I think he might be talking about "Racism in US college admission has been banned" which sounds like a good thing. Do you argue that Asian and Indian students should be rejected because of their race in favor of less qualified black or Hispanic students? I would love to hear your case for why that is ok.
"Less qualified" opens a can of worms. If one student spent twice as long studying does that make them more likely to have a high income after they graduate? Because in the end that's what these schools are looking for, "How do we admit the people who will be the most successful in their career?" Just looking at grades and test scores can't figure that out. Academic success may be correlated with cultural values in a way that income isn't.
> Just looking at grades and test scores can't figure that out.
Do you have any citations to back up that assertion? I think we've reached the point of calling these metrics a bit more than correlations.
I hear this all the time from pro affirmative action groups, but I don't think it's backed up by any science. People who practice more are going to be better at that thing. Same in sports, musics, medicine, literally everything. Hard work it turns out pays off. It's very unfortunate that some can't do the hard work required to make the grade. But that doesn't mean that they should be elevated _over others that did_ make the grade _based on the color of their skin_. I can't even believe I have to argue this.
Looking at academic factors should be the strongest determining factor, economic factors is fine, but looking at race is racist, by definition.
Advocacy groups trying to change the definitions of words as a way to sort of "legislate from the bench" is dishonest and an obvious attempt to avoid the debate on very controversial topics. It will always be racist to make determinations based on race. Attempts to change this definition is racist.
I absolutely believe hard work pays off. But different people value different things. If one person works incredibly hard to get their grades and test scores up and the other works just as hard to start a business who is the harder worker? The academic criteria says it's the first person, but I don't think that means they will have more success in their career. And in the end maximizing career success is what admissions is trying to do.
I think an economic based affirmative action makes more sense, so don't put words in my mouth. Let's just celebrate rule by 5 people in a country of 330M dumbocracy
Once people 'are in', they get more resources, and that allows for (e.g.) their children to have more opportunities, and so they then in turn win. If you have a person who does not 'get in' and 'win', then they have fewer resources / opportunities to show or develop what skills they may have: a doom-loop can become possible.
Yep. Roe vs. Wade was one of the most egregious examples of "legislating from the bench" in the latter 20th century? How many people who would hand-wring over recent SCOTUS decisions oppose Roe on these grounds? Or is this a convenient exception? Griswold? How about Lawrence vs. Texas?
In the right to privacy is so broad that it applies to abortion, it should also apply to self-medicating yourself with narcotics. I'm not saying that decriminalization of drugs is a bad thing, but it's something that obviously shouldn't be decided by the Supreme Court.
Yep, and if it applies to abortion, why not third-trimester abortion? Why is that relevant to a privacy interest?
Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw? Sounds like the whole thing is legislating from the bench! Maybe we should bring back Lochner-style scrutiny of minimum wage laws under a newly-discovered "right to earn a living"?
> Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw?
People inevitably making this argument was actually the primary argument against adopting a Bill of Rights at all, and the Ninth Amendment was the compromise solution to have some enumerated rights while hoping to negate this exact argument.
Right, like how the SCOTUS rejected the Independent State Legislature theory case. Some people were like "we really shouldn't be legislating from the bench", but when the SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade they cheered it on.
> Some people were like "we really shouldn't be legislating from the bench", but when the SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade they cheered it on.
That's internally consistent. Roe V. Wade was the bench legislation in this case.
The citizenship rights in the constitution were not written or otherwise intended to provide a right to abortions.
Even the concept of privacy the decision was based on is inferred only from the statement "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
The constitution doesn't enumerate every right a citizen has. It's a framework for judges (and congress) to determine what laws can and cannot be applied to citizens. The right to abortion was ruled to be protected by the 4th amendment.
While this case is held up as being the legislating from the bench case, it's really not. We don't generally pass laws that make something legal, except as exceptions to other laws. Saying that government access to a person's medical records is protected by the constitution is exactly the function of SCOTUS.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have disagreed with you there, and I think she's more qualified than you to comment on the function of the Court:
> Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.
> Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
> The right to abortion was ruled to be protected by the 4th amendment.
The right to abortion is guaranteed by the right to be free from "unreasonable search and seizure." That is literally the best ever example of squinting REALLY hard at the constitution and trying to make something fit. Roe was 100% making a legal argument for abortion to be regulated at the federal level using the most twisted pretzel logic imaginable.
> The right to abortion is guaranteed by the right to be free from “unreasonable search and seizure.” That is literally the best ever example of squinting REALLY hard at the constitution and trying to make something fit.
No, its just a typo, Roe rested on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, not any provision of the 4th. “A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” (It in passing mentions other previous cases relating to privacy rights which found aspects of them other places in the Constitution, including, among many others, the combination of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in Terry v. Ohio, but no part of the rule articulated in Roe purported to be interpreting the Fourth Amendment, only the 14th.)
Which US state(s) that ratified the US Consitution in 1790 made abortion (particularly pre quickening (~24 weeks)) illegal?
Most sources I can find suggest none.
Eg:
Abortion has existed in North America since the European colonization of the Americas, was a fairly common practice, and was not always illegal or controversial.
Until the 19th century, abortion was legal under common law, and only after quickening it was not allowed.
and
Though it is considered taboo in Christian traditions, until the mid-19th century, “the Catholic Church implicitly accepted early abortions prior to ensoulment,” she explained. “Not until 1869, at about the same time that abortion became politicized in this country, did the church condemn abortion; in 1895, it condemned therapeutic abortion,” meaning procedures to save a woman’s life.
and
Legal scholar Sheldon Gelman has argued that the U.S. Constitution (1789) imported the tenets of the English Magna Carta (1215), which includes the basis of the right to bodily integrity including abortion.
Connecticut was the first state to regulate abortion in 1821; it outlawed abortion after quickening and forbade the use of poisons to induce one post-quickening.
I don't want to debate this particular decision, but I do want to point out that you're taking some dubious legal concepts for granted.
There are opposing legal philosophies on how to interpret amendments 9 and 10, which say that people have rights and the government has powers. The question is always how to resolve when the two are in conflict.
Current SCOTUS majority holds an extremist view that when government exercises an unenumerated power, it essentially cancels the existence of an unenumerated right. That's why they look for historical laws that support their desired outcomes. Until recently, this was a fringe idea because it means the state governments get dibs on your unenumerated rights.
You're entitled to your opinion on this approach, but don't expect everyone to take that reasoning seriously.
The Judicial branch also has the job of ensuring whatever misguided ideas the Legislative branch may come up with, regardless of what they are (Communications Decency Act, anyone here?) are compliant with the US Constitution and other applicable laws.
Laws aren't (and can't) be written to cover all current and future use cases. The judicial branch is meant to provide interpretation of the law.
Federal courts enjoy the sole power to interpret the law, determine the constitutionality of the law, and apply it to individual cases. The courts, like Congress, can compel the production of evidence and testimony through the use of a subpoena.
It's true laws don't account for the future. It's also true that laws can be created and updated by other means and quite often the judicial branch is used as a fast pass extension of the legislative branch.
The problem when you do this - especially on questionable legal arguments - is you're essentially setting up the future to have to fight for that right all over again, as we've seen with Roe v. Wade.
You can't take a section of the constitution that's about citizenship, infer a right to privacy and then extend that to abortion and not expect that flimsy foundation to be challenged later when the right 5 people happen to be present.
Corporations have had certain characteristics of people as long as they've existed. Do you want a corporation to be able to enter a contract that isn't with a specific person within the corporation, for example? Corporations also have freedom of the press/freedom of speech. The question in that decision was whether political spending by corporations was part of the free speech right. There's no question more broadly that corporations can put out a press release saying more or less anything (truthful) that they want.
This is a really lazy trope whatever you think of the specific decision's result (or the reasoning).
> The question in that decision was whether political spending by corporations was part of the free speech right. There's no question more broadly that corporations can put out a press release saying more or less anything (truthful) that they want.
The "political spending" in the case of Citizens United was the production and dissemination of a propaganda film. If the release of a film can be restricted, why not a press release as well?
From wikipedia: "Broadcasting the film would have been a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited any corporation, non-profit organization, or labor union from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time."
If the law bans "electioneering communication", could not an electioneering press release be considered such a banned communication as well?
You're probably right. Most of the attention has focused on the financial angle. That said, organizations do have pretty broad latitude to advocate for laws and other outcomes. Conservation organizations do it all the time for example.
I see multiple ways of interpreting what you said:
1. SCOTUS considers corporations 'natural persons' in their decisions
2. SCOTUS considers 'corporate personhood' to encompass too many rights, you believe should be exclusive for 'natural persons'
3. Possible misunderstanding around the term 'corporate personhood'
Could you clarify a bit? I've seen a lot of (3.) on discussions around this, while claiming essentially (1.) happens or (2.) is what peopel try to complain about.
IMO, a lot of people who didn't like the decision (whether because of which justices decided it or for some other reason) latched onto the "SCOTUS decided that corporations are people" shorthand because it seems absurd taken literally. Corporations are clearly not people (natural persons) the way you and I are.
But saying that corporate personhood shouldn't include political donations as part of their free speech rights, while a perfectly reasonable position and I might even agree, doesn't make as good a soundbite.
When you really think about it, Citizen's United makes a lot of sense as a decision. It seems self evident to me that a non-profit trying to, say, save the local wetlands, should be able to make political statements like "Don't vote for Dave, Dave wants to pave our wetlands". Likewise, labor unions should be able to campaign against politicians trying to attack their ability to exist. Okay, so, only non-profit enterprises can engage in political speech. That still leaves you with the whole PAC thing, but maybe it's an improvement. What about Creedance Clearwater Revival? Or Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? Their art was certainly political, does that mean they should be barred from selling it?
I don’t love the decision, but I actually like the process. And I don’t think it is legislating. It is interpreting the law.
I’d like term limits on Supreme Court justices. But I think the arguments on both sides of this debate are well thought out.
Again I don’t love the decision, but Im OK with it. That said I’d love to see universities stop giving weight to legacies. But the money is just too strong.
When a neoconservative spends his life petitioning courts for this exact result instead of petitioning anyone in congress... it feels like dirty legislating. Part of it is because our congress is dreadfully inept.
Congress has more important issues to deal with, such as making it illegal to participate in any programs involving extraterrestrial craft without notifying Congress
He didn't petition congress because congress already legislated on this issue: neither the 14th amendment nor the civil rights act contain exceptions allowing racial discrimination, as long as it's for the right cause (and the courts get to pick which causes are right).
> I don’t love the decision, but I actually like the process. And I don’t think it is legislating. It is interpreting the law.
I think this is naive. Roberts is not "calling balls and strikes" despite what he would have you believe. The conservative wing of the court has been willing to adopt a range of interpretations to accommodate their outcome.
It's not just setting aside precedent but their increased use of emergency motions (shadow docket) to issue orders without explanation.
> Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.
Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?
Even if 100% of the court agreed, 9 people can't possibly represent 300 million in any representative way.
Even Congress with 535 representatives isn't many. One representative for each 600,000 citizens? When was the last time a thousand Americans agreed on anything, much less half a million?
Edit: And the SC isn't representative anyway. They're appointed by the elites for the benefit of the ruling party, and there's a lot of politicking for those seats. Way too much power and corruption -- for life. The institution itself is a problem.
There's not really checks and balances when all three branches are in cahoots for the benefit of party over people, primarily won through electoral shenanigans and political games. We literally have a system that continously overrules the will of the majority with a small group of electoral elites, justified using some byzantine algorithm of electoral boundaries. That isn't a democracy, it's a farce.
I don't really care about affirmative action much one way or the other. I care about the lack of representation in my so called democracy, and the Supremes are a huge part of that problem.
Through a legal framework enumerating basic inalienable rights, perhaps. But substituting a tyranny of the majority for a tyranny of the minority isn't an improvement.
Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you try to slice it. The compelled speech argument was a line of bullshit to discriminate against customers because it all hinged on their religious right to discriminate against people they did not like. That's the crux of it all.
> 9 people can't possibly represent 300 million in any representative way.
If they were 9 randomly selected citizens, then the majority vote of the 9 matches the result of a majority vote of the 300 million nearly always, particularly for decisive issues.
For example, if 90% of the population think something, then there is a 0.089% chance that a majority of the 9 citizens disagree.
Obviously judge selection isn't random, and thats probably your main concern.
The SC is, by design, a little undemocratic. They're a check against the more democratic parts of the government, with the limitation that they basically can only make things legal. Since the default is that people are free to do whatever, laws can only restrict people's abilities to do stuff. The Supreme Court gets to shoot down laws, so they can only let us do more stuff.
I'm agree in essence, some kind of stipulation needs to be applied to supreme court decisions that incentivizes or outright requires the other houses to apply a more permanent solution.
The judicial branch does not legislate. It interprets existing legislation. In this case they were interpreting the 14th amendment to the US Constitution.
Now, they may not have interpreted it the way you or I would, and they may not have interpreted it correctly. But that is what they do.
"Interpret" is just a word. In practice the Court has enormous power in interpreting laws, to the point where it can completely change the policy that laws implement, or strike them altogether.
We afford deference to the Court because we believe it follows a constrained legal procedure that makes the word "interpret" meaningful: this involves taking into account precedent and past case law. This approach tends to prevent justices from "interpreting" the law in ways that effectively re-write the law according to their instantaneous political preferences. This court is receiving criticism (and serious loss of public approval [1]) because it has abandoned those constraints, and keeps overturning longstanding precedent in ways that happen to correspond to the stated political preferences of the justices (and the politicians that appointed them.)
There's only approximately 330 million of us, but yes, your main point is correct. I think that judicial activism has led to a perversion of both the legislative and the judicial branches. Why try to pass legislation that requires broad consent and lots of work when you can just bank on getting your policies through via the judiciary? At the same time, why constrain the judiciary's decisions on something as irrelevant and inflexible as the constitution?
Judicial review has upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action policies for 40+ years, what changed is the composition of the Supreme Court and its related willingness to legislate from the bench -- abandoning stare decisis and judicial restraint.
Remember the Supreme Court upheld the legality of affirmative action in 2016 in Fisher v. UT-Austin, and two lower courts upheld the legality of affirmative action in this particular decision.
What changed is the make-up of the court; otherwise, apparently affirmative action's unconstitutionality was just realized like a revelation from God and every previous court (federal and Supreme) was wrong.
Racial rancor, and racism in general -- anti black racism in particular -- has probably increased since 2003; at least in the public sphere - hopefully this ruling is not a part of that milieu.
Regardless of whatever the political currents are, it's sensible policy to strike down every pseudo law that doesn't have legislative backing of some kind.
If they only selectively struck them down in favor of one group or another, then that would be a different matter.
Yes I agree with you and in the context of this discussion it's unknown the parent's understanding of law and pseudo-law and I apologize if I came across the wrong way as a poser
Agree except for the "willingness to legislate" changing.
That's been in place for a LONG time, it dates all the way back to the separation of church and state decision being based on a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote.
Some of the original Supreme Court cases upholding these policies went so far as to say that in the future, these exact things should be revisited because they were trying to bandage over decades of institutional racism.
> In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
There are lots of criticisms of the SC, but I don't see why everything they rule should be absolute ground truth forever. They can (and do) revisit cases for good reason.
I think it's mostly about the current MAGA heavy SCOTUS though that got there mostly by duplicity and hamstringing Senate procedures and pure luck. The judges weren't selected for talent, they were selected for an agenda.
>I think it's mostly about the current MAGA heavy SCOTUS
That's modern liberal opinion news talking. It's about law. AA is a direct contradiction to the 14th amendment and it dilutes it. I'm sure just about everyone, including previously and currently oppressed minorities would prefer the protections of 14th amendment over the protections of AA.
No, not true at all and I don't agree. Otherwise no government program could take race into consideration, but they do. Are you saying any kind of programs that are "race based" should now be null and void? Because you can't nit pick situations given your logic. Also downvotes don't hurt me and I don't care, I will continue to speak my peace.
Striking down Roa v Wade was an example of undoing such “legislating from the branch.” The original Roe v Wade created in effect a new federal law, and last year’s decision struck that down.
I'm on the more liberal side of the spectrum, yet it's unfair to say that _this_ SCOTUS has been legislating from the bench. The prior Democratic balance of SCOTUS did exactly the same and stretched very widely the definition of things to fit modern progressive ideals. In my opinion, politicians should have made Roe v. Wade into law instead of relying on SCOTUS to legis-interpret in their favor indefinitely.
I don't like many recent rulings from SCOTUS, but intellectual honesty forces me to admit that when the pendulum was on the other side, the same thing happened with different allegiances.
There was hasn't been a "prior Democratic balance of SCOTUS" the SCOTUS has been firmly conservative since Rehnquist (1986) and probably before that. What is notable about this Robert's Court, is that they have overturned rulings affirmed by other conservative courts and even their own recent rulings!
Almost as if the Robert's court concluded there is no point in being powerful if you can't rule, even though ruling is beyond the scope of all courts.
As for Roe V. Wade being codified, this was a moot point at the time because you had a Constitutional right to an abortion -- your right to an abortion was codified in the Constitution, a law would have been redundant.
No it wasn’t. You had a constitutional right to privacy, not to abortion. It was obviously tenuous reasoning at the time, and its shaky footing hasn’t exactly been a secret ever since. Roe should have been codified into law if we really wanted to keep it around long term.
Alright, prior SCOTUS had a more democratic balance, and at a minimum ruled more often than now in fairly tenuous ways in favor of progressive ideals. The end result was stuff I liked more than what they rule today, but them having voted in my camp doesn't mean I believe it was the right thing.
I think when the status quo requires on someone's stretched interpretation of a series of things, and this status quo is very important to people, it's on lawmakers to make the rules unambiguous.
Roe v Wade's trimester system, like virtually all abortion cutoffs, was essentially arbitrary. Calibrated to fit what their gut felt was right. For evidence of this, look at the abortion cutoffs in Europe, nearly every European country has a different cutoff from the others. In Germany it's 12 weeks and in the UK it's 24. It's all over the place. If these cutoffs were based on science there shouldn't be this much spread.
there are way more things in the world that have changed besides what justices make up the supreme court
these policies of racial discrimination aren't helping anyone. they don't help the people who didn't deserve the spots in the first place, and they don't help the people that are being robbed of the spots they deserve.
Often this is true, but this case was decided based on constitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Congress cannot override this with a law. It would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is more involved. Considering that not even CA could pass a law to allow affirmative action in higher education, it would be impossible for such an amendment to be passed and ratified by the states.
> Often this is true, but this case was decided based on constitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
The main opinion was actually following a line of cases using 14th Amendment jurisprudence to guide the interpetation of similar text in Title VI of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so, yes, Congress can override it by changing the text of the statute, which is in principal what is actually being applied.
The portion of the 14th Amendment whose interprtation was imported doesn’t bind either private actors or the federal government, so isn’t directly applicable on its own.
Hm, that's not my reading of the case, in particular this sentence from page 2 (the Syllabus):
> Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The concurrence by Gorsuch also makes clear that the majority opinion was based on the Constitution, not Title VI.
> Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either.
What are you seeing that indicates that the majority opinion was based on Title VI?
Yeah but that’s nonsense. The Conservative majority wanted to get rid of affirmative action so they decided to interpret the 14th this way. That’s the point. This is judicial activism.
Racial discrimination has been explicitly illegal, and affirmative action - as currently practiced - is racial discrimination. You're right that it's not legislation, it's straight up illegal. The courts have been tying themselves in knots around this but somebody finally just read the law. If Congress wants to make some kinds of racial discrimination legal, they need to actually pass a law saying so.
The original usage of the phrase is reasonable enough[0], but that's not what this lawsuit was about.
[0] > On March 6, 1961, shortly after taking office, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required all federal contractors to take “affirmative action”—the first use of the phrase in this context—to ensure all job applicants and employees were treated equally, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
The legislation in question (the Civil Rights Act) prohibits all racial discrimination and it was only previous (in my opinion, misguided) Supreme Court decisions that allowed affirmative action as an exception to that in the first place.
Liberal SCOTUS opinions talk a lot about morality and societal harm, rarely about the legality of the subject at hand. It is Congress' job to deal with morality and harm, not the judicial branch.
Conservatives also care deeply about morality and society, but their opinions often hide behind whatever legal interpretation gives them the policy outcome they desire.
Thomas is a textualist when the text is favorable. If it's not, suddenly historical context and the founder's intent becomes crucial.
The Jackson dissent opener is a great example of this:
> Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the genera- tions. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles—the “self-evident” truth that all of us are created equal.
Apparently anything that doesn’t further a final state of equality of outcome is inherently racist and it’s the governments job to make that happen.
This is a legal fiction. Both abortion and affirmative action were legislated from the bench. That's how they came to be. It's a classic thing. Having come to the conclusion that some thing should be law, the composition of the bench determines whether sufficient justification can be found. Then these decisions have the weight of law.
It is a defacto Politburo - a long lived legislative body of ultimate authority that has a rolling composition not determined by direct electoral results.
We can point to the legal fiction that the judiciary is not the legislature all we want but it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
> the composition of the bench determines whether sufficient justification can be found.
You're under the mistaken impression that justifications are a prerequisite. Any court can find justification for any ruling in whatever way they see fit. Yes, lower judges have been remove for questionable decisions. SCOTUS is above that, as a lifetime appointment. Sometimes rulings come with no justification at all. SCOTUS has been trying to explain itself via these public "opinions", but is not required to do so.
They kind of do. Federal judges have a great deal of latitude in what they are allowed to accomplish with a ruling. They have the power to effectively change the text of a law to mean what the judge says it should mean (granted, it must also pass appeal).
It has been a problem for decades now that Congress will pass laws that aren't well thought out, then leave it to the judiciary to iron out the specifics. It's only recently that members of the judiciary began pushing back and ruling on the text of the law and saying the legislators should "fix" the obvious problems with the law.
The term for this is colloquially, "legislating from the bench."
> They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
This is not how it works in common law jurisdictions. Common law judges can and do make law. This is called case law (or common law), in contrast to statute law that is enacted by the legislature. That goes beyond just interpreting statute law but also making new laws where they do not exist. Common law offences, for example, are crimes declared as such by judges even when there is no statute criminalising that conduct. Most of the existing contract law has been made by judges rather than by legislators.
This is just a dispute of semantics over what the word "law" means. The fact remains that the United States government has been designed from the start to have legislative bodies that pass statutes, and judicial bodies which do not pass statutes. If judicial bodies effectively pass or amend statutes by exercising too much control, then we have a fundamental breakdown occurring with respect to the design of the system.
They aren't legislating from the bench. Legislating from the bench is the opposite of what is being done here. The role of the judicial is to look at laws and actions and determine if they're legal within the meta framework. That is what was done here.
SCOTUS rules on the constitutionality of laws. It doesn't write or institute any laws whatsoever. Now people need to get into college on merit instead of scoring high in the Victim Olympics. That's a great thing for our society.
New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.
Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.
Whether to a sufficient degree or not, SCOTUS agrees with you on this point and exercises a strong reluctance to second-guess past generations of itself, especially on statutory (as opposed to constitutional) matters, since it is theoretically easy for Congress to amend its own statutes if ever Congress should disagree with how the Court has interpreted them.
Indeed, just today, SCOTUS also released a unanimous opinion protecting a person's religious rights against his employer [1]. Sotomayor and Jackson left an addendum pointing out that this man had asked them to overrule a 50-year precedent in interpreting a law, and they explicitly chose not to do so (though they ruled in his favor in a different, narrower way) precisely for the reason I mentioned about Congress having the opportunity to correct the matter if they so choose.
The "liberal" justices usually get the most flack for "legislating from the bench" (although arguments can be made that the "conservative" ones do it too). But here we have the most liberal justice on the Court saying "The Court's respect for Congress's decision not to intervene promotes the separation of powers by requiring interested parties to resort to the legislative rather than the judicial process to achieve their policy goals."
If I could air a very broad-brush opinion, complaints people have about SCOTUS being a partisan institution these days are best levied against Congress (and litigants) for how they treat the Court, not against the Court for its own behavior. When people express low confidence in the Court, I'm always eager to see them aim their low confidence at Congress instead of (not in addition to) the Court.
This one is interesting because ever since the Native American case, they’ve been carefully sidestepping this issue every time it came before the court, they’d rule very narrowly usually in favor of religious freedom, but would never establish any precedent, looks like they took the same tack here.
Beyond that it took Gore losing in Florida by a handful of votes (butterfly ballot?!), Trump carrying the states he did by less than 100k votes and effectively two Supreme Court Justices to die, and one to retire for this to be overturned.
more asians, less blacks and a bit less latinos at top schools, especially private ones. Will be interesting to see if they move toward an income based affirmative action.
When you say "income based affirmative action" do you mean an increase in need-base grants and scholarships, which already exists, or giving someone preferential admissions treatment because their parents make less money regardless of academic ability?
Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC, and yet score the highest in testing. So, activists will probably eschew this method as well because it will give Asians preferential treatment which they are loathe to do.
Admissions departments will find proxies for race. The next year of Harvard freshmen will not be majority Asian. The admissions department won’t allow that to happen.
A proxy of zip code, maybe. That would be racially blind, a poor white kid in the midst of a poor black neighborhood would be just as likely to get in as their black neighbors would be.
If colleges stop considering standardized tests in order to keep the number of Asians down, is that illegal? Could courts force colleges to keep using the SAT?
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
Sure seems like proxies for race are if anything explicitly called out as being OK by SCOTUS rather than illegal.
Far from it, the point is that the lived experience of the individual matters, just not their race explicitly.
The court recognizes the effects of race and recognizes them as valuable when considering a candidate, just not their race per se. If you allow me to be a bit cheeky, it values the content of their character over the color of their skin.
If true, an in-person English fluency and personality interviewing process, even a supposedly race-blind one, tends to skew heavily against a majority of, but not all, Asian college applicants.
That’s probably what your theoretical proxy will look like, if you’re correct.
This is something that actually got Harvard in trouble as alumni interviews rated Asians roughly similar to Whites, but the personality scores that the admissions offices gave Asians were lower even though they never met the candidates.
"Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono."
Sounds like the equally-ridiculous "cultural fit" part of company interviews. Even if candidates pass all the measurable, competence-based criteria for the job, companies have the cultural fit card to play against those candidates for whatever unsavory reason the company wants to exclude them.
To the contrary, Stanford, for instance, has ~22% of its student body "White or Caucasian", when it used to be 40% in 2016. This swing didn't occur simply because white students stopped applying.
Universities will come up with other justifications to keep their racial diversity high. If you’re from a certain area, single parent household, went to certain schools, etc.
Eventually some university will get sued for that, and we’ll see how the Supreme Court rules. I imagine it’ll depend on how egregious it is, and if there are any internal emails where admissions are openly talking about it.
Historically: Colleges were mostly establishment (liberal or otherwise)
1990s and 2000s: Asians do well on exams (and in workplace), take ever greater % of sets from establishment, competitively
2010s: Establishment realize that "BLM" and aim to give Asian seats to PoC, while also conveniently setting proportionately lower quotas for Asians so establishment retains seats they were losing
2020s: New ways found to prevent Asians from competitively winning seats (e.g., roadblocks on registration, etc)
Just to echo what other people replied. Law is over rated.
If people are really interested in doing something - whether that's discriminating against Black people or discriminating in favor of Black people - they're probably going to find a way to do it. Laws will make a difference on the margins but if there are motivated people then they are going to start trying to work around this ruling today.
The biggest effect of this ruling is that it's a marker to let people know that opposition to affirmative action is serious. That will have more of an impact then the ruling itself.
It is sad that most comments to this continually focus on the racial identity outcomes.
What this really means is that some students who had better grades and test scores will get into their more preferred university, and some students who had worse grades and scores will have to settle for a more fitting less-preferred university.
Even though adcoms try to keep the same regime through other proxies, but they have to be very careful: 'But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.' (p. 39)
I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)?
Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with.
In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all:
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to the Supreme Court then they won’t decide on it.
I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
Narrow rulings are central to the process. It's the difference between a "holding" and "dictum." A court can express an opinion about something, but if that opinion wasn't essential to resolve the case before the court, it's nothing more than an opinion, and later/lower courts can ignore that part.
Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered.
IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.
I do know that 25 years ago or so there considerable weight given to gender in sciences and engineering. I do feel like all talk of it has disappeared, and wasn't sure if it was because it was no longer a factor or because race became the dominant talking point.
From the data you present I suspect that there is weight still given to gender. I wonder how much energy there would be to investigating this? I wonder how many guys who get rejected from MIT CS will now do Tik Toks about how a girl took his spot, since he can no longer say it was a black kid?
Really? Gender-based discrimination is subject to intermediate scrutiny, not strict scrutiny (which is used for race). I thought it was well-known that some schools give boys a leg up because otherwise they would be 60/40 girls/boys.
This article [1] indicates that state schools cannot discriminate, but private schools can. It's a decade old, but I can't think of any intervening laws/cases that would have changed this analysis (IAAL).
I don't know how prevalent gender discrimination is in colleges. My understanding is that enrollment and admission numbers do in fact overwhelmingly admit women over men, at approximately a 60/40 ratio. The article you reference states that while some private institutions can be single gender, once they choose to admit both, they are legally prohibited from discriminating to maintain a 50-50 balance.
It could be very well true that some or many institutions are violating the law, but I don't think that negates the point that I made about what the law is.
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.
It is already illegial to consider all of the characteristics you mentioned.
Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination.
This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed
>Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason.
I agree that there is nuance, but I think this is still accurate in terms of the ruling. Protected class discrimination is illegal in the absence of the compelling interest.
There are still tons of exemptions and hypocrisy, but in general you typical public university can not discriminate admissions based on sex, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, ect.
If a public university instituted a no-gays or no-immigrants admission policy it would be quickly struck down under the status quo, so there is no need to discuss that.
Im not sure how single gender schools fit into the whole scheme. is there a specific case about Wellesley I should look up? I didnt see anything about title 9 challenges on Wikipedia.
> Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, has been the boldest defender of what she prefers to call “race-sensitive” admission policies and has referred to herself as the “perfect affirmative action child.”
That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
Im really not so sure. I've seen plenty of support for "affirmative action", just not based on race. Most people are more than ok with giving those in need an edge, given their situation, but many are against promoting a rich black person over a poor white one.
And sure, race can serve as a proxy, the black population in the United States is impoverished compared to the mean, but in the same way that it's not acceptable to take race as proxy when it comes to crime, it's not acceptable to do it when it comes to livelihood, in my opinion.
Sotomayor revealed in oral argument for this very case that she does not understand the difference between "de facto" and "de jure". There's plenty of other things to dislike her for beyond one liners in interviews.
Yeah. That was really weird. I don't know what to make of it, since it's hard to believe that she actually doesn't know the difference between the terms.
I just finished reading her dissent in this case, and I actually think she understands the legal difference, but because of her policy preferences (in this case, racism is actually okay but only for college admissions) she just forgot for a while.
Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now, they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc., scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can pick whatever students they want.
Adcoms (admission committees) have learned their hard lessons. Williams R. Fitzsimmons and Rakesh Khurana of Harvard might have told everyone to not put everything in writing, just as CEOs tell underlings to not put in writing in order to not be found in the discovery process. And these professors and deans we ordinary mortals should emulate for ethical exemplars. Maybe, they should follow what they preach to students.
I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.
A lottery doesn't guarantee randomness at all because the population is not evenly distributed. If you have 99 people apply who are white and 1 person apply who is black, the lottery is going to naturally favor white candidates by virtue of # of applicants.
> I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept.
Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities.
I think that merit lotteries are excellent and work much more effectively than the ordinary things people to do increase diversity (which often focuses on aesthetics rather than actually changing things). But we are kidding ourselves if we think that they won't face precisely the same resistance.
Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist
This is an uncharitable interpretation. AIUI part of the motivation for overhauling the admissions system was precisely to reduce the proportion of Asian Americans admitted, in order to satisfy some diversity goal set at the state level.
So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.
This is exactly what I mean when I say that merit lotteries will get exactly the same reaction where people just say "this is racist, you want to oppress Asian Americans."
I suggest you read pages 11 and 12 for context, but I'd like to specifically draw your attention to the first full sentence on page 14:
"Here, no dispute of material fact exists regarding any of the Arlington Heights factors, nor as to the ultimate question that the Board acted with discriminatory intent."
For specific evidence of that discriminatory intent, start at page 17.
Nobody was suggesting throwing the 2.5 GPA kids in with the 4.5 GPA kids and sending them wherever. If MIT has a 4% acceptance rate, I can guarantee that more than 4% of those applicants could have succeeded there if a spot was available to them. Applicants already largely self-select whether to bother applying in the first place.
The suggestion is that MIT or Northeastern State A&M for that matter set a minimum standard bar that they will consider. Then, all of those applicants that meet the standard are entered into a lottery to determine who gets the spots.
It's not all that different from today except it eliminates the problems from whether Reader A or Reader B looks at your application and whether Reader A had a good night's sleep or a fight with their partner that morning.
The idea is that there are more kids who could succeed at the college than there are spots. So find the right bar and do lottery.
A lot of this comes down to what you think the mission of college is. Is it to educate the highest achieving kids who apply? Or to graduate a certain type of student? Or something else?
For me I know it’s not just to educate the highest achieving kids. If the top college in the world ended up accepting all terrorists who were trained to be exceptional students that wouldn’t sit right with me. Even if I could acknowledge they had the best academic records. That seems like such a shallow goal for university.
The way I see it, this is only a problem if you must go to one of the top schools in the nation, such as MIT, because you want to be able to graduate and secure an extremely competitive job at the best companies with no questions asked.
If you aren't actively trying to achieve stardom in the professional world, there are tons of good universities that will provide a great education and will look good on your resume, you just might not be hired right out of the gate at Apple with only one or two rounds of interviews.
I wonder if there's also a difference between engineering and non-engineering schools. I tend to agree that at MIT you mostly just want the very best engineers and the more objective the metric, maybe the better.
But if I'm looking to educate the best politicians, judges, business people, activists -- I think that I really do care about a lot more than SATs and transcripts.
It's funny because I feel like no one has this argument about Cal Tech. They might have affirmative action, but if they didn't everyone seemed to be OK with it.
Why is the analogy ridiculous? You should read The Chosen, by Karabel, which is probably the best history of elite college admissions. Much of what we do in college admissions today are remnants to reduce the number of Jewish people at Ivy League schools -- and then later a focus on meritocracy. Colleges have historically taken stock of the "type" of people they accept and adjust to their liking.
I'm ignoring analogies containing terrorists in it lol. It's true that colleges are historically and currently biased. But that does not mean that you just drop the idea of meritocracy and just say fuck it have a lottery. Instead you move towards the ideal and crack down on college biases, e.g, you can assign students to colleges based on prospective student's college preferences and SAT scores; that's how it works in plenty of countries.
I choose terrorists because everyone dislikes them. Seemed non-offensive. But you can make them whatever group you think is harmful in your mind (maybe progressives for you).
The question is what is the ends meant to achieve by the meritocracy? The goal of most institutions in our world is to make the world a better place for us to live in. If the meritocracy seems to run counter to that then it may not be achieving its goal. And the point I was trying to make with the terrorists is that if you blindly treat meritocracy as its own ends then you can end up making the world a worse place for it.
The thing about putting terrorists in an analogy is it distorts the intent of the analogy in unexpected ways, so you lose what you're trying to convey.
The framework that I'm coming from is that work/talent/etc must be rewarded in a predictable manner in order for kids to have the motivation to perform and succeed. If the system gets unpredictable, kids will be demotivated and not compete in the system anymore. As in, if it's a lottery and my classmate who does worse than me gets into a better college than me, this isn't a fair competition so why try studying, I'll go into sports or something where the best person under the competitive framework wins.
You argue that if the system is too predictable then too many undesirable people might succeed. Which might or might not be true, it's pure speculation. We're talking about high achieving students who want to get into good colleges; no need to compare them to terrorists. Purely test based systems work in plenty of other countries without the college graduates collapsing society.
What you point out is maybe partially true. There was an episode on the Hidden Brain podcast recently about the famous marshmallow test that speaks to what you're stating. On this show they point out that the discipline to eat or not eat the marshmallow is also a function of if you believe that the person will actually give you the second marshmallow when they return. The predictability.
But most Black students face this level of unpredictability moreso every day leading up to college admissions. Another, unrelated study, asked teachers to watch for misbehaving kids -- with a mixed race group of kids. The thing was that none of the kids were misbehaving -- but the teachers still pointed to the Black kids. Black kids live with this level of predictability all throughout schooling where they'll be called out for doing the same thing as white students who aren't called out. Eventually you learn to just eat the marshmallow, because the second one isn't coming even if you have the discipline to not eat the first.
So then this ties back to the lottery. It turns out that little in life has 100% predictability. There's no guarantee that my startup will make me billions, even if I seemingly do everything that Steve Jobs did. But I increase my chances and the lottery works the same way. But it also does something else -- it also provides a marshmallow for the kids who know that in their current environment they face steep odds to ever take 16 AP classes or work with their dad's research lab to win the Westinghouse/Intel Science Fair.
It turns out that fairness isn't so easy to determine.
> best universities are meant educate the highest achieving kids. That's how they keep being the best universities. The middle achieving kids can go to the middle universities; there are plenty and there is a whole gradient of them.
How is what you described in any way incompatible with lottery systems? Did you not catch the phrase "So find the right bar and do lottery?" The best colleges set the higher bars, middle schools set a middle bar, etc etc.
> Do we live in a meritocracy or not?
Absolutely not. That's the lie we've been told all our lives by the haves. But either way, the lottery is more meritocratic: you have one seat, two people who are both qualified, how do you choose? Merit has already been established! After that, the lottery doesn't care about race, age, etc etc.
Acceptance into anything, beyond a table-stakes requirement of merit, is essentially a lottery. You work your ass off, you get an interview, your luck of the draw is someone having a bad day, is otherwise biased against you, or any number of other issues. It's naive to think that the people interviewing you are doing so solely on the grounds of your achievements on paper. This is true regardless of whether you're interviewing for an academic program, for a job, for a sale, for an investment...
Society can either do the healthy thing and accept this and embrace it (won't happen, because it's not "fair"), or not, and make the inherent lottery explicit.
I don't think a lottery system is a replacement for affirmative action, it would still not be representative of the racial makeup of our population.
And if rewarding hard work were the only criteria for admission, then legacy preferences wouldn't exist, either. That is the sort of thing affirmative action attempts to balance out.
I don't have an answer, and I hope that all who have earned an opportunity are rewarded. But whenever I see that a group is under-represented relative to population, I have to wonder what the reasons are and what can be done to help.
I am OK with having to work harder if it means someone who has had fewer opportunities, resources and support than me – not only in their lifetime, but for generations in their family – gets a boost.
It seems some are afraid of having to work as hard as someone who was not born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
Early intervention is absolutely best. I have four children and we have about as much opportunity, support and resources as you could ask for, and it is still a huge undertaking to raise a family.
Affordable/free preschool, childcare, school lunches, summer programs, etc., would all be helpful. Perhaps universities can (are?) getting involved in that. But until we do a better job as a country/society funding these programs for all, then disparities will persist.
> Perhaps universities can (are?) getting involved in that. But until we do a better job as a country/society funding these programs for all, then disparities will persist.
This is actually something I was thinking about reading through these comments. These universities should focus on "giving back" type programs, I think. Something like sending their professors to underprivileged schools to speak to or involve themselves in students lives. Mentorship programs that start much earlier in a child's life could make a massive difference.
The problem with programs like that is they don't provide tangible results fast enough for administrator and politicians to justify themselves.
I don't think he means a purely random lottery (at least I hope he doesn't). My son was a high achiever (valedictorian, top 1% SAT, honor society, etc. etc.) but still didn't get admitted to MIT because he was competing with 30,000 other similar high achievers for 1000 spots. That's where the lottery concept comes in - you have to compete to qualify for the lottery. It's already in place after all, they just try to make it less lottery-ish.
The issue is that the lottery is never enough. Effectively, the lottery percentage is removed from discussions and the fight moves on to the non-lottery percentage where the same arguments of diversity come back to the non-lottery percentage. This is not hypothetical, this is how the US immigration system is currently. There is a diversity lottery, which is a mostly foregone conclusion right now. And yet, there is race/country based quota in the skill based categories and proponents want quotas despite it being a skill being category. Once you create a lottery, you can't say, "Go do your thing in the lottery, this lane is for merit". So the lottery is a waste. Several attempts to phase out caps/quotas from skill based categories through legislature have failed so far. In the most recent case, the congressional black caucus opposed it as it would disadvantage the currently advantaged immigrants from African countries.
> Some sort of randomness would guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.
It wouldn't create as much randomness as you think. For example, nearly 90% of student who score 1500+ on the SATs are Asian or white. [1] It's nearly the same for 1400+. If an Ivy set its lottery cutoff to be at a level that kept its average and interquartile range the same as it currently is, their admitted class would follow this pattern.
> Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.
But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down?
Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again.
That's not how this works. The supreme court interpreted the equal protection clause to mean A in the original case and decided that limited discrimination didn't violate the constitution. Disagree with it all you want, I'll join you, but that was the ruling. Today the supreme court interpreted the equal protection clause to mean B and struck down their previous decision.
Also lol our constitution isn't anything blind and both acknowledges and establishes different classes of person in order to make rules about them.
After being presented with new information, they came to a different conclusion. As a result of their previous decisions, the data showed that the limited discrimination allowed has had a larger effect than anticipated and led to an outcome of less than limited discrimination.
I actually agree, but what you're describing is effectively legislation. The courts were asked to make a decision and interpret the law as it's written and they did. Honestly, I care more that the court makes a decision than they make the right one. They took a dispute over ambiguous law and disambiguated it. After that the ball is in the other branches' courts. Legislation that outright banned affirmative action would have been constitutional and we let the status quo stand for 45 years without feeling the need to intervene. I can only speak for myself but a ruling that people just accept and don't feel the need to pass new legislation to correct is to me the gold standard.
> I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions
Yeah. Based off the various deep dives I heard about a year ago, the court is supposed to strongly favor leaving prior court rulings in place, but the current justices decided that they were fine changing prior rulings since it's a convention, not a rule.
The current SC really dislikes all the prior rulings that were based off the 14th amendment, so I fully expect this same behavior to continue.
The problem goes further - a number of justices previously declared they'd honor the previous decisions. They should have lost the publics trust over that alone.
> They should have lost the publics trust over that alone.
Public opinion - let alone public trust - does not matter to a Supreme Court justice; they're appointed by the government for life. There's literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Only the opinions of the house/senate members even remotely matters to them, and so long as congress can't get enough votes to impeach them (a majority in the House, and 2/3 of the Senate), they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It's been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
Public opinion and public trust absolutely do matter to the justices. They derive their mandate from the people. If the people really want to relieve a justice of their duty, they will find a way - "the government" can't exist without any public support.
The Supreme Court is only the Supreme Court if enough people say it is.
> There’s literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Political pressure on Congress to impeach a particular justice, or exercise its power to adjust the scope of the appellate jurisdiction of the Court, as well as taking direct extralegal action against specific judges are all acts “short of revolution”.
> Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It’s been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
No, 1805 was the only successful impeachment of a Supreme Court justice, though no conviction occurred in the Senate. The last attempt (counting only those where there is some official action in the House directed explicitly directed at impeachment) was far more recent, 2019 against Justice Kavanaugh (H.Res. 560).
The court changing their mind feels like a feature not a bug. The court represents people, and those people change their mind from generation to generation.
I don't want to live in a world where we can't overturn bad decisions. Would America be better off if we legalized slavery 300 years ago, and could never undo it?
Our government is structured so that nothing is really set in stone. The people who are supposed to check bad decisions by the court are the legislature.
This game we're playing is we now have one legislative body that writes laws and another that writes effectively constitutional amendments. This makes no sense at all and we've created an in-practice unchecked branch of government.
So I don't disagree that the court has done good things with their power but once in a generation swings is much easier to put up with than what we have going now. The world hasn't meaningfully changed since they originally upheld universities' limited ability to discriminate and as much as I don't like that choice I still think take-backsies is a worse one.
My (red) state has a bill going through right now to outlaw university diversity quotas and it likely won't pass so this isn't cultural attitudes changing.
There's a process for overturning "bad decisions" it's called passing legislation. There's a reason Stare Decisis is supposed to be a thing, after all.
But if the Supreme Court doesn't have to listen to itself, then does any court? Should every minor court just decide SC precedent was bad & overturn it?
>> Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.
The decision continues with:
"But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) "[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.""
They are warning the universities to not play games with them.
I do, I think this should have been done with amendments to the constitution like we did for the 15th and 19th amendment.
Taken to its logical extreme if the US had a single dictator but they did good things would you argue against needing a democratic process? The court lives in a weird place where they have close to unchecked power and make their own rules. It is what it is, there's always a root account somewhere. But the convention/culture of the courts has been the primary thing keeping this in check and if that goes we're in trouble.
> Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again.
> This was already decided forty years ago
If the US Supreme Court never overturned its decisions, these decisions would still be in force:
- laws criminalising private consensual same-sex activity are constitutional (Bowers v Hardwick, 1986–overturned by Lawrence v Texas in 2003)
- miscegenation laws do not violate the 14th Amendment (Pace v Alambama, 1883–overturned in part by McLaughlin v Florida in 1964 and fully by Loving v Virginia in 1967)
- legally enforced racial segregation does not violate the 14th Amendment (Plessy v Ferguson, 1896–effectively overturned by Brown v Board of Education in 1954)
- racial segregation in public schools is constitutional (Cumming v Richmond County Board of Education, 1899–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- states have the constitutional right to ban racially integrated private educational institutions (Berea College v Kentucky, 1908–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- it is constitutional to execute juvenile offenders who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crime (Stanford v Kentucky, 1989–overturned by Roper v Simmons, 2005)
- it is constitutional to execute the intellectually disabled (Penry v Lynaugh, 1989–overturned by Atkins v Virginia in 2002)
- it is constitutional for public schools to force students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even if they have a religious objection to doing so (Minersville School District v Gobitis, 1940–overturned a mere three years later by West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 1943)
- labor laws which impose limits on working hours are unconstitutional (Lochner v New York, 1905–never explicitly overturned, although a series of 1930s decisions effectively did so)
- minimum wage laws are unconstitutional (Adkins v Children's Hospital, 1923–overturned by West Coast Hotel Co. v Parrish, 1937)
- child labor laws violate children's constitutional right to work (Hammer v Dagenhart, 1918, and Bailey v Drexel Furniture Co, 1922–overturned by United States v Darby Lumber Co, 1941)
If the principle "the Supreme Court should never overturn its past decisions" was accepted–the US would be a very different country today. Even if you only want to apply that principle to "established precedent" – Pace v Alabama was law for over 80 years, so if that principle was seriously followed, interracial marriage bans might well still exist in the US today.
As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor.
But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it.
I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged.
I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...
I’m a white Latino and no, we don’t. Maybe on paper if someone assumes I’m mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I’m hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I’ve often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when alone but not with me.
The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles.
He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.
But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america
2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.
If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.
This. “I got mine so no one else needs it”. And sorry GP but you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as well and it was fairly clear.
The problem is that it’s a zero sum game - if you’ve benefited from it, then someone else was discriminated against on the basis of their race for your benefit.
That's simply not true, it is largely on colleges to improve staffing and facilities to accommodate more students. It is well-known that populations generally increase so especially public schools should probably try to understand and address that. Due diligence is something we should ask of our publicly funded services.
It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
Everyone obsesse about Harvard/MIT but AA affects every school and not all of them give you a fancy big name on a resume.
And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
>> I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs
Sounds like OP certainly deserved it to me. Instead we have these perverse incentives to go to "elite" schools purely because of the school's name (not because you're really getting that much of a better education than you would in a different top 100 university). These schools end up with thousands of applicants who definitely deserve to get in, but they need to cull the group of perfect candidates somehow because of practical considerations like faculty to student ratio. Whether they discriminate using race, or implement a lottery system, there's plenty of candidates that deserve the entry but don't get in because of practical limitations.
I certainly didn't get perfect scores on the SAT and I certainly wasn't valedictorian.
This mentality is very gross, and treats life like it's a fair game with clear winners and losers. Life is messy, and you can still do every single thing right and end up worse off. Likewise, you can, and many people do, fail "up" into extraordinary positions of power due to no merit of your own.
If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.
Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes.
Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals.
When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc?
My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ― Stephen Jay Gould
Yeah if Physicians didn't have a monopoly on medicine, OP probably would have lived in a middle-class school district and not had every advantage of a 1-5%er.
While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.
> Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unknown outside a ~150 mile radius, and only somewhat recognized within it.
From what I could tell, the content, pace, and amount & sort of assigned work were all pretty similar.
What differed? Two main things:
1) The guest lecturers—cheap state school, none, or unremarkable ones; the fancy schools, both more common to have them, and universally very impressive credentials, possibly someone you've heard of even if you don't really follow the topic, basically, their guests were "celebrities", at least within a field.
2) How engaged the students seemed to be—not at all, at the cheap state school; very, at the fancy schools.
This is for undergrad. The ways they differ may not be the same in grad school.
Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.
The supply of physicians is artificially limited by Medicare funding for residency programs at teaching hospitals. This shortage will only get worse as the population ages.
The corporations running America's hospitals and health systems are fully aware of this problem and have lobbied state governments to give physician's assistants, nurse practitioners, and in some cases even pharmacists the same powers as doctors. Depending on your state, you'll find an NP or PA where you might have expected a doctor 10 years ago -- places like urgent care clinics and standalone ERs.
Well, there’s someone out there who is white or Asian that didn’t get to become a doctor. Are their kids as successful?
Otherwise I agree with you. It’s in the past. We all have advantages and disadvantages, whether genetic or societal. There’s no reason to feel bad about something in the past you had no control over.
It's worth bearing in mind that if affirmative action helped his father become a doctor, it also prevented someone else's father from becoming a doctor. I wonder what that person could have achieved.
In the end, higher education is a scarce resource. Making it harder for group X to get in is absolutely discrimination, and does reduce the amount of people from group X who can attain higher education.
Affirmative Action is talked about as positive discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-less.
> Every decision is discrimination. Basis and purpose is what matters.
That is true, which is why it is illegal in my country to discriminate based on things that you are. In my country, we value equality and believe that everyone should be treated fairly and without discrimination. Laws are in place to protect individuals from discrimination based on factors such as race, gender, religion, age, disability, and other protected characteristics.
Discrimination based on who you are, such as your inherent traits or characteristics, is considered unjust and contrary to the principles of equality. The focus should be on a person's abilities, qualifications, and merits rather than factors that they have no control over.
There's a saying in my country. "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
Or even a small private army for their protection. The poor have to rely on the mercy of the law, the police, and the courts. They don't like having their things stolen, they don't like being accosted in the street, they don't like disorderly conduct around them -- but they don't have nice villas or townhouses to retire to.
I don't think Anatole France really had thought things through when he wrote that quote...
There aren't any beggars or any people sleeping under bridges in my country who don't want to do that themselves. We have social security for everyone, and homeless shelters for those who cannot behave well enough to not be evicted from apartments.
What if Group X has their own country where they will get that preference but Group Y is native born and gets a taint? The top class of Group Y will be fine. It's the lower ranks of Group Y who lose out to Group X and the higher ranks of Group Y who cement their own status by cutting off their native competition.
As someone not from the US, this whole Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism. I.e. in the end more-or-less still unfair.
Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be racism free, the degree to which it is focused on just proves that the US isn't free of racism. Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
> Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism. I.e. in the end more-or-less still unfair.
It's not even reversed racism, it's just plain old racism. The only difference is the targets of the racism are European descended and Asian descended people instead of African and Latin American descended people.
This post reeks of smugness. I hope you aren't from western Europe, as you can easily see that there is discrimination based on race with regards to eg policing- where crimes committed by certain individuals of a protected status aren't even allowed to be reported on. And FYI- equality is also enshrined in the US constitution, but constitutions are (universally) subject to interpretation
The socioeconomic class of the family is the highest indicator of socioeconomic class of the children in that family.
In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.
In an already racist system, doing something like economic class based support (example: 20% of college admissions need to come from poor households) would just mostly go to the privileged race and perpetuate the systemic racism.
Your post is also an illustration of what white privilege can look like. I know you said you’re not American, but the tone matches to a T. White people don’t realize the negative effects of racism on others and others family history and can’t even conceive of it. From having cab drivers not willing to pick you up, to not getting a job or being passed over for promotions, let alone going to schools that are under funded. And as a side effect of that racism towards non-whites, white people benefit by getting the can, the job, the promotion, the good schools that the non-whites, but equally qualified did not.
And as the head paragraph states, that gets embedded into society in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family.
> In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.
The per capita income for "whites" in the US is $36,962
The per capita income for the following groups is higher than that:
Indian, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
Similar results for median household incomes.
I couldn't easily find the data but I've seen previous reports of sub-groups of "blacks" that also have higher median incomes than whites (as a group). Ahh, here is an article talking about the success of Nigerian immigrants, as an example. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...
Please explain how to reconcile this data with your statement.
When I was growing up ('90s, 00s), that was the "movement" and teaching that was going on. It's colloquially known as being "colorblind". It has radically shifted the opposite direction. It's the difference between equality and equity, equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome.
I don't know what's right or wrong really but I can say that the rapidness of the shift was definitely shocking to me. There's a lot of disagreement between Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z on the topic because of it.
It's because no matter how much you tell people "don't see race", it doesn't stop a large percentage from being raised by explicitly racist people, of the "That football player is acting like a n***" type. If the people who understand that racism is bad do nothing, and the racists are the only ones who act on stuff, what do you think happens? You can't counteract racism with silence.
> Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
Believe me, this has been considered and tried in various contexts. The problem is that in the end schools and companies find out that they don't achieve the "right" mix of ethnicities and genders and so it's back to square one.
They tried this with orchestra auditions by doing them behind a curtain but they didn't end up with the "right" mix. As of yet they haven't figure out how people's auditory senses are racist.
>this whole Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism
It is, but it is an attempt to right a wrong, which isn't an easy thing to do or measure. It's a moralistic endeavor and moralistic endeavors can become monsters in their own right.
>To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race.
It's become a political football, because of this, I think it's perpetuating it more than it would be naturally. Morgan Freeman articulated this well many years ago.
>Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
It's funny, this is done to ensure that historically oppressed races are measured for success / failure. It seems to support to your reverse racism comment.
>Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
I agree, that's why AA was struck down. It's a clear violation of the 14th amendment. This was known at the time and known in the early 2000's (2003?) when this came up before. It's always been considered an emergency measure that would need to end because it was a clear violation of equal protection under the law clause of the 14th.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”
Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country
Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.
> parental income as well as parental education level in admissions
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
That's where things fall down, though. I've done some admissions work (I am not professionally in admissions or HR or anything, I was just an academic mathematician). A lot of "qualifications" are experiences you can buy. You can buy volunteer experiences here or there, whether as literally as flying your child to Africa to volunteer or as simply as not asking your kid to contribute to paying the rent and letting them tutor for no cash. You can buy your kid test prep classes -- yes, the poor kid can get an SAT prep book from the library but the rich kid can have a tutor take their child by the hand and cajole/harass/massage the kid through test prep. You must pay pay pay to have your kid participate in traveling soccer league, dance team, lacrosse, etc. Remember travel soccer and similar activities are a way of divesting from the public schools, ensuring that this money and coaching benefits kids whose parents can pay (the right kinds of kids, the kids you want your kid to marry). What else? The music lessons, the robotics contests, the school district that has a full suite of AP or IB classes rather than just a couple, but in which houses start at $425k...
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment. If someone is a regular A student while dodging bullets with a mother on crack, they are probably a much stronger human than someone who comes from an upper middle class family and gets valedictorian, is class president, does volunteer work and won a teen writing award or some-such.
If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system
Indeed, but the goal of affirmative action as actually practiced is not to help people who are unlucky in terms of where they are born and are growing up, but to literally just achieve desired racial balance. It is pure racism, it’s all about skin color.
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
There are, but Harvard is not the only one competing for them. Once you consider all top schools, the population of ADOSes who can make it based on academics is really tiny: given the fundamental constant of sociology being 1 sigma difference between white and black Americans, given how normal distribution works, the difference in figures at the top of distribution is enormous.
For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.
Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.
Your cut off makes no sense, because Harvard is about potential. If we had a perfect, balanced, equitable test for academic potential than of course we'd use it, but we don't. So you can't just use the distributions about existing tests to prove your point.
If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
You are wrong, we have excellent tests of potential. Read about, for example, about SMPY, where researchers identified kids with high potential in middle school, then tracked their life as they grew up and built their careers. The test they used turned out to be highly effective and predictive: inordinate high percentage of those identified as talented turned out to be highly successful in academic and professional careers. See
What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.
> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.
So you do have a mysticism about what it is like to go to Harvard.
Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.
Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.
Do we need race based affirmative action though? Couldn't we have needs based discrimination? What makes a poor hispanic immigrant more deserving of a hand up than a poor ukranian immigrant?
I would say both are in need, personally, but affirmative action is looking at the reality that society will discriminate more against the Hispanic immigrant… so everything on the way to education and afterwords will reduce the chances of upward mobility and the self-confidence to withstand such discrimination compared to someone who is the dominant perceived race.
Because the issue goes way further back than college, yet they sit here at the college-level with little-dictators breathing down their necks about why is their college "so white". So how far back does one need to go, and how patient are we to see generational results?
Honestly, I think this is 100% the responsibility of parents. They are the ones that need to break the generational cycle of whatever they're facing. Beyond that - as you say - needs based approaches to this.
I don't understand why we as a society can't simply have "Oh you got more than 95% on your standardized test scores? 100% full scholarship to any college and any degree you wish without paying it back." That is how you fix a society if you ask me, by rewarding hard work and merit.
Not really. Selection is a zero sum game. If you add more Ukrainian refugees, you need to remove some other kids from the running. Needs based discrimination makes different choices than race based discrimination. More of one means less of the other.
> If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action.
But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in life?
Did discrimination stop since then? Did the percentage of underrepresented minorities get balanced out since then?
My guess is not, in which case it would be justified under the principles behind it.
Having successful minorities that continue to produce success multi-generationally is a good thing. It brings people out of poverty, creates positive examples for people that look like someone who is struggling, creates more wealth in the targeted communities which can be spread around, etc.
Except if this creamy layer is a minority, society at large will still be trying to push them down. I think it’s important to have some cream to resist this and provide counter examples.
Not to diminish OP's accomplishments at all. His father benefited from AA which enabled him to level the playing field. Or perhaps more than level the playing field. Given that, is OP still starting from behind and need help to catch up? Or is OP now part of the privileged group and should take a few steps back?
> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs
> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs
I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.
AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
> AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
> Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
> is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are
Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.
Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.
No, I'm not saying that - and it's rather disingenuous to even infer that statement from my post.
However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.
The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).
Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.
It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.
Ironically, when it comes to nursing, no small part of the gender difference is because of discrimination against male nurses by doctors, nurses, and patients.
Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.
"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.
> if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
> So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society.
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
Can you take the smallest slice, "people who are literally exactly you" and find no preferences that can't be attributed to discriminatory experiences?
To have complete equality of outcome between ethnic groups would surely involve homogenisation of their cultures. That sounds totalitarian as hell if you ask me.
> Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?
> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?
Affirmative action as we know it only works along race lines. There is no affirmative action based on other criteria. Whenever I hear about affirmative action it’s always about race, race, race, …
"Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion" - no, there's always endogenous interactions. Protected class identity isn't randomized.
"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.
Not every workplace and residential area, those are often too small to expect perfect statistical representation. But for every industry, yes I think that's the goal. "every group label that can be created" is quite broad, this obviously only applies to labels like gender, ethnicity, etc. that have no impact on ability.
Is there a reason they should not? Or at least have representation?
With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
> There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.
> Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.
But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.
This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.
Are you sure about that? I don't think there has ever been a tennis match played under normal rules where a top pro woman has beaten a similarly ranked pro man. In the most recent such major exhibition, Karsten Braasch easily defeated both Williams sisters even though he was only ranked #203. The difference in speed and power is enormous, to the extend that at elite levels women and men are playing totally different games.
> There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example.
Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.
Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].
We live in a society where it's impossible for any woman to ever even do college football in any serious capacity. Of course there are zero NFL capable women in that system, do you think people just magically and spontaneously arise from the aether fully developed to such capacity?
How is it impossible? There are no rules barring women from playing college football. They can try out for the team like any other student, and if they're good enough then they'll get playing time.
This is absolutely delusional. The best women's (non-gridiron) football teams are regularly obliterated by random 14 year old boys teams, and that's a sport that's much less reliant on physical strength.
Kind of a complicated question, but not necessarily, gender (or sex I guess) does impact ability in many sports.
I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.
It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.
So you believe that in every industry where men have less than 50% representation (also college admissions), they are being discriminated against, because our goal should be 50/50?
Direct discrimination is not always the primary cause, sometimes there is a self-selection issue caused by broader societal or cultural issues. But yes, in nursing for example, there is no inherent reason for the 90/10 women/men gender split in the US, and we should aim to equalize that. I don't know what causes it, probably some combination of discrimination by employers and patients, and cultural norms that discourage men from pursuing nursing.
Also, given that the split of working-age humans is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.
You don't see any possibility that the 90/10 split is in some part due to each genders' preferences, in general? You don't think that, in general, women prefer more social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?
For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.
If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
> You don't think that, in general, women prefer more social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?
I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.
> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.
The policy was based on several factors, of which race was one.
And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.
In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.
Elite university admissions is zero sum. Harvard doesn't add a seat for race blind admissions for every seat given to affirmative action admits. Making it easier for group A to gain admission makes it harder for group B to gain admission.
The SC canned AA due to racism, even though AA also applied to gender and disability. So the value of AA for women (and men) and disabled people was completely disregarded.
One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.
A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.
OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.
Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority.
Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.
Do white people in general feel that way because of systemic sustained racial discrimination for their benefit?
I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
Most white/Asian people (especially men) living now haven’t really had any “systemic” advantages. It’s been the opposite for a while now.
If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
This is an oft debated topic. Some possible examples of system advantages include family wealth. Blacks historically weren't allowed to have jobs that paid, or were paid less than whites for the same work. Or weren't allowed to own real estate. Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans). Even as early as this year there have been cases of discrimination relating to real estate and race.
So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from.
Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding).
Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it.
These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.
> Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans)
I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house
The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
> where most research has been done for white ethnicities
The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
> I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
Of course, and any difference in equity associated with the house. Around 75% of whites own a home versus 45% of blacks. And as you know -- homeownership is the single largest source of wealth for most people in the US.
> The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
> Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
The person I was responding to seemed to be making that assertion. And I never said that discrimination was the only way to remedy past discrimination.
The part that's disheartening is that so many people are so up in arms about affirmative action -- and how its discriminatory. But consider everything else we discussed (and there's a lot more) as having no real impact. I mean, why are we even talking about it...
What about people who come from families who immigrated into US very recently? On both ends of affirmative action. Why would sub-Saharan african immigrant get a preferential treatment while eastern european one wouldn’t?
The opposite was true for the entire time affirmative action was not in place. Hindsight doesn't make history less relevant for our present for addressing intergenerational inequities, just like foresight-blindness doesn't make our present actions less relevant for our future.
i won't speak for gabe, but i (hispanic) had two distinct (and memorable) instances at mit where a classmate told me, to my face, that the only reason i was at mit was because i was hispanic. one passed it off as common knowledge in a group conversation, the other said it to me, unprompted, while we were talking to each other. they were assholes, to be sure, but it's not some hypothetical scenario.
Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a cut above them academically.
I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
[1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)
> Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
My friend, you absolutely deserved to go to MIT. I'm sure the person you "beat out" for your spot landed at a different, but equally impressive college and had an experience that they wouldn't trade for anything.
> Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.
Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us.
Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress.
Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out:
1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.
2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.
3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better.
4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools.
5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same.
Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it.
> 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.
This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
as someone who's going through the Google hiring pipeline right now (as a candidate), I just wanted to say thanks for these nice words of encouragement / rational thinking about all of this.
the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.
- You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units
- A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in.
- There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units
- This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in
This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz.
The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model:
- You have 100 people in a work force.
- 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years.
- Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months.
Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in.
This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
This was part of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Everyone loves to focus on people of lower ability having an inflated view of their competence in a specific area, but the other side of the research was people of above average aptitude collapsing down their expertise to get closer to the mean.
As someone who’s worked in a college admission office I assure you that this person could have easily gone into the no bin as they did in the yea bin regardless of who they see. it was more the luck of draw the admission counselors found it amusing or ballsy than the color of the skin. And that’s what you need at institutions like these. interesting people with the ability to succeed and take chances.
I would disagree with your larger point. While I didn’t go to GATech (although I did get in), I did go to MIT and a UC as well as a state school and community college. I’ve also worked for a couple of FAANGS, startups, etc. So I’ve seen a diversity of environments and the people in them. MIT by far had the highest concentration of top talent of anywhere I’ve been. It also had _culturally_ the most ambition which pushed people into excellence, even if they didn’t know they were capable of it. I was in an honors society at my UC, and there were very bright people who went onto top graduate schools, but overall the percentage of them was lower in the school (which was already hard to get into), and the ambition level was much less despite (for this group) raw talent being similar.
Of course there are more people who deserve to be there than there is room. But keeping it small allows it to achieve something special that being bigger wouldn’t allow. Those that do make it in are by and large absolutely top talent.
So it’s not just education and network that matters. I’d argue culture is one of the most important under-appreciated aspects. And MIT culture is top notch.
I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.
A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.
At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.
Hmm, I can definitely say I've seen a version of that at Indian IITs. all great students but most feel like imposters there. also the subtle thing is that the risk/reward calculus gets f-ed up, meaning, for all the students who have been at the top of their games wherever they came from now the rewards for significant incremental efforts were minuscule. So I have seen many disengage & get into 'enjoy life' mode.
Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?
Every day just after 5pm, sitting in my college's Engineering atrium, I would start to see a veritable army (dozens and dozens) of youngish, well-dressed people walk out to the parking lot and leave. They weren't faculty, because I knew all of the faculty, and they weren't students. They had little embossed metal nametags.
I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.
> I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go.
the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools
If MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in.
I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
> if MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in
"better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions
I was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the first hire from country X"
After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
> I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...
What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!
I love this confessional personal anecdote of ambivalence. I often wonder how so many people seem to be so sure about how they feel about seemingly everything. But you, I relate to.
I grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action" to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more) seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result, you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, whereas somebody from the "general" class scores 90 and still doesn't get in.
Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks.
IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.
Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources, but for a lack of familial support. I live in a state where those inner-city schools receive substantially more funding (per student, and total) than ones in wealthy suburbs. Yet, guess what, the wealthy suburbs still have wildly better outcomes. Turns out the parents working several jobs to try to make ends meet have less time to push their kid to succeed than the stay-at-home moms. Why are poor neighborhoods predominantly made up of groups that are minorities in the American population? Because America, within the last few generations by law, and up through today by social convention, has given fewer opportunities to succeed to these marginalized groups, including in education.
Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.
I think the idea that anyone "deserves" to what they get is misguided at best. None of us got to where we are on our own, so I think all that we can really judge ourselves on is how we use the opportunities that we are given.
For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth.
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
Not American and not familiar with American history so apologies if this is a stupid question. The reason as I understand it for AA for black Americans is the history of slavery. What is the reason for applying AA to hispanics?
Hispanics have historically been discriminated against in the United States. They are (or were) predominately Catholic in a country that is (or was) predominately not Catholic.
It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans.
Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities are trying to limit (Asian Americans).
America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.
In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.
Many of those people are imported from foreign universities. If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable.
The ability to fund research and attract the best researchers (not necessarily educators) is useful at education's high-end, which is why many come to the USA in the first place. It isn't so great for standard or remedial education, however.
> If the claim had been "American universities are better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality, it's questionable
Education quality at most top universities is middling, they’re designed for smart people who will reach for knowledge. Being around the best people drained from around the world provides fertile ground for that.
Yes but there's two parts to this: the teachers and the students. The student body in top American universities (especially undergrad) wouldn't even make the wait-list in a fair number of European schools.
Virtually anyone at a top tier university would be 100% capable of learning their material and making good grades on it with the textbook alone. Combined with online resources, even easier. The quality of instruction isn't all that important for these schools, it's the decisions around which material to present and how to present it, which they can do because they attract the best talent.
Care to elaborate? I know I'd been making the same assumption about American universities - Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Stanford do seem to represent a good share of the world's best universities.
In terms of research, it's been roughly true since WWII. Persecution by the Nazis and the war drove the cream of the European scientific establishment to the US, and the US poured a large amount of government funding into science funding after the war. Things are changing, first because the European scientific community has recovered and also because scientific research has been taking off in Asia.
Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.
So untrue. The best resource for preparing for standardized tests is Khan Academy. It is free.
High school grades on the other hand are getting inflated now, because of parental pressure, now that colleges are abandoning standardized tests, and relying more on GPAs. High schools don’t even have a standardized curriculum. Comparing GPAs across high schools make no sense. Within the same school it may make sense though.
I don't know about that. I had two one-hour tutoring sessions that helped me immensely. Going through all of Khan Academy might have helped just as much, but would have taken much, much longer.
So you're saying the SAT gives a bigger advantage to people with resources to prepare, compared to a GPA which is the result of many assignments and tests across four years? That does not sound remotely plausible to me.
SAT + grades is a stronger predictor of college performance than grades alone. AFAIK this is a pretty uncontroversial finding. For a review article, see Frey (2019), "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement."
Are you discounting that the factors that go I to the GPA are wildly different between schools?
I think the guy that got a 2.9 in a school that was seriously focused on education is going to be better prepared for the 4.1 from a peace and love participation trophy school.
And the alternative is letting rich parents hire agencies who will prepare their kids with a perfect portfolio of extracurricular activities starting year 10 that poor kids have no chance to match.
At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.
The question is not "Does being rich help you with the SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and having resources helps with everything.
And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.
SAT prep being affordable only for rich is such a silly meme.
SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.
and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams
This was actually the very first statistics project I ever did. We had the basic high school level "Probability and Statistics class". We learned some simple combinatorics, some formulas for the normal distribution and the basics of hypothesis testing. The we were told to do some project (it was junior or senior year so they gave use fairly wide latitude).
I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.
The results strongly supported the meme.
There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.
I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.
They have been claimed for years; what is known is that they beat the hell out of every other way of judging students, especially subjective ones. When standardized testing was adopted in the first place it was rightly heralded as a tremendous win for diversity.
> If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.
> Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?
I have no strong opinion on affirmative action but this is a dishonest way to frame this topic.
Affirmative action doesn't mean an institution can produce unqualified doctors. Both doctors should've gone through same examinations at medical schools, studied same textbooks and have similar training.
Taking the same texts and having the same books mean nothing since the point of tests is the grades so what matters is if they had the same grades or not
Also if the school is willing to bend their standards on admissions, who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading? It’s also almost impossible to get fired from a residency program once you get in, graduation rates are near 95%…
I already don’t trust MD’s compared to DO’s because MD schools nearly all got rid of grading and all classes are pass/fail which encourages doing just well enough to pass. DO schools meanwhile continue to grade students which encourages excellence.
Wishful thinking. The Physician club is one of back scratching, not critical evaluation.
The Physician->AMA->ACGME->Physician pipe benefits everyone involved.
What's the worst thing that could happen? Malpractice lawsuits have doctors win 50% of the time when there is strong evidence, and 90% of the time when there is weak evidence.
The rich created a cartel and the feedback loop is already here.
IIRC some med schools are getting rid of grades in favor of pass/fail. This makes it hard to tell which students are great and which ones barely passed.
I just saw the stats from a medical school— I believe it was UCSF but correct me if I’m wrong— where the average Asian reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic accepted applicant
Affirmative action was banned across California and the article you cited itself says that the problem is only with UCs and not CSUs. The reasons proposed (distance, costs, number of UCs vs CSUs) intuitively ring true to me. Today's decision is obviously correct from a legal standpoint (equal protection clause bans all race-based discrimination) but the difference between CSUs and UCs actually suggests a positive path forward for helping boost Black and Latino enrollment in UCs- step one might be building a lot more and making them cheaper.
It's important to remember that if the average Asian score is higher than the average Hispanic score, then the average Asian accepted will statistically have a higher score than the average Hispanic accepted, even without discrimination.
Do people who do better on standardized tests make better doctors? I take the null hypothesis. One's grades and test scores in high school are poor predictors of one's professional efficacy after a certain point.
I say, eliminate obvious cases of students who aren't trying, take the handful of obviously excellent students, and for every applicant in between, have a lottery.
The one who is the best surgeon which could be any of them judging from my experience from other jobs. All the best programmers I know did well in school and on tests, but beyond a certain point test scores mean very little and other factors not measured by tests matter more.
I would not want a doctor who did poorly on tests, but a doctor who is great at tests vs one who is top in the country probably does not matter.
UPenn Med School lets in minorities through a side door, no MCAT required. [1]
This will increase discrimination against minority doctors. It most hurts the ones who could have gotten in through the front door but will be assumed not to have.
Good question. There is no consensus on who is considered white. Nazis considered Jews to be a separate and inferior race. At one point in the US, Italians were not considered white. Irish, Greeks and Poles were not considered white at some point, and were discriminated against in the US. “No Irish need apply” (NINA) signs were common at one point in history.
There's several Jewish ethnicities. The largest are Ashkenazi (Euro; 90% of American Jewry) and Mizrahi (MENA; majority of Israeli Jewry). Judaism is a religion, so people who aren't ethnically Jewish can convert, but it's also an ethnic identity, so Jews who drop Judaism or convert to another religion (like nearly all famous 19th century Ashkenazim) are still Jewish.
Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or historical harm will only increase the number of white students at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race based admissions will serve the greater interest without addressing past (and current) systems of white supremacy.
It will be especially helpful for Asian people who don't have Asian-sounding last names. I suspect that schools will continue to discriminate against Asians, and last names are one easy way to do so.
Whites are also the only ethnic group on Harvard's campus that are underrepresented relative to their percentage of the population. I think to argue that Harvard (I am using them as the example since they are part of the SC case and relevant here) is white supremacist is absurd. It's really quite the opposite.
In fact, I think the SFFA case will reduce the number of white students because Harvard may have been using affirmative action to help poor white students who are the least likely to take test prep[1] and likely didn't attend a high powered high school.
There is absolutely 0 appetite from Harvard to favor white people in any way.
If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.
How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.
It has a surprisingly strong effect as schools get more prestigious / exclusive. At schools like Harvard, which have in incredibly low admission rate (something like 5% of qualified applicants get an offer, I think?), legacies get a massive bump.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... is analyzing the admissions data that got released from an earlier lawsuit against Harvard about Asian American admissions bias, and says that although being a legacy isn't as good as being a recruited athlete, it still gets you admitted at about 5x the rate of non-legacies.
It's the difference between "we're setting aside this slot specifically for you because of who your parents are" and "we're placing you in this competitive pool that will make up a certain percentage of the overall class."
If Harvard were to go from a race and legacy aware policy to a race and legacy blind policy, 20 minority students who would have been accepted would not for every legacy student that similarly would not. That is, racially discriminating is 20x times larger of an effect than legacy discrimination.
A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants.
I still find it hard to believe Harvard, with a 50 Billion dollar endowment decided to do something good for society if they though it would hurt them. I feel like colleges must have data to show bottom line benefits for affirmative action
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 502 ms ] threadDo you have any citations to back up that assertion? I think we've reached the point of calling these metrics a bit more than correlations.
I hear this all the time from pro affirmative action groups, but I don't think it's backed up by any science. People who practice more are going to be better at that thing. Same in sports, musics, medicine, literally everything. Hard work it turns out pays off. It's very unfortunate that some can't do the hard work required to make the grade. But that doesn't mean that they should be elevated _over others that did_ make the grade _based on the color of their skin_. I can't even believe I have to argue this.
Looking at academic factors should be the strongest determining factor, economic factors is fine, but looking at race is racist, by definition.
Advocacy groups trying to change the definitions of words as a way to sort of "legislate from the bench" is dishonest and an obvious attempt to avoid the debate on very controversial topics. It will always be racist to make determinations based on race. Attempts to change this definition is racist.
Around 25% of admissions in Ivy League schools are legacies. Unsurprisingly, this does not seem to outrage certain parts of society that much.
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...
* https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocra...
* https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is...
* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Criticism
The word's modern popularity originated in a pejorative meaning which was then lost:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Once people 'are in', they get more resources, and that allows for (e.g.) their children to have more opportunities, and so they then in turn win. If you have a person who does not 'get in' and 'win', then they have fewer resources / opportunities to show or develop what skills they may have: a doom-loop can become possible.
As an example of what resources can get you:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/rick-singer-mastermin...
Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.
If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them.
(Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw? Sounds like the whole thing is legislating from the bench! Maybe we should bring back Lochner-style scrutiny of minimum wage laws under a newly-discovered "right to earn a living"?
People inevitably making this argument was actually the primary argument against adopting a Bill of Rights at all, and the Ninth Amendment was the compromise solution to have some enumerated rights while hoping to negate this exact argument.
That's internally consistent. Roe V. Wade was the bench legislation in this case.
The citizenship rights in the constitution were not written or otherwise intended to provide a right to abortions.
Even the concept of privacy the decision was based on is inferred only from the statement "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
While this case is held up as being the legislating from the bench case, it's really not. We don't generally pass laws that make something legal, except as exceptions to other laws. Saying that government access to a person's medical records is protected by the constitution is exactly the function of SCOTUS.
> Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.
> Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...
The right to abortion is guaranteed by the right to be free from "unreasonable search and seizure." That is literally the best ever example of squinting REALLY hard at the constitution and trying to make something fit. Roe was 100% making a legal argument for abortion to be regulated at the federal level using the most twisted pretzel logic imaginable.
No, its just a typo, Roe rested on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, not any provision of the 4th. “A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” (It in passing mentions other previous cases relating to privacy rights which found aspects of them other places in the Constitution, including, among many others, the combination of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in Terry v. Ohio, but no part of the rule articulated in Roe purported to be interpreting the Fourth Amendment, only the 14th.)
It makes sense therefore that there was no non-enumerated right to abortion, and states did have the right to ban it.
The 1973 decision was most definitively legislating from behind the bench.
It will probably only be banned after both the right and the left get burned by this type of legislating enough times.
Most sources I can find suggest none.
Eg:
and and etc.There are opposing legal philosophies on how to interpret amendments 9 and 10, which say that people have rights and the government has powers. The question is always how to resolve when the two are in conflict.
Current SCOTUS majority holds an extremist view that when government exercises an unenumerated power, it essentially cancels the existence of an unenumerated right. That's why they look for historical laws that support their desired outcomes. Until recently, this was a fringe idea because it means the state governments get dibs on your unenumerated rights.
You're entitled to your opinion on this approach, but don't expect everyone to take that reasoning seriously.
Federal courts enjoy the sole power to interpret the law, determine the constitutionality of the law, and apply it to individual cases. The courts, like Congress, can compel the production of evidence and testimony through the use of a subpoena.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm...
The problem when you do this - especially on questionable legal arguments - is you're essentially setting up the future to have to fight for that right all over again, as we've seen with Roe v. Wade.
You can't take a section of the constitution that's about citizenship, infer a right to privacy and then extend that to abortion and not expect that flimsy foundation to be challenged later when the right 5 people happen to be present.
If the Citizens United decision didn't teach us that, nothing will.
This is a really lazy trope whatever you think of the specific decision's result (or the reasoning).
The "political spending" in the case of Citizens United was the production and dissemination of a propaganda film. If the release of a film can be restricted, why not a press release as well?
From wikipedia: "Broadcasting the film would have been a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited any corporation, non-profit organization, or labor union from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time."
If the law bans "electioneering communication", could not an electioneering press release be considered such a banned communication as well?
1. SCOTUS considers corporations 'natural persons' in their decisions
2. SCOTUS considers 'corporate personhood' to encompass too many rights, you believe should be exclusive for 'natural persons'
3. Possible misunderstanding around the term 'corporate personhood'
Could you clarify a bit? I've seen a lot of (3.) on discussions around this, while claiming essentially (1.) happens or (2.) is what peopel try to complain about.
But saying that corporate personhood shouldn't include political donations as part of their free speech rights, while a perfectly reasonable position and I might even agree, doesn't make as good a soundbite.
You mean 330 million?
I’d like term limits on Supreme Court justices. But I think the arguments on both sides of this debate are well thought out.
Again I don’t love the decision, but Im OK with it. That said I’d love to see universities stop giving weight to legacies. But the money is just too strong.
Some states are getting legislation done. Minnesota, for example, but same too with states that rapidly passed abortion curbs.
I think this is naive. Roberts is not "calling balls and strikes" despite what he would have you believe. The conservative wing of the court has been willing to adopt a range of interpretations to accommodate their outcome.
It's not just setting aside precedent but their increased use of emergency motions (shadow docket) to issue orders without explanation.
Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?
Even Congress with 535 representatives isn't many. One representative for each 600,000 citizens? When was the last time a thousand Americans agreed on anything, much less half a million?
We have one of the worst ratios in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_number...
Edit: And the SC isn't representative anyway. They're appointed by the elites for the benefit of the ruling party, and there's a lot of politicking for those seats. Way too much power and corruption -- for life. The institution itself is a problem.
Democracy isn’t perfect, and they’re a check against some of the failings of the system.
Frankly, I’m shocked at how upset some of you are over racial discrimination being banned.
I don't really care about affirmative action much one way or the other. I care about the lack of representation in my so called democracy, and the Supremes are a huge part of that problem.
Avoiding the tyranny of the majority is a major reason we intentionally don’t have direct democracy.
The cakeshop case was about compelled speech, and the conservative justices’ politics are not “neocon”.
If they were 9 randomly selected citizens, then the majority vote of the 9 matches the result of a majority vote of the 300 million nearly always, particularly for decisive issues.
For example, if 90% of the population think something, then there is a 0.089% chance that a majority of the 9 citizens disagree.
Obviously judge selection isn't random, and thats probably your main concern.
Now, they may not have interpreted it the way you or I would, and they may not have interpreted it correctly. But that is what they do.
We afford deference to the Court because we believe it follows a constrained legal procedure that makes the word "interpret" meaningful: this involves taking into account precedent and past case law. This approach tends to prevent justices from "interpreting" the law in ways that effectively re-write the law according to their instantaneous political preferences. This court is receiving criticism (and serious loss of public approval [1]) because it has abandoned those constraints, and keeps overturning longstanding precedent in ways that happen to correspond to the stated political preferences of the justices (and the politicians that appointed them.)
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4732/supreme-court.aspx
We saw this with Roe last year.
What changed is the make-up of the court; otherwise, apparently affirmative action's unconstitutionality was just realized like a revelation from God and every previous court (federal and Supreme) was wrong.
Racial rancor, and racism in general -- anti black racism in particular -- has probably increased since 2003; at least in the public sphere - hopefully this ruling is not a part of that milieu.
If they only selectively struck them down in favor of one group or another, then that would be a different matter.
This is in juxtaposition to civil law systems that are based on codified legislation, for example in France or Germany.
That's been in place for a LONG time, it dates all the way back to the separation of church and state decision being based on a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote.
Hell Roe v. Wade itself is an example.
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/w...
> In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
There are lots of criticisms of the SC, but I don't see why everything they rule should be absolute ground truth forever. They can (and do) revisit cases for good reason.
That's modern liberal opinion news talking. It's about law. AA is a direct contradiction to the 14th amendment and it dilutes it. I'm sure just about everyone, including previously and currently oppressed minorities would prefer the protections of 14th amendment over the protections of AA.
Can you give an example of a government program that takes race into consideration other than Affirmative Action programs?
I don't like many recent rulings from SCOTUS, but intellectual honesty forces me to admit that when the pendulum was on the other side, the same thing happened with different allegiances.
Almost as if the Robert's court concluded there is no point in being powerful if you can't rule, even though ruling is beyond the scope of all courts.
As for Roe V. Wade being codified, this was a moot point at the time because you had a Constitutional right to an abortion -- your right to an abortion was codified in the Constitution, a law would have been redundant.
I think when the status quo requires on someone's stretched interpretation of a series of things, and this status quo is very important to people, it's on lawmakers to make the rules unambiguous.
A lot of the logic of Roe v Wade was based on viability outside of a womb based on medical science of the time.
Right in the decision of affirmative action there is admission that it will need to be revisited.
Not really, 12 weeks are pretty common, and most european countries fit in 10-14 weeks, with just few exceptions like UK and Netherlands.
these policies of racial discrimination aren't helping anyone. they don't help the people who didn't deserve the spots in the first place, and they don't help the people that are being robbed of the spots they deserve.
Congress cannot override this with a law. It would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is more involved. Considering that not even CA could pass a law to allow affirmative action in higher education, it would be impossible for such an amendment to be passed and ratified by the states.
The main opinion was actually following a line of cases using 14th Amendment jurisprudence to guide the interpetation of similar text in Title VI of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so, yes, Congress can override it by changing the text of the statute, which is in principal what is actually being applied.
The portion of the 14th Amendment whose interprtation was imported doesn’t bind either private actors or the federal government, so isn’t directly applicable on its own.
> Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The concurrence by Gorsuch also makes clear that the majority opinion was based on the Constitution, not Title VI.
> Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either.
What are you seeing that indicates that the majority opinion was based on Title VI?
The original usage of the phrase is reasonable enough[0], but that's not what this lawsuit was about.
[0] > On March 6, 1961, shortly after taking office, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required all federal contractors to take “affirmative action”—the first use of the phrase in this context—to ensure all job applicants and employees were treated equally, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case.
They did no such thing.
They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.
In the dissent at least, the court is very much interpreting court precedent and almost entirely ignoring the law itself
Thomas is a textualist when the text is favorable. If it's not, suddenly historical context and the founder's intent becomes crucial.
> Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the genera- tions. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles—the “self-evident” truth that all of us are created equal.
Apparently anything that doesn’t further a final state of equality of outcome is inherently racist and it’s the governments job to make that happen.
It is a defacto Politburo - a long lived legislative body of ultimate authority that has a rolling composition not determined by direct electoral results.
We can point to the legal fiction that the judiciary is not the legislature all we want but it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
You're under the mistaken impression that justifications are a prerequisite. Any court can find justification for any ruling in whatever way they see fit. Yes, lower judges have been remove for questionable decisions. SCOTUS is above that, as a lifetime appointment. Sometimes rulings come with no justification at all. SCOTUS has been trying to explain itself via these public "opinions", but is not required to do so.
It has been a problem for decades now that Congress will pass laws that aren't well thought out, then leave it to the judiciary to iron out the specifics. It's only recently that members of the judiciary began pushing back and ruling on the text of the law and saying the legislators should "fix" the obvious problems with the law.
The term for this is colloquially, "legislating from the bench."
> They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
This is not how it works in common law jurisdictions. Common law judges can and do make law. This is called case law (or common law), in contrast to statute law that is enacted by the legislature. That goes beyond just interpreting statute law but also making new laws where they do not exist. Common law offences, for example, are crimes declared as such by judges even when there is no statute criminalising that conduct. Most of the existing contract law has been made by judges rather than by legislators.
New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.
Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.
Everything has advantages and drawbacks.
Indeed, just today, SCOTUS also released a unanimous opinion protecting a person's religious rights against his employer [1]. Sotomayor and Jackson left an addendum pointing out that this man had asked them to overrule a 50-year precedent in interpreting a law, and they explicitly chose not to do so (though they ruled in his favor in a different, narrower way) precisely for the reason I mentioned about Congress having the opportunity to correct the matter if they so choose.
The "liberal" justices usually get the most flack for "legislating from the bench" (although arguments can be made that the "conservative" ones do it too). But here we have the most liberal justice on the Court saying "The Court's respect for Congress's decision not to intervene promotes the separation of powers by requiring interested parties to resort to the legislative rather than the judicial process to achieve their policy goals."
If I could air a very broad-brush opinion, complaints people have about SCOTUS being a partisan institution these days are best levied against Congress (and litigants) for how they treat the Court, not against the Court for its own behavior. When people express low confidence in the Court, I'm always eager to see them aim their low confidence at Congress instead of (not in addition to) the Court.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-174_k536.pdf
And that would be the same thing. If someone can prove it, it's illegal.
(They were going to stop anyway, but this ruling sped things up.)
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
Sure seems like proxies for race are if anything explicitly called out as being OK by SCOTUS rather than illegal.
The court recognizes the effects of race and recognizes them as valuable when considering a candidate, just not their race per se. If you allow me to be a bit cheeky, it values the content of their character over the color of their skin.
That’s probably what your theoretical proxy will look like, if you’re correct.
"Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Probably a modest reverse version of that at the lower tier universities.
Love the policy change or hate it, that’s what’s likely to happen.
Given the actual numbers, its more likely that the largest number of applicants negatively affected by this will be white, in absolute terms.
https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-racial-engineering/
Stanford might be an outlier, but I don't see white applicants being negatively affected by this decision. Quite the opposite.
Asians aren’t White.
I will gladly bet the under on double digits for Ivies, MIT, and Stanford.
5% max, possibly as little as 2% — that is, 26% might increase to 31%, but more likely 28%-29%.
Whatever the number is, the increase for whites will probably be greater in both percentage and absolute number.
That said, I agree that the demographics that will lose these spots are non-white, non-Asian groups.
Eventually some university will get sued for that, and we’ll see how the Supreme Court rules. I imagine it’ll depend on how egregious it is, and if there are any internal emails where admissions are openly talking about it.
In relative numbers it probably impacts less than .1% of all students one way or another.
1990s and 2000s: Asians do well on exams (and in workplace), take ever greater % of sets from establishment, competitively
2010s: Establishment realize that "BLM" and aim to give Asian seats to PoC, while also conveniently setting proportionately lower quotas for Asians so establishment retains seats they were losing
2020s: New ways found to prevent Asians from competitively winning seats (e.g., roadblocks on registration, etc)
If people are really interested in doing something - whether that's discriminating against Black people or discriminating in favor of Black people - they're probably going to find a way to do it. Laws will make a difference on the margins but if there are motivated people then they are going to start trying to work around this ruling today.
The biggest effect of this ruling is that it's a marker to let people know that opposition to affirmative action is serious. That will have more of an impact then the ruling itself.
What this really means is that some students who had better grades and test scores will get into their more preferred university, and some students who had worse grades and scores will have to settle for a more fitting less-preferred university.
Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with.
In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all:
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscell...
Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admis...
Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered.
IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.
From the data you present I suspect that there is weight still given to gender. I wonder how much energy there would be to investigating this? I wonder how many guys who get rejected from MIT CS will now do Tik Toks about how a girl took his spot, since he can no longer say it was a black kid?
This article [1] indicates that state schools cannot discriminate, but private schools can. It's a decade old, but I can't think of any intervening laws/cases that would have changed this analysis (IAAL).
1: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/affirmative-actio...
It could be very well true that some or many institutions are violating the law, but I don't think that negates the point that I made about what the law is.
That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.
Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination.
This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed
>Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason.
There are still tons of exemptions and hypocrisy, but in general you typical public university can not discriminate admissions based on sex, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, ect.
If a public university instituted a no-gays or no-immigrants admission policy it would be quickly struck down under the status quo, so there is no need to discuss that.
Im not sure how single gender schools fit into the whole scheme. is there a specific case about Wellesley I should look up? I didnt see anything about title 9 challenges on Wikipedia.
That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
And sure, race can serve as a proxy, the black population in the United States is impoverished compared to the mean, but in the same way that it's not acceptable to take race as proxy when it comes to crime, it's not acceptable to do it when it comes to livelihood, in my opinion.
Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities.
I think that merit lotteries are excellent and work much more effectively than the ordinary things people to do increase diversity (which often focuses on aesthetics rather than actually changing things). But we are kidding ourselves if we think that they won't face precisely the same resistance.
So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.
You can read about in the ruling here:
https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...
I suggest you read pages 11 and 12 for context, but I'd like to specifically draw your attention to the first full sentence on page 14:
"Here, no dispute of material fact exists regarding any of the Arlington Heights factors, nor as to the ultimate question that the Board acted with discriminatory intent."
For specific evidence of that discriminatory intent, start at page 17.
For more evidence, see pages 53-56 in the appeal dissent: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23821588/tjca4opn0523...
People will oppose merit lotteries, like I said.
And the system that is part of the suit isn't the merit lottery, btw.
I responded by explaining why the 'Conservative advocates' were correct.
Do you deny that the changes were racially motivated?
I'm saying that conservatives aren't going to get on board with merit lotteries any more than other proposals.
The suggestion is that MIT or Northeastern State A&M for that matter set a minimum standard bar that they will consider. Then, all of those applicants that meet the standard are entered into a lottery to determine who gets the spots.
It's not all that different from today except it eliminates the problems from whether Reader A or Reader B looks at your application and whether Reader A had a good night's sleep or a fight with their partner that morning.
> ...leftism is appealing to many who want to avoid work, so they won't be familiar with the concept of having their hard work pay off
You seem unfamiliar with the values of those you classify as 'leftist'.
A lot of this comes down to what you think the mission of college is. Is it to educate the highest achieving kids who apply? Or to graduate a certain type of student? Or something else?
For me I know it’s not just to educate the highest achieving kids. If the top college in the world ended up accepting all terrorists who were trained to be exceptional students that wouldn’t sit right with me. Even if I could acknowledge they had the best academic records. That seems like such a shallow goal for university.
If you aren't actively trying to achieve stardom in the professional world, there are tons of good universities that will provide a great education and will look good on your resume, you just might not be hired right out of the gate at Apple with only one or two rounds of interviews.
But if I'm looking to educate the best politicians, judges, business people, activists -- I think that I really do care about a lot more than SATs and transcripts.
It's funny because I feel like no one has this argument about Cal Tech. They might have affirmative action, but if they didn't everyone seemed to be OK with it.
If you don't try, don't go to school, or don't go to your job, your average outcome will be much worse than someone that does
The question is what is the ends meant to achieve by the meritocracy? The goal of most institutions in our world is to make the world a better place for us to live in. If the meritocracy seems to run counter to that then it may not be achieving its goal. And the point I was trying to make with the terrorists is that if you blindly treat meritocracy as its own ends then you can end up making the world a worse place for it.
The framework that I'm coming from is that work/talent/etc must be rewarded in a predictable manner in order for kids to have the motivation to perform and succeed. If the system gets unpredictable, kids will be demotivated and not compete in the system anymore. As in, if it's a lottery and my classmate who does worse than me gets into a better college than me, this isn't a fair competition so why try studying, I'll go into sports or something where the best person under the competitive framework wins.
You argue that if the system is too predictable then too many undesirable people might succeed. Which might or might not be true, it's pure speculation. We're talking about high achieving students who want to get into good colleges; no need to compare them to terrorists. Purely test based systems work in plenty of other countries without the college graduates collapsing society.
But most Black students face this level of unpredictability moreso every day leading up to college admissions. Another, unrelated study, asked teachers to watch for misbehaving kids -- with a mixed race group of kids. The thing was that none of the kids were misbehaving -- but the teachers still pointed to the Black kids. Black kids live with this level of predictability all throughout schooling where they'll be called out for doing the same thing as white students who aren't called out. Eventually you learn to just eat the marshmallow, because the second one isn't coming even if you have the discipline to not eat the first.
So then this ties back to the lottery. It turns out that little in life has 100% predictability. There's no guarantee that my startup will make me billions, even if I seemingly do everything that Steve Jobs did. But I increase my chances and the lottery works the same way. But it also does something else -- it also provides a marshmallow for the kids who know that in their current environment they face steep odds to ever take 16 AP classes or work with their dad's research lab to win the Westinghouse/Intel Science Fair.
It turns out that fairness isn't so easy to determine.
How is what you described in any way incompatible with lottery systems? Did you not catch the phrase "So find the right bar and do lottery?" The best colleges set the higher bars, middle schools set a middle bar, etc etc.
> Do we live in a meritocracy or not?
Absolutely not. That's the lie we've been told all our lives by the haves. But either way, the lottery is more meritocratic: you have one seat, two people who are both qualified, how do you choose? Merit has already been established! After that, the lottery doesn't care about race, age, etc etc.
Society can either do the healthy thing and accept this and embrace it (won't happen, because it's not "fair"), or not, and make the inherent lottery explicit.
And if rewarding hard work were the only criteria for admission, then legacy preferences wouldn't exist, either. That is the sort of thing affirmative action attempts to balance out.
I don't have an answer, and I hope that all who have earned an opportunity are rewarded. But whenever I see that a group is under-represented relative to population, I have to wonder what the reasons are and what can be done to help.
I am OK with having to work harder if it means someone who has had fewer opportunities, resources and support than me – not only in their lifetime, but for generations in their family – gets a boost.
It seems some are afraid of having to work as hard as someone who was not born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
I think the point is that it doesn't need to. College admission is 18 years late for trying to correct racial and social disadvantages.
Affordable/free preschool, childcare, school lunches, summer programs, etc., would all be helpful. Perhaps universities can (are?) getting involved in that. But until we do a better job as a country/society funding these programs for all, then disparities will persist.
In the absence of that, the need remains.
This is actually something I was thinking about reading through these comments. These universities should focus on "giving back" type programs, I think. Something like sending their professors to underprivileged schools to speak to or involve themselves in students lives. Mentorship programs that start much earlier in a child's life could make a massive difference.
The problem with programs like that is they don't provide tangible results fast enough for administrator and politicians to justify themselves.
I don't think he means a purely random lottery (at least I hope he doesn't). My son was a high achiever (valedictorian, top 1% SAT, honor society, etc. etc.) but still didn't get admitted to MIT because he was competing with 30,000 other similar high achievers for 1000 spots. That's where the lottery concept comes in - you have to compete to qualify for the lottery. It's already in place after all, they just try to make it less lottery-ish.
It wouldn't create as much randomness as you think. For example, nearly 90% of student who score 1500+ on the SATs are Asian or white. [1] It's nearly the same for 1400+. If an Ivy set its lottery cutoff to be at a level that kept its average and interquartile range the same as it currently is, their admitted class would follow this pattern.
1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...
I'm a huge fan of this.
But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down?
Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again.
This was already decided forty years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
Which Supreme Court decision did they overrule here? They upheld the Equal Protection Clause. Should they have overruled that?
"Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens"
They upheld that. Should they have overruled it?
They had to overrule something. People are mad because they didn't overrule the Equal Protection Clause.
Also lol our constitution isn't anything blind and both acknowledges and establishes different classes of person in order to make rules about them.
The effects of a law can end up being unconstitutional, that's something that may only reveal itself over time.
Yeah. Based off the various deep dives I heard about a year ago, the court is supposed to strongly favor leaving prior court rulings in place, but the current justices decided that they were fine changing prior rulings since it's a convention, not a rule.
The current SC really dislikes all the prior rulings that were based off the 14th amendment, so I fully expect this same behavior to continue.
Public opinion - let alone public trust - does not matter to a Supreme Court justice; they're appointed by the government for life. There's literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Only the opinions of the house/senate members even remotely matters to them, and so long as congress can't get enough votes to impeach them (a majority in the House, and 2/3 of the Senate), they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It's been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
The Supreme Court is only the Supreme Court if enough people say it is.
“In good behavior”, actually.
> There’s literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Political pressure on Congress to impeach a particular justice, or exercise its power to adjust the scope of the appellate jurisdiction of the Court, as well as taking direct extralegal action against specific judges are all acts “short of revolution”.
> Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It’s been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
No, 1805 was the only successful impeachment of a Supreme Court justice, though no conviction occurred in the Senate. The last attempt (counting only those where there is some official action in the House directed explicitly directed at impeachment) was far more recent, 2019 against Justice Kavanaugh (H.Res. 560).
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overru...
I don't want to live in a world where we can't overturn bad decisions. Would America be better off if we legalized slavery 300 years ago, and could never undo it?
This game we're playing is we now have one legislative body that writes laws and another that writes effectively constitutional amendments. This makes no sense at all and we've created an in-practice unchecked branch of government.
So I don't disagree that the court has done good things with their power but once in a generation swings is much easier to put up with than what we have going now. The world hasn't meaningfully changed since they originally upheld universities' limited ability to discriminate and as much as I don't like that choice I still think take-backsies is a worse one.
My (red) state has a bill going through right now to outlaw university diversity quotas and it likely won't pass so this isn't cultural attitudes changing.
But if the Supreme Court doesn't have to listen to itself, then does any court? Should every minor court just decide SC precedent was bad & overturn it?
The decision continues with:
"But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) "[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.""
They are warning the universities to not play games with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
Taken to its logical extreme if the US had a single dictator but they did good things would you argue against needing a democratic process? The court lives in a weird place where they have close to unchecked power and make their own rules. It is what it is, there's always a root account somewhere. But the convention/culture of the courts has been the primary thing keeping this in check and if that goes we're in trouble.
> This was already decided forty years ago
If the US Supreme Court never overturned its decisions, these decisions would still be in force:
- laws criminalising private consensual same-sex activity are constitutional (Bowers v Hardwick, 1986–overturned by Lawrence v Texas in 2003)
- miscegenation laws do not violate the 14th Amendment (Pace v Alambama, 1883–overturned in part by McLaughlin v Florida in 1964 and fully by Loving v Virginia in 1967)
- legally enforced racial segregation does not violate the 14th Amendment (Plessy v Ferguson, 1896–effectively overturned by Brown v Board of Education in 1954)
- racial segregation in public schools is constitutional (Cumming v Richmond County Board of Education, 1899–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- states have the constitutional right to ban racially integrated private educational institutions (Berea College v Kentucky, 1908–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- it is constitutional to execute juvenile offenders who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crime (Stanford v Kentucky, 1989–overturned by Roper v Simmons, 2005)
- it is constitutional to execute the intellectually disabled (Penry v Lynaugh, 1989–overturned by Atkins v Virginia in 2002)
- it is constitutional for public schools to force students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even if they have a religious objection to doing so (Minersville School District v Gobitis, 1940–overturned a mere three years later by West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 1943)
- labor laws which impose limits on working hours are unconstitutional (Lochner v New York, 1905–never explicitly overturned, although a series of 1930s decisions effectively did so)
- minimum wage laws are unconstitutional (Adkins v Children's Hospital, 1923–overturned by West Coast Hotel Co. v Parrish, 1937)
- child labor laws violate children's constitutional right to work (Hammer v Dagenhart, 1918, and Bailey v Drexel Furniture Co, 1922–overturned by United States v Darby Lumber Co, 1941)
If the principle "the Supreme Court should never overturn its past decisions" was accepted–the US would be a very different country today. Even if you only want to apply that principle to "established precedent" – Pace v Alabama was law for over 80 years, so if that principle was seriously followed, interracial marriage bans might well still exist in the US today.
But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it.
I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged.
I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...
The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.
But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america
2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.
It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
Sounds like OP certainly deserved it to me. Instead we have these perverse incentives to go to "elite" schools purely because of the school's name (not because you're really getting that much of a better education than you would in a different top 100 university). These schools end up with thousands of applicants who definitely deserve to get in, but they need to cull the group of perfect candidates somehow because of practical considerations like faculty to student ratio. Whether they discriminate using race, or implement a lottery system, there's plenty of candidates that deserve the entry but don't get in because of practical limitations.
I certainly didn't get perfect scores on the SAT and I certainly wasn't valedictorian.
This mentality is very gross, and treats life like it's a fair game with clear winners and losers. Life is messy, and you can still do every single thing right and end up worse off. Likewise, you can, and many people do, fail "up" into extraordinary positions of power due to no merit of your own.
Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals.
When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc?
My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.
I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unknown outside a ~150 mile radius, and only somewhat recognized within it.
From what I could tell, the content, pace, and amount & sort of assigned work were all pretty similar.
What differed? Two main things:
1) The guest lecturers—cheap state school, none, or unremarkable ones; the fancy schools, both more common to have them, and universally very impressive credentials, possibly someone you've heard of even if you don't really follow the topic, basically, their guests were "celebrities", at least within a field.
2) How engaged the students seemed to be—not at all, at the cheap state school; very, at the fancy schools.
This is for undergrad. The ways they differ may not be the same in grad school.
Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.
https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
Otherwise I agree with you. It’s in the past. We all have advantages and disadvantages, whether genetic or societal. There’s no reason to feel bad about something in the past you had no control over.
vs...
250k-1M/yr
The difference is being middle class to being upper class/upper-middle class.
The school district differences are stark. So yes, these kind of things make a big difference.
We really just need to remove power from the AMA/AGCME in this specific case. It hurts everyone except the Physician cartel members.
Affirmative Action is talked about as positive discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-less.
Every decision is discrimination. Basis and purpose is what matters.
That is true, which is why it is illegal in my country to discriminate based on things that you are. In my country, we value equality and believe that everyone should be treated fairly and without discrimination. Laws are in place to protect individuals from discrimination based on factors such as race, gender, religion, age, disability, and other protected characteristics.
Discrimination based on who you are, such as your inherent traits or characteristics, is considered unjust and contrary to the principles of equality. The focus should be on a person's abilities, qualifications, and merits rather than factors that they have no control over.
I don't think Anatole France really had thought things through when he wrote that quote...
Snooping at your comment history, you're talking about Finland?
In general, there are massively fewer people sleeping under bridges in places that get seriously cold. How much of this is just climate?
(Ex: in the US, Boston and San Francisco have very different numbers of people sleeping rough, while both being very liberal places for the US)
Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be racism free, the degree to which it is focused on just proves that the US isn't free of racism. Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
It's not even reversed racism, it's just plain old racism. The only difference is the targets of the racism are European descended and Asian descended people instead of African and Latin American descended people.
In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.
In an already racist system, doing something like economic class based support (example: 20% of college admissions need to come from poor households) would just mostly go to the privileged race and perpetuate the systemic racism.
Your post is also an illustration of what white privilege can look like. I know you said you’re not American, but the tone matches to a T. White people don’t realize the negative effects of racism on others and others family history and can’t even conceive of it. From having cab drivers not willing to pick you up, to not getting a job or being passed over for promotions, let alone going to schools that are under funded. And as a side effect of that racism towards non-whites, white people benefit by getting the can, the job, the promotion, the good schools that the non-whites, but equally qualified did not.
And as the head paragraph states, that gets embedded into society in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family.
According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
The per capita income for "whites" in the US is $36,962
The per capita income for the following groups is higher than that: Indian, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
Similar results for median household incomes.
I couldn't easily find the data but I've seen previous reports of sub-groups of "blacks" that also have higher median incomes than whites (as a group). Ahh, here is an article talking about the success of Nigerian immigrants, as an example. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...
Please explain how to reconcile this data with your statement.
I don't know what's right or wrong really but I can say that the rapidness of the shift was definitely shocking to me. There's a lot of disagreement between Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z on the topic because of it.
Believe me, this has been considered and tried in various contexts. The problem is that in the end schools and companies find out that they don't achieve the "right" mix of ethnicities and genders and so it's back to square one.
Minorities, like the Uyghurs, were exempt from the 1-child policy and they got extra points on the national college exam.
It is, but it is an attempt to right a wrong, which isn't an easy thing to do or measure. It's a moralistic endeavor and moralistic endeavors can become monsters in their own right.
>To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race.
It's become a political football, because of this, I think it's perpetuating it more than it would be naturally. Morgan Freeman articulated this well many years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnpIhqSLto
>Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
It's funny, this is done to ensure that historically oppressed races are measured for success / failure. It seems to support to your reverse racism comment.
>Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
I agree, that's why AA was struck down. It's a clear violation of the 14th amendment. This was known at the time and known in the early 2000's (2003?) when this came up before. It's always been considered an emergency measure that would need to end because it was a clear violation of equal protection under the law clause of the 14th.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”
Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.
So nothing happens
If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.
For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.
Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.
If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScien...
What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.
> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.
Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.
Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.
Honestly, I think this is 100% the responsibility of parents. They are the ones that need to break the generational cycle of whatever they're facing. Beyond that - as you say - needs based approaches to this.
I don't understand why we as a society can't simply have "Oh you got more than 95% on your standardized test scores? 100% full scholarship to any college and any degree you wish without paying it back." That is how you fix a society if you ask me, by rewarding hard work and merit.
Just take from some and give to others
But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in life?
My guess is not, in which case it would be justified under the principles behind it.
Having successful minorities that continue to produce success multi-generationally is a good thing. It brings people out of poverty, creates positive examples for people that look like someone who is struggling, creates more wealth in the targeted communities which can be spread around, etc.
As The Boss said, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"...
But not the same “cream” - that’s what the current cream is trying to preserve
> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs
I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.
AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.
Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.
However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.
The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).
Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.
It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.
Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.
"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:tex....
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?
> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?
"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.
With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.
I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.
But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.
This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tennis%...
Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.
Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjGBqDwhUU
I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.
It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.
Also, given that the split of working-age humans is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.
For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.
If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.
> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.
Equal opportunity to participate, yes.
It starts with a basic belief—do you agree that US Society is disadvantageous for certain racial demographics?
And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.
In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.
One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.
But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district.
Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Because if someone can't go to MIT, they're doomed to a life of abject poverty? Really?
A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.
OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.
Into that medical school. There are others.
Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.
It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from.
Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding).
Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it.
These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.
I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house
The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
> where most research has been done for white ethnicities
The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
I was referring to redlining. See https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
> The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
Of course, and any difference in equity associated with the house. Around 75% of whites own a home versus 45% of blacks. And as you know -- homeownership is the single largest source of wealth for most people in the US.
> The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Of course. I'm talking about proportional representation. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4670264/
> Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
The person I was responding to seemed to be making that assertion. And I never said that discrimination was the only way to remedy past discrimination.
The part that's disheartening is that so many people are so up in arms about affirmative action -- and how its discriminatory. But consider everything else we discussed (and there's a lot more) as having no real impact. I mean, why are we even talking about it...
It's a hard problem.
I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
[1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
> Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.
Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other.
The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.
Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out:
1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.
2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.
3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better.
4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools.
5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same.
Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it.
Breaking conditioning is hard.
This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.
thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
- You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units
- A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in.
- There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units
- This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in
This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz.
The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model:
- You have 100 people in a work force.
- 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years.
- Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months.
Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in.
This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
Maybe you’re just being too kind.
So the person that got into Stanford by writing #BlackLivesMastter 100 times was just a coincidence?
Of course there are more people who deserve to be there than there is room. But keeping it small allows it to achieve something special that being bigger wouldn’t allow. Those that do make it in are by and large absolutely top talent.
So it’s not just education and network that matters. I’d argue culture is one of the most important under-appreciated aspects. And MIT culture is top notch.
I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.
A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.
At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.
I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.
the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools
if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.
I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
"better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions
After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!
Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks.
IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.
Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.
But we've known this for a long time, and still refuse to deal with it. With some resources you can deal with this issue.
For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.
I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.
Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities are trying to limit (Asian Americans).
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
Education quality at most top universities is middling, they’re designed for smart people who will reach for knowledge. Being around the best people drained from around the world provides fertile ground for that.
Virtually anyone at a top tier university would be 100% capable of learning their material and making good grades on it with the textbook alone. Combined with online resources, even easier. The quality of instruction isn't all that important for these schools, it's the decisions around which material to present and how to present it, which they can do because they attract the best talent.
High school grades on the other hand are getting inflated now, because of parental pressure, now that colleges are abandoning standardized tests, and relying more on GPAs. High schools don’t even have a standardized curriculum. Comparing GPAs across high schools make no sense. Within the same school it may make sense though.
SAT + grades is a stronger predictor of college performance than grades alone. AFAIK this is a pretty uncontroversial finding. For a review article, see Frey (2019), "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement."
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
I think the guy that got a 2.9 in a school that was seriously focused on education is going to be better prepared for the 4.1 from a peace and love participation trophy school.
Are you missing “standardized” portion?
At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.
And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.
SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.
and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams
I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.
The results strongly supported the meme.
There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.
I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.
To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative you need the other half of the comparison.
If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.
Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?
Without Affirmative action, you'd trust a multiple minority doctor equally to an Asian doctor.
I wonder what the cost is on the healthcare system/US citizens when we have worse performers in critical positions.
> Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?
I have no strong opinion on affirmative action but this is a dishonest way to frame this topic.
Affirmative action doesn't mean an institution can produce unqualified doctors. Both doctors should've gone through same examinations at medical schools, studied same textbooks and have similar training.
Also if the school is willing to bend their standards on admissions, who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading? It’s also almost impossible to get fired from a residency program once you get in, graduation rates are near 95%…
I already don’t trust MD’s compared to DO’s because MD schools nearly all got rid of grading and all classes are pass/fail which encourages doing just well enough to pass. DO schools meanwhile continue to grade students which encourages excellence.
Schools that do this will lose their accreditation.
The Physician->AMA->ACGME->Physician pipe benefits everyone involved.
What's the worst thing that could happen? Malpractice lawsuits have doctors win 50% of the time when there is strong evidence, and 90% of the time when there is weak evidence.
The rich created a cartel and the feedback loop is already here.
Given that affirmative action was banned at UC schools in 1996, I suspect that you're mistaken about at least the school in question.
Which, it should be noted, means that we've accrued ~25 years of data about the results of such a ban. And the answer is that it's bad: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-31/californ...
A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.
As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.
I say, eliminate obvious cases of students who aren't trying, take the handful of obviously excellent students, and for every applicant in between, have a lottery.
I would not want a doctor who did poorly on tests, but a doctor who is great at tests vs one who is top in the country probably does not matter.
This will increase discrimination against minority doctors. It most hurts the ones who could have gotten in through the front door but will be assumed not to have.
1: https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/26/some-underrepresented-stu...
I think Wikipedia does a decent job of breaking it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews
Link to demographics on legacy admissions: https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-ins...
> In addition, 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white.
From US Census:
> Race and Hispanic Origin
> White alone, percent
> 75.5%
> Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status.
So, three-quarters of those individuals didn't earn their place academically.
> Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.
So, the mechanisms in place for academics currently favor white people.
Yes, 70% vs 75% is about the same, but it was helped that way in part because of legacies, and would be much lower otherwise.
Which supports the original comment:
> [legacy admissions] overwhelmingly favor rich and white students.
Maybe the paper itself has more details. I'm only going by the abstract. But unless the abstract is lying, I think it makes sense.
not really. Legacy students have higher SAT scores than non-legacy. https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...
Whites are also the only ethnic group on Harvard's campus that are underrepresented relative to their percentage of the population. I think to argue that Harvard (I am using them as the example since they are part of the SC case and relevant here) is white supremacist is absurd. It's really quite the opposite.
In fact, I think the SFFA case will reduce the number of white students because Harvard may have been using affirmative action to help poor white students who are the least likely to take test prep[1] and likely didn't attend a high powered high school.
There is absolutely 0 appetite from Harvard to favor white people in any way.
[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th...
https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/ says it's 25-35% of students who're legacies at Harvard.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... is analyzing the admissions data that got released from an earlier lawsuit against Harvard about Asian American admissions bias, and says that although being a legacy isn't as good as being a recruited athlete, it still gets you admitted at about 5x the rate of non-legacies.
They're vastly different in terms of magnitude.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
I can't come up with a clear path from increased diversity to increased profitability.
I must be missing something because for profit entities don't do things out of the kindness of their heart.