Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.
I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary.
Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can).
For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy.
It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty.
The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course).
In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
Not an easy task, but an important one!
600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics.
Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice.
Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
>Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose.
>why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation.
The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads.
Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
Also, if one is of mixed race, say white and Asian, are they considered to be from a racially diverse group or are they not?