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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Whatever your views on affirmative action, this logic is hard to follow:

Harvard's legal team denied any discrimination in its opening statement at Boston's federal courthouse, saying race is just one factor that's considered and can only help a student's chances of getting admitted.

For institutions that have a limited number of slots available, it's impossible to say race can only help an applicant. I'm not making a value judgement here, just balancing a math equation. If we determine as a society that taking action to correct our structural biases is warranted, then own it. Not just the plus, but also the minus.

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The argument must be considered within the legal context. In this lawsuit, Harvard is accused of directly discriminating against Asians, not just indirectly harming them by giving a boost to black or hispanic applicants. Under no interpretation of equal protection is that acceptable. The indirect effects of affirmative action that you point to are, by contrast, permissible under at least some formulations of equal protection.

Harvard's strategy thus, and that's what's reflected in the argument you quote, must be to (1) defeat the allegation that it is affirmatively trying to keep Asians out; (2) explain that any knock-on effects to Asians from affirmative action benefiting other groups is within the bounds of what the Supreme Court has found acceptable in cases like Bakke and Grutter.

> In this lawsuit, Harvard is accused of directly discriminating against Asians, not just indirectly harming them by giving a boost to black or hispanic applicants.

But that's the exact same thing.

If you have a system where there are 1000 slots and the 1000 applicants with the highest scores get in, and you give Asian applicants +0, white applicants +5, Hispanic applicants +10 and black applicants +20, the outcome is entirely identical to giving Asian applicants -10, white applicants -5, Hispanic applicants +0 and black applicants +10. There is no meaningful difference, the people who consequently get in are exactly the same in both cases.

Assuming scores are randomly distributed, your hypothetical gives different results if you give asians -5 than if you give black and hispanic applicants +5.

Harvard is accused of excluding more than half the asian applicants who otherwise would have made the cut. Harvard does not admit anywhere near enough disadvantaged minorities where giving those folks a boost would lead to that many asians not getting a spot.

Harvard (and other Ivies) repurposed a mechanism originally introduced by Yale to keep Jews out in the 1930s. If those Asian candidates had not been excluded using the arbitrary and capricious "personal" rating, it's mostly Caucasians who would have been displaced, not African-Americans or Hispanics.

The personal rating differs widely between the admissions committee and the the alumni volunteers (who give Asians roughly the same ratings as other groups). This happens for no other ethnic group. This is the smoking gun for racial discrimination.

Is there a source for this claim?

> Assuming scores are randomly distributed, your hypothetical gives different results if you give asians -5 than if you give black and hispanic applicants +5.

If there are only asian, black and hispanic applicants, it gives exactly the same results. When there are also white applicants, that change is equivalent to adding a -5 modifier for white applicants equal to the original -5 modifier for asian applicants. In neither case is the result a system in which race can only help you -- there are a finite number of slots.

It seems obviously wrong that if you gave +20 to white applicants it would not be a disadvantage to black, hispanic or asian applicants just because they all have the same equally-disadvantaged modifiers.

Clearly there is no system where you can admit a black or hispanic applicant, keep class size fixed, and not push out a marginal white or asian candidate. But that doesn’t mean there is no difference between “discriminating against asians” and “giving a boost to disadvantaged minorities.” In the former case, only marginal asians get pushed below the cutoff. In the latter case, mostly white candidates will get pushed out.

Especially in the latter case, the effect on asians is indirect and attenuted. For example, say Harvard would have been 60% white, 30% asian, and 10% underrepresented minority. You can double the representation of disadvantaged minorities by reducing the asian representation from 30% to about 27%. So basically the bottom 10% of asians get exluded.

What is instead being alleged here is that Harvard exluded more than half the Asians that otherwise would have been admitted.

> But that doesn’t mean there is no difference between “discriminating against asians” and “giving a boost to disadvantaged minorities.”

The only possible difference is adding white people (or some other separate group) to the "discriminating against" set. And the combination of that precedent and intersectional politics makes even those equivalent as soon as you start adding more non-asian subgroups to the set of disadvantaged minorities.

For example, the white population at Harvard is overly culturally homogeneous. It would legitimately be a significant benefit to their cultural diversity to get some more rednecks in there, using some suitably more specific definition with regard to income, hometown urbanization level, etc.

So if you want to discriminate against a specific group, easy -- just enumerate a bunch of underrepresented groups that don't include them and give them each a bonus. Any given applicant outside of the target victim group is likely to be in one of them.

> So basically the bottom 10% of asians get exluded.

That's just because you're using convenient numbers. If the merit-based numbers would have been 60% asian (e.g. because Asia has a couple billion people who would all like to go to Harvard), you do have to exclude half of them to get them down to 30%.

Oh, I see how it is. Black people we're never discriminated against in democracy, because they always had 1 vote per person. It is just that white people got an extra 0.66 every time.

I know it is hyperbole. But college admissions are zero sum games. Giving points to one person, is the same as taking those away from another.

You know black slaves couldn’t vote right.

This is extremely embarrassing for me. (my only weak excuse being I am not American)

I thought that there was a period in american history after the civil war where black people's vote counted for 3/5th of a white person.

Turns out it was how electoral votes were decided, in which only slave owner voted before the civil war.

Well, you learning something new every day. I am an idiot.

Not an idiot. "Less knowledgeable about details of how a country other than your own was governed more than a century ago" does not deserve the label "idiot".

The problem is that a lot of top-tier schools MUST maintain the veil of a deterministic selection process. If it becomes known that these schools are essentially picking names out of a hat, then they will be inundated with applications and the 'brand' will be devalued as they will be swamped with applications.

Think of it as a lottery. If the selection was actually random, what would be the price of the lotto ticket? Based on last year's acceptance rate of ~3% and the expected lifetime earnings of ~$3,000,000, then the price you should pay for that lotto ticket should be $89,800. Now, compare that to the actual price of ~$75 for an application fee. Even a flimsy application to Harvard is totally worth the money.

If Harvard were to drop the act and state that it was basically random chance to get in, then their entire school would become essentially a lotto. That would quickly devalue the enterprise, not just monetarily but also in a holistic and educational way.

Essentially, they have to at least try to CYA and make some real effort at determinism in applications or the whole thing falls apart. Unfortunately, they pissed off some pretty smart people and this legal battle threatens to lift that veil, hence the fight.

There is an element of chance in getting into any top school, but only among the applicants who meet all the other qualifications. That is, between two students with 4.0 GPA, great SAT scores, and a wide selection of extracurricular activities and community service, it's a toss up. But a student with poor grades has no chance. It doesn't matter how many times the student with bad grades sends his application, he isn't getting in just by random chance. When it comes to Harvard, I would guess that 80-90% of applicants can be dropped immediately due to grades, SAT scores or lack of activities. Out of the remaining pool, for those without extenuating circumstances such as athleticism or family connections, is where such as race and "personality" might become a factor, and who ends up getting picked has an element of randomness.

Fair! I did look only at the 'non-legacy/athletic' Harvard acceptance rates (hard to find and piece together, btw), so we're looking at a bit more apples to apples comparison, though, as you say, not totally.

Lets say that only 10% of the applicants that enter can win. If you think that you are a possible winner in terms of scores, grades, etc. then what should you pay to enter the lotto? Please correct my math if I am wrong (probability is always a mind warp). The further reduction in probability to win makes the nominal acceptance rate not 3%, but 0.3%. That means that the price of the hypothetical lotto ticket should be $8,980. You just move the decimal over.

Still, compared to the $75 application fee, this is a steal. The acceptance rate would need to be ~0.003% to get the lotto ticket price to be about what the application fee is. That means Harvard would need to be ~1000x more picky than they currently are to get the lotto priced correctly.

Harvard had ~40k applications last year. At 1:1000 odds being considered 'worthwhile' due to the hypothetical lotto ticket cost, then you should apply if you think you are better than the bottom 40 applicants. You can play with the probabilities and make up a lot of hypothetical curves yourself. Nonetheless, the math seems to indicate that the $75 application fee is really low if you think you have nearly any chance of getting in and the process has nearly any randomness to it.

> Based on last year's acceptance rate of ~3% and the expected lifetime earnings of ~$3,000,000, then the price you should pay for that lotto ticket should be $89,800.

It's not the lifetime earnings from a Harvard education that are relevant, it's the increase of lifetime earnings at Harvard relative to a school one is effectively guaranteed to get into (say your state school that uses objective criteria).

That number is pretty difficult to evaluate, but I'm confident it is well under $1M.

> . Now, compare that to the actual price of ~$75 for an application fee. Even a flimsy application to Harvard is totally worth the money.

The cost of applying to an additional college is generally in time, not money. The money is just there to discourage low-quality shotgunning.

Nit: you need to calculate the Net Present Value of that $3,000,000, as well as subtracting the cost of tuition.

True! That number is, at best, a lower bound. Interest rates will likely make it MUCH larger, even with an inflation factored in. However, I've no way to calculate that as I don't have a crystal ball.

Good catch on the tuition! I did subtract it but did not mention it as I thought it would not read as well. In the end, the price of the lotto ticket should be MUCH higher when compound interest is factored in. How much is anyone's guess.

Your reasoning depends on false assumptions. For example you assume that we are currently at the maximum number of available slots. If we aren't, then it may well be true that adding more people is possible without disadvantaging existing people.

For a concrete example, consider how Dartmouth College went about admitting women back in 1972. The campus was already full. Yet they committed to not reducing how many men were admitted, with no new construction, and without increasing class size. In short they said that the new women would come at no cost to men trying to apply, and little cost to the university itself (certainly less than the benefit of the tuition.)

They succeeded. How? They moved from a semester to a quarter system. Then arranged to have required second year courses that were only available during the summer to get rid of any stigma about "summer school". These changes let them go from the usual part time academic calendar that most schools follow to operating at capacity year round.

The result? They met their apparently impossible commitment. And the new slots opened for women indeed came at no cost to the existing population of men.

> For example you assume that we are currently at the maximum number of available slots. If we aren't, then it may well be true that adding more people is possible without disadvantaging existing people.

Yes, they could "possibly" do that, but they aren't, so why the hell is this relevant?

Harvard admitted 2,200 undergrads in 1988. In 2018 it admitted 2,000. It took me 30 seconds of googling to find this.

Slots go up and down for a variety of reasons over time. As you just demonstrated, Harvard reduced slots from 1988 to 2018. What were their motivations? What would they have done if they weren't trying to let in diversity students?

It is absolutely true that if you do something for group X, you could have done more for group Y instead with the same resources. But saying that doing something for X automatically takes away from group Y is arguing the counterfactual, "Here is what you would have done if you had not done that." But you don't actually know what they would have done. Maybe they would have reduced admissions even more than they actually did. Can you prove otherwise?

That may seem like a rhetorical question, but it is not. Discovery gives access internal communications which could make that case one way or the other. But it is a case that has to actually be made, and isn't simply a foregone conclusion.

I mean now that they expanded the enrollment every admission comes at the expense of one other. If they said “maximum 200 students over 6 foot 2” then anyone over 6 foot 2 would be disadvantaged because they would be competing for a subset of the slots.

In the long run, this is also not necessarily true.

It is generally possible to expand enrollment by paying money to construct larger dorms, open classrooms, and hire staff. Virtually no university in the country is anywhere near its theoretical physical capacity. If I give an institution a large grant earmarked for doing this to create slots for a particular minority, that institution can create those slots without changing what is available to any other minority.

Now I provided a hypothetical case of a large grant from a single individual. That's an admittedly unlikely scenario. But Harvard's affirmative action programs are one of the wonderful things that can be talked about to potential donors. How many were pushed over the edge into donating because of it? Particularly given the fact that a former minority student who went to Harvard was in the press a lot over the last decade. Being the first black President will do that.

The point remains. The fact that one group got something doesn't mean that another group had to get less.

For another area where the same type of fallacy is rampant, consider immigration. People object to immigrants because "they are taking our jobs". When in fact immigrants make a net contribution to our economy, and make a net contribution to how many jobs are available for existing workers.

This is true for say Google employees but not true for Harvard. 90% of the value of a Harvard degree is the knowledge that it is exclusive.

I'm not sure how reducing the size of units of measurements changes the overall quantities. What matters is the total class time = number of classes per semester/quarter * avg hours met per class. If you double the amount of total class time (by doubling the student body), and hold class size constant, you'll have to end up offering twice as many classes. If you don't hold those total hours constant, then you're short-changing the students somehow...and definitely short-changing the faculty by reducing their time available for research.

In the previous semester system, the campus was mostly empty during the summer.

The way that they did the quarter system reduced breaks and filled the campus year round. The result was an increased number of hours of classroom time. Yes, this was more work for the faculty. But faculty is cheaper than buildings, and the primary mission of the school is teaching.

They did not double the hours. But in the early years, they also had a pretty lopsided male/female ratio. They kept their promise.

> They succeeded. How? They moved from a semester to a quarter system.

Of course, this solves nothing. There are still a finite number of slots, the number has just changed. The question of how to allocate the slots remains, and there are still more applicants than slots.

> I'm... just balancing a math equation.

Fine, but are you sure that you are working on the proper one?

Having followed a number of these threads, I think people understand the admissions process as some simple equation where "high academic achievements" + extracurriculars entitle them to a golden ticket @ Willy Wonka U. That's just not how this game works!

I have no affiliation w/the school, but have been through the game elsewhere and done a bit of research on their (and similar institutions') process. Their addy process is complicated, but not exactly inscrutable.

As has always been the case, the school has an agenda and admits the people it thinks most likely to further it. (A number of books do a pretty good job of spelling this all out. I've mentioned at least one of them in previous posts on this topic and the search engine of one's choosing or a librarian can help the interested find the others.)

The practice(s) in question aren't even specific to "elite" schools." A few months ago I attended an event where a State U president explained why they'd ratcheted down the admits for qualified "Asian" students (who actually would pay full freight to attend). Nothing to do w/ making room for "black" or "hispanic" students. But I guarantee you that his school's rationale is the same as Harvard's, Yale's, etc...

I've pondered posting the recording of the event, but honestly, I never sense that the information would change the conversation(s) here. A lot of the comments here smack of attempts to scapegoat others and assuage bruised egos.

Facts: "Asians" get gamed. "Blacks" get gamed. "Hispanics" get gamed. Btw: people should spend a little asking themselves 'WTF do those quoted terms even mean?' Chances are that your defs aren't the same as those of the addy staff, but I digress.

Respectfully, be smart, folks. This is not an issue to be taken at face value.

So, I was just looking at available slots and how that interacts with the statement, "Being X helps you, but not being X doesn't hurt you".

That just can't be. If having a certain quality increases your chances of admission by any amount, then it's the case that lacking that quality will hurt your chances by some amount. The only way around this is if the size of the incoming class is elastic.

I don't think the admissions process is a simple equation. My "balancing" statement was referring to the size and composition of the admitted class.

Also, I need to stress that I'm not anti affirmative action. My feelings on the subject are complicated. I assure you I don't take any of this as face value, and I see legitimate concerns on both sides of the debate.

Again, not involved in the selection process but...

What if a candidate's race results in him/her being placed in a 'race' pool? At that point, one's race doesn't help or hurt.

Then once the pools are formed, one starts looking at the #s. I'd wager that lots of European(-Americans)/"Whites" apply. So that pool = competitive.

The Asian(American) pool, lower #s, but higher than the groups not yet mentioned, and thus = competitive.

Probably few "Black" applicants, same w/ "Hispanic", and since Senator Warren is a topic of conversation, absolutely the same w/ "Native Americans." (BTW, I hate using these race terms.)

Then start thinking about who did (didn't apply) and why (self-selecting). Anyway, if we assume that many of the "Asian" applicants are "model minorities" who have been driven by their parents to, well, be model, the Asian pool is going to be ultra-competitive academically. (Wish I knew how to play w/ formatting here, because I want to highlight 'academically'.) So all that happens there, is that they've gone all cut-throat on each other because they're still in the "Asian" pool. Anyway, the argument could then be made that it was simply the numbers and competitiveness of the applicants (which I believe is always stated in the ding letters) that results in getting rejects getting dinged, not their "race".

Anyway, the factors that make different candidates desirable are, as previously stated, 'complex'. But people who want to figure it out can with some digging and quite a bit of logic. These places are not bastions of altruism. They're businesses and extensions of "things". The schools admit the applicants who they think will best serve their purposes. Take a look at the range of characters who have attended their various programs.

As for Affirmative Action, again, people would be wise to do some research. Ira Katznelson has an interesting book on the development and implementation.[1] Admittedly, the title may seem inflammatory so some, but it isn't entirely wrong and was given to him by another "White" guy who's currently at a DC think tank founded by a 'Republican'. It should also be said that there are many "Black" people who would be happy to see AA done away with because it has essentially been used to benefit everyone but them, even though it was written (supposedly) exclusively to benefit African-Americans. But this would be an even longer conversation that then reaches back into how and why "Asians" came to be the "model minority", and whether or not the achievements that another poster mentioned here are actually solely their own, etc. All stuff I'm not really interested in doing here now, or have done a bit of in related past posts.

Anywho, thanks for following up, and all the best.

[1] http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/when-af...

> this logic is hard to follow:

legal logic often is. your error is in reading it out of the tight legal context/boundaries it is part of.

Unless the external system already has a negative bias against a race and you're correcting for that bias inside your own system by adding race into the equation.

I assume both of those points to be true. That the external system is negatively biased toward certain groups, and that the point of affirmative action is to counteract that harmful bias. I'll even grant that affirmative action has been somewhat successful in achieving that aim.

It's still disingenuous to argue that there is only benefit and no harm when re-balancing the scale here. Nothing irritates me more than intellectual dishonesty, and I perceive it here.

I can see an argument that correcting for bias isn't "hurting" someone that comes with a preexisting positive bias.

But if that's the argument, then you're not "helping" anyone either.

You can look at it either as removing bias so nobody is helped or hurt, or you can view it in comparison to a 'race-blind' process where it helps some and hurts others.

You can't cherry-pick half of each.

Harvard attracts people worldwide. Shouldn't it be a combination of race + country of origin?

Hispanics are not discriminated against in mexico, for instance.

In Mexico the discrimination is based on skin color, and is far more extreme than in the US. At the end of the day the US is one of the least racist racially heterogeneous countries.

I think the issue of affirmative action really comes down to whether people think this is OK or not. The real question is, "is it more right to give privileges to the underprivileged than it is wrong to take away privileges from the privileged?". It'd be nice to just have the former without the latter, but with a limited number of "privileges" available, there just hasn't been a good solution yet (and there may not be one).

> "is it more right to give privileges to the underprivileged, or take away privileges from the privileged?"

In a world with finite resources (admission spots at Harvard) that are already utilized at their full capacity, it is not possible to have one without the other.

Discrimination in the pejorative sense generally includes an aspect of intent to act in a biased manner against a group. In this case the "discrimination" is incidental to the zero-sum nature of college admissions. So it's reasonable to say you're not discriminating against Asian students even though the outcome is the same.

I don't think this passes the smell test. For example, an employer would not be discriminating if he had a policy of hiring only whites, so long as he says he only wants to help whites and harm to other races is incidental?

Your example scenario wouldn't pass the smell test because there's no non-racist reason why someone would only want to hire whites, so it's obviously a smokescreen for racist intent. In the case of college admissions, there are plausible reasons for wanting to increase the diversity of their student body.

Why should diversity of race matter? And if it does matter, shouldnt we be sending talent scouts around the world and country to find representations of unexpressed races? (Eskimos, Sherpas, gypsies, etc) if there are superior races, then it's fairly unequivocally a bigoted process no?

Harvard doesn't exist in an ivory tower. Harvard is preparing graduates to go out into America, where 30% of the population is Hispanic or black. It is a good thing for society if the future academics, politicians, and business leaders educated at Harvard reflect that community. It is also critical for the 70% of Harvard that is white and Asian to be exposed to the diversity of their country. Most of these kids come from enclaves where they may literally have never had a black or Hispanic friend until they get to college. (I grew up in that kind of area and I can't name a single black or Hispanic person I knew well enough in K-12 to remember their name). Having future politicians, judges, etc., graduate ignorant of the society they live in would be a disaster.

How are black/hispanic people different than 'us'? Aren't we just reinforcing racial stereotypes by presenting them as different? Don't we otherize 'them' when we do this?

They’re different because their lived experience is one of being black or hispanic in america rather than white. The median black household makes 1/3 less income than the median white household. Whatever social forces exist to make that true—that’s what is different. (Note that this is different than simply being a white person who grew up in a lower income household. A black person who grows up in a household making $100,000 still experiences an America where that is an exceptional income for a black household, and only a bit above average for a white household. Every black person experiences the social forces that cause that huge income gap; some are just more fortunate than others or achieve more even accounting for those forces.)

Diversity isn’t about you, it’s about how society treats the group you’re a part of. Concrete example: I’m about the least “diverse” person you could meet. I’ve had friends literally forget I’m not white (“wow we’re the only white people in this theater”). But I’m brown and my wife is white, and a majority of Americans disapporved of such marriages until 1998 (when I was 14 and had just gotten a kick-ass PC with 300 MHz Pentium II). When Trump was elected, my wife was low key making contingency plans to move to Germany. Frankly, she’s kind of a prepper anyway. And I’m not worried about Trump or Bannon. But if shit does go sideways, I doubt the jack booted thugs are going to be like “oh, you go to church and subscribe to National Review? Free to go!” Society “otherizes” people-you don’t do it by recognizing that fact.

(And genuinely, I’m not complaining. I think life here is pretty great for immigrants from Muslim countries—Americans are incredibly welcoming, much more so than the people where I’m originally from.) But at least part if my point of reference for that is how much better off we are than African Americans, who are treated like second class in their own country.

> Every black person experiences the social forces that cause that huge income gap

I doubt the extent to which that gap is caused by extant social forces. It strikes me as far more likely that the lion's share of that gap is historical; at a certain point discrimination sharply declined but by that point whites and blacks were on different tracks. There are social forces that exist which close the gap (integration, affirmative action, and a desire to reverse historical injustices); there are other forces which expand the gap (the widening wealth gap, residual discrimination), but I doubt the net of these two is a significant driver of the gap. Besides historical artifacts, I'd guess the next biggest driver of the household income gap (or perhaps the number one driver) is the fact that white households are more likely to have two parents (thereby more likely to have two incomes), which is a social force but not an external one and certainly not one that affects all blacks.

And who is to say that a black Harvard candidate even has "average black expriences" or whatever that means. It seems entirely possible that the pipeline of black Harvard students more closely resembles the pipeline of white Harvard students (in terms of life experiences) than it resembles "black America".

For all of this complexity, using skin color as a proxy for lived-experiences seems like one of the least effective, most flat-footed approaches to achieving an experientially diverse student body imaginable.

> I doubt the extent to which that gap is caused by extant social forces. It strikes me as far more likely that the lion's share of that gap is historical; at a certain point discrimination sharply declined but by that point whites and blacks were on different tracks.

I don't buy that speculation. Until 1998 (the year Google was founded), a majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages. If you think they were like "yeah, blacks marrying whites gives me the heebie-jeebies" but were nonetheless free of discriminatory mentalities when it came to hiring, promotions, etc., I don't know what to tell you.

> I'd guess the next biggest driver of the household income gap (or perhaps the number one driver) is the fact that white households are more likely to have two parents (thereby more likely to have two incomes), which is a social force but not an external one and certainly not one that affects all blacks.

External forces have impacts on marriage rates: people are more likely to put off marriage if they are financially insecure, incarceration breaks up marriages, etc. Unless you're positing that black people just want to be married less than white people (which is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof), the cause must be external.

> skin color as a proxy for lived-experiences

Skin color is not a "proxy" for lived experience. It's a determinant of lived experience in a country that treats you differently based on your skin color, independently of your socioeconomic status.

> I don't buy that speculation. Until 1998 (the year Google was founded), a majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages. If you think they were like "yeah, blacks marrying whites gives me the heebie-jeebies" but were nonetheless free of discriminatory mentalities when it came to hiring, promotions, etc., I don't know what to tell you.

I was quite clear that I don't believe discriminatory mentalities disappeared, but if you think that discriminatory hiring practices _didn't drop precipitously_ in the '60s-80s, I don't know what to tell _you_.

Anyway, I don't know where you're getting that 1998 figure, but Gallup[0] says the last time a majority of Americans disapproved of interracial marriages was 1978 (two decades earlier than your citation) and more Americans approved than disapproved sometime around 1988 (Pew also agrees with this figure [1][2]) (note that there are 3 categories--approve, disapprove, and no opinion).

> External forces have impacts on marriage rates: people are more likely to put off marriage if they are financially insecure, incarceration breaks up marriages, etc. Unless you're positing that black people just want to be married less than white people (which is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof), the cause must be external.

First of all, being financially insecure isn't an external force, it's a state--specifically it's the state we're trying to approximate. So if you're going to justify household incomes as an indicator of financial security, then it doesn't make sense to argue that it depends on financial security. It's simply a bad metric and you should find another one to argue your case.

> Skin color is not a "proxy" for lived experience. It's a determinant of lived experience in a country that treats you differently based on your skin color, independently of your socioeconomic status.

I'm sure it's a determinant for some kinds of experiences, but that doesn't tell us

1) how well race predicts those experiences

2) what percentage of total human experiences are predicted by race

3) how significant these experiences are compared to other kinds of human experiences (for example, do you really want to argue that Asian Americans whose ancestors have lived in the U.S. for 8 generations have more in common with first generation Asian Americans than with 8th generation white or black Americans?)

4) whether the predictive power holds true as true for minority Harvard candidates as it does for minority Americans generally

So I say again, the notion that racial diversity will produce a meaningful diversity of experiences for Harvard's student body is _at best_ an extraordinary claim that requires extroardinary proof.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Public_o...

[1]: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/chapter-4-public-a...

[2]: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/20...

Are you asking about diversity of race only? Or diversity in general? The argument is that a more diverse student body creates a better educational environment for everyone - it broadens the experience. In addition to your academic studies, you learn about interacting with people who are different from you. People who think differently, reach different conclusions, even when confronted with the same data.

Racial diversity is only part of the equation. You also want gender diversity and class/income diversity - any of the major factors that shape how we view the world.

It depends on whose perspective you're taking. For example, diversity matters because a college like Harvard is attempting to prepare its student body to be leaders of society. Being in a diverse environment that more closely mirrors society plausibly is more conducive to leadership growth than being in a homogeneous environment.

Which society? Because last I checked, just China and India made up half the world, and Harvard wanted to produce global leaders or whatever they're calling it these days.

The U.S. society, obviously. The prestige of Harvard is derived from its reputation as being the institution that forges American business and political leaders.

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