“All educators would have a GS-Number and teach because they have a passion for it, not a pay check fedish[sic].”

Few college and university level educators work solely for the money. Except in specific high-profile fields, the money is not that great. Few work solely for the opportunity to “teach”. The official line is that college professors are required to devote time to teaching, research, and service activities. In my experiences and those of other students and faculty, most institutions place higher value on researchers leading faculty members to be more interested in research as a means of gaining/maintaining tenure and status.

Also, I have a problem with Ernie’s notion that the good minorities are advanced to points beyond where their normal academic skill would get them. The Peter principle exists in all fields, all races, all genders, etc. To include all minorities in such a sweeping generality is frivolous at best. I would argue that AA has little impact on “good” students. The bad students will have trouble, because they don’t really have a clue about how college works. Any college graduate knows someone who was the star of his/her high school, came into their undergraduate years expecting to be the campus star as well, and barely held on to graduate (if lucky). That is not a phenomenon that is specific to race or economic status.

Economic Analysis

A university admits the highest valued students; without AA, this value is determined by academic ability, potential, etc. With AA, minorities have extra value.

A middle of the road university will be able to attract students with a value in a certain range; more valuable students will go to better schools, and less valuable ones will go to worse ones.

So the minorities that go to middle range schools will have part of their value given to them for free by AA. Their academic ability will be less to balance it out.

This works because typically minorities have worse economic conditions, so the talent pool is low proportional to population. There’s lots of pressure to get the good minorities. Because they have extra political value because of AA, they get moved up beyond where their normal academic skill would get them, so it makes them look bad.

The whole system is broken and needs to be dismantled. All education should be public and free up to an including grad school. Instead of blowing up and rebuilding countries this is where the money should go! Then all this would be a non-issue. All educators would have a GS-Number and teach because they have a passion for it, not a pay check fedish. Wouldn’t this level the playing field? Then have straight testing for entrance and give points for things like…..having the correct answer or response!

So basically, your post was bollocks.

Signed,
An Asian that doesn’t respect authority

It seems to me that your rationale “Then it hit me: high school teachers don’t always motivate the material either, MIT only accepts students who did well in high school, ergo all students at MIT are people who are willing to do stuff merely because a teacher (authority figure) says to do it.” is a non sequitur. There might well be high-achieving high school students whose teachers poorly motivate the material, but choose to “do stuff” because they are able to detect the motivation themselves.

Let me point out a few things as a member of the “protected minority”, an alumnus from two relatively large universities, a current graduate student at a third large university, and a consistently successful standardized test-taker (averaging above the 90th percentile since high school.

1. Anyone who thinks the playing field is level (or really even close) is fooling themselves. There will unfortunately always be racism, but the majority of the majority will never really know what it feels like. Most will never have epithets and bottles simultaneously hurled at them as they walk across campus from class (I have. Many of my friends have as well). Most will not have their first employer after college request a transfer for them because “well, he is Black…so we don’t think he fits well here” (I did. Interestingly, the person requesting the transfer was unaware that he was speaking to a Black person on the other end.) Most will never have to persistently question the impact of their race upon nearly everything that happens to them.

2. It is important to remember that AA is not a program to reward underachievers based upon their race. It is to balance the playing field for MARGINAL students with recognizable disadvantages in their academic preparation. Let’s be clear about this: no comparatively outstanding students will be disadvantaged by AA. It is always the marginal ones. Yes, a few marginal students will be passed over for a few more marginal minority students every year as part of a university’s affirmative action policies. No outstanding students, by any measure and of any race, will be impacted.

3. Sadly, Philip’s “used-car” theory is correct to some degree. I can “prove” that I belong in any student body that I would choose based upon GPA and test scores. Unfortunately, I am sure that I am branded as an Affirmative-Action recipient based upon my skin color. However, Philip’s analogy doesn’t hold upon graduation because a Bodleian with a 3.0 GPA is just as capable as a Non-Bodleian with a 3.0. A Bodleian who graduates was just as successful as a non-Bodleian who graduated.

A few remarks…

Does a black man living next to me in college with a 3.0 GPA, versus my 3.3, promote my stereotype of blacks as less intelligent and capable?

Is the original post accurate in postulating that the 5%-10% quota of blacks will fail their classes?

UC Berkeley has a history of anti-authoritarian views, has a reasonably diverse student body, yet is one of the country’s premier institutions. This is anecdotal, but with 36k students perhaps it should bear mention in the authority-worship = success debate.

Is someone who got a B+ in Poli Sci 101 recieving less from that portion of his college experience than someone who gets an A-? Will he be less successful? Should his future success based on a 0.4 GPA differential dictate college admissions? What’s college for, anyways?

SATs are a good indicator of future college GPA. SATs, in part, measure knowledge of words like “polemic”. I learned it off a list I memorized for the SAT. I happened to know about half the words already, words like “esoteric”. But I never encountered either of these words in high school. I either read them somewhere cuz I’m a geek or learned them from my PhD mom and MS dad. Will I outperform someone with a less academic family in college? I’d guess yes. Is the playing field level? No. Is not having a level playing field something that should be addressed in admissions? Maybe. But please at least acknowledge it’s an issue.

Also, kyle, quotas are illegal. This was made clearer when the court ruled on the Michigan undergrad case (point system) and the Grutter v. Bollinger Law School case (critical mass).

Kyle, there are indeed studies about how well affirmative action students do in the workplace. The book is called “The Shape of the River.” Here is a clip from a 9/9/98 NYTimes review:

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A major new study of the records and experiences of tens of thousands of students over 20 years at the some of the nation’s top colleges and universities concludes that their affirmative action policies created the backbone of the black middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration.

The study, which challenges much of the conservative thinking about affirmative action, is to be released Wednesday by Princeton University Press in a book titled “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions.” It was written by two former Ivy League presidents, William Bowen of Princeton University, an economist, and Derek Bok of Harvard University, a political scientist.

The key point you miss here is that you have confused affirmative actions and quotas.

A quota demands that a certain percentage of the incoming class be a given race. This offers the potential for underqualified students of a given race to be admitted.

Affirmative action states that given two candidates of the SAME level of credentials (namely, both are perfectly EQUALLY qualified to attend) that one should statistically lean towards underprivileged students. (I personally believe that the definition of “underprivileged” should be considered independently from the concentration of melanin in one’s skin or whether one’s great-great-grandmother had a friend from Mexico, but that’s a separate issue.)

This only works when there are many, many more qualified students than available positions; namely, as is the case in highly selective universities like Harvard and Stanford. Let’s say 2/3 of the people that apply are simply not qualified. We will disqualify them independently of race.

Then we’re left with the 33% that remain, any random subset of which could make for a strong class. We could prefer people who were tall, or pretty, or who had large noses if we wanted, and we’d still have a strong class. Affirmative action says to use “privilege” as a random weighting factor. Privileged students who are qualified can still get in, but are at a slight statistical disadvantage. Underprivileged students still have to be qualified to be considered and if they qualify (qualification standards are often brutally high) they are rewarded with a slight statistical advantage.

This all makes sense to me (well, given a race-free definition of “privilege”) and it is entirely different from the straw man you have decided to rail against.