Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process | Hacker News Reader

Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

npr.org

269 pointstempsy589 comments

This ruling is a travesty and I hope the Supreme Court overturns it when this is appealed. It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory. Take a look at the distribution of students by race in the University of California system, where they're not permitted to discriminate in this manner, thanks to Prop 209 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...) - it is very different (more Asians) compared to private schools like Harvard.

Harvard has a 25%+ Asian American undergrad class, (edit)~~2.5x (Harvard's is ~60% of UC's) more than the latest number listed on that wiki page, so your final statement is factually incorrect`~.

I quoted wrong number. It's 25% vs 40%.

https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

The wiki says the UC system has about 40% Asian American students. This suggests race conscious admissions do indeed (as the name suggests) discriminate based on race, at institutions like Harvard.

I quoted wrong number. Sorry.

Nitpick: Comparing UC to Harvard isn't that straightforward. The UC system is California's, it disproportionately takes people from California, and California does have more Asians than the country as a whole, as well as more than the Northeast region in which Harvard is based.

We all know that number should probably be higher if we're actually caring about academic performance.

Affirmative action doesn't actually bother me as much as legacy based admissions. Just absolutely idiotic that it's accepted.

Indeed, Harvard's own internal study determined that if academics were all that mattered, 43% of admitted students would be Asian.

The major factors pushing down that percentage are legacy admissions and the vague "personal rating," which seems to be the knob Harvard admissions turns to get the demographic ratios it desires. Asians are systematically given a far lower "personal rating" than other demographics.

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/harvard-admissio...

"Well it's simple you see, Asians are simply less personable, as a group, than white folk. No no no, it's not blatant discrimination at all, I assure you! It's just science, I swear!"

I really don't see how anyone justifies this kind of thing in 2019. This is like the barest possible fig leaf over obvious prejudice. They could rename it to "Cromulence Factor" and it'd make as much sense.

It's a personal rating not a personable rating.

The smoking gun is that Asians were doing just fine on personal ratings given by Harvard alumni, but were doing poorly specifically on the personal ratings given by Harvard admissions officers.

I don't see why academic performance, beyond an institution's decided-upon base threshold, should be the sole or even dominant admissions factor. Especially at a liberals arts college like Harvard.

It shouldn't be. Admission should be a lottery passed a base SAT score. That score should be based on analysis of how capable of Harvard's existing course load a student who receives a given score is, rather than, say, calibrating it specifically to cause the rejection of the majority of a given protected class. Suddenly, you achieve demographic near-parity.

Kid didn't get into Harvard? Donate to the school he or she did get into.

If Harvard did not race balance then every year the race % would be different - there should be enough of all races to pick a class of competent people. Why is it that 1 year a class can’t be primarily black or Asian? Before the lawsuit EVERY year the race ratio was almost exactly the same.

Secondly, why doesn’t Harvard just admit Asian Americans that score poorly to bring the Average down and chalk it up to amazing character?

Shut the fuck up you stupid bitch.

We've banned this account. Posting like this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It will almost certainly be overturned on appeal, in appellate court if not the SCOTUS.

Harvard and UC are trying to do different things. Harvard is trying to admit the future leaders of the world, so it can point to them and say “They are Harvard men.” UC is trying to give an academically rigorous education to the most academically qualified students.

Honestly not sure why this is being downvoted. UC and Harvard are practically opposites in terms of the character they are looking for. One has alumni interviews for every serious applicant, the other has a gpa cutoff to filter out most students and then still just goes off numbers. Replace the words 'college' with 'job', and this whole thing looks silly.

> Replace the words 'college' with 'job', and this whole thing looks silly.

I don't know about silly, it certainly looks unlawful to me.

So, asians are less likely to be leaders because of their race? African-Americans are more likely to be leaders because of their race?

Asia hasn't produced a Kanye yet. They got work to do.

G-Dragon, maybe?

A grades and SAT admission model creates a class that is ~70% Asian. America’s future leadership class is categorically not 70% Asian.

Why not? If Asians are hardworking enough to occupy 70% of the top positions, why not?

Because “leadership” in anything requiring a democracy requires people to vote for you or at least not actively work against you. This is far from impossible, America’s leadership class heavily overweights Yankees and Jewish people compared to their share of the population but change is always hard. It’s probably a lot harder if there’s a constant drum beat of race talk insisting that X-Americans have a completely different life experience from Y-Americans but it’s not like this is unprecedented. Anti-semitism was widespread across Europe before, during and after Jewish Emancipation and in every country where Hitler and the locals didn’t kill them Jews are over represented in the professional and leadership classes.

No but it might be possible that an African american with the same grades as an asian american is much more likely to be successful in the future because they got the same results from what is likely a much more difficult starting point. The context of someone's acheivements matters and race is part of that context.

But if it's starting position you're worried about, you'd be worried about class. You would give affirmative action based on economic status, not race. That I would agree with.

And it would help their preferred races, too. But it wouldn't play nearly as well on HN or Twitter.

You would give affirmative action based on economic status, not race

But race also matters in terms of starting position.

Yes, a lot in terms of cultural differences. So Asian-americans are being discriminated against because their parents make them study hard?

I guess in the end, like life, it's not about grades... sadly.

Isn't it interesting to see so many people being okay with Asians getting discriminated against? It's almost as if it's not institutional racism to funnel Asians to colleges that mass produce worker class people instead of leaders of tomorrow. People will almost directly say that Asians make poor leaders because all they care about is school grades, when in reality Asians are taught to work harder than their peers to overcome exactly that prejudice. Let's try evening out the playing field and see how many Asians flourish in all areas of life in America like they do in Asia.

Asians need to organize like people of other races and take bigger pieces of the pie.

Agreed, it is time to stand up for our rights.

My parents were really supportive of me in school; someone whose parents weren't as supportive of them, who got the same grades as me is probably a better student and will be more sucessful with a given set of resources than I would since they overcame more adversity than I did.

It's a little crude to use race maybe, but it probably isn't a terrible approximation. What would be great is if people had to disclose any paid preparation for the SAT or the hours their parents spent with them growing up but that's probably a long way off.

Overall, this issue is framed to be as controversial as possible by political interests but it really isn't that big a deal.

> who got the same grades as me is probably a better student and will be more sucessful with a given set of resources than I would since they overcame more adversity than I did.

Isn't that contradictory? Are you saying that african americans achieve the same as asian americans even though they did not have to study hard? Then why would affirmative action be necessary?

Affirmative action is applied to upgrade the scores of candidates with lower scores if they are of a disadvantaged minority. So, an asian american with higher scores (and who worked harder) will miss out on an opportunity to an african american with lower scores (who did not work as hard).

You're misreading the statistics. If students are admitted in a race blind way then you get 16 times as many Asians as African Americans. He's just arguing they're not 16x more likely to be leaders than African Americans.

Sure. Power concentrates not by "merit" (narrowly construed as GPA/test scores), but through complex social and cultural factors, and race is obviously politically relevant. Existing institutions will favor a black Harvard graduate over an Asian graduate becoming a leader of some political institution. Asians as a whole outnumber blacks, but are far more politically and culturally diverse.

Are you arguing that Asians inherently make worse leaders than people of other races? To me, Harvard keeping Asians out would create a negative feedback loop where Asians are not perceived as leader materials.

> It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory.

Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field. So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.

> but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

So under that thought process... when does the temporary measure end? Is there a specific goal? Or is it something unachievable like "when income inequality is fixed".

I suppose its not far from the SCOTUS 1st Amendment cases of porn/obscenity, they can't quite define it, but they'll know it when they see it.

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)

>The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point "assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself." Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S., at 510

>But such measures, the Convention instructs, "shall in no case entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate rights for different racial groups after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved." Ibid.; see also Art. 1(4) (similarly providing for temporally limited affirmative action); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Annex to G. A. Res. 34/180, 34 U. N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Res. Supp. (No. 46), p. 194, U. N. Doc. A/34/46, Art. 4(1) (1979) (authorizing "temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality" that "shall be discontinued when the objectives of equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved").

Income inequality is only "unachievable" exactly because of thinking like this. If people were genuinely invested in equality they would be asking "what can i do to get us there faster?" instead of being defeatist and calling it unachievable because you didn't personally create the problem.

You didn't answer his question, created a strawman, put words in his mouth, implied he doesn't care about equality (isn't treating people equally, regardless of race equality?)... goodness.

He explicitly said income equality is unachievable. I didn't put those words in his mouth.

You can't answer the question of "when" if a person has already decided the goal is unachievable. Again, those were his words not mine

The temporary measures will end WHEN people are genuinely interested enough to help regardless of whether they created the problem. That is my answer. You just don't like it. And that's ok....

When, in the history of humanity, has income ever been at an acceptable level of equality?

If you/the people who support such a policy can't define an explicit goal then I'd say that's pretty unachievable.

Income equality is outcome equality, which is unenforceable.

It’s very enforceable. It’s just that it really, really sucks to live in a society that implements that enforcement.

I don't believe you, can you give some examples?

Khmer Rouge killing lots of intellectuals is one classic example, although most socialist revolutions had their own variants.

I suppose you can do a No True Scotsman and say that those weren’t truly enforcing equality of outcome since there were people at the top of that society doing the enforcing, but most would find that argument pretty strained.

it should be opportunity equality, rather than outcome equality.

Everyone should have the chance at getting educated, but not everyone needs to pass or excel - it is up to the individual to succeed, but it is up to society to provide the opportunity to succeed. That is why schooling (primary, secondary and tertiary) should be free for everyone.

And why school funding shouldn't be based on the neighborhood it is in.

> So under that thought process... when does the temporary measure end?

Difficult to answer, and honestly not at all a priority to have an answer.

It is when the courts say as a temporary measure its ok. You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

> You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.

The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."

> > You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

> Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.

> The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."

Are new Roe v Wade like cases being heard by the court? There's a chilling effect to people bringing these cases to consider.

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/fede...

I'm sure you're aware that like 10 other states have similar cases working their way through the court system

Ah, I was aware of a couple of suits in states. None yet heard by the Supreme Court, though (or slated for hearing). I wonder if the court would even hear arguments on what they consider to be settled case law.

FWIW, I'm a white person who used to think of affirmative action as unfair discrimination. That was true until I spent time volunteering teaching technical skills to kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods. Now that I have had an up close experience with these communities, I'm here to tell you institutional racism is real and we're far from it making sense to end these programs.

There simply is not a quick easy solution and those who are not oppressed simply have no real frame of reference to understand the problem. I encourage every person who feels these programs are unfair to spend time volunteering in poor minority communities.

I'm like you. White and use to think the same. Love him or hate him, the last chapter, A Jamaican Story, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers really pierced my heart. I can't fathom what it must be like. I think those that despise affirmative action take things personally. They are right, sometimes it's not fair since they busted their butt, paid their dues, etc but lose out possibly because the color of their skin. It sucks and I'm sorry.

Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky? Because the current policies treat white kids from trailer parks like white kids from fancy suburbs. And they treat FOB Asians like they are doctor's children. And black kids from fancy suburbs are treated as if they came from poor ghettos.

The idea that "oppression" is limited to dimensions of race and gender, rather than ethnic/economic/geographic/etc is as juvenile as it is political useful.

You have had up close experience with one kind of disadvantaged community, and act as if that is the only group that has it. The difference between urban communities and places like Clay County, Kentucky is that volunteers like you won't ever get sent to Kentucky.

> Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky?

Your line of reasoning did a dodge there, swapping out between geographic demographics and racial demographics.

I don't think all kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in Eastern Kentucky. I do think that all the white-looking kids in eastern Kentucky, regardless of other factors stacked against them, will never be denied a job, loan, or rental opportunity based on the color of their skin. I can't say the same for the kids from any of those regions who don't look white.

It’s almost 2020, not 1940. We have major cities that are majority nonwhite. We have entire statewide school districts that are mostly nonwhite. We have huge metropolitan areas that are mostly nonwhite. You can walk into an expensive luxury apartment complex in an immigrant heavy city and find tons of nonwhite people.

And yet the data still shows widespread economic disparity due to discrimination

The data also shows widespread economic disparity due to geography, yet Harvard doesn't give the poor kids an extra 200 points on their SAT. If Harvard actually cared about this issue they would create additional scholarship programs that review people on a case-by-case basis rather than a blanket policy.

geography isn't a protected class. it's not a class at all. it's a set of circumstances. your skin color and the privileges or liabilities incurred are inescapable.

> geography isn't a protected class

Frequently it is. Many laws specifically protect "national origin".

Kentucky isn't a "national origin."

Kentucky doesn't has the support a specific national origin might have because there are no laws about that yet. It's an analogy.

If you think "being from Kentucky" should be treated the same as "being from Ireland," you're welcome to make a case to your Congressperson.

Good luck.

i love this kind of red herring: we're very obviously talking about intranational geography. as the person below me quips: kentucky isn't a nation of origin.

>Many laws specifically protect "national origin"

What laws? The US Constitution provides significantly greater protections to US Citizens than foreign nationals, as many of rights are not extended to non-citizens.

> And yet the data still shows widespread economic disparity due to discrimination

The data shows widespread economic disparity. It does not show the cause, which may or may not be discrimination.

The Little Rock Nine was 1957. What do you believe happened to all those people who protested and threatened violence against those children? What do you think they taught their children?

The idea that we have somehow magically eradicated racism over the course of a single generation astounds me.

Seriously, it's almost 2020. You should get how close to the 1960s that is.

Just want to point out that in the same time period, Asians were heavily discriminated against in northern California.

And yet there is no trace of it now. I doubt you have set foot in Arkansas, because your implication that the attitudes haven't changed much is grossly inaccurate.

It's not fair to hurt people just because you think others have been hurt. You're just furthering the abuse. Many white people have been denied housing, education, and jobs because of their skin. You can't solve ignorance with more ignorance. You're literally talking about ruining peoples' lives because of your racism.

> Many white people have been denied housing, education, and jobs because of their skin.

[citation needed]

This is actually factually incorrect. White kids from different economic backgrounds are treated identically != race-conscious admissions policies as they are currently described in the ruling. And FOB Asians is not an economic class, so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make. Is FOB Asian supposed to be poor? Because you need them to visit some places like Vancouver and Waterloo.

I think your point that oppression is not only racial but socioeconomic is not misguided. But as I understand it, the ruling does not preclude adjustments based on the access and opportunity limitations you refer to, which are not strictly limited to a particular race.

>Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky?

You have to distinguish affirmative action (in hiring/employment) and race based factors in college admissions.

Most colleges that use race/minority status as a factor in admissions also generally also use socioeconomic status as a factor. However, I am not familiar with any employment/hiring based affirmative action that looks at socioeconomic status.

Just as an example, I went to a top 50 (at the time) public high school in the country, the school is located in a large city (hint: where Jeff Bezos went). I had a 4.0 GPA and was the 50th percentile of the class, approximately #750 out of 1500 kids in my class. Colleges take that into account and I would never have made it to an ivy league (I did get 1 offer, but because I was an athlete and they wanted me to compete for them), but all things being equal if I came from that poor rural area you reference I would be looked at like a scholar, maybe even #1 in the graduating class vs #750, and I might have had multiple Ivy league admissions.

> I would never have made it to an ivy league (I did get 1 offer

> "those who are not oppressed simply have no real frame of reference to understand the problem"

Yet somehow you think you are enlightened by a little volunteer work. as far as immigrants in America go, Asians make more money than whites. When you compare Chinese, the difference is starker.

FWIW, I don't think you were really that poor. I grew up white, male, and poor from Appalachia. I promise you, there was no privilege in that. Its a crime against humanity that someone's test scores are worth less than another's simply because they were not born with enough pigment in their skin.

On the other hand be happy you were given the poor white from Appalachia scale for your test scores rather than the middle-class Asian from New Jersey scale.

So two wrongs make a right?

I think America largely fails its poor, black and marginalized communities, and that a ton more can and should be done, but that doesn't mean affirmative action is the right (both effectively and morally) solution, or that it's not systemacially unfair to other groups.

Institutional racism is real. That doesn't make these programs right, or even a solution. Ivy+ schools carefully pick out minorities who didn't grow up in poor neighborhoods. Most of these programs act as institutionalized racism, and give the appearance of doing something without the reality.

If you pick out students who had real disadvantage -- growing up with horrible schools, having uneducated parents, not speaking English, being poor -- I'd be 100% for them.

That's not what we've got.

We've got a system where Harvard will bring in black people from the "right" neighborhoods, and white people if their parents went to Harvard, taught at Harvard, or donated to Harvard.

For starters I'd say when the racial wealth gap has closed and when racial outcomes in education even out. So many of the factors that feed back into keeping those gaps alive can be traced directly back to racist policies like red lining that only ended less than a human life time ago.

Who says fixing income inequality is unachievable?

Are all of your coworkers equally productive? Neighbors? Relatives?

The answer for all 3 for me personally is no. I have family members who make decisions based on different priorities which change their income. My coworkers differ radically in their abilities and work ethic. How can they have equal incomes in this scenario? There is a way to do this, and it hasn't worked any time it's been tried.

I mean, "universal basic income" would be a good start.

Adding one thousand to most statistical measures will either not change it or shift it by one thousand.

Until everyone's cost of living goes up because they have an extra $1k/mo and landlords / retailers know it. The same thing happened with guaranteed student loans. When people have money to burn the market will react by increasing prices.

It might, but it turns out macroeconomics isn't that simple.

I don't think "fixing income inequality" needs to mean that everyone is paid the same amount. It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee, and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth. Even if you did think that they were that meritorious, you could still make an argument that "fairness" should involve balancing both merit and utility (in this case referring to the diminishing marginal utility of money).

> It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee

If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company, and the CEO executes a few big multi-million dollar deals that month, then the CEO in fact would be significantly more productive (in terms of capital to the company) than the average employee.

> and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth.

Yes like taking the risk of starting such a business to employ others and putting down the capital which might be lost.

I also don't know who you think would enforce some kind of "fairness" limit on how much money someone makes. The government doing so would likely be ruled unconstitutional and wouldn't likely ever be passed in the first place through congress.

Just to play devil's advocate, if you put a normal Walmart employee in a CEO position, or maybe just an "executive" position with decision-making authority, how far off would they be in terms of productivity from someone normally in that position? Say the employee was 1/10th as productive as that executive, that would still be thousands of times more productive than that same employee at their regular minimum wage job.

> If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company

If all the normal employees quit and Walmart can't replace them, how much money does Walmart lose?

Perhaps we should calculate value to the company based on that sort of reasoning.

In a given time period, let's say a year, you may personally work harder or smarter than in some other year. Do you believe that you should be compensated the same regardless of how hard or smart you work in a given year?

If you're a self-employed craftworker who produces hammers, should your income be the same each year, without regard for the quality or quantity of hammers you produced that year, and without considering the world's need for the sorts of hammers you produced? How would you go about achieving that outcome?

I don't think fixing incoming equality means zeroing out differences in income. It means shortening the gap between the bottom quartile and the top quartile, which is currently huge.

Jews were also historically discriminated against, e.g. "Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: 'Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.'" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States)

Also related: California Alien Land Law of 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...), targeting mostly Asians (Japanase, Chinese, and Koreans). SCOTUS reaffirmed this law in 1923, it was finally invalidated in 1952.

>Jews were also historically discriminated against

And Jewish people are a protected class, even defined by SCOTUS as a race for purposes of Civil Rights/Anti-discrimination laws

Why should historical discrimination matter to the policy? If at all, it should be about discrimination today.

Ummm...because historical discrimination has led to an environment where educational resources are unequally distributed? The effects of those historical policies still exist...and they should therefore be taken into account today...since they still exist...the effects...

Because Harvard admits on legacy status.

This is unrelated.

No it is not.

If Jews have had a hard time getting into Harvard in the past, and Harvard uses legacy status, then that means that Jews will.habe a harder time in the future for getting into Harvard.

Let's say that your parents were discriminated against, and were unable to go to college, or find a good job, or were actively lynched due to their race.

Do you think their kids might be affected by say, the economic troubles their parents might've gone through, or the fact that they lost family due to the racial animus at the time? Or how about if those families were relegated to places designed specifically for them, to keep them away from the rest of the populace, with less opportunity for education or work. Do you not think that might have a multi-generational effect?

It's simpler than that. If legacy status can influence your ability to enter university, then whether or not your parents were barred entry has a direct effect on whether or not you will be able to get in.

> So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.

This shouldn't be an acceptable justification, "righting historical wrongs" is a highly subjective policy goal which shouldn't be relevant to a verdict of "constitutionality".

How did you come to this conclusion?

So if we had Chad the legacy admission against Darnell with a single mother, I could see what you were talking about...

But that's not what's at stake here. Chad is doing great, legacy admissions are alive and well. Meanwhile Cletus and Liu are being discriminated against on race despite their real history that flies in the face of your framing.

Why must they be thrown under the bus? Why not Chad?

How much racism is necessary to get to the ideal of not selecting people based on race?

the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs

No, that is not the justification being used.

The argument used to justify this racism is that a rich education requires exposure to diverse people and ideas, and so the educational mission of the school requires that they bring in sufficient numbers of otherwise-underrepresented racial groups. If they can't do this, they say, they won't be able to give their students a good education.

[Note that I'm just playing devil's advocate by citing their view; I actually think it's bollocks. Sure, being surrounded by diverse ideas is important in education. But if they were truly interested in this, then they'd be trying to recruit based on that actual argument, by looking for Protestants and Catholics and Mormons; tall and short people; introverts and extroverts; right-handers and left-handers; city folk and country folk. The fact that the only dimension along which they measure diversity is race reveals that the justification they give is nothing but a convenient rationalization.]

They do in fact look at diversity along those lines too.

Is that the only dimension along which schools measure diversity? It's much easier to become a National Merit Scholar in some states than others; I imagine similar considerations are made in university admissions. A cursory search suggests that geography is indeed taken into account in admissions: https://qz.com/653167/if-you-want-to-get-into-an-elite-colle...

Similarly, coming from a minority religious or cultural background can also be a plus for a college application. Perhaps your complaint is that the process by which these benefit an applicant is less systematized than it is for race? Or that racial preferences are too systematized?

The other categories you mention are likely to be diverse by default---colleges already have a pretty good distribution of short and tall people, and the hand dominance distribution is also pretty representative. There aren't any mechanisms that impede the society-wide distribution of these traits from replicating itself in the student body.

Do they present any evidence to support this claim? I'm only aware of studies like that of Robert Putnam showing that diversity is extremely detrimental to community engagement and cohesion, among many other things.

Because clearly Asians are at fault.

> the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

This is actually incorrect. The only rationale SCOTUS has ever accepted for affirmative action is to create diverse student bodies. They have never accepted past discrimination as a rationale. For what it's worth, I'm a (former) lawyer. But you don't have to take my word for it! See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/#tab-opi...

> Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

Actually, SCOTUS specifically identified this motivation ("right these historical wrongs") as improper and affirmative action programs premised on it are illegal. That is why affirmative action programs instead talk about "diversity" -- SCOTUS blessed "diversity" as an exercise of judgment by the school that would allow otherwise impermissible race-based admission.

No, that is wrong, the Justices are very clear about the historical context of these programs.

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)

If it were about diversity as you claim, rather than righting historical wrongs of inequality, there would be no concept of a termination point of these programs as diversity would be an ongoing concern ad infinitum.

Well, to be fair, the University of California accepts more international students than Harvard, which is generally going to inflate the percentage of Asian students. Not saying this ruling isn't a detriment to Asian applicants, but probably not by as large of an amount as it would seem at first.

No, only small fraction of UC students are international, and they aren't responsible for UC system's high Asian representation.

The data set and lawsuit excludes international students. This is primarily for asian Americans.

But Harvard is a private school, which I think makes a difference. I also don't know how you maintain a diverse student body with different cultural perspectives if you aren't in some way filtering on cultural background, of which race is a part. Honestly, I don't know. I don't think it's an easy question. However, I think there's a decent case that, if Harvard is making decisions like this, it's ability to receive funding under title IX is called into question. Not that it would really adversely impact them, but it's a valid complaint that they maybe shouldn't be eligible. However, again I don't know! I don't think these are black & white matters.

Since Harvard receives federal funds, it has to play by the same anti discrimination rules as the Federal government.

Yes, that's why I point out that it's status under title IX should be in question, even if what it's doing is legal.

I agree. Trump could order the Department of Education to basically defund Harvard.. He basically is on the plaintiff's side here from what I recall. Now that would be interesting!!!

Not to mention incredible tax treatment of their assets.

The real travesty after this is overturned is that that judge will still be sitting and practicing law.

If a higher court overturns your decision, then there should be consequences.

If this is upheld by the Supreme Court then Prop 209 might fall.

Just so people are aware, this doesn't "set a bad precedent." It doesn't set any kind of precedent, because the precedent is extremely well established. This ruling is directly in line with numerous SCOTUS decisions: Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), Grutter v. Bollinger, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, etc... These cases are cited throughout the opinion. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that race is admissible as part of an admissions decision as long as that admissions process stands up to strict scrutiny.

Bakke established that specific quotas are not legal, but race as one of multiple factors is permissible. If Harvard's admissions policies include any kind of quota, they will probably be ruled illegal.

The first line of the opinion's conclusion is that Harvard's admissions process survives strict scrutiny. If it were found to be dependent on quotas, this would likely not be the case, based on the previously mentioned well established precedent.

My understanding is that there was no written evidence of a hard quota presented. However, the rise in the percent of college-bound Asians has grown dramatically in recent years, but the share of Asians at Harvard has not increased commensurately.

An appellate court could find that this fact, combined with other circumstantial evidence, indicates that quotas were used — even if not put in writing.

Also, it is well known that "strict scrutiny" is interpreted differently in the context of affirmative action than "traditional" discrimination. So when a judge says something survives strict scrutiny, the analysis provided may be more akin to intermediate scrutiny (applied to sex-based discrimination) or rational basis (applied to pretty much everything else).

Yeah, I mean all of that's true. I'm just saying A) this is just the latest decision in a long legacy of maintaining race as part of college admissions, and that B) Harvard's specific admissions process survived immediate scrutiny.

Also, I'm saying this mainly because a lot of the comments in this thread are missing that context (especially when speculating on what happens next in this case, or on what implications this might have).

What do you mean by "survived immediate scrutiny"? Do you mean that in a generic sense, or in some legal sense (that I'm unaware of — I only know strict, intermediate, and rational basis).

I mean it only in the generic sense, in that the admissions process overcame some level of review (and would likely not have if direct evidence of racial quotas had been presented, as the other comment mentioned).

It should be easy to prove quotas based on enrollment statistics from year to year. If Asians are 10% consistently then that seems like a problem. Also if it's not consistent with the qualified applicant pool itself, then that seems to be a problem.

Affirming precedent is a part of setting and establishing precedent. It doesn't set a new precedent, but its absolutely a part of establishing precedent for the future.

Yes, you're correct of course. I considered rewording my comment actually. The point is that the precedent had already been set, this decision primarily follows that precedent.

Then the term precedent is overused and has lost its ability to emphasize the gravity of any situation.

End

It has a very precise and important meaning in the context of American case law.

and irrelevant in the context of casual conversation.

It's like we have these two irreconcilable ideas:

- Diversity is good

- Discrimination is bad

When 50% of the world's population is from China/India, how do you both promote diversity and not discriminate?

Then you start focusing in the diversity within those extremely large countries and groups of people. So further partition once the US becomes saturated with a more accurate representation of who lives on this planet.

Why does the US need to be first?

Because this is a thread about Harvard, a US college, being scrutinized under US laws in the US court system.

50% of the world and admission at Harvard in USA are different groups, so the comparison is flawed. If you would use USA population structure, that is a relevant argument.

This might come as a shock to you, but people from outside the US also attend/apply to US universities.

About 10% at Harvard. Not negating my argument.

To me the obvious thing is to aim to eliminate racial/national/gender bias as much as possible by blinding admission/hiring processes to those things. Then on top of that offer spots for people who have had to deal with exceptional difficulty. Whether that be physical handicap, racial prejudice, economic, etc. There are companies/grants that take an approach like this. Its going to be subjective but perfect is the enemy of good. Then let the percentages land where they may. Having quotas or racial/gender preferences is crazy.

Out of curiosity, why not just lump most of it under "socioeconomic disadvantages" category (mostly based on the family's financial situation)? E.g., poor asian kids shouldn't be grouped with the less poor asian kids and shouldn't have been at a disadvantage compared to a rich african american kid for admission purposes. This proposed approach sounds so obvious, I feel like there has gotta be some caveat in it that I am missing. Is it easily gameable or something?

I think this is the ultimate solution. Of course people will still try to game this system by e.g. sending their kids to high school in poorer districts.

Arguably if people try to game the system in that way it would be socially good. Don't we want the privileged people going to the same schools as poorer people?

Because it’s zero sum? The rich kid pretending to be poor is taking away a seat from an actual poor kid.

Isn't that easy to detect, though? The FAFSA (among other things?) requires disclosing family income (and assets?). The university gets to see all this stuff (well, the FAFSA applicant lists schools that get to see it). If they see "family makes $300k/yr and has $2M in assets" and "kid goes to a poor high school not in his/her normal district", they can say "hah, nice try", and toss their application in the bin.

Yes it is gamed.. a lot of rich kids "emancipate" from their parents to qualify for financial aid for example and probably preferred admissions.

I love this thing that happens where someone jumps in to make an incisive point based on something they learned just recently and even on this same forum. the article about emancipation was posted here just like 2 weeks ago. so that's how certain you should be about that fact. and yet here you are proclaiming it as if you yourself have done the research and know exactly how prevalent emancipation is.

Maybe you missed it but there’s a well researched and detailed Vice news article on it.

How do you blind an admissions process to race, and then offer spots for people who have suffered racial prejudice? That sounds like a contradiction.

Its not about absolute numbers, it's about admitting people from historically underrepresented or oppressed groups.

I think the name 'Race Conscious' is not a great description where it actually means race and oppression.

Everyone who's downvoting me. Please explain why simply stating this is so controversial?

Hasan Minhaj did a pretty informative episode on the lawsuit against Harvard affirmative action -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm5QVcTI2I8

I think the debate from progressives is the definition of the term discriminate. We all agree choosing an unqualified person over a person who is qualified based on their race is discrimination. However is it discrimination to choose the diverse candidate when presented with two candidates that are equally qualified in every other regard? Because that is often the situation. There is no shortage of people who are qualified to get into Harvard or capable of succeeding there.

Yes it is discrimination, because it gives people of that race systematically fewer chances of having a life.

The difference is when it is systematic. It is currently systematic in most universities and schools.

Why set a minimum bar at “qualified”? If you try out for an NBA team they won’t say “you are really fucking good at basketball, you’re not as good as these guys but you’re diverse so you’re hired.” You get scarce positions by outcompeting people, not by clearing a bar and then getting selected for your race.

Basketball is zero-sum, undergrad college admissions mostly aren't. As long as Harvard lets in enough students who are "good enough" to not fail out or besmirch their reputation, it can continue indefinitely as a prestige-generating institution. Put another way - the "Michael Jordan" of undergraduate academics doesn't really exist (in other words, there is no individual undergraduate you could admit who would instantly make your college superior to every other one)

Of course there are — they are the “Michael Jordans” of the world... not only Michael Jordan himself, but all of the top accomplished people in the world... presidents, Nobel Prize winners, CEOs, famous authors... Harvard is prestigious because they admit people who later do those things. The content of the curriculum is largely the same as other colleges.

Harvard is looking for people who have the highest probability of becoming prestige generators, the same way that NBA teams are looking for people with the highest probability of being points generators. Sure, the assessment methods for Harvard are much more coarse, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

You can't really assess someone's capability of becoming a president/CEO/famous author based on their achievements before age 18. It's also really hard to determine whether people achieved those things because they went to Harvard. For example, getting access to the Harvard network massively increases your chances of getting a business funded, being successful in politics, etc. Finally - Harvard's prestige in the sciences is mostly due to graduate students/professors, not undergraduates.

> The content of the curriculum is largely the same as other colleges.

Maybe in some departments, but Harvard's math curriculum is not the same as most other colleges in the US, for example.

> You can't really assess someone's capability of becoming a president/CEO/famous author based on their achievements before age 18. It's also really hard to determine whether people achieved those things because they went to Harvard.

These statements are almost completely incompatible. If there is no way to tell who is likely to be successful beforehand, and yet those who attend Harvard are more successful as a group than those who do not, then it is fair to say that attending Harvard led to their success. Personally I'd say it's some of each: the admissions process does in fact manage to select for applications who are more likely to be successful, as a group, and there are also some unique benefits available to Harvard students and alumni (as you yourself pointed out) which tend to boost their chances even further.

> For example, getting access to the Harvard network massively increases your chances of getting a business funded, being successful in politics, etc.

That would be one of the means by which people achieve things because they went to Harvard. It's not just about the academics. Of course, not everyone would be capable of taking full advantage of that network even if it were made available to them.

What I'm trying to say is that Harvard has a selection process in place, for which thousands of people per year count as "qualified", and I don't think there's a strong reason to believe that the admitted students are in any way "better" than the qualified-but-not-admitted students. However, getting that Harvard stamp of approval (which really comes down to luck, if you're qualified) opens a ton of doors, in terms of network, "brand", etc.

One big difference between Harvard and OPs NBA example is that Harvard gains prestige from its alums, for things they do years or decades after their affiliation with the institution.

> I don't think there's a strong reason to believe that the admitted students are in any way "better" than the qualified-but-not-admitted students

On what basis do you think that? What data or reasoning suggests that the people Harvard almost admits would produce equal (fame, donations, other currency) to the university as those who are actually admitted?

No concrete evidence, just my opinion based on personal experience. I attended Princeton as a lower middle class white, non-athlete, non-legacy admit. Most of the undergrads aren't particularly intellectually impressive - you'll find way smarter and more intellectually curious people in Silicon Valley. The Ivies have a baseline level of intelligence you need to hit, which isn't extraordinarily high, but after that they're selecting based on conscientiousness, willingness to work hard, athletic ability, parental resources, and luck. See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-org...

So, Bill gates, Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page etc etc did not bring their amla mater's any extra fame?

Is your bar just "do not besmirch the good name of this institution"? Then I guess nobody should care for or covet International olympiad winners.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Neither Brin nor Page went to Harvard and are both more famous for their connection to Stanford as graduate students IMO

They did bring fame though right?

Sure, but this is about undergraduate admissions, not graduate.

I mean I don't think the graduate level is that different.

I think their dropping out may have hurt Harvard’s reputation as much as helped it. It’s often viewed as a place smart people and the elite go, but not always where they receive a great education.

Professional sports have well-defined skills and roles to compete for. Diversity of backgrounds/perspectives/ideas is not as valuable in athletes as it is in an academic community.

> ... when presented with two candidates that are equally qualified in every other regard? ... Because that is often the situation

Is that the case? I always thought that the case is brought on because the diversity candidate is NOT often "equally qualified,"

If you read the argument, he/she is setting a lower bar and calling everyone qualified. They do not even acknowledge that their policies discriminate.

That depends on what "equally qualified" means?

If it means "someone who is equally likely to be successful at Harvard" the answer is likely yes. Like I said there is no shortage of people who fit that definition.

If it means "someone who has quantifiably the exact same quality of resume" the answer is potentially no.

Although if you subscribe to the second definition, you should probably have a bigger complaint against athletes and children of alumni, staff, or donors. Almost half of all white students at Harvard are in one of those groups[1] and yet there are always more complaints about "diversity" than there is about these students.

[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

This only makes sense if you're looking at it as a binary thing: qualified vs not-qualified.

But the reality is that it's more of a spectrum, and in general universities usually want to take the most qualified people they can, just like companies want to get the most qualified job applicants.

Of course it's discrimination. Just look at the definition of the word. The only debate is if slight discrimination is acceptable if it achieves higher goals.

> However is it discrimination to choose the diverse candidate when presented with two candidates that are equally qualified in every other regard?

Absolutely discrimination. Unless the definition of discrimination has changed significantly that is.

By realising that India is not homogenous at all, and is inherently diverse?

Sure, but so are Americans: white, black, Hispanic, etc.

Pick two random Indians and there's about a one in three chance that they won't even be able to talk to each other due to not sharing any common languages.

The US has nothing remotely close to India's level of diversity.

Considering the US selects for English-speaking immigrants, and the fact that English is taught as a second language in a lot of the world, I don't think that's a valid way to measure "diversity".

How would you prefer to measure it then? Any reasonable measure of diversity you come up with, India will score highly on.

Skin color? India has the whole spectrum from dark brown to people who could pass for southern European.

Religion? India has a huge variety.

Economic? Everything from some of the poorest people in the world to multi-billionaires.

What percentage of the population's ancestors has been enslaved by other parts of the population's ancestors? Still very high.

Please explain how you are measuring diversity if you want to make the outrageous claim that India is not diverse.

I wasn't making the claim that India isn't diverse, just what was in my comment. The claim was that people being "unable to communicate" makes the country more diverse than the US. Take any western European country and you'll find exactly the same huge diversity in skin color, religion, economy, and all of those factors.

What I'm seeing happen is that unis (and other affected institutions) are trying to get rid of diversity of opinion in favor of diversity of skin color/ethnicity, and... I find that reasoning nothing but racist.

Isn't that a false dichotomy though? You can have both, and I'm not entirely convinced that universities are disqualifying candidates based on opinions in their applications.

As far as universities do these things publicly, this is inadvertently going to tip the scales in who is going to apply. And I'm nowhere seeing an university that is actively filtering for opinion-conciousness in this sense, that might actually not be that bad of an idea.

Then again, if they test for both things, how are they supposed to not prioritize one over another?

I think there is at least one way forward that at least reduces the intensity of these conflicts. Increase the admission numbers of people at Harvard.

Stop treating it like an exclusive club that hands out occupational licenses for an elite class of the well connected few and give as many people as you can a quality education. With the money that these universities receive that should be possible. If increase in the amount of students would have even remotely kept pace with funding we wouldn't have the need to treat this like a zero-sum race game.

For perspective, here are the Harvard vs US demographics, sorted by most to least represented [1,2,3,4]:

    Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x)
    Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x)
    Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x)
    Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x)
    African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x)
    Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x)
    non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x)

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

[2] https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...

[3] https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews, upper estimate used

Do the admission statistics also have the representation further broken down by how they were admitted (affirmative-action, scholarship, legacy-admission, normal, etc.)?

There was an article about legacy admissions, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400

Tables start at page 40.

I didn't see "non-Jewish" white in the source. Did you add up the rest and subtract from 100?

I think these should be able to add up to more than 100. E.g., someone who is both Hispanic and Black.

I subtracted Jewish from white, since "Out of this 2,831,000 religious Jewish population, 92% are non-Hispanic white": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Assimilation_and...

Where did you get the number of white? I'm saying you can't sum ethnicities because many people are multiple ethnicities.

Subtracted everyone else from 100%. I think they made people pick either only one ethnicity in their polls, or they were lumped under 'other'. The numbers I get are close to https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s..., so while not totally accurate, I'd say they're reasonably good.

As a Jewish person I feel weird seeing "whites" being broken into Jewish and non-Jewish. What about other religions? Why include religion at all?

In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this.

In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and also turn it on/off at different phases of your life. You also can't see religion from the outside (with some exceptions for example a Sikh turban).

That's not true for race.

I think it's because Jews are also an ethnic group

That is correct, at least in regards to how the statistics were gathered:

"To ensure that we did not overlook religiously unengaged Jews, we asked students for their religion and whether they considered themselves Jewish aside from religion; then, we asked about their parents’ religious identities. Students who considered themselves Jewish in any way were counted in our estimates." -- https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...

"Jewishness in the United States is considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religion

Aren't Jews a race and a religion? Plenty of non religious Jews out there.

What is a race exactly for humans?

A race is a "folk science" version of an ethnicity (it's defined culturally instead of scientifically). An ethnicity is a genetically similar group of people that often come from the same geographic origin.

Ethnicity has nothing to do with genetics. Dictionary definition says "a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition"; Wikipedia has this starting paragraph:

"An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry or on similarities such as common language or dialect, history, society, culture or nation. Ethnicity is often used synonymously with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism, and is separate from but related to the concept of races."

>usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy

From Wikipedia. You're right that I didn't list every factor.

"Presumed" is the key point. e.g. Ethiopian Jews have no genetic relationship with other Israeli Jewish subgroups, people in Eastern Germany have just as much in common genetically with Poles as with Western Germans, etc. And when these things are brought up, many ethnic nationalists will shrug their shoulders and say "so what".

A culturally and context dependent grouping of people based on ancestry and geographic origin.

"There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label"

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

I think this sort of addresses your comment: https://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/

'White' is commonly thought of as a euphemism for European, they are surely referring to the Jewish race and not Judaism as a religion.

Oh come now.

Judaism as an identity class has a lot more to it than mere religious affiliation.

I have to suspect that if the representation were 0.5x, rather than 5x, then its consideration would strike you as more natural.

I mean grouping Jews together based on a religious affiliation is just weird -- Reform would look at you really funny if you start talking to them about how Hasids and Orthodox view the world. It is as if Christianity was compressed into Amish, Anabaptists and Catholics and someone said "they are the same people"

It is ultimately a response to the fact that Jews were treated as the same people by policies designed to exclude them. There were no such policies for various Christian groups.

Practically for much of this history in this part of the world, "Jewish" has been used interchangeably with Ashkenazi. Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is, and most of the Jewish people at a place like Harvard (or applied-but-denied) have been Ashkenazi. Note this paragraph is descriptive, not normative: this conflating of Jewish and Ashkenazi is a way by which other Jews (many of which face even more racial discrimination) get erased from discourse.

> Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is

This is, to put it mildly, an opinion rather than an established fact. Ethnicity is a social construct, and many Jewish societies do construct an ethnicity that crosses the intra-Jewish Ashkenazi/Sephardi/Persian/etc. lines.

The biggest example of this is of course Israel, but you also see this in other mixed-background Jewish communities like e.g. Los Angeles or France, where a single umbrella Jewish ethnic identity is overlaid on top of those more specific ones.

When I'm in the United States, about half the time, I pray with a Chabad Minyan. About half the people there are not Ashkenazi, despite Chabad's Ashkenazi origins. We have Persians, Yeminites, Ethiopians, Syrians, etc, and people whose families have lived in greater Israel area for generations.

If you don't mind my asking, where in the US is this Chabad minyan?

Silicon Valley

Your point is taken. But, I think there's consensus that the term "Jewish" doesn't unambiguously refer to an ethnicity, because one common definition is that Jewish refers to a religion. Orthodox Judiasm confers full "Jewishness" on Orthodox converts, and most ethnicity definitions have to double-check with one's birth / blood relatives.

There is a belief that many of the "Jewish" ethnic groups form one nation (Zionism tends to hold this) and I suppose there are people who extend that to a broader definition of "ethnicity."

"Ethnicity" is more similar to tribal identities - there are usually ways of entering the group, which can be well- or ill-defined. See for example the traditional initiation ceremonies of many Native American tribes for non-members, or the recently-constructed avenues for Soviet-era Russian immigrants and their descendants to join the Baltic ethnicities. In the reverse direction, Halpulaar'en consider those who have shifted to speaking Wolof to have left the ethnic group. (Note, though, that they are usually not then considered by the Wolof to have entered their ethnic group, creating a serious social problem.)

To continue the example of Zionist ideology, even secular Zionists consider converts to be Jews, and many consider converts to non-Jewish religions to have exited the tribe. Non-Jewish immigrants and their descendants who speak Hebrew as a native language may or may not be considered members depending on the person.

> There were no such policies for various Christian groups.

Say what? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism#United_States

Are Chinese Jews, Jews?

Agreed, I know at least a dozen atheist Jews who are Jewish ethnically (Sephardic / Ashkenazi) / culturally, but not religiously.

I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did. Maybe I'm wrong? Jewishness is a more closely knit identity which Jews are lucky enough to have, whereas even whiteness is an ever expanding identity leaving many white people with nothing but 'American'.

It is the price that "white" identity demands. It is a subtractive identity, ie it abhors identity complication.

You basically have to strip every complicating element of your true identity safe for the absolutely benign forms (ie "Kiss me, I am Irish" tea shirts).

If you pay attention at least in American you can observe intriguing examples of this tension with white identity playing out. For instance being LGBTQ and white presents a problem for many. In fact there are examples now of white gay men who claim to hate "identity politics", what they really hate is that LGBTQ identity jeopardizes their "white" identity and they recognize this, so it is easy to pretend there are no other "blemishes" to their "white" identity....It is a fascinating phenomenon if you pay close attention :)

> In fact there are examples now of white gay men who claim to hate "identity politics", what they really hate is that LGBTQ identity jeopardizes their "white" identity and they recognize this

Speaking for myself, mmm.....no.

Good for you:) Unfortunately not so for these guys:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/magazine/gay-conservative...

> I was under the impression that Jews commonly don't think of themselves as being white whereas the rest of the 'white' groups did.

In the Anglosphere, Jews have pretty much always been considered "white". For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

The conception of Jews as a separate race, has historically been an Eastern European idea. Even in 1930s Germany, the Nazi party's base of popularity was always firmly rooted in the most Eastern federal regions.

Jews were kicked out of numerous Western European countries throughout the Middle Ages and early modern era. I hardly think Eastern Europe has a monopoly on anti-Semitism.

Sure, but in a world dominated by the Christian church, isn't it possible that the discrimination was based more on religion than on race?

I don't remember where (help me, please!) but I read an account by a medieval European monk visiting monasteries and Christian communities in Africa. He described their religious practices, traditions, culture architecture and food in great detail, but mentioned their (certainly much darker) skin tones only in passing.

"Race" (boiled down to skin melanin contents) as a distinguishing point between groups of people is not a permanent fixture in human history. It is especially overwhelmed by religion, language and culture/tribal nationality in terms of its use as a dividing point between "us" and "them".

Depends on the place I suppose. In Portugal it was primarily because of religion (many time out of fear that they had secretly kept their Jewish religion, rather than actually converting to christianity).

It doesn't really make sense to talk about the expulsions in the 1500s as being motivated by race, given that there was no meaningful difference in race between the Jewish and Christian populations in the area, and they had widely intermingled.

While I have read plenty of accounts of riots and expulsions that either explicitly or implicitly state their reasons as being motivated by fears of new Christians still Secretly practicing Judaism, I haven't seen a single account naming race or some ethnic distinction as the cause.

First, I'm not discussing anti-Semitism in general. This is a discussion specifically focused on the idea of when and where Jews were considered a separate race. It's still quite possible for a group to be discriminated, and even persecuted, without them being classified as a separate race. Just ask the Irish.

Second, Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England, nearly 500 years ago. The Dutch readmitted Jews over 500 years ago. The Swedes 300 years ago. Over 200 years ago Napoleon's Western European armies emancipated Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe's absolute monarchies.

In contrast, Jews were never granted equal legal status in Russia until 1917. Pogroms were regular occurrences in Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania until the 1920s. The Romanian Iron Guard persecuted Jews with such brutality, that even the Nazis told them to dial it back. Contrast with Denmark, where the local populace refused to let the SS deport even a single Danish Jew.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity of Jewish history would tell you that while anti-semitism in the modern period isn't unheard of in Western Europe, its orders of magnitude worse in Eastern Europe.

>For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

Not true about South Africa:

"Shortly after the Union of South Africa received dominion status in 1910, the new Boer rulers proposed to re-classify the Jews as "coloured" because they originally came from the Middle East, and hence were not really European. The Jews of South Africa fought tooth and nail to retain their privileged status as "Whites""

https://www.quora.com/Were-Jews-during-South-African-aparthe...

Do you have a citation for that other than Quora?

No. It's something I heard growing up in SA, and I thought there'd be lots of sources about it online, but that was all I could find. It's possible that it's a myth - happy to hear from someone who knows more.

It's definitely possible. But I'd be skeptical that the sentiment was widespread.

Right around the same time the Oppenheimers were becoming the wealthiest and one of the most powerful families in South Africa. Despite being ethnically Jewish, I've never once heard of them facing any discrimination from the apartheid regime or the broader SA public.

>What about other religions? Why include religion at all?

The Supreme Court has ruled that in fact Jewish people are a race...at least for purposes of Civil Rights/anti-discrimination laws.

The distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish whites has been contextually important when discussing the history of discrimination in college admissions. The original move towards subjective ranking of applicants was in part a way to limit the number of Jewish applicants: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

There's lots of sneaky ways they tried to limit Jewish access to higher eduction in Russia. Jewish Problems, for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

That's because Americans fixate on Ashkenazi.

The US Jewish population is 90-95% Ashkenazim. It's unfortunate that Americans sometimes forget about the minority of Sephardim and Mizrahim, but for the most part the assumption that Jewish American == Ashkenazi holds true.

How about Christians, Jews, or... miscellaneous

A lot of the responses here are talking about ethnicity or Jewish identity, but I think when it comes down to it, Jews are considered white mainly when other white people want to consider them as such.

I would bet that your average Ashkenazi Jew (it is worth noting there are multiple different Jewish ethnic groups) has more genetic commonality with an average person of Ukrainian descent than that Ukrainian person has with someone of Irish descent. So why are the Ukrainian and Irish person both white while the Jewish person isn't?

And also let's point out that there is no distinction for any other group of Middle Eastern people. They instead have to choose between being Asian, African, or European.

Arabs, Armenians, North Africans, and Persians are all considered white in the US.

According to who? If you're referring to the census designations, Jews are considered white too which just goes to further underlines my point.

The government and thus US law.

Again, this further underlines how strange it is the Jews are separated out above when they are considered white according to things like the census. The numbers from the top comment would look a lot less scary to the average white person if Jews were lumped into that group.

Not according to many people on the Left. Congresswoman Tlaib, for example, identifies herself as a "Woman of Color" (https://thehill.com/homenews/house/429550-tlaib-people-hear-...).

My maternal grandparents were born in Gaza City, and Syria respectively. Grandmother was expelled Gaza in 1929, and the Syrian grandfather was expelled from Syria in 1927. Both families had been there for many generations, if not since Temple times.

When I'm in the United States, even though I am very dark, I am never considered a "Person of Color" solely because of my religion. Other people from the same places _are_ "Persons of Color" if their religion differs.

I'm darker than Ms. Tlaib if you want to get your colorimiters out.

It's 12:54 AM in Tel Aviv now, where I am. (I spend about half my time here and half in Silicon Valley).

However in the United States it's still Rosh Hashanah. I think it's a little unfair to have a discussion about Jews and affirmative action in the United States at a time when observant Jews will not be on-line.

Shanah Tovah.

I have never seen a coherent definition of POC. It seems to be based entirely on political expediency.

And all the central asians who have turk geneology? Are they white as well?

As an atheist Jewish person, I don't agree with your definition of "Jewish".

Neither did the Nazis, btw.

As others have said, it’s not about religion it’s about ethnicity. If you really wanted to skew things, look at Ashkenazi Jews versus everyone else. You’ll find the former group extremely over-represented among Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, Turing award winners, and world chess champions. In light of all these achievements, I think it makes sense to distinguish Jews from non-Jewish whites at Harvard, where the achievements are paralleled there as well.

Depending on context, Jewish can be either ethnicity or religion (or both). I believe in this context, ethnicity is more important (and it’s also a proxy for higher IQ of Askenazi Jews).

I apologize if this sounds blunt, it's not imprudent to see more sinister reasons given history, but my thought would be you're seeing them break out Jewish because from the religion as cultural group perspective, the cultural import of education is anomalous.

I genuinely am not trying to break out the praeteritio, and say I'm not calling it a 'positive' stereotype, but at a certain level you can't have such a cultural focus on education, and then be gobsmacked when it has statistical significance in things like school admissions.

Like, if I told you that Utah had the lowest per capita alcohol consumption in the US, it's not liable to blow anyone's mind.

Heck, one of the reasons Harvard came up with its holistic admissions process in the first place was targeted at Jewish kids applying. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/9/19/admissions-laws...

Also just a lazy google, I'd hazard to guess you're right about catholic representation being higher than expected. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09...

Because when it comes to academics they (in particular Ashkenazi) have an advantage. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence) - so it does not have directly to do with religion, it's just that their persecution in the middle ages (because of their religion) seems to have lead to a slightly higher capability with regard to abstract thinking (the drawback here being a higher vulnerability to hereditary diseases).

Well this is the most replies I have ever gotten on HN. I strongly regret discussion my feelings on my own religion on here.

If people don't think that breaking "whites" down into Jewish/Non-Jewish and nothing else is strange then I don't think we can discuss this topic rationally.

Some of those things are linked to the applicant pool, for example normal White people (non-legacy/athlete/deans list/faculty child) only make up 40% of the normal people applicants to Harvard. ( http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf page 42 Panel B: Racial Distribution of Applicants by ALDC Status)

These numbers are next to meaningless, Harvard doesn't just accept people from the US, so we should be looking at population percentages of the world. I assume that people who don't fit in any category are shunted into one of them based on skin color. For example a Jamaican is, I assume, counted in the African American bucket, and compared against the African American population, even though they're neither American nor African. And as with all things race it's largely a question of how you draw the lines. Jamaicans are African Americans, white American Jews are separate from whites though. And who could say what bucket the billion people in India are in, Asian American maybe?

Fyi about 1/10 of Harvard College students are international

> While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

> They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

Other commenters have attributed that disparity to the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education rather than a problem of Harvard admissions.

> the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education

Is that a claim that their schools are worse at educating students than schools in Africa?

Yes.

Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries with a population of 1.2 billion people, so it makes perfect sense that such a huge geographic area like that would have many excellent schools compared to the areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US.

The two areas aren't remotely comparable, unless you were thinking of something else?

Moreover, the schools that Harvard's African students come from are typically expensive and prestigious private schools, not schools in impoverished areas.

The comparison isn’t all of Africa with areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US. It’s sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with the black population of the US.

Given that the US black population does better on the PISA tests than the only black majority country that participated, Trinidad and Tobago, it seems unlikely there are better educational systems. A quick check does not find a single country in SSA with college graduation rates above ten percent[1]. Given that over 90% of the US black population are descended from slaves who’ve been in the US since the 1800s the disproportion is suspicious.

[1]http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/global_education...

https://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/02/ssa.html?m=1

No, we are not interested in the total averages of the SSA nations, which obviously will not compare to America: we are interested in the elite high schools of the SSA nations. We are comparing economically disadvantaged African Americans to the economic elite of SSA.

> It’s sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with the black population of the US.

So 1 billion in subsaharan africa vs 42 million african americans - still on totally different scales.

Subsaharan Africa has plenty of educational institutions of sufficient quality to prepare motivated (and likely more well off) students for admission vs relatively small number of seats at Harvard.

That doesn't in any way contradict with the possibility that general education systems in subsaharan africa aren't great.

Foreign undergrads at elite US universities are likely themselves to be privileged in their countries of origin, not the least because the ability to understand English and pass tests administered in English is a huge filter for privilege in many developing countries.

This article is over 15 years old, are the statistics it cites still accurate?

Yes. See for example Paul Tough's book "The Years That Matter The Most" which came out a few months ago.

It's a great exaggeration to say the numbers are meaningless. Just shy of 90% of Harvard undergraduates are from the US and its territories: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

That's wild statement, shunted into a category based on skin color? Nobody is shunted anywhere, you are asked on the application what race are you, or if you are biracial, or if you identify as anything else. It's your choice what to put on the application. Everything is determined from your responses. Nobody is "shunted" anywhere.

Have you ever seen an application where Jewish is a racial option?

I have not, yet comments here assert that it is.

It makes me question the legitimacy of their data sources.

A lot of the data I believe is from the Hillel membership / Jewish org membership numbers.

It is intentionally difficult to find and requires legwork since I believe it is intentionally obfuscated.

This is somewhat useful, but it would be more useful to know what percent of the total college-going population these racial groups make up. And what percent of the 1600-SAT (for lack of a better proxy) population they make up.

I'd be curious to meet or read about those Harvard students with the lowest SAT scores of their cohort (assuming the minimum is not 1600), since they must be extraordinary in some other ways.

Based on the analysis done for the court case, they are their athletes.

This is why you row I guess...

Fascinating that non-jewish whites are actually the least proportionally represented. I've never heard that mentioned anywhere before.

Wasn't that the whole idea of affirmative action?

My understanding was that affirmative action was supposed to correct the under-representation of minorities by eliminating the over-representation of non-jewish whites. Not that it was designed to under-represent them.

Seems your understanding is totally out of touch with SJW/Woke wave sweeping across the world. Pointing out statistics may brand you as apologist of racism, perpetuating while privilege etc.

Seems your understanding is drunk and lost all of its tact earlier in the night.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure you're posting in the intended spirit.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Going down that road always leads to worse discussion and damages the container here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stated vs actual goals. Listen to the rhetoric of the people who campaign for affirmative action and then judge what they'll really do, not what they say they'll do.

These numbers are grossly misleading. US population numbers are meaningless.

Harvard doesn't consider all US born students. They have an academic floor. Most of the US population does not meet the academic floor. Low achieving students are effectively not in the applicant pool even if they apply.

A more accurate representation of the applicant pool would be the USA demographics that meet the 10th percentile SAT score at Harvard. However, even with this more accurate pool, the accepted population would differ because different races have different average scores within this pool. The races with lower averages would be expected to be underrepresented in the accepted pool compared to the applicant pool.

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf

See page 45. Asians have a much higher bar and lower probability of getting in after balancing for same academic level. Seems like discrimination to me.

Is "Jewish" a race? Or a religion? Or a culture?

And how does harvard assert the "race" of someone in the first place?

This is all extremely confusing.

Haha sounds like there is discrimination against non-jewish white people... Liberals seem to be saying the opposite

It's worth noting that religion is not a demographic category that explicitly factors into admissions or collected. Students are not required to disclose their religion (sexuality for that matter as well). Those figures are collected through various student surveys and may not fully representative.

Also international students are counted separately from the race/ethnicity categories. This is due to how the government classifies and collects information about race and ethnicity (see IPEDS definitions below).

https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-de...

I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst. I actually submitted the final reports (institutional demographics and other stats) to US Department of Education. If anyone is curious, a large portion of the aggregate demographic statistics is open and available to the public: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

Where is your source used for the US Demographics for freshman aged students?

I'm guessing if you took age into account (i.e. the average age of a white person is older than the average Hispanic person and the average Harvard attendee will be younger than the average person) then the positions on the bottom two might swap over.

The average age of people who identify as two races is markedly lower than other groups though they're a relatively small group, so not sure how that works out. But there's roughly as many people who identify as both white and native American as just native American. If Harvard only lets them choose one, which I guess they must if it adds up to 100%, then that could have a big impact on those numbers depending on how people react to that.

Interesting.

I find that the black community (including myself) will quickly point to the reason of Affirmative Action, and what it is trying to accomplish. I find it fair if a historically marginalized group require over-representation to "break" it's cycle. Yet I find something troubling.

I'm concerned that many of the flagship arguments that are still often brought forth by this community have propositions that continue to look less and less stable.

There is a perpetual cycle that the average African-American faces, often said starting from slavery. It has frequently been said that starting with proper education, will this cycle begin to unravel. Though there's been significant attempts to equalize opportunity of education for decades, yet there's been virtually no improvement in the racial performance gap (Black-White).

The main reason I commonly see for this gap is socioeconomic status and parental education. College Board prompts every testing student for their family income status, race, gender, etc. I'd love CB to dump every categorical statistic they've collected, but they do provide a summary every year. Every year they're able to give basic statistics on performance of the different groups based upon the groups stated above.

What I find really interesting was for 2 separate years (2003, 2008) College Board made public test performance by race x income. College Board had also released 'Reaching the Top: A Report of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement The book' (1999). The book generally stated that black students whose parents were college-educated scored lower than white students whose parents did not graduate high-school. Both datasets show that black students from high socioeconomic families were scoring comparatively to white students from low socioeconomic families.

I see this as deeply troubling. Though there is an large list of variables that are not publicly accounted for, it would make more sense for discussion to be shifted towards the discovery of the cause of the gap.

I fear that Affirmative Action is inherently unjustified and examples like similar to OP's post will continue to hurt the opportunities of the talented.

(2008) [JBHE] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/why...

(2005) [JBHE] http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

[Teachers College Record] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

Extra bit, attempt to model 1995, caution on the rhetoric but quality article: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

Those statistics are weird because they have several things that are thought of races, and then suddenly there's this religion designation, which is not a race. Why is this specific religion singled out and identified differently?

non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x)

How strange - are these people allowed to benefit from affirmative action?

Harvard does tend to favor wealthy legacies though:

"According to The Harvard Crimson, 43.2% of legacy students and 20% of athletes in Harvard’s Class of 2019 come from households that earn more than $500,000 a year, compared to just 15.4% of the overall class.

Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said that many of the legacy students applying to the university would be in the most desirable applicant pool regardless of their status.

“Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow told NPR. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool.” "

https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...

I guess, It is part of what makes going to Harvard valuable. You get to go to school with the rich and powerful.

Yes it is interesting to see that the focus is on the racial aspect, when to me as an outside it is the classist aspect that really screams out

"Race-Conscious Admissions" obviously implies that a candidates race influences the criteria they must meet for admission to the university. So Harvard is obviously trying to balance the racial demographics of their students according to some ratio.

What I really want to know is what ratio they are balancing towards and why that particular ratio is better than any other.

I could pick any arbitrary ratio. How about a ratio that matches the modern demographics of Cambridge? Or Massachusetts? Or the United States? Or North America? Or all of Earth? Or the demographics of the US in 1636 when Harvard was established? Or the demographics some designer thinks looks good in pictures? Or the demographics of the wealthiest 5% of US citizens? Or the demographics of the poorest 5%? So on and so on.

What is the incentive? Is it political? Is it just a ratio that Harvard admins think will keep them safe from political criticism? That clearly didn't work. Are they getting a kickback somehow? Is it a personal agenda to promote education in places the admins agree lacks it? Is it simple bigotry?

I doubt the answers would change my mind, but I'm still very interested.

I wanted to go to Harvard, and didn't get in, so I went to a slightly less prestigious school instead. I had perfect test scores and grades so I potentially could have been part of this lawsuit, and I used to be super bothered by affirmative action.

But now I don't really care. Even if you don't get into your favorite top school, if you're actually a strong applicant you're likely to get into at least one, or if not, somewhere like Berkeley. Not getting into the tippy-top schools only hurts you if you want to do high octane finance (which these days is less attractive than tech IMO), and maybe puts you slightly behind where you could have been regarding internships or where you land your first job/grad school.

I felt like I had "caught up" to where I would have likely been if I had got into Harvard by the time I hit 23. I had to work a bit harder and smarter than if more opportunities were handed to me on a silver platter, since I went to a slightly worse school, but it wasn't a big deal. Meanwhile there are probably people who got into Harvard for which it was actually a completely make-or-break, life-changing event in their lives. Arguably, they deserved, and certainly needed it, more than someone like me.

> I had perfect test scores and grades

If Harvard wanted to admit 1,000 kids with perfect test scores and perfect grades they’d just take the first 1,000 applicants and call it a day.

They can be and are much choosier than that. Why wouldn’t they be? If you have the choice between a 4.0/1600 kid and a 4.0/1600/world-class pianist, who would you take?

When applying to Harvard grades and test scores aren’t even worth mentioning. If you’re counting on those to get you in then you’ve got almost no shot.

Sure, but there are at least 4 other colleges that are about as prestigious and selective as Harvard for STEM. Back in my day I think it was something like 1000 kids a year got perfect scores between the two standardized tests, and the class sizes at all of these places is about 1600 (except Caltech which was like 250).

I agree it is about more than grades and test scores, and I did have other stuff too, but that's beside the point. Arguing about that is missing the point of what I intended - what I meant is that if you are one of the better applicants, which I do think I was quantitatively (obviously not good enough lol), you don't need to go to Harvard. Whereas for some of the people getting in who might not have without affirmative action, getting into Harvard is actually life changing.

Sort of. They certainly could take a class that had only perfect scores, and they also certainly select based on other criteria, but selecting on these other criteria seriously impact the typical scores of admits. I think Caltech students do noticeably better on every quantitative metric, both in terms of means and medians.

> If you have the choice between a 4.0/1600 kid and a 4.0/1600/world-class pianist, who would you take?

Which would be fine.

Unfortunately, they take the 3.4/1420/Tennis Player instead.

All of these schools have been proven over and over to reduce their standards when an athlete is involved.

In general I think the community I grew up in (a fairly large community of Asian immigrants) over-emphasizes the role that "getting into Harvard" plays in the trajectory of your life. For most people, the thing that determines long term success isn't getting into Harvard, it's having the internal drive to work hard for it over the course of years. The latter translates into sustained career momentum.

Also, some number of years out of college, I think the test scores aren't actually worth much except as a broad way of bucketing applicants. They are a poor proxy of key qualities like resilience and self-awareness, which, in my experience as both a job interviewer and alumni interviewer, show up much more in the work history/extracurriculars and the way they write/talk.

In response to this, schools will continue to devalue the importance of test scores, and lean more on the interview, essay, "personality" and "well-roundedness" of the candidates. Make the process more subjective so that you cannot be shown to be biased according to some numeric criteria.

It will undoubtedly happen that someone hired due to diversity and not skill will do something very wrong, and possibly cause great harm to others. I wonder what the reaction will be then...?

Luckily, the world still follows the laws of physics.

People have been put into undeserving positions for the history of humanity.

I don't see how it is possible for someone to argue that discrimination based on race isn't racist and prejudiced.

I also think the presupposition that an increase in "diversity" is always "good" isn't necessarily always "true".

Recent article on Harvard "legacy" admissions by Tyler Cowen of MR: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-23/harvar...

The "oh wow, that's odd" part:

"The most shocking number in the paper is this: Of the white students admitted to Harvard, more than 43% are in the so-called ALDC category — that is, they are recruited athletes, legacy admissions, applicants on the “dean’s interest” list and children of Harvard faculty and staff. Furthermore, in the model constructed by the authors, three quarters of those applicants would have been rejected if not for their ALDC status."

How about: who cares? Isn’t this hacker news? Aren’t we all supposed to be hackers who are upending the existing system?

How about we build our own Harvards where anybody who wants to study can come and learn whatever they want? And the network comes from being surrounded by other people who cared enough to learn.

We don’t need these places anymore. We’ll find our own funding and do our own research and screw the system. We’ll build our own system.

Or you can just attend a school in CA, where this kind of admission process has been made illegal [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...

yes sir!

oops, is that not inclusive enough? I would like to rephrase then:

yes person!

Well, there is a growing movement of conservatives that are unimpressed with this and with the general politics of universities, and who are becoming anti-college (and the booming cost of the said colleges provides additional arguments). I think it is a bit dangerous, but in essence it joins your argument.

I personally think that the education aspect of colleges is massively overrated, that the quality of the university pretty much all comes from the quality of its recruitment (its students). The teaching is typically very average (researchers aren't necessarily good professors). But if the game is that this badge is required to land a high paying job, a kid today doesn't really have a choice. It's kind of a prisonner dilemna.

We could have a system where the name of the university wouldn't matter that much. That's pretty much how Germany works if I understand correctly.

You can believe exactly that but still acknowledge that institutions like Harvard have a certain amount of power, and believe that if they use it in a discriminatory way that's bad.

I would recommend reading [0] before being so quick to tear everything down. You're replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't know, so I think it's worth making a point of learning more about that one.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

"We’ll build our own system."

...with blackjack and hookers!

We’ll build our own system! With bitcoin and tensorflow!

We have to consider not about who gets into Harvard. What is more important is the incentive structure that our education system is creating. If our system rewards people who play "victimization" games, that would encourage the next generation to prioritize writing stories that complain about the barriers in their way. If we had a system that rewarded learning a skill like mathematics, reading, writing, and only focused on these, we would have the next generation devoting more time, money, and energy to obtaining mastery over these. You can look at China, where families and students spend thousands of dollars on tutors, and some tutors are millionaires. Encouraging investment and dedication to learning is a good thing. True, you might take it too far, but it is far better to have an educated population that can think for itself.

The SAT should transition to something like the National Exam in other countries. Offered only once a year, entirely free, very rigorous, and encompassing all subjects. This will provide both the carrot and the stick for the next generation to apply themselves to education. We need a culture that loves education and learning, not just sports and drama.

How about a balanced culture that can appreciate eduction, sports AND drama? We don't need a culture where everyone strives for excellence in one dimension. That's a very boring world and implicitly creates a pyramid/caste system where the high academic achievers get the lion's share of attention and praise. There's a reason National Exams in Asian countries are sometimes viewed negatively.

Sports and drama are fine as long as they aren't the overriding factor. The research on the Harvard statistics show that playing a sport will increase your admission chance from 10% in the top academic bracket to 50%. Sport, legacy (rich), or dean's list (kushner rich).

I would say given the rapid economic growth of Asian countries, the success of Asians around the world, and the need of America to import Asian engineering labor, we have a lot to learn from Asia.

Just look at the 2012 CIA debacle in China. The entire CIA informant network in China was decapitated because China has superior engineers that hacked the CIA communication system. We need to open our eyes and realize that playing silly games have left us weak. We have a weak minded electorate that elects a weak minded president while China is racing ahead with CRISPR and rail guns.

I think the thing I find most objectionable about the AA policies is that they proceed from an intellectually lazy and flawed premise -- that a group's representation following a selective process should exactly equal its representation in the general population.

That is demonstrably false from general experience in life.

It's only false because of the extreme inequality of opportunity in this country.

They ought to do more to at least make students feel less discriminated against.

The question is really how to add transparency and systemization to the process in a way that cannot be gamed. I don’t think everyone believes standardized testing is the answer, so what is it?

My personal opinion is that they will actually create separate admissions pools, under the cover of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The transparency will be about “Fine, for this specific program, we will simply admit the top 400 test scorers” or whatever. Each department will have its own admissions policy and students will be able to choose which to apply to. Everyone gets the same education, opportunities and degree. They will wind up with the same exact class but at least the deal being cut with students is more transparent.

This is a truly hard problem.

I read somewhere (citation needed) that if truly race-blind admissions were used in the UC system, they'd have 98% Asian students.

(As a dead white male, that's amusing. Just shows how culture affects outcomes.)

Does this mean 98% of the students meeting guaranteed UC admission thresholds are Asian or is that something California did away with? (IE ~98% of the top 9% however that's defined I think.)

This only applies to the "least elite" UC schools (Merced and Riverside, or perhaps just Merced at this point).

>>The question is really how to add transparency and systemization to the process in a way that cannot be gamed.

You can't make a system that can't be gamed if there's people making judgement calls involved. You can't build a perfect system that makes everyone happy. You just need to build a system you're happy with. No matter what you do, someone with a 4.0 isn't getting into Harvard, and they're going to be pissed about that.

This specific ruling at the lower court is mostly inconsequential. DOJ will immediately appeal, and I don't think anyone doubts for a second that it will ultimately be decided by SCOTUS.

It wasn’t the DOJ filing this lawsuit.

I didn't think the DOJ was involved here?

It's absolutely hilarious that the person you're replying to is so sure what's going to happen next without even knowing who the plaintiff is.

Quit being pedantic. The DOJ is openly backing the lawsuit.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/01/harvard-race-affirm...

I propose creating a school that only looks at quantitative measures, gives a single test once a year that is grueling in mathematics, science, logic, reading, and writing. They just pick the top x-percentile of students. If there is a tie, students are picked randomly. We can call it the HackerNews Academy.

We would call that "China," and the Chinese system presents its own social problems.

That would be Ecole Polytechnique (or indeed all engineering schools in France).

This ruling was expected. The judge had been stalling on making a ruling to make it take time to work its way through the appeals courts and get to the Supreme Court where the policy might actually get ruled unconstitutional.

Unlikely to be ruled unconstitutional with the current makeup of the Supreme Court. A case brought against the University of Texas in 2016 ruled 4-3 basically the same way, with one justice recusing and another justice had died and not yet been replaced.

Really? Kennedy is gone and was replaced by Kavanaugh. Kennedy was in the majority (pro-AA) in the 2016 case, and I would venture to guess (based on nothing more than the discussions in the legal circles I'm in) that Kavanaugh would not be as friendly to affirmative action as Kennedy was.

If I were a betting man, I'd put the odds north of 2:1 that this will be overturned if the current SCOTUS sees it.

Kagan, an Obama nominee, skipped the Texas case. I think it'd be ruled the same way this time.

It was a 4-3 decision in a 8 member court (with Justice Kagan recusing herself, as you mentioned). It's a 5-4 reverse decision now based on ideology alone.

I would guess it would be 5-4 against Harvard, with Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts in the majority. Which one of these would you have ruling in favor of Harvard's AA plan?

I believe Roberts would vote with Harvard.

The same Justice Roberts who said: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_...

Yep - I believe he will wordsmith it to use words like "race-conscious" instead of "race-discrimination" and vote with Harvard.

It is absurd that a judge would knowingly make a judgement that a higher court will overturn.

Apart from anything else a waste of taxpayer money.

> It is absurd that a judge would knowingly make a judgement that a higher court will overturn.

If the judge makes the ruling based on previous rulings made by the higher court, while knowing that the higher court is likely to now overturn those rulings, it is still absurd?

The way the US system works is that lower courts are generally bound by previous higher court decisions, assuming those decisions are germane to the case in question.

I hope it is ruled unconstitutional. As a citizen of the US I was discriminated against based on the color of my skin while others due to race or gender received tens of thousands of dollars in free money.

I think its clear that Harvard's selection process is more about predicting (and admitting) those who will be successful than those who are most deserving (by some definition of deserving). This is how they increase their brand's value. I'm not sure how you realign an institutions incentive's to change this priority.

It's pretty clear that Harvard's selection process is more about letting in wealthy and legacy students. This population tends to be more successful in life.

Elite institutions need to juggle a few responsibilities:

They need to let in the children of the ultra wealthy for the status symbol, money, and networking for students.

They need to let in the children of high paying donors (not always the same group as above) for the money.

They need to let in a lot of smart students to give legitimacy to the above groups and create new families of donors.

They need to have a demographic profile that roughly approximates the US demographic profile to not appear racist. They also need to have a balanced gender ratio, not overly favor a single region, etc.

They want to have a balanced class, i.e. not everyone studying computer science and economics, people who can play trombone, people for the Fencing team.

You can argue that it's basically all about giving legitimacy and prestige to the ultra donors and wealthy, but it's also about introducing high-achieving people from less privileged backgrounds to those from more privileged backgrounds in the hope that you will get new generations of wealthy donors.

>They need to have a demographic profile that roughly approximates the US demographic profile to not appear racist. They also need to have a balanced gender ratio, not overly favor a single region, etc.

I don't think this is true of any Ivy League institution (that the racial demographics mirrors that of the nation). The gender ratio and "regionality" are well-balanced, however.

IMO the smoking gun for racism is this: https://imgur.com/IeJeUDw

Asians have the highest "personality" scores among alumni interviewers who meet with the applicants and the lowest "personality" scores among admissions officers who don't.

Of course it's constitutional, Harvard is a private organization and basically none of the constitution applies to them. The question was whether it violates federal law - specifically Title VI.

The confusing part is that Title VI prohibits actions by private entities receiving government funding that would violate the constitution, were they carried out by a state entity. The opinion uses "constitutional" as a short-hand for "is in compliance with Title VI, which means it would be fine for a public college to do it as well under the constitution".

I always thought that it was illegal for private organizations to racially discriminate. I know it is illegal for them to racially discriminate for employment. Is discriminating against customers/users (students in this case) fair game?

It's illegal in many contexts under federal law if the business is a "public accommodation". It's not unconstitutional. It may be against state laws in other contexts as well.

Note the title here and at NPR originally said that the Judge said it was constitutional.

What they should have been examining is why "legacy" (read: people who have already donated, or are likely to donate seriously to Harvard) candidates are so favored...

(Speaking as an old Harvard alum ('76).)

Does it really need an explanation?

So we use tell the kids to study hard, get good grade and test well in the SAT/ACT. What exactly do we tell them now? How exactly do you tell a kid to be "awesome"?

My kid is mixed race so he can check whatever is fashionable at the time on his college applications.

My kid is also, unfortunately, he probably isn’t going to get many advantages from either white or asian.

There are 5,300 colleges and universities in the US alone.

Maybe you tell them "Harvard's not the only option"?

But why? why can't it be an option? question is, there's only a few things in life you can control, SAT and grade being one of them. How do you work on something that you have no control over?

> But why? why can't it be an option?

Because universities have decided (rightly, IMO) that just taking the applicants with the top GPA and SAT scores and no other criteria doesn't give a very vibrant student body.

Chances are a school like Harvard already has more "top student" scorers in this fashion than they can accept.

> How do you work on something that you have no control over?

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

There are plenty of things you can work on that colleges love to see. Volunteering, neat science projects, interesting life experiences, sports and performing arts, etc.

To me that's crazy, to say "I know you're smart and worked hard to get the best GPA but don't bother applying to these schools since you're not vibrant enough."

I'm not saying the school has to take everyone, but we're focusing on discrimination here. How is that not discrimination? "We're not letting you in because of the intangibles, what is that intangible? We can't tell you."

How do you even measure vibrancy? So if a student excels academically that means he/she is not vibrant?

That there are other Ivy League schools, a ton of other top schools, and a ton of amazing public state universities? That life ultimately is not fair and there is no objective measurement of merit to attend any of these institutions? That straight As and 1600s on the SAT are not all that matters in life? Maybe, Harvard isn't that big of a deal, in reality, there aren't really any jobs dominated by Harvard undergrads.

I think you're missing the point, for asians "being asian" has become a bad thing. You can't be smart and play piano and excel at tennis if you want to go to an ivy league, you have to do "non-asian" things. Isn't that crazy?

What is interesting about this entire issue and the discussion is this. It's what I will call the 'Sophia Loren without a nose is not Sophia Loren' paradox.

If you have a University like Harvard and you have it whereby students are admitted strictly on merit and further if you have more people than can be accommodated by merit then is it still Harvard?

If you have a celebrity that is admitted to Harvard (or any 'top' school) is it possible that that person provides more or a better experience in some way to other students then someone who was raised or related to a less notable person?

Pretend for a second you attend school with the daughter of a US President or the son of the head of a major corporation. Do you think that that would provide in itself benefits to other students than in the environment they were raised in? Indirectly in some way?

What I don't get is, what happens if you don't declare a race, or declare "Other", during admission? Why wouldn't Asian candidates do that?

It's can be discerned anyways based on your full name and sometimes admissions essay.

Often your name gives it away.

Often, but far from always.

Actual scenario that happened to me: had an asian-american colleague whose first name was a generic western name, while his last name was german (due to someone on his dad's side of the family being german).

A long time ago a daughter of a friend of mine received a letter from Congressional Black Caucus congratulating her on a phenomenal achievement. The letter congratulated her, Shoshana, a minority in a prestigious public school of overcoming the adversity caused by her circumstances in becoming one of 50 students in a school with the 99th percentile GPA and how the congressmen and women of the caucus were applauding her determination and would be delighted if she were to include that letter in her college application.

She did. And was admitted to one of the Ivys. The school was a bit shocked when she arrived to see a 5'1 girl dressed in a way typical of Orthodox Jews.

P.S. You should look up other stories coming out of Masterman which is located in North Philadelphia. This is not even in the top 100.

> The school was a bit shocked when she arrived to see a 5'1 girl dressed in a way typical of Orthodox Jews.

What "school" inspects every single arriving Freshman? This read like an invented story. Additionally, there is not much overlap between Orthodox Jewish and African-American surnames.

> What "school" inspects every single arriving Freshman?

Pretty much every single school that makes freshmen live on campus, which is pretty much every single school.

> Additionally, there is not much overlap between Orthodox Jewish and African-American surnames.

I'm going to make an educated guess you do not happen to live either in any of the urban areas with large Jewish and African-American populations or you at least do not happen to socialize with both groups. I can virtually guarantee you that you would have a very hard time sorting names in Bed-Sty, Flushing, Cheltenham, area around City Line Ave, Norristown, etc.

The policies to prop any group always bite because those policies presume that the other groups won't figure out how to profit off them and those policies typically do not have a way to stop a determined adversary.

In my experience this is not the case. You could live on campus, but I've never seen any member of the admissions committee in person, and any faculty living in your same dorm have no idea what you wrote on your application.

Oh you misunderstood or I was not clear -- i meant the spreadsheet that listed who was assigned to where that is used by the staff to deal with the move in.

A colleague of mine declared African-American when applying to a US medical school, being from Egypt, a country in Africa, despite also being visibly white and a US citizen. The medical school paired him with a black African-American interviewer for the interview, who was visibly surprised and possibly annoyed at seeing the person he was interviewing.

Did he get in?

No he didn’t, anywhere actually. He ended up spending a few years doing tangentially medical related stuff (research, not sure if he did grad school) before reapplying and getting in.

I don't understand why do you even have to declare a race during admission? Does it happen in all US universities?

Yes. You have to claim your race when applying for just about anything now.

If you don't claim a race they will just put you in as white.

I've always figured that if you do this, it will be assumed that you are trying to dodge negative discrimination and will be treated the same as a White/Asian person.

Stuyvesant used to have 13% African American students in the 1970s, matching the overall population. The test system didn't change, but the African American demographics in Stuyvesant dropped to 1%. Does this mean that the impacts of discrimination increased over time?

I find it quite funny that the judge donated to Elizabeth Warren in 2012, a candidate who infamously listed herself as Native American on her Harvard affirmative action forms. The solution is clear. Just lie about your race.

Yeah. Reading the opinion, it looks like SFFA only could make an argument via statistics and it failed to establish how those statistics related to reality. About 20-30 pages of the opinion are about comparing and contrasting Card and Acidiacono and honestly...it seems to me that both models are just inconclusive. Neither ends up taking into account what goes through the mind of an admissions officer and leaves out (what are arguably) critical components in an applicant's profile. In general, it does not seem there is a way for us to point to statistics and say "look...this is discrimination" there are human factors involved that are too complex (whether that be school support ratings, racial biases of interviewers/admissions officers, or just luck of the particular application cycles we have data on). I'm unsure whether the supreme court would take this case on...there doesn't seem to be much here that SFFA could argue in its favor.

The difficulty of arguing the case is by design of Harvard Admissions and it's very problematic. The point of holistic admissions is to make it almost impossible to prove discrimination even if it clearly exists.

Does anyone have a link to the opinion?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzqBPL57yCRWHZGE7A6U6re3cGX...

I am readying stories about legacy admissions. Let me tell you about a little conversation I had about legacy admission to IvyLeague/Stanford.

A family I know (both mom/dad are children of immigrants) had a kid who got into Harvard and/or Stanford. (not specifying which one to protect identity). Both parents went to public college for undergrad and then went to top school for law/medicine.

Their kid went through K-12 in private school.

When their child got into the top college for undergrad, I asked how many from that same high school got into the top Harvard/Stanford.

Mom said 3 got into that college.

And later, dad said 6 from the high school got into same college, and mentioned 3 out of 6 were legacy admissions.

As far as the mom was concerned, the legacy admissions didn't even count as real admittance. :)

I don't get why a private University can't decide who it wants or doesn't want to attend its school regardless of the metrics it chooses.

For instance, I don't think that matching a Universities demographics to the "national" or "global" demographics is likely to produce highest caliber candidates. What if Jewish and Asian candidates consistently outperform other candidates, why shouldn't a private school be allowed to accept more of the candidates it thinks "deserve" it more?

If people don't like the policies of institutions that do this, or think they are ineffective, over time other institutions will outcompete/outperform them.

Because life sucked for black people in the 60s and they managed to change the law?

I don’t see how that has anything to do with forcing a private institution into serving customers it doesn’t want to.

The argument is: Imagine you and a friend have a private tutoring business. You should be able to have the freedom to pick whatever customers you want, your not a slave, your not obligated to provide a service for someone if you don't want to. Over time if there is demand for private tutoring that you and your friend aren't willing to meet, there will be others who will provide that service because there is profit in it.

Why should that logic only apply to colleges and not businesses in general?

Your laissez faire approach was tried and it didn't work. For example, the backlash from white customers and suppliers could be enough to make it "not worth it after all". Only when the law made private businesses treat all customers equally regardless of race, could outcomes begin to equalise.

Just like we require certain minimum wages and environmental laws, disallowing racist behaviour in businesses is just something that the government can and should impose on commerce.

A private university that accepts federal funds is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.[0] Title VI seems to require the university to adhere to the same non-discrimination standards as a state university. That is why 5th and 14th Amendments, which usually apply only to state actions, are applicable here. That is also why the Supreme Court cases involving discrimination by state universities are relevant.

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/regulatory/statutes/title... See also SFFA's complaint: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/wp-content/uploads/201...

As a private company, Harvard can have any admission process it wants. However, it should have zero federal or state grants if their admission process is using race (or gender, or ...) as part of the decision.

Disappointing ruling. This will encourage other universities to discriminate in the admission process however they see fit as long as they claim to use 'diversity' as a measure.

I wonder what judges and people would think if Asians started an Asian majority/conscious university?

To me this seems like a slippery slope.

Non-American here.

I have never witnessed the dynamics of reparation policies. The closest thing we have in Portugal, if it could be so called, is the Jewish Law of Return, a bureaucratic shortcut for granting Portuguese nationality to descendants of 15th and 16th century Portuguese Jews that were forced to flee the country, escaping persecution.

In Portugal, the concept of race has been recognized on the fly, and only in terms of the Constitutional Rights of citizens in the case of discrimination. This might change in the near future. As such, I follow this subject in American politics and news, since the USA are an obvious case-study.

As I see it, the fact that the concept of race is meaningless in anthropological terms, as informative as it can be, is not helpful in fighting prejudice in general or racism in particular. A bit like explaining basic geometry to a flat-earther: in most cases, it is pointless. On the other hand, it seems to me that acknowledging the dynamics of the division of people by racial categories (self-reported or not) is a dead end, and one that might betray its very purpose.

At best, this strategy will sustain the social conscience of the issues of race, without eroding the poisonous constructs associated with it. As in other areas of discrimination, like gender, strategies that favour outcome in detriment of opportunity might have some value to it, as this is a kind of social bailout that could just work. In some European countries, positive discrimination works only as a temporary exception.

But unlike social concepts like gender, or nationality, whose fundamental aspects are less troublesome (there being, as far as I know, no equivalent of transgenderness in race) or whose arbitrariness (like geography) can be critically questioned in different fora, race has the problem of been deep rooted in physical appearance and prejudice.

I don't see how a humanist society can deal in a meaningful way with such a stratification without risking to reinforce racist preconceptions. Am I missing something?

Anyone got a link to a pdf of the judge's decision?

Clearly the university business is ripe for disruption.

Isn't there a more fundamental issue? The category "Asian-American" is too broad and covers so many people.

Unfortunately this is bigger than Harvard and the Asian American students are 'collateral damage'. Fundamentally, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow permeates every facet of American life, education especially. You can't fix hundreds of years worth of discrimination without tipping the scales in a way that seems discriminatory to others, seems like the Judge in this case understands that.

Immoral and unethical nonsense.

Is it really? Think about the often used phrase in regards to subjects like this: 'equality of opportunity' vs. 'equality of outcome' think of all it would take in America to come close to equality of opportunity: you would need vast levels of education and housing reform at the minimum. That reform would no doubt 'disadvantage' those who have benefited from the discrimination and lack of access that others have dealt with. Fundamentally it looks like an institution like Harvard taking into account this context when determining admissions. This is beyond the individuals who may or may not participate in the discrimination itself because the outcome of that discrimination is everywhere now, no one can escape it.

There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.

I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.

Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice.

Such as being 1/1024 Native American, that technique is known to work at Harvard

> There's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles.

Inherited family wealth nominally does this. There wouldn't be a need for reparations after a generation or two of a 100% inheritance tax.

I'm sorry, is this a judge or a legislator? I don't think their job is to "fix" anything. If the government is going to discriminate against me over my skin color I want to be able to hold them accountable at the ballot box.

The legal basis behind affirmative action, which is the means by which we "fix" these things, has been challenged many times. This case is simply a reaffirmation of the principle.

past discrimination does not explain the rise of asians.

This is discrimination and yet Harvard is a private school and should be able to make its own admission standards. Taking federal money complicates that.

Asian Americans were as discriminated against as African Americans under Jim Crow. The fact is that we have forgotten the rampant bigotry against Asian Americans because us Asian Americans now basically own the United States of America.

Asian Americans had to put up with (among other things):

* Being ineligible to become citizens of the United States well after the passage of the 13th Amendment. There was a time in this country when both the white and black man could enjoy citizenship and voting but neither the brown nor yellow man could.

* A good portion of Asian Americans (the Japanese) who were American citizens were enslaved by the government for three years, after having all their land and businesses taken away. This was in the 1940s.

* Being victims of hate crimes. There was an entire gang in New Jersey in the 80s dedicated to beating up and murdering Indians (dotbusters). This is not a new phenomenon. The labor movement in Seattle also organized a mob to rid Washington state of cheap Indian labor in the early 1900s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingham_riots)

* The stereotype that Asians prevent 'real American' people from achieving their wealth goals is oddly persistent. It is highly reminiscent of the blame that Hitler laid upon the Jews as preventing real Germans from achieving their potential. The Asiatic Exclusion League in the United States had its first meeting in 1907.

* Moreso than black people, Asian Americans are constantly cast as being perpetual foreigners. Americans whose families have been in this country decades are still treated as Asians, rather than 'full' Americans.

I think it is especially telling that the organizations in favor of affirmative action are also the ones that started the Asian exclusion leagues. The labor movement in this country spearheaded affirmative action. Affirmative action discriminates against asians. This continues a long line of labor movement participation in Asian Exclusion Leagues, and it needs to end now.

Clearly all racial and ethnic sub-groups were discriminated against to various degrees in the US (and elsewhere). I distinctly remember being taught this (including about several of your bullet points) in the Texas suburb I grew up in. But its not comparable in scope or legacy to that of Black Americans, and by your own admission if Asian American's "basically own the United States" -- do they actually need help? Its not just about being fair, its about fixing the legacy of segregation in the US. There's an obvious gap between blacks and whites -- not so much between asians and whites.

> not so much between asians and whites.

What are you even talking about? https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...

Basically all post-slavery discrimination against blacks happened to Asians. Can you please cite anything that can support the opposite claim? It's typically better to argue with facts than making shit up, or worse, misrepresenting the facts due to a systematic removal of history from history books.

> your own admission if Asian American's "basically own the United States" -- do they actually need help?

Yes. Asians owned a significant portion of the Western United States before they were put in internment too. Simply having ownership of various assets means nothing if the government is not representative of the population -- after all, it is the threat of government force that maintains every individual's property rights. The fact is that Asians may have money, but have little political power.

I should have said "as much". My implication is that the gap between asian's and whites is both smaller and closing more rapidly than that between black's and whites, based on what I've read and experienced. It doesn't mean there isn't discrimination (etc).

> Basically all post-slavery discrimination against blacks happened to Asians. Can you please cite anything that can support the opposite claim?

I'm not arguing that point. I'm saying that the thing you are excluding from your argument -- hundreds of years of slavery -- has a legacy that goes beyond the discriminatory practices you highlight and likely requires a larger corrective action to fix.

Underlying your position, is the belief that the main reason that African Americans face poorer outcomes than Asian Americans in aggregate is because they have faced more discrimination against them. You are unwilling to compromise in this belief.

You are using Asian's relative success against African Americans to argue that they must therefore not have experienced discrimination. This reasoning is backwards. You ought to first quantify the discrimination (you'll have to figure how to do that yourself) and then see if there's a correlation. Otherwise, you're arguing a fallacy -- a form of affirming the consequent.

If we were to accept your explanation, then we would be forced to conclude that other groups (such as the Hmong or Bangladeshi) who are doing as bad (or perhaps worse) than African Americans must have faced even worse discrimination in America in the past, which I think you'd agree is not true.

> Underlying your position, is the belief that the main reason that African Americans face poorer outcomes than Asian Americans in aggregate is because they have faced more discrimination against them. You are unwilling to compromise in this belief.

Different discrimination. I'll elaborate.

> You ought to first quantify the discrimination (you'll have to figure how to do that yourself)

Sure. Slavery is worse. Multi-generational race based slavery is worse still. That on top of pulling people from multiple distinct ethno linguistic groups, separating their families, destroying their culture and language, and killing them, is worse still. That's the history of blacks in America. Its not just discrimination (which is bad). Its the wiping out of culture that's the problem. When you put discrimination on top of it, you get what we have today. That's what I believe to be true based on what I know so far. To tie that back in, I think it makes sense that it would take generations of affirmative action like repairs to fix the problem. Its not that I don't think Asians (etc) were not discriminated against. Its just that I think it was a (much) larger, more severe scale, that warrants an independent reparation. Its perhaps comparable to Native Americans. I bet they fare similarly in modern America (I don't know the stats).

> we would be forced to conclude that other groups

No. I don't know much about those other groups. It could be any number of extrinsic factors that put them into a similar position (as measured by, e.g. poverty?).

I disagree with both you and OP on the race-based oppression Olympics. Class matters more than race. Class heals all past discriminations for educational and professional outcomes.

Most affirmative action beneficiaries are middle and upper class. Their class standing shields them from the effects of past discrimination.

In the case of African Americans, they are less oppressed than Asian (and all other races) applicants that come from immigrant families. African Americans had access to first world education and infrastructure throughout the 1940s-1980s. Compared with immigrants from previously communistic or 3rd world countries, African Americans have been very privileged. It also helps that African Americans don't have a language barrier in America.

I broadly agree that class matters more than race, but I fail to see how your other statements do not contribute to he so-called 'race-based oppression Olympics'.

Plausible but to turn this assertion into an actual argument there'd need to be a causal statistical analysis. I'd be interested in receiving a pointer to the relevant literature.

I just don't buy this anymore. Not when Asians, Indians, Nigerians, Lebonese, Cubans, Iranians and Jews all do better than average White households in America and are over represented in education. If it permeates everything, why does it not apply to these groups?

Amy Chau wrote a great book on this: The Triple Package.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Package

Perhaps because those groups were not subject to the institutional effects of slavery? If I told you that a people were discriminated against for hundreds of years would you be surprised to learn that they statistically under-perform their peers on certain measures? It's like asking why aren't there more Jews in Spain.

Asians were discriminated against, quite heavily, in america during the 19th and early 20th century. Doesn't seem to be affecting them . . .

Jim Crow was institutional racism designed to suppress one group and lift up another.

This is institutional racism designed to suppress one group and lift up another.

What is the difference?

Should the goal be to achieve parity with global demographics instead?

It seems without some sort of control the worlds most prestigious universities would only admit the wealthiest from the most populous regions - meaning white, Chinese and Indian students, no?

Absolute madness. Of course they discriminate against Asians.

Somehow racism is fine when it’s targeting Asians and Whites.

They do. The court just ruled that racism is fine.

There are thousands of amazing universities in the US that are not Harvard.

Where can I read the decision? Article is paywalled.

Edit: here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.165519/...

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/01/730386096/federal-judge-rules...

Also links to an SC case that will likely be cited should they decide to take up this one (which seems unlikely IMHO).

We changed the URL to that from https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-determines-harvard-s-race..., which is hard-paywalled.

i'm interested if wealth is an omitted variable here. how does a 10k increase in household income effect probability of acceptance.

if society's intuitions began instituting racist rules like this, would everyone have to become racist just to compete?

"Race-conscious" is a handy euphemism.

It's not though. Although you may disagree, in common usage when referring to policy that affects groups:

"Racism" is continuing to disadvantage a group that is already at a disadvantage -- blatantly unfair.

A "race-conscious" policy seeks to give advantage to a group that is at a disadvantage, which necessarily will disadvantage a group that is at an advantage. In this thinking, once the disadvantage goes away, then the policy can go away too.

Even if you disagree with race-conscious policies, conflating them with racism is disingenuous.

Racism is discrimination on the grounds of race.

Stop re-inventing language.

Others here have pointed out, quite correctly, that this ruling follows a long string of precedents. But with the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, I wouldn't be surprised if we see affirmative action knocked down in the next few years.

Fisher v UT (2016) gave us a look at where the justices stand, and the three most conservative justices at the time (Roberts, Alito, Thomas) wanted to strike down UT's affirmative action policy. If the new conservatives (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) join them, we could have a new majority that believes affirmative action at a public college is always unconstitutional.

So a couple of disclaimers. I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst (this was about 3ish years ago). My group worked closely with collecting and analyzing institutional data to advise senior leaders in strategic decision making and policy. Our group provided some of due diligence analysis when the lawsuit first surfaced. I personally didn't work directly with the lawsuit, but I was around those conversations.I also did work on the preliminary demographic analysis for the Inclusion and Belonging Taskforce (https://inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu/), which emerged around the same time as the lawsuit was gaining traction.

I just wanted to offer some observations from my time there.

1. Admissions at Harvard is actually more competitive than most folks realize. There was a running joke that Harvard was moving towards a 0% acceptance rate. With the common app, Harvard has seen an increase in applications every year but the amount of seats available is fixed (~2,000). This year it was about 43,000 applications. That number of available seats is not quite that. The Dean of College has a reserved set of seats that he use at his discretion. There's a set of reserved seats for athletic scholarships. So the actual number smaller of available seats is smaller.

2. Each application is looked at least twice. The entire admissions department locks itself away for about 2 weeks and reviews all the applications. Each officier is responsible for a geographic area and each application is reviewed by 2-3 different officers and scored using an internal rubric. The rubric counts many factors (some of which is discussed in the lawsuit). After meeting a few of the admissions officiers, I have a lot of empathy and respect for them. They were all kind, considerate and very patient folks.

3. I can't speak too much what goes into the admission selection (confidentiality) but there are many factors that play into it outside of just grades and scores. It's worth noting that exceptional candidates are easier to identify (Olympic athletes, students doing groundbreaking research, students with amazing life stories), but they make up small portion of the applicants. Most of the applicants are highly qualified (high test scores, gpa, extra-curriculars) and if there wasn't a limited number of seats, would have been admitted.

4. The troubling narrative that surrounds around race-conscious admissions policies is the implication that under-represented minorities would not meet admissions standards. This is simply not true. Nearly all the students considered for admissions (under represented minority or otherwise) were in in atleast the 98% if not higher. They also had high GPAs and other factors. All the students were very qualified and accomplished. I often wondered if you had a lottery system, would that be better?

5. The variation in SAT score at the upper end corresponds to very tiny percentile differences. The difference between say a 1400 (95%) student and 1600 (99.9826%)is small and honestly (my view) meaningless.

6. One of the interesting things I had to do was review the original case literature on affirmative action. A theme that folks don't talk about is the diversity is not just race/ethnicy that was actually considered in the case law. Geographic diversity and social location do play into Harvard assemement. And the underlying literature is fascinating. Cognitive development literature shows college-age young adults are still developing their world views and college is space where they will run into uncomfortable situations. When faced with the choice of challenging their views or retreating to saftey of thier lived experiences, diversity places a critical role. But not in the way might think. Having others who different from you (not just race, but geography, lived experiences and other factors) plays a significant role. So say you have a student that goes to a local college with the same geographic makeup and lived experiences as their highschool but is otherwise racially diverse, that student is less likely to exposed to experiences that challenge thier world views and help them develop.

7. Harvard and really all other elite college's admissions policies are based on scaricity and it seems outdated. I know the common argument is that scarcity is what drives prestige but Harvard Business School literally allows outsiders to buy their into its network. HBS has like 3 day executive education programs that allow you to say you're an HBS grad and have access to their alumni network for the small cost of 80k (yeah 80k for 3 days!).

Now Harvard's campus is pretty tiny and there is limited space, so that makes sense from the on-campus perspective. But it also has the infrastructure to allow students to attend remotely through its DCE program and Harvard X courses. The stigma of continuing education aside (which is complicated and often unfair), the university should open its traditional programs up. There is precedent for this in the UK at top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, and ICL all of which offer thier main degrees to remote students (of course at price). And there's many problems with this suggestion (who gets access to on-campus vs remote, pricing, fairness, etc) but it's something Harvard and others like it should consider.

Sorry ended up being so long. Hopefully it provides some other views to consider as you think about college admissions.

> After meeting a few of the admissions officiers, I have a lot of empathy and respect for them. They were all kind, considerate and very patient folks.

I'd imagine that the admissions officers, many of them alumni of Harvard or other elite schools, are bright and thoughtful. But I always wondered how they deal with donor admits. "Mmmm, I'm doubtful about this Jared Kushner fellow, but the Development Office has his application marked as a must-admit. Oh well?"

> The difference between say a 1400 (95%) student and 1600 (99.9826%)is small and honestly (my view) meaningless.

If you mean the difference is meaningless (or at least small) when SAT score is figured into the holistic appraisal of the applicant, then I might agree. But I think there's a substantial difference in SAT-taking skill between a 1600 and a 1400. A 1600 means nearly 100% correct answers throughout the test. Someone scoring 1600 knew all the necessary vocabulary, understood the reading passages, and could handle all the math. Someone with a 1400 still could deserve admission, but for excellence in other areas.

The entire problem is that we categorize people into different buckets. "White", "Black", "Asian", etc.

Admissions must be race blind. In general our society must be race blind. "White" people were once Polish, Italian, German, etc. Yet these identities have melted away over generations in large part because society did not and does not actively reinforce these identities.

By forcing people into these buckets we reinforce the very divisions that we want to overcome.

There's so much to unpack here, IDK where to even start.

"I don't see color" doesn't feel helpful to many people of color. If you believe that there are prejudices, and you want to fix them, saying "everyone immediately needs to stop being prejudice and everything will be better" isn't actually a solution we can enact. What if people don't suddenly decide it's in their best interest to not be racist?

*Edited to remove off topic comment

That may not be sufficient, but setting institutional standards that treat people differently based on skin color is guaranteed to perpetuate racial division and prejudice.

It doesn't feel helpful to be viewed as an individual as opposed to simply a member of a group? Not every person with x skin color has the same experiences... You're taking racism and running the other way with it instead of just rejecting the premise of viewing people as tribe members as flawed. You shouldn't judge people by the groups they happen to belong to. Individuals should be judged on a case-by-base basis.

>You shouldn't judge people by the groups they happen to belong to.

And yet, in this country we did just that for hundreds of years. You don't just wave your hand and erase that legacy. We are in a transitional period that will hopefully help ease us into a society where these measures will truly have no place. We are not there yet.

I don't think you're seeing what the parent is saying. What you are suggesting isn't actionable. We already have legislation to make discrimination illegal and it hasn't been effective at stopping it.

Of course it is - the action is to stop discrimination of any kind. And yes, yes it has been effective. Hate crimes have dropped off precipitously and minority unemployment is at an all time low. Continuing to play this reverse-discrimination game will foment resentment, especially in the group that is "allowed to be discriminated against" according to the political flavor of the times (particularly the ones that aren't winning in society) thus creating the monster that you sought to destroy.

No, it's not actionable unless you've developed some kind of machine that can change other people's opinions.

You're right that we've made significant progress on racial issues. That doesn't mean more can't or shouldn't be done. Furthermore it's not clear from your slippery slope argument that the disadvantages of reverse discrimination (of which there are of course some) are actually more significant than the advantages.

But people in the Black bucket are way behind economically because people in the White bucket have been stealing from them for 100s of years, and the people in the White bucket created the buckets in the first place to do the stealing.

So how do you make that right without continuing to use the buckets? The only way is to either completely dismantle Capitalism, and start over with it or something else again from scratch were everyone starts on even ground again, and it never mattered what bucket people were in. The simpler option is to use the buckets and say that people in the Black bucket get special benefits at the cost of people in the White bucket to right the wrong that happened, and this needs to continue until they're close to even again.

It's like if a friend steals money from you. The only way you're likely ever going to fix that friendship is if the friend at the very least gives the money back and apologizes. Pretending like it never happened isn't going to work.

An additional thing is that you still have people using the buckets for their benefit, or just because they don't know better. In order to counteract the actions of those people, and recognize who's hurt by them, you have to also use the idea of the "buckets".

"So how do you make that right without continuing to use the buckets? "

2 wrongs don't make it right.

How is paying someone back for a crime a wrong?

Who are you paying back to? The person who did the crime or some other people based on similarities with the criminal? How about putting on the death row everyone in the neighborhood of a murderer? This is your logic.

I'm saying that white people have inherited a lot of wealth at the cost of black people. Wealth statistics clearly show this. The average black family is 10x poorer then the average white family. The stealing was done through Jim Crow, slavery, red lining, etc.

If you inherit money that your parents stole, that money is taken away from you by the police and given back to the person it was stolen from.

In this case, white people's ancestors stole from black people, and therefore, white people should take responsibility for that and pay back black people since they are still benefiting from that theft at the cost of black people today who would have otherwise inherited the stolen wealth.

"White people" is a vast generalization, it includes people that came in US much later than the history you are talking about. How can you even consider punishing them for something they did not do, just because they are the same race as the people that did something bad a long time ago? This is racism in the purest form.

Most (all?) of Europe benefited from colonialism and slavery, it wasn't just America doing it.

They immigrated to a country built on the free labor of blacks correct? Once here they were given preferential treatment in terms of unionization and local government correct? The narrative that later immigrants didn't benefit from or engage in Jim Crow is kind of ludicrous.

Which wealth statistics? From this article, 90% of family wealth is lost by the third generation.

http://money.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/

There are so many studies on this if you're actually interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Regardless of whether family wealth is lost over time, non-black families still hold more wealth than black families by several multiples.

>Irish immigrants, many of whom were very poor, were more of an underclass than the Germans. In Ireland, the English had oppressed the Irish for centuries, eradicating their language and culture and discriminating against their religion (Catholicism). Although the Irish had a larger population than the English, they were a subordinate group. This dynamic reached into the new world, where Anglo Americans saw Irish immigrants as a race apart: dirty, lacking ambition, and suitable for only the most menial jobs. In fact, Irish immigrants were subject to criticism identical to that with which the dominant group characterized African Americans. By necessity, Irish immigrants formed tight communities segregated from their Anglo neighbors. The later wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was also subject to intense discrimination and prejudice. In particular, the dominant group—which now included second- and third-generation Germans and Irish—saw Italian immigrants as the dregs of Europe and worried about the purity of the American race (Myers 2007). Italian immigrants lived in segregated slums in Northeastern cities, and in some cases were even victims of violence and lynchings similar to what African Americans endured. They worked harder and were paid less than other workers, often doing the dangerous work that other laborers were reluctant to take on. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/alamo-sociology/chapter/re...

- So I take it Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans and Americans of Eastern-European descent, most of them having arrived in states without Jim Crow laws, won't have to pay?

- Will white people who's ancestors fought and died for the union side in the civil war have to pay or maybe they get a discount?

- Will white people who arrived in the last 20 years have to pay?

- Will poor white people have to pay?

- Does this cover rich African Americans or does the money only go to those with less money than white people?

- The average black family is 7x poorer than the average asian family. Does that mean Asians have to pay too?

So... whites steal from black bucket, so that makes it ok for the black bucket to steal from the Asian bucket?

Reading about things like this I love the way we select people for university in Italy. There is a written test, multiple-choice questions.

Those who score higher, pass. Yes, it sounds like a system that favors test takers, but there are so many seats to take that if you don't score enough you really don't deserve the place (I say this as a person who was never smart not good at tests).

Nobody will consider anything else. Sadly, I've noticed a slight shift towards a more american way of talking about things like race and sex, even in universities, but I hope the legal system is strong enough to keep having neutral admissions.

Our economy is already in a bad place, last thing we need is young people being discriminated for anything but their ability to perform a task, even if arbitrary.

> There is a written test, multiple-choice questions

So we have this in the United States but it has been accused of being discriminatory because the outcomes differ by race. You can't make this stuff up people!

Asians should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

Imagine the uproar if you had instead said

> Whites should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

Why not both?

If by "why not both?" you mean "why aren't people outraged about both comments?" then I agree completely. That's why I said what I did. People seem to think racism against whites isn't racism. By reversing the roles, hopefully it's more obvious that it's equally wrong.

This has been true since the 1978 Bakke decision. Judge is only upholding clearly established SCOTUS precedent.

Interested to know: are there any hard numbers that define when we will have achieved egalitarian nirvana?

Wow - this sets a bad precedent. This might now encourage companies to now discriminate against Asias in hiring as well.

There are already murmurs in the Valley about how there are too many Asians in tech.

Why do you think that? Discriminating by race for hiring is explicitly illegal, so wherever it's happening, it's already happening despite the law.

Discriminating by race for college admissions is also explicitly illegal. (Edit: see https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html )

The law only matters inasmuch as it can be enforced. If judges decline to enforce the law when they believe it’s in the interest of diversity to discriminate against a specific race like Asians, it could equally apply to employment where similar diversity initiatives are taking root.

While IANAL...

There is a difference between general admission and "programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance". While I'm not saying this is right, it appears to be the current letter of the law. If, for example, race were a determining factor in who works on one of the R&D projects at Harvard that is funded by federal money it would be different than this situation.

Does each student at Harvard get federal financial assistance through Harvard? Not state financial assistance but federal. The different matters to the letter of the law.

It looks like the devil is in the details.

Almost every college is subject to this law because they accept federal grants and loans for students during the admissions process.

There are only a few conservative religious schools that are exceptions. They refuse all federal funds to prevent such laws applying. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell

Thanks for the pointer. It also says...

> However, the Court also held that the regulation would apply only to the institution's financial aid department, not to the school as a whole.

Yes, but that part of the decision was overruled as noted on the page:

> The decision by the Supreme Court was effectively overturned when the United States Congress subsequently passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which specified that recipients of federal funds must comply with civil rights laws in all areas, not just in the particular program or activity that received federal funding.

That's not true the way you claim it to be.

I just read the full decision, and there's a pretty decent number of citations of existing case law discussing what does and doesn't count as discriminating by race, specifically within the context of college admissions. It's in the last 1/3 of the document after the findings of fact and discussions of statistical analyses.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzqBPL57yCRWHZGE7A6U6re3cGX...

You might disagree with the reasoning of the decision, but there's already case law separating education from employment. Past that we get into slippery slope territory that this decision specifically avoids.

My point is that case law vs an explicit statement of law is not the same.

Judges in the future may rule that tech companies can pass strict scrutiny if they are discriminating against Asians in favor of other races, using similar arguments to those in education law.

This area of law is slippery because the text of Federal civil rights law doesn’t allow for discrimination, but case law (and arguably the original intent of the law’s authors) does.

There is currently a large movement in favor of “diversity” programs in hiring and I can see judges upholding them.

Absolutely reading the decision will be informative to everyone though.

A judge just said it is ok discriminating at admission, another one will say it is ok to discriminate on hiring. It is just a logical path of thinking.

It isn't really a logical path of thinking - admissions policy at Harvard doesn't have anything to do with normal hiring policies nationwide

There are laws against discrimination for both. Someone else just posted the link for the legislation for admission.

Unlike college admissions, the Supreme Court has since 1964 never upheld the idea that race could be an acceptable element of hiring practices.

Hiring =/= college admissions. Just because they both contain 'discrimination' in the complaint doesn't mean they are logically all that linked.

No it isn’t. Affirmative action programs in employment are legal.

No, they are not.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/

Diversity efforts sit in a gray area that is nowhere close to race quotas.

I-1000 is literally called "Affirmative Action and Diversity Commission Measure"

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1000,_Affirmat...

It's a referendum. It's not law yet.

You'd be more right if it was passed, but it's not.

Race quotas are illegal in both employment and admissions but affirmative action is not.

The trick is that affirmative action is sold as an effort to negate other discrimination.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/affirmative-action/

There's people saying there's too many whites and males in tech too.

There's people in Quebec Canada saying there's too many who speaks English in Quebec.

Well, the difference being that white males hold institutional power in the United States, whereas that isn't true for Asian males (or females).

Interesting claim but it's vague in a way that I really don't know what it means.

Are you saying that it is ok to be racist depending on the status of the person?

No, I'm saying there's a difference between people saying "there's too many Asians in tech" and "there's too many white males in tech".

Americans fixate on skin colour and forget that class is far more important

People pushing that argument tend to pretend there's not a significant interlinking between race and class in America.

Isn't that a strong argument for class as a better means for analysis? I mean, if they're so interlinked, why not avoid the pitfalls of racialism?

There are people alive today who's parents or grandparents lived for a time without civil rights. I don't think disregarding their experience is the correct direction to take.

That's not the point I was addressing.

It looks like you've crossed into using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That destroys the spirit of curiosity that HN exists for, and is against the site guidelines. Ditto for comments that cross into being nasty, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942577 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21128710 and, unfortunately, others you've posted.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this place more to heart? We'd appreciate it.

That’s what I was literally taught in school. Our required anti-racism lecture in jr high explicitly said that only white people can be racist and only males can be sexist because only they have power.

I understand the point of the argument; systemic oppression comes from power. The argument just seemed odd though.

Well, not really.

The California legislature (for example) is less than half white.[1]

You could argue white males are overrepresented in some circumstances, but claiming white males hold institutional power exclusively (which is what you inferred) is just plain wrong.

[1]https://www.library.ca.gov/Content/pdf/crb/reports/CRB_2017-...

Per your link, the CA Senate is 75% white.

True, but that means 25% of the power is in non-white hands.

Males, sure, there way more men than women in dev roles.

At least for Silicon Valley though, white people are, oddly enough, underrepresented relative to the US as a whole. Though that's less because white people are discriminated against, and more because there are a LOT of Asian immigrant tech workers.

Hiring and employment is different from college selection processes. Students attending a university are not employees. There are federal laws on equal opportunity employment and California has enacted additional laws.

If anyone is caught discriminating on employment based on race it's directly against federal law.

Morally it is the same. Legally, I don't know, I am not a lawyer and I don't even live in US, someone else can tell what the law is.

Should job seekers be allowed to use prejudice to choose which company to work for?

Judges work based on the law. Morals and laws are different. Different people follow or believe different morals. Judges don't get the luxury to follow what they believe is morally right when there is a law covering it. In the US it's Congress who makes laws rather than judges.

Discrimination based on race for college admission is illegal. There is Title VI (https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html) which may seem limited, but in general restricting economic activity based on race is illegal unless it is exclusive and unadvertised.

Even if it weren't, it should be obvious something wrong is happening...

They already have been doing this. Asians are probably the most discriminated against group but no one ever talks about it. It's always about latino or blacks.

That doesn't pass the smell test.

Ask pretty much any Asian(-American) I know, myself included, and none of them would choose to switch places with a Latino or Black friend who went to the same college and has a similar job, because we all know the problems are overall worse on the other side.

Racism against Asians in the US gets less coverage because it's generally less bad.

When it comes to questions of "degrees" of racism in the US I believe the root of it goes to the news cycle. And in the news business there is a very old expression "If it bleeds, it leads."

Whatever the reason for one group having more violent crime over another - I guarantee you that the more violent groups' activities will be more closely covered due to the "bleed" factor.

This was a district trial court ruling so technically no binding legal precedent has been set. Presumably the plaintiffs will appeal to the First Circuit, and if they take the case they will eventually establish an actual precedent.

Considering that a degree opens doors to employment, not giving them the degree (all other things being equal) is guaranteed to result to hiring discrimination

I.e. Asians who went to Harvard will be seen as extra desirable because they had higher admission requirements?

wouldnt that be illegal hiring discrimination?

But even if companies are completely blind to race, if you reduce the % of asians in top universities, you mechanically reduce the hires of asians by companies, since the most sought after firms typically restrict their hiring to a small list of colleges.

This feels reminiscent of 'diversity hires' where females and/or members of the LGBT+ community are preferred not because of competency/merit but to improve a company's diversity metrics. Disclaimer: I haven't experienced this myself. I only read/heard of these complaints from other people.

This ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit.

To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.

This is one of the things about affirmative action that bothers me the most. If it's known that people in X subset of students are held to lower standards, then in a Bayesian sense it hurts the people in X subset who would have got in if held to the same standards.

Harvard is notorious for glade inflation, but at other institutions the same phenomenon can hurt people's ability to complete harder degrees. I remember reading a paper claiming that affirmative action resulted in lower minority graduation rates/higher transfer rates in STEM because it put people in academic environments that they weren't prepared for; they could have likely had more success completing a STEM degree if they had attended an institution where they fit more of a median student academic profile

> people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit.

Said people have those perceptions regardless.

Is there a study on this?

>People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.

Sure, but that one is difficult to quantify and express in numbers, while the former is very easy, so let's just slap the sticker "solved" on this one and go along, am i right? /s

In the South, even at Holy Cross, Thomas thought that he could force his way into the meritocracy by the power of his intelligence and will. At Yale, his accomplishments felt divested of their authorship. “As much as it had stung to be told I’d done well in [high school] despite my race,” he later wrote, “it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/clarence-thomass-rad...

Who’s actually doing this? In a way that is actually documented? Most evidence I’ve seen of this happening has been hearsay.

Note: Trying to make the applicant pool more diverse is not the same as hiring someone solely because of diversity.

Intel started to withhold a portion of bonuses unless engineering departments achieved percentages of diverse employees, and other companies have followed suit [1]. Microsoft gives hiring managers incentives to hire people of certain genders and ethnicities, which was brought into question recently [2].

I can personally confirm that this results in discriminatory behavior when my previous company instituted these policies. Diverse candidates that failed 2/3rd of our interviews usually got offers, whereas non-diverse candidates generally had to pass 2/3rds of the interviews or more. This year, the company introduced a policy of withholding 20 positions for diverse candidates. When people know their bonuses are going to be compromised unless they hit N% diversity, do you really expect them to treat diverse candidates and non-diverse candidates the same? The company institutes these policies and then it's speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil.

It might not be as egregious as "hiring someone solely because of diversity" but it's definitely discrimination.

1. https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2019/03/tie-bonu...

2. https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...

>Who’s actually doing this? In a way that is actually documented?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Also I think it stretches the bounds of credulity to assert that an industry that bangs on and on about wanting to increase diversity is somehow also a perfect, disinterested and impartial judge.

OP made a positive claim, it's on them to prove it.

Nobody is entitled to go to Harvard and focusing on one institution does a disservice to folks (including Asian Americans like myself) who didn’t get into any elite institutions unlike many of the plaintiffs

Indeed no one is entitled to go to Harvard, but Harvard is also not entitled to federal research grants that are being funded by taxing Asian Americans under the same laws as other Americans, so I guess we are at an impasse.

I wonder how much public support there would be for ending the grants.

Harvard's endowment is around $40 billion. They're awarded about $600M in Federal grants per year. Though I'm sure they'd prefer to keep receiving them, they'd be just fine without them. It seems like turning down Federal grants and handling admissions as they like would satisfy everyone.

I mean that's fine. I'm not out to get Harvard. They have every right to their private wealth. Just don't expect governmental recognition and public praise.

Would everyone be satisfied if a restaurant or a store discriminated based on race even if it doesn't take any federal funds? Racist policies are racist. Hopefully Supreme Court takes it and strikes it down.

The real money is paid directly to students through federal student loans and then to the university.

In order to qualify for the scholarship, a student must be attending a university recognized by the federal government. You can't get a government loan or aide to attend tathougies's super cool pottery school -- for good reason. Some educational institutions are illegitimate.

And that is just scholarships. Harvard is a graduate institution, which means the federal government also funds research projects at the graduate school level.

And I would argue that Harvard is also illegitimate as it practices racial discrimination. Guess we'll see if the supreme court agrees.

>but Harvard is also not entitled to federal research grants

There is no entitlement. The government is purchasing research for the money. There is no obvious connection between Harvard's undergrad admissions practices and the money Harvard gets for research.

The obvious connection is who pays makes the rules. The US federal government uses access to Pell grants to motivate private educational institutions to do what they want, it can use access to any other funds to get Harvard to do what it wants, if it wants to.

Obviously it won’t, because if banning ROTC from your university doesn’t get your access to federal funds cut off affirmative action certainly won’t but they could.

We have the Civil Rights Act which is supposed to prevent this sort of discrimination.

Walmart, for example, couldn't refuse to serve black customers and then claim, "nobody is entitled to shop here."

Walmart isn't Harvard.

If it was, it would again be incredibly disrespectful to compare it as someone that "couldn't go to Walmart". Unlike Harvard, Walmart isn't exclusive by definition.

Now, if a community college was accused of something like this (somehow), you have my rapt attention.

This adds nothing to the conversation because no one is saying that.

People are saying that they're entitled to a fair opportunity to get in, not that they're entitled to get in period.

They got a fair shot. A judge just determined it.

I got a fair shot. I didn't get in. Can the plaintiffs move on?

> They got a fair shot. A judge just determined it.

And what happens if the Supreme Court overrules that? Are you just going to blindly agree then too?

> I got a fair shot. I didn't get in. Can the plaintiffs move on?

How do you even know you got a fair shot. That's the whole point of this case. You're just blindly asserting that.

I didn't get into _any_ elite schools. That's a reflection on me.

Elite schools judge 17 year olds by their future worth. That's perfectly fine by me. I was diligent enough in school to know that if I didn't do as well on a test I should blame myself for being lesser, not the institution.

That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the system is rigged. You are giving a non-answer.

The system isn't rigged if it's slightly harder (if even that!) to get into 1 school with a 4.7% acceptance rate.

It's rigged if a hard working daughter of an immigrant has limited paths to social mobility because their community college is underfunded or because their Cal State school has too few slots for her major. That's when I'll say it's "rigged".

> The system isn't rigged if it's slightly harder (if even that!) to get into 1 school with a 4.7% acceptance rate.

That's disingenuous and given all the past responses you've given, leads me to believe you're responding in bad faith. That is clearly not the thrust of this lawsuit.

> It's rigged if a hard working daughter of an immigrant has limited paths to social mobility because their community college is underfunded or because their Cal State school has too few slots for her major. That's when I'll say it's "rigged".

That is not mutually exclusive with what this lawsuit is asserting.

If you read the article, it says the judge determined the exact opposite. That asians do not get a "fair shot". But the judge said that other concerns (historical racism against other groups) trumps this current bit of racism such that, net net, it's ok for harvard to discriminate against asians. Opinions may differ on the correctness and morality of this decision.

Hacker Newsies employing all their training in computer engineering and sciences to the questions of racial discrimination.

I, for one, cannot wait for the n-gate summary of this thread. It'll be one for the ages.

The issue of discrimination is real but the intent of this lawsuit is not as honorable as you think. Check out the commentary online about the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, and their anti-affirmative action bias.

Frankly, this is good for the plaintiffs, because they will almost certainly be able to be heard at the Supreme Court, and the time is as right as any for a reversal of race based standards based on the general composition of the USSC.

When it comes to affirmative action cases like these people need to think a bit deeper than Harvard or even race in general. This involves our own collective notion of what is 'fair' and what is 'justice'.

I recently heard that the Spanish government is offering citizenship to a subset of the Jewish population that was kicked out of Spain during the Inquisition. Is this 'justice' for the descendants of those Jews? Is this 'fair' for migrants to Spain who have arrived legally but may be denied the benefits of Spanish citizenship? Has your child ever stomped their feet and crossed their arms when they perceived to be on the negative end of a 'fair' or 'just' ruling by you? Is it fair to the spouse and child of someone who has been committed of a crime that they are institutionalized? Is it fair to the employees of WeWork that they won't get to exercise their shares because it's CEO is a fraud?

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