[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.