MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Time to end race-based Affirmative Action?
By HSG on Sat, 01/29/2022 - 1:26pm |John McWhorter's piece on Affirmative Action in today's NYT is a lot more interesting and provocative than your usual run-of-the-mill op-ed in the "newspaper of record." That is to say it is actually interesting and provocative. A couple of quotes stood out:
I. "But the persistence of the wealth gap, after generations of affirmative action, suggests that somewhere along the way, we’ve missed the mark, policy-wise."
In fact, the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites has grown quite considerably since the late 1950s despite affirmative action's implementation during that time. This is because the gap correlates very closely to income inequality across-the-board and over the past 60+ years, the rich have become exponentially richer while everybody else has either tread water or lost ground (to mix metaphors).
II. "[S]uppose that those aren’t your circumstances, that you’re middle class or above and aren’t Black, Latino or Native American. How would you feel about your kids being admitted to a university because of their “diverseness” from other kids rather than, well, their selves?"
This strikes me as an odd question since it is evident that most people just want their kids accepted into the most prestigious school possible regardless of the reason. That's why some alumni give tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions so that their feckless offspring can get in.
Does anybody really believe that the children of Presidents are invariably "qualified" to matriculate at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton? Yet their parents seem perfectly happy to send them there. Then there are the parents of non-athletes who find themselves admitted to UCLA and Georgetown because the tennis and volleyball coaches unaccountably go to bat for them.
Sadly, college admission decisions are, and have always been, based on far more than the achievements of applicants. The best solution to the problem is to reduce greatly the future expected economic advantages that accrue to those who attend highly competitive colleges and universities and the way to do that is to raise top marginal taxes on the wealthy and to guarantee all meaningful remunerative work.
URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/opinion/affirmative-action.html
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Comments
by artappraiser on Mon, 02/07/2022 - 12:06am