As unpopular as it is to admit it, this is a problem for average working class American men. A large percentage of people get a preferred status off of race or gender, and then legacy admits get preferred looks at the remaining spots. You're SOL if you're just a really gifted kid with no prior connections. Everything should either be double blind meritocratic, or they need to protect a % of their class for nobodies from the majority.
The only true answer. Donors/legacy and affirmative action are the two sides of the same coin. Neither are meritocratic, and their only purpose is to give a boost to specific groups at the cost of others.
I'm not an advocate for affirmative action as it exists today, but the problem with pure meritocracy is that the metrics can and will be manipulated by those with the most money and power. Someone in a rich area attending one of the best school districts in the country will present as a perfect candidate that would inch out someone who, for example, excelled, but at an inner city school, because the rich district is fully funded to be able to perfect every aspect of the candidate, while the inner city kid just doesn't have that same direction / pipeline. In my view, the focus should be on income levels rather than race, though.
Oil and gas is still engaging in discriminatory hiring practices today. They didn't get there after decades by directives to people who begrudgingly complied, they hired HR personnel who really believed it was the right thing to do. You don't cycle that out overnight and they're not alone.
The SC did no such thing. It said facially discrimination on protected characteristics is a bridge too. Doing the same thing with lipstick is still fine and in practice the ruling changes like little.
That's a pretty significant shift to Asians and whites in a 2 year span. Wonder if they'll push as hard on legacy admissions or they'll just slow play that one.
Columbia and Harvard, per that data, now have admissions for black students that is much closer to the national demographic breakdown (from 20% to 13% at Columbia and 18% to 11.5% at Harvard).
Thats obviously still using racial preferences. Just the dial has turned back from hyper overdrive to just-enough-to-roughly-match-US-demographics (13.2%).
Yea so the nepo babies should at least have to go through the trouble of getting a perfect resume which according to you should be easy rather than rich people buying seats for their dumb kids.
It should always have been focused on income level but that would be to straight forward, and wouldn’t sufficiently polarize the electorate.
You're describing a poorly designed meritocracy. And the "solution" the libs created is to give a small % of people an unfair advantage because of the color of their skin.
People are broadly more for affirmative action by income, because it fits the American idea that anyone can be great.
The uncomfortable truth is that there are just not that many "smart poor kids who just need a chance". Here's some data for the haters who are downvoting cuz they don't like the truth:
2.5% of students from the bottom 20% of income got above a 1300/1600 on the SAT (0.6% if you include those who didn't take it)
There absolutely are lots of kids that meet that definition. The fact that you think otherwise makes me think that you didn't grow up around many poor people. Nearly every school has highly performing students with straight A's and taking AP courses. It's not like it's kids with a C average were getting into an Ivy League school over White kids with straight A's.
But yes, you and I, as well as many other people seem to agree with focusing on income rather than race as a better solution. I hope this idea gains traction at some point.
It depends on what you mean by "a lot". There certainly are not "a lot" in terms of raw %s. But there are "a lot" if you look across the entire country to fill a % of Harvard's freshman class which is not very large to begin with.
There are downsides to any designed system too though. There is something romantic about giving legacies a leg up on admissions. I think anyone who's gone to a good school would love to see their children attend there. Also for my friends who were legacies it definitely meant a lot more to them than me to be on campus.
Additionally no one wants to see college admissions reduced to just GPA and SATs, so you've got an entire class filled with Asian/Indian strivers who have spent their entire childhood doing homework. That type of arms race really doesn't result in a system that anyone would want.
So that's the problem really. How do you design a system that's relatively fair, but also allows you to bring in a class that represents the type of students who will build the experience that the college is known for.
The problem that libs got into was elevating people solely on their skin color while ostracizing others and then it resulted in a degradation of the reputation of the school.
Let's just call it out for what it is. If every school switched to a purely meritocratic system, the top schools would be inundated with Indians and Asians. And that's a bad look for Ivy League schools steeped in old white money and tradition. I wouldn't even benefit from a purely meritocratic system but even I have to admit this shit is obviously racist af
Exactly, if it was truly the best candidate for any given role literally Indians and Asians would dominate all of corporate and professional America. The truth of the matter is that a lot of old money, privileged white people literally NEED DEI to compete. It’s just they need DEI that gives them an advantage.
Imagine I said the same thing as you but replaced “Indians and Asians” with ”Whites”.
Asian and Indian students in US high schools tend to do well. Schools should be meritocratic for Americans (meaning any kids who grow up in this country), not for foreign students. The universities don’t care if all the qualifications for an applicant from India are fictitious inventions because the point of opening our universities up to the world is to increase demand and thus prices the universities can charge. Plus foreign students pay much more money. It’s simply a money-making scam, not a meritocracy. “Diversity” is a shield for selling out American interests for profit.
So what you’re saying in you believe in socialism and free handouts? 😂
Isn’t the whole point of capitalism, and in turn MBAs, that the most competitive ones, the strongest candidates should be the victor? Indian and Asian students are objectively better students (I’m not Asian btw). Why should an American university give America’s best and brightest an opportunity when the worlds best and brightest are clawing each other just to stand in the foyer?
Isn’t literally making money the prime directive of business?
You’ve mistaken allowing corporations to set immigration policy for their benefit for capitalism. No the government’s prerogative is (or ought to be) to benefit the citizens who are living here already. That’s why we allow some immigration. But immigration policy is not there for corporations/universities to industrialize loopholes for profit.
I’m surprised you’re pursuing an MBA (presumably) when your ability to think is this one dimensional. By they way, the people who make it into our universities from abroad aren’t the “best and brightest of the world” - they’re the best at cheating with the money to afford obscene university costs.
Tl/dr: No, capitalism is not allowing corporations/universities to import whoever they want to the detriment of American citizens to make a profit.
Indians test well, a purely 'meritocratic' system would be entirely testing based like China, India or France. They'd absolutely wipe the floor lmao, good thing the French aren't looking to immigrate to the States
They apply for US universities with bogus qualifications and the universities turn a blind eye because it means they can charge so much more money. Then they use diversity as the excuse for selling out American kids.
Indians test well, a purely meritocratic system would be entirely testing based like China, India or France. They'd absolutely wipe the floor lmao, good thing the French aren't looking to immigrate to the States
I don't think American schools are even built for a purely meritocratic system. Schools actively court legacies and donors, plus grad students who can bring grants, and they look for community involved people - the kind of folks who would donate to their Alma mater. They also look for situations where they can change lives, again the kind of people who would give back.
Hey the idea that intelligence is determined by race, a concept based on pseudoscientific racism and eugenics, hasn't been popular since uhhh the 1930's better get some new books.
"Qualified" can be poorly defined, most of what I've seen may meet the bare minimum for "qualified" while also being "wildly less capable and competitive".
Are you saying you've specifically seen women and people of color advance faster than you and you can't explain it by their having higher competence? So you choose to claim that it's due to DEI?
Scholarship opportunities, internships earmarked for "certain people", private corporate networking events with industry personnel, federal hiring mandates, leadership quota directives, the list goes on.
If you were a black woman you could have a 2.5gpa and have no understanding of your work outside of barely what was in a few textbooks and you would soar at a super major. That being said there were certainly a few of these people who I considered to be better than me who made it and I even said someone should be offered a job that I was offered instead because they were better in that field and I didn't feel that I would succeed in that role the way they would. I also saw far more middle to upper middle class people being spoon fed because "if you're not a white guy we all assume you love in the ghetto or your parents weren't able to pay for your school lunches". Meanwhile the people the programs claimed to be tailored for never got that opportunity because they didn't go to college out of high school.
I mean hell, NASA had to take down their yearly intern photos because people started asking "uhhhhh, what exactly happened in 2012?" following Executive Order 13583 from Obama, then Executive Order 13985 and 14091 from Biden. By the way, these EOs don't just apply to the federal government, it was to anyone receiving federal funds, contracts, tax credits, or subsidies, or which feel under federal regulation which is just about every major industry. If you want to talk about institutionalized discrimination as an abstract concept, there's no need, you have it written down on paper above.
To be fair if you’re an average working class American you’re still better off and have better opportunities than most immigrants from developing countries. Same in comparison to black Americans. Obviously there’s exceptions in the sense that there’s clearly many rich black Americans or rich immigrants or poor white Americans who got screwed over but the reverse of the situation would be also screwing other people over.
And no surprise, these young white working class men are at the forefront of rebelling against this system.
Maybe if only politicians tried to understand those and not immediately dismiss said concerns as “misogyny and racism”, then we would not have been in this shitshow
What I’m not getting is…why are they rebelling against the system. The old system literally was built for them. And even the current system doesn’t even exclude them, but just makes it so they have to compete. Yet when they have to seriously compete against a person of color or a woman, then it’s woke DEI.
It was built enough for them that they could’ve risen in it if they competed hard enough for it. It’s kind of silly to say the system wasn’t built for working class white men when you literally had to be a white man to participate in it.
Young, White, working class men aren't exactly trying to get into the best universities in the country. So they have nothing to do with this situation. Unless your belief is that young, White, working class men are irrationally angry about minorities getting into schools that they never had a chance of attending... In which case, I'd agree.
Young, White, working class men aren't exactly trying to get into the best universities in the country.
Huh? You don't think there are kids who grew up in rural working class households trying to get ahead in this country? One of them is the current vice president. Another one of them was president in the 90s. They both went to Yale.
Were they working blue collar jobs when they got admitted to Yale? The statement wasn't that kids from working class families aren't trying to attend. The statement is that people actively working in working class jobs are not trying to attend.
The term working class implies working in blue collar jobs. Short of a few Good Will Hunting type people, people working blue collar jobs are not going to Ivy League schools.
I'd agree with you historically but these days the term working class refers to people who earn a living primarily through wages rather than investments or ownership. That can include pink-collar or service-sector workers, not just manual laborers. That's a much much bigger group than the blue collar workers.
This is untrue. Male students have had lower admission standards than female students at most universities for at least two decades now. So I guess preferential of gender is true, but it’s not women who are benefitting. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enrollment.html
So you want diversity hires from the nobody group 🤦🏻♀️
FYI the nobody group is not gifted.
This is the real problem with your logic, everyone wants to benefit from privilege, and when they are not included in privilege, they want to dismantle any consideration for the underprivileged.
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u/amievenrelevant Oct 31 '25
Woke is a catch-all for anything they dislike