My position is that whether or not this is true, this is not the basis for sound and equitable policy. If I were black, I would probably be a little offended at the insinuation.

> So why would you call it DEI or equity or anything similar?

Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example). I don't care that the outcome did not increase DEI; I care that the justification did.

There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept. I was watching an official video from LAFD where a firefighter said "people want first responders that look like them" and then later in the video said "it doesn't matter that I can't carry an adult man out of a fire because they shouldn't have been there in the first place."

This is absolutely deranged; the entire Democratic party needs to either boot out the DEI crusaders or we will continue to seem out of touch and untrustworthy.

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever given the facts on the facts on the ground. Have you read the article at all?

What we are talking about here is people who already finished the ATC school and aced the technical aptitude test, but got filtered out by the incoherently test which was explicitly designed to filter out people of undesirable race at higher rates. It would make no sense to filter out if they needed to cast wider net due to being short staffed. Rather, it’s more likely they are understaffed precisely because they filter out eligible and eager people in order to meet race quotas.

It’s hard to get across to people the mechanicsof DEI policies as actually practiced, because it sounds too insane to be real, so people (like probably you) dismiss it as just another instance of crazy Republican screeching.

If they wanted more applicants, then they shouldn’t have been disqualifying good applicants on the basis of their biography.

> The difference between this and the college scandal is that there were limited numbers of seats at colleges, so to putting in an underqualified white student meant you had to pull an overqualified Asian student.

I know this is a tangent, but in case people read this, they may get the wrong idea. While some elite universities like Harvard have a cap on how many people they admit (leading to the displacement you refer to), the vast majority of universities (including probably all top public universities) do not have a cap. Simply put, if you met the (academic) criteria, you got admission. That they also admitted people who did not meet that criteria had no impact on your admission.

(Sorry - just hear this complaint too often from people who did not get into "regular", non-elite universities. No, affirmative action isn't the reason you did not get admission. You just weren't good enough).

The ATC academy can only handle ~1800 students per year. The issue is high failure rates at the academy and then at the facilities graduates are sent after graduation; increasing the quality of applicants should be the FAA's #1 goal.