In my post yesterday, when describing Chapter 6 of Left Turn, I discussed an L.A. Times article about UCLA admissions. I noted that the article had a liberal bias—not because of any false statements but because it omitted some important true statements. In general, it reported many facts that liberals would want people to learn but omitted many facts that conservatives would want people to learn.
One of the facts that it omitted was the following:
- Students who apply to UCLA are aware of the politically-correct, pro-affirmative-action attitudes, and in order to exploit them, a large number of minority students reveal their race on the personal essays that they write in their applications.
For this post, the key phrase in the above passage is “a large number of minority students reveal their race.” When I wrote the initial draft for the chapter, sometime in late 2007, I originally wrote that “most” minority students (as opposed to “a large number”) reveal their race.
I didn’t know whether it was accurate to write “most,” but I had seen lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it was .
The first piece of evidence was revealed to me in 1991. I was in a serious relationship with a black woman, who was about to apply to grad school. At first, she didn’t want any schools to give her affirmative action. But when it became time actually to send out the applications, she became worried that she might not be accepted to any of the schools in which she was interested.
She consequently abandoned her insistence that she not receive affirmative action. “I don’t care,” she joked to me one day. “Just make me a token. I just want to be accepted to at least one of the schools.”
“But how will they know you’re black?” I asked.
“Well, one way,” she responded, “is that my resume notes that I participated in the Black Peer Tutoring program.”
“But how will they know you weren’t just a white person tutoring a black student?” I responded.
“Because it’s called black PEER tutoring. Get it? It means I’m black.”
“Oh,” I responded.
So, I’ve been aware, since 1991, that some minority students reveal their race in their applications. And I was aware that at least some minority students thought that doing that helped their chances of admission.
On top of that, several of my undergrad students have shown me the essays that they have written for their law-school applications. Almost all of the minority students, I’ve noticed, mention their race in the essays. In fact, many made race the focus of their essay. This was even true for some of the students who were members of races or ethnicities that do not typically receive affirmative action—such as Indians, Filipinos, or Armenians. Yet, some of those students would still make their race or ethnicity the focus of their essay.
Nevertheless, despite these anecdotes, I did not know whether it was correct to write “most” in the above sentence—that is, to claim that most minority students reveal their race in their application essays.
However, because I happened to serve on the faculty oversight committee for UCLA admissions, I could actually learn whether it was correct to write “most” or not.
So in Spring 2008, I wrote the director of UCLA admissions, asking him for a random set of 1000 files.
He and his superiors denied my request. I eventually resigned in protest from the committee. My resignation received much attention from the media, including a few posts on Volokh Conspiracy. (See, for example, here and here.)
But, as I can report today, that resignation would have never happened if I hadn’t been writing a book on media bias.
noblesse says:
By what method was the reporter to learn this fact? Perhaps you, your black girlfriend, and the reporter had some kind of polyamory thing going, so she was also hip to the concept?
Also, I would love to see your unbiased version of the LA Times story. In fact, I promise I will buy your book–or send you $15 cash–if you will post your version.
August 31, 2011, 6:46 pmRagtime says:
You write:
“Students who apply to UCLA are aware of the politically-correct, pro-affirmative-action attitudes, and in order to exploit them, a large number of minority students reveal their race on the personal essays.”
You also write:
“This was even true for some of the students who were members of races or ethnicities that do not typically receive affirmative action—such as Indians, Filipinos, or Armenians.”
Doesn’t the second statement directly contradict the first? Students are writing about race irrespective of whether the result will be affirmative action preference. Prospective Black students and prospective Indian students both do it, even though one may (allegedly) get an affirmative-action bump and the other (allegedly) won’t.
How can this imputed motive, then, be a “fact”? Isn’t it more likely, (based only on the information you provided), that students write about their race/ethnicity because it is a particularly important issue to them (irrespective of whether state law deems it important for admissions decisions)?
Meanwhile, to get back to media bias, I cannot blame a reporter for not reporting a “fact” that you, as an insider, could not even get the data to confirm.
August 31, 2011, 6:49 pmJohn L says:
That’s only part of the key phrase. What makes it relevant is the preceding phrase: “in order to exploit them, a large number of minority students reveal their race.”
And you know their motives how? Because you had a cynical black girlfriend?
I will gladly stipulate that black students discuss their race in applications essays far more frequently than white students do. But perhaps that’s because it’s a far more salient part of their experience growing up.
August 31, 2011, 6:55 pmTatil says:
Your allegation of bias is pretty much only supported by the omitted fact that the absolute number of oncoming black students has increased slightly, even though it reported that the number of incoming black freshmen has decreased over the last year.
The rest of your complaint is your allegation that the article is somehow showing UCLA or its faculty in bad light. I am yet to read any comments who thinks the article made them think UCLA did not care about this problem. The article actually mentions in more than a few places that the administrators are concerned about the situation, that they are trying their best to improve the situation and that they are promising to do even more. The only omitted fact here is your insider info about how UCLA might be going around Prop 209 restrictions, but I am not sure if that would change the perception of UCLA administration all that much, as it was not a negative about it in the first place.
On the hand, your complaint omits that:
- The percentage of incoming black students have decreased over that year even if we include the transfer students as you strongly emphasize
- The meat of the article is about the decrease over a number of years and even you agree with that fact
In the end, it feels like you wanted an article about how UCLA might be obeying the letter of Prop 209, but not the spirit of it. Instead what we have is an article about the “alarming” decrease in the number of black students enrolled in UCLA. Sure, that may be an indication of bias, but this is not quite the case study about distortion of facts through “omitted facts or statistics”. I am pretty sure there are much better examples out there. You are not doing your thesis any favors.
August 31, 2011, 7:16 pmByomtov says:
What Ragtime said.
Ethnic (and religious) identity is important to lots of people, and shapes their lives. This is at least plausibly more true of minority group members, like Filipinos, Armenians, Jews, etc. than of members of the majority. Presumably, members of these groups who focus their essay on that subject are just writing about something important to them.
But when a black applicant does it, it’s to gain an advantage in admission.
August 31, 2011, 7:19 pmTatil says:
The second set of the ethnic groups may not be offered legally prescribed affirmative action preferences, but if the students believe that the admissions office is interested in diversity and that it would still tilt the scales a little bit for any minority group, they may find it advantageous to reveal their ethnicity. Prof Groseclose did not claim that they never receive any benefits, he just said they typically do not. I think he is offering the anecdote to dispute the claim that admissions office does not know the race of the applicant, because it does not explicitly ask for it in the application form.
August 31, 2011, 7:49 pmJeff R. says:
Why wouldn’t Indians, Filipinos, or Armenians expect to gain an advantage by mentioning their ethnicity? Taking the institution’s expressed desire for a diverse student body at its word would point them in that direction, wouldn’t it?
To the extent that this kind of self-identification is self-serving, we would only expect to see it not happen in the case of over-represented minorities (Chinese, Japanese, or Jewish, mainly.)
August 31, 2011, 7:57 pmDan Hamilton says:
This says it all. They had no reason not to comply unless there was something they wanted to hide.
It was his JOB to look at admissions. Without being able to evaluate the admissions how did they expect him to do his job. They didn’t. They wanted to hide all they could about the admissions. Sorry but this proves that they are dishonest.
August 31, 2011, 8:36 pmRagtime says:
This says it all. They had no reason not to comply unless there was something they wanted to hide.
That, or maybe they were unduly concerned about violating federal privacy laws like the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)by releasing student records to someone without the applicant’s consent.
But, nah . . . You’re probably right about that obvious dishonesty thing.
August 31, 2011, 8:44 pmJoe Horton says:
I have to wonder what would happen if I were to write an essay celebrating my blackness as part of an admissions process.
And then I got there and was found to be lily-white. If charges arose, would that not (through, admittedly, a few syllogistically logical steps) constitute a de facto confession of racial discrimination…?
Or am I missing something?
August 31, 2011, 8:48 pmRagtime says:
You are missing that you’d get thrown out of school for lying on your application.
August 31, 2011, 8:54 pmFloridan says:
When my daughter applied to the university her mother and I graduated from, she mentioned it in her essay.
Was that what got her in?
Who knows?
And now, over ten years later, who cares? She’s doing just fine.
August 31, 2011, 8:58 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Salient or not, it’s not a criterion that the admissions committees may consider.
August 31, 2011, 9:00 pmHere come the Judge: says:
Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened?
August 31, 2011, 9:00 pmwallace says:
Intuitively, the idea that minorities denote their minority status in essays in order to gain an unofficial type of affirmative action makes sense. Isn’t there any way to FOIA the data so that i could be backed up empirically? Maybe not in California, but in other states? IIRC, Texas and Michigan passed measures similar to prop 209, maybe they have state FOIA laws that are more liberal?
August 31, 2011, 9:02 pmHere come the Judge: says:
Is there any way of measuring “lily whiteness?”
August 31, 2011, 9:02 pmJasonF says:
I bet the people who criticized Prof. Groseclose feel pretty silly now that we know he has a computer and an anecdote.
August 31, 2011, 9:19 pmHere come the Judge: says:
Is it a violation of FERPA to provide application information to members of the application committee? I’m curious, who reads student applications and do those who do violate federal law?
August 31, 2011, 9:20 pmJoe Horton says:
Well, that depends on what suffices for you for evidence: I’m 3/4 Russian Jewish and 1/4 Polish Jewish, being only second generation American myself. Not sure where anything other than lily whiteness could have come from–but I remain open-minded on that point.
August 31, 2011, 9:27 pmJohn L says:
But it may be a perfectly reasonable subject to discuss in an autobiographical essay – for motives that may or may not match Prof. Groseclose’s confident but baseless assertion.
August 31, 2011, 9:38 pmHere come the Judge: says:
Can you vouch for your ancestors? What makes people “Lily-white?” Being Jewish is not it. There happens to be a black Jewish synagogue near my office.
August 31, 2011, 9:40 pmHere come the Judge: says:
What is absolutely fascinating is the people who support affirmative action demand proof of its existence when institutions proudly proclaim it’s their policy.
August 31, 2011, 9:48 pmJoe Horton says:
Well, no. I guess I have plausible deniability on that score. I, after all, didn’t watch them get off the boat at Ellis Island. That what you mean? I can’t prove that they were there or that that’s whence they came, but it was the story I heard all along.
August 31, 2011, 9:56 pmJohn L says:
Not sure how that relates to my post, since it wasn’t what I said at all.
August 31, 2011, 9:57 pmjab says:
I’m calling BS on the story of the “black girlfriend.”
Back in 1991, all applications would have a set of boxes to check off the race of the applicant… there was no Prop 209 back then… no state had outlawed affirmative action… so, the black girlfriend wouldn’t have been stressed that the admissions committees wouldn’t know her race, causing her to feel that she had to slip it in in other ways.
Frankly… this whole series of posts is just nonsensical garbage… for a political science professor, you think you would have a clue that personal anecdotes do not equal data… I mean really? It sounds like all you are saying in this post is “because I once dated a black girl who felt the only way she could get into grad school was trumpeting the fact that she was black.”
Ugggh… Just a variation on “My best friend is black… but…” and we knows what comes next.
August 31, 2011, 9:59 pmDebrah says:
Did you just arrive off the pickle boat?
I realize that it’s amusing and fun — like 9th grade creating writing class! — to simply assign warm and fuzzy scenarios to every aspect of life to keep discussions inside the comfort zone; however, any student who is tethered to their “race” or “ethnicity” to such a bizarre degree that they are compelled to rhapsodize about it within the structured context of admissions to a university (!) are…..
1) doing so because the subject matter has been such a prominent feature of their high school education (indoctrination) process;
2) doing so because their teachers, guidance counselors, mentors, etc… have steered them in that direction, being quite familiar with the admissions process;
3) doing so because most often “minority” students have “minority” teachers who have utilized the very same application formulation and certainly would “be about the business of” passing along the torch of this embedded, albeit ultimately damaging, process.
Students want to discuss “feelings” about their own race/ethnicity when applying to university ….. just because?
Please.
August 31, 2011, 10:04 pmjab says:
Please STOP. I mean seriously…
Maybe you have the luxury of not thinking about race because you are white… but I have taught in inner-city schools, tutored kids released from juvenile hall, tutored non-English speaking immigrants, taught in prisons, and tutored honors kids in urban settings… for many of them, yes, race does color their perspectives on how they relate to society.
I would love for us to progress to a time when that is not the case, but it is. It is not surprising that race ends up in a biographical essay of some sort.
August 31, 2011, 10:09 pmTatil says:
No, at least UCLA claims that they consider everything, but race (overcoming adversity, pursuing extracurricular activities etc.). Finding out the percentage of applicants who manage to disclose their race in their essays would not be proof that the admissions office used race in its decisions. Hence, even if Prof Groseclose got a hold of the applications, he would still need a smoking gun in his crusade to prove that UCLA is violating the spirit of Prop. 209. I am sure his resignation was very useful in bringing the topic into the public discussion and I applaud him for his tactic, but he still does not have a smoking gun.
August 31, 2011, 10:09 pmOrenWithAnE says:
It most certainly violates the intent of P209 to discuss race in an autobiographical essay with the intent of inducing the admissions official to violate the law.
Ultimately, this seems like a political structure problem rather than a legal problem — you can’t sue applicants for writing essays intended to induce violations of P209 nor can you sue the admissions folks for reading them. Instead, I would hope that the 55% of Californians that voted for P209 would also vote for UC leadership that will fix the problem internally.
August 31, 2011, 10:10 pmjab says:
Really! I mean, Professor Grossclose keeps digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole with each post… he keeps descending into sillier and sillier parody of a right-wing polemicist without a freaking clue of the “science” of political science… If I was professor Volokh, I would be embarrassed that he hosted such a silly partisan hack… this really doesn’t make conservative scholars look serious at all.
August 31, 2011, 10:12 pmOrenWithAnE says:
You have it backwards — not thinking about race creates the space to succeed.
For these students (and I’ve tutored in 3 inner-city school districts), my surmise is that their “perspectives” on race are only holding them back.
August 31, 2011, 10:14 pmthirdeblue says:
This post boils down to a whine that the newspaper printed facts that tended to justify the liberal position and did not print an anecdote that kind of, sorta refutes those “liberal” facts?
Am I understanding this correctly?
I believe I was taught in the 5th grade that anecdotes are a poor basis to win an argument and the plural of anecdotes is not data.
But then again, I went to one of those godless public schools.
August 31, 2011, 10:16 pmjab says:
BS. This is the Ward Connerly hypothesis… if we pretend race doesn’t exist and stop asking about it or even acknowledging it, discrimination will magically go away! Discrimination is caused by acknowledging that race exists at all! Kids know what happens in other schools, and they are not unaware of how different schools have different resources, and gee, there seems to be this correlation with race… but no no no… they shouldn’t ask questions, think critically about it, or even acknowledge it… if we all stick our fingers in our ears, screm “La la la,” then there won’t be any racial problems at all!
August 31, 2011, 10:19 pmthirdeblue says:
Liberal: The sky is blue.
Conservative: I had a girlfriend once who thought the sky was a metallic silver and I happen to agree with her.
Newspaper: The sky is blue.
BIAS!
August 31, 2011, 10:20 pmByomtov says:
I wonder if we could also check to see how many applications say something like, “I want to attend X University because three generations of my family have gone there…..” Of course, it might be that those applicants have other ways of getting their message across.
Wallace,
Well, if that’s your intuition, it’s good enough for me.
Or maybe not.
Look, we know from the post that lots of applicants talk about ethnicity in their essays. On what basis do you assume that all, or most, black applicants are doing so just to gain an advantage? Would you say the same about a Jewish or Chinese applicant who talked about how his ethnicity affected his life?
Debrah,
Your skepticism aside, Professor Groseclose has told us, as a simple matter of fact, that lots of applicants discuss their ethnic backgrounds. So stop with the nonsense that black applicants only do it to gain an advantage. You in fact have no meaningful information about this at all.
August 31, 2011, 10:25 pmKen Arromdee says:
No, because it’s possible to try to get something that you’re not typically going to get. It is, after all, still a chance.
Way back when I was entering college, I got a local scholarship for minority engineering students. I am in fact Asian-American and knew very well that I was screwed over by affirmative action. But I figured, hey, maybe it’d work. It worked. (Though the amount was relatively small.)
August 31, 2011, 10:26 pmName says:
Wow. When the conservative-leaning commenters of this blog isn’t buying into your argument, Prof. Groseclose, maybe that’s a sign you should come up with a better argument.
August 31, 2011, 10:30 pmJohn L says:
But that brings me back to the point that I was actually making: how do you know why they’re discussing race? Professor Groseclose’s original assertion:
is simply that, an assertion based on one girlfriend and a lot of assumption without evidence.
August 31, 2011, 10:32 pmuh_clem says:
I was about to comment, but at this point I wouldn’t want to say anything that would getting the way of Prof. Groseclose’s digging.
Time for another bag of popcorn.
August 31, 2011, 10:36 pmthirdeblue says:
Should applicants be banned from mentioning they were in the Girl Scouts so the application reader won’t know they were female?
August 31, 2011, 10:36 pmeyesay says:
Prof. Timothy Groseclose wrote, “So in Spring 2008, I wrote the director of UCLA admissions, asking him for a random set of 1000 files. He and his superiors denied my request. I eventually resigned in protest from the committee…. But, as I can report today, that resignation would have never happened if I hadn’t been writing a book on media bias.”
Very interesting. In other words, Professor Groseclose wasn’t interested in the files because he wanted to investigate a hypothesis about race and admissions in order to improve (by some definition) the way race is treated (or not treated) in the admissions process — he wanted the files because he was writing a book about media bias.
This leaves two possibilities. If he did disclose his true reason for wanting the files, his request was rightly denied, because the only legitimate use of the files, post-admission, is to study retrospectively if the admissions process is fair and unbiased or how it could be improved — not for a personal research project on the unrelated topic of alleged media bias. If he did not disclose his true reason for wanting the files, there is a question of whether it is a violation of ethics to request the files ostensibly for reasons relating to the admissions process, when the true reason was for personal research about alleged media bias.
August 31, 2011, 10:41 pmJonathan D says:
What Tatil said. This is a very poor example if the argument is distortion by omission – these “facts” would hardly change the thrust of the story.
August 31, 2011, 10:42 pmMoishe X says:
The liberal viciousness on display in this thread shocks the conscience! I’m glad for the few decent Americans commenting here, those who go to church and worship the One True God in His Three Aspects that are not Pantheism.
Fear not, Good Professor! The vicious liberals’ god of Equality is a false idol. Conservatives shall easily smite and destroy them like the Canaanites and those kids that Elisha sicced the bear on.
August 31, 2011, 11:17 pmDebrah says:
Your ignorance aside…..perhaps there’s a career in mind-reading for you!
August 31, 2011, 11:28 pmCornellian says:
You are missing that you’d get thrown out of school for lying on your application.
Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened?
Race is usually left to self-identification. If you can shamelessly insist that you are black, despite your blond, straight hair, blue eyes, and ability to get a sunburn in 5 minutes flat, there are few educational institutions willing to tell you that you’re not. They know the implications of going down that road and they don’t want to go there. For the most part this isn’t an issue – most people don’t claim to be what they’re not, but every now and then a test case comes along.
August 31, 2011, 11:44 pmjoe says:
But he was not on the application committee. He was on the faculty oversight committee for UCLA admissions. That committee, like similar committees in other institutions, don’t oversee individual applications, but only the application policy in general.
In order to get those files, the professor would have to show a legitimate need for him to access them in order to fulfill his duties as an educator. Trying to gauge how many students mention their race in their essays, even if scholarly valid, is not such a legitimate need.
In other words, it is ironic that in a post where the professor complains about what the media leaves out, he leaves out this tiny bit of information on FERPA.
August 31, 2011, 11:57 pmjustin says:
Job raises a salient point. The story sounds false because it predates 209. Now, if I were going to lie about my black girlfriend, I’d probably come up with on
September 1, 2011, 12:36 ame that supported my argument. But still, the professor owes an obligation to explain himself. Why couldn’t his gf check the right race box and be done?
SChaser says:
Which means nothing – that they may not consider doesn’t mean that, in reality, they don’t consider it.
September 1, 2011, 12:47 amNCBob says:
But, the application indicates that your first name is Lequishinta or Darnelomaniqua!!
September 1, 2011, 12:49 amSChaser says:
Since the discrimination that actually occurs tends to be against asians and whites, I would suggest that if we ignored race, there would indeed be less discrimination.
When I went to college, they didn’t ask your race, because it wasn’t relevant. Only with “affirmative action” (racial discrimination with a euphemistic name) did inquiries into race become so important.
September 1, 2011, 12:49 amLn says:
What’s truly impressive about Groseclose is that there is no way to guess what his political orientation is. He addresses controversial topics so objectively that it is impossible to discern his personal views; he is so unbiased it is uncanny.
September 1, 2011, 12:54 amjab says:
September 1, 2011, 12:55 amjab says:
In fact, Prof. Groseclose is so lucky that its impossible to tell his political leanings because we all know that if those sushi-eating, latte-swilling, arugula-scarfing Communist professors knew, he would NEVER have won any of those prestigious fellowships or gotten a job at all in academia!
September 1, 2011, 12:57 amLn says:
True, racial discrimination was unknown in America until affirmative action was introduced. That was a real Adam-bites-the-apple moment.
September 1, 2011, 12:58 amEvan says:
Interesting idea. If we could implement it well, I think I’d like it.
September 1, 2011, 1:13 amMoishe X says:
Indeed. He must have taken ideology-stealth lessons from John Yoo. I hear it was just… um…*torture* for John to get tenure, once those Berkeley Stalinists discovered that Tiger Beat photo of Eisenhower in John’s locker.
September 1, 2011, 1:30 amattorney fan of this blog says:
I’m a lawyer and fan of this blog, but am disappointed in the rigor of Groseclose’s posts here. On this one, I would point out something that the commenters above have not yet said: the anecdotal evidence here doesn’t support the assertion, even assuming we were willing to allow argument from anecdote, because none of the applicants were applying for UCLA undergrad spots. The girlfriend was applying to grad school; the students were applying to law schools. UCLA may have been among those schools, but UCLA undergrad definitely was not. Therefore, Groseclose does not have even anecdotal evidence about the behavior or motives of any UCLA undergrad applicants.
September 1, 2011, 1:38 amDavid Schwartz says:
I was in the Girl Scouts. Do you now know I’m female? Only true beliefs can be knowledge, right?
September 1, 2011, 4:29 amRicardo says:
What about if you ignore race but give a slight bump in admissions to people who grew up without a father in the home and whose household income was less than $60,000?
That’s one thing I don’t quite follow in the AA debate. It’s not difficult to construct a system that technically ignores race but gives a boost in admissions to people who are statistically more likely than average to be disadvantaged minorities. Conservatives ought to like my proposal because most of them believe that growing up without a father is a serious disadvantage and liberals should like it because it takes income into account.
September 1, 2011, 4:29 amClark says:
So, what is the slant of Volokh, from a scale of Drudge to Stalin? I assume that there is no question Volokh is indeed a liberal media outlet, which is why I start from Drudge – a liberal org according to your study, on the left end of the scale.
His results have nothing to do with his leanings because they were produced by a computer. I am guessing it was even a computer produced at least partially by Mao lovers from communist China, and with logos from the ultra liberal bastion of California or Austin. If a computer from such an “aggressive, urban” environment ended up producing these results, their veracity is truly beyond question.
September 1, 2011, 5:04 amClark says:
I don’t think that’s fair to Volokh. He stands by his man.
See the aftermath of the original posts. Orin Kerr writes a long, thoughtful discussion about the logic of the study, Volokh snidely posts an overreaching blogpost about the communist worldview apparently unwittingly revealed by a New York Times reporter (in an opinion piece!, but still it is an indication of something apparently).
September 1, 2011, 5:18 amHankP says:
I’ve tried to think of a way to say this without being insulting, but I can’t. This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve read this week. The professor is complaining about applicants discussing their race in an autobiographical essay.
September 1, 2011, 5:50 amFederal Dog says:
“Orin Kerr writes a long, thoughtful discussion about the logic of the study,”
He hasn’t even read the book. “Thoughtful discussion” requires first reading what you are attacking.
September 1, 2011, 6:32 amjukeboxgrad says:
Good point. Then maybe you should try “first reading what you are attacking.” Orin said this:
And then he said this:
I highlighted some important words. Can you guess why?
By the way, the person to whom you were responding said this:
There are some important words there, too. “The study” is available online, for free. I think the odds are pretty high that Orin read it before he asked about it.
Then again, maybe your point is that the study Groseclose published in 2004 can’t be understood without reading the book he published in 2011. Is that it? Maybe you don’t realize that the book is based on the study, not vice versa.
Aside from that, you don’t actually know that “he hasn’t even read the book.”
September 1, 2011, 7:24 amOrenWithAnE says:
I didn’t say discrimination doesn’t exist, I’m quite sure it does. Nor did I say anything about whether race exists. I don’t think the answer to either question is relevant to what is best for disadvantaged students.
Institutional discrimination has a real component but it also very much has a Tinkerbell component — it becomes self-fulfilling when you discourage students from achieving by teaching them that, even if they do well, it won’t matter anyway. We aren’t doing these students any favors by framing their world as one in which they are pervasively disadvantaged (even if it’s true) because that leads inexorably towards underachievement.
September 1, 2011, 7:40 amA. Zarkov says:
Why should a school give a slight “bump up” to anyone? Why not judge applicants on their ability to do college level work? I don’t see why a so-called “disadvantaged background” is pertinent to a college admission. After all the college is not responsible for someone not having a father.
Let’s say you need a critical surgical procedure. Do you care if the surgeon had a “disadvantaged background.” You want a good surgeon period.
How about we just find the set of attributes that provide the best predictors of future success in something. The military gives everyone the AFOQT, which is heavily g-loaded– essentially an IQ test. The score on this test gives a useful signal as to how someone will preform. Not perfect but useful. A correlation of 0.8 is still much better than a correlation of 0.1. It’s very expensive to train jet fighter pilots. Someone who washes out of the training program has wasted valuable resources.
If you think being fatherless provides a signal that the applicant will do better at college level work then by all means use it. But you need to show me the evidence for that. Otherwise it’s just about emotionalism.
September 1, 2011, 7:42 amOrenWithAnE says:
Which is why the elected government of California should fix the upper managements of UCLA until they such time as they are willing to faithfully execute the laws of the State of California.
September 1, 2011, 7:51 amJohn L says:
Pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make its effects go away. They already know if they’re pervasively disadvantaged, and treating them like they’re stupid doesn’t make them smarter
September 1, 2011, 7:54 amRicardo says:
That’s a good question, Zarkov. Are you interested in also directing it at colleges that practice legacy admission and give athletic scholarships? If so, there may well be something to be said for a purely meritocratic university, especially if it is privately funded.
But publicly funded universities are and always have been responsive to the general needs of voters. The UC system could throw open its doors to the entire world instead of reserving most of its undergraduate admissions slots for California residents, for instance. It doesn’t, though, which suggests that public universities often have other missions aside from admitting those most capable of college-level work.
September 1, 2011, 8:09 amMike says:
A. Zarkov:
For one thing, because numbers don’t tell you everything. An 1800 on the SATs from someone who went to underfunded public schools in the inner city is a hell of a lot more impressive and shows more talent and willingness to work than an 1800 from someone who went to a private school and took a $3,000 prep class.
September 1, 2011, 8:26 amjukeboxgrad says:
Exactly. That same point is nicely made here (http://nyti.ms/iR60Hb):
I added emphasis because I think those words are easy to miss.
September 1, 2011, 8:36 amTony says:
If a large number of minority applicants knowingly use their race to exploit UCLA’s pro-affirmative action, politically correct attitudes, then how on earth could the crisis (as believed by UCLA administrators) in black student admissions ever occur? If there is some secret cabal between applicants and admissions, wouldn’t the racial makeup at UCLA match the administration’s desire?
September 1, 2011, 8:39 amA. Zarkov says:
Yes absolutely.
I don’t know how much preference the UC system gives California residents, the people who pay taxes that make the place possible.
September 1, 2011, 8:40 amA. Zarkov says:
Taking a SAT prep course does little to raise your score. The people that peddle these courses want parents to believe that. No one is going from 1200 to 1800 with a course.
Numbers don’t tell us everything, but they tell us something. They tell us more about who is going to succeed that having no father or being raised in an inner city neighborhood, which should count for nothing.
September 1, 2011, 8:47 amA. Zarkov says:
That’s not an admission’s problem. I suspect the children of low income parents don’t apply to college as frequently as the children of high income parents. It has nothing to do with admissions committees favoring the children of high income parents. Of course really high income parents make contributions and that will get you favored. Universities love money more than banks, and will do almost anything to get more of it.
September 1, 2011, 9:45 amjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
Studies have found that they boost scores by 20-30 points. Kaplan et al want you to think the advantage is greater than that, but 20-30 points is not nothing. It’s enough to make a difference.
If you decide to make that “count for nothing” when evaluating the true meaning of an SAT score, then the result is “wasted human capital,” and that waste ends up being a loss for everyone.
What a nice example of writing a sentence and then immediately contradicting yourself.
Low-income seniors understand what you said (“high income parents make contributions and that will get you favored”), which means it’s rational for them to be comparatively less motivated to apply.
September 1, 2011, 10:04 amSarcastro says:
A. Zarkov is right, there is no proof being rich isn’t much of an educational advantage. Maybe rich people work harder – that’s why they’re rich! And they’re kids do too, cause of some combination of nature and nurture!
Lazy poor people (but I repeat myself) deserve nothing from society! Much like Seusian turtles, Human beings band together not to care for the weak, but to lift up the strong to ever more dizying heights!
September 1, 2011, 10:16 amMark Field says:
A strong candidate for the single most delusional claim I’ve seen on this blog. World class.
September 1, 2011, 10:23 amA. Zarkov says:
What studies? The SAT tests are designed to be immune to a practice effect. If you can raise your score enough to make a difference, then ETS is not doing its job very well. Of course immunity to a practice effect applies to averages over large numbers of people. A very small number of students with test anxiety might benefit slightly from a Kaplan course. You need to show me how a Kaplan course raises the probability of admission for the great bulk of students.
There’s no contradiction. “Really rich” means just that. People who are so rich they can contribute a huge sum, say a million dollars. That will get your kid into the school. The number of people who can make such a contributions is extremely small.
September 1, 2011, 10:23 amOrenWithAnE says:
My experiences have been that those that pay the least mind to their disadvantages suffer the least because of them and those that pay the most mind to them suffer the most from them.
I wasn’t commenting on whether we should “pretend” anything, only that particular attitudes (or, “perspectives”, as Jab put it earlier in the comment to which I was responding) seem to be correlated with success and others correlated with failure.
Again, this is just my experience …
Of course, the same can be said for the belief that they are disadvantaged in the admissions process for any other reason.
The belief in pervasive disfavor (even if true) is itself destructive and self-fulfilling. I have always taught my students that, favored or otherwise, the only way to succeed in my field is to work your ass off. That’s true, even if it’s only part of the truth.
September 1, 2011, 10:24 amjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
You’re not even being internally consistent in your unsubstantiated claims. You said “universities love money more than banks, and will do almost anything to get more of it.” The logical implication of that statement is that even a relatively small contribution will be enough to have some effect on an admissions decision.
Here’s an idea: pick one story and stick with it.
Here (http://on.wsj.com/18kHNF):
Just like I said (I said “20-30″).
They’re doing the best they can, but 30 points is indeed “enough to make a difference.”
30 points is indeed enough to “raise[s] the probability of admission.”
September 1, 2011, 10:37 amRJB says:
Prof. Groseclose, please help me understand how to interpret this sentence. In your report (pdf) explaining your decision to resign, you state quite explicitly that “my intention was to study admissions decisions to improve policies at my university, not to publish the results in an academic journal or book.” So why do you now say that “the resignation never would have happened if I hadn’t been writing a book on media bias?” Is it because your colleagues did not believe your stated intent not to use the data for your book? Your own statements in this post suggest their doubts might have been justified. You write:
How is this not a clear statement that you were searching for book content rather than improved admissions policies?
September 1, 2011, 10:44 amEric Rasmusen says:
The tenor of the comments is interesting. If there’s one thing liberals fear on affirmative action, it’s data. To anyone who’s thinking, it’s obvious that if a university fights hard to avoid revealing information that could support its political position, the information runs contrary to that position— and is probably even worse than most people think.
1. FERPA. This is not a disclosure outside the university, or to someone without a need to know. In any case, if the names are redacted, is it a records release under FERPA? And if the information is aggregated (e.g., the average test score of a black applicant, number of applications that mention race), FERPA doesn’t apply at all.
2. Freedom of Info FOIA applies to existing university documents. You can’t use FOIA to make the university create new documents for you. So if the university is careful to destroy key memos or just never to write down things like the average test scores of minority applicants, it’s safe. Plus, of course, who’s to know if the university is violating FOIA if they deny a document exists? See the Climategate scandal, where asking U. East Anglia for documents required to be public by law was met by simple noncompliance with no prosecution when discovered later accidentally.
3. Prof. Groseclove, I hope you tell us how you ever got on that committee. I would have thought nobody but Administration hacks would have a chance of getting near any committee with
oversight over illegal activities.
4. Has it happened that anyone denied admission has sued and gotten to the discovery stage?
September 1, 2011, 11:12 amA. Zarkov says:
The WSJ article supports what I wrote. These expensive practice courses provide little benefit.
It boils down to whether a 20-30 point improvement is going to make a difference. If that’s gap between the children of rich parents taking the Kaplan courses and the poor children who can’t afford the course then yes income makes a difference. That’s the figure we need.
BTW I need to see the report itself to see the assumptions and methods before I will believe that practice courses even produce the trivial bump of 20-30 points.
September 1, 2011, 11:19 amMAM says:
I am really shocked by this guy. If I understand him correctly, he’s saying that black applicants state their race in order to exploit their chances of admissions by signalling admissions committees who are inclined to use race as a factor. Never mind that the article suggested that it didn’t seem to be working that well. Also, never mind that he stated that the school was likely not violating the letter of the law.
A personal note — when I applied to UVA Law School I’m pretty sure that the school new my race as I believe that their application had a box and, although I maybe mistaken, the LSAT application had a box for race. Regardless, my LSAT was lower than the school’s median, I went to an HBCU while one of my parents stopped school after the 9 or 10nth grade as her family worked as sharecroppers and school really wasn’t a priority as everyone had to work to make ends meet.
Call me oblivious but I was aware that my race might give me a boost as I had a directly link to the Jim Crow south, but I really didn’t know what it all meant. UVA, one of only 2 or 3 top law schools at the time that granted interviews, granted me an interview. I took UVA up on that opportunity, got money from my parents, and headed to C’ville where I spoke with Dean Turnbull. There was no doubt now that he knew I was black. In the end I was admitted to the law school, worked hard, performed and went on to become a lawyer, even a partner at a majority firm. In some ways, I might be considered an AA success, even though I have absolutely no idea what my black skin played in the process.
The point is that I find the use of the word “exploited” very distasteful. While it is no doubt true that some students who put their race down are making a calculated decision to improve their chances, I think the generalization the Professor makes really misses what most 18 year olds, let alone black 18 year olds who don’t come from an environment that knows how to game the system. I would guess that most of these students haven’t had tutors, taken math programs like Kumon since childhood, have sharp college counselors or hired professionals to help give them an edge. Many black kids that had good test scores and good GPAs actually don’t even consider schools like UCLA b/c it’s about as foreign to them as going to Oxford.
I’ve mentioned this before but the Professor will not have to worry too much longer. I am convinced that race-based educational affirmative action will not be around much longer as its time has passed and, quite honestly, the forces that oppose it are too strong whereas the country now has a fledgling black middle and upper middle class that should be able to compete for school slots without the program. However, that aside, the assumption of “exploiting” race is, at best, an unnecessary cheap shot at kids that are trying to get ahead.
September 1, 2011, 11:24 amUrso says:
Even giving Prof. Groseclose every benefit of every possible doubt, the thesis of this post still falls apart if (as I suspect) overrepresented minority students are also more likely to mention their race in their application essay.
If Groseclose’s theory is correct, Chinese or Japanese applicants would be careful to hide their ethnicity. But I’d be willing to bet that lots of them write essays making their ethnicity clear, especially if they’re first or second generation, even though it actively works against them in any affirmative action context.
In some ways it’s better for Groseclose that they didn’t hand over the essays. It’s like when opposing counsel fails to answer an RFA, and the judge issues an instruction that the RFA is deemed admitted. He can imply that, because UCLA won’t give him the info, it must be that it supports his thesis. Otherwise why would they hide it?
September 1, 2011, 11:41 amAdam says:
” I noted that the article had a liberal bias—not because of any false statements but because it omitted some important true statements. In general, it reported many facts that liberals would want people to learn but omitted many facts that conservatives would want people to learn.”
No, you noted that it didn’t report facts that you would have wanted to include. You are not “conservatives” and omitting “things Tim knows” is not evidence of bias. At most, it is evidence of error. But even if it was, error and bias are not the same thing.
The continued failures of logic in these guest posts are truly disappointing.
Also, how naive are you? You oversee admissions, but you’ve never noticed that applications give you lots of hints about the people applying? I don’t review academic applications, but I see a fair number of resumes, and not infrequently the applicant’s race and political views, and sometimes religion, are pretty obvious.
September 1, 2011, 11:59 amClark says:
I am not sure what the admission samples prove. Even if underrepresented minorities tended to reveal their race more often than other classes, all it says is that the voices that claim that minorities get unfair special treatment dominate the public discourse. It certainly does not show that UCLA gives these minorities unfair special treatment, which is what Groseclose’s thesis is. Of course, he probably does not see the difference – methodology and rigor don’t seem to be his strong suits.
September 1, 2011, 12:02 pmjoe says:
The professor asked for 1000 random applications, even if the names were redacted, that is still a lot of personal information that is protected. And before you go accusing liberals of being “afraid” of information, maybe you should brush up on your FERPA rules. FERPA does not allow any and all disclosures within a learning institution. Only disclosures with a “legitimate educational purpose.” Legitimate educational purpose understood as something without which the person cannot fulfill his duties at an institution. Groseclose didn’t meet this criteria. I.e., someone on the admissions committee (as opposed to the faculty oversight on admissions) can see applications, like only people dealing with student discipline can see their disciplinary record, and so on. Being part of the organization does not give you free access to private records. Professors not in direct need to know can’t even check a student’s GPA.
The professor did not ask for aggregate data because that data does not exist (race data is not collected, and no one keeps track of race mentioned).
Of course, your ignorance of FERPA may be because you are “afraid of data.”
But one would think that conservatives and libertarias would be against a public institution disclosing federally protected private information to people who just want to prove a political point.
September 1, 2011, 12:13 pmA. Zarkov says:
When the Jews were poor, their children had no problem getting into selective colleges. These poor kids without Kaplan courses managed to get accepted in such numbers that a number of Ivy League Universities decided to have Jewish quotas. Could this have something to do with the fact that Ashkenazi Jews have high IQ’s– an average of one standard deviation above the norm?
Today poor Asian students, who also have high IQs, get accepted to selective schools. Now we hear complaints that the UC Berkeley campus is “too Asian.” The more things change the more they stay the same.
I’ve got news for you. It’s the strong of mind and body that advance civilization. A tiny minority act to the general benefit. For example, one man, Maurice Hilleman, created most of the vaccines for childhood diseases we administer today. We even have a name for this: The Pareto Principle, or The Law of the Vital Few.
September 1, 2011, 12:38 pmA. Zarkov says:
How do you know that if you can’t see the data?
September 1, 2011, 12:43 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I wouldn’t have a problem with this proposal, because poor whites and Asians who are disadvantaged would benefit from it, and blacks from middle and upper class homes would not. It would not be racially discriminatory, and shock of shocks, it would actually help those who are disadvantaged–not just those of the “right” color.
September 1, 2011, 12:55 pmSarcastro says:
Yeah, IQ is not only an awesome heuristic for success and intelligence, it’s clearly inheritable. Thus, we really should stop helping the weak and low-IQ’d – we’re diluting our genetic quality!
But it is indeed more than that – society is really only improved by an upper-class elite few. And everyone knows that the sole purpose of society is the betterment society. Unless individuals are going to serve that purpose, they really have no use.
September 1, 2011, 12:59 pmOrenWithAnE says:
No, but there’s not any practical evidence that can be brought to that point period, absent an admission by a former admissions official. That is, when looking at the sufficiency of the data given, you have to look at what could be produced in general. His methodology is only as good as the problem allows, which is not much absent him learning some method to examine the internal mental state of other human beings.
September 1, 2011, 1:05 pmJohn L says:
Do you really think that’s why they had Jewish quotas?
September 1, 2011, 1:16 pmtde says:
Let’s see, Mr. Groseclose has post on the bias of the leftist media, and the problem of too many dark-skinned people being allowed to enter college.
What’s next – why gays should not be allowed to have firearms?
September 1, 2011, 1:26 pmAdam says:
You are assuming that economic disadvantage is the only kind. It isn’t.
Although I don’t disagree that it is a type of disadvantage that should be addressed with policy.
That’s not a fair characterization of this post. He’s just interested in the zealous enforcement of non-discrimination, at least where, as here, the alleged discrimination would advantage people of color.
September 1, 2011, 1:35 pmzuch says:
… just as Obama’s refusal to release his long form birth certificate proved that he was born in Kenya (and a Sekter Mooslim to boot…).
Cheers,
September 1, 2011, 1:36 pmcja says:
My brother and his best friend took their SATs together and for fun put down that they were “Black” when indeed both were white. They both won scholarships. The high school was suspicious of the award to my brother since he floated through school only because he held the record for rushing yards, not his intellectual diligence.
September 1, 2011, 1:42 pmMy father was livid, the school was embarrassed and my brother never got into college because he was not qualified.
I doubt if Kaplan or other tutoring services would have increased his scores to where he would have received scholarships.
Adam says:
How’s this for a case study in right-wing media bias:
(That’s sarcasm. Neither this nor Prof. Groseclose’s article are “case studies” or evidence of bias.)
September 1, 2011, 2:37 pmShane says:
I didn’t think my Asian race was a very pronounced part of my identity, so I didn’t dwell on it for either my undergrad or law school admissions essays. I chose to write my personal statement on things that are more directly relevant to my identity (professional and personal experience I’ve had), but I didn’t exactly hide my Chinese surname or other indicators of my race (even when applying for the engineering undergraduate program I got into).
However, for law school, I did think it was worth noting on my resume that I have fluency in Chinese, and that I have a few years of professional experience in a job requiring a fairly high level of fluency (well beyond what most U.S. born Chinese kids have).
My point is that a lot of minorities consider their minority status to be a huge part of their identities, and encouraging them to write about themselves will tend to bring that out. It doesn’t matter if they’re an evangelical Christian growing up in New York City or a white guy growing up in a missionary family in Ghana – minority status makes one very much aware of race, ethnicity, and culture in a way that majority cultures are usually unaware.
September 1, 2011, 2:39 pmjoe says:
You know he didn’t request “data,” right? He requested the applications themselves. As for the possibility of UCLA keeping track and tabulating disclosure of one’s race in their applications, that would be a violation of 209. Now, it might very well be that UCLA does favor those who identify themselves as black in their essays. But pointing to the non disclosure of federally protected private data as evidence of that is disingenuous. And I doubt that UCLA would keep track of evidence that would mean they were in violation of 209, even if they were indeed in violation of 209.
This would be like me saying that all members of the college republicans only entered a school because they are rich and the college was interested in their families’ donations, requesting the financial data for students to double check that, and then using the (correct) refusal of my request as evidence that I am right.
In fact, given that this is a law blog, maybe this should be an interesting point of discussion, though I think the answer is clear and straightforward (FERPA does not allow for the disclosure of private information to members of the academic institution itself, unless it is absolutely necessary for the person in question to perform his or her duties within that institution – so someone in charge of discipline can have access to student’s disciplinary records, but a professor, even one in a policy advisory committee, cannot have records that might simply help, but are not necessary, to perform his or her functions in that committee).
September 1, 2011, 2:49 pmKen Arromdee says:
Uhh, yeah. What else would it be?
(If your answer was “because too many Jews were getting in without them”, that answer is of course equivalent.)
September 1, 2011, 2:52 pmTatil says:
I always wondered what my Verbal SAT score told anybody other than I did not know many of the words in those 6 pairs of rare word questions. I’ve never seen most of them before or since. I am curious who decided that knowing these word pairs have any predictive power about many fields of study. Even in systems that are supposedly based on merit alone, the person who is determining the definition of merit has his full complement of subjective bias.
Besides, when somebody gets to the same level of “merit” as another, but while overcoming much more adversity, it makes sense that when conditions are equalized (as they will be at the same campus), the one who had to overcome adversity is more likely to do better from then on. If a research study would actually bear that out, would you change your mind about “bumps” for adversity?
September 1, 2011, 2:53 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I see. I wonder if you take the same view towards essays that talk about volunteering with Hillel, or playing CYO basketball? I’m a very lukewarm advocate of Affirmative Action, but statements like this drive me nuts. Did you ever read about the black Wall Street Journal(!!) editor who wrote about how much more he was offered for his home when his family pictures were replaced by a white family’s during Open House? [Can't find the article online.] The idea that race wouldn’t matter if only the Negroes would stop making such a big deal about it is truly foolish.
September 1, 2011, 2:58 pmJohn L says:
Because they decided to let in a few rather than none.
September 1, 2011, 3:00 pmptt says:
The pursuit of eyeballs, I assume.
September 1, 2011, 3:01 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Of course, they did ask for a photograph on the application.
I would very much like to know which colleges and which years you refer to. I have little doubt some investigation will show they were far from race-neutral.
September 1, 2011, 3:04 pmjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
Let’s review. I said this:
You responded as follows:
Here’s the plain meaning of what you said: that my claim about a 20-30 point boost is wrong. I then cited the WSJ article that says this:
It would be good if you would be honorable enough to admit that you were wrong to question my assertion. Instead you’re moving the goalposts. Before your position was ‘you won’t get a boost.’ Now your position is ‘you’ll get a boost, but it won’t be big enough to impress me.’
There is every reason to understand that 30 points is enough to make a difference. If you are an admissions officer, looking at two candidates who are otherwise indistinguishable, you would not prefer the 600 SAT to the 570? Really? I don’t believe you.
If you were an applicant, and I told you I could give you a 30-point boost, would you say you’re not interested because it’s not “going to make a difference?” I don’t believe you.
Take your complaint to WSJ. The same result has been reported elsewhere. Do your own googling and find out. Funny how you become selectively skeptical when inconvenient facts appear. Meanwhile, you have no trouble making all sorts of sweeping claims backed by no facts at all. Interesting how that works.
And you have no basis for claiming that 30 points is “trivial.” It can make the difference between getting in and not getting in.
Yup, those darn non-Aryans sure are a drag on the rest of us.
A real “civilization” understands that there’s more to a human than brains and muscles, and that there are lots of different ways of being “strong.”
September 1, 2011, 3:11 pmClark says:
jukebox, when discussing with Zarkov, it might help to remember that he is a birther.
September 1, 2011, 3:19 pmjoe says:
Actually, no, it isn’t. There is absolutely nothing in 209 that prohibits any behavior by private individuals. The law says the state institutions can’t take that into account, but absolutely nothing in it prohibits a private person from knowingly trying to induce bias.
September 1, 2011, 3:23 pmSarcastro says:
If folks practice tennis by hitting balls against a wall, folks can argue with birthers on the internets.
September 1, 2011, 3:25 pmjukeboxgrad says:
I wouldn’t be any good at any other form of tennis, so I’m grateful for walls.
September 1, 2011, 3:30 pmA. Zarkov says:
I would. Although we would need a good definition for adversity.
September 1, 2011, 3:36 pmA. Zarkov says:
They had Jewish quotas for the reasons they said they had Jewish quotas. The university administrations did not want too many Jews on campus. In those days people did not speak in code as much as they do today.
September 1, 2011, 3:41 pmMAM says:
Zarkov;
Would you have been for educational affirmative action 1964? I mean the US had just officially ended Jim Crowism. I actually can entertain that affirmative action is fundamentally not a net positive for society. Sowell and others have stated that AA effectively disincentivized progress. I don’t agree with that but I do not find that position unreasonable.
However, there is another view that state sanctioned oppression should be remedied. While not entirely analogous, some victims of the Holocaust received recompense and Japanese Americans received some recompense. Obviously, the recompense was a transfer from one person to another such that it was a cost.
Many viewed educational affirmative action, at least in the 60s through the 80′s, as an effective way to integrate a black society that had been segregated under law from the majority society, which resulted in a separate black society. With the turmoil of the 60′s and 70s with riots and racial friction coming to a head, affirmative action served as a safety valve to social disruption.
We are not now in the 60s or 70s, but, as pure policy, do you believe educational and for that matter, employment affirmative action in the federal government, was a good policy position.
September 1, 2011, 3:54 pmJohn L says:
Your original statement was this:
In fact, their children had an enormous problem getting into selective colleges. It’s true, the Ivies didn’t want “too many Jews on campus,” but not because Jews were being accepted at some very high rate. “Too many” was a very, very low number.
September 1, 2011, 4:03 pmA. Zarkov says:
The article itself regards the improvement in SAT scores as trivial.
Here is the molehill of a paragraph that you try to make into a mountain.
Now let’s look at the very next paragraph where I add emphasis.
Thus we need to know if the control group for that 20-30 increase. Was it people who did no preparation, or was it people who used “low-cost College Board materials, including a $20 study guide.”
The whole point of the article and the report is that expensive SAT preparation courses are not worth the money. The industry is a scam on rich and poor students alike.
September 1, 2011, 4:05 pmalonzo portfolio says:
The most interesting thing to take from this is that the director of UCLA admissions is immune to information requests from the admissions “faculty oversight committee.” It would be nice to know where the real power lies. Who has power to tell the Director of Admissions to cough it up? Are faculty members embarrassed by their impotence before a mere salaried functionary? In the face of this kind of intransigence, is there really any reason for an “oversight committee”?
September 1, 2011, 4:09 pmJohn L says:
Sorry about the double quote. It wasn’t intended to come out that way. Pure klutziness.
September 1, 2011, 4:10 pmA. Zarkov says:
The quotas were either 10% or 20%. Jews were about 2% of the population. The Ivy League schools were up front about their policy. They did not want more than a 10% Jewish student body. Jews had no trouble at all getting admitted to the selective City College of New York. Until after the 1960s, City was something like 90% Jewish because (a) New York City was about a third Jewish, and (2) the Jews scored high on the SAT and other examines without expensive preparation courses.
September 1, 2011, 4:16 pmA. Zarkov says:
Clark blogs from his soft cell at Creedmoor. I am not a birther and I should know what I am. My birtherness exists only in his mind. Months ago I defined “birther” and made it clear I do not subscribe to such beliefs. That should have been enough, but as we know the insane keep making the same mistake over and over.
September 1, 2011, 4:23 pmSarcastro says:
The Jews are very succesful at using education to attain success. The Irish are very good at using local politics to do the same. The Koreans use local business ownership.
Clearly, this means Jews are inherently smart, Irish inherently charming and Koreans inherently industrious!
[I should say that my third-hand info about Jewish quotas in the Ivys agrees with A. Zarkov's]
September 1, 2011, 4:27 pmjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
No, it doesn’t. The main point of the article is that the prep companies make inflated claims. But, as you noticed, the article also says this:
That’s precisely the opposite of what you’ve been trying to claim.
Who cares? So what? The College Board has very good reason to not be happy about the test prep industry, and to want to discourage the growth of that industry. But them being “critical of colleges that select applicants based on small score differences” simply proves my point: that “colleges … select applicants based on small score differences.” This is the simple, plain factual reality that you’re trying really hard to deny.
No, we don’t “need to know” those things. All we need to know is that prep can add 30 points, and that “colleges … select applicants based on small score differences.”
The way you attempt to deny plain facts is quite spectacular.
Whether it’s “worth the money” is a separate issue. That depends on a bunch of other factors, like how much money I have. If I’m going to get in anyway, it’s not “worth the money.” If I’m starving and homeless, it’s probably not “worth the money.” But if it helps me get into a college where they “select applicants based on small score differences,” then it’s probably worth the money.
Yes, falsely telling people to expect a 300-point boost is a scam. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that someone who can afford test prep has an edge, because many “colleges … select applicants based on small score differences.”
Yes, and Nixon was not a crook.
I’ve read your statements. You’re a birther.
September 1, 2011, 4:29 pmA. Zarkov says:
No. It stigmatizes the people who get it. AA is not comparable to remediation granted to Holocaust survivors.
September 1, 2011, 4:29 pmMAM says:
Ok, are survivors of the Jim Crow south entitled to remediation outside of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act? If not, how is it materially different than a Holocaust survivor?
I’m not talking about a descendant, but an actual person who lived under Jim Crow.
As for stigma, I can tell you with some degree of confidence that black people in 1964 didn’t care about the stigma of educational affirmative as they were already stigmatized for having black skin.
September 1, 2011, 4:35 pmA. Zarkov says:
We do need to know that. If a student can get the same small increase with cheap self study then there is absolutely no need for an expensive preparation course. You seem to believe that someone can pay $1,000 and bump his score slightly even if he’s done self preparation. BTW some high schools provide SAT coaching.
September 1, 2011, 4:37 pmSarcastro says:
And that’s the science! American Slavery contained only 77 turps of evil. Even adding in Jim Crow gets you only to 84 turps. The Holocaust is 120 turps.
No comparison! If you start helping out every group that’s had high two-figures of turps visited on them, you’ll never stop!
Plus 120 turps puts Jews beyond the Zarkov Stigmatizing Limit.
September 1, 2011, 4:37 pmA. Zarkov says:
The governments of the southern states did not round up large numbers of people and put them in gas chambers. That’s a material difference.
September 1, 2011, 4:41 pmmel belli says:
Ricardo’s challenge to Zarkov suffers from a sneaky and likely erroneous assumption. The AA controversy of the ’90′s followed from the fact that blacks admitted to selective institutions such as UCLA had SAT scores 150-300 points below the white average. By contrast, Ricardo and other AA proponents have no information that similar discrepancies applied to legacy admits at those schools. If legacy admits had scores averaging 100 points less than non-legacy admits, it still wouldn’t support admitting blacks with SAT scores of 1000 to UCLA, or 1100 into Michigan. On the other hand, experience since 1996 has shown that blacks almost always major in “ethnic studies,” where they simply have their assumptions about being victims reflected back at them. Given their choice to major in a subject utterly devoid of content or scholarship, there really is no reason to hold them to any admissions standards whatsoever. I say open admissions for blacks. The rest of the student body knows who the real students are. Anyone who cares to open his eyes knows that daily life at places like UCLA, or Berkeley, is one of racial self-segregation, with black basically setting up their own de facto HBC. The rest if just argument fodder for whites.
September 1, 2011, 4:45 pmSarcastro says:
Lots of raping, though!
Now that we’ve compared the relative evil of protracted institutionalized dehumanization with mechanized institutionalized genocide, lets quantify and compare something hard, like circles versus triangles!
September 1, 2011, 4:48 pmMAM says:
Uh, the governments of southern states, I would suggest, were instrumental in both the killing and the committing of violence against black people for approximately 100 years.
However, I would also suggest that the killing of people is not materially different than the lawful subjugation of people as it relates to who gets remediation. We can get into a debate as to who suffered more at the hands of government, but that would trivialize history of both Holocaust survivors and black americans.
September 1, 2011, 4:50 pmA. Zarkov says:
The remediation was given to survivors not to their descendants in perpetuity. Much of the remediation was compensation for stolen property both real and personal. The Third Reich confiscated all Jewish property they could find. After the war, the Czechs played a similar game. The Beneš decrees confiscated the property of the Sudetenland Germans. In a separate action they were expelled from the county outright. I don’t know if they have a “right of return” or have received any compensation. Again the focus is on actual victims.
September 1, 2011, 4:51 pmSarcastro says:
[Arbitrary line drawing. Of course, the line must be drawn somewhere, but I see no moral imperitive it be there.]
September 1, 2011, 4:56 pmA. Zarkov says:
You want to equate apartheid with genocide? In any case the question is moot because very few of the survivors are still alive.
September 1, 2011, 4:58 pmA. Zarkov says:
The line is not arbitrary. Someone is a direct victim or not. If the state comes along and steals your property then you deserve to get it back. That’s a lot different from saying the state should compensate your grandchild simply for being your grandchild.
September 1, 2011, 5:03 pmToby says:
I know someone who did that. Got in handily to an Ivy League school. Spent most of his first two years declining invites to special clubs and career events.
September 1, 2011, 5:05 pmMAM says:
Actually, you trivialize a great deal by stating anyone is equating the history of blacks in america merely to aparthied, even if you are referring to post 1864.
However, my point was to understand the point, if any, at which you believe government had an obligation to remediate. If you don’t believe there was an obligation in 1864 or 1964, you obviously don’t consider remediation a viable position today. But if you believed remediation was valid in 1964, you would have some form of justification for it not being valid today.
For instance, many libertarian and conservative commenters on this blog accept, if grudgingly, that affirmative action was a valid response to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, but believe that its time has passed. Some have commented that there was never a time to justify racial remediation b/c it’s unconstitutional or it’s unfair to non-blacks.
September 1, 2011, 5:08 pmAdam says:
Huh? He didn’t want to see them for oversight reasons. Most charitably, he wanted them as data for his research. Least charitably, he wanted to use them to make his University and colleagues look bad because they might be able to tell race from some of the applications.
Thus sayeth Justice Thomas. And close to no one else who received it.
September 1, 2011, 5:08 pmjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
There you go again, trying to relocate the goalposts. You have moved through this series of positions:
A) test prep doesn’t boost scores
B) OK, it boosts scores, but not by enough to make a difference
C) OK, it boost scores by enough to make a difference, but it’s not the only way to achieve a boost in scores. You can ostensibly get the same result with cheap self study.
Come back when you’re ready to have a discussion in good faith. Constantly trying to sneak the goalposts into a different position is a sign of a hack.
I do believe that, because the research supports that belief. The research behind the WSJ article took into account the question you’re raising, and it found that “cheap self study” helps, but not as much as a commercial course or tutoring. See this pdf (http://bit.ly/2VOaK8), p. 17. One more time: people with money to spend on a course have an advantage. This is the key point you’re working so hard to deny.
And it’s self-evident that getting the same boost from “cheap self study” is not as easy as you claim. If it was, there wouldn’t be a large market for courses that cost thousands. I assume you do believe in markets, right?
September 1, 2011, 5:23 pmjoe says:
A federal judge or the students themselves. Those are the people who have the power to tell the admissions to release personal records. It’s like people never heard of FERPA.
It is always fun to see people want state agencies to violate people’s privacy when it can advance their own political positions.
September 1, 2011, 5:28 pmzuch says:
Proof by anecdote?!?!? Runs in the family, eh? But don’t despair; perhaps there’s a perfessorship in store for you at UCLA….
Cheers,
September 1, 2011, 5:42 pmsmead jolley says:
All this “proof by anecdote?” sneering really is rich. When you lefties were arguing, e.g., that Joe Camel was pulling in kids, anecdote or even less was fine for you. Being a lib really requires a bottomless reservoir of hypocrisy.
September 1, 2011, 6:03 pmA. Zarkov says:
From your link.
Thus your own reference says we don’t know if paying for an expensive prep course provides an advantage over cheaper alternatives.
I also note that these studies rely on observational data and not controlled experiments. They have to assume that the non-prep group is identical to the prep-group or they can adjust for the differences by linear regression analysis. This means they have to assume they have all the variables that can affect the outcome. As they are getting a small effect, this is a heroic assumption. As such I don’t put much confidence in these results. Had they found a large effect I would be impressed.
September 1, 2011, 6:11 pmjukeboxgrad says:
I think the key word there is “adequately.” They cite a study that reports an effect, but I guess they are hedging with “adequately” because the effect is small. Here’s where the effect is described (p. 17):
So books are worth seven points and tutoring is worth 15 points.
And it would be good if you didn’t ignore the conclusion, which says this:
If you can afford it, taking the course is a good idea. Because there is an effect, and because “even small test score increases may increase a student’s chances of admission at selective institutions.”
One more time: people who have money for a course have an advantage.
This is just you doing your usual thing: rejecting all inconvenient facts.
September 1, 2011, 6:28 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Sorry if I wasn’t clear — the core problem is with the admissions folks, who want to continue with their preferred policy contrary to the will of the electorate. That said, when someone else is keen to something wrong, intentionally doing something to induce is a “secondary” offense.
If the admissions committee was known or suspected to have illegally favored Jews and a Jewish applicant intentionally mentioned Hillel in order to curry such an advantage, that would be wrong. Again, mostly because the committee and, in a much smaller way, because of the student. He shouldn’t have to censor himself because they are incapable of making a decision in accordance with the law but likewise he shouldn’t purposefully gives them the means to violate that law.
Relevance? I didn’t say race wasn’t a big deal, I said that, as a subsidiary of the State of California, the University of California must do as they are told by the electorate even when their management disagrees.
Perhaps you don’t understand the difference between violating the law and acting contrary to the spirit of the law. I made it quite clear to which of those two I was referring in my post, it might behoove you to read it sometime.
September 1, 2011, 6:33 pmjoe says:
Nothing in the “spirit” of the law speaks to the actions of the applicants, so no, applicants cannot violate the spirit of the law.
September 1, 2011, 6:56 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Inducing someone else to violate a law that applies to that individual for your own gain doesn’t violate the spirit of that law? What planet are you from and what language do they speak there?
If I offer to pay my landlord (or other purveyor of taxable goods) in cash (wink wink, the taxman will be no wiser) am I acting within the spirit of the tax law? I mean, tax law doesn’t say anything about the form in which I have to pay my rent (or make other purchases) — in fact, it doesn’t say anything about renters (or buyers) actions at all.
Of course, there are legitimate reasons to pay cash for goods (less so for rent) but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t illegitimate reasons to do so as well. If it’s done for the express purpose of inducing the landlord to avoid taxes (and presumably make you a more appealing tenant in the process), it’s not only illegitimate but plainly at odds with the purpose of the statute. Individuals aren’t required to go out of their way to help enforce the law or prevent violations but that’s a far cry from telling them not to take active purposeful steps towards illegal ends, even when those steps are not themselves illegal.
September 1, 2011, 7:13 pmA. Zarkov says:
Now we are down to a 7 point difference. And what is the confidence interval for this 7 points? We need to know that. We also need to know if you get an additional 7 points above the books. It’s far from obvious that the effect is necessarily additive.
When you get to a marginal result like 7 points, it pretty easy to get a spurious result. They have to know and observe all the variables and have the right model. I am skeptical because I have experience with regression models. They are not reliable for small effects unless you are nearly certain about the model and the variables. You get this in the physical sciences, but almost never in the social sciences. How do we know that paying $1,000 for a Kaplan course does not increase motivation enough to get an additional 7 points?
September 1, 2011, 7:45 pmjukeboxgrad says:
Maybe it does, but that’s still an advantage rich people have that non-rich people don’t have. If I get well because I took an expensive placebo I have an advantage over someone who is going to stay sick because they can’t afford an expensive placebo. What counts is the result.
One more time. The study reached this conclusion:
Keep showing how eager you are to run away from facts you don’t like. It’s revealing.
September 1, 2011, 7:58 pmA. Zarkov says:
I don’t believe in collective guilt and group entitlements. Compensation to actual victims is one thing, but a collective punishment of one group to favor another is something else. When private universities give preference on race they are punishing other people who are innocent.
At one time Jews in America faced barriers. They had trouble getting jobs in big corporations such as Standard Oil of California who had an explicit policy of not hiring Jews even as consultants. I know this from a Wasp who worked for them in the early 1950s. Nevertheless the Jews didn’t go whining to the government. They formed their own businesses and studied hard to enter the learned professions.
September 1, 2011, 8:01 pmMark M says:
Zarkov
My question was whether the government had an obligation to redemidate in 1964 for what happened before during Jim Crow. Remember, as opposed to policies of private individuals, in which case they can discriminate as they wish, the govenment sanctioned and enforced Jim Crow. Would that black person who endured during Jime Crow long enough to see 1964 have right to remediation?
As for your example of the Holocaust, those who recieved recompense received it from the government, right? Accordingly, the money recieved came from Germans who may have had no hand in the government’s atrocities. If the government is not obligated to recompense blacks in 1964, the titular end of Jim Crow, because innocent people would have to pay, why should innocent Germans have to pay for the crimes of their government?
One more question. Would jewish person who merely endured concentration camps, but did not have property taken from him, have a right to recompense for what he endured?
September 1, 2011, 8:23 pmA. Zarkov says:
Some Jews received compensation for property taken from them by the government of the Third Reich. Now if (say) the state of Alabama confiscated property from people they certainly should get that back. We have a clear way to do the accounting.
The answer is yes. Specific individuals deserve compensation for their specific pain and suffering. This does not mean their grandchildren have a claim against the current German Government for the pain and suffering their grandparents went through.
September 1, 2011, 8:39 pmjoe says:
What a nonsense of an example. First of all, the level of interaction on the “cash for lower rent” example is much higher than in the admissions example. Doing a sort of “wink-wink” negotiation might violate the “spirit” of the law, but the admissions case is more akin to simply starting to pay cash out of the blue and never negotiating for a lower rent, just hoping that the landowner will reduce the rate unsolicited because of that. Second of all, essays are supposed to make a candidate more desirable, it is the duty of the selection committee to weigh what they are allowed to take into account and what they aren’t. Third of all, in the case of admissions, it presupposes that the individuals making the selections are already in violation of 209, so the student would be reacting to that, as opposed to someone paying cash in hopes of making the landlord start to cheat on his taxes.
September 1, 2011, 8:58 pmMark M says:
So would you agree, at minimum, that blacks that endured the Jim Crow south were due recompense? That was my original question.
September 1, 2011, 9:41 pmleo marvin says:
Right. The newly freed slaves should have lawyered up pronto instead of living the easy life of sharecroppers, staying a step ahead of the lynch mob and waiting for the UPS man to deliver their 40 acres and a mule. If they were too ignorant to know they might be entitled to reparations no one ever told them about, while most of them weren’t even getting what they’d been promised, whose fault was that? They should have taken their formal education more seriously when they were slaves, instead of loafing around the plantation watching daytime TV and drinking Colt 45. I mean, it’s a simple matter of personal responsibility, right?
September 1, 2011, 9:54 pmGiant Frog says:
Everyone except (almost all) white men gets the Special Treatment:
If racism is bad, more racism is certainly good. For some mysterious reason.
September 1, 2011, 9:56 pmSChaser says:
Conservatives would rather not incentivize fatherless families. However, plenty of conservatives would favor a system that provides *financial aid* to those who are financially disadvantaged.
OTOH, giving admissions preference on such basis penalizes those who do not meet the favored criteria, which is simply wrong. It should be the purpose of a university to educate, not to provide rewards to the victims of poor child rearing.
September 1, 2011, 10:04 pmSChaser says:
Yes, because they are using it to game an unfair system, one which is, by law, supposed to ignore race but which actually seeks to discriminate based on racism. I suspect the purpose of requiring an autobiographical essay is to enable this crypto-racist behavior by the admissions committees.
This phenomenon says something pretty bad about those functionaries who are using this signalling: they are happy to take the money of the taxpayers, while intentionally violating the law that those same taxpayers voted in. University elite
September 1, 2011, 10:08 pmSChaser says:
Yes, because they are using it to game an unfair system, one which is, by law, supposed to ignore race but which actually seeks to discriminate based on racism. I suspect the purpose of requiring an autobiographical essay is to enable this crypto-racist behavior by the admissions committees.
This phenomenon says something pretty bad about those functionaries who are using this signalling: they are happy to take the money of the taxpayers, while intentionally violating the law that those same taxpayers voted in. University elites are apparently above he law, at least if they perceive it as misguided.
September 1, 2011, 10:08 pmA. Zarkov says:
Once again. That conclusion pertains to a general group and does not address the question as to how much advantage prep courses give over using alternative and cheaper approaches. As you own reference states, they don’t have adequate studies on that question.
Let’s do a little calculation. Assume the measurement error has a standard deviation of 20 points. That means that the probability a student would get an extra 30 points by chance alone is 14%. If a Kaplan course adds an extra 7 points, then he would get an extra 30 points with a 20% probability. That would be the benefit of a Kaplan course over a cheap alternative: a rise in probability from 15% to 20% to get that critical extra 30 points which might make the difference on getting admitted. Thus even with a pile of optimistic assumptions, the benefit is extremely minimal.
September 1, 2011, 10:12 pmMark M says:
Schaser
How do you know why someone would discuss their race on a college applicaton? Even the Professor, who was on the committee, did not charge they were violating the law, although he didn’t believe they were applying the way he thought it should.You have an amazing talent. Can you tell us what Bernanke is really thinking?
September 1, 2011, 10:16 pmA. Zarkov says:
The newly freed slaves had no property to get compensated for. At the time the federal government could have paid them a compensation for their servitude, but didn’t. That’s not the fault of anyone alive today. I don’t get your point.
September 1, 2011, 10:18 pmjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
It gives enough of an advantage to support the conclusion that was stated:
Did I cite that already?
From the perspective of someone with plenty of money, the chance to “increase a student’s chances of admission at selective institutions” is not viewed as something “extremely minimal.”
September 1, 2011, 10:26 pmA. Zarkov says:
The Jews in concentration camps were prisoners and were not free to leave. On the other hand, in Jim Crow south, people were free to migrate to other states and many did just that. I don’t see any equivalence.
September 1, 2011, 10:28 pmMark M says:
So that’s the difference? Thanks b/c that clears the distinction up.
September 1, 2011, 10:34 pmRicardo says:
If there was a “sneaky” assumption in my comment it certainly was not intentional. Instead, I was responding directly to Zarkov’s point that admission to a university should focus on the applicant’s ability to do college-level work. Legacy admission or preference for athletes (or people who have lots of extracurricular activities) has seemingly no relationship with the ability to do college level work just as race does not. In both cases, universities are considering factors other than the applicant’s ability to successfully complete a college degree.
Moreover, I would suggest that your comment has a “sneaky” assumption of its own built in by taking UCLA as a representative of AA programs nationwide. AA can vary quite a lot in terms of implementation by institution. For instance, some may only consider race in a “borderline” case where they have a set of applicants who are all qualified for admission but from which they can only choose a few and might use minority status to help decide who gets admitted. If you oppose that kind of AA, then you have no basis for defending legacy admission based on your comment above since neither type of preference grants admission to people who have scores below the white average (unless the institution also admits whites below the white average).
September 1, 2011, 10:37 pmA. Zarkov says:
I gave you the number. An increase to 20% from 14% to get an extra 30 points which might make a difference in some special cases. Moreover as pointed out in your reference, there is an opportunity cost to taking a Kaplan course. The time spent there is time away from studies which could lower grades and reduce the chances of admission. It’s not at all clear that such courses are a benefit even to rich people because the benefit is so iffy and so marginal.
My daughter took the SATs and scored very high without any courses. If fact she got invited to apply to Kaplan as a teacher. I didn’t want her to because I thought the whole business was a scam. I still do.
September 1, 2011, 10:37 pmRicardo says:
As I already pointed out, lots of universities penalize otherwise-qualified applicants who do not meet certain favored criteria. UC schools heavily penalize non-California residents. Many if not most colleges penalize those who don’t play a sport or who did not participate in extracurricular activities in high school. If you are applying to an Ivy, you may be penalized for not having parents who also went there. Etc.
September 1, 2011, 10:44 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Which would not be very honorable if it was known that landlords see cash payers favorably because they seek to violate the tax law.
This is the difference between having a legitimate intent and an illegitimate one.
The People of California voted otherwise in Prop 209 and have constrained them, by law, not to take race into account. As the University is a subsidiary of the State and not some private institution, they are not permitted to derogate from that law.
As I’ve said above, if a student reveals his race accidentally or without intent to gain illegal advantage, there’s nothing he can do if an admission’s official violates the law just as much as a tenant is not responsible for his landlord’s tax evasion.
Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked.
September 1, 2011, 10:48 pmjukeboxgrad says:
zarkov:
That’s what you say. On the other hand, people who have studied the matter a lot more than you say this, which is quite different from what you said:
All you’re doing is proving that you’re impervious to evidence.
September 1, 2011, 10:59 pmA. Zarkov says:
Are you sure about that? They pay more tuition, but I don’t know if they suffer with respect to admission. The UC graduate schools have a lot of out of state people.
In any case, California residents should not have to compete with the whole world as California taxpayers make the UC system possible.
September 1, 2011, 11:00 pmzuch says:
OTOH, they will ban abortions and birth control. Go figure.
But why do they want to “incentivize” gambling away life savings at Vegas and buying world junkets with the kid’s prospective college funds?
Cheers,
September 1, 2011, 11:07 pmA. Zarkov says:
You are taking statements out of context. Moreover you seem to think that taking a Kaplan course gives a certainty of getting an extra 7 points. It doesn’t. As the reference says 20 – 30 points is the measurement error of an SAT test. This means a given student will show a scatter with multiple tries at the test and the standard deviation of the scatter will be at least 20. That 7 point improvement would be largely invisible without a large number of tries. A student could do nothing and have a 14% chance of a 30 point gain over his true score. He can spend a lot of money and time to move that 14% to 20%. I call that marginal.
September 1, 2011, 11:13 pmleo marvin says:
The liberty they were robbed of wasn’t a valuable commodity? Why do I doubt you’d say that if you were kidnapped and held captive, even if you weren’t required to work?
Not only could have, but should have.
The kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment, and uncompensated slave labor were the nation’s fault in 1865. That fault created a national obligation to make reparations, which the nation has long denied. We didn’t inherit the fault, but we did inherit the obligation, just as we inherit all unsatisfied national obligations incurred by previous generations. Or do you think the holder of an unpaid Treasury note inherited from great-great-grandparents isn’t entitled to be paid what’s due on the note?
September 1, 2011, 11:23 pmMark Field says:
As Madison put it (from memory), “just as we have a right in our property, so we have a property in our rights.”
September 1, 2011, 11:29 pmMark Field says:
And that he can mis-state facts.
September 1, 2011, 11:31 pmClark says:
Haha! Zarkov defines birther to exclude those who keep demanding evidence that Obama was born in the US, while describing Obama as the most stealth candidate about whom nothing is known and trustworthy, so yeah, Zarkov is not a birther. Others can make their own judgment from Zarkov’s views.
September 2, 2011, 12:26 amA. Zarkov says:
Slavery was legal and thus the slave holders were not guilty of kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment etc as those were not civil crimes at the time.
As all the slaves are now dead, and there is no one to pay reparations to. Moreover there is no legal basis for such a claim.
No one holds an unpaid Treasury note from a great-great-grandparent. Those notes have a maximum maturity of 30 years. If someone forget to redeem a 150 year note it would have long since become abandoned property.
September 2, 2011, 12:48 amA. Zarkov says:
What fact?
September 2, 2011, 12:51 amMoishe X says:
Well, then! Let’s just move along without all the whining!
Or, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute, son… Wasn’t the Union the victor? Doesn’t the Union get to say what was and wasn’t legitimately “legal”? After all, Germany’s treatment of the Jews, Gypsies, etc. was all pretty much “legal,” too, until the pesky Allies came up with all that “crimes against humanity” and “law of nations” codswallop at Nuremberg. The Nazis had to do more than collectively pay for reparations—many of those poor blokes got the noose for engaging in perfectly “legal” activities.
September 2, 2011, 1:41 amSChaser says:
Sometimes it doesn’t take a mind reader. When people are applying to selective colleges, they tend to know a lot about how the admissions process really works. I certainly know people who put their race on their applications exactly for affirmative action. Heck, I know someone whose family changed their last name to that of a favored group in order to benefit from it.
Of course they are mentioning their race in order to benefit from it. Otherwise they’re too dumb to go to college.
I don’t think he said that.
I know what he’s thinking, but if I tell you, it’ll cut into my profits.
September 2, 2011, 1:46 amLN says:
Were the gas chambers illegal during World War II? I’m pretty sure they weren’t. Same goes for the confiscation of Jewish property, I’m sure some of it was illegal but a lot of it was backed by laws passed by the Nazi government. Zarkov’s views on Holocaust reparations are frankly shocking (if it was legal, no need for compensation).
September 2, 2011, 1:47 amSChaser says:
There is financial justification for a state school system to penalize those who are out of state. Penalizing those who don’t play a sport or participate in extracurricular activities reflects on the probability that they will succeed in college. Discriminating in favor of those from disadvantage backgrounds, on the other hand, increases the probability that they will fail (and indeed modern affirmative action reduces the success rates of institutions, which ultimately penalizes the supposed beneficiaries).
Ivy legacy admissions are wrong and pernicious as they help create an aristocracy. However, as private schools, they get to be evil if they choose.
September 2, 2011, 1:52 amSChaser says:
September 2, 2011, 1:55 amSChaser says:
His point is Amerikkka is evil and always was and should don hair shirts and suffer forever. In other words, he’s a nut-bag.
September 2, 2011, 1:58 amSChaser says:
What claptrap. By that standard, any victim of injustice any time in history, or their descendant, is owed recompense by whoever inherited the “obligation.” Hence the descendants of the barbarians have an obligation to the descendants of the Romans.
September 2, 2011, 2:04 amLN says:
You’re the guy who thought that there was no racial discrimination in America before affirmative action. Credibility less than zero.
September 2, 2011, 2:06 amjukeboxgrad says:
Then again, maybe his finest moment was when he lied about Jay Rosen and then refused to do the right thing when Rosen showed up and called him on it (http://bit.ly/pQqfNE).
I’m not sure which of those two to pick as more impressive. It’s a tough call. But I think I would give the edge to what you mentioned.
September 2, 2011, 2:14 amMoishe X says:
leo marvin might have used a better term than “inherit,” but he’s absolutely correct that the present-day U.S. has the same obligation as the pre-Civil-War and post-War U.S. did. The reason is not because the present-day U.S. “inherited” anything, but because the present-day U.S. is precisely the same entity as pre-War and post-War U.S. Presidents and Congresses and electorates have passed to dust, but those are merely the dead cells of a body that is eternal, in principle. Even successor regimes generally are responsible for the obligations and debts of predecessor regimes. There’s been no regime-change here. The very same U.S. is simply 146 years older than it was at the Civil War’s end.
September 2, 2011, 2:30 amzuch says:
“So what”? Meaning they’re perfectly happy to cause more single parent families. You’re just being obtuse.
As for the rest of your non-response: Hitler ate vegetables. Do you also eat them?
And Sanger was never for forced abortions, and her “negative eugenics” was hardly unusual for that time.
See if you can figure it out. Try. Just a little effort. I thought you had at least that level of intelligence.
Cheers,
September 2, 2011, 2:38 amRicardo says:
No it doesn’t. Any Division I school’s athletics department spends considerable resources on tutoring for student athletes both because practice takes away from study time and also because many of the student-athletes were academically behind their peers in the first place and did not get admitted on their academic merits.
There also isn’t any financial justification for state schools giving preference for in-state students — there is only justification for charging them more (Kenneth Anderson posted a while ago about UC’s in-state preference in undergraduate admissions — it still exists although it has been weakened due to state cut-backs in funding).
All this is simply to show that in the real world, academic institutions have many goals aside from merely admitting students with the highest test scores or grades.
September 2, 2011, 5:06 amA. Zarkov says:
I glad you realize that the Nuremberg trials had no real basis in law. FDR and Churchill simply wanted to shoot the Nazi leadership, but Stalin liked show trials, so they gave in to him like they did in so many other ways. We have a general aversion to ex post facto laws and the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids Congress (Article 1 Section 9), and the (states Article 1 Section 10) from passing them. Thus Congress could not punish slave holders after the Civil War. Lincoln also decided not to put the Confederate generals on trial either. This was a wise move on his part as the south was ready to continue the Civil War as a guerrilla war. This whole topic is explored in depth in the book April 1965 by Jay Winik.
September 2, 2011, 6:58 amA. Zarkov says:
Not exactly. I said there was no legal basis for compensation. That does not mean that compensation would have been bad idea. Similarly there’s no legal basis for compensation for slavery. The southern states or the federal government could have compensated the freed slaves for their lack of liberty during their servitude but did not. Why they didn’t is a topic for another discussion. I suspect lack of resources played a part. While we had fiat money during the Civil War we went back to the gold standard afterward. Thus the feds couldn’t just create money and handed it out to the freed slaves.
September 2, 2011, 7:10 amOrenWithAnE says:
I should think it would be the other way around — Caesar killed 1/3rd of the Gauls and enslaved another 1/3rd. The Italians are going to owe a lot of people a lot of money (if modern Italy is the inheritor of Roman debts, that is, a dubious proposition).
September 2, 2011, 10:06 amKirk Lazarus says:
Why should conservatives want the state to subsidize and encourage fatherlessness?
September 2, 2011, 6:13 pmSChaser says:
You need to take a remedial reading course.
September 2, 2011, 6:22 pmSChaser says:
Okay, if I buy that (ignoring the substantial change in the identity of the US as a result of the secession and then reunification, what would those obligations be? Did the US issue slavery reparations bonds?
September 2, 2011, 6:24 pmSChaser says:
Today, many students are given points for participation in extracurricular activities (of which sports is just one) who do not become members of a sports team.
September 2, 2011, 6:26 pmMoishe X says:
What “substantial change in the identity of the US,” specifically, are you referring to?
Those obligations are the same now as they ever were, to provide some kind of serious compensation to, at a minimum, individual slaves and slave families and former victims of Jim Crow, and perhaps to the community of former slaves/former victims of Jim Crow as a whole. As someone wrote above, the federal and state governments both could have and should have—and they still should today; can’t let them wriggle out of it by waiting until everyone who lived under the laws themselves is dead and then calling “game over, no-one left.”
At a minimum, entitlement to reparations should survive and be inheritable, just like most other financial claims. The fact that the US never issued “reparation bonds” or the like (oh, the wit of it!) merely proves that the wrong is ongoing and that at least one aspect of slavery and Jim Crow—the denial of compensation—still happening today.
Thus, contrary to those who claim “I never owned a slave, therefore I shouldn’t have to pay reparations,” all Americans today are still party to slavery and Jim Crow. Either way you slice it—surviving claims or ongoing offenses—the debts are still owing, and the interest is now at almost 150 years-worth, and counting.
September 3, 2011, 3:49 amA. Zarkov says:
In other words, reparations to the descendants of former slaves? No legal basis for such a claim. Each person claiming a reparation would need to trace his lineage to someone who at one time was entitled to a reparation. Of course there is no entitlement as a matter of law.
Good luck selling that to a nation deeply in debt in both the private and government sectors. It’s not going to happen because Congress would have to pass enabling legislation and they won’t do that because the legislators would soon be out of office.
September 3, 2011, 6:59 amMarian Kechlibar says:
“We didn’t inherit the fault, but we did inherit the obligation, just as we inherit all unsatisfied national obligations incurred by previous generations.”
Frankly, that seems nonsense to me. Obligations that were incurred 6 generations ago are meaningless.
Consider the absurdity if Germany wanted reparations from France for Napoleonic Wars or if the entire Europe and Arabia wanted reparations from Mongolia from the devastating raids of the 13th century.
In my opinion, when all the perpetrators and victims are dead, the obligations are rendered meaningless, or, worse, a perpetual source of ethnic strife that prevents normalization of inter-ethnic relations.
A glaring example is the Balkans and the Near East, where most of the ethnicities keep their precious lists of grievances for hundreds of years, and justify their occasional outbursts of genocidal violence on said grievances.
How would Japan look today if they concentrated their entire culture on hating Americans?
September 3, 2011, 9:52 amA. Zarkov says:
In the Third Punic War Roman General Scipio Aemilianus razed the city of Carthage to the ground. Fifty thousand Carthaginians were sold into slavery, and Rome annexed the majority of the Carthaginian colonies. Tough guy.
Twenty five hundred years later (1985) the mayor of Rome and the mayor of Carthage (now a suburb of Tunis) signed a formal peace treaty ending the war. Does anyone think Rome owes Carthage reparations for destroying the city and enslaving its people? There is no limit to the “you owe us” as history is replete with winners and losers.
A message to losers. Stop whining and get along with your life.
September 4, 2011, 8:45 amleo marvin says:
If you think there’s a moral equivalence between hypothetical claims for reparations by Carthage against Rome from the Third Punic War, and by Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped and robbed of liberty and the labor that built much of this country, and then post-slavery were subjected to a regime of legal apartheid and oppression that ended just 50 years ago, that’s pretty sad.
September 4, 2011, 5:22 pm