A Nice Takedown

http://takimag.com/article/the_solipsism_of_john_edgar_wideman/print#axzz31O0o0ueE
Of course, Obama was in the same line of work as this professional whiner. It suited him.

An especially good line: "The unexamined life is, we are told, not worth living. If, like Mr. Wideman, you are one of modern liberalism’s pampered pets with a plush affirmative-action sinecure teaching a made-up pseudo-discipline so that some university can darken up its brochures to the degree required by federal regs, the over-examined life is worth a neat 200 grand a year, plus tenure."

Basic Numbers in Education

Note that this is a remedial education post--those who understand racial IQ disparities should skip it.

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-men-high-academic-success.html
This study shows 5% of blacks/Hispanics take certificates or associates degrees within 3 years at community colleges--and 32% of whites achieve the same. The initial racial differences in academic capacity on the ACT: the test shows that 15% of blacks, 29.5% of Hispanics, and 54% of whites at community colleges are prepared for college. This is the only hard predictive data--the percentage of each race that meets ACT college readiness benchmarks. But, this disparity is exacerbated by the fact that "equally capable" students of different races have far different levels of achievement. It shows 17% of hispanics, 33% of blacks, and 59% of whites who meet ACT college readiness benchmarks (equally capable in theory) get certs/degrees within 3 years. But, the blacks/hispanics claim to be more "motivated and committed"? This might be related to the races having different definitions of "motivated and committed." There might also be some lying involved in the claims.


Another problem is that most blacks who make the college readiness cutoff barely make it, whereas most whites who make it are comfortably above the minimum. In other words, the average ACT scores of "college ready" whites and blacks are different, with the white average markedly higher. This is unavoidable due to the large racial IQ gaps. Average IQs for the major races in America are 110 for Jews, 105 for Asians, 100 for whites, 92 for Hispanics, 85 for blacks. The black-white IQ gap has been in the 13-18 point range for 100 years. That is, it is nature consequent upon evolution in different environments, which different environments produced different characteristics, including different intelligence levels. In the general population 75% of Jews, 60% of Asians and 50% of whites have 100+ IQs--but only 31% of Hispanics and 14% of blacks have 100+ IQs. Note that this statistical difference in IQs is almost exactly the same as found above in the percentage of each race that is college ready. Also, if you calculate the average IQs of whites, blacks, Hispanics who make the 100+ IQ cutoff you find that the averages are approximately 114 for whites, 109 for Hispanics, and 106 for blacks. Whatever IQ cutoff is specified (whether 90, 100, 110, etc.) this difference in averages above the cutoff persists. The college ready whites are therefore smarter on average than the college ready blacks/Hispanics, just as college ready Asians and Jews are smarter on average than college ready whites. Another way to look at this is to consider what the minimum IQ of each graduate (5% of blacks/Hispanics, 32% of whites) would be if only the smartest of each group could graduate, which would give a general idea of how much the graduation rates are based on pure intelligence and how much on other factors like effort. This is in the nature of a thought experiment, since the smartest of each race do not attend community colleges. The underlying principles of analysis are about the same though--only there would be an IQ ceiling for each race in reality. If the smartest 5% of blacks/Hispanics and the smartest 32% of whites graduated, the minimum IQs for each race would be the following: black IQ: 106, Hispanic IQ: 116, white IQ: 107. This shows that if all blacks and whites with IQs above 107 graduated, the graduation rates would be almost exactly what the study found in reality: 4% for blacks, 32% for whites. This implies roughly equal effort and equal treatment among blacks and whites, though the 32% of whites with 107+ IQs still have higher average IQs than the blacks with 107+ IQs (which means in reality slightly better effort or treatment for the blacks). Hispanics in the 107-115 IQ range are not graduating as blacks and whites in that range are. The lack of effort therefore seems to be primarily an Hispanic problem. To get black numbers up to 32% you would have to arrange for blacks with minimum IQs of 91 to graduate. Moreover if Hispanic effort levels improved to match black/white levels, their graduation rate would rise from 5% to 13%.


Because the authors are politically correct socialist cowards, none of this IQ-based analysis finds its way into the 36 page report, even though my analysis explains everything very clearly. In particular, my analysis specifies the most correctable problem: lack of effort among Hispanics. Beyond that, only much lower academic standards across the board or, in the long run, differential eugenics would have much impact. And this study does not get close to the real problem, which is the huge disparities in the number of blacks/Hispanics capable of doing high level work, people at the 135+ IQ level. About 5% of Jews, 2% of Asians, 1% of whites, 0.2% of Hispanics, and 0.01% of blacks make this cutoff. Whites outnumber Hispanics 5 to 1 and blacks 100 to 1 at this level. Virtually all of the best scientists and inventors have IQs of at least 135. Many are 145+ where the ratios are 7 to 1 and 280 to 1. Without science and invention progress stops or, as in Sub-Saharan Africa, it never starts, or, as in "Idiocracy," progress turns into regress.

En Bref

http://www.halfsigma.com/2012/10/homosexual-propaganda-campaign-working.html

Look at how young women have bought into this idea. Consent manufactured. Conformists par excellence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Sense of Those Who Matter

http://www.vdare.com/articles/graduate-school-admissions-race-and-the-white-status-game

This is particularly damning:
"Data gathered by Richard Sanders of the UCLA Law School shows that 53% of the black students who enter law school fail to qualify to become lawyers, versus 24% of white students. About 40 percent of black law school graduates (many of whom will have taken out crushing loans to pay three years of tuition) never pass the bar exam, compared to 15 percent of whites. Some will also waste additional years working dead-end day jobs while paying to take bar exam review courses at night, before finally giving up in despair."

Anywhere intellectual standards are imposed, major racial differences appear. Ideally, the analysis would also include Jews, who are not a comfortable fit within the white category. Their numbers are doubtless even better than those of the Asians. My first thought in seeing numbers like these is to wonder whether a sufficient number of men in the top IQ percentile are pursuing the ideal of progress, rather than just the idol of Mammon.

Affirmative Action in Action

check out the graph on the second page: http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Racial-Wealth-Gap-Brief.pdf When you hand out undeserved high paid jobs to affirmative action beneficiaries, is it any surprise that they behave not according to their income, but according to their (mental) abilities? This goes back to the relationship between intelligence and time horizons--the higher the intelligence level, the longer the time horizon. In this context, this means white people invest for the future, blacks for the present. In other words, giving blacks high pay is a waste of money since they squander it instead of investing in the country's economic future.

How Deep is the Deep End

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/09/dual-discipline-systems-in-tucson.html This is pretty impressive, I didn't know you could go that deep. Maybe this concept should be tried with our criminal justice system: not to the victims of crime or the taxpayers who fund the system, but, more importantly, to the misunderstood criminals themselves. Second degree murder? 4-6 years for blacks, 10-15 for whites--until whites succeed in achieving a ten-fold increase in their convictions for murder to match the rate of blacks convicted of murder. In all spheres, be it remembered, the burden is upon the white race to match black achievement, not the other way round--that would be racist.

The Left and Reality: Another Missed Connection

Apparently 10-20% of blacks and 2-3% of higher IQ races are exempt from execution by virtue of extreme stupidity. So, according to the socialist regressives, IQ tests only count when they benefit minorities. Otherwise, they are clearly baseless pseudo-science and racist to boot. http://www.isteve.com/2002_IQ_Supreme_Court_Death_Penalty.htm

Reasons for Unreason

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/white_pride_is_uncool/ The second half of the article is especially interesting and, because the problem is systemic, difficult to correct.

AA

This is interesting methinks. Have a gander at yer Congressmen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:G._K._Butterfield,_official_photo_portrait_color.jpg He is a self-identified black man and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. If this guy qualifies for full-on affirmative action (blacks have the advantage of the lowest standards of admission, hiring, promotion...etc), who the hell doesn't qualify? Next time I apply for something, I'm going to "self-identify" as a black hispanic Polish American Indian gay woman who had a sex change operation to become a man. I count 7 diversity points there. A Harvard MBA might be nice (preferably graded on the black curve).

Legalizing PC

The Ginsburg dissent in Ricci v. DeStefano, most of which I read, is one of the worst Supreme Court opinions I've ever read for sheer illogicality. It's embarassing, and the problem isn't that she's stupid: there simply isn't a coherent set of arguments available to defend her preferred form of social engineering. Of course, most organizations evade this Title VII issue with more political acumen than New Haven evidenced. For example, Chicago's fire department makes its promotions by administering a test designed to achieve an 85% pass rate. They then award promotions by lottery from this pool of "qualified" firefighters. They get racial diversity, but they do not get the best leaders since they don't weed out the witless and the lazy.

I wrote a reply to a NY Times editorial on this issue (guess which side they took). They never posted it. Here it is:
 

Apparently the city leaders in New Haven and their supporters at the NY Times think that the most important criterion in selecting leaders for the fire department is "well-balanced racial diversity." Not competence, not leadership, not commitment--instead they prioritize racial politics above all these things and thereby sacrifice lives and resources in the line of duty.  In the end they're letting political corruption and political correctness corrode the city government’s efficiency at one of its most crucial junctures—where people’s lives are actually at stake.

Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? The implicit premise underlying these policies is that certain races cannot engage in intellectual competition on an equal footing with whites and Asians--and, if this is the case, the choice faced by decision-makers is whether to lower the standards for the uncompetitive races or effectively exclude them from those positions which confer the most power upon their holders. Unfortunately, as noted in the editorial, most cities have opted for what the NYT deems “better tests”—which really means tests that are simple enough for virtually everyone to pass, allowing HR to base hiring and promotions on “other factors” than actual demonstrated competence and thereby to achieve a preconceived notion of racial balance.

The Western world, in its moral and material successes, is founded on the concept of the value of the individual as such. This much elaborated concept, with accretions of depth and meaning extending over millenia, has invested mankind with a dignity never conceived, much less attempted, by any other cultural tradition. From the Greco-Judaic source-springs, and all heirs and contributors to them, we have in our possession--in our minds and, maybe, in our souls--the grandest of all inventions: the idea of the human individual as an end in himself--no longer deemed dirt and manure for a tyrant's whimsical gardens, whether he plants by socialist or royalist or any other plan, cultivated to secure Leviathan's moral and practical predominance over the individual. And they want to sacrifice all this to some socialist fantasy? Reinvent the sort of state machine that necessarily reduces man to what is contemptible? And perfect this pulverizing machine? What? And the effort, even the mere thought, does not resolve them into puddles of self-contempt? Human bio-diversity indeed!

A Court-Jester

"Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge (Miriam) Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice (Sandra Day) O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."  Sonia Sotomayor

 

The last sentence, of course, is asinine. However, the lead-up is common sense, even if jurists rarely admit to this reality. But, it's the narrow, leftist, group-identity obsessed version of the common sense notion that different experiences lead to different opinions. A broader version would note that people of the same sex and ethnicity may also have highly divergent life experiences that help to form different bases for their opinions. She also discounts the value of intellect and professional competence, though I admit these are generally of less consequence in the political rulings with which she seems primarily to be concerned.

 

The Supreme Court's decisions are either political or technical. Disagreements usually arise on the political questions, howsoever they may be disguised behind more or less clever facades of euphemistic rhetoric and irrelevant technicalities.

 

I think other parts of the speech from which this quote was pulled are equally disturbing. Elsewhere, she basically makes an argument (which I might add is poorly constructed as a matter of pure logic and full of holes even half-wits can see) for imposing ethnically-based quotas to determine who should sit on the federal bench--and, presumably, by extension, to determine who should obtain all other government offices. Never mind who is actually qualified on individual merit for such appointments--for every uptick in the Hispanic percentage of the population, more Hispanic judges must be appointed. This consists with her ruling against the New Haven firefighters, whose system of promotion based on individual achievement she curtly tossed out the window: apparently, in promotions, color is more important than competence. In short, she has limited faith in meritocracy and blithely privileges group rights over individual rights--thus undermining two of the essential principles upon which this country is founded--and on the application of which principles we had been making constant improvements until the socialist breakthrough into the mainstream in the 1960s.

 

Politically, she's a member of the party of resentment.

Intellectually, she's too mediocre to inflict much influence on the Supreme Court beyond that granted by her single vote.

Building Idiocracy

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090406_graduate_school.htm What is particularly shocking is that we allow incapables to become doctors and dentists. Dead patients and squandered resources result. For the rest, it's certainly inefficient to promote less intelligent individuals into the professions when more intelligent people are available and could perform the work more effectively. Part of the waste is borne by the affirmative action beneficiarcies themselves. Note the estimate that half of blacks who enter law school never become lawyers. This is hardly surprising given the two hurdles they face: 3 years of law school, then the bar exam (which does not give racial credits). I would imagine that black medical school graduates face similar challenges. In the end, affirmative action is a crude form of covert welfare for those minorities who suffer from cognitive and cultural deficits. But, these deficits are not the excuse provided by the policy's apologists: they claim discrimination pervades our society (including the design of all standardized and IQ tests) and can only be sufficiently redressed by recourse to legally-mandated racism against those races who manifest higher intelligence and higher rates of economic success. Of course, one obvious irony here is that the Jews in America have faced uninterrupted racism throughout the last century (the form of the racism evolved from being in favor of whites initially, then in favor of blacks and hispanics), and rose to power in spite of it. Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? And, if diversity is of such monumental importance that it overrides considerations of intellect and diligence, why doesn't Harvard admit lazy, half-witted whites to complement the diversity provided by all the lazy, half-witted blacks and Mexicans it admits? The implicit premise underlying these admissions policies is that certain races cannot engage in intellectual competition on an equal footing with whites and Asians--and, if this is the case, the choice faced by decision-makers would be whether to lower the standards for the intellectually sub-standard races or to exclude them from those educational institutions which confer the most power upon their graduates. Unfortunately, the imperative of lower standards seems to extend to the top of our government: witness Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the least competent Justice on the Supreme Court since his confirmation, and Judge Sotomayor, who will finally offer Thomas some competition for this sad distinction.  So we witness the continuous corrupt degradation of the fine old ideal of individual merit, the ideal to which we owe most of the Western world's achievements and global leadership, the ideal that raised the moral value of the individual to a Judeo-Christian plane profoundly superior to the nihilistic oriental fantasy of the preemptive value of the group.

Affirmative Action Numbers

Here's some hard evidence on the huge qualifications gap between white and black law school applicants--which gap leads ineluctably to the bar passage gap discussed in the last post:

"In the 1996-1997 admissions cycle, some 2,646 white applicants placed in the top 7.7 percent of LSAT-takers and had college GPAs of 3.5 or better. These credentials are very good, obviously, but not phenomenal; the average student who was admitted to Boalt Hall this year had an LSAT in the 97.7 percentile and a GPA of 3.74. And yet a mere 16 African Americans in the United States and 45 Hispanics had records that strong! In this elite group of applicants, whites outnumbered blacks 165 to one. If we relax the standard substantially and look at students in the top sixth (83.5 percentile or better) on the LSATs and a GPA of only 3.25, 7,715 whites and just 103 blacks qualify. In this broader elite, there were 75 whites for every African American." (See Diversity and Meritocracy in Legal education: A Critical Evaluation of Linda F. Wightmans's "The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education."; Response to Linda F. Wightman, New York University Law Review, vol.72, p. 1, 1997 Constitutional Commentary March 22, 1998).

The differences are even more astounding when you consider that many self-identified blacks and hispanics are actually mixed race (like Obama). Adjusted for the difference in the sizes of the white and black populations in America that 165 to 1 still comes to 30 to 1. If there were as many blacks in America as whites, there would still be 30 times as many highly qualified whites as blacks. This is obviously not a convenient fact socially. Inequality creates tensions and affirmative action is imposed by the elites to keep the people pacified. They will use this strategy for so long as it produces pacification. Of course, if it ever ceases to work, instead of treating the symptoms of pathology (racial inequalities in achievement levels), they might then adopt measures to treat the pathology itself (lower black IQ).

I've drawn up a rough statistical comparison of LSAT scores by ethnicity extrapolated from numbers from this report: Law School Admission Council, LSAT Technical Report 98-04, March 1998. The most recent scores are virtually identical to those in this report. The left hand column is LSAT scores, the numbers in the next 4 columns represent the percentage of each ethnicity who equalled or exceeded the matching score. 

median	152	151	146	142
SD	9	10	9	8
LSAT Scores	White	Asian	Hispanic	Black
142	86	84	70	50
143	84	82	65	45
144	82	79	60	40
145	79	76	55	35
146	76	73	50	30
147	73	69	45	26
148	69	65	40	22
149	65	60	35	19
150	60	55	31	16
151	55	50	28	13
152	50	46	25	10
153	45	42	22	8
154	40	38	19	6
155	35	34	16	5
156	31	31	13	4
157	28	28	10	3
158	25	25	8	2
159	22	22	7	1.7
160	19	19	6	1.4
161	16	16	5	1.1
162	13	13	4	0.9
163	10	11	3	0.7
164	8	9	2	0.5
165	7	8	1.7	0.3
166	6	7	1.4	0.2
167	5	6	1.1	0.1
168	4	5	0.9
169	3	4	0.7
170	2	3	0.5
171	1.7	2	0.3
172	1.4	1.7	0.2
173	1.1	1.4	0.1
174	0.9	1.1
175	0.7	0.9
176	0.5	0.7
177	0.3	0.5
178	0.2	0.4
179	0.1	0.3
180		0.2

Only half of LSAT test takers actually go to law school and these attendees tend to be in the top half of each ethnicity's scoring distribution. This means that a 163 will place a white in the top 10 percent of test takers, but only about the top 18-20 percent of law students. Given that 152 is the median white score, it's fair to assume that few whites with sub-152 scores attend law school. So 152 is effectively the minimum expected from white applicants as far as admissions officers are concerned. If this minimum were imposed on blacks, just 10% would make the cut at any law school. About 15% of law students attend top 20 schools, which are those with nationwide reputations and prestige. This corresponds to a minimum LSAT of 165 for whites and asians. Only 0.6% of black law students score that high. On merit, they would represent less than 0.1% of the student populations at top 20 schools--in reality they are closer to 7%. A 70 to 1 ratio of charity cases to merit cases is impressive. This is a religion forbidding doubts. The black minimum score, then, is 156 at these schools--a full standard deviation below the white minimum. Of course, this makes sense insofar as the median black score on the LSAT is a standard deviation lower than the white median. Coincidentally, the black-white IQ gap has stood at a standard deviation for generations. The education system in this way achieves a superficial unity at the expense of fundamental inequality, de facto and de jure.

On merit, blacks would run to 0.25% of students at the top 50 law schools (which combined graduate a third of law students). And the study quoted at the top of the post estimated that, depending on the predictive model used, between 2% and 3.4% of all law students would be black if admissions were color-blind. Her methodology is quite generous to blacks. To estimate race-blind admissions rates she looked only at LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA. The thing is, white students at any given college have higher IQs than their black peers (due to undergrad affirmative action). I guarantee that people with higher IQs are more likely to take difficult classes than lower IQ people. Result: white and black GPAs are not comparable. An "A" in precalculus hardly carries the same signification as an "A" in multivariable calculus. She certainly overestimates the black representation that would be expected from a more thorough merit-based admissions process. But, even if you accept an average of her numbers, 2.7% is much lower than the 13% of the American population blacks represent. It's a 5 to 1 shortfall. This exactly matches my statistical estimates in the table above: if blacks had to meet the white minimum of 152 to get into any law school, only 10% would make it, compared to 50% of whites. This is slightly misleading, though, since only 10% of test takers are black and my table is based on test takers, not population numbers. By my numbers, 10% of the 10% of test takers who are black would make it--which means they would compose 2% of law students, a 6.5 to 1 shortfall.

The analysis I've done here showing the effect of affirmative action on law school admissions applies in similar fashion to undergrad admissions and admissions to any competitive graduate or professional programs. They are all based, to a significant degree, on pure (eg, SAT, LSAT) and applied (GPA, courseload) cognitive ability. The IQ differences between groups predicts to a high degree of accuracy, as shown above, the academic qualifications that characterize each ethnic group. I do not think most Americans have any notion of the magnitude of the assistance given to affirmative action cases. Even supporters of this racial strategy might be privately grieved by it. My purpose here was to pull out a variety of numbers to give some perspective on the issue.

The Wages of Corruption

Our government mandated racism provokes blowback in all sorts of ways that the PC crowd could never (allow themselves to) imagine. For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/weekinreview/13liptak.html
A key figure from this is that 4% of white law school graduates never pass the bar. For black law grads, the number of those who never pass the bar is 22%. That is a shocking contrast and, for the many, many blacks who cannot pass, it is a tragic waste of time and money.

Here's the problem: black law applicants with the best credentials match places like Ohio State or American (ranked 30-50), but, because of affirmative action, instead go to Harvard or Yale (the top ranked programs). Those blacks who fall just short of this top group have qualifications like those at schools in the 50-80 range, but get accepted to schools in the 4-10 range. This continues down the line until you have the least competitive law schools accepting the best black students that higher ranked schools have not snapped up. These students fall short of the white students at their schools just as blacks at Harvard fall short of white Harvard students. Unfortunately, the whites at low ranked schools can barely pass the bar themselves--their less qualified black peers have even more trouble, and frequently cannot pass even with multiple attempts. So the problem starts at the top, though it is not obvious there since the black Harvardeers (being Emory level students) pass the bar at high rates.

The solution is to either end affirmative action, leaving the top 20 programs with virtually no black students and even the top 50 with about 1% blacks, or to somehow prevent the bottom third of law programs from admitting blacks whose qualifications demonstrate they are highly unlikely to pass the bar--which would leave the bottom third bereft of black students. This would theoretically be simple since there is a close correlation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates. Today these ill-fated blacks are not even informed of their odds. At a minimum, they ought to be provided information they can understand on this issue prior to committing to 3 years of law school. The socialists will no doubt reject all my proposed remedies. I'm a threat to their holier-than-thou hypocrisies, and the religion of PC has no mercy on apostates or heretics.

The Affirmative Presidency

Now, if Obama did not slide into Columbia and Harvard Law by "affirmative" means, he might heretofore have released his academic records. Virtually every black in attendance at those schools is an affirmative action case. This is well established. There is no reason to believe that Obama constitutes an exception in this regard. This means if he weren't "black" he probably would not have made it into a top twenty school for undergrad or law--much less the top five Columbia and Harvard. Yet, I merely infer probabilities from available statistical information on these matters. Obama'a academic records could prove him the highly improbable exception to these inferences. One indicator of his intellect is that he never, as a law professor at a top five law school, actually published anything. This is extremely unusual, a flagrantly inadequate contribution. I see no sign anywhere that there is any substance to this man. He's smoke and mirrors. He presents as the sort of black man the liberals have long been desperate to believe they could bring to life--yet he's nothing, nothing in himself, only a collective liberal dream-delusion of a dreamer.

A Fine Instance of Idiocy: Affirmative Action for the Stupid

Federal Law Drains Resources for the Gifted

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/education/07education.html

I believe that if this is one of the consequences of the new education law, it will do more harm than good. Pulling the illiterate up to the level of the mediocre is far less important for the future of this nation at every level than fully potentializing the gifted among us. In virtually every field it is the gifted who cut the path and lead the way--in the private sector above all, but also in government, intelligence, the military, philanthropy, academia, medicine, science, the arts, education. One must be both intelligent and motivated to think beyond the current state of affairs and imagine innovations, then find creative ways to implement them. The gifted create progress, they solve problems--the rest are inertia, human baggage, just followers and laborers.

Of course, based on numbers in the article there is no reason why the new law should push out the gifted programs--Illinois was only spending $19 million a year in the first place on the gifted ($1.50 per citizen of the state). To cut such a cheap and important program displays incredible stupidity. And how can the feds offer only $10 million a year for this? The practical social ramifications of this trend will be further stratification of opportunity by income level--only those who can afford to attend quality private schools will find the blessing of an education proportionate to their ability.

The Garden of Academe

http://www.economist.com/node/7945858

This article is essentially a review of the book: “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."

The Economist opines that it "deserves to become a classic." The book reveals the shocking truth that college admissions officers rarely even attempt "fairness," as that term might be understood by most of those actually "competing" for admission to college. A vast collection of applicants have "unfair" advantages in this game: affirmative action cases, athletes (even in obscure sports), and the offspring of alumni, the rich, and college employees. The author, Daniel Golden, estimates that only 40% of the slots at elite universities are available to applicants without one of the above listed categorical advantages. The result: "Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites." I would extend that to all whites who are not in one of the favored categories.

Tellingly, at some elite schools blacks are better represented than non-Jewish whites, despite the fact that whites have much higher test scores and grades than blacks--and despite the fact that whites are better represented in all the favored categories except affirmative action. It would be very interesting indeed to see a breakdown of those who make it in on merit. My guess is the gentiles, Jews, and Asians each take a third of the 40 percent of the class admitted on merit. The Jews are in the highly fortunate, and far from accidental, position of being lumped in the "white" category despite having higher IQs than the Asians. Though they're only 3 percent of the "white" population, they typically take 30-50 percent of the slots allotted to "whites" at the Ivy League schools. Several other studies have made it clear that the overall result of the web of social and financial preferences leads to various levels of admissions standards for the four primary races in America. From most advantaged to least advantaged the list runs: Black, Hispanic, White, Asian. Of course, it's no accident but precisely the intent that this is the inverse of the actual academic performance of each group--the better the performance, the more that group is punished by exclusion and higher standards. Thus, like American government, American academia has become an institution designed to benefit the rich and the welfare cases, at the expense of the merely meritorious. They are clever enough, though, these wiley academic beguilers, to sustain a core of high merit students and capable professors to provide shade for all the coddled rich kids and race-based incapables.