Universities: Training America’s youth to be racist

A grim day in the Supreme Court.  Libraries can filter out porn sites, which means that philip.greenspun.com won’t be accessible (there are a few nude pix on it but the filtering companies generally block the whole site).  Judging a man (or woman) by the color of his skin gets Supreme Court blessing as well.


My personal primary argument against affirmative action at universities was never voiced during the debate so I’ll present it here.


Background:  Getting into a selective university is partly a consequence of high IQ and fortunate preparation but a lot of doing well at all levels of school is a question of how willing a student is to accept authority blindly.  For example, I was amazed last semester when tutoring 6.002 (intro circuit theory).  My friend Gerry delivered several lectures on the response of linear systems to complex exponentials.  I said “Gerry you have to motivate this by telling the students that any real-world signal can be represented as a sum of complex exponentials.  Otherwise, why would they care?”  Gerry refused to take even 30 seconds out of his lecture time to explain why what he was teaching was relevant.  I waited for the MIT sophomores to tune out.  They never did!  They paid attention, took notes, did the problem sets, etc., even though they had no idea what any of the stuff was good for.  Then it hit me:  high school teachers don’t always motivate the material either, MIT only accepts students who did well in high school, ergo all students at MIT are people who are willing to do stuff merely because a teacher (authority figure) says to do it.


Top schools select heavily for people who respect authority and those who respect authority the most tend to do the best once in college.  It is thus no mystery that Asian immigrant children do well and ghetto kids raised on rap music (“fuck the police”) don’t do so well, even if both groups start out with the same IQ.


Assertion:  Affirmative action programs at universities do not result in a reduction of prejudice but rather inculcate prejudice in people who would otherwise be fair-minded.


Example of how this happens:  Consider a hypothetical race of Bodleians, people from the Planet Bodleia.  Bodleians on average do not perform well in high school and are under-represented at universities.  If admissions were race-blind Big State U would be 5% Bodleian, 40% white, and 55% Asian.  Administrators at Big State U establish a program that gets rid of 5% of the Asians and replaces them with Bodleians.  Now Big State U is 10% Bodleian.


Consider Joe Whiteboy, a new graduate student who has no preconceived ideas about Bodleians.  He is a teaching assistant for undergrad courses and, after three semesters, notices that all of the students who got Fs were Bodleian.  Not all Bodleians got Fs, mind you.  In fact some of Joe’s best students were Bodleians, presumably drawn from the 5% who would have gotten in under a race-blind system.  That said, Joe’s very worst students were all Bodleian.  They didn’t do any of the homework, seldom showed up to class, and didn’t seem to care about academics.  Grading in these big courses is all based on exam scores so it couldn’t have been prejudice by other staff members that resulted in the Bodleian failure.  Joe Whiteboy starts his fourth semester of TAing and sees four Bodleians in his section.  He gets a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.  Though he hopes that one or two will be quite bright, he expects that at least two of these minorities will fail the class.  Joe Whiteboy has learned prejudice at Big State U, as have all of the white and Asian undergrads who watched the failure of such a high percentage of Bodleians in their classes. 


Is it so bad for our state schools to teach prejudice?  Our prejudiced graduate can make $300,000 per year as a radiologist.  He reads the MRI scans and probably nobody will ever ask what he thinks of Bodleians as a group.  He’d think twice about hiring a Bodleian but his prejudice isn’t a career liability for him.


What about for the 5% of Bodleians who would have gotten into Big State U?  Affirmative action is a disaster for them.  Consider the used car market.  Very few used cars are lemons but it is tough as a buyer to figure out whether or not a used car is reliable.  Economists have demonstrated that the result, in the absence of certification programs and warrantees, is people valuing all cars as though they were lemons.  A Bodleian with a degree from Big State U will be treated as a potential lemon.


Suggestion:  Public universities should be race-blind.  There are enough high achievers from every ethnic group that every university student will have some contact with politically favored minorities and those students will learn an important lesson:  politically favored minorities are every bit as smart as whites and Asians.


How do we help under-represented minorities?  Our public schools are so expensive that, at no extra cost to taxpayers, we could fly ghetto kids out of the ghetto and into a top boarding school in an authority-respecting, achievement-oriented society, e.g., India, Hong Kong, or Korea.  When they come back from their sojourn among the diligent, they’ll be able to get into just about any American college.


Homework assignment:  watch the documentary Spellbound, currently in theaters, to see how American kids from different ethnic groups prepare for the National Spelling Bee (my college classmate Barrie Trinkle was the winner in 1973 but sadly she was not interviewed).


Tidbit:  Our local school system here in Cambridge, Massachusetts is the most expensive in Massachusetts and also one that has some of the lowest test scores in the state, i.e., we are producing the kids that need affirmative action to get into college.  I ate Thanksgiving dinner with a couple of Mexican children whose father was spending a year at Harvard and therefore they had enrolled in Cambridge public school.  I asked them how they compared their school experience in Cambridge versus Mexico and was it difficult to attend classes in English when their native language was Spanish.  They replied “School here is much easier.  In Mexico we had to work until 8:00 pm every night doing homework but in Cambridge we never have to study at all.”

26 thoughts on “Universities: Training America’s youth to be racist

  1. I suspect you are going to get many people that disagree with you for many different reasons, so let me just choose one of the many counterpoints to make.

    You are suggesting that raising the admission level of blacks, uh I mean Bodhelians, from 5% to 10% is going to leave others with a negative impression of them. The 5% who were admitted to meet the quota will get F’s, and the other 5% who deserve to be there on merit will be tainted somehow.

    How utterly ridiculous. Don’t you think that if the ratio was 55%/40%/5% (based on merit, remember) that others will still get the same impression? If your prestigious Harvard or MIT only allowed one, uh, Bodhelian in a semister, that will be positive proof that Asians are smarter than Europeans, and everyone is smarter than Bodhelians. You logic is flawed.

    The truth of the matter is, marks alone don’t matter. Shouldn’t matter even. If you’re going to do away with race as a factor, you might as well do away with money, sports scholarships, who your father was (Mr. Bush), who you know, etc. Just have everyone take a computerized test, and whoever scores the highest gets in? Ugh, no thanks! That would be a pretty boring school — I wouldn’t want to go there.

    I would rather go to one that sees potential in me, so that I can live up to that potential. Yes, high-school grades demonstrate some form of potential, but plenty of poor high-schoolers (like myself) went on to do much much better in University.

  2. Scott: are you saying that a number of factors decrease a student’s apparent potential (as measured by their marks), and that being “Bodleian” is one of these? And thus universities, in their attempts to identify potentially good students, should take Bodleianism into account?

    My problem with this theory is that there doesn’t seem to be any way in which being “Bodleian,” in and of itself, decreases one’s apparent potential. Being Bodleian might be highly *correlated* with some factor that does reduce apparent potential (such as being poor), but this doesn’t mean that preference should be given to Bodleians especially if–as in this case it is–it’s easy to measure the other factor directly.

    (I think this is partly why the Supreme Court debate revolved around issues of “diversity,” rather than issues of “unfulfilled potential.” (As recollection serves.) A nice story in the NY Times Magazine asked why racial diversity was considered more important than, say, religious or political diversity, but that’s for another argument, I suppose…)

  3. Phil, I agree with much of what you say. I am focusing in on the theme where you are suggesting our schools teach racism and also that our students in public schools don’t have to study. You see, it is all the more easier to accumulate such standards (or lack thereof) when you have teachers that only teach what they wish to teach and students to blindly follow. In general, our public schools are no longer teaching much at all about HOW to think, just do it, isn’t that the phrase?

  4. There are good arguments for and against affirmative action. There are bad arguments for and against affirmative action. And then there are plain silly ones.

    Unless Philip is being supremely ironical, the argument here is plain silly: “doing well at all levels of school is a question of how willing a student is to accept blind authority.” If that’s really true, then the top institutions should be recruiting from the ranks of military prep academies and our pre-college curriculum should be changed to drill and kill academies a la sparta.

    Philip’s own experience and character belies his single anecdote. (Even the anecdote does not mean what Philip thinks it means). Really smart people are irreverent and implicitlly take as their motto “de omnibus dubitandum”. Why are American universities the best in the world? It’s because they encourage people to think for themselves and make up their own mind. I can’t imagine Philip walking around MIT accepting “authority blindly.” Reverence for teachers, yes. Blind acceptance of authority, no.

    It’s also a silly sterotype to say that Asians “respect authority” and that’s what accounts for their success. I am an Asian and growing up I had no respect for authority whatsoever. It’s also sloppy argument to equate African Americans as a whole with “ghetto kids” and then generalize to say that as a group they don’t respect authority.

    The notion that “all students at MIT are people who are willing to do stuff merely because a teacher (authority figure) says to do it.” is absurd. I have to think Philip is spinning here and can’t really believe that he really believes what he is saying. Philip Green “spin”?

    Just to be clear, I am not arguing for or against affirmative action. I am asserting that one of Philip’s premises is downright silly.

  5. Note that in much of his argument, Philip isn’t talking about MIT, he’s talking about my school, Big (well, medium) State U.

    I have to agree with the gist here: paying attention to skin color is racism and there’s not really any way around that. In an ideal world, we could recruit a diverse undergraduate student body, without ever looking at race. (My assumption here is that we all agree that most of what you learn as an undergraduate is from your peers and that the university experience should expose students to ways of thinking unlike their own.) In practice, one of the most effective ways of ensuring diversity is by looking at race. Is it racist? Yes, by definition. But remove that ability to code for diversity (“estimate” diversity) through race, and you end up on a campus of students who have little exposure to ways of thinking other than their own. SAT and grades select only a particular sort of student.

    I’m a big fan of sojourning, but you should understand that for many students who grew up outside of the suburban mainstream, the university *is* a sojourn, replete with culture shock and a wide array of social, cultural, and linguistic challenges. If anyone needs shipped overseas for a while it’s the upper-middle-class suburbanites who think the mall is the highest point of Western culture.

    I shouldn’t have to tell you that the SAT and GRE are extremely weak predictors of academic success. My experience has been that there are many who score very well on these exams but are dumb as sticks, and many who score badly who are very bright. (And, as a defense for what is often assumed by a statement like this: I personally did quite well on IQ and standardized tests; I just didn’t put too much stock in these scores.) Ideally admissions committees would look at the life experiences of each candidate, and chat with them a bit to better explore the depth and breadth of their interests and knowledge. Of course, such an admissions process, especially for Big State U, is utterly impractical. In the real world, I think paying attention to race is a bad practice with a good outcome. If you are worried about how well students of color are graded in the classroom, perhaps you should be campaigning against grades in the university setting. I think the practice of giving exams and assigning A-F grades to these exams has a far more deleterious effect on undergraduates’ learning.

  6. One funny thing about the affirmative action debate is that conservatives that typically don’t care about equality at all, are suddently very worried about it.

  7. This is a pathetically naive post from a weblog that I *always* enjoy finding a new post from.

    * “Top schools select heavily for people who respect authority and those who respect authority the most tend to do the best once in college.” I don’t know about this. Do people who blindly respect authority outperform others outside of college? I’m incredibly relieved I didn’t go to college surrounded by people whose priority was respecting authority.

    * “It is thus no mystery that Asian immigrant children do well and ghetto kids raised on rap music (“fuck the police”) don’t do so well, even if both groups start out with the same IQ.” I’m not going to touch “ghetto kids raised on rap music.”

    * Bodleia: Neat idea but completely unfair and not at all relevant. We aren’t dealing with green, blue, and purple people. This issue can’t be removed from its context. Affirmative action is strong medicine. We need to be careful when using and applying. This isn’t permanent medicine (as seen in the case decision…). Hopefully, we won’t need affirmative action in 25 years. But are we there yet?

  8. I believe that this discourse is addressing the symptom instead of the cause.

    Success at anything requires both ability and preparation.

    How well have the Bodhelians been prepared?

    K-12 education is financed by unequal local property taxes (See Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities”). Real estate agents trumpet the quality of the schools in their sales pitch. Because, if you do not have to ante up $18,000+ per child for private schools, it frees that amount for mortgage service. A couple of children and you can afford a whole different community. California has the “Proposition 13” property tax limit, which has hamstrung local government financing since 1978. However, communities can voluntarily tax themselves above that limit. State government has tried to remedy the huge resulting inequality by granting poor districts more state monies. Rich districts just responded by creating more funding inequalities through non-government “bake-sales” ala the auction depicted in “The Silicon Boys” where the likes of Larry Ellison can benefit the local elementary school to the tune of $225,000 by donating a week on his yacht.

    Even if school districts had equal funding, if the Bodhelians were from Los Angeles, they would be sharing a classroom with students whose first language is among 80 other than English. Preparation is going to cost more and take more time.

    This all assumes that Bodhelian values rate education above the ability to “go to the hoop.” It further assumes that Bodhelian parents are present and are supportive of academic endeavors.

    How do Universities decide who gets in?

    In the absence of really getting to know each candidate, they rely on grades, test scores, and coursework as surrogates for ability and preparation. Preparation is very important. I worked on a study while at the BigU analyzing the results of admitting 1.5GPA, miserable LSAT students from the California State Universities
    into the same law school class as 4.0GPA graduates of Amherst with 99+ LSATs, all in the name of social justice. Suffice to say that the U didn’t do the CalState entrants any real favor, whatever their ability.

    Why not an open format?

    The major premise of this discussion is the “selectiveness” of university admission. It assumes the university as a finite resource. Prisons are not deemed finite. I do not see why universities should be. We need to harness technology to improve the delivery system. The Net can help transform education. And, for instance, one can purchase the entire ArsDigita University curriculm, video lectures and all, on a 80Gb harddrive for $200 at “http://www.aduni.org/drives”. MIT is going in the right direction with its
    OpenCourseWare initiative. What about each BigU lecture series as an album of DVDs, with periodic tutorial contact? You tell me.

    What is important is the preparation, both before and during college. Doubt it, ask Gates, Dell and Ellison, notable college dropouts.

  9. I’m going to ignore the relevant topic for a refresher on signals.

    In 1978, when I went to HMC, we did learn that real world signals could be represented by a sum of complex exponentials. Uh, except I have to remark that by “a sum of complex exponentials” are you referring to cosine and sine waves? (cosine + i*sine?) (And is it true that a delta function can be represented in such a way?) I must be thinking of something else, for it certainly was the case that we learned to analyze and compare circuits by determining how well they responded to delta, step, and sin waves.

    That’s still got to be part of the curriculum now, right?

    Maybe I remember it as I remember a wonderful graphical Fourier Transform demo from my older brother on an Imlac showing this very sort of analysis.

  10. Without coming to any conclusions about affirmative action, I am curious to know what people think about the following premises:

    a) the distribution of intelligence (not synonymous with IQ) is the same across races; (notion of race is problematic but let’s let that go)

    b) certain groups still suffer from discrimination, particularly african americans

    I am not saying that it follows from a) and b) that we should have affirmative action, but it’s good to agree on starting points.

  11. While I agree that affirmitive action forces people to discrimate against the protected groups it is trying to protect, I fully disagree with your statement that “Getting into a selective university …. is a question of how willing a student is to accept authority blindly” . Even when the students do not know how useful the course material towards their future, they do know how useful it will be to know the material during a test, and how useful this test will be towards their grade, and how useful their grade will be towards their GPA, which will be usefull towards whatever….
    Phil, you are under the illusion that university is supposed to be some sort of enlightning experience for the student, in which case it would be important for the student to understand the revelence of what he is learning. However, your own empirical evidence shows that this is not the case.

  12. The real issue is whether government universities should be in business in the first place. Is extorting money from people in a certain geographical region in order to selectively provide educations to a fraction of those who apply a nice way of doing business? If all people had the moral privileges of government universities, we could all start schools that extort funding from our neighbors to pay the bills. In addition, we would be free and justified in denying admission to the children of our paying neighbors.

    If the education of our neighbors is a good investment, why do government universities have to put someone else’s hard-earned money on the line? It is easy to make investment decisions when your own money is not on the line. For example, anyone who has played the stock market on paper with imaginary dollars, knows the game changes when one starts putting real money at risk. For interested lisp programmers, this newsgroup post by Kent Pitman makes a similar point, not in relation to government universities, but in the context of what’s the best business model for a software company like Franz, Inc.

  13. I guess I’m just not too politically correct, because I still don’t understand why having a “diverse” studenty body is more important than having a student body of the best, most capable students who all earned the right to be there, regardless of their friggin’ skin color….

    I chuckle at those who say “Well, we just need XXX more years of AA, then everything will be equal.” Yeah. Whatever. How utterly naive and stupid.

    AA has become an entitlement with such strong political backing, it would be suicide to try and undo it. Whenever it is attempted, the pro-AA side simply screams “RACISTS!!” and the other side is forced to retreat lest they be branded as a bunch of evil bigots. (Forget the notion of fairness and equality.)

    If you are a non-favored minority (read: White) get used to being discriminated against. Your evil and you deserve it. It’s the Law of the Land that we can discriminate against someone based solely on their skin color….as long as their color is white. Otherwise, you’re a racist.

    Sure. That makes sense.

  14. Racism is the ugly side of the neurological ability to perceive difference. It’s good to
    be able to pick our kin out of a crowd, but kids learn prejudice quickly after memorizing their mothers face- racism is not lying about dormant until college. Forcing well-entrenched administrators to allow women, blacks, mexicans, indians, asians, portuguese, the poor- (who in the US hasn’t been suppressed?) the opportunity to go to college is not a bad thing; but these policies benefit the system as much as the students. When the underpriveleged believe that *if they work hard* they too will prosper, they are less likely revolt against the majority rule and more likely to accept “democracy”.

    Capitalism also thrives on the notion of equal opportunity. Our education system primes us to labor in corporations for the benefit of shareholders. In the last few decades GNP surged when women were finally “allowed” to attend college and enter the work force.
    There is tremendous corporate incentive to continue to extend markets to the growing population of non-caucasians in and out of the US.

    This is easier to accomplish via magnanimous if nominal inclusion of the target consumer into the ranks of corporations and government. If the government gives someone a scholarship and they proceed to flunk out whose fault is that? It doesn’t matter that the socialization to see or toe some (white) line is limited to certain privileged environments. Minority failure in the face of “equal opportunity” leads to questioned intelligence and reinforced bigotry, but importantly the government is cheaply exonerated while democractic ideals are propagated.

    Schools do teach and reward compliance because it’s behavior that makes our society hum. No one asked questions in my classes (2 BS degrees)- since the profs were so busy talking. We all graduate to similiarly accept the assertion that our one nation runs best when no (unpatriotic) questions are asked. Why question anything when corporations churn out everything we need, we can vote to choose our very competant leaders, the military protects us (with well architected defense systems) from foreign evil, and the wealthy readily pay their share of taxes. In fact we generally welcome the rewards of complicity; the corporate job, the mortgage, the unalientated right to shop, and the two week vacations to anyplace in the world as long as the hotel feels like home, the place looks like Florida and our boisterous nationalism goes unchallenged. We concede only *minor* things- the environment, healthcare for the unincorporated, survival of Africa, imprisonment of the innocent, international strife…and so on. The system is perpetuated mightily.

  15. Hmmmm, I wonder how many of the previous posters on this thread have had teaching experience? In my limited high school teaching experience (5 years), I tend to side with Philip in the smart students and motivated students are the best students camp. A troubled (academically, emotionally, etc.) students will always tap your time, energy, and patience. Yes, it is a fact of life that not everyone is the same, especially in high school, and that as teachers we are obligated to help everyone, but it certainly does NOT mean that we enjoy it all of the time. Universities should be a different story. There are more higher education institutions than ever before in the history of the world, and they can and do cater to the entire spectrum. Assuming that there is an institution for everyone, why on earth should MIT have to fill quotas? Well, some people believe that given America’s ugly history of oppression, not everyone has had a fair chance, and that to have a cross ethnic, multi cultural community is far superior to having a bunch of homogeneous really smart people. There probably is something to that, but when kids are accepted to a program that they cannot possibly succeed in, who’s really at fault? I wonder how well the Affirmative Action students do in the work place post graduation. Does anyone know of any studies?

  16. The key point you miss here is that you have confused affirmative actions and quotas.

    A quota demands that a certain percentage of the incoming class be a given race. This offers the potential for underqualified students of a given race to be admitted.

    Affirmative action states that given two candidates of the SAME level of credentials (namely, both are perfectly EQUALLY qualified to attend) that one should statistically lean towards underprivileged students. (I personally believe that the definition of “underprivileged” should be considered independently from the concentration of melanin in one’s skin or whether one’s great-great-grandmother had a friend from Mexico, but that’s a separate issue.)

    This only works when there are many, many more qualified students than available positions; namely, as is the case in highly selective universities like Harvard and Stanford. Let’s say 2/3 of the people that apply are simply not qualified. We will disqualify them independently of race.

    Then we’re left with the 33% that remain, any random subset of which could make for a strong class. We could prefer people who were tall, or pretty, or who had large noses if we wanted, and we’d still have a strong class. Affirmative action says to use “privilege” as a random weighting factor. Privileged students who are qualified can still get in, but are at a slight statistical disadvantage. Underprivileged students still have to be qualified to be considered and if they qualify (qualification standards are often brutally high) they are rewarded with a slight statistical advantage.

    This all makes sense to me (well, given a race-free definition of “privilege”) and it is entirely different from the straw man you have decided to rail against.

  17. Kyle, there are indeed studies about how well affirmative action students do in the workplace. The book is called “The Shape of the River.” Here is a clip from a 9/9/98 NYTimes review:

    —————————————–
    A major new study of the records and experiences of tens of thousands of students over 20 years at the some of the nation’s top colleges and universities concludes that their affirmative action policies created the backbone of the black middle class and taught white classmates the value of integration.

    The study, which challenges much of the conservative thinking about affirmative action, is to be released Wednesday by Princeton University Press in a book titled “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions.” It was written by two former Ivy League presidents, William Bowen of Princeton University, an economist, and Derek Bok of Harvard University, a political scientist.

  18. Also, kyle, quotas are illegal. This was made clearer when the court ruled on the Michigan undergrad case (point system) and the Grutter v. Bollinger Law School case (critical mass).

  19. A few remarks…

    Does a black man living next to me in college with a 3.0 GPA, versus my 3.3, promote my stereotype of blacks as less intelligent and capable?

    Is the original post accurate in postulating that the 5%-10% quota of blacks will fail their classes?

    UC Berkeley has a history of anti-authoritarian views, has a reasonably diverse student body, yet is one of the country’s premier institutions. This is anecdotal, but with 36k students perhaps it should bear mention in the authority-worship = success debate.

    Is someone who got a B+ in Poli Sci 101 recieving less from that portion of his college experience than someone who gets an A-? Will he be less successful? Should his future success based on a 0.4 GPA differential dictate college admissions? What’s college for, anyways?

    SATs are a good indicator of future college GPA. SATs, in part, measure knowledge of words like “polemic”. I learned it off a list I memorized for the SAT. I happened to know about half the words already, words like “esoteric”. But I never encountered either of these words in high school. I either read them somewhere cuz I’m a geek or learned them from my PhD mom and MS dad. Will I outperform someone with a less academic family in college? I’d guess yes. Is the playing field level? No. Is not having a level playing field something that should be addressed in admissions? Maybe. But please at least acknowledge it’s an issue.

  20. Let me point out a few things as a member of the “protected minority”, an alumnus from two relatively large universities, a current graduate student at a third large university, and a consistently successful standardized test-taker (averaging above the 90th percentile since high school.

    1. Anyone who thinks the playing field is level (or really even close) is fooling themselves. There will unfortunately always be racism, but the majority of the majority will never really know what it feels like. Most will never have epithets and bottles simultaneously hurled at them as they walk across campus from class (I have. Many of my friends have as well). Most will not have their first employer after college request a transfer for them because “well, he is Black…so we don’t think he fits well here” (I did. Interestingly, the person requesting the transfer was unaware that he was speaking to a Black person on the other end.) Most will never have to persistently question the impact of their race upon nearly everything that happens to them.

    2. It is important to remember that AA is not a program to reward underachievers based upon their race. It is to balance the playing field for MARGINAL students with recognizable disadvantages in their academic preparation. Let’s be clear about this: no comparatively outstanding students will be disadvantaged by AA. It is always the marginal ones. Yes, a few marginal students will be passed over for a few more marginal minority students every year as part of a university’s affirmative action policies. No outstanding students, by any measure and of any race, will be impacted.

    3. Sadly, Philip’s “used-car” theory is correct to some degree. I can “prove” that I belong in any student body that I would choose based upon GPA and test scores. Unfortunately, I am sure that I am branded as an Affirmative-Action recipient based upon my skin color. However, Philip’s analogy doesn’t hold upon graduation because a Bodleian with a 3.0 GPA is just as capable as a Non-Bodleian with a 3.0. A Bodleian who graduates was just as successful as a non-Bodleian who graduated.

  21. It seems to me that your rationale “Then it hit me: high school teachers don’t always motivate the material either, MIT only accepts students who did well in high school, ergo all students at MIT are people who are willing to do stuff merely because a teacher (authority figure) says to do it.” is a non sequitur. There might well be high-achieving high school students whose teachers poorly motivate the material, but choose to “do stuff” because they are able to detect the motivation themselves.

  22. So basically, your post was bollocks.

    Signed,
    An Asian that doesn’t respect authority

  23. The whole system is broken and needs to be dismantled. All education should be public and free up to an including grad school. Instead of blowing up and rebuilding countries this is where the money should go! Then all this would be a non-issue. All educators would have a GS-Number and teach because they have a passion for it, not a pay check fedish. Wouldn’t this level the playing field? Then have straight testing for entrance and give points for things like…..having the correct answer or response!

  24. Economic Analysis

    A university admits the highest valued students; without AA, this value is determined by academic ability, potential, etc. With AA, minorities have extra value.

    A middle of the road university will be able to attract students with a value in a certain range; more valuable students will go to better schools, and less valuable ones will go to worse ones.

    So the minorities that go to middle range schools will have part of their value given to them for free by AA. Their academic ability will be less to balance it out.

    This works because typically minorities have worse economic conditions, so the talent pool is low proportional to population. There’s lots of pressure to get the good minorities. Because they have extra political value because of AA, they get moved up beyond where their normal academic skill would get them, so it makes them look bad.

  25. “All educators would have a GS-Number and teach because they have a passion for it, not a pay check fedish[sic].”

    Few college and university level educators work solely for the money. Except in specific high-profile fields, the money is not that great. Few work solely for the opportunity to “teach”. The official line is that college professors are required to devote time to teaching, research, and service activities. In my experiences and those of other students and faculty, most institutions place higher value on researchers leading faculty members to be more interested in research as a means of gaining/maintaining tenure and status.

    Also, I have a problem with Ernie’s notion that the good minorities are advanced to points beyond where their normal academic skill would get them. The Peter principle exists in all fields, all races, all genders, etc. To include all minorities in such a sweeping generality is frivolous at best. I would argue that AA has little impact on “good” students. The bad students will have trouble, because they don’t really have a clue about how college works. Any college graduate knows someone who was the star of his/her high school, came into their undergraduate years expecting to be the campus star as well, and barely held on to graduate (if lucky). That is not a phenomenon that is specific to race or economic status.

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