Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans? | Hacker News Reader

Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

nytimes.com

32 pointsjbegley23 comments

This article is poorly written. Early on the reporter really steps her foot into it by practically insulting the kid. Then he bristles at her and responds as if he's being attacked. It's cringing and I'm learning more about these two people than I needed to.

These are clearly driven individuals who will excel anywhere. In fact when you consider grade inflation, they'd be better of going taking a scholarship from a flagship state university. Especially for STEM majors.

Affirmative action is an attempt to break the cycle of educational under-performance for certain groups in America. It's a blunt tool that needs to be improved, not discarded.

Either that or given the current state of higher education, it's used as a way to take advantage of those desperate to better their lives under the false pretense that any degree they receive will land them a job that will afford them to pay back student loan debt.

The problem I see is that higher education never really improved performance of anyone. The way it historically worked was that higher education institutions would admit only the smartest people around and so only the smartest people would come out of them, too. Smartest roughly equates to highest performing.

Employers would then be able to use the certificate from those institutions to filter for only the smartest people since those were already filtered for to begin with to be eligible to get such a certificate.

If you put people into higher education that ain't already the smartest, you will get people coming out of higher education that ain't the smartest and employers will learn the hard way that the certificate in question is worthless and will begin to filter through other means. Now those students sit on debt they have no way to pay off, since high paying employers will find the smartest people around some other way.

This assumes that educational under-performance can be fixed by more education.

By my own experiences, the people who I have seen do well academically tended to have stable support systems (whether that is direct family or a mentor, or a solid group of friends, it doesn't matter). And likewise, the people who I have seen do poorly have broken or missing support systems (divorced or absent parents, bad friends or community).

Affirmative action does not solve the support system problem. All it does is throw people who can't swim into the deep end. I am not sure why people are confused as to why these people then drown.

I'm no fan of judging people by the color of their skin, why not use family income?

This way it's apparent who is getting high scores due to tutoring and who is naturally gifted.

They already do that too, but it can't solve the racial distribution problem which colleges care a lot about: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/1995-SAT...

Originally I was against the idea of affirmative action but I've came around to it, but I still don't understand the need to solve for racial distribution rather than socioeconomic distribution.

In my mind affirmative action's goal should be to break the cycle of poverty, where smart kids have poor/uneducated parents which holds them back and they grow up to be poor/uneducated themselves and so on.

It's my understanding that this problem disproportionately affects minorities (in particular black people), so solving for socioeconomic would "self select" (I don't know the proper term) for black people and avoid the issue of "Asian kid with poor/uneducated parents passed over for black kid with richer/educated parents" right?

Or is that just not a real issue? The article seems to mention pluses and minuses (e.g. "two college-educated parents (minus) from a major American city (minus) with aspirations to study either computer science (minus)") so it could be that the above hypothetical would never happen.

I don't know, I'm just struggling to understand why colleges would care more about solving racial distribution rather than socioeconomic distribution.

why not both? income and race. suddenly poor white men will become a protected class. for the uninitiated, this should make you realized that affirmative action only helps the wealthy members of each demographic. we also should add a citizenship criteria.

i do think a better way of measuring wealth is needed. maybe the amount of money you are deducting from your taxes. nobody who knows finance, aka the wealthy, has a large amount of taxable income.

I read a paper on this - if you cut the data by social-economic status, the number of 'qualified' black students would be just over 2%, and I think the colleges are targeting 8% of each incoming class (they don't call it a quota but it is, since it stays consistent each year regardless of overall applicants' demographic changes).

  They already do that too,

At Harvard, the acceptance rate for legacy students is about 33%, compared with an overall acceptance rate of under 6%.

If you think they're discriminating in favour of low-income families I'm afraid you've fallen for a PR campaign. For all that the article talks about "the tireless efforts of places like the Harvard admissions office to change the face of elite society in America" their actions do not evince that.

Well-off parents will simply have more incentive to disown their child.

The overall goal of affirmative action is to allow smart children, regardless of background, to break through the socio-economic glass ceiling regardles of the parent's decisions and abilities.

Although it can be seeing as a noble action, it is to wonder whether too much incentive on one side distorts the market too much, forcing well-off parents to spend higher % of their income to compete with Affirmative Action, including in gray and not so gray areas.

they got rid of affirmative action in california. the asians were the only minorities to see growth in the number of acceptances to uc. however, it was no where near the rate of growth of their population demographic. most of the new spots went to foreign students. once again the faculty went back to being exclusively white male. also all state government jobs hiring practices were no longer scrutinized for discrimination. minority elected officials in california clearly have difficulties dealing with their own state government.

nobody bothered to check whether eliminating affirmative action actually helped.

This is why so many white-centric right wing groups very much want affirmative action abolished, because it is a massive advantage to the politically powerful and connected, who are mostly white in America.

Lets just say its hardly like they are out for justice for all races...

"Politically powerful" are obviously mostly white because the population of the US is mostly white.

There is about 10% of black reps in the House which is well in line with the overall population.

And we also just have had a black president.

I mean, the UC is a merit based educational institution - why should the ethnicity of the faculty matter? If they are the expert in their field and can teach, then who cares if they're white/black/asian/alien.

Leave Asian Americans?? Asian Americans have the highest income of all groups of Americans.

Not all Asians are the same. I’m an outlier because I graduated high school

Money does not necessarily mean happiness.

> Asian Americans have the highest income of all groups of Americans.

Amazing how people in the United States nowadays are sensitive to stereotyping and racism ... except when it comes to Asians.

And caucasians.

So to resolve issues of Asian poverty, should the poorer Asians appeal to their richer peers? Is this the path forward for racial progress in the US? What should poor white or black people do?

highest taxable income per household. if you have a demographic of people who tend to live with their extended family their entire life. then they will always come out on top. once again people got tricked by comparing people of different cultures with a single stat. this is how the powerful trick people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com