Justice Scalia Suggests Blacks Belong at "Slower" Colleges

Bentleyspop said:

PJ_Soul said:

Anyone else kind of feel like we've all time traveled back to 1962 recently?

I was thinking 1952

Let's do the time warp again!

get passed the racial insensitivity the bottom line is it doesn't help anyone to admit kids to schools they can't achieve at. admitting students just for numbers and perception who most likely won't make it through just hurts the students themselves. Poorly stated by Scalia...but not wholly incorrect either.

pjhawks said:

get passed the racial insensitivity the bottom line is it doesn't help anyone to admit kids to schools they can't achieve at. admitting students just for numbers and perception who most likely won't make it through just hurts the students themselves. Poorly stated by Scalia...but not wholly incorrect either.

Not gonna give Scalia a pass that easily. What do you think about what I said above? Makes no difference? Good point? Irrelevant?

brianlux said:

pjhawks said:

get passed the racial insensitivity the bottom line is it doesn't help anyone to admit kids to schools they can't achieve at. admitting students just for numbers and perception who most likely won't make it through just hurts the students themselves. Poorly stated by Scalia...but not wholly incorrect either.

Not gonna give Scalia a pass that easily. What do you think about what I said above? Makes no difference? Good point? Irrelevant?

I think your point above is spot on. Maybe the process of choosing which students from those type of schools should be admitted needs to be changed. Clearly there are many who can have lower SATs and still achieve at a high level. We just need to maybe check a bit more to find them than arbitrarily picking an SAT score or what your class rank was.

Scalia likely had some valid and real points, but they were lost in his unfortunately racist overtones.

I think the overall point is valid - if you suspend your admittance criteria to force a population in, those who "benefit" from that really will be at a disadvantage with their peers. Put race aside. If a school decided they wanted more kids of veterans to attend, and suspended the rigorous academic standards to get the numbers they wanted, those kids may well have a hard time keeping up with the curriculum if they couldn't meet the baseline standard for admittance. Hell, I know I wouldn't have stood a chance at Columbia, MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth, whatever. I didn't have an embarrassing record coming out of high school, but would have been way over my head being surrounded by academic overachievers. Nothing to do with intelligence - more to do with my focus/priorities at the time, the curriculum, and the pace of learning. I was happy doing things at the pace i was used to, and would have floundered in an institution that requires almost religious diligence to the coursework. It would have been a setup for failure to admit me to one of those institutions.

I am opposed to affirmative action, not because it is attempting to give a less represented population a shot (I applaud that!), but because of the above - if they couldn't pass muster from an academic standpoint, and were admitted due to some other factor, they likely aren't going to be prepared to succeed. If they were ready to be admitted, it would have been reflected in their previous coursework and scores. I would like to see data, and I'm sure it exists, regarding the success rates/graduation rates of those students who get admitted on the basis of something other than academic achievement vis-a-vis the general student population who were admitted based on their academics.

is this the case where the plaintiff was too stupid to get into the school even if there was no affirmative action?

oh the irony.

ldent42 said:

HughFreakingDillon said:

two letters: E Q. the whole style of education needs to be reexamined and overhauled.

What's the E Q stand for?

And yes, gimmie, it is that case.

emotional quotient, instead of intelligence. we measure the wrong things with regards to how to succeed in life. intelligence is but a fraction of how to attain success.

gimmesometruth27 said:

is this the case where the plaintiff was too stupid to get into the school even if there was no affirmative action?

oh the irony.

She missed the mark by a couple of percentage points (finished outside the top 10%, but finished in top 12%). Did well on SATs. Had extracurricular and volunteer work. To categorize her as "too stupid" basically means that the 25% who were admitted on the basis of something other than academics are just as, or even more "stupid" (not my word), which supports Scalia's argument that they may not be ready for the rigors of an academically challenging school.

To specifically answer your question, we don't know, but based on how close she was to meeting the academic admission requirements it is likely that she would have been admitted if 25% of the slots weren't reserved for affirmative action.