I find affirmative action in a college admissions in intersting topic that has come up frequently in posts in the context of Strahilivetz's book. Nicolas Steenland and Angus Ni discuss the "Lowell effect" and how the policies have disproportionatelly impacted Asian Americans. Which leads me to the question of what are the goals of these affirmative action policies? And are they being reached?
The short answer to the first question is diversity. And this is something Strahilivetz discusses at length, and what the benefits are to a society that becomes more inclusive to avoid historical homogeneity. The benefits can be seen in a variety of scenarios, whether it be a college campus having people from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints sharing among each other and growing as adults, or even appellate judicial panels that have an amplifier effect when all share similar ideological beliefs and how panels are affected when members have a mixture of political viewpoints.
But affirmative action in college admissions is not only to increase the value of one's education through heterogeneity, but also to "level the playing field," which is a phrase I don't like. Perhaps it could better be described as an attempt to equalize opportunities. Regardless, it's unclear whether that goal is reached, especially given the discussions of Nicolas and Angus.
Nicolas mentions the "cut-off" method some universities use, where people that reach a certain class rank in high schools can achieve admittance into college. Texas used to use such a system, which scholars argued achieved overall greater diversity than a system that uses race.
There are a few reasons for this, and they have to do with the same principles that come up over and over again in the book. Using imperfect proxies for imperfect exclusionary mechanisms leads to imprefect results. I discussed this in my last post regarding using golf as an imperfect way to exclude based on income and race, and it also came up in discussions on criminality as proxies.
But in terms of academic opportunities, race is only one of many traits that are used by schools as an imperfect means to achieve diversity. James Heckman is an expert on the inequality that exists in America. He finds that half of the inequality in the present value of lifetime earnings is due to factors determined by age 18. This is also the age around when college admissions is determined. Which is why I worry that an equalizing opportunity policy that takes place around this time just happens too late to achieve the change desired.
Factors that determine a person's education capabilities and opportunities are affected by things like socioeconomic status, geographic location, type of household, level of education attained by a parent or guardian, and the like. This impacts things like how involved a parent or guardian is in one's education, from helping out with homework to being involved in the school system to exercising school choice, which has a huge effect on how well someone does in school. Such factors also have a racial component as Heckman finds in his article "Schools, Skills and Synapses." There is an education gap, much like Strahilivetz's discussion of the incarceration numbers, where different groups of people are affected by societal factors to varying degrees.
Andreas Baum elaborated on this "tricky issue" in his post, where he recognized that "even when we eliminate discrimination based on proxies which we find unacceptable, we still end up with the problem of discriminatory effects." Yet affirmative action in college admissions seems to go about it the opposite way. And by using race as a proxy for these societal advantages, while it does work in benefitting some it doesn't attack the heart of the issue in as successful a way as the high school class ranking system. And as Nicolas and Angus pointed out, it also creates what I see as problems with the system.
This problem I see with affirmative action I also see with the incarceration and criminal background discussion we've had in class, online, and that Strahilivetz has in his book. I can not get past the question of what kind of social meaning is attributed to race when things like affirmative action or mandatory criminal background checks are instituted. I understand that things like race and exclusion are delicate topics and incredibly complex, which is why I applaud Strahilevitz for discussing so many of these complexities in such an informative way. But I worry that when any type of classification is used in an attempt to correct for inequalities, whether they bring new harms, much like the harms brought to tenants with the change in landlord-tenant law that Conor Shaw pointed out.
My concern really came to a head on page 180. There Strahilevitz was discussing the inequalities in the criminal system, and how a welfarist or utilitarian should support his terms of view when he asked "Why shouldn't we help decision makers identify these particularly desirabe individuals [black non-criminal offenders versus black criminal offenders] with greater ease?" Upon reading that question, so many answers came to mind. Because we don't want to support what is honestly a racist system. We don't want to justify peoples racist opinions.
Asher's example of a UCLA student who was almost charged with a sex offense for peeing in a public is a perfect example. What kept that student and not others from having to register as a sex offender is bluntly put as advantage. That person was a very advantaged individual in the view of society overall. So society treated him differently. He used what means he had to protect himself from a sex offender label. Others who don't have that advantage are in such a higher risk of switching from desirable to undesirable that the question posed by Strahilevitz is so much more frightening. When that line is so thin, to then use systems that seem to give it so much more power, that is unsettling to me.
Now I am not saying that I don't support criminal background checks. I'd like to know whether my neighbors or murderers or sex offenders as much as anyone else. But my worry is that the more things like criminal labels are weighed by decision makers, the more the information becomes available, the more inequality that results. And while having criminal background checks leads to more hiring among African American males, I worry that by having such a check sends a signal that this group is deserving of suspicion, and that's such a harmful signal to send. I just don't want the sorting that Stahilevitz proposes to justify racism and a broken societal system. And while Strahilevitz openly mentions during the discussion regarding incarceration that he's setting aside other measures to fix inequality, I worry that in the real world, proposals like mandatory background checks won't just be an aside to other measures, but will replace them. And I worry about the type of legitimacy that some people could inappropriately read into mechanisms like the ones Strahilevitz proposes.
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