http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1226169,00.html

“Like what?” I asked. I told they they shouldn’t be swearing or such anyway, and as far as (I didn’t use the term, but described it) sexist language or deprecatory language about women or girls, 1) I don’t want it either, and 2) they didn’t know enough about women or girls to know WTF they were talking about.

OTOH, I also found that I have had to have a talk with some (not all) of our suburban mother Assistant Scoutmasters. This has been along the lines of “Your shoulder patch says ‘Assistant Scoutmaster’, not ‘Troop Mom’”. For example; a kid comes up to you with a cut on his hand. It’s bleeding. You take a look and it doesn’t appear to be so deep as to require stitches or other professional medical care. What do you do?

“Oh, the poor kid is probably scared and in pain; I’ll clean it out for him and put a bandage on and give him a big hug.”

Wrong. You ask him if he knows what to do. If he says that he should clean it out and put a band-aid on, tell him he’s right and to go do it. If he doesn’t, tell him what to do and where he can get a band-aid and some soap and water. Then let him do it himself. I have had problems with some female ASM’s who want to do all kinds of stuff for the kids, even cleaning up the pots and dishes after dinner. There’s one that it has taken me over a year to break of the habit of following the kids around and doing things for them and from interfering with the kids when they are doing something that is actually reasonably safe but has some hazard associated with it (like using an axe).

Of course, then there’s an issue we have faced as Moslems and Hindus have moved into the area. In Cub Scouts, the youngest kids (Tigers, Wolves and Bears, 1st - 3rd grades) tend to have female-led dens, and the older kids (Webelos I and II, 4th and 5th grades) tend to have male-led dens. I have heard of female Den Leaders who have been told by kids that their Dads have told them that they don’t have to listen to what a woman tells them to do. I can imagine what those kids must be like in school!

My understanding is that there’s not a fudge factor; what was done was to give greater weight to the Verbal SAT score. I’m actually in favor of this on a very straightforward basis. If you want to really change the world with technology, and want an ability to guide/control that change, you need to be able to communicate. You also need to communicate well to be able to work as part of a team.

As a nature educator of both single-sex and co-ed groups of children, I’ve observed that boys and girls both prefer to learn through hands-on activities or motion. Girls are more hesitant to compete in co-ed groups, especially as they get older and the cultural expectations of girls become more restrictive– I have noticed that teenaged girls will pretend not to know the answer or will defer to boys much more often than younger girls will. During freetime, girls in co-ed groups do choose much more passive activities, but in the absence of boys they will take over the basketball courts and sledding hills with enthusiasm.

Boys (especially in single-sex groups) seem to have a problem following the instructions of a female nature instructor. “I don’t have to listen to a girl” is a pretty pervasive attitude, even at a young age. It’s amazing to me how suddenly snakes and frogs and creeks become worthless to boys if taught by a woman– there’s this idea that anything a woman is interested in is not good for boys. Since boys are told (by the boy-crisis people) that only girls are good at sitting still and reading, all of a sudden, reading becomes useless to them. And I have yet to meet a girl who would rather sit and listen to a lecture on trees than go for a hike and look at trees. But we as a culture place a lot of importance on girls being quiet and polite; we expect girls to sit still and read, so they will. It’s not about ‘hardwiring’, and we do both boys and girls a disservice if we base our expectations of them on false gender essentialism.

Trouble about Affirmative Action is that there are several flavors of it:

MIT: Several years back MIT noticed that SAT scores correlated pretty well to GPAs, but under-predicted the ability of female students. Hmm. Ok–they started adding a fudge factor during admissions to take account of this. As far as I know, they still do this.

Stanford: (in the 1990s) We’ll take every female student who has graduated from a California high school! Regardless of what their grades are!

Stanford quickly dropped this idea when they discovered a higher percentage of their female students were dropping out because they found classes “too difficult.”

One thing that I liked very much about MIT was the amount of rope they gave one. Once you’re in, they expect you’ll be able to get through. A sizable percentage don’t graduate in four years–some take less time, a lot take more. During my period there (1980s) it was quite popular for people in Computer Science to drop out for a year or so, work at one of the start-up computer companies in the area, make a bunch of money as a software designer, then come back to polish off the degree. For all of the pressure that we were under as students, it was often quite comforting to think that MIT wouldn’t have let us in unless they thought we were up to the level of work required. We WOULD be able to get through. (MIT’s also the only university I know about where the pre-meds helped each other out with homework.)

non-minority
100
99
98
97
96
95
94
93.5
92

minority
100
96
93
92
91

Where an acceptable entrance score is say 90, I can admit 10 students, and the minority proportion of the population as a whole is 30%.

If I understand MIT’s policy correctly, they would accept the top 3 minority students and the top 7 majority students. That would be because once they had admitted the 3 minority students, they would no longer be an underrepresented minority - they would be present in the admitted class at the same proportion they would be present in the population. This would mean that the minority student with a score of 92 would be admitted while a majority student with a score of 93.5 would not be admitted, so there would still be a preference at work.

In practice at MIT, this does not occur; there are not enough qualified minorities applying to enable MIT to admit them to the proportion that they occur in the population. So the actual practice so far is to admit all qualified minorities that apply.

There is a qualification to that; Asian-Americans are a minority in the U.S. population, but they are admitted at a higher proportion than they occur in the population because of the large number of qualified Asian American applicants.

non-minority
100
99
98
97
96
95

minority
100
96
95

Where an acceptable entrance score is say 90 then do we take the non-minority 100 / minority 100 as our first picks then fill say the remaining 3 slots with non-minority 99.98.97 or do you take the minority 96,95 then the non-minority 99?

I could understand (though not endorse) an AA policy where equal grades (so in my example above the minority 100 gets preference over the non-minority 100) however can we really endorse a non-meritocracy if the minority is given preference over a non-minorty who was academically better?

So, what are we talking about when we say “affirmative action”? Does it include a policy such as the above, where underrepresented minorities who don’t meet the same academic standard as everyone else are not accepted, but all those who do are?

You seem to be implying that, given identical academic qualifications, a poor, black student matriculating into an elite college at the same time as a rich white student is just as likely to graduate and go on to a successful career. Do you really believe that?

Also, my impression is that elite schools are typically willing to go to greater lengths, in terms of lowering admissions standards, for underrepresented minorities than they are for legacy applicants. I may be wrong on this point, though.

Racial preferences in education in essence make white-run institutions look progressive and racially sensitive, and do so by fucking over the career prospects and life paths of their minority students. I don’t believe this to be the best way of raising the level of minority academic performance. If that makes me racist, I’ve been called worse things for worse causes.

Legacy affirmative action for rich whites has not fucked over the career prospects and life paths of wealthy, white students so why do claim this will happen to nonwhite students?

Robert, do you not get what most of us are trying to tell you here, that removing racial preferences from minority groups and extending them to white males from upper-class families will notimprove minority group outcomes and performance and lower rich white male performance? What kind of wing nut theory is this?

You continue with your weird, wing nut theories in comment #84

Now imagine that we take this arbitrary group, and in addition to the schools that they have gained admission to, we say “oh, and by the way, you also got admitted to school X” - where school X is a school in the next tier up. That’s the effect that any preference generally has - it opens an opportunity at a level you didn’t quite make on your own. Not all of the students will take their new opportunity. Most will.

And many if not most of that group will fail.

The tragic irony is this: racial preferences are not necessary to get members of minority groups into elite institutions, or quality institutions, or adequate institutions. Members of minority groups have earned admissions to colleges and universities at all levels ever since the racist restrictions on their attendance were lifted. Racial preferences are the tool that institutions use to increase their own racial minority presence - to look good on paper, as a progressive and non-racist institution. Which is well and good - but the cost of the policy isn’t paid by the institutions, it’s paid by the students. It’s paid by the really bright black kid who would do great at Cornell but fails out of Yale. It’s paid by the decently bright Hispanic kid who would do great at UT but fails out of Cornell. It’s paid by the adequate fill-in-the-blank kid who would have done fine at Oklahoma State but who can’t cut it at UT. (The genius kid who would have been at Yale anyway is largely unaffected, other than whatever psychic cost there is to having people think he or she is there because of preferences instead of raw merit. Which I don’t know the magnitude of, but which I assume is nonzero.)

Spare me the “tragic irony” and the idea that racial preferences are not necessary to get minorities to attend and that schools only have racial preferences to look good. Diversity is good for society and for business. Spare me the fake concern for people of color. Check out what Robert says here: “Give racial preferences to rich white kids, and rich white kids will start flunking out of college in higher numbers.” Legacy policies have not caused privileged white men to drop out of Ivy League colleges.

Please notice that this effect occurs regardless of whether the racial group being preferred has higher or lower intelligence or social capital or ANYTHING than the majority population. Give racial preferences to rich white kids, and rich white kids will start flunking out of college in higher numbers. So please feel free to decide that I am personally a ‘orible racist bigot - but please also be aware that doesn’t make a sparrow’s fart worth of difference in whether or not the effect occurs. Racist society or non-racist society, dumb minorities or genius minorities or average minorities - group preferences that encourage selection of mismatched performance-based institutions will fuck up group outcomes and performance, guaranteed. It doesn’t really matter too much if Whitey McRichfuck fails out of Harvard; he’s going to go work for Daddy at the investment bank anyway. It matters a great deal when someone who’s the first in the family to go to college gets the shaft.

Racial preferences in education in essence make white-run institutions look progressive and racially sensitive, and do so by fucking over the career prospects and life paths of their minority students. I don’t believe this to be the best way of raising the level of minority academic performance. If that makes me racist, I’ve been called worse things for worse causes.

Donna, do you not get that I do not need to “speak for people of color” because the phenomenon I am describing is racially neutral? It’s a structural problem. It doesn’t have anything to do with which group or groups is inside the structure. If we remove racial preferences from minority groups and extend them to white males from upper-class families, then minority group outcomes and performance will improve and rich white male performance will decline.

Don’t backpedal from your woe-is-me tale in comment #84 about how your individual, white, male failure at an elite college means people of color should not attend elite colleges

Please indulge me if I use myself as an example. I got into a very decent liberal arts school - not Harvard, but a damn fine school. My admission was a narrow squeak - I didn’t really have the grades for it, but my SATs were high and I wrote a killer essay. I also got into some other schools, but the school I chose to attend was the best school I could get into. Obviously there are exceptions, but generally speaking, the academic reputation and attainment of a school are primary factors in student decisions. We go to the best place we can get into, even when other considerations loom; I turned down a full-ride scholarship at a less prestigious school. I also applied to a school even better than the one I attended - let’s call it Stanford - but didn’t get in there. If I had gotten into Stanford, I would definitely have attended.

At the school where I barely got in, I earned a C+/B- average, in not particularly challenging coursework, relative to the institution’s offerings, over the two years that I attended before dropping out - despite a high intelligence and a pretty good dollop of human capital, too. I did have a good time, though, and learned a fair amount of things while just getting by. I had a suboptimal match with my institution, but it was (barely) within my capabilities to perform acceptably. (I left for other reasons, and later attended a school which was a better match for my intellectual capacity, and did very well there.)

If I was a member of one of the racial groups which typically receive preferential admission, the odds are very good that I would have gotten into Stanford, too. And I would have gone. And I would have failed egregiously, instead of scraping by for a couple of years and at least learning some stuff, because I was not smart enough (oops, I mean, I didn’t have enough social capital) to go to Stanford. My BEST match was probably the school that offered the scholarship. If I’d attended there, odds are good I would have gotten a 3.6 and graduated in four years.

The fact that you underperformed probably due to lack of a work ethic informs your argument that people of color should not attend elite colleges. You cannot compare your preparation to that of people of color because it sounds like your preparation before college was different.