Um, Duh: Affirmative Action Is Setting Students Up For Failure
This drive to dot schools with certain colors of student faces rather than a certain level of competence is hurting the students they admit -- those who are ill-prepared to meet anything but the face-color quotas.
Two letters have come out at Smith College that reflect this, reports Blake Neff at The Daily Caller.
The controversy in question concerns two letters sent by faculty in Smith's School for Social Work to school administrators. Although the letters were initially private, they were leaked to students at the school by an unknown person, who said they wished to reveal the "violent, racist rhetoric directed toward students of color on the Smith campus."The first letter, sent by professor Dennis Miehls, warns that the school was failing in its "gatekeeper" function by admitting too many academically unprepared applicants.
A separate letter, from adjunct professors, says this:
"There is clearly something terribly faulty with the admission policy when scores of students develop, from the very start, serious problems in both their academic performance and their field experience," the letter said. "What many people are thinking but afraid to say is that when students are admitted who do not have the academic qualifications to do well enough in a rigorous, demanding, stressful program ... these students are being set up for failure."This is unethical and immoral," the letter adds. "But beyond that, we must acknowledge that social work -- like every other kind of work -- is not for everyone, and we have to stop pretending that it can be."
Clarence Thomas made this argument in Fisher, notes Dan McLaughlin at The Federalist:
The University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched. But, as a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete. Setting aside the damage wreaked upon the self-confidence of these overmatched students, there is no evidence that they learn more at the University than they would have learned at other schools for which they were better prepared. Indeed, they may learn less.
It isn't just people "of color" who have this problem. At the link above, there's a bit from Dick Cheney, talking about how he only got into Yale because he was from Wyoming. He wasn't up for it, and, as he puts it, "In the Spring of 1962, Yale and I parted ways."
McLaughlin adds:
Cheney ended up going home, discouraged about school, and working at laying power lines. He would later return to his education at the University of Wyoming, which was more his speed, graduate successfully, and a little more than a decade later he was White House chief of staff.Nobody familiar with his subsequent career would argue Cheney was somehow intellectually inferior. But he was both academically and socially unprepared at 18 for Yale, and it nearly ended his education. If we are serious about educating young people of every color--especially in an age when college dropouts often leave with massive debts they can never hope to repay--we should want to avoid subjecting more of them to experiences like Cheney's.
Meanwhile, at Smith, the person who linked the letters is sure it's whitey and whitey hatred to blame, writing in a cover note with the letters:
"We feel that it is critical to share these letters with the community, in order to facilitate transparency and accountability around the violent, racist rhetoric directed toward students of color on the Smith campus. The language in these letters contributes to a climate of fear experienced by students of color at Smith and exemplifies how individuals in positions of power are both participatory and complicit in white supremacist systems at the school."As an example of "white supremacist language and ideology" in the letters, it cited references to minority students' "perceptions of racism," rather than treating those perceptions as real.
And the comments on admissions particularly upset the person who leaked the letters and many students. "The use of the term 'tainted' to describe a supposed degeneration in quality of students at Smith calls upon a historically racist discourse which casts people of color or others deemed 'lesser than' as contaminants of a pure white bloodline. This is violent language that is completely unacceptable to use in reference to students at this institution."
Smith is a tough school. The friends' daughter I know who went there for undergrad had parents who put everything toward her education, sending her to Marlborough, an expensive private school in Los Angeles (probably $40K a year, with expenses). She's extremely bright and a high achiever -- and has been one and one amongst other very bright high achievers all her life.
What's sick and awful and "tainted" is a process that lets students into a school they are not prepared to handle. Where they are doomed to fail -- leaving them with, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans they can't pay back and career prospects that range from Starbucks to Applebee's.
Can't students who get into a college they're not prepared for do what Cheney did--withdraw and go someplace more suited to their needs?
As for "hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans they can't pay back and career prospects that range from Starbucks to Applebee's"--that's what kids who succeed in college face these days.
Rex Little at August 22, 2016 10:38 PM
Withdraw and admit failure - that's hard to do for a teenager. I remember my time in college - I was in the wrong damned major, but couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge this. Teenagers generally lack the experience to step back from a situation and look at it objectively. Heck, most adults lack that ability.
No, it's on the colleges. They should only admit students who have a good chance to meet the college's standards. Affirmative action is hugely counterproductive. Not only do you damage the kids who are in over their heads, you damage the credibility of all the minority kids who *aren't* in over their heads. It's just nuts.
Consider: Medical schools are under huge pressure to graduate more black students. Look at this chart: a black student with a 3.3 GPA and an MCAT of 25 has roughly the same chance of admission as an asian student with a 3.7 GPA and a 31 MCAT. Worse, some medical schools have been caught grading black students differently, in order to avoid failing them out.
You, as a patient, have no insight into any of this. If you have a choice of going to two doctors, one of whom is black: why would you choose ever choose black doctor? The people who should really be pissed off are the black doctors who really are qualified!
a_random_guy at August 23, 2016 1:58 AM
I've said this, too, a_random_guy. In fact, just the other day:
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2016/08/22/diversity_polic.html
Amy Alkon at August 23, 2016 4:24 AM
you damage the credibility of all the minority kids who *aren't* in over their heads.
True, but you do this not by admitting unqualified students, but by handing them credentials which say they succeeded when in fact they failed. That's a different problem than what Amy posted.
Rex Little at August 23, 2016 4:59 AM
A friend at work thought he'd enroll in the SECOND year math class at MIT, because he'd always taken advanced math at his high school.
Then, on the first day, he noticed that he had never seen the 5th or 6th symbols the TA put on the board, so he immediately got up, went back to the office and signed up for the proper first-year class.
Somehow, this is impossible for students today, I guess, since they've been told all their life that it's someone else that isn't performing when they have problems...
Bad ol' whitey invented that nasty physics, and it doesn't recognize my culture!
Radwaste at August 23, 2016 6:17 AM
The SJWs have set up a neat tautology for themselves. They demand affirmative-action admissions of unprepared minorities. When those students inevitably fail, that gives the SJWs ammunition to scream that racism and sexism are WORSE THAN EVAH!!!!!#3!!!!!!, and the school is compelled to double down on what didn't work the first time. Rinse, repeat. It keeps those foundation dollars rolling in at the activist headquarters, and never mind who it harms -- the AA students who unfairly get stuck with the "failure" label, the more qualified students who are excluded, or the school's other students who see their school lose cred and the value of their degrees decline.
Cousin Dave at August 23, 2016 6:44 AM
At that point you are engaging in fraud Rex as well as racism. Having one set of standards for people who have one skin color and another set of standards for another skin color is just bad business. Admitting people you are pretty sure won't succeed is also bad business. Be it because of their skin color or their parents (legacy admissions). You are taking their money with little intent of actually providing the service that was paid for.
Rad, that isn't solely a US thing. My first roommate was an Indian fellow (dot not feather). His father was an oil minister in Dubai. He was used to leaning on his father's position. The idea that he didn't have any servants was hard enough. But the fact that I tested out of Calc 1 & 2 while he didn't was especially galling. After listening to his rant for a while I asked him what the derivative of e^x was. He didn't know. He insisted that wasn't important. For those of you who don't know calculus e^x is the integral/differential identity. Not knowing this is the same as not know x+0 for addition. 0 is the additive identity. If you don't know what x+0 is you haven't mastered addition. If you don't know d/dx(e^x) you haven't mastered calculus.
Long story short, arrogant ignorance it's not just for Americans.
Ben at August 23, 2016 6:53 AM
"She's extremely bright and a high achiever -- and has been one and one amongst other very bright high achievers all her life. "
I have no doubt, but... At that age, "bright" is not usually defined in terms of actual knowledge held, because the students haven't been around long enough to have learned a whole lot. Instead, it's defined in terms of the student's ability to learn, to absorb what they are taught and then apply that teaching to problems that are presented to them by the instructor.
The big pink elephant in the room is: how much of what they are being taught is actually true? That's a big problem these days. Most of the liberal-arts schools are teaching intellectual Gnosticism, which goes: "We the elites determine what is true about the physical universe and what is true about human beings. Ignore the evidence from your own lying eyes. The things that we say are factually true because we are the ones saying them. You must accept these things as true in order to be in our tribe. Otherwise, we will brand you as hoi-polloi, incapable of thought." Students get the message quickly. And then they graduate having been mal-educated, actually knowing less than they did when they were admitted, and then they find that they have no skills that apply to anything in the real world. They're bright, yeah. But in terms of knowing things that are actually true, they are quite stupid. And because they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are the Smartest People In The Room, it's nearly impossible for them to do any further learning.
Cousin Dave at August 23, 2016 6:55 AM
I'll throw out one other bit, which was my own personal experience with hitting an academic brick wall. Starting with second grade, my parents had sent me to a private school, which was highly regarded for academics at the time. But halfway through the fifth grade, my parents divorced and we moved, and I was placed in a public school. I spent the next 2-1/2 years, through the seventh grade, in public schools, and by the end of the seventh grade, they were just getting to things that I had learned in the fourth and fifth grades in the private school. So needless to say, I cruised through those grades. I liked reading and I did learn some things on my own, but nobody or nothing was challenging me intellectually.
Then, in the eighth grade, I was placed in a private school again. Wham! I remember question on a pop quiz on my second or third day in science class, asking questions about certain types of proteins, none of which I had learned because it had not been taught in the public school I had attended the previous year. I think I made a 60 on that quiz. I was used to getting high grades without working very hard, so it was devastating. The whole fall that year went like that.
Time after time, over the next four years, I found myself facing questions about subjects on which I had not been taught, and fighting just to maintain passing grades. And since it was high school, dropping classes and taking easier ones wasn't an option. I had to just gut it out. It wasn't until the end of my junior year that my grades came back up and I felt like I had caught up with my classmates.
Cousin Dave at August 23, 2016 7:08 AM
They should only admit students who meet the college's academic standards.
Fixed it for ya. Yes, I know I'm a dirty, dirty racist.
But grades should be colorblind - you either know the material and can demonstrate that knowledge, or you can't. If they're passing them along when they should have washed out, then they're doing themselves, their students and the rest of us a huge disservice.
And in the medical field, a couple of malpractice suits will get you out of private practice in short order.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 23, 2016 7:14 AM
Part of the problem is the obsession with Ivy League schools. Do we really want a society where access to the most important and rewarding careers is controlled by a few admissions officers (who are these people? what are their values?) at a small number of institutions?
Peter Drucker wrote way back in 1969 that a huge advantage America had over Europe was that we didn't have a distinction between 'schools for leaders' and 'schools for followers.' We have lost a lot of that advantage.
David Foster at August 23, 2016 7:28 AM
Radwaste..."Then, on the first day, he noticed that he had never seen the 5th or 6th symbols the TA put on the board, so he immediately got up, went back to the office and signed up for the proper first-year class."
The American Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was initially offered a regimental command, despite his lack of military experience (college professor). He turned it down and chose instead to become deputy commander of another regiment under an experienced officer. Learned on the job, he did.
How many Americans today would make Chamberlain's wise choice? I'm afraid that many, under the influence of 'self-esteem' and 'fail upwards', would choose to jump right into the regimental command job.
david foster at August 23, 2016 7:33 AM
"And in the medical field, a couple of malpractice suits will get you out of private practice in short order."
Wouldn't it be interesting to graph the number of malpractice suits with the colleges who conferred the degree in medicine?
Radwaste at August 23, 2016 7:38 AM
@David Foster: Part of the problem is the obsession with Ivy League schools. Do we really want a society where access to the most important and rewarding careers is controlled by a few admissions officers (who are these people? what are their values?) at a small number of institutions?
Part of the problem with that, I think, is the drive to get more and more people into college, regardless of whether they have any business being there. With so many people going, the degree from Directional State means much less than it did a generation ago, leaving only elite degrees with any real weight.
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at August 23, 2016 8:46 AM
interesting to graph the number of malpractice suits with the colleges who conferred the degree in medicine?
Radwaste at August 23, 2016 7:38 AM
I doubt if it would tell you much. Malpractice suits follow deep pockets, and friendly venues and juraidictions. Because of those overriding factors, any doctor negligence would be swamped by the other incentives in the system.
In orther news,what most often happens with under qualified applicants at elite schools is;. They usually dont leave for a less academically challenging school, because the student loan industy and the colleges themselves insure that doing that means you start at ground zero, and must reapply for all scholarhsips and loans, and probably lose all your academic credit.
What they do is change their major to communications, or gender studies. Anything that will keep them at the school and keep the money rolling in, until it comes time to collect that worthless degree, and default on all that debt.
"Part of the problem with that, I think, is the drive to get more and more people into college, regardless of whether they have any business being there. With so many people going, the degree from Directional State means much less than it did a generation ago, leaving only elite degrees with any real weight."
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at August 23, 2016 8:46 AM
At all schools these days, anything other than STEM is Potemkin degrees all the way down.
The fact that the Ivy League still retains some reputation is mostly due to the fact that people dont know how even the best schools have been totally undermined by affirmative action.
Isab at August 23, 2016 9:47 AM
I disagree with you RPM. The real issue is degrees without commercial value being treated like they have commercial value. I.e. the go to college to learn how to learn crowd. When the information they impart has to extrinsic value you end up ranking people based on how hard it was to get into the institution in the first place instead of based on what they learned and can now do. If you are using university admissions as a kind of intelligence test (since actual ones are outlawed) you naturally have this Ivy to state scale.
Ben at August 23, 2016 9:56 AM
Yeah, this was all over the Smith Alum groups. Between this and the transgender stuff, Smithies are having a veritable civil war.
NicoleK at August 23, 2016 10:31 AM
If you have a choice of going to two doctors, one of whom is black: why would you choose ever choose black doctor? The people who should really be pissed off are the black doctors who really are qualified!
a_random_guy at August 23, 2016 1:58 AM
Well, if YOU'RE black and making the choice, maybe a particular doctor might be less qualified than another doctor - in SOME ways, that is - but if the first doctor is black, that doctor could well be more aware and sensitive to certain health factors for black people that white doctors might be more ignorant of. I seem to remember more than one study about this.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=white+doctors+black+patients
lenona at August 23, 2016 11:52 AM
Affirmative Action is not setting minority students up for failure, the school systems are setting them up for failure. Affirmative Action is just the government turning a blind eye to its own mis-steps and creating a straw man of racism and racist admissions to cover up the fact that our school systems, long under the control of the edu-crats and teachers' unions, have failed the very children who need them most.
The time to reform college admissions is not at the registrar's doorstep. It's in the elementary grades. Start students on a track that prepares them for academically rigorous programs.
Conan the Grammarian at August 23, 2016 12:25 PM
Grades from which schools? Public High School A is a grade mill and its average GPA for graduating seniors is 4.5 while Public High School B is a rigorous program and its average GPA for graduating seniors is 3.24. Which will do better in college, an honors student from A or a mediocre student from B? All other things being equal, my money's on B. But those pesky all other things are never equal, are they?
Conan the Grammarian at August 23, 2016 12:32 PM
But the Smith program is a grad program, and co-ed to boot. Makes you wonder where their students went to undergrad.
KateC at August 23, 2016 4:06 PM
If you have a choice of going to two doctors, one of whom is black: why would you choose ever choose black doctor? The people who should really be pissed off are the black doctors who really are qualified!
a_random_guy at August 23, 2016 1:58 AM
Well, if YOU'RE black and making the choice, maybe a particular doctor might be less qualified than another doctor - in SOME ways, that is - but if the first doctor is black, that doctor could well be more aware and sensitive to certain health factors for black people that white doctors might be more ignorant of. I seem to remember more than one study about this.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=white+doctors+black+patients
lenona at August 23, 2016 11:52 AM
==========================================
I don't care if my doctor had a 2.0 GPA, went to medical school in Grenada and had to be rescued by Clint Eastwood and Mario Van Peebles.
I do care that my doctor be curious, active, interested in the cause of a medical problem and not just whip out the 'scrip' pad with the standard "on a scale of 1-10 how do you rate your pain" and then proceed to prescribe a drug to mask the symptoms.
I recently had to choose between a white doc and a black doc at my HMO, and I chose the black doc. Why? Luckily, I was able to observe how he handled an unusual problem that my dad developed. He was found by the random doctor generator punched in by the Wound Center and my dad was lucky to get the right type of doctor.
Jay J. Hector at August 23, 2016 5:49 PM
"in SOME ways, that is - but if the first doctor is black, that doctor could well be more aware and sensitive to certain health factors for black people that white doctors might be more ignorant of. "
This whole "I have to have a doctor that looks like me" trend is prejudice of the worst sort. It's complete, utter bullshit, and any conclusions to the contrary are to be rejected out of hand by any thinking person. The best dentist I've ever been to, by far, was a woman, and it makes me sad and a bit anxious that she had to retire for health reasons. (Fortunately I haven't had any dental issues since then, but I worry about how things will go with my current dentist when that time comes.)
I've had women doctors and Hispanic doctors (no black doctors yet). My current G.P. is second-generation Korean. What's the big deal? They are all human beings. Some are better than others, but you can't tell that by just looking at them. The day when robot doctors arrive, I wonder if it will be necessary to have some painted black, some brown, some red, and some with bolt-on boob shapes.
Cousin Dave at August 24, 2016 6:54 AM
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