Let’s use a simple metaphor. You have a bridge. One side of the bridge is heavier than the other, so it’s not balanced. You add a counterweight to balance the bridge.
Several years later, someone says “there’s no need for this counterweight anymore, it’s just unbalancing the bridge.” If the bridge was rebuilt to address the imbalances, you’d be right. But it wasn’t rebuilt, it’s the same bridge with the same flaws it had when the counterweight was put in place. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need affirmative action. But pretending we’re in that ideal world isn’t actually solving anything.
This assumes that the systemic issues causing the imbalance are the admissions themselves and that you are fixing the source of the problem. Everyone agrees about fixing the source of a problem. There are many issues with patching over a systemic concern by targetting a single metric, the most common being Goodhart’s Law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
For example, if POC are being exposed to poorer education prior to University, the solution is not to force the universities to lower standards for POC, it would be to address the issues in the elementary schools.
Let’s use a simple metaphor. You have a bridge. One side of the bridge is heavier than the other, so it’s not balanced. You add a counterweight to balance the bridge.
Several years later, someone says “there’s no need for this counterweight anymore, it’s just unbalancing the bridge.” If the bridge was rebuilt to address the imbalances, you’d be right. But it wasn’t rebuilt, it’s the same bridge with the same flaws it had when the counterweight was put in place. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need affirmative action. But pretending we’re in that ideal world isn’t actually solving anything.
This assumes that the systemic issues causing the imbalance are the admissions themselves and that you are fixing the source of the problem. Everyone agrees about fixing the source of a problem. There are many issues with patching over a systemic concern by targetting a single metric, the most common being Goodhart’s Law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
For example, if POC are being exposed to poorer education prior to University, the solution is not to force the universities to lower standards for POC, it would be to address the issues in the elementary schools.