Affirmative Action - students affected

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by AsianStew, Jan 26, 2022.

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  1. AsianStew

    AsianStew Moderator Staff Member

  2. TEKMAN

    TEKMAN Semper Fi!

    Honestly, I am not biased, but people might think I am. I think affirmative action should be gone. You should not admit students based on their race. The admission criteria should be based on academic standing, test score, and extracurricular activities. I am Asian-American, and I am dumb as a rock....only the University of Parris Island accepted me. But if they still keep affirmative action, then for Harvard admission purposes my kids are Latino since they are half Asian and half White. :D

     
    tadj likes this.
  3. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    Well, he's still not a doctor.
     
    felderga likes this.
  4. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    How the heck do you pad that story out to an entire book? It's weird that he did that if he didn't want to be a physician.
     
    chrisjm18 likes this.
  5. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Not unprecedented. John Howard Griffin wrote "Black Like Me" in 1959 and it was a best seller. I read it when I was 17 or so. Griffin was a pretty good writer, I thought. This guy - I dunno.
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2022
  6. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

  7. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Race-blind admissions would be fine if everyone in the competition started from the same place. They do not.

    There is a lot that goes into a student's college application beyond his/her academic accomplishments. Not everyone receives the same educational opportunities.

    How is society best served here? Treat it as a horse race where everyone begins at the same starting gates? (When they do not.) Or, try to give opportunities to disadvantaged students who, if given a chance, would be able to produce the same outcomes?

    Too much emphasis is placed on admissions when considering the quality of a higher education institution. What are its graduates accomplishing? What do its students learn?

    And even if we acknowledge racial inequities that exist in our social systems, is the college admissions process the place to help rectify them?

    And if the answer to that question is "yes," how do we accurately identify who should receive the affirmative action boost? Does the middle-class Black kid from a middle-class neighborhood get the affirmative action boost over a poor white kid from a terrible neighborhood and school?

    These are tough questions that defy easy, cookie-cutter answers. But simply saying we shouldn't consider race in the admissions decision isn't sufficient, especially when you realize race was a major consideration for centuries--in the other direction, of course. Simply halting unfair treatment doesn't mean the lingering effects of it are gone.

    I don't have answers, particularly. But I know the answer isn't simply, "Hey, let's just treat everyone equally." Not yet.
     
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  8. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Any system in which my youngest gets preference over his siblings because he's the only one who passes the reverse paper bag test should be a total non-starter.

    But I completely agree with you that admissions should put their thumb on the scale for kids who are overcoming adverse circumstances. That's why approaches like the Texas 10% rule make sense to me.
     
    Rich Douglas likes this.
  9. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    Israeli approach

    https://che.org.il/en/preacademic-preparatory-programs/

    Preacademic Preparatory Programs

    Some of my friends from poor immigrant families attended such programs and aced entry exams to the university.
    All accepted, Jews, Arabs, non Jews, Sefardi, Mizrachi, Ashkenazi, etc
    Including inmate populations.

     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2022
    Johann likes this.
  10. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    This is a really sensitive subject everywhere. Not just college admissions but the role it plays in hiring (note: "Affirmative Action" does not mean hiring people on the basis of race but it does mean that we actively try to create more diverse applicant pools and try to identify issues in the workplace by looking at promotion and retention numbers). So I'm going to tread lightly here especially since I don't have much experience in the admissions piece. But I have a story (surprise?).

    Years ago I dated this woman who brought me to visit her aunt and uncle and her younger cousins. Said cousins were nearing the end of high school at the time. Lovely family. The uncle was white with ginger hair and freckles and a complexion that scorched at the suggestion of sun. His wife was hispanic, had a much darker complexion and was born in Cuba and was bilingual. Both of their kids were raised to be bilingual as well. It was a boy and a girl and they all shared the same vaguely Irish last name as a family. The difference was that the boy was named after his father and the girl was named for her deceased maternal grandmother. Another key difference was that the boy looked remarkably like his father. The girl, on the other hand, had a darker complexion as her mother. So let's use some fake names to make this easier. Let's say his name was Kevin O'Brian and her name was Isabella O'Brien.

    Well, they both graduated from high school and they both went off to college. Both kids identified as being hispanic, they both being half Cuban and raised to be bilingual, and Isabella had no issues whatsoever. Kevin, on the other hand, was accused of academic dishonesty by an overzealous administrator of some sort who saw that a young man with ginger hair named Kevin O'Brien had identified himself on admission documents as hispanic. This came to light when he joined some hispanic student association. So, if I were a gambling man, I would say some student felt there was some dishonesty afoot, reported it and said administrator thought they had found the smoking gun.

    Kevin's mother (a lovely woman, by the way) tried to call the administrator to calmly explain the obvious misunderstanding but shut down harshly. Lawyers, yada yada yada, out of court settlement with no admission of wrongdoing and administrator placed on permanent leave.

    Self-identification can get very, very complicated. And media frenzies aside, there are often nuances to that not easily resolved by a trip through ancestry.com.

    Class factors heavily into the difficulties a student has in reaching academic goals. And race is correlated to this. It is not, however, a cause. The daughter of a black federal judge is going to have fewer obstacles to higher education than the white son of unemployed, economically disadvantaged parents. It's really as simple as that. That does not mean that white privilege does not exist. That white son of economically disadvantaged parents may face a very different encounter if they get pulled over by police than the daughter of that federal judge. Put both young people in suits and send them into an office building and, statistically, you're much more likely to run into one being assumed to be support staff rather than a professional over the other. But access to higher education is much, much more money driven than those other issues.

    With enough money a kid can go to the finest schools, take advantage of every study in Europe semester and never have to figure out ways to manipulate the cafeteria salad bar to maximize their caloric intake at the lowest possible expense.

    One of the best things we can do for higher education access it to make it affordable, to provide realistic job outcomes for majors and to educate our kids about doing the math on the ROI for a chosen path. Better that we make it so an 18 year old unable to buy a beer or obtain a credit card can't walk into an office to financial aid office to unknowingly sign themselves up for crippling lifelong debt because the terms were never examined and their "advisor" simply told them to sign the forms so they can go register for class and to not worry about it. Better that we make it so that a bankruptcy, which can discharge a company's obligation to pay its employees as it closes its doors, can also discharge student loan debt.

    Because I have to tell you, my kids can, on paper, look identical to the children of refugees in terms of racial self-identification. One of those needs an extra leg up to get access to higher education and it ain't my kids.
     
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  11. Jan

    Jan Member

    Interesting discussion.

    Affirmative action had its place and time. It served to bolster the educational and career opportunities for classes of people who were seriously denied opportunities to advance and enhance their lives for centuries.

    However, it appears to have resulted in entitlement, unrealistic expectations and demands that society has an obligation to perpetuate these advantages ad infinitum, unfortunately, at the expense of many other Americans who have also experienced myriad sociocultural, familial and economic disadvantages but none of the advantages?

    The other issue is one of optics. Individuals who are admitted to highly reputed universities, and/ or attain the most prized jobs based on affirmative action, are often perceived as being below par, intellectually and professionally, and not deserving of their attainments. The watering down of academic curriculums, grade escalation and social promotion add to the stereotyping of individuals who benefit from affirmative action as being less able. So in lieu of attaining equality and admiration, actually increases prejudice and animus.
     
  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Let me tell you (and everyone) a real life example of how Affirmative Action works in a typical workplace and why it still has relevance and utility to our society.

    Every year we review our data with our consultants. We are looking at applicant data (those voluntary self-disclosure forms). We're looking at internal promotions, resignations, terminations etc. all using that same self-identification data.

    When we look at, say, applicant data we're not saying "Dammit, Jerry, stop hiring white people!" Nor are we saying that one candidate should advance over another because of race. What we ARE saying is "Hey, we aren't attracting a very diverse applicant pool and we need to rethink how we post this position."

    For example, we looked at this data and determined that one of the reasons we were having such low diversity turnout was because a good number of engineering managers ONLY recruited engineers from their own alma mater. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Clarkson, Cornell, Binghamton etc are all good schools. However, to say we will ONLY hire engineers from those schools is not a good way to get a diverse candidate pool. So what was the shift? When posting a job, you can't just send the posting to the job office of your favorite school and then call it good once they deposit a stack of resumes to your desk.

    So it involves recruiting in other schools and in posting the job in other locations. That's what affirmative action, at its most common implementation level, actually is. It is not what the media portrays it to be. Have there been abuses of it? Absolutely. I think it is terrible the situations where that Fire Department tossed out the promotional test results because not enough diverse candidates scored high enough so they just had a do-over. But I DO support the efforts of companies and agencies in recruiting people other than the normal batch of (typically) fellows.

    It goes beyond race and religion. When I was in the Navy I watched guys go from wildly homophobic to, well, not when they worked with a shipmate who was LGB (unfortunately, "T" wasn't really an option when I served). Though DADT was still the law of the land when I was in the Navy, at least the parts of the Navy I was in, was generally tolerant of it all as long as your "telling" wasn't done in an official capacity. There are guys who hated people who were gay for no reason other than that's how they were raised. The moment they worked with said people, they identified them as a person and a friend and not a social construct from talk radio.

    Workplaces benefit from this.

    Some years ago, there was a situation with a manager (prior company) who was very adamant that he would never hire POC or women for his team. His reasons were as you would expect. HR wanted to fire him for this. But he had friends with power who could overrule HR. What they didn't overrule HR on, though, was taking away his hiring and termination authority. And HR promptly took over hiring for his department. They didn't go out and only hire POC to spite the guy. What they did was they hired fairly, posted in more diverse forums and expected him to conduct himself like a professional. If he didn't. If he created a hostile work environment for any of his employees...well, our VP was willing to go to the mattresses over bouncing this guy no matter how much the President liked him.

    A year on, and with very close watching, this guy too changed his tune. A lot. He had a team of super hard workers who, unlike the good old boys he was hiring, didn't spend half the day outside smoking. And as his good old boys rotated out (willingly or otherwise) his most devoted employees recommended friends and family members who then got hired as well. By the time he retired, he had promoted three POC when he had previously refused to hire a single one for an entry level factory job. And his chosen successor was a hispanic woman.

    Before I wrap this up, let me just say that I don't think the right answer for a racist manager is that we hire a diverse team for him and hope that he has a movie-like change of heart in the end. We were playing with a President who, himself, desperately needed to take some unacceptable attitudes with him into retirement. That said, it did work out in this instance. And I think it illustrated how it's very easy to say "I hate X" when "X" is a concept. But when X becomes personified in the form of a really great human being you interact with regularly, suddenly "X" isn't what you thought. Still, this isn't an instructional manual of how to break down racism.

    But it does illustrate how important diversity , especially in the workplace, can be. We are exposed to fairly limited viewpoints in our little narrow slice of the world. And it becomes really easy to forget how narrow a view we have until we meet others whose own differing views challenge us. And that challenge doesn't have to be aggressive. But it does often cause some discomfort as we realize our assumptions are not as sacrosanct as we believed.

    So, Dear Jan, I encourage you to consider how what you know of affirmative action is incredibly limited. And anyone you may have met who you think of as feeling "entitled" firstly does not represent an entire system and second, may be rightly angry because of how they have been treated over the course of their career. And I would invite you to consider alternative perspectives rather than just deciding it's time to chuck the baby out with the bath water.
     
  13. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    Did this come up on another thread? I feel like I read this days ago (I remembered when I saw the note about people hiring from their alma maters) but DI says it was posted 10 minutes ago.
     
  14. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I posted earlier in this thread but commented again. I did repeat some points but I felt they warranted repeating given some of the claims being made about AA.
     
  15. DrSchmoe

    DrSchmoe Member

    Just so you know test scores are supposed to measure aptitude and therefore predict success in a college program. However, it's been discovered that test scores do not correlate well with predicted college success. We now know that test scores correlate very highly with parents' wealth. That's all test scores do. They predict only whether you come from a wealthy background or not. Most top colleges temporarily waived SAT scores during the pandemic. Many, including Harvard, are extending the no test scores required in the foreseeable future. So that's a good thing. No what does this have to do with AA/discrimination? Standardized tests unfairly discriminate against students from communities of color. I don't even have to back that up. There are at least five decades of research that backs that up. I want to add one more thing "extracurricular activities" is an unfair metric as well. Many rich kids have the time to participate in their after-school tennis teams. Electing amongst themselves "President of French Club", "Vice President of Latin Club". Ridiculous. Many of us who weren't privileged had to work and help out pay family bills. Test scores and extracurricular activities don't measure grit and determination.
     
    Rich Douglas likes this.
  16. DrSchmoe

    DrSchmoe Member

    You seem to have a need to write a post on every single topic whether you know anything about it or not. Some of the stuff you wrote is complete nonsense. Are you intentionally trying to piss people off? Or do you just say random things, string them together, and hope it makes sense?

    How is society best served here?

    Who cares? Utilitarian outcomes don't justify inequity at the individual level. And who is "society"?

    And even if we acknowledge racial inequities that exist in our social systems

    "
    if" . I don't have anything to say. Justify your "if" any way you want. Whatever. Sadly, you will find a way to justify it.

    is the college admissions process the place to help rectify them?


    That tells me, or I should say, tells us, you don't have any idea what discrimination is. What do you mean "the place"? So discrimination isn't something faced every damn day? Discrimination occurs only twice, correct? Applying for jobs, and applying to colleges, and no other times. Well, to answer your question, no, college admissions isn't the place to help rectify inequity. The right places are all of these places: Kindergarten. 1st grade, 2nd grade. 3rd grade... college freshman year, sophomore year... get it? Fixing a broken admissions process is an annoyance to you? Okay, let's not trouble you.

    who should receive the affirmative action boost?

    My eyes are tired. It's really late now. It looks like you wrote the word "boost", I can't really tell. I don't think you did. You wouldn't be that insulting right in our faces. If you did, I have no comment. If you see nothing wrong with that, then you won't get it. Your most egregious remark is yet to come.

    Does the middle-class Black kid from a middle-class neighborhood get the affirmative action boost over a poor white kid from a terrible neighborhood and school?

    O.M.G. Do you realize what you're saying? You are ignoring the most fundamental concept of discrimination. It seems like you don't subscribe to the concept of privileged classes. A black kid is never considered to be in a privileged class, no matter how wealthy the kid's family is. By the way, you said "boost" AGAIN.

    race was a major consideration for centuries--in the other direction, of course. Simply halting unfair treatment doesn't mean the lingering effects of it are gone

    You just don't quit, do you? Nonsense stacked upon more nonsense. "was"? And "lingering effects"? I like it how you present yourself as all-knowing with your good grammar and great diction. But you don't know what you're talking about. I've heard stuff like this before. Like, "AA is an initiative to compensate minorities for past injustices". It's not. Learn about disparate impact vs disparate treatment. Discrimination isn't just disparate treatment. My point is "was" indicates the past. Discrimination is alive and well today. While you're educating yourself, take the time to read about protected vs privileged class, and Title VII. Discrimination today isn't "lingering" or residual effects.
     
  17. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Thank you for the analysis and feedback. I've been posting here since the creation of this board, and now I finally know what. It is a relief.

    This seems personal to you. It is not to me. I'll pass on the rest, thanks.
     
  18. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    It does seem personal, and we're out of patience for that. DrSchmoe, the next one prompts moderator response. Please don't make that necessary.
     
  19. Jan

    Jan Member

     
    Last edited: Mar 12, 2022
  20. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    What program and for whom, please? Was this for a non-profit? For an educational institution? Was it publicly funded or privately funded? Were you a volunteer or were you paid?

    I'm not trying to needlessly pick you apart, however, these things do matter. A well meaning non-profit aiming to transform a group of high school juniors with a 6th grade reading level into Ivy League material in less than a year is not going to yield favorable results. Nor am I familiar with your qualifications or what role you played in this program. I once volunteered as part of a prisoner GED program. We also had a retired math professor in the mix. Would you care to guess which of us had more favorable outcomes when it came to teaching math? As an aside, said math professor was a rather brilliant theorist but his true passion was teaching teachers to teach math. So it wasn't just a "PhD wins all."

    Qualification matters. Time spent matters. Motivation of the individuals matter.

    I have watched people go from functionally illiterate to a GED to college coursework at a community college in the scope of 4 years. My wife, a non-profit executive director and clinical counselor, oversaw such initiatives when she was working with refugees who were being resettled in Upstate NY. So if your program was incapable of preparing young adults for higher education it may well say more about your program than about the abilities of the individuals with whom you worked.

    However, absolutely none of this has anything to do with affirmative action. I'm not saying this of course as the "expert" on affirmative action. I'm saying it as an objective reader who knows that affirmative action does not mean "take people of color with zero qualifications and throw them to the wolves in higher ed." If it meant that then, despite your failures, those individuals would all have been enrolled in college and should have been given their participation degrees and their courtesy C-suite jobs by now, no?

    Again, what programs and in what capacity and relying upon what qualifications? Or are you saying that you were a participant in said special programs?

    Because, dear Jan, this is not Raiders of the Lost Ark. You cannot just shut down any commentary by insisting it is being handled by top men. Were these school programs? Community based? were these funded by a politically appointed think tank? Were they privately funded? Did they have grants? Where can I see copies of the actual outcomes?

    As much as I'd like to believe that you have dedicated your life to educating the underprivileged and have simply worked out to a less successful version of the guy Edward James Olmos played in Stand and Deliver I suspect that is not the case. I respect you may not wish to share program names or organizations, I get that. But you should at least provide some information as to scope and involvement.

    I suspect you haven't actually read anything I've written if you took my clarification of what Affirmative Action is as "hyper defense" of it. Just this morning I explained to my daughter who the Patriarch of Moscow is. Does that constitute a hyper defense as well? Am I now an unregistered foreign agent because I offered her clarifying points of the role and its history in the USSR? Hmm, strange. I would have thought I would need to actually defend a practice to be accused of a "hyper defense" of it. My comments on "affirmative action" deal with my experience in it as an HR Director (one of numerous) at a Fortune 500 company that, as a federal contractor, has mandatory affirmative action reporting. I also spoke about VETS-100 in my earlier post. Was that a hyper defense? Are you against that as well? Have you many stories and examples of how you, through the same or other "special programs" educated veterans and prepared them for college?

    Absolutely nothing I said could possibly be construed to suggest otherwise.

    Again, affirmative action has nothing to with "enhancing skills." That just isn't what it is for. As it relates to higher education, institutions may consider race among all other factors in admission. That's it. Are there schools that are weighing it too heavily to the detriment of academics? Possibly. I cannot say definitively either way (and neither can you). There is nothing about "affirmative action" that says we take a bunch of people of college age who cannot read at an age appropriate level and make them college ready. It doesn't exist. Is it a noble program? Absolutely. Could it help us as a society? Education is always a good thing. Is it "affirmative action?" No, it is not. So I'm not quite sure what you are actually arguing against or what you think I wrote in defense of anything.
     
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