US supreme court strikes down affirmative action

Asking prospective students for their skin color when they apply to your school should be unthinkable.

"I want to attend your school just like my grandfather" = This is fine
"I want to attend your school because my grandfather wasn't allowed to" = This is not
Think about that for a second.
- Legacy admissions shouldn't be a thing either, imo. It should be 100% about merit.
Honestly, asking anyone for race on any application for anything shouldn't be a thing. With the exception of medical things specific to race, it's completely unnecessary. Unless I'm missing something glaring, other than perpetuating systematic disenfranchisement.
- It's a way for the college admissions to combat the systemic racism already present in USA society. It treats a symptom of a larger issue. A college cannot help with all the disadvantages minority students face throughout thier primary education but they can account for that in admissions.
- While I agree that requiring people to reveal their ethnicity should be a no-no for anything other than medical, asking for people to volunteer this information makes sense.
  In UK in many places giving ethnicity is optional and the results are used to monitor how different groups aka "races" are doing. This then can be used for research.
But asking them who their father is is fine?
If people gave a shit about fairness they'd care about legacy admission more than affirmative action.
- No, that's not fine either and should also be outlawed due to a history of systemic racism giving some people an advantage over others.
  It should be 100% merit based, plain and simple. It's the only fair way.
- Neither is ok. But only one likely violates the constitution. Congress could make legacy admissions illegal if they wanted to.

This is honestly great to hear. I have heard calls for this for years, and have repeatedly seen stats that show how Affirmative Action can end up hurting lots of people's chances at acceptance to universities. See: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med1.jpg?x91208

I just wish that, based on their recent track record, I knew that the Supreme Court had passed this ruling with good intentions.

It's such a small weight in the overall judgement (according to the selection metrics published by universities) that I'm doubtful much will change. And another dog whistle becomes obsolete for the right wing.
- If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible -- it's responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.
  Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.
- Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.
  This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.
- It's a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to "solve discrimination", it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they're in without additional opportunity.
  Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people's livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they're directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that's discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.
This is really great to hear. College admissions should be a fair process.
- You know how many people on a certain other social media site have issues with the idea of equality? How is equality bad? Isn't the ultimate goal of a society not to discriminate based on things such as race? So if an admission process is blind to race, how is that bad?

The elite are at it again. Got to keep them colored folks down.

- People of color have never been treated equally in America. That is the reason they need priority in education to allow them to start to balance out some of that inequality.

A lot of things that US courts have recently done(this included) is making making me wonder about how judicial review should work. Because what I keep seeing is that US courts will strike down shitty band aid solutions(which AA was, it was an attempt at a quick and easy solution for a very long list of social issues) without offering better alternatives. I do think that affirmative action should not have to exist, but the better choice is full scale education reform, addressing systemic racism, an understanding of how privilege affects educational outcomes, and greater availability and lower cost of the highest quality tertiary education. As it is today I am observing courts not choosing perfect over good, but rather destroying half baked solutions because they oppose the intended outcomes of those solutions.

the better choice is full scale education reform, addressing systemic racism, an understanding of how privilege affects educational outcomes,
This would likely help, which is why if I'm not mistaken conservatives in the U.S. are opposed to it by lambasting it as "woke Critical Race Theory". A significant part of the wealthy, and career political class views systemic racism and privilege as foundational, protected rights for which the nation was established to maintain.
That is, of course, contrary to the fact that those elements were only preserved as a result of compromise so that the nation could exist at all, and not because they necessarily wanted to preserve them, give or take those founding politicians involved.

Almost like anti-Caucasian and anti-Asian racism is still racism.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. Historically minority groups (specifically black and Hispanic) have been underrepresented in higher education. Affirmative action was supposed to help make higher education racially represent the population at large. Many minority groups are disadvantaged from a young age in terms of education in the USA so collecting data on race of applicants was supposed to help normalize people's racial background. If I grew up in a predominantly well funded schools my exam scores will likely be higher than a student who grew up in a poor school district. The effects of segregation, racism, and xenophobia in the USA have led to a racial divide between many local school districts in the USA. The whites who have historocally had more money have better funded schools. Without knowing where someone came from it is harder to judge how good their respective scores are. Odviously there are still ways to do this but the supreme court removed a legally required one.
- So racism now should be okay because racism in the past was okay? Racism is still racism, and racism is still bad.
What "anti-Caucasian" racism?
- I think he means anti-white? Racism is any kind of prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by a group, individual, or institution against a person or group on the basis of their race or ethnicity. The group being discriminated against does not necessarily have to be the minority group.

Rule 10

Wouldn't this impact admissions for international students too?

This is gross. Why are these people allowed to be in charge of anything?

- The problem is that people were NOT being treated equally and so we had to try to force institutions to accept people they'd otherwise discriminate against. This isn't going to bring any equality, we're going to go back to marginalized groups and historically discriminated groups being left out again and rich white people will be back "on top."
  I say this as a white guy with all the advantages society gives me so I'm not some rando asking for a leg up on anyone. It's not about me.
Why? Colleges can still give preference to students who live in poor neighborhoods or bad school districts. What's the problem with that approach?
- my understanding was that affirmative action is about creating a diverse student body
Not at all. Why should wealthy black students get consideration denied to a poor white student? Why should Asian students be straight up discriminated against?
Use economic status, not skin color.
- The unfortunate reality is that left unattended these organizations revert to extreme bias for white and rich. Getting rid of AA in favor of something better is fine - but getting rid of any guideline full stop is a much, much worse answer to the problem.
Well with the supreme court it isn't because we elect them. They are appointed so I'd say it's to protect the interests of the elite like banning abortions etc.
- They are there to interpret laws, not go along with what's socially acceptable at any given time
  They are not the group of people you should look to for social progress and it's by design

How about the likes of Harvard bitching and moaning about this, replaced "affirmative action" with measures to make it easier for students from poorer backgrounds to attend it, which would probably help way more people of latin and afro-american ancestry (who in the most tend to be poorer than average) than this system of "quotas for people who went to nice schools and can afford Harvard student fees" that mainly helps the scions of high-middle and richer parents whose only thing in common with the vast majority of people in the minorities supposedly being helped is a handful of genes?

You can measure the dripping hypocrisy and sense of entitlement of the people defending certain (maybe most) "afirmative action" measures by just well-off compared to the vast majority of the population those "helped" by it are (a particularly obvious one is "quotas for CxO positions for women" - it's not going to be women from poor backgrounds who work as cleaning-ladies that will benefit from such quotas, but rather a handful of women from much better off backgrounds than 99% of people)

- There is a huge problem out there with the inequality in access and quality of even primary Education, especially in the US.
  Make it so that inner city schools are as good as posh private schools and I guarantee you that there will be a ton of kids from poor minorities well prepared to atten the likes of Stanford and MIT.
  Affirmative Action has been used as a massive distraction from the huge discrimination along income lines in Education in the US whilst doing almost nothing to actually correct the worst discrimination, as it's not the well-off kids who attended expensive private and are "prepared for MIT" and happen to be black or latino who need help.

In a country built by slave labor this is the most egregious example of institutionalize racism? Not the slavery? Or the time we took Japanese people and put them in camps?
- So racism is still okay but only when it is against certain groups? That sounds pretty racist
- "But this one affected 'Asians'! Oh, and white people, but that's totally not what we're focusing on." - these people
You must be joking. Have you ever looked at history in your lifetime?