response 21 of 232:

Jan 16 13:43 UTC 2003

re resp:19: I had to respond to that comment separately.

The U-M is pretty proactive about bringing in non-traditional students, 
students from troubled backgrounds, and those with unusual 
circumstances.  I guess that's the purpose of the provost's 20 
discretionary points.

response 23 of 232:

Jan 16 20:24 UTC 2003

So that the elite college has a fair representation of all communities
for the purpose of diversity in backgrounds, attitudes, and perspectives,
which are essential for a well-rounded education. 

In addition, there is NO measure that a-prior ensures success or failure
in higher education. There are statistical relations between groups from
different backgrounds, but one cannot say with assurance what will happen
with particular individuals. A rigid admissiion based just on prior
academic achievement is ensured to omit some students that will actually
succeed better than some of those admitted on such a narrow basis. 

response 27 of 232:

Jan 17 00:03 UTC 2003

An easy way to pick apart claims of unfairness is to ask those who claim their
group isn't being treated fairly to consider whether they'd want to switch
sides with the person they think is getting better treatment.  So, would those
of you white people who think your race has kept you from getting into the
Unviersity of Michigan, would you prefer to have grown up as a black person
in Michigan?  Would those of you who've attended the 16% black Ann Arbor
schools prefer to have attended school in Detroit, where I don't have figures
for the school system, but the city is 82% black?  What about those who are
presumably this case's primary constituency, the "Reagan Democrats" of 2.7%
black Macomb County (right across 8 Mile Road from 82% black Detroit)?  Are
they clamoring to switch places black Detroiters?  Probably not, because
Michigan is still a very segregated state, and it's very clear that conditions
are nowhere near equal between the state's two main races.

I fully agree, the current ways of dealing with race in the US are lousy, and
everybody should be treated differently.  Unfortunately, that isn't happening,
and Affirmative Action is an attempt to compensate, not the cause itself. 
What we have now is equivalent to a race (in the other meaning of the word)
where one group of people starts behind the main pack, get tripped up
frequently along the way, and then gets given some extra points at the finish
line to make up for some of the time they lost.  A few people in that group
may be such good runners that they manage to catch up to and pass the main
pack, and don't need the bonus points.  Some people in the main pack may be
sufficiently bad runners that they end up behind those who started behind
them.  Still, nobody's being helped so much by the bonus points that they're
better off than if they'd started in the main pack.

I hope we can all agree that a race run like that would be a farce.  However,
what would even things would would be to eliminate the different treatments
of the groups at the beginning.  Eliminating the bonus points at the end
without changing the discrimination at the beginning would do nothing useful.
The same goes for racial discrimination.  It should be gotten rid of, from
the start, and everybody should be treated equally.  But leaving things as
they are, with all the rampant discrimination that goes on, while getting rid
of the Affirmative Action that attempts to compensate for it, isn't going to
help anything.

response 29 of 232:

Jan 17 00:17 UTC 2003

re:  "#24 (aruba): klg shows his lack of understanding of mathematics 
and statistics when he/she tries to make that statement into "there will 
be no qualified minority doctors and lawyers if we don't have 
affirmative action" (not an exact quote). "

I don't know if it's an exact quote or not, since I didn't say it.

But thanks for the kind words, anyway.

response 31 of 232:

Jan 17 03:01 UTC 2003

Does that % apply to the total student body - or just undergrad?  If it 
is the total student body, then you need to consider the pool from which 
grad students can be drawn, which is probably < 13% "black."

Also, considering the high dropout rate among affirmative action 
admittants, it might be interesting to know the makeup of the freshman 
class before the attrition began.

response 33 of 232:

Jan 17 11:08 UTC 2003

re #20 ... actually, n an interview i heard today, the texas 10% criterion
DID make a significant difference - not in the first year - but as the
system progresssed the admissions balalnced the culture.
  
as for graduations ... well, that's different entirelky. and a toic
topic for another itme.

response 35 of 232:

Jan 17 15:51 UTC 2003

I read in the AA News yesterday that one of the U. Texas campuses 
(Austin?) dropped it's affirmative action admissions, and had a 25% 
drop in black admissions.  They then adopted the top 10% rule and their 
racial balance has been moving back to what it used to be, but isn't 
quite there yet.  I don't remember the numbers on how close it has 
gotten to what it was before.

response 37 of 232:

Jan 17 18:16 UTC 2003

Enrollees who did not supply ethnic information?

response 39 of 232:

Jan 17 19:41 UTC 2003

If your goal is to have something that looks diverse, and your high schools
are all fully segregated, the 10% rule would work reasonaly well.  I still
think it's a pretty poor Affirmative Action substitute.

The Ann Arbor Public Schools, through the analysis of racial data in the
drawing of school district boundaries and the dreaded quotas (yes, really
quotas, not bonus points) in determining admissions to the alternative
schools, manage to be pretty diverse at the per building level.  However, when
I was a student there (graduating seven years ago), there still wasn't mixing
between black and white students.  With a few exceptions, people of different
races didn't tend to socialize together or eat lunch together, or anything
like that.  There was also a big racial achievement gap.  So despite the
buildings being integrated, there was still clearly a lot of segregation, and
something seemed to be creating a big disadvantage for the black students.
Using the 10% rule, black students from the Detroit area, where rigid
segregation at the school district level has been maintained, would be
admitted to the University in the same proportion as white students from the
Detroit area.  However, black students from a place like Ann Arbor that had
attempted to integrate its schools would apparrently remain at a big
disadvantage.

Another issue here, though, is that I think the argument about diversity
helping the white students is somewhat of a smokescreen for those afraid to
support Affirmative Action on its more important merits -- compensating for
other bad treatment of black people in the US.  It appears that nobody thinks
they can sell contemporary American society on doing anything to help a
segment of scoiety other than white people.  Maybe they're right, but I find
that rather sad.

Way back there, somebody asked if the eliminiation of Affirmative Action had
turned the University of California campuses into a "sea of white faces." 
The simple answer to that is no.  You don't see a "sea of white faces" in the
big urban areas of California, anywhere.  But I don't tend to see a lot of
black faces wandering around the UC Berkeley campus either.  I don't have the
statistics in front of me, but my impression was that there was a significant
drop in black UC enrollment when Affirmative Action was outlawed, and that
continues to be a source of campus protests.

response 41 of 232:

Jan 17 20:50 UTC 2003

Re #39: This article has a statistic that may be the one you're thinking of:
Minority enrollment lags under plans Bush favors
http://www.freep.com/news/mich/class17_20030117.htm

"Percentage plans guarantee admissions to a percentage of the graduating
class at each high school. In California, the top 4 percent of graduates
are guaranteed a spot in the University of California System."
...
"Yet the results have not met expectations. Today, fewer minorities
enroll in California's most-selective universities than before
affirmative action was banned in 1995. U-C Berkeley enrolled 222
African-American students in 1995, out of 3,405 freshmen. That compares
with 141 African Americans out of 3,655 freshmen in 2002."
...
"At the same time, some of the least-selective California universities
have increased their minority enrollments, leading to concerns that the
U-C system could become racially divided."

[We're headed back towards seperate but (un)equal, I guess.]

There's also a couple quotes from UofM President Sue Coleman.  One is
that the Texas and California plans put universities in the
uncomfortable position of depending on high schools being segregated to
integrate universities.  The other points out that unlike the University
of California, the University of Michigan is a single institution, not a
state-wide system, and couldn't guarantee enough admission slots to take
a fixed percentage from each high school.