I don't know much about the details of how AA affects whites and Asians differently, but what I've read is that after the UC system removed their AA, Asian enrollment at Berkeley skyrocketed, white enrollment changed a bit, and black enrollment dropped substantially. However, the race distribution for the UC system as a whole didn't change much.
I worry about its effectiveness, too, and even moreso about the resentment it creates. (You can dismiss the the resentment as simple racism if you want, but it's at least a two-way causation -- some of the resentment is indeed just a manifestation of preexisting racism, but some of the racism is undoubtedly a manifestation of resentment. And I don't like programs that create more racism is our society.)
But mostly, (watch as any liberal credentials I have are shredded and tossed like confetti in a single sentence) I believe affirmative action programs as currently constituted are unjust because in modern American class is a bigger division/obstacle than race. Meaning: in the absence of affirmative action, I think poor whites will generally have a tougher time getting equal opportunities than will middle-class blacks, so having social programs that help middle-class blacks at the expense of poor whites is really adding insult to injury.
But of course intent matters, and there a moral difference between programs designed to help minorities and programs designed to hurt them. Does anyone really argue otherwise? (I haven't ventured over to Hilzoy's.)
in the absence of affirmative action, I think poor whites will generally have a tougher time getting equal opportunities than will middle-class blacks, so having social programs that help middle-class blacks at the expense of poor whites is really adding insult to injury.
I think this is false as a matter of fact. My husband grew up poor, and half-killed himself putting himself through college. That sucked, but it's over, and has hardly affected him since college, because people don't know what his class of origin was. If you're black, on the other hand, you're vulnerable to racism your whole life.
Poor is lousy, but it's different.
I'm a little bit sympathetic to Brock's arguments, but by and large it's rich whites giving poor whites the shaft--through legacy admits and the weight schools put on the ability to pay full tuition (not insubstantial I've heard, like, fourth hand)--and not affirmative action. So if the system's already all screwed up, why not screw it up a little more, for justice?
it's not clear to me how effective affirmative action programs generally are.
Wildly successful. Look around, or even just at the TV and in the newspapers, and wonder how many African-Americans, Hispanics, and women are there, in part, because someone made an effort. As successful as everyone hoped: no, and maybe the program needs to be adjusted. But well-credentialed and successful African-Americans, Republican and Democrat, credit affirmative action for being an important part of their success.
eaning: in the absence of affirmative action, I think poor whites will generally have a tougher time getting equal opportunities than will middle-class blacks, so having social programs that help middle-class blacks at the expense of poor whites is really adding insult to injury.
Insofar as there was a much linked report suggesting that white candidates with a criminal record got more employment callbacks than same-resumed black candidates without a criminal record, I doubt it.
That sucked, but it's over, and has hardly affected him since college
He's very lucky then, because as we said yesterday wrt to food choices, class origin tells your whole life in myriad ways.
Your point about blacks being vulnerable to racism always is a good one though, and "driving-while-black" is just the tip of the iceberg.
5: That's right, and I do know it, I just worry about having data to point to. And the study you mention is linked at ObWi.
3- well, it's obviously a question of fact, and of course class can be disguised and overcome in ways that race can't. And it also perhaps depends on where one is, geographically. But overall, I do think that class is a greater obstacle than race in our society. Compare the aggregate experience of our relatively wealthy asian-americans to our relatively poor african-americans. Or even the experiences of relatively wealthy african-americans to our relatively poor african-americans. (And the fact that so many blacks face have to try and overcome both racism and poverty sucks extra much, to be sure. The question is which chain is heavier?)
The argument from resentment has never seemed meaningful to me: it's not as if racial resentment didn't exist in very nasty forms before AA, and someone who (for instance) resents ni -- umm, African-Americans for being prosperous will even more readily resent them for being poor. The only difference is that without Affirmative Action, the prosperous minority is smaller and the community has fewer tools with which to fight back against the resentment.
The issue of class would seem a reason to question how affirmative action programs are structured and implemented over time, but doesn't seem a reason to object to them on principle. Presumably AA most recommends itself in situations where class and ethnicity and/or gender closely correspond -- that's why it comes about in the first place.
4- I thought most all schools these days had aid-blind admissions? Is that incorrect?
where class and ethnicity and/or gender closely correspond
Or rather, I should say, where economic advantage and ethnicity and/or gender closely correspond. That's a little different from "class" but does include it.
an argument that can be caricatured as "By god, racial discrimination is racial discrimination, and there's no moral difference between considering race as a factor in hiring the first black lawyer in a firm and considering race to make sure that the first black lawyer never gets hired." And this is pretty much nonsense -- the moral difference is perfectly clear.
Well sure, but I'm not sure you're comparing apples to apples. Taking race into account to ensure no minority gets hired at a firm is certainly worse than taking it into account to ensure the first minority gets hired, but the former involves multiple instances of discrimination (pretty much forever) and the lattter only one.
I think a more apt short version of the argument against would be "there's no moral difference between considering race as a factor in choosing to hire a black lawyer and considering race as a factor in choosing to hire a white lawyer."
Compare the aggregate experience of our relatively wealthy asian-americans to our relatively poor african-americans.
I'd attribute this difference not to wealth differences between the groups, but to differences in the amount and type of racism directed at each.
Or even the experiences of relatively wealthy african-americans to our relatively poor african-americans.
Here, I think even relatively wealthy (by which I mean not exorbitantly wealthy) blacks have life experiences shaped by racism.
What I'm getting stuck on here is that I have a hard time seeing affirmative action as the best response to poverty. Wouldn't you think that redistributive social programs made more sense? I don't want people treated fairly despite being poor so much as I want people treated fairly because no one is particularly poor.
9- well, sure, that's how most people dismiss it. Maybe it's right, but I don't think so. As I said, I strongly suspect -- having grown up around a lot of racists -- that the causastion to some extent runs both ways.
I've nothing but personal experiences and observations to support any of this.
10: I think no longer -- that more schools are not aid blind these days. But I'm not sure.
Wouldn't you think that redistributive social programs made more sense? I don't want people treated fairly despite being poor so much as I want people treated fairly because no one is particularly poor.
Um, okay sure... doing away with poverty would be preferable to just doing things to ameliorate its effects.
10: With a wikilicious grain of salt: link
2: To add to LB's very good point, I'd add that these two goals aren't mutually exclusive. A university could count an impoverished background as a diversity 'point' without taking away points for being a minority. So it means fewer underqualified legacies get in.
My worry with AA is that it's too little, too late. Some students just need the extra boost, but some are coming from bad districts and are underprepared. How likely are they to succeed once at college? How likely is it that a university will help them succeed? How many resources should the universities allocate to getting disadvantaged students up to speed?
This doesn't entail that AA should go, but just that it's better than nothing.
14: The thing is, if you do the math, there's very little chance that a white guy was actually injured by affirmative action (race based, anyway. Gender, there might be a bigger chance). So it's hard to interpret affirmative-action-based resentment of blacks (note: not opposition to affirmative action, which could certainly be respectably motivated) as anything other than a symptom of pre-existing racism.
And the resentment argument bothers me. I don't have a substantial argument against it. I know resentment is created. But it always to me seems to be created in complete tools of human beings. It's always the white kid complaining that his 3.5 wasn't good enough because gasp, horror, some poor black girl got a 3.45 and TOOK HIS SCHOLARSHIP GODDAMN YOU AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, and all I can think is first off, it isn't your scholarship, honky, and second, if you have all this talent we should be recognizing with scholarhips and all those advantages you couldn't have pulled a 3.6 and made the question of who to give the aid to moot?
I've recommended it here on Unfogged before, but I'd like to again recommend this book on the issue, it really frames it in an important and useful way:
Here are a couple of decent quick summaries of the author's arguments, to give you a flavor:
Lawyers, Guns and Money's Review
19 - completely true. I think there's probably got to be preexisting racism. What I mean is that resentment over these sorts of things (which the individual need not necessarily be affected by, but only needs to fear they might be affected by) can do a lot to reinforce and cement that racism, and close off individuals who otherwise might have been more open to moving past it. It gives a non-totally-imaginary rationale on which the racism can be hung.
20- look, I'm not in any way trying to say the resentment is justified. Just that it exists. And more racial resentment is not the sort of thing we need to be creating. If I believed AA was the only way to achieve some really important goals, I might say it's worth it. But I'm not sure AA is the best way to get where we want to go. That's my point.
What I mean is that I think class- instead of race-based AA would both do more social good and less social bad.
I strongly suspect -- having grown up around a lot of racists -- that the causastion to some extent runs both ways.
Oh, I don't rule out the possibility that some people's racial resentments may be affirmative-action based. I just think those people don't come close to outweighing the kind of racial resentment that preceded AA, and therefore fear of resentment isn't very useful in evaluating it. Affirmative action hasn't magically brought the races together or anything, but it's hard to argue that it has worsened race relations (and fairly easy to argue that it has improved them).
Of course affirmative action isn't a substitute for an actual social safety net, and I don't know that it was intended to be. But it's not as though you have an either/or choice between affirmative action and effective social programs.
2: Also, to piggyback. Remember we're not just talking elite colleges. I could say that maybe, maybe, if you're black, middle-class, and Harvard-bound, you've got enough of the class markers that you might be better off and better prepared the poor rural kid who feels like a hick and has to play catch-up socially. And you'll be moving in more enlightened circles, hopefully.
But most affirmative action cases aren't about getting into Harvard and Yale, are they? State schools still have it, and I'm not sure that a degree from a good state school would erase the resume problem that SCMTim mentioned.
What I mean is that resentment over these sorts of things (which the individual need not necessarily be affected by, but only needs to fear they might be affected by) can do a lot to reinforce and cement that racism, and close off individuals who otherwise might have been more open to moving past it.
As between (a)living in a world in which African-Americans do better, and more closely approximate the lives of society as a whole, but have to deal with retrenched racism, and (b) living in a world in which African-Americans deal with less racism, because nobody worries about someone permanently beneath them on the ladder, I think most African-Americans would choose the former. Can't say as I blame them.
I do think class is probably, ultimately, as big an issue (maybe in the long run, maybe in aggregate, maybe bigger--caveat, caveat) than race. But that's potentially a much easier problem to ameliorate: give poor people more cash. I'd fully support efforts to make sizeable amounts of capital available to people down the economic chain, on extra-favorable terms. But part of the problem is that in a capitalist society, capital is always going to matter--it's a moving target.
19: That's a good point, though since it's African Americans who tend to benefit most from AA, the thought process would go in most people "He got the job/university admission instead of me because he's black" followed by resentment, rather than "He got the job/university admission instead of an Asian American" followed by (presumably) less or no resentment.
20: I would agree with you, but from what I recall reading about some of the statistics that came out from AA programs (those related to university or other school admissions, I think) is that we're not talking about the difference between 3.45 and 3.5, but, as you say, 3.45 and 3.6 (or more likely 3.45 and 3.9). What particularly sticks out in my mind was a comparison done of the scores on some standardized test for admission to something or other* where the average score by admitted white candidates (or perhaps Asian, or both) was higher than the highest score acheived by any admitted African American candidate. This has since influenced my view (probably incorrectly) on the topic ever since.
*Yes I know, very specific.
26: I'd say most African-Americans assume that scenario b) isn't on the menu, because people do worry about others who are permanently beneath them on the ladder. That's the history of the vast majority of white American anxiety about Blacks to begin with.
27: My sense of it is different. I cannot remember where I read it, but I remember reading that AA's help was worth about 100 SAT points. Sounds like a lot, but it's comparable to what legacies get and less than a star athlete does.
I am generally pro-affirmative-action for blacks due to the whole slavery thing.
Here is a nyt story about admissions at Berkley after affirmative action was dismantled:
It is possible to do affirmative action by setting a population based percentage for blacks and then have the remainder selected on merit. This doesn't seem to happen in practice.
For an empirical look at the question of effectiveness, I'd suggest The Shape of the River, by Bill Bowen and Derek Bok (former presidents of Princeton and Harvard), which looks at AA outcomes at a couple dozen elite universities, using a couple decades' worth of data. (Short answer: it's been tremendously effective in this particular context.)
What I mean is that I think class- instead of race-based AA would both do more social good and less social bad.
The extent to which people think this demonstrates the extent to which we still, as a society, see race as meaningful, and people of color (as a class) as somehow less deserving than "regular" people. Honestly. We have AA programs for (white) women; for military veterans; for disabled folks; and yes, for first-generation college students at a lot of places. And yet no one feels uncomfortable about any of those. Hell, most people don't really feel uncomfortable about legacy admissions except as a rhetorical ploy to defend AA.
But think about it. it was *one* generation ago that blacks couldn't *get into most colleges* at all.
31: Bowen, of course, famous also for saying that athletic scholarships undermine elite schools' educational missions.
Hell, most people don't really feel uncomfortable about legacy admissions except as a rhetorical ploy to defend AA.
Oh, they deeply, deeply piss me off. But I suspect I'm in a minority.
"Hell, most people don't really feel uncomfortable about legacy admissions except as a rhetorical ploy to defend AA."
Oh, I very much do. But I think I agree with B's overall point.
Class is deaper than money. I grew up in a family that's relatively "poor" in relation to my peers (family of 6, $30,000ish (and much less when I was little)), but my parents both went to college, we always had enough, and I had a great education. I went to summer programs in highschool (on scholarships) where I learned that people like me go to Harvard or MIT. There are plenty of people who make similar amounts of money but are in a very different class than I am. Take a family making $15,000, give them enough to make $100,000 and they would still face more barriers than I did.
36 gets it exactly right. I wouldn't want to say 'culture', exactly, but expectations and plans aren't always tied to income.
A family that makes $60,000 a year but whose attitude toward school is that you're only doing it till you can get a job will probably turn out less scholars than a family making $30,000 who worships education.
I've literally never talked to anyone who defends legacy admissions.
Nobody goes after them too hard, either.
38: Okay, here you go. For an elite university that wants to maintain its material standard of existence, there could hardly be a more necessary evil.
27
>what I recall reading about some of the statistics that came out from AA programs (those related to university or other school admissions, I think) is that we're not talking about the difference between 3.45 and 3.5, but, as you say, 3.45 and 3.6 (or more likely 3.45 and 3.9).
Since there about nine times more non-blacks than blacks in the US, affirmative action can significantly reduce the entry requirements for blacks without significantly raising the requirements for non-blacks. A lot of people who think they would get some advantage but for affirmative action are kidding themselves.
In Indonesia, affirmative action programs give natives of Malay origin preference over the Indonesian Chinese in the country. Since there are more Malay than Indonesian Chinese in Indonesia, affirmative action in Indonesia has the effect of significantly raising the entry requirements for Indonesian Chinese without helping out Malays very much.
The defense of legacy admissions is pragmatic, not principled. It's alumni donations. Not that this is a good justification.
I think the relative invisibility of class is part of what makes it a better criterion for AA. It's a lot easier for bigots to look down on successful blacks because "he/she probably just got that job/degree by affirmative action, not because he/she's qualified" than it would be with a class based system, because class isn't so visible.
And of course class is more than money. But that's the easiest thing to measure, and is pretty strongly correlated overall.
I couldn't say that legacy admissions deeply piss me off, but I do think they're pretty stupid.
Of course, I was probably a beneficiary of a legacy policy.
40: right, legacies provide a strategic advantage for fundraising. The only way to eliminate them properly would be across the board, not school by school. You could do that with public universities, but not with private.
In my opinion they're horrible in a number of ways, not just with regard to unfairness in admissions.
since it's African Americans who tend to benefit most from AA
I know this was said above, but it bears repeating: By far -- by far -- the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action over the last 40 years have been white women. There are many, many scholarly works exploring this theme, and a half-dozen of them are among my (packed) books, otherwise I'd be citing chapter and verse, or at least author and title.
I'm harping on this because I think it's valuable to note how noticeable AA for race/ethnicity is, and how (often) it is not noticed when applied to white women. Also, that in some areas you can even argue that AA has lived up to its ideal of being temporary -- nobody today sees a need for AA for women in med-school admissions, right?*
*Yes, yes, still a lack of women surgeons, I agree, blah blah.
My lord, how much my male collegues on the academic job market are aware of AA for women.
Also, with regard to legacy admissions: Yes, alumni donations, but in my experience it's also often one of those rules-for-others, not-for-my-kid situations. It's much easier to be against legacy admissions in principle than it is to leave your grandfather's name (or whatever) off your own/your kid's college application.
The problem with affirmative action in college admissions for Asians is that colleges are putting unofficial limits on how many Asians they will admit. They used to do the same thing with Jews a generation or two ago.
48: Also -- and the recent NYT article touched on this only briefly -- the umbrella term "Asian" encompasses a very wide range of people.
Consider the difference between a fourth-generation Japanese-American with Ph.D-holding parents, and a second-generation Cambodian-American whose parents came here as refugees and have barely adapted from an agrarian lifestyle, much less gained the social capital to help their child navigate FAFSA.
47: totally, I'd try to work it for my kids. but this argument is like asking opponents of tax cuts why they don't, personally, pay extra taxes. and hopefully my kids would have better moral judgment than to attend the institutions I attended.
Who would want the money of a person who made its offering conditional on the acceptance of his or her offspring? I would be far too high-minded to take such lucre. (Vespasian would surely disagree.)
The defense of legacy admissions is pragmatic, not principled.
No denying that. Still deeply stupid, even though they create the Super-Tool who is fun to mock: the beneficiary of lowered legacy standards who decries AA because it lets in people who only meet... lower standards.
Yes, yes, still a lack of women surgeons, I agree, blah blah.
This is going to be a tough nut to crack. My cousin's a med student. Sharp. Not even considering surgery as a specialty. Wants to have kids. Doesn't want to start having kids when she's 35. It sucks, because women are only going to be drawn to be surgeons when it doesn't wholly fuck up their lives (I mean, more than medicine already does), but it's going to be hard to change that without more women becoming surgeons, and it's really impossible to ask a 23-year-old to compromise on the way she wants her life to be when she's going to have a pretty good deal being a pediatrician.
Depends how much money and how objectionable the child, I imagine.
Cala's cousin's kids may be objectionable, but that's no reason to choose the money of a surgeon over the possibility of giving birth to them.
50 - you must not think them to be *all that* unjust, then. A minor concern. An inflammatory analogy: If slavery were legal, presumably you wouldn't buy your kids some slaves, just to try and "work it" for them.
In one of his books, Alan Dershowitz had a great anecdote about bias in admissions at Harvard. Apparently at one point, Harvard would admit inner-city kids (who tended to be non-Jews) and rural kids (who tended to be non-Jews), while passing over kids in the suburbs around city centers (who tended to be Jews).
The head admissions area at the time mendaciously claimed this pattern was the result of an attempt to ensure geographic diversity, by making sure Harvard didn't admit too many kids from the "donut" areas around major cities. To which Dersh replied, "Those aren't donuts! They're bagels!"
55: Ah, there's that social capital rearing it's head. The first rule of Money and Power is never let a personal principle stand in the way of personal advantage. Cf. the Draft Dodger in Chief, Magic Baby Cheney, and the Fighting Keyboarders. I like government requirements (in certain cases) because I don't trust people's willingness to choose virtue over advantage. That doesn't mean I think most people are bad people; it just means I think they're people.
See, even those who object to legacy admits on principle admit their practical usefulness. But even those of us who support AA on principle fail to make much of a case for its practicality, which is dumb of us. The Shape of the River makes it clear that students from traditionally disadvantaged groups--even students who themselves were not poor--are *far* more likely to serve those same groups after graduation, e.g. by becoming inner city doctors or teaching on reservations, which obviously helps all of us as a society. It also really helps the kids who *don't* benefit from AA to meet and befriend people who are different. Why people don't think this is more important is completely beyond me.
The problem with affirmative action in college admissions for Asians is that colleges are putting unofficial limits on how many Asians they will admit.
I'm wondering what makes this affirmative action. It might be an attempt to create a 'balanced' class, but limiting Asian admissions isn't redressing historical or current racism in any way I can figure out.
See, even those who object to legacy admits on principle admit their practical usefulness.
I'm not sure what this proves. That we recognize that donating millions of dollars to a library or a laboratory can benefit the university? I can pretend the money isn't useful so as not to betray my principles, but well, no.
You're absolutely right on the practicalities of AA, though.
55: Well, when slavery *was* legal, an awful lot of people bought their children slaves. I don't see any reason to think that those people were substantially worse than we are.
It also really helps the kids who *don't* benefit from AA to meet and befriend people who are different. Why people don't think this is more important is completely beyond me.
Agree with this entirely. Also, it really helps to be able to point to Powell and Obama and Rice and Ford and so on and say, "See, we're not fucking you over that badly." Whatever the truth of the matter.
60: What I meant is that we still feel that fairness to black people is somehow unfair to whites, as much as we want not to. We can easily see the practical reasons for giving advantages to people who already have them; evening the playing field always gets treated as if it's some mark of sainthood and sacrifice, though. Status discrepancy, basically.
61- yeah, an awful lot of people did. An awful lot of other people were abolitionists. I like to think there was a moral difference between the two.
That Dershowitz thing may be a bit urbanlegendary; the exchange appears in the film A Small Circle of Friends, made in 1980, which is about events at (indeed) Harvard in the 60s. That is, maybe he wasn't the one who said it. Or for matter I could drag out the commentary track and see if it is. But I won't.
Here's another half-hearted attempt at a defense of legacies: at the highest snobbish levels, such as Harvard itself, part of the appeal and the value of going there is the x% of the student body that is super-rich and/or is from very old money. That's the difference between going to Harvard to become an engineer and going to MIT. Or, as I've seen it put, "The purpose of the Ivy League is for the smart young people to meet the rich young people."
64: Some of it was moral difference, but a lot of it was a question of situation. If you're born in the north and/or your family doesn't own slaves, you're way more likely to be an abolitionist. If you're born in the south to slaveowners, probably not so much.
It also really helps the kids who *don't* benefit from AA to meet and befriend people who are different. Why people don't think this is more important is completely beyond me.
I do think this is important, I just don't think it works via AA. I support AA, but only for social justice reasons. The diversity reasons don't pan out for me. I don't see that AA actually works to promote social integration -- I went to a big state school with AA, and for the most part, I saw people self-segregating into their own racial cliques. The well-meaning white liberal guy's complaint -- "I'd like to be friends with black people, but they won't be friends with me" -- was so common it was a joke. Also, I think that the diversity rationale can, and does, easily slide into a rationale for socially engineering an environment with the "right" racial mix, which can actually work against the more important (to me) objective of social justice. Case in point -- Ivy League schools trying to cap the numbers of Jews (in the past) or Asians (now) because they don't want their student body to have the wrong mix. Nevermind that those Jews or Asians may have come from financially disadvantaged backgrounds and suffered plenty of racial discrimination of their own.
66- obviously. But I'm talking about text, here and now. Whose admission that he'd try and get his kids legacy admitted means he either doesn't think its' all *that* unjust (akin to the southerner), or is a bad person (akin to a northern abolitionist who bought his kids slaves anyway). I wasn't even considering the latter a possibility, even though text and I are enemies, so I assumed he didn't think legacy admissions were terribly unjust. Which was all I said in 55.
67: Well, anecdotally, mainstreaming kids with developmental disabilities seems to have made PK amazingly complacent about same. He's not especially friends with the Asperger's kid in his class, but we ran into him at the grocery store, PK said hi, the kid said nothing, and when I said to PK, maybe he didn't hear you? He just shrugged and said, oh, he's just like that sometimes. To me, that's progress over the way those kids were treated when *I* was at school, as if they were invisible.
And I have seen kids from poor backgrounds become friends with kids from advantaged backgrounds. I did it myself. Sometimes they're both brown, and sometimes not. Admittedly it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, and it really ought to start in elementary school when it's easier. But it's a damn good thing anyway. Hell, even if middle-class white kids get to just learn that black fraternities exist and that Jews aren't the only people who don't celebrate Christmas, that's a good thing.
Also, I think that the diversity rationale can, and does, easily slide into a rationale for socially engineering an environment with the "right" racial mix, which can actually work against the more important (to me) objective of social justice.
That's not always nonsense, though. I've talked about Sally's school -- the Spanish/English dual language immersion program. Admissions are by lottery, but there are two separate lotteries -- one for Anglophone kids, and one for Hispanophone kids, so that the classes are 50-50. It's not a simple white/Latino split, because a bunch of the Anglophone kids are Latinos who've been in the US for a couple of generations, but as an Anglophone, Sally had much better odds of getting into what is a very good program.
On some level, this seems unjust -- it's a good program, and why should the little blonde lawyer's kid have a better shot of getting in than someone just here from the DR who needs a good school. But the program doesn't work unless enough of the kids are fluent native English speakers -- if 90% of the spots in the program went to Spanish dominant children of immigrants, the program wouldn't exist in it's current form, and the kids who got in wouldn't benefit in the same way.
I'm certainly not saying its always like that, but it is sometimes.
Also, I think that the diversity rationale can, and does, easily slide into a rationale for socially engineering an environment with the "right" racial mix, which can actually work against the more important (to me) objective of social justice....Nevermind that those Jews or Asians may have come from financially disadvantaged backgrounds and suffered plenty of racial discrimination of their own.
This is sort of interesting to me. I think that something like "specific social justice" is the standard justification for AA, but I don't care about the specific instantiation at all. I just want discrete minority groups to have enough people in elite positions to do deals and take care of their own. I figure they'll have a better idea of what needs to be done, and what "social justice" is appropriate than I do. This makes class a tough one for me. A rich black guy is still black; a rich poor guy is not so much poor anymore.
70: Does that program consider what it does to be affirmative action? That seems more like a straightforward attempt to create a specific linguistic balance, which was not the theory behind AA.
It's not affirmative action. But in some ways it serves a similar purpose to diversity-driven AA.
To my own 65: according to the commentary, the "bagel" response was from Michael Walzer. And yet Googling get no relevant hits. Nor on Dershowitz with any relevant baked goods.
75 is the kind of thing that puts me in a tizzy. As if recruiting blacks and Latinos were the reason Jews couldn't get in, rather than the overwhelming dominance of WASPS.
Honestly. We have AA programs for (white) women; for military veterans; for disabled folks; and yes, for first-generation college students at a lot of places.
I'd think the military veteran thing is a bit different from the others. It's rewarding people who voluntarily sign up for a job defending the country. A job that might get them killed.
Well, for a long time it was rewarding people who hadn't voluntarily signed up for the job, but were drafted, and who as draftees were uniformly male. There's a fair argument that it was a deserved reward nonetheless, but not on the basis of volunteerism until recent decades.
77: I don't have a problem with AA for military vets at all. Nor do I have a problem with AA for the descendants of people whose unpaid or pittance labor built a lot of the country's wealth.
Three sources! Maybe nobody said it at the time, and it's an instance of espirit d'escalier. (Even Glazer's TNR piece from the link in 75 leaves open the possibility that it was not a direct at-the-moment response.) We should check into Churchill, Orwell, and Mark Twain. Maybe they were there too. And Lincoln.
Incidentally, in the context of the film I mentioned, the suggestion was that part of the motivation was that suburban Jews were big anti-war protest organizers and that this would reduce campus tensions. Separating the kind of antisemitism that just doesn't want too many Jews from the kind that blames them for campus riots may not be worth the analysis.
Nor do I have a problem with AA for the descendants of people whose unpaid or pittance labor built a lot of the country's wealth.
Bah to the descendants thing. Plenty of Irish and Cornish who worked mines and railroads got shit on as well. So did a lot of East Asians.
legacy admissions: not as unjust as slavery, more unjust than skipping out on university parking tickets (which I've done). I'd still try to help my kids. Call me a bad person.
Lizardbreath, what is your defintion of effectiveness? I don't much care for affirmative action but it seems to me to be reasonably effective on its own terms, ie that it is more important to have a diverse mix than the most qualified candidates.
Do those of you objecting to legacy admissions object to similar favoritism in union apprentice programs? Such policies exist to promote feelings of community and solidarity which both universities and unions find useful.
81: True. However, none of those other groups were *also* subject to over a century's worth of laws that explicitly made them second-class citizens and continued their peon state, nor were they explicitly and deliberately left out of mid-century programs designed to promote home ownership and the accumulation of wealth by the middle class.
Still "bah"?
Seeing as I know as much about union apprentice programs as you have just told me, I'm afraid that I can't say.
Do those of you favoring union apprentice programs favor Venutian Snodnobbers Leagues?
83: My own definition of effectiveness would be any education that managed to get it through people's skulls that brown people are not automatically less qualified than white people. Obviously whatever school you went to, James, needs to overhaul its admission program, so as to admit people who are more qualified to understand this simple concept.
To be fair, I probably know more about union apprentice programs than you know about Venutian Snodnobbers Leagues. Still, I think there are enough differences between unions and universities that we can favor one program and disfavor the other without our minds exploding.
Still bah. Plenty of laws like that targeted Asians, Jews, and Irish.
I'm not saying there's not a problem with certain ethnicities being disproportionately poor and undereducated. I just don't think AA is a very effective way to go about solving this. I also think we've reached a point that we have enough people of all backgrounds in the middle class that targeting socioeconomic status rather than race will yield better results. And seeing as certain ethnicities are disproportionately poor, policies that target socioeconomic status will disproportionately benefit them anyways.
87 If statistically brown people are just as qualified there is no need for affirmative action just admit on the basis of merit and you will get sufficient brown people.
"Statistically Brown" is an ok band name.
85: Um, Chinese Exclusion Act? Internment camps? Not exactly the same, sure, but still.
85: There were plenty of discriminatory laws targeted towards Asians that deprived them of citizenship, home ownership, family and wealth.
87 90 In fact the existence of affirmative action programs reinforces the belief that brown people are less qualified as otherwise there would be no need for such programs.
I think 81 and 85 are talking past each other. Certainly historical inequities matter, but only insofar as their effects persist today. Black folks are still at a significant disadvantage due to past wrongs. The Cornish? Not so much.
89: I see what you mean, but there are some serious problems with AA by socioeconomic class. The most obvious way to do it would be by income, but income doesn't correlate entirely with class. What's more, if having an income under a certain level gave an advantage in college admissions, you can be sure that there would suddenly be a lot more people with incomes just under the line (with other assets stashed elsewhere in accordance with whatever loopholes are in the regulations).
In fact the existence of affirmative action programs reinforces the belief that brown people are less qualified as otherwise there would be no need for such programs.
"less qualified" s/b "less well prepared due to structural inequities in our society"
71: A rich black guy is still black; a rich poor guy is not so much poor anymore.
Or maybe not so different sometimes, cf. the existence of Black Republicans like Alan Keyes.
Shearer, are you posting from the alternate universe with no racism, or are you slyly joking?
AA for the descendants of people whose unpaid or pittance labor built a lot of the country's wealth.
This just seems wrong to me. Yes to affirmative action for people who are likely to suffer racial discrimination in their own lifetime, and for those who have had to overcome their own disadvantaged circumstances. But preferences for people just because of what their ancestors, at one time or another, suffered? How is that justice?
The most obvious way to do it would be by income, but income doesn't correlate entirely with class. What's more, if having an income under a certain level gave an advantage in college admissions, you can be sure that there would suddenly be a lot more people with incomes just under the line (with other assets stashed elsewhere in accordance with whatever loopholes are in the regulations).
Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to adjust for higher cost of living in various areas of the country. And seriously, how much could people stash to make themselves look poor? And surely this is going to be better at targeting those in need than simply checking a box identifying your race.
As is, we've got the problem of rich white kids, whose rich white fathers have whimsically decided not to pay tuition for Harvard, taking tanning pills so as to qualify for a race-based scholarship. c.f.
Is there some sort of Law regarding affirmative action discussions and the movie "Soul Man"? I shall compose one.
I enjoyed this Google Cache explanation on the page linked in #75:
These search terms have been highlighted: college admission bagel
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: doughnut jew
Has anyone actually seen Soul Man? Granted, I wasn't very old when it came out, but still.
Lizardbreath posted in part "... assuming we're talking about a system that doesn't explicitly penalize applicants for being Asian ...".
You don't have to explicitly penalize applicants for being Asian, you just have to give affirmative action bonus points to any group including whites which would be otherwise be underrepresented.
100: Okay, AA 101. It's justice because, as a result of slavery *and then* Jim Crow *including* things like redlining, not being eligible for federally supported mortgages, segregated education, not being admitted to most colleges, chronic discrimination in pay and employment, ad infinitum, black people as a class have *way, way* less economic and cultural capital than white people. Black undergraduates today--which is to say, kids who were born in the mid-80s--were likely born to parents who grew up in segregated schools and who were excluded from most colleges and universities. That's *one* generation. And again, b/c of redlining and segregation, those same parents not only had less opportunity but were in most cases legally *prevented* from government mortgage programs, gi bills, and the like.
In other words, your average black peer does not have the advantages of *generations* of educational and economic opportunity that stand behind you. If your parents went to college, they know something about how to get financial aid, studying, course selection, and so forth. If their parents went to college, then all that stuff was easier for them, too. Even apart from what your folks make in income, that kind of cultural capital makes a *huge* difference. And again, your average black peer not only lacks that, but lacks it because of specific laws that denied it to them.
Now. How would an entirely neutral admissions process be justice, given the simple historical facts?
101: No. Income is not a better proxy for opportunities or cultural capital or class than race, *in general*. In specific instances, yes. But across the board, I'm pretty sure that race trumps simple income for the reasons given in 107.
E.g., if I make $60k, and my parents own their own home and were college educated and have retirement savings, then my $60k goes a LOT further than it would for someone else who makes $60k and whose parents do not own their own home and did not go to college and do not have retirement savings. Not to mention the other disadvantages blacks suffer--e.g., worse health care--that also add to out-of-pocket costs.
107: Oh for heaven's sake. Reading comprehension, 101: I've explicitly said, in 100 and elsewhere, that I support race-based affirmative action, and I've never claimed that I think that an "entirely neutral admissions process" is justice. And I've also said, in 100, that I support affirmative action for people who are likely to suffer racial discrimination in their own lifetime, and for those who have had to overcome their own disadvantaged circumstances, which I believe controls for the problems you state in 107. I don't believe that historical injustice, however, is by itself any kind of justification for affirmative action.
don't believe that historical injustice, however, is by itself any kind of justification for affirmative action.
Do you mean "by itself" in the sense of as an abstract concept absent any specifics? Because while I'd agree with you about that, I'd also say that it's pretty much a meaningless quibble. The essence of historical injustice is specifics: there's no such thing as history in the abstract.
E.g., if I make $60k, and my parents own their own home and were college educated and have retirement savings, then my $60k goes a LOT further than it would for someone else who makes $60k and whose parents do not own their own home and did not go to college and do not have retirement savings.
But what about the black kid from the 60k household vs. a Cambdian kid from a 22k household? Or an Italian kid from a 22k household?
It isn't at all a meaningless quibble -- it makes a difference in how we justify AA to its detractors, and how we plan to maintain or adjust our goals w/r/t AA in the short and long term future. If we are primarily worried about correcting historical deficiencies, AA strategies should remain basically the same over time. If we are worried about correcting problems in the now, AA will change over time, with (one hopes) racial components becoming less important, and, perhaps, class components eventually predominating.
112: But the problem is that justifying AA to detractors on those terms concedes points that are silly. Whereas pointing out the specific ways that vague arguments about "historical inequalities" that (it's implied) no longer exist are just dumb gives people something very concrete. Most people talk about race and equality in extremely vague terms, and most white people really know almost nothing about the history of race. But neither race nor inequality are vague things, and letting them become abstractions is wrong.
111: C'mon. And what about the homeless white guy in the gutter? The point is that yes, people are uncomfortable with race-based affirmative action. They argue that we should substitute income for race, because that seems "fairer." In short, people are uncomfortable with the idea that white people, *as* white people, might still have unfair advantages. But getting rid of AA just to make white people feel less uncomfortable is manifestly unfair, and the fact that the argument even receives a serious hearing only shows how far we have still to go.
114: I'm saying that using AA as a corrective measure for horrific wrongs that happened in the past is morally wrong. I support AA, but "correction of historical wrongs" is emphatically not one of my reasons. AA cannot fix or make up for a history of racial injustice. Nor should it. I am not owed an apology for a wrong inflicted on my grandparents, by someone else's grandparents. I am owed a correction and assistance for the wrongs that have been and will be committed against me in this lifetime. Talking about AA as a fix for something that happened a generation or two ago pisses people off, and I can see why.
Of course AA can't change the past. But that doesn't mean it isn't a corrective measure for history: history specifically defined black people as a class as inferior, and specifically worked to make them poorer and worse-educated. As a result, guess what? Black people are now poorer and worse-educated, as a class. The *entire point* of AA is to correct that.
But getting rid of AA just to make white people feel less uncomfortable is manifestly unfair
When did I say anything even remotely like this?
It only makes sense that as time goes on, and increasing numbers of traditionally oppressed ethnicities transition into the middle class, that race alone will become less effective at identifying who's being failed by the system.
118: You didn't, and I think the comment you're quoting made it pretty clear that I was talking about people in general.
Well shit, then why say it if no one's arguing it?
It only makes sense that as time goes on, and increasing numbers of traditionally oppressed ethnicities transition into the middle class, that race alone will become less effective at identifying who's being failed by the system.
This, to me, is the heart of the debate. Race isn't important all by itself, but it's a useful proxy for poverty and within a generation or so, the target for a lot of discrimination that leads to a lot of poverty and lack of opportunities.
We're not trying to right grandfather's wrongs here. It's a proxy. With any luck, it won't be a good proxy by the time my kids are going to college. But I don't think that it's not a good proxy now.
And as I said before, it's not a zero-sum game. You can introduce a couple of diversity points for rural or poverty or immigrant kids (isn't this standard practice anyway?) without getting rid of AA.
In short, people are uncomfortable with the idea that white people, *as* white people, might still have unfair advantages.
This is exactly what I'm uncomfortable with. "White people" aren't a monolith. Not all our parents and grandparents did go to college. In my hometown, very few had. And just because income isn't a perfect correlate with advantage, since there are plenty of lower income people with well educated parents and reasonable social capital, which people seem to keep belaboring for I-have-no-idea-why, that doesn't mean that income isn't a *better* correlate with advantage than is race. I think it's *much* better. Most (certainly not all, but most) of the statistical disadvantages faced by blacks in modern america are explained by income.
This is exactly what I'm uncomfortable with. "White people" aren't a monolith.
Except they don't have to be to have, on the whole, advantages over non-whites in, say, the job market or college admissions. Just as men aren't a monolith, but don't have to be to have, on the whole, advantages over women in these areas. Saying that most of blacks' statistical disadvantages are related to income says nothing about the cause of the income gap, which is what AA exists to address.
Again, your objection seems to be that AA isn't playing the role of comprehensive social programs. That's not a convincing reason to object to AA, it's a convincing reason to support a bigger welfare state.
"Saying that most of blacks' statistical disadvantages are related to income says nothing about the cause of the income gap, which is what AA exists to address."
But if income is a better predictor of a given person having the concrete disadvantages in question than race, then AA would *better* serve blacks by being based on income.
Most (certainly not all, but most) of the statistical disadvantages faced by blacks in modern america are explained by income.
I think this is one of those things that looks as if it explains more than it does. Certainly, income correlates strongly with race, and with other markers of statistical disadvantage, but that doesn't show that blacks are only disadvantaged because they're poor -- it's just as plausible to say that blacks are likely to be poor in large part because they're disadvantaged.
If you look at something like the study Hilzoy linked, showing that a black candidate for a job is less likely to be hired than a white candidate with the exact same resume, except for the addition of a felony conviction, black people who have a hard time getting hired are going to end up lower income. But their disadvantage is a result of race rather than than their low incomes.
125 crossed with 124, but I think answers it -- there's a fair argument that low income is caused by racism, rather than the reverse, and so that income based AA is not going to be a well targeted means of addressing racial disadvantages.
There is a basic problem (which people have mentioned above) with basing a benefits program on a mutable attribute like income/wealth -- people want the benefit, so they will move their assets around to make it look, by the numbers, like they should qualify. Wealthy people already do this with tax brackets -- indeed there is a huge industry devoted to helping them do so. I can't see how they wouldn't jump on this.
To expand: if being black is the US is very highly correlated with being poor, and also highly correlated with economic disadvantage (i.e. lack of social capital), and if lack of social capital is *more* highly correlated with being poor among blacks, then blacks gain by switching to income-based methods of AA. And if social capital is additionally highly correlated with poverty in general, then *everyone* gains. And as Brock said near the beginning of the thread, the question of what is correlated to what is an empirical one.
Right. Which is why empirical studies showing that being black hurts your chances of getting a job more than a felony conviction does suggest that race-baced AA is still useful.
127: That problem already exists with financial aid. I couldn't go to the college I wanted initially because my family had a bunch of legitimately frozen assets (i.e. not gaming the system) that completely maxed out my FAFSA application. And the reason we had to include those kind of assets on the application is that there's an regulatory arms race between FAFSA and sort-of-rich-families-that-want-to-look-poor. And that screws the lower-middle class. So I doubt it would be anything new.
What would it have done if it had worked?
The tag? It's a breaking non-space, to tell the browser it can put a line break there, but not to put a space if it doesn't put a line break.
Ah. Now I know four HTML tags.
87 My school admitted blacks under some sort of affirmative action program. They were much less prepared than the rest of the students. As a result they had great difficulties keeping up and I believe most of them flunked out. Which didn't exactly combat the notion that blacks are automatically less qualified. I believe my school has since stopped doing this.
136: A non-breaking space is different from a breaking non-space, right?
137: That proves everything! Thanks for convincing me, James.
Obviously at that point, the only thing to do is start measuring the bumps on their skulls. We ought to get back to that.
You can introduce a couple of diversity points for rural or poverty or immigrant kids (isn't this standard practice anyway?) without getting rid of AA.
Exactly. That *is* already standard practice. So the whole "let's throw race out and look at income instead" is, imho, basically an (unconscious, I'm sure) expression of racism--one that comes from our ongoing discomfort with the issue of black disadvantage. DS's 123 gets the "but white people can be poor too" thing exactly right, even without my having to point out that white people *have* at least theoretically had access to things like the GI bill and mortgage assistance, things that black people *were legally prohibited from getting*.
The point is, it isn't about being "fair" to individuals. It's about being fair to groups.
Can we ban James yet on the grounds that he doesn't know what he's talking about?
142: We need at least a few people like that here.
142: No. Banning is only for the time-consumingly insane, like the Troll of Sorrow. James is just wrong about a bunch of stuff (although not everything. I can't remember the thread, but I found myself moderately stunned to be agreeing with him wholeheartedly on some thread somewhere). No bannings.
Besides, the person most inclined to argue against LB's positions, to doubt the purity of her motives, to bring up the complicating inconsistencies in her practice, to search endlessly and diligently for any valid argument to qualify her positions, is LB herself.
Maybe if we paid black people less it would give them an incentive to work harder and assimilate into the middle class.
He's not just wrong, he's stupidly so. And in this thread, clearly racist. Anyway, I wasn't really serious.
The book I mentioned way upthread focusses primarily on the New Deal, WWII, and post-WWII laws, programs and benefits which lifted millions out of poverty and created the modern American middle class. Stuff like job training, labor rights, skills training in the military, the GI Bill, Social Security, affordable home mortgages, etc.
The problem was that in order to get such legislation passed, Southern Democrats who feared upsetting their social order had to be appeased, and the primary way this was done was via allowing "local control" by the States. Also shit like specifically having Social Security not apply to farm laborers and maids (i.e. most black workers at the time). This resulted in all of the above benefits going overwhelmingly to whites, so while white incomes, standards of living, and prospects rose dramatically, black ones stagnated or even fell.
So these otherwise incredibly effective and laudable programs actually strengthened and solidified the tight connection between being black and being poor and undereducated, and that connection still largely holds today, despite some significant progress in the last several decades. It creates present-day harms that should be addressed, it's not just bad things that happened to somebody's grandparents.
Also shit like specifically having Social Security not apply to farm laborers and maids (i.e. most black workers at the time).
??????????? When was this overturned? I never heard about that in my civil rights history classes.
Which didn't exactly combat the notion that blacks are automatically less qualified.
Fortunately, the point of affirmative action isn't to try to convince racists not to be racist.
149: I'm not sure, and I'm not where I can look it up right now. And Katznelson's book is no longer in my possession. Anyone else know?
Fortunately, the point of affirmative action isn't to try to convince racists not to be racist.
I disagree, for reasons best spelled out by hilzoy in the first linked post.
I figure the lack of racism is a side-effect, but if someone's sitting there saying 'The point of AA is to convince me that black people are just as qualified and it didn't, therefore it is a failure!!!!!', I think it helps to remind them that maybe it's not about them.
I don't think James should be banned. His point in 137 isn't unsupportable. Here is a paper arguing something similar with respect to law schools:
http://adversity.net/Sander/Systemic_Analysis_FINAL.pdf
Affirmative action lets in less qualified students. This can have negative consequences for the students in certain situations. I don't doubt that caltech or wherever James went to school was one of those situations.
I don't think this goes against "bend in the river" type findings because alot of elite schools are not particularly rigorous. Affirmative Action is a good way to let blacks move into America's ruling class.
The point of AA is to make racists less racist? Uh uh. Politically, educating white people about reality is necessary, because white people vote. But that's not *why* we should have AA. Nor should it be. It's not like white people shouldn't be able to fucking read a book or two--even if practically speaking, you probably can't trust them to do that.
154: "Less qualified" than who? For what?
This thread has basically convinced me that AA is valuable, and I would respond to 154 by saying that there are many other factors by which colleges also let in "less qualified students" in the interests of diversity -- legacies, athletes, people from North Dakota ("we are proud to say that once again the entering class of 350 includes students from more than 45 states!") -- none of which has induced a huge backlash.
However, I'm really concerned that the good it does is outweighed by the way that people's lack of understanding makes them think that it's a semi-racist and semi-embarrassing thing that has no place in today's colorblind society. I don't think I've ever heard anyone in the real world express a pro-AA opinion stronger than "It really should be income-based rather than race-based; there's an awful lot of middle-class black people nowadays who don't need the help anymore and they are the ones who take advantage of AA, so it doesn't fulfill its purpose anymore." That is really the argument that needs to be addressed. Not whatever racist argument we would like to address.
Less qualified how?
Look, elite institutions admit extremely bright students. They pick a very few lucky kids out of a huge number of applicants. Maybe Keisha got an A- in her AP physics class, while Biff got an A--that doesn't fucking make Keisha unqualified.
And once you admit students, you have a duty to fucking support them. Especially students who are going to have to deal with racist motherfuckers saying "you're not qualified to be here," or who because their own parents didn't go to college/have less money than other students' parents, have more social adjustment problems. That doesn't make them fucking unqualified. If motivation and hard work and determination count as qualifications--and they damn well should--those kids are *more* fucking qualified. And if knowing something about how the world works counts--and it damn well should--then they're certainly more qualified than the James B. Shearers of the world.
157 gets it right. It's extremely worrisome that the popular understanding of AA is so bad. And that problem *does* need to be addressed. Not only for the sake of preserving AA, but also for the sake of educating people, giving them a realistic and complex understanding of race and history. That so few Americans lack those things is a national embarrassment; that so many people who consider themselves educated lack any intellectual curiosity about these issues is inexcusable.
150 What is the point of affirmative action? I stated the purpose as I see it in 83 but it seems there is disagreement.
while Biff got an A--that
For clarity's sake I should have punctuated "Biff got an A. That. . ."
I think the phrase "lack any intellectual curiosity about these issues" in 159 should link to 160.
Many students from disadvantaged backgrounds struggle at elite schools. That shouldn't be surprising, what with the backgrounds being disadvantaged and all.
But going from there to 'and that proves to this honky that blacks are just unqualified.' without making stops at 'gee, did we do anything once the kid was in school to prevent attrition', 'did we at least get some kids through the program', 'how many white kids wash out of the top programs anyway', well, like I said, it's not the job of AA to pull racists' heads out of their asses.
God, the resentment argument is so, so lame, guys. As are white people who have anecdotal evidence that affirmative action is harmful to black people.
Also: I take Cala's comments to mean, we need to fucking clean up the inequities in our public education system YESTERDAY, but since that's not happening, the least we can do is say to underprivileged black people, ok, sink or swim, good luck. Which I agree with. It's better than not being able to jump in the pool at all, even if just marginally.
There is a problem with the law governing affirmative action, in that I think the strongest argument for AA is to remedy the effects of current and past discrimination, but that those effects are, while easily proven statistically, very hard to prove for any specific case (that is, look at the linked employment study. If being black hurts your chances of getting a job as much as a felony conviction, someone's discriminating. But there's no easy way to tell which employers are, and which employers wouldn't have hired the tester regardless of race.). So you end up, particularly in college admissions, with the diversity rationale used as a figleaf for the stronger, but legally problematic, argument that it's necessary to remedy the effects of discrimination.
166: From the point of educators, though, the diversity rationale is a good one. Because part of what diversity does *for education* is give *all* students better critical thinking skills and a wider knowledge base. If anything, the biggest argument against the diversity thing is that it's primarily geared towards helping the white kids. Your average person of color has had way more experience with white kids than vice-versa; it's not the AA admits who benefit most from diversity per se. What they benefit from is having access to good educations that would otherwise be denied them, *not* because they're unqualified, but because the effects of racism mean that a lot of what white people think of as intellectual qualification really means being anglocentric, well off, and complacent about one's social position.
166
". . . So you end up, particularly in college admissions, with the diversity rationale used as a figleaf for the stronger, but legally problematic, argument that it's necessary to remedy the effects of discrimination."
This doesn't make sense. The claim with the employment studies is that the black candidates are objectively just as well qualified as the white candidates but are not being hired at the same rate because of discrimination. But that is not the case with elite college admissions, the black candidate pool is objectively not as good. The rationale for admitting more blacks is diversity.
Shorter 168: Black people are intellectually inferior to white people. This is an objective fact.
bitchphd: objectively pro-Panther.
Black people are intellectually inferior to white people.
This may or may not be true but it's a pointless argument, since we're both gonna get stomped by the Yellow Peril.
It would sure be nice if Shearer could provide some data for the claim that "unqualified" students are being promoted by AA that doesn't rely on "I seem to remember a few coloureds flunking out of my school."
James: You are assuming that there is some objective measurement of "most qualified" which affirmative action seeks to undermine. I don't think that is actually true. Higher SAT score does not mean "more qualified". Higer GPA does not mean "more qualified".
Would you be opposed to income-based affirmative action as well? After all, it would let in people who couldn't afford to take the Kaplan classes that ensure a higher standardized test score than the student would get otherwise.
Bphd: James does not think he is racist. Calling him racist is not how to get him to listen to you. This isn't relevant in the current situation, because James is unconvinceable, but may be relevant in getting more reasonable people to listen to you.
171: On the upside, the Mexicans (both kinds) will have conquered America by then and whitefolk will be a thing of the past. So it'll be someone else's problem.
Ned, he's not gonna listen anyway. He might as well hear it.
173: I know he's unconvinceable. However, I also know that I and others have provided actually good evidence for the benefits of AA in this thread, and at this point the only reason to continue to post the things James does is out of racism, conscious or no, and a stubborn refusal to actually think beyond cliche. Your comment about what constitues qualification does a perfectly fine job of unpacking what I meant with my comment; I figure that at this point the actual audience for this thread can see the parallel perfectly.
Crap, pwned by Jody. Ah well, in this case I'm just as happy to have that happen.
bitchphd in 158:
"If motivation and hard work and determination count as qualifications--and they damn well should--those kids are *more* fucking qualified."
I don't think so. Motivation and hard work are what separate people who succeed in school from those who fail. (Intelligence is a less strong predictor.) To the extent that black people are less successful in college (and I have no idea how true this is) it's going to be determined *more* by differences in motivation and hard work than by any other "social capital" type differences. If black students do worse in school (after controlling for number of hours worked during the semester) then I would blame motivation and determination before differences in social capital. Social capital is about *getting in* to college. To the extent that social capital helps you succeed *once there*, it's because it inculcates values of hard work, and those values can't be compensated for by any sort of AA.
Notably, family income can be quite important here. The less a student has to work to pay the bills, the more time they have to study and do well. The more money their parents have, the more often they get to work less.
If these people have the kind of motivation you say they do, I would expect that they would be more successful that the average student (again, after controlling for the amount they have to work). Is this the case?
If these people have the kind of motivation you say they do, I would expect that they would be more successful that the average student (again, after controlling for the amount they have to work). Is this the case?
Well...these people, once they get in, don't feel as "at home" there as the average student, and have less of a safety net preventing them from dropping out, so I wouldn't necessarily expect that to be the case.
(the phrase "these people" intentionally left vague)
179: Non-traditional students of *any* type have to work harder to get in, harder to stay in, and have a lot more institutional and psychological baggage that gets in the way of academic success.
Example: a student I had who drove *two hours* each way from home to college *and* worked 20+ hours/week to pay tuition. She came to me crying because she was getting a B- in my class, and when I said that that was only because she didn't seem to be revising her papers as much as she should, explained the time constraints she was dealing with. I said, in that case I'm fucking surprised you're managing a B. Why don't you move into dorms? Couldn't afford it. I told her to appeal to financial aid, and she said she had, but the only extra they'd give her was loans. I told her, take the loans. And she said that she would never be in debt again because she'd spent most of her high school years *homeless* when her mom lost her job and couldn't pay the rent.
Absolutely *none* of those things had anything to do with a lack of intellectual ability. All of them showed that she had more fucking gumption than 90% of the college students I've met. And yeah, she was an AA admit, and she was fucking bright as hell.
This in contrast to the traditional students who skip class when they have a head cold, or when they're hung over from a frat party, or who want me to excuse them from deadlines because they're flying to Hawaii for their sister's wedding. Yeah, those little fuckers have higher GPAs and higher SAT scores, probably. But that says *nothing* about their intellectual capabilities or work ethic or intellectual curiosity. It only says that they're lucky bastards, and I cannot stand it when those students pull bullshit about how AA admits don't fucking deserve to be there.
And yeah, she was an AA admit
You knew this? It was on her record, in some fashion accessible to her professors?? That seems like a *really* bad idea. Or did she tell you? (And how would she have known?)
181: Why are you conflating the issues of motivation and time to devote to study that I explicitly distinguished between twice in my post?
183: AFAICT you brought up the issue of time to devote to study but then defaulted -- without any apparent reason -- to "motivation" as the means of explaining any achievement gap. Maybe you have a reason for doing so , but you haven't really given it.
184: That's exactly what I didn't say. I said: "If these people have the kind of motivation you say they do, I would expect that they would be more successful that the average student (again, after controlling for the amount they have to work)."
After controlling for the amount of time they have to work.
Did I say it enough yet?
Right, but it's a pointless kind of thing to say unless you do have data that controls for that available. What was your point?
That sounds hostile, but I do mean that I'm honestly unsure. I think Bitch and DS assumed, and on the basis of the words 'I don't think so' in your 179 assumed fairly, that you had a belief that data controlling for time available to work would reveal that students admitted under AA would show that they were not in fact more motivated, and that's what they were responding to.
182: I was teaching a course that was specifically *for* AA admits. Which, by the way, included white male first-generation college students.
185: You treated "time they have to work" as if it merely meant homework. My point is that there's "work" that college students have to do that isn't just sitting with a pencil and paper, and that the simple fact that nontraditional students do work in this regard that traditional students *don't even know exists* demonstrates superior motivation.
But you can't control for the amount they have to work. The whole idea behind affirmative-action admits is that they have had less opportunities during their upbringing to demonstrate academic prowess, but they are being admitted because they still deserve a chance to succeed. The factors that have given them less opportunities to succeed don't disappear after they get into the program. They have less time/freedom there to devote to schoolwork, too. That's why the classmates of our friend J.Shearer were unfortunately more likely to drop out, much to his disgust.
Yeah, 186 is right. Basically what I'm saying is that I'm not familiar with the data that supports "after controlling for the amount they have to work." I'm not saying the data doesn't exist, mind, just that I'm not familiar with it.
189: I don't know of anything like that data, either. For what it's worth, I'm not sure you can get anything meaningful out of it. pdf's 179 doesn't match my experience either, for what it's worth.
188 makes a good point about the confounding factors. Dropping two people in the same college classroom does not meant they are on an even playing field.
186: That would indeed be a valid point to make, but one that, unfortunately, I wasn't able to gleam from either of their posts. B's was little more than the bare anecdote, and I prefer not to speculate about people's points in writing unannotated anecdotes.
My point was that if there *is* a difference in performance per unit of available study-time, (which I did not claim to know) that it would be caused by a difference in motivation, and not by any of the sorts of social capital we were talking about earlier in the thread. So the justification applied to AA doesn't straightforwardly apply to programs designed to help and retain those students once at the school, unless those programs are aimed toward making it possible for self-supporting students to have more study time.
I don't believe there is a difference in motivation between the two groups. I believe that, if there is shown to be a difference in performance not explained by available study time, that it is a difference in motivation. (Plus many smaller factors.)
Motivation and hard work are what separate people who succeed in school from those who fail.
Not in my experience. "Controlling for the time to study" is rather a red herring. When it comes time to grade the essays, for example, I'm not going to curve the scores based on who had the most time to revise. They're going to be marked based on the criteria I set. Student X could be working her ass off with all the time she has, but it might not be enough. She might be more motivated than the kid who didn't have to be on work study, and a harder worker, but working 20 hours a week on top of the schoolwork.
But set that aside. Knowing *where* to apply the motivation and hard work is also something that separates those who succeed from those who fail. And that is a skill that you pick up easily if you're running through top high schools that nurture you, but much harder to pick up later on.
Are you socialized to believe that the professor works for you and you're destined to get an A? Then you're probably in my office hours, e-mailing me, taking risks in discussion. Are you socialized to believe that the instructor isn't on your side and is judging you? Then you're probably pouring those hours of hard work spinning your wheels on an assignment instead of invading my office. Did you spend your life surrounded by computers? Probably pretty easy for you to research and type. Did you first have a computer when you went off to college, or are using the labs? You probably spend more time typing and researching.
I don't think it's just as simple as saying 'if you work hard, you'll succeed.' If you work hard wrongly, you'll be working hard at running in circles.
"You treated "time they have to work" as if it merely meant homework."
Didn't mean to. I meant "time they have to devote to study". That means any activity that helps them increase their grades.
188: It sounds like you're saying "Just because AA admits can't study as much for the same reason they're AA admits doesn't mean AA is bad". Which I wholeheartedly agree with.
My point was that if there *is* a difference in performance per unit of available study-time, (which I did not claim to know)
Part of this whole charitable argument thing is, or should be, cutting people slack for misinterpreting you. Look back at your 179 -- can't you see how opening that paragraph with "I don't think so," gave the impression B. and DS reacted to?
And of course, Cala's right about other confounding factors. It's not just brains and motivation -- confidence and bureaucratic skills and all sorts of things also entered into it.
I was reacting to the whole post, but I think this line does a great job of summing up the worst part of it:
To the extent that social capital helps you succeed *once there*, it's because it inculcates values of hard work, and those values can't be compensated for by any sort of AA.
Black people are lazy? Social capital doesn't make any difference in one's comfort zone, which has no impact on whether or not one can succeed in an unfamiliar enviornment? There's no way to mentor nontraditional students so as to help them feel like they belong in college, and to give them the social capital that traditional students are able to take for granted--stuff like how to talk to professors, how to pick classes, how to form study groups, the importance of speaking up during class, how to argue with a professor, fuck, even how to dress?
Gimme a break. The whole "after you control for" blah blah is putting a pseudoscientific veneer on a really lazy argument.
192: I say the same things as to 188. I realize that time available to study is a major issue. By controlling for it, I'm not saying it's not important, I'm just trying to make a very specific point.
As to your point about "misdirected hard work". Yes, that's a factor. I don't think that it's as much of a factor as willingness to work hard in the first place. And I grant that, taken together, all the things that make certain students less likely to ask for help from professors and free tutors (my school had lots) might be very important, but in order to take advantage of those things, you still have to have motivation, so I think my main point stands.
...if there is shown to be a difference in performance not explained by available study time ...
This is pretty speculative. And in my experience on both sides of the fence, this:
Motivation and hard work are what separate people who succeed in school from those who fail.
Isn't irrelevent, but isn't by any means the only major factor, and may even be a second order effect.
194: Bullshit. Cala's not saying nontraditional students can't study as much. She's saying--and ime, as a professor, this is true--they may very well study *more* and still not get the same grades as the lazy-ass traditional frat boys for all sorts of reasons that have to do with socialization, disadvantage, and lack of mentoring. All of which are *completely* beyond the student's control and have jack shit to do with motivation, except that the fact that students succeed with*out* these things fucking testifies to their superhuman abilities.
Basically it's a case of black people have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good. And then some idiot comes along and says that the only difference is motivation. Honestly, you should be ashamed.
195: Navigating the social bureaucracy is still something I struggle with. I'm getting better at it, but it didn't occur to me to go into professors' office hours until maybe the second year of grad school. And things like scholarships, talks, teaching opportunities, often tend to spread through this vaguely old-boys' word-of-mouth network. It's not bad, exactly, but it's not just hard work. It sometimes involves sitting in people's offices till they do what you want.
196: I'm going to provide a personal anecdote, *not* as evidence, (if someone takes it that way, to hell with you,) but to provide contexts to my argument.
When I spent my semester in college before dropping out, I felt completely cut off from the culture. I did not know how do any of the things that you and Cala are talking about. Consequently, I felt isolated and made mediocre grades. I come from a middle class family, with two parents who went to and graduated from college. (No grad degrees.)
So in my experience, knowing how to study well, to use the resources on campus available to help you succeed, is knowledge that many, maybe even *most* students of every race lack. Am I wrong?
I don't think that it's as much of a factor as willingness to work hard in the first place.
And you don't think this why?
things that make certain students less likely to ask for help from professors and free tutors (my school had lots) might be very important, but in order to take advantage of those things, you still have to have motivation
And you also have to have motivation to study your ass off without any help because you're afraid to ask for it.
200: That's the second thing Cala said, which I also addressed. What you're responding to is me responding to the first thing Cala said.
So in my experience, knowing how to study well, to use the resources on campus available to help you succeed, is knowledge that many, maybe even *most* students of every race lack. Am I wrong?
I don't know that you're wrong, but I would expect that knowing those things, to the extent that any students do, is strongly correlated with being a traditional middle class student.
"And you also have to have motivation to study your ass off without any help because you're afraid to ask for it."
Are you saying that most black people are too stupid to succeed by studying solo, and not interacting with profs/TAs/tutors? Even if you don't know what help is out there, you're going to do a lot better if you study every day than you would otherwise.
202: Most students feel that sense of displacement and don't know what resources are out there. Nontraditional students feel it much worse, and have less of an idea where to even start to find out. Not to mention that where students whose parents are college graduates at least feel like they belong in college, nontraditional students are not only likely to doubt their own capacities, they also have to deal with harebrained asshole theories about how they're less qualified, don't deserve to be there, are less motivated, and all the rest of it.
200: I'm saying three things. First, that some non-traditional students often can't study as much because they're working other jobs. Second, that talk of 'controlling for studying time' is largely silly hand-waving, because a) we don't have a study to point to and b) no professor is going to grade based on time available to study in any case, so I can control all I want and still have failing students.
Third, that the social factors I mentioned mean that even if time available to study is identical, that the time available might be spent inefficiently. (Second part of my 188.)
I conclude, as a result, that correlating success with a student's motivation is il-founded.
Are you saying that most black people are too stupid to succeed by studying solo, and not interacting with profs/TAs/tutors?
Charity foul.
206: I am saying that most STUDENTS cannot succeed solo. And I'll add that most successful students do NOT succeed solo.
205: And I would expect them to be correlated with families in the upper middle class, upper class, or with an academic background.
205: Actually, I think more than that, it's the number of generations your family has been educated. I was a second generation. I think it takes a third generation or more to have that kind of knowledge.
So your point is what, that you had it tough in school and succeeded, so obviously if black kids do worse than you--and you're not saying they don't, you're just saying "if"--then that means they didn't work as hard?
Gimme a break.
209: Parallel to "Black people are lazy?" in 196. I'm being vindictive and petty.
Are you saying that most black people are too stupid to succeed by studying solo, and not interacting with profs/TAs/tutors?
Hardly. The isolation pressures you felt as a freshman, though, are likely much stronger for someone who's the first in their family to go to college, who has had to overcome a lot to get there, and who isn't sure they are even the right type to be in school.
And studying solo is one way to succeed. I think it's the harder path. I think that if you're one of my students and have three hours to study and you spend it all in the library puzzling it out, you will likely be worse off than if you made an appointment with me for an hour and studied for two.
213: No, I dropped out after a semester. Lack of motivation. I attribute my disuse of the resources we're talking about to my lack of motivation more than my lack of knowledge that they exist. That kind of knowledge isn't hard to come by if you spend a significant amount of time on campus. (And I do think time is a more important factor than motivation.)
And, once again, I'm saying that the motivation is a bigger factor in the performance of students (in general) than social capital of the type Cala's been talking about.
And, once again, I'm saying that the motivation is a bigger factor in the performance of students (in general) than social capital of the type Cala's been talking about.
But on what basis?
We're awfully far away from talking about affirmative action by now, given that no one's got any data on all the confounding factors we're arguing about.
And I do think that a big way colleges could help their students is to find a *good* way to make sure that people aren't afraid to ask their prof about things or to find study groups and such. For instance, introverted people (like me) have a big disadvantage here. Cala in 215 says that first-gen college students are more hesitant to use these resources. It's because their unsureness makes them more introverted in that context.
The effect of that sort of thing would be to make it possible for people with less motivation (but enough time) to succeed where they couldn't before.
I really don't think motivation is it. I've been ludicrously successful in academic environments, and it's not because I'm the most motivated, but because I'm kinda entitled, and have always succeeded, and, like Cala mentioned earlier, I know where to apply the effort. I end up doing a lot less work than some of my peers and doing just as well, not because I'm smarter, but because I know which time is going to produce a payoff and which things I can blow off. It's something that's very hard to learn, I think, and pure motivation can actually end up hurting you, because trying to do everything perfectly is a very poor way to actually succeed in competitive academic environments.
Some of the unprepared kids in my freshman writing class were not going to get much better without extremely careful, directed attention from their instructor (me). And until they got better in their writing, they were going to do poorly in most of their classes that involved more than numbers. Some of these kids I couldn't help, for one reason or another, and some of them worked their butts off, studying basic grammar, rewriting and rewriting, and eventually getting to basic competency.
The guy I was the most proud of, just a great guy, worked his ever-living ass off to get to what I'd consider to be the writing fluency everyone else started with. That was after consultations with me pretty much every week. He was intensely aware of it. The class difference between him and his peers was very, very stark. He may have been an AA admit, I don't know.
217: Not much of a basis. But I don't see that B has more of a basis for her position. I wasn't meaning my objection to be very substantial.
218: Absolutely. AA isn't a magic bullet. Colleges that actually give a shit about those students will also provide mentoring and minority student centers and financial aid seminars and creative fa packages and ongoing support for first-generation students.
And again, students who need those things don't need them because they lack motivation. The motivation issue is a complete red herring.
221: Oh? My having taught hundreds of college students for ten years and three years of experience working in a program designed *specifically* for AA admits doesn't give me a basis for knowing something about the subject?
Not to mention having actually done some reading in the relevant literature, by the way.
It's something that's very hard to learn, I think, and pure motivation can actually end up hurting you, because trying to do everything perfectly is a very poor way to actually succeed in competitive academic environments.
This is definitely true in graduate school. You're almost always better off talking to an advisor with a half-baked idea than you are waiting until it's refined enough to present. We're revamping our program here, and one of the things we're trying to do is mandate faculty-grad student interaction, so you have to go and talk even if things aren't perfect, so people don't spin their wheels and slip through the cracks. (We have nice professors with open doors. We also have neurotic grad students who won't bother the nice professors unless they are happy with their ideas.)
I like the idea of entitlement, as both a personal and a class attribute, being perhaps more predictive of success than effort or motivation. My performance has varied tremendously, sometimes as confident as m., sometimes more like pdf. Basically I was raised not to feel entitled, personally, and learning how to take advantage of resources was slow work for me, because I was, and remain, deeply conflicted about it.
222: For people who are very unsure about the whole experience, I don't think that having those things just be available would be enough. (It wasn't for me, at least.) I never understood that those programs were something I needed, because I wasn't looking at them the right way, which was largely because they weren't presented the right way.
223: Well, I meant in the context of my original comment. After which you were free to relate your experience with it all. But your initial response really didn't address my points.
Yeah, I like the idea of entitlement being really important too. (But I would think that the relationship would be multiplicative--that you require both to really make it, and that while at least some of each is necessary, that lots of one can make up for less than average in the other.)
226 is on to something, I think. Aboriginal students in Canada, for example, face a bit of a conundrum WRT mainstream education. On the one hand there's a recognized need for access, on the other hand there's a longstanding conflictedness about assimilating to institutions that are basically perceived as "white." And people educated in those settings can expect to encounter that ambivalence in daily life. I suspect a similar dynamic works with Black and (to an extent) Hispanic communities in the US.
228: Sure, if you want to spitball about motivation generally. But we've drifted way, way far away from affirmative action. Not that there's anything wrong with drifting, it's just that I can misunderstandings arising out of a belief that AA was still the topic.
219 m. leblanc
"... I end up doing a lot less work than some of my peers and doing just as well, not because I'm smarter ..."
Why do you think you aren't smarter?
231: Well, it's relevant to any aspects of AA that might extend past the initial admission.
Umm, wrt/ 230 - the conflictedness being about entitlement, if you get my drift. I see I edited out the part that made an obvious connection with 226.
Relevant how? What's your point, and what data do you have to support it? Or if your point is to suggest that some data should be collected, what is that, and how do you suggest we go about it?
People are interpreting you uncharitably because you're being unclear about where you're going with everything you're saying. If you leave parts of your argument blank, they're going to get filled in.
If the upshot of this is another post on how I'm uncharitable, I'm just saying, calabat.
Isn't there actually a sort of gourd called a calabash?
Seriously, I'm getting meta about this because I think pdf and everyone else are talking past each other, and I usually think I'm pretty good at understanding what people are trying to say, but I'm not getting pdf at all today. And he's more tolerant of/into meta discussions than most.
pdf, as far as I can see your main point seems to be repeating an assertion that motivation is the main factor, without offering any support for this. Others have pointed out that it is a very difficult thing to measure in any meaningful way, and that their experience suggests it isn't true. To which you respond that motivation is the (a?) main factor.
Am I missing something?
It seems to me that a sense of entitelment is a (the) major feature differentiating middle class upbringings and working/lower class ones.
236: I don't think you're uncharitable, just shrill.
*ducks for cover*
235: Well, I did say in 191, "So the justification applied to AA doesn't straightforwardly apply to programs designed to help and retain those students once at the school, unless those programs are aimed toward making it possible for self-supporting students to have more study time." To which, in light of following comments, I would add that the programs should also encourage more awareness and use of campus resources designed to help students study efficiently.
238: Well, I added entitlement to that after IDP's post, but basically, yeah. Like I said, I didn't mean the objection to be *that* substantial.
And at that point, aren't you pretty much talking about everything you'd expect retention programs to do? What function of retention programs are you opposed to?
I don't mean 238 as an attack, pdf, I'm genuinely puzzled.
To make things more explicit: Sure, it's anectdotal, but in my experience as both a student and instructor, motivation and hard work are somewhat loosely correlated with (grade) performance. Like anyone else post ph.d, i've sat in a lot of classes and i've also taught hundreds of students, if only for a few years.
It sounds to me like you are operating from a very limited experience, and trying to generalize it....
Oh, sweetheart, we haven't even approached shrill. More seriously, I can't figure out how to read this:
My point was that if there *is* a difference in performance per unit of available study-time, (which I did not claim to know) that it would be caused by a difference in motivation, and not by any of the sorts of social capital we were talking about earlier in the thread.
in a way that doesn't suggest that the reason AA students don't succeed is that they aren't working hard.
240 cont.: Which should be about changing students' attitudes and conceptions about those programs/habits as well as raising awareness of them. Essentially, trying to make students feel entitled to the help the campus is trying to offer them.
There was one time I went to the writing lab to get some "help" with a paper I was doing. I'm really a pretty good writer, so my main motivation was just seeing some graduate students' thoughts about my composition skills. I felt half-guilty about using resources that more needy students could be using.
But the problem is, I had the same attitudes about other subjects that I *know*, and sort of knew then too, than I wasn't all that good in. Maybe I would have learned my lesson by the second semester. In any case, I'm probably not the typical student being targeted by those programs even if I do need some of them. (Except for my ADHD, which is a different story, really.)
244: I was joking about the "shrill" thing. I have the Farber curse, I think.
The possibility you're missing, I think, would be that AA admits on average have to do a lot more non-school work, and thus don't have as much study time as they need. Which seems likely to me, and I'm interested in how much that explains, and whether AA students do better than others after we adjust for that, or not, and in any case, why. And if you and B are right, they wouldn't do better because after the time disadvantage they still have the entitlement disadvantage, but after adjusting for that, they're comparable. Or something like that.
243: I wasn't trying to be defensive in my reply in 241, either. I agree, limited experience, vague impressions. I regret that I was seen as being more confident than that in my position.
I was joking, too. Except about the calabat.
But what I quoted in 244 doesn't make sense with what you say in 246. In the quoted bit, you're controlling for study time, presumably (performance per hour), and still saying that the reason AA admits don't do well is because of motivation and hard work.
I'm still trying to figure out why you think this is, or if you're using 'hard work' in some way that encompasses not being confident enough to take advantage of resources.
"without offering any support for this. Others have pointed out that it is a very difficult thing to measure in any meaningful way"
Many Unfogged threads have been built on less, so I don't feel too guilty about that.
247: I guess that was unclear. I didn't mean to be controlling for "performance per hour", but for total hours, and that the variance would be in the performance part.
I'm not sure that revision helps.
Given X amount of time, if student S does Z amount of work in time X and student T does Y in time X, then if Z is less than Y, it is because S didn't work as hard as T.
?
Am I close?
250: With the caveat that X is time where the student is free to study, not actual time spent studying, and that it's only the most important factor among many, then yes, that's what I was saying. And then changed that later to be "work harder" + entitlement.
"you're controlling for study time, presumably (performance per hour), and still saying that the reason AA admits don't do well is because of motivation and hard work."
Well, I was saying that *if* they still don't do well after controlling for time, not that it was the case.
Grant you the conditional. Why do you think that? We're all mostly talking out of our experiences here, and that's fine, but I haven't seen a reason that you think that hard work would outweigh it.
I'm not saying that every student is a perfectly hard worker, but just that there seem to be a lot of other things that would explain failure to succeed, and I don't know why you're dismissing them.
Well, one factor causing my impression could be that lack of motivation is, by far and away, the main difficulty *I* had, and people tend to assume others are like themselves. Like I said, I have ADHD, and so I have a lot of difficulty concentrating on certain subjects. It would take a lot of motivation for me to be able to overcome that. (One view is that voluntary attention regulation *is* motivation, and that it's lacking in ADHD.)
Another factor is just me observing all of the people I saw in school, and noticing that the ones that did the worst were, uniformly, the ones that just didn't care. But it could be that once you skim off those (because they're not likely to want to go to college) that the relationship doesn't hold.
I dunno, I always got pretty fair grades while slacking my ass off. High-speed reading and facile writing will get you pretty far without all that much work.
Indeed, the more substantial the cost of attendance to the student (which is inversely proportional to the wealth of the student, if the student is paying their own way) the more motivation you would expect from the student. So it could be that students from poor backgrounds tend to be much more motivated because of this selection factor, and the demographics of the poor who attend universities would be very unrepresentative of the poor in general. They would be much more motivated than even the average student.
Of course, this doesn't invalidate my original point, it just makes it mostly irrelevant. Or even reverses its significance w.r.t. AA.
255: Slacking and a lack of motivation are a bit different. If you're already confident that you can do well without tons of effort, you don't need a surplus of motivation. You know there's not a lot of point in working harder. But if you know you need to work harder, but don't anyway, then that's a problem.
239: Entitlement is big. So is cultural capital, which includes things like knowing how to apply for financial aid or write a resume, having friends who might know about possible jobs or careers, knowing how to dress to look "respectable," having a "neutral" accent, and so on. Also having "mainstream" values, like being willing to move away from your family for college or a job, being willing to put your work ahead of your family obligations, etc.
227a: In my experience, having *specifically* minority-targeted mentoring and support services makes a big difference, because it goes a long way towards overcoming students' sense of not belonging. Of course some students won't want to take advantage because they'll see it as condescension, or whatever, but in terms of the overall picture, it makes a big difference.
So it could be that students from poor backgrounds tend to be much more motivated because of this selection factor
Ding ding ding ding, we have a winner. Also, I said that way, way upthread in (I believe) my initial response to your point.
and the demographics of the poor who attend universities would be very unrepresentative of the poor in general.
Meaning that "the poor in general" are less motivated than the rich? Hardly. Same damn logic applies: most working poor (and most poor people are working) work harder than most middle-class folks. And a lot of the non-working poor have untreated mental illnesses like depression. Struggling against that shit requires a hell of a lot more motivation than getting up to go to your office job.
255 gets it exactly right. Never underestimate charm and manners, either.
258b: Not to whine, but that doesn't help *me*. I guess that when you're a statistical anomaly, you don't get whining rights about society not being accommodating for you. (IQ + ADHD + INTP makes me about 1 in 40,000, unless there's some major correlation between those three. The point is that each of those things strong affects what kind of educational environment I need to do well.)
Not to whine, but that doesn't help *me*.
True. But it's not targeted at helping you. It's targeted at helping students injured by current or former racism.
Not that you don't deserve help, but not through an AA program, and the fact that you need help and didn't get it has nothing to do with the justification for AA programs.
262: It might not help you, pdf, but I think I'd be disinclined to call your troubles with school due to a 'lack of work ethic.' To do so would strongly imply that the educational institution had done everything that it could to ensure success, and that what happened was just your own fault.
And that's what seems to be mystifying people here. You don't want to say, at least from your later comments, that the reason AA admits aren't succeeding isn't due to their own faults, but failures of the school, yet you're putting it down to 'hard work and motivation.'
259a: If you don't mind me asking, where?
259b: Meaning that the poor in general are less motivated than the poor who go to college (because you have to work *that* much harder), and that the poor who go to college are more motivated than the middle-class and rich who go to college.
But since you bring it up, I don't think that being consigned to a life of backbreaking or soul-crushing labor automatically makes you motivated. Slaves worked hard--were they motivated? Now, being poor and successfully raising kids counts, maybe more than going to college.
Are the rich more motivated than the poor? Well, if we define how rich you are by how much money you've made (as opposed to inherited) then I would say definitely. You can't get rich without being intrinsically motivated to work really hard. (Exceptions are even rarer than rich people.) And while you can have all the motivation in the world and remain poor through circumstance, the fact remains that, in the best case, the poor have the same average motivation as the average person in general.
Are the middle-class more motivated than the poor? Hard to say. Maybe slightly. But probably not very significantly.
Well, if we define how rich you are by how much money you've made (as opposed to inherited) then I would say definitely. You can't get rich without being intrinsically motivated to work really hard. (Exceptions are even rarer than rich people.)
Are you on crack? Seriously, where do you get this from?
263: Yeah, which is why talking about me more would be whining.
264: Motivation requires both a work ethic and the ability to focus. I don't lack the former.
266: Making anything more than a few million a year pretty much requires you to work your ass off. In fact, *most* ways of making more than about 80,000 a year require you to work your ass off. "Working your ass off" = motivation.
I'm really not all that sure where you're getting that from. If we're talking about salaries above a few million a year, we're talking about maybe a couple thousand people total. Most people get rich from investments, not salaries.
I'm not seeing the tight connection between wealth and work ethic here. Are you basing it on anything, or it just seems likely to you?
Meaning that the poor in general are less motivated than the poor who go to college (because you have to work *that* much harder)
Or possibly because the poor who get to college have opportunities or luck that most poor people lack.
I don't think that being consigned to a life of backbreaking or soul-crushing labor automatically makes you motivated.
No, but doing that shit day in and day out takes more motivation than sitting around an office cubicle.
Slaves worked hard--were they motivated?
To stay alive? Hell yeah.
268: Working as a waitress or a maid requires you to work your ass off, too.
269: Do you know of people who got rich from investing who didn't work their asses off? I wasn't aware that that happened except like when someone gets a bunch of stock options at the startup job they got recruited for out of college that IPO'd or something like that. I thought venture capitalists worked pretty damn hard.
270: Are you not seeing the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation? Poor people have to work hard to survive. Rich people work hard because they want to. Many poor people spend most of their time working hard. (I'd assert that just as many don't work longer hours than, say, most middle-class folk, even if the work itself is shittier.) But rich people spend *all* of their time working.
Seriously, I don't have data, but working as a lawyer I have some occasional contact with seriously rich people, and they don't appear to work harder than other professionals, or other employed people generally. Why do you think they do?
"Or possibly because the poor who get to college have opportunities or luck that most poor people lack."
The two are not exclusive explanations. I'm not saying that poor people who don't go to college don't have intrinsic motivation. I'm saying that of all the poor people who get the chance to go, only those with intrinsic motivation will actually go/succeed. It's a selection effect.
272: What I'm seeing is a lot of fairy tale cliches about the difference between the rich and the poor.
But rich people spend *all* of their time working.
The ones I've run into tend to retire young and get into collecting wines, or traveling.
273: Simply because I'm not aware of any paths to generating large amounts of wealth that don't require having a disposition that predisposes one to extremely long hours. And the many stories I've read of people getting rich involve very long hours.
Maybe you're thinking about people who were born rich, and shuffle money around and get even richer? I *suppose* I can see that not taking lots of effort, but I would imagine that sort of rich person wouldn't be the most common kind among the rich who increase their own wealth. (But there would be a lot of people born into wealth that either don't work or work more normal hours without making serious money.)
276: Maybe because the ones that continue on with other projects aren't the ones you meet as much? And even still, there's that initial period of very hard work.
275: Are you saying it's common for people who get rich to not have to work extremely hard (and be intrinsically motivated) to do so?
Come on now. The fact that many rich people got rich by working hard doesn't entail that the reason poor people are poor is that they didn't work as hard. Not even close.
And the many stories I've read of people getting rich involve very long hours.
Don't believe the hype. Or, at least, you're building opinions about how hard rich people work based on flattering articles you read about them. Surely you can see the problems with that. (Now, I'm not saying that rich people don't often work long hours, but so does everyone else.)
I'm getting a great visual, here: Tinsley Mortimer in a Rosie-the-Riveter outfit. I think that's a keeper.
280: I didn't mean to imply that--would you point out where I did?
279: I'm saying that "clarifications" like 277--'m not aware . . .the many stories I've read . . . I *suppose* I can see . . . I would imagine that . . . indicates that you're operating pretty much in the realm of fantasy.
For fuck's sake, the problem isn't with the claim that 'Rich people work hard.' Yes, they work hard. Many of them work very very hard. The problem is with the claim that "because rich people work hard, if people are poor, it's because they didn't work hard."
This doesn't follow from the first claim no matter how many examples you point to of hardworking IPO stockbroker superheroes with large wine collections who cure cancer on the side.
If I am rich, I worked hard. P implying Q. Negating the P doesn't give you negating the Q, no matter now much I grant you the implication, m'kay?
Are the rich more motivated than the poor? Well, if we define how rich you are by how much money you've made (as opposed to inherited) then I would say definitely.
281: But that's the point: not *everyone* else does. There are lots and lots of people of every class that work very hard (to the exclusion of much else), but also many who don't work so hard. I don't suppose you're denying that there are people who value spending more time with their families above advancing their career. And the ones that get rich are the ones that sacrifice everything for their career.
Are *among* the ones. Working very hard guarantees you nothing.
Are the rich more motivated than the poor? Well, if we define how rich you are by how much money you've made (as opposed to inherited) then I would say definitely. You can't get rich without being intrinsically motivated to work really hard.
This, from 265. That the rich are uniformly hardworkers -- while some of the poor may also be, some are slackers and that's why they're poor.
285: I'm not saying that negating P negates Q. You're just think that I'm saying that because I'm not explicitly denying that P negates Q at every turn. I *never* said that.
288: That is not implied by that quote.
Specifically, the "and that's why they're poor" part is not implied.
I declare this conversation officially over.
Okay. If work ethic is not an important difference between the rich and the poor, why are we talking about it? If it is, how are you not claiming that lack of work ethic is an important explanation of poverty?
Yes, you are. I realize we're all supposed to be charitable according to your rules, but when you say Are the rich more motivated than the poor? Well, if we define how rich you are by how much money you've made (as opposed to inherited) then I would say definitely.
meaning, charitably, "The rich are definitely more motivated than the poor.", I'm not sure how to read that charitably other than by saying "pdf thinks that the rich are definitely more motivated than the poor."
I am not having to read anything into what you're saying to get what that says.
291: OK, it *is* implied that being poor and being a slacker makes it virtually certain that you will remain poor. Same goes for the middle class, to a great extent (although you can really fuck up and become poor), and same goes for the rich to a substantially smaller extent.
What's not implied is that being motivated will make you not-poor, or that the only reason *any given* poor person is poor is because of a lack of motivation.
I still don't see where you're getting rich people being on average more motivated than anyone else, except from flattering profiles of CEOs in business magazines.
"That the rich are uniformly hardworkers -- while some of the poor may also be, some are slackers and that's why they're poor."
The last "they're" is referring to all poor people. That's what makes the implication invalid. If the last "they're" was referring only to the slacker-type poor people, then the implication is valid.
297: A very motivated person tends to end up richer than they started. A very lazy person tends to end up poorer. Because the rich in particular have a higher churn than other classes (between them and the upper-middle class), the motivated people end up dominating numerically in that class.
And yet you ignore the slacker-type rich people.
If all this means is that to make money, you have to have it together enough to be employable, sure. There's a segment of the poorest people who are poor because they're mentally or emotionally incapable of working. Leaving those to one side, though, you don't have a basis for anything you've said.
299 cont: And that isn't just hypothetical speculation. That's what I observe in real life. Not to say my observations are automatically correct.
254
"Another factor is just me observing all of the people I saw in school, and noticing that the ones that did the worst were, uniformly, the ones that just didn't care. But it could be that once you skim off those (because they're not likely to want to go to college) that the relationship doesn't hold."
You have to be careful here. People find it easier on the ego to fail because they aren't trying rather than because they are stupid. So a lot of apparent lack of motivation is really lack of ability or perhaps self confidence.
pdf, your claims to be exempt from conversational implicature are charming, but I don't know how then to interpret this sentence, or with what justification you say it:
And while you can have all the motivation in the world and remain poor through circumstance, the fact remains that, in the best case, the poor have the same average motivation as the average person in general.
Why would this follow, unless you were also accepting "If one works very very hard, one will not remain poor" as a premise? And when we put all of your 265 together, it seems that what you're proposing is that rich people are rich, in general, because they work harder than the poor.
300: Slacker-type rich people don't make money, and so they fall out of the upper class after a few generations.
My primary basis is direct observation, which I guess isn't easy to communicate.
303: Let me try to be more explicit about my model. Depending on class mobility, people, let's say, can rise half a class in a lifetime (if they work extremely hard) or fall one class (if they really slack off). So at any given time, you're going to have people exiting and entering all classes. And because the lower class is the *lowest* class, you don't have people exiting that class because they're lazy. And because the upper class is the *highest*, you don't have people exiting it because they're driven. The only other assumption you need is that there's a correlation between a person's parents' level of motivation and their own, and the lower class ends up with more lazy people, and the upper with more driven people.
But that doesn't mean that the reason poor people are poor is *because* they're not as driven as rich people. I mean, the causality is several steps (and a generation or two) removed there.
All I can say is that you have a vastly inflated idea of the influence motivation has on success.
Any evidence for any of this, or are we in axioms of intuition land again?
306: It doesn't have to have a very large effect for 305 to be right. If it's a *necessary* but not sufficient part of getting rich, then the model works. Even if there's huge amounts of luck involved (both in making money and losing it).
In fact, due to the vast size differences in the classes, the lower class won't end up with significantly more non-motivated people in it that average. And the model still works.
Sure if you control for everything else being more motivated means you'll make more money than being less motivated. But things like "being smart" or "having connections" or a "graduating from Stanford between the years 1995 and 1999" seem to have a much larger affect on earnings than motivation does.
The other problem with motivation in the abstract is that it ignores what the ratio is between effort and success. If a little effort goes a long way, then given the same amount of motivation you'll work a lot more. Whereas, if you have reason to believe that working harder won't help you much, then even if you're just as motivated you won't work as hard.
307: Similar models have been used to demonstrate the variations in class mobility. (Granted, with data.) If you *really* wanted, I could probably dig up some data.
309: I don't contest any of that. I don't think it contradicts my position.
311: Then your claim isn't wrong, it's merely uninteristing. Much like the observation that protons in the nucleus exert a gravitational force on each other.
306 So why do you think some people succeed and others fail? In my view the main factors are luck, ability and effort.
"pdf, your claims to be exempt from conversational implicature are charming,"
I do see, now, how I was misleading. But with the assumptions I had (which I didn't know weren't obvious), the implication wasn't there. With your assumptions (which I wasn't aware of until later), it was implied. I don't deny it, or look down on your assumptions. It's just that we're coming from very different viewpoints, and these misunderstandings happen.
If it's a *necessary* but not sufficient part of getting rich, then the model works.
But it's not. I know a rich guy who was a moderately but not extravagantly hardworking OB/GYN (five syllables, guys), who got rich because his partner was a very successful investor, and Dr. W rode along with him. Early investors in Berkshire Hathaway weren't particularly hard workers.
Goddamn non-switching back name thingie.
312: I guess I'm a pedant, then. Or a geek.
313: If you mean by "luck" to include "born into class X", "had good parents with good work ethic", and all sorts of other social capital, then that sounds good to me.
You also need to include how highly you value money in respect to other things. I'd rather have a 50K postdoc than a 150K hedge fund job (assuming both are in reasonable places to live) because I don't value cash money as highly as certain other things. Someone who valued cash and what it could buy more highly would make the other choice and hence be richer.
Similarly, my friend who quite his hedge fund job to write a novel. He works just as many hours a week writing as he did at the hedge fund, but now he's probably not going to end up being rich. In this case his being more motivated actually makes him much less rich. If he'd been less motivated he'd have just stuck with his old job.
315: Anyone can get rich through exceeding luck, but I just don't think it's all that common. If I'm wrong, then the rich may be a lot less hardworking than the people who actually *make* all the money, since they're less coextensive than I thought.
Also, people in the upper-middle class get lucky a lot more often than poor people, since rich people rise out of that class, and so you're more likely to be friends with them.
Yeah, I'm working in Biglaw because I didn't have the motivation to get the sort of public interest job I wanted.
I'm not sure what you mean by "*make*" money.
You know, you get the special paper, and engrave the plates...
Working hard doesn't entail that someone will compensate you handsomely for it. (e.g., working two minimum wage jobs.) Slacking off only hurts you if you get caught and don't have a safety net. (e.g., do well enough but not great but family are old money and trustees at Harvard. have enough money that when you get arrested for drug possession, the lawyers make it go away and it doesn't follow your career.) Bad luck can hit anyone, but it's easier to weather emergency surgery if you have health insurance. You get the idea.
I'm not saying that hard work can't bring about success, but this idea that the poor are lazier because the laziness settles like fine sediment to the bottom of the income scale seems to be wildly at odds with reality.
You know, ya'll may accuse me of tin-ear syndrome or some other Volokhy thing, but I'm not so sure that it isn't just you (Cala and B) being biased. If I can't *ever* make a point that's technically correct but vaguely resembles some hated viewpoint without being pounced upon (not that pouncing is bad in principle) then I think something is wrong. I mean, just once, I could put it down to me not being clear. But this has happened, what, three times now? (Not counting the "rich", thing, because that's understandable, but the earlier one in this thread, and two earlier threads.) And I do believe that I am, in general, fairly precise in my language. I have arguments on plenty of other forums without having to deal with this much flaming. Hell, I was defending Amanda Marcotte at Gene Expression and didn't get this kind of treatment. So I'm reluctant, at this point, to continue thinking it's just me.
But you're still awesome, LB.
Oh, man, now I feel like mean for turning on you after you said something nice, but honestly, I think you're having a way, way off day clarity wise. I've been trying to figure out what you could be saying all afternoon, and I've been interpreting you right along with Bitch and Cala. And I usually pride myself on being able to figure out what people mean to be saying.
Get a good night's sleep, and we'll try this argument another day.
322: You make money by getting people to give it to you. The difference between LB's OB/GYN and his partner was that the investing one got some other traders to give him money for his stocks at an opportune price. (Or however he invested.)
326: Yeah, I know you didn't agree with me any more than them. But you weren't mean about it.
At least I didn't ask you if you were on crack.
I don't think I'm obligated to be charitable to people who are belaboring meaningless points, or to people who fail to realize that the implications of what they're saying are patently offensive.
325 It is not just you, I get more abuse here than on any of the other blogs I comment on.
Seriously? That's great, we're doing something right.
333: Try commenting on Alas, A Blog. Heh.
A couple additions. 325 was spiteful and hurtful, not meant to be useful (though I think it's true--everyone's like that, myself included, and Cala and B are still better than most). I don't apologize. I've been feeling very irritable. Also, LB, you might be right about my not being very sharp. I've had a crappy day for mental acuity, among other things.
And oh, yes. I do remember getting treated like this on a right-wing site. At Gene Expression, in fact, defending a particular Twisty post (even though I don't read Twisty and don't really like her). But even there, I got more a LB-like level of opposition.
It's not the (mild) insults like "are you on crack" that bother me, it's when I feel that people just aren't understanding what I'm saying as well as they ought to be. (When I *feel* that way.)
And James, your comments in the education thread *were* pretty dumb. Sorry. You started off on the wrong foot here. If you had been commenting congenially before that point, you'd have gotten a lot more slack. Maybe as much slack as I've gotten in this thread. Heh.
And I do appreciate the slack, as much as I complain.
334 Seriously, it is not even close.
337: Hey, I'm not trying to apologize. How's this: Go to hell. I just don't let my anger at you keep me from looking at all this from a distance.
And to be fair, the issues I've been going over in this thread get *very* close to the *central* differences between economic conservatism and liberalism: how large is the variance in human capacity to produce and be productive? And so it's pretty much inevitable that it's going to generate a lot of argument. Bases of worldviews tend to be like that.
340: How's this: Go to hell.
You know, there's been some snark on this thread, but it seems to me to have been pretty restrained on the whole. I've seen far nastier / drearier threads on Unfogged, let alone other, way more humorless blog environments. I don't understand where this is coming from.