Most Affirmative Action Is White
Something to consider as the Supreme Court prepares to eliminate the consideration of race — but not parental status — in admissions for public colleges:
What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.
Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
[...]
Who are these mediocre white students getting into institutions such as Harvard, Wellesley, Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Virginia? A sizable number are recruited athletes who, research has shown, will perform worse on average than other students with similar academic profiles, mainly as a result of the demands their coaches will place on them.
A larger share, however, are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators, and politicians topping the list.
Since opposition to affirmative action is based on solely on concerns about merit, and not racial resentment, we can be sure the outrage machine will go into full attack over this.
Obama was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action because he won’t release his college transcripts or something, doncha know? Would someone please just think about the poor underachieving legacies that was also admitted and had to sit next to him in lecture!
And the Harvard Law students he would be competing with for jobs after graduation were just so gosh darn sweet and PC that they made him editor of the law review to give him and extra hand
outupout.Obama’s election to the presidency of the law review seems to have hinged on his personal popularity and that the conservative editors thought he would be fairer to them than his colleagues who were further left.
Fixed.
Not actually true. Law students pick the preznit of the law review, not lawyers, and at the HLS Law Review, they’re a bunch of hypercompetitive careerist law students looking for clerkships with federal judges.
Law students, especially those law students, ain’t lawyers.
First of all, you don’t make the law review based on affirmative action; it’s grades or writing (and grading is blind).
Second of all, his college grades would have been relatively irrelevant to his admission to the law school, as he had significant community organizing experience after college. HLS takes that stuff into consideration all the time.
Pretty sure this isn’t properly addressed to me. All I talked about was how the head of the law review is picked, not how people get on to the law review or even how they get into law school.
I have no idea what kind of point you’re trying to make — you’re arguing against a point nobody in this thread is even trying to make except in mockery of the people you seem to be arguing against.
College admissions should be decided solely on merit. Obviously minor exceptions for football players and legacies. An enrollment cap on asian students in the interest of diversity would also be reasonable. College admissions should be decided solely on merit.
Asians are the Jews of liberal fascism?
Indeed, because the role of higher education is to reward the smartest, not to increase education.
Poe’s Law is a cruel taskmaster.
Fixed.
Who exactly gets to decide what constitutes merit? Do you mean things like SAT/ACT scores and GPA that have been shown to have no correlation to matriculation? Or some other definition of merit?
You may have achieved sarcasm fail satori
For sufficiently moderate values of “no,” at least. They aren’t particularly good, but it’s highly improbable that they have 0 correlation.
College admissions should be decided solely on merit.
Make sure every single American student is on a level playing field prior to college, and I will join you in this statement.
Paging G.W. Bush!
Working on it. Just have to stop those stupid home-schooled kids from getting their unfair advantage of having a decent education.
You obviously have not taught many home schooled students. While there are a few who shine, the vast majority have been dramatically shortchanged and do not have a lot of basic knowledge to succeed in college. Most home schoolers are Talibangelicals and conservatives who do not want their little darlings exposed to that nasty and pernicious liberal knowledge.
I’ve seen it myself with kids who attend the elite boarding schools in the northeast. They invariably get into the ivy league and ivy equivalent schools with much lower SAT scores and grades than kids from excellent public high schools. I’d love to see the the data on the rich boarding school kids v. the public school kids.
Dubya got into Yale with a C average from his prep school and into the Harvard MBA program with a C average from Yale. The living embodiment of affirmative action for rich white fuck ups.
I’m sure we’ll have Clarence Thomas railing over the bigotry of low expectations affecting well-connected white students.
I don’t know why this doesn’t get talked about more or why more people do not find it outrageous. My husband is a Duke alum and, yes, did give money (not huge sums because while we are comfortable we are not super wealthy by any means). Duke was pretty up front about how they favor legacies (although the “and if you donate, we like you even more” part was a bit more subtle). Now, my son was a tip top student in high school and did get into Duke – by any objective criteria he deserved it, see, parenthetical (ultimately picked UVA where he was an Echols scholar). BUT it always make me very angry that people are so angry about affirmative action for minorities but seem unbothered by affirmative action for unqualified children of wealth alumni/benefactors. Not to take anything away from my son (he is terrific!) but I have no doubt that there were equally well qualified kids who did not get into Duke in ’08 because slots are “reserved” for legacies. That is simply not acceptable.
Duke had a legacy admit rate of 37% in 2009
when 20% of the student body were children of alumni. That number is declining as legacies are about 15% of the classes of 2013-15.
Students from high-income families were overrepresented at highly selective institutions by something like 21% during the middle of the last decade. I assume that number has increased during the last five years.
57% of students where from the top income quintile but only 36% of very highly qualified students were from the same group. That is a bunch of athletes, legacies and kids with ‘special talents.’
White students were five times as likely as black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and almost three times as likely as Hispanic students.(3.5x and 2x when controlled for income) However, the strength of the association between family income and access to the most selective schools is particularly strong among white students.
Didn’t Scalia write in his Grutter dissent that the Framers believed equal protection means the right to have a child admitted to college based on how much money the parents make?
But a reversal of Grutter in Fischer wouldn’t disallow this kind of “affirmative action,” would it?
So win-win for the right.
This can all be solved by proper declension:
I received a well-deserved return on my hard work.
You got a good break.
They got unfair affirmative action.
Those people got unfair affirmative action.
Not to be too picky, but that appeared to be a 5 year old article. Anything with more up-to-date stats?
Probably not. Much of the research in this area is based on three national longitundinal studies of high school classes from 1982, 1992 and 2004. Another study was started with high school sophomores in 2009 with the first follow up planned for this year.
The increase in the over representation, of primarily white students, from the upper quintile was clear however and one would think the financial collapse may have made the disparity even worse not better.
Has anyone proposed a law that would deny federal funds to schools who practice legacy?
It has a clear populist appeal. It aligns with RWing ideology (less gov spending, relatively non-coercive way to legislate morality, and screw those universities). it aligns with Left (less slots reserved for privileged means more potential slots for less privileged).
Higher ed lobbyists may pluck off some votes on the left while typical Banker’s party influence will rattle the right, but each side would have a lot of explaining to do.
Has anyone proposed a law that would deny federal funds to schools who practice legacy?
Do politicians not have mediocre offspring?
This would make for a good populist talking point.
No, never. Just ask them, if you doubt me.
It aligns with RWing ideology (less gov spending, relatively non-coercive way to legislate morality, and screw those universities).
I’m not sure you understand right-wing ideology. Coercion is fine, and denying the rich their hard-earned privileges is the opposite of morality.
Well, in this case I’m reverting back to the layman’s definition of ideology, which is basically what we say.
But you have the nerve to judge us by what we do. You bastard! We may do evil shit, but that doesn’t mean we believe it. Beliefs = ideology, and DW-nominate can’t measure that.
How dare you measure my worth by using something measurable. I am what I say i am, not what I do.
“You said this shirt was guaranteed not to shrink in the wash!”
“Well, yes, but it didn’t intend to shrink.”
It aligns with RWing ideology (less gov spending, relatively non-coercive way to legislate morality, and screw those universities).
Ah, but you forget; the right has an out. To enforce this regulation, or any regulation for that matter, you’d have to increase government funding and involvement in the process, which would be bad, even though the vast majority of colleges in the US are public and even the private universities tend to take in rather astounding amounts of public money.
“It aligns with RWing ideology (less gov spending, relatively non-coercive way to legislate morality, and screw those universities).”
That’s three reasons it will never happen. Those are reasons the Right Wing pretends to be against stuff, not reasons the Right Wing is actually against stuff.
The Right Wing has never been against government spending; it’s only against spending on Those People. Other spending is “necessary for the good of society.”
Legislating morality is the bread and butter of the Right Wing. The Democrats aren’t bring us “you can only sleep with the person you’re married to.”
Public universities were and are awesome, when it isn’t those brown people taking up all those slots.
I’m aware of this.
Look, much of the Republican elite aren’t opposed to unskilled immigration either, including illegal. One, they benefit from lower prices. Two, it doesn’t affect their wages. Three, its an end-run around the minimum wage. And four, “What will we ever do without Maria.”
So what exactly has their panties in a twist since ’08? The base. Ditto here. I mean, their kids aren’t getting favored.
Depending on how much Dem support there is, all you need is a minority of republicans willing to break rank. This is the sort of issue they can be broken on.
Are you sure those Republicans want their kids to go to college?
Look, stop whining about oppression and do something about it. The Rwing wasn’t afraid to go after affirmative action…why should you?
Because you’re up against rich whites, not poor blacks? Well, how hard is it to argue to the American people that rich whites shouldn’t get their affirmative action subsidized by the state? Grow some George Wallace balls…the New Deal Populist one, not the other.
Its not like single payer. Its doable. It’ll probably come down to those left-leaning moderates again.
“Most Affirmative Action is White and Upper Income”
Specifically regarding colleges, a lot of them give points for geographical diversity and I am pretty sure this overall favors white applicants. But, I am not sure this is a bad thing.
When I was a kid, my next-door neighbor was a very high-ranking official at Harvard (those of you in academia probably know who he is, if I were to name him). His daughter got rejected from pretty much every school she applied to, even her alleged safety schools, but did get into Harvard. But surely all of that was a coincidence.
But anyway, don’t the Ivies openly acknowledge that they give priority to legacies?
And remember, GW was not admitted to the University of Texas Law School, his first choice. But Harvard took him for an MBA.
Is that true?
Yes
according to PBS he was rejected,unclear if it was his first choice, but it is the only one mentioned
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2000/bush/cron.html
Saying “most” affirmative action is white is like claiming that “most welfare recipients are white. It may be true, but it also may not be incredibly meaningful given that most people in the country are white. A (significantly) larger proportion of the black students at elite universties are ‘under-qualified.’ That doesn’t mean that legacy preferences are a good thing or insignificant, but the kind of argument being made in the post and article are a bit deceptive- whites may be the biggest gainers at an aggregate level, but not at percentage level.
I’m curious: how do veterans fit in this equation? I mean, there are veterans who have zero college credits when they leave the service, and so are true freshmen when they finally get into school. How do they figure into affirmative action? Do schools consider them separately from traditional students, since the veterans might be considered “less qualified” (i.e. didn’t do so well in high school, had low SAT scores or no scores at all, or have been out of the academic setting for at least 3 years or more, etc.)?
I guess the same questions can apply to other non-traditional students as well.
Just wondering.
As with every other question of admissions policy (I don’t mean that to sound snarky), it varies by school.
People make the mistake of thinking that all elite schools must use the same policies. It ain’t so. When I was an undergrad working in my elite school’s Admissions office, I was constantly running into people who complained about policies that we didn’t actually have, who didn’t believe me that we didn’t have them, because Harvard or whoever did.
Some colleges admit men applicants with weaker applications that the women applicants so that the ratio of men students to women students is as close to 50-50 as they can get it.
I think I remember reading about Yale doing this a few years ago.
[...] file this under completely unsurprising (h/t LGM): [M]any of the applicants who were rejected [by selective colleges] were far more qualified than [...]
Im thankful for the blog article. Really Cool.