Republicans, according to Dark Matter, appear to have some sort of ADD or memory-based disability, and literally cannot remember basic economic concepts presented by the Republican party until someone reminds them!
It's a lot easier to remember the last 6 times you bought a "wonderful" used car from that salesman it turned out to be a lemon (and 'free isn't free') than to become a mechanic.
I expect most people (of either party) can't balance their checkbook and basic econ is way beyond them.
Bern's followers were mostly young, because if they were older they'd know better. 'If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.' (Falsely attributed to Churchill)
Do you mean the system where, when a quarter of the population inevitably gets cancer, we let almost all of them just die instead of trying to treat it?
Cost to treat cancer in a dog via Chemo: Between $6k and $10k (and that's the entire cost).
https://www.petcarerx.com/article/managing-costs-of-cancer-treatment-for-dogs/1232
Here's another example: Dolly’s care cost around $10,000 for all tests, surgeries, radiation therapy treatments, and medication. http://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/10-things-dog-cancer
What they're missing is the multiple massive bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other massive bureaucracies, all created because of the government's "help" and mandates.
Reduce the cost of health care by 10x or 20x and suddenly far more people can afford it, and we as a society can afford to treat most people if not everyone.
From what I understand, Asian-Americans have gone from being Republican friendly to also being part of the Democratic Party very firmly because they see the GOP as being unfriendly to people of color.
Sure, absolutely, probably because the Moats! wing of the GOP is unfriendly to people of color.
But we're talking about Affirmative Action, which in California is banned. And the Dems, even with an unhealthy level of control, can't get that ban overturned. And the reason they can't overturn that ban is because the Asians won't cooperate.
Yet the GOP seems unable to see if this small little piece of advice because they might sincerely (but IMO wrongly) see affirmative action programs as racist.
Elsewhere on this page we go into what "affirmative action" does to Asians, i.e. holding them to a much higher standard because we need to keep their numbers in college down. I don't see how we can call that anything other than 'racist'.
I had high hopes for Arnold to be able to start bridging the divide, but in hindsight (even if Arnold had had the combined political acumen of Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney), I don’t think it could have been possible. Would the CA GOP of the time sign off to policies that had the assent of the CA Dems?
California needs policies which would have resulted in Arnold being hated, aka Scott Walker. He decided he didn't want that.
But my point isn’t that, my point is that a large majority of people *default*, in absence of party identification, to left positions. Both Republicans and Democrats.
Of course they do. Left-ish positions have the supposed outcome baked in as part of the position.
Sample Proposal: Let's make toilet paper a human right! We'll force prices to go down! It will be widely available for everyone! Everyone will save money!
Actual Result: Massive Shortages! To get toilet paper you need to go to the black market! People get arrested for 'hording' toilet paper!
I'm a lot more disturbed by Bern's rise than Trump's.
Trump is running on his fame and personality. We've seen that before. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jesse Ventura. Even Clint Eastwood (he was mayor). It's a problem but it happens and it probably doesn't mean much for the next guy.
Hillary had to move to the left to get the nod because the party is moving left, maybe far to the left.
Dark Matter: The 13th AM would be a good choice.
Stillwater: Could you elaborate on that a bit, Dark?
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Assume a fetus is fully human. That's great, but I don't see why it is supposed to have 'rights' that I do not.
I can't take your blood without your ongoing permission. I can't take your tissue, I can't use your organs, etc. This is true even if I'm your kid, and even if you've promised to donate an organ to save my life.
Up until the point where you're physically unconscious on the table, you can get up and walk out, even if it kills me. You even have the ability to kill me to stop me if I insist on living at your expense.
Sex without consent is rape (you can kill me to stop me there too). This is worse. We have a word to describe 'imposing on someone else's body, for months, where the one imposing has all the benefits and the one being imposed upon has the physical/emotional/financial trauma'. The word is 'slavery', and it works pretty well... and you can kill someone to prevent yourself from being enslaved. If we're serious about giving a fetus (especially a mindless fetus) 'rights', then the appropriate way to do that is amend the Constitution to allow women to be enslaved by their fetus, if that sounds like a hard sell it's supposed to be.
The problem with Roe is the Supremes wanted to leave the gov with the ability to meddle.
Yes, explaining that the gov's spending, which is mostly on entitlements, *your* entitlements, isn't sustainable or good for the economy long term is a hard sell. It's even a harder sell when "long term" is FAR longer than the current election cycle and it's enough decades in the future that you might be dead.
However math is without mercy.
FDR started us down this path, and ever since then gov spending as a percentage of GDP has basically gone up (excluding WW2), and gov spending on entitlements (i.e. politicians using your money to buy your vote) has only gone up. Gov spending trends up over the decades, growth in the economy trends down. That's a problem.
How do we pay for all these wonderful benefits we've promised everyone? When does the gov stop expanding? So... where does it end? Communism (the ultimate in state control) has shown itself an abject failure enough times that it's not a problem in implementation.
IMHO it's very fair to say we need a state to function.
IMHO it's also very fair to say the state is too big, doesn't function especially well, wastes money, is prone to corruption and other abuses of power, and is attempting to do things best left to the markets. Every generation of politicians needs to *do* *something* to justify their existence, we haven't figured out a way for that *something* to be shrinking the state as opposed to growing it.
It was “laziness” not lack of work plaguing those without jobs.
The gov really should get out of the business of job destruction.
I would like to think that America is becoming less racist as the pre-civil rights generation dies off. I'm not sure if we have a good way to measure this however.
Speaking as a member of the Money! faction (although sadly that's not the same as actually having money) the GOP is at their best when they're out of power.
Give them a super majority and instead of tax reform or entitlement reform we get the Medicare Drug Expansion.
Trump’s loud anti-semite supporters certainly won’t help it, but it’s not like the GOP ever had a shot.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's odd for him to be supported by anti-semites. His daughter and grandkids are Jewish. He's been on record thinking it's great for years.
It worked for Wilson, but he destroyed the GOP in California. He was really a moderate Republican who struggled to manage San Diego as its Mayor. He sold out to radical racist and fundamentalist christian members of the GOP. It got him elected, damaged him as a politician and permanently altered the California GOP.
All true. When I say it "worked", I'm talking "won him this next election", which is the time frame politicians function. From that point of view, it absolutely worked because it won him the election.
And yes, it also destroyed the party by scaring the hell out of the Hispanics, and the legal immigrants made the effort to become citizens so they could then vote Dem. Something GOP forgot was lots of illegal immigrants have legal relatives, and trying to rip apart families gets you branded as insane.
Wilson deserves to be remembered as the man who burned down the California GOP. But this kind of 'next election' time frame thinking causes all sorts of problems. The pension crisis is basically that, ditto our various other entitlements, and I'd argue Mayor Young of Detroit set the city on a path towards bankruptcy with his actions... although to be fair the bill didn't come due until after he'd left office and even died.
I am increasingly feeling like we’re heading towards a near-parliamentary system dependent on short term coalition-building.
The rules are set up so that's close to impossible. Winner takes all really punishes the lesser parties and rewards the big guys. That's why the Tea Party joined the GOP.
It took slavery to create the GOP and destroy the Whigs. I don't think we're anywhere close to being that divided, nor the big parties that dysfunctional. If Trump goes down in flames he gets written off as a bad idea and everyone moves on.
Prediction: Trump gets blown out of the water. Epic loss.
GOP keeps the House.
GOP, barely, keeps the Senate.
Very strong showing by Gary Johnson (by 3rd party candidate norms), but Hillary wins.
The problem is I'm not sure how much is wishful thinking.
IMHO we're not there yet. It depends on how hurt the GOP is by this election. Ideally they'll get hurt really bad and then give some Hispanic Conservative (maybe even one of the ones who was supposed to win this time) the nod to run against Hillary in 4 years.
The problem with the California-Wilson example is that for Wilson it *worked*. His policies passed, Wilson won reelection, party as a whole followed him, and yes, it sent the party over a cliff a few years down the line but that was down the line.
Mainstream GOP leaders still haven't really signed on to Trump. They've got the problem that the guy who won the election is who he is, but he really did win the nod. They've also got the problem that Trump is still pretty much an unknown in terms of what he's going to do.
And yes, agreed, there's still a lot of room for Trump to send the party over a cliff if he wins.
The reason I say it’s a question-begging study is because of their methodology. The study study notes that there’s a difference in admittance rates between academically similar Whites and Asians, and then concludes that if that difference in admittance rates didn’t exist, then more Asian students would be admitted. But that’s a tautology.
Fair enough, so let's look at other stats.
#1) A 2005 study... three highly selective private research universities... admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group)
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: –50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[74]
#2) ...students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.[75]
#3) After controlling for grades, test scores, family background (legacy status), and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete), Espenshade and Radford found that whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.
I can’t find the acceptance rate numbers, but here are the racial breakdown in offers of admission, and they paint a very different story:
Hmm... dueling links. So, fine, let's toss that study and look at the underlying data, ideally in a historical graph and not a snapshot.
I'm on page three
http://opa.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/UndergraduateDemographics.pdf
What I take away from this is:
1) Prop 209's 'effect' apparently took place before it's actual effect (meaning it was in the news and everyone was expecting it). Notice black+hispanic enrollment drop a lot ahead of time.
2) White enrollment... I'm inclined to call that blip down an anomaly and say it was largely flat.
3) Asian was trending up before and they continued to trend up after.
I don't think we have enough detail here to make a sound judgement (which is really weird, there's enough of a drop in the Black/Hispanic numbers that there should be a bounce somewhere else). Raw/Better numbers are below, but they don't cover the bridge years (probably deliberately).
@alan-scott
Siting the "actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated" is not "begging the question". The original question was whether Affirmative Action penalized Asians rather than Whites, the actual experience of removing it is "yes".
Only, there’s no real reason to assume that Harvard has policies that explicitly penalize being Asian in the same way that they have policies that explicitly reward being Black or Latino.
Harvard has "a number of slots to fill" as it's sometimes put, and for all the squeaking about it being a "holistic" practice, the actual results look like a quota system. They want a class which has X% of a race, they move the goalposts until they get that.
That Whites aren't rewarded or penalized is... weird. I'd think it deliberate but we see something similar with Silicon Valley employment stats broken down by race. For all the talk in the media about a lack of minority representation, the percentage of Whites is only at or slightly-below their population percentage.
The first couple of times, your brain stops whatever it’s doing and tries to figure out what’s going on.
At some point people become individuals I guess. I work with the shortest woman in the building. She told me it took a while but now doesn't process me as 'tall' unless it's pointed out somehow.
No. Perhaps in theory AA takes spots away from Asians. But in practice, when AA policies were implemented, it was white admissions that dropped. And even in theory, AA will have to be ended in a very specific way for the changes to increase Asian enrollment more than it increases white enrollment.
(Just going to quote here, but bold parts are for emphasis and I've snipped some. link at bottom)
Ending affirmative action would devastate most minority college enrollment
Study finds virtually no gain for white students
Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students.
In a study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, authors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung examined the controversial notion that eliminating affirmative action would lead to the admission of more white students to college and found it to be false. The assertion that qualified white students are being displaced by less qualified minority students was a prime plaintiff argument in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases against the University of Michigan (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger).
..."The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated."
According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While these declines are dramatic, the authors note that the long-term impact could be worse.
...The authors also cite other studies and the actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated: "The impacts are striking. Compared to the fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 55.... African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent. ...
Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. ...
On “This Party Cannot Be Saved”
@davidtc
It's a lot easier to remember the last 6 times you bought a "wonderful" used car from that salesman it turned out to be a lemon (and 'free isn't free') than to become a mechanic.
I expect most people (of either party) can't balance their checkbook and basic econ is way beyond them.
Bern's followers were mostly young, because if they were older they'd know better. 'If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.' (Falsely attributed to Churchill)
"
@davidtc
Cost to treat cancer in a dog via Chemo: Between $6k and $10k (and that's the entire cost).
https://www.petcarerx.com/article/managing-costs-of-cancer-treatment-for-dogs/1232
Here's another example: Dolly’s care cost around $10,000 for all tests, surgeries, radiation therapy treatments, and medication. http://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/10-things-dog-cancer
What they're missing is the multiple massive bureaucracies which only exist to deal with other massive bureaucracies, all created because of the government's "help" and mandates.
Reduce the cost of health care by 10x or 20x and suddenly far more people can afford it, and we as a society can afford to treat most people if not everyone.
"
@saul-degraw
Sure, absolutely, probably because the Moats! wing of the GOP is unfriendly to people of color.
But we're talking about Affirmative Action, which in California is banned. And the Dems, even with an unhealthy level of control, can't get that ban overturned. And the reason they can't overturn that ban is because the Asians won't cooperate.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/03/california_affirmative_action_ban_why_liberals_should_let_it_stand.html
"
@saul-degraw
Elsewhere on this page we go into what "affirmative action" does to Asians, i.e. holding them to a much higher standard because we need to keep their numbers in college down. I don't see how we can call that anything other than 'racist'.
"
@gabriel-conroy
RE: ACA
If you want to look at what how an actual free market would function for healthcare, examine the HC system we have for dogs.
"
@j_a
California needs policies which would have resulted in Arnold being hated, aka Scott Walker. He decided he didn't want that.
"
@davidtc
Of course they do. Left-ish positions have the supposed outcome baked in as part of the position.
Sample Proposal: Let's make toilet paper a human right! We'll force prices to go down! It will be widely available for everyone! Everyone will save money!
Actual Result: Massive Shortages! To get toilet paper you need to go to the black market! People get arrested for 'hording' toilet paper!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-venezuela-toilet-paper-shortage-kass-0226-20160225-column.html
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/apr/16/venezuela-economy-black-market-milk-and-toilet-paper
So yes, reminding people of the actual history of the leftist promises results in massive shifts of opinion.
"
I'm a lot more disturbed by Bern's rise than Trump's.
Trump is running on his fame and personality. We've seen that before. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jesse Ventura. Even Clint Eastwood (he was mayor). It's a problem but it happens and it probably doesn't mean much for the next guy.
Hillary had to move to the left to get the nod because the party is moving left, maybe far to the left.
"
@stillwater
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Assume a fetus is fully human. That's great, but I don't see why it is supposed to have 'rights' that I do not.
I can't take your blood without your ongoing permission. I can't take your tissue, I can't use your organs, etc. This is true even if I'm your kid, and even if you've promised to donate an organ to save my life.
Up until the point where you're physically unconscious on the table, you can get up and walk out, even if it kills me. You even have the ability to kill me to stop me if I insist on living at your expense.
Sex without consent is rape (you can kill me to stop me there too). This is worse. We have a word to describe 'imposing on someone else's body, for months, where the one imposing has all the benefits and the one being imposed upon has the physical/emotional/financial trauma'. The word is 'slavery', and it works pretty well... and you can kill someone to prevent yourself from being enslaved. If we're serious about giving a fetus (especially a mindless fetus) 'rights', then the appropriate way to do that is amend the Constitution to allow women to be enslaved by their fetus, if that sounds like a hard sell it's supposed to be.
The problem with Roe is the Supremes wanted to leave the gov with the ability to meddle.
"
@morat20
Yes, explaining that the gov's spending, which is mostly on entitlements, *your* entitlements, isn't sustainable or good for the economy long term is a hard sell. It's even a harder sell when "long term" is FAR longer than the current election cycle and it's enough decades in the future that you might be dead.
However math is without mercy.
FDR started us down this path, and ever since then gov spending as a percentage of GDP has basically gone up (excluding WW2), and gov spending on entitlements (i.e. politicians using your money to buy your vote) has only gone up. Gov spending trends up over the decades, growth in the economy trends down. That's a problem.
How do we pay for all these wonderful benefits we've promised everyone? When does the gov stop expanding? So... where does it end? Communism (the ultimate in state control) has shown itself an abject failure enough times that it's not a problem in implementation.
IMHO it's very fair to say we need a state to function.
IMHO it's also very fair to say the state is too big, doesn't function especially well, wastes money, is prone to corruption and other abuses of power, and is attempting to do things best left to the markets. Every generation of politicians needs to *do* *something* to justify their existence, we haven't figured out a way for that *something* to be shrinking the state as opposed to growing it.
The gov really should get out of the business of job destruction.
"
The 13th AM would be a good choice.
"
I would like to think that America is becoming less racist as the pre-civil rights generation dies off. I'm not sure if we have a good way to measure this however.
"
Speaking as a member of the Money! faction (although sadly that's not the same as actually having money) the GOP is at their best when they're out of power.
Give them a super majority and instead of tax reform or entitlement reform we get the Medicare Drug Expansion.
"
We're not in enough pain yet. Spending other people's money is popular until you run out and melt down the economy.
"
@ltl-ftc
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's odd for him to be supported by anti-semites. His daughter and grandkids are Jewish. He's been on record thinking it's great for years.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/06/donald-trump-on-jewish-daughter-ivanka-this-wasnt-in-the-plan-but-im-very-glad-it-happened-video/#
"
Let me channel my "evangelical" for a moment. Warning: Seriously Not me.
I'm voting for Trump hands down. Trump is really clear on who he'd put on the Supreme Court, and that's the only thing which matters for a President.
So he gets a pass on multiple divorces and not being in God's pocket personally (and all Politicians probably go to hell anyway so whatever).
"
@peter-green
All true. When I say it "worked", I'm talking "won him this next election", which is the time frame politicians function. From that point of view, it absolutely worked because it won him the election.
And yes, it also destroyed the party by scaring the hell out of the Hispanics, and the legal immigrants made the effort to become citizens so they could then vote Dem. Something GOP forgot was lots of illegal immigrants have legal relatives, and trying to rip apart families gets you branded as insane.
Wilson deserves to be remembered as the man who burned down the California GOP. But this kind of 'next election' time frame thinking causes all sorts of problems. The pension crisis is basically that, ditto our various other entitlements, and I'd argue Mayor Young of Detroit set the city on a path towards bankruptcy with his actions... although to be fair the bill didn't come due until after he'd left office and even died.
"
@mike-dwyer
The rules are set up so that's close to impossible. Winner takes all really punishes the lesser parties and rewards the big guys. That's why the Tea Party joined the GOP.
It took slavery to create the GOP and destroy the Whigs. I don't think we're anywhere close to being that divided, nor the big parties that dysfunctional. If Trump goes down in flames he gets written off as a bad idea and everyone moves on.
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules”
Prediction: Trump gets blown out of the water. Epic loss.
GOP keeps the House.
GOP, barely, keeps the Senate.
Very strong showing by Gary Johnson (by 3rd party candidate norms), but Hillary wins.
The problem is I'm not sure how much is wishful thinking.
On “This Party Cannot Be Saved”
IMHO we're not there yet. It depends on how hurt the GOP is by this election. Ideally they'll get hurt really bad and then give some Hispanic Conservative (maybe even one of the ones who was supposed to win this time) the nod to run against Hillary in 4 years.
The problem with the California-Wilson example is that for Wilson it *worked*. His policies passed, Wilson won reelection, party as a whole followed him, and yes, it sent the party over a cliff a few years down the line but that was down the line.
Mainstream GOP leaders still haven't really signed on to Trump. They've got the problem that the guy who won the election is who he is, but he really did win the nod. They've also got the problem that Trump is still pretty much an unknown in terms of what he's going to do.
And yes, agreed, there's still a lot of room for Trump to send the party over a cliff if he wins.
On “Linky Friday #177: Creatures, Cities, Calories”
@alan-scott
Fair enough, so let's look at other stats.
#1) A 2005 study... three highly selective private research universities... admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):
Whites (non-recruited athlete/non-legacy status): 0 (control group)
Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: –50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[74]
#2) ...students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African Americans who got 1100.[75]
#3) After controlling for grades, test scores, family background (legacy status), and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete), Espenshade and Radford found that whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_United_States
"
Hmm... dueling links. So, fine, let's toss that study and look at the underlying data, ideally in a historical graph and not a snapshot.
I'm on page three
http://opa.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/UndergraduateDemographics.pdf
What I take away from this is:
1) Prop 209's 'effect' apparently took place before it's actual effect (meaning it was in the news and everyone was expecting it). Notice black+hispanic enrollment drop a lot ahead of time.
2) White enrollment... I'm inclined to call that blip down an anomaly and say it was largely flat.
3) Asian was trending up before and they continued to trend up after.
I don't think we have enough detail here to make a sound judgement (which is really weird, there's enough of a drop in the Black/Hispanic numbers that there should be a bounce somewhere else). Raw/Better numbers are below, but they don't cover the bridge years (probably deliberately).
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/04/admits_archival.shtml
"
@alan-scott
Siting the "actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated" is not "begging the question". The original question was whether Affirmative Action penalized Asians rather than Whites, the actual experience of removing it is "yes".
Harvard has "a number of slots to fill" as it's sometimes put, and for all the squeaking about it being a "holistic" practice, the actual results look like a quota system. They want a class which has X% of a race, they move the goalposts until they get that.
That Whites aren't rewarded or penalized is... weird. I'd think it deliberate but we see something similar with Silicon Valley employment stats broken down by race. For all the talk in the media about a lack of minority representation, the percentage of Whites is only at or slightly-below their population percentage.
"
At some point people become individuals I guess. I work with the shortest woman in the building. She told me it took a while but now doesn't process me as 'tall' unless it's pointed out somehow.
"
(Just going to quote here, but bold parts are for emphasis and I've snipped some. link at bottom)
Ending affirmative action would devastate most minority college enrollment
Study finds virtually no gain for white students
Princeton University researchers have found that ignoring race in elite college admissions would result in sharp declines in the numbers of African Americans and Hispanics accepted with little gain for white students.
In a study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, authors Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung examined the controversial notion that eliminating affirmative action would lead to the admission of more white students to college and found it to be false. The assertion that qualified white students are being displaced by less qualified minority students was a prime plaintiff argument in the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court cases against the University of Michigan (Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger).
..."The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated."
According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While these declines are dramatic, the authors note that the long-term impact could be worse.
...The authors also cite other studies and the actual experience of the University of California system where affirmative action has been eliminated: "The impacts are striking. Compared to the fall of 1996, the number of underrepresented minority students admitted to the University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School for the fall of 1997 dropped 66 percent from 162 to 55.... African-American applicants were particularly affected as their admission numbers declined by 81 percent from 75 to 14, but acceptances of Hispanics also fell by 50 percent. ...
Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. ...
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/78Q19/index.xml?section=newsreleases
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.