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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I think a lot of discussions about AA focus on the effect on black enrollment and try to depict it as a kind of "black vs. asian" conflict. Perhaps this is partly because those are the racial groups for whom the differences between standardized test scores and admission chances are most dramatic, but I think it somewhat misreads the issue. Black people are a relatively small percent of the US population (~13%) and are not increasing especially fast. Hispanic people, on the other hand, are an increasingly large share of the population because of immigration, high birth rate and changing fashion in racial identification among people of mixed race or ambiguous race (e.g. an ethnic white person who was born in Mexico). Even if no black people were admitted to elite universities (an unlikely outcome even if admissions were based entirely on test scores), this would only allow an increase of about 12% in asian admission. However, to some extent now and perhaps much more in the future, the rate at which hispanic people are admitted to elite universities could have a large impact on asian admission rates (as could white admission rates, of course).