Of Course, They Did . . . Follow-up

In the wake of the SCOTUS eviscerating affirmative action laws, I read this on The Guardian:

“In 1996, Californians voted to ban race-conscious affirmative action policies in the state’s public universities. Since then, eight other states – Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington – have also barred race-based considerations, often through ballot initiatives approved by the states’ voters. Some universities in these states report that the bans have made it significantly harder to achieve racial diversity on their campuses.”

Full Disclosure—I was born and raised in California and served in its higher education establishments.

Now, I repeat here the statistics for the 2020 undergraduate classes at U.C. Berkeley: “UC Berkeley’s undergraduate population is made up of 42.2% Asian, 19.7% White, 4.4% Black, and 21% Hispanic students.”

Okay, now look at those statistics and explain to me how “racial diversity” does not exist there?

People often equate “proper” diversity when the percentage of students in the college/university parallels the percentages of students in the general population. In California, the only to do that is to admit via a lottery and nobody wants that. If you want to have “admission standards” you are creating a system where some win and some lose. If the standards are valid and properly executed, those who win are the students most likely to benefit from attendance and succeed in those colleges and universities.

If U.C. Berkeley’s admission standards are so executed, they have identified the students who most want to go there, by exhibiting the traits and accomplishments established in the standards.

Apparently “white” students don’t want to attend there as much. Which makes the systems of “legacy students” at places like Harvard even more egregious.

Postscript It also seems that if UCB’s experience were to play out at Harvard University, it would be the farthest thing from “to return higher education to white, elite control.”

And, I focus on California’s systems because those are the ones I have the most experience with.

Of Course They Did

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has made a ruling that will eliminate Affirmative Action enrollments in U.S. colleges and universities. I know, surprise, surprise!

An article in The Guardian contained these paragraphs:

“Experts have argued that the elimination of affirmative action in higher education will lead to drastic reductions in Black and Latino students admitted to selective institutions, upending the fabric of college campuses,” the Guardian’s Edwin Rios wrote after the decision came down.

“A more dire reality undergirds the court’s decision,” writes Eddie R Cole, an education and history professor at UCLA in a op-ed we just published about how today’s decision fits into a history, more than a century old, of resistance against efforts to make American universities more equitable. “It reflects a decades-long drive to return higher education to white, elite control.”

Wow, I guess the sky isn’t falling but “return higher education to white, elite control,” is damned close! The crux of the rulings was a complaint that Asian-Americans were being discriminated against in those admission policies. As someone who walked the campus of U.C. Berkeley, a premier university, and then walked it again some twenty years later, astonished to see that the student body seemed to have morphed into just Asian students, I understand what is happening. Affirmative Action began as a basic reparations scheme to provide places for African-American students who had been systemically weeded out over the decades. But as admissions requirements became more meritocratic, Asian students began to dominate the acceptances.

Many Asian families prize education highly and Asian students are motivated to do well in school. They have done so well, that their acceptance rate to schools of higher education soared. But universities, like Harvard, thought it unseemly to have so many students of color (as well as, historically, of Jews), they created workarounds, one of which was to limit Asian applicants to make room for Black and Brown applicants, keeping the number of students of color at “reasonable” levels.

If that isn’t racism, I don’t know what is. Of course, Harvard has other ways to stack the deck. One such is “legacy students.” If your parents or even a parent graduated from Harvard, you only need to meet the minimum requirements and you are in. No nasty competition for you. “Legacies” constitute 14-15% of all admissions (estimates of 25-35% for all Ivy League schools). Were they to be banned, that would leave all kinds of room for more minority admissions. But our plutocratic society isn’t about to easily give up any advantages already vested in the wealthy.

I am not sure that this ruling is a bad thing. Many of said “AA admissions” involved admitting a disadvantaged student, and then it was “sink or swim” time, often more sink than swim. I have no data on the graduation rates for AA students but I would be shocked if they were higher rather than lower than the others.

And as to “white, elite control,” I think that needs to be re-considered. I see our future educational establishments run by Asian females, based upon talent, skill, and will displayed.

For example, UC Berkeley’s undergraduate population is made up of 42.2% Asian, 19.7% White, 4.4% Black, and 21% Hispanic students as of 2020. White students are a smaller minority than Hispanic students at this point. This is what free unbridled admissions produces.

And for all y’all who are bigots out there, I did serious research as to why Asian students were kicking butt in American educational systems. All kinds of things were considered: cultural bias, innate abilities, racism, etc. You know why Asian students do so well in American schools? It is almost exclusively “time on task,” baby! Where white students show that in high school, getting a part-time job for X hours per week reduces study time by X hours, that doesn’t happen in Asian families. The irony is that Asian students are kicking white ass through the “protestant work ethic” so highly praised by Americans. Hard work beats slacking every time.