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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32427 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I think you are overstating your case here. It is clear that Prop 209 did have a major effect on admissions in the UC system. For example, you can see here that the number of black freshmen students at Berkeley fell by about 50% from 1997 to 1998 (the first year the new rules were in effect) from 6-7% of new freshmen to 3-4%. I believe that the UC system did try to circumvent Prop 209 in various ways and may have become more effective at this over time, but claiming that "UCs were comprehensively violating Prop 209 since shortly after it was passed" doesn't seem correct.

Before Prop 209, the UCs used particular metrics and methods to preferentially boost black admissions to UCs. Then Prop 209 mandated an end to racial preferences, and decreed that admissions should be race-blind. After Prop 209, the UCs covertly used different methods some of which I specifically described to boost black admissions, in violation of Prop 209, and conducted a massive coverup of their illegal behavior. I'm not evaluating the post-Prop 209 behavior on the basis of statistical analysis; I'm talking about the actual behavior that Prof. Sander uncovered.

That the post-Prop 209 methods produced fewer black admissions to the UCs than the pre-Prop 209 methods is an interesting point in itself, but it's not a counter to what I wrote.

I didn't claim that the UC system made no attempts to circumvent Prop 209, only that these attempts, at least for the first decade after Prop 209, did not manage to bring admissions numbers close to where they were before Prop 209. That seemed to contradict the phrase "comprehensively violating Prop 209" but perhaps we interpret the word "comprehensively" differently.

That could still be consistent - if the "true" percentage with no preference was 1-2%, then there could have still be a thumb on the scale which was not pressed quite as firmly in 1998.

I objected to the phrase "comprehensively violating" which to me seems to imply that Prop 209 had little to no effect on admissions numbers. I was simply pointing out that it did have a large effect on admissions even if this effect may not have been as large as in a scenario with no attempts to circumvent Prop 209.

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