The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT:
This new number, called an adversity score by college admissions officers, is calculated using 15 factors including the crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood. Students won’t be told the scores, but colleges will see the numbers when reviewing their applications.
Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.
White students scored an average of 177 points higher than black students and 133 points higher than Hispanic students in 2018 results. Asian students scored 100 points higher than white students. The children of wealthy and college-educated parents outperformed their classmates.
“The purpose is to get to race without using race,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Mr. Carnevale formerly worked for the College Board and oversaw the Strivers program.
They seem to presume that disparate impact is destiny. They’re bold enough to place a big bet on it.
I’d call this a move in the right direction, even though from the way Carnevale talks he will probably balk at all the poor whites from eastern Tennessee wandering the hallowed halls.
This is properly called “race norming.” It is a corrupt attempt to cover up the reality of human biodiversity. An open, hard quota system would be preferable, because it would be honest
The large scale result of programs like this is to reduce significantly the capabilities of our institutions, both private and public, and to devolve our culture in the direction of Africa and Latin America. If such deceptions as the Adversity Index are implemented long enough, it will disassemble our modern high technology. Only China and Russia will have modern economies.
I doubt it will be implemented long enough. The SJWs themselves won’t like the side effects.
And it’s high time the hillbillies caught a break anyway, however briefly. They’re not all bad.
This is just another marker, a way-station, on the way towards the eventual state that these idiots are taking themselves and their institutions.
See, here’s the thing that these morons simply don’t get: Things like a college degree and a mortgage don’t actually create successful citizens. They are markers, things that successful people accomplish in the course of things. You don’t actually hire the diploma, you hire the person. And, if that diploma becomes useless for determining whether or not that person is worth hiring…? What then? Why bother with it?
The entire “elite” culture is participating in a cargo cult: They think that if they take a kid out of the ghetto, and give him a degree, then he’ll be a success. Well, yeah–So long as some corporation can use them as a affirmative action hire, and stick him in a basement office somewhere, in order to meet “diversity” needs.
Meanwhile, the actual issue, that of cultural dysfunction in the inner city, remains unaddressed. That kid with the diploma hasn’t been inculcated with the values and mores that made a mid-century WASP kid successful, at all–Instead, he’s fully aware that he’s a “post turtle”, and has gotten where he is not because his contribution is valued, but because his skin has the right melanin content to make a quota.
This is divisive, and very erosive to the real accomplishments of those who do possess actualy, y’know… Merit.
So… What you can take from this is that the entirety of our academic-industrial system is going to implode, and that this is one of the rocks coming down about two-thirds of the way through the avalanche. As soon as they finish devaluing the diplomas granted by the academy, something else will have to arise to supplant it, because those diplomas will no longer actually fulfill the function they have been dragooned into filling in society.
You can see the effect of similar things, throughout our modern society. In the Army, the idiot Shinseki thought that all you needed to do in order to turn the entire Army elite was to take the black beret of the Rangers, and make that a uniform item for the entire Army.
A more insidious implementation of magical thinking is hard to think of–The key thing these creatures infesting our elite miss, just like Shinseki did, is that the symbol is not what creates the effect. Just like with the Janissaries, who used a spoon as their regimental symbol, the marker is not what makes the man; the man makes the marker. If the Rangers wore pink panties over their uniforms, then the pink panties would be the symbol of the elite–Because, that’s what the elite wears, not the other way ’round.
And, if you wanted to make everyone else as good as the Rangers, there is no shortcut: You have to make everyone else do the work, and be as discriminating in your cull of the non-performers. That’s what makes the Ranger battalions elite: Hard work, a shit-ton of training ammunition, a focus on that training, and lots and lots of money for training. You could not afford to make the rest of the Army as good as the Rangers, and if you did manage it, there’d be about 100,000 of them left at the end of it all.
This whole deal with how we’ve implemented affirmative action is indicative of the mindset of the elite, which is focused simply on external markers, and not true merit. Because of that, they’re engaged in a process that is hollowing out the very institutions they’re so invested in, and it’s not going to end well for them, as society routes around the damage they’ve done to things.
In my estimate, the current paradigm is going to be vestigial in about another two-three generations as a practical matter, and will hang on only out of habit for a few more, until the entire idea of going to university is a quaint holdover for select members of society who’ve nothing better to do with their time.
The irony, here? It’s all self-inflicted, because the idiots doing it do not actually understand what they are doing. They make the same mistake Shinseki made, and quintuple-down on it: The marker is not the man; the man makes the marker, and if you give the marker out unearned…? The marker is inevitably going to become devalued and meaningless. Society will come up with something else to fill that role, and there’s no telling what the hell that will be, at this point.
Find something else to fill the role? I wouldn’t give most hiring managers that much credit for astuteness.
The people who get ahead bypass the recruitment process anyway. It’s not what they think you know, it’s whom you golf with.
I’d love to see it all fall down and go boom, but I decided long ago that you can’t fix stupid. What’s needed is a whole new elite. I’m not sure how to bring that about. There are people talking about it – Objectivists, the Neoreaction – but I’ve yet to see a workable plan.
One way or another, the world will route around incompetence.
It may manifest as a gradual supplanting of the status quo, it may manifest as conquest by outsiders who conquer, or it may manifest as society crumbling and something new taking over.
But, it will manifest. How is another question, entirely.
Actually, though… Harry makes a good point, and it’s one that actually goes towards supporting my thesis: The hiring managers, themselves products of the academic-industrial system, are being routed around.
If it doesn’t work, it won’t last. It will hang on, as the British aristocracy has, in purely ceremonial form, but… As to running things? Nope; something else will supplant the current dysfunction, and if it isn’t supplanted, then the whole shoddy edifice will come crashing down.
Think of it like the Roman Empire; the Republic quit working, so Augustus turned it into an Empire. His bloodline/dynasty/whatever petered out, and new ones arose, renewing things. Western Rome fell, Eastern Rome kept right on keeping on, until the Turks finally came knocking in the 1400s.
The vestigial remnants of the old order will hang on, as ceremonial and visual cruft, but the reality is, if the current lot of idiots prove incompetent, as ours has, well… They’re gone.
Consider the current contretemps vis-a-vis Trump and the “attempted coup”: These assholes aren’t even competent enough to come up with a way to stop Trump, and the BS they used to try to do it? Holy crap, but the incompetence displayed. Did neither Strzok or Page realize that those texts would eventually come out? I’ve seen girls high-school cliques run things more competently. And, the sheer hubristic arrogance of the involved parties, from Mueller on down? LOL… Same-same with the Clintons, who’ve failed to even pay lip service to much of the law when it comes to their little “charitable organization”, which when all of that finally comes out, is going to turn out to be the biggest scandal of the era. I mean, they didn’t even bother to file the right paperwork in most states, and took in millions of dollars in donations–And, that’s not even looking at the international chicanery. If anyone ever so much as starts to try to unravel all the crap that went on with Haiti, the Clintons are done for. And, they were so ‘effing brazen about it… These ass-clowns aren’t even competent enough to be bargain-basement Rothschilds.
“See, here’s the thing that these morons simply don’t get: Things like a college degree and a mortgage don’t actually create successful citizens. They are markers, things that successful people accomplish in the course of things.”
I believe that this is “Reynold’s Law”, per Glen Reynolds of Instapundit.
If successful middle class people go to college and own homes, then subsidizing or encouraging college and home ownership will increase prosperity and the size of the middle class, whereas, as Kirk correctly stated, going to college and owning a home is a result of the attitudes and aptitudes of that class, not the cause.
A college degree is required for many jobs now, tat don’t actually require one. The problem is “disparate impact” and Griggs vs. Duke Power. Once an employer can’t do in house aptitude testing, a college degree is a handy way of weeding out the illiterate and low IQ.
It used to be that successful high school graduation would do this, but high school is too dumbned down now, so now we need a college degree to ensure that our candidate can read and write and reason. Unfortunately now college will be dumbned down, so something else will have to be used instead.
Likely you will see some kind of independent accrediting institutions.
The sad part is that they are doing a real dis-service to the very people they claim to want to help. Putting someone in a university setting who is really not suited for it, is setting them up for failure, and adding massive debt to their failure on top of it.
Paul, the key thing about the whole issue is that it was intended to shift money over into the academic world. Go take a hard look at who was behind Griggs vs. Duke Power, and ask yourself if any of this was an “accidental by-product” of innocent good intentions.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I can identify things as “not accidental”. That decision in Griggs vs. Duke Power accrued a hell of a lot of money and power to academia, just like all the other social “initiatives” of that era actually did more damage than they reformed. Whether you’re looking at the mental health BS, or the law enforcement aspect, there were a whole complex of supposed “reforms” that have now generated vastly destructive second- and third-order effects downstream in our society.
And, what really pisses me off about all this? Nobody calls the geniuses who came up with this crap on any of it–Homeless problems? Oh, of course we’re not doing enough, spending a billion every year in the Puget Sound metro area… It’s all our faults, us normies, and if we just give more money and civil liberties up to the cognoscenti oh-so-enlightened left, we’ll solve all those problems… That the assholes created with their earlier “solutions” to things.
The “elite” have so thoroughly discredited themselves that they’d all be up against the wall, in earlier and less prosperous times. If we still had the margins society had in the pre-industrial era, most of these people would already be dead in a revolutionary pogrom of truly epic proportions.
The really stupid part is that it doesn’t help produce the result that they purport to want, which makes me think that they don’t actually want the effect that they claim. (Which would re-enforce your “conspiracy theory”).
Their stated goal is to increase minority participation in higher ed, so far so good. The minorities you are championing don’t achieve the raw SAT scores required to succeed in same, so lower the standard, or add these bullshit handicaps to get them in. Problem is, that if you put your finger on the scale to add points to their score, their raw score is STILL below that needed to succeed, so you are setting them up for failure.
If I decide I really, really, really want to be a world class theoretical physicist like Stephen Hawking, I can’t, because I don’t have the raw intelligence required. No matter how much I may WANT it, or no matter who supports me, I just will not be able to succeed. Reality bites!
I am reminded of the incident where the Dean at (Harvard?) was drummed out of his job because he dared to say that there would never be sexual equality in STEM because not enough women had the aptitude and desire to study it.
Another university (MIT?), decided that after his defenestration, decided that they should take a look at the issue and see if indeed there was any systemic bias keeping women out of higher math’s and physics. I am going from memory here, so the numbers are approximate. They struck a committee and the first thing they did was to determine a baseline. What percent of the population had the raw IQ to participate? Answer, something like 2%.
So, determine the IQ cutoff (160?) required, graph male IQ for North America, graph female IQ for North America, shade under the graph for above 160, and make a ratio of the result. End result? of the 2% of the population theoretically capable of succeeding in the field, the percentage of that population that is female is approximately 14%. Percentage of females in that university’s physics and higher math? 13.something percent!
“Reality is that which continues to exist when you cease to believe in it”.
The question which remains to be answered is how long the balloon can stay up, with just wishful thinking keeping it inflated with hot air…
I think that as long as we don’t get locked into some sort of hegemonic system akin to the Chinese Mandarinate, we’ll do just fine–The thing is, so long as the various “elites” can continue to be successfully supplanted when they become dysfunctional, we’re OK. I think we’re seeing that, right now–The interesting thing I keep hearing from the “206ers” who actually live in the Seattle area is how generally dismissive they are of the idiot left-wing “activists” and politicians running the show over there. Which I suspect is going to manifest as something “unexpected”coming out of the region, in the not-too-far-off.
Kinda like Australia just re-elected their government, against all expectations. And, how Trump wound up in charge of the US.
I don’t think the left wing progressive communists quite realize how thoroughly they’ve damaged their brand, and with them, the go-along-to-get-along pinko fellow-traveler Rino assholes. If I were to prognosticate, I think Trump actually represents a new centric political path, one that’s dismissive of both sides of the existing paradigm. If the Democrats had been open to listening to him, and working with the constituency that elected him, they might have a future. Given that they’ve done what they have…? I think they’re in for either destruction as a party, or a very, very long time in the political wilderness. Trump is going to co-opt the Republicans into forming a party around his center-line positions, and if they’re smart, they’ll cooperate.
I don’t think Trump is necessarily a genius, just a pragmatist–Which does not spell good things for the existing uniparty in Washington, DC. Just keep watching the Trump rallys out in the hinterlands, and observe how hard a time everyone else has getting anything else going.
One of the crippling things for the Democrats is their assumption that everything grass-roots is ginned up as a movement from the center–Because that’s all they have, themselves. They simply do not grasp that things like the NRA are basically organic expressions of the public will, and if they succeed in outlawing or de-legitimizing the NRA, they’re going to be dealing with a hydra-head of other organizations springing up to do the same thing–And, they’ll have aroused the animus of the NRA-supporting public, so there will be all kinds of unforeseen side-effects.
Key issue that these idiots don’t take into account is that if they ever do arouse the “silent majority”, they’re all going to wind up swinging from lamp posts, and you’re going to see a paroxysm of violence like nothing you’ve ever seen before. When you’re sitting in an Eastern Washington restaurant, eating breakfast, and you hear the table next to you start talking about driving to Olympia, holding trials, and then hanging a bunch of legislators, well… That’s not too surprising. What is surprising is to look over and see that you’re not hearing a bunch of stereotypical right-wing loons talking, but guys who look like they’re founding members of the local Kiwanis and Rotary chapters.
Piss those guys off enough, and there’s no telling where it all ends.
It is a lot like the reaction to the “yellow Vests”. The whole thing started because the government encouraged/subsidized “green diesel”. Turns out VW (and everyone else), cheated, and “green diesel” isn’t really “green”.
So now the government, having “nudged” the populous into adopting diesel vehicles and fuel oil heating, must now be “nudged” into doing the opposite of that which we nudged them into doing previously.
Guess who has to pay.
Same with immigration. The elites that champion open borders all live in the gated communities or use wealth to separate themselves from the negatives.
It is not their daughters being sexually harassed and called whores at school. Their kids are in private schools, or at public schools in rich areas where third world immigrant kids are rare, or those that exist are also from rich families, and so behave appropriately.
Likewise, their neighborhoods are not full of litter, and the staff at the local corner store still speaks their language.
It is the working class that suffers, and then they wonder why they vote for Donald Trump or Marie LePen.