Monday, May 26, 2008

Pomona College Targets the Supposedly Low-Income at Everyone's Expense

Pomona College is using data mining techniques to recruit students who live in low-income areas, according to May 24th's Chicago Tribune.

Here's the essential graff of the story which ran on Saturday.

Responding to lobbying by [Ted] O'Neill [director of admissions at U.Chicago] and others, the College Board is piloting a program this year with about 30 colleges and universities that will enable them to buy students' names and information based on whether they live in lower-income communities.

"We are swearing to use it for good, not for evil," said Bruch Poch, dean of admissions at Pomona College. "The myth of unaffordability has become a nightmare, and we can't directly speak to kids or their families unless we can really target them."
Never fear, though. The College Board is taking precautions to protect our privacy.
The schools still will not be able to request a search that would reveal which students have family incomes below or above a certain level. Instead, college admissions officers could request the names of students who live in low-income communities, determined by their high school and nine-digit ZIP code.
Naturally, this kind of policy might have side effects as all social engineering does.

Wouldn't a public high school district want to appear as if it were in a poorer area than it otherwise is? Wouldn't parents pressure their property assessors to assess them at a lower rate so that they could be "targeted" by college officials?

What does low-income even really mean? Shouldn't it be low-wealth?

After all, by the definition of low-income anyone who lived in an elderly community would be hurting and anyone who put his money into cars or boats or property years before they were assessed would be left alone. What's more anyone who lives in any area that has high taxes that when all is said and done take 40% or so of your income cannot be said to have a high-income.

Moreover, students that come from areas that are poor and rural might qualify for assistance from the colleges. Similarly, what if they are one of the few low-income people living in an area? It is not entirely uncommon, for instance, for people who own six figure homes to be making under $60,000 or so given how volatile property values can be.

Of course, relying on high school data is unfair because some students may be bussed to a different zip code (thank liberals for busing, by the way.)

I suspect that what the colleges really want to do is excuse their obvious efforts at racial engineering by throwing in a couple of students from the supposedly rough inner-city. It's been quite politically inconvenient that students from the black upper and middle class have gotten the benefits of affirmative action, while those for whom it was intended to help have not gotten any assistance whatsoever.

(In fact, as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated conclusively that because university admittance is a zero-sum game, affirmative action has benefited upper and middle class blacks at the expense of poor whites and Asians who tend to be more qualified than most of those upper-class blacks and yet are rejected.)

For them, low-income means black and Hispanic and we would be kidding ourselves if it meant anything else.

Throughout the Tribune piece, you get the sense that the colleges are bemoaning the fact that so few students are paying for college with federal grants. These students either have wealthy parents or don't currently qualify for federally-subsidized loans because Mom and Dad make too much money.

Now why would they be upset about that?

Allow me to venture an educated guess.

You see, if colleges are successful at getting the federal taxpayers to bear their costs, they can raise their tuition and push still more students onto federally subsidized loans as more and more parents demand that college be "affordable." Politicians will be happy to make college "affordable," but that will be at the expense of all the rest of society, most of which does not have a college degree. As federal subsidies rise, so too do the taxes.

If people really want to make college affordable, they could ask for an education, instead of say, a super expensive multi-million dollar student center, equipped with pool tables and restaurants.

What's that? Pomona already has one of those? Gee, look at how that's turned out!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Meh, they do what they have to to boost ratings and rankings. There are too many flaws with their method, except I come from a low-income, or low-wealth, neighborhood and family so I wouldn't have mind being recruited so I don't have to deal with so much paperwork.

claremontliberal said...

For someone who has routinely ragged on the TSL (and often with good reason) about shoddy reporting and a lack of standards, you come remarkably close to, and probably cross into plagiarism yourself in this post.

You wrote: "(In fact, as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated conclusively that because university admittance is a zero-sum game, affirmative action has benefited upper and middle class blacks at the expense of poor whites and Asians who tend to be more qualified than most of those upper-class blacks and yet are rejected.)"

The quote on the link is: "Thomas Sowell has observed, preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. At the same time, because admissions are a zero-sum game, preferences hurt poor whites and even many Asians."

Granted, you do put the link to the article in your quote, but you credit Thomas Sowell, while the article was written by David Sacks and Peter Thiel. Moreover, you choose not to cite the Stanford Magazine like you cited the Chicago Tribune earlier in the article.

You obviously weren't trying to hide that you basically lifted a section of someone else's material (you put in a link), but for someone who bemoans the lack of journalistic standards of others, I find it interesting that you wouldn't give proper credit to either the actual authors of the article or the magazine in which it ran. Also, you take what the article said, that Sowell "observed" a relationship, and assume that it means it was "demonstrated conclusively".

So really, you took someone else words without attribution, then misstated whhat was actually written. Not exactly pioneering journalism of the first rate.

Charles Johnson said...

I don't think so claremontliberal. I could cite all six books and the page numbers where Sowell makes the point. I fell asleep last night with Sowell's Race and Economics on my lap.

That's not even close to plagiarism by net standards as I linked to the article where I found it first, instead of putting in those pesky page numbers. It's called accessibility and I certainly didn't lift it from anywhere. Of course you know that this is a blog and that that isn't even close to be anywhere near the standard for plagiarism in academic works, but I'll entertain you.

But since you've called me on it (and because I'm bored), let's go through the internet stuff I found with just a casual glance.

Here's Sowell in 2003: "Affirmative action is great for black millionaires but it has done little or nothing for most people in the ghetto. Most minority business owners who get preferences in government contracts have net worths of more than one million dollars."


I suspect that the real reason you are going after that quotation and how I used it is that you don't want to address the underlying truth. The black under class hasn't been helped by affirmative action.

Charles Johnson said...

Here's the evidence that Sowell has marshaled to support the following paragraph:

In the United States, where many group preferences have sought to justify themselves as counterweights to discrimination that would otherwise prevail, such “discrimination” often turns out to be statistical “under-representation” in desirable occupations or institutions. The implicit assumption, tenaciously held, is that great statistical disparities in demographic “representation” could not occur without discrimination. This key assumption is seldom tested against data on group disparities in qualifications. For example, as of the year 2001, there were more than 16,000 Asian American students who scored above 700 on the mathematics SAT, while fewer than 700 black students scored that high—even though blacks outnumbered Asian Americans several times over. Data such as these are simply passed over in utter silence—or are drowned out by strident assertions of “covert” discrimination as explanations of a dearth of blacks in institutions and occupations requiring a strong background in mathematics.

claremontliberal said...

It's been a while, but I'm not contending the point, I haven't looked at it, and I'm actually iffy on Affirm. Action. My issue is that you basically lifted a quotation from an article you didn't cite. You changed some words around, but the fundamental phrasing is identical. That's plagiarism, or at least dangerously close to it, even by net standards. Citing the place of information is good, and I gave you credit for it. But you ALSO took the wording, which I think crosses that line and where a more specific citing, as occurs earlier in your post, should have occurred. Regardless, it caused me to raise an eyebrow, and it certainly would be easy for you to avoid such actions in the future. I mean really, you raise enough ire through your ideas, perhaps you shouldn't be giving people other ammunition while you're at it.

claremontliberal said...

Wow, my first sentence was horrible. What I meant was: I'm not debating the validity of the argument because I haven't researched it and am iffy on the use of affirmative action in college admissions and against it in job promotion.

Charles Johnson said...

I didn't take the "wording." According to U.Chicago Style Guide, I gave proper attribution by referencing that where it occurred. I've written about the zero-sum issue of affirmative action in the past. Sowell isn't the first to come up with the phrase. Nor, do I suspect, will he be the last.

Nice try.

claremontliberal said...

You wrote: "(In fact, as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated conclusively that because university admittance is a zero-sum game, affirmative action has benefited upper and middle class blacks at the expense of poor whites and Asians who tend to be more qualified than most of those upper-class blacks and yet are rejected.)"

The quote on the link is: "Thomas Sowell has observed, preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. At the same time, because admissions are a zero-sum game, preferences hurt poor whites and even many Asians."

The similarities between the two sections are more than coincidental.