The real indicator to see if colleges are taking these decisions seriously is to see how much next few years' admitted classes has changed in racial composition. When California ended affirmative action, Black and Latino numbers took a big hit the first year, then climbed back up through programs specifically designed to circumvent the law.
I predict UNC’s percentage won’t change too much three years out, AND the academic quality of admitted African-American students will likely rise (as students who would have gotten admitted to the Ivies opt for UNC instead). To me, 10 percent sounds about right for a state like N Carolina. The issue was Harvard et al poaching the kids who should have gone to UNC, leaving UNC with a lower quality pool that they had to put a finger on the scales for
I feel like this is a win for everyone. UNC is a great school and those brighter than average black kids will do just as well in life going there. An institution like Harvard, in my opinion, has an important function to play in society which is to maximize the potential of the most gifted intellects. When Harvard performs this function well, we all benefit. Most universities are meant to educate regular people to just be productive citizens. The vast majority of people shouldn’t even think about going to Harvard and that’s OK. The NBA is meant to maximize the potential of the most gifted athletes. The fact that it’s majority black is irrelevant because 99.99% of people, black or white, should not even dream of going there. High school basketball is for most people, and that’s great. As a result the NBA is a world class institution that keeps getting better and better talent. We all benefit from getting to enjoy this. Harvard should function the same way.
Imagine the NBA proclaimed "diversity is our strength," strove to recreate the league so it "looked like America," then insisted the quality of the game had improved, because what wouldn't be improved with so much more diversity?
Well, Harvard sure doesn’t do this in athletics, which it uses to create gender balance (admitting less qualified males) and as an excuse to admit legacies, but overall I agree
Yep, but it took them many years. I hope that there is a fool-me-once component to this and that FedSoc etc. won't treat this as the beginning of the end, but rather as the end of the beginning.
I still don't think they ever really managed to get around it to a major degree. Berkeley's Computer Science department is 92% Asian and 75% Male. In fact, there are 3x as many Asians in the UC system (even higher at the top ones) relative to California's population. I couldn't find statistics for high school GPA for all UC admits stratified by race, but from UCSD's data it looks like the high school GPAs of admits is pretty consistent across races. https://ir.ucsd.edu/_files/stats-data/admissions/freshmen/hsgrades.pdf
It is more a socioeconomic quota, which is why some conservatives like it. There are high performing Asian students at some of these poorer high schools, and black kids who do well in Urban schools (top 10 percent of public high school classes in CA are generally offered admission) get a shot, rather than the wealthier suburban black kid in the top 40 percent of a suburban high school
On one hand this seems fair -- if a kid performs well at in high school it seems wrong to fault him for not going to a better hs. On the other, some high schools have average SAT scores 200+ pts higher than the state average, so the random kid in the top half of the class would likely be top 10% at an average school. The SAT adds some context here, which is kind of important to get an accurate picture as to how strong the student objectively is. I don't think it makes sense to incentivize ambitious upper middle class families to send their kids to worse schools so they perform comparatively better.....or maybe it does?
It has been happening for over a decade. It is nearly impossible for a good (but not exceptional) student from a wealthy suburban HS to be admitted to a UC school- this is why there are so many Californians at Arizona, Washington, Colorado and at east coast liberal arts schools. While the 50th percentile student at Palo Alto, Lamorinda schools, Irvine, etc very likely is a stronger academic candidate than the top 10 percent in most of Oakland or LA city, they are still getting into good schools and have their parents connections to rely on. Also, white kids in mediocre high schools in the central valley and far northern CA get some help from this policy - though they usually end up at Merced or Humboldt or Santa Cruz or maybe Davis rather than UCLA or Berkeley.
One can argue (successfully) that the upper middle class taxpayers in CA are getting screwed- they are paying for CA’s university system but their kids aren’t allowed into it. Screwing taxpayers is nothing new for CA, though. Also, a way around it is to go to a community college for 2 years and then transfer.
Presumably insurance against a potential future lawsuit.
It also could have been an argument in the case (though I'm not sure if they actually used it): "Whaddya know, Asians are already starting to do better under the current system due to pursuing a more well-rounded path to admissions and scoring better on 'personality'. No need to change anything."
Was speaking with a friend who is a Stanford professor and he was saying that there have been a lot of internal emails to faculty about what to do when SCOTUS overturns AA. The university doesn't quite know what to do, except perhaps comply. That suggests that this ruling is going to have immediate effect on the next admissions cycle.
Thanks for all the coverage, and good timing for your book launch! This is an aside, but the American cultural importance placed on where you went to college is a huge waste of everyone’s time and resources. Canada’s top universities, McGill and University of Toronto, have >40% undergraduate acceptance rates. All you need to do to get in is have good grades in your senior year. No SAT, no essays, no stress. These are top-40 global institutions (similar rank to places like Duke and Michigan). Mediocre grades get you in somewhere not-embarrassing. In top jobs and politics, nobody in Canada knows or cares where people went to university.
In Canada the selectivity starts coming into play at the graduate level (especially in MBA and Law School programs). But I'm fine with that because the students who choose to continue are a selective bunch who are undeniably motivated and driven individuals.
I read your entire tweetstorm this morning, and it certainly seems like someone went down your wishlist and checked every box. I'd guess someone's listening to you.
UC Berkeley is a good example, as Affirmative action banned in California state system, its incoming class in 2021 was 30% white, 3% african American, 50% Asian ( with 16% Indian, 19% chinese , 4% Vietnamese, 2% Pakistani etc). Next year, we should see Asian admissions climb up in all elite schools and decrease in African american admissions, though not at the same levels as UC Berkeley as CA has higher percentage of Asians. A good test would be to see if Stanford and UC Berkeley have similar admission demographics.
"I can’t think of another progressive program where the defenders of that program have forbidden people from saying that the system is working as it is intended to work."
Outstanding post, and that particular line is devastating.
If the racial balance doesn't significantly change in the coming years, doesn't that alone potentially put Harvard at risk of additional lawsuits?
This ruling is important because the top-tier of higher ed isn't a competitive market. Had there been real competition, the folly of race-based admissions would have self-corrected over time.
1. The viewpoints of the left are worthless hysterical garbage that can be dismissed as utter nonsense. As your Twitter thread outlines, they don't even try to be coherent.
2. Despite that, only power matters. "Debate" doesn't matter. Nothing and no amount of logic or evidence could change a leftist's mind on this. We can sit here and recognize how insane and absurd their perspective is, but if they had more justices, the decision would've gone the other way. If they ever get more justices again, which seems likely to happen eventually, I predict this decision will be overturned.
I guess these two things were already kind of obvious, but this event reinforces them.
I’m happy about this ruling, but it’s worth pointing out to everyone that one of the biggest affirmative action programs at these schools is for men. Many more female applicants have good grades. While I imagine that the difference is smaller for test scores, what admissions officers have told me is that there’s still a gap. Achieving anything like gender parity requires affirmative action for men.
Just goes to show how little the admin officers care about “social justice” as any kind of coherent value system.
What are you referring to? Men consistently (albeit modestly) outperform women in the SAT. Not to mention that women are over represented in college attendance overall.
There are more Men with 800 SAT scores than women. There are more women with 600-700 scores than men and many more academically qualified women applicants than males. The top schools want a 50/50 mix, so they put a finger on the scale to get more men. This leaves the lower-tier schools with 60/40 or 65/35 female classes.
Being a college graduate, I've always wondered why all colleges and universities don't do blind judging based on Merit alone. Wouldn't a prestigious college or university want the most qualified students to enroll? Wouldn't they want the best of the best instead of having to take a remedial student just to satisfy DIE standards?
Colleges and Universities are supposed to be training fields for the next generation of business and potential government leaders. Wouldn't you want the brightest of the bright, the ones who would make a difference, instead of those that choose to take Gender and race studies and thus fill the HR roles that vex us so?
I've never claimed to understand how colleges and universities think. But from the business standpoint, you'd want the most qualified for a given position, not just some good ole' boy with the right pedigree. If I had my own business, I'd hire the best person for the job, regardless of his or her skin color, as if skin color has anything to do with anything at all.
Or are the colleges and universities saying that the only way minorities can get into colleges is to take pity on them and let them in without the grades to back them up?
With selective institutions, you're into the far right-hand tails of the cognitive ability bell curves. The relative numbers of different racial/ethnic groups in that rarified extreme is simply unacceptable when compared to representation in the general population. Either you drop your standards (move more to the fat part of the curves with greater overlap) or accept the newly "racist" profile of your student body. Stark and difficult choices facing selective colleges and universities after the SFFA decisions—might be a good time to take early retirement from the Admissions Department...
The business of Harvard isn't having the students who are most able to get good grades. It's having the students who will do the most to elevate the Harvard brand and to make major donations to the institution. Which is to say, you want to pick the future elites of America, for whom the elements that grades and test scores measure are only one part of success.
Contra your remark about "right pedigree", it would be idiotic, purely from a business standpoint, not to give a huge leg up to Obama's daughters, unless they were just embarrassingly dumb.
Politics demand that a certain percentage of the US elite MUST be black, and that percentage is going to be significantly higher than the percentage of blacks that could get into Harvard by academic merit alone. If you're Harvard, you want the next Obama or Ketanji to be a Harvard grad.
The universities find themselves in a very tough spot now. If they ignore the ruling and continue with AA, among those who will be (and have been) losing out are the children of upperclass white suburban Lululemon wearing soccer moms whose kid has been preparing to go to Brown since he was 3 years old.
Christine will want to see the receipts when little Tyler doesn’t get into Brown and her lawyer maybe the one asking for them.
Which is to say, if they continue down this path, they won’t be able to hide it for long.
.Berkeley, UCLA and Michigan have practiced implicit discrimination for many years with no lawsuits. Seems to work OK for everyone (as far as they know)
The UC system has faced several lawsuits and took years to come back to its late 90s minority admission figures after the ban of AA in California. More doomerism based on falsehoods.
What you said was that, after affirmative action was banned in California, minority admission to the UC system dipped briefly and then recovered. That is a better match for the position "this makes no difference and the schools will do whatever they want" than it is for whatever position you're trying to support with it.
Two decades is not brief, and that was before the current decision which 1) is federal and 2) unequivocally says that backdoor attempts to get the same outcomes based on race are unlawful.
Berkely is 3% black, harvard is 15%. They might be able to get away with a little under the table discrimination but it will be incredibly difficult to get away with the extreme amount of discriminiation they've been doing.
The “top 10 pct” policy of rbe UC system has helped quite a bit, moreso for Latino applicants than African-American. Check out the percentage of Latino students. CA’s Latino population has been rising while its black population is now a lower percentage of the total. Berkeley also enrolled a class with 13 pct LGBTQ+.
Schools like Harvard will need to change policies like UC schools have: de-emphasize test scores, require diversity statements, more heavily weight high school class rank, etc. Berkeley will be glad the playing field is more level- the competition for qualified African-American students is quite fierce- every school accepts as high a percentage as they can because the yield is much lower than with Asian or White students (because the same AA applicants are accepted by almost every school). I think Bari Weiss’ FP substack did a great piece on the issue. An African-American applicant they profiled got a 28 on the ACT and was accepted at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Coulmbia, but chose to take the free ride at Duke. She is in demand everywhere.
> In the end, I expect that top schools are going to be given the choice of either engaging in less racial discrimination, or maintaining their diversity numbers while harming their own reputations by lowering standards for everybody.
How would the second option work? The stated goal has long been for blacks to be the same share of the pool of admitted students that they are of the national population.
But that goal cannot be accomplished by just moving an admission threshold up or down. It's easy to show this if we adjust the goal to parity between the pool of admitted students and the pool of applicants - in that case, a threshold that admits X% of nonblacks must, to satisfy the goal, also admit X% of blacks. No such threshold exists; that is why the disparate impact standard was able to prohibit all possible courses of action.
If blacks and nonblacks have to be considered under the same admission standards, blacks will not be admitted at a rate equaling their population share. Their admission rate will be much less than that (if the standards are academic in nature) or potentially more, if the standards are revised for that purpose.
For the schools that started diversity admissions early, expect them to lean heavily on legacy admissions, the racial makeup of which will presumably have a statistical relationship to their parents’ classes.
I’m thinking that another tactic would be to offer admission to the top x% of each high school’s graduating class. That would be justified on the basis of economic diversity. That would take advantage of residential segregation to pull in the top minority candidates.
If economic diversity works, then you could also give a bonus to the admission score based on average income of the student’s zip code or voting precinct or something like that. You could also do it directly on average parental income for the last four years, but that gets complicated and invasive.
That was brought up in Hanania's Twitter remarks. Michigan has tried this but it can only get so far.
The problem is that the best black students are going to be locked in mostly white/Asian suburban schools or private high schools (where they get full scholarships). If you're a college that requires 1450 SAT for most whites/Asians and really doesn't want to go below 1200 SAT for anyone else, you will find that you run out of those 1200+ SAT blacks very quickly by recruiting at overwhelmingly black schools. Especially since any true gem of a student from these schools will be picked up by better colleges than you.
The problem is you just can't have 900-1000 SAT students in the same classrooms as 1450 SAT students and hand them passing grades with any sort of integrity. Even sequestering them in the easiest majors and passing them is going to compromise more integrity than elite schools want to do. At that point, they'd rather throw in the towel.
So apparently I’m wrong about legacy admissions. What I’m reading says that legacy admissions tends to make Harvard’s entering class whiter. I wonder if that will change. Perhaps the children of Harvard’s entering classes that were blacker and browner have not yet reached college age.
One thing to consider is that a legacy admit is likely (maybe required?) to be the offspring of a *graduate* of the school, and what you're looking at are the demographics of students admitted. Schools like to advertise how many minorities they admit but bury the graduation rates of those minories pretty deep.
The real indicator to see if colleges are taking these decisions seriously is to see how much next few years' admitted classes has changed in racial composition. When California ended affirmative action, Black and Latino numbers took a big hit the first year, then climbed back up through programs specifically designed to circumvent the law.
Agreed. On its website, Harvard says that the freshman class for the year that just finished was 15.2% black. UNC says that their number was 10%.
Every verbose take about this decision can be condensed into a simple prediction: what will those numbers be in four years?
I predict UNC’s percentage won’t change too much three years out, AND the academic quality of admitted African-American students will likely rise (as students who would have gotten admitted to the Ivies opt for UNC instead). To me, 10 percent sounds about right for a state like N Carolina. The issue was Harvard et al poaching the kids who should have gone to UNC, leaving UNC with a lower quality pool that they had to put a finger on the scales for
I feel like this is a win for everyone. UNC is a great school and those brighter than average black kids will do just as well in life going there. An institution like Harvard, in my opinion, has an important function to play in society which is to maximize the potential of the most gifted intellects. When Harvard performs this function well, we all benefit. Most universities are meant to educate regular people to just be productive citizens. The vast majority of people shouldn’t even think about going to Harvard and that’s OK. The NBA is meant to maximize the potential of the most gifted athletes. The fact that it’s majority black is irrelevant because 99.99% of people, black or white, should not even dream of going there. High school basketball is for most people, and that’s great. As a result the NBA is a world class institution that keeps getting better and better talent. We all benefit from getting to enjoy this. Harvard should function the same way.
Imagine the NBA proclaimed "diversity is our strength," strove to recreate the league so it "looked like America," then insisted the quality of the game had improved, because what wouldn't be improved with so much more diversity?
Well, Harvard sure doesn’t do this in athletics, which it uses to create gender balance (admitting less qualified males) and as an excuse to admit legacies, but overall I agree
Yep, but it took them many years. I hope that there is a fool-me-once component to this and that FedSoc etc. won't treat this as the beginning of the end, but rather as the end of the beginning.
I still don't think they ever really managed to get around it to a major degree. Berkeley's Computer Science department is 92% Asian and 75% Male. In fact, there are 3x as many Asians in the UC system (even higher at the top ones) relative to California's population. I couldn't find statistics for high school GPA for all UC admits stratified by race, but from UCSD's data it looks like the high school GPAs of admits is pretty consistent across races. https://ir.ucsd.edu/_files/stats-data/admissions/freshmen/hsgrades.pdf
It is more a socioeconomic quota, which is why some conservatives like it. There are high performing Asian students at some of these poorer high schools, and black kids who do well in Urban schools (top 10 percent of public high school classes in CA are generally offered admission) get a shot, rather than the wealthier suburban black kid in the top 40 percent of a suburban high school
On one hand this seems fair -- if a kid performs well at in high school it seems wrong to fault him for not going to a better hs. On the other, some high schools have average SAT scores 200+ pts higher than the state average, so the random kid in the top half of the class would likely be top 10% at an average school. The SAT adds some context here, which is kind of important to get an accurate picture as to how strong the student objectively is. I don't think it makes sense to incentivize ambitious upper middle class families to send their kids to worse schools so they perform comparatively better.....or maybe it does?
It has been happening for over a decade. It is nearly impossible for a good (but not exceptional) student from a wealthy suburban HS to be admitted to a UC school- this is why there are so many Californians at Arizona, Washington, Colorado and at east coast liberal arts schools. While the 50th percentile student at Palo Alto, Lamorinda schools, Irvine, etc very likely is a stronger academic candidate than the top 10 percent in most of Oakland or LA city, they are still getting into good schools and have their parents connections to rely on. Also, white kids in mediocre high schools in the central valley and far northern CA get some help from this policy - though they usually end up at Merced or Humboldt or Santa Cruz or maybe Davis rather than UCLA or Berkeley.
One can argue (successfully) that the upper middle class taxpayers in CA are getting screwed- they are paying for CA’s university system but their kids aren’t allowed into it. Screwing taxpayers is nothing new for CA, though. Also, a way around it is to go to a community college for 2 years and then transfer.
Why has Asian admission gone up at Harvard while the lawsuit was pending? A tacit admission of guilt?
Presumably insurance against a potential future lawsuit.
It also could have been an argument in the case (though I'm not sure if they actually used it): "Whaddya know, Asians are already starting to do better under the current system due to pursuing a more well-rounded path to admissions and scoring better on 'personality'. No need to change anything."
Was speaking with a friend who is a Stanford professor and he was saying that there have been a lot of internal emails to faculty about what to do when SCOTUS overturns AA. The university doesn't quite know what to do, except perhaps comply. That suggests that this ruling is going to have immediate effect on the next admissions cycle.
Good news for the liberal arts at Stanford, which had been dying.
Thanks for all the coverage, and good timing for your book launch! This is an aside, but the American cultural importance placed on where you went to college is a huge waste of everyone’s time and resources. Canada’s top universities, McGill and University of Toronto, have >40% undergraduate acceptance rates. All you need to do to get in is have good grades in your senior year. No SAT, no essays, no stress. These are top-40 global institutions (similar rank to places like Duke and Michigan). Mediocre grades get you in somewhere not-embarrassing. In top jobs and politics, nobody in Canada knows or cares where people went to university.
In Canada the selectivity starts coming into play at the graduate level (especially in MBA and Law School programs). But I'm fine with that because the students who choose to continue are a selective bunch who are undeniably motivated and driven individuals.
I read your entire tweetstorm this morning, and it certainly seems like someone went down your wishlist and checked every box. I'd guess someone's listening to you.
UC Berkeley is a good example, as Affirmative action banned in California state system, its incoming class in 2021 was 30% white, 3% african American, 50% Asian ( with 16% Indian, 19% chinese , 4% Vietnamese, 2% Pakistani etc). Next year, we should see Asian admissions climb up in all elite schools and decrease in African american admissions, though not at the same levels as UC Berkeley as CA has higher percentage of Asians. A good test would be to see if Stanford and UC Berkeley have similar admission demographics.
Berkeley’s African-American percentage might rise, as there will be less competition for the well-qualified AA candidates.
Richard needs to have Freddie DeBoer on CSPI podcast to talk about Affirmative Action - Freddie put up this great substack yesterday:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-thoughts-in-an
"I can’t think of another progressive program where the defenders of that program have forbidden people from saying that the system is working as it is intended to work."
Outstanding post, and that particular line is devastating.
If the racial balance doesn't significantly change in the coming years, doesn't that alone potentially put Harvard at risk of additional lawsuits?
This ruling is important because the top-tier of higher ed isn't a competitive market. Had there been real competition, the folly of race-based admissions would have self-corrected over time.
My two takeaways:
1. The viewpoints of the left are worthless hysterical garbage that can be dismissed as utter nonsense. As your Twitter thread outlines, they don't even try to be coherent.
2. Despite that, only power matters. "Debate" doesn't matter. Nothing and no amount of logic or evidence could change a leftist's mind on this. We can sit here and recognize how insane and absurd their perspective is, but if they had more justices, the decision would've gone the other way. If they ever get more justices again, which seems likely to happen eventually, I predict this decision will be overturned.
I guess these two things were already kind of obvious, but this event reinforces them.
I’m happy about this ruling, but it’s worth pointing out to everyone that one of the biggest affirmative action programs at these schools is for men. Many more female applicants have good grades. While I imagine that the difference is smaller for test scores, what admissions officers have told me is that there’s still a gap. Achieving anything like gender parity requires affirmative action for men.
Just goes to show how little the admin officers care about “social justice” as any kind of coherent value system.
What are you referring to? Men consistently (albeit modestly) outperform women in the SAT. Not to mention that women are over represented in college attendance overall.
There are more Men with 800 SAT scores than women. There are more women with 600-700 scores than men and many more academically qualified women applicants than males. The top schools want a 50/50 mix, so they put a finger on the scale to get more men. This leaves the lower-tier schools with 60/40 or 65/35 female classes.
Being a college graduate, I've always wondered why all colleges and universities don't do blind judging based on Merit alone. Wouldn't a prestigious college or university want the most qualified students to enroll? Wouldn't they want the best of the best instead of having to take a remedial student just to satisfy DIE standards?
Colleges and Universities are supposed to be training fields for the next generation of business and potential government leaders. Wouldn't you want the brightest of the bright, the ones who would make a difference, instead of those that choose to take Gender and race studies and thus fill the HR roles that vex us so?
I've never claimed to understand how colleges and universities think. But from the business standpoint, you'd want the most qualified for a given position, not just some good ole' boy with the right pedigree. If I had my own business, I'd hire the best person for the job, regardless of his or her skin color, as if skin color has anything to do with anything at all.
Or are the colleges and universities saying that the only way minorities can get into colleges is to take pity on them and let them in without the grades to back them up?
With selective institutions, you're into the far right-hand tails of the cognitive ability bell curves. The relative numbers of different racial/ethnic groups in that rarified extreme is simply unacceptable when compared to representation in the general population. Either you drop your standards (move more to the fat part of the curves with greater overlap) or accept the newly "racist" profile of your student body. Stark and difficult choices facing selective colleges and universities after the SFFA decisions—might be a good time to take early retirement from the Admissions Department...
The business of Harvard isn't having the students who are most able to get good grades. It's having the students who will do the most to elevate the Harvard brand and to make major donations to the institution. Which is to say, you want to pick the future elites of America, for whom the elements that grades and test scores measure are only one part of success.
Contra your remark about "right pedigree", it would be idiotic, purely from a business standpoint, not to give a huge leg up to Obama's daughters, unless they were just embarrassingly dumb.
Politics demand that a certain percentage of the US elite MUST be black, and that percentage is going to be significantly higher than the percentage of blacks that could get into Harvard by academic merit alone. If you're Harvard, you want the next Obama or Ketanji to be a Harvard grad.
Richard, unblock me on twitter. @Isaiah545251391, been two years. Much appreciated!
unblock the frog
I’m excited to hear about this book, sounds like a very valuable contribution. And a happy toast to you all on this fine day.
The universities find themselves in a very tough spot now. If they ignore the ruling and continue with AA, among those who will be (and have been) losing out are the children of upperclass white suburban Lululemon wearing soccer moms whose kid has been preparing to go to Brown since he was 3 years old.
Christine will want to see the receipts when little Tyler doesn’t get into Brown and her lawyer maybe the one asking for them.
Which is to say, if they continue down this path, they won’t be able to hide it for long.
.Berkeley, UCLA and Michigan have practiced implicit discrimination for many years with no lawsuits. Seems to work OK for everyone (as far as they know)
The UC system has faced several lawsuits and took years to come back to its late 90s minority admission figures after the ban of AA in California. More doomerism based on falsehoods.
You appear to be saying that "doomerism", as applied to the University of California, was... completely correct?
No, not at all. Doomerism is "this makes no difference and the schools will do whatever they want." Realism is what I said.
What you said was that, after affirmative action was banned in California, minority admission to the UC system dipped briefly and then recovered. That is a better match for the position "this makes no difference and the schools will do whatever they want" than it is for whatever position you're trying to support with it.
Two decades is not brief, and that was before the current decision which 1) is federal and 2) unequivocally says that backdoor attempts to get the same outcomes based on race are unlawful.
Berkely is 3% black, harvard is 15%. They might be able to get away with a little under the table discrimination but it will be incredibly difficult to get away with the extreme amount of discriminiation they've been doing.
The “top 10 pct” policy of rbe UC system has helped quite a bit, moreso for Latino applicants than African-American. Check out the percentage of Latino students. CA’s Latino population has been rising while its black population is now a lower percentage of the total. Berkeley also enrolled a class with 13 pct LGBTQ+.
Schools like Harvard will need to change policies like UC schools have: de-emphasize test scores, require diversity statements, more heavily weight high school class rank, etc. Berkeley will be glad the playing field is more level- the competition for qualified African-American students is quite fierce- every school accepts as high a percentage as they can because the yield is much lower than with Asian or White students (because the same AA applicants are accepted by almost every school). I think Bari Weiss’ FP substack did a great piece on the issue. An African-American applicant they profiled got a 28 on the ACT and was accepted at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Coulmbia, but chose to take the free ride at Duke. She is in demand everywhere.
https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-after-the-end-of-affirmative
> In the end, I expect that top schools are going to be given the choice of either engaging in less racial discrimination, or maintaining their diversity numbers while harming their own reputations by lowering standards for everybody.
How would the second option work? The stated goal has long been for blacks to be the same share of the pool of admitted students that they are of the national population.
But that goal cannot be accomplished by just moving an admission threshold up or down. It's easy to show this if we adjust the goal to parity between the pool of admitted students and the pool of applicants - in that case, a threshold that admits X% of nonblacks must, to satisfy the goal, also admit X% of blacks. No such threshold exists; that is why the disparate impact standard was able to prohibit all possible courses of action.
If blacks and nonblacks have to be considered under the same admission standards, blacks will not be admitted at a rate equaling their population share. Their admission rate will be much less than that (if the standards are academic in nature) or potentially more, if the standards are revised for that purpose.
For the schools that started diversity admissions early, expect them to lean heavily on legacy admissions, the racial makeup of which will presumably have a statistical relationship to their parents’ classes.
I’m thinking that another tactic would be to offer admission to the top x% of each high school’s graduating class. That would be justified on the basis of economic diversity. That would take advantage of residential segregation to pull in the top minority candidates.
If economic diversity works, then you could also give a bonus to the admission score based on average income of the student’s zip code or voting precinct or something like that. You could also do it directly on average parental income for the last four years, but that gets complicated and invasive.
That was brought up in Hanania's Twitter remarks. Michigan has tried this but it can only get so far.
The problem is that the best black students are going to be locked in mostly white/Asian suburban schools or private high schools (where they get full scholarships). If you're a college that requires 1450 SAT for most whites/Asians and really doesn't want to go below 1200 SAT for anyone else, you will find that you run out of those 1200+ SAT blacks very quickly by recruiting at overwhelmingly black schools. Especially since any true gem of a student from these schools will be picked up by better colleges than you.
The problem is you just can't have 900-1000 SAT students in the same classrooms as 1450 SAT students and hand them passing grades with any sort of integrity. Even sequestering them in the easiest majors and passing them is going to compromise more integrity than elite schools want to do. At that point, they'd rather throw in the towel.
So apparently I’m wrong about legacy admissions. What I’m reading says that legacy admissions tends to make Harvard’s entering class whiter. I wonder if that will change. Perhaps the children of Harvard’s entering classes that were blacker and browner have not yet reached college age.
One thing to consider is that a legacy admit is likely (maybe required?) to be the offspring of a *graduate* of the school, and what you're looking at are the demographics of students admitted. Schools like to advertise how many minorities they admit but bury the graduation rates of those minories pretty deep.
Harvard graduates almost all of its admits
And almost everyone gets A’s- funny that!
Fuck yeah fuck the DEI commissars.