A reader writes:
As you’ve written earlier, I think the value of affirmative action is that it co-opts dissent by including the most intelligent from every ethnic group. This reinforces the ability of the elite to continue discriminating ruthlessly on intelligence for the jobs “that matter” in law, finance etc. As such, it is unlikely that AA would be banned outright. Even a restriction would just push it “into the shadows” – eg, it will still happen, just in another way or form.
Because I think the above is true, it seems like the only way affirmative action would end is if it is taken to its ridiculous logical conclusion, whereby admissions test are made easy and applicants are chosen randomly. A better strategy for folks opposed to AA would probably be to try and achieve these ends – to push on elite institutions with disparate impact (universities and corporations).
The downside case to this strategy, is that there is a social benefit to have a cluster of very smart people in one place, so they can feed off one another and do more interesting things together than they might do alone.
With places that focus on engineering (Stanford etc) this results in tangible and incredible technologies. The ivy league seems to be the font of financial engineering, so clusters can also produce products that more focused on the clever taking advantage of the clueless. (Yes, the economy benefitted from the additional leverage that was available from these innovations, but it has now left us with major structural problems).
The upside case from this strategy, for the folks who are disadvantaged by the practice, is that it would undermine the value placed on “elite” credentials, making the individual’s performance more important. This is a form of equalizing outcomes by lowering the standard. Not pretty, but it would have a big effect.
For society - if smart folks were more evenly spread throughout various industries and fields, rather than concentrated into a few value transference sectors, we might see a very different country 25 years from now.
An alternate way to achieve this last outcome would be to mandate reverse quotas – no single university can have no more than x% of their students from the top y% of scores. This would force the spread of our smart fraction and ensure we have smart people working in more fields. Safer for society since the “next big thing” is always unpredictable.
I can recall visiting Stanford as a high school student in 1974 or 1975 and being suitably impressed Why would anybody want to go anywhere else, I thought at the time, what with the weather, the beautiful campus, the easy grades, and now the rise around Stanford of this thing that was then starting to be called "Silicon Valley," where guys get rich living out science fiction dreams?
As far as I can tell, Stanford has fulfilled my exorbitant expectations of 37 years ago, but has it even moved up in the rankings since then? Not particularly. And that's mostly because Wall Street has sucked up more and more of the wealth, making the Ivy League colleges with the best pipelines to Wall Street ever more desirable, which in turn encourages Tigermothermania and so forth.
The sensible thing would be to take concrete actions to rein in Wall Street, but that may turn out to be politically unfeasible because they are, after all, Wall Street. So, perhaps we could nibble away at the Ivy League via Wall Street?
We're all supposed to be worked up over inequality, right, so why is it so important which college you get into at 18?
The Ivy League takes in about 15,000 freshmen per year out of an annual cohort of 4,000,000. Obviously, they do a pretty good job of selecting people likely to write them big checks in future fundraising drives, but, still ...
Perhaps regional hiring quotas could be imposed on firms in proportion to how much TARP money they took in 2008. For example, Goldman Sachs got a ten billion dollar loan in 2008 from the feds, so why not guidelines for Goldman Sachs about diversifying their hiring, showing that they are now recruiting at Big Ten and at SEC campuses. It's not like Goldman can't afford the airfare.
And so the troop of raisin-faced thespians convene again for another production of judicialpiece theater. Watch as they furrow brows, cock heads, stroke chins, and issue sententious inquiries like syncopated Epcot animatronics.
ReplyDeleteAnd like the changing guard, it is all mere pageantry. For once in chambers, all chaffing pretense to constitutional fidelity will be dropped in favor of the court’s true purpose: producing an expedient. And here the battle rarely varies. The Three Jewges will reflexively adopt the anti-white position and whistle for the lumpish latina to come bounding for her biscuit. Across the field the court’s phalanx of conservative popery will level its lances in likely service to another acerbic dissent. In the middle, Freddie Mercury Roberts and Sandra Day O’Kennedy will gambol like two children chasing butterflies…both being urged to join one of the warring factions.
“This way Freddie!”
“No join our team!”
Of course the most persuasive constitutional argument will be the one that most pleasantly strokes the ego of these two queens. And so their suitors should have the sense to eschew stare decisis in favor of stare in the mirror. “This opinion would look veeery good on you Freddie.”
there is a social benefit to have a cluster of very smart people in one place, so they can feed off one another and do more interesting things together than they might do alone.
ReplyDeleteLike come up with new and exciting ways to give our country away to wall street. A social benefit indeed!
forming a critical mass would be a desirable end, but that won't happen with talent spread to the far corners of the academic system. What could be called critical masses generally only formed under segregation.
ReplyDeleteAsymmetric warfare. The Ivy league are concentrated in Wall Street and the political system.
ReplyDeleteBYU. Religion seems like the answer, it's the one area that trumps race. You want to talk to Mel Gibson, not T Boone.
why not nationalize the Ivy leagues?
ReplyDelete"As far as I can tell, Stanford has fulfilled my exorbitant expectations of 37 years ago, but has it even moved up in the rankings since then? Not particularly. And that's mostly because Wall Street has sucked up more and more of the wealth, making the Ivy League colleges with the best pipelines to Wall Street ever more desirable, which in turn encourages Tigermothermania and so forth."
ReplyDeleteIs this actually true? I'm pretty sure that Google has a higher starting salary than Goldman Sachs. Silicon Valley and Wall Street salaries are comparable.
NFL draft?
ReplyDelete"As far as I can tell, Stanford has fulfilled my exorbitant expectations of 37 years ago, but has it even moved up in the rankings since then? Not particularly."
ReplyDeleteWhat rankings are you looking at, Steve?
According to the Times Higher Education Survey Stanford is now No. 2 in the world (it was #4 2 years ago). Cal Tech is #1, and Cal Berkely is # 9. MIT is #5. Harvard and Princeton are the only Ivy League schools in the top 10, Yale is down at #11.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2012-13/world-ranking
Obviously international students may not care as much about the Wall Street pipeline as Americans do. The Times/Reuters survey clearly puts more value on strong STEM schools.
As usual, diversity and equality for thee, but not for me.
ReplyDeleteHasn't all this been tried before in the Soviet Union?
According to the Times Higher Education Survey Stanford is now No. 2 in the world (it was #4 2 years ago). Cal Tech is #1, and Cal Berkely is # 9. MIT is #5. Harvard and Princeton are the only Ivy League schools in the top 10, Yale is down at #11.
ReplyDeleteCould this be the beginning of a slide in Ivy League standing by their turn from scholastics/academics to PC totalitarian fascism and slavish devotion to "diversity" and groupthink and generalized cronyism?
One can only hope. It is inevitable, ultimately.
One reason Wall Street recruits at Ivy League schools is that directly screening for high SAT scores would lead to disparate impact lawsuits. Congress should make it harder to sue for disparate impact. I know this would be a dogfight.
ReplyDeleteHow far is Stanford supposed to move up from 2 or 3?
ReplyDeleteCould this be the beginning of a slide in Ivy League standing by their turn from scholastics/academics to PC totalitarian fascism and slavish devotion to "diversity" and groupthink and generalized cronyism?
ReplyDeleteArguably that is the positive aspect of American schools working so hard to attract Chinese, Indian, Korean, Russians, etc. Most international students don't want to pay a lot of money to study wymyn's issues with affirmative action babies. Or at least the people who sponsor those students don't want that. They want transfer of real skills and real tools they can use to beat our brains in later. So American schools who want the Chinese elites are going to have to tighten up their standards.
Given that universities allow applicants to self-identify by race, if people think affirmative action is an unjust law, why not just self-identify as African-American or Mexican? Call it civil disobedience. Problem solved.
ReplyDelete"As you’ve written earlier, I think the value of affirmative action is that it co-opts dissent by including the most intelligent from every ethnic group."
ReplyDeleteWill someone elaborate/explain?
@Peter A:
ReplyDeleteThe only rankings that "matter": USN&WR's. 6 Ivies in the Top 10 (Cornell, Brown didn't make it.).
HPY top 3.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/slideshows/best-colleges-2013-top-10-national-universities/12
Like anyone gives a flying fig about the Times of London's rankings.
"Congress should make it harder to sue for disparate impact. I know this would be a dogfight."
ReplyDeleteWhatever its unfortunate side effects, using disparate impact evidence was itself the consequence of racist state and local governments violating the Constitution by gaming the system. Just remember that almost everything the civil rights movement protested for in the 1950s and 1960s was already guaranteed by law by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the civil rights laws passed by the Reconstruction Congress between 1866 and 1875.
Alas from the 1880s to the 1950s, legislators in Southern states found all sorts o ways to comply with the letter of the law while still operating a system of apartheid, The most famous was, of course, grandfathering (you can vote if your grandfather was eligible to vote. Race neutral on its face, not so much in its disparate impact). So yeah, disparate impact isn't going anywhere.
On another note, the Service Academies have an interesting system of affirmative action. The congressional appointment system ensures that cadets and midshipmen come from all corners of the country on a roughly per capita basis.
What they really need to do is set some quotas for hiring short people. That could serve as a proxi for certain needy Latin Americans, counter certain aspects of body privilege that might affect less fortunate men, neutralize people with Napoleon Complex by keeping them occupied, and help out people like Maya.
ReplyDeleteShort people offer a different perspective, literally.
ReplyDeleteThe Aquatic Gardener said...
"As you’ve written earlier, I think the value of affirmative action is that it co-opts dissent by including the most intelligent from every ethnic group."
Will someone elaborate/explain?
Suppose you are an imperial power faced with a hostile (sub-)population which you wish to govern (it's important that they are hostile). What do?
One possibility, let's call it the Israeli strategy, is to stomp on the head of the population all day long, every day. This strategy causes the population to really, really hate you. Furthermore, to get ahead in life, the native elite of the population has to play on that hate and to demonstrate that they are doing something to the hated overlords. So, you get unified resistance led by the native elite. Think about how Mahmoud Abbas (who seems pretty smart and psychologically normal) is considered by so many Palestinians to be soft on Israel even though he has a PhD in Holocaust Denial and regularly talks about how he wants to destroy Israel.
Another possibility, let's call it the Nixon strategy, is to pay off the native elite of the subject population and pretty much ignore the rest. But you do the payoff on the installment plan, $X per year. Now, the hoi polloi among the subject population still hate you, though not as much as under the Israeli strategy. However, the subject population is unable to organize effectively against you because their natural elite is too busy taking conference calls on Martha's Vineyard, blowing their payoff on cocaine and white hookers, or whatever. If the native elite rebels against you, they lose the installment-plan payoffs, so they don't. The only members of the subject population's natural elite trying to organize the masses are ones with personality disorders, like, say, Al Sharpton. And they are more funny than scary.
Because affirmative action is only applicable to blacks who both 1) graduate high school and 2) do at least sort-of well on the SAT, it distributes payoffs (on the installment plan over a whole career) to the blacks who are smart and hard-working, i.e. the natural elite among them.
I'm not saying one of these stragegies is always better than the other. It depends on lots of stuff. But, the US does the Nixon thing.
On message boards frequented by Tiger moms and cubs, the common phrase to use is "HYPSMC," short for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech.
ReplyDeleteThese are the most impressive undergraduate schools you can go to, and the only ones where people will think it was your first choice.
Also, if you want to be current, the best job out of college isn't at Goldman Sachs, but at certain top hedge funds. DE Shaw is sometimes mentioned as a top target, but really any of the big hedge funds are better/higher paying/more selective than Goldman.
shanghai ranking, which takes into account only measurable things (papers published by department, papers cited by department, academic prizes won by the faculty, number of undergrad, master, and doctor degrees awarded per year by the university, yearly budget of each department, endowment spending of the university), puts stanford at number 2 in the world, behind only harvard.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.shanghairanking.com/
princeton is 7, columbia 8, yale 11, cornell 13, penn 14. brown is correctly ranked way low, down at 65, and dartmouth drops off the map, below 100.
prestige is irrelevant to the rankings, so several prestigious universities in the US, which would be attractive to have on your resume, can drop very far on the list under these criteria.
they also rank each university by subject and field, so it's more specific than just the aggregated, combined hybrid ranking system published by US news & world report.
Margaret Thatcher tried this strategy; worked out swimmingly I believe.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember there being so many "ties" in the Mort Zuckerman rankings list back when I was sending out $70 applications. Well I'm sure those bright magazine people & their admissions office contacts know what they're doing!
ReplyDeletePenn's in a great, vibrant neighborhood too
ReplyDelete