What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-what-happens-when-you-ban-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/

by tyleroconnell • 11 years ago

37 97 11 years ago

omonra• 11 years ago

Seems like a pretty ludicrous analysis. Can be summed up as 'If you ban quotas, the people who get in because of quotas will not be as represented'. Uhh - duh? Will they have another post 'What happens when heavy objects are thrown up in the air - do they fall to the ground or float away?'

There is actually a much more interesting analysis of effects of AA on its recipients I read recently here: http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine...

Lawtonfogle9• 11 years ago

I think the argument was 'if you ban quotas based on race in favor of other measure which should still help increase diversity, you don't get as good an effect as just quotas'.

That it is lower shouldn't be surprising, but how much lower or higher than the expected lower might be surprising.

gareim• 11 years ago

which should still help increase diversity

I think quotas by income would be a much more interesting experience for college students than quotas by race.

yequalsx• 11 years ago

A quote from the article of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor:

"The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."

The salient part being, "further the interest approved today". The U.S. has a long history of dealing with nonwhite in pernicious ways. Part of the remedy has been affirmative action. The claim that affirmative action is no longer necessary because we are all equal is being called into question. If the outcomes of banning affirmative action are worse, in terms of racial disparity, then the aforementioned claim can be called into question.

The analysis is not ludicrous.

bitwize2• 11 years ago

"A society which has for hundreds of years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lawtonfogle9• 11 years ago

Whomever you are, you have had ancestors that enslaved and ancestors that were enslaved.

MisterBastahrd4• 11 years ago

That has nothing to do with this issue.

drabiega• 11 years ago

While true, this is irrelevant.

Things like affirmative action do not exist as revenge or compensation for some past act, they are there to undo some of the still present damage from those acts.

dragonwriter13• 11 years ago

The things done specially against African-Americans in particular (or non-whites in general) in the US aren't limited to (or even limited to the parts of the US which practiced), and also aren't all as distant in time as, slavery.

danharaj2• 11 years ago

Chattel slavery was a fairly unique and brutal phenomenon.

bitwize2• 11 years ago

But none of my current living relatives are being pulled over for minor traffic violations and then beaten, choked, or shot.

bduerst3• 11 years ago

In context to society at the time this was said, being able to sit wherever you want on a public bus was considered special privilege.

ThrustVectoring• 11 years ago

IMO, the real problem with differences in educational opportunity is the knock-on effects in hiring decisions. If there were many more jobs that could not discriminate on college degree, then Affirmative Action doesn't matter (since the net present value of a college degree goes down). As a nice side-effect, a college education is often a positional good in hiring decisions, so we're often better off as a whole if we stop consuming it. (That is, instead of looking at 5 college graduates for a firefighting job, we look at 5 non-graduates, and we get to save 20 person-years of education costs)

cygnus_a• 11 years ago

In other words, not using racial preferences in admissions decisions lets the black college enrollment trends continue; though, as the article doesn't point out, 'not using mandated racial preferences (banning aff. action)' is not the cause of disproportionate representation.

I think the argument against affirmative action is more, morally speaking, addressing the question, "should we use racial preference to fight racial preference?".

MisterBastahrd4• 11 years ago

There's no moral question here. We have a disadvantaged group of people who are being actively discriminated against by a majority group. The easiest way as a society to make sure that we treat the group fairly is by creating a system that ensures that they are being represented in the university population. It's good for them, it's good for their classmates, it's good for the university, and it serves long-term goals by putting more educated people in their demographic.

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

Why does the majority discriminate against themselves and in favor of other minorities (Asians, Jews)?

gadders• 11 years ago

I'd like to see research on whether banning affirmative action benefits Asian students, who are typically discriminated against.

finance-geek• 11 years ago

Not sure what sort of research you want to see, but the Michigan case opened up the books on who gets the raw deal. Summary here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/04/23/hidden-b...

Steko4• 11 years ago

I'd be interested in seeing the underlying data because there's a lot of noise you introduce by just equally weighing all colleges as data pts and then teasing out a weak trend. You could boil down the entire ban and non-ban populations to a single number for each group which would probably tell you more than these graphs do. Better yet do it over time.

Someone12342• 11 years ago

One issue with affirmative action which rarely gets addressed: What is the definition of a certain race anyway?

If someone is from two black parents, fine, they're black. But what if one parent was black and one was white, are they black? Are their children black? What about their children's children? Are we going to spin out genetic testing, color cards, or start looking at people's family tree to decide eligibility?

Honestly I think the US has the right idea, but has the wrong implementation.

People who are from disadvantaged households SHOULD be given a leg up. They don't get the expensive tutors, and their parents might have to work longer hours, they cannot afford that trip to Europe the rich kid wrote their essay about, and their home life could be a lot more disruptive.

And the nice "perk" of discriminating based on household income and or poverty is: A lot of minorities will benefit because they're already in that group.

It also solves another issue we're seeing: Second generation kids of minorities whose parents are college educated and or professionals. The affirmative action program is designed to give kids with a disadvantage a more fair shake, but it is being used by minority kids who are by all definitions from middle class or from affluent households even more of an advantage, which is stealing spots from poor minority kids that actually need it!

So I would like to see affirmative action based on race scrapped. Base it on income. It will still largely benefit minority applicants, but we won't have to answer awkward questions like "how white is too white to be a minority?"

Steko4• 11 years ago

I see this topic discussed all the time, not rarely.

kelukelugames2• 11 years ago

It's literally in the link.

"Opponents of affirmative action argue that aiming for diversity in areas other than race, such as socioeconomic class, can ensure sufficiently diverse student bodies. The most common race-neutral policy used as an alternative to affirmative action is a plan that the University of Texas already uses, in which a percentage of graduates from every high school get automatic admission. These policies have been shown to increase racial and ethnic diversity on campus, but research on whether they’re as effective as more explicit race-based affirmative action policies has been mixed, and critics say that it doesn’t make sense to use a proxy when so many colleges continue to struggle with racial diversity."

CM30• 11 years ago

I agree entirely on the 'base affirmative action on income' thing. Class/income inequality is the biggest issue there is today, and something to aims to fix that rather than a meaningless race or gender quota would be fantastic.

Might also slowly start getting rid of the overly abudant trust fund kids found in most high end professions, the kinds who seemingly get jobs and money simply because their parents were born into the same.

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

Base it on income. It will still largely benefit minority applicants...

This is probably not true. Blacks and hispanics significantly underperform whites and asians at fixed levels of income.

https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-c...

cptskippy• 11 years ago

I think you're spot on.

I worked for an Auto Insurance Broker in a former life and they had a state come down on them pretty hard for discriminating against minorities. At the time it was pretty common to jack up the rate factors on particular minorities for a pretty legitimate business reason.

Instead of using race as a rate factor they switched over to a combination of zip code, income, and vehicle age which encompassed pretty much the same demographic but actually ended up improving their overall loss ratio.

I would hope risk analysis has evolved since those days but if not there's a huge opportunity for any aspiring data scientists out there who wish to become actuarials.

ZeroGravitas2• 11 years ago

As an outsider looking in, it seems that the one thing the US hates more than affirmative action is exactly the kind of "socialist" interventions you describe.

I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race? You're begging the question if you assume that people will be chosen fairly with no regard to race under this system.

Someone12342• 11 years ago

I'm also wondering what would stop a structurally racist society from simply choosing poor people from their preferred race?

It is illegal in the US. Also colleges could simply stop asking about race on applications.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

It also solves another issue we're seeing: Second generation kids of minorities whose parents are college educated and or professionals. The affirmative action program is designed to give kids with a disadvantage a more fair shake, but it is being used by minority kids who are by all definitions from middle class or from affluent households even more of an advantage, which is stealing spots from poor minority kids that actually need it!

Not only that but it can get worse. It creates an ample opportunities for discrimination. You can never be sure if someone's credentials got some boost along the way, so the wiser course of action is to hire the default. Yeah the default could get her boost by being kid of generous donors, but at least she is well connected.

Almost any anti racism policy can be perverted to perpetuate racism.

T2_t22• 11 years ago

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key.

Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine... has a good summation of this argument.

I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.

dragonwriter13• 11 years ago

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement.

As an American, your comment confuses me for one very specific reason: it doesn't at all reflect the actual dialogue about race I've experienced in this country (from all sides of the dialogue), in which very much is about achievement.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes.

Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome. Its also an outcome that is proven to improve other outcomes (both for the person experience it, and in future generations, since not only is education attainment measured in highest level attended shown to be a significant influence on income and other outcomes for the person receiving it, its also shown to be a strong factor in educational attainment of that person's children.)

(And, of course, affirmative action and other diversity efforts in colleges aren't the only mechanism, nor is college attendance the only goal, in improving the condition of historically-disadvantaged groups in the US. So the whole criticism of this being the only goal -- which seems to be based on nothing other than the fact that its the focus of the article -- is entirely misplaced.)

T2_t22• 11 years ago

Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome.

See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" - simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student". In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

Step back, there are four important factors that make up the value of college: 1. Attendance - how many people go to college. 2. Graduation - where total graduates, not a percentage, dictates success. Because 25% of 4 is worse than 10% of 100,000 in addressing disadvantage. 3. Degree choice - the choice of degree is almost as important as getting one. 4. Post-graduation outcomes - like career earnings, opportunities, stability etc.

Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve - and specifically I think what society wants is more absolute numbers of graduates of good degrees, who go on to great post-graduate success. That seems, to me, a pretty uncontroversial summation of the issue.

The goal of uni quotas is to improve 1, so that 2, 3 and 4 improve. It isn't to address historical rates of attendance. But I could be wrong, and if the case is that the goal is simply getting more blacks and Hispanics to go to uni for at least a day/semester, outcomes be damned, then I withdraw my argument.

I think that the idea of addressing disadvantage is a lofty, important and praise worthy goal. And because it is such an important goal, policy choices have to be effective, and rigorously shown to be effective, because failure only fails the most disadvantaged more.

My fear is that a lot of people judge policy by INTENTIONS, not OUTCOMES, and this leads to inbetween goals of attendance trumping deeper issues.

As an analogy, the push to change people from "I donated so I feel good" to "my donations DID good" is a huge mental shift that effective altruists are championing. If quoatas help improve life outcomes, they need to stay. If they don't, if they put black and Hispanic students in positions to fail or almost worse, to choose lesser paths, then they should be replaced by something better.

Rather than quotas, what is needed is policy that puts black and hispanic students into colleges where they get the largest number of the best degrees for to improve their lives. Going to an Ivy league school to flunk out is worse than going to a tier 2 school and graduating with honors.

I could be wrong about the inbetween goals being a focus, and there may be a whole raft of research that shows these inbetween goals achieve positive outcomes making them the metric to focus on. I'd honestly like to be proven wrong, and know that these policies are on the right track, but it seems to me that the circle of policy to outcomes is rarely fully closed, and with even 15 years of data, the outcomes achieved should be dictating policy, not something more immediately measurable, but ultimately less important, like attendance rates.

TL;DR good outcomes dictate the quality of a policy, not intentions.

hsitz• 11 years ago

College admissions are hardly the only arena where affirmative action operates. And of course it's not an ideal solution, but it's at least a start.

Where are you from? Quite possibly your country also has some similar sorts of policies, even if it lacks the huge minorities that have suffered past discrimination to the extent some have in U.S. You can start by checking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

kuschku2• 11 years ago

Actually, Germany has been replacing Affirmative Action in most areas in the past years with purely random, or purely achievement-based systems.

Due to the simple fact that hiring people based on direct affirmative action violates the constitution.

Even the famous "womens quota" in Germany is just a quota that 30% of each gender have to be represented in a company’s board.

(The official statement of the constitutional court regarding affirmative action, which is called "positive discrimination" here, was that "even positive discrimination is, as the name says, still discrimination")

curryst• 11 years ago

it is all about involvement, and never about achievement.

The ultimate goal is achievement, but that's much harder to achieve without creating more borderline racist policies. Unless you're going to adopt affirmative action for grades as well, and punish professors for fair grading, it's hard to affect those rates.

the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes

Affirmative action is meant to be a way to help reverse some of the ill effects of slavery and racism that have had long lasting impacts that even today can depreciate the opportunity of racial minorities. The goal is to even out that playing field and provide an equal opportunity, not an equal outcome. What an individual chooses to do with that equal opportunity is up to them.

Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it.

This is partly a difference in what you see as the problem. Is your goal equal opportunity or equal outcomes? If your goal is equal opportunity, what someone does with that opportunity is up to them. They may choose to go to a university where they are in over their heads, but that's a choice that they made and doing poorly is a consequence of that choice. They may also choose to take an easier degree than to go to a less selective college, again, that's up to them.

kuschku2• 11 years ago

But how does putting people with worse grades in college help?

It doesn't fix the actual issue: access to quality primary and secondary education.

If a person going to a school with mostly minorities and underpaid staff never heard of complex numbers, then their math study won't be successful, no matter if they need a 3.5 or 3.0 GPA to attend.

Sure, attendance rate goes up, but the outcome is the same.

You need to target the roots of the issue, not the outcome.

kelukelugames2• 11 years ago

I looked at the graphs earlier and couldn't understand them. Can a stats wizard please help me understand how significant the difference between ban and no-ban are?

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

The article presents an interesting fact. The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

I was previously told it's racist to believe things like this.

The article also begs another question: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” But that decision was only 12 years ago, and the data suggests that we’re still a long way from having proportional minority representation on large public college campuses.

Supposedly AA and similar programs were supposed to solve this problem, and colleges have been engaging in them for many years. At what point can we conclude that perhaps goals like getting a critical mass of minority students will simply not be effective, and conclude that the real problem lies elsewhere (and out of the control of college)?

Steko4• 11 years ago

Yes it's racist to hold one race down for centuries and then claim the system is entirely meritocratic.

tadfisher• 11 years ago

Please be careful with your attribution; the GP presumably does not own slaves and did not prop up Jim Crow.

rmxt3• 11 years ago

"The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system."

AA and meritocratic systems are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of the two is what is currently used in most college admissions processes. It is inaccurate to say that none of the people in question would be there were it not for AA.

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

It is inaccurate to say that none would be there without AA. It's completely accurate to say that only 77% of those currently present would be there without AA.

It's true that AA is a non-meritocratic hack on top of an otherwise meritocratic system (modulo other small hacks, e.g. large donations and alumni preferences).

dghf2• 11 years ago

The article claims minority (presumably non-Asian) enrollment drops 23% when AA is banned. The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

That assumes that without AA the system would be meritocratic, and not biased in favour of people from particular backgrounds.

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

Yes, that's because building systems like this is pretty easy. Just use a point system based entirely on grades/extracurriculars/SAT/etc.

For example, google the old U-Mich point system - it was entirely meritocratic except for the +1.0 boost to GPA given to non-Asian minorities, a much smaller alumni preference and some "women in engineering" boost.

taco_emoji2• 11 years ago

The converse of this is that 23% of non-Asian minorities are only there due to affirmative action, and would not be there under a meritocratic system.

Your curiously unstated but obviously logically necessary premise that non-AA systems are already magically meritocratic is what's racist.

Hope that clears it up for you.

yummyfajitas15• 11 years ago

Non-AA systems primarily look at grades, SAT, extracurriculars and the like. They tend to also include small alumni preferences and the occasional "this guy's dad donated $20M" preferences. Why do you believe they are not predominantly meritocratic?

tomp5• 11 years ago

I think the two of you are using slightly different definitions of "meritocratic". Yummifajitas means "who's better", whereas you mean "who's potentially better".

Obviously, in average whites are better than blacks (and Asians are better than whites). All test scores prove that. That's what yummifajitas is referring to when he says "meritocracy".

Obviously blacks have been severely disadvantages throughout their lives (before college), so they aren't as good as they could be (again in average). Therefore, you're saying that we should accept more blacks, who could be just as good as whites are.

Personally, I agree with yummifajitas' definition of the word "meritocratic", but I think that favoring the disadvantaged is a better outcome for the society than a purely meritocratic system. However, I also think that favoring (affirmative action) should be non-racist, but instead targeting the disadvantaged people/families (regardless of their race); furthermore, I believe that the effect of such policies would be orders of magnitude greater if they were favoring people waaaay before university.

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

This assumes that alternative systems (eg ranking people by SAT scores) is meritocratic, and not subject to structural biases. I like standardized testing myself, but that's because I perform well in those situations. I'm not so sure it's necessarily a good way to measure merit; I perform less well in more open-ended contexts, for example.

venning• 11 years ago

Why is 538 selecting public research universities? Is that the full, technical name for typical US colleges, or is there a specific distinction here that would imply they are excluding whatever "non-research" universities are?

rmxt3• 11 years ago

I imagine the distinction that they are trying to make is between research universities and liberal arts colleges (most of which are private, though there are some public). The term "research university" has connotations of a place with four-year undergraduate programs, with few or no two-year degree options, and likely the presence of graduate or PhD programs on campus, as well. In many ways, "research university" is the typical US college experience, though there are still many people who only attend "community colleges" or local public institutions where no research is performed and there may only be two-year degree programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_in_the_United...

What Happens When You Ban Affirmative Action in College Admissions

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