No comment, just interesting
No comment, just interesting
42 comments
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What's the average, or at least the past few years? How does this compare with other years percentage-wise - is overall enrollment up or down? Maybe it's usually 20 every other year, maybe it's usually 200 🤷♂️ mostly useless without context
EDIT: there's a little more in the actual article, at least
Harvard Law enrolled 19 first-year Black students, or 3.4 percent of the class, the lowest number since the 1960s, according to the data from the American Bar Association. Last year, the law school’s first-year class had 43 Black students, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
“This is the lowest number of Black entering first-year students since 1965,” he added, pointing to numbers compiled by the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard, where he also serves as faculty director. That year, there were 15 entering Black students. Since 1970, there have generally been 50 to 70 Black students in Harvard Law’s first-year class, he said.
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So well under half is a big change.
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Racism is working!
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How many Asians and Indians, serious question, and, respect.
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- African American or Black 14%
- Asian American 37%
- Hispanic or Latino 16%
- Native American 1%
- Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander <1%
- African American/Black 15.3
- Asian American 29.9
- Latinx 11.3
- Native American 2.2
- Native Hawaiian 0.5
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The dirty secret of affirmative action is that schools were not filling their ranks with inner city or low income African American students. They were heavily recruiting wealthy students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the Caribbean, and the UK.
I didn’t go to a top school by any stretch of the imagination but every Black student I met was wealthy and international.
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Same here. In our district they have every hbcu, but not even the state local engineering college on their wall of universities.
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What's to stop them from doing it anyway barring there being a racist on the admissions committee? Even then, a majority vote would rule right? Couldn't the majority say, "We had exceptionally good black students applicants this year. This is an internal matter"?
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Yeah, I feel that this proves 1 of 2 things: either that Harvard's Admissions Board is in fact racist, or that affirmative action was actually causing an uneven playing field.
P.S. whether or not creating an uneven playing field is right or wrong is an entirely separate issue.
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Creating a false dichotomy does nothing but eliminate nuance. The simple fact is that there are more students applying to Harvard than Harvard can let in. Because not this, it means Harvard gets to choose from people they think will benefit the University, an "even playing field" has nothing to do with it.
The university doesn't benefit the most from getting the smartest or hardest working graduates, they benefit from students who will one day increase their endowment.
The idea of an even playing field is laughable, as we don't have an equal path to higher education. Someone getting 4.0 from a private highschool who has access to private tutors, isn't the same as someone getting a 4.0 from a public school and holding down a part time job.
So if the school doesn't have to acknowledge this, what do you think is going to happen? If the idea of merit is only tracked by how well you can beef up your student portfolio......who do you think is going to win out, the family that spent tens of thousands on private education, or the family who is struggling to pay rent?
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Of course affirmative action was causing an uneven playing field. That was the whole point. Our society has screwed over certain marginalized groups, so this is a way to help give them a leg up.
The Wikipedia page literally says affirmative action is sometimes known as "positive discrimination/action"
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Something needs to be done but affirmative action isn't it. It's just a bad policy.
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Unfortunately the other options are worse or impossible...
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No affirmative action and we probably wouldn’t be stuck with Clarence Thomas. It’s not all bad.
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Ouch, if that isnt the worst truth I've heard. I wonder what we can do to fix the massive mess our public institutions have become.
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If there's hidden segregation in education, as it was with Jews in USSR, then universities doing less of it will become better over time.
(I mean - this effect has sort of receded by now, but in today's Russia all education kinda slowly rots. There are exceptions, which are mostly connected to specific passionate people.)
And affirmative action is hard to do right, and from what I've heard, it's not done right in the USA.
The right way is similar to support groups and employment help groups.
Having a list of protected groups is wrong for two reasons - it doesn't protect at all those who haven't made it into that list, first, and making a group protected also cements its definition, makes an arbitrary border for it, second.
So - applying force, as in such laws, may feel intuitively more powerful, but it's not.
Also laws meant to protect may actually in obscure ways cement a certain group's disadvantaged position. The best policy is no special cases and minimization of blocking and gatekeeping, so that if for members of some group things don't work somewhere, there's enough alternatives so that they'd find a way. That is harder, but known to work. Unlike preferential treatment.
There is a comment with percentage of Asian students here too, where they are represented more than in population. Is there no racism against Asians? Is there any affirmative action in their favor?
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Your theory is sound except for the glaring ommision of the existence of racism. That's why """preferential""" <--(needs more quotes) exists, because in America, systemic racism absolutely does
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Yeah I agree with you.
When they said:
If there's hidden segregation in education (...) then universities doing less of it will become better over time.
They are totally ignoring the fact that systemic racism is self reinforcing.
E.g. if one group of parents have enough cash on hand to enroll their children in tutoring when they need it, and impressive extra curricular activities when tutoring is unnecessary, then the children of those parents will have stronger university applications than the children that have to work part time jobs. This perpetuates racially inequality.
It's not difficult to understand. It doesn't even require racial prejudice.
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42 comments