I don’t think you’re up to date on admissions preferences and rates at Amherst, Brown, etc... these places are just as bad. Especially in recent years.
Those who have just gone through it -- especially white males in STEM -- know this. As do the college counseling operations at the high schools they’re coming from. The latter are scrambling and advising white males to take up a sport at high level beginning in 9th grade to have a chance.
I don’t think most people have a clue how skewed this system has become. It’s discrimination on steroids since George Floyd.
At both Amherst and Brown Black and Hispanic students are still significantly below their representation in the population as a whole. So... what are you talking about?
That’s not the relevant metric when determining how much affirmative action is taking place. What is their representation as a percent of qualified applicants to the school? How does that compare for white and Asian students? The schools increasingly prevent us from knowing this by no longer requiring test scores.
I’ve talked to countless college counselors this past year and they all agree: affirmative action is very much at play in these schools (Amherst, Brown, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Haverford, etc, etc -- the list is very long) -- well beyond the Ivies. They’ve said this past year was the worst they’ve seen in their careers, particularly for “white males in STEM” -- the word “bloodbath” was used more than once. This anecdotal info is supported by looking at STEM racial breakdowns at these schools over the last few years.
I agree with the vast majority of what you say in your piece. But this aspect isn’t current in my experience.
I'm not sure why you need to say "in STEM." Undergrads do not apply to programs, after all, they apply to schools, and then work their majors out maybe a year into college. So nothing is stopping someone from applying to STEM programs within any of these universities, though enrollment may be lower for other reasons of course.
I do think some of the poison comes down to the financial incentives of universities rather than just "diversity" though. One of my daughter's friends has a father who's a professor within STEM at University of Pittsburgh. He has said none of the grad students in his department are American, and most are Chinese, which he blames on a lot of international students willing to bear the full cost of tuition, which would be subsidized to some extent for domestic students. Presumably a lot of them are willing to come without being offered graduate assistantships as well.
While in most schools you’re not applying to a specific program, most of them DO consider the profile of the student and their stated area of interest. This comes across in courses taken, essays, the many college applications that specifically ASK your intended area of focus, etc. Those schools compare students with similar areas of focus to one another.
It was worse this past year in STEM than elsewhere per the people I spoke with. The thinking is that this was schools upping their minority representation in these STEM programs -- where the racial differences are greatest -- ahead of the SCOTUS ruling.
I have no doubt in talking to the admissions people at many institutions that they will find a way around the ruling. It might just take them a bit of time to adjust.
For the record, a number of schools do require a separate admissions process, governed by separate criteria, for freshman intending to major in engineering. This is true at George Mason University in Virginia, for example. So your sources may well be correct when speaking in particular about a "bloodbath in STEM," apart from whatever is happening more generally in admission trends.
Yes. Some have separate engineering admissions, some architecture, many for things like performing arts. I’m talking about math, physics, chemistry, etc. Most acutely in pure math and physics.
I think it's dangerous to generalize engineering across all sciences. Engineering is its on weird beast. It's the last professional-class job you can get by with just an undergraduate degree, but in order to do so it's larded up with heavy course loads. Probably only a matter of time before it becomes a "masters required" field like everything else.
From what I can see, there are plenty of white dudes still in STEM, but they tend to go into areas with little-to-no private sector application. Like they want to study supernovas, or dinosaurs, or phytoplankton or something. They want to be professors or work for some nonprofit institute somewhere, not get a science degree to make money. The white dudes who want to make money just get MBAs.
For many STEM fields you bet undergrads apply directly to programs, even at not-quite-elite institutions. For our local public school if you do not get admitted directly to the undergraduate computer science program as a high school senior it is "unlikely" that you'll ever be admitted. https://admit.washington.edu/apply/admission-to-majors/
I have also heard (in the context of the immigration debate) that there are not enough Americans in advanced graduate-level STEM classes, but I think that most people just do not want to go into STEM fields if they can help it. Most people do not find technical fields inherently interesting and only go into them because of the salary (the dearth of qualified candidates being one of the reasons why salaries are higher). I've read that engineers are more likely to come from poor families, artists from rich ones.
I may be misunderstanding the comment, but I understood the comment to be disputing your characterization that the average black admitee of Harvard would have gone to Brown in the absence of AA. The average black admitee of Harvard has standardized test scores equivalent to a Pepperdine or UC Davis admitee. Brown’s 25/75 SAT range is 1440/1560. The median SAT score of black Harvard admitees pre covid gaming was below 1300.
I disagree with Carolyn A, at least in regards to policies at Amherst College. I’m curious what you make of the Amherst Within Reach initiative https://www.amherst.edu/mm/653337
Just more window dressing that purports to increase access to what remains a fundamentally elite undertaking? Or maybe a good step towards eliminating economic barriers to said elite education?
I also know that Amherst maintained a ‘summer science’ program for years that tried (and failed) to bring minority admissions without sufficient prior coursework up to speed through accelerated summer work. More interesting, they also had (have?) a program where they partner with local community colleges to identify talented transfer students.
Just generally curious, I’ve had an inside view to these programs through my father, who was a chem professor (and occasional dept. chair) at Amherst for 30 years.
I don't want to put words into Freddie's mouth, but I think the rhetorical point that he was making isn't that Amherst or Brown are less discriminatory, but that these "second tier" elite schools are where the marginal Harvard-reject students end up. If you miss the Harvard cut by one slot, you should have no trouble getting into your second-choice school, even if the racial deck is also stacked at that other school, because you're nearly Harvard-material.
And while I think that holds true when you compare the most exclusive tier of elite schools to less exclusive tiers, it probably applies less within each tier. The competition for Harvard and the competition for Yale are pretty similar, so if you barely miss the cut at one you'll probably barely miss the cut for the other for the same reasons, racial or otherwise.
A clearer example would be Harvard rejects going to the University of Massachusetts. Which they can definitely do with no problems.
I don’t think this is accurate anymore -- it’s out of date at least since George Floyd: “If you miss the Harvard cut by one slot, you should have no trouble getting into your second-choice school, even if the racial deck is also stacked at that other school, because you're nearly Harvard-material.”
People should look at admissions rates at the schools a tier below Harvard -- they’re in single digits or teens. And look at the racial breakdowns of their STEM majors, and test scores to the extent that they still collect them.
And Freddie, speaking for himself, cited this, as though it’s evidence that Brown and Amherst aren’t engaging in as much affirmative action as Harvard: “At both Amherst and Brown Black and Hispanic students are still significantly below their representation in the population as a whole. So... what are you talking about?”
I agree wholeheartedly with this!! “Individual ability rules. I would much, much rather be a 120-IQ graduate of a nondescript state school than a 100-IQ graduate of an Ivy League school.”
But how can you suss this out when hiring, let’s say...? You can’t ask for an IQ test. Transcripts have become meaningless, there’s so much grade inflation. Case interviews?
That's because a high IQ isn't allowed at most consulting firms.
But seriously, once you understand what an IQ test is, and how they are generated, you'll see that most technical interviews are at least partly IQ tests.
Lots of jobs give IQ tests to applicants, they are called "personality" tests but they include sections with complex logic tests, test an applicants vocabulary etc.
This is true. They do it as part of application process and some companies are now requiring these under the guise of giving employees professional “certifications”. I suspect it’s a way to generate the lay-off lists or as Big Blue likes to call them “resource actions”.
Exactly. With credentialism, a Harvard degree, even possessed by a 100 IQ individual, will give the individual a huge advantage in grad school and employment, even over a 135 IQ state school grad.
You interview them! If you're interviewing people for a technical position that you yourself can do, it's easy. Even just asking "tell me about a project you worked on - what was easy, what was hard, what would you have done differently and why?" will flag the bullshitters within seconds, and in under an hour you could absolutely distinguish a 20 point IQ gap.
How do you decide who to interview? I get between 400 and 600 applications for each position. If I interviewed all of them, we would never get around to hiring anyone.
Assuming you're serious, it depends on how selective you want to be. If you're hiring for a general position, where there are lots of qualified candidates, then a 500:1 applicant to position ratio during a period of incredible labor market tightness indicates that you're paying too much. If you really want to keep the pay that high then you can process the applications stochastically - just select a random sample and start interviewing. When you've interviewed enough to believe that you've found a good enough candidate such that the costs of further interviews would exceed the gain from increased employee quality, stop interviewing and offer. This is a standard search costs problem.
If you're interviewing for an exclusive position, where the gains from having an exceptional employee are exceptionally high, then thank your lucky stars for the abundance and start interviewing. Over time you can study the applications/resumes/vitae of the most and least successful candidates and use that knowledge to learn to rapidly screen out the weakest ones for future positions.
I know it can be scary, but court opinions are just essays, with citations to exact authority that readers (including us lawyers) can skip. The Chief Justice's lead opinion is both pretty readable and sensible; but Justice Thomas's concurrence is a master class in the history of the 13th and 14th amendments, and his difference of opinion with Justice Jackson (and hers with him) is as illuminating as it gets on how different, smart and black individuals can disagree strongly about our nation and our constitution.
I always encourage everyone to read Supreme Court opinions and dissents for themselves. The specific arguments are always more complex, and often entirely different, than the way they get portrayed in the mass media.
Minor point of pedantry: Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, not a dissent, because he ruled with the majority. Only saying this because you made me do a double take as to the composition of the vote
"This all hangs on the basic broken thinking about education that I discussed in The Cult of Smart: we demand that our education system be both a ladder of success, a sorting system that creates a hierarchy of excellence, and a great equalizer, a way to make society more equitable. These are flatly contradictory purposes."
It would appear to be contradictory, unless you're able to synthesize a new ideology that equates personal success (or a small elite within a bigger group's success) with some kind of wider social justice.
I wrote in my Substack last week about how media representation has become a like a holodeck substitute for actual progress, encouraging people to find avatars of themselves on the screen or in the page, and then measure box office revenue as a way to validate themselves: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/affirmation-art-and-box-office-politics.
Similar philosophy here: let me—or let us—be your champions. Through my rise, you too will be uplifted, even if only emotionally so. And if you can't be happy for me, then you're all backwards (many elite-educated minorities have disdain for their communities too).
I've recently been reading about W.E.B. DuBois's theory of black racial progress, which was unabashedly elitist in exactly that manner. His goal was to cultivate a black elite class with the same sorts of tastes, social mores, and economic position as the white elite class, which would relate to the wider black culture in a manner similar to how white elites relate to white culture. While he believed that this would benefit the entire black population indirectly, he didn't envision the result as being some kind of egalitarian classless racial identity group, but rather a stratified class system in which black people could be led into social progress by their own intellectual/cultural vanguard.
Whether or not one agrees with this approach, I think it's a lot more internally coherent than imagining that everyone can equally benefit from access to the same educational opportunities.
I've found their dispute quite fascinating, as a study both in how people might have different political approaches to racial discrimination despite having the same ultimate objective, and also in the effect that their different personalities and backgrounds had on their perspectives.
I think it's a bit sad that, in the post-Civil Rights era, we tend to see black antiracism as a singular movement with a single obvious political program, rather than containing a wide variety of possible approaches informed by different black perspectives.
There are plenty of black conservatives and moderates today but they are conspicuously ignored by the mainstream media which is interested only in conformity on this issue.
I'd go further: I wish we could detach the analysis of different black approaches to racial injustice from the right-center-left conceptual framework. There are black political movements and figures whose ideas really don't map onto that schematic well at all. Eric Adams is a good example.
Right now partisanship is at such an insane level that the right-left dialectic is subsuming everything. The discourse on most topics is ill suited to being boiled down to a Republican versus Democratic model but the country seems determined to do it anyway.
DuBois was deeply influenced by the eugenics movement that was all the rage among intellectuals of his time. He believed that only a "talented tenth" could save Black America. Elites will always look down on the common folk no matter what.
“Affirmative action is a system in which students of color who would not ordinarily gain entry to a given college are given a slot” Is this necessarily true? I was under the impression that it also means, given two candidates of equal ability, preference would go to the person of color. Ivies perennially get more fully qualified candidates than they can accept, thus race can be a determining factor among the qualified. But I don’t know how it actually works in the real world.
Plenty of test score data out there showing that far less qualified minority students are accepted over more qualified Asian or white students. It’s NOT merely a case of race being a tie breaker between two equally qualified candidates. And even if it was... why is that acceptable?
Yeah this is the only part of the essay that I disagreed with. My impression is that for the tiny number of hyper-selective colleges, the margins between candidates are effectively imperceptible, and of course beyond quasi-objective measures like test scores the entire process is necessarily subjective anyways, so the goal of race-based affirmative action is to push candidates from historically oppressed minorities closer to the front of the line. Whether it plays out that way is of course an open question, but the idea does not assume a lesser level of ability.
Except statistically, based upon standardized testing data and similar objective metrics used by elite colleges (number of AP courses taken, etc.), the margins between and among admitted candidates are in fact quite perceptible, and break down heavily along racial lines.
I guess it depends on how much stock you want to put in the difference between a supposed 97th percentile applicant versus a 99th percentile applicant. I don't think any of our "objective" measures claim that level of granular accuracy, so if you have a pool of applicants that highly qualified, I'm not persuaded that selecting among them is much more than dart-throwing.
The question is whether a black student admitted into Harvard under the auspices of affirmative action is really in the top 3% versus the top 20% or 30%.
If the threshold is set at 1450 that would exclude the average black applicant straight off the bat.
This is fair, however, I think the issue is that many of the african-american and hispanic students are *not* in the 97% percentile (or close) and they get preference over other students who are.
Harvard was going to lose this case just based on stats alone (but there were also plenty of internal communications detailing their discrimination against Asians). The average SAT scores for admitted Asian students have been much higher than every other race. Similar numbers can be found for GPA, and likely also holds for extracurricular activities (although those are much harder to quantify): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/
By that graph in the Crimson we're still talking about applicants in the like 98th percentile of SAT takers, so unless you think the SAT is such a perfect measure of ability that there is an objectively irrefutable distinction in qualification between someone who scores say 1450 versus 1500, that doesn't counter what I'm saying. Not even the College Board would argue for that level of granularity, and no admissions officer would say that all the students they admitted were qualified and none of the ones they rejected were not. The admissions process is opaque by design, because past a certain minimum (and still very high) level of qualification they are throwing darts at a board.
It wasn't just SAT scores. Harvard systematically discriminated against Asians by using opaque nonacademic "personal ratings". From the NY Times article:
"Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found."
"University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent."
I don't see how this is a counterargument to my point that there are more extremely qualified applicants than there are spots. If anything, this is just further evidence that past a certain very high threshold of selectivity, admissions departments are basically just making shit up to get the outcome they want. If they really wanted to be fair, they would just make it a lottery system for anyone past some semi-arbitrary qualification cutoff. But they aren't going to do that, because that would risk letting in even more undesirables.
There is an irrefutable distinction in test scores. And doesn't that correlate with other markers such as GPA even when you get past the supposed threshold of 1450?
Your use of the term 'enviable' in this piece harms another part of your argument. Would you really rather be the 120 IQ state school grad vs the 100 IQ ivy leaguer?
You also overuse the term generally: you always leave me wondering who, exactly, envies these people. I sure don't. Do you?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is moral, ethical or natural in consideration of admission, acceptance, hiring, promotions, rewards etc... other than merit. Any other criteria is corrosive, unnatural and results in a spiral down of lower human achievement that dooms the entire system to failure.
If we want to see better outcomes for groups, the effort has to be at the very front... improving early childhood development for the people in those groups.
The fact that Asian Americans have better socioeconomic outcomes than do whites in the US, completely shatters the myth of modern racism being responsible for lower socioeconomic outcomes for other minority groups... and also shatters the myth that blacks and Democrats that exploit them, can rely on the excuse of historical oppression from 150+ years ago to get a unqualified boost to the head of the line.
The fact is that multiple decades of failed liberal and bonehead globalist policies have decimated the economic opportunity within the black community at the very time the people of that community were poised to advance from the poor to the middle-class. Pushing the unqualified to the head of the line is just deflection for those that need to take responsibility for the harm they have caused.... by piling on more harm.
No one really deserves anything. Our aptitudes - intelligence, diligence, perseverance, etc. - are not under our direct control. It's a combination of winning the genetic lottery and non-shared environmental aspects which we can't really grok the origins of. But none of it comes down to "trying hard" because a predisposition to trying hard (or being lazy) isn't under our control either.
On a practical level, I do think it's true that some people have the chops to be say an engineer, while others do not. Of course jobs like that have to be selective. But there is no moral argument IMHO why they should be compensated more just because they are better at the job, because they have no control over being "better" at all.
More importantly, those who are not bright, lazy, disorganized, mentally unstable, etc. are so by no choice of their own. Punishing them via poverty will not suddenly change their traits. It's being needlessly cruel, like forcing someone in a wheelchair to crawl up a flight of stairs for want of a ramp.
If "bright, lazy, disorganized, mentally unstable" etc. are all things no one can meaningfully control, you are flirting with hard determinism that makes moral vocabulary essentially meaningless.
Yes. I don't believe in the idea of free will - I don't see anywhere for volition to exist if materialism is correct and the brain is just a collection of matter and energy. I don't even think that we can really talk about culpability in terms of crime in a moral sense, because whatever traits cause someone to commit a crime comes down to their brain structure and external stimuli, neither of which they had any control over.
I do believe that suffering is real though. While I recognize that my empathy as well is a result of my brain structure, I think we should do everything possible to reduce suffering, which in the end is a moral judgement.
As I said, I am open to the idea that some people have rare skills which make them more suited to some positions. I just don't see why we need to "reward" them.
In the capitalist superstructure, sure. Some people have unique "talents" which allows them a lot of negotiating power for wages. That's why some pro sports players and actors get paid so much. But that doesn't translate into a moral argument on how they "deserve" the money due to their "hard work."
They "deserve" the money because somebody is willing to pay them that money. It's simple supply and demand: if the number of rock star coders (or whatever) is low then naturally demand will be high.
We pay people more for the things that need to be done that fewer people are willing or able to do. For the jobs that no one wants to do, I'm not sure how you get people to do them except by paying them more. It seems to me that paying everyone the same for every job screws the people assigned to the worst jobs...or even simply to jobs they don't like. (And that's all ignoring what incentives can actually do to help our society.) As bad as meritocracy is, the alternative is worse.
The takeaway is the statement that "nothing, is moral...other than merit" is an unsubstantiated prior, and a really, really dangerous one that both conservatives and liberals hew to in our country.
Conservatives generally claim that merit works itself out on its own without interference, while liberals believe that merit exists, but the "wrong people" are benefitting because we don't have a "true meritocracy" yet, with various factors holding people back. Both operate from the same prior though; that there are some people that society should reward, and others it should not.
I personally believe there is basic human dignity we are all owed regardless of how "hard" of a worker we are. And...this actually holds true when you look at other countries. In Scandinavia, the gap between rich and poor is much less than here, but the same sorts of people still become doctors/lawyers despite getting paid a lot less, and there's no evidence that overall productivity is lower. It's just a less miserable place to be poor, without any substantive economic downsides.
No... I agree with you. Interesting your comnent about coders and DBAs. I am a recovering IT exec that made mistakes allowing HR to push non-merit criteria in hiring and it resulted in a mess. Not only did those hires underperform, but they created resentment and toxic performance-killing behavior within the team. Merit can certainly be a bigger tent. For example, I had this brilliant Oracle DBA that I had to fire because he kept telling department business project sponsors their ideas were idiotic.
I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but ultimately, if you are a determinist, then morality is irrelevant and so is meritocracy and there is no injustice. There is no is / ought distinction because there is no ought. Everything boils down to a description of is.
I agree in the sense that I don't think the idea of free will holds up to logical scrutiny (how can any choice be made freely when it's entirely subject to external forces?).
However I do think for certain individuals, "tough love" does work on a psychological level to motivate positive change and development, the same way deadlines work for some people to finish a project in a timely manner.
But for other individuals, tough love only makes things worse, and what they really need is support and care.
"you are flirting with hard determinism that makes moral vocabulary essentially meaningless"
Is the point of moral vocabulary to say whether or not a person is good or bad? If that's the case, I'm more than fine with it. If, though, at least part of it is to say "murder is bad" or whatever, then I think that recognizing that some people were born in horrible circumstances that doomed them to becoming narcissists or prone to excessive dissociation (lazy) or whatever, is not going to conflict with that. Murder bad!
Well said, especially the part about the genetic lottery. I’ve always hated cruelty of meritocracy and the belief that anyone can succeed with the right mix of positive thinking and elbow grease. The flip side of “you can do anything you set your mind to” is “you have only yourself to blame for failure.” Given that way more people fall into the latter category, that’s a recipe for self-loathing and cold indifference to suffering.
It’s our equivalent of karma and how it’s been used to justify the cruelties of the caste system.
It's also notable that if you look at societies that have even a greater culture of "hard work" than the U.S. - like South Korea, where the social norm is to work 50-60 hour weeks, and the suicide rate is the highest in the OCED.
So yeah, maybe people can 'work harder" - but if you work harder, than your peers have to work harder to keep up with you, which means eventually everyone capable is working as hard as they can, meaning more "productivity," less free time, more misery, and the relative positions of everyone are pretty much the same.
But the overall wealth enjoyed by South Koreans has soared. Back in the 1970's Korea's primary export to the West was human hair and meat was a rarity, enjoyed as a luxury item only on special occasions.
Now along with Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc. the primary Korean export to the US appears to be KBBQ joints.
The iconoclastic Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang once likened it to a person at the front of a movie theater standing up to get a slightly better view. That in turn forces everyone else to stand up just so they can see the film. In the end, very few people have a better view, but everyone is now more uncomfortable. That’s how I view hypercompetitive societies with a meritocratic ethos.
There is an old Soviet saying "the workers pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay them."
Good thing athletes don't follow your prescription.
You have two choices. Market-based merit or egalitarian collectivism. The first requires economic growth to sustain it. The second always leads to complete system collapse. So you only really have one choice.
And don't give any BS about Scandinavian countries. Those people are more capitalist than Americans these days.
Do you work 7 days a week or only 5? The "9-5" workday and the 5 day workweek are the result of coordinated collective bargaining and capital/labor negotiations to prevent a game-theory driven race to the bottom among workers.
You mention hyper-competitive athletics as if that's a good model for life. No, it's a model for determining the pinnacle of human achievement in athletics. Its economic rewards follow a power law distribution. A few huge winners and a lot of nobodies. No shock most professional leagues have players unions! Without them, most pro athletes would be paid a pittance, as they were in the past.
Don't be ashamed if you're a social darwinist. but just admit it.
If Scandinavians are more capitalist than Americans, then I assume the anti-socialists in the US will be fully supportive of adopting their public health care system and their tax rates. No?
That assumes a zero sum that doesn't exist. Our standard of living has been driven relentlessly upwards by competition and higher performance yielding higher rewards.
So what is the alternative? Work less hard so as to propel a race to the bottom of low achievement?
Who the fuck cares about relative-positions? If you can work hard to have a good life, why do you care that your neighbor up the street has more whatever?
Again, I sense just a basic malcontent here. I have a brother with the same mindset. He claims that the system is unfair and yet never really gets off his ass to try things he might fail at so he can learn to be better.
You’re the one who comes across as “malcontent” and excitable in your various comments, so I can’t help but sense some projection; but putting the minor ad hominem sniping aside, yes, I believe Americans would do well to work less hard. Seriously, it’s been almost a full century since the 40-hour work week was enacted. You’d think with all this amazing progress and technological development - which, of course, people like you would attribute solely to the wonders of capitalism - we would be working less by now. So what gives?
What gives is that without work and accomplishment of work most people won't have self-worth, won't have a personal identity that is worth a shit, won't be happy because some will work harder and have more and the non-working will resent it. In terms of evolution, it is only the last few decades of human existence where the hard work and sacrifice of people even gives someone like you the expectation that there is some no-work utopia. You don't understand human nature nor human psychology. Put down the game controller dude and get to work. You just sound like a lazy keyboard klicker.
There is no sustainable future where the hardest working, most capable don't tend to earn the biggest returns. It isn't natural to not work. It will fuck up your head eventually.
The alternative is for workers to unionize and demand more pay for less work, while the government runs a growth-oriented macroeconomic policy that makes labor expensive and capital cheap.
Don't those cultures combine the social norms of long hard hours with a pretty relentless sorting of students based on how they perform on standardized exams? Most other educational systems don't pretend that *anybody* can succeed with enough "grit."
Bullshit. Everyone is capable of growth and development. The fucking Governor of Texas is in a wheelchair. What is both cruel and destructive is the soft bigotry of low expectations for people not miraculously gifted.
This "from those that can to those that cannot" is always just a "from those that do to those that don't"
It is 99% mindset that holds people back from doing what they should to be qualified to be recognized for their merit. Everyone has challenges to overcome.
I have conducted countless interviews for developers and DBA's. When I look for someone bright and interested it's because I don't want to have to clean up broken shit. If that means paying more money for the right candidate I am all for it.
I don't think anyone doesn't think that people should do the jobs they're good at, and jobs should be filled by people who are good at them. What we (me and the others, and I think this would include Karl) believe is that the people who are good at things should not be the only ones to get medical care and bikes for their kids on Christmas or whatever, and everyone else gets to live under the overpass because they didn't have enough "merit."
That's a bastardization of the argument though. What does the principle of paying a developer or an engineer more than a busboy or dish washer have to do with the social safety net? I would answer "Nothing" but for whatever reason the two topics get muddled together.
Naw. There are many more people qualified to be a busboy and fewer that are qualified to be a waiter. The waiter should make more. Law of supply and demand and it is generally connected to skills attainment that has higher value in the job market.
Yes, exactly. I have no problem with certain talented, ambitious people achieving great success. My issue is when these same people - who often benefit from various forms of luck they almost never acknowledge - embrace a bootstrapping, victim-blaming mindset that “losers” deserve to suffer for being losers. (Ie. Not as hard-working and virtuous as them, which also makes it a form of humble-bragging).
Who really believes that though? It's one thing to believe that hard work will often pay off in terms of economic mobility but to assume that means a parallel belief that anybody in dire straits deserves their circumstances is completely unjustified.
Well it's the fundamental ideology underlying movement conservatism so uh, lots of people (although far fewer than conservative elites would have us believe)
Who really believes that? The overwhelming majority of Americans on some level. Whom they apply that belief to depends on their ideological leanings. Conservatives tend to blame inner city black people, single mothers, and others for their suffering, whereas liberals generally think that poor whites are undeserving of any sympathy or help (ie. How could they be poor despite all their whites privilege? Tsk tsk). Americans are very big on micro-accountability and the cult of personal responsibility, and tend to think that, exceptions notwithstanding, people get what they deserve
But they do have control over what job they choose, how many hours they work, how seriously they take that work, etc. Should there not be salary differences as a result of those choices?
I have a high paying job due to winning the genetic lottery. I'd go back to driving the tractor on the driving range if there wasn't a salary difference.
Same. I'm a PhD but sometimes I fantasize about working in a coffee shop or something if I could make the same money. I always kind of liked that work, just hated the wages.
I will give you this. All people are capable, but have different innate talents and capabilities. I think education and practice can add to those innate abilities, but certainly those with stronger innate abilities will have an advantage. The secret to US success was that there were many career paths for the diverse capability population to make a good life. That has been erroded with a loss of manufacturing jobs, too much immigration and too many over educated people competing for too few opportunities.
You should at least be able to acknowledge that if a doctor is getting paid the same as an IHOP waiter, then fewer talented people are going to bust their butts to become excellent doctors. Why should they, if the outcome will be the same if they don't? The quality of medical care overall will then go down. Sure, there will still be doctors, just fewer good ones. There can be a debate about whether or not that would be worth it in order to achieve an egalitarian society, but to pretend it won't happen is naive.
While you are right on some level, the Soviet era Polish saying that “no one can pay me as little as I can work” tells you just how self destructive it is to act on the impulse of your observation.
I get the determinism thing but I don't get how you can logically go from there to "punishing them via poverty." Who's doing the punishing if not someone who under your determinism definition has no control over what they're doing? You can't pick and choose as if somehow the downtrodden have no choice but the punishers do. I get that it's convenient to think that way to support your argument but it doesn't make sense. Find extreme examples, let's say Hitler, and apply your determinism arguments to him, just as you would to someone living under a bridge. If you can't do that than you really don't believe in determinism.
Ok, now how does all that moralizing make any particular category of labor-power more abundant or scarce? Nobody gets paid because they deserve it. They get paid because the relative scarcity and macroeconomic market conditions make it hard to find anyone who will work for less.
Generally agree with the virtues of focusing on merit, but I still think it makes sense for schools to screen out people with poor character. A student or alumnus who ends up a fraud or a murderer is a stain on the institution. Of course, "good character" can be subject to abuse as a tool to screen out the "wrong" people. On balance, I think it makes sense to put much less weight on holistic admission standards but not scrap them entirely.
Harvard has already been using character to weed out Asians. On measures of likeability, courage, etc. Asians score much lower than whites or blacks. At least according to Harvard.
I mean, you’re not even making an argument. Implicit in your first “myth” is that Asian Americans (a wildly heterogenous group) experience “modern” racism in exactly the same ways that Blacks do, which is preposterous. And implicit in your second “myth” is that the systematic, brutal, institutionalized and all-encompassing racism that Blacks experienced in America under slavery doesn’t actually matter because that was all in the past, 150+ years ago. Which is, also, preposterous.
The only “myth” here is your claim that historical conditions don’t inform present realities. I know you haven’t been given a chance to elaborate on it, but, like all claims that want to fall back on a racist evaluation of society, you won’t be able to give an account of when the brutality of slavery or the anti-Black enculturation in whites actually ended.
150 years ago was 1873. You say that the historical oppression of Blacks ended here. This is so ahistorical it almost beggars belief: 1873 was the very year the Redeemers rose and the beginning of the end of Reconstruction. Four years later, all throughout the South, the Blacks who had been democratically elected to office were forced out, sometimes at gunpoint; Jim Crow was being instituted in every state; the First Ku Klux Klan had finished its coalescence and was actively conducting a reign of terror against Blacks in the South that dared challenge White supremacy.
It didn’t end there. A Supreme Court full of Northerners ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was a valid doctrine. The Ku Klux Klan rose two more times, each with millions of adherents. Tens of thousands of Black people were lynched in the era spanning 1873 - 1968.
I mean, for fucks sake, each and every time there was some civil rights victory for Blacks, it was stymied in some way by recalcitrant whites being recalcitrantly racist.
Even the most generous concession to your argument, that racism totally ended in 1968 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (and ignoring the massive groundswell of support for third-party George Wallace’s explicitly racist and segregationist platform that same year), means that Blacks have had, at most, two generations to rebuild from the effects of having their lives oppressed by systemic racist. And your argument goes that they should be on equal footing with those who haven’t had to endure that sort of systematized, racialized prejudice in living memory?
You got the CRT stuffed so far you your noggin' you cannot critically think.
Sp Asian Americans are wildly heterogenous group, but blacks are a monolithic race? Talk about a racist viewpoint!
Life was harder in the past. For most people. There are poor whites all over the country. We have a class problem, not a race problem. And I am guessing that your are part of that elite over-educated liberal class that looks down on everyone else, exploiting group divisions so you have plenty of victim virtue signaling material to help you keep feeling smugly superior.
The problems in the black community today are not because of past slavery. They are because liberals fucked up their communities with handout and crappy schools, and conservatives exported working class opportunity to other countries while importing other people's poverty. The breakup of the black family started when the jobs disappeared. And you upity over-educated elites know it, but instead of taking responsibility you make up the CRT crap for a deflection.
There are similar stories for how Italians, Irish, Polish, Mexicans, Asians were treated in this and other countries historically. It is a lie to say that these things are still occurring or that they have any bearing on the path of a black person in this country. The problems in the black community today are not from historical slavery no matter how much you type. They are from a victim mindset perpetuated by the elite liberal class bent on exploiting black misery for votes.
Italians, Irish, Polish, Mexicans, Asians were never bought and sold as chattel, so, sorry, no, their experiences of rampant and systemic discrimination by nativists — which is identical to the discrimination that so-called “illegal” immigrants experience today, mind you — aren’t comparable to the experiences of Black slavery.
You are correct that they are not comparable to the experience of black slavery because black slavery was over for decades and this systemic discrimination by nativists (which is exactly the same as the elites discrimination of white working class today) was much, much more recent.
Just stop with the stupid ass argument that slavery or pre-civil-rights acts has anything to do with black socioeconomic outcomes today. Fuck, new legal black immigrants to this country have higher socioeconomic outcomes than do average for whites.
The difference is that these people assimilate to the norms of the country for making a good living. While the black urban community keeps getting blasted with the leftist Democrat message that they are oppressed victims and need a strong grievance culture and a unique identity and other people should pay them for their pain.
A victim mindset is the primary "oppressor" preventing people from attaining a good life. If we had systemic racism still, then how do you explain all the successful blacks in society today?
Literally none of the neutral and factual account that Maxwell gave is CRT. Critical Race Theory has a definition, and "listing historical events" is not it.
It will be interesting to see if the change in admission practices at the Ivies drifts to the point where they resemble the UC system (meaning something like a 40% Asian student body). If that happens, given the way that our country works, it basically means we're going to have a plurality Asian ruling class within 1-2 generations, for exactly the same reasons that Jewish people became massively over-represented among the elite once anti-Jewish quotas at the Ivies finally ended.
A human female I recall, perhaps the only human I ever could have loved (she had an incredibly light touch and could even get the most wary and skittish ferals to come up to her to get pettins) remarked that feminists have a gift for wanting it both ways. They wanted all the privileges associated with being female, but also the privileges associated with being male.
Well, it seems that the phenomenon of wanting it both ways is not limited to feminists, although we do hear some bromides about "our diversity is our strength!"
The university I teach at has an acceptance rate of 85% and just sent out a message about how we will come together to discuss how this decision will impact us and "the work that we do." Had to laugh -- not at all is the answer! Wish there could be some honesty in the discussion of this topic.
And while you're at it, quit pretending Hollywood cares about social justice. For all their European sensibilities and occasional indulging of artistic pretensions, they're as conservative as big money can be.
The bigger question is why these highly selective private colleges have access to federal and state funding when they can actively discriminate based on class status (and they are!). When you look at the year over year pell grant % of students at these schools, they hover around the same rate. Highly selective colleges know the minimum % of pell grant recipients they need to let in to make themselves look good and do just that (there are exceptions - Amherst for example seems to be putting their money where their mouth is). They are placing these kids into very specific admission’s pools from the start.
They hide behind “needs blind” phrasing to pretend they aren’t actively discriminating against low ses kids but use “hs rigor” and zip codes as proxies. More so, the poor UMR they are letting in are kids that did programs like Prep4Prep, Questbridge, or were lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private high school. At the end of the day, they don’t want to take risks on diamonds in the rough bcs it will hurt their grad % and their ranking. There is no such thing as “equity” or “dei” in the admissions process. No idea why libs are getting so up in arms about all of this. It’s always been rigged.
This argument is a colossal red herring. When the cost of a university education is at ahistorical high, and the value of said education is at a historical low, who is zooming who here? Do you really want to saddle preferred minorities with significant debt in exchange for a liberal arts degree in the passing social fad du jour?
Employers are not vested, universities and government are engineers of the grift. Good luck to students and families. The wealthiest happiest guy i know is a high school drop out who started a lawn mowing company.
If you want a middle class life, which is all most of us can ever hope for, you just need to go to college, any old college really. Of course what's more concerning is that significantly less black and brown students even apply to college and when they do they are often these for-profit scams. Why not just make sure everyone has a comfortable life and has access to middle-class jobs if that is their goal?
Using access to college education to reduce inequality is massively inefficient. Better to do it the other way around; reduce inequality first, which means that the children of the formerly poor individuals will have more educational opportunities opened up for them (due to greater financial stability if nothing else).
I don't know that I am arguing against that? Everyone should have their material conditions taken care of. Safe housing, access to fresh nutritious food, quality healthcare and if people are ok with that, that's fine. If they want access to middle class jobs (which degrees are not always needed for) they can get them as long they attend college (even community college) or trade schools. No one should be forced to suffer poverty but likewise, not everyone will want to commit the additional resources, time (or can't intellectually) to access the aspirational middle class.
Right, I wasn't disagreeing, I was concurring. I don't think college is a path to a middle class lifestyle. I think more money is a path to a middle class lifestyle, which can lead to college if that's what people want.
Except that sooner or later the curve breaks. If 33% of the jobs in the US are white collar and the other 2/3 are blue collar what happens when more than 33% of all high school grads go to college?
There's a lot of hand waving that suggests that the percentage of white collar jobs will somehow expand--but there's also a lot of English majors working as waiters or as cashiers at Target.
The US has an aging population with non-replacement level growth. I don't foresee this being an issue.
I hope English grads understand that they can get jobs the require degrees that aren't related to "English." Hell I work in Software Development despite never having written a line of code and having a degree in Political Science.
Yeah, but tech is a Special Case. There's always been more jobs than qualified candidates so tech has long been willing to look the other way in terms of a degree or certification.
I think the problem is that you can make the argument that right now the US is graduating too many people from college compared to the number of jobs available. This so called "overproduction of elites" is tremendously destabilizing.
there's for sure far too many people with advanced degrees. People with college degrees enjoy a lower unemployment rate than those who just graduate high school and much lower than those who didn't finish high school.
I should add that I have a couple of tech related certifications and I often offer that as advice for people who are looking for marketable skills. There are employers who also don't require degrees (especially for talented coders) but many employers still expect one for hires.
I should add that I am a first generation college student. For me, a college degree has been life changing.
My concern is that there are a bunch of people with degrees who graduate and then spend years delivering pizzas. I know some. If they wanted to work as a waiter or delivery driver they could have done so with wasting six years and going into debt for six figures.
The legacy argument is such a dodge. If people are offended (as I am) by legacy admissions, tell your legislature to ban it (for public schools) or condition funding on its abolition (for private schools).
I don’t think you’re up to date on admissions preferences and rates at Amherst, Brown, etc... these places are just as bad. Especially in recent years.
Those who have just gone through it -- especially white males in STEM -- know this. As do the college counseling operations at the high schools they’re coming from. The latter are scrambling and advising white males to take up a sport at high level beginning in 9th grade to have a chance.
I don’t think most people have a clue how skewed this system has become. It’s discrimination on steroids since George Floyd.
At both Amherst and Brown Black and Hispanic students are still significantly below their representation in the population as a whole. So... what are you talking about?
That’s not the relevant metric when determining how much affirmative action is taking place. What is their representation as a percent of qualified applicants to the school? How does that compare for white and Asian students? The schools increasingly prevent us from knowing this by no longer requiring test scores.
I’ve talked to countless college counselors this past year and they all agree: affirmative action is very much at play in these schools (Amherst, Brown, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Haverford, etc, etc -- the list is very long) -- well beyond the Ivies. They’ve said this past year was the worst they’ve seen in their careers, particularly for “white males in STEM” -- the word “bloodbath” was used more than once. This anecdotal info is supported by looking at STEM racial breakdowns at these schools over the last few years.
I agree with the vast majority of what you say in your piece. But this aspect isn’t current in my experience.
I'm not sure why you need to say "in STEM." Undergrads do not apply to programs, after all, they apply to schools, and then work their majors out maybe a year into college. So nothing is stopping someone from applying to STEM programs within any of these universities, though enrollment may be lower for other reasons of course.
I do think some of the poison comes down to the financial incentives of universities rather than just "diversity" though. One of my daughter's friends has a father who's a professor within STEM at University of Pittsburgh. He has said none of the grad students in his department are American, and most are Chinese, which he blames on a lot of international students willing to bear the full cost of tuition, which would be subsidized to some extent for domestic students. Presumably a lot of them are willing to come without being offered graduate assistantships as well.
While in most schools you’re not applying to a specific program, most of them DO consider the profile of the student and their stated area of interest. This comes across in courses taken, essays, the many college applications that specifically ASK your intended area of focus, etc. Those schools compare students with similar areas of focus to one another.
It was worse this past year in STEM than elsewhere per the people I spoke with. The thinking is that this was schools upping their minority representation in these STEM programs -- where the racial differences are greatest -- ahead of the SCOTUS ruling.
I have no doubt in talking to the admissions people at many institutions that they will find a way around the ruling. It might just take them a bit of time to adjust.
For the record, a number of schools do require a separate admissions process, governed by separate criteria, for freshman intending to major in engineering. This is true at George Mason University in Virginia, for example. So your sources may well be correct when speaking in particular about a "bloodbath in STEM," apart from whatever is happening more generally in admission trends.
Yes. Some have separate engineering admissions, some architecture, many for things like performing arts. I’m talking about math, physics, chemistry, etc. Most acutely in pure math and physics.
I think it's dangerous to generalize engineering across all sciences. Engineering is its on weird beast. It's the last professional-class job you can get by with just an undergraduate degree, but in order to do so it's larded up with heavy course loads. Probably only a matter of time before it becomes a "masters required" field like everything else.
From what I can see, there are plenty of white dudes still in STEM, but they tend to go into areas with little-to-no private sector application. Like they want to study supernovas, or dinosaurs, or phytoplankton or something. They want to be professors or work for some nonprofit institute somewhere, not get a science degree to make money. The white dudes who want to make money just get MBAs.
If you apply to the school of engineering you are most likely going into STEM.
For many STEM fields you bet undergrads apply directly to programs, even at not-quite-elite institutions. For our local public school if you do not get admitted directly to the undergraduate computer science program as a high school senior it is "unlikely" that you'll ever be admitted. https://admit.washington.edu/apply/admission-to-majors/
I have also heard (in the context of the immigration debate) that there are not enough Americans in advanced graduate-level STEM classes, but I think that most people just do not want to go into STEM fields if they can help it. Most people do not find technical fields inherently interesting and only go into them because of the salary (the dearth of qualified candidates being one of the reasons why salaries are higher). I've read that engineers are more likely to come from poor families, artists from rich ones.
"The [Amherst] class of 2027 is 50% domestic students of color and 13% international." https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2023/june/class-of-2027-expected-to-enroll-with-19-percent-first-generation-students
I may be misunderstanding the comment, but I understood the comment to be disputing your characterization that the average black admitee of Harvard would have gone to Brown in the absence of AA. The average black admitee of Harvard has standardized test scores equivalent to a Pepperdine or UC Davis admitee. Brown’s 25/75 SAT range is 1440/1560. The median SAT score of black Harvard admitees pre covid gaming was below 1300.
I disagree with Carolyn A, at least in regards to policies at Amherst College. I’m curious what you make of the Amherst Within Reach initiative https://www.amherst.edu/mm/653337
Just more window dressing that purports to increase access to what remains a fundamentally elite undertaking? Or maybe a good step towards eliminating economic barriers to said elite education?
I also know that Amherst maintained a ‘summer science’ program for years that tried (and failed) to bring minority admissions without sufficient prior coursework up to speed through accelerated summer work. More interesting, they also had (have?) a program where they partner with local community colleges to identify talented transfer students.
Just generally curious, I’ve had an inside view to these programs through my father, who was a chem professor (and occasional dept. chair) at Amherst for 30 years.
I don't want to put words into Freddie's mouth, but I think the rhetorical point that he was making isn't that Amherst or Brown are less discriminatory, but that these "second tier" elite schools are where the marginal Harvard-reject students end up. If you miss the Harvard cut by one slot, you should have no trouble getting into your second-choice school, even if the racial deck is also stacked at that other school, because you're nearly Harvard-material.
And while I think that holds true when you compare the most exclusive tier of elite schools to less exclusive tiers, it probably applies less within each tier. The competition for Harvard and the competition for Yale are pretty similar, so if you barely miss the cut at one you'll probably barely miss the cut for the other for the same reasons, racial or otherwise.
A clearer example would be Harvard rejects going to the University of Massachusetts. Which they can definitely do with no problems.
I don’t think this is accurate anymore -- it’s out of date at least since George Floyd: “If you miss the Harvard cut by one slot, you should have no trouble getting into your second-choice school, even if the racial deck is also stacked at that other school, because you're nearly Harvard-material.”
People should look at admissions rates at the schools a tier below Harvard -- they’re in single digits or teens. And look at the racial breakdowns of their STEM majors, and test scores to the extent that they still collect them.
And Freddie, speaking for himself, cited this, as though it’s evidence that Brown and Amherst aren’t engaging in as much affirmative action as Harvard: “At both Amherst and Brown Black and Hispanic students are still significantly below their representation in the population as a whole. So... what are you talking about?”
You've said this a couple times, but I don't really get it: what does George Floyd have to do with anything?
Because that's when the college educated class in this country lost their shit.
Did college admissions standards radically change?
You subscribe to this SS and you're asking that?
Now come on, they lost their shit at least by 2013.
I also think that was FdBs point, but it is wrong by orders of magnitude.
I agree wholeheartedly with this!! “Individual ability rules. I would much, much rather be a 120-IQ graduate of a nondescript state school than a 100-IQ graduate of an Ivy League school.”
But how can you suss this out when hiring, let’s say...? You can’t ask for an IQ test. Transcripts have become meaningless, there’s so much grade inflation. Case interviews?
Many companies require submitting SAT/ACT results.
Many? In recent years? What industries? I’ve not seen this (even in highly mathematical consulting jobs as one example) and am very curious.
That's because a high IQ isn't allowed at most consulting firms.
But seriously, once you understand what an IQ test is, and how they are generated, you'll see that most technical interviews are at least partly IQ tests.
Lots of jobs give IQ tests to applicants, they are called "personality" tests but they include sections with complex logic tests, test an applicants vocabulary etc.
This is true. They do it as part of application process and some companies are now requiring these under the guise of giving employees professional “certifications”. I suspect it’s a way to generate the lay-off lists or as Big Blue likes to call them “resource actions”.
Exactly. With credentialism, a Harvard degree, even possessed by a 100 IQ individual, will give the individual a huge advantage in grad school and employment, even over a 135 IQ state school grad.
You interview them! If you're interviewing people for a technical position that you yourself can do, it's easy. Even just asking "tell me about a project you worked on - what was easy, what was hard, what would you have done differently and why?" will flag the bullshitters within seconds, and in under an hour you could absolutely distinguish a 20 point IQ gap.
How do you decide who to interview? I get between 400 and 600 applications for each position. If I interviewed all of them, we would never get around to hiring anyone.
Assuming you're serious, it depends on how selective you want to be. If you're hiring for a general position, where there are lots of qualified candidates, then a 500:1 applicant to position ratio during a period of incredible labor market tightness indicates that you're paying too much. If you really want to keep the pay that high then you can process the applications stochastically - just select a random sample and start interviewing. When you've interviewed enough to believe that you've found a good enough candidate such that the costs of further interviews would exceed the gain from increased employee quality, stop interviewing and offer. This is a standard search costs problem.
If you're interviewing for an exclusive position, where the gains from having an exceptional employee are exceptionally high, then thank your lucky stars for the abundance and start interviewing. Over time you can study the applications/resumes/vitae of the most and least successful candidates and use that knowledge to learn to rapidly screen out the weakest ones for future positions.
Another "For more" cite to check out: The actual opinion. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
I know it can be scary, but court opinions are just essays, with citations to exact authority that readers (including us lawyers) can skip. The Chief Justice's lead opinion is both pretty readable and sensible; but Justice Thomas's concurrence is a master class in the history of the 13th and 14th amendments, and his difference of opinion with Justice Jackson (and hers with him) is as illuminating as it gets on how different, smart and black individuals can disagree strongly about our nation and our constitution.
I always encourage everyone to read Supreme Court opinions and dissents for themselves. The specific arguments are always more complex, and often entirely different, than the way they get portrayed in the mass media.
Minor point of pedantry: Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, not a dissent, because he ruled with the majority. Only saying this because you made me do a double take as to the composition of the vote
"This all hangs on the basic broken thinking about education that I discussed in The Cult of Smart: we demand that our education system be both a ladder of success, a sorting system that creates a hierarchy of excellence, and a great equalizer, a way to make society more equitable. These are flatly contradictory purposes."
It would appear to be contradictory, unless you're able to synthesize a new ideology that equates personal success (or a small elite within a bigger group's success) with some kind of wider social justice.
I wrote in my Substack last week about how media representation has become a like a holodeck substitute for actual progress, encouraging people to find avatars of themselves on the screen or in the page, and then measure box office revenue as a way to validate themselves: https://salieriredemption.substack.com/p/affirmation-art-and-box-office-politics.
Similar philosophy here: let me—or let us—be your champions. Through my rise, you too will be uplifted, even if only emotionally so. And if you can't be happy for me, then you're all backwards (many elite-educated minorities have disdain for their communities too).
I've recently been reading about W.E.B. DuBois's theory of black racial progress, which was unabashedly elitist in exactly that manner. His goal was to cultivate a black elite class with the same sorts of tastes, social mores, and economic position as the white elite class, which would relate to the wider black culture in a manner similar to how white elites relate to white culture. While he believed that this would benefit the entire black population indirectly, he didn't envision the result as being some kind of egalitarian classless racial identity group, but rather a stratified class system in which black people could be led into social progress by their own intellectual/cultural vanguard.
Whether or not one agrees with this approach, I think it's a lot more internally coherent than imagining that everyone can equally benefit from access to the same educational opportunities.
Also: there was an alternative viewpoint offered by Booker T. Washington.
I've found their dispute quite fascinating, as a study both in how people might have different political approaches to racial discrimination despite having the same ultimate objective, and also in the effect that their different personalities and backgrounds had on their perspectives.
I think it's a bit sad that, in the post-Civil Rights era, we tend to see black antiracism as a singular movement with a single obvious political program, rather than containing a wide variety of possible approaches informed by different black perspectives.
There are plenty of black conservatives and moderates today but they are conspicuously ignored by the mainstream media which is interested only in conformity on this issue.
I'd go further: I wish we could detach the analysis of different black approaches to racial injustice from the right-center-left conceptual framework. There are black political movements and figures whose ideas really don't map onto that schematic well at all. Eric Adams is a good example.
Right now partisanship is at such an insane level that the right-left dialectic is subsuming everything. The discourse on most topics is ill suited to being boiled down to a Republican versus Democratic model but the country seems determined to do it anyway.
DuBois was deeply influenced by the eugenics movement that was all the rage among intellectuals of his time. He believed that only a "talented tenth" could save Black America. Elites will always look down on the common folk no matter what.
“Affirmative action is a system in which students of color who would not ordinarily gain entry to a given college are given a slot” Is this necessarily true? I was under the impression that it also means, given two candidates of equal ability, preference would go to the person of color. Ivies perennially get more fully qualified candidates than they can accept, thus race can be a determining factor among the qualified. But I don’t know how it actually works in the real world.
Plenty of test score data out there showing that far less qualified minority students are accepted over more qualified Asian or white students. It’s NOT merely a case of race being a tie breaker between two equally qualified candidates. And even if it was... why is that acceptable?
Yeah this is the only part of the essay that I disagreed with. My impression is that for the tiny number of hyper-selective colleges, the margins between candidates are effectively imperceptible, and of course beyond quasi-objective measures like test scores the entire process is necessarily subjective anyways, so the goal of race-based affirmative action is to push candidates from historically oppressed minorities closer to the front of the line. Whether it plays out that way is of course an open question, but the idea does not assume a lesser level of ability.
Except statistically, based upon standardized testing data and similar objective metrics used by elite colleges (number of AP courses taken, etc.), the margins between and among admitted candidates are in fact quite perceptible, and break down heavily along racial lines.
Exactly. It’s surprising to me how many people still don’t know this to be true.
I guess it depends on how much stock you want to put in the difference between a supposed 97th percentile applicant versus a 99th percentile applicant. I don't think any of our "objective" measures claim that level of granular accuracy, so if you have a pool of applicants that highly qualified, I'm not persuaded that selecting among them is much more than dart-throwing.
The question is whether a black student admitted into Harvard under the auspices of affirmative action is really in the top 3% versus the top 20% or 30%.
If the threshold is set at 1450 that would exclude the average black applicant straight off the bat.
This is fair, however, I think the issue is that many of the african-american and hispanic students are *not* in the 97% percentile (or close) and they get preference over other students who are.
Harvard was going to lose this case just based on stats alone (but there were also plenty of internal communications detailing their discrimination against Asians). The average SAT scores for admitted Asian students have been much higher than every other race. Similar numbers can be found for GPA, and likely also holds for extracurricular activities (although those are much harder to quantify): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american-admit-sat-scores/
See here for some of the most damning evidence:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html
Even Harvard's own internal investigations concluded that they discriminated against high-achieving Asians.
By that graph in the Crimson we're still talking about applicants in the like 98th percentile of SAT takers, so unless you think the SAT is such a perfect measure of ability that there is an objectively irrefutable distinction in qualification between someone who scores say 1450 versus 1500, that doesn't counter what I'm saying. Not even the College Board would argue for that level of granularity, and no admissions officer would say that all the students they admitted were qualified and none of the ones they rejected were not. The admissions process is opaque by design, because past a certain minimum (and still very high) level of qualification they are throwing darts at a board.
It wasn't just SAT scores. Harvard systematically discriminated against Asians by using opaque nonacademic "personal ratings". From the NY Times article:
"Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found."
"University officials did concede that its 2013 internal review found that if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent. After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent."
I don't see how this is a counterargument to my point that there are more extremely qualified applicants than there are spots. If anything, this is just further evidence that past a certain very high threshold of selectivity, admissions departments are basically just making shit up to get the outcome they want. If they really wanted to be fair, they would just make it a lottery system for anyone past some semi-arbitrary qualification cutoff. But they aren't going to do that, because that would risk letting in even more undesirables.
There is an irrefutable distinction in test scores. And doesn't that correlate with other markers such as GPA even when you get past the supposed threshold of 1450?
Your use of the term 'enviable' in this piece harms another part of your argument. Would you really rather be the 120 IQ state school grad vs the 100 IQ ivy leaguer?
You also overuse the term generally: you always leave me wondering who, exactly, envies these people. I sure don't. Do you?
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is moral, ethical or natural in consideration of admission, acceptance, hiring, promotions, rewards etc... other than merit. Any other criteria is corrosive, unnatural and results in a spiral down of lower human achievement that dooms the entire system to failure.
If we want to see better outcomes for groups, the effort has to be at the very front... improving early childhood development for the people in those groups.
The fact that Asian Americans have better socioeconomic outcomes than do whites in the US, completely shatters the myth of modern racism being responsible for lower socioeconomic outcomes for other minority groups... and also shatters the myth that blacks and Democrats that exploit them, can rely on the excuse of historical oppression from 150+ years ago to get a unqualified boost to the head of the line.
The fact is that multiple decades of failed liberal and bonehead globalist policies have decimated the economic opportunity within the black community at the very time the people of that community were poised to advance from the poor to the middle-class. Pushing the unqualified to the head of the line is just deflection for those that need to take responsibility for the harm they have caused.... by piling on more harm.
The idea of "merit" is absolutely toxic.
No one really deserves anything. Our aptitudes - intelligence, diligence, perseverance, etc. - are not under our direct control. It's a combination of winning the genetic lottery and non-shared environmental aspects which we can't really grok the origins of. But none of it comes down to "trying hard" because a predisposition to trying hard (or being lazy) isn't under our control either.
On a practical level, I do think it's true that some people have the chops to be say an engineer, while others do not. Of course jobs like that have to be selective. But there is no moral argument IMHO why they should be compensated more just because they are better at the job, because they have no control over being "better" at all.
More importantly, those who are not bright, lazy, disorganized, mentally unstable, etc. are so by no choice of their own. Punishing them via poverty will not suddenly change their traits. It's being needlessly cruel, like forcing someone in a wheelchair to crawl up a flight of stairs for want of a ramp.
If "bright, lazy, disorganized, mentally unstable" etc. are all things no one can meaningfully control, you are flirting with hard determinism that makes moral vocabulary essentially meaningless.
Yes. I don't believe in the idea of free will - I don't see anywhere for volition to exist if materialism is correct and the brain is just a collection of matter and energy. I don't even think that we can really talk about culpability in terms of crime in a moral sense, because whatever traits cause someone to commit a crime comes down to their brain structure and external stimuli, neither of which they had any control over.
I do believe that suffering is real though. While I recognize that my empathy as well is a result of my brain structure, I think we should do everything possible to reduce suffering, which in the end is a moral judgement.
Isn't the question of free will irrelevant to how many lines of code a bright developer can turn out versus one that's mediocre?
As I said, I am open to the idea that some people have rare skills which make them more suited to some positions. I just don't see why we need to "reward" them.
In the capitalist superstructure, sure. Some people have unique "talents" which allows them a lot of negotiating power for wages. That's why some pro sports players and actors get paid so much. But that doesn't translate into a moral argument on how they "deserve" the money due to their "hard work."
They "deserve" the money because somebody is willing to pay them that money. It's simple supply and demand: if the number of rock star coders (or whatever) is low then naturally demand will be high.
We pay people more for the things that need to be done that fewer people are willing or able to do. For the jobs that no one wants to do, I'm not sure how you get people to do them except by paying them more. It seems to me that paying everyone the same for every job screws the people assigned to the worst jobs...or even simply to jobs they don't like. (And that's all ignoring what incentives can actually do to help our society.) As bad as meritocracy is, the alternative is worse.
You are demonstrating classic malcontent victimology.
What's the takeaway here? That if you are hiring that you shouldn't choose the more motivated, hard working candidate? That's ludicrous.
The takeaway is the statement that "nothing, is moral...other than merit" is an unsubstantiated prior, and a really, really dangerous one that both conservatives and liberals hew to in our country.
Conservatives generally claim that merit works itself out on its own without interference, while liberals believe that merit exists, but the "wrong people" are benefitting because we don't have a "true meritocracy" yet, with various factors holding people back. Both operate from the same prior though; that there are some people that society should reward, and others it should not.
I personally believe there is basic human dignity we are all owed regardless of how "hard" of a worker we are. And...this actually holds true when you look at other countries. In Scandinavia, the gap between rich and poor is much less than here, but the same sorts of people still become doctors/lawyers despite getting paid a lot less, and there's no evidence that overall productivity is lower. It's just a less miserable place to be poor, without any substantive economic downsides.
No... I agree with you. Interesting your comnent about coders and DBAs. I am a recovering IT exec that made mistakes allowing HR to push non-merit criteria in hiring and it resulted in a mess. Not only did those hires underperform, but they created resentment and toxic performance-killing behavior within the team. Merit can certainly be a bigger tent. For example, I had this brilliant Oracle DBA that I had to fire because he kept telling department business project sponsors their ideas were idiotic.
I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but ultimately, if you are a determinist, then morality is irrelevant and so is meritocracy and there is no injustice. There is no is / ought distinction because there is no ought. Everything boils down to a description of is.
I agree in the sense that I don't think the idea of free will holds up to logical scrutiny (how can any choice be made freely when it's entirely subject to external forces?).
However I do think for certain individuals, "tough love" does work on a psychological level to motivate positive change and development, the same way deadlines work for some people to finish a project in a timely manner.
But for other individuals, tough love only makes things worse, and what they really need is support and care.
"you are flirting with hard determinism that makes moral vocabulary essentially meaningless"
Is the point of moral vocabulary to say whether or not a person is good or bad? If that's the case, I'm more than fine with it. If, though, at least part of it is to say "murder is bad" or whatever, then I think that recognizing that some people were born in horrible circumstances that doomed them to becoming narcissists or prone to excessive dissociation (lazy) or whatever, is not going to conflict with that. Murder bad!
Well said, especially the part about the genetic lottery. I’ve always hated cruelty of meritocracy and the belief that anyone can succeed with the right mix of positive thinking and elbow grease. The flip side of “you can do anything you set your mind to” is “you have only yourself to blame for failure.” Given that way more people fall into the latter category, that’s a recipe for self-loathing and cold indifference to suffering.
It’s our equivalent of karma and how it’s been used to justify the cruelties of the caste system.
It's also notable that if you look at societies that have even a greater culture of "hard work" than the U.S. - like South Korea, where the social norm is to work 50-60 hour weeks, and the suicide rate is the highest in the OCED.
So yeah, maybe people can 'work harder" - but if you work harder, than your peers have to work harder to keep up with you, which means eventually everyone capable is working as hard as they can, meaning more "productivity," less free time, more misery, and the relative positions of everyone are pretty much the same.
But the overall wealth enjoyed by South Koreans has soared. Back in the 1970's Korea's primary export to the West was human hair and meat was a rarity, enjoyed as a luxury item only on special occasions.
Now along with Samsung, LG, Hyundai, etc. the primary Korean export to the US appears to be KBBQ joints.
The iconoclastic Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang once likened it to a person at the front of a movie theater standing up to get a slightly better view. That in turn forces everyone else to stand up just so they can see the film. In the end, very few people have a better view, but everyone is now more uncomfortable. That’s how I view hypercompetitive societies with a meritocratic ethos.
There is an old Soviet saying "the workers pretend to work and the bosses pretend to pay them."
Good thing athletes don't follow your prescription.
You have two choices. Market-based merit or egalitarian collectivism. The first requires economic growth to sustain it. The second always leads to complete system collapse. So you only really have one choice.
And don't give any BS about Scandinavian countries. Those people are more capitalist than Americans these days.
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Do you work 7 days a week or only 5? The "9-5" workday and the 5 day workweek are the result of coordinated collective bargaining and capital/labor negotiations to prevent a game-theory driven race to the bottom among workers.
You mention hyper-competitive athletics as if that's a good model for life. No, it's a model for determining the pinnacle of human achievement in athletics. Its economic rewards follow a power law distribution. A few huge winners and a lot of nobodies. No shock most professional leagues have players unions! Without them, most pro athletes would be paid a pittance, as they were in the past.
Don't be ashamed if you're a social darwinist. but just admit it.
If Scandinavians are more capitalist than Americans, then I assume the anti-socialists in the US will be fully supportive of adopting their public health care system and their tax rates. No?
That assumes a zero sum that doesn't exist. Our standard of living has been driven relentlessly upwards by competition and higher performance yielding higher rewards.
So what is the alternative? Work less hard so as to propel a race to the bottom of low achievement?
Who the fuck cares about relative-positions? If you can work hard to have a good life, why do you care that your neighbor up the street has more whatever?
Again, I sense just a basic malcontent here. I have a brother with the same mindset. He claims that the system is unfair and yet never really gets off his ass to try things he might fail at so he can learn to be better.
You’re the one who comes across as “malcontent” and excitable in your various comments, so I can’t help but sense some projection; but putting the minor ad hominem sniping aside, yes, I believe Americans would do well to work less hard. Seriously, it’s been almost a full century since the 40-hour work week was enacted. You’d think with all this amazing progress and technological development - which, of course, people like you would attribute solely to the wonders of capitalism - we would be working less by now. So what gives?
What gives is that without work and accomplishment of work most people won't have self-worth, won't have a personal identity that is worth a shit, won't be happy because some will work harder and have more and the non-working will resent it. In terms of evolution, it is only the last few decades of human existence where the hard work and sacrifice of people even gives someone like you the expectation that there is some no-work utopia. You don't understand human nature nor human psychology. Put down the game controller dude and get to work. You just sound like a lazy keyboard klicker.
There is no sustainable future where the hardest working, most capable don't tend to earn the biggest returns. It isn't natural to not work. It will fuck up your head eventually.
The alternative is for workers to unionize and demand more pay for less work, while the government runs a growth-oriented macroeconomic policy that makes labor expensive and capital cheap.
Don't those cultures combine the social norms of long hard hours with a pretty relentless sorting of students based on how they perform on standardized exams? Most other educational systems don't pretend that *anybody* can succeed with enough "grit."
Bullshit. Everyone is capable of growth and development. The fucking Governor of Texas is in a wheelchair. What is both cruel and destructive is the soft bigotry of low expectations for people not miraculously gifted.
This "from those that can to those that cannot" is always just a "from those that do to those that don't"
It is 99% mindset that holds people back from doing what they should to be qualified to be recognized for their merit. Everyone has challenges to overcome.
Deserve has nothing to do with it.
I have conducted countless interviews for developers and DBA's. When I look for someone bright and interested it's because I don't want to have to clean up broken shit. If that means paying more money for the right candidate I am all for it.
I don't think anyone doesn't think that people should do the jobs they're good at, and jobs should be filled by people who are good at them. What we (me and the others, and I think this would include Karl) believe is that the people who are good at things should not be the only ones to get medical care and bikes for their kids on Christmas or whatever, and everyone else gets to live under the overpass because they didn't have enough "merit."
That's a bastardization of the argument though. What does the principle of paying a developer or an engineer more than a busboy or dish washer have to do with the social safety net? I would answer "Nothing" but for whatever reason the two topics get muddled together.
If anything the busboy should be paid more, since he has to deal with gross things. But I'm fine with paying them the same.
The problem is finding an employer who's willing to pay them both the same salary.
Naw. There are many more people qualified to be a busboy and fewer that are qualified to be a waiter. The waiter should make more. Law of supply and demand and it is generally connected to skills attainment that has higher value in the job market.
Yes, exactly. I have no problem with certain talented, ambitious people achieving great success. My issue is when these same people - who often benefit from various forms of luck they almost never acknowledge - embrace a bootstrapping, victim-blaming mindset that “losers” deserve to suffer for being losers. (Ie. Not as hard-working and virtuous as them, which also makes it a form of humble-bragging).
Who really believes that though? It's one thing to believe that hard work will often pay off in terms of economic mobility but to assume that means a parallel belief that anybody in dire straits deserves their circumstances is completely unjustified.
Well it's the fundamental ideology underlying movement conservatism so uh, lots of people (although far fewer than conservative elites would have us believe)
Who really believes that? The overwhelming majority of Americans on some level. Whom they apply that belief to depends on their ideological leanings. Conservatives tend to blame inner city black people, single mothers, and others for their suffering, whereas liberals generally think that poor whites are undeserving of any sympathy or help (ie. How could they be poor despite all their whites privilege? Tsk tsk). Americans are very big on micro-accountability and the cult of personal responsibility, and tend to think that, exceptions notwithstanding, people get what they deserve
But they do have control over what job they choose, how many hours they work, how seriously they take that work, etc. Should there not be salary differences as a result of those choices?
I have a high paying job due to winning the genetic lottery. I'd go back to driving the tractor on the driving range if there wasn't a salary difference.
Same. I'm a PhD but sometimes I fantasize about working in a coffee shop or something if I could make the same money. I always kind of liked that work, just hated the wages.
I will give you this. All people are capable, but have different innate talents and capabilities. I think education and practice can add to those innate abilities, but certainly those with stronger innate abilities will have an advantage. The secret to US success was that there were many career paths for the diverse capability population to make a good life. That has been erroded with a loss of manufacturing jobs, too much immigration and too many over educated people competing for too few opportunities.
You should at least be able to acknowledge that if a doctor is getting paid the same as an IHOP waiter, then fewer talented people are going to bust their butts to become excellent doctors. Why should they, if the outcome will be the same if they don't? The quality of medical care overall will then go down. Sure, there will still be doctors, just fewer good ones. There can be a debate about whether or not that would be worth it in order to achieve an egalitarian society, but to pretend it won't happen is naive.
^^^This!
While you are right on some level, the Soviet era Polish saying that “no one can pay me as little as I can work” tells you just how self destructive it is to act on the impulse of your observation.
I get the determinism thing but I don't get how you can logically go from there to "punishing them via poverty." Who's doing the punishing if not someone who under your determinism definition has no control over what they're doing? You can't pick and choose as if somehow the downtrodden have no choice but the punishers do. I get that it's convenient to think that way to support your argument but it doesn't make sense. Find extreme examples, let's say Hitler, and apply your determinism arguments to him, just as you would to someone living under a bridge. If you can't do that than you really don't believe in determinism.
Ok, now how does all that moralizing make any particular category of labor-power more abundant or scarce? Nobody gets paid because they deserve it. They get paid because the relative scarcity and macroeconomic market conditions make it hard to find anyone who will work for less.
Generally agree with the virtues of focusing on merit, but I still think it makes sense for schools to screen out people with poor character. A student or alumnus who ends up a fraud or a murderer is a stain on the institution. Of course, "good character" can be subject to abuse as a tool to screen out the "wrong" people. On balance, I think it makes sense to put much less weight on holistic admission standards but not scrap them entirely.
"Merit" can and should be a big tent. But race, gender sexual identity, etc... those are not in the tent.
Harvard has already been using character to weed out Asians. On measures of likeability, courage, etc. Asians score much lower than whites or blacks. At least according to Harvard.
It doesn’t “shatter” anything.
I mean, you’re not even making an argument. Implicit in your first “myth” is that Asian Americans (a wildly heterogenous group) experience “modern” racism in exactly the same ways that Blacks do, which is preposterous. And implicit in your second “myth” is that the systematic, brutal, institutionalized and all-encompassing racism that Blacks experienced in America under slavery doesn’t actually matter because that was all in the past, 150+ years ago. Which is, also, preposterous.
The only “myth” here is your claim that historical conditions don’t inform present realities. I know you haven’t been given a chance to elaborate on it, but, like all claims that want to fall back on a racist evaluation of society, you won’t be able to give an account of when the brutality of slavery or the anti-Black enculturation in whites actually ended.
150 years ago was 1873. You say that the historical oppression of Blacks ended here. This is so ahistorical it almost beggars belief: 1873 was the very year the Redeemers rose and the beginning of the end of Reconstruction. Four years later, all throughout the South, the Blacks who had been democratically elected to office were forced out, sometimes at gunpoint; Jim Crow was being instituted in every state; the First Ku Klux Klan had finished its coalescence and was actively conducting a reign of terror against Blacks in the South that dared challenge White supremacy.
It didn’t end there. A Supreme Court full of Northerners ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was a valid doctrine. The Ku Klux Klan rose two more times, each with millions of adherents. Tens of thousands of Black people were lynched in the era spanning 1873 - 1968.
I mean, for fucks sake, each and every time there was some civil rights victory for Blacks, it was stymied in some way by recalcitrant whites being recalcitrantly racist.
Even the most generous concession to your argument, that racism totally ended in 1968 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act (and ignoring the massive groundswell of support for third-party George Wallace’s explicitly racist and segregationist platform that same year), means that Blacks have had, at most, two generations to rebuild from the effects of having their lives oppressed by systemic racist. And your argument goes that they should be on equal footing with those who haven’t had to endure that sort of systematized, racialized prejudice in living memory?
You got the CRT stuffed so far you your noggin' you cannot critically think.
Sp Asian Americans are wildly heterogenous group, but blacks are a monolithic race? Talk about a racist viewpoint!
Life was harder in the past. For most people. There are poor whites all over the country. We have a class problem, not a race problem. And I am guessing that your are part of that elite over-educated liberal class that looks down on everyone else, exploiting group divisions so you have plenty of victim virtue signaling material to help you keep feeling smugly superior.
The problems in the black community today are not because of past slavery. They are because liberals fucked up their communities with handout and crappy schools, and conservatives exported working class opportunity to other countries while importing other people's poverty. The breakup of the black family started when the jobs disappeared. And you upity over-educated elites know it, but instead of taking responsibility you make up the CRT crap for a deflection.
What about the historical account that I’ve just written is factually wrong? Where is my “critical thinking” incorrect?
There are similar stories for how Italians, Irish, Polish, Mexicans, Asians were treated in this and other countries historically. It is a lie to say that these things are still occurring or that they have any bearing on the path of a black person in this country. The problems in the black community today are not from historical slavery no matter how much you type. They are from a victim mindset perpetuated by the elite liberal class bent on exploiting black misery for votes.
Italians, Irish, Polish, Mexicans, Asians were never bought and sold as chattel, so, sorry, no, their experiences of rampant and systemic discrimination by nativists — which is identical to the discrimination that so-called “illegal” immigrants experience today, mind you — aren’t comparable to the experiences of Black slavery.
You are correct that they are not comparable to the experience of black slavery because black slavery was over for decades and this systemic discrimination by nativists (which is exactly the same as the elites discrimination of white working class today) was much, much more recent.
Just stop with the stupid ass argument that slavery or pre-civil-rights acts has anything to do with black socioeconomic outcomes today. Fuck, new legal black immigrants to this country have higher socioeconomic outcomes than do average for whites.
The difference is that these people assimilate to the norms of the country for making a good living. While the black urban community keeps getting blasted with the leftist Democrat message that they are oppressed victims and need a strong grievance culture and a unique identity and other people should pay them for their pain.
A victim mindset is the primary "oppressor" preventing people from attaining a good life. If we had systemic racism still, then how do you explain all the successful blacks in society today?
Irish and Chinese workers were in fact imported as chattel slaves to the US.
The Chinese in California that built the railroad were very close though. And indentured servitude is as old as the Mayflower.
Literally none of the neutral and factual account that Maxwell gave is CRT. Critical Race Theory has a definition, and "listing historical events" is not it.
Ask FdB about the replicability of any study showing that head start like programs have any positive impact.
It will be interesting to see if the change in admission practices at the Ivies drifts to the point where they resemble the UC system (meaning something like a 40% Asian student body). If that happens, given the way that our country works, it basically means we're going to have a plurality Asian ruling class within 1-2 generations, for exactly the same reasons that Jewish people became massively over-represented among the elite once anti-Jewish quotas at the Ivies finally ended.
Well, good. Get to work practicing with those chop sticks.
A human female I recall, perhaps the only human I ever could have loved (she had an incredibly light touch and could even get the most wary and skittish ferals to come up to her to get pettins) remarked that feminists have a gift for wanting it both ways. They wanted all the privileges associated with being female, but also the privileges associated with being male.
Well, it seems that the phenomenon of wanting it both ways is not limited to feminists, although we do hear some bromides about "our diversity is our strength!"
The university I teach at has an acceptance rate of 85% and just sent out a message about how we will come together to discuss how this decision will impact us and "the work that we do." Had to laugh -- not at all is the answer! Wish there could be some honesty in the discussion of this topic.
This is going to be the funniest, most on point comment in this substack
I don’t think people realize the greenfield opportunity this created for the DEI consultant class
“Stop taking their horseshit social justice rhetoric at face value. It just makes you look like a mark.”
Fantastic quote Freddie. A million times this.
And while you're at it, quit pretending Hollywood cares about social justice. For all their European sensibilities and occasional indulging of artistic pretensions, they're as conservative as big money can be.
The bigger question is why these highly selective private colleges have access to federal and state funding when they can actively discriminate based on class status (and they are!). When you look at the year over year pell grant % of students at these schools, they hover around the same rate. Highly selective colleges know the minimum % of pell grant recipients they need to let in to make themselves look good and do just that (there are exceptions - Amherst for example seems to be putting their money where their mouth is). They are placing these kids into very specific admission’s pools from the start.
They hide behind “needs blind” phrasing to pretend they aren’t actively discriminating against low ses kids but use “hs rigor” and zip codes as proxies. More so, the poor UMR they are letting in are kids that did programs like Prep4Prep, Questbridge, or were lucky enough to get a scholarship to a private high school. At the end of the day, they don’t want to take risks on diamonds in the rough bcs it will hurt their grad % and their ranking. There is no such thing as “equity” or “dei” in the admissions process. No idea why libs are getting so up in arms about all of this. It’s always been rigged.
This argument is a colossal red herring. When the cost of a university education is at ahistorical high, and the value of said education is at a historical low, who is zooming who here? Do you really want to saddle preferred minorities with significant debt in exchange for a liberal arts degree in the passing social fad du jour?
Employers are not vested, universities and government are engineers of the grift. Good luck to students and families. The wealthiest happiest guy i know is a high school drop out who started a lawn mowing company.
Nice anecdote, but high school dropouts are not doing very well economically or socially: https://www.bls.gov/emp/chart-unemployment-earnings-education.htm
It should be noted though that back in 1960, only 40% of Americans had a high school education, whereas it's now like 90%.
There's a big difference between being in the bottom 60% in terms of aptitude and the bottom 10%.
The value of an education at an Ivy league school is not at a historical low! And this is really the only place AA matters.
If you want a middle class life, which is all most of us can ever hope for, you just need to go to college, any old college really. Of course what's more concerning is that significantly less black and brown students even apply to college and when they do they are often these for-profit scams. Why not just make sure everyone has a comfortable life and has access to middle-class jobs if that is their goal?
Using access to college education to reduce inequality is massively inefficient. Better to do it the other way around; reduce inequality first, which means that the children of the formerly poor individuals will have more educational opportunities opened up for them (due to greater financial stability if nothing else).
I don't know that I am arguing against that? Everyone should have their material conditions taken care of. Safe housing, access to fresh nutritious food, quality healthcare and if people are ok with that, that's fine. If they want access to middle class jobs (which degrees are not always needed for) they can get them as long they attend college (even community college) or trade schools. No one should be forced to suffer poverty but likewise, not everyone will want to commit the additional resources, time (or can't intellectually) to access the aspirational middle class.
And I should add, we should make it easier for workers to organize unions and demand the more jobs are middle class through collective action.
Right, I wasn't disagreeing, I was concurring. I don't think college is a path to a middle class lifestyle. I think more money is a path to a middle class lifestyle, which can lead to college if that's what people want.
Except that sooner or later the curve breaks. If 33% of the jobs in the US are white collar and the other 2/3 are blue collar what happens when more than 33% of all high school grads go to college?
There's a lot of hand waving that suggests that the percentage of white collar jobs will somehow expand--but there's also a lot of English majors working as waiters or as cashiers at Target.
The US has an aging population with non-replacement level growth. I don't foresee this being an issue.
I hope English grads understand that they can get jobs the require degrees that aren't related to "English." Hell I work in Software Development despite never having written a line of code and having a degree in Political Science.
Yeah, but tech is a Special Case. There's always been more jobs than qualified candidates so tech has long been willing to look the other way in terms of a degree or certification.
I think the problem is that you can make the argument that right now the US is graduating too many people from college compared to the number of jobs available. This so called "overproduction of elites" is tremendously destabilizing.
there's for sure far too many people with advanced degrees. People with college degrees enjoy a lower unemployment rate than those who just graduate high school and much lower than those who didn't finish high school.
I should add that I have a couple of tech related certifications and I often offer that as advice for people who are looking for marketable skills. There are employers who also don't require degrees (especially for talented coders) but many employers still expect one for hires.
I should add that I am a first generation college student. For me, a college degree has been life changing.
My concern is that there are a bunch of people with degrees who graduate and then spend years delivering pizzas. I know some. If they wanted to work as a waiter or delivery driver they could have done so with wasting six years and going into debt for six figures.
I agree that people who are fine delivering pizza shouldn't go to college
This was really well done. Concise and very persuasive.
The legacy argument is such a dodge. If people are offended (as I am) by legacy admissions, tell your legislature to ban it (for public schools) or condition funding on its abolition (for private schools).