The article goes astray in the very first paragraph. "Even after decades of affirmative action." The period starts after the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents v. Bakke which put significant limits on how affirmative action programs can be structured. More generally, the entire 35-year period (starting 1982) takes place during a conservative retrenching from the civil rights era.
We're going to play poker. Everyone will start with a randomly determined number of chips. But people whose HN handles start with A-H will get, on average, 40% less to start with. Aside from that tiny nit, it'll be a totally fair game.
As a big proponent of civil rights and the whole civil rights movement I hope that I'm not misunderstood.
Reverse discrimination refers to discriminating against say non-hispanic white males because they are non-hispanic white or male. It seems obvious to me that making admission choices to increase minority representation at universities is tautologically decreasing the representation of other groups and is reverse discrimination. The question to me is, "Is this a good thing?".
Here in Texas, it works in a way that is not quite obvious. The University of Texas as Austin is a desirable state University. It was once all white (1950), clearly race was being used to discriminate against minority applicants--an unfair and condemnable practice. By 1996, the University, in an attempt to increase minority representation, had been using race as one of the factors in admission, blacks with lower academic scores were admitted ahead of whites with the same scores (clearly reverse discrimination). In 1996, Federal Appeals court ruled against the University and for a white student that made that claim.
The University stopped considering race, but minority representation started to drop and the University found a way in 1997 to discriminate between applicants to change the minority representation again, this time without explicitly mentioning race. It automatically admitted the top 10% of every high school graduating class, regardless of actual academic achievement. This discriminated against the high schools with high performing students. Since these schools were usually found in more expensive suburban neighborhoods that had well funded school districts and mostly white student bodies (so although there was no longer any explicit reverse discrimination, it still produced the same result, minority students were being admitted with lower test scores, etc).
This practice of admitting students based on where they went to high school helped but didn't completely achieve the goals that UT had for the make up of it's student body. In 2003, UT began to use race in addition to the 10% rule and now discriminates in favor of minorities that do not automatically qualify under the modified top 7% rule, this has resulted in a number of law suits that race based discrimination is happening, which it clearly is.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. I detest the idea that race is used to discriminate against anybody including groups like Jews, Asians, and whites. I live in a school district that has a very high performing public high school. A friend recently got perfect scores on the SAT and I believe that he got very close to a perfect score on the ACT. He had a very high GPA and was a varsity athlete on a top rank team. He now attends Stanford, but was only around the top 13% of his graduating class. He didn't even bother to apply to the University of Texas. No one needs to feel sorry for him, he's a genius going to Stanford; I feel sorry for so many of his classmates that would have been very successful at an affordable University that can't get in despite working so hard in high school.
Please, college acceptance here is more like giving the C-J folks a pass on their first 2 blinds. College acceptance isn't like we're taxing people based on race.
And what of studies that give evidence for racial biases in standardized testing?
Your suggestions are all well and good, but do you see any of those happening soon? It's not like anyone is even remotely discussing this anywhere and with the current administration, it sure isn't happening soon at a federal level.
The question becomes if affirmative action is better than nothing at all.
Word, but I think it underlines a real problem. For some people with low chances of losing in the game (trust fund, property, stable family, no prior convictions, etc) life can be a game about maximizing gains. For others it's toothe and nail. When the rules of the game are historically set by people who are already too stable to really lose, it's the "weaker" players who get exploited.
I would add to this that making the system fairer will inherently decrease the chances for the higher starting players. That is because they had a higher chance to start with. The lowering of their chances is not a bad thing, it is perfectly just. But it's hard to get those players to accept that when they are starting from that position of power.
When you phrase it that way, it sounds like you think it's hopeless to have a system with objectively fair rules.
Notwithstanding the probably uninspired resulting college environment, I think it would be hypothetically fair to admit people solely based on their standardized test scores without any other consideration. The admission standard while somewhat arbitrary would be clear, such that anyone who wants to get admitted could work towards it.
If someone is provided with a substandard K-12 education, it would make it harder to work towards admission. In that case, maybe we should look into the K-12 environment. Maybe it turns out that it's not as much the K-12 environment, and it's actually home life. Maybe home life issues are related to incarceration or maybe they're hereditary. I think this is what an effort to root-cause the problem would look like. When you find the root causes, then you could provide help for anyone with that root cause problem.
I do think a fair system can't exist, but I'm very fearful of moving towards a libertarian meritocratic system that fails to consider many of the issue you bring up. There's a guy up above going hard on genetic IQ differences making a nuanced claim that higher IQs are more valuable and thus deserving of more merit. Is that a fair system?
I see where you're coming from. I can get on board with that; we can address root causes before needing to remove these fixes/patches. Though I think we should keep both things in mind; perhaps the day can be celebrated when we can remove affirmative action programs.
Every individual black/Hispanic person is born with exactly 40% less wealth than every white/Asian person? It's time to re-evaluate your life choices when you think it's a good thing to promote blanket race-baiting stereotypes.
So you're saying individuals' wealth may differ from the average of other people sharing their skin color? Too bad we can't measure a person's wealth directly and have to rely on racist hysteria as a proxy.
Discrimination can't be "solved" because 1. People are genetically different and 2. Anyone can have biases about anything. I could shut down every interviewee with big ears, or beady eyes, if I wanted to.
Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.
+1; and, even if poster above had a proposed methodology for proving discrimination, he couldn't show how such discrimination, over a population of hundreds of millions over decades and over trillions of minute decisions, nets out, since discrimination runs in all directions at all times.
I encourage you to teach a science course for non-majors at a local university that serves minorities. Unless you are intentionally blind the experience will be enlightening. The variation in quality of high schools in the US is astounding and needs to be experienced first-hand.
Where does the talk about genetic variation and unconscious bias even come from? It's not relevant in this context.
That's like saying I need to go live in a bad neighborhood to understand they are bad. Or that I need to do opiates firsthand to understand they feel good.
I 100% realize that there is massive variation in high school quality. It doesn't astound me. [1]
What does that have to do with making college admissions fair and standardized?
> Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.
Another ground breaking discovery! Everyone has equal opportunity in this world. Poverty, discrimination and access to quality education are completely fictional. Keep these thoughts coming man, I'm writing you up for the Noble Prize.
Why can't we prioritize overhauling systematic oppression by calling attention to it and occasionally giving advantages to people who have historically been disadvantaged?
What other way? The one where some people have enormous structural disadvantages due to decades or more of discrimination? We agree it doesn't work, but many people get angry and defensive when we try and create systems that are fair enough to take this into account, like affirmative action policies.
Because the input of applicants is the original problem. Affirmative action is intended to select more from the limited applicants, which in the end is a small effect in comparison to getting more black/hispanic students who are able to go college at all. Solving that takes a lot more, and affirmative action is attempting to stopgap for that.
Entry into an orchestra isn't something that is cost prohibitive for an economic class of individuals.
Applicants to orchestras likely enjoy a certain level of affluence given how demanding the required practice is for performers. Musical performers enjoy slightly less systematic discrimination throughout their careers and technkal musical ability is something that is largely self-taught meaning that the applicants to orchestras are more likely to share similar levels of abilities at the stage of auditioning for an orchestra whereas college applicants are more likely to express difference at the time of application due to systematic discrimination throughout their educational trajectory.
Playing in an orchestra doesn't share the same grave weight of attending college in careerist society where college is increasingly necessary. The demand is higher for college, and the supply can reflect that.
Orchestras arnt a part of a massive industry tied to sports, science, defense, state subsidies etc...
None of those are reasons not to try it. It worked well on a smaller scale and hasn't been tried on any sort of larger scale.
Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. I personally love the idea of bling hiring in orchestras, in technology jobs, and in college admissions.
People's upbringings are never going to be fair. Nor is their potential, if we're being honest. But moving the admissions goalposts all over trying to make everything more "diverse," when that's really just a racist codeword for "skin color," is not a valid answer to me.
This is simplistic, but a weighted average of standardized test scores + being in a top percentage of your graduating class (regardless of school quality) is already going to give you a lot of genuine diversity.
> Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here.
...People's upbringings are never going to be fair.
Maybe you value it less than others, and that's why you're willing to give up on a whole section of the playing field so easily?
If you don't think a fair playing field is achievable then why pretend you care more and are working harder to achieve it than others, instead of admitting that you're focusing your energy elsewhere?
A fair starting point is not achievable without everyone being clones, and very likely not even then.
I care more about equal opportunity than others, because equal opportunity means truly treating people fairly and in a standardized way at a policy level, rather than discriminating based on skin color, gender or ethnicity.
Equal treatment is in no way the same thing as equal opportunity or a level playing field. So you care deeply about equal treatment and think that a level playing field/equal opportunity is unimportant. I disagree, but you might have more productive conversations if you use the terminology correctly.
No man, its not going to give you genuine diversity. It's going to give you a bunch of people who score well in classes and according to standards that the standard creators determined. The standards are often blind to the cultural nuances of the questions themselves and often reward those who belong to the normative culture. It's the same problem with IQ tests. I don't want the people in college to be all the people who scored top of their class in AP history and AP econ, I want to also see the kids who struggled through the extreme boredom of those classes while having underground poetry meetings after school or having other interests other than those rewarded by the schoolastic institution.
No, it isn't. It would be hypocritical to say "slavery is bad and it was done to black people so we should make white people slaves now". It is not hypocritical to say "black people were mistreated because of their race and this has disadvantaged them as a group, here are some ways to make up for that previous treatment". If one kid gets singled out at school to be beaten up, it is not hypocritical to single him out for medical treatment afterwards. You are not giving him medical treatment because he is a nerd/funny looking/unlucky,you are reacting to the situation he is in now because of past unfairness.
I bet it's all those pesky good for nothing lazy asians that spend their entire time doing useless things like studying and trying to make it in life. They're the reason smart and honest blacks and hispanics are being pushed out of top universities. We really need to do something about this.
Honestly I appreciate competing views. Sure Asians seem to push academic excellence. Some parents push sports, some push military, Asians push academics which results in them going to highly elite schools. No Asians are not elite they just focus on books. Calm down.
Amazing how quickly the proportion of whites dropped in a mere 35 years, in every single one of those charts. Pretty soon they'll have to get used to being a minority in the US as well.
To fix inequality of opportunities one would be well advised to start with the way k-12 schools are funded. It's too late for most disadvantaged students by the time they are old enough to go to college.
Tying such a large percentage of funding to the property wealth of the community ensures the poor remain under educated without access to upward mobility. I cringe thinking what effect this had in the Jim Crow era.
SO just went through a school like one you mention. Yes, it was really bad, and yes, admin had a lot to do with it. Yes, funding was an issue, a big one, but not the main one.
Want to fix it?
Go to your next PTA meeting, become a coach on a team there, volunteer with the local school, get involved, today. Do you even know where your kids would go to school from the place you live (speaking to HN in general)?
This is a democracy, you must participate for it to function at all. Sitting there screaming at the internet and the Moldavian troll-bots isn't fixing anything. Yes, it stinks. Yes, the admins and the superintendant are complete and total idiots. Guess who gets to fix it?
You do.
It's likely near the beginning of the school year near you. Now, today, is the best time of the entire year.
Some of the best-funded and worst-performing school systems are ones in inner cities with high minority populations. Baltimore, MD public schools spends more per student than the wealthy D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, MD, despite having a lower cost of living.
Sure. But many of the worst performing schools are under funded. You can find outliers either way. There's also the fact that the way k-12 schools are funded causes socio-economic segregation. People with means congregate together due to schools (among other reasons). I don't know if this would be true but maybe if there was genuine equality of funding throughout the country then maybe there would be less socio-economic segregation.
> Federal spending — including through Title I, money meant to bolster programs for poor children — is serving as an equalizer, according to the federal data. When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.
I'm no expert on the issue but I have seen schools in poor neighborhoods lacking in computers and with dilapidated equipment. In rich districts I've never seen this. I doubt that just looking at numbers as in the Washington Post article is sufficient to get to the bottom of the issue. Of course, I'm not certain I'm right either.
Whatever the reason I think there is no doubt that some schools are run down and have crappy learning environments. They certainly, on the outside, give the impression of being underfunded.
The denominator used is "college-age population". I wonder what the charts would look like if they used "4-year college attendees".
I'm not saying that's the only way to look at things, but if the overall attendance rate for 4-year colleges is lower because a large swath of the population self-excluded from 4-year colleges, it would surprise me if that effect didn't show up in the data.
Now, you could fairly ask why that large swath selected out of 4-year college, but the answer there probably isn't in the recruitment and admission processes of the specific colleges even though that's where the problem appears.
There is something very funky about the numbers used in this article. All their charts are measuring "enrollment gap", defined as (percentage of college-age population) minus (percentage enrollment). But this conflates changes in enrollment with changes in population. This is especially obvious when looking at the graph for Hispanics, where the number of college-age Hispanics has greatly increased from 1980 to 2015; the "gap" has grown from 3% to 9%, but without using a ruler, it's hard to tell whether the actual percentage of Hispanics attending college has gone up or down!
This makes me feel like the author of the article is trying to deceive me, and I'd much rather get numbers from somewhere else.
I suspect users are flagging these submissions because of the abysmal comments, and they're not wrong to. If were going to have a discussion it needs to be up to the civility and intellectual standards of the site.
I'm only talking about the African-American portion (is that word still used?) for now, stats on Hispanics are harder to find.
Perhaps a significant part of it is because those groups have lower IQ's on average? I think it's kinda strange that the article doesn't even entertain the notion that intelligence is genetic.
According to Wikipedia[0] it's 15 to 18 points lower on average for African-Americans than for white Americans, which would imply that only 11-18% of African-Americans have an IQ above 100.
I get that it's taboo to talk about groups having "worse genes" in some respect than white people, I guess I can thank the fucking Nazi's for that. I definitely don't think any individual should be judged based off their group identities, but I do think it's hypocritical to only accept the discussion of racial differences when it's to the benefit of minorities (e.g. "Jews/Asians are smart", "certain Africans run best", "white people/especially Asians have tiny penises").
Perhaps "Affirmative Action" even hurts a portion of black students, by lowering the bar and funneling them into colleges that are too competitive for their abilities; that would be a possible explanation if there would still be an achievement gap after corrections for IQ.
Affirmative Action is partly about admission standards, so I interpret it as assuming someone was measured to perform worse, because of some kind of systemic disadvantage that will leave them once they're at university. However, I don't really understand how you'd tell the difference between someone being plain under-qualified and someone being under-qualified due to unjust circumstances that will "magically" correct once they're at university. I'm on shaky ground here though, I don't know that much about AA.
Meta: is my post at all "trollish" to anyone? I tried to be as neutral as possible but perhaps I overreached somewhere, I'm fairly new to this topic and it's hard to always distinguish between information that can reasonably be assumed to be factual and baseless or exaggerated claims.
This area of knowledge is mostly discussed by white supremacists, I suppose partly for lack of liberals even wanting to consider the notion that IQ is genetic. I must admit I'm slightly grateful to them for spamming comment sections because they inspired me to start studying media, history and politics.
If you say "Hitler did nothing wrong" I think you're dead wrong and you should learn to troll better or go home, but history sure is more nuanced than I previously thought, and the people that complain about steel beams actually seem to have more solid evidence than those who support the official story.
I also think it should be more acceptable to discuss these non-mainstream perspectives, because even though they're wrong they highlight different parts of history, and if they're taboo you also can't find sources that will refute them. It makes it harder to curate a well-balanced perspective.
I don't agree with your comment that it is genetics I think it is more environmental. If you take two smart people. Deprive one of them from sleep, water, food and then give them an IQ test in a dimly lit room that is freezing cold but don't do this to the other person on average the person who was not subject to all that crap will do better. This is the uneven playing field that AA was supposed to correct. If these racial based IQ test took into account the socio economic status of maybe 2 generations before the actual subject and normalized for that I wonder if the difference would be as big or even there at all.
I didn't say it's certain to be 100% genetic, just that it's a serious possibility that a "significant" part of the difference can be explained that way. I'm aware of the concept of the Flynn effect, but it's not going to make me discard biology altogether. IQ is known to be largely hereditary, around 75%[0] when tested in adults.
Average IQ's in Africa are between 67 and 82[1], which to me is interesting to note as it suggests that the IQ of African-Americans has increased by 3-18 points on average since they were moved to America, assuming the average African IQ has not increased since the introduction of slaves to America (otherwise the effect would be larger, but perhaps this increase happens uniformly to all groups of humans). Interracial reproduction could be one factor in this rise in IQ, as the average percentage of white DNA in African Americans is 17-18%. There are also socioeconomic factors, cultural factors, the particular African demographics of slaves imported to America, selection processes after their arrival (e.g. smart slaves reproducing more often) and selection processes after the end of slavery, to name a few possibilities.
There's also the possible factor that socioeconomic factors can be embedded in your DNA, as research suggests that things that happen to you in life can affect gene expression in your offspring.
I'm not disputing that nurture is a factor, but nature exists too. Biology is real, and race is not just a social construct.
I suppose one would have stronger evidence that African American's genes are not a factor in their disadvantages, if one studied the correlation between IQ and percentage of white DNA in African Americans, but I'm not sure what universities would approve such a study for fear of it reaching an undesirable conclusion.
Then again, this won't be relevant once we find what genes are responsible for IQ and genetic enhancement goes mainstream.
I think it's as much or less of a jump to say "a group with low IQ has that because of their genes, as IQ is genetic" than to say "a group has low IQ because of socioeconomic factors", but then again I'm a certified member of the Church of STEM.
I guess my easy acceptance of that as a potential factor is founded on my belief that IQ is largely genetic. My divorced-parents upbringing certainly was less than optimal but my IQ is still pretty high like my parents', and then there's also the fact that IQ is 75% hereditary[0].
> I think it's as much or less of a jump to say "a group with low IQ has that because of their genes, as IQ is genetic" than to say "a group has low IQ because of socioeconomic factors", but then again I'm a certified member of the Church of STEM.
But while IQ capacity is heritable, it's equally well demonstrated that various adverse environmental factors (exposure to virtually all of which are increased on probability/severity by low socioeconomic status) negatively impacts IQ.
Of course, when a population is enslaved and subjected to artificial selective emphasizing suitability for menial labor, genetics are themselves a product of adverse socioeconomic position; of course, with even moderate interbreeding with outside populations, that effect should erode, though it will take many generations to be reduced to background noise.
>I think it's as much or less of a jump to say "a group with low IQ has that because of their genes, as IQ is genetic" than to say "a group has low IQ because of socioeconomic factors", but then again I'm a certified member of the Church of STEM.
I'm just asking you to validate your claims with some evidence (the S in STEM).
>I guess my easy acceptance of that as a potential factor is founded on my belief that IQ is largely genetic. My divorced-parents upbringing certainly was less than optimal but my IQ is still pretty high like my parents', and then there's also the fact that IQ is 75% hereditary[0].
Of course I believe in heritability. What I don't believe is that there is a basis in saying that a pool of Africans is biologically determined to have a lower average IQ than a pool of Whites. It seems that you believe that so I'm asking for any evidence of it.
Note how systematic and inexorable the graphs are; it's not any individual college or policy or region. I suspect that this is a mechanical effect of top colleges keeping enrollment essentially static even as the population continues expansion; this means that getting in becomes ever harder (see for example average SAT scores at MIT or Harvard), which in turn changes group admission ratios by the usual tail effects - when you have two normal distributions with different means, the further out you go, the more lopsided the fraction becomes. If you have a mean difference of, say, 100 SAT points between two groups, that leads to a relatively small difference in the number from each group passing a low cutoff like 900, but it means that there will be hardly any members of the lower group reaching 1600 compared to several from the higher group. The tails thin out too fast. (The tails effect is likely also related to the Asian overrepresentation.) Presumably the larger effects in elite colleges are why the NYT investigator focused on them rather than national aggregates, which will show smaller shifts as the lower-scoring students can still go to the unselective colleges.
So as long as Harvard et al keep their incoming classes small and the number of prospective college students remains high or keeps increasing, the imbalance will continue. A few elite colleges may be able to poach from each other to improve their numbers (like Harvey Mudd) but obviously they can't all do that.
Being "underrepresented" speaks absolutely none as to the cause of such a state. I would be interested in more comprehensive data on college applications, and the acceptance/rejection of said applications.
93 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadJust treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.
The "reverse discrimination" solution is to take, after half of the game, the winnings of P-W folks and give them to C-J folks.
Reverse discrimination refers to discriminating against say non-hispanic white males because they are non-hispanic white or male. It seems obvious to me that making admission choices to increase minority representation at universities is tautologically decreasing the representation of other groups and is reverse discrimination. The question to me is, "Is this a good thing?".
Here in Texas, it works in a way that is not quite obvious. The University of Texas as Austin is a desirable state University. It was once all white (1950), clearly race was being used to discriminate against minority applicants--an unfair and condemnable practice. By 1996, the University, in an attempt to increase minority representation, had been using race as one of the factors in admission, blacks with lower academic scores were admitted ahead of whites with the same scores (clearly reverse discrimination). In 1996, Federal Appeals court ruled against the University and for a white student that made that claim.
The University stopped considering race, but minority representation started to drop and the University found a way in 1997 to discriminate between applicants to change the minority representation again, this time without explicitly mentioning race. It automatically admitted the top 10% of every high school graduating class, regardless of actual academic achievement. This discriminated against the high schools with high performing students. Since these schools were usually found in more expensive suburban neighborhoods that had well funded school districts and mostly white student bodies (so although there was no longer any explicit reverse discrimination, it still produced the same result, minority students were being admitted with lower test scores, etc).
This practice of admitting students based on where they went to high school helped but didn't completely achieve the goals that UT had for the make up of it's student body. In 2003, UT began to use race in addition to the 10% rule and now discriminates in favor of minorities that do not automatically qualify under the modified top 7% rule, this has resulted in a number of law suits that race based discrimination is happening, which it clearly is.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. I detest the idea that race is used to discriminate against anybody including groups like Jews, Asians, and whites. I live in a school district that has a very high performing public high school. A friend recently got perfect scores on the SAT and I believe that he got very close to a perfect score on the ACT. He had a very high GPA and was a varsity athlete on a top rank team. He now attends Stanford, but was only around the top 13% of his graduating class. He didn't even bother to apply to the University of Texas. No one needs to feel sorry for him, he's a genius going to Stanford; I feel sorry for so many of his classmates that would have been very successful at an affordable University that can't get in despite working so hard in high school.
Edit: admission to good public schools based on standardized tests instead of family real estate would be a good start
Your suggestions are all well and good, but do you see any of those happening soon? It's not like anyone is even remotely discussing this anywhere and with the current administration, it sure isn't happening soon at a federal level.
The question becomes if affirmative action is better than nothing at all.
At what point(s) should redistribution happen? At what point(s) should it stop to allow better decision making?
Notwithstanding the probably uninspired resulting college environment, I think it would be hypothetically fair to admit people solely based on their standardized test scores without any other consideration. The admission standard while somewhat arbitrary would be clear, such that anyone who wants to get admitted could work towards it.
If someone is provided with a substandard K-12 education, it would make it harder to work towards admission. In that case, maybe we should look into the K-12 environment. Maybe it turns out that it's not as much the K-12 environment, and it's actually home life. Maybe home life issues are related to incarceration or maybe they're hereditary. I think this is what an effort to root-cause the problem would look like. When you find the root causes, then you could provide help for anyone with that root cause problem.
Values are extremely subjective, people tend to base their values on however they feel about a situation at any given time.
You know about slavery of the past and the labor practices of big agriculture today yeah?
Wow, man, you just like, solved racism and discrimination.
Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.
Where does the talk about genetic variation and unconscious bias even come from? It's not relevant in this context.
I 100% realize that there is massive variation in high school quality. It doesn't astound me. [1]
What does that have to do with making college admissions fair and standardized?
[1] http://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/6-baltimore-s...
Another ground breaking discovery! Everyone has equal opportunity in this world. Poverty, discrimination and access to quality education are completely fictional. Keep these thoughts coming man, I'm writing you up for the Noble Prize.
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....
Entry into an orchestra isn't something that is cost prohibitive for an economic class of individuals.
Applicants to orchestras likely enjoy a certain level of affluence given how demanding the required practice is for performers. Musical performers enjoy slightly less systematic discrimination throughout their careers and technkal musical ability is something that is largely self-taught meaning that the applicants to orchestras are more likely to share similar levels of abilities at the stage of auditioning for an orchestra whereas college applicants are more likely to express difference at the time of application due to systematic discrimination throughout their educational trajectory.
Playing in an orchestra doesn't share the same grave weight of attending college in careerist society where college is increasingly necessary. The demand is higher for college, and the supply can reflect that.
Orchestras arnt a part of a massive industry tied to sports, science, defense, state subsidies etc...
Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. I personally love the idea of bling hiring in orchestras, in technology jobs, and in college admissions.
People's upbringings are never going to be fair. Nor is their potential, if we're being honest. But moving the admissions goalposts all over trying to make everything more "diverse," when that's really just a racist codeword for "skin color," is not a valid answer to me.
This is simplistic, but a weighted average of standardized test scores + being in a top percentage of your graduating class (regardless of school quality) is already going to give you a lot of genuine diversity.
Maybe you value it less than others, and that's why you're willing to give up on a whole section of the playing field so easily?
I care more about equal opportunity than others, because equal opportunity means truly treating people fairly and in a standardized way at a policy level, rather than discriminating based on skin color, gender or ethnicity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/21/new-book-expl...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?m...
Want to fix it?
Go to your next PTA meeting, become a coach on a team there, volunteer with the local school, get involved, today. Do you even know where your kids would go to school from the place you live (speaking to HN in general)?
This is a democracy, you must participate for it to function at all. Sitting there screaming at the internet and the Moldavian troll-bots isn't fixing anything. Yes, it stinks. Yes, the admins and the superintendant are complete and total idiots. Guess who gets to fix it?
You do.
It's likely near the beginning of the school year near you. Now, today, is the best time of the entire year.
> Federal spending — including through Title I, money meant to bolster programs for poor children — is serving as an equalizer, according to the federal data. When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.
http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of-Fundi...
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-fundin...
I'm no expert on the issue but I have seen schools in poor neighborhoods lacking in computers and with dilapidated equipment. In rich districts I've never seen this. I doubt that just looking at numbers as in the Washington Post article is sufficient to get to the bottom of the issue. Of course, I'm not certain I'm right either.
Whatever the reason I think there is no doubt that some schools are run down and have crappy learning environments. They certainly, on the outside, give the impression of being underfunded.
I'm not saying that's the only way to look at things, but if the overall attendance rate for 4-year colleges is lower because a large swath of the population self-excluded from 4-year colleges, it would surprise me if that effect didn't show up in the data.
Now, you could fairly ask why that large swath selected out of 4-year college, but the answer there probably isn't in the recruitment and admission processes of the specific colleges even though that's where the problem appears.
This makes me feel like the author of the article is trying to deceive me, and I'd much rather get numbers from somewhere else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps a significant part of it is because those groups have lower IQ's on average? I think it's kinda strange that the article doesn't even entertain the notion that intelligence is genetic.
According to Wikipedia[0] it's 15 to 18 points lower on average for African-Americans than for white Americans, which would imply that only 11-18% of African-Americans have an IQ above 100.
I get that it's taboo to talk about groups having "worse genes" in some respect than white people, I guess I can thank the fucking Nazi's for that. I definitely don't think any individual should be judged based off their group identities, but I do think it's hypocritical to only accept the discussion of racial differences when it's to the benefit of minorities (e.g. "Jews/Asians are smart", "certain Africans run best", "white people/especially Asians have tiny penises").
Perhaps "Affirmative Action" even hurts a portion of black students, by lowering the bar and funneling them into colleges that are too competitive for their abilities; that would be a possible explanation if there would still be an achievement gap after corrections for IQ.
Affirmative Action is partly about admission standards, so I interpret it as assuming someone was measured to perform worse, because of some kind of systemic disadvantage that will leave them once they're at university. However, I don't really understand how you'd tell the difference between someone being plain under-qualified and someone being under-qualified due to unjust circumstances that will "magically" correct once they're at university. I'm on shaky ground here though, I don't know that much about AA.
Meta: is my post at all "trollish" to anyone? I tried to be as neutral as possible but perhaps I overreached somewhere, I'm fairly new to this topic and it's hard to always distinguish between information that can reasonably be assumed to be factual and baseless or exaggerated claims.
This area of knowledge is mostly discussed by white supremacists, I suppose partly for lack of liberals even wanting to consider the notion that IQ is genetic. I must admit I'm slightly grateful to them for spamming comment sections because they inspired me to start studying media, history and politics.
If you say "Hitler did nothing wrong" I think you're dead wrong and you should learn to troll better or go home, but history sure is more nuanced than I previously thought, and the people that complain about steel beams actually seem to have more solid evidence than those who support the official story.
I also think it should be more acceptable to discuss these non-mainstream perspectives, because even though they're wrong they highlight different parts of history, and if they're taboo you also can't find sources that will refute them. It makes it harder to curate a well-balanced perspective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#United_S...
Average IQ's in Africa are between 67 and 82[1], which to me is interesting to note as it suggests that the IQ of African-Americans has increased by 3-18 points on average since they were moved to America, assuming the average African IQ has not increased since the introduction of slaves to America (otherwise the effect would be larger, but perhaps this increase happens uniformly to all groups of humans). Interracial reproduction could be one factor in this rise in IQ, as the average percentage of white DNA in African Americans is 17-18%. There are also socioeconomic factors, cultural factors, the particular African demographics of slaves imported to America, selection processes after their arrival (e.g. smart slaves reproducing more often) and selection processes after the end of slavery, to name a few possibilities.
There's also the possible factor that socioeconomic factors can be embedded in your DNA, as research suggests that things that happen to you in life can affect gene expression in your offspring.
I'm not disputing that nurture is a factor, but nature exists too. Biology is real, and race is not just a social construct.
I suppose one would have stronger evidence that African American's genes are not a factor in their disadvantages, if one studied the correlation between IQ and percentage of white DNA in African Americans, but I'm not sure what universities would approve such a study for fear of it reaching an undesirable conclusion.
Then again, this won't be relevant once we find what genes are responsible for IQ and genetic enhancement goes mainstream.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_and_intelligence [2]: http://blackdemographics.com/geography/african-american-dna/
I guess my easy acceptance of that as a potential factor is founded on my belief that IQ is largely genetic. My divorced-parents upbringing certainly was less than optimal but my IQ is still pretty high like my parents', and then there's also the fact that IQ is 75% hereditary[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
But while IQ capacity is heritable, it's equally well demonstrated that various adverse environmental factors (exposure to virtually all of which are increased on probability/severity by low socioeconomic status) negatively impacts IQ.
Of course, when a population is enslaved and subjected to artificial selective emphasizing suitability for menial labor, genetics are themselves a product of adverse socioeconomic position; of course, with even moderate interbreeding with outside populations, that effect should erode, though it will take many generations to be reduced to background noise.
I'm just asking you to validate your claims with some evidence (the S in STEM).
>I guess my easy acceptance of that as a potential factor is founded on my belief that IQ is largely genetic. My divorced-parents upbringing certainly was less than optimal but my IQ is still pretty high like my parents', and then there's also the fact that IQ is 75% hereditary[0].
Of course I believe in heritability. What I don't believe is that there is a basis in saying that a pool of Africans is biologically determined to have a lower average IQ than a pool of Whites. It seems that you believe that so I'm asking for any evidence of it.
So as long as Harvard et al keep their incoming classes small and the number of prospective college students remains high or keeps increasing, the imbalance will continue. A few elite colleges may be able to poach from each other to improve their numbers (like Harvey Mudd) but obviously they can't all do that.