They do, but that money is restricted as to what it can be used for. From the article:
“There is a common misconception that endowments, including Harvard’s,
can be accessed like bank accounts, used for anything at any time as long
as funds are available,” Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman, said. “In reality,
Harvard’s flexibility in spending from the endowment is limited by the fact
that it must be maintained in perpetuity and that it is largely restricted
by the explicit wishes of those who contributed the endowed funds.”
1. Long-term return on the stock market, factoring in inflation and dividends, is a little under 7%. If you can consistently nail 12%, I'd like to know your secret.
2. It's possible that the returns from the principal are also restricted.
> The annualized return on the endowment over the last 20 years has been approximately 12.0% per year and the endowment was valued at $37.6 billion at June 30, 2015.
Yes but they also like to build stuff with donors' names on it. There are few places in America that are more expensive for construction than Cambridge.
Besides, they can't plan on using the maximum from the endowment every year, because the endowment sometimes grows less than usual, or even shrinks.
Top tier (and/or Ivy league) schools tend to have fairly generous financial aid packages, so this is a less shocking proposal than it might otherwise seem.
The problem is that many applicants don't realize that. During graduate school, I was active in recruitment in the sciences and I have often spoken with high-achieving but low-income high school students and undergraduates, and many of them have false ideas about financial aid for undergraduate and graduate education.
Well, many of these have prohibitive application fees that take a lot of work to get waved. I think that's a bigger immediate barrier than figuring out how you'd even pay for the schooling.
I know I didn't apply to several schools merely out of exhaustion of trying to figure out how to not have to pay the application fee.
I guess it has been too long for me... what fees were these? SAT/ACT fees? I don't recall there being any fee for actually filling out the application form and sending it in?
Nevertheless, if schools have any control over the "front-end" fees, they might ought to start by eliminating those. Knowing that one needs to send an email like that is also a barrier of a sort.
Yep. In my day the fees at the more elite schools were about $70, which was entirely too much money. The effort required to waive the fee was enough to incentivize me to apply to fewer schools (thereby also incentivizing me to accept the first offer I got).
> And if Harvard abolishes tuition for undergrads, Mr. Nader said, “It will ricochet across the Ivy League.”
A proposition like this is really exciting to me! As a recent college grad (though admittedly one who's very lucky to not have loans, though my partner is screwed with them), I am particularly sensitive how how insane it is that college students are sold massive amounts of debt that many will take years to pay back. And a lot of new systems to help students pay them back are ineffective at best and disgusting at worst.
I am intrigued to see what the other motives are here. I doubt that there will be much change in how students pay back college debt, but we do need some sort of real change. I would be really excited to see a cultural shift away from profiteering from student debt.
If you are going continue to use race as part of the equation they why bother with tests? Its really apparent in medical schools where your MCAT score has to be significantly higher; near perfect; to obtain the same rate of admissions as a minority student with the much lower scores.
This cheats both parties in any college admission as the best and brightest may not be able to meet on even ground and you slight those who are pulled up by placing in a situation where they will likely end up dead last in achievement because fellow students just do so much better. That last alone cannot be easily discounted simply for the psychological effects of placing low
Good on you for supplying a citation. I might analyze it later if I have nothing better to do tonight than figure out how someone from AEI is deliberately being misleading about a study yet again.
Really you demand a citation and then it's given you dismiss immediately while also admitting you won't even bother reading it because it doesn't support your view. Why did you even ask?
No, that's not why I won't bother reading. I won't bother reading it because I've found AEI to be garbage before and I have a finite supply of energy and time to verify claims which I thus prioritize based on my perceived quality of the source.
To take it to an extreme, I don't bother verifying claims made by neonazis. AEI is obviously not that bad, but it's also not good enough for me to care.
What kind of amateur mistakes can AEI make? Well for one, I bet this analysis of the data falls victim to Simpson's paradox. Basic shit like that happens all the time in their analyses.
Surely if happens all the time you can give us some links to the offending articles and explain how they fall victim to Simpsons pardox or other logical errors... I promise to actually read them.
But the data isn't broken down into schools. There is probably (although I don't know for sure), a difference in accept rate between a tier-1 vs bottom-tier medical school. They should control for that too. At least I didn't see that in the data.
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics. Without knowing the breakdown by school, the result can easily be the result of an effect like Simpson's paradox[1].
The AEI source even acknowledges that Simpson's paradox prevents one from drawing conclusions (also please note the rhetorical quotation marks):
> The AAMC doesn’t provide acceptance data by individual medical school, so we can’t conclude that any of the four medical schools at public universities in Michigan (University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State and Oakland University) are practicing illegal “affirmative discrimination” or “racial profiling” in admissions
But quickly pivots, pretending like this doesn't matter:
> "Based on national data, is there any conclusion other than the obvious one – that US medical schools are granting special preferences for admissions on the basis of race for certain preferred minority groups (blacks and Hispanics) over other non-preferred minority groups (Asians) and whites"
Yes. Simpson's paradox. The data is consistent with schools being discriminatory in favor of whites if white people tend to apply only to selective schools, for example. This is why I don't bother with the playschool polemical bullshit that comes out of AEI. They ignore basic facts about statistical inference in order to push their views.
That's probably one of the worst sentences that's ever been uttered in the english language, because it lets you dismiss an argument by assuming that because it involves math it must be manipulated and therefore bullshit.
That's not what Yule-Simpson implies. They're missing the data breakdown by school, so you can't make the conclusion that somehow they're lying instead. Again, they don't make a conclusion and you can't either. In the absence of that school-centered data, it is reasonable to come to their conclusions on the national data set.
I doubt there is much out there to cite. This isn't a medical school anecdote, but it's a similar process.
My sister and someone she went to high school with both went to the same college to pursue physical therapy. When it came time to apply for the physical therapy program after undergrad, my sister was denied while the other girl was accepted. There were only two differences on paper: 1. My sister's GPA was somewhere around 0.3-0.4 points higher; and 2. The other girl is a minority.
It's very hard to imagine they were otherwise exactly the same. How can you know enough about the other woman to know? Maybe her essay or interview were better. Maybe she took harder classes or had better recommendations. Maybe she came from a more difficult background or maybe she didn't need a grant. Maybe she knew someone; maybe someone knew your sister and didn't like her. (No offense to your sister whom I don't know at all.)
There is an important difference between medicine and most other professions.
If, say, Asians are overrepresented among electrical engineers and Blacks are underrepresented compared to the prevalence of those groups in the general population, it doesn't really affect those who will use the devices designed by those electrical engineers. My iPhone works the same for me regardless of whether or not the people who designed the circuits look like me, or in the same community as me, or have the same culture as me. We should still look at the demographics of electrical engineers, of course, to see if it is due to discrimination, but if it turns out that, say, Asian cultural values just tend to make Asians more likely than other groups to go into electrical engineering, that's not inherently a problem.
With doctors it is different. People want a doctor that understands their culture and community, because culture and community can have big influences on their health choices. Doctor demographics being too far from general population demographics is an inherent problem, even if it is not due to any kind of discrimination on medical school or admissions or in the pipeline leading to that.
Harvard also denied discriminating against Jewish applicants before the 70s. Yet Wikipedia says they were one of the worst offenders.
I hate how the article phrases helping underrepresented minorities as hurting Asian Americans. The two things are not related. Universities will discriminate against us even without affirmative action. The Ivy Leagues invented "legacy" and "manliness" as admissions criteria. They will create new forms of discrimination. History repeats. Stop using us as an excuse. Stop driving a wedge between minorities.
The politically charged data holds the potential to reveal whether Harvard bypasses better-qualified Asian-American candidates in favor of whites, blacks and Hispanics, and the children of the wealthy and powerful, the group argues.
The problem is that "better-qualified" is not some absolute measure. I don't think any Ivy League-tier school would say that a formula of SAT+GPA is sufficient. There are several factors that aren't easily measured. For example:
1. Difficulty of high school course load.
2. Extra academic work. For example, if you've solved P=NP while having a 2.0 GPA -- would anyone care about your GPA?
3. Performance in academic-RELATED activities. If you win the IMO or the spelling bee or the Intel Science competition, etc...
4. Performance in non-academic activities. If you have a platinum album, does that matter? Or being a famous actor? Or creating a game changing app? Or becoming a top rated Go player?
4. Performance in athletics. Would being a Lebron James level talent matter? Winning an Olympic gold in gymnastics?
5. Having highly regarded morals, conviction, and courage. Would Malala get special treatment?
6. Socio-economics. All other things being equal, do we favor a student who has had no advantages over those who have had every economic advantage (best schools, tutors, etc..)?
7. Diversity of life experience (especially if exceptional). Would the child of a President have an advantage getting in? What about the experience of anyone that is fundamentally against the norm of most of the population of the incoming class. Maybe they navigated combat missions for the South Korean Navy.
I do think systemically excluding a certain race is a problem. But I don't think using an old notion of merit is much better.
I think that the only data driven conclusion we can derive from "holistic" admissions that consider every factor stems from what happened in California. Most California public colleges (UC Berkeley, etc.) subscribed to the same school of thought, but when race-based considerations were banned, the Asian American percentage at the school shot up considerably.
The colleges were still considering the same criteria for admissions, but once race was removed, a significant increase in Asian American acceptances at the schools occurred. I think it's very hard to argue that Asian Americans failed on your aforementioned categories, or that there wasn't a systematic bias against them when considering these facts.
The colleges were still considering the same criteria for admissions, but once race was removed, a significant increase in Asian American acceptances at the schools occurred.
This may have occurred, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the metrics they used were the only reasonable metrics. I think Harvard would argue that their metrics always looked much different than state schools. And actually that probably cuts to the heart more than anything else:
What is the end goal of the pool of accepted students you bring in? Is it to reward the students for a job well done? Or is it to shape a society? Or is it something altogether different -- or a combination?
I think a lot of people view college admittance as a reward for a job well done. But maybe for top-tier colleges the goal is to create leaders who will shape the future. In which case diversity actually matters a fair bit. Can you get the societal diverse leaders that you want by accepting just Asian and White students? I honestly think the answer is probably no.
Can't 1+2+3 be solved by make your own exam - but make it brutally hard. Like - having no one getting to the top to be expected and a 170 IQ person getting B+. Make it with invisible names.
You admit the first 1000 and have couple of places for people with 4-7 that were very close on the exam but were below the cut off line.
On top of all those very reasonable points, they are building a class. Some characteristic that may be desirable in one, ten or a hundred members of the class may not be desirable in every member of the class. For example, what if you took in all people who were interested in pursuing degrees in mathematics? The math department doesn't have the facilities to teach all those students and the upper class history classes are going to be empty.
It's a matching problem as much or more as it is a ranking problem.
> I don't think any Ivy League-tier school would say that a formula of SAT+GPA is sufficient.
The Technion literally just admits people based on their exam scores, and nothing more. Seems to work for them. There are actually lots of universities in non-American countries that work this way.
... except that, if I understand correctly, neither the donors nor Harvard paid taxes on that $40 billion. So, some of it comes from taxpayers, in the form of taxes that would have been paid if the money had been used for something else.
By that logic, all taxation is inherently morally wrong. I think that should be enough to tell you that your view is unlikely to be correct.
You say the government employs coercion? You are correct; it does. For the greatest part, though, it employs it on those who, in the absence of the government, would themselves use coercion on those weaker than themselves. If you're not the strongest, you want a government to protect you from those stronger than yourself.
If we want a government at all, someone has to pay for it. (If you don't want a government at all, see the previous paragraph. Or see the horrible examples of places that, right now, don't have one.)
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way. But the free rider problem not only starves the government of enough resources to function correctly, it also leads to citizens who are disengaged because they have no skin in the game.
Short of those unworkable extremes, what you probably really want is a much smaller government (like the one laid out in the Constitution, perhaps). It may not be funding government that bugs you; it may be funding that elephant of a government. If that's your position, I'm with you.
If there's going to be taxation, then, let it be fairly applied. Let there be much fewer loopholes, so that arguments about what the government should fund can be out in the open, in the budget process, rather than arguments about the mind-numbingly complex details of the tax code.
By that logic, all taxation is inherently morally wrong.
Compulsory taxation, yes.
I think that should be enough to tell you that your view is unlikely to be correct.
I think the word you're looking for is 'unpopular' ;)
It seems we're largely agreed on the proper purpose of Government - to protect citizens from each other, that is, to protect their rights. But don't you see it as wrong for the Government to violate those very rights in order to fund itself?
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way.
Actually, funding a Government isn't that expensive. If you pare Government back to core functions, you don't need much money. In New Zealand, we (meaning the Libertarianz) estimated it at around $2,500 / working adult / year. That (back at the turn of the 21st century) would get you courts, police, Parliament, defense, embassies and the glue to run it all.
Then you need a way of raising the money. Probably, most working people can afford $2,500 per year to keep civilisation running, especially if they're not paying any other taxes. Maybe a poll tax? Seems reasonable that those paying also do the voting. Could simply solicit donations, or maybe run a lottery.
But no: you couldn't run a socialist country that way. Which is sort of the point :)
Thanks for the discussion. I can only assume the downvotes were from people who disagreed with my argument, and chose to express their disagreement that way. I'm seeing so much of that lately that it's starting to put me off HN.
No, the money didn't come from taxpayers. If Harvard didn't give free tuition, it wouldn't increase the federal budget at all.
Additionally, charitable giving is incredibly consistent (around 2% of GDP). [0] If people didn't donate to Harvard, they would probably donate elsewhere.
I think you really have to stretch it to make this at the cost of taxpayers.
Current system: you take up a student loan. You go to college. After college, you pay the bank back more than the college cost. Bank pockets the interest, at least 25% of the total.
Proposed system: your parents pay taxes that cover less than the college cost (not everyone has kids that go to college). You go to college. Bank gets nothing. After college, your pay more tax than in current system, but you have no student debt, so you total expenses are significantly lower.
Which system do you think is better (assuming you're not a bank)?
The value of one education to future productivity grows with the number of educated people.
So the more people you can educate, the more valuable each educated person is. This is because innovation more commonly occurs with collaboration than without.
The U.S. has already reaped significant windfalls from all the excellent foreign students attending its universities. Create an environment with a high density of trained thinkers, and innovations result. And there may be no limit to the benefits. If we (as a species) could educate everybody up to the limit of their intelligence and imagination, rather than to the depth of their pockets, even a professional futurist would be hard pressed to predict the consequences.
This is one situation where it is very clear how a cartel enforcer can provide an overall benefit to the cartel by enforcing a certain mode of behavior.
But the problem with levying taxes for public schooling is that there is much more to education than just the amount of money you spend on schools.
>The value of one education to future productivity grows with the number of educated people.
It's highly dependent on the kind of education a person receives. For example, we will get much more productivity growth from a typical engineering graduate than philosophy graduate (though we still need some philosophy graduates).
"But the problem with levying taxes for public schooling is that there is much more to education than just the amount of money you spend on schools."
That, and the fact that you're funding a supposedly benevolent institution by threatening people with jail or death should they choose not to pay for it.
That's just one of the many relevant things that government officials do not consider when deciding to increase their budgets for operating schools.
It is a side effect of electing politicians that were never taught to consider the potential consequences of their own actions from the perspective of someone else who may be affected by them. To them, taxes magically appear from happy munchkins who sing about how great it is to pool their resources for the common good, and the only worry is about how to get the politicians from the evil other party to go along with spending the money to do something useful and good this time.
Since public schools rarely teach that there is no such thing as a free lunch, those who are fully schooled are still incompletely educated. I recall being taught in high school that Keynesian macroeconomics were superior to classical macroeconomics, and left without an inkling that Chicago or Austrian macroeconomics even existed.
Who would have thought that a government-funded school might teach me that deficit spending is good for the economy? I wonder if that teacher was paid out of the pocket of someone who didn't want higher taxes, or if he was paid out of the state's credit account?
But that's beside the point. In the transition from a worker-based to a robot-based economy, unskilled labor no longer has any role. Everyone has to, at minimum, be able to design, build, program, repair, or maintain the robots. If you can't train everyone up to the minimum requirements for the jobs that will exist, or remove their absolute need to have a job, you are abandoning them to lives of crime or rent-seeking. Whether you choose to spend the money on education, basic income, or hordes of useless middlemen or criminals, you just can't redesign an economy such that the lifeblood never manages to flow through any of the capillaries. Poor people not only have to eat, but they also have to feel like their lives have meaning.
Do you mean interest free forever, or while in college?
Also, if I may ask, how much of a typical student loan goes to tuition fees? I think interest free student loans to pay for the cost of living while in college is a good system.
Interest free forever, except if you leave the country.
There are minimum repayments, which are skimmed from your paycheck.
About $7000 a year goes to tuition, and about the same on living costs. The government also has a means-tested student allowance, which is based on your parents income, which I'm not eligible for, but replaces the living costs loan (which is a bit bullshit).
I grew up in New Zealand; I'm familiar with the system and think it's great, with one catch: it's funded through coercion.
Why not set up a non-profit and solicit donors, sponsors, etc.? That way you can have all the benefits of interest-free student loans, without the coercion.
I wonder if they still allow the names of admissions candidates to be revealed to the people who review the applications? It seems that hiding this would be a really basic step.
And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
Not saying it's bulletproof; it's not. But it would help. And I can't think of a valid excuse for not doing it.
The principal who hired him told him he was lucky to get the job because they hadn't been planning to take another student teacher. Then Allan's application showed up.
"They scanned through it ... and they saw someone named Jamaal who played basketball, listed Muhammad Ali among his heroes and inspirations, and thought, 'We could use some diversity here, so let's bring this guy on, I think he'd be good for some of our younger minority male students,'" he says.
It was a tangential comment relating to natch saying,
> I wonder if they still allow the names of admissions candidates to be revealed to the people who review the applications? It seems that hiding this would be a really basic step.
> And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
I guess a more relevant point is that if they think your race is relevant to admissions, then they're probably not thinking about removing names from the equation at all. I'd think that they'd happily admit to biases inherent in the process, but at the end of the day they'd argue that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
>they'd argue that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
Better decisions for whom? Perhaps for their friends whose children are applying.
Sure they might argue that, in any case.
And it might even be true, if they were free from all bias, whether conscious or subconscious.
If they think race is relevant, they should just put that right out in the open as a requirement. Especially if they think that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
Harvard can't end racial discrimination in admissions. To get into Harvard, a teenager needs:
1) To know about Harvard and elite universities in general. Believe it or not, research shows that most qualified poor kids don't apply because they don't have any knowledge about the value of an elite education or that places like Harvard exist. Anecodotally, I know a couple of brilliant ones from poor backgrounds who went to their state universities simply because they had no idea there were other options - in fact, it was an imaginative stretch to go to college at all.
2) Family and community support for a college education, much less an expensive elite one far away. Sure, some super-teen can overcome this, but it's a major reason kids don't apply or drop out at high rates. My two friends were constantly asked, why would you want to go to college? Kids in these situations are in alien environments at college (that it seems perfectly normal to white middle-class kids should tell you exactly what environment it is) where they have few people who can relate to them (Edit: and an institution not built for their needs), then they go home and are asked why they are wasting their time and family's money. And as they absorb university life, they also become alienated from people at home who don't have those life experiences or opportunities.
3) Money: There is a very strong relationship between family money and college education.
4) An excellent high school education: Something else that correlates strongly with the family they come from.
5) Connections: It's not what you know, but who you know. Do you think all those kids in Harvard are there on merit? What about the legacies? The big donors' kids? The kids with recommendations from alums? Those aren't avenues available to most kids.
And all these things have a strong racial component. If Harvard can eliminate these factors then sure, why not eliminate affirmative action too?
> Family and community support for a college education, much less an expensive elite one far away. Sure, some super-teen can overcome this, but it's a major reason kids don't apply or drop out at high rates. My two friends were constantly asked, why would you want to go to college? Kids in these situations are in alien environments at college (that it seems perfectly normal to white middle-class kids should tell you exactly what environment it is) where they have few people who can relate to them, then they go home and are asked why they are wasting their time and family's money. And as they absorb university life, they also become alienated from people at home who don't have those life experiences or opportunities.
This feels strangely familiar to me as a guy who moved from a tiny poor-ish European country to Silicon Valley in his late 20's. I know it's not the same, but holy shit, I never thought a random comment on a message board would peg me so well.
At least in my case most of my back-home environment understands the why, even if they do question the rationality of it.
But try to explain to the average Silicon Valley dweller that just ~6 years ago, a $5 purchase was a significant expense, and they have very little to relate to.
There's also an explicit racial component to college admissions that I think plenty of us suspect does actually exist in the form of quotas, higher average scores/academic performance. That part can go pretty easily.
I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal. Which I guess would fall under 'affirmative action.' The typical argument is that colleges want kids who are more 'well-rounded' and Asian kids are stereotyped to be less so.
> The typical argument is that colleges want kids who are more 'well-rounded' and Asian kids are stereotyped to be less so.
I didn't know any college used that argument. Certainly those kids should be judged on their own merits and not on stereotypes.
> I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal.
My point above, which I might not have explained well, is that racial preferences are unavoidable. Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically. (Also, as I point out at the end, Harvard admits students on many factors that aren't due to performance but due to the applicants' families' social networks and wealth.)
The best Harvard can do is manage the situation to make it as fair as possible, which may include balancing the discrimination against some races with preferences in their favor. I can understand arguments either way but I don't think it's realistic to eliminate that component withhout looking at its affect on the whole system.
"well-roundedness" includes all sorts of stuff, like sports (especially WASP-y sports, like things involving boats) as well as volunteering and voluntourism.
If they really wanted to make it as fair as possible, they'd set some minimum admissions standards, and then just select randomly from the set of students who meet those.
Interesting. Googling led me to a post[1] which claimed that Caltech uses a "pure meritocracy" and avoids consideration of race in admissions.
hackuser's original post noted that there are race-based sorting effects outside of the admissions department. To that point, Caltech's admission policy, flaws or merits of it aside, is not a counterexample to hackuser's claim[2]. That's exactly the sort of system hackuser was talking about.
[2] Which I took to be, essentially, "racial discrimination in admissions is inevitable due to selection factors beyond the control of admissions policies."
Are you saying none of these problems could be solved by putting a team of professionals on it? For example, maybe six PR and marketing people working full time for four years couldn't make a dent in #1?
A team of six and four years and a pile of money is unlikely to stack up favorably against an entire life saying that Local U is as high as they can dream of.
#2 empirically cannot be readily addressed by professionals. A number of schools have already adopted the approach you favor - a team of full-time professionals - and the problem persists.
> Are you saying none of these problems could be solved by putting a team of professionals on it? For example, maybe six PR and marketing people working full time for four years couldn't make a dent in #1?
The elite colleges say anyone who gets in will be given affordable tuition, but they must have long known that their applicants come from specific socio-economic groups and therefore they are missing top applicants outside those groups. Why haven't they done much about it? (I can only guess.) Note that it must weaken their student body to miss so many top students.
Issue #1 has received a bunch of broader public attention recently (NY Times articles, etc.), so perhaps that has energized a response; I don't follow it closely enough to know.
I also know that solving #1 without solving #2 results only in a lot of dropouts. I happen to know someone at a good university that mentors a group of students from other backgrounds; the university has developed a detailed program to try to keep them in school.
Finally, I have read that Amherst, many years ago, decided that they would actually make an effort to admit a socio-economically (or maybe just economically; I don't know the details) diverse student body, with great success. That is true public service by an institution.
I always want to comment on articles like this and share my opinion, but then I worry that if mass public opinion shifts or changes a decade from now, everything I've said about a touchy subject will be archived online for any future employer to search. There always seems to be a delicate art to wording one's thoughts in a "neutral" way on issues like this.
I agree it's a concern, but the truth doesn't change with a trend. Slavery was wrong when it was trendy in some places and it's still wrong now that it's not. What do you think of the people who held their tongues? What about the ones that spoke out?
I despise intellectual trends. If it was a good/bad idea before, that hasn't changed because the idea (or the entire subject) became un/fashionable. Privacy is one such issue that comes to mind.
HN has no real name policy. Why not sign up for another account that you use to discuss riskier topics? As long as you're careful to not include identifying details in posts, you should be okay.
Missing out on substantive discourse simply because of fear would make me sad.
I feel in the near future, what we say, buy, and do will be easily available data to anyone. I think employees, Insurers, law enforcement, etc. will be able to tie data to specific IP's, and even if you have been careful not to use your real name--it won't matter.
I think we need federal laws enacted protecting privacy. I would like to see a universal Delete law. Meaning if I wanted everything from my IP address, or my name permently deleted from Facebook, Google, etc. servers they would be required to do so. It would also be a felony to sell, or even give away data.
That is sad. People grow, people mature. Most of us say/do things that we regret years later - it shows that the person has matured compared to 10 years ago.
If an employer rejects an applicant because of some comments they made 10 years ago, maybe one should think twice about working for that employer?
Not to rain on your parade, but it's gone beyond things you say online. Ask the two gentlemen who lost their jobs for making a dongle joke/repo forking joke at PyCon. They're named and shamed for the rest of their lives because somebody objected to a private conversation they were having.
Because your birth certificate lists your first name as Xcelerate? At least you didn't list your full name as it appears on your resume 'Xcelerate Bartholomew Jones'
Less sarcastically, at least here on hacker news you're as anonymous as you want to be. A future employer isn't going to find any comments you post if you remain as anonymous as you currently are.
I notice that, generally, the same political groups who want to eliminate race in admissions also want to stop immigration from Mexico and Syria, and to make it more difficult for non-white people to vote.
They always frame it in terms of 'fairness', but I see another pattern. Does anyone really believe they are motivated by fairness? There are people facing far more unfairness in the world and in the U.S. than wealthy white and Asian college applicants - I don't see these groups paying much attention to them.
Perhaps what outrages people about Trump is that he says what many others in his party say, but doesn't use the dog-whistle[1] coded bulls*t words to cover it up.
Invoking a generalization about "the HN crowd" as a rhetorical device in an argument isn't really legit. You're as much part of that "crowd" as anyone, and such generalizations are mostly just bias (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10889615), which explains why the comments that diss the community routinely contradict each other.
Of course, but there are multiple collectives. On hot divisive issues, both sides routinely get flagged. Neither side is "the HN community", though each sees the other that way. That's not objective; it's a cognitive bias, and it leads people to get angrier at each other and at the community because they feel the community is against them.
In reality, on most issues where society is divided, HN is also divided, with a few exceptions (like mass surveillance) where there's a fairly clear skew.
The thing that is never, ever talked about in these discussions is "geographic diversity", or "discrimination" as these folks would see it. Harvard could fill its entire freshman class each year with students from east coast private prep schools. They will never do that because it is just bad for diversity in general. A less qualified student from a public school in Iowa (regardless of race) will eventually get a spot at Harvard over yet another rich kid from a private school in the northeast. Diversity of all kinds is important, and since this article talks about "the children of the wealthy and powerful", they must also talk about the children of the middle class in other parts of the country that will indeed get selected over these elite kids just because they are a "fresh face from the Heartland".
To flesh out one aspect of that: Diversity is valuable to the students. Where would you rather get educated: A school with people from all over the world and from all socio-economic backgrounds, or a school only with people from your hometown?
"And if Harvard abolishes tuition for undergrads, Mr. Nader said, “It will ricochet across the Ivy League.”
And similar top schools, especially private schools in and outside of the Ivy League. My first question would be what impact would this have on schools that actually depend on tuition to pay for things, those that aren't Harvard/Princeton/etc that don't have as huge endowments per student? Would the gap between the quality of the average student widen further between the very very top schools and the other top schools, further entrenching the status quo?
I'm not sure how this would change the gap between top schools and super top schools. Most of the top students at A tier schools already applied and got rejected by S tier schools in the current environment. So the quality of students theoretically doesn't change. What am I missing in your logic here?
Students who got into S schools would have even more reason to go to them over A tier schools. All students would have even more reason to apply to S tier schools. A tier schools, who depend more on tuition dollars and would need to charge or find other sources of funding (likely without much success- governments have been cutting funding for decades, they're all already tapping private sources as much as they can). S tier schools would become comparably less desirable. This loop would continue (other than schools who try not to charge but depend on tuition dollars falling into the A range).
"Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have proposed requiring that about 90 colleges with endowments of $1 billion or more spend about 25 percent of their annual earnings for tuition assistance — or forfeit their tax exemptions."
That seems like a rational requirement. Does anyone know what institutions like Harvard currently do with their annual earnings from endowments?
Build, build and build. My campus is completely unrecognizable from 10 years ago as they keep putting up glamorous new buildings, including a 2nd (2nd!!) art museum.
No, it does not seem like a rational requirement. It's also none of our business what these institutions do with their earnings. Most of us will never go to Harvard and we need to get over it, regardless of our race.
Lots of angst in this article on university admission could be avoided if selection was thought of as a chance to get in, instead of automatic entry and a right.
The problem of affirmative action is complicated by several things.
One, it is by definition discrimination by race. You are giving preferential treatment to people based on skin color.
Two, it creates distrust between students of different colors. If you know that some black students are accepted based on skin color rather than ability, then you'll start to suspect that the black students in your class didn't earn their ride to college, so to speak. In extreme cases, if you've been denied entry to Harvard, you may suspect that you were left out to leave room for a less-qualified but more "diverse" student.
These two issues combine to not only make affirmative action hypocritical, but also to make it actively harmful. Affirmative action doesn't "fix" racism, it encourages it.
124 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] thread“There is a common misconception that endowments, including Harvard’s, can be accessed like bank accounts, used for anything at any time as long as funds are available,” Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman, said. “In reality, Harvard’s flexibility in spending from the endowment is limited by the fact that it must be maintained in perpetuity and that it is largely restricted by the explicit wishes of those who contributed the endowed funds.”
2. It's possible that the returns from the principal are also restricted.
2. That is why Harvard hasn't already done it, apparently.
http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...
Huh, but it doesn't specify whether this is inflation-adjusted.
Besides, they can't plan on using the maximum from the endowment every year, because the endowment sometimes grows less than usual, or even shrinks.
Disclaimer: not a Harvard grad
I know I didn't apply to several schools merely out of exhaustion of trying to figure out how to not have to pay the application fee.
Nevertheless, if schools have any control over the "front-end" fees, they might ought to start by eliminating those. Knowing that one needs to send an email like that is also a barrier of a sort.
A proposition like this is really exciting to me! As a recent college grad (though admittedly one who's very lucky to not have loans, though my partner is screwed with them), I am particularly sensitive how how insane it is that college students are sold massive amounts of debt that many will take years to pay back. And a lot of new systems to help students pay them back are ineffective at best and disgusting at worst.
I am intrigued to see what the other motives are here. I doubt that there will be much change in how students pay back college debt, but we do need some sort of real change. I would be really excited to see a cultural shift away from profiteering from student debt.
This cheats both parties in any college admission as the best and brightest may not be able to meet on even ground and you slight those who are pulled up by placing in a situation where they will likely end up dead last in achievement because fellow students just do so much better. That last alone cannot be easily discounted simply for the psychological effects of placing low
There you go
To take it to an extreme, I don't bother verifying claims made by neonazis. AEI is obviously not that bad, but it's also not good enough for me to care.
What kind of amateur mistakes can AEI make? Well for one, I bet this analysis of the data falls victim to Simpson's paradox. Basic shit like that happens all the time in their analyses.
This isn't a false claim.
The AEI source even acknowledges that Simpson's paradox prevents one from drawing conclusions (also please note the rhetorical quotation marks):
> The AAMC doesn’t provide acceptance data by individual medical school, so we can’t conclude that any of the four medical schools at public universities in Michigan (University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne State and Oakland University) are practicing illegal “affirmative discrimination” or “racial profiling” in admissions
But quickly pivots, pretending like this doesn't matter:
> "Based on national data, is there any conclusion other than the obvious one – that US medical schools are granting special preferences for admissions on the basis of race for certain preferred minority groups (blacks and Hispanics) over other non-preferred minority groups (Asians) and whites"
Yes. Simpson's paradox. The data is consistent with schools being discriminatory in favor of whites if white people tend to apply only to selective schools, for example. This is why I don't bother with the playschool polemical bullshit that comes out of AEI. They ignore basic facts about statistical inference in order to push their views.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
P.S. Looks like I got roped into reading their blog post anyway. I guess my plan to save my time and patience failed.
That's probably one of the worst sentences that's ever been uttered in the english language, because it lets you dismiss an argument by assuming that because it involves math it must be manipulated and therefore bullshit.
My sister and someone she went to high school with both went to the same college to pursue physical therapy. When it came time to apply for the physical therapy program after undergrad, my sister was denied while the other girl was accepted. There were only two differences on paper: 1. My sister's GPA was somewhere around 0.3-0.4 points higher; and 2. The other girl is a minority.
If, say, Asians are overrepresented among electrical engineers and Blacks are underrepresented compared to the prevalence of those groups in the general population, it doesn't really affect those who will use the devices designed by those electrical engineers. My iPhone works the same for me regardless of whether or not the people who designed the circuits look like me, or in the same community as me, or have the same culture as me. We should still look at the demographics of electrical engineers, of course, to see if it is due to discrimination, but if it turns out that, say, Asian cultural values just tend to make Asians more likely than other groups to go into electrical engineering, that's not inherently a problem.
With doctors it is different. People want a doctor that understands their culture and community, because culture and community can have big influences on their health choices. Doctor demographics being too far from general population demographics is an inherent problem, even if it is not due to any kind of discrimination on medical school or admissions or in the pipeline leading to that.
I hate how the article phrases helping underrepresented minorities as hurting Asian Americans. The two things are not related. Universities will discriminate against us even without affirmative action. The Ivy Leagues invented "legacy" and "manliness" as admissions criteria. They will create new forms of discrimination. History repeats. Stop using us as an excuse. Stop driving a wedge between minorities.
Some links from wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
They're related in the underlying implication that it's best to treat applicants as groups and not individuals.
But you could be fair with certain minorities and unfair with others. There is not a direct cause and effect relationship there.
But the people who equate the two don't actually care about Asian Americans. They are making a political argument.
[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html
[2] https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2007/12/11/harvard-takes-ano...
The problem is that "better-qualified" is not some absolute measure. I don't think any Ivy League-tier school would say that a formula of SAT+GPA is sufficient. There are several factors that aren't easily measured. For example:
1. Difficulty of high school course load.
2. Extra academic work. For example, if you've solved P=NP while having a 2.0 GPA -- would anyone care about your GPA?
3. Performance in academic-RELATED activities. If you win the IMO or the spelling bee or the Intel Science competition, etc...
4. Performance in non-academic activities. If you have a platinum album, does that matter? Or being a famous actor? Or creating a game changing app? Or becoming a top rated Go player?
4. Performance in athletics. Would being a Lebron James level talent matter? Winning an Olympic gold in gymnastics?
5. Having highly regarded morals, conviction, and courage. Would Malala get special treatment?
6. Socio-economics. All other things being equal, do we favor a student who has had no advantages over those who have had every economic advantage (best schools, tutors, etc..)?
7. Diversity of life experience (especially if exceptional). Would the child of a President have an advantage getting in? What about the experience of anyone that is fundamentally against the norm of most of the population of the incoming class. Maybe they navigated combat missions for the South Korean Navy.
I do think systemically excluding a certain race is a problem. But I don't think using an old notion of merit is much better.
The colleges were still considering the same criteria for admissions, but once race was removed, a significant increase in Asian American acceptances at the schools occurred. I think it's very hard to argue that Asian Americans failed on your aforementioned categories, or that there wasn't a systematic bias against them when considering these facts.
This may have occurred, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the metrics they used were the only reasonable metrics. I think Harvard would argue that their metrics always looked much different than state schools. And actually that probably cuts to the heart more than anything else:
What is the end goal of the pool of accepted students you bring in? Is it to reward the students for a job well done? Or is it to shape a society? Or is it something altogether different -- or a combination?
I think a lot of people view college admittance as a reward for a job well done. But maybe for top-tier colleges the goal is to create leaders who will shape the future. In which case diversity actually matters a fair bit. Can you get the societal diverse leaders that you want by accepting just Asian and White students? I honestly think the answer is probably no.
You admit the first 1000 and have couple of places for people with 4-7 that were very close on the exam but were below the cut off line.
It's a matching problem as much or more as it is a ranking problem.
The Technion literally just admits people based on their exam scores, and nothing more. Seems to work for them. There are actually lots of universities in non-American countries that work this way.
It's their money, and ought to be theirs to do with as they please.
Those who would force them to spend it on something else are the people employing coercion. It's they who are in the wrong, morally.
You say the government employs coercion? You are correct; it does. For the greatest part, though, it employs it on those who, in the absence of the government, would themselves use coercion on those weaker than themselves. If you're not the strongest, you want a government to protect you from those stronger than yourself.
If we want a government at all, someone has to pay for it. (If you don't want a government at all, see the previous paragraph. Or see the horrible examples of places that, right now, don't have one.)
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way. But the free rider problem not only starves the government of enough resources to function correctly, it also leads to citizens who are disengaged because they have no skin in the game.
Short of those unworkable extremes, what you probably really want is a much smaller government (like the one laid out in the Constitution, perhaps). It may not be funding government that bugs you; it may be funding that elephant of a government. If that's your position, I'm with you.
If there's going to be taxation, then, let it be fairly applied. Let there be much fewer loopholes, so that arguments about what the government should fund can be out in the open, in the budget process, rather than arguments about the mind-numbingly complex details of the tax code.
Compulsory taxation, yes.
I think that should be enough to tell you that your view is unlikely to be correct.
I think the word you're looking for is 'unpopular' ;)
It seems we're largely agreed on the proper purpose of Government - to protect citizens from each other, that is, to protect their rights. But don't you see it as wrong for the Government to violate those very rights in order to fund itself?
Do you want a government paid for entirely by voluntary contributions? Good luck with getting enough money that way.
Actually, funding a Government isn't that expensive. If you pare Government back to core functions, you don't need much money. In New Zealand, we (meaning the Libertarianz) estimated it at around $2,500 / working adult / year. That (back at the turn of the 21st century) would get you courts, police, Parliament, defense, embassies and the glue to run it all.
Then you need a way of raising the money. Probably, most working people can afford $2,500 per year to keep civilisation running, especially if they're not paying any other taxes. Maybe a poll tax? Seems reasonable that those paying also do the voting. Could simply solicit donations, or maybe run a lottery.
But no: you couldn't run a socialist country that way. Which is sort of the point :)
Sure. But how many of those who can afford it will send it in voluntarily? I seem to be more cynical than you; my answer is "not enough".
Additionally, charitable giving is incredibly consistent (around 2% of GDP). [0] If people didn't donate to Harvard, they would probably donate elsewhere.
I think you really have to stretch it to make this at the cost of taxpayers.
[0] https://philanthropy.com/article/The-Stubborn-2-Giving-Rate/...
Proposed system: your parents pay taxes that cover less than the college cost (not everyone has kids that go to college). You go to college. Bank gets nothing. After college, your pay more tax than in current system, but you have no student debt, so you total expenses are significantly lower.
Which system do you think is better (assuming you're not a bank)?
- solicit money from rich donors (as seems to be the case here)
- adopt policies to drive down the cost of quality education, instead of making it more expensive as has been the case for the past many years
- establish charitable scholarships, funded by donations, sponsorships, etc.
- establish non-profit mutual societies to lend money to students at cost price
There are many options that don't involve holding a gun to people to demand they pay for the education of others.
So the more people you can educate, the more valuable each educated person is. This is because innovation more commonly occurs with collaboration than without.
The U.S. has already reaped significant windfalls from all the excellent foreign students attending its universities. Create an environment with a high density of trained thinkers, and innovations result. And there may be no limit to the benefits. If we (as a species) could educate everybody up to the limit of their intelligence and imagination, rather than to the depth of their pockets, even a professional futurist would be hard pressed to predict the consequences.
This is one situation where it is very clear how a cartel enforcer can provide an overall benefit to the cartel by enforcing a certain mode of behavior.
But the problem with levying taxes for public schooling is that there is much more to education than just the amount of money you spend on schools.
It's highly dependent on the kind of education a person receives. For example, we will get much more productivity growth from a typical engineering graduate than philosophy graduate (though we still need some philosophy graduates).
That, and the fact that you're funding a supposedly benevolent institution by threatening people with jail or death should they choose not to pay for it.
It is a side effect of electing politicians that were never taught to consider the potential consequences of their own actions from the perspective of someone else who may be affected by them. To them, taxes magically appear from happy munchkins who sing about how great it is to pool their resources for the common good, and the only worry is about how to get the politicians from the evil other party to go along with spending the money to do something useful and good this time.
Since public schools rarely teach that there is no such thing as a free lunch, those who are fully schooled are still incompletely educated. I recall being taught in high school that Keynesian macroeconomics were superior to classical macroeconomics, and left without an inkling that Chicago or Austrian macroeconomics even existed.
Who would have thought that a government-funded school might teach me that deficit spending is good for the economy? I wonder if that teacher was paid out of the pocket of someone who didn't want higher taxes, or if he was paid out of the state's credit account?
But that's beside the point. In the transition from a worker-based to a robot-based economy, unskilled labor no longer has any role. Everyone has to, at minimum, be able to design, build, program, repair, or maintain the robots. If you can't train everyone up to the minimum requirements for the jobs that will exist, or remove their absolute need to have a job, you are abandoning them to lives of crime or rent-seeking. Whether you choose to spend the money on education, basic income, or hordes of useless middlemen or criminals, you just can't redesign an economy such that the lifeblood never manages to flow through any of the capillaries. Poor people not only have to eat, but they also have to feel like their lives have meaning.
That way user pays, but user doesn't get gouged.
It works well enough here in New Zealand. Your student loan is interest free here, unless you go overseas for more than 6 months.
Also, if I may ask, how much of a typical student loan goes to tuition fees? I think interest free student loans to pay for the cost of living while in college is a good system.
There are minimum repayments, which are skimmed from your paycheck.
About $7000 a year goes to tuition, and about the same on living costs. The government also has a means-tested student allowance, which is based on your parents income, which I'm not eligible for, but replaces the living costs loan (which is a bit bullshit).
Why not set up a non-profit and solicit donors, sponsors, etc.? That way you can have all the benefits of interest-free student loans, without the coercion.
And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
Not saying it's bulletproof; it's not. But it would help. And I can't think of a valid excuse for not doing it.
6 Words: 'My Name Is Jamaal ... I'm White'
...
The principal who hired him told him he was lucky to get the job because they hadn't been planning to take another student teacher. Then Allan's application showed up.
"They scanned through it ... and they saw someone named Jamaal who played basketball, listed Muhammad Ali among his heroes and inspirations, and thought, 'We could use some diversity here, so let's bring this guy on, I think he'd be good for some of our younger minority male students,'" he says.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/06/404432206/six-words-my-name-is...
> I wonder if they still allow the names of admissions candidates to be revealed to the people who review the applications? It seems that hiding this would be a really basic step.
> And no I'm not saying that a name tells you the race. But sometimes it is an indication.
I guess a more relevant point is that if they think your race is relevant to admissions, then they're probably not thinking about removing names from the equation at all. I'd think that they'd happily admit to biases inherent in the process, but at the end of the day they'd argue that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
Better decisions for whom? Perhaps for their friends whose children are applying.
Sure they might argue that, in any case.
And it might even be true, if they were free from all bias, whether conscious or subconscious.
If they think race is relevant, they should just put that right out in the open as a requirement. Especially if they think that more information will allow them to make better decisions than less.
1) To know about Harvard and elite universities in general. Believe it or not, research shows that most qualified poor kids don't apply because they don't have any knowledge about the value of an elite education or that places like Harvard exist. Anecodotally, I know a couple of brilliant ones from poor backgrounds who went to their state universities simply because they had no idea there were other options - in fact, it was an imaginative stretch to go to college at all.
2) Family and community support for a college education, much less an expensive elite one far away. Sure, some super-teen can overcome this, but it's a major reason kids don't apply or drop out at high rates. My two friends were constantly asked, why would you want to go to college? Kids in these situations are in alien environments at college (that it seems perfectly normal to white middle-class kids should tell you exactly what environment it is) where they have few people who can relate to them (Edit: and an institution not built for their needs), then they go home and are asked why they are wasting their time and family's money. And as they absorb university life, they also become alienated from people at home who don't have those life experiences or opportunities.
3) Money: There is a very strong relationship between family money and college education.
4) An excellent high school education: Something else that correlates strongly with the family they come from.
5) Connections: It's not what you know, but who you know. Do you think all those kids in Harvard are there on merit? What about the legacies? The big donors' kids? The kids with recommendations from alums? Those aren't avenues available to most kids.
And all these things have a strong racial component. If Harvard can eliminate these factors then sure, why not eliminate affirmative action too?
This feels strangely familiar to me as a guy who moved from a tiny poor-ish European country to Silicon Valley in his late 20's. I know it's not the same, but holy shit, I never thought a random comment on a message board would peg me so well.
At least in my case most of my back-home environment understands the why, even if they do question the rationality of it.
But try to explain to the average Silicon Valley dweller that just ~6 years ago, a $5 purchase was a significant expense, and they have very little to relate to.
> But they have tied the notion to another equally provocative question: Does Harvard shortchange Asian-American applicants in admissions?
I didn't know any college used that argument. Certainly those kids should be judged on their own merits and not on stereotypes.
> I mean the preference for other races besides Asian when academic performance is held equal.
My point above, which I might not have explained well, is that racial preferences are unavoidable. Academic performance can't be held equal because the various applicants are competing on playing fields that can differ radically. (Also, as I point out at the end, Harvard admits students on many factors that aren't due to performance but due to the applicants' families' social networks and wealth.)
The best Harvard can do is manage the situation to make it as fair as possible, which may include balancing the discrimination against some races with preferences in their favor. I can understand arguments either way but I don't think it's realistic to eliminate that component withhout looking at its affect on the whole system.
Caltech manages to do this just fine. So does UC Berkeley. Harvard could stop racism if it wanted to.
hackuser's original post noted that there are race-based sorting effects outside of the admissions department. To that point, Caltech's admission policy, flaws or merits of it aside, is not a counterexample to hackuser's claim[2]. That's exactly the sort of system hackuser was talking about.
[1] http://jadeluckclub.com/caltech-meritocracy-from-the-america...
[2] Which I took to be, essentially, "racial discrimination in admissions is inevitable due to selection factors beyond the control of admissions policies."
EDIT: readability.
#2 empirically cannot be readily addressed by professionals. A number of schools have already adopted the approach you favor - a team of full-time professionals - and the problem persists.
The elite colleges say anyone who gets in will be given affordable tuition, but they must have long known that their applicants come from specific socio-economic groups and therefore they are missing top applicants outside those groups. Why haven't they done much about it? (I can only guess.) Note that it must weaken their student body to miss so many top students.
Issue #1 has received a bunch of broader public attention recently (NY Times articles, etc.), so perhaps that has energized a response; I don't follow it closely enough to know.
I also know that solving #1 without solving #2 results only in a lot of dropouts. I happen to know someone at a good university that mentors a group of students from other backgrounds; the university has developed a detailed program to try to keep them in school.
Finally, I have read that Amherst, many years ago, decided that they would actually make an effort to admit a socio-economically (or maybe just economically; I don't know the details) diverse student body, with great success. That is true public service by an institution.
I despise intellectual trends. If it was a good/bad idea before, that hasn't changed because the idea (or the entire subject) became un/fashionable. Privacy is one such issue that comes to mind.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904615
Missing out on substantive discourse simply because of fear would make me sad.
I think we need federal laws enacted protecting privacy. I would like to see a universal Delete law. Meaning if I wanted everything from my IP address, or my name permently deleted from Facebook, Google, etc. servers they would be required to do so. It would also be a felony to sell, or even give away data.
If an employer rejects an applicant because of some comments they made 10 years ago, maybe one should think twice about working for that employer?
Less sarcastically, at least here on hacker news you're as anonymous as you want to be. A future employer isn't going to find any comments you post if you remain as anonymous as you currently are.
They always frame it in terms of 'fairness', but I see another pattern. Does anyone really believe they are motivated by fairness? There are people facing far more unfairness in the world and in the U.S. than wealthy white and Asian college applicants - I don't see these groups paying much attention to them.
Perhaps what outrages people about Trump is that he says what many others in his party say, but doesn't use the dog-whistle[1] coded bulls*t words to cover it up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
For example, elephantinthevalley got killed and reposted multiple times.
In reality, on most issues where society is divided, HN is also divided, with a few exceptions (like mass surveillance) where there's a fairly clear skew.
And similar top schools, especially private schools in and outside of the Ivy League. My first question would be what impact would this have on schools that actually depend on tuition to pay for things, those that aren't Harvard/Princeton/etc that don't have as huge endowments per student? Would the gap between the quality of the average student widen further between the very very top schools and the other top schools, further entrenching the status quo?
I meant A tier schools.
That seems like a rational requirement. Does anyone know what institutions like Harvard currently do with their annual earnings from endowments?
Barry Swartz, in my view wrote the definitive article about the mess elite university is in. Read it, "Do College Admissions by Lottery"~ http://nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/31/how-to-improve-t...
Still getting wound up about credentials? ~ http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
One, it is by definition discrimination by race. You are giving preferential treatment to people based on skin color.
Two, it creates distrust between students of different colors. If you know that some black students are accepted based on skin color rather than ability, then you'll start to suspect that the black students in your class didn't earn their ride to college, so to speak. In extreme cases, if you've been denied entry to Harvard, you may suspect that you were left out to leave room for a less-qualified but more "diverse" student.
These two issues combine to not only make affirmative action hypocritical, but also to make it actively harmful. Affirmative action doesn't "fix" racism, it encourages it.