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Originally Posted by Kobi
Wow. Interesting choice of articles.
I tend to look for a different type of article i.e. one that is likely to explain the legal issues and arguments and engage me on an intellectual and cognitive level rather than an emotional one. Plus, I prefer to come to my own conclusions after weighing the information rather than being told what I am supposed to think. But, I'm weird like that.
I liked this one because it provided information to digest and research.
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When I'm looking for something to engage me on an intellectual level, I won't search the Washington Post for it, nor will I depend on it to explain legal issues and arguments. I don't depend on any one newspaper article to conclude things for me. I don't see reading a heartfelt article as being in danger of being told what to think. Facts are not even that persuasive for most people. Thought does not have to be separate from emotion. I have always believed thinking and feeling are both equally important in coming to any conclusion. Feeling your way through thoughts opens you up to all sides and all the dark corners of issues. But when it comes to the mismatch theory, I don't need to weigh the information on an intellectual and cognitive level rather than an emotional one, I already know what racist crap it is. To me it is almost as startling to hear a Supreme Court justice spewing this bull as it is to hear Trump's racist, xenophobic hate speech. Almost as startling but even more nefarious because it masquerades as a perfectly logical theory when in reality it is more racist rhetoric used as a popular argument against affirmative action. On the surface it seems to profess that students with lesser academic qualifications don't benefit from being admitted to a more competitive college, but it is really saying we don't want universities to concern themselves with diversity. However we will continue to encourage them to over extend other less academically qualified students for all kinds of reasons other than race. But responding only to the idea that students with lesser academic qualifications don't benefit from being admitted to a more competitive college, in actuality there is no proof that this is so. It's a racist mime that hides it's ugly face behind concern and when I hear these kinds of things I almost long for Trumps openly hateful words that cannot be construed as anything but what they are. Here is a less emotional argument although I can't imagine this kind of thing doesn't warrant some emotion.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...tion-mismatch/
The argument that black students, or less prepared students of any race, don't end up benefiting from affirmative action because they can't keep up with the work is known as mismatch theory. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is its most prominent advocate. In his dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, the court's last high-profile affirmative action case, in 2003, he described elite colleges as "tantalizing" underprepared students with admissions offers.
"These overmatched students take the bait, only to find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition," Thomas writes.
The only way to prove the mismatch theory true or false would be to randomly assign minority students with similar academic backgrounds to different colleges and see what happens. That's obviously impractical. But the bulk of research suggests that in fact, students who are admitted to competitive colleges despite being less academically qualified than their peers end up doing fine.
•Students from underrepresented communities who attend selective colleges are more likely to graduate than students with similar academic qualifications who do not.
•A 2013 study from two sociologists, Michal Kurlaender of the University of California Davis and Eric Grodsky from the University of Wisconsin, looked at an unusual situation at the University of California. Budget struggles led the university to admit fewer students than it had expected to, and it cut out students who were on the academic margins, weaker than other applicants. Then the budget situation improved, and so students were admitted after all. Those students who barely made the cut performed no worse than students from a similar educational background who were admitted through the normal admissions process.
•A 2007 study of students whose SAT scores were lower than the average SAT score of other students at their college found those students were not less likely to drop out, although in some cases they earned lower grades.
•Students from minority groups benefit more, in terms of lifetime earnings, from attending a selective college than their white peers, according to research from economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger.
Some research has supported the mismatch idea. A 2012 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that after California banned affirmative action, graduation rates went up for black and Latino students, and attributed part of the increase to a better academic fit between students and colleges.
But the paper didn't consider that graduation rates for these students were already on an upward trend. An analysis by Matthew Chingos, now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, found that graduation rates grew less than they otherwise would have if the affirmative action ban had not passed. In other words, banning affirmative action ended up holding back minority students.
Mismatch theory is always brought up in the context of affirmative action. But universities admit less academically qualified students for all kinds of reasons — because they're the children of alumni or donors, due to athletic or musical talent, and so on. There isn't nearly as much concern about how those students fare, and some research has found they're more likely to drop out than other students, including those admitted through race-based affirmative action.
Scalia was right about one thing: Many black scientists don't graduate from big public research universities like the University of Texas.
But that's not because they struggle to keep up with the work. It's because historically black colleges punch far above their weight when it comes to enrolling and graduating black science majors.
Nationally, black students are 11 percent of the undergraduate population, but they make up only 9 percent of degree recipients in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, known as STEM.
Fewer than 10 percent of black college students are enrolled at historically black colleges and universities, and those colleges typically have smaller endowments and fewer resources.
Yet one-third of black students who received an undergraduate degree in math or statistics did so at an HBCU. So did 37 percent of black students who received a degree in the physical sciences. Among black students who went on to earn a PhD in the STEM fields — a tiny slice of PhD recipients — more than one-third started their education at a historically black college.
This doesn't mean historically black colleges are "lesser schools" or "slower-track schools," as Scalia implies. It suggests that they might have something to teach the University of Texas about diversity in the sciences.