

The Power of Race - tokenadult
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/elite

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patio11
I have always thought that the "soft variables" which are used as the
explanation for why Asian students don't get admitted as well as their hard
credentials would suggest are, if you forgive me, a crock. Its kind of like a
poll test: sure, a requirement that somebody be literate to vote is facially
neutral, but in both aim and application it is designed to fall nearly
exclusively on black voters.

Soft factors, in aim and application, allow universities to shape their
entering class to fit their preferences. One of the key preferences of
selective American universities is that they have a rough idea of how many
black and Hispanic students they want in their classes, and they will
discriminate on the basis of race to achieve that rough idea. So, wham, soft
factors.

Universities will profess that they love admitting students who do hip hop and
don't particularly need to admit more students who do violin, but if its a
Korean doing hip hop and a black guy doing violin they will change their minds
in a hurry.

Plus it is an undeniable, documented historical fact that the "soft factors"
introduced into university admissions were _explicitly designed_ to keep out
the undesirably academically competent disfavored minority du jour -- at the
time they were first instituted, that was Jews.

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RK
_the authors suggest that it's time for a massive federally supported effort,
equivalent in intensity to the Manhattan Project, to determine the source of
academic achievement gaps and to develop plans to shrink them._

I don't even know how to comment on that. I'll just point this out as a choice
sentence from the article.

~~~
tokenadult
Richard Nisbett's recent book

[http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-
Cultures/...](http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-
Cultures/dp/0393065057)

is the subject of an academic study group I'm participating in this semester

[http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...](http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/default.htm)

and one of the amazing conclusions from broad literature reviews is that there
is STILL remarkably little research on educational outcomes with sound
experimental designs.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

There may be some rather inexpensive and simple (once discovered)
interventions that could do a lot to close group achievement gaps, but today
no one is sure at all.

------
ShabbyDoo
I generally oppose race-based preferences, but I have recently forced myself
to think about them from a different perspective. What if I was the US's
benevolent dictator? I would be concerned with large, concentrated populations
of very poor black people. To break the cycle of generational poverty, I could
institute all sorts of social service programs and provide hand-outs. Or, I
could game the incentives people observe so that they would be more likely to
take actions that would improve their situation. Observing more people "like
you" opt into higher education and get middle class jobs sufficient to buy
homes in the suburbs might make you think that you too could achieve a similar
outcome. But, if you had no such role models, you might decide that your fate
has been pre-determined and make no effort to improve your lot. So, I wonder
if the value of affirmative action is not to the individual so much as to the
group.

I still oppose racial preferences. As a teenager, I opposed them from a civil
rights standpoint -- after all, they're a blatant form of institutionalized
discrimination. In college, I had an experience that made me oppose
preferences for a more pragmatic reason -- they can be cruel. I had a summer
internship at a large company that made a substantial effort to recruit
minorities. One guy in my internship class was a student at a small,
historically black college in the South. He was a great guy...fun to hang out
with, and had superb interpersonal and communication skills. Ostensibly, he
was a computer science major but once admitted that his school had not
required that he write "a program" in more than two years. This company, with
all good intentions, put him in a very technical role for the summer. He
failed miserably and accomplished nothing. On one of the last days of the
internship program, I heard him literally sobbing to his mentor that he had
accomplished nothing during the summer. He was right and smart enough to know
it. If he had been white (or, more correctly a "non-disenfranchised"
minority), someone would have told him that he could have a great career in
marketing, PR, sales, whatever. Writing code wasn't for him, but it's not for
most people, and that's quite ok. Had he not been wooed because of the color
of his skin, he could have opted into a mutually beneficial internship with a
PR firm where he would have learned a lot and gained self confidence. Instead,
he got the message that he sucked.

