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A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made Affirmative Action the target of public criticism. I don’t know if it’s because of the limited circle, but all I saw was applause for the ban on AA, which made me wonder how much of it was just emotional venting rather than rational thinking. Then I will poke this hornet’s nest and talk about my own views.
AA is actually a preferential policy when some colleges and universities in the United States admit (of course, some people say that this is a discriminatory policy, depending on the specific position). The general idea is to reduce some admission standards (such as SAT scores) for relatively few ethnic groups, so as to increase the proportion of these people among freshmen. If it is substituted into China’s college entrance examination system, it is probably equivalent to a policy of bonus points for ethnic minorities. Why do most of the Chinese people applaud the judgment of the High Court? Because the Chinese are precisely the ethnic groups that do not enjoy the bonus points policy, the prohibition of AA seems to be beneficial to the admission of the Chinese.
Regardless of the AA of American colleges and universities or the extra points of Chinese college entrance examinations, behind them is a cruel problem of scarce resource allocation, who can enter better colleges and universities and obtain better educational resources. Whether it is China or the United States, colleges and universities have become a threshold for “social class transition” to some extent. Studies dating back decades have found that people with a college degree in the United States earn significantly more than those with a high school diploma or less, and the gap has widened over time . But at the same time, the theory of diploma inflation and diploma uselessness has gradually become popular in the United States. The cruel fact behind this is that the demand for a college degree in the labor market has not increased rapidly with the increase in the number of graduates, and many people have to be squeezed into positions that did not require a college degree before. At the end of the day, the diploma itself is not absolute, but relative—relative to the rank of your peers in this labor market. When the rate of college diploma possession has soared from less than 10% in the 1940s and 1950s to 30% in the past decade ( source ), this shows that the relative ranking of the college diploma itself is naturally declining.
The reason why people care about college diplomas is rather that they care more about the possibility of rising in class in the future, or they don’t need to call going to college a “carp jumping over the dragon’s gate”. For those who are already at the top of society, whether they have a diploma will not substantially change their class, and even if they don’t like studying, it is not uncommon to buy a diploma to decorate their appearance. However, for the middle class, keeping the current class from falling has already increased the pressure, not to mention competing with each other to squeeze into a higher class. What the AA blocks is the opportunity for many middle-class Chinese to realize the American dream, so they will naturally praise the abolition of the AA.
In addition to AA, legacy, another preferential policy for American college admissions, has also become the next target of public criticism. If AA takes care of the bottom, then legacy takes care of the top, because this policy favors the descendants of its alumni. Most of the previous generation who were able to enter the top universities in the United States were not ordinary families, so the legacy took care of the social vested interests in a disguised form.
So is it fair to ban AA, and even later ban legacy, to give the middle class the opportunity they want once and for all? I don’t think so. In turn, I think this will further exacerbate the class solidification of American society. Academic qualifications used to be the threshold for class change, but no one can guarantee that it will always be the future, and universities can be completely open to everyone. Even if the middle class obtains a higher-paying job by improving their education, it is only labor income. The solidification of class is not only to distinguish the allocation of resources through labor income, but will become more and more inclined to capital income in the future, that is, “money makes money”. The existing class of capital has countless ways to control the distribution of social resources, such as real estate, such as inflation, which will become the threshold for a new class transition, and it seems fair. Even if the top strata of society do not want to abolish the threshold of academic qualifications, they can also control class mobility by establishing a more private educational threshold, leaving a new fantasy for the middle class. There is an old saying in China that long-term divisions must be united, and long-term unions must be divided. In fact, the civil wars of divisions and unions just reflect the fact that class solidification has to be broken through violence. The rich Americans have learned to be more and more obedient in recent years. They know that in order to maintain their class stability, wealth must not be concentrated in their own hands, so they do charity. Aren’t they anxious? No, they are equally anxious, but they can use the resources in their hands to protect the interests of their own class. Of course, there are many other ways to maintain relative stability, such as pornography, gambling and drugs. As long as people are alive and happy, there will be no uprising. The anxiety of the middle class will not disappear just because an AA is banned. What they should think about is how to truly break the reality of resource monopoly, rather than fighting each other within the same class or even with the lower class.
Speaking of this, I think of Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Merit” I read a few years ago , and some of his analysis of the nature of social equity issues. At that time, I felt that social justice itself was against the self-interested “blood lineage” in human nature, that is, people would naturally leave resources to their own descendants instead of strangers. Egoism brings about the solidification of social class, and the solidification of social class will definitely hurt equality of opportunity. It is not difficult to understand that the increasingly strong egoism of the Chinese American middle class (it can even be called “elitist”) seems to be a fair fight for their own opportunities, but the real result can only be self-imposed cocoon, which intensifies the solidification of the class .
So is there a solution? My pessimism tells me that I still don’t have a perfect answer, but my intuition tells me that if we really want to achieve equal opportunities, we must find a way to fight against the egoism in human nature. Only when people stop worrying about their own lives and think about self-protection all the time (defensive mode), can we further discuss how to achieve greater fairness. How can people not be anxious? In addition to meeting the “Maslow’s first level needs” such as basic necessities of life, I think the next step is how to make people’s happiness no longer based on comparison.
According to Kant, freedom must be based on the original will of human nature, and the inherent goodness of human nature must be guaranteed in both material and moral aspects. On the material level, in terms of the resource allocation system, this may be guaranteed by communism, or it may be other forms of resource allocation to protect people’s freedom that has always been unfavorable to themselves. On the moral level, generations of people need to work hard to resist the temptation of egoism. By that time, social justice must come naturally. It’s just that we are still far apart, and I hope we don’t push ourselves in the opposite direction.
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