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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the point:

>There is a popular and persistent image of college admissions in which diversity-obsessed universities are using affirmative action to deny spaces to academically talented affluent students while admitting low-income students with lower ability in their place. Boeckenstedt says the opposite is closer to the truth.

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I'm sure that Boeckenstedt is a good blogger and everything, but you can actually calculate how many SAT points race is worth (black positive, Asian negative) compared to wealth. And poor, non-Jewish white and East Asian males, are huge losers in the current admissions system.

One problem is that "diversity" means a lot of things to different people, and unfortunately to some, it means "freedom to exercise my hatred of <insert non-diverse boogeyman group>."

There’s no such thing as black race being worth positive SAT points and Asian negative. It’s only relative. Your race can only be an absolute positive or negative factor if there’s a no-race or neutral race to compare against ... oh you mean compared to white.

Not true even a little. You can compare to the average or median applicant.

Yea, I guess that's a good point.

Does he have any statistics to back up that claim? Every study I have seen says that students with privileged backgrounds get better results in college which suggests that the disadvantaged students who currently gets admitted are worse.

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