The colleges are currently staffed to the rafters with DEI administrators and faculty busy “giving back” by replicating themselves. That will take lots of time, lawsuits and lost tax preference status to rectify.
Something to keep an eye on as well is international admissions. I stumbled across a subreddit dedicated to this topic and was rather stunned by the amount of financial aid many schools are offering to international students - many of whom don’t seem to have especially compelling credentials. Naturally they’re all “POC” - mainly varieties of Asian and black. They also make use of the test optional policies - which is rather unbelievable for students applying from schools in Pakistan or Nigeria yet… the schools are allowing it.
There were nearly 3m African-born people in the US in 2020, up from a mere 80,000 in 1970.
Therefore many black 18YOs in 2024 are the children of African-born parents. This number was negligible fifty years ago when American blacks were almost all slave descendants.
Does anyone know how many 2024 black matriculants are DOAS and how many are children of recent African immigrants? Does anyone count?
I think the reparations folks have some preliminary numbers on these kinds of breakdowns. You might look there. It's not in the schools' interests to make such distinctions.
Must immediately cut off the money that supplies a steady stream of students to every one of these institutions, innocent or guilty. Reinstate the flow ONLY when the institutions attest they are in full compliance with all applicable anti-discrimination laws. Once they've so attested, proven violations of the law will place the institutions in legal jeopardy where they stand to lose accreditation, access to federal, state, and local funding, and penalty judgements for their illegal actions.
Such evidence as is turned up under discovery can then be used by individuals harmed by such discrimination to go after the institutions and the administrators directly responsible in high dollar class action civil suits. Crack open those huge endowments and give trial lawyers a clear path and mechanism to clean out the coffers unless and until the institutions change their tune. It's simply a matter of changing the incentives currently in place and allowing (rather than trying to force) existing systems to do what comes naturally to advance their own interests. That should do the trick.
UPDATE: Put in three private schools I've known in my travels as well as two local ones. Not one of the five was in the database. Sorry I didn't check it more thoroughly before posting.
One of the most interesting things in that piece and graphics is that it demonstrates how a massive share of higher ed institutions have quite minimal standards - the overwhelming majority of schools admit well over 50% of the people that submit an application, which is absurd. Like others, I have long recognized that the share of the public attending college or university going from 20% to 40% over the course of half a century is only possible by admitting huge numbers of 'students' that are in no way actual college material and that our perverse student loan system basically incentivizes schools to cram in as many warm bodies as possible, but the graphics in the NYT piece really shows how big of an issue that is even if they don't address that head on.
Obviously a disproportionate share of these underqualified students who end up with with hard to shake debt are black and Latinos, and from just a concern for other perspective it's immoral that we have a system - zealously defended - that is basically set up to fleece them, but hey it does let schools put out press releases about their commitment to diversity and some nice candid multicultural photos for their marketing.
I agree. It comes from a mistake about which way causality went in the college/financial success association. Ideally college would be far less expensive and attended by fewer people. It would also go back to the mission of producing educated people rather than focusing on career training. A motivated two digit IQ person should leave high school with the ability to earn a living and if this means welding classes instead of analytic geometry I'd be fine with that. Surely by the second year of high school we and the students can tell which track would be better for them.
Charles Murray writes well on this in his 2008 book "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality." It's kicking around in PDF format somewhere on the interwebs. Short (10 mins) BookTV segment with Murray talking about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmTr2EMt66c
Everyone with a triple-digit IQ should at least read Chapter 2 which clearly explains the real-world limits on capability with which lower-IQ people must cope (what Steve has written of in his "left-half of the bell curve" essays, and blindness to which by smart people I term "the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect").
A lot of higher IQ people don't work with 2 digit IQ people or interact with them on a customer or client basis in which they would get first-hand experience in what their limits are in terms of processing information and applying it.
Most are perfectly decent people, but the mistake a lot of people make is in thinking the difference between those lower down the socio-economic ladder and themselves are nebulous structural defects in society, like "lack of opportunity." They then make the mistake of thinking that like-cash aid or stuff like affirmative action will let them move ahead, when the reality is that they just don't have the capacity to leverage those things into a better situation.
One of the few professions in which high IQ people routinely interact with low IQ people and need to explain important things to them is medicine. The shock comes not from the fact that they can't understand basic science facts; it's from things you can't believe anyone cannot understand.
For example- Q-"last time you complained of heartburn and we gave you some pills for it. Did they help?" A- "I don't know." Q-"do you remember telling me you had heart burn last time?" A-"yes". Q-"did you take the pills I prescribed?" A-"yes." Q-"Is your heartburn any better?" A-"I don't know." Q-"Ok, so your heartburn is about the same as last week?" A- "Oh, I don't know the answers to these questions you're asking me" on and on for ten more minutes with no progress.
I have a relative who went to Yale and tried to get into Teach for America. She had some idea about how she was taught science in high school incorrectly and had a better way. This was the topic of the presentation she did as part of the application and she was rejected. I told her, whatever this insight you had was obviously, if anything, a better way to teach science to high IQ kids and that wouldn't be of great value to that program. If you could come up with a way to teach it better to average students you might have something...but after people have worked on it for a few centuries it's unlikely an amateur fresh out of college would crack that.
Just as Clinton and W and others pushed to increase minority homeownership to catapult them into the middle class, but which saddled many of them with foreclosures and bad credit ratings (and tanked the economy). Do gooders done bad.
Yep. They have thoroughly devalued a credential and have created a false sense of accomplishment (and thereby entitlement to economic and social rewards) that has further skewed our racial issues. Naturally the left sees this and tells them it's just more evidence of structural racism rather than that they were sold a bill of goods.
At MIT in the 1980s there were no majors in which to hide. You couldn't pass your classes with an IQ below 120, even in Poli-Sci I think. I had friends who were black and were graduated from tough engineering majors like EECompSci and Aero-astro. It was a running gag that no matter much you studied the exams were essentially IQ test and the people who were B and C students eventually accepted their place in the world.
I coasted through an easy undergrad and then did a very hard quantitative master’s degree.
The faculty failed 15% of the class which was basically any <120 IQ and it was brutal for parents who’d put in a year’s salary into it.
There were two black students out of about 70 who were comfortably in the middle of the pack. One was the son of an African doctor and the other from a small Caribbean island on a scholarship.
How much has the absolute number of white 18 y.o. dropped? I would think top schools would have little trouble filling seats, unless many parents are deciding they're not worth the premium. Many prospering schools here in NC attract NE parents who don't want to pay NE prices, though ours are much higher than they were.
What percent of black college-age Americans are foreign-born or children of immigrants, who tend to have higher IQ than ADOS?
Not to quibble, but outside the Ivies, the best measure of compliance with the AA ban is not percent black but SAT parity (assuming we can actually get that data). After all, some of who would have been AA admits at MIT will in fact be good fits at Northwestern. We should expect that at some level down the educational competitiveness hierarchy, there won't be much change in percent black as schools are able to replace their AA admits with higher qualified minorities who are now not going to Harvard. Not claiming this is happening yet, only that our model should account for it.
The colleges are currently staffed to the rafters with DEI administrators and faculty busy “giving back” by replicating themselves. That will take lots of time, lawsuits and lost tax preference status to rectify.
Something to keep an eye on as well is international admissions. I stumbled across a subreddit dedicated to this topic and was rather stunned by the amount of financial aid many schools are offering to international students - many of whom don’t seem to have especially compelling credentials. Naturally they’re all “POC” - mainly varieties of Asian and black. They also make use of the test optional policies - which is rather unbelievable for students applying from schools in Pakistan or Nigeria yet… the schools are allowing it.
In Canada, where almost all universities are public and kids attend locally, schools love international students because they pay much higher tuition.
Then it’s easy to become a permanent resident if you graduate. I think Trudeau was forced to cut back on this system due to his extreme unpopularity.
There were nearly 3m African-born people in the US in 2020, up from a mere 80,000 in 1970.
Therefore many black 18YOs in 2024 are the children of African-born parents. This number was negligible fifty years ago when American blacks were almost all slave descendants.
Does anyone know how many 2024 black matriculants are DOAS and how many are children of recent African immigrants? Does anyone count?
I think the reparations folks have some preliminary numbers on these kinds of breakdowns. You might look there. It's not in the schools' interests to make such distinctions.
Must immediately cut off the money that supplies a steady stream of students to every one of these institutions, innocent or guilty. Reinstate the flow ONLY when the institutions attest they are in full compliance with all applicable anti-discrimination laws. Once they've so attested, proven violations of the law will place the institutions in legal jeopardy where they stand to lose accreditation, access to federal, state, and local funding, and penalty judgements for their illegal actions.
Such evidence as is turned up under discovery can then be used by individuals harmed by such discrimination to go after the institutions and the administrators directly responsible in high dollar class action civil suits. Crack open those huge endowments and give trial lawyers a clear path and mechanism to clean out the coffers unless and until the institutions change their tune. It's simply a matter of changing the incentives currently in place and allowing (rather than trying to force) existing systems to do what comes naturally to advance their own interests. That should do the trick.
Who says left-wing ProPublica is good for nothing?
https://projects.propublica.org/private-school-demographics/
UPDATE: Put in three private schools I've known in my travels as well as two local ones. Not one of the five was in the database. Sorry I didn't check it more thoroughly before posting.
One of the most interesting things in that piece and graphics is that it demonstrates how a massive share of higher ed institutions have quite minimal standards - the overwhelming majority of schools admit well over 50% of the people that submit an application, which is absurd. Like others, I have long recognized that the share of the public attending college or university going from 20% to 40% over the course of half a century is only possible by admitting huge numbers of 'students' that are in no way actual college material and that our perverse student loan system basically incentivizes schools to cram in as many warm bodies as possible, but the graphics in the NYT piece really shows how big of an issue that is even if they don't address that head on.
Obviously a disproportionate share of these underqualified students who end up with with hard to shake debt are black and Latinos, and from just a concern for other perspective it's immoral that we have a system - zealously defended - that is basically set up to fleece them, but hey it does let schools put out press releases about their commitment to diversity and some nice candid multicultural photos for their marketing.
I agree. It comes from a mistake about which way causality went in the college/financial success association. Ideally college would be far less expensive and attended by fewer people. It would also go back to the mission of producing educated people rather than focusing on career training. A motivated two digit IQ person should leave high school with the ability to earn a living and if this means welding classes instead of analytic geometry I'd be fine with that. Surely by the second year of high school we and the students can tell which track would be better for them.
Charles Murray writes well on this in his 2008 book "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality." It's kicking around in PDF format somewhere on the interwebs. Short (10 mins) BookTV segment with Murray talking about the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmTr2EMt66c
Everyone with a triple-digit IQ should at least read Chapter 2 which clearly explains the real-world limits on capability with which lower-IQ people must cope (what Steve has written of in his "left-half of the bell curve" essays, and blindness to which by smart people I term "the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect").
A lot of higher IQ people don't work with 2 digit IQ people or interact with them on a customer or client basis in which they would get first-hand experience in what their limits are in terms of processing information and applying it.
Most are perfectly decent people, but the mistake a lot of people make is in thinking the difference between those lower down the socio-economic ladder and themselves are nebulous structural defects in society, like "lack of opportunity." They then make the mistake of thinking that like-cash aid or stuff like affirmative action will let them move ahead, when the reality is that they just don't have the capacity to leverage those things into a better situation.
One of the few professions in which high IQ people routinely interact with low IQ people and need to explain important things to them is medicine. The shock comes not from the fact that they can't understand basic science facts; it's from things you can't believe anyone cannot understand.
For example- Q-"last time you complained of heartburn and we gave you some pills for it. Did they help?" A- "I don't know." Q-"do you remember telling me you had heart burn last time?" A-"yes". Q-"did you take the pills I prescribed?" A-"yes." Q-"Is your heartburn any better?" A-"I don't know." Q-"Ok, so your heartburn is about the same as last week?" A- "Oh, I don't know the answers to these questions you're asking me" on and on for ten more minutes with no progress.
I have a relative who went to Yale and tried to get into Teach for America. She had some idea about how she was taught science in high school incorrectly and had a better way. This was the topic of the presentation she did as part of the application and she was rejected. I told her, whatever this insight you had was obviously, if anything, a better way to teach science to high IQ kids and that wouldn't be of great value to that program. If you could come up with a way to teach it better to average students you might have something...but after people have worked on it for a few centuries it's unlikely an amateur fresh out of college would crack that.
Just as Clinton and W and others pushed to increase minority homeownership to catapult them into the middle class, but which saddled many of them with foreclosures and bad credit ratings (and tanked the economy). Do gooders done bad.
Yep. They have thoroughly devalued a credential and have created a false sense of accomplishment (and thereby entitlement to economic and social rewards) that has further skewed our racial issues. Naturally the left sees this and tells them it's just more evidence of structural racism rather than that they were sold a bill of goods.
The first person I can ever remember saying in print that most students actually don't belong in college, was David Riesman, I think in the '50s.
Schools like to grow and hire more people and what better way to do it than by lowering standards?
At MIT in the 1980s there were no majors in which to hide. You couldn't pass your classes with an IQ below 120, even in Poli-Sci I think. I had friends who were black and were graduated from tough engineering majors like EECompSci and Aero-astro. It was a running gag that no matter much you studied the exams were essentially IQ test and the people who were B and C students eventually accepted their place in the world.
I coasted through an easy undergrad and then did a very hard quantitative master’s degree.
The faculty failed 15% of the class which was basically any <120 IQ and it was brutal for parents who’d put in a year’s salary into it.
There were two black students out of about 70 who were comfortably in the middle of the pack. One was the son of an African doctor and the other from a small Caribbean island on a scholarship.
Good grief, Columbia was admitting 20% black classes? No wonder they beat all of the other Ivies at lunatic student activism.
How much has the absolute number of white 18 y.o. dropped? I would think top schools would have little trouble filling seats, unless many parents are deciding they're not worth the premium. Many prospering schools here in NC attract NE parents who don't want to pay NE prices, though ours are much higher than they were.
What percent of black college-age Americans are foreign-born or children of immigrants, who tend to have higher IQ than ADOS?
“Post-woke era” - not sure we are there yet Steve…
I just now discovered that in 1988 something called The Urban Review published a piece titled,
"Meritocracy and diversity in higher education: Discrimination against Asian Americans in the post-Bakke era" Did you ever see that, Steve?
Not to quibble, but outside the Ivies, the best measure of compliance with the AA ban is not percent black but SAT parity (assuming we can actually get that data). After all, some of who would have been AA admits at MIT will in fact be good fits at Northwestern. We should expect that at some level down the educational competitiveness hierarchy, there won't be much change in percent black as schools are able to replace their AA admits with higher qualified minorities who are now not going to Harvard. Not claiming this is happening yet, only that our model should account for it.