Open link in next tab
MIT: US university says diversity slumps after affirmative action ban
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rxvd2z6ldo
MIT says intake of some minority groups has fallen from 25% to 16% in one year after a Supreme Court decision.
Notice how black admissions drop. Clarence Thomas is a traitor, screw everyone else he's got his own.
Un-fucking-fortunately all this will do is reenforce the beliefs of all the assholes out there...
"See! If these people had any merit they'd have been accepted, they only got accepted before because they're (insert minority group here)!"
Large university who is fully in control of the people they choose to admit or decline says "there's no doubt they left out many qualified and promising applicants who would have excelled". How could the government do this!? Large university, who is completely in control of their applications process, wonders out loud.
They are not fully in control because the ruling didn't say that affirmative action couldn't be a government requirement. It said that a policy that enables affirmative action violates the constitution.
So, they are no longer asking applicants about race or ethnicity information. But they are expanding recruitment and financial aid to prioritize low income students.
I'm not agreeing with the court ruling, just clarifying the false representation of the issue with regard to the school.
I was lucky enough to see Ibram X. Kendi speak on anti-racism in higher education, and it was illuminating to realize that, as a white, cis-het man, I might not be able to work within the system to change the system without actively breaking laws.
The example he used was actually affirmative action and EEO standards and how the best an ally can do in certain situations might be to put your thumb on the scale even when it's technically illegal.
Basically, if you want to be anti-racist, you've gotta be Chaotic Good since the system is literally rigged against people of color.
So, they are no longer asking applicants about race or ethnicity information. But they are expanding recruitment and financial aid to prioritize low income students.
Holy shit, this is what I’ve wanted forever, finally!
Focusing on low income families. That by itself would have a positive impact on minorities since they happen to be over represented in the poor families category.
Imo this way poor conservatives don’t feel excluded and work against these initiatives. Same destination, different paths to get there.
Except in reality this change caused diversity to go down. Like actual real numbers, not theory.
Would like to see the data for that if you have it.
There could be other factors but a lot of people like me just don’t want minorities to be held back because of poverty. People can have cultural reasons why they might not go towards education (or go more so than other cultures). Personally, I don’t think it’s up to society to change something like that.
Yeah that jumped at me as well.
The whole process is about accepting the most qualified, leaving people out who are qualified but didn’t meet the limit is kind of the whole thing.
Obviously they aren't since it was a SCOTUS decision that forced them to change their admissions.
FYI, places that already had affirmative action bans have partially got around this by at least pulling a percentage out of disadvantaged high schools (the kind with only one or two AP courses) since segregation still exists and it increases diversity. It's not quite as direct, though, even if it is easier to justify.
Another FYI on the history of affirmative action; the original argument that won over the court wasn't a social justice argument. It was a "diversity benefits everyone" argument --- in other words, white kids benefit from exposure to black and brown folks. Which is in fact true, but kind of a fuckery rational to begin with and one that doesn't seem to be winning over white folk the way it used to.
(Sorry for the fyis, just have to as the resident Education PhD on Lemmy)
As a white college graduate I can definitely confirm that I benefitted from black classmates as well as classmates of every other race. But also Jesus fuck that shouldn’t be the main reason why disadvantaged people of color get to get an education.
I’ll also add that a poverty quota in general is a good thing for colleges. I learned a lot from my impoverished white classmates as well.
There's generally an effort to get first generation college students, which is a better way to ultimately say poverty quota. It's a little easier to lie about, but it's what most schools like to brag about. There's also a lot more need based scholarships than there used to be, so that helps.
What changed in their admissions procedures as a result of the court ruling? Is it as simple as just not asking race on the application so they couldn't hold spots open to fill racial quotas? Or is it more complex than that?
They had a way of weighting a person's background as a part of their application. So imagine 2 students: -4.0 through high school, AP classes, a bunch of extra curriculars, great test scores -3.8 through high school, one AP class, no extra curriculars (because of family responsibilities), great test scores.
If the second student is a black student coming from a disadvantaged community, they legally can't consider that in their admission process.
Good, should be based on rec letters, or parental income, or if they do not have access to that, zip code.
The metric shouldn’t be black. It should be economic, which usually impacts black americans the most. An Asian kid whos parents make 40k will struggle more than the black kid with 300k.
I agree that income matters more than race. Obviously. But they cut out considering race, and then less black people made it through the admission process. You can't say that you are a big fan of the process AND you wish there were different outcomes.
Black people experience racism that has disadvantaged them, and it seems silly to think that we shouldn't acknowledge that in processes that could give them a leg up.
The fact that black people are being disproportionately affected by this change means they were disproportionately represented before. You should not have a system that accounts for race at all. If two candidates are completely the same, gpa, extra curriculars, aps, etc. it shouldn’t be race just economics.
If you haven’t seen this, go check it out. While not directly addressing it, you can see how even ending up with the “same gpa, extra curricular, aps, etc.” can take absolutely different levels of challenges to overcome.
https://digitalsynopsis.com/inspiration/privileged-kids-on-a-plate-pencilsword-toby-morris/
So the question then becomes, why are there less black candidates that can get in when race blind? Are black people just dumber? Or has the system they grew up in acted on them in a way that disadvantaged them? Because if we agree with the former, we are racists, and if we agree on the latter, well then it's unfair to them because the system actively worked against them.
More than 40% of the US population identifies as a race other than white, according to 2023 census data.
White students make up 37% of the new class, compared with 38% last year, while the percentage of Asian American students rose to 47% from 40%.
Seems like with or without affirmative action, white students are underrepresented at MIT. 60% of the population (minus those who didn't report?) vs 37-38% at the school. Or could there be a discrepancy about how white as a race vs Hispanic as an ethnicity is reported in the two different stats?
Anyway, white supremacy seems to have little to do with the issue. It's the Asian American proportion that went up and the black, Hispanic, and Pacific Islander proportions that went down.
::: spoiler BBC News - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report) Information for BBC News:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this source
:::
::: spoiler Search topics on Ground.News https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rxvd2z6ldo ::: Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
After reading about materialism and Marx, I know more about how the world works than I ever learned at university.
Meh. Brilliant poor kids of all races exist. Where is the help for them? Dumb rich black kids exist. Affirmative action has no place in a society that wants to get past racism.
enslaves an entire race for centuries and then racially segregates them for another, stripping them of generational wealth, education opportunities, equal treatment under the law due to prejudice, and otherwise on average putting them far behind their white counterparts through zero fault of their own
"Teehee we gave you equal rights (kind of sort of) so now it's egalitarian and paying you back would be unfair to everyone else. You have to run the same-length track as everyone else, and don't go asking for special treatment just because we shot you in the leg before the race."
What's wild to me is that legal segregation was like, not that long ago at all. It always feels like it's taught as ancient history but it was only half a lifetime ago, really... and still ongoing. It's not like this happened a thousand years ago and "you should really be over it by now", this was the experience of some people's still living grandparents and parents.
The idea that an entire demographic of people should magically recover and be equals again after like 30 years of half-assed "equality" after literal generations of slavery is fucking wild.
Absolute goblin energy to not recognize the ongoing effects of such a recent thing.
I'm pretty young and my mom has told me stories about when the token black kid was bussed into her Oklahoma school because of legal requirements. She's not even retired yet. Passing a law doesn't magically fix things overnight. It takes time AND community effort to enact social changes
I'm in my late 30s, and my older brother went to a different elementary school than I did because of the city's integration program. I went to the school up the street in our neighborhood; he was bussed to the inner city.
We're not nearly as far from the effects of racism as the racists want us to believe.
Sorry brother, not my problem. I was born well after those events occurred and so did these people.
Solving the problem of having an advantage based on race is not going to be solved by giving "the right" people an advantage based on race.
Economic factors should be the most weighted if any advantage is needed to be given.
And what if the white people have all the money and all the best schools? How do you want to get past racism then?
We can only build an egalitarian society on the ashes of the old.
Equity is a necessary evil only so long as we keep the current underlying power structures of capitalism.
And what if the white people have all the money and all the best schools?
Certain german guy said the same, except he used "jews" instead of "white people".
Stop thinking like him.
And today's Godwin Award goes to "affirmative action is like what the man who oversaw the Holocaust said".
Guessing you believe Bush was racist against white people when he said the top 10% of students should get into public universities in Texas because those who go to worse schools arent as challenged as those who go to more privileged schools. A more "holistic" approach, that ignores all challenges placed infront of people, and boosts white admissions because they had more privilege is needed.
Bunch of fucking malarkey. Systemic racism exists, choosing to ignore it is in fact racist. Living in poorer neighborhoods, being poor in itself, and having worse schools create and are obstacles that those students have to overcome. Choosing to pick other students over them because they could afford to be in after school programs and be in groups of prestige while having a lower GPA only allows disparities to thrive.
You seem to misunderstand.
Prejudice exists throughout all people and cultures.
White Supremacy is a focused method of prejudice.
Racism is a tool of white supremacy.
Racism towards Jews, PoC, indigenous, etc. has created societal disparities.
White people are not victims of those societal disparities, and cannot be a target of racism, because again, racism is a specific tool of white supremacy.
You're thinking of prejudice, which will never go away.
But racism can go away.
Oh please stfu. White people like you have a fetish of being oppressed. You're not and you never will be.
That’s a strawman as all the kids who are accepted into mit are smart. We shouldn’t be colour blind when it comes to resolving inequalities while past and current racism is still largely affecting the United States.
If you want to fix the percentage of minorities being underrepresented in post secondary education affirmative action is the quickest way to do it even if we’re assuming “racism ended years ago” as the trauma and lack of generational wealth would still linger.
Racially agnostic support for exceptional achievers still exists, it's not an either-or proposition.
I think you could argue that affirmative action has no place in a society that has overcome the systemic issues caused by generation of racism. But that isn't the society in which we live. I hope to live in a world where one could abolish it and everyone can agree that the time has come. It isn't now.
America is not a meritocracy. It is big racist misogynist shithole with misogynist racists usually in charge of selection processes. "But we have legal protections against that!" you cry. Yeah, as long as you can prove it. If they don't say something or leave a paper trail, you can't prove shit. The system is still absolutely rigged against minorities and women and set up in a way that protections against any form of bigotry are so fucking vague as to be virtually unenforceable in all cases except the most extreme. Affirmative action is one of the ways to combat that. It, too, is not a perfect answer, but it is better than letting the bigots win. Indeed, the end game of Affirmative Action is to get enough women and minorities lifted up that the US can actually become a real meritocracy.
You mean like in the sense of free college education for all, or more in the sense of like close our eyes and pretend generational wealth isn't the largest factor to success?
And also just fucking racism. We don't need to pretend it's just economics. Studies have shown people with black names get selected for interviews less frequently.
Yep, when I was poor and smart, even though I was an immigrant, there were no scholarships for me. All the scholarships were for aspects you can’t change about yourself.
Have never supported affirmative action after that, it never seemed fair to me.
I’m sure others would think it’s fair, but the issue is, I’m the one who it affected negatively, and I think it’s unfair. I wish my opinion mattered.
So what I'm hearing here is that the federal government should be giving affirmative action to the Appalachia region because we allowed them to get fucked over by the coal industry. And of course that its state governments should be voted out in favor of policymakers who will be willing to help the common folk there achieve that equity.
Sounds good to me; glad we're on the same page.
•
Personally I’m tempted to say those people in the Appalachian region should have their states disbanded and placed into receivership so someone competent can start getting them fixed. Then again, I’m not fascist
Maybe because those people in need aren't getting free race based rides to college with no regards to merit.