Elite Foundries
There’s a lot of worry about the institutions that produce the next generations of college-graduate elites. It’s enough worry to cause scandal and lawsuit, although both are low bars to clear. But the problem is also a genuine one according to media whose denizens attended such institutions.
The obsession with the matter was intensified by the recent Supreme Court decision on university admissions and race, popularly known as affirmative action. The Supreme Court said the schools shouldn’t, and now now longer may, use racial discrimination to combat a history of racial discrimination that once favored white males. Unchastened, the schools and the government bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Education have decided to change the odd word here and there in their requirements, but otherwise to continue on the course of action they find most agreeable to their self-righteousness and path dependence. Josh sends a link to a story in the virtual Politico Magazine:
Though the court explicitly warned not to “simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” Harvard, the defendant in one of the two cases, seemed to prefer to focus on another passage of the Court’s decision: a caveat that said schools may consider “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” Harvard’s official statement quoted the perceived loophole and responded, somewhat mischievously: “We will certainly comply with the Court’s decision.”
There is a long history of such workarounds to affirmative action bans, dating back 25 years to when the University of California was prohibited by California voters from considering race in admissions. Michigan voters forced the same on their public universities 10 years later. Both university systems, with very selective flagship schools, have taken numerous measures to attempt to diversify their campuses, according to both the amicus briefs they filed in support of Harvard and University of North Carolina (the other defendant) and to the researchers who have studied them.
Along the way, the article goes from wringing its hands over the issue of race in admissions to ruminating on family income as the main problem to be fixed. Thus, the schools’ expansive admissions systems spend a lot of money just trying to filter out potential students who might make the student body appear too white or too rich, especially when viewed through a lens gauzy enough to show complexion without revealing individual identities, or to show accoutrements suggestive of high net worth.
The article concludes by noticing that rich people get what they want, and that poor people who are smart are a problem for universities. One pities the put-upon admissions administrator!
Of course, the universities wouldn’t be in this pickle if they simply refused the corporate welfare checks made out to them by the federal government when it backs student loans. Then they would be private institutions that don’t have to satisfy the whims of socio-political fashion expressed through government bureaucracy. But that simple fix would presumably fail to pique the interest of journalists struggling to pay down their own student loan debts.
Cynthia: here’s a potential TSAF!
https://wapo.st/3N2EtFg
no paywall
ALERT: https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-general-vladimir-sviridov-and-his-wife-suffer-absurd-death?ref=home?ref=home
We haven’t had a case of SRDS in a while. Vlad never disappoints.