On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Joseph Catron <[email protected]> wrote:
> Your thoughts? > > "If the powers-that-be think it's useful to ability-rank 18 year-olds for > pedagogical purposes, then perhaps that's correct. But the second stage of > the college sorting process where more resources are expended on a UC > Berkeley student than a community college student doesn't have any > justification. That unfairness permeates the entire system. And because the > system is unfair, there's no way to incorporate race (or not incorporate > it) or to replace race with class or geography or anything else that will > produce a fair outcome." > > > http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/05/affirmative_action_and_its_critics.html > I don't think this is factually correct. The assertion about "more resources are expended on a UC Berkeley student than a community college student" is confusing. Elite institutions *by definition* have more resources than non-elite ones. What has that to do with fairness? Unless you want to argue (like some PEN-Lers seem to do) that the very existence of elite institutions is undesirable. A better question may be to ask if elite institutions are disproportionate beneficiaries of public subsidies. This is not at all clear to me. It is true that elite institutions benefit from various tax-exemptions from their non-profit status and it may make public policy sense to limit some of that. But it seems to me more generally, that public subsidies, to the extent they still exist, are progressive in their effect i.e. benefit non-elite and less selective institutions more than elite ones. I may be incorrect about this, but I'd like to see some evidence. The real problem as I see it is that public subsidies are disappearing which effectively weakens non-elite institutions that do not have vast private resources and endowments. -raghu.
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