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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

The book seems to say a fairly obvious point, which is:

If you attempt to diversify by socioeconomic status (including race), those that are overrepresented be SES and race will appear to be penalized. This is due to the fact that admission to elite colleges is a zero sum game. There are X number of spots. If you somehow diversify to get Z more members of group A then there will be Z less spots to go around.

Not really rocket science.

To me the two big questions really are: 1) Are race and SES the right things to seek diversity, if anything at all? This is oft debated. 2) Is merit the right measuring stick for admission in general? This is rarely debated.

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You've missed the point. The "fairly obvious point" would be that ALL whites are disadvantaged by providing a certain quota or advantage to non-white applicants, but that's not the point here.

The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa.

The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?

This isn't new, and has little to do with diversity programs. Frankly, it's not the unqualified poor minority students keeping you out, it's the unqualified wealthy legacy students. That group is almost certain to gain admittance to a prestigious school, while the minority group member has to fight just as hard as you did.

But (at least the intent) is to penalize the overrepresented groups because they have already benefited from being born at the right place to the right parents at the right time. That's why there are they're overrepresented in application numbers. The point is to counteract bias already present in the application and evaluation process.

This of course explains the great disparity in minority vs. poor white student admissions....

Merit as determined how? By SAT scores? Doesn't that give a bit of an advantage to people who could afford SAT prep classes?

How much are SAT prep classes worth anymore? 30 years ago maybe, but today thanks to government requirements, kids go through yearly or twice-yearly standardized testing from elementary to high school. A significant amount of instructional time is spent on practice tests and strategies. How much more is a high school junior going to learn about these tests in a prep course?

Sure, it's debatable. AFAIK, the only people who have paid for studies of the classes are the companies that produce the classes. And those studies, of course, show a significant improvement.

There's no debating that SAT scores are highly correlated to income. And there's very little evidence that SAT scores are reliable predictors of college success.

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