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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included.

The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage.

To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males.

Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.

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> The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most.

Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.

> Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.

(circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...

(Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed...

(Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i...

The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting.

And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration.

If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure.

TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.

> with imposed inadequacies in family structure.

If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies?

Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...

They do but it goes deeper as people tend to stereotype Asians as being privileged as if they are a monolithic group, yet you have those (mainly from South East Asia) coming from low socio-economic backgrounds being lumped in as privileged.

People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.

You're entirely right. The anti-Asian bias would probably (as suggested by the article) also impact populations with the same socioeconomic detriments, examples of whom can be seen among Vietnam War refugees and subsequent South-East Asian asylum-seekers/immigrants more generally, as you suggested.

So by penalizing the whole band of Asian races to even out admission, a whole bunch of materially disadvantaged Asian populations end up less favored than their African counterparts.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs.

Actually, I forgot to add that it can be bad as a whole for Chinese people too if they're stereotyped as rich. There are plenty going overseas to study who are pretty much in poverty too or even those born here with a Chinese background that are poor.

Tangentially, if we wanted a strict meritocracy based solely on someone's skills, then we'd base our decisions off of a skill assessment that was open to all people, and do away with college degree credentialism. The current system is based on what you were like when you were 17, what your peers (competition) at the time were like, how admissions personnel feel (what they believe is) your personality at a particular time fits (what they believe is) the culture of an institution at a particular time, etc.

I think this sometimes gets overlooked - no matter what form it takes, the system of college credentialism is in itself fairly arbitrary and removed from actual merit. It shouldn't be surprising that such a system tends to run into a lot of problems.

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