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Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

The article says that there are only 1600 spots at Harvard, and of the applicants "3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, and more than 8,000 had straight A’s" (doesn't say how many had all three).

Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this) or expand the university and accept more students and make the school larger.

It boggles my mind why they don't expand the school. The US population and GDP increase, the demand for education and exemplary leaders in society increase, Harvard's endowment and prestige increase, yet their class size remains the same. I'd say they have an obligation to increase class size.

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>Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias.

I think you are missing the point OP is making. The top 80% of blacks score well on the subjective stuff. Only the top 10% of Asians score that well. With that, there are a few possibilities.

1) Blacks are more interesting than Asians.

2) Personality is uncorrelated with test scores.

3) Harvard is purposely scoring to change the racial split of the class.

Of those, I think 3 is most likely. I am open to discussion but I think Harvard is to smart to be doing it on accident and the racial split is to politically acceptable to be by chance.

I wish you were right, because if the issue was just a few racist admissions officers, then the solution would be simple: fire them and get non-racist ones, problem solved. However, there is a fourth, more likely explanation:

4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students.

From the article, it seems that Harvard focuses on establishing student diversity that roughly tracks the US population, bringing in big money donors, bringing in legacy students, and finding leaders that have traits similar to other successful leaders in the past.

None of these values have the intent to reduce Asian admission, but that is their undeniable effect.

It means that Asian students don't face a single racist admissions officer, they face a facially race-neutral system that has a discriminatory effect. To fix it, you can't just fire a few people, you need to make much larger changes. My original point was that the only fair and effective solution would need to require a larger class size.

>4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students.

It's Harvard we are taking about, not a community college. Someone in admissions knew it was happening and let it keep happening. If you are willing to say unintentional means knew it was happening and didn't care to stop it, sure it was unintentional. The issue I have with that is if the same thing was happening but you replaced Asian with African, people would be up in arms. Such a double standard offends my sense of equality.

I am not arguing with you that it's wrong, I am saying the solution isn't as easy as you describe. This isn't a tumor you can cut out, it's a veiny cancer that is hard to see and widespread. I'd bet there were a number of individuals that knew about it, felt it was wrong, and maybe some did do something about it. Firing them would probably make the system worse, not better.

It's quite easy for a bunch of non-racist individuals to create a well-intentioned system that has a racist effect. It happens in many institutional systems, this year's Pulitzer prize went to a guy who showed that D.C.'s well intentioned and black-run criminal justice system discriminated against black people in their own city.

When you have systemic problems like this, you can't just swap out some individuals, you need to fix the system. My original point is that increasing Harvard's class size will be a necessary component. It may also require a change of leadership (e.g., president or dean of admissions), but this is not a personnel problem, it 's a structural one.

We all think the claim that just policies result in just consequences, is logically true. Empirically, as this case demonstrates, that is not true.

It seems unlikely to be unintentional. Since Harvard is grading personality on a USA-centric scale, it would most likely accentuate the traits of the current USA leaders and executives who are overwhelmingly white. We would expect the white children to inherit, genetically and environmentally, these traits from their leader and executive parents and score the highest by a good margin and all other minorities to score low.

The results contradict the expectations. Conveniently, it is black > Hispanic > white > Asian which is exactly the diversity hierarchy

If their only aim was to favor "the traits of the current USA leaders and executives", then that would indeed to a preference of white males, but they have other goals as well, and when taken together, do fall in line with expectations.

What "other goals" and "expectations"?

It conveniently falls in line with racial diversity goals but it is unclear what other goals it accomplishes. The reasonable assumption is that any soft skill goals or measures will have a high preference for white males. It is very suspect that this isn't true.

> If you were president of one of the top universities, the way you would instantly get all the students, all the alumni, and all the faculty to hunt you down and fire you would be to propose doubling the enrollment over the next 20 years. But why can't Harvard double or triple its enrollment? It’s like a Studio 54 nightclub where you have a velvet rope with a very small number of people on the inside and very, very large line of people on the outside.

The difference is that Harvard's goal is to create the next generation of leaders, not to increase the appearance of scarcity and exclusiveness for profit, as a nightclub seeks to do.

It seems that Harvard does have a strong vested interest in maintaining the (appearance of) exclusiveness.

Even setting aside the concern of “where would they live?”, the average Harvard grad probably doesn’t want to see Harvard undergrad triple in class size.

> Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias.

Why do they need to dip into subjectivity? Why not just set admission standards and then run a lottery on everyone who meets those standards?

Using randomness to evaluate students is an admission that it's impossible to evaluate them with any objective or subjective criteria. While it would be fair, it's a dereliction of responsibility on the part of admissions officers.

But from all we know about recruitment and bias we know that it is impossible to fairly evaluate candidates.

Random selection would be closer to meritocracy than anything that involves humans evaluating other humans.

Random would just favor the biggest demographic

Get rid of the admissions officers.

The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this)

They can't change the SAT, but they could create a New Harder SAT and give it just to their applicants.

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