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Michael Berkowitz's avatar

Congratulations on a very well-written essay, Mr. Knospe.

I don't recall any issues with your reasoning offhand, but I question your axioms.

For one thing, why must admissions to private institutions be "fair"? As long as they're not lying to anyone about their policies they're simply exercising the prerogatives of ownership. If the whole reason is, as you put it "to restore societal faith in meritocracy" then I will posit that a) I never had faith in meritocracy and b) I see no advantage to promoting such.

For another thing, I think LBJ's quote was correct but misapplied. Certainly it's unreasonable to consider the newly-freed man as other than handicapped in the race, but that doesn't imply that we should stop running races or should in fact run them with the handicapped starting closer to the finish line. Tranposed to our topic, it could be that students whose academics don't qualify them for a particular college should go to a different college -- even if they would have been capable of achieving more had they been blessed with more fortunate lives.

These points are arguable. One could claim that preferential treatment has benefitted society as a whole, justifying the harm done to some individuals, but I'd want to see both the evidence of the former and the reasoning behind the latter.

One could claim, as well, that we benefit from a "real" meritocracy, but then I'd want to know why we would and why you believe such a thing is achievable.

Still, an excellent essay.

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The Ghost of Tariq Aziz's avatar

To me, the advantage of affirmative action was never that it was fair. Rather, it was a way of assuring that the composition of elites bear some resemblance to the underlying distribution of ethnic, cultural, and religious groups in society. There's plenty of economic research looking at caste and gender reservations in politics that suggest that legally mandated diversification does yield improvements in the conditions of under-represented groups (for example, "Can Mandated Political Representation Increase Policy Influence for Disadvantaged Minorities? Theory and Evidence from India" by Rohini Pande).

I think the chief problem with college admissions today is that it's become impossible to get into a prestigious school. The simplest solution would just be for the elite universities to double or triple in size. I know that Stanford, for one, would like to increase the size of its undergraduate student body, but Palo Alto won't let them. Another win for NIMBYism!

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