Classy
One thing to say on the subject of trying to do affirmative action on the basis of a comprehensive assessment of socioeconomic class is that people aren’t going to agree on who counts where.
Kid number one grew up in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. His dad was a charismatic college football star at Texas Tech but not good enough to play in the pros and eventually made millions of dollars as one of the most successful fast food franchisers in the Southwest. Mom is dad’s high school sweetheart who was a couple of years younger and stopped going to community college soon after she and dad got married.
Kid number two grew up in the suburbs of Boston. Dad’s a professor at, and graduate of, the Berklee College of Music and mom did her undegrad at Columbia and her PhD work at Harvard and now she’s on the faculty at Boston University.
Kid number one’s family is going to have a lot more money. I think kid number two’s family has more “class” in a common sense way. Which kid is inheriting more advantage from his family is a bit hard to say — it probably depends on exactly what you’re talking about in a pretty nuanced way. I don’t think this is by any means an insurmountable objection to trying for some affirmative action on the basis of a broad class metric, but I do think it’s a real stumbling block. By contrast, a straightforward attack on privilege in the form of efforts to dismantle legacy preferences and the like would have a similar effect and it’s easier to get a clear sense of what the target is. And of course if you reduce the level of inequality, you reduce the scope of inherited advantage directly.
78 Responses to “Classy”
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November 12th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Up late eh, Matt?
November 12th, 2008 at 3:56 am
Where to start… first of all, neither kid would receive any preference in a class-based affirmative action system. They’re both pretty fortunate. Second, I don’t know anyone who’s suggested that we try to assess who has more class and go on that basis; all these proposals are about wealth. Wherever have you gotten this idea that there’s someone out there who wants affirmative action for the Beverly Hillbillies?
November 12th, 2008 at 4:08 am
the point is well taken that class isn’t necessarily best understood in a strictly economic sense (probably some combination of family income, family wealth, and parents’ educational attainment). but while you could certainly make the argument that either one is more advantaged than the other, the fact is, both of these hypothetical kids are tremendously more advantaged than most hypothetical kids.
also, kid 1 sounds a bit like cindy mccain.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:21 am
same sort of objection applies to race. a dark-skinned curly haired egyptian is white (non-hispanic white). this guy is “black.” in fact, he’s part of the black congressional caucus….
November 12th, 2008 at 4:23 am
re: #4, i mean to suggest that a substantial minority of egyptians could pass as african american (albeit, mixed-race ones obviously). but egyptians are middle eastern, therefore their census category is non-hispanic white, just like everyone north of sub-saharan africa and west of pakistan.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:48 am
I grew up a lot like kid #2. I have no relatives that were alive when I was that didn’t have a college degree. I’m 40 years old, and my grandmothers had college degrees. One of them had a PhD and an LLD. But everyone was always upper middle class. We never really got rich. We favored knowledge over money. But you know what? We did fine. And it’s possible that I might have gotten a legacy advantage in the Ivy League. But we never tested that because I was fully qualified anyway. Let’s face it, if I can get into MIT, I can get into Cornell. And that happened because my parents made damn sure I was educated regardless of what the public schools taught me. I’m glad I was kid #2 instead of kid #1. But maybe we should be talking about kid #3.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:01 am
I think the use of the term privilege is key here, a much better term than class.
Class seems more encompassing nationally than the idea of privilege, yet the effects of privilege, on all levels (especially with regard to college) is more pervasive, and smacks of inequality in all the wrong ways. Legacy students, the homecoming kings/queens, the nepotistic job placements, etc. A lot of people with privilege are not necessarily of the upper class, they are just, well, privileged in certain circumstances at certain places. This is true in high school, in college (ivy league or state school), etc.
Class, though, is a good rough measurement for certain occupations, ones with a lot of clout politically and financially. One need only look at Supreme Court Justices, presidents, financial bigwigs, and as Kevin Drum points out, left-leaning publications to see the overwhelming advantage of attending and Ivy League or similar school, as most of the influential people and institutions are from the NE. Which makes sense…sort of. Just depends on the crowds you run with or want to run with. SoCal is where you want to be for some things, but other than that, aside from oil, the movers and shakers on the national level are generally near NY, Chicago, SF, or LA. Privilege will get you a good gig locally, but if you have privilege and are located in one of these areas, two things are true. One, you need a lot more privilege to get to the top of the heap (privilege in and of itself becomes somewhat mundane), and two, you really are better positioned, assuming you are at the top of the heap, to make the leap to being a force on the national scene, regardless of your job. In short, privileged guy from NM needs to leave NM pretty early in life in order to be a bigwig nationally, not true for someone from NYC, Boston, Chicago, or even SF. If you rise to the top in NM, you have to move, if you do in NYC, well, you are already positioned.
Finally, legacy admissions to universities are shameful, as are the tuition rates at nearly every private and public school I can think of. It makes health care cost increases look almost normal. Again, only those with connections, or lots of money, need apply to any college absent truly remarkable life achievements prior to graduating high school.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Great post abject funk.
That said, the real issue is not between the universities, it’s about those who can’t get there. It’s nice to have rich parents, and it’s nice to have educated parents. But what about that really smart kid in the ghetto? How do we give him the opportunity? It’s silly to waste that kid’s talents, but we do it all the time. Yes, we have grants, but not enough of them. The real solution is to give everyone the opportunity that I had: you can go to any university that will accept you. And for me, that was any university. But that’s only because my parents could pay for it. We’ve made a choice in our society: rich kids and exceptional poor kids can go to college. Everyone else is on their own. By doing that, we make a decision that many talented kids will never get a real chance. That is not wise for a society, and we will pay the price for that philosophy.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:35 am
If we really want to go this way, why not based it just on family income, i.e. how much money does the student’s parents make in a year + how much asset they own etc instead of this amorphous definition of “class”?
November 12th, 2008 at 6:42 am
To answer my own question, I guess when people refer to class, we are usually referring to socio-economic class, rather than strictly income-based class. Makes sense, I guess, you can make a lot of money and still be a hick, etc. But if we really want to move to class-based AF, I think someone really need to figure out what is meant exactly by CLASS, first.
November 12th, 2008 at 6:52 am
This appears to have been an autobiographical post designed to reveal Matthew’s views on “class”. Matthew simply wanted his readership to know that he looks down on the nouveau-riche who got that way by being successful in private industry (and/or on people who live in the Southwest). No matter how much money some uppity fast-food peddlers may have, Matthew wants to make sure we all understand that he still thinks they aren’t “classy”, like East Coast people in academics.
I can discern no other point from the post.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Sonic Charmer,
It seems to me that the point is that income is not perfectly correlated to education. While it is a huge advantage for college admissions to be rich, it is also a big advantage to group up in an intellectual family. All the post is saying is that if you base admissions preferences on economic class, then you are still not eliminating a privilege advantage for some. If you want to get all worked up about the semantics of using the word “classy”, fine; but the post was hardly an indictment of fast food moguls in the southwest.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:39 am
err…grow up.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:53 am
“People aren’t going to agree on who counts where.”
To me, this is almost the best thing about affirmative action based on SES. Long ago, I was a libertarian who thought admissions should be strictly merit-based. Then I realized that by taking this “merit” idea far enough, I’d live in a world where we could all just punch our stats into a computer and find out if we were admitted to a certain school. No, there’s a reason why schools ask for recommendations and legacy status and extracurriculars — they’re looking for something intangible (mixed in, of course, with the cynical numbers-gaming for the rankings).
I was heartened recently, when filling out a law school application, to see a prompt along these lines: “_____ Law School seeks to enroll a diverse student body with different backgrounds, experiences, etc. If you wish to inform the admission committee about how you would add to this diversity, please explain below.” This means the white Appalachian straight-A’er with subpar test scores can explain himself or whatever.
Though it also opens up the possibility of lying about “class” credentials on applications, something that could really only be sniffed out by looking through FAFSA forms, but then aren’t most schools need-blind these days?
My point, though, is that the subjectivity of “class” — an admissions committee deciding “we like this, we need that” and creating a class that is diverse in the best way — seems to me the best way to go. And the best way to get this info from applicants seems to be just prompting them on the application in some way.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:19 am
If we really want to go this way, why not based it just on family income, i.e. how much money does the student’s parents make in a year + how much asset they own etc instead of this amorphous definition of “class”?
Dude, that is where we’re headed. No one other than Matt has suggested that we start inspecting how much “class” students have and giving preferences to the classless ones. It’s all in his imagination.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:26 am
What every kids needs to know is that if you want to pursue a career in a field with a log-normal distribution of incomes (say laywers) you need to get yourself to the Ivy Leagues. However, if you want to pursue a career with a normally distributed income pattern, going to an Ivy league or any $50K per year liberal arts college is a waste of money. You care where your lawyer went to school but you probably do not care about your doctor and you really do not care at all about your Dentist, pharmaicst, or physical therapist.
What Affirmative Action is meant for is to help the children of upper middle class minorities to move into the log-normal distributed career fields. You see much less AA for pharmacy school but the students have to pass board exams at the end and admitting unqualified students pushes down the pass rate and increases the drop out rate.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:28 am
My point, though, is that the subjectivity of “class” — an admissions committee deciding “we like this, we need that” and creating a class that is diverse in the best way — seems to me the best way to go.
I guess this would be the best way to go if we are sticking to the argument that the purpose of affirmative action is to encourage diversity. On the other hand, if the purpose, as some people have argued, is actually to help or give a leg up to people who would otherwise be disadvantaged, then I think income level is a better way to go.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Legacy admissions are often wasted opportunities. Attending Yale probably didn’t affect George Bush’s life chances, but
giving slots to slackers like him takes slots from kids whose lives would be changed by an Ivy League education.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Asher, at #2, says all that needs to be said about this. Matthew is, for reasons that I can’t understand, comparing two completely irrelevant cases that wouldn’t be candidates for preference under any non-insane class-based preference system. As the very first comment suggests, blogging late at night is probably not the best idea when it comes to public policy.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:40 am
There are about five different threads intertwined into this bowl of Yglesian spagetti.
1) One, you need to segregate people by academic achievement, regardless of their past circumstances, but not in a way which punishes them or forecloses future opportunities. You don’t want a class being held back by an underprepared kid — or that kid suffering pain because he’s in over his head.
As an example: My understanding, from people who went there, is that Penn State has various academic tracks depending upon an enrollees past high school preparation. This way, it can provide some degree of remedial education to those who need it –for whatever reason — and yet provide challenging coursework for more advanced students. Of course, it is a large public university of a large state so it has more flexibility than a small college like Middlebury.
Unfortunately, the very schools who provide the greatest service to society — in remedying the ills of highly unfair K12 education and income distribution and in teaching vice research — are heavily penalized in the academic beauty contests run by US News every year.
Even when scholars at those institutions do very well in competing for US research grants.
But of course, the only people more stupid at beauty contests than the contestants are the judges — and the viewers.
2) As I’ve noted here in the past, high academic achievement is not a path to great success in a monetary sense. Our most wealthy self-made billionaires are college dropouts –or else went to schools pretty far from the Ivy League.
3) To not utilize people who are motivated and capable of providing service is a HUGE waste. We have millions of people in prison –who never had much of a chance at a middle class life because of our educational system and fucked up Republican economy — who could be working and providing taxes. It costs more to keep an inmate under lock and key than it would take to send him to Harvard.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Maybe it shouldn’t even be called class-based affirmative action. We should call it wealth-based (or lack-of-wealth-based) affirmative action. Then no one would get side tracked into this classy argument.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:48 am
What Asher and Rich in PA said. I guess if you’ve haven’t spent much time with the lower classes it’s difficult to come up with real examples.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Asher, at #2, says all that needs to be said about this. Matthew is, for reasons that I can’t understand, comparing two completely irrelevant cases that wouldn’t be candidates for preference under any non-insane class-based preference system. As the very first comment suggests, blogging late at night is probably not the best idea when it comes to public policy.
Rich, what’s bizarre is that people keep talking about this nonsense and saying he has a good point, as if he didn’t just invent this insane straw man of an argument five hours ago.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:54 am
So apprently success is based more on charisma than class. We need affirmative action for non-charismatics.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:57 am
Matt’s example of Kid #1 and Kid #2 doesn’t strike me as a particularly effective criticism of the notion that affirmative action would be better applied through income/wealth-based distinctions, rather than race. While Kid #1’s family is certainly wealthier than Kid #2’s, the latter’s family would still probably rank somewhere in the 90th-95th percentile of earners by income. Neither child is a particularly good candidate for affirmative action.
The point of using income or wealth as the primary criterion for affirmative action, rather than race, is that it does a better job promoting the policies underlying AA; namely, leveling the playing field between haves and have-nots and counteracting the entrenchment of persistent inequality.
As the example hints at, there will be cases where income or wealth is a poor indicator, but the error rate is likely quite small (i.e. limited to uneducated nouveau-riche or over-educated fuddy duddies in academia). The beauty of using income, like race, is that the information costs are low. Trying to develop a system that accounts for the small number of Kid #1/Kid #2 anomalies would be a good deal more difficult and costly and would likely generate a different set of errors.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Then again, maybe Matt could start a finishing school for classless scions of fast food millionaires. There, they can make up for the grievous misfortune of not having been born to a Berklee music professor and learn to appreciate Chopin and Nixon in China. Maybe the graduates of this school will even rectify the lack of operas on great progressive Presidents.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:59 am
It looks as if someone borrowed these kids from an old conservative argument against the Federal Estate Tax. The gist of that argument was that Kid 1 and Kid 2 had both received valuable inheritances, but only Kid 1’s was taxed.
The counterargument, of course, is that regardless of the advantages his education affords, Kid 2 still has to work for a living to realize the value of his inheritance, while Kid 1 can sit on his duff and live off the old man’s money. This is much more advantageous to Kid 1, but our society benefits far more from Kid 2 than from Kid 1.
Don’t know if that contributes much to the immediate discussion, but the intro was quite the flashback.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:01 am
As A Berklee grad, Kid #2’s dad is likely playing in the subway for quarters, hence Kid #2 may well qualify for welfare. Since Reagan, we all know the grand lifestyle that can be financed by a welfare check. Conclusion: Kid #1’s dad probably needs a capital gains cut.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Asher (#23), perhaps Matthew is pulling a meta on us: he’s modeling how ridiculous examples can mis-inform public policy discussions. I’m waiting for him to spring the trap in 3….2….1….
November 12th, 2008 at 9:11 am
As A Berklee grad, Kid #2’s dad is likely playing in the subway for quarters, hence Kid #2 may well qualify for welfare.
You didn’t pay attention; he’s a Berklee professor. He exudes class. Besides, mom is a BU professor too. It’s quite a classy family. Unlike Kid 1 and his hillbilly fast food franchising dad. Because we know that all extravagantly rich fast food franchisers don’t attain any class with their money, they just buy ugly McMansions and get drunk all the time.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:16 am
This is the problem with the term class. Some people are just one step away from sounding awfully condescending when they talk about it.
The point of using income or wealth as the primary criterion for affirmative action, rather than race, is that it does a better job promoting the policies underlying AA; namely, leveling the playing field between haves and have-nots and counteracting the entrenchment of persistent inequality.
Dave puts it best with this sentence.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Kid #3 is biracial and raised by a single mom and his grandparents, sometimes on food stamps; his father was highly educated, but absent from the household; intelligent and charismatic, kid #3 will soon be moving to Washington, DC.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Why is this post so oddly specific? Is person #2 Matt? Who is person #1?
November 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
“And of course if you reduce the level of inequality, you reduce the scope of inherited advantage directly.”
Of course? Really? Seems that the only way to redice the “inequality” is economically. (You can’t take the education away from the educated, or force a 40-year-old parent to get a PhD from Harvard.)
So let’s say that happens. Some economic shock makes a group of people the exact same in economic terms. A few families are blue-collar. Some have parents from elite universities. Some of the parents are meth addicts on parole.
So again, assume this economic shock puts them all in the exact same economic situation. We have eliminated the “inequality.” Have we really managed to “reduce the scope of inherited advantage directly”? Seems to me that the kids from successful families still have a significant inherited advantage.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Matt I agree with some of the commenters above. Neither of those kids should be getting class-based preferences. (The idea that they would is pretty ridiculous.) If one is to implement class-based preferences obviously the only way to do it is based on income. Presumbably you could arrange something where at the poverty level you get so many points and at certain levels going up from there your number of “points” would decrease until they stopped. That is really the only fair way to do it.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Way to demonstrate two people who shouldn’t qualify for class based affirmative action.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:56 am
If one is to implement class-based preferences obviously the only way to do it is based on income.
Income and assets. Paris Hilton – well, she’s actually earning tons of income, but she doesn’t have to, she could just sit and live on her inheritance. So you could have a very rich student whose parents don’t make much money. So there you have it. Let me say, though, that class-based affirmative action isn’t a great idea if what you’re really after is doing race-based affirmative action in a more fair way, i.e. not giving preferences to rich blacks who don’t deserve it. Rich blacks still struggle on standardized tests relative to their rich white peers; in fact, rich blacks don’t do as well as whites below the poverty line on the SAT. Now, why that is is quite the mystery, but so long as you don’t think it’s genetic, and so long as you believe in affirmative action in the first place, you ought to be in the business of giving preferences to rich blacks too.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Correction on Kid 1, mother got pregnant in high school.
November 12th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Here is a better example of what you were thinking:
Kid 1’s dad went to a technical school and makes $30,000 a year working for an electronics firm. His mom never went to college because she got pregnant in college and she works part time as an assistant in a clinic making $15,000 a year. Kid 1’s “babysitter” was often the television and he has 2 siblings.
Kid 2’s was raised by a single mom. From the ages of 8-12 his mother pursued a degree in English during which time they were on food stamps. She now works as an editor of a small town newspaper making $45,000 a year. Kid 2’s mother often sacrificed to take him to the museum, buy him books, and encourage his hobbies.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I’m quite sure that if the current economic downturn continues, many of us will be able to testify from direct experience what is or is not economically disadvantaged.
So there’ll be lot’s of expertise on how to solve this problem. Don’t worry.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:03 am
Matt,
It’s time to move to an even worse neighborhood. I don’t generaly (or ever) agree with the “trust fund scumbag” comments, but you’re really out of touch.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Matt makes his point in a horrible way, but there is a point under there. And it makes a lot more sense in context of the linked LGM post. But if you want to talk about the educational advantages associated with class, and how money is poorly correlated, I think you’re a lot better talking about people whose parents never went to college vs. those whose parents did. In high school, my girlfriend’s dad was a logger who made a lot more money than my dad. My best friend’s dad was a alcoholism counselor for a non-profit, who made less than half of what my dad did. My girlfriend was the only one of the four kids in her family to finish college. All 3 of the kids in my other friend’s family finished college (though they relied pretty heavily on student loans).
Who had it easier financially? My girlfriend. Who grew up in an environment much more encouraging of educational attainment, and looked and sounded more like somebody middle class? My other friend. Neither situation was severe enough that I think AA is necessary, but two points remain: class != money, and money != an environment supporting education. Both of which I think are relevant to the discussion of class-based AA.
FWIW, coming from a small town in northern Wisconsin, all three of us would appear pretty classless to (ahem) some people around here.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Any AA system that gives any help to either of those kids is a complete joke.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:35 am
I think Matt’s points about the inconsistencies among the concepts of wealth and class and privilege, and the relative merit of dismantling privileges rather than trying to redress disadvantages through class-based affirmative action, deserve to be discussed.
A lot of people seem to be hung up on the fact that Matt unfortunately illustrated his point with two different examples of privileged kids instead of two different examples of underprivileged kids… but that’s really neither here nor there. The questions at hand are what types of inequality in opportunity need to be mitigated, and what are the most effective ways to do so. The lack of economic resources and the lack of a family commitment to educational achievement are both class-based inequalities that suggest entirely different remedies.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:38 am
same sort of objection applies to race. a dark-skinned curly haired egyptian is white (non-hispanic white). this guy is “black.” in fact, he’s part of the black congressional caucus…
It’s interesting to note that Butterfield went to a historically black institution (North Carolina Central University) for both undergraduate college and law school. Which would mean that he’s considered himself black ever since his teenage years. One could be cynical and say that Butterfield has done so deliberately, in an attempt to qualify for affirmative action, but consider that given his age (b. 1947) he would have started college in the mid-1960’s, before affirmative action was quite as fully developed as it is today. It seems fair to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he genuinely considers himself black notwithstanding his Caucasian appearance.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Matt,
I think its all relative in terms of class. Though TT Football player runs McD’s (get your guns up) and PhD guy has less money but more education, that doesn’t define class. Say PhD guy kids rebel, taking on blue persona in Boston, while TT guy sees the value in business and has his kid pushing to pursue new endevours.
From my experience, recent money puts more value on people being “successful” while someone who had the ability to get a PhD in the first place, probably wants their child to ‘find their own way’ and lets them run wild.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:08 am
La.P.
You’re right, but money is very easy to quantify. Once you get beyond that, you start getting into indivual judgement calls. You could go by which degrees parents obtained, but while every dollar is worth a hundred pennies, not all degrees are the same.
Child 1 has a father with a BA from Harvard who decided to go into teaching high school. Child 2 was raised by a single mother high-school drop-out, who just married a man she met in an AA meeting with a PhD in computer science, though he can’t get a job in that field anymore and works as a bookkeeper for a temp agency.
Child 1 has the more advantaged background, but in any point system based on degrees child 1 would be given preference.
I suppose you could use a pro-rated “degree years” system. Each year a parent has had a degree while acting in a custodial capacity, multiplied by some factor for the level of the degree, counts as some advantage.
Then, if a kid’s dad has a medical degree but spent the last 5 years in Iraq, how do you count that?
November 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am
This is one of Mr. Yglesias’ sillier posts, and that’s saying a lot.
Under any reasonable AA system, neither the child of the Berklee grad or the fast food frachiser would get preferential treatment. David’s modification is much better. As regards people who might actually be in consideration for socioeconomic AA, I would almost always go by money rather than some ill-defined conception of ‘class’.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
The quantity and intensity of the class based hostility toward Matt in this thread is breathtaking. If ever there is an indicator of class, it’s when people don’t get pissed off about stuff like this.
If he is not perfect in projecting outside his own experiences and background, that makes him like just about every other person in the whole fucking world. But the fact that his experience and background is one of privilege drives people uncharacteristically nasty things.
Seriously people, leave that shit to the Republicans.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Njorl,
As you say, money is very easy to quantify. If we view the class divide in higher educationt as entirely a function of money, then the obvious way to reduce educational inequality is to provide income-based affirmative action.
It’s a hell of a lot harder to quantify class based on family background. And, seen through this lens, the concept of preferences for the disadvantaged looks like a much less effective tool for equalizing opportunity.
I’d add that preferences in university admissions and hiring kick in far too late in life to be effective even if class were purely a function of money.
It seems to me that the only potentially effective tools for reducing inequality in educational opportunity are substantial redistribution of wealth, coupled with a systematic dismantling of the privileges in admission to elite schools starting with Kindergarten… living in the right neighborhood to attend the right public schools and having the money and connections to get into elite private schools. Given that these are all third-rail political issues, however, we’re not likely to achieve anything beyond window dressing.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Asher and Sonic Charmer: When Matt wrote, “I think kid number two’s family has more ‘class’ in a common sense way,” I don’t think he meant that they were objectively “classier” in the sense of being more refined, but that they were closer to traditional centers of privilege. I think he actually thought he was sticking up for kid number one, not criticizing him or his family. If he had proofread, which he apparently never does, he probably would have tweaked his wording to make this clear.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
If college were free, the way it is in France, we might not be having this invidious discussion.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Harold, France is not a good example, with its substandard Universities and tiny elite attending the Ecoles. Even Germany, which has uniformly mediocre (but free) Unis because they accept everyone with an Arbitur and have little ability to choose their students, isn’t a good example because the education system before college tracks students at an early age and they usually end up getting separated by class anyway. Probably best to look, once again, to the Scandanavian countries.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
What everyone else said, such as #35. My addition is to point out how contextual and subjective this notion of “class” is.
Having grown up in the Southwest, it seems to me that the ostensibly higher class of kid #2 gives him a heck of a lot more advantage in the Northeast (where I’ve also lived). Southwesterners generally would not be as impressed as Northeasterners with a Berklee music professor and an Ivy League professor.
That kind of status just isn’t as important there, and I doubt you’ll get as many Southwesterners to agree that kid #2 has more “class.” Move kid #1 to the more status-conscious Northeast, though, and I’m certain Matthew’s view would prevail.
Just so I’m clear, this notion of class is totally silly, and should be left out of any consideration of affirmative action in admissions. Income and wealth provide a much smaller error rate.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I don’t think we need to get into the business of slicing up the upper middle class from the upper class when we are dealing with class-based affirmative action. I think the policy should be to tip the scales in favor of those who clearly are low-income. Leave everyone else alone.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
well, from your description of both of these individuals, they are both quite well-off, neither needs or requires any ‘affirmative action’ on their behalf.
if you’re trying to create some weird measure of ‘how much class’ (???) someone has, if we’re really going to phrase things that way, then in this day and age I think it really comes down to a question of “who is the most rich and powerful person you could get to go to bat for you when the sh$t goes down?” and the person who can summon the person with the most clout and influence, would win.
but both individuals you cite are well-off enough that they would probably never, ever have to worry about their class status.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
All this class wankery is inane and boring.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
It sounds like if by ‘inherited privilege’ Matthew is trying to say ‘intangible privilege’ — family B has more ‘class’ but less money — an unfair advantage in his view.
But wait a minute — Is the goal of our social policy really to reduce ‘intangible privilege’ and if so why? I mean, to me, this brings up the shades of the Red Guard.
Um, shouldn’t we be trying instead to increase intangible privilege — spread it around — not reduce or eliminate it?
Just sayin’.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Uh, I’ve never heard a logical explanation as to why we should have any kind of affirmative action at all. I doubt if there is one.
As for the idea that income determines standardized test scores – not overwhelmingly true. In 2002, the average SAT score for blacks from families earning $80,000 to $100,000 a year was substantially lower than the average for whites from families making $20,000 to $30,000 per year.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
In 2002, the average SAT score for blacks from families earning $80,000 to $100,000 a year was substantially lower than the average for whites from families making $20,000 to $30,000 per year.
Yep, let’s stick with race-based affirmative action.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
As I’ve mentioned before, Matt gets about 10% of his ideas directly from me:
As I wrote in VDARE about proposals for class-based affirmative action:
“Nobody has ever adequately explained how class-based quotas would actually work, since class is a hazier concept than race. What class was Obama as a young man?”
Consider the 18-year-old Barack Obama:
Obama’s father had a Masters from Harvard. His mother eventually got a Ph.D. His maternal grandmother was a bank executive. Her sister was a college professor of statistics. Obama grew up in a highrise apartment with astonishing views in a nice neighborhood of Honolulu. He attended the most socially dominant prep school in his state. His paternal grandfather was a regionally prominent landowner.
On the other hand, Obama’s grad student mother was on a food stamps for awhile. His biological father gave him a basketball once, but that was about it for child support. (His hard-working stepfather was quite generous toward him, but his mother didn’t like him having influence over her son and cut that off.) His maternal grandfather was a barfly.
So, how many class-based affirmative action brownie points should Obama have gotten?
November 12th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
a straightforward attack on privilege in the form of efforts to dismantle legacy preferences and the like would have a similar effect
I agree, also, if you are serious about attacking privilege in higher education, the answer is to nationalize the Ivy League. Make Harvard more like Berkeley or the University of Michigan. Invert the pyramid.
Probably best to look, once again, to the Scandinavian countries.
Partially. Scandinavian countries all have some sort of vocational track in high school, quite sensibly IMO. OTOH Sweden has a popular voucher program, which I’m not terribly fond of.
But I wouldn’t exaggerate what America can learn from Sweden. America is the only country that has the challenge of integrating a significant minority educationally-lagging racially-distinct recently-oppressed into an advanced economy.
Theoretically speaking, this is an interesting topic, but I hope it’s not prompted by a idea that race-based affirmative action is going away just because Obama was elected president. For Obama to initiate such a policy would be a huge betrayal of the black middle class which accepted him as one of their own, indeed into which he married. It will never happen.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I hope it’s not prompted by a idea that race-based affirmative action is going away just because Obama was elected president. For Obama to initiate such a policy would be a huge betrayal of the black middle class which accepted him as one of their own, indeed into which he married. It will never happen.
He’s hinted at it though.
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