iSteve commenter Guest007 writes:
Steve,
You should listen to this podcast about affirmative action where the guest was one of the expert witnesses in the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit, Dr. Peter Arcidiacono from Duke University. … Dr Arcidiacono talks a lot more about UNC-Chapel Hill than virtually everyone else, makes a reference to Amy Wax, and states that black students being overmatched is a feature of affirmative action and not a bug.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/arcidiacono#details
There is a written transcript if one does not want to listen but the listening was very informative.
One insight that I have always suspected but someone else finally said is about female college students:
“Mounk: And it’s impossible to get anything below a B plus in the humanities or social science subjects at American elite schools.
“Arcidiacono: And what’s remarkable about that is from an economist’s point of view, that emerges because of supply and demand. Lots of people come in wanting to major in STEM courses, because that’s where the money is. And universities effectively allow these other departments to bribe them to leave those fields by offering them higher grades and lower workloads. And the irony is that (I have another paper on this) that actually really hurts women, because women tend to value grades more than men. So you could actually do something to close the STEM gap just by saying, look, we need to equalize grades across fields. Why should it be the case that it’s so much easier to get a good grade in a humanities course than a science course? I don’t think it’s that way in high school, where you’re captive and everyone has to take those courses.”
Say you want to major in civil engineering and build bridges. How much tougher is it to get your B.S. in Civil Engineering at, say, MIT than at Directional State U.? Yeah, no doubt you’ll have to party less and buckle down more at MIT than at a nondescript college that’s still good enough to offer engineering. If you get into MIT due to affirmative action with Directional State test scores and grades, are you a lot more likely to flunk out of MIT than out of Directional State? Or is the minimum to pass civil engineering pretty much the same level of difficulty everywhere because there are objective standards in what we need to keep bridges from falling down?
Or does MIT work hard to channel you into majoring sociology so you won’t slow down its superstar engineering majors while Directional State would be happy that you are there majoring in civil engineering?
For example, I knew a rich old guy who had gone to Stanford to major in physics (because that’s the class he’d really liked in high school), which is of course the Big Leagues of science, and done sort of okay at it, but after a couple of years he was called in to an intervention with the head of the physics department and the head of the electrical engineering department and told that the physics department only wanted majors for whom they could maybe imagine a path to a Nobel, but the electrical engineering department was happy with bright hard-working non-geniuses like him, so he was now an EE major. Of course, having to be an electrical engineering Stanford grad is one of the world’s better fates, and he made his fortune.
Of course, that’s way out at the 140 vs. 150 edge of the bell curve.
Our society still deems it important that our bridges don’t fall down, but nobody cares anymore about whether sociologists are any good, unlike a couple of generations ago when Edward Banfield and Father Andrew Greeley helped make sociology cool.
