Equivalent Bloomberg article [0] mentions that the ACLU has taken Harvard's side, and they state [1]:
While the DOJ’s brief does not challenge Supreme Court precedent granting universities the right to freely select their own student body—presumably because it cannot do so at this stage of the litigation—the Trump administration has advocated for “race-blind” policies, which Harvard and virtually all other universities have found are demonstrably insufficient to achieve meaningful diversity, given the reality of historic and continuing racial discrimination in this country.
Disappointed in what the ACLU has become. I don't think their fundamental intentions are off, but in order to raise money in an anti-Trump era, they've definitely veered off course in practice.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, cultural, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
Brown guy in the US here. And Muslim and Pakistani. What kind of racism do you think I face? I felt more discrimination in Pakistan for being short and quiet and not having a deep voice than I ever did in the US for being brown, Muslim and Pakistani.
I have been sent through the express lane many times at airport check-in, I have prayed openly(in a corner) at 2 airports, I have worked with a Christian Republican who dropped me off at a mosque on my request and reminded me of prayer times.
I know this is anecdotal but I firmly believe the issue is pure economics + upgringing. I happen to be a moderately rich Pakistani Muslim from a happy and close-knit family, a white person with less income and/or bad family life will have it much harder in the US than I do and thanks to affarmative action, he will have a much harder time getting into an ivy league school than any member of my family or any rich/happy Black or Hispanic family.
I'm not sure I understand the ACLU's statement. Is Harvard's discrimination against Asian-Americans for their race not racial discrimination to the ACLU? Or is it OK because it benefits worse-off races? I'm open to alternatives, I'm not trying to establish a false dichotomy here.
That argument is plausible, in general. In this specific case, I don't think it is. Harvard admissions policy benefits at least as many white applicants as non-Asian minority applicants.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, cultural, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
Take a completely random sampling of 1 million people from populations all across the world. And in fact, take them from the day of birth to avoid any sort of early biases (actually 'harbor' the parents from the day of conception to avoid any sort of prenatal differences). And now put all of these million people on a completely homogenous and equally fertile chunk of land on an island. Raise each and every single one of them identically until they are of an age to take care of themselves. Give each and every one of them the exact same amount of starting 'capital' and set them free to achieve as they will.
200 years later, with a population that's multiplied several magnitudes over - would you expect to still see a completely equal people? I wouldn't. People are different. And each child that is born is different, even when born to the same parents. Even identical twins are no longer completely identical by the time of birth. These differences express themselves in different ways (and wow was that the most tautological statement ever), but the point is that I think it's highly illogical to expect to see equality.
> 200 years later, with a population that's multiplied several magnitudes over - would you expect to still see a completely equal people? I wouldn't
I would. South Koreans are 2-3 inches taller than North Koreans, plus a miriad of other biological differences, in a relatively short span of time. This is for the same ethnicity, yet alone race.
For me, that alone is proof we are much more similar than we think, and environmental factors, which your hypothetical scenario accounts for perfectly, has a much greater impact on us compared to genetics.
Which is why, for perfectly randomly selected humans raised identically for 200 years, I would not expect significant differences.
The short of it is that the ACLU consider affirmative action a form of just racism. This form of racism corrects for past transgressions, helps achieve diversity targets, and "keeps the doors open" for minorities, so they consider it not only morally justifiable, but commendable.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, culture, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
No. Racism is: "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior"
Incorrect: you're probably grabbing the Webster dictionary definition. Which is made by white people. Your go to citing is an example of racsim: control the definitions to make everything better for white poeple (and make it seem like white people can be affected by racsim hah!).
This is probably the first time you've heard this fact: racism is systematic, instutionalized, collective, cultural, social oppression of people of color for the benefit of white people.
It's true that there's a difference between discrimination and racism. Racism is under the surface and hard to quantify, but it's a real thing that affects people. Discrimination is more obvious and in your face.
My view on it is that all ethnicities are necessarily equal (no race is smarter than any other) so large scale differences in admissions are the result of cultural and historical circumstances. By picking off most metrics you will get a "better" student body by those metrics but you are also responsible for perpetuating those biases. In addition to this philosophical reasons there is the practical reason that diversity can increase access to new ideas (and generally overall team performance) and can also make it much easier to recruit a wider set of people so it's not an absurd goal from a practical standpoint.
I'm referring to things that affect ability (things like skin color are different but not unequal in this regard). Even if certain small communities had some variations they become meaningless once you reach the scale of "asian", "european", or even just "chinese" so once your are talking about a group of any significant size it averages out. I used the term "necessarily" because by statistics on that large of a sample they will be equal unless there is a reason to think the underlying distribution between those groups is different (which I don't think there is on a large scale).
I'm skeptical. There are clear physical distinctions between different races. Africans clearly have blacker skin, a different facial structure, and different hair types compared to Nordics.
Unless one is going to argue that there are no genetic differences between individuals in the brain, it seems unlikely to me that different races don't have different brains in some fashion.
Lack of compelling statistical evidence that explicitly shows otherwise when taking into account different environmental and societal backgrounds.
Sure that is a nearly impossible to accomplish considering how convoluted this equation is so we have to step back and it becomes a question of belief, and in this world of belief I can really only condense it into two categories.
1. If it exists, it doesn't matter
2. It exists and does matter ("does matter" in my mind precludes equality, one must be superior)
To me it is really a question of whether I personally choose be racist or not, racism being defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior".
I'm going to cut this short at that I do not believe someone can both believe a specific race is superior and act without prejudice. Again a lot of assumptions, but if wanted to keep going down the ladder of explanations I'd write an essay or a book.
Disappointed in ACLU's stance. Why not apply the same logic to other parts of admission and ensure Asian students receive equal share of sport scholarships.
But they offer admission based on ability to play sports, so they can mandate meaningful diversity on their sports teams that reflects the greater student body.
Along with other school propaganda like "MIT doesn't do legacy", "Ivy League doesn't offer sports scholarships" is essentially false. The implication is that the ivy leagues don't give a "free pass" to students for athletic reasons, when they do.
To their credit, they aren't willing to sacrifice all pretense of "student-athletes" compared to some other schools. But there are definitely plenty of students that only get admission due to their athletic ability.
I find the ACLU's statement wholly unsatisfying. There is a tradeoff here: is unquestionable racism against Asian-Americans justifiable to increase advance African-American participation in higher education? There is also surely a legal question at play.
The ACLU, instead of addressing either matter, launches a political statement announcing its stance without justification. Lost some respect for them here.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, culture, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
The ACLU has historically taken the philosophy of defending fundemental rights by defending them for unpopular people (eg. they would defend the right of Nazi's to march in a Jewish neighboorhood).
I don't know if I am looking at their past through rose colored glasses, but their new direction is disturbing. It seems like they are increasingly okay with sacrifing our fundemental rights in favor of short term expediancy.
Having said that, this is still just the start of a change in course. They still do a lot of good work, and they might find their way again.
The bigger problem is that liberalism is dying in the US. The ACLU is the last major liberal public group/movement and they seem to be turning away from it.
It annoys me how every official statement from institutions supporting affirmative action doesn't seem to acknowledge that racial discrimination is happening and is actively harming individuals.
Any reasonable person would at least acknowledge the trade-off between racial discrimination and racial diversity.
Personally, I'd love to see Harvard set aside 75% of their spots for a lottery of students who meet an insanely high threshold (98% percentile in the SAT, for example, or some other objective measurement), and then use the other 25% for athletes, legacies, diversity, etc.
That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; enables kids to save face with friends/family too.
Not a fully baked idea here, just a potential avenue.
Lots of people dislike the current situation. They might very well prefer a random sampling of the 2% to the weighted-against-asians portion of the 2% that Harvard "already" admits.
Yes but then you invite the idea that the “meritocracy” is biased because only rich kids have the opportunity to study and achieve the top 2 percentile scores needed for admittance. This argument has been used against Texas schools, specifically A&M and UT, who currently work with a “Top 10%” rule where the top 10% of any class in state is automatically admitted to any state school.
Note that I am not expressing any opinion about any of this, merely pointing out the counter argument.
> I'd love to see Harvard set aside 75% of their spots for a lottery of students who meet an insanely high threshold (98% percentile in the SAT, for example
I feel like a lot of people use this phrase to emphasize... something... without thinking about it.
Asian skin color isn't all that different from white skin color, particularly among the Asians that schools are trying to keep out.
Can you tell the difference between an Asian and a white by looking? Easily, but skin color is certainly not where you'd look first, or fifth, or tenth.
This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion.
We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools.
We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.
The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don't take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There's enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.
"We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]."
Ergo, we need affirmative action.
That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary to counter-balance failures elsewhere.
The inverse of your example sentence would be something like - "I don't have a good immune system, so I would need medicine if I got a cold" - which makes sense, and is analogous to "Reality is not different, so we do need affirmative action."
The inverse of a proposition is not logically entailed by the proposition itself. You're looking for the contrapositive, but the contrapositive of his example is "I need medicine if I got a cold, so I do not have a good immune system."
Honest question: are there actually any long-term longitudinal studies of affirmative action that reasonably demonstrate it does or doesn't work? You seem to take it as a truism, but I'm not convinced that concerted after-the-fact addressing of symptoms is necessarily doomed to failure, pragmatically or generally speaking.
Saying there is an issue with the pipeline is he same as saying “white applicants are just better candidates”.
Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.”
One way or the other, you have to make a presumption.
My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.)
It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why?
This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.
You could make it around parent's income level and the amount of funding per capita the graduating school district receives. It's probably a better determinant to help the people who are really in need and removes race from the equation.
Your "ergo" is only seeing in black and white (pun not intended).
We do not need affirmative action in its current form, as it actually is not fair or an actual equalizing platform.
We do need a form of it that looks at ability and opportunity the child and the family have, and makes sure everybody at least has the same baseline of opportunities and skills they can work from.
Growing up as a 2nd generation child from immigrant parents, you hear about all of the opportunities your father sees you have that he did not. I think many times there are cases of people being blind to what's always around them ... ability to start a business, work for a better life, provide an even better future for your child than you had.
Malnutrition is a staggering problem for children that many people do not understand the severity of. It is much cheaper and convenient for a poor family to buy unhealthy food than healthy food. If a developing child does not have a good foundation to grow from, then that impacts their entire life.
I think better education is the key to a better society. But that requires actual education and understanding. In my college in the USA, I saw forms of affirmative action where certain students who belonged to groups (usually divided by race) were allowed to continue with lower grades. This is a terrible idea, as it only promotes under education of these students, and actually hinders their understanding of the topics, and limits their real world opportunities in the future.
Building a carriage is not the solution to flying to the moon. And right now we have a very poor carriage.
Opportunity. Affirmative Action is a band aid on one of many gaping wounds in America caused by discrimatory policies.
White flight, block busting and redlining all contribute to the current state of affairs in which Affirmative Action seems like a decent solution. The real solution however will require full scale reform. Have you ever seen video of a school board meeting where desegregation bussing was on the agenda? Parents go bezerk. But these are probably the same parents that would veto any changes to education funding that diminish the reliance on property taxes or any other reform which may affect them.
We have a huge collective action problem in America. We have been taught that this is a land of fair opportunities and if you work hard you will get yours, but that has not been the case, so any action that tips the "free market" is looked down upon without acknowledgement that there are many policies that prevent equality of opportunities because they are subtle (in the form of tax breaks for instance) and are beneficial for the dominant groups.
Damn right I’ll fight tooth and nail any policy which aims to make my child’s school worse to make a different child’s school better. Selfish? Hell yes.
You may be aware of it, but there is a proposed solution that works on the problem on both ends, the admission process and the local school districts, and is not racially based (except for the deep historical roots of class/income inequality in the USA.)
Affirmative action bestows a patronizing narrative on the selected groups. And what's worst, the narrative likely taints the reputation of the beneficiaries thereafter. We all know examples of that. Affirmative action for one person almost always results in an undeserved kick in the backside for someone else.
Definitely low hanging fruit nevertheless I think it is a small step in the right direction.
I would definitely like to see a more parental income based AA. Take the proverbial Black applicant whose parents are dentists, versus the proverbial Asian applicant whose parents emigrated and own a struggling restaurant.
Who would rank higher on the AA scale? We know the answer.
The other changes you mentioned are way more important, substantive, and difficult. How many parents (even those with great intentions!) would make the required sacrifices to see an equitable educational outcome for someone else's children?
While that would certainly improve education, affirmative action camp would still have plenty of talking points. More educated parents do have effect on their kids' educational ability. There's always space to one-up by those who got money. Classes can always be smaller, some schools can always have better teachers and equipment, more study-oriented students will keep concentrating in specific locations. Perfect equality is not possible.
The other problem is that affirmative action (as currently practiced), is a very blunt instrument to mitigate the problems you describe. If your concern is fairness to people from underfunded schools, then discrimanate in favor of students from such schools. Currently, colleges do the opposite, since they use their historicall records to favor students that come from schools which have a history of producing students that do well at said college.
The result of that is that the bennificiaries of AA tend to be the members of the target group who least need the help, and for whom the underlying justification is least relevent.
You could view my proposed course of action as affirmative action, and I am sure there are other approaches I haven't thought of without the problems I describe.
The current practice I refer to is biasing decisions based on race.
Have you considered the possibility that these school districts have financial needs that are different from better districts, and that they would do even worse if there was less money spent on them?
In general, school districts in poorer neighborhoods need to spend more money on things like subsidizing lunches and before/after-school child care. Bad school districts also can have a spiral effect where parents with means take their children out of public schools and put them in other schools, leaving the public school with a higher baseline of children with learning disabilities or other adverse conditions for learning.
School lunch programs are largely federal, aren't they? The school itself isn't paying most (or any) of the bill, and I'm not aware of any link between socioeconomic status and learning disabilities.[0] Even if it did, does having a larger proportion of learning-disabled pupils negatively effect a school's funding?
Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students.
Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc.
Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening.
These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.
Is this true of individual schools, or only on average? I'm not particularly well versed on the subject but when I lived there my impression was that there was a mix of schools that were well-funded/performing and under-funded/performing but not a lot of crossover between those two categories?
Assume the underlying cause of the discrepency is external to the school (eg. parents' income) (yes, this is an assumption that may not be universally true). It is possible that throwing money at the schools still helps, but just not enough to counter the original difference (either because we aren't throughing enough money at the problem, or we are out of productive places to through money).
For instance, consider providing 3 free hot meals a day to students. This helps poor students far more then wealthy ones, and is something we can "just through money at" (nothing in large orgs is actually that simple, doubly so in goverment). But it will not close the gap entirely.
"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?"
Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence.
Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?
The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class.
As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students.
I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.
I was looking more for studies than anecdotes, like the one mirajshah posted.
My anecdote is that I went to a charter school that served 23 different communities across basically half the state of Massachusetts. Median family income from these communities ranged from $54K (Leominster) to $202K (Lincoln). And there were very noticeable differences in both behavior and academic achievement between students from the Fitchburg/Leominster/Ayer region (poorer and more blue-collar) vs. wealthy Boston exurbs like Lincoln, Carlisle, or Bolton. Almost everyone at the school was white, so this wasn't much of a conflating factor (aside from some Asians & blacks adopted into wealthy white families, and half-Chinese like me who also were in relatively well-off and well-educated families).
Granted, it's a charter school, and my class was the first year they were legal in Massachusetts. This tends to exacerbate differences because you don't go to an experimental charter school unless you're unhappy with your existing school, and top reasons for being unhappy include falling behind classmates or being so far ahead that you're bored. But interestingly, a large number of those who struggled from poor districts went back to their home district, perhaps because they struggled even more when going to a school with a wide mix of backgrounds. This despite my school having a radically individualistic instruction method (every student had a personalized learning plan) and an enviable 1:12 teacher:student ratio.
I went to a school that was majority (97%+) Black and wasn’t zoned to any “wealthy” neighborhoods. But out of the top students, the majority were teachers kids, one was the child of a lawyer (now s judge). Only three or four were children of blue collar workers.
There has been a severe brain drain from the city. Most of the minorities (I am one FWIW), that were honors students left after graduating and never came back.
While the school isn’t crime ridden by any means now, it definitely doesn’t have any standout high achievers.
“White Flight” happened shortly after integration in the 70s. High income “Black Flight” happened after all of the children of white collar parents left.
No, it was all by lottery, with preference given to students from the school's home town and to siblings. That was mandated by the state's charter school laws.
Well of course. Property taxes are high because property values are high, and if property values are high then the only people who can afford to buy (or even rent) are going to be wealthy or relatively wealthy. So what we're really saying is that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, which I think is non-controversial.
What I found insightful about GP's post is that it explains the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to schools, i.e. property taxes. When I was younger I had wondered if it was e.g. donations. Now that I'm older and less ignorant of the housing market, I appreciate much more exactly how large property taxes can be in the more expensive areas....
Property taxes are certainly the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to public schools. They're a mechanism by which wealth transfers away from private schools.
But more relevantly, they are not a mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents into academic outcomes. It is non-controversial that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, but it's not at all obvious that there is a causative link between them. Increasing the amount of money a school has does not in general improve the academic outcomes achieved by the students at those schools.
I don't think solving the funding issue would directly solve the performance issue because this is a problem with multiple variables like you have mentioned.
When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart due to the higher incarceration rates for black and Hispanics when compared to whites, even for doing the same crime. When you split a family apart, even for a few years, and especially during the formative years of a child's life this will have a detrimental impact on their lives.
High income and the ability to afford tutors is also affected by not only education (as college educated workers earn more) but again by incarnation: if your husband is in jail you've lost his income, how can you afford a tutor? Especially if you don't have a great job due to your own struggles.
Even when looking at health there are discrepancies among the races that is affected by institutional racism: look at Flint, MI. Those kids are not going to perform as well as their peers down the road no matter what. Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
There are so many factors that we as Americans need to deal with, it's like placing whack a mole or untangling yarn that has been woven for hundreds of years. Almost every aspect of our day to day lives are affected by the policies of our past. We need to study them deeply and figure out a plan of action or we will continue to plug our fingers into the hole until another one springs up.
> When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart
Given that these things are happening, do you think it's good for colleges to accept less-prepared students whom life or people have mistreated over better-prepared students whom life has treated well? (Because that seems to be the position of affirmative action advocates.)
I think we should bypass the solution of Affirmative Action and really work on the fundamental issues of America which lead to solutions like Affirmative Action. In my ideal world AA would not exist because it would not be necessary. So by principle you can call me anti-Affirmative Action.
I do think however it would be interesting for elite colleges to allocate a percentage of freshman / graduate admissions to "experiment" on bringing in students who may fall outside the criteria they use to evaluate most candidates. I think you could learn a lot from that kind of experimentation.
Some of those are good reasons that someone would have a harder time in life, but AA doesn't look at that; it looks solely at your race.
>Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
I'm honestly not sure how you can look at that as anything but minorities like fast food so corporations build there.
That's how the school district I grew up in ended up with a large population of high expectation Chinese parents. Parents with young kids move there because they hear that some Chinese students from that school district got accepted to Ivy League schools. The children of these high expectation parents inevitably also disproportionately get accepted into top tier universities, which further perpetuates the cycle.
also hereditary high cognitive ability, i.e. population genetics. But you're not supposed to notice that because the Left wants Diversity (but without Disparity).
> Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?
I don't know about studies but if you look beyond American borders there are countries where schools are funded at the state and/or national level rather than the local one. There is some correlation with poorer areas having worse results despite identical funding but overall the results are much more even, schools in poorer areas can even be in the top results from time to time, even beating out top tier private schools.
It's not perfect, schools in "problem" areas tend to be where freshly graduated teachers go for a tour of duty before moving elsewhere, but it's still in improvement.
In Minneapolis the best schools are not the best funded. The North Minneapolis schools, which perform the worst, have the highest funding per pupil by a fair margin.
I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.
Not just parents though I graduated from Minneapolis public schools and looking back I would say nearly 1/3rd of teachers should not have been teachers for one reason or another.
Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes.
Where in that link does the case for single-parenting causing poor outcomes get made? Why is pointing to a spreadsheet sufficient evidence for a complex outcome?
This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).
Unequal enforcement of the law is certainly a major problem, but I have no objections to excluding from governance oversight those people who refuse to comply with that governance.
I know couple of people who are unwed couples but they claim to be single mom and work partime so they get daycare assistance. Not sure how widespread this because that might be inflating the single mother numbers.
According to the link, 65.3% of black kids live in single parent families vs 34.8% of all kids living in single parent families. This is for America only, which is the context of this story and this thread.
Even so, I want this to be a country where single parents can thrive and get the help they need. I think all children are entitled to health care, food, and school. I would add shelter, but that is a tougher nut to crack, and that free food (at school) and free health care for kids are themselves low-hanging fruits when it comes to supporting the children and making an environment where they can thrive.
> Even so, I want this to be a country where single parents can thrive and get the help they need.
Why do you think single parenthood is rising, or that adoption opportunities are drying up? I doubt there has been a time in the history of mankind that is more accepting of single parenthood, or where it's been more possible to raise a child on your own. Women by and large aren't financially obligated to give up their children in this day and age, and with society becoming more secular it's socially more acceptable to be a single parent.
Further, what makes you think any institutional policy, or anything at all, can fix single-parent households having worse outcomes than two-parent ones? It's just simple logic: two parents tend to meet children's needs better than one because there are two of them.
One suspects that the rise of single parenthood has more to do with the accommodations society is making for single parents (and their lawyers) than with those it makes for their children...
Great point and I'm glad you brought this up. Like I mentioned, America has many gaping wounds which I believe can be traced back to institutional racism. When talking about the prevalence of black kids raised under single family homes we have to take into account why these kids may be raised that way. Is it a character flaw of black families? I don't think so. I'm black and familial ties run DEEP in almost every family I know: especially those with Southern roots where most of black America still resides.
I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.
This article/issue is about non-white applicants (Asian Americans) who are being discriminated against in the admissions process. And not just at Harvard but other elite schools, med schools, etc.
It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups.
Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ...
Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.
Solid point, I really feel for Asian kids and parents who are being discriminated against. The reason why these discussions usually end up in a discussion of black v. white is because (in my opinion) that "struggle" affects every aspect of American life, whether or not you are aware of it or have any influence.
Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.
Many proponents of AA may admit that things are near fair now, but they used to be much worse. so AA this is just reparations for the past injustice. If that is the case then fixing underlying issues would have less of an effect than we would expect.
It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.
A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.
Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]
> Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.
It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.
It is in fact not difficult to explain carceral inequality through the prism of white supremacy, as "whiteness" is a fluid concept largely defined in specific opposition to "black" people; historically, it's adapted as needed to embrace formerly "non-white" people (the Irish, Italians, Jewish people) in solidarity against encroaching black people (for instance, during the Great Migration).
A useful thing to keep in mind is that "black", as in "African American", actually is a sort of synthesized ethnicity (their original cultures having been stripped from them in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)... but "white" is not. There are Irish people and there are Slavic people and there are Sicilian people, and their cultures are not in fact all that similar. "White" just means what it needs to mean.
All you need to add to your mental model of "white" and "black" to fit low Asian American incarceration into it is the idea that Asians will soon attain "honorary white" status. That's not a message board concept; the transition of Asians from "model minority" to "white people" is much discussed in the real world as well.
White is still very synthesized as European Americans generally have mixed ancestral origins.
I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases.
Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.
People such as myself and everyone who's written a scholarly article or magazine essays about when and how Asians have/will become "white"? Because, like I said, this isn't my idea.
I never claimed it was your idea. It's just people who think like this want to claim that every successful non-white group of people are white to continue viewing reality through a faulty prism.
That depends on what you think the definition of "white" is. The one you prefer --- "of various European origin" --- is not the only one, and is in fact ahistorical: several European ethnicities were not "white" until relatively recently.
I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.
> It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group...
Actually, it's not bizarre at all. In fact, the long unsettled distraction of "black" vs. "white" is entirely what this whole dust-up is about. And while the particular case being litigated involves "Asian" students, the people/group funding the suit are non-Asian, IIRC. In fact, I believe they(the funders) actually did something of a casting call to find their plantiff(s), which isn't altogether uncommon. This case, ties into the previous anti-affirmative action cases that did not deliver the desired death blow. I don't have time (or interest really) to dig up old articles and such, but you shouldn't have any difficulty validating what I'm saying here if you are interested in doing so.
Also, there isn't much concern about Asian students who perform well on the requisite tests outnumbering other groups. The concern is about their outnumbering one group. W/all due respect, this should be pretty clear to anyone who understands the historical mission(s)-- which aren't all that different from those of current-- of such elite institutions. It's even clearer if one reads a little history (of the schools or broader society, your choice).
With respect to your question(s) about institutional racism, I'm not sure if you ask in earnest or are being rhetorical, so I beg forgiveness in advance. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole issue consists of many moving parts and circumstances. You say "Asian", but who are we even really talking about? That's a pretty diverse population. And it doesn't consist solely, or even mostly, of superior performers. All of the dysfunctions that many like to label as being exclusively 'Black' or (maybe) 'Hispanic' can easily be found among "Asians", too. And we still haven't even gotten to talking about which "Asians" from "Asia" are here and how they got here, or why.
> What are these Asian applicants supposed to do...
1) Question whether their understanding of admissions criteria is correct;
If they believe that their understanding of the admissions criteria is correct (I don't believe that it is based on personal experience/inside knowledge and research), and they believe that they meet the criteria for admission, then...
2) Start asking some very tough questions about why the bar is lower for everyone else; or
3) Opt out and do their own thing instead of seeking validation from, and validating, a system that for whatever reason(s) doesn't seem to value them appropriately.
Again, the entire issue is pretty complex, far more so than I've ever seen anyone here make it out to be. Which is why I hope you'll actually check out the video in the linked post.
"Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient."
When I made that claim, I meant at the national /societal level. Of course I didn't mean there is no single successful education experiment.
On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.
In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.
It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes.
Yes there are two criminal justice and police reform.
> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding
I'd like this to be true, but unfortunately, it just isn't.
Many of the worst performing schools in America are actually reasonably well funded. Take a look at DC or Chicago and you will find individual schools within those districts that perform very poorly despite being similarly (or better) funded compared to their peers.
More funding isn't always the answer. Something else is going on.
It's not mutually exclusive, and this particular issue isn't low hanging fruit. If anything, this is close to the debate on affirmative action as they come. Harvard, and universities in the US have biased admissions processes with Asian Americans that go beyond what affirmative action is supposed to accomplish.
Legacy-based admissions are one thing, though I can't see how a policy based on race would be the right tool to combat that (and it's not entirely clear to me that it's unjustified for a school to find ways to get alumni funding, though some institutions like Harvard clearly have all the funding they need). As for students that come from schools with or without "proper funding" and such that "prepare them for college" better or worse... Suppose it's true that certain students would be the most meritorious if everyone got an optimal education, but that, due to unfortunate circumstances, some of those students ended up being significantly less prepared than the rest. Do you actually recommend a policy that would force colleges to take these less-prepared students? It seems like a recipe for problems.
(You don't actually say the opposite statement—"we would need affirmative action if some school districts do not receive proper funding". It seems implied, though you also call AA a "symptom", which admits an interpretation like "the situation makes people mad and they'll demand X and probably get it, though I don't necessarily think they're right to do so".)
>We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.
What counts as proper funding given many school systems get massive amounts of money that is lost to corruption and past debts (which are themselves likely attributed to corruption). And how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education.
That isn't unheard-of. Tort law, for instance, has something of that flavor. You might respond that we're talking about different time periods. However, that ignores present reality. Right now, minorities face systematized injustice in numerous important ways.
Please familiarize yourself with basic facts about crime and punishment in USA. After that, pay attention to how those basic facts affect the communities on which they are imposed.
The basic facts are black people commit more violent crime and have a correspondingly high rate of incarceration. They have a higher prevalence of single parent homes, a contributing factor to academic under achievement (and future crime). Blacks commit abortion at such an alarming rate, in some major US cities there are more black abortions than live births.
Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, or other means) isn't going to change the real, underlying problems.
Screaming? Who is screaming? Blacks are a small minority; they do not commit "more" crimes of any sort than whites commit. Yet 90% of the victims of Chicago PD violence are black. [0] In other locations like Ferguson MO, poor blacks are a captive gold mine for predatory police, prosecutors, jailers, and municipalities. [1] You cannot possibly not have heard anything about this. Even if you were right (you're not) about the verdicts reached by such a self-evidently flawed system, how could you trust those verdicts?
As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow.
There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself.
Legacy admissions is a separate issue which basically everybody would be in favor of removing because such a tiny tiny minority of kids actually get that benefit.
After that only reasons you've listed for affirmative action have to do with economics. Why not just be race agnostic and then factor in income? As time passes races will fall in and out of the income brackets and nobody can argue its unfair.
> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.
That doesn't change the economic conditions of the student's home life.
I was a high school teacher for half a decade (not exactly veteran status, I know) and I've kind of soured on the very concept of education. Both affirmative action and the general push for increased funding suffer from the same fundamental flaw of "fostering opportunity." Even if every last student in the US were educated to the point of genius, at the end of the day they'd still be let loose in an economy where wealth is derived from ownership, not brainpower. Devoting so many resources towards ensuring everybody is as intelligent as Bill Gates is a fool's errand when only a sliver of a sliver can ever be Bill Gates.
The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."
It's not low hanging fruit by any means. I'm guessing it would raise the Asian American population by 10s of % at all the top tier schools.
The set of students who are both poor and almost meets Ivy League standards is most likely very Asian. IIRC, universities have made the argument that financial affirmative action would not work for racial diversity (implicitly because few poor students who do well are black or Hispanic). Generally, this set is competing with the privileged black and Hispanic students who under perform compared to their socioeconomic background. Removing affirmative action would displace almost exclusively rich Hispanic and black elites with a mix of poor Asians and some rich Asian/white elites.
Harvard (and some other schools) used to apply similar subjective criteria to limit the number of Jewish students.
Since there is no real legal definition of race, applicants who might be disadvantaged by this policy are free to select whichever answer on the "What is your race?" question they want. If the system is unfair, there's nothing immoral about gaming it.
Setting the racial aspect to one side, is there anything of value in "admissions readers" in a gargantuan administrative bureaucracy rating young kids on their "likability"?
The parent comment seems to be emphasizing the point that bureaucrats who have never met/interviewed the students shouldn't be the ones deciding which students have the potential to develop positive people skills. Their alleged leaning on stereotypes to make those decisions is unsurprising given such constraints.
Especially since the alumni interviewers who actually meet the candidates give Asian candidates basically the same marks for personality as White candidates.
It's not just alumni. Asian applicants were rated basically the same on "Personality" scores from teacher letters, counselor letters, alumni interviews, etc. Everything except their final grade (which is the only place that includes essays, I believe).
However, I find it incredibly unlikely that asian applicants are so bad at writing essays that it's singlehandedly tanking their personality score that drastically.
A lot of commenters here are demonstrating that they do not understand the difference between racism and racial discrimination.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, culture, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Racism is a term which has become fairly muddy without a specific definition. You say it's the systematic oppression of people. Wikipedia says it's "the belief in the superiority of one race over another". Others say it's prejudice + power. We could go on for a while.
This arguing about what the word exactly means is a waste of time.
That is one definition of racism, but it is not even the most common definition. Individuals can be racist/perform racism. You don't get to change the definition that most people use just because you don't agree with it. Check the dictionary, you will clearly see that "racial prejudice or discrimination" is right there.
Since you posted this exact statement a dozen times. Could you answer, What exactly is the benefit for white people to be racist to black and brown people?
They're so many: being able to get a home loan (redlining), not being killed by police even when you have a gun, having access to generational wealth, being promoted and included in instutions of power and wealth that are run by white people, having family or friends being able to get you high paying jobs because they and their parents were similarily employed, seeing images of people that look like you portrayed as the hero/savior/good guy in media, living in school districts that ate better funded, not having people target or attack you for your skin color, not having laws that were created to incarcerate you (war on drugs, the numerous new Jim crow laws) etc.
And I see that your question implies a confusion: a white person needs to do nothing to participate in racism. By being white, going with the flow means receiving the benefit of these insutions. A white person could never act in a racially discriminatory way and still receive benefit.
White people need to actively dismantle the system that is racism so that it no longer benefits them. (This is the only ethical path forward.) And if white people are scared that they'll be treated the same way that they treated non white people, then they should ensure that the dismantling doesn't prop up a new oppressive system.
There's a tendency in many fields to take a piece of jargon specific to that field and insist that non-members of that field also use it the same way. Forming jargon is healthy in a field but trying to enforce it outside the field isn't. A biologist who tries to correct you when you talk about an octopus having tentacles is wrong to do so. And a critical race theorist correcting you when you say that James Strom Thurmond was racist is equally wrong.
I think a lot of this boils down to where the problem can be solved.
With AA, universities and companies have decided that rather than wait for education reform to streak across the US and guarantee proper funding and adequate education regardless of income, they will seek out those with the potential to do great things regardless of their test scores etc.
They have decided to solve the problem in the portion that affects them: aka not solving the root but simply getting different types of applicants in that they think are valuable.
I think the grand solution is to go back and reform education, which I think most agree on. But for now, companies and universities are doing really the only thing they can, which is give students and applicants opportunities that they have not been given earlier in their lives.
Also in the end I believe that most people can do most jobs once you get training. Most jobs are specialized enough to train someone directly and college is meant to learn anyway so if Harvard wants to admit people of various socio economic backgrounds in favor of not admitting solely the top, I think that'd be better for them in the long run. Especially since the metrics for success are measured as if everyone is in the white top-middle class.
I think this, and many similar issues, all come down to the need to clarify one's desire for equality of opportunity, or equality of result. If you are in support of equality of opportunity, then this is obviously a good thing. If you're in support of equality of result, then this is obviously a bad thing.
In my opinion, equality if result is not really a tenable position. I suspect even if we were all completely and absolutely genetically identical, we'd still see different groups perform differently. The reason in this case would be emergent cultures. The culture in area like Palm Beach is going to diverge from the culture in e.g. Nome, Alaska. When Nomians then have, perhaps, better results than Palm Beachians does that mean we now need to start making it harder for Nomians to get into schools? It just doesn't make any sense. And of course this is all built on top of a false premise of each and every group starting with genetic equivalence to each and every other group. Ultimately I don't see any realistic way you can achieve equality of result without turning society into a dystopia.
Diversity quotas are the dumbest invention of the 21st century. All they do is create racial discrimination against a group of people. If you want to have a balanced admission process, which isn't biased towards a certain group of people (good schools, parents with money, Asians, etc.) then simply change the entry exams from tests which require someone being very book smart (= coming from a privileged background with access to higher education) to someone who just generally is very (street) smart. Smart people will always pick up what they need in order to succeed university, with or without a previous academic background.
A blind process wouldn't discriminate and doesn't need quotas. Instead of asking questions with the hope for the right answer, ask questions to explore the right thinking which can be equally achieved no matter what someone's background is.
"Smart people will always pick up what they need in order to succeed university, with or without a previous academic background." is just a reframing of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and ignores the entire history of inequality in the US.
No it's not. It means if you are smart then you are still smart even if you haven't visited a private school and entry exams should be changed in such a way that it actually measures the potential of a candidate instead of their current education history. Also years of inequality don't have an effect on a blind process, because no student today had to live through a century of inequality. People of today have been born into a better world and if we design a blind application process then there is no reason why anyone shouldn't perform well. Quotas are only making it worse, by trying to apply a flaw in order to fix another flaw, which might not even exist anymore.
Inequality is systematic and generational, "because no student today had to live through a century of inequality" is a ridiculous statement when we still have major problems with inequality in schooling, health care, criminal justice, the list goes on and on. Just because things are better than they were 50 years ago doesn't erase 300 years of history.
There is no such thing as a completely "blind" process that can somehow "measures the potential of a candidate" outside that candidate's socioeconomic history and outside the history of inequality in the US. It's the dream of a pure meritocracy which is completely impossible in reality.
The key facts of this story is that Harvard has been discriminating against Asian-Americans based on race, which is illegal in the US.
Harvard knows they've been acting unlawfully, which is why they desperately try to resort to evasive tactics, such as claiming their admission process is a "trade secret" and should never be discussed in court:
It's actually not at all clear if it's legal hence the court battle. In fact AA is literally legalized discrimination that benefits Minorities so you really don't know what you are talking about.
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Indeed. Harvard's legal argument isn't that they are racially discriminating and that it's legal. They know it's not.
Their argument is what you'd expect from an institution that is racially discriminating, but trying to weasel out of its culpability: they try to hide their systematic bias in the most subjective and ambiguous candidate score - the "personality" ratings.
> The report by the plaintiff’s expert witness, the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, revealed that Harvard evaluated applicants on the extent to which they possessed the following traits: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Asian-Americans, who had the highest scores in both the academic and extracurricular ratings, lagged far behind all other racial groups in the degree to which they received high ratings on the personality score.
> “Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”
> Even if the very worst stereotypes about Asians were true on average, it beggars belief that one could arrive at divergences as dramatic as the ones Mr. Arcidiacono documents by means of unbiased evaluation.
>Harvard's legal argument isn't that they are racially discriminating and that it's legal. They know it's not.
Grutter v. Bollinger 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Sorry but that doesn't really have bearing on the Harvard case, the decision upheld that scoring systems and quotas are unconstitutional.
Of course you seem to be ignoring Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 1978 that ruled that race could be used as a factor in admissions but struck down quotas.
In fact Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Hmm sounds like Harvard's argument. So the law is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
I think the problem lies with SATs/GREs/GMATs. The tests (especially SAT, GRE) are ludicrously simple. I'm your run of the mill IIT-an and placed 98th and 99th percentile without breaking a sweat in the GRE when it came time for grad school. I think I maxed 2 of the 3 sections and was 98th percentile in both. What's the point of a test like that? Thousands of people max/get to the highest percentile and it becomes useless as a variable.
Why not follow the model of the JEE exam instead of the SAT (a different variant of the exam for each specialization). If the exam is harder, the distribution of students is more spread out. You can rank them nationwide.
Not being a jerk, I'm honestly curious why people like middle school math problems in a grad school exam?
https://jeemain.nic.in/webinfo/Public/Home.aspx
The SAT, which is the more relevant test for this discussion, was intentionally made easier years ago, so that it would be better suited to measuring the vast majority of USA college applicants. That made it less suited to Harvard's needs, but not as much as one might think. Plenty of Harvard students had less than the maximum SAT scores. Some might prefer that admission be based solely on test scores, but that is not Harvard's preference.
So maybe have 2 tests. A second one that is harder and spreads students out more. I was just questioning the value of a test that 'normalizes' student scores having no distribution at the top end.
Or it works in Harvard's preference by potentially hiding the academic disparities of the different ethnic groups studying at Harvard.
If everyone's score is truncated at 800 on a test out of 1200, then you can't tell the difference between a group that averages 800 vs one that averages 1100
My son did miserably on the ACT the first time he took it and didn’t meet the minimum to get into his college of choice.
After 10 sessions with a private tutor who was a college professor - costing $100/hour - he scored well enough to get admitted. Did he learn anything from the tutor that would help him do well in college or was he taught the test? The test did not measure his aptitude.
Another anecdote. I had the highest SAT score in my school and the second highest in the (relatively poor) city I grew up in. Do you think it was because I was that smart or because my mom was a high school math teacher who had been doing SAT tutorials for years?
Why do people think affirmative action is a good idea?
It's not meritocratic. People should be judged based on their skill, not based on their gender, race, or ethnicity. We should be striving for a fair society, not equality of outcome
It's insulting to those minorities, it implies that they can't be smart enough to make it without this kind of leg up, and they will never know the extent to which this played a role in their success even if they're absolutely solid at what they do. And I think there's definitely a negative psychological effect to minorities by doing these kinds of things
If a student gets into a school which is above their skill level or general academic interest, they could burn out and loose interest in a profession that otherwise would've been a good fit for them. A similar lack of motivation can also happen for someone who can only get into a school that's below their true skill level because they don't feel that their being valued fairly
It isn't all encompassing -- it's not just gender and race, there are ethnicities that are widely discriminated against and they don't get a similar leg up. I don't think AA should be applied at all, just pointing this out
There are problems in some minority communities struggle with for sure, but this isn't the right way to solve it at all
One of big reasons why asian and jewish communities do better here is just culture -- their cultures highly value intellectual pursuits. I knew an asian guy that went to Harvard and they were so poor they lived in the ghetto, which should've messed up his chances because the public school sucked, but he was raised to highly value academic pursuits. And an asian girl I knew that went to Columbia, her mother told her that if she doesn't achieve academically she won't love her anymore. While harsh, they punish their kids for an A- the way other cultures would view an F. But it's a big reason for their academic success
I also knew a girl that was very rich, but she basically didn't have to pay tuition because of her minority. I'm sorry but that's really annoying for someone that had to take out insane amounts of student debt. There were times when I thought I had to drop out because I couldn't even get approved for a loan, and the interest rates were insanely high
The better solution is to find out why some minorities aren't doing well academically in proportion to others in the first place and change that. If it's financial or cultural or whatever else, the underlying cause should be addressed, not this BS
Your initial question is linked to your final remark.
People think affirmative action is a good idea because they think that minorities aren't doing well academically because they don't have role models to identify with.
To be clear affirmative action is supposed to be temporary until the culture of minorities that do not do well academically as changed enough.
So paradoxically the goal of affirmative action is to reduce cultural diversity.
There's obviously an inequality problem between races in America but why don't we just provide affirmative action to low income people of all races? It could be as simple as boosting the chances of admission for all low income applicants by 5%. Just because systematic racism has lead to the oppression of black people in the country doesn't mean that race is the only factor we can look at to encourage diversity.
I'm guessing that the poor students that are academically decent enough for Harvard are mostly Asian with some children of European immigrants and a few of African immigrants.
I think that Asians are even more represented in the set of poor students that can academically fit into Harvard than the set of upper middle class and above students that can academically fit into Harvard.
"Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions"
translation:
"We don't discriminate, but we discriminate."
The subtext of the hand-wringing over this case is that somehow Asians have earned or deserve their spot in Harvard for having X GPA or Y SAT scores, and thus it is "unfair" for people with lower GPA/SATs to be admitted over them. But this is just flat out wrong.
The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT scores. Harvard as an institution wants to increase its prestige over time, and so they want to admit students who will go on to be CEOs, Senators, Presidents, etc. They want to pick the future leaders of society, but this is only correlated with GPA/SAT up to a point.
This is where race-aware admissions is perfectly warranted by Harvard. They want students who are outliers as those people will go on to do great things. But being an outlier of your cluster is important signal. And race is a very important cluster in society. That they structure their admissions to make sure they're getting the outstanding people from a broad range of races and circumstances is Harvard just working in their best interest. If Asian applications are very similar to each other, then they have a good reason to weigh such applications lower because you're no longer an outlier in the sense that is valuable to Harvard.
This isn't a moral issue like some are trying to make this out to be. If there is a moral issue here, its whether any institution should have such an outsized influence on the outcome of a person's life, not whether Asians are being unfairly barred from the king-maker institution.
It most definitely is a moral issue when students are racially discriminated against. There is a trade-off between racial diversity and racial discrimination.
What you're saying here is that non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders because the race of non-Asian leaders makes them better leaders.
But we haven't settled whether they're being racially discriminated against. If some legitimate feature to discriminate or filter against correlates with race, then it will look a lot like racial discrimination when it isn't. Harvard wanting to maximize their future prestige by carefully constructing the makeup of their student body is such an instance. Maximizing leadership potential of their student body will look like racial discrimination. It's similar to how the distribution of housing loans can look like racial discrimination if you didn't already know that income correlates with race.
> non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders
No. I'm saying GPA and SAT scores only correlate with leadership potential up to a point. Once you've passed that threshold, other factors start contributing more, e.g. your background, interests, etc. It is not the case that the person with the higher GPA/SAT necessarily has more leadership potential.
> It is not the case that the person with the higher GPA/SAT necessarily has more leadership potential.
And somehow these "lacking in leadership potential" students happen to be Asian more often than the norm? Year after year? Seems like a convenient coincidence.
You're missing the point. There is no way to quantify leadership potential and so they have to come up with various heuristics. One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Those who are outliers of those groups are likely to have leadership potential: whatever drove them to succeed where others failed in similar circumstances is a strong signal for leadership potential.
> One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc.
Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.
Your responses seem to indicate you don't understand the points I'm making (or you're just very invested in the narrative you're pushing). It's hard to see what I can say that won't invite a further response such as this.
But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible.
The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.
I think his argument is if you have the same number of great leaders per capita in each race. Then maybe at the margin you should take in an African American who scored better than 98% of his peers over an Asian who scored better than 90% of his peers.(for instance Asians have 30x the number of individuals per capita who score an 800 on an SAT compared to African Americans.)
My interpretation of your statement is that you're arguing for Harvard's business prerogative to turn business knobs to achieve business outcomes. But do you not agree that there is moral wisdom in striking race as a consideration from the market?
There are all sorts of scenarios where there are natural incentives to discriminate on race; perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race. Perhaps a company that provides security personnel can better model risk if they considered race. Perhaps Harvard can better improve their ability to accumulate powerful people if they considered race.
But isn't it agreeable that not all kinds of strife is useful to a nation? Perhaps strife between companies is useful for diversity in a market, but racial strife? Which brews into generations of mistrust?
>But do you not agree that there is moral wisdom in striking race as a consideration from the market?
Sure, but not when done naively. Naive "anti-racism" policies generally serve to cement the current status-quo, which is why they have so much support these days. This is only to argue against the idea that being race blind across the board is a moral imperative.
The issue is what responsibility does Harvard have to admit students in a "meritocratic" (i.e. GPA/SAT are paramount) manner. I don't see that they have any such responsibility. I don't think they should discount Asian applicants because they're Asian. I do think its fair to positively weigh diversity in background and interests. But in a zero-sum scenario, this will look like racial discrimination from the outside, and that's OK.
>perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race
Banks do use income and wealth in their model of creditworthiness. But if you didn't already know that race correlates with income, you might think that they are using race as an independent factor. Presumably you have no issue with this.
This is totally against "test takers". Knowing the rules will make them better at taking tests but Harvard wants to be about something else. I may sure be downvoted to say that from my experience asians are the great test takers, and gotta also add that they have amazing rote memory, one of the best imho.
Please don't perpetuate stereotypes like this. This sentence has a clear discriminatory undertone implying that asians are less capable of creative/critical thinking.
You just said this in one of your comments : "Unless one is going to argue that there are no genetic differences between individuals in the brain, it seems unlikely to me that different races don't have different brains in some fashion."
Then I may ask, if you think different races have different brains , how can you argue against statements on traits by calling them stereotypes? I wasn't implying creativity, It was more general than that, and there's no better one than other.
Well, to be clear, the Supreme Court has not ruled on this case yet. The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, responsible for the enforcement of the law.
As for what the difference is, I'm no expert on law, and can't confidently provide an answer.
To me, the difference seems to be that while white students may be slightly discriminated against through affirmative action, asian students face much larger hurdles.
The Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have not decided anything as clear cut as "affirmative action is completely allowed", nor "affirmative action is not allowed". From my understanding, explicit quotas are not allowed, but if a school can reasonably argue that their use of affirmative action serves its "education goal", then it's allowable.
Can someone point out the material difference(s) between the Asian quotas, which Harvard is stridently defending, and the Jewish quotas which were repealed and roundly reviled?
At what point will any of the self-professed "friends of science" -- the majority of HN posters for that matter -- sack up and allow themselves to even entertain the possibility that, in modeling disparate outcomes between ethnic groups, that the genetic term is almost certainly non-zero?
The trends in genomics, specifically ever more powerful GWAS studies on complex phenotypes (e.g. height, academic achievement and yes cognitive ability) are not breaking in favor of this blank slate world view.
Can someone point out the material difference(s) between the Asian quotas, which Harvard is stridently defending, and the Jewish quotas which were repealed and roundly reviled?
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadWhile the DOJ’s brief does not challenge Supreme Court precedent granting universities the right to freely select their own student body—presumably because it cannot do so at this stage of the litigation—the Trump administration has advocated for “race-blind” policies, which Harvard and virtually all other universities have found are demonstrably insufficient to achieve meaningful diversity, given the reality of historic and continuing racial discrimination in this country.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/doj-backs...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-statement-department-justice-...
EDIT: For those downvoting me, you should give this a listen: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/podcasts/the-daily/aclu-n...
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
I know this is anecdotal but I firmly believe the issue is pure economics + upgringing. I happen to be a moderately rich Pakistani Muslim from a happy and close-knit family, a white person with less income and/or bad family life will have it much harder in the US than I do and thanks to affarmative action, he will have a much harder time getting into an ivy league school than any member of my family or any rich/happy Black or Hispanic family.
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
200 years later, with a population that's multiplied several magnitudes over - would you expect to still see a completely equal people? I wouldn't. People are different. And each child that is born is different, even when born to the same parents. Even identical twins are no longer completely identical by the time of birth. These differences express themselves in different ways (and wow was that the most tautological statement ever), but the point is that I think it's highly illogical to expect to see equality.
Out of genuine curiosity, do you disagree?
I would. South Koreans are 2-3 inches taller than North Koreans, plus a miriad of other biological differences, in a relatively short span of time. This is for the same ethnicity, yet alone race.
For me, that alone is proof we are much more similar than we think, and environmental factors, which your hypothetical scenario accounts for perfectly, has a much greater impact on us compared to genetics.
Which is why, for perfectly randomly selected humans raised identically for 200 years, I would not expect significant differences.
Their position paper on affirmative action is available here: https://www.aclu.org/other/affirmative-action-aclu-position-... and I think it illustrates not only their rationale, but the tone of their support for that philosophy.
Fair disclaimer that I am obviously opposed to this approach and have been cautiously skeptical of the ACLU for a while now.
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
This is probably the first time you've heard this fact: racism is systematic, instutionalized, collective, cultural, social oppression of people of color for the benefit of white people.
I'm curious as to why you think that should necessarily be the case.
Unless one is going to argue that there are no genetic differences between individuals in the brain, it seems unlikely to me that different races don't have different brains in some fashion.
Sure that is a nearly impossible to accomplish considering how convoluted this equation is so we have to step back and it becomes a question of belief, and in this world of belief I can really only condense it into two categories.
1. If it exists, it doesn't matter 2. It exists and does matter ("does matter" in my mind precludes equality, one must be superior)
To me it is really a question of whether I personally choose be racist or not, racism being defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior".
I'm going to cut this short at that I do not believe someone can both believe a specific race is superior and act without prejudice. Again a lot of assumptions, but if wanted to keep going down the ladder of explanations I'd write an essay or a book.
To their credit, they aren't willing to sacrifice all pretense of "student-athletes" compared to some other schools. But there are definitely plenty of students that only get admission due to their athletic ability.
The ACLU, instead of addressing either matter, launches a political statement announcing its stance without justification. Lost some respect for them here.
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
Your confusion comes from falsely equating racial discrimination and racism.
I don't know if I am looking at their past through rose colored glasses, but their new direction is disturbing. It seems like they are increasingly okay with sacrifing our fundemental rights in favor of short term expediancy.
Having said that, this is still just the start of a change in course. They still do a lot of good work, and they might find their way again.
The bigger problem is that liberalism is dying in the US. The ACLU is the last major liberal public group/movement and they seem to be turning away from it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp...
Any reasonable person would at least acknowledge the trade-off between racial discrimination and racial diversity.
That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; enables kids to save face with friends/family too.
Not a fully baked idea here, just a potential avenue.
Note that I am not expressing any opinion about any of this, merely pointing out the counter argument.
Insanely high threshold? That's... a very low bar. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-... (no idea how good this source is) shows roughly 4 million births a year. A 98th percentile cutoff would admit 80,000 kids per year to Harvard. By contrast, according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics (hopefully a strong source), the class of 2021 admitted 2037 people of which 1687 enrolled.
You would hope that 100% of Harvard admits would have 98th percentile (or, really, better) scores, but they don't.
Like by IQ, achievements, attitude, etc.
I feel like a lot of people use this phrase to emphasize... something... without thinking about it.
Asian skin color isn't all that different from white skin color, particularly among the Asians that schools are trying to keep out.
Can you tell the difference between an Asian and a white by looking? Easily, but skin color is certainly not where you'd look first, or fifth, or tenth.
We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools.
We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.
The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don't take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There's enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.
"We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]."
Ergo, we need affirmative action.
That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary to counter-balance failures elsewhere.
Logical fallacy.
"I have a good immune system, so I would not need medicine if I got a cold."
Doesn't mean I need medicine right now, when I'm not sick at all.
EDIT: The example seems to be confusing people, so here's a more formal explanation:
if (reality is different) then not (we need affirmative action)
Does not imply:
if not (reality is different) then (we need affirmative action)
The original claim is P-> ~Q
It doesn't follow that ~P -> Q
Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.”
One way or the other, you have to make a presumption.
My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.)
It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why?
This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.
We do not need affirmative action in its current form, as it actually is not fair or an actual equalizing platform.
We do need a form of it that looks at ability and opportunity the child and the family have, and makes sure everybody at least has the same baseline of opportunities and skills they can work from.
Growing up as a 2nd generation child from immigrant parents, you hear about all of the opportunities your father sees you have that he did not. I think many times there are cases of people being blind to what's always around them ... ability to start a business, work for a better life, provide an even better future for your child than you had.
Malnutrition is a staggering problem for children that many people do not understand the severity of. It is much cheaper and convenient for a poor family to buy unhealthy food than healthy food. If a developing child does not have a good foundation to grow from, then that impacts their entire life.
I think better education is the key to a better society. But that requires actual education and understanding. In my college in the USA, I saw forms of affirmative action where certain students who belonged to groups (usually divided by race) were allowed to continue with lower grades. This is a terrible idea, as it only promotes under education of these students, and actually hinders their understanding of the topics, and limits their real world opportunities in the future.
Building a carriage is not the solution to flying to the moon. And right now we have a very poor carriage.
White flight, block busting and redlining all contribute to the current state of affairs in which Affirmative Action seems like a decent solution. The real solution however will require full scale reform. Have you ever seen video of a school board meeting where desegregation bussing was on the agenda? Parents go bezerk. But these are probably the same parents that would veto any changes to education funding that diminish the reliance on property taxes or any other reform which may affect them.
We have a huge collective action problem in America. We have been taught that this is a land of fair opportunities and if you work hard you will get yours, but that has not been the case, so any action that tips the "free market" is looked down upon without acknowledgement that there are many policies that prevent equality of opportunities because they are subtle (in the form of tax breaks for instance) and are beneficial for the dominant groups.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unu...
I would definitely like to see a more parental income based AA. Take the proverbial Black applicant whose parents are dentists, versus the proverbial Asian applicant whose parents emigrated and own a struggling restaurant.
Who would rank higher on the AA scale? We know the answer.
The other changes you mentioned are way more important, substantive, and difficult. How many parents (even those with great intentions!) would make the required sacrifices to see an equitable educational outcome for someone else's children?
Of course but this is one of those "perfect is the enemy of good" situations. Right now we're doing very little and it shows in Title I schools.
Even in today's situation affirmative action is wrong. We should accept people by merit, period.
The result of that is that the bennificiaries of AA tend to be the members of the target group who least need the help, and for whom the underlying justification is least relevent.
The current practice I refer to is biasing decisions based on race.
[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219476009009...
Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students.
Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc.
Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening.
These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.
Assume the underlying cause of the discrepency is external to the school (eg. parents' income) (yes, this is an assumption that may not be universally true). It is possible that throwing money at the schools still helps, but just not enough to counter the original difference (either because we aren't throughing enough money at the problem, or we are out of productive places to through money).
For instance, consider providing 3 free hot meals a day to students. This helps poor students far more then wealthy ones, and is something we can "just through money at" (nothing in large orgs is actually that simple, doubly so in goverment). But it will not close the gap entirely.
Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence.
Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?
The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class.
As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students.
I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.
My anecdote is that I went to a charter school that served 23 different communities across basically half the state of Massachusetts. Median family income from these communities ranged from $54K (Leominster) to $202K (Lincoln). And there were very noticeable differences in both behavior and academic achievement between students from the Fitchburg/Leominster/Ayer region (poorer and more blue-collar) vs. wealthy Boston exurbs like Lincoln, Carlisle, or Bolton. Almost everyone at the school was white, so this wasn't much of a conflating factor (aside from some Asians & blacks adopted into wealthy white families, and half-Chinese like me who also were in relatively well-off and well-educated families).
Granted, it's a charter school, and my class was the first year they were legal in Massachusetts. This tends to exacerbate differences because you don't go to an experimental charter school unless you're unhappy with your existing school, and top reasons for being unhappy include falling behind classmates or being so far ahead that you're bored. But interestingly, a large number of those who struggled from poor districts went back to their home district, perhaps because they struggled even more when going to a school with a wide mix of backgrounds. This despite my school having a radically individualistic instruction method (every student had a personalized learning plan) and an enviable 1:12 teacher:student ratio.
I went to a school that was majority (97%+) Black and wasn’t zoned to any “wealthy” neighborhoods. But out of the top students, the majority were teachers kids, one was the child of a lawyer (now s judge). Only three or four were children of blue collar workers.
There has been a severe brain drain from the city. Most of the minorities (I am one FWIW), that were honors students left after graduating and never came back.
While the school isn’t crime ridden by any means now, it definitely doesn’t have any standout high achievers.
“White Flight” happened shortly after integration in the 70s. High income “Black Flight” happened after all of the children of white collar parents left.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878703
What I found insightful about GP's post is that it explains the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to schools, i.e. property taxes. When I was younger I had wondered if it was e.g. donations. Now that I'm older and less ignorant of the housing market, I appreciate much more exactly how large property taxes can be in the more expensive areas....
But more relevantly, they are not a mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents into academic outcomes. It is non-controversial that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, but it's not at all obvious that there is a causative link between them. Increasing the amount of money a school has does not in general improve the academic outcomes achieved by the students at those schools.
When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart due to the higher incarceration rates for black and Hispanics when compared to whites, even for doing the same crime. When you split a family apart, even for a few years, and especially during the formative years of a child's life this will have a detrimental impact on their lives.
High income and the ability to afford tutors is also affected by not only education (as college educated workers earn more) but again by incarnation: if your husband is in jail you've lost his income, how can you afford a tutor? Especially if you don't have a great job due to your own struggles.
Even when looking at health there are discrepancies among the races that is affected by institutional racism: look at Flint, MI. Those kids are not going to perform as well as their peers down the road no matter what. Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
There are so many factors that we as Americans need to deal with, it's like placing whack a mole or untangling yarn that has been woven for hundreds of years. Almost every aspect of our day to day lives are affected by the policies of our past. We need to study them deeply and figure out a plan of action or we will continue to plug our fingers into the hole until another one springs up.
Given that these things are happening, do you think it's good for colleges to accept less-prepared students whom life or people have mistreated over better-prepared students whom life has treated well? (Because that seems to be the position of affirmative action advocates.)
I do think however it would be interesting for elite colleges to allocate a percentage of freshman / graduate admissions to "experiment" on bringing in students who may fall outside the criteria they use to evaluate most candidates. I think you could learn a lot from that kind of experimentation.
>Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
I'm honestly not sure how you can look at that as anything but minorities like fast food so corporations build there.
I don't know about studies but if you look beyond American borders there are countries where schools are funded at the state and/or national level rather than the local one. There is some correlation with poorer areas having worse results despite identical funding but overall the results are much more even, schools in poorer areas can even be in the top results from time to time, even beating out top tier private schools.
It's not perfect, schools in "problem" areas tend to be where freshly graduated teachers go for a tour of duty before moving elsewhere, but it's still in improvement.
I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...
Perhaps...
> It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1]
This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?
This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
Why do you think single parenthood is rising, or that adoption opportunities are drying up? I doubt there has been a time in the history of mankind that is more accepting of single parenthood, or where it's been more possible to raise a child on your own. Women by and large aren't financially obligated to give up their children in this day and age, and with society becoming more secular it's socially more acceptable to be a single parent.
Further, what makes you think any institutional policy, or anything at all, can fix single-parent households having worse outcomes than two-parent ones? It's just simple logic: two parents tend to meet children's needs better than one because there are two of them.
I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...
It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups.
Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ...
Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.
Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.
It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.
A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.
Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]
0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.
Less than half the arrest rate.
A useful thing to keep in mind is that "black", as in "African American", actually is a sort of synthesized ethnicity (their original cultures having been stripped from them in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)... but "white" is not. There are Irish people and there are Slavic people and there are Sicilian people, and their cultures are not in fact all that similar. "White" just means what it needs to mean.
All you need to add to your mental model of "white" and "black" to fit low Asian American incarceration into it is the idea that Asians will soon attain "honorary white" status. That's not a message board concept; the transition of Asians from "model minority" to "white people" is much discussed in the real world as well.
I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases.
Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.
I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.
> It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group...
Actually, it's not bizarre at all. In fact, the long unsettled distraction of "black" vs. "white" is entirely what this whole dust-up is about. And while the particular case being litigated involves "Asian" students, the people/group funding the suit are non-Asian, IIRC. In fact, I believe they(the funders) actually did something of a casting call to find their plantiff(s), which isn't altogether uncommon. This case, ties into the previous anti-affirmative action cases that did not deliver the desired death blow. I don't have time (or interest really) to dig up old articles and such, but you shouldn't have any difficulty validating what I'm saying here if you are interested in doing so.
Also, there isn't much concern about Asian students who perform well on the requisite tests outnumbering other groups. The concern is about their outnumbering one group. W/all due respect, this should be pretty clear to anyone who understands the historical mission(s)-- which aren't all that different from those of current-- of such elite institutions. It's even clearer if one reads a little history (of the schools or broader society, your choice).
With respect to your question(s) about institutional racism, I'm not sure if you ask in earnest or are being rhetorical, so I beg forgiveness in advance. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole issue consists of many moving parts and circumstances. You say "Asian", but who are we even really talking about? That's a pretty diverse population. And it doesn't consist solely, or even mostly, of superior performers. All of the dysfunctions that many like to label as being exclusively 'Black' or (maybe) 'Hispanic' can easily be found among "Asians", too. And we still haven't even gotten to talking about which "Asians" from "Asia" are here and how they got here, or why.
> What are these Asian applicants supposed to do...
1) Question whether their understanding of admissions criteria is correct;
If they believe that their understanding of the admissions criteria is correct (I don't believe that it is based on personal experience/inside knowledge and research), and they believe that they meet the criteria for admission, then...
2) Start asking some very tough questions about why the bar is lower for everyone else; or
3) Opt out and do their own thing instead of seeking validation from, and validating, a system that for whatever reason(s) doesn't seem to value them appropriately.
Again, the entire issue is pretty complex, far more so than I've ever seen anyone here make it out to be. Which is why I hope you'll actually check out the video in the linked post.
Consider, just as one example, the paper "Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone" (Dobbie and Fryer 2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/are-high-qual...
Here is the abstract:
"Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient."
On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.
In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.
Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704
Yes there are two criminal justice and police reform.
I'd like this to be true, but unfortunately, it just isn't.
Many of the worst performing schools in America are actually reasonably well funded. Take a look at DC or Chicago and you will find individual schools within those districts that perform very poorly despite being similarly (or better) funded compared to their peers.
More funding isn't always the answer. Something else is going on.
Everyone I know, this is in the South Bay part of the SFBA
(You don't actually say the opposite statement—"we would need affirmative action if some school districts do not receive proper funding". It seems implied, though you also call AA a "symptom", which admits an interpretation like "the situation makes people mad and they'll demand X and probably get it, though I don't necessarily think they're right to do so".)
What counts as proper funding given many school systems get massive amounts of money that is lost to corruption and past debts (which are themselves likely attributed to corruption). And how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education.
Bingo.
Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, or other means) isn't going to change the real, underlying problems.
As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow.
There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduc...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...
After that only reasons you've listed for affirmative action have to do with economics. Why not just be race agnostic and then factor in income? As time passes races will fall in and out of the income brackets and nobody can argue its unfair.
That doesn't change the economic conditions of the student's home life.
In the US overall, school funding is negatively correlated with student achievement.
This does not suggest that lack of funding is an obstacle to achievement.
The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."
The set of students who are both poor and almost meets Ivy League standards is most likely very Asian. IIRC, universities have made the argument that financial affirmative action would not work for racial diversity (implicitly because few poor students who do well are black or Hispanic). Generally, this set is competing with the privileged black and Hispanic students who under perform compared to their socioeconomic background. Removing affirmative action would displace almost exclusively rich Hispanic and black elites with a mix of poor Asians and some rich Asian/white elites.
Cf Brian Kaplan "The Case Against Education" https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
Robin Hanson "Elephant in the Brain" https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
I don't think eliminated legacy based admissions or increasing school funding would bring this number down.
Since there is no real legal definition of race, applicants who might be disadvantaged by this policy are free to select whichever answer on the "What is your race?" question they want. If the system is unfair, there's nothing immoral about gaming it.
English wasn't common in pre-Columbian America.
However, I find it incredibly unlikely that asian applicants are so bad at writing essays that it's singlehandedly tanking their personality score that drastically.
Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, culture, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.)
Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up for the benefit of white people.
This arguing about what the word exactly means is a waste of time.
The admission policy of Harvard (an institution) has been used against Jews, now it is used against Asians. By your definition, it is racism.
And I see that your question implies a confusion: a white person needs to do nothing to participate in racism. By being white, going with the flow means receiving the benefit of these insutions. A white person could never act in a racially discriminatory way and still receive benefit.
White people need to actively dismantle the system that is racism so that it no longer benefits them. (This is the only ethical path forward.) And if white people are scared that they'll be treated the same way that they treated non white people, then they should ensure that the dismantling doesn't prop up a new oppressive system.
With AA, universities and companies have decided that rather than wait for education reform to streak across the US and guarantee proper funding and adequate education regardless of income, they will seek out those with the potential to do great things regardless of their test scores etc.
They have decided to solve the problem in the portion that affects them: aka not solving the root but simply getting different types of applicants in that they think are valuable.
I think the grand solution is to go back and reform education, which I think most agree on. But for now, companies and universities are doing really the only thing they can, which is give students and applicants opportunities that they have not been given earlier in their lives.
Also in the end I believe that most people can do most jobs once you get training. Most jobs are specialized enough to train someone directly and college is meant to learn anyway so if Harvard wants to admit people of various socio economic backgrounds in favor of not admitting solely the top, I think that'd be better for them in the long run. Especially since the metrics for success are measured as if everyone is in the white top-middle class.
In my opinion, equality if result is not really a tenable position. I suspect even if we were all completely and absolutely genetically identical, we'd still see different groups perform differently. The reason in this case would be emergent cultures. The culture in area like Palm Beach is going to diverge from the culture in e.g. Nome, Alaska. When Nomians then have, perhaps, better results than Palm Beachians does that mean we now need to start making it harder for Nomians to get into schools? It just doesn't make any sense. And of course this is all built on top of a false premise of each and every group starting with genetic equivalence to each and every other group. Ultimately I don't see any realistic way you can achieve equality of result without turning society into a dystopia.
A blind process wouldn't discriminate and doesn't need quotas. Instead of asking questions with the hope for the right answer, ask questions to explore the right thinking which can be equally achieved no matter what someone's background is.
There is no such thing as a completely "blind" process that can somehow "measures the potential of a candidate" outside that candidate's socioeconomic history and outside the history of inequality in the US. It's the dream of a pure meritocracy which is completely impossible in reality.
Harvard knows they've been acting unlawfully, which is why they desperately try to resort to evasive tactics, such as claiming their admission process is a "trade secret" and should never be discussed in court:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/harvard-university-is-figh...
The DoJ is right to conclude that Harvard has been acting illegally.
Their argument is what you'd expect from an institution that is racially discriminating, but trying to weasel out of its culpability: they try to hide their systematic bias in the most subjective and ambiguous candidate score - the "personality" ratings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...
> The report by the plaintiff’s expert witness, the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, revealed that Harvard evaluated applicants on the extent to which they possessed the following traits: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Asian-Americans, who had the highest scores in both the academic and extracurricular ratings, lagged far behind all other racial groups in the degree to which they received high ratings on the personality score.
> “Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”
> Even if the very worst stereotypes about Asians were true on average, it beggars belief that one could arrive at divergences as dramatic as the ones Mr. Arcidiacono documents by means of unbiased evaluation.
Grutter v. Bollinger 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Of course you seem to be ignoring Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 1978 that ruled that race could be used as a factor in admissions but struck down quotas.
In fact Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Hmm sounds like Harvard's argument. So the law is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
If everyone's score is truncated at 800 on a test out of 1200, then you can't tell the difference between a group that averages 800 vs one that averages 1100
My son did miserably on the ACT the first time he took it and didn’t meet the minimum to get into his college of choice.
After 10 sessions with a private tutor who was a college professor - costing $100/hour - he scored well enough to get admitted. Did he learn anything from the tutor that would help him do well in college or was he taught the test? The test did not measure his aptitude.
Another anecdote. I had the highest SAT score in my school and the second highest in the (relatively poor) city I grew up in. Do you think it was because I was that smart or because my mom was a high school math teacher who had been doing SAT tutorials for years?
It's not meritocratic. People should be judged based on their skill, not based on their gender, race, or ethnicity. We should be striving for a fair society, not equality of outcome
It's insulting to those minorities, it implies that they can't be smart enough to make it without this kind of leg up, and they will never know the extent to which this played a role in their success even if they're absolutely solid at what they do. And I think there's definitely a negative psychological effect to minorities by doing these kinds of things
If a student gets into a school which is above their skill level or general academic interest, they could burn out and loose interest in a profession that otherwise would've been a good fit for them. A similar lack of motivation can also happen for someone who can only get into a school that's below their true skill level because they don't feel that their being valued fairly
It isn't all encompassing -- it's not just gender and race, there are ethnicities that are widely discriminated against and they don't get a similar leg up. I don't think AA should be applied at all, just pointing this out
There are problems in some minority communities struggle with for sure, but this isn't the right way to solve it at all
One of big reasons why asian and jewish communities do better here is just culture -- their cultures highly value intellectual pursuits. I knew an asian guy that went to Harvard and they were so poor they lived in the ghetto, which should've messed up his chances because the public school sucked, but he was raised to highly value academic pursuits. And an asian girl I knew that went to Columbia, her mother told her that if she doesn't achieve academically she won't love her anymore. While harsh, they punish their kids for an A- the way other cultures would view an F. But it's a big reason for their academic success
I also knew a girl that was very rich, but she basically didn't have to pay tuition because of her minority. I'm sorry but that's really annoying for someone that had to take out insane amounts of student debt. There were times when I thought I had to drop out because I couldn't even get approved for a loan, and the interest rates were insanely high
The better solution is to find out why some minorities aren't doing well academically in proportion to others in the first place and change that. If it's financial or cultural or whatever else, the underlying cause should be addressed, not this BS
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA
People think affirmative action is a good idea because they think that minorities aren't doing well academically because they don't have role models to identify with. To be clear affirmative action is supposed to be temporary until the culture of minorities that do not do well academically as changed enough.
So paradoxically the goal of affirmative action is to reduce cultural diversity.
I think that Asians are even more represented in the set of poor students that can academically fit into Harvard than the set of upper middle class and above students that can academically fit into Harvard.
translation: "We don't discriminate, but we discriminate."
How can somebody write something that stupid?
The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT scores. Harvard as an institution wants to increase its prestige over time, and so they want to admit students who will go on to be CEOs, Senators, Presidents, etc. They want to pick the future leaders of society, but this is only correlated with GPA/SAT up to a point.
This is where race-aware admissions is perfectly warranted by Harvard. They want students who are outliers as those people will go on to do great things. But being an outlier of your cluster is important signal. And race is a very important cluster in society. That they structure their admissions to make sure they're getting the outstanding people from a broad range of races and circumstances is Harvard just working in their best interest. If Asian applications are very similar to each other, then they have a good reason to weigh such applications lower because you're no longer an outlier in the sense that is valuable to Harvard.
This isn't a moral issue like some are trying to make this out to be. If there is a moral issue here, its whether any institution should have such an outsized influence on the outcome of a person's life, not whether Asians are being unfairly barred from the king-maker institution.
What you're saying here is that non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders because the race of non-Asian leaders makes them better leaders.
But we haven't settled whether they're being racially discriminated against. If some legitimate feature to discriminate or filter against correlates with race, then it will look a lot like racial discrimination when it isn't. Harvard wanting to maximize their future prestige by carefully constructing the makeup of their student body is such an instance. Maximizing leadership potential of their student body will look like racial discrimination. It's similar to how the distribution of housing loans can look like racial discrimination if you didn't already know that income correlates with race.
> non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders
No. I'm saying GPA and SAT scores only correlate with leadership potential up to a point. Once you've passed that threshold, other factors start contributing more, e.g. your background, interests, etc. It is not the case that the person with the higher GPA/SAT necessarily has more leadership potential.
And somehow these "lacking in leadership potential" students happen to be Asian more often than the norm? Year after year? Seems like a convenient coincidence.
Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.
But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible.
The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.
There are all sorts of scenarios where there are natural incentives to discriminate on race; perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race. Perhaps a company that provides security personnel can better model risk if they considered race. Perhaps Harvard can better improve their ability to accumulate powerful people if they considered race.
But isn't it agreeable that not all kinds of strife is useful to a nation? Perhaps strife between companies is useful for diversity in a market, but racial strife? Which brews into generations of mistrust?
Sure, but not when done naively. Naive "anti-racism" policies generally serve to cement the current status-quo, which is why they have so much support these days. This is only to argue against the idea that being race blind across the board is a moral imperative.
The issue is what responsibility does Harvard have to admit students in a "meritocratic" (i.e. GPA/SAT are paramount) manner. I don't see that they have any such responsibility. I don't think they should discount Asian applicants because they're Asian. I do think its fair to positively weigh diversity in background and interests. But in a zero-sum scenario, this will look like racial discrimination from the outside, and that's OK.
>perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race
Banks do use income and wealth in their model of creditworthiness. But if you didn't already know that race correlates with income, you might think that they are using race as an independent factor. Presumably you have no issue with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
There's definitely a bit of gray in there for me.
Then I may ask, if you think different races have different brains , how can you argue against statements on traits by calling them stereotypes? I wasn't implying creativity, It was more general than that, and there's no better one than other.
Can anyone tell me why not here and what's the difference?
As for what the difference is, I'm no expert on law, and can't confidently provide an answer.
To me, the difference seems to be that while white students may be slightly discriminated against through affirmative action, asian students face much larger hurdles.
The Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have not decided anything as clear cut as "affirmative action is completely allowed", nor "affirmative action is not allowed". From my understanding, explicit quotas are not allowed, but if a school can reasonably argue that their use of affirmative action serves its "education goal", then it's allowable.
It's pretty weird everything, on my country nothing outside "this is your score, this is your admission" would be allowed.
The trends in genomics, specifically ever more powerful GWAS studies on complex phenotypes (e.g. height, academic achievement and yes cognitive ability) are not breaking in favor of this blank slate world view.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/07/game-over-genomic-predi...