https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html

"Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.

Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school. It was a game I was soon compelled to play myself: A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like cheating to check the box and like self-sabotage not to.

Be it for an acceptance letter or a tenure-track professorship, the incentives at elite universities encourage and reward racial gamification. This will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions. The rise of affirmative action produced, inadvertently, a culture of racial gamification by encouraging so many students and their parents to think about the ways race could boost or complicate their chances of admission; the end of affirmative action, in turn, will just exacerbate things by causing students and parents to get even more creative.

Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action.
....
Yet I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture. Before students ever step foot on a rolling green, they are encouraged to see racial identity as the most salient aspect of their personhood, inextricable from their value and merit.
....
And amid this great tornado of race chatter, if you take a moment to plug your ears and look around, you will probably begin to notice fewer and fewer brown and Black kids reading on the quad and, down the line, fewer and fewer brown and Black doctors in the maternity wards. It will turn out that all those initiatives will have next to nothing to do with actually combating structural racism. We may well find ourselves teaching Toni Morrison to rooms that get whiter and richer by the year.

So what is to be done? What actions should elite colleges and universities take next if they actually care about diversity?

First, they should exit the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit.
....
Second, elite colleges and universities should band together to strangle the parasitic U.S. News & World Report ranking system. "

On Friday, June 30, 2023 at 11:11:12 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html
>
> "Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
>
> Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school. It was a game I was soon compelled to play myself: A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like cheating to check the box and like self-sabotage not to.
>
> Be it for an acceptance letter or a tenure-track professorship, the incentives at elite universities encourage and reward racial gamification. This will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions. The rise of affirmative action produced, inadvertently, a culture of racial gamification by encouraging so many students and their parents to think about the ways race could boost or complicate their chances of admission; the end of affirmative action, in turn, will just exacerbate things by causing students and parents to get even more creative.
>
> Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action.
> ...
> Yet I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture. Before students ever step foot on a rolling green, they are encouraged to see racial identity as the most salient aspect of their personhood, inextricable from their value and merit.
> ...
> And amid this great tornado of race chatter, if you take a moment to plug your ears and look around, you will probably begin to notice fewer and fewer brown and Black kids reading on the quad and, down the line, fewer and fewer brown and Black doctors in the maternity wards. It will turn out that all those initiatives will have next to nothing to do with actually combating structural racism. We may well find ourselves teaching Toni Morrison to rooms that get whiter and richer by the year.
>
> So what is to be done? What actions should elite colleges and universities take next if they actually care about diversity?
>
> First, they should exit the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit.
> ...
> Second, elite colleges and universities should band together to strangle the parasitic U.S. News & World Report ranking system. "

The following from https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teaching/Affirmative_Action/Meeting_V/supporting_documents/Doc%20415-8%20-%20(Arcidiacono%20Expert%20Report).pdf

"Table 5.2 shows that this is the case: for every racial/ethnic group
moving to a higher decile is always associated with a higher probability of
admission with only one exception.54 Virtually no one is admitted from the bottom
decile in the baseline dataset. And in the second decile the admit rates for each
racial/ethnic group are all below 1%.

Asian-American applicants in the baseline dataset do not clear 1% admit rates until
the fifth academic decile (where the admit rate is 1.5%). The Asian-American admit
rate peaks in the tenth (and highest) decile at 9.3%. They are uniformly lower than
the admit rates for white applicants. Indeed, Asian Americans in the fifth decile
have similar admit rates to whites in the fourth decile. This pattern continues for
each academic index decile including the 10th decile: Asian-American admit rates
are most similar to white admit rates one decile lower.

Starker differences are seen when comparing Asian-American admit rates to
African-American and Hispanic admit rates. African American admit rates rise to
4.5% in the third decile, and they reach 19.6% in the fifth decile— 13 times higher
than the Asian-American admit rate in the same decile. They continue to rise,
peaking in the ninth decile where the admission rate is over 50%..55 Moreover,
between the third and ninth deciles, the admit rates for Hispanic applicants are
always at least 3.4 times higher than Asian-American admit rates; in the same span
of deciles, the African-American admit rate is always at least 8 times higher than
the rate Asian-American admit rate."

On Friday, June 30, 2023 at 11:11:12 AM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html
>
> "Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
>
> Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school. It was a game I was soon compelled to play myself: A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like cheating to check the box and like self-sabotage not to.
>
> Be it for an acceptance letter or a tenure-track professorship, the incentives at elite universities encourage and reward racial gamification. This will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions. The rise of affirmative action produced, inadvertently, a culture of racial gamification by encouraging so many students and their parents to think about the ways race could boost or complicate their chances of admission; the end of affirmative action, in turn, will just exacerbate things by causing students and parents to get even more creative.
>
> Let me be clear that I am not an opponent of affirmative action.
> ...
> Yet I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture. Before students ever step foot on a rolling green, they are encouraged to see racial identity as the most salient aspect of their personhood, inextricable from their value and merit.
> ...
> And amid this great tornado of race chatter, if you take a moment to plug your ears and look around, you will probably begin to notice fewer and fewer brown and Black kids reading on the quad and, down the line, fewer and fewer brown and Black doctors in the maternity wards. It will turn out that all those initiatives will have next to nothing to do with actually combating structural racism. We may well find ourselves teaching Toni Morrison to rooms that get whiter and richer by the year.
>
> So what is to be done? What actions should elite colleges and universities take next if they actually care about diversity?
>
> First, they should exit the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit.
> ...
> Second, elite colleges and universities should band together to strangle the parasitic U.S. News & World Report ranking system. "

Both exiting "the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit" and "elite colleges and universities should band together to strangle the parasitic U.S. News & World Report ranking system" are good advice.

But cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit " comes with ritualistic voting. Politicians need cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker event that have been shown to bear little fruit" 1) to attract votes and 2) to raise fund for political campaign. Parasitic, superficial reporting/ranking is needed to make money as well as to make targeted readers feel superior against other groups.