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Because when forming teams of people, their total merit is usually not the sum of individuals merits. I do not work in the field, but I can easily find papers (like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221256711... which says it has a positive impact or http://ftp.iza.org/dp6973.pdf which says it has a negative one) saying diversity by itself directly impacts productivity in companies, and I don't think it's too stretched to think it also impacts the growth of students.

So, I can see why a university, depending on which studies it's basing its decisions upon, would want to directly work on the diversity of its students, in order to improve the quality of the global education its giving (I don't think one need studies to be convinced that your education depend both on professors and fellow students, among other things).

Whether it's a good decision or not to increase diversity, I wouldn't judge rationally (even though my gut would say it's good, based on something like "mono genes crops die but wild crops live" things...), but it's certainly an impactful one !

How about: what if an equitable share of the brilliant astrophysicist minds are women of many ethnicities? And are underrepresented due to high selection factors in the admission process for alumni, coached applicants and so forth?

Which is far more likely the case than some hunky-doodle strawman meant to justify continued bias.

My bias is towards letting the cream rise. I don't care what color my surgeon is or what is/isn't between their legs. I want the surgeon who got in based on merit alone and is one of the best people in the world for this job. I don't want a diversity candidate who barely got by and got passed along by people who were afraid to be labeled racist because of PC culture.

Immutable traits should never be considered, only merit.

The point is that systemic issues in society reduce opportunities of minorities/females that otherwise would be as competent or moreso than whites or males.

For hundreds of years and most of recorded history, non-whites and females have been seen as inherently less capable and intellectual. Only in the past 20-40 years has Western society (as a whole) made explicit, respectable attempts at giving minorities credit for their capacity to lead and to learn.

I understand your point, and I don't think your opinion is of malice: I used to have the same one. And it is tough, because unlike some other societal issues, college admissions is a zero-sum game. Therefore, no matter how noble the idea, it seems pretty shitty that a smart, motivated and passionate white man would get passed over at an elite university in order to allow an equally passionate, motivated person of color who isn't as smart (on paper).

Diversity is useful for its own sake, and giving historically suppressed groups of people more opportunity is noble. How can we do it equitably? Perhaps use the government to better higher education instead of trillion dollar tax cuts for the uber-wealthy. But that wades further into politics.

Worth being said we're talking about access to education here, not serious job.

Maybe the world's best surgeons are actually within a traditionally marginalised group, but their skill and talent isn't developed because they're denied access to quality education because their previous levels of education were of lower quality?

The best way of finding that is to have access to proper education to develop that talent. Proper education is currently a myth. Education is unfair.

If the best surgeon is out there, but has had every barrier to educational success thrown in front of them (inner city school, poor parents who can't pay for tuition to improve your grades, who can't help you access support for university applications, where there's no expectation or ambition for success, where teachers have no investment in seeing you succeed, where you see another group repeatedly, systematically preferenced because they got the birth lottery to have access to all of the above), is that the right outcome for society? To preference one group just because it's always performed reasonably as a result almost solely of their privileges?

To be clear, it's not PC culture. Noones saying an underrepresented group has to be shoehorned in to make up quotas - but seeing the context of candidates, to put weight to performance that's not just proportional, but outweighted to their background (even if it means the overall performance at the previous educational level was lower, the markers of their ability to outperform their "position" mean that given access to the top tier of education, they'd outperform).

To back up what the other comments are saying, recent studies find that students from worse secondary schools with worse grades end up outperforming students from more selective schools with better grades once in medical school.

So, if you want the cream to rise... take it from the bottom.

---

The relationship between school type and academic performance at medical school: a national, multi-cohort study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5589012/

What is the effect of secondary (high) schooling on subsequent medical school performance? A national, UK-based, cohort study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29792300

How do you measure "only merit" in a way that cannot be gamed by parents paying for prep courses, practice tests, expensive tutors, mentoring, etc.? That's the problem - it's entirely too easy to conflate actual merit with opportunity, which is the driving force behind diversity under-representation.

> gamed by parents paying for prep courses, practice tests, expensive tutors, mentoring, etc.

Given the amount of free things like Khan Academy, MIT Courseware, etc. the distribution of access to resources to perform well is becoming more distributed than ever.

A poor motivated kid with good encouraging parents and access to only free resources is on a more level playing field with kids from a rich family than at any point in history.

How much time have you spent with poor families? You seem to think it's merely a problem of will, which is absolutely not the case. It's kind of hard to sit down and do a Khan Academy series when, for example, you have to spend all your time helping your mom raise your siblings because she's working three jobs since your dad left home. Or if you're a girl, your parents tell you not to waste your time on studying or STEM things because you should just be trying to be pretty and get married.

And even if you did get out of those traps and spend the time on free stuff, it's not even going to come close to getting you on par with a tutor who knows what they're doing spending 1 on 1 time with you and parents willing to spend thousands of dollars on electronics, flying lessons, or whatever other enrichment activities support you. And where's the free equivalent of your dad getting you a high school internship at his prestigious company for kids who need to work minimum wage service jobs to help pay the bills?

"A more level playing field" is not even close to the same thing as "A level playing field" today, and it won't be for a long time. That's why diversity programs are still important.

I still contend that the ability to access educational resources is more evenly distributed than it has been at any time in history. Motivated kids from supportive families have more free and inexpensive educational opportunities than they will ever be able to exhaust even if their family is at the lower end of the income spectrum. Your examples of bad parents making things hard for their kids doesn't change anything I stated.

Your main contention is that a kid with access to tutors, expensive electronics and flight training is going to get a far superior education to someone who is working with their parents to direct their own study. Those things aren't as big of a differentiator as they used to be in one's ability to obtain an education. Much of the pedagogical value a tutor can provide in sequencing topics is easy to find online--often written by the very people who would make the best tutors. The ability to ask questions and get answers is also easily available. Is it nice having someone decide exactly what you need to work on and learn. Sure, but in terms of access to educational resources, not having a tutor isn't a particularly big differentiator.

> How much time have you spent with poor families?

I grew up below the poverty line, so a reasonable amount of time.

Except weve constructed systems if evaluation that disproportionately benefit some groups over others. This is an attempt to fix that.

First they are students, not surgeons. And we've likely been passing over the most brilliant, most talented, most likely to succeed because of biased application processes.

There's no mention in the CMU process of being 'passed along'. In fact, its all about them standing on their own merit, and not their alumni-parent nor influential uncle.

I'm so glad to hear 'your bias' is right in line with the new CMU process!

> Which is far more likely the case than some hunky-doodle strawman meant to justify continued bias.

Why is that far more likely the case? Do you then also believe there are far less men in nursing because of a lack of opportunity rather than a lack of interest?

My understanding is that diversity isn't a goal as much as lack of diversity is a symptom that something is wrong. The idea is these immutable characteristics have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of the candidate, so what in the process is removing the underrepresented groups.

I am not sure I agree it is a symptom of something wrong. Merit has been the major factor in these decisions which is why Jews and Asians have been so overly represented with respect to their population size. This is how things should be in terms of who to let in, and there is significant evidence that these immutable characteristics DO have a bearing on the quality of the candidate.

However, we should NEVER consider these characteristics. Instead we should considered the merit of the candidate. I don't care if my surgeon is an African refugee who escaped a crazed warlord and has an incredible story. I care that they are one of the best possible people in the world to be performing this surgery because not everyone is equipped to perform it and I don't want to die because they aren't able to handle this position.

I'm going to echo my previous comment elsewhere in the thread, when talking about diversity in HE, they're not just talking about BAME, gender, or religion, but background.

This is socioeconomic factors, this is high school value-add, this is location, this is previous family members attending an HE institution, this is performance in the face of adversity.

Diversity isn't a box-ticking exercise to make the front of the brochure have different sorts of people on it, but recognising that there are a wealth of different barriers and paths to "equality of opportunity".

To boil it down to "only the best people who are in the position to be best at it should be able to do it" completely ignores the fact that there are groups of people (through circumstance, or through no fault of their own birth) who would never have access to the same opportunity to succeed. To not only accept that, but to make some allowances (and in HE, the amount we're talking about is exceptionally minor in the vast majority of cases) so that outweighted performance proportional to background (contextual) rather than absolute performance is the factor you're looking at to consider giving someone the opportunity, seems innately fair to me.

>Meritocracy should be the paramount consideration in all things, and possibly a small consideration of diversity of ideas and beliefs, but not diversity of skin color or genitalia.

>If all of the most brilliant astrophysicist minds in the world happen to be Japanese women, why shouldn't they be preferred over all others in getting into prestigious colleges to study astrophysics? Why do we care if we have a certain number of European males in that situation?

The fallacy with assumptions like these is that it presupposes a completely level starting point for all demographics/ethnicities.

If everyone had access to the exact same resources throughout the entirety of their developmental lifespan, then yes, no one would rightfully care whether or not $genderNationality was predisposed to be above-average at a given discipline.

That is just not how reality plays out though. More often than not, certain groups are predisposed to excel because they simply won the socioeconomic lottery. To draw on your hypothetical example, if Japanese women happen to dominate the field of astrophysics, is it because they're predisposed to it? Or is it because Ugandan men and Mongolian women simply don't have the same access to the educational systems and resources that give them a decided advantage in preparing for a rigorous, top-10 education in such a discipline?

I think a lot of times people look at efforts like this and try to oversimplify it to "oh look they just arbitrarily think they need more of a certain gender or ethnicity".

It's far more complex than that, and we need to make an honest effort to understand why some groups are underrepresented. I'm willing to be it has less to do with pre-disposition, and more to do with inherent inequality in an adversarial and unevenly distributed socioeconomic system.

The problem with such an academic (pun!) view is it misses the politicization of gender and race in society. That's why you get the "oh look they think they need more of a certain gender or ethnicity".

Additionally, you're casting an individual who happens to have certain characteristics as a member of a group of people who share those characteristics (and more often than not it's a concentration on a very particular characteristic as opposed to the individual as a whole). "We need more black women in the student body" is not a valid reason to take on a specific black woman as a student. Of course, dismissing that woman based on those characteristics is also ridiculous.

Like you've said, this is a very complex topic that definitely requires further research. The pity is that operational regulations (and in a few cases even laws) are being changed before this research has had a chance to take place.

>I'm willing to be it has less to do with pre-disposition, and more to do with inherent inequality in an adversarial and unevenly distributed socioeconomic system.

Wouldn't it be best to start at the root of the problem then, rather than merely patronizing?

If someone does not meet the high standards of an "elite" institution but are admitted anyway, aren't you setting them up to fail?

Be careful with the word "meritocracy". Perhaps all you mean by "meritocracy" is picking the people who are best at X when hiring people to do X, but the suffix -cracy has a well established meaning so "meritocracy" will often be understood as a sinister alternative to democracy.

I tend to think that diversity should not be a "goal" except perhaps in the case of political representation. However, diversity is generally a good thing and if there is a lack of diversity in some field then this should be seen as a potential symptom of something being wrong. People just need to make sure that they correctly identify and fix the underlying problem rather than just "fix" the symptom.

> which is true today but for different reasons that I am not trying to get into

This is exactly the reason. Right there. You just referenced it. And yet you're avoiding it. See why we have a problem right here?

Meritocracy is great in theory, but in real-life it's just the same perpetuation of rich/white/male advantages. I'm 2.5 out of 3 of those - it only works when the playing field is level to begin with, not when I start out 10 points ahead of someone who didn't have my advantages.

You're not going to do an extracurricular project when you have to work weekends to support your family. You're not going to the university library to read research material when you don't have access to a car. Joining that after-school robotics team is impossible when you have to watch your little sister because both your parents are working and can't afford child care. Yes, you could work even harder to get around these obstacles, but there's no recognition of "level of effort" in meritocracy, the only thing that matters is results.

What CMU is proposing won't fix everything (per nsnick above, "wealthy parents will always be able to game an adversarial process"), but it's a step in the right direction.