Man, I remember appplying to colleges and being rather selective about how I self identified. I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).
The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.
Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.
This is true about one of my workplaces. Diversity this, diversity that. As a Director, I remind them that I'm not white. They seem to handwave it away and not count it despite Asian-Americans being underrepresented in this line of work. Such is life.
EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.
This is exactly why people say "all lives matter", because there has been a significant focus on black, female, and LGBT lives, but not for disadvantaged people in general. There are many of them.
If you have been paying attention you may have seen the term “BIPOC” pop up overnight. This is a less handwave-y way of excluding Asians when it is convenient.
I was confused by the B in BIPOC. I thought African-Americans were people of color?
I'm trying to be earnest here because if that's the term that should be used I will use it, but I'd like to know its genesis. It feels wrong to refer to entire, disparate groups of people (indigenous peoples and Latinos in the Dakotas probably have very little in common) by an acronym that seemingly double-counts a particular group seems odd.
it essentially just means “the black and indigenous subset of people of color”. Some definitions say it is to emphasize them more but includes all POC, but the former definition is effectively what it means in any context where one would find it necessary to use it at all.
Interesting thought. Is it racism if you feel minority but are counted among the majority?
If I would immigrate to the US I would count as white, even though I would be a clueless foreign stranger and would have difficulty connecting culturally with many. Still I wouldn't count as "diverse".
According to critical race theory, the identity group you fall into has systemic power over others. That means that no, you would not be considered disadvantaged or part of any oppressed group. Therefore it's not possible to be racist towards you.
Of course, there are still plenty of people who don't see white immigrants through the prism of Woke ideology so you'd likely find some sympathetic to considering you as a diverse hire, despite not checking any boxes on the Woke identity list. It would be an unofficial acknowledgement though.
I know you're not saying it, but not sure when Asian-Americans ever had systemic power over others in this country. Korematsu v. United States is one explicit example of the opposite...
This is fully in line with Woke ideology. It seems a lot of people still don't understand it, and it's extremely important to read up on critical theory, postmodern theory, and social justice if you want to understand why things like this are happening to you.
Essentially, Woke ideologists believe that identity groups are in a constant struggle for power, and they describe two main classes: the oppressed, and the oppressors. They are also rooted in Marxist ideology, believing in the emancipation of the oppressed by seizing the means of production - except where Marxists strictly focused on economic means, critical theorists focus on narrative and cultural means.
In terms of economics, trade and industry, Asians are considered part of the oppressor group along with Whites and Jews. Asians are part of a narrative where they are known to be high earners and hold powerful positions in a wide array of industries. That's why they don't care about your ethnicity, because it's irrelevant to their stated goals of emancipating the oppressed.
First - just to clarify I actually believe in many aspects of modern democratic socialism RE: Nordics, and I think 2020 anti-racism is well-intentioned and doing a lot of good work.
That being said, you really have to download some actual coursework from critical race programs at modern universities and actually read through it. And then go on a wikipedia spree to understand the cultural evolution of them and where they came from.
Modern economic Marxists may or may not like these ideas, but certainly the original leaders of critical race theory were Marxists, the same academic language and ideas used by Marxists are ubiquitous in critical race texts. It's in the DNA.
It's not about blaming Marxism, casting some kind of cold war boogey-man, it's just...a strange or somewhat alien or foreign type of thought to many people in the year 2020 but it is a big part of the intellectual underpinnings of this branch of education/academia that is growing in cultural importance.
Marxists hating people is not evidence of anything. Very similar groups of people hate each other all the time. The catholics vs. protestants in the middle ages comes to mind.
Seconded. Read Lasch (Revolt of the Elites) to make sense of what dyed-in-wool Marxists think of the Woke "ideology" (if we can even be charitable enough to use that word, for most of what they say lacks coherence). In fact, even the widely recognized coiner of the term "intersectionality," Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, wouldn't explicitly subscribe to many of their positions.
I mean they incorporated a lot of Marxist theory, and it is essentially Neo-Marxism. I don't know how much these schools of thought differ, but I do hear about OG Marxists feeling that they're ruining it, or turning it into a mockery of the true philosophy.
>EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.
Oh yes, with a similar side-dish of people claiming we're spies who control the world.
My brother-in-law is half Vietnamese and half Chinese. He asked me to review his personal statement and help him with college applications a few years back. I encouraged him to self-identify as Vietnamese instead of Chinese. He was accepted to multiple Ivy's (but ended up staying in state in the end) where his Chinese friends were all rejected. They are otherwise indistinguishable. Even their personal statements were all more-or-less on the same level, at least the few that I helped out and recall. They all learned a pretty valuable lesson there.
I was accepted by a graduate program at one of the more selective UCs. An alum of my college who was a current student at the UC contacted me to invite me to a recruiting shindig for accepted minority students (she knew I was Asian from the club activities on my resume). But when she found out what my specific racial background was (half white and half Chinese), she said I would not be invited. The only people who were invited to the recruiting trip were those from other Asian backgrounds (anything but Chinese/Korean/Japanese), or students who were black or hispanic.
Instead of an all-expense paid visit spanning from Thurs-Sun and including sitting in on lectures, I was allowed to come for a single Sunday-only event. I spent more money on that trip than I had ever spent on anything in my life, except for my college computer. I was pretty ticked that the school was treating different minorities differently, and that for all the money I spent I couldn't even visit a class in session (since I was only allowed on Sunday). I remember meeting a half-Chinese / half-Vietnamese guy there, who regaled me with tales of the wining and dining that the favored-minority students had enjoyed.
I should note that this was way after Prop 209 (barring affirmative action at the UCs) was passed. I ended up attending the UC, and I asked an administrator about how recruiting trips like this were legal (he happened to be a lawyer). He gave some hand-wavey answer about federal pre-emption that, if true, would have completely gutted Prop 209.
It's not that Vietnamese is the "right kind" of Asian. It's that Chinese-Americans dominate the landscape compared to Vietnamese-Americans. So here you have a Vietnamese-American who has excelled (just ever so slightly, in his case) beyond his immediate Chinese-American peers, which made him a standout in that regard.
What's the representation at Yale, I wonder. Without checking I just assume that (from living in SoCal for a long time) California has most of the country's Vietnamese-Americans.
Well that's complicated. I believe that it's been made deliberately confusing (the geopolitical issues between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China are at least known to exist today) and it's pretty hard to talk about. I wanna tap out of this conversation before I even say anything about it because I feel like it's way over my head.
But, in the very specific context of what I was saying regarding university admissions in 2017, I don't think there was a lot that a Taiwanese-American person could do to distinguish themselves from being labeled or otherwise considered Chinese-American.
There are simply more Chinese so brain drain will be more pronounced. But I would also speculate that a larger percentage of Vietnamese are second generation or more. Very true in little Saigon. Poor Vietnamese who were born in the USA live in east San Jose, Chinese live in Cupertino. Very different levels of privilege.
That would only be true if the US allowed only the same number of immigrants from each country. I don't think that's been the policy historically. I'm not familiar with the current policy.
People immigrate for different reasons at different times. The causes combine with changing US immigration policies and the dynamics of preferential attachment to diaspora clusters to create distinct cohorts that have similar socioeconomic outcomes.
For a light-hearted take, Google Ali Wong's bit about Jungle Asians. The gist is that different waves of immigrants from different countries ended up with wildly different average socioeconomic outcomes in the US. Even different waves from the same country. Sadly, cohort matters.
Note that Vietnamese here is good, because in other situations, it ain't good. The college admissions context is a confounder that flips the desirability of being a particular ethnicity.
European here, is stating your ethnicity normal on uni applications? What is the reasoning behind that? To me it seems very odd as being female in IT I try to hide it when I can (having resume without photo etc) and I would be outraged if we had to state our ethnicity/religion/other on resume.
> Yes, it is fairly normal. US universities attempt to control the percentages of each ethnicity using a short list of ethnic buckets.
This is outrageous. Inasmuch many people do not fall neatly into these idiotic "buckets". Moreover, people with exceptional academic records and belonging to the categories that are biased positively have legitimate reasons to be incensed by this. How on earth anybody thought it to be a sensible policy?
We've gotten to the point in US culture where many view it as sexist or racist to rally against affirmative action policies that are blatantly sexist and racist.
I'm as left wing as they come, and I'm all for affirmative action. I think that a lot of state money should go to help impoverished neighborhoods, and to specifically aid their people to attain a higher education. But directly biasing the admission process seems bigoted and risks tarnishing the reputation of the very people it should be helping. I do not understand the rationale behind that.
>is stating your ethnicity normal on uni applications?
Yes
>What is the reasoning behind that?
Affirmative action requirements. Students can check the box for "prefer not to answer" if they wish. Though I don't know if that gives you better results than admitting to be white or asian.
> I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'.
To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)
Yep. All of it is just emergent shorthand, and none of it makes literal sense. :) If we had some specifically correct terminology, it would likely be quite a mouthful, either including genetic terminology or some mix of geography and time period, but both of those would probably still be insufficient. Race basically doesn't really exist in any clean delineation.
>Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced
This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.
> "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
Nowhere near as weird as "black". Not only is there more genetic diversity within Africa than anywhere else, anyone who has a single drop of black in their lineage is considered black, unless they have completely white skin. It's a ridiculously broad bucket.
People don’t know what to do with Asians because, as a group, they achieve better than white people. However, this shouldn’t be possibly in systemically racist white America.
But they don't achieve better than white people, they just have that perception based off school grades. When it comes to life, that is career, they tend to not get promoted as much or be in much executive positions.
> "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
No, it's not. There aren't “technically” multiple light-skinned races. While there are a few different models of race, they tend to descend from the old three-race (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) model and tend to have only a few more categories than those old models, which are now more commonly labelled White, Asian, and Black, with Native American typically added and, in the case of the US Census, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” also added as a distinct category. (Both of the latter would generally have previously been considered part of the Mongoloid category.)
It's not. Spanish and Portuguese people are European, but in the US they're "Hispanic", and so not really "white". Conversely, people from Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa frequently get lumped in as "white".
Portugal is a fuzzy area, but according to the OMB definition and for the purposes of the US Census people from Spain are Hispanic:
> The OMB defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican,Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
This is the definition generally used by all US federal agencies.
That's not universal. I have Brazilian family members of Portuguese descent who think of themselves as non-hispanic "white" and have Brazilian Portuguese as their first language. And a few others in the same side of the family with darker skin who I believe identify as black.
Yet I would probably have made the same classification you did without knowing them.
Brazilians are Latin and definitely not Hispanic. Latin is not a racial term (and that's why Brazilians tend to find the racialized term "Latino" as used in the US repellent), and has nothing to do with your appearance or genes: it means you speak a language that was derived from Latin as a first language. Angolans are Latin, the French are Latin, Romanians are Latin, etc. Some Swiss are Latin, some are not. So, Brazilians can be Latin, White and non-Hispanic all at once.
Hispanic is something related to Spain. Spaniards are definitely Hispanic, Colombians, Argentines, etc. are (in a more distant sense) Hispanic.
"Hispanic" is not considered a racial term by the US government. It's an ethnicity that can be applied to any race. It is, however, considered a minority group for various purposes.
I know many South Americans, Brazilians in particular, don't like the label as used by the US government. I also know native Spaniards who have embraced it.
Latino/Latina/Latinx is it's own brand of controversial in the communities it is applied to. Regardless, in the US it has never been applied to people unless their heritage traces back to the Iberian peninsula.
Honestly, most race/culture terms seem weird to me: Caucasian (random geographical area), white (tan-pink), black (brown), African-American (regardless of being from Africa, or being American in some cases), native American (as opposed to immigrants?), Asian (sure, the biggest continent can be lumped together)... I assume it's from trying to describe a very complicated combination of factors in a single term, but the results do not make my programmer's brain happy.
It's not because you've got a programmer brain. It's because these categories are truly stupid but academics and other people in a position to challenge then will not out of fear of ostracization.
A truly non-racist policy would be to remove these ridiculous categories from any official documentation. European countries do not need to rely on these stupid labels to implement social welfare.
It's easy to engage in a zero sum game of fighting for the "fair" share of the pie, but I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other. I honestly think we are already headed in the direction of providing a more open education through the internet. COVID has probably accelerated the process.
I hope we can find ways to lift each other up rather than bring each other down.
This scarcity problem was the issue I had with the free college proposals last year. It basically proposed that we should make everyone professionals. But, this isn't possible! For every manager, there are 10 workers. "Working class" jobs are necessary. The solution should not be give everyone an escape from hell, it should be make the jobs less hellish. Better wages, better healthcare, more respect and dignity overall.
Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".
> Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".
This seems self evident to me and I'm always surprised at how much pushback people get for saying that sending 100% of kids to college isn't some especially useful magic bullet.
Personally I have a college degree and have been through trade schools in two different industries. The trade schools were much cheaper, much shorter, and vastly more useful to my earning potential than going to college. I loved the college experience but it felt much more like a middle class luxury than an economic necessity.
All of them. There's a huge problem with folks not getting into the trades. HVAC, electrical, framing, millwork, machining, masonry, plumbing, welding, etc etc. I live in a small town. A young local guy started up a small plumbing company about five years ago with contemporary thinking, branding, marketing, etc. He's a super sweet dude that volunteers a lot of time, runs some community facebook groups, etc. Today he's got 50 employees operating out of two locations.
Another question from me: what do you make of the "its backbreaking work" argument? That is, trades are more precarious as you age. Its easier to sit in a chair at 50 than to hunch and squat and crawl.
You sit in a chair until 50, you'll have a heart attack. You do physical work until 50, you'll have an injured spine. Take your pick. Wage labor wasn't designed to be healthy.
It's definitely a factor, some more than others. Unfortunately because the labor pool isn't replenishing like it used to, tradesmen are doing the heavy stuff much later in their career and taking larger tolls on their bodies.
That's not how it works in other countries with free college. You have to pass admissions which are very competetive and obviously not everyone gets in.
This is already the case. NY went tuition free for state schools for middle class income brackets, and admissions is still the same as it was in the past. I'm unsure where you got the idea that subsidized higher education meant that students didn't have to meet academic targets for admission.
Is there not pushback on the means by which they determine who gets in? SAT, grades, the income bracket window, etc? If one barrier is removed (tuition), it seems reasonable to get the idea that who gets in will receive even more focus.
Well, I think if large groups of people (companies) are collaborating, some degree of hierarchy should be maintained. While, yes, even if all employees are reasonable adults, it would still benefit their shared objective if there is structure in what they are working on, and when.
The 10:1 ratio I mentioned was just to illustrate that the free college proposal implicitly assumes but explicitly ignores a "natural hierarchy". I also think workplaces should be more egalitarian than they are now.
By definition elite qualifications will always be scarce. Everyone can attend college, if we include things like community college. Not everyone can attend Harvard. Some community colleges may even be better at teaching, but they'll never have the prestige.
The question they’re asking is, does it need to be, or is this antiquated?
Is there a good reason to pit people against each other? Is it possible to provide a great education for everyone who wants one and meets some base qualification, etc.
I think the answer is pretty clearly that the best education, in many fields, will always require proximity and therefore scarcity. I just wrapped an OMSCS degree, and as much as I loved the program and the education, missing the on-campus experience definitely makes it a different thing.
Not because I learned any less of the material. More so because I walked away with very few relationships and very little spontaneous creativity amongst peers.
Some of that is on me for doing it while working full time, but it would’ve been hard regardless.
Many people consider those community aspects to be the some of the most valuable qualities of the college experience.
Credentials vs. education. Credentials are a positional good, education an intrinsic one. We've decided the two should be bundled together, but they don't have to be. Maybe they shouldn't be; that would be a much more interesting conversation to have.
Creating employees is not the primary goal of education. The goal is to create thinking individuals. We can't allow the education system to only serve the interests of the business community. It's clear that they limit education to the least amount of people, because an educated citizenry is very difficult to rule. Ignorance is being weaponized in a class war and education for all would take away that weapon.
The more people are educated the more likely or numerous the emergence of people like Einstein or newton. The more people are educated the more democratic society will be and the free-er we all will be. If a large part of society does not understand what's going on around the world then they have to take everything for granted that they have been told by tptb.
True, but these qualifications hold power only as long as people care about them. I believe the main benefit of attending these prestigious institutions is largely in networking -- getting the chance to know powerful people (some say this fact alone means our education system is failing greatly). But what happens when you have harvard on your resume but took all the lectures remotely? What happens when people realize you can do great and amazing things by taking courses on X online learning service and start building things? What happens when these people create a support network for other like-minded people?
I personally want to see it happen. There are ways we can win in life without bringing others down. Sometimes that means creating a new path.
Even "attending" is starting to matter less (see the sky-high graduation rates for these schools). An Ivy League undergraduate degree is best described a patent of minor nobility, honored by all Western bureaucracies including governments, NGOs, and corporations.
Online lectures might be able to scale, but communication platforms and social networks cannot.
I would say more than half of what you learn is from your peers. People who by design were already filtered to be at a high baseline of competence and are forced to go through the same curriculum in the same timeframe as you.
No professor or expert can explain a concept better than someone similar to yourself who recently figured it out. There's also an immense amount of camaraderie built from helping each other grow. All of this is lost when you're just one of millions watching a video where most of the public discussion is dumb.
A little artificial exclusivity isn't a bad thing.
I agree for the most part. I've met some of my best friends in college while working on lab assignments through the night. But I think that we can't form meaningful communities through online learning platforms only means there are a lot of improvements (=opportunities) to be made in the market.
> I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other.
I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.
Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.
Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).
So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.
I view that today's labor market and education system are interdependent on one another, so I don't think we disagree in that regard.
> Status is always bound to be a scarce good
I think this hits the core of the problem. The REAL problem is that these institutions are more or less made in our image. Many people want prestige, status, power, so people create institutions that have zero-sum dynamics. Some people observe that this is just how the world works and will always work. But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo. I believe we have the capacity to innovate for increased sustainability in our institutions and more importantly our lives.
> But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo.
I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.
Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).
Hmm, perhaps I should have elaborated more, because I never intended to say moral failings alone explains what's going on or even blame certain people. I believe that many institutions and systems created by people exhibit zero-sum dynamics partly because people just don't think there's a viable (competitive) alternative. Amplifying competence signals is certainly one way we could help change that.
I totally agree. If Ivy League colleges wanted to be truly diverse, and fair, there is a very simple solution: set a minimum bar in terms of things like grades, class rank, AP scores, and perhaps some objective measure of extracurricular activities. In very competitive schools, you'd still have many times the number of qualified than you do spots. So than you have 2 options: increase or class size, or take people at random. Of course, either of these options take away from the exclusivity of the institution in the first place, which really is the raison d'etre of the Ivy League.
Fairness in academics should be based on merit. Handing out tokens just codifies a belief that certain groups are inferior to others. The social justice rhetoric only exists to justify treating certain races and sexes as a disability
I've had a couple of observations about this whole process, and I would love to be convinced (either way!) with real data / evidence.
1) For all the contortions that universities in the US go to, to adjust and hand-tune their population -- does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff? Would such a class (chosen by simple, unbiased score cutoff) be so much worse at innovation, leadership, (alumni donations??) than a class chosen by our heavy judgement-laden process? Sports, maybe?
What is all this extra effort and political decision-making worth, in actual outcome? Many other countries use purely exam based entrance. Or allow anyone in, and test them once there and kick out if they don't pass. What is the value of the "high judgement" method of admissions? Is it that you're more likely to produce a president or CEO?
2) To echo Justice O'Connor's final question on the matter in oral arguments, when do we know that we're done with this policy? Who says we're done and fixed the situation? How will we know we've reached a point where we can agree that we've achieved something that was the goal, or is it just arbitrary, up to whomever is in power at the moment? If not, will this just go on forever? Is that not ripe for some bad side effects, or worse, corruption of the process?
3) Why have universities adopted themselves as the place where this modification of outcomes should be applied? As I understand it, the problem of diversity etc. etc. happens long before the college/university stage. Attempting to fix it at the end does no one very much good, than if the effort was applied earlier in students' lives. Or, the metrics by which you decide if it's working become softer and softer.
I struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions, and therefore don't find myself convinced for why AA is reasonable (or legal).
1) The incentives are different for different universities. Less elite universities don't (generally) do all this because, you're right, there's no point. More elite universities do, because they're incentivized to.
Elite universities play a zero-sum game with one another for the far right tail of prestige/power/access. Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either. The other part of the game is played not with the graduate but with _everyone else_. Harvard is Harvard (to most people) not because of the mean Harvard grad's success, but because everyone else couldn't get in. Those two incentive structures point more or less at what we've got: painstaking care taken to identify a very small group of candidates, who are then _highly_ credentialed (ex: grade inflation). (All while retaining the aura of meritocracy.)
> Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either
And this is just a way to show class/status with more steps. The fundamental problem is that there exists positions in society where holding it isn't merit based, but connection and class based. Harvard is a vector for which some people of a lower class are allowed to ascend - but only under the auspices of the current crop of upper-class.
Sure, but Harvard's position in society is no more fixed than anyone else's (albeit with more inertia). They maintain their status by producing high status graduates.
If we want to influence that dynamic (say, to push it toward justice, perhaps meritocratic justice), we can identify high status-granting institution/processes (ex: Harvard) and try to make them grant status differently. But, of course, if you interfere with that process it's going to be less effective... but maybe that's okay; maybe burning the process/institution (slowly) and redistributing status along the way is worth it. Or, maybe, if you're skillful, you can get away without burning the process. But this is a big, complicated, social process and heavy-handed manipulation simply won't work -- you'll never rid status of connection and class, because status /is/ connection and class. You can only hope to redistribute things in a more just way (however defined).
The effect of AA on these universities is that they gradually lose their prestige amongst the population they discriminate against. Supposedly amongst the Asian population, UCB is held in as high a regard as Stanford. UCB was mandated by law to not discriminate by race. Stanford could do so.
> does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff?
It depends on the goal. Is it to produce the best possible set of mathematicians, etc, at graduation? Or is it to pick the candidates that are the most likely to benefit the current network of alum and their sphere of influence? If its the latter, a simple cutoff is a terrible idea.
I don't think the purpose of these policies are to produce a "better" student population, but are more that a) there are too many qualified applicants for the number of seats and they need a good alibi to justify cutting people basically randomly, and b) the racial aspects are more of an advocacy choice to try to make up for past racial injustices by ironically biasing the system racially.
The latter issue, I don't see a clean cut way to rectify - as an Asian American I get the feeling of being discriminated against, but I also see the power of giving the most discriminated minorities more opportunity to exploit the power that elite degrees bestow.
Personally I end up being OK with affirmative action policies - as much as I'd like a fair system, an unfair system built on past injustices make that impossible, and I'd rather exclusive universities adopt these unfair policies to shift the balance back.
If this is a topic that interests you, I'd encourage you to listen to the oral arguments/ opinion announcements from the landmark supreme court cases: Bakke [0] and Grutter [1], the latter of which parent references.
The legal underpinning, at least, of considering race in admissions actually IS to make a better class and in turn, a better experience for students.
I also find it a more compelling moral argument than the past injustices or tilting the scales arguments. If the goal is reparations for past injustices, surely japanese internment should count for something. If the goal is to balance the economic scales, we should penalize underrepresented students from wealthy families (and frankly, the preference should be along economic, not racial lines). If the goal is to ensure students don't graduate thinking black (or non-asian, or athletic, or poor, ...) people are dumb because I didn't meet any in my prestigious college class, that seems to me a worthwhile goal that is legitimately furthered by trying to create a diverse class. To GP's point, I don't have data, but also think that outcome is hard to measure.
The problem with your stated goal is that it can justify any length or extent of remedy. That is where a big problem lies. How are we (or the courts) to decide that your chosen remedy is right, reasonable, or effective? Or that it's not merely symbolic and will go on forever? Or that you will say later it's not enough, and choose a different action, and that gets added to the pile?
Is there a concrete actionable principle you can state, to be applied by everyone who needs to apply it?
There seems to be some emerging evidence that election processes, even those which supposedly require significant expertise (e.g. selecting NIH grant recipients), don't perform meaningfully better than random selection. Which, to be honest, shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone steeped in Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral psychology.
The problem with universities simply selecting by score is that it reinforces the inequality feedback loop. Education tends to correlate with wealth. Wealthy people are really good at investing into educating their descendants. Selection by score becomes equivalent to selection by wealth/heredity.
Used properly, “hand-tuning” of university population could offset biases liable to be introduced by a seemingly-unbiased simple score cutoff in presence of social inequality—though I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it works as intended.
The alumni admissions point is an interesting one. I wonder how one's propensity to donate is affected by their perception that they were chosen by the institution vs. they were selected by a deterministic process.
My college experience was made massively more enlightening because it exposed me to people from very different backgrounds. I grew up in a nearly 100% white suburb of Detroit, and even though I only had to walk 5 blocks north from my house to be in nearly 100% Black Detroit, I had never had a real conversation with a Black person until college, where both dorm life and coursework put me in close frequent contact with many people from diverse backgrounds. My undergrad degrees were in physics and mechanical engineering, and many engineering courses involved group projects where you end up spending maybe 100+ hours with the group members over the course of the semester. This situation specifically lead me to a number of eye-opening conversations and experiences where I discovered my own blind spots. For example, one time when I was driving to Home Depot with a Black electrical engineer groupmate and friend, I was pulled over for no obvious reason. I'm white and my father was an FBI agent so I have always been comfortable around law enforcers, so I asked what the issue was but the officer gave a vague non-answer (I made a "suspicious turn") and asked my friend for his ID. I asked the officer for clarity and why he would need the ID from a passenger if it was a moving violation, to which he asked how I knew the passenger. I explained we were engineers going to pick up supplies for a project, and I could see in his demeanor relax, right before he said "that explains it, something just didn't seem right" and let us go. After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious. I was able to better see part of the world that was hidden from me because I was with a Black person who I met through school. Without the coursework, I wouldn't have developed that friendship, and without the friendship, I couldn't have started a real conversation about what it was like being Black in America and what other stuff like that happened to him.
That's just one example (one of the most impactful for sure) of the great extracurricular educational value I got out of being around a diverse group of people.
As a high schooler, I held similar views to many of the people commenting on this link, that affirmative action was unjust. Today, I know that my educational experience was greatly improved by my exposure to people with very different lived experiences, educational backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. My understanding of the world and the problems to be solved is so much richer because of these experiences and connections, and universities absolutely improve the quality of the education by promoting and facilitating these connections. Even excluding the societal benefits of affirmative action (eg helping a systematically oppressed population gain access to better economic opportunities), affirmative action is a smart and good policy for universities to embrace.
modriano says>After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious.<
But it was not obvious!
There are many alternative explanations for what happened. I suggest that you create a list of alternative explanations as an exercise; there are an infinite number of them. This will allow you to admit that you really do not know why the police officer stopped you!
You accept your friend's explanation as if it were the only one that makes sense! Consequently everything that follows from your friend's explanation is likely flawed. I would ask that you reconsider and learn to leave final explanations indefinite. Part of life is not knowing.
I see futile efforts by people trying to understand others all the time. They concoct explanations that shatter under the slightest scrutiny. Even the brightest people fall prey to the belief they can explain others' actions w/o at least asking that person (sometimes worthwhile, but also often misleading!).
Wrong and/or unsupported explanations are assumptions and have an effect: they fix thinking along a path that is likely wrong. Learning to live with "I don't know." will allow you to think more clearly without incorrect assumptions and also more clearly reveal the limits of your knowledge, showing it to be far more limited than one might wish to admit.
"When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME!"
There is a difference between the positive effects one wants and the methods to achieve these effects. It is also valid to criticize and propose alternatives to policies which seek to give the same results but without other side effects. Other countries do things differently but want the same end result, some organisations do things differently from others but also desire the same result.
What I find absurd in the US is that high school students cannot choose their own public school, but are assigned based on where they live. This creates a big divide in rich schools and poor schools. Or white and black schools.
Where I am from in Europe you can choose your own school and schools compete for students. I came from a poor neighbourhood and the nearest high school had a terrible reputation, and I am glad I had the choice to go somewhere else.
I think the population density in the US makes this difficult.
If you can't get into the nearest one or two high schools, you may end up with a 40+ minute commute to get to school which would make morning classes and extra curriculars pretty difficult.
Why do schools need to know the race and ethnicity of their applicants in order to make merit-based admissions decisions? Even things like geographical location and economic adversity can be anonymized and quantified. It seems like a no-brainer to hire some accounting firm to filter applications for racially identifying material before they are reviewed by the admissions board.
>Why do schools need to know the race and ethnicity of their applicants in order to make merit-based admissions decisions?
School admissions in the US are almost never based on merit alone. If all these elite schools never saw the name or face or skin color of their applicants, their student bodies would look way different than they are now.
The UC system is legally required to be race-blind.
They aren't actually race-blind, and funnily enough they're happy to admit that in official documents. The recent study on "should we stop accepting SAT scores from applicants" specifically noted that, although black and hispanic applicants have much lower SAT scores than other applicants, the effect of ignoring SAT scores on black and hispanic admissions would be negative. Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus! If and only if you belong to a certain race.
Do you mean they take race into account when admitting an individual?
>Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!
Do you have direct evidence of this? Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.
>If and only if you belong to a certain race.
How does that work, are the admissions people factoring in race?
> Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.
The distribution satisfying the following constraints:
- low SAT scores are bad for your application
- the average black SAT score is very low
- absence of SAT scores would result in a net loss in black admissions
looks like most blacks scoring above average (so that their applications are hurt by the loss of the score) and a few blacks scoring deeply negative numbers (to get the average down). You can't actually get a negative score on the SAT.
In reality, black and hispanic scores are roughly normally distributed, just like white scores, but substantially lower.
I just skimmed part of the report[1]. I don't see anything indicating "Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!" There's nothing indicating that it's advantageous for an individual to get a lower score.
It does seem to show that black and hispanic students seem to have a lower admission standard for SAT scores. But I can come up with a couple hypotheses for why we might see this data even if the admission ignores race:
1) The admission might largely ignore SATs already. If that's the case, and if black and hispanic applicants have lower SATs, then it it would be expected that black and hispanic accepted students would also have lower SATs because nothing is really filtering out low SAT scores, they're just passed through unfiltered.
2) The admission might have a lower SAT standard for students from low income families. Black and hispanic students might be on average lower income, and thus on average be aided by the income-based standard policy, even though students' race is actually not taken into account.
This makes perfect sense. You would expect Asians to be a much higher percentage of UCB especially if it were truly race blind. For comparison, Stuyvesant High School (maybe the closest thing to a race-blind merit-based educational institution this country has) is 72.6% Asian.
The well known hack for the essay is to emphasize how you grew up poor, disadvantaged, first in family to go to college, escaped war, etc... Apparently helpful both for college and medical school.
California is required to be race blind because they have stronger anti descrimination laws (prop 209). They are trying to repeal those laws with prop 16 this year.
Caltech is a private university. They have to be race-blind because their graduation requirements make it impossible to admit students who can’t do math.
Before we even consider race blind admissions, we'd need to remove legacy admissions, athletic admissions, the buddy-buddy relationships that most private school college counselors enjoy with admissions officers, standardized testing (demonstratively biased against underrepresented minorities) and the entire cottage industry of college essay writers.
You may respond that a lot of these benefits are about wealth, not race. However the two are connected. Black Americans on average have a tenth of the wealth of a white family.
Standardized testing is not biased against underrepresented minorities. The study that UC commissioned found that performance in the tests correlated with college performance and was not biased.
Underrepresented minorities are as a whole not as optimized for the system. Some of that is that cottage industry of essay writers etc, SAT prep courses, etc... but some of it is objectively not being as prepared. Now some of this is also due to growing up in worse environments for academic performance but this is a real difference in performance.
I have interviewed Stanford students. There is a step difference between the Asian/white students and the underrepresented minority students in their performance. The underrepresented minorities were still smart but the Asian/white students behaved like they were a year or two ahead in school.
You could say that standardized testing is somewhat biased against poverty rather than minorities directly. Poverty won’t let you afford extra summer tutoring, SAT prep, etc...
The best white/Asian kids seemed to be much more experienced with actual computers and computing. Classes taught in schools cannot compensate for this. It’s the difference between learning about programming in school and actual on the job programming or better yet hacking with strong friends for a year. It’s a huge difference in confidence, comfort, and dexterity. It isn’t necessarily a difference in raw ability.
An example: I interviewed an underrepresented minority student from Stanford. He was bright but obviously only understood computing from what was taught in class. So he didn’t do that well in the interview. If it were up to me, I would still have brought him in as an intern. However, the company did not move forward. Under their criteria, they wouldn’t move forward because the student would not have been able to contribute. The company should have changed the criteria to look for raw ability instead of realized ability and to look to nurture the next generation rather than feeding its hiring pool directly.
How did you test for computing skills 'outside' of the class though (you mention it was obvious, I don't see how this can be)? Or is it just your gut-feeling that he wasn't any good at extracurricular computing?
One good step is mentorship, outreach, and internship programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids starting from elementary school. The tech giants should just embrace this.
A poor asian family might have a hundredth of the wealth of a rich black family. Race is a terrible proxy for wealth. If wealth is the issue, use wealth.
Less, because the 1% are overwhelmingly white. But from [1] it looks like if you take the average then it's actually less than a 10x difference, which is surprising to me. And the difference in income is only 1.5x.
I imagine that black wealth is pretty lumpy. Blacks are underrepresented in white collar professions but overrepresented in elite sports and entertainment. There aren’t too many black small business owners. There’s only been a few decades to build wealth so blacks who have some probably made all of it themselves in the last few decades. That’s probably why the average looks better. But that’s all assumptions on my part and I have no sources to back any of this up.
1.5x is a huge difference in income. Imagine a 50% raise.
It is huge - I had originally put the “only” in quotes, but removed them because it’s really not huge compared to 10x.
I do think it makes sense that the wealth difference stems from blacks having so little time to build wealth. The income also is a big factor for sure, but it’s hard to see it causing the 10x gap by itself. OTOH generational wealth is lost really quickly.
i don't think it's that simple. I honestly think race and ethnicity make a difference. Disclaimer: I'm asian and I would certainly have been affected by discrimination against my race in college admissions. Certainly I've felt bitter about certain school rejections.
On the other hand, there are multiple instances I can remember interacting with people of other ethnicities in uni and thinking "wow, I can't _ever_ see myself thinking that way" - and I think I'm better off for it. IMO, diversity of culture and thought is real.
If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity. Fair? I suppose so. But is it good for society? That is harder to answer.
> If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity
If this is the case -- which I believe it is not -- then you are arguing that a meritocratic approach (normalized for factors that affect access to education) would skew toward white and Asian people. I recognize that you're speculating, but I don't believe there to exist a top-tier university that has actually put such a filter into practice for its admissions process, so there's insufficient data to verify your claim.
In response to your speculation, I speculate what you would find is that, normalizing for economic and social factors, race makes little difference....If a pure merit-based approach actually skewed the playing field toward whites and Asians, it would already have been put into place long ago. The whole problem with racism is that it damages the ability for people to be judged on their merits.
I appreciate your take. I know that UC schools and Caltech are commonly held up examples of "meritocratic" approaches to admissions that skew heavily Asian - but your rebuttal would be that I haven't normalized for socioeconomic factors, right? I can definitely buy that possibility. Would be great if we can see some data, but I don't know if that's readily available.
That said, from personal experience, I would still contend that _cultural_ diversity is valuable to uphold. I don't think diversity of thought stems solely from socioeconomic background.
I think it depends on what you consider a meritocratic approach. Most would say that it by definition does not normalize for economic or social factors.
I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students. And there is definite value in a diverse class: differences of thought, background, opinion, and lived experience make for a much more interesting discussion in the classroom.
> I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students
Why not provide racially neutral class-based / disadvantage-based affirmative action instead? You get points if your parent(s) are poor. You get points if you have a single parent. You get points if you or your parent(s) have been on welfare. You get points if your parent(s) are in or have been to prison. You get points if you went to a high school with a low average academic achievement. You get points if your parent(s) have a history of homelessness or drug addiction or serious mental illness. You get points if you reside in a low income area.
That would produce a diverse student body without any direct consideration of race.
I think your assumption here is that if you were to filter based on those things you'd get an outcome that would be representative of the total population. But I don't see why you think that. Look at relatively poor Asian kids in the NYC public schools system. Even if you were to apply your filter there, they would still likely end up massively over-represented. Similar (but less dramatic) outcomes are likely even with Whites. Even factors like social class and family income don't carve things up in such obvious ways.
Why must the outcome "be representative of the total population"? If group X is Y% of the national population, must group X also be exactly Y% of the student body at universities? It is inevitable that, in anything, some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented, partly just by random chance, partly due to all kinds of complex cultural and historical reasons. To the extent under-representation is due to bad historical reasons (past oppression/persecution/discrimination/etc), then yes I think something should be done about it. But why not do that at the individual level, of the individual who is socially disadvantaged due to that history of oppression?
I have no problem with the idea that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get some special consideration. But compare two individuals: (a) a person from an under-represented racial/ethnic minority who comes from a privileged background (e.g. parents who are university professors, politicians, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc) (b) a person from the ethnic/racial majority (or a minority which is not considered to be "under-represented") who grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from child abuse and neglect, parental drug addiction and criminality, homelessness, etc. How is a system fair if (a) gets given a preference but there isn't one for (b)? That's why I think affirmative action should be based on individualised assessment of social disadvantage, not group membership.
Humans all suffer the same regardless of race. The goal is to reduce suffering in the end right? If targeting on disadvantage rather than race doesn't produce the "right" racial mix, so what?
1. You are assuming that they are not already taking non-racial attributes into account. Intersectionality is a well-understood concept and sits at the heart of most diversity initiatives
2. We can argue all day over which categorization should have the most weight. There will always be people on the fringes of the applications that feel like they were shafted
At the end of the day, these universities are trying to give disadvantaged individuals. They may not be perfect, but it is hard to come up with a perfect system to do this.
I think it still makes some sense to ask if someone is Black or Native American due to their unique history in America (slavery and genocide), but tossing people into these buckets based on their ancestral continent is absurd.
In the current system, you're essentially punished if you're Asian, but what is "Asian," really?
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans often immigrate to America with advanced degrees, wealth, etc. and they pass those advantages on to their kids, hence the high standardized tests scores / GPAs, but immigrants from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines often come here with nothing in search of a better life, and their children are tossed into the same "Asian" bucket, and punished.
Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university, which is important if they still have legacy admissions. Hispanic people might not have the option of getting extra points for having a father that went to Yale, who himself had a father that went to Yale, if Hispanic people were outright excluded in the past.
I think we'll eventually move to something close to what you're describing. You could get some points if your parents are poor, or didn't attend college themselves, or don't speak English, but categorizing people into one of a few crudely drawn racial categories has got to end.
Should individuals from other groups that have suffered recent genocide be treated similarly to those you named? Does it matter if America carried out the genocide inside its own borders? What if the country said little while very bad things happened? What if America fought but could not stop the very bad things? The Armenians and at least three more recent groups come to mind depending on those answers.
The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids.
The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?
> The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids.
The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos
Yale reports statistics based on these “buckets” on their own website - https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts (you have to scroll down to the section labelled “University-wide Enrollments by Ethnicity (% of non-international enrollment)” and click to expand it)
You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
You should look closer at average test scores of admitted students by more fine grained ethnic groups. My high school discriminated by particular ethnic groups: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, etc...
Are those figures – i.e. test scores of admitted students broken down by fine-grained ethnic groups – publicly available for Yale? (Or any other similarly prestigious US university?)
Pacific Islander vs Asian isn't "fine-grained". They are two distinct "buckets" in the US government's standard racial classification system, to which I linked earlier [1]. It is just that the "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander" bucket sometimes gets its name abbreviated to "Pacific Islanders". "Pacific Islander" is a collective term referring to the indigenous peoples of the islands of the Pacific Ocean, which peoples are divided into three main ethnolinguistic super-groups – Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians – and Native Hawaiians are a Polynesian people. New Zealand's Maori are another Polynesian people.
Prior to 1997, the US government had a single bucket, "Asian or Pacific Islander". Since 1997, they've been split into two separate buckets (although it took some time for the bureaucracy to fully adopt the new grouping – the 2000 census still used the old classification, but the 2010 census adopted the new one.)
Important correction:
affirmative action at these schools mostly doesn’t take spots away from white people. It mainly takes them from Asians, because Asians outperform whites on quantitative metrics like grades and GPA. IMO this is a critical piece of information, considering the place affirmative action holds in the politics of white resentment. White people who didn’t get into top schools: turns out you can’t blame affirmative action!
Affirmative action as practiced by top schools is completely consistent with the white power structure, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering these institutions are part of that power structure.
I sure some people who apply to Caltech apply to Yale, but most people who apply to Yale probably aren’t applying to Caltech. Even if Caltech practiced AA, it would still have very few underrepresented minorities.
Randomly admitting Indians will give you great diversity in backgrounds. Randomly admitting 4chan users will give you great diversity of thought. Of course that would absurd because those are not about race...
How can you know how hard a person had to work without knowing how they grew up? Part of merit is understanding that not every student starts with the same footing. Those that start off worse might not seem as good on paper, but worked harder to end up where they did.
Part of understanding this is race, location of growing up, schools, and parent's wealth.
You can quantify a lot of these things, and those things that cannot be quantified can be hashed with a pre-existing mapping that captures the relevant information in a way that doesn't reveal irrelevant genetic traits.
For example, high schools nationwide are constantly ranked and compared. If you have an identifier that simply says "rural tier 3 high school," it's unclear what the race of the applicant is.
A parent's income can be shown based on decile of Americans, without revealing the race of the applicant.
Geography can be given in a way that is nonspecific enough to prevent educated guesses about the applicant's heritage.
I contend that race doesn't tell you much more about how hard a person had to work, if you already have all of the preceding factors evaluated.
You made a mistake already. These decisions are not purely merit based. Meritocracy isn't real. It never was.
What you are seeing is looking at race on purpose. Because racism is a real thing. There are studies that even if you remove the names and photos of people from their resumes, white people will prefer to accept other white people. They intuitively know, because their resumes will look "familiar". You have to go out of your way to solve the problem, you can't just be colorblind.
So what do you want to do, establish a wholly separate admissions path that intentionally seeks out people from traditionally less powerful races, in order to counteract your personal perception that there is such a thing as a "white" resume?
It probably gets worse than that. Eventually, if you pursue the task with gusto, it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. And then, if those you just let in aren't doing so well, you have to just let them pass. And so, eventually, you have to just give them degrees. And then, if those people who were just handed degrees can't convince anyone to hire them, you have to just give them the job..
>it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit.
Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.
I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves.
I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.
I'd argue that high socioeconomic people on these selection boards would be likely to select high socioeconomic students. The sports, hobbies, etc will all be familiar. This isn't a "white" issue.
By the way, you all know this is going to come up in California this fall? Because there is a proposition on the ballot (Prop 16, ACA 5) to repeal the current CA Constitutional section that government shall not discriminate based on race.
"The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
Washington has a similar law, and a referendum to repeal it was on the ballot last year (I-1000/R-88). It was narrowly defeated (ie, the law was not repealed). Interestingly, according to Ballotpedia, there were many newspaper editorials in favor of repealing the anti-discrimination law, but only one against (in the WSJ [1]), and it also makes mention of the issue of Ivy League admissions.
Remember when The College Board was developing an "adversity score" but then dropped it in the face of criticism?
I honestly wish we would just do that. We would actually have something quantitative instead of vague generalizations about "personality". The methodology could be scrutinized, and centralized (instead of every college coming up with its own special formula), and we could stop talking about this every X months.
Family income is a pretty good proxy for any adversity score.
Because of the African American income gap, it would also serve to boost AA enrollment, particularly from disadvantaged inner city kids, while still not discriminating against the white kid growing up amid grinding poverty in rural Appalachia.
It’s not a perfect indicator, but it’s a very good one. On average, it even picks up on adversities such as many medical/physical disabilities, since families usually take a big financial hit on account of such issues.
This would be really nice. It's objective, quantitative, scalable and I think fair. This gets to the real problem too because if dynamics ever changed and some other groups we disadvantaged at large, they woukd automatically be advantaged here. Thus it automatically adapts to the situation. Not saying its perfect, but it'd be a great improvement.
I read a study from awhile back that said that for whites, wealth correlated with intelligence but that it didn’t with blacks when there was discrimination.
You're probably right about some universities, because they're attended by the children of the almost-rich. It could happen in Ivy League, however, because those who really run things there are really rich, and their children get accepted through legacy and donation quid pro quo.
Hm - so people who faced more "adversity" would be propelled to the top of the list? I can see that going horribly wrong: if it worked perfectly, you'd end up with yo-yo generations where one generation went to a good college and had a successful career (and if you don't believe one thing follows from the other, why bother with the adversity score at all?) while the next would be relegated to struggling, giving their children the needed "adversity". Realistically, though, you'd have smart parents finding the right mix of adversity to give their kids a leg up just just the way they find the right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today.
What mechanism do you imagine would push high income families down the socioeconomic ladder?
Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.
If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.
> right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today
This is close, but I imagine it would be more akin to temporarily relocating to a different school district, then selling / moving out after the children hit college age.
Note that this type of thing does aalready happen, albeit not to the extremes you're imagining. Imagine one parent retiring early or temporarily so that total family income qualifies for certain loans or grants.
Nah, you'd just have wealthy people deciding how they calculate the score and making sure they can tweak the numbers to show their kids are disadvantaged.
Just like some wealthy parents find a friendly doctor to diagnose their child with a "learning disability" to get extra accommodations on tests. Knowing how to work the system confers huge advantages on the privileged.
You know, I'll take "yo-yo generations" over what we've got now. Right now we've got "a massive wealth divide". "yo-yo"ing would imply that some people that are right now stuck on the bottom would at least have some time a bit higher up.
That sounds like a strict improvement over the current system, where those that struggle adversity are stuck trying to pull themselves up by their bootstrap forever.
If that means my parents made decent money, but I can't get into a good school and have to struggle a bit? Sure, fine, that's still nothing compared to those who have parents with no money and also can't get into a decent school.
A full fledged accurate adversity score (as much as such a thing can be objectively quantified) brings to mind some very weird perverse incentives resulting from it from the sheer desperation for an edge. From deliberately sandbagging income around admission (transferring to a lower paid start up).
Not to mention potential absurd implication and emergent from a model like "due to statistical outliers the best thing for getting an average middle class child into the Ivy League is to both survive cancer and to survive a school shooting". It could rapidly turn into an absurdist comedy sketch about misery poker.
Except racking up points for your adversity is the point of such policies.
Avoiding doing so basically means you need to rack up the inverse - privilege points - except you're not allowed to do that, so it turns into obscure "penalty points" hidden in euphemisms.
Right, at the beginning sure, and ideally it would quickly improve. But why have all of these institutions do it individually, and out of the public eye? I doubt some random Yale admissions specialist has unique societal insights that the other institutions don't.
The adversity score in this case wasn't directly related to race, but I think some facts about your school and neighborhood, so not illegal in the way that assigning point values to certain races would be.
To engage in this conversation you sort of need to accept the premise that colleges are being used to correct historical (and even current) injustices, and then go from there.
You may not think it's the "right" thing to do, but it's the premise on which this topic is based and figuring it only muddies the quality of the conversation.
On a very related note, California Prop 16 will be on the ballot in November, seeking to remove the following text from the CA constitution:
>The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
I wonder what impact the ordering of those clauses has on people reading/voting. I didn't even notice "or grant preferential treatment to" until the ~third read through, still trying to figure out why anyone would vote to repeal this.
Alternative ordering for comparison:
>The State shall not grant preferential treatment to, or discriminate against, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
It will be interesting to see whether the BLM movement and attitudes plays a factor into this proposition's turnout, or cases like this one cause other people to rethink their support.
I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.
Although it's perplexing just how...nasty?...the discrimination against Asians is. I can't imagine ever trying to justify that "all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college, as is proven to be what the colleges are doing here.
I may get a lot of hate for this... But I think affirmative action has opposite the desired effect. The majority groups are dicriminated against by design. I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. I think it makes them worse.
The government should find a way to benefit minorities without outright descrimination against those that doesn't fit their definition. My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.
AIUI, it’s even worse, as the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are well off members of the minority group (e.g. the kids of doctors and dentists) rather than students whose SES would be significantly improved by a degree from a prestigious institution. This is because admission is the first hurdle, not the last, and being well off removes potential sources of stress.
If you look on LinkedIn you'll see the vast majority of "African-American" Ivy League alumni are actually African immigrants. It seems without fail when I run into someone black that's a successful doctor or lawyer they often turn out to be an African immigrant. They're often quite coy about it and will only tell you when you ask them directly.
There's nothing wrong with immigrants but it seems as though immigrants are benefiting from programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.
> programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.
Where is it communicated that this is the intent of these programs? My understanding is that the criteria is simply race (and to an extent, economic conditions).
Should it matter if you’re an immigrant or not if the program is designed to provide an advantage solely on race and economic circumstance? If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.
> If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.
My (lay) understanding is that universities are (were?) doing a careful dance around Regents of the University of California v. Bakke[1], which permitted them to consider the race of an applicant in order to provide the educational benefits associated with a diverse student body, but did not permit them to use their admissions as a tool for administering reparations.
It's also my understanding that their compliance here is more littoral than spiritual, given the widespread on-campus support for reparations in general.
I've been catching whiffs, of a cultural tension between descendants of black families that immigrated from places like Africa and the Caribbean in the mid-20th century, who in my experience seem to benefit those most from affirmative action policies, and black Americans whose families either arrived decades before the civil rights movement, or descended directly from black slaves, and bore the brunt of America's apartheid policies.
I wonder if we'll see a major political bifurcation along those lines in the next decade.
Some have been advocating "American Descendants of Slavery" (ADOS) as an identity specifically for those whose ancestors were victims of slavery in the United States
That is true. However, the US immigration system seems to select for the affluent, the skilled, and the already the successful. Many of them come to the country with existing contacts in positions to aid them through the process, and with specific plans. That means that many of these migrant are able to leapfrog many of most insurmountable structural barriers that black Americans face in terms of capital, debt, skills, policing, and access to an affluent social network by the simple act of being from anywhere else than America.
When they (the affluent ones to whom I'm referring) establish themselves and settle down, they're then in a position to shelter their children from many of the structural inequities faced by the black community writ large, such as access to quality schooling, housing, and living in overpoliced areas.
This does not mean that the descendants of black migrants are immune to racism in the US. Indeed, even the most affluent family can scarcely hope to protect their children from the overt, and even covert acts of conscious and unconscious racism perpetrated by both individuals and our institutions.
But affluence does open doors, and can be used as a buffer against the most systemicly insidious elements of America's segregationist past.
Is that something that Caribbean nations should address, rather than USA? Frankly I don't see how policies that don't benefit ADOS meet the ethical burden that USA universities (especially those such as Ivy League universities who historically benefited from slavery in USA) would seem to have.
I disagree. I think the primary beneficiaries are the universities themselves and their alumni networks. Employers, particularly elite employers, know about affirmative action - and not just racial affirmative action. Job candidates are sometimes judged by employers in the context of advantages they might have received - employers are known to "unconsciously" penalize candidates who list diversity clubs, fraternities (legacies), and sports teams - three signals that a candidate may have received a non-academic boost in college admissions. In the United States, the right sometimes calls this effect w.r.t. race the "Clarence Thomas effect," as he famously struggled to find any law firms that would employ him, despite having a law degree from Yale. Many universities with affirmative action, including elite universities also have a racial gap in the graduation rate and average GPA exiting university - suggesting that some of those black C-GPA Harvard students (well, black C-GPA Princeton students, Harvard doesn't really give Cs) could have B or A students at Carnegie Mellon or Emory and had an easier time finding employment after graduation. So while some members of the minority group may benefit from affirmative action, I'd argue that many more members of the minority are actually hurt by affirmative action, either because they're forced to compete slightly above their abilities or because they're evaluated as if they received unfair advantages by employers after college.
If you think about it, it's not really surprising. Harvard is not going to take a kid who reads at a 6th grade level, no matter what. They will take an underrepresented minority kid who is probably just short of being an outright admit. And where are those types of kids most likely to come from? The higher income end of the minority group, of course.
>My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.
The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have. Networking is the primary benefit of top tier schools, and so unfairly giving a chance to those without the network is the only way for them to move up the ladder as a group.
This will necessarily displace individually who might deserve to be there more, but the problem is an intractable one due to the outsize gains of being part of that network.
I am not endorsing affirmative action, or discrimination against certain "successful" minorities, simply offering a chain of reasoning for it.
My SO taught in public schools. One was a 'standard' public school, the other was a 'charter' school [0]. I have some second hand knowledge here.
The parents make all the difference.
Yes, poverty is a huge factor, but some parents are more in touch than others, in spite of the poverty.
At the 'standard' school, it was a mess that I won't burden the reader with. One key metric that I found interesting was that the teacher drop-out rate was ~80%. This gives an idea of the quality of the school.
At the 'charter', every single graduate has gone to college in some form. They are quite proud of this metric, as they should be. The 'charter' was richer on average, yes. But many of the kids were opting out of the 'standard' school and going to the charter. The income of those kids' parents was similar to the 'standard' school. The population of 'poor' kids that went to the 'charter' school was much less though.
[0] It's publicly funded, but still a charter. The local district is not like most. Every parent/guardian is forced to rank the schools for their child to go to. All are open for enrollment. City Bus passes are provided for every child for free in lieu of school busses. It works, but still has a lot of issues, like most places.
But the problem we realized, after trying out forced busing, was that in the long term all parents with resources would simply opt out of the public school system to avoid it.
Because schools are a reflection of the students they get. Private schools do better not because they teach any better, but because they keep out the ones that aren't there to learn and thus the teacher can actually spend their time teaching a group of kids at the same level.
Affirmative action was almost certainly the least bad solution--it broke the back of the rampant discrimination in this country, something that would have been very hard to do anywhere near as fast by other means.
The problem is that it's already produced all the benefits it's going to, now it's pure burden with no benefit.
> The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have.
The consistent positive outcomes of disadvantaged students in KIPP Academies would suggest this is not always the case.
The authors of The Charter School Dust-Up said that KIPP's admission process self-screens for students who are motivated, compliant, and come from similarly motivated, compliant and supportive families. The 2010 Mathematica Policy Research study found that KIPP schools had a "lower concentration of special education and limited English proficiency students than the public schools from which they draw".[22]
Some KIPP schools show high rates of attrition, especially for those students entering the schools with the lowest test scores. A 2008 study by SRI International found that while KIPP fifth-grade students who enter with below-average scores significantly outperform peers in public schools by the end of year one, "60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003–04 left before completing eighth grade",[23] although research on attrition at one KIPP school in Massachusetts differs.[24] The SRI report also discusses student mobility due to changing economic situations for student's families, but does not directly link this factor into student attrition. Figures for schools in all states are not readily available.
Of course KIPP selects for motivated students. But it also selects for severely disadvantaged students. So while it's true that we can't assume KIPP's results can be generalized across the entire population, we know that additional school resources works in a subset.
It is always good to make this clear. It is "how", not "how much".
The American system would benefit a great deal from a systematic reshuffle without a dime extra being spent.
A few realigned incentives here, a little more competition there, and voila... The system pulls itself closer to your goals as it iterates, rather than further down a path that appears to satisfy no one except those whose interests are entrenched.
I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place.
The purpose of affirmative action isn't to cure racism, broadly defined as racial animosity or something similar. The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Racial animosity and so-forth should be dealt with in other fashions.
If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America?
(I'm not sure if you're defending affirmative action or if you're just outlining its supposed purpose.)
If the justification of affirmative action is to "correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias," how is it justified that it discriminates against Asian-Americans when we've never held institutional power in America?
There is zero way in which may post claims discrimination against Asians is justified by purpose of affirmative action and implying that I am doing so is a despicable bad-faith troll. Of course, the truth of the Federal Government's claim various colleges are discriminating against whites and Asians is a different corner of this debate, which is to say it's the thing looking at this would argue.
>> The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion).
Asian-Americans were broadly excluded as enshrined by law in Korematsu v. United States, to say nothing of the discrimination that Chinese-Americans dealt with.
So... kinda odd that it is correct to continue to discriminate against them in higher education... isn't it?
Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell whether someone in a group benefited by AA is in a given position because of AA, or because of their merit. This is harmful to people in those groups.
I worry about this a lot - my kids are Hispanic (inherited from their Mexican mother), and I honestly don’t know what to tell them when it comes time to check the “race” box for college admissions in a few years. Do they check the “hispanic” box and always wonder if they were just admitted to meet some quota? And no matter what they do, as soon as somebody realizes they have a Hispanic parent, they’ll (reasonably) assume that they did check the Hispanic box.
I would check it. It's a free advantage in a competitive application process. The government has plenty of misguided programs that people take advantage of. The law is blind to morals and it's clearly a stupid system, so just close your eyes first if it makes you feel better :)
You shouldn't feel any worse than when you try to minimize your taxes. In a broken system there are no bad actors
Research has shown that heavy AA can lead to a mismatch between the putative beneficiaries and their peers. As a result, these students are more likely to end up in the bottom of their class (IIRC, 50% of black students at top law schools ended up in the bottom 10% of their class, and AA beneficiaries who planned to major in STEM were more likely to change to a non-STEM major).
So it is also possible that a preference that helps your kids get into a school could actually end up hurting them if they end up outmatched by their classmates.
I find this a really odd point because you could say the same about people with any sort of privilege. Did Jack Welch succeed because of his intelligence or because of his race/gender? Well, a little of column A and a little of column B. White dudes do have an easier time in the business world. Should we discredit all successful white male businessmen? No, of course not. Why is it any different with minorities and Affirmative Action? Some people have privilege by circumstance and others have privilege by design. So be it.
I happen to agree: the worst penalty is in schooling, and the most bang-for-interventionary-buck is also in schooling.
It's also not visible to peers in adulthood, and thus not a source of jealousy or mistreatment or suspicion, as many AA recipients detail experiencing.
It's also the most moral way to address something which - IMO - deserves addressing, but which currently is addressed quite immorally.
If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed. If the process is flawed than correcting the process can be seen as removing bias, not adding it.
Do you feel like any correction at all is discrimination, the correction of is flawed in some specific way, or do you feel like its a matter of overcorrection?
It seems unlikely that anything can be subdivided, repeatedly, into arbitrarily many groups by arbitrary criteria whereby comparing all possible groups (i.e. comparing the non-empty members of the powerset) yields statistically insignificant differences for all discernable moments.
Unless the thing is truly homogeneous. Which people are certainly not. For example, I clearly have less than average tact.
If I'm reading your humor correctly I think I've fallen into some semantical trap instead of a serious critique. In which case, I will play along.
However, the topic at hand is 'equal' in a decidedly subjective sense. Even if you have two identical hydrogen atoms, they still might differ in some sort of property you may or may not find significant to the concept of equality. Location perhaps? Can any two things be "truly homogeneous" while remaining distinct entities? True object homogeneity was not intended by my use of the term 'equal.' Does that satisfy the concern? :)
I've taken courses is probability and topology where the power set is used, and am intimately familiar with it, but I have no idea what you're talking about
The powerset of S is all possible ways to subdivide humanity into groups of individuals.
Comparing two members of the powerset of S is comparing two groups of people.
Any criterion by which you can divide people will produce elements of the powerset of S. For example, "people that like jazz" are in there. So too are "people who eat peas with a knife".
I am saying that there are many ways to lump people into buckets. What defines the buckets does not matter. They are all in the powerset of S.
If humans are equal, then comparing any two arbitrary groups in the powerset of S should always conclude in equality. At least in some statistical sense.
I am giving a counterexample to equality across arbitrary divisions of humanity (members of the powerset of S). I claim that arbitrary groups of humans are not equally tactful. Because if you measure the tactfulness of any member of the powerset of S where I personally am present it will generally show less tact than members of the powerset where I am not present.
The post you're responding to is ambiguous, and most language is and relies on context, but this doesn't seem like a very charitable interpretation.
I have heard the argument you're making with Jordan Peterson (who I absolutely don't respect - if you're looking for a Christian conservative try Peter Hitchens instead, although I'm not a conservative myself. He's not fashionable these days, but he represents actual long standing conservative beliefs rather than opinions that will fade away in 2-3 years)
I think the parent comment is being deliberately ambiguous in order to skirt around politically sensitive issues.
The moment you clarify the statement you end up in a contentious political debate, so the ancestor post is trying to bait others into saying the elephant in the room without putting words in others' mouth: That some groups/ethnicities are more successful than others. The actual discussion will begin when you ask the question "why?"
In response you're arguing against a strawman. No one has _ever_ claimed that everyone must be equal in all possible ways. That's of course ridiculous. The discussion plays out more or less the same way over decades, so to save time at the risk of putting words in your mouth, I'm going to take the liberty of presenting both sides.
Let's return to the question of "why are some groups more successful than others?" If it's because of either direct oppression, or systemic oppression (i.e. policies that favour some groups over others), then affirmative action is justified. This is the position the ancestor comment holds.
Once you move past the rhetoric, there's no difference in reality between affirmative action and "oppressing Asians and whites," but the framing as just vs unjust depends on your idea of justice.
The conservative counter-narrative is decades old. It's not exactly racist, but it claims that cultural reasons are primarily to blame for disparities in success. Undoubtedly cultural reasons are partly to blame, and its possible for cultures to be improved. But a narrow focus on cultural reasons detracts from a long history of oppressive laws whose effects are still felt today.
Now we get back to what "justice" means. Does justice mean merely removing the oppressive institutions and returning to a natural law Lockian universalistic liberalism? Or does it mean correcting for past injustices.
> If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed.
Since groups can differ in meaningful ways, for any number of reasons, no conclusion can be made about whether the selection process is flawed. At least not in the ancestor post's framework. The assumption does not hold.
The funding bill could be crafted so that disproportionately high, or nationally-leveling, funding could be sent to schools in ZIP codes with the lowest average incomes, and the law could exist in perpetuity such that it would always assist the most disadvantaged ZIPs without regard for the ebb and flow of various identity groups over time.
Except throwing money at the schools doesn't do much of anything about the problem. Schools reflect the students they get far more than they make the students.
You are correct because it forms obvious common interest groups. That is at least one factor. Maybe I should scrap the "obvious" since it seems to be beyond elite university staff.
My neighbor looks pretty similar to me but that doesn't mean we get along (My neighbor is pretty cool and doesn't look like me at all, but the concept should be clear).
Regarding schools, I think there is evidence that charter schools and school vouchers have a significant positive impact for the most disadvantaged kids.
>I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action.
I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.
Even with the baseline+diversity system, you have a situation where people will be rejected because they are of race X - but if everything was exactly the same about them except they were of race Y, they would have been accepted. To me, that seems like textbook racism.
Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc.
Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"
Not contradicting you, but FWIW there seem to be a half-dozen-each implicit definitions of 'racism' and 'racist' floating around society these days, and each might have widely-varying senses of magnitude or extremity associated with them (from innocuous to extreme). It becomes difficult to parse logic and moral logic around these words, when various interpretations are taken into account.
I agree with your point about diversity beyond ethnicity and race in some regards. I 100% agree schools should try for more income diversity for example. However other criteria you listed are meaningless. I don't see a benefit to height diversity or ugliness/beauty diversity. Other examples of yours also serve to conflict with your first point. There are some people who get rejected from Yale who would otherwise get into Yale if they could play basketball well or if their parent attended Yale. Is that discrimination against those people? I tend to think not. Treating everyone exactly the same isn't always the fairest solution in every situation.
Also your NBA example doesn't fit because it clearly falls into the category when you need the top X basketball players. I don't think needing the top X students is or should be the goal of college admissions. The goal of a basketball team is to defeat other teams in competition. It is inherently a zero sum game. The goal of a university is to educate the population. It is not a zero sum game and having a diverse student body actually works to support that goal.
No, I think role value is different. Sport teams are doing what will make them will the most games by getting the role the need. Sometimes the players in the position in abundance will be good enough to make adjustments to offset the bad ratio, (see the center position for the rockets this year) but it's a rare scenario.
For a software comparison, it is like finding a Data Engineer for a Front End position. Sure if the Data Engineer is super smart, you can have him or her switch roles for a bit; but if the needs are immediate, like they are in the NBA, it is not going to produce the best results.
What if diversity is a role to be played at college?
What if the student body is part customer, part product?
Colleges give out sports scholarships all the time to unqualified student athletes- a trade off from the academic excellence purity test - because it enhances the college’s value.
How can those be OK but diversity scholarships wrong?
The problem with any discussion of "ranking" students is that it is impossible to define the ranking system. Is the goal to produce the highest GPAs at Yale? To maximize future donations? To produce the greatest number of Supreme Court justices? I had a friend in college who was recruited because the marching band needed a baton twirler. To make matters worse, some programs (such as computer science) are over impacted and it may be the case that the "top" students all want to be in the same programs.
Opponents of AA would argue that there is not one baseline, though. There are not enough candidates of race X and Y to meet diversity quotas, so the baseline criteria is lowered for students of those races. This means that a candidate of race Z has to work harder and achieve higher to be considered above the baseline.
There's not great data about college admissions out there that I could find, so I don't know if this is true or not.
>There are not enough candidates of race X and Y to meet diversity quotas
Do you think that any Black student who could be successful at Yale and applies to the school will get in? Maybe in super niche graduate programs the school has a problem finding qualified diverse candidates, but at an undergraduate level they turn so many people away that I seriously doubt they have a problem finding good applicants.
> Do you think that any Black student who could be successful at Yale and applies to the school will get in?
Is that the baseline? Top tier schools aren't top tier because they let in anyone who might be successful. Their requirements are such that only top tier candidates make it over the baseline. And, due to various institutional problems, Black students are under represented in that top tier of candidates.
>We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor.
The numbers of people who apply to the school combined with the selectivity of the school all but guarantees that there are top tier candidates of every race who are rejected.
The article mentions the law makes allowance for this:
> The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate.
Apparently the accusation is that Yale goes beyond what is reasonable.
Nothing was proven. This is just an allegation right now.
Wait until the court date. And then the SCOTUS overruling the decision, because like you said: discrimination is required for affirmative action. And universities like Yale are specifically allowed to discriminate for that purpose.
For any allegation to stick, the Feds will have to show that the reason was not for diversity. Which, obviously, it is.
> It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.
Not true. There is a third way. This is a problem of artificially induced scarcity. Instead of recognizing the problem for what it is, we are creating a false dichotomy of choice between merit and justice. We sacrifice one for the other, blind to the possibility that we can have both.
I will use a metaphor comparing seats at great universities to slices of pie:
When a bakery finds that customers are routinely fighting to buy the last few pieces of pie, it should simply bake more pie. The U.S. government isn't just one of the biggest pie bakeries around, it also subsidizes all the other bakers and loans money to their customers. No one has more leverage than them. If they say "you must make more pie," the other bakers must fall in line, or else they stand to lose a lot of money and decline relative to their peers.
If X # of university applicants are admitted due to affirmative action, the government should mandate that the university expand its capacity by X students. Otherwise, the government should threaten to remove all subsidies (including loans to students pursuing an education at that institution).
For its part, the government should also fund an increase in capacity at the best public universities. Perhaps it should even create new universities to help solve this problem. While people deserve the best education they can get, private universities do not deserve public monies if they refuse to increase positive externalities at the perceived expense of their prestige.
Yep, I am somewhere else in the world but benefited (although somewhat indirectly) from a similar kind of process and it is ludicrously unfair, arbitrary, and there is almost no oversight of how decisions are actually being made.
The only effective system is one that is fair to all. You can't make up for socioeconomic differences this way. College isn't a magic pill if you are disadvantaged. And I would be genuinely surprised if it actually helped the people it is aimed to help because unfair systems are always co-opted by the people who have advantages.
Also, I went to school in the West with many students from Asia. They worked harder. That is it. It wasn't a fair sample, the school attracted kids who wanted to work and attend university in my country. But they out worked everyone else bar one or two people. I am not sure exactly what the allegation is here: that working harder is cheating?
the point is that the group that should be taking the hit from affirmative action is (wealthy) white people, who have been disproportionately benefitting from an unfair system for the history of the country, not asians, who, while more successful than average, have also experienced discrimination and unfairness through most of that history.
What are you referring to? I've not seen the claims you describe, and they aren't mentioned in this article.
From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.
The end result would be indistinguishable from excluding those others. They could even just do it with words on paper with a statement like "We're accepting 100 fewer students next year." followed the next day by "We're accepting 100 extra students from our preferred races next year".
I don't agree with with Yale's position, but I also didn't see anywhere that they make your statement:
>"all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college
I think it is important to accurately reflect their position if we, as a society, want to have a rational discussion about the role race should play in college admission.
A more accurate characterization of the Yale claim is that asians, on average, have personalities which detract from their application.
This is a much more complicated assertion to refute, because differences between races can and do exist, as demonstrated by above average test scores among asians.
Have you met an Asian American? Would you or Yale repeat that ridiculous slur of personality ("asians, on average, have personalities which detract...") about any other racial group? How do you feel about the "Karen" phenomenon?
Test scores are problematic because tests have some measurable level of bias. The answer to that isn't to codify drastically more bias into the process.
You're trying to make something of a supposed difference between the proposition "members of set A have quality P" and the proposition "on average, set A has quality P". When P is something as subjective, ill-defined, and capricious as "personality defects", especially when said of a group of students who on all other measures qualify for admission to "elite universities", there is no difference between the two propositions. How do we even calculate an average personality? I doubt that even Yale people would stoop to such sophistry.
"All A has P" is a world of difference from "A has P", or "on average A has P".
>How do we even calculate an average personality? I doubt that even Yale people would stoop to such sophistry.
This is exactly what Yale is doing and the DOJ is going after them for. Yale requires personal statements, which they grade and rank based on personality attributes they find desirable. By Yale's metrics, asians, on average, score lower and this is used as rationale to deny acceptance. Asians who score high on the personality assessment are given acceptance. After ranking tens of thousands of students of different races, Yale or a 3rd part can look at the scores given by reviewers, and see if there is a correlation with race. This is the avereage, as reviewed by Yale.
YES, this can have bias. YES, this is highly suspect. Yes, I think this should be investigated. As said in my original post, I don't support Yale's position.
That said, I think it is important to have the moral and intellectual honesty to represent it for what it is, and debate it.
There is no need to lie and claim that Yale says "all asians are inferior". refuting this claim is a waste of everyone's time because nobody is making it.
It's only a matter of time before "asian privilege" becomes a common phrase and / or people start campaigning to no longer classify asian / pacific-islanders as a "minority".
I've already seen people jokingly use the term "schrodinger's minority" to refer to Asian's and Indians. They're excluded from minority statistics when trying to push for more diversity hires, but included in minority statistics when trying to show how many succesful businesses are run by minorities.
It's already common (in the US) to hear diversity initiatives as being about inclusion of non-SE Asian minorities (as these groups are 'overrepresented').
It used to be enough, from a rhetorical perspective, to talk about representation of "minorities" (or, "minorities and woman" because women are a very slight population majority in the US).. but then once a minority became "overrepresented", they had to find a better way to describe the groups whose inclusion they're looking to increase.
I mean, asians are likely to always be a minority in the US, as in, there are fewer of them then there are caucasians. But if they reach the point where they are no longer disadvantaged or discriminated against... isn't that what we want? Not just for asians, but for everybody?
> Slightly tangential, but why are Pacific Islanders often considered in the same "ethnic group" as Asians in the USA?
Up until 1997, the US government's official racial classification system contained a race called "Asian or Pacific Islander". In that year, they modified the system to split that race into two new races – "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander". However, more than 20 years later, the old system still gets used sometimes (e.g. the University of Pennsylvania's published diversity statistics), but most institutions in the US have moved to the new system (and I think as time goes by the old system becomes less and less common.)
Now, why they did originally group these two groups together? I'm not entirely sure why. There are some historical connections between the two groups – the Pacific Island languages (Hawaiian, Maori, etc) belong to the Austronesian language family, which is believed to originally come from Taiwan, and contains several major languages of Southeast Asia (e.g. Malay, Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog) – but I'm not sure whether that history plays any role in the decision to originally group them together. The original grouping was established by OMB Circular No. A-46, dated May 12, 1977 – I have been unable to find a copy of that document, maybe it contains some explanation of why they did it.
> They're about as similar as North Africans and Europeans.
The US government officially classifies North African and Middle Eastern people as "White". Some Arab Americans and Iranian Americans don't agree with the label "White", and don't be surprised if the system gets changed sooner or later to split out a separate label such as "Middle Eastern or North African": https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...
> people start campaigning to no longer classify asian / pacific-islanders as a "minority".
I'm not aware of any organized campaigns to this effect, but the idea that Asians aren't "real" minorities / PoC is one that sometimes gets tossed around in progressive circles.
Arguments put forth range from the purely visual ("some asians are fairer than white people") to the socioeconomic ("asians don't give back to the black communities in which they own businesses"), or variants thereof.
I guess it's a gentle reminder in these relatively polarized times that relations between minority groups in the US have historically been tense, be it black-latinx, black-asian or black-jewish. It might feel like there's a detente right now due to the focus being on the state and the white power structure et al - but the underlying animosity is real enough. Humans are tribal to a fault, and that will never change.
> Consider that most people here on HN have some level of privilege simply by being in the tech field.
I have to disagree with this statement. My view on "privilege" in its contemporary usage is that it is any advantage which comes "naturally" without any (or at the very least a relative minimal amount of) effort. Being in the tech field is something you have to work for, develop your skills for, etc. That isn't what privilege is, that is the result of your own work and ambitions.
Asians experience a lot of racism too. It’s not always the clear cut racism other groups experience but it is reliable enough to have a definite impact. Sometimes it’s country club style “I have an Asian friend” or “not you though”. And then admissions turns around and lumps Asia all together with negative quotas even though there are rather meaningful differences between south, SEA, and east Asian countries and cultures. So someone saying check your privilege to someone who’s parents may very well have earned them that privilege the hard way sounds hollow.
I mean the systemic racism against black people in America is far worse than Asian people for a long time - Ivy leagues didn’t have blanket bans on Asian students, so they started getting the legacy admission benefits a long time ago.
This isn’t to say that Asian Americans don’t experience a ton of discrimination, but rather that the penalties for being black are systemic and reach out a long way.
To be clear, Yale absolutely does discriminate against Asian applicants. As far as I can tell, they justify it using the same language about "personality" that they used to justifying discriminating against Jews in the the first half of the 20th century.
What is most galling about this is that even if we assume that culture X yields candidates with personality characteristics undervalued by culture Y, _racial background doesn't indicate culture_. How should a second-generation Taiwanese American raised predominantly in American culture answer the race question on their application?
This. I remember an anecdote by Ota Ulč, a Czech writer who escaped communism to emigrate into the USA.
When asked to select his race, Ota didn't realize "Caucasian" applied to him – after all he's Czech, not from Caucasus! So he checked "Other" instead. An honest mistake.
Yale is 20-27% Jewish [1,2], while the US is just 1.7-2.6% [3]. Few other groups would have the gall to call 10x over-representation as being discriminated against.
That was exactly the same argument the soviet union had. So we have too much jews there, lets limit it. Its not discriminating, since there are already so much jews or asians in the universities (20%+). On the individual level a person get reject based on its race, that is sad.
I'm sorry, are you saying that Jewish students are currently, in the US, in Yale, being discriminated against in college applications? Despite the current and previous Yale presidents both being Jewish [1,2]? And that without that discrimination, they would be... what? 40% of all Yale students? More?
Just because Jews and Asians have high enrollment at a university doesn't mean the numbers are being suppressed. It's pretty trivial to show wrt quantitative methods that it is clearly true that it's happening... hence the OP.
Not sure what assumptions are to be made by comparing this with US population by ethnicity except that they should be match up - which I don't agree with.
Also are Jewish people considered White in this case? I simultaneously see that they are referred to as minorities but also don't see them represented in statistics such as these when comparing ethnicity in X with ethnic population in the US.
Are you non-white according to the classification system commonly used by the US government and universities though? In the US, everyone who lives in Mexico and almost everyone who lives in Iraq is white.
No idea. Why should I care what the US government thinks white equates to. Having zero "white", "caucasian", or similar ancestry other than Jewish and from Arab lands for hundreds of years makes me very non-white.
But if you want to judge it by looks, I look like an Arab. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews.
That's fine. I'm sorry if I've offended you. I meant that for the purpose of these discussions about US university racial demographics, Arabs are white.
No worries, I wasn't offended! I just think it's insane that a group of people other than my own can even think to tell me what my ethnicity is. As an example, it would be utter hubris were I to say the same to Black Americans, so I'm not sure why it's randomly okay to do this to other groups.
> Not sure what assumptions are to be made by comparing this with US population by ethnicity except that they should be match up - which I don't agree with.
Different race happen to be correlated with different cultural values.
One particular cultural value is caring a whole lot about education and prestigious degrees (see the test prep industry in most of asia).
I have no problem with people who value education getting an edge in admissions. So even in a race-blind world, I am okay with outcomes not matching population statistics. Because in a world where you're solely judged based on your values that's exactly what you'd see.
But what's happening is that two different people can both adopt this same "education" value and have different outcome because of their race. The opportunities are not equal, not for blacks, not for asians.
The demographics of the US population may differ from the demographics of the college-age US population, or the demographics of the population of high-achieving high schoolers who want to go to Yale, or the demographics or the population of those people plus international students.
Alternately, it rewards those who made the school great in the first place -- by admitting their children.
Note that it's not strictly zero sum either. Huge grants by previous may have opened the university to more people than are admitted by legacy admissions -- yielding greater participation by non-legacy than previously possible.
People are choosing one small slice of what goes on with a university -- admissions right now. They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.
==They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.==
Nobody is glossing over that fact. I am simply saying that if anything outside of a student's merit is "discrimination", then taking into account the alumni status or past contributions of [not that student] is also "discrimination".
They are not the student's merits to weigh, they are the relative's merits.
Ok, but "discrimination" is a loaded word and definitely not neutral. It has implications. It implies a right to admission that ignores the desires of those who built the school to what it is now (which would be that their heirs get to attend as well).
Not all selection criteria is "discrimination". Alternately, if it is, then there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination.
Again, these are private schools that everyone is talking about. The use of legacy admissions in a state school would be completely wrong.
Google? I know that sounds rude, but since it's well established, not some fringe theory, it's trivial to find out yourself. Wikipedia has a page on it with references you can dig into. Google also shows a Forbes article if you want lighter reading.
I asked for your source because most studies have been refuted and I was curious if you found a legitimate one. Pulling up a random link on Google is not helpful to the discussion.
>>> The concept of "race" is a social construct, and "intelligence" has no agreed-upon definition; the validity of IQ tests as a metric for general intelligence is itself disputed. In particular, there is no scientific evidence that the average IQ scores of different racial or ethnic population groups can be attributed to any claimed genetic differences between those groups.
I didn't say it was attributed to genetic differences, nor that IQ is a good measure of general intelligence. I didn't even use the word "race" that you're concerned about the definition of. You might be arguing a different point.
What are these most studies that have been refuted? Can you tell me the number or the percentage or a big list of refuted studies along with a shorter list of non-refuted ones, or anything to show that's a real fact and you're not just repeating what activists have told you. Make sure it's not a trick like counting mostly 100 year old studies which could be greater in number allowing you to ignore everything from the last couple of decades. That might make true but also misleading.
I am not concerned about the definition of race - that was a direct quote from the Wikipedia article that you pointed me to.
Somehow the goalposts got reversed and I am now responsible for disproving your theory.
Let's go back to the original post. You made an assertion and I asked for a source because I was genuinely curious where you were drawing conclusions from. You then linked me to Wikipedia and I stated that all of the studies on that page are refuted (not abstractly... directly refuted in the Wikipedia article).
The same article says "In the US, generally individuals identifying themselves as Asian tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians" Where does it say that it's refuted?
"The IQ debate became worldwide in scope when it was shown that East
Asians scored higher on IQ tests than did Whites, both within the United States and in Asia, even though IQ tests were developed for use in the Euro American culture" https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense... You might not like the author of that one but it's in term cited to someone else.
"The top 10 countries by average IQ are:
1. Hong Kong (108)
2. Singapore (108)
3. South Korea (106)
4. China (105)
5. Japan (105)
6. Taiwan (105)"
[7+ is where non-Asian countries appear.]
https://www.healthline.com/health/average-iq#average-iq
I can't actually find anything saying there are no such differences, whether for Asians or anyone. Can you? For something that's so refuted, why didn't even The Guardian bother to mention it when they're trying so hard to oppose that kind of idea?https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...
Remember, your claim is that all of these are wrong and most of the studies they're based on have been refuted.
There is disagreement among researchers about the causes of the differences, but not about their existence. I think you're confusing the two.
No - I can't say that I agree with the way you are using this data.
Your original comment implied causation - that different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race. You are hiding behind a technicality of never explicitly saying "causes" in your posts.
The sources you posted are all correlational - and indeed each goes on to explain in great detail why they are not causal. You are literally using articled that disagree with your initial implication to try to prove some technicality and twist data.
It is no better than stating "black people are dangerous" and then providing articles that show per-capita crime rate. The data without context (socioeconomic forces, etc) is useless. Using it blindly hurts people.
So you do agree but just misunderstood me. You should have made this post about your assumptions up front instead of asking for evidence of the wrong claim.
You people really need to stop hunting for racists under every rock! It blocks your ability to think as well as everyone else's when they're at risk of being attacked for failing to write the equivalent of "praise the Lord" at the end of every sentence to demonstrate their faithfulness.
I never said that I misunderstood. I said that your comment was implying other things. You are hiding behind technicalities, knowing full well what you had implied.
Hypothetically, if I commented on a fashion blog "people that wear blue shirts are more intelligent" and then pointed to an article stating that doctors often wear scrubs and score higher on intelligence, my original comment - while technically true - is worthless - it adds nothing to the discussion. Worse, my comment implies the wrong thing - color of shirts is independent - the true causal variable is a person's profession
I asked for a source for your statement. Why was it so hard to provide that? Instead we had to go through this huge ordeal to discover that you were making a weak correlational observation. Was it because you knew that your articles didn't support the claim you made?
I was reluctant to provide a source because it was trivial to do so yourself. I found 7 just from the first page of a couple of quick Google searches.
But it turns out you didn't want a source for my claim, you wanted a source for a different claim that you didn't state. Your mind is so bogged down in racism that you can't read people's words objectively.
No, it's not like your blue shirt example. Many people credit race-IQ differences to fairly common differences in upbringing and treatment by others, not the existence of some small but very uniform sub-group. A better example would be "people wearing t-shirts are less intelligent than people wearing buttoned shirts". That might actually correlate with the jobs of a wide range of people.
But at the end of the day, it's very clear:
My claim: "those different ethnic groups have different average IQs"
Your interpretation: "different races have different intelligences BECAUSE of their race"
That is clearly a misunderstanding, so you misunderstood me. The difference between causation and correlation exists and you conflated the two.
It’s hard to find global numbers by these categories, but I think world class universities should look at global numbers rather than usa only numbers... if they are going to look at demographics at all. if you look at global numbers, caltech demographics may be pretty close to being proportional representation.
The US makes up about 4% of the global population. So it would only makes sense to expect Yale to be close to global representation if only about 4% of its students were from the US.
And I'm sure there are many world-class universities in India, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey... Are they pretty close to proportional if you look at global numbers? For example, Kyoto University or Peking University, both world class institutions, does their student body reflect the global population, or the Japanese/Chinese population?
What I mean is us is a melting pot / magnet for upward social mobility. So I expect in the long run, the annual cohort of bright children would be proportionally represented here in the top Private universities / companies.
Or...
I expect the demographics of hn users to be more similar to global demographics rather than us demographics.
Note: these do not add up to 100%, because they are ignoring international students. So whatever comparison you're trying to do with US demographics needs to be normalized.
The percentages at the link above are labeled as "University-wide Enrollments," which seems to mean that they account for graduate students as well as undergraduates. But the DOJ finding is only about undergraduate admissions.
Source for the "personality" language? In everything I've seen from US universities, they justify race-based admissions policies primarily with language about "diversity".
>One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.
This is the problem with assigning weight to subjective, hand-wavey categories. It becomes an easy way for bias (conscious or unconscious) to creep in. The same thing happens with "culture fit" evaluations at tech companies.
The alternative isn't that rosy - if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests, Goodhart's Law takes effect, and we breed a generation of highly optimized test takers. Maybe I'm just exposing my Western bias, but I have a child and I don't want his adolescence to be continuous preparation for one academic test after another. Mine wasn't.
Combining standardized tests along with bias-ridden subjective measurements may just be the best solution among lots of imperfect solutions. We try to address egregious abuses when we find them, but "fair" will always be a goal, not a destination.
> if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests, Goodhart's Law takes effect, and we breed a generation of highly optimized test takers.
As opposed to a generation of people highly optimized for a fuzzier metric that nevertheless exists. I know a bunch of graduates from elite universities who all just happened to be really into debate/mock trials/mock UN, competed at the national/international level at obscure sports, founded a school newspaper (we had five new school newspapers every year because everyone wanted to be a founder, few of them last once the founder graduates), "founded" a "business", etc in high school[1]. They're all in consulting/banking/law/ML now. Mildly obfuscating the metric doesn't actually make Goodhart's law go away, it just means you have to be in the right crowd to game the metric.
[1] I, on the other hand, actually liked maths and became one of your "highly optimized test takers". Funnily enough, all the elite American schools said no, while Oxford said yes. I am now a PhD student (in maths) at one of the elite American institutions that rejected me as a high school student.[2] If you have a scarce resource, and a system that distributes it, people are going to game the system. The trick is to have better tests so you can't study to the test without actually, you know, learning.
Take a look at the SAT (subject) math section. That's the test that should be distinguishing between the student that goes to Harvard and the student that "merely" goes to Georgia Tech. Obviously it can do no such thing, it's way too easy. This is by design. The American system does not want to distinguish between the top 3% and the 0.5%, because then Harvard would have to take the poor genius over the solidly talented but unexceptional rich legacy kid whose dad is worth billions and will donate tens of millions.
Now take a look at the MAT, the maths test that tells you if you'll be going to Oxford or Imperial. Or the STEP, the analogous test for Cambridge.
[2] Disclaimer: I may be a little bitter to this day. In my defence, I teach the wannabe consultants now, and while some of them are legitimately very competent, boy does the system have false positives.
Rice University had about 600 freshmen when I matriculated over 2 decades ago and they rejected 16 perfect SATs that year. I feel for you, though I know that if you really are so into math then maybe this was a much better path for you than doing undergrad at an American institution where the goals in undergrad are usually broader and fuzzier. Contrast that with grad school where I’d be more inclined to be biased for the top student in the specific subject. My alma mater is a top-20 school and as unfair as it might seem, I appreciated the fruit of their quest for diversity among matriculants. Not only ethnic diversity, but people of a slightly wider set of interests too. I felt interacting with the other students was the best part of my college experience. It’s true I don’t know all the stories of the people who weren’t admitted, but when dealing with such tiny acceptance percentages it really feels more like a lottery for a very scarce resource. So it’s definitely not fair, and they’re deliberately not always choosing the highest scores. My mother always said life isn’t fair and I’m not sure if the outcome would be what you or I would hope for if the process was made more “fair” for undergrad selection.
I remember looking into the STEP after graduating for "fun".
They were such classic Oxbridge style questions, sure you can probably game them but as you say, once you've done the graft to game those types of questions, you're pretty much qualified to be there because the rest of your degree will just be more of the same.
Playing devil's advocate a little... it seemed like it worked out ok for you? There are different universities with different selection criteria, and any particular university might have multiple selection pools. There's room for rich scions and math geniuses at Harvard. And in your case, Harvard's loss was Oxford's gain.
I feel like you're expecting some sort of clear stack ranking of students. Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both? See also: computer science, chemistry, biology, physics, history, physical fitness, social sciences, languages, music, art...
We have examples of test-regime-driven educational advancement in Asia. From what I've read, it doesn't seem very appealing to me, either as a student or as a parent.
> Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both?
This is the kind of tradeoff I'd be happy to see colleges worried about. Complicating the fact is that US universities generally don't expect students to be set on a specific major while European ones do, making the US problem a bit harder. But I don't think this is what US unis are trading off on. I think they're trading off merit for parental wealth + future wealth (which is greatly effected by parental wealth).
Re: your comment about different unis with different criteria, I'd be a lot less worried if the diversity was evenly distributed geographically. I had the privilege of being able to choose from multiple countries. For the vast majority of high school students, studying abroad is not an option.
I'm venturing off into speculation here, but I don't think there's anything so organized or homogeneous about college admissions. Probably there are thousands of judges across various universities, each with their own biases, each trying to pick a hundreds of candidates among tens of thousands of applicants.
"US unis" don't seem like a homogenous block to me. But then, I went to a state school and received a fantastic CSc education that I would not trade for ivy league at any price. I've also interviewed/hired countless people and never even noticed what school they came from. I guess the policies of Yale don't bother me that much either way.
Added wrinkle is that for Oxbridge you'll get interviewed as well. I recall being asked interesting things that they didn't cover in class, things that are more deep understanding than parroting syllabus materials.
Certainly the test is not the be all end all, other factors are important. Grades, recommendation letters, activities, and an understanding of the students background.
However it can help us evaluate who is able to perform in a higher learning environment and that they have the knowledge to study advanced degrees.
I had 4 standardized tests in my educational career, 4th grade state test, 10th grade state test, ACT and GRE. Only 2 of those were non-repeatable.
How many do students take these days?
> if you judge everyone by (objective) standard tests
That's why I don't like standard tests. When I was studying, entrance exams were oral. You were given three problems (chosen at random), had some time to solve them, then presented your solutions to the examiner. Examiner would then ask follow-up questions.
There is no way to prepare for such test other than to learn the subject. No multiple-choice questions you can Kaplan.
What do you want your child selected on for an elite school then? The bedrock reality is that most children, by definition, won't make it into an elite school. How do we pick?
This question is phrased oddly. I want my child to enter an educational environment where he will flourish. It's not obvious to me that having the brand of an 'elite' school is all that significant.
We’re about to see an end to standardized tests for college admissions. This is paving the way for discrimination against good students who wish to attend elite universities. Currently elite universities ideas of diversity and “personality” are more important than upholding educational standards.
It is simply wrong to evaluate and condemn a person based on race. To justify any kind of discrimination on the idea that you are helping one person, you are hurting another. This an equally problematic, it’s taking us back to times before equal rights and for people to be judged on their abilities.
Hoping a brilliant student will apply to a university twice and deepfake their race in one of their admission interview videos.
How do you differentiate a good student as in a bright individual who has good grades but who doesn't "prepare" continuously versus a very good test taker and ambitions in this test taking sense and who is also able to prepare for any type of standardized test and ace them but, not as bright as the former? Surely not by race, that's no fun but standardized tests can be gamed and that was not their intention.
But how can they ensure that part cannot be gamed though? By choosing something non objective, this giving a little opening for inept but rich students? I understand that their funding is needed so why don’t they make a clear standard as in 1M donation or whatever is expected of these silverspoons?
Because it can't be elite its filled with people who are mediocre. It's in the name... elite. Everytime you just let someone in on some flimsy diversity grounds you debase degree.
It’s not in the name. The presumption is that elite means other good students, and not the school itself.
When I buy elite golf clubs, it means the clubs are elite not other people who buy it are.
Now you can argue part of the reason to attend college is because of your classmates. And then I’d ask is the best experience a bunch of kids who are simply good at school?
> The same thing happens with "culture fit" evaluations at tech companies.
I totally agree, this reminded me of culture fit interview questions as well. I think the evidence is very strong that almost any subjective evaluation is going to devolve down to the evaluator picking whatever confirms their subjective biases, then coming up with ex post facto rationalizations.
This to me says that assimilation doesn't work. The article states:
"boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits"
The outcome was to move the bar to soft skills:
things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”
This has happened to minority groups of all backgrounds in this country since its inception.
Except when alumni interviewed candidates, there was no such difference, only when university staff did. A pretty convincing smoking gun if you ask me.
I am glad I studied in France, where admission to elite schools is based purely on objective entrance exams (emphasis on Math). It’s not a perfect system, rich parents can afford tutors and teachers can tutor their kids, but it’s a hella fairer than the system in the US, corrupted by legacy admissions, sports scholarships and racial quotas that purposefully ignore socioeconomic disparity, because it’s easier for the powers-that-be to throw poor rural white kids under the bus than something that might adversely impact their own children.
I think you got just about everything correct except for just one nitpick —- the alumni actually interviewed the candidates in person, and the university staff did not and assigned personality score purely based on the application.
I'm from the Netherlands. I feel like the US admission proces is more like job interview, while in Europe it is more like multi year internship. Secondary education is divided into levels. If you pass all classes on the highest level and pass the final exam, you are guaranteed university admission. If you were a late bloomer and you started at a lower level, there are of course proceses to go up.
> This is ironic because in the U.S. most people believe the S.A.T. is the most biased portion of the college entrance criteria.
I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.
I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.
Do you have a link to the this study? All I can find is this 2019 quote from the UC commission investigating this that indicates otherwise:
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...
The Chancellor and chief academic officer are politicians not academics. The academics voted to keep the SAT and ACT.
> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says
> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday
From the article you posted, the faculty senate found that it was fine to keep the SAT and ACT because admissions officers were already correcting for racial and socioeconomic bias, not that bias doesn't exist. It says nothing about a study that finds no racial bias in the test, which is what I'm asking for.
"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."
"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."
Perhaps the current SAT is, but remember SAT I and the "oarsman–regatta analogy" question? That could explain why some people continue to suspect it's racially biased against non-whites.
To make a target race to score higher, fill the test with things the target race tends to be disproportionally familiar with (owing to culture, relative affluence, etc.) To bump up the average Black score, for instance, fill the test with word problems involving rappers.
1) Is that actually "most" people?
2) Is the belief that it's the "most" biased?
I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.
We need to intervene much much earlier than college admissions if we want to fix that. But it's a really difficult problem because cultures in low SES areas like where I grew up tend to shame and beat the shit out of smart kids, and one culture's "intervention" is another's "unwelcome interference".
Even the whole argument about success rates of assimilation aside, this doesn't seem to check out.
How does this whole "assimilation doesn't work" argument even flow from the statement? Asian Americans referenced were all born in the US, grew up here, went through the education system here, etc. There is nowhere they need to assimilate to, they were born Americans and grew up here. This is their primary culture, not that of a country where their ancestors were born.
I am leaving a big possibility that I completely misunderstood your comment, so please correct me if my interpretation of it was incorrect.
so you meant to say assimilation doesn't work for them ? Makes me see your statement in a completely different light so you may want to qualify that :)
The most obvious course of action would be to deny the school any knowledge of an applicants race. Assign them a random number instead of a name and only conduct text-based interviews.
When I was in university I remember being somewhat intimidated by the asian students because I knew that while other white students had an even chance of being smarter or dumber than me, the asian ones were all probably smarter than me just to get in.
That does not show, however, that "personality" is used as a "cover" for discrimination. That argument, in fact, implicitly assumes equalism (i.e. that all groups have equal distributions of traits), which in turn justifies representation-based admissions. It is self-defeating in that regard.
Essentially "personality" appears a very pretextual criteria along with the goalposts mounted on rails. It is an infamous pattern of behavior of bigots that when they present some nominal objection they keep on changing it whenever it can actually be fulfilled. If they keep on changing the game it becomes clear that they just don't want to let them win no matter what and aren't acting in good faith.
Would be interested to see if Asians whose families have been in the USA for many years get in at different rates to e.g. immigrants or the children of immigrants. It would indicate that perhaps Yale et al. really do care about "personality", and aren't just being racist.
It reminds me a bit what my parents told me about the soviet union. So basically it was kind of the same. Too much jews in the universities, so lets discriminate them. The same is going on here, as far as race plays any role.
Kind of sad to see this kind of decision making around the globe.
How does "Scheduled Caste" work? Generally matters of caste are mysterious in the west, since they're rarely (in my experience) discussed with non-Indians.
Russian empire had the same policy. They justified it by the fact that unversities were financed by public money, and it would be unfair if most of the student, who this money would go to, turned out jews due to "this group's propensity" to education.
Of course that is the point. Also in yale. They want diversity. Even so, in such case the decision is based on race or let say gender and that alone is discriminating.
It reminds me of an other story of my parents. As Lenin came into power they took all the land from rich farmers and killed a lot of them. Since they were privileged and all the prosperity belongs to the people. The result was that bad skilled farmers took over and that led to more poverty.
These are loathsome comparisons. The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1991 and before are not comparable to the experience of east Asians in America in 2020.
For every similarity you might imagine there are 1,000 more important dissimilarities. Surely if you are sincere about reducing discrimination "around the globe" you wouldn't be doing this kind of stylized generalization.
There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian. That isn't going to compare to anything positive or pleasant. Racism should be condemned in strongest possible terms.
> The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union...
True, but horrific ideology in the government is a totally different kettle of fish than that ideology in a non-government organisation.
If my neighbours don't really believe in property rights, I'll call them hippies and laugh about their eccentric antics. If my government doesn't really believe in property rights I'd give serious thought to fleeing the country.
> There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian.
> Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
The situation of Jews in the Soviet Union's does not apply too well here because the real vs. stated reasoning behind it were very different. But I see a lot of parallels with the gender and racial discrimination in the workplace in current times. So there is precedent on legally using race or gender in a selection process.
When it comes to fixing past discrimination in the workplace it is already considered legally acceptable to have quotas until the situation is brought back to balance. Such a quota all but guarantees that at some point some candidates will have to be rejected based on gender or race even if they would be otherwise accepted. The split was set around the actual gender/race split of the population. For example California's gender or racial diversity bills proposed that at least at Board of Directors level although I don't know if they were ever passed into law. Needless to say, with or without such a law companies all over the world publicly advertise their equality focused hiring targets so I must assume they're not just outing themselves as breaking the law.
Is this the case here? The article doesn't really provide that many concrete details and I can imagine a lot of implications coming out of this. Is Yale doing this to have a balance of races based on the split in the population? Are they just arbitrarily picking a ratio for this? What impact will a decision here to eliminate any race criteria from the admission have on already established measure to explicitly consider race or gender as part of the process? What happens if one group ends up naturally being over-represented?
We'll have to start paying more attention to equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. And whatever is decided at some point we'll also have to start being consistent, not just chase conflicting targets based on what each administration sees as a priority at the time.
I personally think that anything but basing it on merit is wrong due to X factors:
1. If you reject someone based on race, no matter which, it is racism
2. Those that got in due to quotas, even if they are the most qualified are gonna be having doubts about if they only got in through the quota and are in reality not good enough.
3. There is a stark difference in the percentage of male/female/black/white/etc that go into different fields. Basing it on the wider population would not even be close to approaching a representative percentage. Also: local differences, which basically makes the whole attempting to represent the percentage of the population moot.
As an example: There are barely any women working in sewers, should they have quotas for getting about 50% of the sewer workers to be female?
In short: Quotas are bad for everyone, are especially hurting those they claim to help and are completely misguided anyways.
I wasn't here to make a value judgement on either option because I know how polarizing the topic is and there's very little room to objectively argue any side before you're drowned by the other.
My main point focused on something that I find more important: will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I took your comment as a chance to share my thoughts on it.
> will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate due to my above problems with it. But for the general population? I think that both can be legitimate in their eyes.
> I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate
I took your point. I was thinking of legitimate as in official decisions. There are already laws that implement gender or racial quotas in a work environment. Many companies already advertise this [0] and even public institutions were discussing it at least as far back as a decade ago [1]. One would logically have to assume that they're equally valid for a university. If the issue is indeed that Yale is using such quotas to maintain a certain balance between the different groups based on the population ratios but the courts agree with the Feds that this is illegal then we'll be left holding 2 equally (il)legitimate but contradictory views on the problem: quotas are legal, positive measures to achieve balanced participation and representation [2] but at the same time they are illegal because they discriminate against the other groups.
Since the details of the Yale case aren't all that clear right now we'll have to wait for the judgement. They may actually do something more onerous than that I assumed above.
You can find here https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 infamous "Jewish Problems" that were given to select applicants during entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. They were designed to prevent Jews from getting a passing grade.
I’ve heard the same thing regarding the SU. If you were the wrong ethnicity even if you got the right answer and showed all your work the professor could say, “yes, but you used the wrong solution” and other such nonsense.
On the bright side, we now have collections of "coffins" [1] - problems that have a simple solution that is difficult to find. Those were given to undesirable applicants to justify weeding them out.
This seems like a disingenuous comment at best. For example, Harvard's incoming class was something like 25% Asian-American, which I think is probably the highest it's been (compared to Asian-American's probably being like 5% of the population). Whatever the policy is, it is not trying for "equality", nor is it really anything close to what happened in the Soviet Union. My grandparents lived there; some relatives were killed in the middle of the night because of their ethnicity. Nowadays, someone gets turned down by Yale, and these BS comparisons start up. Come on.
Conveniently, the year that Harvard was sued for discrimination against Asians, the % of admitted Asians skyrocketed to 25%. Previous years it was about 33% lower.
And Asian Americans have an 8% admit rate going back to 1995, the lowest of all ethnicities.
According to this random site[0][1], the income difference between Yale undergrads vs. those from a top Public school like Michigan is 44K in income per year (10 years after graduation). Obviously there is a good bit of selection bias at play, but I can't imagine the true 'cost' of being denied Ivy admission is trivial monetarily, not to mention the social/interpersonal boost that would come along with it.
I see. Do you think I'm permanently setback because of this? What can I do if I can't get into grad school with a 3.92 GPA and just 2 2nd author papers?
I'm suggesting that you are statistically likely to miss out on a significant monetary 'Ivy League premium' over your career, and that you will certainly miss out on a social 'Ivy League premium', which could affect your social status, mating opportunities (as silly as that sounds), and more.
Because it is a statistical observation, it does not necessarily have any bearing on your outcomes as an individual--though it seems likely that it does.
Saying "Asians are more intelligent" is absolutely, objectively racist, and also incorrect. It's the same as saying "Blacks are dumber than other races," the fact that it's a "good thing" is irrelevant.
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.
Both here and in the general western society, there's a vicious policing of certain taboo ideas about psychology, even ideas that are well accepted by the researchers. Being anti-science is seen as a good thing here because the truth might turn us all into Nazis! It reminds me of religious people who oppose education and scientific knowledge because it might weaken people's faith in God which would turn them into immoral criminals.
The scarier thing is that the researchers themselves are also subject to this policing, though with a little more leeway allowed. But they can still get ostracized for making the wrong findings and you get ridiculous cases where the published data from a study clearly shows the opposite of what the conclusion says because the authors are scared of punishment from their peers. In one case, an author openly admitted this was his reason after people were confused about the apparent contradiction.
At the individual level of course there is a huge genetic component to intelligence. Even with the perfect environment and all the money in the world you might just be a dummy.
But I'm not sure how you square the argument that intelligence is mostly genetic with population-level shifts in intelligence such as that of the Jewish-Americans that someone else brought up in this thread. The only thing I could see is those populations begin selecting for intelligence with regard to reproduction, but a couple hundred years is an extremely short period of time for something like that to happen at the population level if it's mostly genetic.
In the 1920s and 1930s Jewish Americans scored very poorly in IQ tests. Since WW2 they have rapidly risen up the ranks and now as a group score among the highest of any ethnicity.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.
To give benefit of the doubt, the comment that spawned this thread didn't make any claim as to why Asians are supposedly more intelligent. If it's from social and economic factors then that it stands to reason that it's something worth studying so that the knowledge gained can be used over time to make everyone more intelligent.
I don't see why we should be blinding ourselves to any difference that happens to fall along racial lines. It seems like an overwhelming majority of the time once the issue is studied we find out it has nothing to do with genetics or race anyway and that it's something socioeconomic and cultural that applies to everybody and it happens to correlate with race for historical reasons. We have no problem studying mostly isolated cultures (e.g. the Amish, some tribe in the Amazon, etc) in a clinical manner without people getting their panties in a knot. Why is this not true for big groups?
Socioeconommic conditions are themselves not independent of race though. It's not so long ago that it was perfectly legal to discriminate who got a job on the basis of Race, and it was commonplace for people to do so.
It's interesting that it's not the considered least bit controversial to speak about certain ethnic groups being physically genetically gifted, or statistically over-represented in certain athletic endeavors. Perhaps the most obvious examples are black athletes who dominate popular American sports, or east Africans being superb long distance runners, but the same extends to free divers, mountain climbers, and more.
Put simply, some populations have physical adaptations that make them better at certain things - be it lung capacity from ancestry in bolivia, lighter / skinnier legs from ancestry in kenya, or whatever. That's uncontroversial.
Why do we all accept without question that population genetics play a somewhat key role in athletic pursuits, but insist that intelligence or mental acuity is distributed perfectly evenly across the entirety of humanity? It doesn't really pass the smell test to be honest.
Sibling comment did a great job and I want to add one more thing. Paraphrasing the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein from a podcast I listened to a couple of years ago:
Physical challenges are unevenly distributed. Some places are very hot and others are very cold. Some places are high elevation. Bodies have adapted to these differences to produce the physical differences across races. The brain solves for the challenge of life and life is difficult everywhere. What the brain adapted to is evenly distributed.
I think that's a very interesting and concise formulation, that I'll probably refer to when having similar discussions in the future.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate with a thought experiment. Specifically, I'd like to address your fundamental assumption of equally distributed evolutionary pressure. It's true of our ancient history (which covers most of human existence), but it feels premature to ignore the potential impact of modern human societies over the last few millenia.
Imagine two identical human groups, one which spends 1000 or so years in an urban or quasi-urban setting, and one which spends the same time as hunter gatherers. Seems like some traits would be self-selected more heavily in one group vs the other based purely on environmental pressure. I.e. someone gifted with an above-average capacity for abstract modeling, but with - say - severe myopia, would find it easier to procreate in an environment where their skills are valued and their physical limitations negated, and vice versa.
Human history is long, but reproductive pressure can have a discernible impact on a population even over the relatively short time scale covered by human civilization. It's an imperfect analogy, but for instance new dog breeds only require a handful of generations (<10) to be both physically and behaviorally discernible. Why should reproductive pressures applied by different social environments, stretched over millenia, not have an impact on human populations?
Is the quasi-urban group modern, e.g. with technology and everything else? Even ignoring the fact that 1000 is not a long time evolutionarily - you'd get what, 15-20 generations? - a hunter-gatherer group is going to have a lot of evolutionary pressure that a modern technological group won't. You can have a physical injury or disability in the modern group and be fine, but without support that may not be there in the hunter-gatherer group, you will die quickly.
> First, this could only happen to small, isolated, and bottle necked populations. This on its own eliminated the vast majority of humanity
I disagree with several points made here. Firstly, I would question your reasoning behind the prerequisite of the population being "small", because in fact larger societies face different and more complex challenges than small ones, which in turns favors the ability to navigate the challenges of large human groups. More to the point, environmental pressure is applied regardless of a group's size.
Secondly, an isolated population does not eliminate the vast majority of humanity - far from it. While there's always some form of mobility between societies, until very recently that was a relatively rare phenomenon. By and large people lived and died within artillery distance of where they were born.
> including any racist notions like "asian" or "black."
This is actually the first time I've heard those designations described as 'racist', but that's somewhat orthogonal and more of a passing observation
> In your dog metaphor, it's like looking at a dachshund and then saying "all dogs with short hair are also have short legs."
I don't follow this extension to my analogy, which is probably a reflection of the problems of using analogies as a discussion aid in the first place
> Between the occasional plague and the occasional famine, you have times of war and times of peace. You have changing aesthetics, shifting cultures, values gained and lost.
Yes, but at its core an urban, even if premodern, existence places emphasis on different skill sets than a hunter gatherer lifestyle. This goes back to my point above about the social challenges of navigating large human groups - aesthetics can change, but figuring out how to grapple with complex social dynamics, as opposed to taming nature, is a constant (and one closely correlated with the evolution of human intelligence to boot)
If that’s true then in today’s society with abundance and pervasive entertainment will we see a cleavage between the academic class and those who gravitate toward leisure and entertainment?
Evolution doesn't distinguish between physical and mental challenges and organs aren't the unit of evolution. They don't survive or reproduce in isolation.
Species can and do evolve different adaptations to the same evolutionary pressures. Bret isn't convincing.
Have we actually had much in the way of mental challenges on an evolutionary timescale? It would appear to be a reasonably recent phenomenon. I think I heard Jordan Peterson comment that a couple of hundred years ago, most people were piss poor working in fields, so a high IQ didn't actually gain you very much.
First, because minds are tremendously complex and much less well understood than things like fast and slow twitch muscles. That we see different distributions in one does not imply different distributions in another.
Second, because we have tremendous evidence of clear bias, discrimination, and oppression of certain groups and a direct link to confounds that make claims about people of certain races just being genetically smarter amazingly messy.
Third, because for physical characteristics we don’t use broad racial categories but instead use ethnicities. “Black people” don’t have the specific physical characteristics that enable the absolute peak of running capabilities. Specific subgroups do. Expanding to racial categories (that were invented by humans to justify slavery and colonialism) is fraught with peril.
Fourth, because discussion of physical traits usually looks at the very very very peak while discussion of intelligence is usually a broad claim about all members of a race. This is not the same thing.
And finally, because these arguments have been used for centuries to justify literal enslavement. To justify denying voting rights. To justify all manner of horrors because it was just obvious to eugenicists that black people were less developed. And we should be extra careful of claims that, if followed carelessly, lead to genocide.
The first one is indeed true. But i hope even acknowledging the theoretical possibility is not mistaken/admonished as racial supremacy and scientific inquiry gets hurt.
The second one, I don't think anybody says that there is no nurture component. Acknowledging theoretical possibility of a nature component via genetics is not saying that there is no nurture component, and that it does not confound any test. We would need to design better tests.
For third, that is just a definition issue. You're saying that it is wrong to investigate differences between races, but fine to do so for ethnicities. So, let us look if there are cognitive differences between different ethnicities?
Fourth is just downright false. Subgroups living in Africa are generally darker, taller, and better runners. Subgroups in east Asia generally shorter. None of the statements about physical characteristics or intelligence are about extremes or broad strict inequalities about all members. They are always statistical distributions over the whole population.
Fifth is the crux of the matter. Are we going to stop scientific inquiry because of that? Instead of trying to stop scientific inquiry, we should debate why our liberal values are useful and should hold even if there are genetic components that determine intelligence.
nutrition and environmental nurture account much more for intelligence than race. Genetics, at most, account for a tiny difference, and is only barely visible at the very top level of competencies - and even then, those differences are massively dwarfed by environmental factors.
I was under the impression that every year we discover more genes tied to "educational attainment" so the assumed heritable % for g increases. In another comment you mentioned 100% environmental--If you have a study, please link to it. Granted, you are correct at the other end, where if one grows up malnourished and lives in a war zone, this will have a oversized negative impact on intelligence potential, but the overall context of this discussion is admittance to Yale.
Intelligence is just one small aspect out of many of what it means to be a human. It isn't special any more than having freckles is. We really need to dissolve the cult we have created around it.
it's taboo because there is no real scientific basis for one race being more superior. The differences can almost 100% be entirely traced to environmental factors like wealth, nutrition, nurture and community support.
No, we don't make things taboo because they're wrong, we make them taboo because they're dangerous.
Nobody is forbidding mention of modified Newtonian dynamics, just pointing out all the evidence against it.
The idea of differences in intelligence between ethnic groups, regardless of whether it is true or not, is not one that our society is currently able to discuss in a productive way. So, we very sensibly keep quiet about it for now.
I think it's taboo because certain segments of society secretly think there might be an element of truth and are disturbed by the implications and potential ramifications if the theory was proven to be true.
>it's taboo because there is no real scientific basis for one race being more superior
In which case it stands to reason that it's something that the things that make this or that race "superior" at this or that metric can be emulated by people regardless of race to everyone's benefit.
On your second point, I don't believe that is true. Not the 100% part. I am sure they play a big part, but a Kenyan Olympic runner doesn't win (only) because of environmental factors.
Since all of the studies in this area have essentially been done by racists with obvious flawed methodology, yes.
To the extent that IQ means anything at all (it doesn't, past about 100), there are much greater inter-personal differences than inter-group differences, except when one of the groups is explicitly disadvantaged by the test (e.g. the test is administered in the first language of one group and the second language of the other).
Wow... Hard-core racism, here on HN? And connecting 'accomplishments of races' with modern day policing practices...
Are you even aware of the influence of black people on ancient history? Of the black Roman emperors? Of the black Egyptian Empire, one that was looked at in awe for 5 thousand years?
Are you aware of the inspiration the founding fathers took from the Hodenoshone (Iroquois)?
And in general, are you even slightly aware of how much circumstance and happenstance impact big historical moments?
Either way, you are a perfect example of the kinds of people who invented IQ, and exactly the reasons why it was invented - scientistic veneer to justify racist beliefs, not much better than phrenology before it.
And I sincerely hope you'll get to experience how the kind of policing you praise feels on you own skin. It will hurt, but perhaps it will help you grow as a human being.
Edit: the above comment was heavily edited after my response, removing everything except a link to 1 study.
A published study doesn't make the theory mainstream. This study is heavily criticised in the field, for p-hacking amongst other things. Also their conclusion is about IQ, which itself isn't seen in the mainstream as an indication of general intelligence, so they're really reaching from the get go. You have to have a serious agenda to read this paper and sincerely think the conclusion correct...
Sure, one of the least reliable fields of science mostly believes this effect exists. They also have one of the worse reproducibility crises, and a history of fraudulent but widely believed studies (Stanford Prison Experiment, to name just one), and entire schools of thought defeated by a priori arguments (behaviorism as a theory of the human mind).
Meanwhile you ahbe neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists arguing against the plausibility of differences in intelligence in large ancient groups a priori. You have people like Stephen Jay Gould arguing against the idea that IQ is a measure of general intelligence at all.
And then, just to prove a point about how warped your perspective is, you cite James Damore as an argument for a basic statistical fact. You really should avoid citing beligerantly misogynistic and/or racist people when you're trying to claim that science is on your side.
Not to mention that large scale aptitude tests (rather than 'general intelligence' tests) do NOT show a normal distribution of aptitudes, rendering Damore's claims statically correct but un applicable anyway.
Anti-Jewish philosophy in the Soviet Union was not 'equality at all costs' it was 'jews are thieves' and other horrible racist beliefs, same as in most of Western Europe before.
The buzzword now is “equity.” The left now seeks equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. All such initiatives are oppressive should be rejected outright.
The human potential lost to poverty is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, it seems like the political toolbox we’ve been bequeathed is filled with wooden spoons instead of scalpels. Open to ideas.
Perhaps I was too hasty in my comment. I am not partisan. The right has its own problems, obviously. I recently moved from deep red Georgia to deep blue Maryland, and the polarization is demoralizing. Even though the political climate is so caustic these days, there are reasoned arguments on both sides of issues that are worth listening to. Unfortunately, these voices are being drowned out by extreme views. Our democracy is being eroded by gerrymandering, 24 hour news and social media. Unfortunately, these sources of extremism and authoritarianism are extremely profitable for a very select few. I wish the bright minds that visit this site would work to create products that foster democracy rather than erode it.
To expound on my previous comment, those on the left calling for ‘equity’ should be viewed critically. The calls for ‘removing barriers’ should alarm everyone, because ultimately it only serves to control and dumb everyone down. The alternative is to encourage public policies that seek the empowerment of all individuals and groups. One concrete example is the debate in NYC schools that math and honors courses are ‘inequitable’ and racist. Voices on the left are calling for the abolishment of such classes, thereby denying students the opportunity to be challenged according to their ability. The other undiscussed side of this issue is that such calls for ‘equity’ result in basically giving up on poorer students who won’t be given the support they need to meet the higher standards. In short, anything involving ‘equity’ should be viewed as a race to the bottom for everyone.
You would lose nothing by omitting terms like "the Left" and "the Right" and gain not immediately baiting people into partisan flame wars. I find it baffling that so many Americans have an inability to discuss politics without invoking either of those terms, especially when your "Left" and "Right" are practically leanings of Centrism to most of the rest of the world.
But really, it does nothing to enforce your argument. You complain about 24 hour news and social media eroding Democracy (and presumably discussions about the politics of Democracy), yet you use these terms so loosely and end up reducing anyone Left of you to some or other policy you deem to be essential to that position.
I completely agree that adding these polarizing terms is not helpful in persuading anybody, however I think it's an extreme simplification to say the American Left and Right are leanings of centrism from the view outside the US.
This is kind of an outside perspective - America as seen through the news - but I would say that a lot of the stuff I see espoused by the Left and Right in the US is much more extreme than in Germany for example. Germany has laws that allow for positive discrimination, but I can't think of any such extreme measures as in the US here, where chances are diminished for one race by a factor of 10. Even having race on the application form would be unthinkable here.
On the other hand we have many more social programs that would be unthinkable in the US. We have 4+ (usually 5-6) weeks vacation per year, etc.
The American Right on the other hand is also in many ways more extreme than in Germany, nobody would consider Republicans as right-leaning centrists here, e.g. building a wall would be a bit taboo, although maybe more due to historical reasons. Denying people health-care, because they're poor would also probably not count as centrist here.
I guess Germany itself is kind of exceptional, given its past, but maybe I'm just moving the goalposts now, so let me try to substantiate.
I don't think positive discrimination laws in the US has as much to do with an embrace of Leftist ideology as it does with an attempt at attracting previously disenfranchised voters. I realise this seems very cynical, but my argument is that having a few policies that seem Leftist doesn't mean that the underlying ideology behind those policies is; correlation does not imply causation etc. So I'd argue those laws are reactionary, much in the same way they are in Germany and also in places like South Africa, to varying degrees of course. They're exactly the kind of toe-dipping you'd expect of parties who are more driven by quests for power than ideology. That's why, even with several Democratic presidents, for instance, the US still doesn't have proper vacation and parental leave: it's bad for business.
If I had to plot it, I'd say Germany's political landscape is also quite huddled up around the Center, but slightly Left (with more outliers than the US), where the US is huddled around the Center and slightly Right. This would explain why the Right in the US feels further Right than in Germany. These configurations are probably not even that strange for developed and developing Western nations, though most have more outlier parties than the US even if they're not generally in contention during elections.
I just feel that the binary-narrative - even though the spectrum is quite large and nuanced - is something that has spread from US political commentators to other nations and is watering down the discourse.
I consider myself left and i do not think that. I don't think this type of generic mud slinging adds anything to the conversation especially when it is not based on verifiable facts.
Its not just slavery, its jim crow, segregation, black people being systematically disadvantaged through racist policies like getting higher rates on loans despite having the same risk. Also:
- the New Deal excluded black people
- The GI Bill excluded black people
etc...
Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated, so yes there absolutely should be reparations. I think this should be done in several ways:
- monetarily: by funding scholarships and other projects to remedy the injustices perpetrated and help black americans accumulate some of the generational wealth they have been denied. Although at the end of the day, no amount of money will ever compensate for the hurt, death and atrocities, its a start.
- education: teaching kids at school what slavery was really like, instead of what some of the schoolbooks teach (that slavery wasn't that bad for example). Teaching kids about systemic racism that persists to this day.
This is a real problem and it has to do that we try to quantify everything for risk assessments. This is a huge problem and the IT sector is a large part of that. A problem that should be discussed.
Reparations within a country between different ethnicities a good way to increase animosity. Because people would complain rightfully, that the wealth transfer is unjust.
I doubt you find any book in education that says that slavery wasn't bad. Every ethnicity on the planet has suffered from it and < 1% were slave owners. Yes, I know the argument that people profited passively... it isn't too convincing given the huge wealth distribution discrepancies western nation exhibit.
I don't think you are advocating for justice or equality here.
He's saying that if the economic gains where wiped out, then blacks and whites should have had equal economic standing after the war. But we all know that didn't happen, which is why he posed that question.
Even if it was the case that the civil war wiped out the gains from slavery, it doesn't change the case for reparations as well as the other injustices that were being committed are are still being committed to this day
I assume your interest in reparations is to create an even playing field. Reparations won't do that. It'll just create a lot of opportunities for capitalist predators to milk a poorly educated population that is now flush with cash. Once they've been squeezed dry, most of them will be in an even worse situation, because reparations will have assuaged the white guilt of their supporters while stoking the racism and anger of their opponents.
So you are assuming all black people are poorly educated and will suddenly be flushed with cash?
I wasn't talking about wealth transfer. I was mainly talking about stopping discrimination and providing loans and scholarships to a section of the population that has been discriminated against to redress centuries of oppression.
The average educational attainment of black people in the united states is lower, that's not racism, it's data. You can attach racial causes to it if you want, but it doesn't change my point.
"Reparations" is basically code for wealth transfer. If you mean crafting a more just, fair society, you probably want a different word.
Firstly, the milking you refer to is already happening, and has been happening for hundreds of years. Second, as i've already said, the way i see reparations is not a simple cash transfer. Its stopping the systemic injustices and having programes in place to help black communities in terms of loans, grants and educational scholarship.
If you agree that the New Deal and GI bill helped spur economic development (though they were not perfect) and lifted poor white people out of poverty, why not do that today for black people? Black people were systematically left out of that help, so time to give them the help they are owed.
I’m sure people were saying that and they can speak for themselves. The problem is with extrapolating that thought to “the left”. Now you’ve editorialized it to fit you political views.
While your point is valid, media outlets with known political biases to "the left" have been putting out a lot of pro-reparations stuff since the protests started. Regardless of what the people who are actually protesting want, white folks sure like to talk about reparations.
The difference is that political bias of news outlets is a matter of public record, as is the number of articles on reparations before and after the protests started. All objective.
Was that really the philosophy of the USSR? Marx argued against the abstract notion of equality to begin with (and more concretely, the idea of equality between people) and Lenin explicitly rebuked the notion that equality means anything more than class equality for socialists. The whole phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is precisely against equality - it recognizes that people have different abilities, talents, capabilities, and things happening in the course of life, and it recognizes that people have different needs, wishes, and desires.
Unless you're saying that the USSR's underlying philosophy comes from somewhere other than Marx or Lenin, in which case I'm curious as to what philosophy, and originated by whom, you're talking about.
I actually meant AA similar to the American one, for the school admissions. I don't believe the US has reached the USSR level of D&I to set quotas of minority representatives in governments of various levels (yet). And sorry, there is no source for this - even Yale does not publish their minority quotas or even admits they exist, what do you expect from the USSR Ministry of Education?
> The whole phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is precisely against equality - it recognizes that people have different abilities, talents, capabilities, and things happening in the course of life, and it recognizes that people have different needs, wishes, and desires.
This is not the kind of equality the poster was talking about. Forcing equality at government level does not mean forcing everyone to have equal IQ and work ethic. It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need"). "Equality of outcomes" as another poster put it.
> Would that not fall onto government in a communist state?
and this is why communism fails, because an external entity cannot possibly know the true needs of the individual, and cannot act in the best interest of every individual. Unless somehow they are a benevolent god.
Nowhere does Marx or any other 'communist' author claim that the state knows or pretends to know the needs and desires of the populace, or even an aggregation of their individual abilities. In fact, later 'communist' authors specifically say that it's up to the individual to sort out their needs and abilities, and to cultivate them.
Then you get back to the problem that I presented - who decides the needs and abilities? At least with a free market we can be honest about trying to do as little as possible in return for as much as possible, and let the market decide what your abilities are worth.
>It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need").
I'm not convinced. The slogan specifically recognises differences in needs, and therefore differences in 'income' under a socialist system. This is concordant with Marx's other writing on the matter. It means that in terms of what people need, they'll have access to it. But people have different needs. How can the 'outcomes' possibly be equal if the outcomes are a result of concrete, different needs and life situations? The outcome of a mother of three being given what they need is different from the outcome of a single civil engineer. Both the inputs (based on what they need) and the outputs (the outcomes) vary between each person.
Further, in every society as Marx notes, there is some amount of surplus. If everyone's needs are covered, Marx argued for an allocation based on contribution, at least in the lower phase of Communism (sometimes called socialism). Let's go into what Marx actually said:
>Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. [0]
So it seems that Marx proposes a system, his 'lower phase of Communism', which Lenin took to mean 'socialism' - in which people get out what they put in, accounting for deductions (which Marx enumerates as deductions for health care, education, care for those who cannot work, provisions in the case of disaster, and expansion of production). In what possible way does "everyone get the same outcome" here? More,
>Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.
Does this sound like 'equality of outcome'?
[0] Karl Marx - Critique of the Gotha Program (Part I, 1875).
This slogan describes the state of affairs in the society that Communists were aspiring to build, the Communism. It's a class-less and state-less (one and the same from their point of view) paradise, where nobody has to work and all needs are taken care of.
The USSR was not in the Communism, it had Socialism (which is not "a lower phase" but a "transitional state on the way to the Communism" as same as Capitalism, Feudalism, Slavery etc.). However, as far as equality goes, they subscribed to the French Revolution's "liberty,equality,fraternity" with a huge emphasis on "equality", "fraternity" meaning that Soviet people had to help other peoples ("fraternity of peoples") and "liberty" meaning "absence of slavery".
This short video[1] seems instructive in terms of norms in the former Soviet Union. These are named as bad things in that context: "career builder", "initiative at work", some specific Russian noun for "different thinker". Then punishments for "non-conformity".
Consider the phrase also said to have been popular in the USSR, "Everything Marx said about Capitalism was correct, but everything he said about Communism was wrong."
Philosophy of the USSR changed significantly over it's history, and it's actual philosophy, as applied in thinking and decision-making, was at times very different from the public image and propaganda.
You're talking about Marx and Lenin, but one of the first deep changes in USSR history was Stalin's raise to power - and with him, complete rejection of the "world revolution" and nationalistic "socialism in one country", up to re-establishement of orthodox church in the 40s.
Sovient Union was a completely different country with every decade of it's existence. In a dogmatic system it was not openly articulated, and leaders continued to pay lip service to "Marx and Lenin", but their real economic and political decisions were often in complete odds with the original values.
> It reminds you of the Soviet Union because the underlying philosophy is the same. Equality at all costs.
Cannot laugh more at that.
The Union has never been, or at least not the union my father's memory, about that.
It was strongly regimented, rigid, very hierarchical, caste society. The communist fraternity has been a model aristocracy, with its primary imperative being maintenance of party member's status, and privilege.
This practice was supposed to end with sovient union — but my school, which always had a fair share of jews that applied to math department in MSU, taught those in 00s, and athough discriminiation wasn't as blatant then, I'm not sure that it completely went away.
That a supposed lack of personality was used as cover for discrimination against Jewish applicants to universities is well-known. I’m not sure why you’d express concern over that reference being inflammatory ex nihilo.
> Harvard itself found a bias against Asian-American applicants in an internal investigation in 2013, but had never made the findings public or acted on them.[1] Plaintiffs and commentators have compared thetreatment of Asians with the Jewish quota in place in the early 20th century, which used deficient personalities as the reason for excluding Jews in elite universities.[4][1]
Lowell wanted a quota, but couldn't get it and introduced this well-roundedness thing and weirdly and totally coincidentally Jewish people found themselves unable to match up. Turns out they were all one-dimensional human beings less skilled at all those other things White Americans were capable at. It is sheer good fortune Lowell was there to rescue us from these nerdy egg-heads. Close one.
This years UCSF admissions also caught a stir. Asian admission cut in half from 40 in 2019 to 22% in 2020. Student demo suggest it was cut from 60% the years prior.
No, as referenced below, the original tweet by a first year student UCSF Med was removed. But original tweet and some of the drama from /r/premed below. Apparently figures were shared in privately in acceptance emails during height of protests. The rest of the numbers was Asian community extrapolating from acceptance and demographic data from past years. I guess we'll wait until official data updates to confirm.
>UCSF upcoming class reveals heavily shaped racial mixtures. Other schools will probably follow? “The stats are in: @UCSFMedicine's Class of 2024 is 23% Hispanic/Latinx, 22% Asian, 20% White, 19% Black, and includes 4 Native Americans” (twitter.com)
Definitely interesting. Only things I'd be concerned about when thinking about painting them with a racially biased admissions brush is that UCSF's class size is not large at 171 so a swing of 20% in 1 year is only 40 students. It would not be hard for me to believe that there are 40 Latino and black students who also scored 98%ile+ on the MCAT who equally "deserve" acceptance there, the med schools ranked #15-3ish all provide pretty much the same level of opportunity so the Asians missing from UCSF might have chosen a different top school. If it's a decline for 5 years straight I would be concerned about it but idk if 2 years is enough to state a trend.
I am really curious how those Yale guys check applicants race. Some kind of skin color pigment measurement (sorry, you are a bit too white to qualify as African American, next person please)?
Or do they measure someones eye shape to "detect" Asian people?
How about Jews, is nose measurement sufficient (they need to dig really hard in their archives to find some Nazi "scientific" statistics on that...) or they just ask to take off pants during interview to check if someone is not hiding his race?
The issue is not really that they discriminate (which is bad). But the fact that they have arbitrarily made this into a Zero Sum Game.
Why an organization with 30 BILLION in endowment cannot admit more than 2000 eighteen year olds baffles me. If you want to admit more POKs then increase the class size and hire more professors with that vast amount of money.
I realize places like Yale try to be like old, exclusive country clubs. But if that’s the case then they should be taxed on that money.
The whole idea of an institution being "elite" is that it restricts access. The smaller the % of applicants to make it through, the more prestigious the placement. It's a high-end night club with VIP access for the rich, famous, and the connected. And with a long line outside the door to signal that many are fighting to get in.
Elite universities are luxury brands, and by definition a product is no longer a luxury if everybody gets one.
If you just want a quality education, you can get it anywhere else. What people are complaining about here is that don't get to access an intentionally carefully-restricted item.
I'm not going to be writing to my senator because you don't get to drive a Lamborghini. Get in a Corolla like the rest of us, you'll be just fine.
>I realize places like Yale try to be like old, exclusive country clubs. But if that’s the case then they should be taxed on that money.
How would this be enforced? That private universities can't get tax exempt status if they don't spend a certain % of their net assets each year? Doesn't this effectively penalize organizations operating on an endowment funding model?
I think if Yale had a true meritocracy for admissions, they would have a majority Asian student body.
And I think if they actually admitted all of the Asian students that fulfilled their acceptance criteria, they would probably want to expand the school so that a more diverse student body could fit into Yale.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how much larger Yale would have to be, in order to retain all th Black, Hispanic, and Native American students that they currently have, while also including the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.
Would Yale be twenty-five percent larger? Twice as large? What's the scale here?
I would love for them to report enrolled Native Americans and what tribes they are from did they attend high school on a reservation. I keep discovering Native Americans who don't actually have any connection to any tribe.
...the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.
I know you're repeating a framing from TFA and from numerous other sources, but the discrimination against Asians primarily benefits whites, because there are so many more of them. There simply aren't enough BIPoC students to make room for the Asians who would be accepted if the discrimination against them stopped, as implied by your "majority Asian student body" comment. (Also, lots of BIPoC students are not "just over the line" and perform as well as or better than Asian and white students.) The eventual result of this lawsuit will be a much lower percentage of white students, while BIPoC percentages might drop slightly.
Yale discriminates in favor of Whites. If admissions were based purely on merit as they are at Caltech or Berkeley, you would have far more Asians and far fewer Caucasians. This was also true when they discriminated against Jews (using the same techniques) at a time when Jews were not considered White.
By your own post, you seem to consider Jews a separate population from gentile whites. If that were the case, I'd suggest you double check the relative (to national proportion) population of non-athelte/legacy gentile whites at Yale and similar schools before making posts like this.
Before we get our pitchforks out here, let's remember that Yale's percentage of Black students is 7.4%[1]. That's not exactly a gigantic portion. In fact Yale is on the lower end compared to Harvard's 14.3%[2] and MIT's 12% [3]. If Yale is truly discriminating in favor of Black and Hispanic students, well, they're not doing an excellent job of it.
But here is the fallacy you have to be very careful about.
You cannot say that just 7% is low or 14% is high. Even looking at other universities. You have to know what source population that is being drawn from, and what is the criterion for drawing.
It could be that 4% of people applying to Yale are black, 3% are qualified, and 7% outcome is already overrepresented. Or it could be "terrible" if 10% are applying, and 7% are qualified.
You have to look at what % pass the filter you are applying, to those who apply. With that further criterion applied, any of these figures could be "reasonable".
It is not true that a selective process should simply match the proportions of <x> group that you see in the general population. That is the wrong and very misguided / misrepresented way of reporting the problem. But too often it's the politically simple (or intellectually lazy) approach to framing the issue.
It sounds good to say "we should look like our customers". But that is often not true for a selective process. It is true, if and only if, the qualities you're selecting for are represented in an unbiased way, among the people who are your customers, and among those who apply.
Most of the black students are probably African immigrants. I see it all the time. If you just browse through LinkedIn and look at black Harvard/Ivy League alumni you'll immediately notice all the African immigrants
This is very true, and speaking as a non-black/african person, I noticed they're very different culturally. They carry a sense of national pride related to their home country, and draw from it constantly. I'm thinking about Nigerian immigrants specifically.
Yes, that's a very interesting phenomenon that should be taken into account. Likewise I've wondered what the sub-demographics are of Asian ethicity students. It's a little ridiculous to lump children of Vietnamese boat people in with nouveau riche direct from China.
But what percentage of college students are black? (sincere question, couldn't find the answer from a quick search). Without knowing that I don't think it's fair to say they aren't doing a great job. Just because other colleges are doing better, doesn't mean Yale is doing bad.
edit: This report says 14% of college enrolled U.S. residents were black in 2017. But that makes it sound like it doesn't include international students.
It's actually not very hard to see how discimination-in-favor can be compatible with overall low numbers. The simplest way is if they comprise less than 7.4% of the applicant pool. Another way is if they comprise less than 7.4% of "qualified" applicants, in some definition of qualified. But those breakdowns of the applicant pool are typically not shared except from lawsuits.
There has never been equal opportunity. This is clear. The reasons why opportunity has not been equal is becoming more clear, regardless which side of the nature versus nurture debate you fall on. Equal outcome should not be the goal (test scores and grades are not the best nor only indicator the likelihood of success). The goal should be equal access.
For me, access implies the right, opportunity reflects the demonstration of those rights.
There are a lot of examples of equal access to programs in this country, by the letter of the law, but in practice locally, folks were unable to access these opportunities.
The FHA most immediately comes to mind. The letter of the law of FHA versus local implementation by local banks, bank executives, realtors, mortgage brokers, even home sellers were able deny opportunity though technically these programs were accessible to all.
Your argument is a misnomer, equal access is just a restatement of belief in equal rights. Equal opportunity is the belief that everyone should be given a level playing field.
People don't benefit from Yale from the lectures. They benefit from the brand name and alumni you get to be associated with. Which is because Yale restricts admission to people who have high probability of being influential.
So it's really just an exclusive club and not about education and knowledge building at all? Okay, you simply reenforce my point. It's a signalling mechanism for cargo cult employers who would rather simply hire from Yale than do the work of actually assessing people's capabilities. It needs to go the way of the dodo.
Equality of outcome would mean that the race/ethnicity/etc proportion of people admitted to Yale would be similar to the appropriate proportion in the general community instead of being wildly different.
Equality of opportunity would mean that if two equally qualified persons of different races/ethnicities/etc have the same chance of getting admitted.
The big issue is that you can't have both, mostly due to various family and childhood circumstances that mean that different groups have different rates of "getting to X years old with qualifications/skills/preparations Y".
For Yale admissions, you can have one, or the other, or a compromise in the middle. You can have a situation that's unfair/unequal according to both criteria, but you can't get both "types of equality" at the same time, as increasing one generally requires to trade off or sacrifice the other.
Not for me. But I don't thinks its' A or B, but some blend and it's always been some blend. House of Commons and House of Lords. Representatives and Senators, Electoral College, etc.
I believe the right discussion to have is where do we as society want to be between the two outcomes. Not do we want A, or do we want B.
I was referring the the balance of power between large states (House) and small states (Senate) as a metaphor for not wholly espousing the binary outcome equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.
Man, I've been frustrated when I see that story recently; it reads like a bad caricature of what a lot of good movements are trying to accomplish. In reality the goal (though not always perfectly executed of course) is always about raising people up, not tearing people down (like the handicaps in the story)
Show me any evidence that this isn't literally what the far left wants? CA is moving to remove hiring anti-discrimination protections, as if nothing could go wrong with that line of reasoning...
My belief is that this is a compromise of convenience rather than want. It appears to be easy to achieve equality by hampering the best, but much harder work to achieve equality by raising the worst off up.
Even as someone who identifies as a liberal, I 100% agree with your sentiment here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to the obvious narrative or too simple to acknowledge basic tenants of human behavior.
As an aside, I find it interesting how Harrison Bergeron is so commonly misinterpreted as a satire of the left. When one considers Vonnegut's personal beliefs and the strawman portrayal of communism in the story, it really should become clear that it is actually a critique of Cold War/anticommunist hysteria. A satire of anticommunist satire, if you will.
In context, it was written at a time when the ideological and intellectual opposition to communism hadn't been very well-articulated yet, and hadn't become "obvious" to onlookers.
It might be a little on-the-nose, but I think it is a sincere takedown of the authleft (and moreso: crab mentality). These views can and do come from within the left - like Orwell, most notably.
I don't see how you draw that path, but maybe you could try explaining it. It seems the story is clearly an extreme form of "equality of outcome," but there's no clear linguistic or conceptual path from capitalism to cannibalism.
Quotas restricting Asians, and affirmative action benefiting Jews, who make up an astounding full quarter of the student bodies of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, despite being only 2% of the population, which is 5x their rate of admission at Caltech, an elite school with a famously merit-based, AA-free admission process:
The campus is located in the Los Angeles area, home to one of America’s largest and most successful Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionally been strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed, at least three of Caltech’s last six presidents have been of Jewish origin, and the same is true for two of its most renowned faculty members, theoretical physics Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.
Just wondering if it is a crime to lie about your race n college applications. What if a bunch of Asians just decided to write black on their college admissions applications -
- Will the colleges rescind the applications.
Also do mixed race individuals get to pick either white or black on college applications?
As a european I don't get why americans are so obsessed about race. I would never even think of writing about my skin color on a university application. That seems very foreign to me. People today are making the same old mistakes, just treat everyone the same and it'll sort itself out over time.
Such an obvious thing imo, but now it's simply popular to discriminate against whites and asian people. Awesome, we've come full circle.
In practice it seems that affirmative action primarily takes from Asians and unconnected whites to give to blacks. I have no objection to the latter—indeed, I can see some justification in taking from educated middle class Asians like me—but the obvious people from whom to take places are those who get in on connexions (most of whom are white). If this creates a shortfall, the obvious solution is to dismantle a bureaucracy that was clearly unneeded, say, 40 years ago. Unfortunately there is no political incentive to do this—the Republicans will almost certainly attempt to restore a situation by which blacks end up in the grand scheme of things disadvantaged, with no correction at university admissions, whilst the progressive narrative is controlled by mostly white liberal bourgeois class interests, and therefore will continue to find some other group to make the sacrifices it deems (not incorrectly in this case!) necessary, and happens to create not inconsiderable employment for them, inter alia—indeed, one might go so far as to say is necessary for their broader control of the capitalist system by holding onto cultural power within education.
Maybe universities should consider adding an optional box to specify if the applicant is willing to give up their potential seat for an affirmative action candidate. /s
I don’t see why this is would actually be a bad idea—it just sounds like the offer wouldn't be taken up much. Most systems that allow people to express some preference to be kinder to someone else probably won’t end up causing harm—the worst case is that they just don’t cause anything.
The Justice Dept made the exact same allegations against Harvard, and last year a Federal Judge found that Harvard was constitutionally in the clear.
SCOTUS has said that race can be narrowly used in admissions to promote diversity, which Yale says they are doing. The fact that the Justice Department wants Yale to cease all uses of race in admissions (despite this interpretation) is suspect.
The rules around AA and the courts has been in a constant state of change since 1964. AA was justified as a temporary solution, thus there is no stare decisis which people can agree. I think it is unpredictable what the courts will do. The issue is setup to be never settled.
No, the judge found that despite Harvard having introduced the current system to discriminate, and the current system discriminating, the plaintiffs hadn't shown Harvard maintained the system to discriminate against them.
When wasn't it, at just at the high-profile margins?
Its daily work currently consists of fighting sex-trafficking and other inarguably good pursuits... The claim that the DOJ is any more political today than a decade or three ago doesn't seem borne out by the facts, IMO.
well I am not nearly expert enough to debate your points about the DOJ's history. What I _can_ say with confidence is that from my POV that this is a hot button issue for my parents, many in their circles, and I imagine asian families nationwide. Given the other actions of this administration I can't shake the feeling that a strong motive for this is to curry favor with that demographic. It strikes me as an awfully convenient time to start making noise here.
Considering that the Justic Dept has dropped cases against friends of the president (one of whom confessed to the crime of lying to the FBI to cover up for the president) and given that we're a couple months from an election where race is an issue, I also share your doubt about the Justice Dept being agnostic here.
You are making things up. Flynn was setup, his 302s were altered, FBI didn’t believe he lied, Brady evidence was not provided to his counsel (and still hasn’t been), he was bankrupted with over 6 million in legal fees, he had to sell both his houses, his old lawyers had severe conflict of interest which were not disclosed and he was threatened that they would go after his son if he didn’t plead guilty to something he never said. He was the incoming national security advisor - media makes it seem like the national security advisor talking to foreign countries after election is somehow an illegal thing? Now his judge has gone on a full circus.
Please research from non biased non spin news and look at actual documents unsealed.
There's also a perfectly reasonable argument on the facts to drop the case against Flynn - not least of all what appears to be motivated entrapment and no appropriate cause to investigate in the first place - but this becomes a politically charged argument and I feel it's inappropriate on HN.
There's probably some edgy contrarian aspect going on, but do note that this was spurred by a lawsuit brought in 2014 by those alleging that they were discriminated against.
The DOJ took it up, but at one level it would be obscene if they didn't - imagine the inverse (some evidence of anti-black admissions procedures is found), and the DOJ - who is tasked with prosecuting hate crimes and other civil rights-style issues - did not take it up.
In this case I almost feel like the Republican DOJ is being looked at sideways because one of the alleged victim parties is white... Had it been blacks and Asians, I doubt anyone would've cast aspersions on the Obama DOJ for taking up the charge.
TL;dr this sort of topic is the DOJ's bread and butter, and since it began via lawsuits from the affected parties I don't think there's much cynical "discretion" going on in this particular case.
> The DOJ took it up, but at one level it would be obscene if they didn't - imagine the inverse (some evidence of anti-black admissions procedures is found), and the DOJ - who is tasked with prosecuting hate crimes and other civil rights-style issues - did not take it up.
You mean like publicly abandoning ongoing investigations of systematic racial discrimination by local police departments while dismissing the entire idea of conducting such investigations when there was evidence in hand as an intrusion on law enforcement?
The DOJ did that almost immediately when the current Administration took over.
> this sort of topic is the DOJ's bread and butter, and since it began via lawsuits from the affected parties I don't think there's much cynical "discretion" going on in this particular case.
The DOJ doesn't join or follow every, or even most, discrimination cases filed by private parties which are minimally viable and state claims which would also provide a public cause of action, so I have no idea on what basis you jump from “started by a private lawsuit” to “therefore doesn’t have much cynical discretion involved”.
>The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.
Harvard has already faced this and had it shut down. Because it’s the fed maybe they’re subject to some kind of double jeopardy type thing? Or just tying different courts?
SFFA vs Harvard isn’t over yet. Harvard won at District Court level but SFFA is appealing. It is likely to ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, but it is probably going to take a few years for the case to get there.
1. it's all about diversity and equality these days, meaning every thing should be distributed proportionally based on race population and by gender. the ultimate goal will be wealth re-distribution(or, communism), until then, it is not going to stop.
2. especially in hi tech and elite universities.
3. NBA is an exception, actually all sports can be an exceptions.
4. Asian is not considered as minority when it come to college admissions, what doe minority mean?
5. MIT and many other STEM universities has 50:50 boys and girls, if not so, it's called gender discrimination.
...
So, let's throw out SAT/ACT/GPA and admit people via 'holistic' review, i.e. totally subjective, which means, the more miserable you're the better chance you will have, we joked as parents the best we can do for our kids is going to jail, do drugs, go bankrupt, so our kids can get some benefits. Nice family, law-biding family are basically punished.
I have not seen anywhere more communism like in USA now, you cut the corner because of your race or gender, merit-based is racism, we're going to hell.
I wish those AA pumpers will get a doctor who was admitted/graduated/career-ed based on AA rules, when they need a cure the most at hospitals.
the United States population is equivalent to 4.25% of the total world population while accounted for 15.2% of global gross domestic product (GDP). The world definitely need more diversity in the wealth distribution , let's start by just cutting every single American's income every month by 11% and donate it to other countries in the world.
The investigation also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity
If they're "racially balancing" their classes, that does sound like it is a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity in their classes. Whether or not that's actually a noble or appropriate goal is a different question, but it sounds like it's allowed...
Of course the definition of "balance" here is tricky. Corresponding ratios to the overall racial balance of the country? The state? Overall racial balance of all applicants? Of all alumni?
The school in question never formally disallowed blacks.
"Yale’s first black graduate was Courtland Van Rensselaer Creed, who received his medical degree in 1857 and went on to have a prominent practice in New York City"
I wonder if you could build a model to assign handicaps to each applicant? Forget racial quotas, just assign a modifier to each applicant based on the difficulty they have likely faced in their lives. Race, but also household income, zip code, alma mater, siblings, how many parents, etc... Then just hide all that info from the review board.
In that way, you could get right at what is most interesting- which students are actually the most impressive.
Past student body provides the training dataset- just define what measures a successful student whom you are happy to have. College GPA, graduation date, post-graduation compensation, whatever.
HN is weirdly silent about identity politics except for threads like these. Threads about discrimination in tech get a few dozen post, a third of which are to the tune of “does this belong on HN?” But an article about discrimination at a college with a horrific engineering program and no cachet in the tech industry gets 500 posts.
Can anyone explain why this belongs on HN or why it gets so much attention? I don’t understand it.
This thread is a minefield. Any claims about discrimination on race or gender is going to ignite controversy. Why is it OK to talk about this subject despite the fact that it’s in no way relevant to tech?
On other sites, much of the posts are fueled by indignation. That's a bit less here, and very few people are going to reply: "yeah, I know. It's a shame.", especially because that's against the rules. But it's only a possible factor.
> Why is this on HN?
Relatively many students and recently graduated under the members, more than on e.g. reddit?
The thing I never understood about the US is why asking for someone's "race" (or whatever the current PC term for it is) on a form, government or otherwise, is not flat out illegal on account of being a) entirely meaningless b) downright insulting c) guaranteed to produce the kind of outcome we're discussing here.
That's a nice thing to say, but it's utterly unrealistic when 29,000 students apply to Yale every year.
So you need a system to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Just like a job interview, you don't just hire people at random. Some kind of system is necessary.
This is a symptom of issues that still very much exist in the 21st century. In the US access to a good education is closely tied wealth, which is closely tied to homeownership and property values, which are in turn still benefiting from discriminatory housing policies [1].
As an example, the Bay Area has some of the best schools and most expensive real estate in the country. This is due to a lack of supply, yet to this day it is illegal to build high density and inexpensive housing in the vast majority of lots so that the less wealthy can start building equity, which again is a huge portion of wealth. Ordinances like high minimum lot sizes and low coverage were deliberately designed to make it more expensive for POC to buy into a neighborhood. This is covered extensively in The Color of Law, and is a great read [2].
Perhaps the better approach is to fix these systemic issues so that schools didn't have to compensate for them.
Yeah but in the 21st century it's ridiculous to associate physical buildings with good education. There's no reason, today, why students can't consume lectures from several world class instructors at scale. Video lectures are not even inferior to the actual experience. Do you know how many lectures are skipped entirely by students in college? Do you know how many students are distracted by phones and laptops in lectures? This whole system needs to be retooled. The main thing students need from college is enforced accountability and pacing to keep them from dawdling. This can be done with proctors and tutors coupled with world class video lectures from top professors.
I'll echo the other poster that this is a nice thing to say, but it really glosses over many realities regarding the various ways wealth influences education. It is not just about the physical building, or even the lectures themselves. It's the entire picture of what it means to have more wealth than others.
First, there's k-12, and not just higher education, which the quality and access thereof is impacted greatly by wealth — Nicer, more expensive homes tend to also have nicer school districts.
It is not a leap to say that a student from a disadvantaged background had to struggle a lot more to learn than one that didn't. Either because of costs (Supplies, tutors, extracurricular activities etc.), or environment (Parent's help and education, support). This is why higher education attempts to compensate for opportunity: They understand the cards are stacked against some groups more than others.
Yes anybody from any race/ethnicity can face these struggles, but remember that a lot of these disadvantages are still _structurally engrained_ to target a particular group. These aren't slight advantages, and housing isn't the only issue, but taken together it has resulted in white families having 6.7x more wealth than a typical black family.
In my opinion, policies like this stem from having good intentions, but intervening where there is just friction instead of where there is most value.
Intervening at Ivy League admissions is a surefire way to benefit those minorities who are currently the least inhibited, while expending a lot of social (and potentially "real") capital to do so.
Intervening much earlier in the process would be much harder, but would provide relatively more assistance to those who are so disadvantaged as to otherwise end up nowhere near college admissions anywhere, much less the Ivy Leagues.
The whole undergraduate system in the US needs dismantling and rebuilding. it is costly, wasteful, discriminatory and largely about signaling than any skills. If race-based admissions moves to STEM graduate school, then we're in trouble.
With no data backing this up, I feel like people would be happier with quotas.
If Asians were told that at most X% of school Y could be Asian to save room for other ethnicities for social reasons, they could probably accept that better than being told that it was because they were being categorically determined as having shitty or empty personalities.
I feel sorry for Yale (et al) in this case because they're being presented with a very hard problem (defining and measuring merit in a reliable non-game-able way), one that likely has no widely accepted solution, and one that we as a society have actively decided to completely ignore in favor of everyone looking out for themselves.
I sympathize as well, but I think the problem is much more fundamental; I think there is no universally acceptable solution.
- If you think merit is a function of de facto performance, you will not deem it justified when the bar for admission is lowered for under-performing groups.
- If you think merit is a function of effort[0], then you will not deem it justified when everybody is held to the same standard of performance.
The reason this is such a touchy issue, I think, is that both approaches result in a de facto racial (and/or other immutable-trait-based) hierarchy. In my estimation, the determining ideological factor in picking a side is whether one prefers implicit vs explicit hierarchies.
[0] There's probably a better word than effort, but it's not coming to mind.
my solution to this problem is the same as my solution to the tech megacorp oligopily problem.
there are too many students chasing to few colleges. there should be 20 Yales, 30 Harvards and 50 MITs. just like there should be 10 Microsofts, 20 Googles and 50 Apples. if competition for credentials wasnt so pirate cut throat due to induced artifical scarcity, then society wouldnt be nitpicking over admissions quota minutia.
imagine a world where we cut the Pentagon's budget by 15%, and poured that $150 billion into turning every Community College into a University on par with Yale and the Ivys. imagine a world where unemployable grad students were not ground up and churned out through a system that only has teaching jobs for a fraction of them.
the solution to all higher education problems is to radically increase the supply to meet the demand.
dont you want humanity to have an orbital base around Alpha Centauri someday? how else are we going to achieve that?
Very true, especially with the modern logistics of education.
Today we could show the best lecture any prof has ever given to a village in nirvana that got running water 10 years ago. That doesn't replace direct mentoring, but would still elevate education to new standards.
Special schools for particularly gifted people should exist, but the product today is more prestige than quality of education (which is good, but not the primary selling point anymore).
I see how everyone speaks about the discrimination against Asian males, but what about white males? If Freedom is not for everyone then no one is trully free.
In this rebel youth aim to destroy older "conservative" ideas apparently someone broke some of the oldes hard earned lessons by mankind about freedom and equalty.
To be clear, I'm not saying I don't care about the discrimination against white men, but generally speaking white men have more societal advantages in North America than Asian men such as likelihood in getting positions in leadership roles at companies, political positions, as well as desirability in online dating. My hunch is that's why it's not as 'highlighted' (for lack of a better term) than Asian men who are discriminated against.
>The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity
Sounds like SCOTUS will agree with Yale on this one.
The real discrimination is continued legacy and athletic admissions which artificially inflate the number of white students (discriminating against Asians and other minorities).
>The findings detailed in a letter to the college’s attorneys Thursday mark the latest action by the Trump administration aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges.
I'm an Asian liberal and I think trump is an idiot but the reality is that all people, as altruistic or immoral as they appear to be, are, in fact, complex amalgamations of good, evil, intelligence and stupidity. My judgement of trump is just a biased simplification of reality and the complexity of his character.
Has it occurred to any of you that somebody might just want to intentionally make us hate each other with this "racism" BS? To keep us divided? In the end, who really cares if someone is black, white, Korean, or half Vietnamese? Denying an earned admission to someone because that someone is of the color, sex, religion or original nationality not in fashion at the time for the leftist taste only serves to make us dislike each other more and more.
A similar issue came up in relation to California's rules against giving IQ tests to black students:
"Amaya said Fontana school officials tried to explain their action by showing her copies of Peckham’s 131-page ruling. Because Amaya is a Latina and Demond of mixed racial heritage, officials told her she could have her son reclassified as Latino and he could be tested."
It is already a fact since race is not a well-defined category. People with mixed backgrounds choose the category with the most affirmative action benefits.
No. There was a prominent case of Rachel Dolezal who identified as black and used that in college and job applications as well as welfare claims.
She got sacked, sued by the state government, and vilified in the court of popular opinion. You might get away with this kind of fraud, but it's not a good time for it if you do get caught.
Clearly she did, but my point is that society may evolve it's viewpoints on the matter, in the same way that has happened with transgenderism, at least in non-conservative circles.
Caitlyn Jenner would have been called a "fraud" 30 years ago if she identified as she does now. Why would it be different for race?
10 years from now, will everyone who vilified Dolezal have to issue mea culpas on their twitter equivalent about how they should not have hated on her and how un-woke they were?
Rather than a fraud, I think Caitlyn Jenner would have been seen more as a pervert or a monstrosity or an attention-seeking weirdo, depending on your world view. It's not like she's competing in women's athletics, or hides the fact that she was born a man.
But yeah, fashions change, and at some point it will be completely acceptable to pick your own ethnic identity. The only question is whether that happens in 10 years, or long after Dolezal and all her critics have been forgotten.
This is election-year flack, pure and simple. Can we trust anything the Dept. of Justice does? The Attorney General is clearly a proxy for Trump's desire to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Barr's first priority is not enforcing the law, it's enabling Trump's twisted agenda.
How is everyone's first reaction not that this is Trump electioneering? I have no idea if there's merit here or not, but the replies below seem to largely fail to acknowledge two facts:
(a) All top schools weigh race and gender. They consider student body diversity important. You can disagree that they should, but it's true.
(b) Bill Barr's DOJ is one of the least trustworthy entities in the USA on this subject this side of the KKK.
This is something that has been pursued by the DOJ for years.
The lawsuit that began this process was in 2014.
Also, allusions to the KKK are just obscene. You can have political views, but shoehorning them in while exhibiting such ignorance about the underlying facts of the case just destroys the quality of the conversation.
Weird that they don’t mention that the vast majority of legacy entries are white, followed by Asian.
Any school that had racist policies that banned black and other PoC that still has legacy admissions is fundamentally biased in favor of white applicants, and will always be.
The bar for legacy entry is incredibly low, far below GPA requirements for any affirmative action has ever been.
It will take more than a couple of generations, because the children of people who got legacy admittance also get legacy admittance, which removes available slots for people who don't just have the benefit of being born to the right parents.
That's the big cudgel right: look at the racial spread of legacy acceptances, and if that does not match (within reason) the average racial spread then legacy admittance is adding a discriminatory pressure against those races that are less represented.
This "finding" is absolutely tasteless. Studies found that SATs have little to no correlation to graduating from a university, same thing with GREs in grad school. African American students are proven year over year to have far less educational resources in their communities, live in poverty, etc. And far less African Americans apply to get into Yale compared to their white or Asian counterparts and the ones that do apply have a better shot of getting in due to their hard work than the African Americans that don't apply. And on top of that still has to deal with inequality across the board. So yes, to the 5% of Yale students that are African Americans, their acceptance was very well deserved. Knock off the bs about IQ this and IQ that. Try that crap in the real world at your job and see how far that gets you.
Free advice: there is no reason this suit could not have been brought in the prior 3 years. It is shameless election year politics via the courts. Whatever you think of the merits of the case, realize what this is from the timing and the unprofessional release accompanying the filing.
"Yale College could fill its entire entering class several times over with applicants who reach the 99th percentile in standardized testing and who have perfect high school grade point averages, but we do not base admission on such numbers alone," President Peter Salovey wrote. "Rather, we look at the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants." (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/08/13/us/politics/ap-u..., the other post on this on the front page)
This argument will be shown to have merit. Simply put, the question of whether to have a class that represents the population vs the applicant pool is at the discretion of the college. A lower ratio of acceptance by race is not de facto indicative of individual discrimination. They can pick and choose a class from the top tenth of a percent of the graduating seniors in the US. Every student there is elite.
On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).
The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.
Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.