Why YSK: because what seems like equal situation from surface isn't always equal opportunity for all. And even when equal measure of help is provided, it might not be equally useful.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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How is giving college scholarships or preferential admissions to one and only one specific group anything but inequality?
You're completley correct. We should balance the system so that admissions allow more people of color and first-in-family admissions, instead of preferencing legacies so much
Better yet, base it on merit.
Do achievements under tougher conditions not have merit?
I never thought of it this way, that's a pretty good interpretation.
The toughness of the conditions aren’t the point of merit-based entry. The point is matching where someone is now, to where the school can take them.
Agreed.
And we should give extra points to people who grew up in disadvantaged situations but still had decent grades. A 'C' in AP History by someone working a job in high school, is just as good as someone who got an 'A' And didn't have to work.
Merit isn't just a good GPA. It takes into account all of the things that made it some more difficult for a person. Getting a decent score on an SAT exam when you went to a shit school, should be able to get you into a good college. But the reality is someone who lived in a zip code with better schools is more likely to get into that college purely by where they grew up. And you tend to grow up in a good neighborhood if you're parents were well off or had a degree themselves.
Purely looking at grades and scores is bad. Unfortunately, people of color tend (not always) be from worse neighborhoods. They tend to have a lot of disadvantages when it comes to getting good grades and good scores. Affirmative action is/was supposed to break the cycle. It's supposed to help give a little more merit to the situations surrounding grades Ultimately, it's supposed to diversify the nicer neighborhoods.
An issue is that lower income areas often have less focus on things like test taking skills, so genuine ability is really hard to distinguish from test taking practice.
Also, schools in lower income areas often aren't nearly as good, forcing a cycle of poverty since they can't get into college very easily at all.
We will be re-learning this lesson for the next fifty years along with why the voting rights act was necessary.
Better yet, expand universities and allow everybody in.
Or teach critical thinking in grade and trade schools. The fact that critical thinking skills are scoffed at as being "elitist" is an intentional devolution of our culture.
How do you decide what majors people should be allowed to take? If money was no object, there would be many many more liberal arts type majors that don't directly contribute monetarily to society nearly as much as other professions.
Doing what’s good for you and others is often very different from doing what’s good monetarily.
The monetary side helps match people where they're most needed. (Not exactly because capitalism is broken in some ways, but approximately) If education and money were entirely decoupled, there would be less of a way to get people where they're needed. Raising income wouldn't help much since you wouldn't need to think about that when choosing a major.
Distributing skilled labor to where it's needed is still good for others too. I agree money and morality aren't correlated, but it can help guide in the useful direction. I think there needs to be a balance between allowing people to do whatever they want and encouraging them to do what's needed.
Here's some more info on problems you can have with colleges. youtube.com/watch?v=Rqv0nuP4OAU
In my country university is free, some have a test you have to pass because there are so many people that want to go, but those are law and medicine. And most people drop out in the first year.
Otherwise it's not really an issue.
Dropping out seems like an issue, as you're paying for someone who isn't going to benefit very much from it. Most people overall, or most people in those majors?
I think most people in those mayors drop out, not overall. My guess is that people know you can make a lot of money there but then realize they don't actually like it.
I don't think it's a big issue though, some public money might be "wasted", but you give everyone a chance which find perfectly acce.
What is merit? How do you measure it?
You know what ISN'T merit? ...simply being born part of some special group that gets preferential treatment based on the most meaningless of things.
Merit could be anything from HS grades to SAT scores or placement in various scholarly competitions. Income level should be mixed in there as well.
Do we want to live in an equitable world? Then stop dividing people over stupid shit.
being born rich isn't merit either, but it has lasting inpacts on HS grades, SAT scores, and placement in scholarly competitions. How do you propose to ensure schools aren't full of people who just bought their way in?
Its the equity stage. Certain socioeconomic groups have fewer educational opportunities earlier in life. We should really move on to justice and fix that. But first, we need equity to help people now and make up for that.
We have need based programs to address people who need help. Why not bolster to those? Why focus on shifting resources/programs away from the poor to people who objectively don't need it as much? We know how much people need, we can measure income.
How much money/time/reaources are going into programs, grants, scholarships that target single demographics?
That's horseshit. Some poor person living right next door to some other poor person has access to X scholarship but the neighbor doesn't. They went to the same schools growing up. Their parents make comparable money, but magically only one of them could get a free ride scholarship or gets easier access to school.
That's not going to breed resentment. Nooo. Not at all.
Because money doesn't cover the whole issue. Two people starting at the same economic point, one is statistically more likely to have downward economic mobility compared to the other based on race. There are people in our society actively being held back.
What's the differing factor between them?
Obviously if you paint this hypothetical situation as between two identical parties it'll look silly. What do you think would differentiate the two enough to warrant a scholarship difference?
I'm pretty far left, and even I felt resentment as a first-generation college grad from a lower middle class background that had to go into massive debt for law school. A friend of mine had Pilipino and black parents that were college educated and quite well off, but she had a free ride to law school because of her skin color instead of her grades, despite having far less financial need than I did. There's no reason a poor white yokel and a poor black kid, both of whom have substantial structural and cultural barriers keeping them from accessing higher education, should be treated differently. I am not denying history, or saying that systemic racism isn't a thing, but history and systemic racism shouldn't be justifications for furthering inequality.
All things considered, she will be hit with more roadblocks then you over the course of her life only because of the color of her skin, and being mixed. Consider this one of the only times where the shoes on the other foot. Many minorities feel like this constantly about most major elements of society.
You don't solve racism with MORE racism.
And "reverse racism" is no different than any other racism.
Yet that is exactly what is happening. And people see it happening and it turns off some of the same people who would otherwise support your cause. This is a situation that breeds resentment, and stories like the ones posted over the last few days where a LOT of young white males are turning to right-wing groups should not be a surprise to anyone. These terribly thought-out policies are pushing many white (as well as Asian and Indian and Cuban) voters away from left-leaning causes because they feel they are being excluded. The Left is fighting racism in the dumbest way possible... with more racism, and SHOCKINGLY it is blowing up in their faces.
You're missing the larger point. It isn't about individuals.
If your parents and grandparents were from an ethnic/social/other group that did not have access to resources, then there's less chance that you grow up in a household that values education or have resources like food, time with parents and caring adults, emotional support and, financial security and so on. These affect your academic success irrespective of how talented or smart you might be.
Providing better access to higher education for people from such groups is a way to make sure that their children don't grow up in the same environment and the problem is solved over generations.
Such measures of equity are always stop gap measures to address problems until you find grass root level solutions. Right now say protected groups might be first Nations or African Americans. In the future that might change to immigrants from Ukraine or Honduras.
One of them got "the talk", the other didn't. It's not all about economic status. They're treated different, no matter what. I see it every single day, even in friends and family, and even on Lemmy. This mindset just adds to the fire. Resentment is in the mind of the beholder, skin color is not a choice.
What is the justice of a rich black valley girl from Santa Barbara (who was always going to be college-bound) getting a free ride because of her skin color despite ZERO financial need, and a poor white yokel kid from rural Alabama not going to school because she can't afford to (who also gets zero social support for going to college because her culture decided to intentionally devalue education as being "liberal elite")?
The fact that racism is a problem and that "the talk" is still a reality doesn't justify race-based preferential treatment. No wonder culture wars are so easy to wage.
Can you link me to a source so I can review the details of that case?
The source is me. One of my roommates was from Santa Barbara and enjoyed a free ride to a out-of-state public school based on her race. She reeked of money and privilege and had no business getting a free ride.
So every minority that wanted to attended that school got a scholarship then? Presumably a worse off minority should have taken the slot. Your missing a lot of vital context.
Fair enough. I’m not singleminded about this, but it certainly raised my hackles hearing her go on and on in her valley girl meets prep school accent about how hard it was to be her, while she meanwhile had every privilege available to her,flew anywhere she wanted on a whim, and drove around a paid-for new Lexus SUV that her daddy gave her. I don’t know what justice should look like, but giving her a free ride sure as hell wasn’t it.
There are always going to be individuals that don’t deserve things. Across the entire population however, these systems work and well. For all we know she was in massive debt. I know throughout my twenties some of my peers would have new cars constantly and buy expensive things they didn’t need and most of the time I found out they had $10k+ on credit cards and were living paycheck to paycheck with no savings or investments.
It’s important to keep in mind that these systems are seeking to correct the long standing discrimination faced by people of color that were unable to obtain these things for no other reason than the color of their skin. They weren’t given access to capital despite being just as qualified as anyone else. They weren’t allowed to attend most colleges. Movies like Hidden Figures and the Banker, although dramatized, paint a picture of what needed to be corrected. As modern society chips away at these safeguards, it remains to be seen if we slip back into those patterns.
She wasn’t in debt. It was family money in great abundance. Yet she deserves a hand on the scale because of her skin color? I’d rather see a just and effective social state for everyone instead of selective handouts in a broken system that effectively reifies race and othering. Does recognizing the harm of systemic racism require reinforcing the concept? We talk about race as a harmful social construct and yet push for reparatory systems that amplify and reinforce it.
Depends where the money came from. If he parents had it, she would have been disqualified from paying Nicole based scholarships. If her grandparents had it and not her parents, it wouldn’t have been known.
My point still stands. If the scholarship was solely based on the color of her skin, there must have been someone of the same race with more need that could have qualified. There had to be other merit attached to it.
If all things equal a black person got into college instead of a white person, then congratulations, you’ve experienced a little bit of what black people have gone through since the beginning of the nation in not just higher education, but jobs, housing, dealing with the police, etc.
It would be great if the problem could be solved without uneven rules. You’ll find it unrealistic to accomplish once learn how much is involved. You’re not asking to solve one problem, but dozens. Dozens of huge issues each with smaller sub-issues that could take you a lifetime to correct. Forcibly correcting it through affirmative action actually worked, and wouldn’t take generations.
Culture wars are easy to wage because of childish assholes that can't handle seeing someone else receiving aid. Poor white yokel kids from rural Alabama problems stem from their parents voting for shit people that want them to be poor and uneducated. Then they grow up to vote for the same breed of shit people, against the aid (education, fair labor laws, safety regulations, etc) everyone else is trying to give them. They dig their own graves, over and over. Minorities are born into a grave, they're trying to crawl out of it and a ridiculous amount of assholes are, not only not lending a hand, they're attacking anyone that tries. Affirmative action doesn't work perfectly but only because it gets abused by those same assholes.
Meanwhile a neighborhood over, the kids don't need scholarships.
Both scenarios breed resentment.
We need better answers, like... free public education, better schools, tutoring supplements for those who ask (including high acheivers), and it needs to go through uni and trades.
We can't keep having people left behind because of structural issues. Poor decisions happen and it's nice to soften blows where we can. But if a person commits no errors and ends up paycheck to paycheck for the rest of their life... that's a failed society.
We need to transcend the "they get x and we don't" part of this and get onto the real thing.