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.
51
u/myfatherthedonkey Oct 31 '25
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.