Showing posts with label Affirmative action. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Affirmative action. Show all posts

June 1, 2011

Fighting alumni bias

Here's an amusing NYT article about how Chinese-American firms that mold applications to fancy colleges for hefty fees are expanding into the Mainland China market, where they write essays and create Potemkin extracurricular activities
LuShuang Xu provides an example of that approach. Ms. Xu, who was born and raised in China before emigrating to suburban California at age 9, had high hopes that she would be the first in her family to go to college. But poor results on a practice SAT and a dearth of extracurricular activities convinced Ms. Xu, 17, that she needed a scholastic makeover if she were to make it into a school her parents could brag about to relatives. 
ThinkTank sent her to a public speaking camp, helped her improve her college essay and gave her the e-mail addresses of all the members of the Stanford University history department. At the company’s prompting, she found two internships with department professors. She also enrolled in ThinkTank’s college prep courses, which helped improve her SAT score 410 points to 2160 out of 2400. Next autumn, she will start at Harvard University. 
ThinkTank’s success with students in California’s Asian-American community, which accounts for 90 percent of the company’s American clients, has drawn interest from wealthy parents in China. Mr. Ma opened an office in Shenzhen in 2009 and another in Beijing last year. 
The company entered China at a time when the college consulting industry on the mainland was booming, with numerous agencies promising to make Chinese student’s academic dreams come true, often through questionable practices. 
One company, Best Education, has offices across China and charges clients an average of 500,000 renminbi for writing clients’ essays, training them for the visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and providing career guidance. 
“The students just supply their information and we do all the work,” said one representative, who requested anonymity to protect his job. Best Education offers a 50 percent refund if an applicant is rejected by the student’s chosen schools. ... 
Reached by telephone, an agency representative said the company did a lot more than just polish résumés. “If a client’s English is poor, our trained professionals can write the essay to make sure it looks perfect,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions from her employer. 
Helping students from China clear the college entry hurdles has presented ThinkTank with a fresh set of challenges. Often they have poor English language skills and have done little with their free time beyond homework. Yet their parents often demand the Ivy League. 
“We really have to hold their hand and do everything along with them,” Mr. Ma said, including deliberately leaving spelling mistakes on college essays so they look authentic, training them for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and building extracurricular activities from the ground up. 
ThinkTank has founded Model United Nations groups, built a Web site for a Shanghai student’s photography project to get news media coverage and helped another obtain funding to build a hydroelectric generator. 

This raises the more general question of why anybody, Chinese or non-Chinese, cares so much about getting into a famous American college? Obviously, some of it is sheer social climbing -- bragging to relatives, etc. 

Yet, there is a rational piece of the puzzle, which is that many elite employers, such as Goldman Sachs, discriminate extravagantly based on college attended (see Steve Hsu here and here). Many super-lucrative Wall Street firms won't bother recruiting at non-Ivy League campuses, and some even feel Columbia is a little downscale for them. 

Why? Well, there are various obvious reasons of convenience, but another is sheer self-interest. If you graduated from Harvard, keeping it much easier for Harvard students to get hired by your company than equally gifted graduates of lesser-known colleges burnishes the name Harvard, which is on your resume. Plus, your kids will have some legacy pull when they apply to Harvard so why give outsiders an even break?

In other words, there is a pervasive pattern of hiring bias perpetuated by an old boy's network. When discrimination involves race or sex, government and media go on red alert. But when it involves colleges, well, who cares?

Now, one thing we could do to reduce college admissions mania is make Wall Street a little less lucrative. But, that seems beyond imagining. So, let's think about a direct approach.

The normal solution for discrimination is quotas, explicit or covert. So, why not quotas for, say, Goldman Sachs? GS is not only vastly wealthy, but has been hugely helped out in recent years by the taxpayers (e.g., the AIG bailout, which saved Goldman $13 billion). So, Goldman should publicly commit to doubling the percentage of new recruits it hires each year from public universities.

I'm not sure that this is a great idea, but what's interesting is that it's a rather novel idea. 

May 23, 2011

The Importance of Being Barack

A minor trend I've noticed is people fiddling around with their names in order to make themselves seem more eligible for diversity brownie points. For example, local talk radio host Raoul Lowery noticed that his Irish surname wasn't getting him anywhere, so he added, in the Mexican style, his Mexican mother's last name to make himself Raoul Lowery-Contreras, and, bingo, he was suddenly Spanish-surnamed and could market himself to radio stations as the Voice of the Emerging Latino Tidal Wave.

Similarly, performance artist Sandra Loh felt contempt for the whole system of diversity brownie points, but a starving performance artist has to eat. So, she realized it would a be a lot easier to get grants in the diversity-crazed SoCal arts scene if she emphasized being Asian. She already had a Chinese last name via her Cal Tech professor dad, but Loh sounds like it could be, say, German. Maybe it's short for Lohmann? And since her mother was German, that was a problem. So she added her middle name Tsing and became Sandra Tsing Loh, which immediately boosted her career.

Similarly, a friend in the Bay Area tells me about an Asian high school girl who got into UCLA despite grades and test scores well below UCLA's usual standards. Why? Well, Proposition 209 in 1996 meant that the UC schools aren't allowed to ask about racial identity on the application. So, the diversicrats struck back by making the admissions process "holistic," including two essays, on which you are encouraged to wax eloquent about your diversityness. 

The consultant who wrote the Chinese girl's UC essay played on her ambiguous sounding last name (could be Chinese, could be WASP, could be black) and the fact that she happened to have been born into the small Chinese community in Ecuador (but grew up in suburban California) to make her sound like she might be black and/or Latino instead of just another pretty smart, pretty hard working Chinese girl from a Bay Area suburb. UCLA automatically enrolled her in the summer-before-freshman-year remedial program that they run to help NAM admittees catch-up with whites and Asians.

In America, unlike in apartheid South Africa, there is very little in the way of background checking into claims to belong to a particular racial/ethnic group. 

The main exceptions are Indian tribes. If you wake up tomorrow and remember that your grandmother told you she was a Pechanga Indian, and therefore you deserve an annual check of your share of the profits from the giant Pechanga casino on the road to Palm Springs, well, you've got your work cut out for you. The Pechanga tribe is allowed only one casino, so distributing profits is a zero sum game: adding a long lost Pechangan to the roles dilutes the size of all the current Pechangans' checks. They they set a "blood quantum" of minimum Pechanganess (typically, 1/4th, so you'd better hope Grannie wasn't merely, say, 3/4th Pechangan). 

So, Indian tribes maintain systems much like the Boer state did in apartheid South Africa to decide who is in and who is out of the favorable line of descent. Much genealogical detail is required to validate claims of Pechanganess. 

On the other hand, diversity bennies for everybody else, such as blacks and Hispanics, are close to infinite sum games. The more people who claim to be diverse, the more the non-diverse must pony up, and more the beneficiaries of affirmative action there are to fight politically for their continuance. Every so often, a few black intellectuals, most notably Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, complain about how Harvard gives away too many affirmative action slots to blacks who don't have a plausible claim to have been victimized by American slavery. For example, they have a white parent or their black parents are foreign. But, Gates and Guinier kind of shut up about this with the rise of Barack Obama, who is the double epitome of exactly the kind of freeloader they are kind of talking about.

Obama, himself, had the problem than "Barry Obama from Honolulu" doesn't sound black at all -- it sounds like an assimilated part-Japanese guy. (Obama is a town in Japan, and thus he almost didn't get hired for his famous community organizer job organizing blacks because the guy he sent the resume to thought he was Japanese.) 

Moreover, by the 1970s, "Barry" was sounding like the kind of tin-eared name that immigrants foist on their kids to make them sound more assimilated and classier. The classic example is Irving, an old, respectable Anglo-American surname -- most notably, Washington Irving, America's first famous fiction writer. In the early 20th Century, Russian Jewish immigrant parents seized upon "Irving" as a  WASPy first name for their sons (e.g., Irving Kristol). Soon, the name was so inextricably linked to socially maladroit hard-chargers from the Outer Boroughs that it became a standard joke name for Mad Magazine.

"Barry" peaked in popularity as a first name the year after Obama was born, but it was already starting to sound a little Irvingish, a little trying-too-hard-to-be-assimilated by the late 1970s: e.g., Barry Manilow. So, no more Barry. If Obama had been really confident in his blackness, he would have shortened Barack to Rock Obama, like baseball player Tim "Rock" Raines. Instead, at Occidental, he switched to Barack. Compared to Barry, Barack sounds more Balack.

Are there any strategies where parents could manipulate this kind of thing? Could you name your kid D'Shqwan Jacob Smith, and he grows up being Jake Smith, but when he applies to the University of California, he's suddenly D'Shqwan Smith? 

November 29, 2010

The Set-Aside Boondoggle

Heather Mac Donald explains in NRO in The Set-Aside Boondoggle another detriment on the economy. 

Allow me to reiterate that the one comparative political advantage that Obama personally would possess in improving the economy is his ability as a black President to set in motion -- so should he choose -- the reform of the huge number of distortions in economic life due to the Civil Rights Era of the last half century.

November 22, 2010

More unsolicited advice for President Obama

In VDARE this week, I offer the President another policy suggestion that he won't hear from anybody else that would be politically feasible and good for himself, good for the Democrats, and good for the country.

You're welcome, Mr. President.

November 2, 2010

Ward Connerly's ballot initiative cruises in Arizona

Proposition 107, banning affirmative action in government operations, won easily in Arizona 60-40 (with 92% of precincts reporting), carrying every county in the state except the Four Corners Indian reservation county.

October 25, 2010

September 14, 2010

Affirmative Action for Italian-Americans

From the New York Times, by Lisa W. Foderaro:
Of all the universities and colleges that offer protections for minorities, CUNY [City University of New York] appears to be the only one that has declared Italian-Americans an official affirmative action category in employment, promising special efforts to recruit, hire and promote them, according to national higher-education groups.

The declaration, made in 1976 and reaffirmed in later years, came after pressure from Italian-American legislators in Albany responding to complaints of bias from the faculty and staff. The lawmakers also created a research institute at the university to counsel students of Italian heritage and study “the Italian-American experience.”

Yet ever since, a group of Italian-American professors and staff members at the institute and at CUNY have been making the case that the university has failed them.

They have produced a paper mountain of manifestos, research studies and lawsuits, and exposed a deep vein of grievance in an ethnic group that has risen to prominence in fields like politics, law and medicine. Some of the dissidents have lamented that Italian-Americans are still stereotyped in popular culture as mobsters or muscle-bound buffoons; others have described an unsympathetic Italian-American administrator as an “Uncle Tony” — the equivalent of an Uncle Tom. 

What could be more surprising than to find out that giving out affirmative action preferences only generates more demands for more affirmative action preferences?

Back in 2003, I wrote:
If the government started giving out goodies to people born on Wednesdays, within a year we'd see pressure groups with names like The Children of Woe lobbying for continuation of Wednesdayians' privileges. PBS would be running Wednesday Pride documentaries during Wednesday History Month about famous Wednesdaytarians like Jimmy Carter, Bruce Lee, and Rosie O'Donnell. 

In illustration of my point, Foderaro continues:
Though CUNY vigorously denies the allegations, the critics have met with some success: Outside arbiters have largely upheld claims that Italian-Americans are underrepresented in university jobs. In a written opinion, the civil rights lawyer and federal judge Constance Baker Motley, who oversaw a settlement in 1994, called the group’s lack of progress “unconscionable given the existence of an affirmative action commitment.”

Still, for some who work in higher education, the notion of protections for Italian-Americans — at a university where 70 percent of the 262,000 full-time students are black, Latino or Asian — has prompted some head-scratching.

“In the diversity of the community that is New York City, it seems particularly unusual that Italian-Americans would be considered disadvantaged,” said Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education. “After all, in New York we had an Italian-American governor, and we may have another one coming up.”
Having a black President, however, well, that's different! 

Joseph V. Scelsa, who was one of the institute’s first directors and led the legal fight that resulted in the settlement, said Italian-Americans had succeeded in many spheres and seemed to be well represented on the staffs of other New York-area colleges, but had long been mistreated at CUNY. 

I wonder why ... 
“There have been so many cases of discrimination that I personally know of — from not getting hired to not getting promoted to not getting tenure,” said Dr. Scelsa, who is now president of the Italian American Museum in Manhattan. “It’s so clear that there’s been no serious attempt to increase our numbers.”

The latest skirmish centers on a lawsuit filed in July in United States District Court by Vincenzo Milione, a researcher at the institute, now known as the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, in memory of the state senator who first held hearings on Italian-Americans at CUNY.

The suit says CUNY and the institute’s current director, Anthony J. Tamburri, retaliated against Dr. Milione, cutting his staff and rescinding a prestigious job title, after Dr. Milione, in 2006, made a presentation to Italian-American state lawmakers. In the presentation, Dr. Milione argued that Italian-American representation on the faculty and the staff had remained flat — between 5 percent and 6 percent — over three decades, while that of groups like blacks, Latinos and Asians had climbed.

“Did affirmative action work at CUNY?” he asked in a recent interview. “Yes. But it did not work for Italian-Americans.” The New York office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that his suit had merit.

CUNY officials said that Dr. Tamburri would not comment, but they defended the university’s record. As of last fall, they said, Italian-Americans represented about 7 percent of the full-time instructional staff of 11,000, up from 5.8 percent in 1981. While the increase was modest, it occurred while the proportion of white employees fell sharply, to 54 percent from 74 percent, as the university strove to hire blacks and Latinos.

“Were CUNY not proactively engaging in affirmative action for Italian-Americans, one would expect to see Italian-American representation in CUNY fall at the same rate as that of whites,” Jennifer S. Rubain, university dean for recruitment and diversity, said in a statement. “That has not happened.”

Like other research universities that receive federal money, CUNY must extend affirmative action hiring protections to a variety of government-designated groups, including blacks and Latinos. University officials say the Department of Labor reviews its progress periodically, but not its efforts for Italian-Americans, because those are voluntary.

The government does not allow hiring quotas for the groups it designates. But as a benchmark, employers must develop estimates of the groups’ availability in the labor pool.

Yet even agreeing on how many Italian-Americans are in that pool has proved hard for the university and its critics. Indeed, the 1994 settlement called for the appointment of an expert panel to help sort out the matter. One thorny issue was whether to include people who report Italian ancestry secondarily on the long form of the census — for example, a woman who lists herself first as Irish, then Italian.

The expert panel finally determined in 2006 that half of them should be counted.
A Solomonic decision well worth the 12 years it took to emerge.
Today, CUNY says, Italian-Americans make up 8.4 percent of the qualified candidates in the available labor pool; Dr. Milione has called that estimate low. ...

Others see the tortured history of Italian-Americans at the university as a case study in an old bit of wisdom: No good deed goes unpunished.

“The best of intentions are quickly mired in the potential for litigation and additional charges of discrimination,” said Andy Brantley, president of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. “

Indeed.

July 26, 2010

Class and Disparate Impact

Every so often, a nice moderate suggests getting rid of racial preferences and replacing them with class preferences. They usually make this suggestion in various states of naivete, but one of the most common is that they don't understand that the main body of preferences isn't college admissions but employment, and it's less done by overt than by covert quotas motivated by fear of disparate impact discrimination lawsuits.

One reason why class has faded relative to race so dramatically as a subject of liberal concern since the days of Harry Truman is that there's no money in it. You can't file a disparate impact lawsuit over class discrimination because the government doesn't count by class, it counts by race/ethnicity, by sex, and by age. The Soviet Union counted people by class, but the whole project seems pretty hopeless in the U.S. The Office of Management and Budget has rules for how to count by race, but not by class.

I realize that there are a lot of other reasons why liberals are so bored by class these days, but never underestimate the power of the government handing out money and prizes along some lines and not along other lines to determine what is a political obsession and what is not.

Affirmative action: race v. class

Kevin Drum responds on Mother Jones to Democratic Sen. Jim Webb's op-ed "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege" questioning affirmative action:
Class/income-based affirmative action has long struck me as an alternative that ought to get more attention than it does. ... Class-based program programs might, in the end, provide modestly less help for ethnic minorities than current policies — though well-designed ones might not. 

This is a common centrist misconception. It is widely assumed: There must be lots of black and Hispanic kids in the 'hood with 1300 out of 1600 SAT scores who are losing out to Chad Buffington of Lake Forest's tutor-aided 1400. I mean, there just have to be, right? So, All We Have To Do is institute class-based affirmative action and then we wouldn't have to have race-based affirmative action and we would still get a whole bunch of pretty smart blacks and Hispanics, almost as many as we get now. Why didn't anybody ever think of this before? After all, class is the reason that blacks and Hispanics average lower scores, right? It couldn't be anything else, of course. Right?
But they have some advantages too. For one thing, they help poor people. That's worthwhile all by itself. (Kahlenberg quotes William Benn Michael as noting acidly that currently the debate in higher education is mostly about what color skin the rich kids will have.) Beyond that, there's another benefit: for all the good it does, there's no question that race-based affirmative action has drawbacks as well. It makes employers suspicious of minority graduates, wondering if their degrees were really fairly earned. It provokes a backlash among working class whites. And it's open to abuse on a number of fronts. Class-based programs don't solve all these problems at a stroke, but they go a long way toward addressing them.

This isn't normally a subject I write much about. I've done only modest reading about it, and my personal background — middle class white guy born and raised in Orange County — obviously doesn't give me any valuable personal insight. But the status quo has done, and continues to do, a lot of damage to all sides. It's probably a fantasy to think that there's any progress to be made in our current fever swamp atmosphere, but a conservative concession on the reality of race as a continuing problem — think racial profiling, penal system injustices, health system disparities, etc. — combined with a liberal concession on emphasizing class much more than we have in the past, would almost certainly be a step forward.

How would living in Orange County, California on and off over the last half century not give you any valuable personal insight into this subject?

But the line I want to look into is Drum's criticism of race-based quotes: "And it's open to abuse on a number of fronts." 

I've certainly pointed out abuses myself. For example, Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier have complained for years that an ever increasing number of black affirmative action slots at Harvard are going to people who aren't descended from American slaves: people who have a white parent, and/or are descended from African or Caribbean elites. 

Of course, Barack Obama (Harvard Law, '91) is the classic example of this. His racial identity was so ambiguous that he had to write a 150,000 autobiography talking himself into believing he was black enough to be a black politician.

You often hear: How can anybody say that race exists when all you have to do is look at Barack Obama to see that not everybody fits into a perfect little box?

On the other hand, if you think Obama's race  is complicated, try to figure out what class Obama was from when he was applying to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard.

- Barack Obama Jr.'s mother was on welfare for awhile.
+ His mother was working on her Ph.D.

- His mother got pregnant out of wedlock at 17.
+ His mother was accepted by the University of Chicago when she was 15.

- His father abandoned him when he was 2. 
+ His father abandoned him when he was 2 to obtain an advanced degree in economics from Harvard.

- He lived in a poor Third World country in a fairly poor neighborhood.
+ His Indonesian geologist stepfather was an oil company executive from a wealthy family and they quickly moved to an exclusive neighborhood in Jakarta.

- He came from a multiply broken family, abandoned by his father as an infant and twice by his mother, and had to live with his grandparents.
+ He lived with his grandparents on the tenth floor of highrise in a nice part of Honolulu with a fabulous view.

- He smoked a lot of dope in high school.
+ He smoked a lot of dope on the beach in Hawaii with his fellow students at the most prestigious prep school in the state.

- In college he hung out with Third Worlders.
+ They were rich Third Worlders, such as a son of a future prime minister of Pakistan.

- His maternal grandfather was a fairly unsuccessful salesman.
+ His maternal grandmother was a quite successful bank executive.

- His maternal grandfather was from a family with a shady reputation.
+ His maternal grandmother's family was quite respectable and academic-oriented. One of his great aunts became a statistics professor and great-uncle became the #2 man at the U. of Chicago library.

- His mother had to do lowly clerical work in Indonesia. 
+ She did it at the powerful U.S. embassy in Jakarta, where she got to know diplomats and CIA men.

- His paternal grandfather had been a servant.
+ His paternal grandfather was a large landowner.

- His father was a drunk.
+ His father's Master's degree made him a legacy at Harvard.

- His father got fired a lot.
+ His father was, when sober, an oil company executive and government official.

- His father was politically and ethnically persecuted. 
+ His father was, when sober, the protege of the CIA's main man to become President of Kenya, Tom Mboya.

- His father was the prime witness of his mentor's assassination by President Kenyatta's allies in 1969, and was hounded by the dominant Kikuyus after that.
- Well, that is a bummer.

I could go on and on. I know a lot about Obama, and I have no idea how to definitively categorize him as a young man by any usual ranking of class from low to high. (I might say he came from the Vaguely Academic Class, but I just made up that term.)

So, does class not exist?

July 15, 2010

"2030: Alternative Futures for the Jewish People"

From my VDARE.com column, which reviews the new book by the Israeli-American think tank known as the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute:
As a long-time admirer of Israel, I’ve come to envy especially the freedom of discussion that Israeli culture permits on fundamental questions of demographics.

Consider, for example, the new book 2030: Alternative Futures for the Jewish People [5 megabyte  PDF], which makes for eye-opening reading for anyone lulled by the pabulum of the American press. ... An intellectually serious effort, 2030 can serve as a template for all those thinking about improving the demographic prospects of their own peoples or parties.

For example, GOP leaders could read it and consider how its framework of analysis and its policy recommendations could be adapted to the task of growing more Republicans.

Founded in 2002, the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute has always been chaired by prominent Jewish-American diplomats. Its 2030 report was begun under Dennis Ross, chief U.S. negotiator at Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David 2 peace talks in 2000 between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Ross left JPPPI in 2009 to run the Obama Administration’s Iran policy. ...

Despite this American participation, the JPPPI is an offshoot of the Israeli government’s immigration arm, the Jewish Agency for Israel. (The  JPPPI’s #2 man is a former boss of Israeli military intelligence). It makes an annual presentation to the Israeli cabinet. And, because the JPPPI’s publications are not intended for non-Jewish audiences—this book has not, so far as I know, previously been reviewed in America outside the Jewish press—it suffers less from the timidity that emasculates intellectual discourse in America.

For example, the JPPPI’s 2030 observes:
“World Jewry today is at a historical zenith of absolute wealth creation. … one can say that Jewish wealth is higher than almost any other ethnic group worldwide.”

That’s not the kind of thing you read in the U.S. press every day…

It’s also informative to discover that the JPPPI views anti-Semitism at present “as a moral problem and an irritant, but not having any serious consequences.” ...

The 2030 project strives to identify the middle ground between the ephemeral and the permanent.

The JPPPI methodology is to boil the future down to merely A) internal factors (what it calls “Jewish Momentum” -- “quantity, quality, power, structures and leadership”) and B) external factors: “the well-worn notion of ‘good for the Jews or bad for the Jews.’”

This generates four alternative futures: “Thriving,” “Drifting,” “Defending,” and “Nightmare.” The think tank doesn’t try to predict which one will happen, but it does outline the various mechanisms pushing the global Jewish People in each direction.

If in 2030, Jews are self-confidently ethnocentric (have high Jewish Momentum) and the rest of the world loves them, then, according to the JPPPI, the Jewish People will be “Thriving”.

The opposite quadrant is called “Nightmare”—where Jews are both unpopular with outsiders and highly assimilated. Currently, Iran is the best (or worst) example of this.

The JPPPI classifies the American Jewish community as currently “Thriving” due to an extremely positive external climate for Jews in America and moderately high internal Jewish Momentum.

It worries, though, that Jews are so popular with other Americans that Jewish cohesiveness will be sapped over the next 20 years. A high rate of intermarriage could drive the American Jewish community into the Drifting quadrant, where “Demographic shifts including accelerated assimilation of the Jewish community in the US, and its decline relative to other groups in the US leads to decline in its political power.” ...

The opposite of “Drifting” is “Defending”—where Jews are besieged by anti-Semites, yet internally strong as a community. The JPPPI cites France, where Muslim immigration has led to pogrom-like incidents, as currently the closest to this alternative future.

The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute seems to prefer “Defending” to “Drifting”:
“While the Drifting future might be very pleasant and positive for Jews as individuals, it reflects an overall decline of the Jewish People as a whole. … a Defending alternative future demonstrates that even under strenuous external conditions, the Jewish People could become stronger.”

My review goes on to consider the demographic policy proposals of the JPPPI, which are analogous to my own for Republicans. Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below. 

July 2, 2010

College ROI

Ben Espen blogs:
I did a quick plot of the top 50 schools on the Payscale list versus the 25th percentile SAT scores of incoming students, and some schools definitely do better than others. I also resorted the list by annualized rate of return, and plotted the top 50 again, and the public schools do much better on rate of return than on 30 year net return.

The same schools stand out on both lists:

    Georgia Institute of Technology
    University of Virginia (UVA)
    Brigham Young University (BYU)
    Colorado School of Mines
    College of William and Mary
    University of California, Berkeley
    University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)
    University of Michigan
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
    University of Florida (UF)
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNCH)
    California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (CalPoly)

All public schools with strong engineering and science programs, except for BYU, but they produce good engineers too. These schools are probably good options if you live in state, especially since there are often incentive programs to keep academically talented students at state universities. And they are a lot cheaper than the top private schools on the list

By the way, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo didn't have affirmative action last time I checked because it's in the second-tier Cal State system. Proposition 209 outlawed racial preferences in California in 1996, so the top tier University of California colleges responded by imposing "holistic admissions" where you submit an essay about how The Man Has Been Keeping You Down so the admissions officer can guess your ethnicity. But the Cal State system can't afford too many admissions staffers, so they just use the same system UC used to use: GPA and test scores. Nobody much cares about the other Cal State schools, but Cal Poly SLO is worth caring about so MALDEF sued it for not discriminating. 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 1, 2010

Ideology doesn't matter

The French have always had an ideological aversion to affirmative action, but, in the long run, ideology doesn't much matter, so the French government is imposing quotas on its elite virtually free tuition public colleges. The funny thing is that it's all playing out along the same exact lines as it has in America. Principles turn out to be less important than demography.
France is embarking on a grand experiment — how to diversify the overwhelmingly white “grandes écoles,” the elite universities that have produced French leaders in every walk of life... 

The background is that the winners of WWII, America and Britain, kept their old-fashioned elitist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge old-fashioned and elitist. The losers, like Germany, France, and Italy, after the war trashed their great universities on the altar of egalitarianism by going to open admissions. (In the U.S., CCNY was the only famous college to take the Spirit of '68 seriously enough to dump selective admissions.) Today, that's why ambitious Korean and Chinese students want to go to American or British universities, not to Continental ones: We won The War.

The French, not being fools, however, kept a number of small elite colleges, the grandes écoles, to publicly educate the small number of people who keep the place running. Not surprisingly, blacks and North Africans have a hard time passing the entrance exams to the French equivalent of Caltech at rates equal to whites.
Because entrance to the best grandes écoles effectively guarantees top jobs for life, the government is prodding the schools to set a goal of increasing the percentage of scholarship students to 30 percent — more than three times the current ratio at the most selective schools. But the effort is being met with concerns from the grandes écoles, who fear it could dilute standards, and is stirring anger among the French at large, who fear it runs counter to a French ideal of a meritocracy blind to race, religion and ethnicity.

France imagines itself a country of “republican virtue,” a meritocracy run by a well-trained elite that emerges from a fiercely competitive educational system. At its apex are the grandes écoles, about 220 schools of varying specialties. And at the very top of this pyramid are a handful of famous institutions that accept a few thousand students a year among them, all of whom pass extremely competitive examinations to enter.

... The problem is not simply the narrow base of the elite, but its self-satisfaction. “France has so many problems with innovation,” Mr. Descoings said. Those who pass the tests “are extremely smart and clever, but the question is: Are you creative? Are you willing to put yourself at risk? Lead a battle?” These are qualities rarely tested in exams. 

Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That's why Google was founded by Michelle Obama.

To an American, it's amusing to hear the French come up with the exact same cliches and fallacies as Americans have been telling each other for 40 years. Indeed, there are problems caused by reliance on entrance exams in terms of selecting for creativity and the like. But quotas do zip to fix those real problems. It's not like the American quota kids all flock to Silicon Valley and start-up their own firms. A quota won't give France its own Silicon Valley.
Gen. Xavier Michel, 56, runs École Polytechnique, one of the world’s finest engineering schools and still overseen by the Ministry of Defense. Known as X, the school is extraordinarily competitive, and its students do basic training and parade wearing the bicorne, a cocked hat dating from Napoleon, who put the school under the military in 1804. 
“The fundamental principle for us is that students have the capability to do the work here, which is very difficult,” with a lot of math, physics and science, very little of it based on cultural knowledge, General Michel said. Even now, he said, the school takes only 500 students a year, barely 10 percent of its specially educated applicants. “We don’t want to bring students into school who risk failing,” he said. “You can get lost very quickly.”
Despite the misgivings, in February the Conférence des Grandes Écoles, under considerable pressure, signed on to a “Charter of Equal Opportunity” with the government committing the schools to try to reach the 30 percent goal before 2012 or risk losing some financing.

But how to get there remains a point of contention. There is a serious question about how to measure diversity in a country where every citizen is presumed equal and there are no official statistics based on race, religion or ethnicity. A goal cannot be called a “quota,” which has an odor of the United States and affirmative action.

Maybe the distinction between "goal" and "quota" makes more sense in French than it does in English, but in my experience with corporate American sales force management, "goal" and "quota" were absolutely interchangeable. We'd hire some hotshot to be head of sales management, and he would issue the salesmen either "goals" or "quotas" depending upon which term was used where and when he first worked. When the salesmen missed their goals/quotas, they wouldn't get their bonuses. If they kept missing their goals/quotas, they'd get fired. Eventually, the sales force manager would get fired by the CEO for missing his goal/quota, and then we'd hire a new sales manager who'd use whatever the other term was until he got fired for his missing his.

Instead, there is the presumption here that poorer citizens will be more diverse, containing a much larger percentage of Muslims, blacks and second-generation immigrants. 

Or maybe not. I don't know anything about France, but my guess is that in the U.S., the biggest under-utilized repository of talent are white boys from broken homes.
But the government is examining whether the current test depends too much on familiarity with French history and culture. 

Like analytic geometry (Descartes) and probability (Fermat and Pascal).
“We’re thinking about the socially discriminatory character, or not, of these tests,” Ms. Pécresse said. “I want the same concours for everyone, but I don’t exclude that the tests of the concours evolve, with the objective of a great social opening and a better measure of young people’s intelligence.” 

"With the objective of a great social opening," the U.S. has been trying to invent "a better measure of young people’s intelligence" for 45 years, but we keep finding out that the old tests we had before the Great Society worked fine. It's the test-takers who turned out to be the problem, not the test. But why should the French government learn from the U.S. experience? The U.S. government never learns from the U.S. experience.

June 4, 2010

Lewis v. Chicago

My new column at VDARE.com is about last week's Supreme Court decision in the Lewis v. Chicago case: yet another firefighter disparate impact discrimination lawsuit. It was a victory for Elena Kagan's office of Solicitor General. Nobody paid any attention to this case because they were all worked up over how Rand Paul's views would work out if America fell through a time warp and went back to 1960.
Despite likely having more firemen than it really needs, being a Chicago fireman is kind of like being a Harvard student: there are far more applicants than openings. In 1995 in Chicago, there were about 40 test-takers for each job opening. In contrast, when Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School in 2006, there were about 12 applicants for every place.  
In 2005, finally, Judge Gottschall, a graduate of Stanford Law (LSAT range 168-172), issued her ruling: total victory for the black plaintiffs. Chicago should just pick randomly among anybody scoring at the 16th percentile on up.

... In 2006, Chicago finally gave another firefighter’s hiring test. To avoid disparate impact, it made the test so easy that 96 percent of whites passed it. Then it chose randomly from all who passed.

Judge Gottschall’s opinion would be the kind of thing people would laugh about if you were allowed to have a sense of humor about things like this. However, judges never have to worry about, say, Jon Stewart making fun of them on TV if they say stupid things about race as long as what they say is socially acceptable.

Judge Gottschall’s 2005 opinion was dopey in exactly the same way as Judge Garaufis’ 2009 opinion in the New York fire hire test lawsuit brought by Alberto Gonzales when he was George W. Bush’s attorney general: obtuse, ignorant, blinkered, and elitist.

Judge Gottschall condemned Chicago as racially discriminatory for not hiring randomly from all those who scored 65 or higher. That’s the 7th percentile of white guys who’d like to be a fireman, which is scary bad.
The essence of firefighter disparate impact law is that judges never, ever learn anything from all the other firefighter disparate impact cases. Each kind of test gives the same result in racial terms, but that is never admitted as evidence for anything, or even admitted at all. (The only way that’s been found to close the racial gap is to get rid of blind-grading: i.e., cheat.)

Disparate impact, however, does not apply to some institutions. The military takes virtually no enlistees who score below the 31st percentile on its AFQT IQ test.

Or, consider that when she was dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan required all applicants to take the Law School Admissions Test even though the LSAT has ferocious disparate impact. The average black score on the LSAT in 2005-2006 was 143, which would fall at only the 12th percentile of the white range. Dean Kagan’s 2006 freshman class had scores ranging from 169 out of 180 at the 25th percentile to 175 at the 75th percentile.

Now, Kagan didn’t need to demand such stratospheric test scores from applicants. She could have admitted Harvard Law students random from the top five-sixths of applicants. You don’t need to be that smart to pass Harvard Law or the bar exam. She just wanted exceptionally bright students.

But it’s okay for Harvard Law School to use the LSAT because it’s Harvard Law—not a bunch of moron firemen who only have to know to point the open end of the hose at the flames, right? Just ask Dean Kagan!

(In fact, that would be a fun question to ask her. Senator Sessions?)

Read the whole thing there (there's lots more) and comment upon it below.

June 3, 2010

Disparate Impact: How it works

How could disparate impact legislation lead to de facto quotas? Let's check out an NYT article on the gigantic gender discrimination lawsuit against Walmart. Note how frequent (and how uncontroversial) are the article's references to Walmart not being quite aggressive enough in imposing quotas on itself to avoid a huge payout:
More than six years before the biggest sex discrimination lawsuit in history was filed against Wal-Mart Stores, the company hired a prominent law firm to examine its vulnerability to just such a suit.

The law firm, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, found widespread gender disparities in pay and promotion at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores and urged the company to take basic steps — like posting every job opening and creating specific goals to promote women and minorities — to avoid liability....

Without significant changes, the lawyers said in their confidential analysis, Wal-Mart “would find it difficult to fashion a persuasive explanation for disproportionate employment patterns.”

In 2001, seven women filed a class-action suit on behalf of all women working at the company. They complained of a general pattern of discrimination in pay and promotions.
Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has denied any systematic discrimination and asserts that any claims should be tried individually, not as a class action that would sweep in more than a million current and former employees.

Akin Gump estimated that for 1993 alone, Wal-Mart’s potential legal exposure in a class-action sex discrimination suit was $185 million to $740 million. Mr. Seligman said the women suing Wal-Mart were seeking damages for every year since 1997, meaning the company could be on the hook for billions of dollars.
The report examined employment patterns at all Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores. It found that men employed by Wal-Mart as department managers, an hourly position, earned 5.8 percent more than women in those positions in 1993 ($236.80 versus $223.70). Men in salaried jobs earned $644.20 a week compared with $540.50 for women.

Akin Gump also found large disparities in job assignments. Fifty-five percent of women were initially hired as cashiers compared with 12 percent of men. Twenty-nine percent of men were initially hired in receiving jobs like unloading, which generally pay at least 20 percent more than cashier jobs, compared with 7 percent of women.

I'm utterly baffled coming up with any reason other than sheer malignant irrational prejudice why Walmart would hire more men than women to unload trucks. What possible reason could there be? Clearly, Walmart is a totally irrational organization that doesn't know anything about how to, say, unload trucks. No doubt, Walmart will become much more efficient after this lawsuit. Walmart should thank the plaintiff's attorneys for helping them get better at unloading trucks.
The law firm found smaller, but still significant, disparities in the company’s employment of black employees.

The report warned that the overall disparities it found were “statistically significant and sufficient to warrant a finding of discrimination unless the company can demonstrate at trial that the statistical disparities are caused by legitimate, nondiscriminatory factors.”

... Mr. Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, also said that in the last five years, Wal-Mart has told its 50,000 managers to promote more women and minorities, with 15 percent of managers’ bonuses tied to achieving diversity goals. Women now hold 45.8 percent of assistant store manager positions — a pipeline to higher-level jobs — up from 39.7 percent five years ago.

Employment experts say there can be innocent reasons for the types of disparities found by Akin Gump. For example, women might apply disproportionately to be cashiers and men disproportionately to work in receiving. But there could be improper discriminatory reasons for the differences, like managers believing that cashier jobs are for women.

Akin Gump recommended that Wal-Mart document applicants’ job preferences, post notice of all openings and training opportunities, establish promotion goals and timetables for women and minorities, and monitor progress. ...

Company documents and depositions in the lawsuit suggest that Wal-Mart’s initial adoption of the report’s recommendations was fitful and incomplete.

Wal-Mart began posting more, but not all, job openings and adopted numerical goals [in business, the term "goals" is interchangeable with the term "quotas"] for promoting women. But in a February 2000 memorandum to Wal-Mart board members, Coleman H. Peterson, executive vice president for human resources at the time, bemoaned the lack of progress toward diversity goals.

“Female management representation at Wal-Mart super centers, Sam’s and logistics and, therefore, total company are worse than prior year,” he wrote in the memorandum, which was turned over to the plaintiffs.

... Mr. Seligman, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, says the Akin Gump report, which he has not seen, would seem to confirm that “top managers were fully aware that women were not getting promoted in proper numbers.”

Let's review the number of references in this one article to de facto quotas:
- creating specific goals to promote women and minorities
- 15 percent of managers’ bonuses tied to achieving diversity goals
- establish promotion goals and timetables for women and minorities, and monitor progress
- adopted numerical goals for promoting women.
- proper numbers

April 15, 2010

Stevens' heresy

Ann Coulter's new column points out something that has been lost in all the tributes by the media to the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. A long time ago, in the government contracting quota case Fullilove, he noted that quotas are essentially reparations, and asked why then are we giving reparations to voluntary immigrants from south of the border?
But on many other issues, such as race discrimination, Stevens swung so far to the left that his earlier opinions would be unrecognizable as having been written by the same man.

In 1978, Stevens was not only in the majority in University of California Regents v. Bakke, but he wrote the opinion holding that the school's race-based admissions program violated Title VII and ordering the university to admit Bakke.

In another case of government race-based classifications, Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980), Stevens ridiculed the idea of race-based "remedies" being applied to every ethnic group under the sun.

Adopting Justice William Rehnquist's view that the specific history of blacks in America makes their claims unique, Stevens wrote: "Quite obviously, the history of discrimination against black citizens in America cannot justify a grant of privileges to Eskimos or Indians." (Remember when you could use terms like "Eskimo" and "Indian" without being accused of a hate crime?)

Unlike blacks, who were "dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Stevens said "the 'Spanish-speaking' subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived."

Now fast-forward to 2003, when the court considered the race-based admissions policy at the University of Michigan. The school automatically awarded 20 points -- one-fifth of the total points needed for admission -– to every minority, including not only blacks, but also Hispanics, Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.

This time, affirmative action for Aleuts was just peachy with Stevens, who came up with a ludicrous procedural objection to the lawsuit, basically concluding that no one ever has standing to sue for race discrimination in college admissions. I guess he figured it was time somebody did something about the University of Michigan's long, shameful history of discriminating against Aleuts.

That's quite a change from the Justice Stevens of Fullilove, who compared government affirmative action programs to Nazi policies, saying if the government "is to make a serious effort to define racial classes by criteria that can be administered objectively, it must study precedents such as the First Regulation to the Reich's Citizenship Law of Nov. 14, 1935," translated in Volume 4 of "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression."

Whatever you think of Stevens' newfound admiration for government racial preferences, it's preposterous to say, as Stevens did, "I really don't think I've changed all that much." 
Here's more from Stevens' 1980 dissent in Fullilove, when he was 60:
Even if we assume that each of the six racial subclasses has suffered its own special injury at some time in our history, [p538] surely it does not necessarily follow that each of those subclasses suffered harm of identical magnitude. Although "the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold in slavery," Bakke, supra, at 387 (opinion of MARSHALL, J.), the "Spanish-speaking" subclass came voluntarily, frequently without invitation, and the Indians, the Eskimos and the Aleuts had an opportunity to exploit America's resources before the ancestors of most American citizens arrived. There is no reason to assume, and nothing in the legislative history suggests, much less demonstrates, that each of the subclasses is equally entitled to reparations from the United States Government. [n8]
 
At best, the statutory preference is a somewhat perverse form of reparation for the members of the injured classes. For those who are the most disadvantaged within each class are the least likely to receive any benefit from the special privilege even though they are the persons most likely still to be suffering the consequences of the past wrong. [n9] A random [p539] distribution to a favored few is a poor form of compensation for an injury shared by many.

My principal objection to the reparation justification for this legislation, however, cuts more deeply than my concern about its inequitable character. We can never either erase or ignore the history that MR. JUSTICE MARSHAL has recounted. But if that history can justify such a random distribution of benefits on racial lines as that embodied in this statutory scheme, it will serve not merely as a basis for remedial legislation, but rather as a permanent source of justification for grants of special privileges. For if there is no duty to attempt either to measure the recovery by the wrong or to distribute that recovery within the injured class in an evenhanded way, our history will adequately support a legislative preference for almost any ethnic, religious, or racial group with the political strength to negotiate "a piece of the action" for its members.

Although I do not dispute the validity of the assumption that each of the subclasses identified in the Act has suffered a severe wrong at some time in the past, I cannot accept this slapdash statute as a legitimate method of providing classwide relief.

Perhaps some Senator could ask Obama's upcoming nominee what he thinks of the sainted Stevens Fullilove opinion? And, then, when they demur to agree, ask why brand new immigrants should legally benefit from preferences from the moment they arrive, even if they arrived illegally?

And, then, ask was it just to the rest of Americans for immigrants from India to have been reclassified from white to Oriental in 1982 in response to lobbying by immigrant Indian businessmen for special breaks on government contracting.

That would be fun.

April 11, 2010

Obama and Reparations

One of the more interesting anecdotes in David Remnick's interminable new biography of Barack Obama's "story of race and inheritance," The Bridge, comes from Obama’s class at the University of Chicago Law School on “Race, Racism, and the Law:”
“’But there was a moment when he let his guard down,’ one former student recalled. ‘He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable. … as the complexities emerged—who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants still feeling racism, do they have a claim—finally, he said, ‘That is why it’s unworkable.’’”

Of course, the exact same questions also apply to affirmative action—which Obama finds wonderfully “workable.”

Obama’s student recalled:
“You could tell that he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics of the country …”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 22, 2010

Supreme Court to hear Chicago Firemen Test?

From the AP:
The Supreme Court on Monday seemed willing to let a group of African Americans sue Chicago for discrimination over a hiring test that weeded out black applicants to become firefighters.

It is the second time in as many years that the high court has tackled discrimination in testing within the firefighting ranks. In a landmark case last year, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision said New Haven, Conn., violated white firefighters' civil rights by throwing out an exam in which no African-Americans scored high enough to be promoted to lieutenant or captain.

In Monday's case, the city of Chicago decided to use a test to weed out potential firefighter trainee applicants. Anyone who scored 64 or below was deemed not qualified. But the city set a second cutoff score of 89 points.

Officials told applicants who scored below 89 but above 64 that although they passed the test, they likely would not be hired because of the large number of people who scored 89 or above. The majority of those in the top-scoring group were white; only 11 percent were black.

"Chicago used an unlawful cutoff score to determine which applicants it would hire as firefighters," said John Payton, director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "There is no dispute that the cutoff score had an adverse impact on qualified black applicants and was not job-related."

However, the issue before the court was whether the aspiring black firefighters waited too long to sue. People are supposed to sue within 300 days after an employment action they seek to challenge as unlawful.

The city says the clock started when it announced the use of the test scores in January 26, 1996. The first lawsuit in the case was filed on March 31, 1997, 430 days after the city announced the results.

But the plaintiffs say a new act of discrimination also happened each time the scores were used in hiring firefighter trainees between May 1996 and October 2001.

A U.S. District judge agreed with the black applicants, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The federal appeals court said the limitation period began when the city placed the applicants into the middle tier.

"And after that decision was made, there was nothing else that Chicago did that affected petitioners in the terms required by the statute," city lawyer Benna Solomon argued. "Hiring others did not adversely affect petitioners."

But "what is the list, other than an administratively convenient way to use the scores?" Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked.

Added Justice Sonia Sotomayor: "When you hire, aren't you acting upon the results?"

Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal argued that if the court allows the city of Chicago to hire using its flawed method, that will tell employers they can get away with a discriminatory test if they manage to avoid a lawsuit within the 300-day limit .

"If the rule of the city of Chicago were adopted, then an employer who made it 300 days without an EEOC charge being filed ... would then be able to, for all time, use that discriminatory test," Kaytal said.

The court is expected to make a decision before fall.

The case is Lewis v. Chicago, 08-974.

This is not an obscure case: Mayor Daley put the city through contortions in the 1990s to come up with racially fair fire and police test, and was shocked when whites always did so much better on them.

Will anybody nationally come to the defense of the Chicago firemen most qualified to save lives?

The two guys who did the most to impede Obama's momentum last summer were Frank Ricci and James Crowley. And, yet, nobody seems to pick up on these huge New York and Chicago fire department cases as politicizable.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 13, 2010

Vulcan

And here's the New York Times illustrating the First Corollary to Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society:
"The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for noticing and drawing rational conclusions about that group's bad behavior."
In the case of today's "intentional discrimination" ruling against the Mayor of New York in Albert Gonzalez's discrimination lawsuit against the Fire Department of New York, we could perhaps offer a Second Corollary:
"The more egregiously any non-Western or non-white group behaves, the more evil whites are made to appear for not noticing that group's bad behavior."
From the New York Times:
Judge Cites Discrimination in N.Y. Fire Dept.
By AL BAKER

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that New York City intentionally discriminated against black applicants to the Fire Department by continuing to use an exam that it had been told put them at a disadvantage.

It was not a “one-time mistake or the product of benign neglect,” wrote the judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. “It was a part of a pattern, practice and policy of intentional discrimination against black applicants that has deep historical antecedents and uniquely disabling effects.” A remedy will be decided on later.

In his decision, the judge highlighted how “black and other minority firefighters have been severely underrepresented,” characterizing that as a “persistent stain on the Fire Department’s record.”

City officials said that they intended to appeal the decision, but could not do so until the judge had determined what damages the city might face.

Legal experts, as well as lawyers for the plaintiffs and city officials, said the decision was the first in recent memory in which a court had found that the city had intentionally discriminated against a large group of people — racial minorities or women, for instance — in the workplace.

“I can’t recall there ever being a finding of intentional racial discrimination in a pattern-and-practice case against the city,” said Elise C. Boddie, a professor of constitutional law at New York Law School who formerly litigated employment discrimination cases. “I would say this is pretty big.”

In July, Judge Garaufis — acting on a claim being pushed by the United States Justice Department — ruled that the Fire Department used a test in 1999 and 2002 that had a discriminatory effect on black applicants.

In his ruling on Wednesday, the judge found that the city intentionally discriminated against blacks in using those tests and in ignoring calls over the years to change the testing procedure. The suit was brought by three people who took the test and by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black city firefighters.

At the heart of the case is the Fire Department’s persistent underrepresentation of minorities and the continued use, between 1999 and 2007, of the entrance exams. In 2007, there were 303 black firefighters, accounting for 3.4 percent of the department’s ranks; black residents make up 25.6 percent of the city’s population.

The judge noted that while the city’s other uniformed services “have made rapid progress integrating black members into their ranks, the Fire Department has stagnated and at times retrogressed.”

Judge Garaufis stopped short of finding that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the former fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, had also intentionally discriminated against black applicants. But the judge wrote that he found strong evidence to suggest that they were made aware numerous times that the Fire Department’s entrance exams were discriminatory, yet failed to take sufficient remedial action.

The mayor testified at a deposition in August that he did not recall receiving a report more than six years ago warning him about sharp differences in the pass rates between white and minority candidates for firefighter jobs, lawyers said.

The judge “let the mayor and the commissioner off the hook on the basis of a doctrine known as qualified immunity,” said Richard A. Levy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. He said that doctrine exempts public officials from lawsuits that are based on their discretionary decisions. ...

Some city officials said they found the decision unexpected and deeply perplexing, in part because the judge ruled on plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment and the city’s motion to dismiss the case without a trial.

Mr. Levy agreed it was unusual to get a ruling based solely on documentary evidence and depositions, but he said “the evidence of a decades-long pattern of discriminating against black and Latino firefighter applicants was overwhelming.”

Ms. Boddie, the New York Law School professor, said such rulings against government entities were rare around the nation, adding, “To the extent there is a finding of liability, it is usually on disparate-impact grounds, not based on racially discriminatory intent.” ...

I wrote about the Vulcan case a million times last summer, so here are a few facts the NYT left out of the article:

1. The discrimination lawsuit against FDNY was brought by the Alberto Gonzalez's Justice Department under the Bush Administration in 2007.

2. The white-black racial gap, as pointed out by La Griffe du Lion, was 1.04 standard deviations in 1999 and 0.96 standard deviations in 2002. In other words, the racial difference on the two test dates averaged exactly the one standard deviation difference that La Griffe calls the Fundamental Constant of Sociology.

3. You can take the tests yourself here.

4. Here's a sample question:

17. Which one of the following portable power saw blades must be put out of service?

A) A carbide tip blade missing nine tips.
B) A carbide tip blade with three broken tips.
C) An aluminum oxide blade measuring 12 inches.
D) A yellow silicon carbide blade measuring nine inches.

You can find the answer on the same page in this excerpt from a 250 word reading selection:

A saw blade must be put out of service (OOS) and sent to the Technical Services Division when the blade becomes worn or damaged. Carbide tip blades must be put OOS when eight or more tips are missing or broken.

4. The NYT should profile some beneficiaries of this bias, such as firefighter Michael Cammarata (1978-2001).

January 6, 2010

Chicago considering scrapping police tests

From the Chicago Sun-Times (thanks to the readers who sent this in):
Police may scrap entrance exam
'OPEN UP THE PROCESS' | Union chief: It's 'too stupid to be true'

BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND FRANK MAIN, Staff Reporters

The Chicago Police Department is seriously considering scrapping the police entrance exam to bolster minority hiring, save millions on test preparation and avert costly legal battles that have dogged the exam process for decades, City Hall sources said Tuesday.

If the process is opened to everyone who applies and meets the minimum education and residency requirements, Chicago would be virtually alone among major cities. Most cities have police entrance exams -- and for good reason, experts say.

"A background check and a psych [exam] alone will not eliminate some people who should not be there," said Brad Woods, who ran the Personnel Division under former Chicago Police Superintendents Phil Cline and Terry Hillard.

Calling an application-only process a "step backward" and the "wrong way to go," Woods said, "When you lower your quality, you will get poor police service and more complaints. ... Whenever you make it easier to be the police, you're doing the citizens and the Police Department a disservice."

Charlie Roberts, who ran the training division from 1995 to 1999, noted that there are "eleven tracks" recruits must go through in the police academy, including the law and the municipal code.

"If you don't give someone at least a reading comprehension test, can you just put them in and risk the possibility of having so many of them fail? That could get quite expensive," Roberts said.

"We were getting people with 60 hours of college credit who were reading at a third-grade level. What do you think you'll get if you have no screening process?"

Human Resources Department spokesperson Connie Buscemi acknowledged Tuesday that the Daley administration has been exploring other "options" since last fall, when a "request-for-proposals" for companies interested in preparing an on-line police entrance exam was cancelled.

The last police entrance exam was held on Nov. 5, 2006.

"We wanted to try to develop something on-line to allow the city to accommodate members of the U.S. military who are on active duty. But, we didn't get any responses that met our needs. No one said they could administer an on-line exam" and guarantee its integrity, Buscemi said.

This is a legitimate need, although I doubt if it has much to do with dumping testing. Hiring tests in Chicago are typically given on a single day every few years, with copies of the test delivered written by outside consulting firms delivered to the test site by armored car. Otherwise, insiders will get a look at the test ahead of time and alert their nephews and in-laws to what's on it.

One problem with this system is that if you are a Chicagoan stuck on active duty in Iraq on the day of the test, you are out of luck getting hired as a Chicago fireman or policeman for years to come. And since the EEOC's Four-Fifths rule doesn't apply to military enlistment tests, such as the heavily g-weighted AFQT, Chicago is missing out on its most promising source of future policemen and firemen. But if Chicago offered the test online at the same time it was being given in Chicago, who would proctor the test-takers in the middle of the night in Iraq and Afghanistan?

That's an interesting question, but it's a complete sideshow for what's really going on. Post-Ricci, the politicians can't fudge the results as much, so now they want to get rid of the test.
"We're [now] reviewing our options on how to administer the police application process."

Other sources confirmed that the police entrance exam could be scrapped altogether "to open up the process to as many people as possible." A final decision could be made later this week.

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue said the idea "sounds too stupid to be true." "You need a testing process. ... You need to be very concerned about the very limited information you would get from just a screening and application process," Donahue said.

Something that is completely overlooked but that is totally obvious when you stop to think about it is that civil servant unions, who are always demonized by Republicans, are one of the few effective forces actively working against affirmative action in big cities. The head of the union always has some name like "Donahue," and union policies work to keep older white civil servants from being fired in the name of making the government work force "look more like Chicago." This is particularly true for teachers unions, whose leaders all remember when black politicians got local control of New York public schools in the Ocean Hill neighborhood in the late 1960s, and immediately fired hundreds of Jewish schoolteachers and hired blacks to replace them.

Hiring and promotions in the Police and Fire Departments have generated controversy in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember.

The criticism reached a crescendo in 1994 after a sergeants exam produced just five minority promotions out of 114.

The test was the first to be administered by the city after "race-norming" -- the practice of adjusting scores on the basis of race -- was ruled unconstitutional.

In November 2005, City Hall announced plans to offer the police entrance exam a record four times the following year -- and for the first time on the Internet -- after an unprecedented outreach campaign that bolstered the number of minority applicants to 34 percent black, 24 percent Hispanic and 26 percent women.

More than two years later, black ministers told newly-appointed Police Supt. Jody Weis that, if he was serious about re-establishing trust between police and the black community, he should start by hiring and promoting more African Americans.

NBCChicago adds
:
And as of last year, one in four patrol officers were African-American, but just one in 12 Lieutenants were of color.

Let me point out that, to get around the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule, Chicago has already almost completely emasculated its police and fire tests, in order to make the disparity between white and black passing rates (as innumerately measured by the feds) less than one-fifth. Chicago's last fire and police tests were passed by 85% of the people who walked in off the street. What's the point of even giving a test so easy that people at the fifth percentile among whites pass?

So, why not give up on testing completely? That's the logical implication of the EEOC's Four-Fifth's Rule.

As Steve Farron pointed out in The Affirmative Action Hoax, honest racial quotas would be better than abolishing testing. You'd at least get the smartest of each race.

Considering that Barack Obama taught "Racism and the Law" (not, by the way, "Race and the Law") at the University of Chicago and litigated disparate impact lawsuits in Chicago, somebody might want to ask the President of the United States his opinion on this subject.

But don't count on that ever happening.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 25, 2009

Latest Diversity crisis: the Coast Guard Academy

Here's an excerpt from a long article in the Washington Post:
Despite pact, few blacks at Coast Guard school

Eight years after the U.S. Coast Guard and the NAACP signed a voluntary agreement to work together to boost the number of African-Americans at its 1,000-cadet service academy, the annual enrollment and graduation figures for blacks remain in single digits.

Seven blacks graduated from the academy based in New London, Conn., in the spring of 2001, the year the agreement was signed. The same number graduated from the Class of 2006, the first class for which blacks were recruited under the agreement. Subsequently, there were seven black graduates in 2007, five in 2008 and four in 2009.

That makes 23 graduates in four years under the agreement, including the academy's first black female valedictorian. In the four previous years the number was 33.

Leading lawmakers have grown increasingly upset with results even as they repeatedly are told the Guard is working hard to improve diversity in a service where only 311 of its 6,787 commissioned officers are black, with only one black admiral.

"The Coast Guard has just not paid attention to it. It is not antipathy or animosity toward it," said Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., chairman of the House Transportation Committee. "I think we're moving in the right direction and got the Coast Guard's attention and we're not going to let up."

Under a House bill, sponsored by Oberstar and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the Coast Guard subcommittee chairman, members of Congress would nominate candidates for the academy. All the other service academies have long used congressional nominations.

On a 385-11 vote last month, the House advanced the legislation to the Senate.

The Coast Guard Academy historically has taken pride in viewing itself merit-based and choosing its applicants without regard to their geographical distribution among the states.

Cummings, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, expects black enrollment to grow with congressional involvement, at least in part because the House typically has about 40 black lawmakers who would be effective recruiters in largely black congressional districts.

The Coast Guard's position on the bill has been rather subdued.

The academy's superintendent, Rear Adm. J. Scott Burhoe, likes the existing "merit-based system," but would be "fine" if Congress adopted congressional nominations.

"I think for us part of our fear is the unknown, really, right now," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Coast Guard Academy graduated its first black officer in 1966. In the 43 years since, only about 2 percent of the academy's graduates have been black and only once has there been as many as 10 in a single year.

Two years ago, the academy drew national attention when a noose was found among a black cadet's personal effects on a Coast Guard vessel. That was followed with the appearance of a noose for a white officer who was conducting race relations training at the academy.

Cummings said at the time that the Coast Guard must redouble its efforts in the face of a clear attempt to threaten and intimidate efforts to increase diversity.

An investigation involving 50 federal agents including the FBI produced no arrests or motives.

At present, the academy reports it has 136 minorities, with 72 Hispanics, 39 Asians and 25 African-Americans.

The Coast Guard, when asked by The Associated Press how many African-Americans were admitted to its academy as a result of the NAACP memorandum of agreement, said, through spokeswoman Nadine Santiago, that there was no way to know.

Lawmakers lashed out at the Coast Guard at a hearing last June for admitting so few blacks for the 2013 class only months after a previous hearing and discussion about the need to provide for congressional nominations.

"I am shocked that you only have five African Americans entering the class of 2013 and that you only offered two African American students appointments that were coming directly from high school that did not need additional preparation from a preparatory school," Oberstar said. "The Naval Academy found 149 fully qualified African-Americans to attend their Academy."

The U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md.,, accepted 1,328 as cadets for its Class of 2013. For that class, 327 African-Americans applied, with 138 of the 149 blacks deemed fully qualified accepting offers of admission.

The Coast Guard, for its own 2013 Class, offered admission to 411 of 1,672 applicants, with 290 accepting offers. Only 47 blacks had applied, with seven being offered admission and five accepting. At the same time, 26 Hispanics and five Asian-Americans accepted admission. ...

The Coast Guard must graduate 70 percent of its cadets in science, math and technological fields. For the 2013 Class, the average SAT math and verbal scores totaled 1240, with the average GPA a 3.8, and half of the students were in the top 10 percent of their high school class.

A couple of points: Is it really that surprising that as the Naval Academy increases its "commitment to diversity," that has an effect on the demographics of the Coast Guard Academy?

I call it the Diversity Domino Effect.

Second, I introduced the concept of "critical mass" into the diversity debate in this 1995 National Review article, which the Supreme Court used in its Grutter and Gratz decisions of 2003:

One little-appreciated reason for the impressive record of accomplishment by blacks in the Army (e.g., after Desert Storm there were 26 black generals) is their lack of success in the Navy (only two black admirals). Achievement in one field naturally breeds more success in that same field. Initially arbitrary variations self-perpetuate. Successful immigrant group like Asian Indians rise to affluence precisely by dominating niches of the economy like motel-keeping. As Adam Smith pointed out on P. 1 of The Wealth of Nations, specialization is the road to riches.

According to Charles Moskos of Northwestern, the leading sociologist of military life, one key to the strong performance of black Army officers has been a widespread self-help organization for black officers called Rocks. In it, senior officers mentor younger men in how to live up to the demands of being an officer and a gentleman. In the Navy, however, a lack of critical mass hampers similar efforts: if, say, you are the only African-American officer on your nuclear submarine, you can't turn to another black man for advice for your entire cruise. Thus, it continues to makes more sense for an ambitious young black to join the Army than the Navy.

Of course, the Supreme Court got the concept of critical mass absolutely backwards, seeing it as a reason for quotas: We must have critical masses of talented blacks in every single institution in America! To have Diversity we must have utter homogeneity at the institutional level!

Yeah, well, there simply aren't enough talented blacks to go around -- that the reason for quotas in the first place. Instead, what happens when, say, the Army gets a critical mass of black talent is the Navy gets pressured to raid the same pool of black military academy applicants. Then, when the Navy gets its quota system going full strength, the next domino to fall is the Coast Guard. Unsurprisingly, you end up with no critical mass of talented blacks anywhere. There's no place where blacks feel comfortable.

Of course, that's the point of it all. The NAACP doesn't want talented blacks to come together where they feel comfortable. It wants to spread them thinly, mixed in with untalented blacks, so they always feel people around them are biased against them. Thus, the NAACP stays in business. As Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in 1964 about Quebec in his Oxford History of the American People, "Racial minorities, as the history of the last century shows, are seldom satisfied because their leaders, to keep in power, are always stirring up fresh resentments." [Vol. III, p. 77, 1972 edition]

But, nobody in power understands this simple chain of logic because if you wrote it down and emailed to anybody, your career is in jeopardy the next time there's a discovery process in a discrimination lawsuit. So, nobody even thinks about it.

It's the unilateral intellectual disarmament of America.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer