A good school, will consciously recruit minorities.

I’d be interested to read your post.

I suspect there IS a quota, conscious or not. As it stands now, most graduate students make a concerted effort to recruit minorities. At some (undisclosed) percentage or number of POC, that effort would stop and all students would be treated equally, recruited equally, and supported equally.

That point is the quota.

So when you say

“these professors don’t really advocate a quota per se. They believe that the more students of color they have the easier it will be to attract more students of color.”

you’re hiding (unintentionally) behind the “per se” part. Quotas are rare. Functional quotas are common, as are minimums. (Show of hands: Absent a written agreement, given the clinton threads does anyone NOT think Clinton’s next large blogger meeting will have at least four POC?)

An easy way to think about functional quotas is this: colleges do not adopt their affirmative action programs in a vacuum. They adopt them with full knowledge of the programs’ effects. When a school makes the decision of how many “applicant points” to give to whatever category of race, they know full well what the effect will be on their entering class. They know how many extra POC will benefit and how many will not. It’s a quota in everything but name.

If they actually believe this to be true, then it is difficult to see the thinking behind everyone’s desire to have students of color. Or at least, it’s difficult to see why it’s considered “progressive”.

If each incremental unit of “production” (graduate students of the preferred ethnic groups) reduces the cost of producing more, then we should expect to see a monopoly; one institution would have all the desired students. (Or at least, monopolies being difficult to hold, there might be a steep hierarchy, with some institutions having lots of the most desired students.)

Instead, we see thousands of institutions, all competing for the desired students on more or less equal footing. This raises the “cost” of production for everyone. Since resources are finite, this means fewer ethnically preferred students overall.

So in behaving as they do, the professors are actually trying to increase their own advantage, at the expense of the students in question collectively.

Thanks Daran. “Borked” is that a techincal term?

Indeed it is. It’s also one of those wonderful words which, even if you’ve never seen it before, you know exactly what it means. :-)

Just as a general statement, these professors don’t really advocate a quota per se. They believe that the more students of color they have the easier it will be to a attract more students of color.

In that Clinton-blogger-battle (with a paddle in a bottle on a poodle in a puddle and the poodle’s eating noodles… sorry–too much Seuss lately) the quota issue came up.

When people talked about quotas in the context of the blogger meeting, most people said quotas were bad: That it would be inappropriate to require ___ POC at the meeting.

But I note that in this post you are referring in a reasonably neutral/supportive fashion (link 3, above) of what essentially amounts to a quota in graduate school: “Often, professors have the “numerical critical mass perspective” where the entire focus is on increasing the number of students of color who enroll.” How do you decide what’s a “good quota” (graduate students?) and what’s a “bad quota” (bloggers?)