104 Comments
Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

The Ivies will abolish legacies just in time so that the Asian grad wave can't use it.

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Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I think your framing of the nation essentially outgrowing affirmative action is uniquely persuasive. Also probably explains why even lifelong liberals have turned away from it, even in California where it was recently voted down on a statewide ballot (Prop 16). I attended college just as Prop 209 hit and was very active in a number of clubs that promote diversity...and support for affirmative action has waned while other progressive leanings (including for racial justice) deepened in this cohort.

SCOTUS may strike this down for bad reasons but I think we have the tools to build something better for the 2020s. I finally feel old enough to recognize I'm not seeing the world through the lenses of my youth (which explains why I'm wearing bifocals now).

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Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

This is the part where Freddie deBoer pops in and points out that we need to radically re-evaluate our system that overemphasizes intelligence and college-track curriculum as having social value relative to other abilities. But that’s two or three steps ahead of sorting out the post affirmative action regime.

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Nov 2, 2022·edited Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Much of the decline in admission rates to elite schools is just because people apply to so many more schools these days. I don’t know how much though.

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I feel like there's a rhyme between YIMBYism and the call to expand the number of seats available at "elite" schools. The most important place to build more housing, or add more seats for students, is in the neighborhoods / schools that most enhance the productivity of the people who get to be there.

And in fact, considering the recent battle over expanding UC Berkeley, these two policy issues seem pretty closely intertwined.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/uc-berkeley-university-enrollment-nimby/622927/

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Nov 2, 2022·edited Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Well written and thought out.

Some food for thought on the decreasing acceptance rates at elite universities … I think this mostly has to do with inflation of the number of applications going to these top schools. Not sure there’s really anything to address there.

“Among students in the top 5% of graduating seniors, the inflation in the number of schools is even more dramatic, with many (if not most) students who are applying to the most selective colleges applying to 15 - 20 schools, with some even submitting 25 or more applications.”

I definitely didn’t apply to that many schools when I got into Stanford in 2001.

Source 👇

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-number-of-college-applications-per-student-in-the-United-States/answer/David-M-Joseph-1?ch=15&oid=78108093&share=4d109dba&target_type=answer

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Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I agree with most of this. But if Harvard or wherever is only claiming to admit the most exceptional kids - wouldn’t variance from their peer group be a better sign of that than absolute sat scores. Understand defining peer groups will become increasingly difficult though per your point.

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Legacy preferences are part of the product Ivy League colleges offer to the other students. Mingling with the families of the rich for four years is way more valuable than what you learn in the classes.

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Nov 2, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I recall a study, which now I cannot locate, from perhaps 15-20 years ago, looking at law school admissions for public university law schools (back when it was still common to have fairly direct racial thumbs on the scale versus hypothetically race neutral criteria) that concluded that income-based class preferences (versus no direct preferences at all - just things like LSAT scores) would simply result in a slightly greater number of whites from moderately tight circumstances with getting in (at the expense of richer whites with slightly better LSAT scores), while doing nothing for blacks in terms of boosting their total, and we couldn't have that.

In terms of admission to the hyperselective universities, where admission is practically a Veblen good so we absolutely mustn't have a supply side solution, I think you are right that solutions which are notionally race neutral but actually designed to boost black admit fraction will need fairly opaque tuning (I agree with you re boosting the group labelled Native American, but for obvious reasons that goal will be extremely low salience). Adding wealth would be one - another that seems fairly obvious to me is to give bonus points based on poor average performance of the applicant's high school, which would at least in some cases provide a boost not just for people of the correct color, but also ruralia, which could use some boosting.

As you say, it will be a spoils system regardless.

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Removing race-based AA, and especially replacing it with SES-based AA, should also help reduce the grievance felt by poorer whites towards minorities and the Democratic Party.

Growing up poor in rural Alabama, with no one else in my family ever having gone to college, few things pissed me off as a young man more than having progressive peers (usually from UMC+ families) tell me about my 'privilege'.

That stuff is poison for the soul. And also pushed me more towards conservatism. Or at least made me distrustful that left-spectrum folks had my interests at heart.

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Nov 2, 2022·edited Nov 2, 2022

Very interesting take on the AA issue. UC system and Prop 209 seems to show that AA doesn't really matter. Whether that's because administrators are using race or race proxies (SES?) anyway, or some other system, it is clearly Prop 209 hasn't hurt racial diversity in any meaningful way, at least not as it stands today.

Though Black enrollment did decline as a percentage of students post 209, it only dropped by ~1% of total enrollment. Meanwhile, Hispanic enrollment, which dropped initially since prop 209, has doubled from 13% to 26% since Prop 209, White enrollment has fallen and Asian enrollment has increased slightly (as percentages). Both Asians and Hispanics individually outnumber Whites by a good margin on UC campuses now. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-center/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity

Also your source on black enrollment is way old (2014), since then Black enrollment has increased above pre-prop 209 levels by percent. It is now at 4.4% and total enrollment (of actual people, not percent) is nearly double what it was then. It should also be pointed out that this number is not far off the K-12 demographic split of CA schools, which is 5.2% Black. Relative to the younger K-12 ages, Hispanics are underrepresented in the UC system, Asians are over represented, and Whites are proportionately represented.

Anyway, just some musings since you got me curious.

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You've buried the lead a bit. It's the stratification of the system and the shortage of places in the top tiers that makes the problem so intractable. I've been banging on about this for ages. https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/20/the-eye-of-the-needle/

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It’s also a demeaning system where white gatekeepers are empowered to judge minorities on their “diversity.” I’m certain I’m not the only minority who hates having to perform a “diversity jig” for white people for access to opportunities.

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The NYT ran an article on Nov 2, “Has America Outgrown Affirmative Action” by Spencer Bokat-LIndel. Surprisingly for the NYT the article had some balance and nuance and is interesting to compare to Noah’s commentary on the potential for the Supreme Court to do away with AA in higher education. Both articles start with a history of AA but Noah’s focus is the changing demographics of America and the impact those changes have and will have on how America manages affirmative action. The Times completely misses this fundamental point which is the crux of what has happened to AA over the past fifty years. The NYT article makes a big deal that if legacy, athletic etc. programs were to go away at the Ivy League schools white admission would fall by the same amount that Asian would increase, that preferential treatment for white, wealthy, connected students is the problem. Noah agreed that it would be good to end this preferential treatment but shows that it does not lead to lower overall white enrollment (at least in case of Harvard) since higher achievement non-connected whites would take their place. A nice graph is presented to prove his point. Black and Hispanic enrollment would fall.

The Times article then goes on to make the argument that the only solution to keeping Black, Hispanic enrollment at current levels is raced based and that class based solutions will not work. Only support for this is quotes from The Times Nicole Hannah-Jones. Noah has a much more in-depth analysis, presents data and a graph showing impact of different admission policies including those using SES (social economic status). The information came from the Century Foundation; it seems the NYT does not have the resources to find this type of information?

Both Noah and the Times do bring up the problems with the University of California system and both discuss the problem with elite universities more interested in prestige than in educating students. Noah shows a graph on admission rates and failure of universities to keep up with population growth; these universities think turning away great students is something positive. NTY times goes off on the solution of taxing endowments and that the main problem is the US is fundamentally a crappy, merit based society.

Noah’s basic point is that if AA was just black versus white it could be justified and be a valuable tool but in our diverse, multi-cultural society affirmative action has the most likely outcome of becoming a racial spoils system that will only tear the nation apart more than it already is. This very basic point was not even comprehended by the NYT article.

I pay more for Noahpinion than for my on-line NYT, I ask is this reasonable? Then I look at these two articles as example of excellent writing versus mediocre and I get why it is.

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Good article, but Noah’s repeated references of Hispanics as a “race” and sometimes being “mixed race” underscores our general confusion. Hispanic is a marker or *national origin* not where your ancestors lived in 1491. The average Hispanic has a mix of Native American and European ancestry and those from the Caribbean often have significant African ancestry. Many, many Hispanic families have been of near complete European ancestry, or near complete African ancestry, for decades or centuries. The fluctuating percent of Hispanics who call themselves “white” is due to flaws in the category.

Also not sufficiently acknowledged is that first and second-generation immigrants are now a huge proportion of the “Black” population in major metro area like New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Houston, Miami, and Washington DC, and are becoming that way nationwide, but are treated as being the same historical ethnicity.

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Nov 3, 2022·edited Nov 3, 2022

I’m Cuban-American. Both sides of the family had been in Cuba for many generations/centuries, according to family trees the old great aunts kept in Santa Clara. Those trees traced us back to Castilla La Vieja (northern Spain).

I arrived in NYC as a child. I’m fluent in Spanish, cook Cuban food, play & dance to Cuban music — just generally love being Cuban.

My WASP husband gave me a DNA test kit for x-mas, thinking it’d be fun. I was (laughingly) devastated by the results.

It turns out I’m mostly Norwegian, with French and northern Spanish rounding out the rest.

My husband googled up a map of Viking trade routes, one matched the 3 spots listed on the dna results. He turned to me and said, “Well, this explains a lot honey, you’re a Viking.”

Should descendants of a Viking clan who made it to Cuba centuries ago receive affirmative action to get into Ivy League law school in the U.S.?

(Theoretical question, I graduated ages ago).

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