Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools.
We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.
The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don't take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There's enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.
"We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]."
Ergo, we need affirmative action.
That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary to counter-balance failures elsewhere.
Logical fallacy.
"I have a good immune system, so I would not need medicine if I got a cold."
Doesn't mean I need medicine right now, when I'm not sick at all.
EDIT: The example seems to be confusing people, so here's a more formal explanation:
if (reality is different) then not (we need affirmative action)
Does not imply:
if not (reality is different) then (we need affirmative action)
The original claim is P-> ~Q
It doesn't follow that ~P -> Q
Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.”
One way or the other, you have to make a presumption.
My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.)
It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why?
This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.
We do not need affirmative action in its current form, as it actually is not fair or an actual equalizing platform.
We do need a form of it that looks at ability and opportunity the child and the family have, and makes sure everybody at least has the same baseline of opportunities and skills they can work from.
Growing up as a 2nd generation child from immigrant parents, you hear about all of the opportunities your father sees you have that he did not. I think many times there are cases of people being blind to what's always around them ... ability to start a business, work for a better life, provide an even better future for your child than you had.
Malnutrition is a staggering problem for children that many people do not understand the severity of. It is much cheaper and convenient for a poor family to buy unhealthy food than healthy food. If a developing child does not have a good foundation to grow from, then that impacts their entire life.
I think better education is the key to a better society. But that requires actual education and understanding. In my college in the USA, I saw forms of affirmative action where certain students who belonged to groups (usually divided by race) were allowed to continue with lower grades. This is a terrible idea, as it only promotes under education of these students, and actually hinders their understanding of the topics, and limits their real world opportunities in the future.
Building a carriage is not the solution to flying to the moon. And right now we have a very poor carriage.
White flight, block busting and redlining all contribute to the current state of affairs in which Affirmative Action seems like a decent solution. The real solution however will require full scale reform. Have you ever seen video of a school board meeting where desegregation bussing was on the agenda? Parents go bezerk. But these are probably the same parents that would veto any changes to education funding that diminish the reliance on property taxes or any other reform which may affect them.
We have a huge collective action problem in America. We have been taught that this is a land of fair opportunities and if you work hard you will get yours, but that has not been the case, so any action that tips the "free market" is looked down upon without acknowledgement that there are many policies that prevent equality of opportunities because they are subtle (in the form of tax breaks for instance) and are beneficial for the dominant groups.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unu...
I would definitely like to see a more parental income based AA. Take the proverbial Black applicant whose parents are dentists, versus the proverbial Asian applicant whose parents emigrated and own a struggling restaurant.
Who would rank higher on the AA scale? We know the answer.
The other changes you mentioned are way more important, substantive, and difficult. How many parents (even those with great intentions!) would make the required sacrifices to see an equitable educational outcome for someone else's children?
Of course but this is one of those "perfect is the enemy of good" situations. Right now we're doing very little and it shows in Title I schools.
Even in today's situation affirmative action is wrong. We should accept people by merit, period.
The result of that is that the bennificiaries of AA tend to be the members of the target group who least need the help, and for whom the underlying justification is least relevent.
The current practice I refer to is biasing decisions based on race.
[0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219476009009...
Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students.
Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc.
Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening.
These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.
Assume the underlying cause of the discrepency is external to the school (eg. parents' income) (yes, this is an assumption that may not be universally true). It is possible that throwing money at the schools still helps, but just not enough to counter the original difference (either because we aren't throughing enough money at the problem, or we are out of productive places to through money).
For instance, consider providing 3 free hot meals a day to students. This helps poor students far more then wealthy ones, and is something we can "just through money at" (nothing in large orgs is actually that simple, doubly so in goverment). But it will not close the gap entirely.
Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence.
Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?
The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class.
As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students.
I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.
My anecdote is that I went to a charter school that served 23 different communities across basically half the state of Massachusetts. Median family income from these communities ranged from $54K (Leominster) to $202K (Lincoln). And there were very noticeable differences in both behavior and academic achievement between students from the Fitchburg/Leominster/Ayer region (poorer and more blue-collar) vs. wealthy Boston exurbs like Lincoln, Carlisle, or Bolton. Almost everyone at the school was white, so this wasn't much of a conflating factor (aside from some Asians & blacks adopted into wealthy white families, and half-Chinese like me who also were in relatively well-off and well-educated families).
Granted, it's a charter school, and my class was the first year they were legal in Massachusetts. This tends to exacerbate differences because you don't go to an experimental charter school unless you're unhappy with your existing school, and top reasons for being unhappy include falling behind classmates or being so far ahead that you're bored. But interestingly, a large number of those who struggled from poor districts went back to their home district, perhaps because they struggled even more when going to a school with a wide mix of backgrounds. This despite my school having a radically individualistic instruction method (every student had a personalized learning plan) and an enviable 1:12 teacher:student ratio.
I went to a school that was majority (97%+) Black and wasn’t zoned to any “wealthy” neighborhoods. But out of the top students, the majority were teachers kids, one was the child of a lawyer (now s judge). Only three or four were children of blue collar workers.
There has been a severe brain drain from the city. Most of the minorities (I am one FWIW), that were honors students left after graduating and never came back.
While the school isn’t crime ridden by any means now, it definitely doesn’t have any standout high achievers.
“White Flight” happened shortly after integration in the 70s. High income “Black Flight” happened after all of the children of white collar parents left.
What I found insightful about GP's post is that it explains the mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents to schools, i.e. property taxes. When I was younger I had wondered if it was e.g. donations. Now that I'm older and less ignorant of the housing market, I appreciate much more exactly how large property taxes can be in the more expensive areas....
But more relevantly, they are not a mechanism by which wealth transfers from residents into academic outcomes. It is non-controversial that wealth is correlated with academic outcomes, but it's not at all obvious that there is a causative link between them. Increasing the amount of money a school has does not in general improve the academic outcomes achieved by the students at those schools.
When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart due to the higher incarceration rates for black and Hispanics when compared to whites, even for doing the same crime. When you split a family apart, even for a few years, and especially during the formative years of a child's life this will have a detrimental impact on their lives.
High income and the ability to afford tutors is also affected by not only education (as college educated workers earn more) but again by incarnation: if your husband is in jail you've lost his income, how can you afford a tutor? Especially if you don't have a great job due to your own struggles.
Even when looking at health there are discrepancies among the races that is affected by institutional racism: look at Flint, MI. Those kids are not going to perform as well as their peers down the road no matter what. Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
There are so many factors that we as Americans need to deal with, it's like placing whack a mole or untangling yarn that has been woven for hundreds of years. Almost every aspect of our day to day lives are affected by the policies of our past. We need to study them deeply and figure out a plan of action or we will continue to plug our fingers into the hole until another one springs up.
Given that these things are happening, do you think it's good for colleges to accept less-prepared students whom life or people have mistreated over better-prepared students whom life has treated well? (Because that seems to be the position of affirmative action advocates.)
I do think however it would be interesting for elite colleges to allocate a percentage of freshman / graduate admissions to "experiment" on bringing in students who may fall outside the criteria they use to evaluate most candidates. I think you could learn a lot from that kind of experimentation.
>Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.
I'm honestly not sure how you can look at that as anything but minorities like fast food so corporations build there.
I don't know about studies but if you look beyond American borders there are countries where schools are funded at the state and/or national level rather than the local one. There is some correlation with poorer areas having worse results despite identical funding but overall the results are much more even, schools in poorer areas can even be in the top results from time to time, even beating out top tier private schools.
It's not perfect, schools in "problem" areas tend to be where freshly graduated teachers go for a tour of duty before moving elsewhere, but it's still in improvement.
I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...
Perhaps...
> It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1]
This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?
This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
Why do you think single parenthood is rising, or that adoption opportunities are drying up? I doubt there has been a time in the history of mankind that is more accepting of single parenthood, or where it's been more possible to raise a child on your own. Women by and large aren't financially obligated to give up their children in this day and age, and with society becoming more secular it's socially more acceptable to be a single parent.
Further, what makes you think any institutional policy, or anything at all, can fix single-parent households having worse outcomes than two-parent ones? It's just simple logic: two parents tend to meet children's needs better than one because there are two of them.
I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...
It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups.
Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ...
Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.
Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.
It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.
A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.
Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]
0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.
Less than half the arrest rate.
A useful thing to keep in mind is that "black", as in "African American", actually is a sort of synthesized ethnicity (their original cultures having been stripped from them in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)... but "white" is not. There are Irish people and there are Slavic people and there are Sicilian people, and their cultures are not in fact all that similar. "White" just means what it needs to mean.
All you need to add to your mental model of "white" and "black" to fit low Asian American incarceration into it is the idea that Asians will soon attain "honorary white" status. That's not a message board concept; the transition of Asians from "model minority" to "white people" is much discussed in the real world as well.
I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases.
Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.
I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.
> It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group...
Actually, it's not bizarre at all. In fact, the long unsettled distraction of "black" vs. "white" is entirely what this whole dust-up is about. And while the particular case being litigated involves "Asian" students, the people/group funding the suit are non-Asian, IIRC. In fact, I believe they(the funders) actually did something of a casting call to find their plantiff(s), which isn't altogether uncommon. This case, ties into the previous anti-affirmative action cases that did not deliver the desired death blow. I don't have time (or interest really) to dig up old articles and such, but you shouldn't have any difficulty validating what I'm saying here if you are interested in doing so.
Also, there isn't much concern about Asian students who perform well on the requisite tests outnumbering other groups. The concern is about their outnumbering one group. W/all due respect, this should be pretty clear to anyone who understands the historical mission(s)-- which aren't all that different from those of current-- of such elite institutions. It's even clearer if one reads a little history (of the schools or broader society, your choice).
With respect to your question(s) about institutional racism, I'm not sure if you ask in earnest or are being rhetorical, so I beg forgiveness in advance. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole issue consists of many moving parts and circumstances. You say "Asian", but who are we even really talking about? That's a pretty diverse population. And it doesn't consist solely, or even mostly, of superior performers. All of the dysfunctions that many like to label as being exclusively 'Black' or (maybe) 'Hispanic' can easily be found among "Asians", too. And we still haven't even gotten to talking about which "Asians" from "Asia" are here and how they got here, or why.
> What are these Asian applicants supposed to do...
1) Question whether their understanding of admissions criteria is correct;
If they believe that their understanding of the admissions criteria is correct (I don't believe that it is based on personal experience/inside knowledge and research), and they believe that they meet the criteria for admission, then...
2) Start asking some very tough questions about why the bar is lower for everyone else; or
3) Opt out and do their own thing instead of seeking validation from, and validating, a system that for whatever reason(s) doesn't seem to value them appropriately.
Again, the entire issue is pretty complex, far more so than I've ever seen anyone here make it out to be. Which is why I hope you'll actually check out the video in the linked post.
Consider, just as one example, the paper "Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone" (Dobbie and Fryer 2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/are-high-qual...
Here is the abstract:
"Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient."
On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.
In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.
Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704
Yes there are two criminal justice and police reform.
I'd like this to be true, but unfortunately, it just isn't.
Many of the worst performing schools in America are actually reasonably well funded. Take a look at DC or Chicago and you will find individual schools within those districts that perform very poorly despite being similarly (or better) funded compared to their peers.
More funding isn't always the answer. Something else is going on.
Everyone I know, this is in the South Bay part of the SFBA
(You don't actually say the opposite statement—"we would need affirmative action if some school districts do not receive proper funding". It seems implied, though you also call AA a "symptom", which admits an interpretation like "the situation makes people mad and they'll demand X and probably get it, though I don't necessarily think they're right to do so".)
What counts as proper funding given many school systems get massive amounts of money that is lost to corruption and past debts (which are themselves likely attributed to corruption). And how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education.
Bingo.
Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, or other means) isn't going to change the real, underlying problems.
As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow.
There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduc...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...
After that only reasons you've listed for affirmative action have to do with economics. Why not just be race agnostic and then factor in income? As time passes races will fall in and out of the income brackets and nobody can argue its unfair.
That doesn't change the economic conditions of the student's home life.
In the US overall, school funding is negatively correlated with student achievement.
This does not suggest that lack of funding is an obstacle to achievement.
The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."
The set of students who are both poor and almost meets Ivy League standards is most likely very Asian. IIRC, universities have made the argument that financial affirmative action would not work for racial diversity (implicitly because few poor students who do well are black or Hispanic). Generally, this set is competing with the privileged black and Hispanic students who under perform compared to their socioeconomic background. Removing affirmative action would displace almost exclusively rich Hispanic and black elites with a mix of poor Asians and some rich Asian/white elites.
I don't think eliminated legacy based admissions or increasing school funding would bring this number down.
Harvard knows they've been acting unlawfully, which is why they desperately try to resort to evasive tactics, such as claiming their admission process is a "trade secret" and should never be discussed in court:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/harvard-university-is-figh...
The DoJ is right to conclude that Harvard has been acting illegally.
Their argument is what you'd expect from an institution that is racially discriminating, but trying to weasel out of its culpability: they try to hide their systematic bias in the most subjective and ambiguous candidate score - the "personality" ratings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...
> The report by the plaintiff’s expert witness, the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, revealed that Harvard evaluated applicants on the extent to which they possessed the following traits: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Asian-Americans, who had the highest scores in both the academic and extracurricular ratings, lagged far behind all other racial groups in the degree to which they received high ratings on the personality score.
> “Asian-American applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time only in the top academic index decile. By contrast, white applicants receive a 2 or better on the personal score more than 20% of the time in the top six deciles,” wrote Mr. Arcidiacono. “Hispanics receive such personal scores more than 20% of the time in the top seven deciles, and African Americans receive such scores more than 20% of the time in the top eight deciles.”
> Even if the very worst stereotypes about Asians were true on average, it beggars belief that one could arrive at divergences as dramatic as the ones Mr. Arcidiacono documents by means of unbiased evaluation.
Grutter v. Bollinger 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Of course you seem to be ignoring Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 1978 that ruled that race could be used as a factor in admissions but struck down quotas.
In fact Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003 Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion that the Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Hmm sounds like Harvard's argument. So the law is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
Since there is no real legal definition of race, applicants who might be disadvantaged by this policy are free to select whichever answer on the "What is your race?" question they want. If the system is unfair, there's nothing immoral about gaming it.
English wasn't common in pre-Columbian America.
That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; enables kids to save face with friends/family too.
Not a fully baked idea here, just a potential avenue.
Note that I am not expressing any opinion about any of this, merely pointing out the counter argument.
Insanely high threshold? That's... a very low bar. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-... (no idea how good this source is) shows roughly 4 million births a year. A 98th percentile cutoff would admit 80,000 kids per year to Harvard. By contrast, according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics (hopefully a strong source), the class of 2021 admitted 2037 people of which 1687 enrolled.
You would hope that 100% of Harvard admits would have 98th percentile (or, really, better) scores, but they don't.
Like by IQ, achievements, attitude, etc.
I feel like a lot of people use this phrase to emphasize... something... without thinking about it.
Asian skin color isn't all that different from white skin color, particularly among the Asians that schools are trying to keep out.
Can you tell the difference between an Asian and a white by looking? Easily, but skin color is certainly not where you'd look first, or fifth, or tenth.
translation: "We don't discriminate, but we discriminate."
How can somebody write something that stupid?
With AA, universities and companies have decided that rather than wait for education reform to streak across the US and guarantee proper funding and adequate education regardless of income, they will seek out those with the potential to do great things regardless of their test scores etc.
They have decided to solve the problem in the portion that affects them: aka not solving the root but simply getting different types of applicants in that they think are valuable.
I think the grand solution is to go back and reform education, which I think most agree on. But for now, companies and universities are doing really the only thing they can, which is give students and applicants opportunities that they have not been given earlier in their lives.
Also in the end I believe that most people can do most jobs once you get training. Most jobs are specialized enough to train someone directly and college is meant to learn anyway so if Harvard wants to admit people of various socio economic backgrounds in favor of not admitting solely the top, I think that'd be better for them in the long run. Especially since the metrics for success are measured as if everyone is in the white top-middle class.
I think that Asians are even more represented in the set of poor students that can academically fit into Harvard than the set of upper middle class and above students that can academically fit into Harvard.
In my opinion, equality if result is not really a tenable position. I suspect even if we were all completely and absolutely genetically identical, we'd still see different groups perform differently. The reason in this case would be emergent cultures. The culture in area like Palm Beach is going to diverge from the culture in e.g. Nome, Alaska. When Nomians then have, perhaps, better results than Palm Beachians does that mean we now need to start making it harder for Nomians to get into schools? It just doesn't make any sense. And of course this is all built on top of a false premise of each and every group starting with genetic equivalence to each and every other group. Ultimately I don't see any realistic way you can achieve equality of result without turning society into a dystopia.
The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT scores. Harvard as an institution wants to increase its prestige over time, and so they want to admit students who will go on to be CEOs, Senators, Presidents, etc. They want to pick the future leaders of society, but this is only correlated with GPA/SAT up to a point.
This is where race-aware admissions is perfectly warranted by Harvard. They want students who are outliers as those people will go on to do great things. But being an outlier of your cluster is important signal. And race is a very important cluster in society. That they structure their admissions to make sure they're getting the outstanding people from a broad range of races and circumstances is Harvard just working in their best interest. If Asian applications are very similar to each other, then they have a good reason to weigh such applications lower because you're no longer an outlier in the sense that is valuable to Harvard.
This isn't a moral issue like some are trying to make this out to be. If there is a moral issue here, its whether any institution should have such an outsized influence on the outcome of a person's life, not whether Asians are being unfairly barred from the king-maker institution.
What you're saying here is that non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders because the race of non-Asian leaders makes them better leaders.
But we haven't settled whether they're being racially discriminated against. If some legitimate feature to discriminate or filter against correlates with race, then it will look a lot like racial discrimination when it isn't. Harvard wanting to maximize their future prestige by carefully constructing the makeup of their student body is such an instance. Maximizing leadership potential of their student body will look like racial discrimination. It's similar to how the distribution of housing loans can look like racial discrimination if you didn't already know that income correlates with race.
> non-Asian leaders who are individually worse leaders take the spot of Asian leaders who are individually better leaders
No. I'm saying GPA and SAT scores only correlate with leadership potential up to a point. Once you've passed that threshold, other factors start contributing more, e.g. your background, interests, etc. It is not the case that the person with the higher GPA/SAT necessarily has more leadership potential.
And somehow these "lacking in leadership potential" students happen to be Asian more often than the norm? Year after year? Seems like a convenient coincidence.
Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these heuristics where other minority applicants do.
But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible.
The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.
There are all sorts of scenarios where there are natural incentives to discriminate on race; perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race. Perhaps a company that provides security personnel can better model risk if they considered race. Perhaps Harvard can better improve their ability to accumulate powerful people if they considered race.
But isn't it agreeable that not all kinds of strife is useful to a nation? Perhaps strife between companies is useful for diversity in a market, but racial strife? Which brews into generations of mistrust?
Sure, but not when done naively. Naive "anti-racism" policies generally serve to cement the current status-quo, which is why they have so much support these days. This is only to argue against the idea that being race blind across the board is a moral imperative.
The issue is what responsibility does Harvard have to admit students in a "meritocratic" (i.e. GPA/SAT are paramount) manner. I don't see that they have any such responsibility. I don't think they should discount Asian applicants because they're Asian. I do think its fair to positively weigh diversity in background and interests. But in a zero-sum scenario, this will look like racial discrimination from the outside, and that's OK.
>perhaps a bank can improve their model on creditworthiness if they considered race
Banks do use income and wealth in their model of creditworthiness. But if you didn't already know that race correlates with income, you might think that they are using race as an independent factor. Presumably you have no issue with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
There's definitely a bit of gray in there for me.
A blind process wouldn't discriminate and doesn't need quotas. Instead of asking questions with the hope for the right answer, ask questions to explore the right thinking which can be equally achieved no matter what someone's background is.
There is no such thing as a completely "blind" process that can somehow "measures the potential of a candidate" outside that candidate's socioeconomic history and outside the history of inequality in the US. It's the dream of a pure meritocracy which is completely impossible in reality.
Then I may ask, if you think different races have different brains , how can you argue against statements on traits by calling them stereotypes? I wasn't implying creativity, It was more general than that, and there's no better one than other.
While the DOJ’s brief does not challenge Supreme Court precedent granting universities the right to freely select their own student body—presumably because it cannot do so at this stage of the litigation—the Trump administration has advocated for “race-blind” policies, which Harvard and virtually all other universities have found are demonstrably insufficient to achieve meaningful diversity, given the reality of historic and continuing racial discrimination in this country.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/doj-backs...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-statement-department-justice-...
EDIT: For those downvoting me, you should give this a listen: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/podcasts/the-daily/aclu-n...
200 years later, with a population that's multiplied several magnitudes over - would you expect to still see a completely equal people? I wouldn't. People are different. And each child that is born is different, even when born to the same parents. Even identical twins are no longer completely identical by the time of birth. These differences express themselves in different ways (and wow was that the most tautological statement ever), but the point is that I think it's highly illogical to expect to see equality.
Out of genuine curiosity, do you disagree?
I would. South Koreans are 2-3 inches taller than North Koreans, plus a miriad of other biological differences, in a relatively short span of time. This is for the same ethnicity, yet alone race.
For me, that alone is proof we are much more similar than we think, and environmental factors, which your hypothetical scenario accounts for perfectly, has a much greater impact on us compared to genetics.
Which is why, for perfectly randomly selected humans raised identically for 200 years, I would not expect significant differences.
Their position paper on affirmative action is available here: https://www.aclu.org/other/affirmative-action-aclu-position-... and I think it illustrates not only their rationale, but the tone of their support for that philosophy.
Fair disclaimer that I am obviously opposed to this approach and have been cautiously skeptical of the ACLU for a while now.
I'm curious as to why you think that should necessarily be the case.
Unless one is going to argue that there are no genetic differences between individuals in the brain, it seems unlikely to me that different races don't have different brains in some fashion.
Sure that is a nearly impossible to accomplish considering how convoluted this equation is so we have to step back and it becomes a question of belief, and in this world of belief I can really only condense it into two categories.
1. If it exists, it doesn't matter 2. It exists and does matter ("does matter" in my mind precludes equality, one must be superior)
To me it is really a question of whether I personally choose be racist or not, racism being defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior".
I'm going to cut this short at that I do not believe someone can both believe a specific race is superior and act without prejudice. Again a lot of assumptions, but if wanted to keep going down the ladder of explanations I'd write an essay or a book.
To their credit, they aren't willing to sacrifice all pretense of "student-athletes" compared to some other schools. But there are definitely plenty of students that only get admission due to their athletic ability.
The ACLU, instead of addressing either matter, launches a political statement announcing its stance without justification. Lost some respect for them here.
I don't know if I am looking at their past through rose colored glasses, but their new direction is disturbing. It seems like they are increasingly okay with sacrifing our fundemental rights in favor of short term expediancy.
Having said that, this is still just the start of a change in course. They still do a lot of good work, and they might find their way again.
The bigger problem is that liberalism is dying in the US. The ACLU is the last major liberal public group/movement and they seem to be turning away from it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp...
Any reasonable person would at least acknowledge the trade-off between racial discrimination and racial diversity.
However, I find it incredibly unlikely that asian applicants are so bad at writing essays that it's singlehandedly tanking their personality score that drastically.
Can anyone tell me why not here and what's the difference?
As for what the difference is, I'm no expert on law, and can't confidently provide an answer.
To me, the difference seems to be that while white students may be slightly discriminated against through affirmative action, asian students face much larger hurdles.
The Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have not decided anything as clear cut as "affirmative action is completely allowed", nor "affirmative action is not allowed". From my understanding, explicit quotas are not allowed, but if a school can reasonably argue that their use of affirmative action serves its "education goal", then it's allowable.
It's pretty weird everything, on my country nothing outside "this is your score, this is your admission" would be allowed.
It's not meritocratic. People should be judged based on their skill, not based on their gender, race, or ethnicity. We should be striving for a fair society, not equality of outcome
It's insulting to those minorities, it implies that they can't be smart enough to make it without this kind of leg up, and they will never know the extent to which this played a role in their success even if they're absolutely solid at what they do. And I think there's definitely a negative psychological effect to minorities by doing these kinds of things
If a student gets into a school which is above their skill level or general academic interest, they could burn out and loose interest in a profession that otherwise would've been a good fit for them. A similar lack of motivation can also happen for someone who can only get into a school that's below their true skill level because they don't feel that their being valued fairly
It isn't all encompassing -- it's not just gender and race, there are ethnicities that are widely discriminated against and they don't get a similar leg up. I don't think AA should be applied at all, just pointing this out
There are problems in some minority communities struggle with for sure, but this isn't the right way to solve it at all
One of big reasons why asian and jewish communities do better here is just culture -- their cultures highly value intellectual pursuits. I knew an asian guy that went to Harvard and they were so poor they lived in the ghetto, which should've messed up his chances because the public school sucked, but he was raised to highly value academic pursuits. And an asian girl I knew that went to Columbia, her mother told her that if she doesn't achieve academically she won't love her anymore. While harsh, they punish their kids for an A- the way other cultures would view an F. But it's a big reason for their academic success
I also knew a girl that was very rich, but she basically didn't have to pay tuition because of her minority. I'm sorry but that's really annoying for someone that had to take out insane amounts of student debt. There were times when I thought I had to drop out because I couldn't even get approved for a loan, and the interest rates were insanely high
The better solution is to find out why some minorities aren't doing well academically in proportion to others in the first place and change that. If it's financial or cultural or whatever else, the underlying cause should be addressed, not this BS
People think affirmative action is a good idea because they think that minorities aren't doing well academically because they don't have role models to identify with. To be clear affirmative action is supposed to be temporary until the culture of minorities that do not do well academically as changed enough.
So paradoxically the goal of affirmative action is to reduce cultural diversity.
If everyone's score is truncated at 800 on a test out of 1200, then you can't tell the difference between a group that averages 800 vs one that averages 1100
My son did miserably on the ACT the first time he took it and didn’t meet the minimum to get into his college of choice.
After 10 sessions with a private tutor who was a college professor - costing $100/hour - he scored well enough to get admitted. Did he learn anything from the tutor that would help him do well in college or was he taught the test? The test did not measure his aptitude.
Another anecdote. I had the highest SAT score in my school and the second highest in the (relatively poor) city I grew up in. Do you think it was because I was that smart or because my mom was a high school math teacher who had been doing SAT tutorials for years?