[felix_n]

As long as we're talking about fair, is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs? Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the second kid getting, say, a nearly (but not quite) perfect SAT score and a 3.9 GPA is at least as impressive, or arguably more impressive, than your little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him?

[xyzzyz]

Doesn’t your argument only highlight how appalling it is to consider something as crude as the race of the applicant?

Even if you disregard how crude the official government racial classifications are (black Americans have much more in common with white Americans than with black Africans, for example, and Pakistanis have much more in common with Afghanis than with the former have with Japanese or the latter have with Swedish, contrary to what the governments racial groupings specify), if you are interested in recognizing hardship and overcoming the obstacles, why not just ask about those directly? When you read the students essay about his jailed father and mother working three jobs, what more do you learn from the mere race checkbox?

I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity. They really are, indeed, trying to achieve a certain color balance among their students, and they really do not care a lot about the diversity that’s more than skin deep. This is really as simple as that, and it’s disgusting.

[ams92]

> I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity.

This is the part that bothers me, they want all the colors of the rainbow but do not care if they are actually helping their students move up in the world.

I went to an ivy, and sure the student body was "diverse" by race but I did not encounter many people from lower classes.

[RigelKentaurus]

>is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs?

That's the exact case I made. The kid with the absentee father has worked hard, and deserves to be helped. But it's independent of race.

>little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him

I caught the condescending tone here. We live in a good, safe school district but nothing else has been laid out for him. He found all the APs, college courses, internships and applied on his own. The one thing he's not is an entitled, spoilt brat -- he's the exact opposite who takes nothing for granted and works very hard to make full use of his opportunities. It's sad that some people can't see the difference.

[speakfreely]

> It's sad that some people can't see the difference

Some people don't want to. There's an entire political movement devoted to removing individuality from the equation and seeing people only as oppressed or oppressor races. The heroes and villains are conveniently identifiable by their appearances and any details or personal history deviations from the storyline are disregarded.

[rayiner]

That’s an argument for basing admissions decisions on economic status not race.