“There is one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”.
University in the US, for better or for worse, has been the envy of students and parents alike for as long as the US Empire has been around. When the best students graduate high school they choose to go to the US. The constant supply of the best of the best academics has allowed US institutions to be constantly at the pinnacle of human progression.
From my understanding, the whole debate here in my eyes is about the ruling on affirmative action is based on should the question of whether we should systematically include race as a metric to be taken into consideration on a systematic basis. Affirmative action in the state that it was, essentially, seeks to artificially diversify the racial profile of the student body. While the concept of meeting a predetermined quota for racial diversity seems a little odd, the affirmative action policy is a well-intentioned one. It seeks to bring people of multiple ethnicities closer together and give more historically minorities, perhaps without the best resources, a better chance at prestigious education.
The main contention here is what does systematically considering race in college applications actually imply. Is race the actual characteristic we are trying to address here? Or have we aligned race with other factors like socioeconomic status? Are we merely encouraging certain races to go to college? Or are we giving historically underprivileged races a better chance at college? These are very important distinctions.
As it stands right now, the Supreme Court rules that you can take into account the individual hardships that a person has endured due to race but you cannot systematically evaluate applicants differently due to race - essentially the order of consideration has been changed and you can no longer treat race like a checkbox.
If we are to judge applicants solely based on merit, or metrics that can be directly compared, the education system, in its current state, will naturally favour those with greater resources and greater access to things like tutoring, textbooks and teachers. So those people that are less fortunate will, unfortunately, be at a significant disadvantage. But should we recognise and artificially adjust for this disadvantage? And do these artificial racial adjustments implicate what was intended?
College admissions are a zero-sum game inherently, for someone to be accepted others have to be rejected - there are only so many student slots a college can accommodate. The metric of evaluation by which applicants are judged, theoretically, should be based on their historical ability to perform well in academia (because obviously, stellar grades are an excellent metric for intelligence and future success) as well as other softer qualities that make up the content of their character. To artificially rebalance applicant admissions due to some other metrics is to give inherent advantages to one type of applicant and disadvantages to another.
If the goal of the college admission is to admit the most worthy people, then the system becomes similar to that of something like an NBA draft. In an NBA draft, the only question a GM is asking is: "Can this guy play basketball?". The NBA doesn't need to systematically adjust for something like race, they just need to find the strongest players in that class. If the goal of the admission process isn't necessarily to admit the most worthy people, but also to give underprivileged people a better shot, then one must ask themselves whether systematically filtering race will yield the intended consequences. Have we prematurely assigned race to other factors here? If the goal of the admissions process is to also create a more diverse campus, one must also ask themselves whether the definition of diversity has been reduced to ethnic diversity and whereby ethnic diversity is given more weight than let's say political diversity or cultural diversity.
On the topic of fairness, we can ask ourselves whether evaluating applicants by traditional letter grades is even fair in the first place. The education system is not one that was designed to accommodate any sort of neurodiversity; everyone at school largely learns the same thing the same way and the expectations of students are the same regardless of individuality. Learning disabilities, personality, even biological sex may play a significant role in a student's ability to perform well academically. Most humans, especially teenagers, were not designed to go to school at 8:30 AM and sit in classrooms for 6-7 hours a day.
In the current state of education, those that perform the best at school will invariably share similarities and traits that will eventually find themselves in universities. Universities nowadays preach about diversity, inclusion and critical thinking and all that BS. I can tell you, anecdotally, unequivocally, that the college campus is not a place for diversity - it's not the idea lab that every college is advertising, it's an echo chamber that largely amplifies existing conventional thoughts - it's where confrontation and disagreement are met with self-justifying hostility.
