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I guess I’d say that, although it’s helpful in some situations, it looks bad, and affirmative action for class instead is about as good, maybe better, while also (hopefully) not generating nearly as much opposition or backlash.

I think it’s really important for elite colleges to have a racial composition similar to the nation’s composition because they are the feedstock for leadership positions across the country in politics, business, etc. They are one of the main factors determining who is part of the American elite. If people have different experiences by race, then a racially homogenous elite will generally not understand the experiences of people whose race isn’t represented in that elite; the logical conclusion is that they will not sufficiently address problems experienced by people of races not included in the elite.

The main effect of elite colleges is to give their students prestige. In institutions where the main effect is to provide some service to society (e.g. city planning), rather than individuals, it’s more important to make sure that the provision of the service is not enforcing some racial inequality than to have a racially diverse staff. Then again, having a racially diverse staff may help with providing the service in a way that doesn’t increase racial inequality.

Even in elite colleges, where the case is IMO especially strong, class- based is probably better in several ways. It’s just that colleges want to have rich kids who will hopefully donate later.

You can set up a poll to ask questions, which also have comment sections.

In theory, affirmative action could conceivably be a useful tool to mitigate some of the consequences of structural racism (though most of the actual problems that people face are caused by generational poverty and the legacy of racism rather than by racism in the present). The main problem with affirmative action is that the buckets that are currently used are so broad as to be essentially meaningless. "Asian", in particular, covers so many different ethnicities/cultures/countries of origin that it is worse than useless.

Of course, making race based affirmative action illegal (as the Supreme Court recently did) is unlikely to improve the situation. Those who want to implement affirmative action will continue to do so, but since they can't do so legally, they'll use other categories that correlate loosely with race which will make the "big bucket" problem even worse (i.e. there will be winners and losers more or less at random in ways that will fail improve the situation generally).

What could actually help is affirmative action based not on race but on poverty, with a focus on giving poor kids the choice to be able to go to good schools.

@DanielParker I'd think other categories that correlate with race (income, from inner-city regions, single-parent households, etc.) are a much better proxy for 'disadvantaged' than race itself, unless you have a counterexample.

@Frogswap If elite colleges actually preferenced those things to any significant extent, that would be great, but I doubt that they will (those categories are also correlated with lower benefits to the college in terms of prestige and income). The worst (and most common) blunt instrument I've heard of is the de-emphasis of grades and standardized test scores (primarily because certain sub-groups of the "Asian" bucket are over-represented by that metric).

@DanielParker De-emphasis of test scores in favor of what?

@Frogswap Essays, extracurricular activities, teacher recommendations, that kind of thing. See: https://reason.com/2023/07/25/rich-kids-will-benefit-the-most-from-eliminating-standardized-tests-for-college-admissions/

De-emphasizing standardized tests alone would not allow a school to achieve its diversity goals (obviously), but it moves the needle in the "right" direction and could muddy the waters enough to hide de-facto racial affirmative action. If an elite school has 100,000 "equally qualified" applicants they have enough wiggle room to select the 1000 actually most qualified candidates that also fit their (secret) diversity goals.

Note that there are also questions about affirmative action in other contexts (public state colleges, primary schools, jobs, etc.), but most of the discussion has been about race based affirmative action at elite colleges because they're the only ones who have such a large pool of applicants that they can practice affirmative action with minimal loss of prestige/money.

@DanielParker As far as I know, there aren't discrimination laws preventing them from only taking rich kids now, right?

I lean in favor of a lottery based admissions system, so I can't really feel opposed to policies that increase randomness.

And then the worst case of eliminating affirmative action is that schools continue illegally practicing it anyway, which doesn't seem like a case not to do it.

@Frogswap The problem is that when a college practices affirmative action illegally, they will need to hide the fact that they're doing it. If they do this by de-emphasizing standardized tests to (apparently) broaden their applicant pool, what will actually happen is that they will cherry pick the candidates who are both rich enough and diverse enough to meet their goals. The end result will be less randomness in a direction which will benefit rich applicants and penalize poor applicants with good test scores. It's almost certain that there will be lawsuits about this and that may end up discouraging such practices in the end, but the short term outlook isn't great.

Note that one of the underlying problems is that it relatively easy for an elite college to find a reasonably intelligent minority applicant with affluent parents in order to meet diversity quotas. It's much harder for them to find an intelligent and motivated kid from the inner city who could be successful if given the opportunity (one way to do this could be for an elite college to create and/or partner with elite primary and secondary schools with the goal of affirmatively selecting for poorer candidates, but that would be expensive and difficult).

@Frogswap In particular note that one of the avenues of affirmative action which is still considered legal in higher education is that colleges are allowed to prioritize people who write essays which describe how their race has affected their life experience in various ways. Successful essay writing is more highly correlated with wealth than test scores are, so this will have the perverse effect of privileging richer individuals in a favored minority over poorer individuals in that same minority. There is also a strong likelihood that it will privilege those who are willing to lie (or at least stretch the truth) in their essays.

@DanielParker I guess I still don't get how removing affirmative action makes this worse. You're saying that this avenue is a leftover of the previous legislation; what was stopping them from doing this before if they wanted/were incentivized to do it anyway?

@Frogswap The recent Supreme Court decision (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf) contains the following words:
"A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. "
This sounds like an admirable sentiment, but I expect that the actual effect will be that, since elite colleges still want to practice Affirmative Action, and they cannot (legally) do so directly, they will instead attempt to do so by ranking kids according to the essays they write about their experiences with race.

To be clear: I want disadvantaged kids to be given opportunity to succeed (especially if some of the causes of the disadvantage are based on race/ethnicity). In the context of admissions to elite universities, however, race (by itself) is a poor proxy for that goal, and an essay about race would be an even worse proxy.

I also believe it to be a temporary solution to a greater problem, but all for making this a bounty in the future!

Yes, you should make a bounty!

Band-aid solution to a greater structural problem. Obviously less than ideal in terms of actionable policy and should not be the end-all to fix the issue of racism and education. Of course there’s going to be issues along the way but it’s better than nothing.

@dittopoop To the extent there is a problem with racism in education, AA is absolutely the wrong approach.

Having universities classify and then discriminate against individuals on the basis of race (even if you cushion it with euphemisms) is wrong.