“When I think of colleges, the word courage doesn’t come to mind”

October 14, 2023 7:41 AM

Why Won’t Elite Colleges Deploy the One Race-Neutral Way to Achieve Diversity? Giving a leg up to poor students of all races would diversify elite schools. Officials would rather do anything else.
posted by crazy with stars (54 comments total)

It's almost like academia isn't a meritocracy after all. Who would've guessed???
posted by rikschell at 7:46 AM on October 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

Somehow, people use machine learning and AI to make accidentally racist and sexist algorithms for job applications and policing, and all sorts of other things that don't explicitly use race as an input, but suddenly its a hard problem to make an intentionally anti-racist admission algorithm that doesn't explicitly use race?
posted by Zalzidrax at 8:14 AM on October 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Elite schools will use whatever “holistic” fig leaves they need to make sure they can admit all the rich kids and legacies they want to. And strivers from all backgrounds will still want to go because for many, access to those networks is the whole point.
posted by ducky l'orange at 8:48 AM on October 14, 2023 [25 favorites]

Diversity is on the back burner for universities...They want the money first and foremost... It's a business.
posted by Czjewel at 9:07 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Diversity remains important for their prestige and credibility, but hardly outweighs donor cash, alumni networks and rankings.
posted by ducky l'orange at 9:15 AM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

academia is a business but also it's a key part of the means of production. as ducky l'orange observed, elite universities play a key role in the social reproduction of extant power structures — they're where ruling-class parents send their children to ensure that the ruling class remains the same from generation by generation. as such i think "they want the money first and foremost" is not exactly the right frame. sure, schools like it when their alumni drop a ton of cash on new buildings and such, but the cash itself is less important than ensuring that the networks of power from which the cash comes continue to operate.

like, this has been a problem with elite education since centuries before capitalism, and the problem would still exist even if magically we were shifted to an economy that wasn't based around commodity production and didn't have a designated commodity (i.e. cash) that is freely exchangeable for other commodities.

so yeah sure cash is a part of it, but a bigger part is that if dirty proles got in en masse instead of just occasionally winning admittance as members of a talented tenth, well, that might throw sand in the gears of the intergenerational social capital preservation/accumulation machine.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:17 AM on October 14, 2023 [45 favorites]

The counterintuitive thing about this argument is that the elite schools were designed to be and always have been a luxury product for the wealthy. Calls for "economic diversity" at Harvard etc. means subsidizing a few fortunate underprivileged students so that they can drive a BMW, too. Meanwhile, we know where the poor and middle-class students are, there are entire public university systems full of them.

It actually makes more sense for economic justice to incentivize employers to hire from public universities and stop favoring the wealthy, rather than these endless essays that pretend that the ivy league is all that matters.
posted by anhedonic at 9:19 AM on October 14, 2023 [25 favorites]

> It actually makes more sense for economic justice to incentivize employers to hire from public universities and stop favoring the wealthy, rather than these endless essays that pretend that the ivy league is all that matters.

i am sufficiently cynical that i think that even if this hypothetical scenario were to come to pass employers would still prefer hiring straight out of ivy-stanford-mit. i am in fact sufficiently cynical to think that i'm not just being cynical, and that what i'm identifying as cynicism is actually depressive realism.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:21 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think a lot of people should reconsider trade school.
posted by ducky l'orange at 9:28 AM on October 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

i think the general population should get to live the life of the mind instead of it being reserved for a few rich kids who are only there to network with other rich kids.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:32 AM on October 14, 2023 [32 favorites]

This is a great idea because almost all colleges in USA discriminate heavily against poor students and USA needs a more economically diverse tertiary student body.

But this article is talking about racial diversity. Ugh. "Poor" isn't a synonym of "racially diverse", fixing income inequality will not fix racial inequality, and giving money to poor people will not in fact fix racism. I grow so very tired of people who equate the two systems of oppression (or worse, argue that one is "more fundamental" than the other, or causes the other, ugh ugh ugh, please stop).
posted by MiraK at 9:33 AM on October 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

fixing income inequality won't fix racial inequality, but it'll help, and fixing racial inequality without a concomitant push to fix income inequality — or more accurately, wealth inequality — will fail to fix racial inequality. and although racial inequality absolutely cannot be reduced to wealth inequality, the institutional structures of racial inequality are backstopped by the vast intergenerational fortunes held by a few white people. moreover, these vast intergenerational fortunes often got their start as piles of dirty money accumulated by slave traders.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:44 AM on October 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

bombastic, yes to all that, but this article IS reducing racial diversity down to class/wealth diversity and nothing else ("~the only way~"), and that is deeply offensive. I don't see why racial diversity must be achieved in race neutral ways!
posted by MiraK at 9:50 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ha. Incentivizing employers would be a start, but ed reform needs to come for the whole system. One of the main utilities of a public university is to employ all the folks getting advanced degrees at the Ivy’s. Reforming the higher ed system is a total nonstarter without first resetting that process/pipeline.

The esteem and preference that is given to ‘elite’ colleges by their peers is just auto-fallatio. These other institutions are all lead by products of that elite system who are all dedicated to replicating Harvard at their own institution. And like a funhouse mirror of Harvards whole lack of the poors, they are attempting to create a Harvard without any of the riches.
posted by zenon at 9:55 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Why the admissions process has to ‘race neutral’ is because a bunch of supreme courts of increasing importance have decided that. I think the premise of the article is to argue that the admission process primarily serves the organizations business goals, which would be fine if these orgs didn’t simultaneously claim a higher moral and ethical purpose.
posted by zenon at 10:03 AM on October 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

> bombastic, yes to all that, but this article IS reducing racial diversity down to class/wealth diversity and nothing else (note how it says "the ONLY way" etc.), and that is deeply offensive.

i mean, it's politico. it's a garbage outlet, but i didn't read this article that way. as i read it the use of the phrase "there's only one race-neutral method that would work" wasn't an endorsement of race-neutral methods, but instead positioned this particular race-neutral method as a least-bad workaround under the extant constraint against non-race-neutral methods that's been imposed by the cursed supreme court.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:04 AM on October 14, 2023 [10 favorites]

I think a lot of people should reconsider trade school.

*Looks at a map of right to work states and shrugs*
posted by Selena777 at 10:15 AM on October 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

~the only way~

It’s the only way because the reactionary Supreme Court has banned the other ways.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:20 AM on October 14, 2023 [14 favorites]

I think a lot of people should reconsider trade school.

Nobody ever says this to rich kids. It’s only poor folks who get pushed to trade school.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:27 AM on October 14, 2023 [38 favorites]

This is a confused article that is advocacy rather than analysis. One overriding question -- how long would it take if colleges adopted this for the right-wing to go after it? Blum can say all he wants now, but the American right doesn't want to increase opportunities for a racially-diverse population.

In terms of it being advocacy instead of analysis -- you can't discuss elite colleges treatment of poor students without acknowledging that most of the Ivies guarantee complete financial aid for an admitted student whose family makes under some sum (Harvard is 65K, I think). That might not be enough, but an honest analysis allows for the fact that elite colleges are actually trying things to help the poorest student.

Other things:

the percentage of underrepresented minority students went up from 28 percent to 30 percent,

That's it? This wonder policy that will solve everything will raise the numbers by about 10%? Hallelujah!

going to an elite school increases your chance of being in the top 1 percent of earners.

This is one of those tropes that reverses causation. Elite college graduates tend to up among the 1 percent because they tend to *come* from the 1 percent. The college isn't doing much to add to it. (This also applies to the academic achievement of the students at elite colleges -- their abilities don't actually move that much over the four years they're at, aka, Harvard. They came in great; they leave great. Harvard doesn't do much to change that).
posted by Galvanic at 10:43 AM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

bombastic lowercase pronouncements [username up thread] makes a great point. This has always been the case with elite schools of all kinds since well before Capitalism. Since the Middle Ages when Oxford was founded, and probably before that.

No one cared if the "smartest" or "best" or "best-ability-to-learn" kids went to those schools. They were always for the powerful and the connected. It's always been about keeping and maintaining the secret passwords and cults, and hoarding wealth and knowledge into already-established elite families and classes of people. And more importantly, about keeping certain people, classes and families out.

It's the same today, with the veneer of Capitalism over it, which has made access to these places a tiny bit more democratic.
posted by SoberHighland at 10:46 AM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

> In terms of it being advocacy instead of analysis -- you can't discuss elite colleges treatment of poor students without acknowledging that most of the Ivies guarantee complete financial aid for an admitted student whose family makes under some sum (Harvard is 65K, I think). That might not be enough, but an honest analysis allows for the fact that elite colleges are actually trying things to help the poorest student.

i feel like there’s an analogy to be made between the financial aid packages of elite universities and how google pays mozilla staggering amounts of money in the hopes that propping them up will thereby make google look like less of a monopoly. like, people might catch on if princeharvaryalecolumbiastan et al only accepted legacy students, and so schools learned a very long time ago that they have to admit some servitors and scholarship kids along with them.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:58 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

What a great closing paragraph.
posted by doctornemo at 11:45 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is a good pair of reasons why the elite universities* the article discusses won't do this:

Embracing that method would make their student bodies slightly less academically elite (in terms of grades and test scores). It’s also a bit more expensive.

The first one can irk faculty, who have some governance powers. It can also depress published data somewhat, which is major for US News rankings (which every academic professes to despise, and to which most institutions pay intense fidelity anyway).

The second isn't much of an issue for Harvard or Stanford. But it can be an issue for those leading institutions right below them.


*This article is about the upper tier of US higher ed. The supermajority of campuses occupy very different worlds.
posted by doctornemo at 11:47 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was surprised to see SAT scores mentioned, and how they would decline if schools followed what the piece advocates. At least where I am (West Coast USA), SATs just aren't a thing. One of the high schools in my city is a testing site but there's no pressure from the schools to take them, and the colleges I'm familiar with aren't particularly interested in your scores.

One application I saw last year had a checkbox for if one of your parents had been a front-line healthcare worker during the pandemic.
posted by The corpse in the library at 11:54 AM on October 14, 2023

...poor and middle-class students ... there are entire public university systems full of them.

Middle-class students get a shot at public universities, maybe, but the actual poor? eh, notsomuch

It's money, racism, and a large sprinkle of elitism.
It's hard to feel extra special when you're graduating with the lower class.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:08 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

fixing income inequality will not fix racial inequality

No, but it will lead to much more diverse student populations than what we have tried so far
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 12:14 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's going to be interesting to see how this intersects with the 2025 enrollment cliff.
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:56 PM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's almost like academia isn't a meritocracy after all. Who would've guessed???

If a kid was raised poor would they be as capable as the same kid raised rich?

If they got enough food, enough sleep, enough stimulation, enough safety, and freedom from exposure to toxics such as lead paint, leaded gas, pesticides and polluted air, yes they would and arguably more so. Otherwise not.

Those conditions haven’t been met for generations in the US if they ever were, and I think the relative plight of the poor kid is getting worse year by year, currently.
posted by jamjam at 12:59 PM on October 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

At least where I am (West Coast USA), SATs just aren't a thing.

And none of the Ivies are west coast. The closest we have is Stanford, and the competition is fierce:

69 percent of Stanford's applicants over the past five years with SATs of 2400—the highest score possible—didn't get in.

Meanwhile, the UC system has dropped test scores as an admissions requirement or filter. Since there's way fewer Stanford slots than UC slots, you can imagine high schools focusing on doing the most good for the most students.
posted by pwnguin at 1:00 PM on October 14, 2023

giving a clearly defined, substantial boost to low-income applicants. Neither the University of Michigan nor the University of California embraced that method, and so far, it seems likely that no other university will try it either.

Selective universities already do this. I suppose that the writer might say that by "defined and substantial" he means a literal formula "you get your SAT score + 10*number of percentiles below 50 your household income is" but I must admit I don't think that would be a good idea.

In Kahlenberg’s Harvard simulation, where he modeled a large boost to low-income students instead of affirmative action, the percentage of underrepresented minority students went up from 28 percent to 30 percent, but the percentage of first-generation college students rose from 7 to 25.

The percentage of first-generation students in Harvard's entering class last year was 19.6%, not 7%.
posted by escabeche at 1:13 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

people might catch on if princeharvaryalecolumbiastan et al only accepted legacy students

People already think that.
posted by Galvanic at 2:14 PM on October 14, 2023

Entering class refers only to first time, first attempt, degree seeking undergraduate students. And if that feels like a very specific definition it’s not just academic. That number excludes all graduate students, non degree, transfers (both internal and external) and readmit (returning/2nd attempt/dropout).
posted by zenon at 2:28 PM on October 14, 2023

> People already think that.

i mean yeah and also people already think google's a monopoly. it's a fig leaf.

i know i'm being somewhat reductive on this thread, but well i refer you to my username
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:41 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love how so many people from outside higher ed in this thread are making uninformed statements about capitalism and universities, and are lumping professors, institutions, trustees, and administrators into one bucket. Re the arguments about capitalism and profit: Harvard was founded in 1636, well before what anybody would call "capitalism" (Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776; the primary economic form in the 1600s was mercantilism). Professors I know don't want what higher admin or trustees want: we want students from a variety of backgrounds, and we want to help them achieve their goals, whatever those goals might be.
posted by vitia at 2:43 PM on October 14, 2023 [8 favorites]

Apologies if this NYT analysis was already linked but I found their visualizations of how income affects admissions when test scores are held constant interesting (if not out of line with my expectations).
posted by atoxyl at 2:53 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

The simple fact is that socioeconomic preferences aren't sufficient to replace racial preferences. From TFA: "In Kahlenberg’s Harvard simulation, where he modeled a large boost to low-income students instead of affirmative action, the percentage of underrepresented minority students went up from 28 percent to 30 percent..."

For more detail, see "The Problem With Wealth-Based Affirmative Action: It’s not an adequate substitute for race-based programs." "Several of the justices on today’s Supreme Court take the fanciful position that inequality can be attacked only by ignoring the race of its victims. Advocates of wealth-based affirmative action embrace this hope."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:35 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's going to be interesting to see how this intersects with the 2025 enrollment cliff.

Indeed, Grawe's forecast looms large. Meanwhile US enrollment has declined since peak in 2012. And demographics aren't looking good.
posted by doctornemo at 7:24 PM on October 14, 2023

I hate HATE when applications ask questions that ultimately are "please tell us how much of a minority you are so we can have ~diversity~". What it usually means is that they want us marginalized people to do extra D&I labor on top of what we're applying for, for free, and deal with the likelihood of them not listening to us or even getting rid of us.

This entire thing is so self-serving. Sure, get more diversity in your applications, get more diversity in your intake. And then what? Will the faculty be considerate of diversity in their student body? Will they cover living costs? Will students be supported or will they be left to flounder? Will their education reflect the diversity of the world or will it just be white nonsense? What if a student faces discrimination - is there adequate recourse for them? Will their accommodations be met?

If not, this is all just a PR exercise for the universities that do not serve these students at all.
posted by creatrixtiara at 7:40 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Harvard is sitting on a $50 billion endowment. I doubt they are desperate for the bucks.
posted by srboisvert at 5:34 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, while there are of course plenty of for-profit universities, the “better” schools are almost entirely structured as non-profits; “academia is a business” is a vast oversimplification of this particular bizarre form of late-stage-capitalism enterprise. Which is not to say that enormous sums of money aren’t moving around, or that profits aren’t being extracted, just that it’s fundamentally different in some ways from making widgets and paying shareholders dividends.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:11 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Nobody ever says this to rich kids. It’s only poor folks who get pushed to trade school.

The exception is when people use a trade apprenticeship or something similar as part of their "gap year" where it is understood by everyone that in a year or two the kid will be going off to college, but with a couple of years of unusual experience (for their demographic) to highlight in their admission essays.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:59 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think a lot of people should reconsider trade school.

On the one hand, this is easyish advice to give to a cishet anglo boy who's a stereotypical bro. Harder advice to give to a woman, or a black boy, or an obviously queer boy of any race.

On the other hand, as long as capitalism, the trades in general will burn up your body enough that there's very serious risk that you just won't be able to do them any more somewhere in your 40s or 50s.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:00 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

the "lol go to trade school" advice, as if trade school and university study are equivalent, presumes that the reason one gets a degree is to make money. it's an insult to universities, it's an insult to trade schools, and it's an insult to human dignity. the fact that this nasty little received notion is so commonplace is a clear sign that our culture has lost its way and lost its way badly
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:40 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

> Yeah, while there are of course plenty of for-profit universities, the “better” schools are almost entirely structured as non-profits; “academia is a business” is a vast oversimplification of this particular bizarre form of late-stage-capitalism enterprise.

yeah one thing that complicates all of this is that universities and particularly the elite universities are directly descended from the medieval church. it's a system set up by the first estate to serve the second estate, and it retains more than a bit of that heritage.

i think it was raymond williams (or terry eagleton? i can never keep track of which of those guys said what) who defined this sort of thing as part of the residual power structure rather than the currently dominant power structure, even though it's a tool that the currently dominant power structure has taken up and used for its own ends.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:02 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just to be clear, Bombastic, I was not LOLing when I said I wished more people would reconsider trade school. I make most of my living as a tradesman and consider myself lucky. If I had a contractor’s license or electrician’s license I could do even better. There’s a lot of demand.

I realize this thread is more about access to elite institutions for people who want to join the leadership class and less about mass upward mobility. Personally, I care more about the latter, but i didn’t mean to derail.
posted by ducky l'orange at 12:48 PM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

see, my commitments are different from either of those. i don't want people to go to elite institutions to join the leadership class because fuck a leadership class, and although mass upward mobility — or rather, mass prosperity — is obviously a good thing, i don't think either of the two types of educational institution we're talking about are that great at making mass prosperity happen. my commitment is to maximizing the number of people who get to spend a large part of their life thinking about things in a structured environment full of other people thinking about things, and likewise to maximizing the largeness of said large part.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:11 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Re the arguments about capitalism and profit: Harvard was founded in 1636, well before what anybody would call "capitalism" (Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776; the primary economic form in the 1600s was mercantilism). Professors I know don't want what higher admin or trustees want

Disagree, what professors want--their intentions--is irrelevant to the larger structural critique of the neoliberal university and the privileged (and often politically passive in relation to exploited students going through this dehumanizing "pipeline" (a term so many academics so casually use)) position that professors occupy within it. This is like complaining Chomsky's "The responsibility of intellectuals" lumps in all professors, or Jeff Schmidt's Disciplined minds is not about graduate students--only someone with severe reading bias would not get the point of those seminal works about the power structure of modern academia.

Second, that remark right there is another prejudiced notion even more biased the oppressive mainstream notion of "cooling out" a person by suggesting trade schools as a solution to a social ill, thereby devaluing the cultural purpose of the the university:

The lay notion that hierarchies or institutions existed before capitalism, therefore capitalism is irrelevant is precisely the superficial argument that privileges a neoliberal worldview. Because Actually Existing Capitalism is Not Even Capitalism, so if you read any leftist intellectual, i.e. the ideas of any post-Marxist leftist thinker, the grounding for "anticapitalist" arguments was always already an humanist and egalitarian one. It goes without saying that anticapitalists as such are also antifeudalists, anti-racist, etc.: for the same human reason of social justice.
posted by polymodus at 2:17 PM on October 15, 2023

and, like, my commitment to people getting to think about things is not driven by a desire to see any particular outcome of that thought — i don't particularly care what new technologies get developed as a result, and though i do rather like it when people develop new scientific paradigms and political theories and methods of reading text and so forth, the point isn't the scientific paradigms or the political theories or the epistemological strategies or whatever. the point is that a human life isn't full unless a very large part of it is spent thinking in a community of thinkers. this is true regardless of whether or not that thinking comes to anything.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:28 PM on October 15, 2023

69 percent of Stanford's applicants over the past five years with SATs of 2400—the highest score possible—didn't get in.

FTA:
"I say, 'OK, let's assume there are approximately 10,000 high schools in the United States, just the United States,'" Bigham says. "'Let's assume the very best students from only half of those high schools all apply to Stanford. That's 5,000 of these very best kids, just in one country. Stanford can only take half of those kids, because they don't have the space. They don't have the beds.'"

Lady, I hate to break it to you, but there are close to 25,000 high schools in the US. The US is seriously under-produced for elite colleges too, the number of which haven't grown that much since the 1950s, when the US population was about 1/2 as much. That's why the so-so state university I went to can now require an exceptional class rank or require SAT scores better than 80% of the population receives for automatic entry.

Also the 'enrollment cliff' is kind of overstated- since there are about 4000 university systems in the US. The sheer number: 576,000 fewer students by 4000 systems = 144 fewer students per system. Of course this won't necessarily be evenly distributed, but let's not get dramatic here.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:38 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

because those what make decisions have for quite some time been systematically defunding basically everything except for computer science and engineering (and i guess business), any small decrease in the number of students enrolled in the non-blessed majors will result in departments that are on the knife's edge getting knifed.

the deep problem here isn't the enrollment cliff, of course, it's the fact that people who own money and state legislatures have been systematically defunding everything but computer science and engineering (and i guess business).
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:12 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

That is all surely true, and i’d like to see all of these trends reversed so that some day we really could have the thoughtful, educated citizenry necessary for functional democracy. But for people who need realistic options now: those options exists, they’re just regressive and disappointing.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:01 PM on October 17, 2023

(At least, apparently, to some)
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:11 PM on October 17, 2023

Oh forget it, disregard. The thread’s about affirmative action, so this is a total derail. Stepping away.
posted by ducky l'orange at 1:17 PM on October 17, 2023