Often what replaces affirmative action is even worse.
For instance, in Texas, they got rid of affirmative action. Instead, they had a rule that if you scored within the top 10% of your class, you got a spot in UT. That way, they could still get a fair amount of 'diversity' so the thinking went. Except schools vary so much that you could be average at one school and in the top 5% at another. So it tended to favor so-so students at mediocre schools over brighter students at more competitive schools.
Another example is police and firefighter exams. The passing rates vary hugely by race, if the tests are made to be hard. This doesn't fly with the courts. So they dumb down the tests until the passing rates are close to identical for all groups. Of course, by that point, the test results are near meaningless; you'd be much better off with say, taking the top X% of each group, in what's known as race-norming, aka quotas.
To put it more concretely, imagine you run a security detail, and you need to recruit some guards. You need to impose a strength test, but any real strength test would necessarily discriminate against women. And you're not allowed to have that result. So your test ends up being, "raise your right hand." That's it. There's no more sex difference in strength! Of course, the results were meaningless. You would've been much better off by making applicants say, bench press and squat and then taken the top 5% of men and women, even though those top 5% of women would be far weaker than the corresponding men.
The problem with quotas is that they make the racial/sex preference explicit, whereas cheapening the test doesn't. It's a subtle point, but it's lost on all the mindless hacks who wade into the debate. And cheapening the test just turns the whole thing into a lottery; at best, it makes the decision based off things the test doesn't measure. Ivy League schools started caring more about bullshit 'extracurriculars' and whether you rowed crew or played the trombone after the SAT was dumbed down in the mid 1990s, aka 're-centered.' That effectively lobotomized the test's ability to pick out extremely brilliant people. High test scores became more common, so the colleges had to figure out other criteria on which to accept students. It's like if you were making a baseball team from the country's high school baseball players, and you were told who the top 1% are, in terms of pure skill. But that still meant thousands of players, and you only need 25. At that point, you'd say, "fuck, I don't know who's the best of the best, and who just narrowly made the cut. I'm just gonna pick whoever has hot sisters, and I'll make sure they come to our parties so I can bang them. Oh, guess that means no blacks or Asians, 'cause I only dig blondes." And that's not even irrational per se.
Quote: (10-01-2012 12:38 PM)Samseau Wrote:
Affirmative Action is contradictory with Equality
Depends. AA is consistent with 'equality,' if you mean 'equality of results.'
