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.
“[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
“[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”
Fuck yeah
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Richard, unblock me on twitter. @Isaiah545251391, been two years. Much appreciated!
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.
> 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.