>I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action.
I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.
Even with the baseline+diversity system, you have a situation where people will be rejected because they are of race X - but if everything was exactly the same about them except they were of race Y, they would have been accepted. To me, that seems like textbook racism.
Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc.
Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"
Not contradicting you, but FWIW there seem to be a half-dozen-each implicit definitions of 'racism' and 'racist' floating around society these days, and each might have widely-varying senses of magnitude or extremity associated with them (from innocuous to extreme). It becomes difficult to parse logic and moral logic around these words, when various interpretations are taken into account.
I agree with your point about diversity beyond ethnicity and race in some regards. I 100% agree schools should try for more income diversity for example. However other criteria you listed are meaningless. I don't see a benefit to height diversity or ugliness/beauty diversity. Other examples of yours also serve to conflict with your first point. There are some people who get rejected from Yale who would otherwise get into Yale if they could play basketball well or if their parent attended Yale. Is that discrimination against those people? I tend to think not. Treating everyone exactly the same isn't always the fairest solution in every situation.
Also your NBA example doesn't fit because it clearly falls into the category when you need the top X basketball players. I don't think needing the top X students is or should be the goal of college admissions. The goal of a basketball team is to defeat other teams in competition. It is inherently a zero sum game. The goal of a university is to educate the population. It is not a zero sum game and having a diverse student body actually works to support that goal.
No, I think role value is different. Sport teams are doing what will make them will the most games by getting the role the need. Sometimes the players in the position in abundance will be good enough to make adjustments to offset the bad ratio, (see the center position for the rockets this year) but it's a rare scenario.
For a software comparison, it is like finding a Data Engineer for a Front End position. Sure if the Data Engineer is super smart, you can have him or her switch roles for a bit; but if the needs are immediate, like they are in the NBA, it is not going to produce the best results.
What if diversity is a role to be played at college?
What if the student body is part customer, part product?
Colleges give out sports scholarships all the time to unqualified student athletes- a trade off from the academic excellence purity test - because it enhances the college’s value.
How can those be OK but diversity scholarships wrong?
The problem with any discussion of "ranking" students is that it is impossible to define the ranking system. Is the goal to produce the highest GPAs at Yale? To maximize future donations? To produce the greatest number of Supreme Court justices? I had a friend in college who was recruited because the marching band needed a baton twirler. To make matters worse, some programs (such as computer science) are over impacted and it may be the case that the "top" students all want to be in the same programs.
Opponents of AA would argue that there is not one baseline, though. There are not enough candidates of race X and Y to meet diversity quotas, so the baseline criteria is lowered for students of those races. This means that a candidate of race Z has to work harder and achieve higher to be considered above the baseline.
There's not great data about college admissions out there that I could find, so I don't know if this is true or not.
>There are not enough candidates of race X and Y to meet diversity quotas
Do you think that any Black student who could be successful at Yale and applies to the school will get in? Maybe in super niche graduate programs the school has a problem finding qualified diverse candidates, but at an undergraduate level they turn so many people away that I seriously doubt they have a problem finding good applicants.
> Do you think that any Black student who could be successful at Yale and applies to the school will get in?
Is that the baseline? Top tier schools aren't top tier because they let in anyone who might be successful. Their requirements are such that only top tier candidates make it over the baseline. And, due to various institutional problems, Black students are under represented in that top tier of candidates.
>We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor.
The numbers of people who apply to the school combined with the selectivity of the school all but guarantees that there are top tier candidates of every race who are rejected.
I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.