Affirmative Action Was Banned. What Happened Next Was Confusing.

September 13, 2024 7:27 AM

Here is what we know about the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision curtailing race-based admissions at selective universities. And why many experts and administrators are baffled. By Anemona Hartocollis and Stephanie Saul (Gift link).
posted by bq (35 comments total)

many experts and administrators are baffled
?
"Black students have been most affected, their numbers declining at most highly selective schools."
posted by HearHere at 7:33 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]

I mean, yeah, it's pretty obvious that the intent of the ruling was to have fewer Black students at universities.

What I'd like to know is when the legacy system will be declared unconstitutional? Oh, right. Never.
posted by sotonohito at 7:38 AM on September 13 [30 favorites]

it still enrages me that they used nouveau riche recent immigrants from China as their primary wedge--every single study shows that the majority of asian americans, particularly the ones who have been here longer, support affirmative action, even the ones that have very visible anti-blackness problems

and because asian american has always been a weak political coalition/identity, that distinction is painted over because of some dumbfucks that are now utterly shocked that they're getting their faces eaten by leopards, even though they were warned in all the goddamn wechats about this
posted by i used to be someone else at 7:46 AM on September 13 [17 favorites]

I strongly suspect that White and Asian students are the ones least likely to report their race. White folk because they believe themselves to be default and not have a race, Asian folk out of a desire to avoid perfect minority stereotypes and such. So yes, the percentage Black students as a portion of students reporting race has gone up. This is not surprising.

It's interesting that Black people are approximately 16% of the 15-19 year old age group. And yet, if their admission numbers pass half that number, there clearly must be something nefarious at play. It's almost like a law professor is suffering from engineer's disease in trying to interpret statistics.
posted by Hactar at 7:47 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]

White folk because they believe themselves to be default and not have a race

Or, white folk because they want to downplay their numbers and not help in accurate measurement.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:51 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]

This article was working hard to seem like one big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's does little but serve as copy-paste link fodder for folks who want to cherry pick data from this.

highlights for folks who are skimming the article:

• they say that actual impact on racial diversity is "a land of contrasts." But the cited research shows 75% of institutions, like MIT and Amherst have seen steep declines in Black students being enrolled. Only a few institutions bucked this trend: Yale has seen this segment hold steady, Duke has seen Black student admissions increase compared to last year. But it's presented in the article like equivalent variance
• fewer students have been electing to state race in their college application this year, which obfuscates a lot of the data and essentially expands this big hole of opaqueness in how any university would measure impact
• some institutions, in an effort to promote some facet of intentional diversity, have been redirecting their efforts to rural and small town recruiting - aiming for economic diversity if racial diversity is not available to them. while minorities are heavily represented in urban cities, it would be interesting to see how that stays true as continued migration expands into exurbs.

posted by bl1nk at 7:54 AM on September 13 [12 favorites]

was that the proportion of Black students at highly selective schools would go down and the proportion of Asian American students would rise.

showed that the percentage of Black enrollment is down at three-quarters of the [elite selective] schools,

LOL. Also it's only year 1 isn't it? Let's follow this for a few years for the full effect.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:56 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

they say that actual impact on racial diversity is "a land of contrasts." But the cited research shows 75% of institutions, like MIT and Amherst have seen steep declines in Black students being enrolled.

FTFA, the NYTimes one:

A tracker of about 50 selective schools developed this week by the organization Education Reform Now showed that the percentage of Black enrollment is down at three-quarters of the schools, with some campuses more affected than others.

Doesn't look like the NYTimes is trying to hide it, when they link to it and discuss the data itself.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:00 AM on September 13 [3 favorites]

It's interesting that Black people are approximately 16% of the 15-19 year old age group. And yet, if their admission numbers pass half that number, there clearly must be something nefarious at play. It's almost like a law professor is suffering from engineer's disease in trying to interpret statistics.

The relevant comparison group isn't the overall demographics of the population, cf: "Black students make up about 3 percent of the top tenth of high school students academically"
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:04 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

The relevant comparison group isn't the overall demographics of the population, cf: "Black students make up about 3 percent of the top tenth of high school students academically"

Sure it is. If 'affirmative action' wasn't needed, then the percents of different demographics at the tops of the high school student achievement wouldn't be a useful descriptive variable. It would be like the number that have 2 arms, or wear shoes or something. It would almost exactly model the percents of the population.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:22 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]

That's not the point. If the demographics of a highly selective university do not mirror the demographics of high-achieving high school students by a large amount, that suggests that there is some other process going on, regardless of the demographics of ALL students.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:29 AM on September 13 [1 favorite]

From the perspective of someone who had two sons go through the admissions process this past year (and one now attending a college named in the story):

- It seemed like the elite colleges where my kids applied tried to counter the Supreme Court decision somewhat, with an essay question option that said (roughly) "tell us how your life experience shows how you overcame significant societal obstacles." Colleges telegraphed pretty hard that this was for Black students to tell admissions they were Black, underprivileged and faced discrimination -- a substitute for the "check box." I'd hope that the telegraphing becomes even better known and more widely used, which might help Black students in coming years.

- But... this was also the last year at most colleges where the SAT or ACT were optional. Despite reforms, those tests are known to skew in favor of white students and depress Black students' scores. Eliminating the tests made the colleges more accessible to Black students and poor students who can't afford the test prep and tutoring. So I'd imagine that making those tests mandatory will make it *significantly* harder for Black students in coming years and will wipe out any gains from the essay question option.

In short, this sucks and will continue to suck.
posted by martin q blank at 8:33 AM on September 13 [9 favorites]

Or, white folk because they want to downplay their numbers and not help in accurate measurement


Or white and Asian folk who don’t report their race because affirmative action discriminates against white and Asian folk. I’ll eat my hat if that isn’t the primary reason for not reporting race in college admissions. Followed closely by “general distrust of the system”.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:36 AM on September 13 [5 favorites]

I didn't report my race on the application fifty thousand years ago when they had AA because I wanted to "know how they *really* felt". That may have qualified as a "general distrust of the system" motivation. They offered me the opportunity to complete my data when I was doing other orientation stuff, and I was like "ok, yes, I'm black" so it may have shown up in subsequent records like this.

i used to be someone else

There's been discourse about this in the black community and I try to let people know that Asian American sentiment on this in the aggregate is generally reflective of the bright blue places like CA where they tend to build communities, but because they got a few individuals to challenge the policy, the idea that Asian Americans "did this" sticks.
posted by Selena777 at 8:55 AM on September 13 [7 favorites]

So, elite institutions aren’t as affected, because they use other systems, but the FAFSA debacle this year (and maybe next, too), hit disadvantaged students pretty hard, since a lot of the problems were with various kinds of documentation. Not the Supreme Court’s fault, but still a problem.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:56 AM on September 13 [6 favorites]

meritocracy is stupid, both as a utopian fantasy and as it exists in practical terms.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 8:57 AM on September 13 [5 favorites]

Race, particularly anti black racism, is such a cornerstone of the USA that it affects many many other metrics-- housing and health outcomes, air pollution, three examples among many.

The Supreme Court may be climate change deniers, and sociology deniers, but doesn't mean institutions cannot find and create "race neutral" metrics that achieve the same or similar result.

And hell, sometimes institutions that don't think about this carefully and methodically can be tokenizing and weird and fail that way.

Racists have been doing this for decades now, in order to discriminate
quietly, see the Lee Atwater quote.

Institutions can do the same, but in reverse, for racial justice, if the Supreme Court is going to be a bunch of corrupt babies for the foreseeable future. Term limits, y'all.

The Census was damaged by T, but it s still very robust, your zip code is destiny.
posted by eustatic at 9:12 AM on September 13 [9 favorites]

Using the % of students in a given demographic who are in the top tenth of high school academically is a completely bullshit way of determining who "should" be accepted to elite institutions. There are NO national academic standards in the US for high school. There is such huge variation among schools even in the same state, much less nationwide, to make comparing students' academic achievement based on their rankings a completely laughable exercise. Not to mention how incredibly easy it is to game this. Just move your kid from a very high-performing, well-resourced high school to a lower-performing, under-resourced school and boom -- now your kid went from say the top 25% to the top 10% because you changed the pool.

I was teaching and in grad school in Texas in the early aughts, shortly after the state passed it's own top 10% rule (because of a different AA lawsuit) and I lost count of how many students cheerfully admitted how they changed towns and/or schools in their senior year so they could be in the top 10% and thereby get guaranteed admission to UT. And who has the money to game the system and change their kids' schools to increase their rankings?? I wonder...
posted by DiscourseMarker at 9:38 AM on September 13 [10 favorites]

Using the % of students in a given demographic who are in the top tenth of high school academically is a completely bullshit way of determining who "should" be accepted to elite institutions.

Sure, but anyone outside the top ten percent of any high school has almost no chance of getting into an undergrad ivy without over a million of donations. 'should' has nothign to do with it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:01 AM on September 13 [3 favorites]

> I strongly suspect that White and Asian students are the ones least likely to report their race.

White and Asian aren't meaningful racial categories for these people. They don't identify as Asian because what they identify as is "Chinese" or "Korean" or some other specific ethnicity, and it's demeaning to be lumped into some generic "Asian" category that washes over their entire identity for the sake of bureaucratic expediency. White people similarly identify as Dutch or Russian or some other specific ethnicity, not a catchall "White" that lumps them together with others towards whom they feel no solidarity.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 10:08 AM on September 13 [3 favorites]

Sure, but anyone outside the top ten percent of any high school has almost no chance of getting into an undergrad ivy without over a million of donations. 'should' has nothign to do with it.

Ok, but that wasn't really my point. From the article:

Black students make up about 3 percent of the top tenth of high school students academically, according to data collected by Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied the effects of racial preferences and who is a critic of race-based admissions.

With preferences based on factors like parental income, wealth and level of education, as well as neighborhood poverty and school quality, and strong outreach, the share of Black students who qualify for admission to top schools grows to 5 percent, Mr. Sander said.

He believes some of the declines in Black students’ numbers — to 5 percent from 15 percent at M.I.T., or to 3 percent from 11 percent at Amherst — have brought those schools to where they should be. (my emphasis)

Richard Sander is the person saying that there "should" only ever be 3 to maybe 5% Black students in elite universities, based on his data. And I am calling bullshit on Mr. Sander's data because you cannot in fact come up with a valid and unbiased metric for determining the quality of high school students nationwide -- and that is why schools implemented AA admissions policies in the first place! Because they knew these metrics were biased and were missing good applicants!
posted by DiscourseMarker at 10:44 AM on September 13 [5 favorites]

Sure, but anyone outside the top ten percent of any high school has almost no chance of getting into an undergrad ivy without over a million of donations. 'should' has nothign to do with it.

This can be done by attending community college. The admission rate to most ivies is lower for transfer students than first-years, but it's entirely possible.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:50 AM on September 13

White people similarly identify as Dutch or Russian or some other specific ethnicity, not a catchall "White" that lumps them together with others towards whom they feel no solidarity.

Citation needed.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:52 AM on September 13 [9 favorites]

If the demographics of a highly selective university do not mirror the demographics of high-achieving high school students by a large amount, that suggests that there is some other process going on,

This is the crux of the question: Racial identify has nothing to do with ability/potential/aptitude (or whatever you want to label it) but it is hugely correlated with academic achievement. So the question is: To what extent should selective admissions weight achievement vs. potential, after considering the important fact that the racial differentials are due to [summarize all of history here].

Another perspective from academic and columnist John McWhorter: "Colleges should be very happy with the new numbers. ... Getting into an elite college is hard, and we should celebrate Black applicants pulling it off in such high numbers, even if they don’t happen to fall precisely at 14 percent."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:36 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

White people similarly identify as Dutch or Russian or some other specific ethnicity, not a catchall "White" that lumps them together with others towards whom they feel no solidarity.

In my own experience, most every time I've seen a fellow white person check off the "choose not to answer" box in the race/ethnicity section of a form, it has accompanied a muttered "I don't see why race should have anything to do with this".
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:43 AM on September 13 [4 favorites]

ou cannot in fact come up with a valid and unbiased metric for determining the quality of high school students nationwide -- and that is why schools implemented AA admissions policies in the first place! Because they knew these metrics were biased and were missing good applicants!

I really, really wish that were true. But the fact is that it's not. Even after taking into account economic differences, there are huge differences in academic achievement levels by race. For example, "Of those scoring above 700 [on the math SAT], 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black." Test scores are a limited and imperfect measure of achievement, but these huge gaps are overwhelmingly a reflection of the inequality in primary and secondary education. (And the SAT is the least biased measure.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:46 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

every single study shows that the majority of asian americans, particularly the ones who have been here longer, support affirmative action

I am not sure what studies are referred to here but that’s definitely not consistently the result in polls. I think those results vary a fair amount with framing, so I’m not saying you’re wrong necessarily, just that it seems complicated.

(I think Asian Americans are pretty consistently found to be less opposed than white Americans)
posted by atoxyl at 11:48 AM on September 13 [2 favorites]

pew has admitted weaknesses in polling asians, but you are correct that framing matters, because that very link at the top you can see they're strong supporters of affirmative action in general

specifically, regarding education, however, your link also states that asian americans feel that even if it makes admissions less fair, they still support it with decent margins, which is something that aapi data concurs on
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:17 PM on September 13 [1 favorite]

(sorry, pew link specifically re: asian americans)

this one essentially confirms exactly what i was saying:

Among Asian adults who have heard of affirmative action, views do not vary significantly by nativity, though there are some differences by length of time that immigrants have lived in the United States.

- More than half of those born in the U.S. (56%) and about half of immigrants (52%) say affirmative action is a good thing.
- Among Asian immigrants, 12% of those who have lived in the U.S. for 10 years or less say it is a bad thing, as do 17% of immigrants who have been in the U.S. between 11 and 20 years. Half of Asian immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 21 years or more say affirmative action is a good thing, while 25% say it is a bad thing. Another 25% say they don’t know if it’s good or bad.

Assessments of affirmative action differ among Asian immigrants by their origins. Chinese immigrants who have heard the phrase (33%) are more likely to say affirmative action is a bad thing than Vietnamese (21%), Korean (21%), Filipino (18%) and Indian (12%) immigrants.

posted by i used to be someone else at 1:41 PM on September 13 [1 favorite]

your link also states that asian americans feel that even if it makes admissions less fair, they still support it with decent margins

I’m missing this part in my initial link, is it in one of the links from that link?

I think a big part of the framing gap is that people don’t like when it’s framed as a “preference” or even a “consideration” of race in admissions - in fact in some polls this only gets support from the narrowest majority of Black respondents - but do approve of the idea more fundamentally of some positive action to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And I don’t doubt that the heterogeneity of “Asian American” complicates the interpretation of these results considerably.
posted by atoxyl at 1:44 PM on September 13

Yep! I thought you linked it directly but it turns out I'd opened it when reading the link instead
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:25 PM on September 13

And yeah I get what you mean about Asian Americans being used as a wedge, regardless, because that is clearly not the most strongly opposed group.

If I’m reading your last study right it actually shows an inverse association between time in the US and approval of affirmative action, which surprises me. (EDIT sorry that’s just for foreign-born, not sure about the effect of more generations in America which I think might be more relevant).

Really the anecdotal experience that lead to me having Thoughts about this in the first place, way back when college admissions were part of my life, was that I was kind of shocked by how bluntly negative some of my friends, who were precisely “ nouveau riche recent immigrants from China ” talked about affirmative action. Like, dude, your parents are both doctors, you will be fine. But then I got a little more sympathetic realizing that, coming from a liberal ~3rd gen white immigrant family, I’d always had the idea that I’d be fine, you know, I didn’t grow up with any insecurity about “belonging” or “making it” in America.
posted by atoxyl at 2:30 PM on September 13

White people similarly identify as Dutch or Russian or some other specific ethnicity, not a catchall "White" that lumps them together with others towards whom they feel no solidarity.

That's emphatically not my experience in America. Outside of the first two generations of immigrants, or people who participate in strong local ethnic cultural groups (e.g. Irish in Boston, Poles in Chicago), or belong to minority religions (e.g. Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, to a lesser extent Catholics), white Americans generally have very little sense of ethnocultural identity and unless they get genetically tested many don't even know what European nationalities they're descended from.

I'll concede that there's not a huge amount of racial solidarity among white people (except for among open white-supremacists, I guess), but I don't think it's because they feel specifically marked as belonging to a more specific category so much as feeling completely unmarked. "White" as "default" means that white people by and large don't think about their racial identity at all.
posted by jackbishop at 2:32 PM on September 13 [8 favorites]

yeah I get what you mean about Asian Americans being used as a wedge

I also grew up around academics who taught at a university with a heavily Asian student population, so I am certainly familiar with white people invoking model minorities to soft-pedal their racial views.
posted by atoxyl at 3:07 PM on September 13

Yale admitted 3.7% of its applicants for this year's entering class. I went to an "elite" university. I don't see why admissions shouldn't just be a straight up lottery. It would certainly have a positive effect on diversity, and I genuinely do not believe it would have that much effect on the quality of the students.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:27 PM on September 13