In other words: penalize Asian American kids for being born into intact, hard-working families. Subtract 300 points from their SATs and subjectivity give them low personality scores. Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.
> Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.
No, that's not the goal.
For the ones that don't just want a quota, it's about how you measure the baseline of equal opportunity.
Let's imagine, for the sake of simplicity, a situation with only good motivations and where race has no correlation with anything else:
Learning more because someone helped you is a good thing.
Learning more because of intrinsic motivation is even better.
If two candidates have the same score, but one got their on their own, they are the better candidate.
Which implies that sometimes a candidate that has a worse score but has more motivation is a better candidate. Depending on the ratio of how much worse and how much motivation.
Favoring them would not mean the other candidate is penalized for their family environment. It's saying that different ways of reaching a test score matter different amounts. The raw test score isn't your level of qualification.
And trying to find the candidate that will do best is definitely not favoring equality of outcome at the cost of equal opportunity.
Note: None of this is a defense of the specific way Harvard does anything. None of this is a promise that Harvard admissions have good motives.
So when whites were considered genetically superior you chose them and now that you consider Asians to be genetically superior, you chose against them. How very "heads I win, tails you lose"
But no, that's not it at all. If someone is genetically superior, this method favors them. It "disfavors" having a good environment. And by "disfavors", I mean that a good environment is still favored, but less so than individual attributes.
And again, no promises that such a method is actually representative of what Harvard is doing.
