> A university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction.
Well, your implication here is that accessible, affordable colleges are clearly a second-rate experience. I'm not necessarily disagreeing here, but it's something academia themselves have not admitted.
Your example forgets that they are still allowed to look at financial/hardship data to determine merit. So presuming that someone with identical upbringing must have had a harder life because of the color of their skin only exists to perpetuate bias.
I'd certainly like to live in a world where students of the same age, with the same family income/savings etc., with the same teachers and classrooms, with equally supportive parents, would have equivalent opportunities throughout their K-12 careers. In such a world, I would indeed be the one "perpetuating bias" with my comment. But we live in a world where the race of those students, controlling for everything else, is statistically shown to have an impact on things we'd generally agree are an important part of a child's learning experience.
Now, we might reasonably disagree on whether admissions departments are overreaching in trying to ensure that their merit-based decisions take these factors into account. And we might reasonably disagree as to whether the government should have the ability to intervene if such overreach were found to exist. But the idea that any of this is only being done to perpetuate bias, ignores the fact that bias already exists.
Well, your implication here is that accessible, affordable colleges are clearly a second-rate experience. I'm not necessarily disagreeing here, but it's something academia themselves have not admitted.
Your example forgets that they are still allowed to look at financial/hardship data to determine merit. So presuming that someone with identical upbringing must have had a harder life because of the color of their skin only exists to perpetuate bias.