Attention Economy


Friday, June 30, 2023

Race, Merit, and College Admissions - The Significance of the SCOTUS Decision

Harvard Undermined Itself on Affirmative Action
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/affirmative-action-supreme-court-harvard.html
David French:
To understand why Harvard lost — and why race-based affirmative action in public colleges and federally funded private schools is now unlawful — it’s necessary to understand two key facts about the case. First, the evidence is overwhelming that Harvard actively discriminated against Asian applicants. As Chief Justice John Roberts notes in his majority opinion, a Black student in the fourth-lowest academic decile had a higher chance of admission to Harvard than an Asian student in the top decile.
This discrimination wasn’t unique to Harvard. As Chief Justice Roberts makes clear, the University of North Carolina — which was a defendant in a separate case about its admissions process — also imposed far tougher admission standards on Asian students. Compounding the injustice, Asian Americans were already historically marginalized. As Justice Clarence Thomas details in his concurrence, “Asian Americans can hardly be described as the beneficiaries of historical racial advantages.” 

Affirmative Action betrayed black America. It was not true equality
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/01/affirmative-action-betrayed-black-america-not-true-equality/
INAYA FOLARIN IMAN:
Affirmative action betrayed black America. Far from addressing long-standing structural inequalities, it institutionalised the deeply racist idea that black people were incapable of attaining positions of excellence and high achievement on merit alone. It suggested that only through reliance on paternalistic white offerings could they ever succeed.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action in College Admissions
A majority of Americans say race should not be a factor in college admissions.
A Middle Ground on Race and College

Attacking ‘merit’ in the name of ‘equity’ is a prescription for mediocrity
George F. Will observes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/25/attacking-merit-prescription-mediocrity/
“A meritocratic society has less discord than a society that abandons meritocratic principles. Equity, pursued through government-driven allocation of social rewards, drenches society with bitter distributional conflicts because wealth and opportunity are allocated by political power according to shifting standards contested by competing factions. Allowing the market to articulate preferences, without seeking to decide — who will decide who the deciders are? — the preferences’ moral worth, promotes domestic tranquility”.  

Payoff-based College Admissions by Frederick M. Hess
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/63a/3c2/deb/63a3c2deb56fc934667451.pdf
Elite universities present themselves as bastions of meritocracy. But they routinely offer the children and grandchildren of major donors an easy path to admission, even when those students wouldn't otherwise qualify. Worse yet, the donations that open these doors are tax-deductible, and therefore heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Some questions surrounding college-admissions policies are complex and profound, but this one is painfully simple: We should press college officials to mean what they say about opportunity and equity, and to spend less time strong-arming wealthy donors. But at a bare minimum, we should get taxpayers out of the business of subsidizing campus shakedown artists.

Elite Colleges’ Quiet Fight to Favor Alumni Children
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-colleges-universities.html
Colleges like Yale and Harvard give a boost to legacy applicants. But with affirmative action under attack, that tradition may become harder to defend. 

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