Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago | Hacker News Reader

Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago

nytimes.com

44 pointsrafaelc87 comments

I suspect users are flagging these submissions because of the abysmal comments, and they're not wrong to. If were going to have a discussion it needs to be up to the civility and intellectual standards of the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would suggest otherwise.

What would you suggest?

As noted: otherwise.

Note how systematic and inexorable the graphs are; it's not any individual college or policy or region. I suspect that this is a mechanical effect of top colleges keeping enrollment essentially static even as the population continues expansion; this means that getting in becomes ever harder (see for example average SAT scores at MIT or Harvard), which in turn changes group admission ratios by the usual tail effects - when you have two normal distributions with different means, the further out you go, the more lopsided the fraction becomes. If you have a mean difference of, say, 100 SAT points between two groups, that leads to a relatively small difference in the number from each group passing a low cutoff like 900, but it means that there will be hardly any members of the lower group reaching 1600 compared to several from the higher group. The tails thin out too fast. (The tails effect is likely also related to the Asian overrepresentation.) Presumably the larger effects in elite colleges are why the NYT investigator focused on them rather than national aggregates, which will show smaller shifts as the lower-scoring students can still go to the unselective colleges.

So as long as Harvard et al keep their incoming classes small and the number of prospective college students remains high or keeps increasing, the imbalance will continue. A few elite colleges may be able to poach from each other to improve their numbers (like Harvey Mudd) but obviously they can't all do that.

Best comment in this thread. Thank you.

The article goes astray in the very first paragraph. "Even after decades of affirmative action." The period starts after the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in Regents v. Bakke which put significant limits on how affirmative action programs can be structured. More generally, the entire 35-year period (starting 1982) takes place during a conservative retrenching from the civil rights era.

The denominator used is "college-age population". I wonder what the charts would look like if they used "4-year college attendees".

I'm not saying that's the only way to look at things, but if the overall attendance rate for 4-year colleges is lower because a large swath of the population self-excluded from 4-year colleges, it would surprise me if that effect didn't show up in the data.

Now, you could fairly ask why that large swath selected out of 4-year college, but the answer there probably isn't in the recruitment and admission processes of the specific colleges even though that's where the problem appears.

There is something very funky about the numbers used in this article. All their charts are measuring "enrollment gap", defined as (percentage of college-age population) minus (percentage enrollment). But this conflates changes in enrollment with changes in population. This is especially obvious when looking at the graph for Hispanics, where the number of college-age Hispanics has greatly increased from 1980 to 2015; the "gap" has grown from 3% to 9%, but without using a ruler, it's hard to tell whether the actual percentage of Hispanics attending college has gone up or down!

This makes me feel like the author of the article is trying to deceive me, and I'd much rather get numbers from somewhere else.

Thread about this same article from 4 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419

To fix inequality of opportunities one would be well advised to start with the way k-12 schools are funded. It's too late for most disadvantaged students by the time they are old enough to go to college.

Tying such a large percentage of funding to the property wealth of the community ensures the poor remain under educated without access to upward mobility. I cringe thinking what effect this had in the Jim Crow era.

Highly dependent on state. In CA, all money goes to Sacramento and then gets re-distributed to schools.

Throwing more money at failing and corrupt school districts wont fix it either.

SO just went through a school like one you mention. Yes, it was really bad, and yes, admin had a lot to do with it. Yes, funding was an issue, a big one, but not the main one.

Want to fix it?

Go to your next PTA meeting, become a coach on a team there, volunteer with the local school, get involved, today. Do you even know where your kids would go to school from the place you live (speaking to HN in general)?

This is a democracy, you must participate for it to function at all. Sitting there screaming at the internet and the Moldavian troll-bots isn't fixing anything. Yes, it stinks. Yes, the admins and the superintendant are complete and total idiots. Guess who gets to fix it?

You do.

It's likely near the beginning of the school year near you. Now, today, is the best time of the entire year.

Some of the best-funded and worst-performing school systems are ones in inner cities with high minority populations. Baltimore, MD public schools spends more per student than the wealthy D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, MD, despite having a lower cost of living.

Free and reduced breakfast and lunch will do that to any budget.

Sure. But many of the worst performing schools are under funded. You can find outliers either way. There's also the fact that the way k-12 schools are funded causes socio-economic segregation. People with means congregate together due to schools (among other reasons). I don't know if this would be true but maybe if there was genuine equality of funding throughout the country then maybe there would be less socio-economic segregation.

There is more or less equality of funding (at least, between rich and poor counties in the same state): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2....

> Federal spending — including through Title I, money meant to bolster programs for poor children — is serving as an equalizer, according to the federal data. When federal dollars are included, just five states are spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest. Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2 percent.

From what I've read school funding for k-12 varies widely throughout the country.

http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of-Fundi...

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-fundin...

I'm no expert on the issue but I have seen schools in poor neighborhoods lacking in computers and with dilapidated equipment. In rich districts I've never seen this. I doubt that just looking at numbers as in the Washington Post article is sufficient to get to the bottom of the issue. Of course, I'm not certain I'm right either.

Whatever the reason I think there is no doubt that some schools are run down and have crappy learning environments. They certainly, on the outside, give the impression of being underfunded.

Oh great, another race/gender-based discussion to elicit the best that the HN community has to offer.

Amazing how quickly the proportion of whites dropped in a mere 35 years, in every single one of those charts. Pretty soon they'll have to get used to being a minority in the US as well.

I bet it's all those pesky good for nothing lazy asians that spend their entire time doing useless things like studying and trying to make it in life. They're the reason smart and honest blacks and hispanics are being pushed out of top universities. We really need to do something about this.

I wondered how long it would take to see trollish comments on this thread. Not long!

We've banned this account and the others by the same user.

Honestly I appreciate competing views. Sure Asians seem to push academic excellence. Some parents push sports, some push military, Asians push academics which results in them going to highly elite schools. No Asians are not elite they just focus on books. Calm down.

More like "because of Affirmative Action".

Just treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.

We're going to play poker. Everyone will start with a randomly determined number of chips. But people whose HN handles start with A-H will get, on average, 40% less to start with. Aside from that tiny nit, it'll be a totally fair game.

The "fair" solution is to make sure that A-H folks start with the same amount as the rest.

The "reverse discrimination" solution is to take, after half of the game, the winnings of P-W folks and give them to C-J folks.

But when in reality does that actually happen? I'm not trying to incite you, I just really don't see evidence of "reverse discrimination"

As a big proponent of civil rights and the whole civil rights movement I hope that I'm not misunderstood.

Reverse discrimination refers to discriminating against say non-hispanic white males because they are non-hispanic white or male. It seems obvious to me that making admission choices to increase minority representation at universities is tautologically decreasing the representation of other groups and is reverse discrimination. The question to me is, "Is this a good thing?".

Here in Texas, it works in a way that is not quite obvious. The University of Texas as Austin is a desirable state University. It was once all white (1950), clearly race was being used to discriminate against minority applicants--an unfair and condemnable practice. By 1996, the University, in an attempt to increase minority representation, had been using race as one of the factors in admission, blacks with lower academic scores were admitted ahead of whites with the same scores (clearly reverse discrimination). In 1996, Federal Appeals court ruled against the University and for a white student that made that claim.

The University stopped considering race, but minority representation started to drop and the University found a way in 1997 to discriminate between applicants to change the minority representation again, this time without explicitly mentioning race. It automatically admitted the top 10% of every high school graduating class, regardless of actual academic achievement. This discriminated against the high schools with high performing students. Since these schools were usually found in more expensive suburban neighborhoods that had well funded school districts and mostly white student bodies (so although there was no longer any explicit reverse discrimination, it still produced the same result, minority students were being admitted with lower test scores, etc).

This practice of admitting students based on where they went to high school helped but didn't completely achieve the goals that UT had for the make up of it's student body. In 2003, UT began to use race in addition to the 10% rule and now discriminates in favor of minorities that do not automatically qualify under the modified top 7% rule, this has resulted in a number of law suits that race based discrimination is happening, which it clearly is.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I detest the idea that race is used to discriminate against anybody including groups like Jews, Asians, and whites. I live in a school district that has a very high performing public high school. A friend recently got perfect scores on the SAT and I believe that he got very close to a perfect score on the ACT. He had a very high GPA and was a varsity athlete on a top rank team. He now attends Stanford, but was only around the top 13% of his graduating class. He didn't even bother to apply to the University of Texas. No one needs to feel sorry for him, he's a genius going to Stanford; I feel sorry for so many of his classmates that would have been very successful at an affordable University that can't get in despite working so hard in high school.

Please, college acceptance here is more like giving the C-J folks a pass on their first 2 blinds. College acceptance isn't like we're taxing people based on race.

So give everyone the same number of chips; don't compensate by changing the rules so that a black straight beats a white flush.

Now translate "chips" into "systemic and generational advantages" and include detail on how to give everyone the same number.

Childcare, subsidized/free tutoring, mentoring, etc. I'm on board with practically anything other than lowering the admission bar.

Edit: admission to good public schools based on standardized tests instead of family real estate would be a good start

And what of studies that give evidence for racial biases in standardized testing?

Your suggestions are all well and good, but do you see any of those happening soon? It's not like anyone is even remotely discussing this anywhere and with the current administration, it sure isn't happening soon at a federal level.

The question becomes if affirmative action is better than nothing at all.

Is the alternative that we play poker and after every N rounds the chips are redistributed so that everyone has the same amount?

At what point(s) should redistribution happen? At what point(s) should it stop to allow better decision making?

There's your problem: you assume that redistributing every n rounds means that decision making suffers.

I grant you that this example is contrived, but I'd play poker very differently if that was the case!

Word, but I think it underlines a real problem. For some people with low chances of losing in the game (trust fund, property, stable family, no prior convictions, etc) life can be a game about maximizing gains. For others it's toothe and nail. When the rules of the game are historically set by people who are already too stable to really lose, it's the "weaker" players who get exploited.

I would add to this that making the system fairer will inherently decrease the chances for the higher starting players. That is because they had a higher chance to start with. The lowering of their chances is not a bad thing, it is perfectly just. But it's hard to get those players to accept that when they are starting from that position of power.

When you phrase it that way, it sounds like you think it's hopeless to have a system with objectively fair rules.

Notwithstanding the probably uninspired resulting college environment, I think it would be hypothetically fair to admit people solely based on their standardized test scores without any other consideration. The admission standard while somewhat arbitrary would be clear, such that anyone who wants to get admitted could work towards it.

If someone is provided with a substandard K-12 education, it would make it harder to work towards admission. In that case, maybe we should look into the K-12 environment. Maybe it turns out that it's not as much the K-12 environment, and it's actually home life. Maybe home life issues are related to incarceration or maybe they're hereditary. I think this is what an effort to root-cause the problem would look like. When you find the root causes, then you could provide help for anyone with that root cause problem.

I do think a fair system can't exist, but I'm very fearful of moving towards a libertarian meritocratic system that fails to consider many of the issue you bring up. There's a guy up above going hard on genetic IQ differences making a nuanced claim that higher IQs are more valuable and thus deserving of more merit. Is that a fair system?

Can exist

I see where you're coming from. I can get on board with that; we can address root causes before needing to remove these fixes/patches. Though I think we should keep both things in mind; perhaps the day can be celebrated when we can remove affirmative action programs.

At the point when you realize that the original distribution is out of line with your current moral and ethical values.

Non-sarcastically, I think this is a completely reasonable subjective way to resolve the issue. It's what our political systems are doing.

So whenever you feel like it, basically.
Values are extremely subjective, people tend to base their values on however they feel about a situation at any given time.

If only it was so easy in real life to cleanly figure out who "starts out with less". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Target: Don't subjugate people to work agriculture.
You know about slavery of the past and the labor practices of big agriculture today yeah?

Every individual black/Hispanic person is born with exactly 40% less wealth than every white/Asian person? It's time to re-evaluate your life choices when you think it's a good thing to promote blanket race-baiting stereotypes.

> people whose HN handles start with A-H will get, on average, 40% less to start with

So you're saying individuals' wealth may differ from the average of other people sharing their skin color? Too bad we can't measure a person's wealth directly and have to rely on racist hysteria as a proxy.

> Just treat people as fairly as possible.
Wow, man, you just like, solved racism and discrimination.

Discrimination can't be "solved" because 1. People are genetically different and 2. Anyone can have biases about anything. I could shut down every interviewee with big ears, or beady eyes, if I wanted to.
Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.

+1; and, even if poster above had a proposed methodology for proving discrimination, he couldn't show how such discrimination, over a population of hundreds of millions over decades and over trillions of minute decisions, nets out, since discrimination runs in all directions at all times.

I encourage you to teach a science course for non-majors at a local university that serves minorities. Unless you are intentionally blind the experience will be enlightening. The variation in quality of high schools in the US is astounding and needs to be experienced first-hand.
Where does the talk about genetic variation and unconscious bias even come from? It's not relevant in this context.

That's like saying I need to go live in a bad neighborhood to understand they are bad. Or that I need to do opiates firsthand to understand they feel good.
I 100% realize that there is massive variation in high school quality. It doesn't astound me. [1]
What does that have to do with making college admissions fair and standardized?
[1] http://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/6-baltimore-s...

> Again, all you can do is treat people as fairly as possible by basing admissions policies on merit and standardization, rather than sloppily basing them on perceived group identity.
Another ground breaking discovery! Everyone has equal opportunity in this world. Poverty, discrimination and access to quality education are completely fictional. Keep these thoughts coming man, I'm writing you up for the Noble Prize.

There is a lot of angst in your reply, but no alternatives to what the OP is proposing.

the alternative is what OP is attacking - affirmative action.

Which doesn't seem to work very well, as shown by the source link for example.

Why can't we prioritize overhauling systematic oppression by calling attention to it and occasionally giving advantages to people who have historically been disadvantaged?

What other way? The one where some people have enormous structural disadvantages due to decades or more of discrimination? We agree it doesn't work, but many people get angry and defensive when we try and create systems that are fair enough to take this into account, like affirmative action policies.

Because you can't fight bias with more bias, it's hypocritical.

You understand the problem with color-blindness, yes?

Blind-hiring worked to remove the gender gap in orchestras. Why wouldn't it be good to use in college admissions?
http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact....

Because the input of applicants is the original problem. Affirmative action is intended to select more from the limited applicants, which in the end is a small effect in comparison to getting more black/hispanic students who are able to go college at all. Solving that takes a lot more, and affirmative action is attempting to stopgap for that.

Of The cuff; a whole slew of reasons.
Entry into an orchestra isn't something that is cost prohibitive for an economic class of individuals.
Applicants to orchestras likely enjoy a certain level of affluence given how demanding the required practice is for performers. Musical performers enjoy slightly less systematic discrimination throughout their careers and technkal musical ability is something that is largely self-taught meaning that the applicants to orchestras are more likely to share similar levels of abilities at the stage of auditioning for an orchestra whereas college applicants are more likely to express difference at the time of application due to systematic discrimination throughout their educational trajectory.
Playing in an orchestra doesn't share the same grave weight of attending college in careerist society where college is increasingly necessary. The demand is higher for college, and the supply can reflect that.
Orchestras arnt a part of a massive industry tied to sports, science, defense, state subsidies etc...

None of those are reasons not to try it. It worked well on a smaller scale and hasn't been tried on any sort of larger scale.
Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. I personally love the idea of bling hiring in orchestras, in technology jobs, and in college admissions.
People's upbringings are never going to be fair. Nor is their potential, if we're being honest. But moving the admissions goalposts all over trying to make everything more "diverse," when that's really just a racist codeword for "skin color," is not a valid answer to me.
This is simplistic, but a weighted average of standardized test scores + being in a top percentage of your graduating class (regardless of school quality) is already going to give you a lot of genuine diversity.

> Maybe I just hold the value of having an objectively fair playing field higher than some others here. ...People's upbringings are never going to be fair.
Maybe you value it less than others, and that's why you're willing to give up on a whole section of the playing field so easily?

It takes wisdom to know what things you can fix and what things you cannot.

If you don't think a fair playing field is achievable then why pretend you care more and are working harder to achieve it than others, instead of admitting that you're focusing your energy elsewhere?

A fair starting point is not achievable without everyone being clones, and very likely not even then.
I care more about equal opportunity than others, because equal opportunity means truly treating people fairly and in a standardized way at a policy level, rather than discriminating based on skin color, gender or ethnicity.

Equal treatment is in no way the same thing as equal opportunity or a level playing field. So you care deeply about equal treatment and think that a level playing field/equal opportunity is unimportant. I disagree, but you might have more productive conversations if you use the terminology correctly.

No man, its not going to give you genuine diversity. It's going to give you a bunch of people who score well in classes and according to standards that the standard creators determined. The standards are often blind to the cultural nuances of the questions themselves and often reward those who belong to the normative culture. It's the same problem with IQ tests. I don't want the people in college to be all the people who scored top of their class in AP history and AP econ, I want to also see the kids who struggled through the extreme boredom of those classes while having underground poetry meetings after school or having other interests other than those rewarded by the schoolastic institution.

No, it isn't. It would be hypocritical to say "slavery is bad and it was done to black people so we should make white people slaves now". It is not hypocritical to say "black people were mistreated because of their race and this has disadvantaged them as a group, here are some ways to make up for that previous treatment". If one kid gets singled out at school to be beaten up, it is not hypocritical to single him out for medical treatment afterwards. You are not giving him medical treatment because he is a nerd/funny looking/unlucky,you are reacting to the situation he is in now because of past unfairness.

reparations are not the same as acute care.

If the analogy wasn't somehow different from the original case it wouldn't be an analogy, would it.

Being "underrepresented" speaks absolutely none as to the cause of such a state. I would be interested in more comprehensive data on college applications, and the acceptance/rejection of said applications.

gets negative karma for attempting to discuss thanks fam

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