[yummyfajitas]

The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this.

The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we’re still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses.

Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?

[dghf]

> The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

That assumes that without AA the system would be meritocratic, and not biased in favour of people from particular backgrounds.

[yummyfajitas]

Yes, that's because building systems like this is pretty easy. Just use a point system based entirely on grades/extracurriculars/SAT/etc.

For example, google the old U-Mich point system - it was entirely meritocratic except for the +1.0 boost to GPA given to non-Asian minorities, a much smaller alumni preference and some "women in engineering" boost.

[tomp]

The problem is that colleges don't rely only on SAT/grades (at least the elite colleges). Extracurriculars are, obviously, very non-meritocratic - doing extracurricular activities is not really correlated with how good you are at them (or at anything else), but rather with how much time you have and how much your parents can afford to pay for your activities.

[taco_emoji]

Is that what meritocracy looks like to you? Kids whose circumstances are highly negatively correlated with grades and test scores get shafted?

[yummyfajitas]

Yes, "meritocracy" and "no one has a hard life" are different concepts. A person having bad parents and therefore having bad grades has less merit than a person with good parents and good grades.

It sucks that some people have bad parents (or whatever the specific issue is), but that's a different problem than lack of meritocracy.

[dghf]

Well, that kind of depends on how you define merit. One could argue that someone who gets reasonable but not stellar grades in spite of bad parents, a deprived background, etc. displays more merit than someone from a privileged background with every advantage who attains perfect grades.

[SamReidHughes]

If you have that information, you can factor that into your admissions criteria using feedback from previous students. For example, you could rank incoming students and tweak a racial parameter to equalize the 6-year graduation rate of the bottom decile in each race. Doing so will (by construction) improve the outcome of your 6-year graduation rate. Pick whatever is a good proxy for whatever your goals are.

That's more meritocratic than ignoring that information.

There is a different sense of meritocracy though, in which the goals themselves are unmeritocratic. For example, "educating lots of left-handed people" (to the exclusion of right-handers) is a rather unmeritocratic goal. The real argument being had is in this respect -- for one, whether educating should be done for students' benefit or for the sum of others' benefit. And also, in the subcategory of "for others' benefit," whether making maximally good scientists, historians, and the like, should be the goal, or whether and to what extent there's benefit in trying to infiltrate minority communities with a more education-valuing culture.

[anigbrowl]

A person having bad parents and therefore having bad grades has less merit than a person with good parents and good grades.

So your basic position is that lucky people are better than unlucky people (since nobody gets to select their parents) so that social outcomes are largely a matter of predestination.

Well, at least this saves me the bother of even temporarily taking you seriously in any topic in the future. No doubt this will mean missing out on some correct insights, but I figure that on any important topic I'll hear about it from someone else sooner or later, meanwhile saving myself the effort of seeking good-faith interpretations of what turns out to be self-serving bullshit from your end.

[Steko]

Yes it's racist to hold one race down for centuries and then claim the system is entirely meritocratic.

[tadfisher]

Please be careful with your attribution; the GP presumably does not own slaves and did not prop up Jim Crow.

[kefka]

Good point.

How long does it take for us to rid the sins against blacks by our ancestors?

3 generations? 5 generations? Never?

[Steko]

It has nothing to do with getting rid of sins, it's about counteracting systemic racism, you stop doing it when the need is gone.

[kefka]

At least regarding higher education (where SCOTUS is reviewing), how is it systemic?

It seems to be much more of an economic issue, where family income, local society income, and students' school budgets should be controlled and watched for rather than "black".

It seems to me that saying, "hey you, who live in the ghetto, your school budgets are linked to your poverty. Hope you get the education you deserve" is so much more wrong, as education should be granted to everyone, equally in our public system.

[rmxt]

"The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system."

AA and meritocratic systems are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of the two is what is currently used in most college admissions processes. It is inaccurate to say that none of the people in question would be there were it not for AA.

[yummyfajitas]

It is inaccurate to say that none would be there without AA. It's completely accurate to say that only 77% of those currently present would be there without AA.

It's true that AA is a non-meritocratic hack on top of an otherwise meritocratic system (modulo other small hacks, e.g. large donations and alumni preferences).

[dragonwriter]

> It's true that AA is a non-meritocratic hack on top of an otherwise meritocratic system

I'm not sure that's true, and am fairly certain its not supportable as true. While the exact models used in admission have evolved, even fairly recent studies have shown that many of the objective factors considered in admission aside from AA and contributor/alumni preferences have fairly weak predictors of success, and some of them (particularly standardized admissions tests) are measures which are very strongly tied to race/ethnicity, disadvantaging traditionally-disadvantaged groups when they are used. (Now, some schools have adapted their admissions processes to eliminate some of the more problematic factors, but that leaves them with systems that are unproven -- which is an improvement over systems that are proven to be biased rather than meritocratic, but not the same as demonstrably meritocratic.)

[yummyfajitas]

The fact that some races/ethnicities perform worse on SAT or other explicitly race-neutral metrics does not mean they are not meritocratic. It just means those groups have lower average merit.

Similarly, the fact that any individual component of a predictor has little predictive power is a truly terrible critique. Similarly, no individual pixel is particularly predictive of the content of an image. Therefore image recognition is impossible!

[dragonwriter]

> The fact that some races/ethnicities perform worse on SAT or other explicitly race-neutral metrics does not mean they are not meritocratic.

That's true, and even the fact that taken together the main objective admission criteria aren't (even considered together) strong predictors of performance taken together with that doesn't mean that the systems using them aren't meritocratic, its just strongly suggestive of that.

However, there is plenty of reason to believe that a system that doesn't account for demographics -- including race and income and possibly other factors -- can't be effectively meritocratic or (perhaps surprisingly) race-blind. For instance, studies have shown that the relationship between expected performance (in terms of college grades) -- both in terms of predictive power and expected results -- of SAT scores, college grades, advanced coursework, etc. is not consistent across different racial and income-based demographic groups. [0]

So a system which ignores those differences and just applies the measures by a one-size fits all formula is not adopting a race (etc.)-blind measure of merit.

[0] e.g., this analysis http://ftp.iza.org/dp8733.pdf which itself also references a study identifying that what predictive power SAT scores have is mostly as an indirect measure of the high school the student attended, and that within-school variations in SAT scores have almost no predictive power.

[yummyfajitas]

You seem to be suggesting that we should actively use racial and other demographic characteristics as part of a predictor.

Suppose we run our linear regression or random forest, and it turns out holding all else equal, black people underperform others. I.e., same SAT, same GPA, the black guy is likely to perform worse. (Please read your source and note the sign on the black/hispanic coefficients.)

You seem to be advocating that we should then penalize the black guy even though his grades are identical. Is that a fair statement of your post?

I don't have a strong opinion on this, though I definitely have a negative emotional reaction to it.

[rmxt]

Your two sentences are contradictory. If some members of those 23% would be there without AA, then some amount greater than 77% of those currently present would be there without AA.

[yummyfajitas]

You are confused. No members of the 23% would be there without AA, according to the article, but all members of the 77% would be.

[anigbrowl]

This assumes that alternative systems (eg ranking people by SAT scores) is meritocratic, and not subject to structural biases. I like standardized testing myself, but that's because I perform well in those situations. I'm not so sure it's necessarily a good way to measure merit; I perform less well in more open-ended contexts, for example.

[taco_emoji]

> The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

Your curiously unstated but obviously logically necessary premise that non-AA systems are already magically meritocratic is what's racist.

Hope that clears it up for you.

[tomp]

I think the two of you are using slightly different definitions of "meritocratic". Yummifajitas means "who's better", whereas you mean "who's potentially better".

Obviously, in average whites are better than blacks (and Asians are better than whites). All test scores prove that. That's what yummifajitas is referring to when he says "meritocracy".

Obviously blacks have been severely disadvantages throughout their lives (before college), so they aren't as good as they could be (again in average). Therefore, you're saying that we should accept more blacks, who could be just as good as whites are.

Personally, I agree with yummifajitas' definition of the word "meritocratic", but I think that favoring the disadvantaged is a better outcome for the society than a purely meritocratic system. However, I also think that favoring (affirmative action) should be non-racist, but instead targeting the disadvantaged people/families (regardless of their race); furthermore, I believe that the effect of such policies would be orders of magnitude greater if they were favoring people waaaay before university.

[dragonwriter]

> I think the two of you are using slightly different definitions of "meritocratic". Yummifajitas means "who's better", whereas you mean "who's potentially better".

I think both are using "who is better", the problem is that there "who is better" is very vague: better in what way?

Claims to "meritocracy" only have substantial meaning with a concrete definition of "merit", and while yummyfajitas is happy to assert that but for AA college admissions process are certainly meritocratic, there is no identification of the merit that the combination of measures used is supposedly assessing, against which one could evaluate the claim that using those measures without considering race is, in fact, meritocratic.

[tomp]

Hm... Aren't SATs widely used for college admissions (not exclusively, of course, but if they were, I'd say the system is totally meritocratic)? I'm not saying it's the best indication of the kind of merit required to excel at the university, but it's probably one of the best we have (and definitely a better one than race or disadvantage - remember, we're favoring the disadvantaged so that they can improve despite them being worse, not because we believe SATs wrongly assess them as being worse (although there is some research that claims SATs systematically underscore women)). Also, in which way (relevant to university admissions or completion) are blacks better than whites/Asians?

[dragonwriter]

> Hm... Aren't SATs widely used for college admissions

Yes.

> (not exclusively, of course, but if they were, I'd say the system is totally meritocratic)?

Wait, what? Unless you make that tautologically true by defining the merit you are trying to assess in admission as "SAT scores", I don't see why you would.

> I'm not saying it's the best indication of the kind of merit required to excel at the university, but it's probably one of the best we have

Its not. For predicting college performance, its a very weak predictor of college grades, or even first-year grades (weaker than high school grades, class rank, or even just the high school you attended), and, to the extent its useful, at least one study has indicated that its predictive power is almost entirely explained by the degree to which it serves as a proxy measure for the high school that the student attended, and that within-school variation in SAT scores lacks predictive power.

Also, there is evidence that the relationship between SAT scores (and the same is true of other measures, like GPA) and college performance is not consistent across various axes of demographic variation (race, income, etc.) -- I've cited one analysis on this elsewhere in the thread.

> remember, we're favoring the disadvantaged so that they can improve despite them being worse, not because we believe SATs wrongly assess them as being worse

One of the many reasons for admissions preference for traditionally disadvantage groups is advocated is that many of the measures used as signals to admission disadvantage those from traditionally disadvantaged groups, where the measure reflects disadvantage of circumstance rather than lack of merit.

> Also, in which way (relevant to university admissions or completion) are blacks better than whites/Asians?

I never said they were.

[yummyfajitas]

It's true - black people tend to underperform relative to their SAT.

http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/09/the_underperformance...

Your source agrees with this if you scroll down to the data tables. Note the sign on the black and hispanic coefficients.

So your real critique seems to be that SAT is unfair because it gives a non-predictive boost to blacks and hispanics. Consequently, if we wanted to have the most accurate predictor possible, we'd include negative weights for black people. Is this really the critique you are making of using SAT and GPA?

One of the many reasons for admissions preference for traditionally disadvantage groups is advocated is that many of the measures used as signals to admission disadvantage those from traditionally disadvantaged groups...

That's simply incorrect. If it were true, then blacks would overperform relative to SAT rather than underperform.

[tomp]

> For predicting college performance, its a very weak predictor of college grades

That's interesting. Naively, I would expect SAT correlated with IQ, and that correlated with success in university. Are there better predictors of college grades?

> where the measure reflects disadvantage of circumstance rather than lack of merit

Hm... I can hardly imagine how a bad score on the math SAT would not indicate that you lack merit in math.

> I never said they were.

Well, then it doesn't much matter which definition of merit (who is better) you take (as you claim in your original response to me)...

[yummyfajitas]

Non-AA systems primarily look at grades, SAT, extracurriculars and the like. They tend to also include small alumni preferences and the occasional "this guy's dad donated $20M" preferences. Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

[anigbrowl]

As if everything you mention were equally distributed (quality of academic instruction, affordability of extracurricular activity or exam coaching services etc.), such that everyone had access to more or less the same quality of basic education.

You're an intelligent guy and have taken part in discussions on this sort of topic many times before here on HN, so why do you persist in advancing simplistic arguments whose specious nature has been pointed out many times before?

[dragonwriter]

> Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

What is the concrete merit being assessed, and where is the evidence that the measures used provide a race, ethnicity, and gender-blind predictor or measure of the that concrete merit?

[yummyfajitas]

To check that such measures are race, ethnicity and gender blind, just run the following unit test on your admission procedure:

    allow_admission( x.copy(race=a) ) == allow_admission(x.copy(race=b))

[dragonwriter]

That proves that your admission procedure does not consider race separately from the measures (and could be extended to do the same for gender and ethnicity, mutatis mutandis), it does not prove that the measures themselves are race, ethnicity, and gender-blind measures of the concrete merit which they are designed to assess.

If you want to make the case that they are meritocratic, it would be more convincing with a concrete definition of the merit they are intended to measure, evidence that they do measure that merit, and evidence that the manner in which they do is not sensitive to race, ethnicity, and gender.

Assuming that there is an objective, measurable merit being addressed, these are all empirically testable, and the claim can be assessed based on the evidence for it; if there is no such merit being addressed, the claim that they are meritocratic is empty.