Originally published at: Supreme Court ends affirmative action in college admissions, except military academies | Boing Boing
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As usual, the SCOTUS’s resident Office Porn Guy and buddy to billionaires gives an especially impressive demonstration of both hypocrisy and ladder-pulling.
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Once again, all those declarations of “it’s a case of settled law” and the promises to respect it are shown to be complete bullshit.
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Fucking extremist fucking reich-wing fucking “supreme” fucking court, doing exactly what the special interests that fucking control them want them to fucking do. FUCK!
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Legacy and donor admissions are still okay, according to the court. It’s just that the Supreme Court believes colleges should be whites-only.
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I haven’t read the 200 pages but I have questions:
Does this impact government hiring and contracting? If so does it impact that at the Federal level only, or at all levels? In other words, is this a broad ruling like “race can’t be a factor in government decisions, period” or it’s a narrow decision applying to college admissions only?
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Periodic reminder that when Clarence Thomas was accepted to Yale Law School in 1971 the school had an affirmative action policy in place, setting a target goal that 10% of students would be People of Color such as himself. He openly stated that he wouldn’t have had the opportunities he did if such policies weren’t in place:
In 1983, as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), he said that affirmative action laws were of “paramount importance” to him. “But for them, God only knows where I would be today,
Some folks just can’t resist kicking the rungs out below them on their way up the ladder.
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The problem with affirmative action is that it discriminated against Asians, saying, “you can be successful, but not too successful. We can’t have too many of your kind around here.” And was used to take away the ladder that really was helping other minorities.
Instead of killing affirmative action, it should have included all disadvantaged minorities, including Asians, in preferred status.
A strong argument could be made that legacy admissions are themselves discriminatory.
“The percentage of the freshmen class admitted at several colleges via the legacy route exceeds the percentage of entering freshmen who are Black, According to ERN. For example, at Notre Dame, 21% of freshmen in the 2020 entering class were legacies, 4% were Black. At Harvard, 14% of the entering class were legacies, double the percentage of Black freshmen at 7%. Similar ratios were found at Stanford University, the University of North Carolina, and Cornell.” [Legacy College Admissions Come Under Fire In New Report]
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That is an incorrect assessment. It is what was argued before the court, and 6 of the Justices bought that argument, but it’s bullshit.
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It’ll help if you can point out what part was BS. The fact that the policy unfairly discriminated against Asians is true, where if it was fair, Asian Americans should be considered as disadvantaged minorities and affirmative action should prefer enrolling Asians as well as other minorities.
Asians were discriminated against due to racial quota in admissions. I saw that firsthand in the UC system when it stopped AA. Flood of Asian students came in that year, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The negative effect is that it also took away support for other minorities as well.
I think the argument to abolish AA would have lost more wind if it has decided to HELP asian americans. Model minority myth is a racist tool.
Quotas haven’t been allowed in admissions in a long time. Universities have only been allowed to use race as one factor is assessing admissions. There’s no quota system keeping Asian admissions down and others up.
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Yes, instead they basically raised the bar for admission. Same effect, different mechanism. You needed to have higher SAT score to be selected if you were Asian. I mean, I think Asian americans have enough shit to deal with already.
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Am I the only one puzzled by why military academies would be subject to a different standard than everything else?
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presumably, this will be the effect of their decision
Berkeley and UCLA, the most selective public universities in the state, saw a declines in Black and Hispanic enrollment of about 40% immediately the year after the Proposition was implemented
And that has long-run ramifications for those students. They’re less likely to earn graduate degrees. Among lower-testing students, they’re less likely to ever earn an undergraduate degree at all. They’re less likely to earn degrees in lucrative STEM fields. And if you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action.
note: it didn’t improve outcomes for white students, it only hurt black students. 
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Yes and yes! This is the tragedy of it all. It actually HURTS economy by removing help.
to be honest, i’m less concerned about the impact on the overall economy than i am with the inability for black americans to lead the kinds of lives obtainable by their white counterparts
black americans face unique challenges due to the legacy of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism. removing affirmative action pretends none of that matters. and it does
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I don’t know the official reason, but my cynical side says it’s because they have no problem with non-whites being sacrificed in endless wars, and they want to push them in that direction once they have added obstacles to becoming well-educated professionals in other fields.
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