Affirmative Action

[noahgibbs]

I just felt like I should write this down somewhere. After some discussion on jhaugh's journal and some talk with the housemate (bk2w), we actually figured out an Affirmative Action plan that the housemate and I both find acceptable. Not that it matters to anybody, but hey, I'll write it down anyway.


The nominal reason that being part of a racial minority should give preferential treatment in the admissions process is the extra educational challenges that such minorities face. The logic is that race correlates well with these educational challenges, which is reasonably fair as far as it goes. Basically like jhaugh's 'corrected personal brilliance' metric.

So what you'd really like to do, if possible, would be to stop measuring race, which provides only a decent correlation, and start measuring those educational challenges more directly. As it turns out, we have a pretty decent way to do that -- standardized test scores are used for admissions anyway, so it's just a matter of determining, say, the average SAT and ACT scores for a given school and determining how the individual student's score compares. So a 1400 SAT, while it's not bad at a place like Stuyvesant, would have even more weight in the admissions process at a place where the average SAT score was in the 800s...

You could argue that this penalizes students in very good schools since they can't compete with the same score from somebody from a worse school... But then, they've had the extra educational opportunities, so they should be scoring better than somebody equally intelligent. And I think the number of people with 1400+ SAT scores from horrendous schools is pretty limited, so it's not like good students from the best schools will be thrown out en masse. Those who *will* be penalized are the worse students from the best schools, which seems reasonable -- they're surrounded by the best available resources and still aren't making much of a showing.

So the argument that minorities are often poor, causing underfunded schools, causing less-educated students would be dealt with nicely. If that's true and the schools are of lower quality then the average standardized test scores will be very low, which will give an admissions boost to the best students from that school. And that'll be true regardless of race, and in a colorblind way.

The biggest downside I'm seeing is that by the time the graduates of such a program got old, their stories about how poor and downtrodden their upbringing was will get even more obnoxious. That's a risk I'm prepared to take.

Anyway. Not that it matters.

Comments

[griffjon.livejournal.com]

I can't, but Google can:
http://www.jbhe.com/latest/37_b&w_sat.html

"
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 980. This is 123 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 46 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 142 points below the mean score for whites from families at the same income level.
"

plus more useful comparisons.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Wow. Yeah, that first bullet point definitely floors me. I'd say something about "putting a greater value on education, or at least formal education", but it appears I'm disproven. While it's entirely possible, even likely, that large sections of black culture value formal education less than the equivalent bits of white culture (fair enough, it's not always all that useful), I'd be surprised if that were true of very poor white people and very well-off black people.

So I suppose it's something else, though I couldn't tell you what. I'd specifically mention the bits of formal education that the SAT tests (obscure vocabulary, analogies using same) as perhaps being less-valued, but again, I doubt that's true of very poor white people and affluent black people.

I'm not sure how else to explain it, though. That makes very little sense to me. I'm not denying that it's true, of course.

[sheenaqotj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm amazed by that data, as well. In light of it, I might have to re-evaluate response to your income-based affirmative action comment in jhaugh's journal.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

That is fucked up!

I'm going to continue to be very disturbed at those numbers until I figure out whats behind them.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Pow! I have a theory.

Did they measure "percentage of black kids from families with incomes under $10K taking the SAT vs. percentage of white kids bla bla bla taking the SAT?"

Here's my new theory. If you're white and bad at school there's more opportunities for you. Ergo, you're less likely to take the SAT to begin with, and don't count against "average white SAT score".

Ever notice that janitors at (CMU/your place of employment/etc) are usually black/hispanic, but the much-higher-paying (and, incidentally, union-controlled) skilled-blue-collar workers (electricians, carpenters etc) are almost always white? Maybe there's a barrier to blacks entering high-pay skilled-blue-collar jobs, and so, to get ahead, they have to take the SATs and go to college. Am I suggesting that some major US labor unions might, in fact, be racist? Perish the thought!

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Boom!

Statistical evidence.

"Data from The College Board shows that 52 percent of white students who take the SAT are ranked in the top 20 percent of their high school class. This compares to 32 percent of black test takers. Some 46 percent of white students who take the SAT report that their high school grade point average is in the A range. This compares to only 22 percent of black test takers. These figures alone can explain the large racial scoring gap on the SAT."

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

racism in organized labor

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Well, sorta. The question, then, is whether blacks are represented proportionally in the top 20% of their class. I'd guess not. Ditto on proportional representation of blacks among A students.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Depends on how segregated schools are.