Reply to NYTs: if affirmative action goes, say buy-bye to legacy, EA/ED, and most athletic preferences

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "NYTs: if affirmative action goes, say buy-bye to legacy, EA/ED, and most athletic preferences"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It will be interesting to see whether the ruling prohibits consideration of gender.

I don’t see why colleges would eliminate preference for athletes if affirmative action is banned. What’s the rationale?

I understand why ED and legacy could be eliminated but it may not be in the colleges’ interests to do so. [/quote]

Right - I think the OP’s topic headline doesn’t reflect the article. It did refer to ED and legacy admissions being at risk, but not athletic preferences at all. Colleges definitely do NOT look at them the same way.

[b]If anything, colleges are going to rely upon athletic preferences even more because that’s a clear race-blind way that can have the effect of increasing underrepresented minority students.[/b][/quote]

PP here - except that the VAST majority of college athletes are white. There are a few, disproportionately popular sports where Black athletes are overrepresented, but they represent a small portion of college athletes. Sports like soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, tennis, cross country, squash, fencing, sailing, crew, golf, swimming and diving—they’re all overwhelmingly white. That’s part of why athletic preferences are part of the debate: many privileged, white kids get admissions preferences because of athletics. [/quote]

At the end of the day, though, athletic achievement IS merit-based (or at least should be outside of Varsity Blues scandal-type situations), which is vastly different than legacy programs that are based on being lucky enough to be born with alumni parents or born into a financial situation where they don’t need to  worry about financial aid and apply ED.

My point is that athletic preferences are actually *not* a debate at these colleges. They might be part of the debate on forums like this one for the reasons that you’ve given (e.g. the “country club sports”), but they are NOT being looped into the same category as legacy preferences and ED. Once again, the OP misrepresented the article, which mentioned legacy and ED admissions being under scrutiny but not a single word about athletic preferences being under scrutiny.[/quote]

It’s not merit-based if the only students who can afford to compete in the sports are the ones whose parents have the resources to support them. Do you think these sports are pretty much all-white because white people are better at them?

And why do college athletics exist? A small number do for financial reasons—football and basketball bring in money (like legacy students and donor kids). Many of the others exist, arguably, to give rich white kids a(nother) path into elite schools. That’s why Varsity Blues was possible; it just took what was already going on over a criminal line.

All I’m saying is…athletics are part of this conversation about, even if the NYT article didn’t focus on it.[/quote]

PP here - You’re focused on wealthy white students. Those aren’t the students that these elite colleges are trying to depress. It’s the stereotypical top academic Asian students that Harvard has been literally been assigning scores saying that they have worse personalities!

Taking away the lacrosse team at an Ivy school isn’t going to replace that wealthy white student with an inner-city Black student. Instead, what’s actually happening is the Ivy is using lacrosse to enable them to admit a wealthy white student over an academically-inclined Asian student. So, sure, I would concede that removing those “country club sports” could increase diversity, but the “problem” for Harvard and other elite schools is that it wouldn’t create the “right type” of diversity. The actions of all of these elite colleges is that they fear becoming “too Asian” much more than any perception that they’re hospitable for wealthy white students.

To be sure, legacy admissions also disproportionately give an advantage to wealthy white students over Asian students. ED, though, is used heavily by Asian students, which is a downstream effect of Asians being told for the past 15 years that they’re not getting into elite colleges via regular decision.

In any event, once we understand that the real goal of “more diversity” at elite colleges is to be “less Asian” mucb kre than “fewer wealthy white kids”, it stands to reason that ED would be on the chopping block because Asian students use that tool just as much or more than wealthy white students compared to the general population. Legacy admissions might be a small “p” political casualty because, just like race, it’s a characteristic that a person has zero control over and has nothing to do with merit.

Athletics, though, do provide a relatively objective merit-based way for colleges to admit students that is completely outside of their GPAs and test scores. So wealthy white parents have an advantage in setting up their kids here? Yes, absolutely… but we can go down the rabbit hole and say that this is the case for every single part of the college application. Can there be corruption and bribery a la Varsity Blues? Absolutely, but we can say that this has been happening in other forms at elite colleges for generations.

At the end of the day, athletic preferences give colleges a tool to directly admit an underrepresented minority in that sole achievement in a way that pretty much no other method can. At the same time, once we take the truth serum that a white lacrosse player is taking the spot from a “normal” Asian or white student as opposed to a Black or Latino student, the athletic preferences can absolutely be used as an important tool for college DEI goals where Affirmative Action is banned for the purposes for admissions. Those lacrosse players are the “right types” of white students that those colleges want and eliminate the “low personality” Asian (and to a lesser extent white students) that they don’t want.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics