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There is going to be a lot of legal scrutiny for any institution that tries to implement the old system by other means. How does a University actually implement this policy without incriminating texts/emails? A University can't have emails to their admissions officers that "being from a black community is hardship wink" or they'll be violating the Civil Rights of other applicants.
Here's one evasion technique you could use that's very simple and powerful.
"Any racial discrimination is very bad and wrong. We also know that blacks have been discriminated against in the past. Therefore take extra care not to discriminate against BIPOC individuals or risk facing consequences".
Is it illegal to be extra careful against discriminating against a specific race? I think not. And of course, the admissions officer would quickly get the point.
... not sure why I'm giving them ideas.
Admissions offices are ideological, I just don't think they're this suicidal. I don't think this decision is some silver bullet, but any "tinkering" that Universities will do will make them targets for lawsuits. Affirmative action will continue in some form, but it's going to be much more marginal as opposed to a heavy thumb on the scale. There is only so much Universities can accomplish without explicitly using race as a criteria.
I'm pretty cynical, but many posters here are taking it too far. If you're opposed to affirmative action, this is a good day not only for the decision but for the embarrassingly bad arguments put up by Harvard, UNC, and the dissenting justices. It's also a wildly unpopular policy, so the public will back up the decision.
Indeed, for all their attempts to evade the law, the UC system only managed to get the black percentage up to 8% as opposed to 18% at Harvard. Now 8% is probably higher than it would be naturally, but still- that’s more than a 50% reduction in affirmative action.
Given that California is significantly less black than the national average (5% vs. 12%), it's a similar amount of over-representation when compared to the catchment population.
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Right, and with this decision there will be a lot of pressure for UC to become less enthusiastic about skirting the law because it just takes one admissions officer or dean of whatever to say the quiet part out loud in an email.
There’s already a lot of pressure for UC to not skirt the law(it is literally illegal) and they do it anyways.
That's true, but now it's unconstitutional and a violation of Civil Rights.
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I've read an article a couple of years ago (unfortunately, link long lost) about how they did it in California (where explicit racial discrimination is banned). They hire a set of "evaluators", which evaluate the candidates and rank them by their acceptability (I don't remember the exact details of ranking mechanism, but it's largely irrelevant here). They have the training program, which never explicitly mentions race of anything like that. The most they get is the standard "we value diversity, inclusion and treating everybody in the most inclusive and welcoming manner" spiel. And they have a set of supervisors, which oversee the training. The training is done as a set of fake (or maybe real, from past years?) student profiles, which the candidate evaluator has to evaluate, and then the supervisor reviews it and tells the candidate where they may be wrong, if they are. The author of the article was one of the candidates. The supervisors, again, never explicitly mention the race or any prohibited criteria, but if the candidate evaluates certain profiles not in the "correct" way, the supervisor suggests they may want to reconsider - maybe they didn't take all the necessary factors into account, or overlooked something? They may remind them to re-read the policies, etc. That is repeated, until the candidate "gets it" - and starts producing the results that satisfy the supervisors - or the candidate "doesn't get it" even after a set of repeated suggestions, and then it turns out their services are not required at the present time. The author of the article was one of the latter.
If you see similarities to some other, currently popular, area of research - it is probably not coincidental. But it's hardly possible to prove that any racially discriminatory criteria were used. Of course, somebody has to train the supervisors, but it's California we're talking about, Berkeley could supply thousands of such supervisors which wouldn't need a word of discoverable explanations to produce the correct results.
For all the obvious-in-hindsight problems with disparate impact, you can kind of see how it might have made sense at the time.
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Mechanical Turk + Gradient Descent
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