Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants
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On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).
The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.
Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.
There's a very large Vietnamese population in Houston. Probably other cities.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large...
But, in the very specific context of what I was saying regarding university admissions in 2017, I don't think there was a lot that a Taiwanese-American person could do to distinguish themselves from being labeled or otherwise considered Chinese-American.
Chinese Americans: 2.5M[2]
It's almost double, but is it really on a rare pokemon level?
1 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant...
2 - https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-u...
My guess is there's much more ethnically Chinese applicants (which includes international students).
Note that Vietnamese here is good, because in other situations, it ain't good. The college admissions context is a confounder that flips the desirability of being a particular ethnicity.
Average household income, Chinese American, excluding Taiwanese, 2018: $91,944
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
People immigrate for different reasons at different times. The causes combine with changing US immigration policies and the dynamics of preferential attachment to diaspora clusters to create distinct cohorts that have similar socioeconomic outcomes.
Instead of an all-expense paid visit spanning from Thurs-Sun and including sitting in on lectures, I was allowed to come for a single Sunday-only event. I spent more money on that trip than I had ever spent on anything in my life, except for my college computer. I was pretty ticked that the school was treating different minorities differently, and that for all the money I spent I couldn't even visit a class in session (since I was only allowed on Sunday). I remember meeting a half-Chinese / half-Vietnamese guy there, who regaled me with tales of the wining and dining that the favored-minority students had enjoyed.
I should note that this was way after Prop 209 (barring affirmative action at the UCs) was passed. I ended up attending the UC, and I asked an administrator about how recruiting trips like this were legal (he happened to be a lawyer). He gave some hand-wavey answer about federal pre-emption that, if true, would have completely gutted Prop 209.
EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.
If I would immigrate to the US I would count as white, even though I would be a clueless foreign stranger and would have difficulty connecting culturally with many. Still I wouldn't count as "diverse".
Of course, there are still plenty of people who don't see white immigrants through the prism of Woke ideology so you'd likely find some sympathetic to considering you as a diverse hire, despite not checking any boxes on the Woke identity list. It would be an unofficial acknowledgement though.
I do wonder occasionally, when did institutional racism become the only flavor of racism?
Essentially, Woke ideologists believe that identity groups are in a constant struggle for power, and they describe two main classes: the oppressed, and the oppressors. They are also rooted in Marxist ideology, believing in the emancipation of the oppressed by seizing the means of production - except where Marxists strictly focused on economic means, critical theorists focus on narrative and cultural means.
In terms of economics, trade and industry, Asians are considered part of the oppressor group along with Whites and Jews. Asians are part of a narrative where they are known to be high earners and hold powerful positions in a wide array of industries. That's why they don't care about your ethnicity, because it's irrelevant to their stated goals of emancipating the oppressed.
That being said, you really have to download some actual coursework from critical race programs at modern universities and actually read through it. And then go on a wikipedia spree to understand the cultural evolution of them and where they came from.
Modern economic Marxists may or may not like these ideas, but certainly the original leaders of critical race theory were Marxists, the same academic language and ideas used by Marxists are ubiquitous in critical race texts. It's in the DNA.
It's not about blaming Marxism, casting some kind of cold war boogey-man, it's just...a strange or somewhat alien or foreign type of thought to many people in the year 2020 but it is a big part of the intellectual underpinnings of this branch of education/academia that is growing in cultural importance.
I'm trying to be earnest here because if that's the term that should be used I will use it, but I'd like to know its genesis. It feels wrong to refer to entire, disparate groups of people (indigenous peoples and Latinos in the Dakotas probably have very little in common) by an acronym that seemingly double-counts a particular group seems odd.
Oh yes, with a similar side-dish of people claiming we're spies who control the world.
Yet I would probably have made the same classification you did without knowing them.
Hispanic is something related to Spain. Spaniards are definitely Hispanic, Colombians, Argentines, etc. are (in a more distant sense) Hispanic.
I know many South Americans, Brazilians in particular, don't like the label as used by the US government. I also know native Spaniards who have embraced it.
Latino/Latina/Latinx is it's own brand of controversial in the communities it is applied to. Regardless, in the US it has never been applied to people unless their heritage traces back to the Iberian peninsula.
> The OMB defines Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican,Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.
This is the definition generally used by all US federal agencies.
Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'.
To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)
Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location.
Defending either definition would be an exercise in absurdity and I'm not even going to try.
Asian is also a skin tone: the Middle East is in Asia, but counts as White for the US Census.
This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.
No, it's not. There aren't “technically” multiple light-skinned races. While there are a few different models of race, they tend to descend from the old three-race (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) model and tend to have only a few more categories than those old models, which are now more commonly labelled White, Asian, and Black, with Native American typically added and, in the case of the US Census, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” also added as a distinct category. (Both of the latter would generally have previously been considered part of the Mongoloid category.)
Nowhere near as weird as "black". Not only is there more genetic diversity within Africa than anywhere else, anyone who has a single drop of black in their lineage is considered black, unless they have completely white skin. It's a ridiculously broad bucket.
Also, portions of Africa have white populations. South Africa, for example. And North Africa is Arab.
Ethnicity ≠ geography.
I believe certain government universities are not permitted to do this (the UC system?)
EDIT: Found it. The UC system can't do it because Prop 209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...
This is outrageous. Inasmuch many people do not fall neatly into these idiotic "buckets". Moreover, people with exceptional academic records and belonging to the categories that are biased positively have legitimate reasons to be incensed by this. How on earth anybody thought it to be a sensible policy?
This is not a statement that accurately represents current American politics, and that is....
Astonishing.
Yes
>What is the reasoning behind that?
Affirmative action requirements. Students can check the box for "prefer not to answer" if they wish. Though I don't know if that gives you better results than admitting to be white or asian.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
I hope we can find ways to lift each other up rather than bring each other down.
Is there a good reason to pit people against each other? Is it possible to provide a great education for everyone who wants one and meets some base qualification, etc.
I think the answer is pretty clearly that the best education, in many fields, will always require proximity and therefore scarcity. I just wrapped an OMSCS degree, and as much as I loved the program and the education, missing the on-campus experience definitely makes it a different thing.
Not because I learned any less of the material. More so because I walked away with very few relationships and very little spontaneous creativity amongst peers.
Some of that is on me for doing it while working full time, but it would’ve been hard regardless.
Many people consider those community aspects to be the some of the most valuable qualities of the college experience.
The more people are educated the more likely or numerous the emergence of people like Einstein or newton. The more people are educated the more democratic society will be and the free-er we all will be. If a large part of society does not understand what's going on around the world then they have to take everything for granted that they have been told by tptb.
I personally want to see it happen. There are ways we can win in life without bringing others down. Sometimes that means creating a new path.
Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".
This seems self evident to me and I'm always surprised at how much pushback people get for saying that sending 100% of kids to college isn't some especially useful magic bullet.
Personally I have a college degree and have been through trade schools in two different industries. The trade schools were much cheaper, much shorter, and vastly more useful to my earning potential than going to college. I loved the college experience but it felt much more like a middle class luxury than an economic necessity.
Shit's there for the taking.
We are already approaching automation levels where people who are just workers are needed less and less.
I would say more than half of what you learn is from your peers. People who by design were already filtered to be at a high baseline of competence and are forced to go through the same curriculum in the same timeframe as you.
No professor or expert can explain a concept better than someone similar to yourself who recently figured it out. There's also an immense amount of camaraderie built from helping each other grow. All of this is lost when you're just one of millions watching a video where most of the public discussion is dumb.
A little artificial exclusivity isn't a bad thing.
I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.
Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.
Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).
So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.
> Status is always bound to be a scarce good
I think this hits the core of the problem. The REAL problem is that these institutions are more or less made in our image. Many people want prestige, status, power, so people create institutions that have zero-sum dynamics. Some people observe that this is just how the world works and will always work. But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo. I believe we have the capacity to innovate for increased sustainability in our institutions and more importantly our lives.
I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.
Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).
1) For all the contortions that universities in the US go to, to adjust and hand-tune their population -- does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff? Would such a class (chosen by simple, unbiased score cutoff) be so much worse at innovation, leadership, (alumni donations??) than a class chosen by our heavy judgement-laden process? Sports, maybe?
What is all this extra effort and political decision-making worth, in actual outcome? Many other countries use purely exam based entrance. Or allow anyone in, and test them once there and kick out if they don't pass. What is the value of the "high judgement" method of admissions? Is it that you're more likely to produce a president or CEO?
2) To echo Justice O'Connor's final question on the matter in oral arguments, when do we know that we're done with this policy? Who says we're done and fixed the situation? How will we know we've reached a point where we can agree that we've achieved something that was the goal, or is it just arbitrary, up to whomever is in power at the moment? If not, will this just go on forever? Is that not ripe for some bad side effects, or worse, corruption of the process?
3) Why have universities adopted themselves as the place where this modification of outcomes should be applied? As I understand it, the problem of diversity etc. etc. happens long before the college/university stage. Attempting to fix it at the end does no one very much good, than if the effort was applied earlier in students' lives. Or, the metrics by which you decide if it's working become softer and softer.
I struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions, and therefore don't find myself convinced for why AA is reasonable (or legal).
Elite universities play a zero-sum game with one another for the far right tail of prestige/power/access. Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either. The other part of the game is played not with the graduate but with _everyone else_. Harvard is Harvard (to most people) not because of the mean Harvard grad's success, but because everyone else couldn't get in. Those two incentive structures point more or less at what we've got: painstaking care taken to identify a very small group of candidates, who are then _highly_ credentialed (ex: grade inflation). (All while retaining the aura of meritocracy.)
It isn't. UCB is known as the school of Stanford rejects.
And this is just a way to show class/status with more steps. The fundamental problem is that there exists positions in society where holding it isn't merit based, but connection and class based. Harvard is a vector for which some people of a lower class are allowed to ascend - but only under the auspices of the current crop of upper-class.
If we want to influence that dynamic (say, to push it toward justice, perhaps meritocratic justice), we can identify high status-granting institution/processes (ex: Harvard) and try to make them grant status differently. But, of course, if you interfere with that process it's going to be less effective... but maybe that's okay; maybe burning the process/institution (slowly) and redistributing status along the way is worth it. Or, maybe, if you're skillful, you can get away without burning the process. But this is a big, complicated, social process and heavy-handed manipulation simply won't work -- you'll never rid status of connection and class, because status /is/ connection and class. You can only hope to redistribute things in a more just way (however defined).
It depends on the goal. Is it to produce the best possible set of mathematicians, etc, at graduation? Or is it to pick the candidates that are the most likely to benefit the current network of alum and their sphere of influence? If its the latter, a simple cutoff is a terrible idea.
There seems to be some emerging evidence that election processes, even those which supposedly require significant expertise (e.g. selecting NIH grant recipients), don't perform meaningfully better than random selection. Which, to be honest, shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone steeped in Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral psychology.
This isn't a new idea of course; after the admissions bribery scandal last year Barry Schwartz revisited the idea which he had originally proposed fifteen years prior: https://behavioralscientist.org/do-college-admissions-by-lot...
The latter issue, I don't see a clean cut way to rectify - as an Asian American I get the feeling of being discriminated against, but I also see the power of giving the most discriminated minorities more opportunity to exploit the power that elite degrees bestow.
Personally I end up being OK with affirmative action policies - as much as I'd like a fair system, an unfair system built on past injustices make that impossible, and I'd rather exclusive universities adopt these unfair policies to shift the balance back.
The legal underpinning, at least, of considering race in admissions actually IS to make a better class and in turn, a better experience for students.
I also find it a more compelling moral argument than the past injustices or tilting the scales arguments. If the goal is reparations for past injustices, surely japanese internment should count for something. If the goal is to balance the economic scales, we should penalize underrepresented students from wealthy families (and frankly, the preference should be along economic, not racial lines). If the goal is to ensure students don't graduate thinking black (or non-asian, or athletic, or poor, ...) people are dumb because I didn't meet any in my prestigious college class, that seems to me a worthwhile goal that is legitimately furthered by trying to create a diverse class. To GP's point, I don't have data, but also think that outcome is hard to measure.
[0]https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/76-811 [1]https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-241
Is there a concrete actionable principle you can state, to be applied by everyone who needs to apply it?
That's just one example (one of the most impactful for sure) of the great extracurricular educational value I got out of being around a diverse group of people.
As a high schooler, I held similar views to many of the people commenting on this link, that affirmative action was unjust. Today, I know that my educational experience was greatly improved by my exposure to people with very different lived experiences, educational backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. My understanding of the world and the problems to be solved is so much richer because of these experiences and connections, and universities absolutely improve the quality of the education by promoting and facilitating these connections. Even excluding the societal benefits of affirmative action (eg helping a systematically oppressed population gain access to better economic opportunities), affirmative action is a smart and good policy for universities to embrace.
Where I am from in Europe you can choose your own school and schools compete for students. I came from a poor neighbourhood and the nearest high school had a terrible reputation, and I am glad I had the choice to go somewhere else.
If you can't get into the nearest one or two high schools, you may end up with a 40+ minute commute to get to school which would make morning classes and extra curriculars pretty difficult.
But it was not obvious!
There are many alternative explanations for what happened. I suggest that you create a list of alternative explanations as an exercise; there are an infinite number of them. This will allow you to admit that you really do not know why the police officer stopped you!
You accept your friend's explanation as if it were the only one that makes sense! Consequently everything that follows from your friend's explanation is likely flawed. I would ask that you reconsider and learn to leave final explanations indefinite. Part of life is not knowing.
I see futile efforts by people trying to understand others all the time. They concoct explanations that shatter under the slightest scrutiny. Even the brightest people fall prey to the belief they can explain others' actions w/o at least asking that person (sometimes worthwhile, but also often misleading!).
Wrong and/or unsupported explanations are assumptions and have an effect: they fix thinking along a path that is likely wrong. Learning to live with "I don't know." will allow you to think more clearly without incorrect assumptions and also more clearly reveal the limits of your knowledge, showing it to be far more limited than one might wish to admit.
"When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME!"
- unknown
Used properly, “hand-tuning” of university population could offset biases liable to be introduced by a seemingly-unbiased simple score cutoff in presence of social inequality—though I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it works as intended.
I found this discussion with Daniel Markovits quite enlightening, even if I don’t agree with the 100% of it: https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/. If it’s partially paywalled, sorry—I think there are other resources online that convey his ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/arts/meritocracy-trap-dan..., etc.).
Affirmative action as practiced by top schools is completely consistent with the white power structure, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering these institutions are part of that power structure.
Why not provide racially neutral class-based / disadvantage-based affirmative action instead? You get points if your parent(s) are poor. You get points if you have a single parent. You get points if you or your parent(s) have been on welfare. You get points if your parent(s) are in or have been to prison. You get points if you went to a high school with a low average academic achievement. You get points if your parent(s) have a history of homelessness or drug addiction or serious mental illness. You get points if you reside in a low income area.
That would produce a diverse student body without any direct consideration of race.
I have no problem with the idea that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get some special consideration. But compare two individuals: (a) a person from an under-represented racial/ethnic minority who comes from a privileged background (e.g. parents who are university professors, politicians, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc) (b) a person from the ethnic/racial majority (or a minority which is not considered to be "under-represented") who grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from child abuse and neglect, parental drug addiction and criminality, homelessness, etc. How is a system fair if (a) gets given a preference but there isn't one for (b)? That's why I think affirmative action should be based on individualised assessment of social disadvantage, not group membership.
2. We can argue all day over which categorization should have the most weight. There will always be people on the fringes of the applications that feel like they were shafted
At the end of the day, these universities are trying to give disadvantaged individuals. They may not be perfect, but it is hard to come up with a perfect system to do this.
Like a would-be 30% population of Asian students?
In the current system, you're essentially punished if you're Asian, but what is "Asian," really?
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans often immigrate to America with advanced degrees, wealth, etc. and they pass those advantages on to their kids, hence the high standardized tests scores / GPAs, but immigrants from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines often come here with nothing in search of a better life, and their children are tossed into the same "Asian" bucket, and punished.
Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university, which is important if they still have legacy admissions. Hispanic people might not have the option of getting extra points for having a father that went to Yale, who himself had a father that went to Yale, if Hispanic people were outright excluded in the past.
I think we'll eventually move to something close to what you're describing. You could get some points if your parents are poor, or didn't attend college themselves, or don't speak English, but categorizing people into one of a few crudely drawn racial categories has got to end.
The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?
The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
Harvard
Tap on SAT by Ethnicity
Look at Pacific Islander vs Asian. That is as close as I have found so far.
Prior to 1997, the US government had a single bucket, "Asian or Pacific Islander". Since 1997, they've been split into two separate buckets (although it took some time for the bureaucracy to fully adopt the new grouping – the 2000 census still used the old classification, but the 2010 census adopted the new one.)
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
The data says otherwise. You'll have a HUGE amount of Asians and Asian-Americans. Not whites.
The UC system has a sizable Asian population as a result (and my personal experience), but also admits a diverse student body every year.
On the other hand, there are multiple instances I can remember interacting with people of other ethnicities in uni and thinking "wow, I can't _ever_ see myself thinking that way" - and I think I'm better off for it. IMO, diversity of culture and thought is real.
If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity. Fair? I suppose so. But is it good for society? That is harder to answer.
If this is the case -- which I believe it is not -- then you are arguing that a meritocratic approach (normalized for factors that affect access to education) would skew toward white and Asian people. I recognize that you're speculating, but I don't believe there to exist a top-tier university that has actually put such a filter into practice for its admissions process, so there's insufficient data to verify your claim.
In response to your speculation, I speculate what you would find is that, normalizing for economic and social factors, race makes little difference....If a pure merit-based approach actually skewed the playing field toward whites and Asians, it would already have been put into place long ago. The whole problem with racism is that it damages the ability for people to be judged on their merits.
That said, from personal experience, I would still contend that _cultural_ diversity is valuable to uphold. I don't think diversity of thought stems solely from socioeconomic background.
School admissions in the US are almost never based on merit alone. If all these elite schools never saw the name or face or skin color of their applicants, their student bodies would look way different than they are now.
Correspondingly, you see 33% asian in UCs, and 43% asian at Caltech.
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...
They aren't actually race-blind, and funnily enough they're happy to admit that in official documents. The recent study on "should we stop accepting SAT scores from applicants" specifically noted that, although black and hispanic applicants have much lower SAT scores than other applicants, the effect of ignoring SAT scores on black and hispanic admissions would be negative. Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus! If and only if you belong to a certain race.
Do you mean they take race into account when admitting an individual?
>Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!
Do you have direct evidence of this? Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.
>If and only if you belong to a certain race.
How does that work, are the admissions people factoring in race?
The distribution satisfying the following constraints:
- low SAT scores are bad for your application
- the average black SAT score is very low
- absence of SAT scores would result in a net loss in black admissions
looks like most blacks scoring above average (so that their applications are hurt by the loss of the score) and a few blacks scoring deeply negative numbers (to get the average down). You can't actually get a negative score on the SAT.
In reality, black and hispanic scores are roughly normally distributed, just like white scores, but substantially lower.
It does seem to show that black and hispanic students seem to have a lower admission standard for SAT scores. But I can come up with a couple hypotheses for why we might see this data even if the admission ignores race:
1) The admission might largely ignore SATs already. If that's the case, and if black and hispanic applicants have lower SATs, then it it would be expected that black and hispanic accepted students would also have lower SATs because nothing is really filtering out low SAT scores, they're just passed through unfiltered.
2) The admission might have a lower SAT standard for students from low income families. Black and hispanic students might be on average lower income, and thus on average be aided by the income-based standard policy, even though students' race is actually not taken into account.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
You made a mistake already. These decisions are not purely merit based. Meritocracy isn't real. It never was.
What you are seeing is looking at race on purpose. Because racism is a real thing. There are studies that even if you remove the names and photos of people from their resumes, white people will prefer to accept other white people. They intuitively know, because their resumes will look "familiar". You have to go out of your way to solve the problem, you can't just be colorblind.
Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.
I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves.
I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.
Part of understanding this is race, location of growing up, schools, and parent's wealth.
For example, high schools nationwide are constantly ranked and compared. If you have an identifier that simply says "rural tier 3 high school," it's unclear what the race of the applicant is.
A parent's income can be shown based on decile of Americans, without revealing the race of the applicant.
Geography can be given in a way that is nonspecific enough to prevent educated guesses about the applicant's heritage.
I contend that race doesn't tell you much more about how hard a person had to work, if you already have all of the preceding factors evaluated.
You may respond that a lot of these benefits are about wealth, not race. However the two are connected. Black Americans on average have a tenth of the wealth of a white family.
Underrepresented minorities are as a whole not as optimized for the system. Some of that is that cottage industry of essay writers etc, SAT prep courses, etc... but some of it is objectively not being as prepared. Now some of this is also due to growing up in worse environments for academic performance but this is a real difference in performance.
I have interviewed Stanford students. There is a step difference between the Asian/white students and the underrepresented minority students in their performance. The underrepresented minorities were still smart but the Asian/white students behaved like they were a year or two ahead in school.
And the median?
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-fact/median-value-wea...
1.5x is a huge difference in income. Imagine a 50% raise.
I do think it makes sense that the wealth difference stems from blacks having so little time to build wealth. The income also is a big factor for sure, but it’s hard to see it causing the 10x gap by itself. OTOH generational wealth is lost really quickly.
https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ballot-measures/pdf/aca-5.p... http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
"The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/legalizing-discrimination-11571...
I honestly wish we would just do that. We would actually have something quantitative instead of vague generalizations about "personality". The methodology could be scrutinized, and centralized (instead of every college coming up with its own special formula), and we could stop talking about this every X months.
Avoiding doing so basically means you need to rack up the inverse - privilege points - except you're not allowed to do that, so it turns into obscure "penalty points" hidden in euphemisms.
They're called standardized tests
You may not think it's the "right" thing to do, but it's the premise on which this topic is based and figuring it only muddies the quality of the conversation.
Hm - so people who faced more "adversity" would be propelled to the top of the list? I can see that going horribly wrong: if it worked perfectly, you'd end up with yo-yo generations where one generation went to a good college and had a successful career (and if you don't believe one thing follows from the other, why bother with the adversity score at all?) while the next would be relegated to struggling, giving their children the needed "adversity". Realistically, though, you'd have smart parents finding the right mix of adversity to give their kids a leg up just just the way they find the right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today.
That sounds like a strict improvement over the current system, where those that struggle adversity are stuck trying to pull themselves up by their bootstrap forever.
If that means my parents made decent money, but I can't get into a good school and have to struggle a bit? Sure, fine, that's still nothing compared to those who have parents with no money and also can't get into a decent school.
Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.
If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.
This is close, but I imagine it would be more akin to temporarily relocating to a different school district, then selling / moving out after the children hit college age.
Note that this type of thing does aalready happen, albeit not to the extremes you're imagining. Imagine one parent retiring early or temporarily so that total family income qualifies for certain loans or grants.
Because of the African American income gap, it would also serve to boost AA enrollment, particularly from disadvantaged inner city kids, while still not discriminating against the white kid growing up amid grinding poverty in rural Appalachia.
It’s not a perfect indicator, but it’s a very good one. On average, it even picks up on adversities such as many medical/physical disabilities, since families usually take a big financial hit on account of such issues.
Not to mention potential absurd implication and emergent from a model like "due to statistical outliers the best thing for getting an average middle class child into the Ivy League is to both survive cancer and to survive a school shooting". It could rapidly turn into an absurdist comedy sketch about misery poker.
>The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
Alternative ordering for comparison:
>The State shall not grant preferential treatment to, or discriminate against, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.
Although it's perplexing just how...nasty?...the discrimination against Asians is. I can't imagine ever trying to justify that "all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college, as is proven to be what the colleges are doing here.
Utterly unacceptable, IMHO.
Nothing was proven. This is just an allegation right now.
Wait until the court date. And then the SCOTUS overruling the decision, because like you said: discrimination is required for affirmative action. And universities like Yale are specifically allowed to discriminate for that purpose.
For any allegation to stick, the Feds will have to show that the reason was not for diversity. Which, obviously, it is.
The government should find a way to benefit minorities without outright descrimination against those that doesn't fit their definition. My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.
The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have. Networking is the primary benefit of top tier schools, and so unfairly giving a chance to those without the network is the only way for them to move up the ladder as a group.
This will necessarily displace individually who might deserve to be there more, but the problem is an intractable one due to the outsize gains of being part of that network.
I am not endorsing affirmative action, or discrimination against certain "successful" minorities, simply offering a chain of reasoning for it.
I think the government adopted affirmative action instead because it was a much cheaper way to placate the masses
I believe it has been proven that as communities become more integrated, outcomes improve for all parties — and not just academically.
One Source, since people seem to disagree: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/...
Something more academic: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/johnson_schooldesegregat...
The problem is that it's already produced all the benefits it's going to, now it's pure burden with no benefit.
The consistent positive outcomes of disadvantaged students in KIPP Academies would suggest this is not always the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIPP
---
The authors of The Charter School Dust-Up said that KIPP's admission process self-screens for students who are motivated, compliant, and come from similarly motivated, compliant and supportive families. The 2010 Mathematica Policy Research study found that KIPP schools had a "lower concentration of special education and limited English proficiency students than the public schools from which they draw".[22]
Some KIPP schools show high rates of attrition, especially for those students entering the schools with the lowest test scores. A 2008 study by SRI International found that while KIPP fifth-grade students who enter with below-average scores significantly outperform peers in public schools by the end of year one, "60 percent of students who entered fifth grade at four Bay Area KIPP schools in 2003–04 left before completing eighth grade",[23] although research on attrition at one KIPP school in Massachusetts differs.[24] The SRI report also discusses student mobility due to changing economic situations for student's families, but does not directly link this factor into student attrition. Figures for schools in all states are not readily available.
The American system would benefit a great deal from a systematic reshuffle without a dime extra being spent.
A few realigned incentives here, a little more competition there, and voila... The system pulls itself closer to your goals as it iterates, rather than further down a path that appears to satisfy no one except those whose interests are entrenched.
The parents make all the difference.
Yes, poverty is a huge factor, but some parents are more in touch than others, in spite of the poverty.
At the 'standard' school, it was a mess that I won't burden the reader with. One key metric that I found interesting was that the teacher drop-out rate was ~80%. This gives an idea of the quality of the school.
At the 'charter', every single graduate has gone to college in some form. They are quite proud of this metric, as they should be. The 'charter' was richer on average, yes. But many of the kids were opting out of the 'standard' school and going to the charter. The income of those kids' parents was similar to the 'standard' school. The population of 'poor' kids that went to the 'charter' school was much less though.
[0] It's publicly funded, but still a charter. The local district is not like most. Every parent/guardian is forced to rank the schools for their child to go to. All are open for enrollment. City Bus passes are provided for every child for free in lieu of school busses. It works, but still has a lot of issues, like most places.
[1] http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_resul...
[2] https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-...
Give more money to public schools, and support affirmative action until those network effects start occurring naturally.
The purpose of affirmative action isn't to cure racism, broadly defined as racial animosity or something similar. The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Racial animosity and so-forth should be dealt with in other fashions.
(I'm not sure if you're defending affirmative action or if you're just outlining its supposed purpose.)
There is zero way in which may post claims discrimination against Asians is justified by purpose of affirmative action and implying that I am doing so is a despicable bad-faith troll. Of course, the truth of the Federal Government's claim various colleges are discriminating against whites and Asians is a different corner of this debate, which is to say it's the thing looking at this would argue.
Asian-Americans were broadly excluded as enshrined by law in Korematsu v. United States, to say nothing of the discrimination that Chinese-Americans dealt with.
So... kinda odd that it is correct to continue to discriminate against them in higher education... isn't it?
I wonder if we'll see a major political bifurcation along those lines in the next decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
When they (the affluent ones to whom I'm referring) establish themselves and settle down, they're then in a position to shelter their children from many of the structural inequities faced by the black community writ large, such as access to quality schooling, housing, and living in overpoliced areas.
This does not mean that the descendants of black migrants are immune to racism in the US. Indeed, even the most affluent family can scarcely hope to protect their children from the overt, and even covert acts of conscious and unconscious racism perpetrated by both individuals and our institutions.
But affluence does open doors, and can be used as a buffer against the most systemicly insidious elements of America's segregationist past.
There's nothing wrong with immigrants but it seems as though immigrants are benefiting from programs meant to help the descendants of African-American slaves. The only question is if the Ivy League universities care about this or not.
Where is it communicated that this is the intent of these programs? My understanding is that the criteria is simply race (and to an extent, economic conditions).
Should it matter if you’re an immigrant or not if the program is designed to provide an advantage solely on race and economic circumstance? If so, it sounds like the program should come right out as indicating reparations are the intent.
My (lay) understanding is that universities are (were?) doing a careful dance around Regents of the University of California v. Bakke[1], which permitted them to consider the race of an applicant in order to provide the educational benefits associated with a diverse student body, but did not permit them to use their admissions as a tool for administering reparations.
It's also my understanding that their compliance here is more littoral than spiritual, given the widespread on-campus support for reparations in general.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v...
You have a completely different disposition to education if you see it as a chance instead of something you have to endure with respective results.
Given, that doesn't apply to everyone, but is definitely a common occurrence.
I think autocorrect failed here. Did you mean to say "discriminated against by design"?
If they're going to fall on that sword make sure it's their own choice and not yours.
You shouldn't feel any worse than when you try to minimize your taxes. In a broken system there are no bad actors
So it is also possible that a preference that helps your kids get into a school could actually end up hurting them if they end up outmatched by their classmates.
It's also not visible to peers in adulthood, and thus not a source of jealousy or mistreatment or suspicion, as many AA recipients detail experiencing.
It's also the most moral way to address something which - IMO - deserves addressing, but which currently is addressed quite immorally.
See: the OP article.
Do you feel like any correction at all is discrimination, the correction of is flawed in some specific way, or do you feel like its a matter of overcorrection?
It seems unlikely that anything can be subdivided, repeatedly, into arbitrarily many groups by arbitrary criteria whereby comparing all possible groups (i.e. comparing the non-empty members of the powerset) yields statistically insignificant differences for all discernable moments.
Unless the thing is truly homogeneous. Which people are certainly not. For example, I clearly have less than average tact.
The powerset of S is all possible ways to subdivide humanity into groups of individuals.
Comparing two members of the powerset of S is comparing two groups of people.
Any criterion by which you can divide people will produce elements of the powerset of S. For example, "people that like jazz" are in there. So too are "people who eat peas with a knife". I am saying that there are many ways to lump people into buckets. What defines the buckets does not matter. They are all in the powerset of S.
If humans are equal, then comparing any two arbitrary groups in the powerset of S should always conclude in equality. At least in some statistical sense.
I am giving a counterexample to equality across arbitrary divisions of humanity (members of the powerset of S). I claim that arbitrary groups of humans are not equally tactful. Because if you measure the tactfulness of any member of the powerset of S where I personally am present it will generally show less tact than members of the powerset where I am not present.
I have heard the argument you're making with Jordan Peterson (who I absolutely don't respect - if you're looking for a Christian conservative try Peter Hitchens instead, although I'm not a conservative myself. He's not fashionable these days, but he represents actual long standing conservative beliefs rather than opinions that will fade away in 2-3 years)
I think the parent comment is being deliberately ambiguous in order to skirt around politically sensitive issues.
What does it mean to be equal?
I am asking for a clearer statement. And I am skirting politics because they would detract from shoring up that statement.
In response you're arguing against a strawman. No one has _ever_ claimed that everyone must be equal in all possible ways. That's of course ridiculous. The discussion plays out more or less the same way over decades, so to save time at the risk of putting words in your mouth, I'm going to take the liberty of presenting both sides.
Let's return to the question of "why are some groups more successful than others?" If it's because of either direct oppression, or systemic oppression (i.e. policies that favour some groups over others), then affirmative action is justified. This is the position the ancestor comment holds. Once you move past the rhetoric, there's no difference in reality between affirmative action and "oppressing Asians and whites," but the framing as just vs unjust depends on your idea of justice.
The conservative counter-narrative is decades old. It's not exactly racist, but it claims that cultural reasons are primarily to blame for disparities in success. Undoubtedly cultural reasons are partly to blame, and its possible for cultures to be improved. But a narrow focus on cultural reasons detracts from a long history of oppressive laws whose effects are still felt today.
Now we get back to what "justice" means. Does justice mean merely removing the oppressive institutions and returning to a natural law Lockian universalistic liberalism? Or does it mean correcting for past injustices.
"Why" is completely irrelevant to this thread.
Returning to where this all started...
> If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed.
Since groups can differ in meaningful ways, for any number of reasons, no conclusion can be made about whether the selection process is flawed. At least not in the ancestor post's framework. The assumption does not hold.
However, the topic at hand is 'equal' in a decidedly subjective sense. Even if you have two identical hydrogen atoms, they still might differ in some sort of property you may or may not find significant to the concept of equality. Location perhaps? Can any two things be "truly homogeneous" while remaining distinct entities? True object homogeneity was not intended by my use of the term 'equal.' Does that satisfy the concern? :)
Hopefully much better, affirmative action harms even the minorities it attempts to help, let alone others like Asians: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
My neighbor looks pretty similar to me but that doesn't mean we get along (My neighbor is pretty cool and doesn't look like me at all, but the concept should be clear).
I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.
Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc.
Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"
This whole topics rests on the premise that "positive discrimination" is acceptable or even necessary due to historical injustice.
An analysis that reverts to "racism is always and everywhere bad" will fail to reconcile, even if you believe it.
Not contradicting you, but FWIW there seem to be a half-dozen-each implicit definitions of 'racism' and 'racist' floating around society these days, and each might have widely-varying senses of magnitude or extremity associated with them (from innocuous to extreme). It becomes difficult to parse logic and moral logic around these words, when various interpretations are taken into account.
Also your NBA example doesn't fit because it clearly falls into the category when you need the top X basketball players. I don't think needing the top X students is or should be the goal of college admissions. The goal of a basketball team is to defeat other teams in competition. It is inherently a zero sum game. The goal of a university is to educate the population. It is not a zero sum game and having a diverse student body actually works to support that goal.
The NBA does something similar with positions
If they need a backup center they’ll get a backup center regardless if a better scoring point guard is available
For a software comparison, it is like finding a Data Engineer for a Front End position. Sure if the Data Engineer is super smart, you can have him or her switch roles for a bit; but if the needs are immediate, like they are in the NBA, it is not going to produce the best results.
What if the student body is part customer, part product?
Colleges give out sports scholarships all the time to unqualified student athletes- a trade off from the academic excellence purity test - because it enhances the college’s value.
How can those be OK but diversity scholarships wrong?
There's not great data about college admissions out there that I could find, so I don't know if this is true or not.
Do you think that any Black student who could be successful at Yale and applies to the school will get in? Maybe in super niche graduate programs the school has a problem finding qualified diverse candidates, but at an undergraduate level they turn so many people away that I seriously doubt they have a problem finding good applicants.
Is that the baseline? Top tier schools aren't top tier because they let in anyone who might be successful. Their requirements are such that only top tier candidates make it over the baseline. And, due to various institutional problems, Black students are under represented in that top tier of candidates.
>We estimate that over three quarters of the students who apply for admission to Yale are qualified to do the work here. The great majority of students who are admitted stand out from the rest because a lot of little things, when added up, tip the scale in their favor.
The numbers of people who apply to the school combined with the selectivity of the school all but guarantees that there are top tier candidates of every race who are rejected.
Not true. There is a third way. This is a problem of artificially induced scarcity. Instead of recognizing the problem for what it is, we are creating a false dichotomy of choice between merit and justice. We sacrifice one for the other, blind to the possibility that we can have both.
I will use a metaphor comparing seats at great universities to slices of pie:
When a bakery finds that customers are routinely fighting to buy the last few pieces of pie, it should simply bake more pie. The U.S. government isn't just one of the biggest pie bakeries around, it also subsidizes all the other bakers and loans money to their customers. No one has more leverage than them. If they say "you must make more pie," the other bakers must fall in line, or else they stand to lose a lot of money and decline relative to their peers.
If X # of university applicants are admitted due to affirmative action, the government should mandate that the university expand its capacity by X students. Otherwise, the government should threaten to remove all subsidies (including loans to students pursuing an education at that institution).
For its part, the government should also fund an increase in capacity at the best public universities. Perhaps it should even create new universities to help solve this problem. While people deserve the best education they can get, private universities do not deserve public monies if they refuse to increase positive externalities at the perceived expense of their prestige.
The only effective system is one that is fair to all. You can't make up for socioeconomic differences this way. College isn't a magic pill if you are disadvantaged. And I would be genuinely surprised if it actually helped the people it is aimed to help because unfair systems are always co-opted by the people who have advantages.
Also, I went to school in the West with many students from Asia. They worked harder. That is it. It wasn't a fair sample, the school attracted kids who wanted to work and attend university in my country. But they out worked everyone else bar one or two people. I am not sure exactly what the allegation is here: that working harder is cheating?
> The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate.
Apparently the accusation is that Yale goes beyond what is reasonable.
From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.
Can be done with increasing seats, so same count of existing racial profiles + additions for the affirmative actioned populace
>"all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college
I think it is important to accurately reflect their position if we, as a society, want to have a rational discussion about the role race should play in college admission.
A more accurate characterization of the Yale claim is that asians, on average, have personalities which detract from their application.
This is a much more complicated assertion to refute, because differences between races can and do exist, as demonstrated by above average test scores among asians.
Test scores are problematic because tests have some measurable level of bias. The answer to that isn't to codify drastically more bias into the process.
I'm not sure what your point is or how it relates to mine.
The purported claim was:
> "all Asians" have personality defects
"All A has P" is a world of difference from "A has P", or "on average A has P".
>How do we even calculate an average personality? I doubt that even Yale people would stoop to such sophistry.
This is exactly what Yale is doing and the DOJ is going after them for. Yale requires personal statements, which they grade and rank based on personality attributes they find desirable. By Yale's metrics, asians, on average, score lower and this is used as rationale to deny acceptance. Asians who score high on the personality assessment are given acceptance. After ranking tens of thousands of students of different races, Yale or a 3rd part can look at the scores given by reviewers, and see if there is a correlation with race. This is the avereage, as reviewed by Yale.
YES, this can have bias. YES, this is highly suspect. Yes, I think this should be investigated. As said in my original post, I don't support Yale's position.
That said, I think it is important to have the moral and intellectual honesty to represent it for what it is, and debate it.
There is no need to lie and claim that Yale says "all asians are inferior". refuting this claim is a waste of everyone's time because nobody is making it.
This isn’t to say that Asian Americans don’t experience a ton of discrimination, but rather that the penalties for being black are systemic and reach out a long way.
Consider that most people here on HN have some level of privilege simply by being in the tech field, which is highly paid and respected right now.
I have to disagree with this statement. My view on "privilege" in its contemporary usage is that it is any advantage which comes "naturally" without any (or at the very least a relative minimal amount of) effort. Being in the tech field is something you have to work for, develop your skills for, etc. That isn't what privilege is, that is the result of your own work and ambitions.
It used to be enough, from a rhetorical perspective, to talk about representation of "minorities" (or, "minorities and woman" because women are a very slight population majority in the US).. but then once a minority became "overrepresented", they had to find a better way to describe the groups whose inclusion they're looking to increase.
Which is an indirect way of achieving the same ends.
I mean, asians are likely to always be a minority in the US, as in, there are fewer of them then there are caucasians. But if they reach the point where they are no longer disadvantaged or discriminated against... isn't that what we want? Not just for asians, but for everybody?
I'm not aware of any organized campaigns to this effect, but the idea that Asians aren't "real" minorities / PoC is one that sometimes gets tossed around in progressive circles.
e.g.
https://www.insider.com/the-internet-is-debating-who-to-call...
Arguments put forth range from the purely visual ("some asians are fairer than white people") to the socioeconomic ("asians don't give back to the black communities in which they own businesses"), or variants thereof.
I guess it's a gentle reminder in these relatively polarized times that relations between minority groups in the US have historically been tense, be it black-latinx, black-asian or black-jewish. It might feel like there's a detente right now due to the focus being on the state and the white power structure et al - but the underlying animosity is real enough. Humans are tribal to a fault, and that will never change.
They're about as similar as North Africans and Europeans.
Up until 1997, the US government's official racial classification system contained a race called "Asian or Pacific Islander". In that year, they modified the system to split that race into two new races – "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander". However, more than 20 years later, the old system still gets used sometimes (e.g. the University of Pennsylvania's published diversity statistics), but most institutions in the US have moved to the new system (and I think as time goes by the old system becomes less and less common.)
Now, why they did originally group these two groups together? I'm not entirely sure why. There are some historical connections between the two groups – the Pacific Island languages (Hawaiian, Maori, etc) belong to the Austronesian language family, which is believed to originally come from Taiwan, and contains several major languages of Southeast Asia (e.g. Malay, Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog) – but I'm not sure whether that history plays any role in the decision to originally group them together. The original grouping was established by OMB Circular No. A-46, dated May 12, 1977 – I have been unable to find a copy of that document, maybe it contains some explanation of why they did it.
> They're about as similar as North Africans and Europeans.
The US government officially classifies North African and Middle Eastern people as "White". Some Arab Americans and Iranian Americans don't agree with the label "White", and don't be surprised if the system gets changed sooner or later to split out a separate label such as "Middle Eastern or North African": https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...
edit: typo
There are citations for that point specifically in this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions...
> Harvard itself found a bias against Asian-American applicants in an internal investigation in 2013, but had never made the findings public or acted on them.[1] Plaintiffs and commentators have compared thetreatment of Asians with the Jewish quota in place in the early 20th century, which used deficient personalities as the reason for excluding Jews in elite universities.[4][1]
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Lawrence_Lowell#Admissions_...
Lowell wanted a quota, but couldn't get it and introduced this well-roundedness thing and weirdly and totally coincidentally Jewish people found themselves unable to match up. Turns out they were all one-dimensional human beings less skilled at all those other things White Americans were capable at. It is sheer good fortune Lowell was there to rescue us from these nerdy egg-heads. Close one.
>One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvar...
The OP said Yale. I know they are both Ivy league schools but you can't just lump them together when you are accusing one of wrongdoing.
I totally agree, this reminded me of culture fit interview questions as well. I think the evidence is very strong that almost any subjective evaluation is going to devolve down to the evaluator picking whatever confirms their subjective biases, then coming up with ex post facto rationalizations.
Combining standardized tests along with bias-ridden subjective measurements may just be the best solution among lots of imperfect solutions. We try to address egregious abuses when we find them, but "fair" will always be a goal, not a destination.
In all seriousness it works well if you have a pool sufficiently quality homogenous but would tend towards the mean of the pool.
However it can help us evaluate who is able to perform in a higher learning environment and that they have the knowledge to study advanced degrees. I had 4 standardized tests in my educational career, 4th grade state test, 10th grade state test, ACT and GRE. Only 2 of those were non-repeatable. How many do students take these days?
As opposed to a generation of people highly optimized for a fuzzier metric that nevertheless exists. I know a bunch of graduates from elite universities who all just happened to be really into debate/mock trials/mock UN, competed at the national/international level at obscure sports, founded a school newspaper (we had five new school newspapers every year because everyone wanted to be a founder, few of them last once the founder graduates), "founded" a "business", etc in high school[1]. They're all in consulting/banking/law/ML now. Mildly obfuscating the metric doesn't actually make Goodhart's law go away, it just means you have to be in the right crowd to game the metric.
[1] I, on the other hand, actually liked maths and became one of your "highly optimized test takers". Funnily enough, all the elite American schools said no, while Oxford said yes. I am now a PhD student (in maths) at one of the elite American institutions that rejected me as a high school student.[2] If you have a scarce resource, and a system that distributes it, people are going to game the system. The trick is to have better tests so you can't study to the test without actually, you know, learning.
Take a look at the SAT (subject) math section. That's the test that should be distinguishing between the student that goes to Harvard and the student that "merely" goes to Georgia Tech. Obviously it can do no such thing, it's way too easy. This is by design. The American system does not want to distinguish between the top 3% and the 0.5%, because then Harvard would have to take the poor genius over the solidly talented but unexceptional rich legacy kid whose dad is worth billions and will donate tens of millions.
Now take a look at the MAT, the maths test that tells you if you'll be going to Oxford or Imperial. Or the STEP, the analogous test for Cambridge.
[2] Disclaimer: I may be a little bitter to this day. In my defence, I teach the wannabe consultants now, and while some of them are legitimately very competent, boy does the system have false positives.
Everything else is just a new set of rules to game.
* edit: typo on mobile :)
I feel like you're expecting some sort of clear stack ranking of students. Even if you take tests at face value, do you accept the student who aces math but bombs literature, or the student who is merely above average in both? See also: computer science, chemistry, biology, physics, history, physical fitness, social sciences, languages, music, art...
We have examples of test-regime-driven educational advancement in Asia. From what I've read, it doesn't seem very appealing to me, either as a student or as a parent.
This is the kind of tradeoff I'd be happy to see colleges worried about. Complicating the fact is that US universities generally don't expect students to be set on a specific major while European ones do, making the US problem a bit harder. But I don't think this is what US unis are trading off on. I think they're trading off merit for parental wealth + future wealth (which is greatly effected by parental wealth).
Re: your comment about different unis with different criteria, I'd be a lot less worried if the diversity was evenly distributed geographically. I had the privilege of being able to choose from multiple countries. For the vast majority of high school students, studying abroad is not an option.
"US unis" don't seem like a homogenous block to me. But then, I went to a state school and received a fantastic CSc education that I would not trade for ivy league at any price. I've also interviewed/hired countless people and never even noticed what school they came from. I guess the policies of Yale don't bother me that much either way.
They were such classic Oxbridge style questions, sure you can probably game them but as you say, once you've done the graft to game those types of questions, you're pretty much qualified to be there because the rest of your degree will just be more of the same.
That's why I don't like standard tests. When I was studying, entrance exams were oral. You were given three problems (chosen at random), had some time to solve them, then presented your solutions to the examiner. Examiner would then ask follow-up questions.
There is no way to prepare for such test other than to learn the subject. No multiple-choice questions you can Kaplan.
It is simply wrong to evaluate and condemn a person based on race. To justify any kind of discrimination on the idea that you are helping one person, you are hurting another. This an equally problematic, it’s taking us back to times before equal rights and for people to be judged on their abilities.
Hoping a brilliant student will apply to a university twice and deepfake their race in one of their admission interview videos.
Why don’t we prefer hard working students or students that played the most sports? There’s nothing inherently special about being a good student.
When I buy elite golf clubs, it means the clubs are elite not other people who buy it are.
Now you can argue part of the reason to attend college is because of your classmates. And then I’d ask is the best experience a bunch of kids who are simply good at school?
"boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits"
The outcome was to move the bar to soft skills:
things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”
This has happened to minority groups of all backgrounds in this country since its inception.
Even the whole argument about success rates of assimilation aside, this doesn't seem to check out.
How does this whole "assimilation doesn't work" argument even flow from the statement? Asian Americans referenced were all born in the US, grew up here, went through the education system here, etc. There is nowhere they need to assimilate to, they were born Americans and grew up here. This is their primary culture, not that of a country where their ancestors were born.
I am leaving a big possibility that I completely misunderstood your comment, so please correct me if my interpretation of it was incorrect.
I am glad I studied in France, where admission to elite schools is based purely on objective entrance exams (emphasis on Math). It’s not a perfect system, rich parents can afford tutors and teachers can tutor their kids, but it’s a hella fairer than the system in the US, corrupted by legacy admissions, sports scholarships and racial quotas that purposefully ignore socioeconomic disparity, because it’s easier for the powers-that-be to throw poor rural white kids under the bus than something that might adversely impact their own children.
I've heard the claim that the SAT is biased against lower SES for a while now, but more on the left than the right, and I've never heard "most" biased.
I don't see any evidence either that most people believe that or that it's true.
I personally find it more likely that high school grades and extracurriculars are probably the most biased portions (grades because a large portion of them usually depends on assignments with loose grading rubrics, which are empirically linked to greater racial and other bias for otherwise similar responses, and extracurriculars because both access and evaluation of them is impacted by cultural factors of both the student, the evaluators, and other members of society.
Determined by who?
UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ, along with the UC system’s chief academic officer, Provost Michael Brown, said Friday that research has convinced them that performance on the tests is so strongly influenced by family income, parents’ education and race...
> UC should keep SAT and ACT as admission requirements, faculty report says
> University of California faculty leaders are recommending the continued use of the controversial SAT and ACT as an admission requirement for now, citing UC data showing the standardized tests may actually help boost enrollment of disadvantaged students, according to a highly anticipated report released Monday
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-03/uc-shoul...
"The new yearlong faculty review found evidence that most UC admissions officers offset much of the bias against disadvantaged students by evaluating standardized test scores in the context of their high schools and neighborhoods."
"Among students with SAT scores of 1000 — the 40th percentile — half of Latinos were admitted compared to less than one-third of whites."
https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/print/land...
When I was in university I remember being somewhat intimidated by the asian students because I knew that while other white students had an even chance of being smarter or dumber than me, the asian ones were all probably smarter than me just to get in.
It reminds me of an other story of my parents. As Lenin came into power they took all the land from rich farmers and killed a lot of them. Since they were privileged and all the prosperity belongs to the people. The result was that bad skilled farmers took over and that led to more poverty.
Is it discrimination if the decision is based on intelligence alone?
Unless you're saying that the USSR's underlying philosophy comes from somewhere other than Marx or Lenin, in which case I'm curious as to what philosophy, and originated by whom, you're talking about.
It was. There was affirmative action for "ethnic minorities" too. Source: born and raised in the USSR.
Can you please link an authoritative source for this?
Edit: found an authoritative source, no air quotes. https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/rightsviews/2017/11/07/sovie...
Consider the phrase also said to have been popular in the USSR, "Everything Marx said about Capitalism was correct, but everything he said about Communism was wrong."
This is not the kind of equality the poster was talking about. Forcing equality at government level does not mean forcing everyone to have equal IQ and work ethic. It means ignoring those differences and forcing everyone to get the same benefit in life even though some are less productive than others ("to each according to his need"). "Equality of outcomes" as another poster put it.
and this is why communism fails, because an external entity cannot possibly know the true needs of the individual, and cannot act in the best interest of every individual. Unless somehow they are a benevolent god.
I'm not convinced. The slogan specifically recognises differences in needs, and therefore differences in 'income' under a socialist system. This is concordant with Marx's other writing on the matter. It means that in terms of what people need, they'll have access to it. But people have different needs. How can the 'outcomes' possibly be equal if the outcomes are a result of concrete, different needs and life situations? The outcome of a mother of three being given what they need is different from the outcome of a single civil engineer. Both the inputs (based on what they need) and the outputs (the outcomes) vary between each person.
Further, in every society as Marx notes, there is some amount of surplus. If everyone's needs are covered, Marx argued for an allocation based on contribution, at least in the lower phase of Communism (sometimes called socialism). Let's go into what Marx actually said:
>Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. [0]
So it seems that Marx proposes a system, his 'lower phase of Communism', which Lenin took to mean 'socialism' - in which people get out what they put in, accounting for deductions (which Marx enumerates as deductions for health care, education, care for those who cannot work, provisions in the case of disaster, and expansion of production). In what possible way does "everyone get the same outcome" here? More,
>Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.
Does this sound like 'equality of outcome'?
[0] Karl Marx - Critique of the Gotha Program (Part I, 1875).
The USSR was not in the Communism, it had Socialism (which is not "a lower phase" but a "transitional state on the way to the Communism" as same as Capitalism, Feudalism, Slavery etc.). However, as far as equality goes, they subscribed to the French Revolution's "liberty,equality,fraternity" with a huge emphasis on "equality", "fraternity" meaning that Soviet people had to help other peoples ("fraternity of peoples") and "liberty" meaning "absence of slavery".
You're talking about Marx and Lenin, but one of the first deep changes in USSR history was Stalin's raise to power - and with him, complete rejection of the "world revolution" and nationalistic "socialism in one country", up to re-establishement of orthodox church in the 40s.
Sovient Union was a completely different country with every decade of it's existence. In a dogmatic system it was not openly articulated, and leaders continued to pay lip service to "Marx and Lenin", but their real economic and political decisions were often in complete odds with the original values.
- the New Deal excluded black people
- The GI Bill excluded black people
etc...
Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated, so yes there absolutely should be reparations. I think this should be done in several ways:
- monetarily: by funding scholarships and other projects to remedy the injustices perpetrated and help black americans accumulate some of the generational wealth they have been denied. Although at the end of the day, no amount of money will ever compensate for the hurt, death and atrocities, its a start.
- education: teaching kids at school what slavery was really like, instead of what some of the schoolbooks teach (that slavery wasn't that bad for example). Teaching kids about systemic racism that persists to this day.
- policing, housing, prisons: watch 13th documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8) its free on netflix
(edit: spelling and formatting)
Reparations within a country between different ethnicities a good way to increase animosity. Because people would complain rightfully, that the wealth transfer is unjust.
I doubt you find any book in education that says that slavery wasn't bad. Every ethnicity on the planet has suffered from it and < 1% were slave owners. Yes, I know the argument that people profited passively... it isn't too convincing given the huge wealth distribution discrepancies western nation exhibit.
I don't think you are advocating for justice or equality here.
That’s almost certainly not the case.
Any economic gains from slavery were more than wiped out by the civil war.
Does that mean white Americans and Black Americans were on economically equal after the civil war?
Where are you going with this line of questioning?
They aren’t economically equal now in 2020.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/8/16/20806069/slavery-ec...
Even if it was the case that the civil war wiped out the gains from slavery, it doesn't change the case for reparations as well as the other injustices that were being committed are are still being committed to this day
I wasn't talking about wealth transfer. I was mainly talking about stopping discrimination and providing loans and scholarships to a section of the population that has been discriminated against to redress centuries of oppression.
"Reparations" is basically code for wealth transfer. If you mean crafting a more just, fair society, you probably want a different word.
If you agree that the New Deal and GI bill helped spur economic development (though they were not perfect) and lifted poor white people out of poverty, why not do that today for black people? Black people were systematically left out of that help, so time to give them the help they are owed.
I have listened to people explain how Fox News is “liberal” and “true conservatives” must watch OANN.
Also, separating outcome and opportunity is tricky because it's a feedback loop.
I don't disagree with you, I just want more precision [edit]: and nuance.
The only ppl I see aim for that are republicans that don’t know the difference.
Is it just me or has the quality of commentry on political topics gone substantially downhill on HN in the last five years?
To expound on my previous comment, those on the left calling for ‘equity’ should be viewed critically. The calls for ‘removing barriers’ should alarm everyone, because ultimately it only serves to control and dumb everyone down. The alternative is to encourage public policies that seek the empowerment of all individuals and groups. One concrete example is the debate in NYC schools that math and honors courses are ‘inequitable’ and racist. Voices on the left are calling for the abolishment of such classes, thereby denying students the opportunity to be challenged according to their ability. The other undiscussed side of this issue is that such calls for ‘equity’ result in basically giving up on poorer students who won’t be given the support they need to meet the higher standards. In short, anything involving ‘equity’ should be viewed as a race to the bottom for everyone.
But really, it does nothing to enforce your argument. You complain about 24 hour news and social media eroding Democracy (and presumably discussions about the politics of Democracy), yet you use these terms so loosely and end up reducing anyone Left of you to some or other policy you deem to be essential to that position.
This is kind of an outside perspective - America as seen through the news - but I would say that a lot of the stuff I see espoused by the Left and Right in the US is much more extreme than in Germany for example. Germany has laws that allow for positive discrimination, but I can't think of any such extreme measures as in the US here, where chances are diminished for one race by a factor of 10. Even having race on the application form would be unthinkable here.
On the other hand we have many more social programs that would be unthinkable in the US. We have 4+ (usually 5-6) weeks vacation per year, etc.
The American Right on the other hand is also in many ways more extreme than in Germany, nobody would consider Republicans as right-leaning centrists here, e.g. building a wall would be a bit taboo, although maybe more due to historical reasons. Denying people health-care, because they're poor would also probably not count as centrist here.
I don't think positive discrimination laws in the US has as much to do with an embrace of Leftist ideology as it does with an attempt at attracting previously disenfranchised voters. I realise this seems very cynical, but my argument is that having a few policies that seem Leftist doesn't mean that the underlying ideology behind those policies is; correlation does not imply causation etc. So I'd argue those laws are reactionary, much in the same way they are in Germany and also in places like South Africa, to varying degrees of course. They're exactly the kind of toe-dipping you'd expect of parties who are more driven by quests for power than ideology. That's why, even with several Democratic presidents, for instance, the US still doesn't have proper vacation and parental leave: it's bad for business.
If I had to plot it, I'd say Germany's political landscape is also quite huddled up around the Center, but slightly Left (with more outliers than the US), where the US is huddled around the Center and slightly Right. This would explain why the Right in the US feels further Right than in Germany. These configurations are probably not even that strange for developed and developing Western nations, though most have more outlier parties than the US even if they're not generally in contention during elections.
I just feel that the binary-narrative - even though the spectrum is quite large and nuanced - is something that has spread from US political commentators to other nations and is watering down the discourse.
And Asian Americans have an 8% admit rate going back to 1995, the lowest of all ethnicities.
You'd think I'm going to be downtrodden for life because I went to a state school.
[0]https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/michigan/university-o... [1]https://www.collegesimply.com/colleges/connecticut/yale-univ...
Because it is a statistical observation, it does not necessarily have any bearing on your outcomes as an individual--though it seems likely that it does.
Cannot laugh more at that.
The Union has never been, or at least not the union my father's memory, about that.
It was strongly regimented, rigid, very hierarchical, caste society. The communist fraternity has been a model aristocracy, with its primary imperative being maintenance of party member's status, and privilege.
For every similarity you might imagine there are 1,000 more important dissimilarities. Surely if you are sincere about reducing discrimination "around the globe" you wouldn't be doing this kind of stylized generalization.
The situation of Jews in the Soviet Union's does not apply too well here because the real vs. stated reasoning behind it were very different. But I see a lot of parallels with the gender and racial discrimination in the workplace in current times. So there is precedent on legally using race or gender in a selection process.
When it comes to fixing past discrimination in the workplace it is already considered legally acceptable to have quotas until the situation is brought back to balance. Such a quota all but guarantees that at some point some candidates will have to be rejected based on gender or race even if they would be otherwise accepted. The split was set around the actual gender/race split of the population. For example California's gender or racial diversity bills proposed that at least at Board of Directors level although I don't know if they were ever passed into law. Needless to say, with or without such a law companies all over the world publicly advertise their equality focused hiring targets so I must assume they're not just outing themselves as breaking the law.
Is this the case here? The article doesn't really provide that many concrete details and I can imagine a lot of implications coming out of this. Is Yale doing this to have a balance of races based on the split in the population? Are they just arbitrarily picking a ratio for this? What impact will a decision here to eliminate any race criteria from the admission have on already established measure to explicitly consider race or gender as part of the process? What happens if one group ends up naturally being over-represented?
We'll have to start paying more attention to equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. And whatever is decided at some point we'll also have to start being consistent, not just chase conflicting targets based on what each administration sees as a priority at the time.
1. If you reject someone based on race, no matter which, it is racism 2. Those that got in due to quotas, even if they are the most qualified are gonna be having doubts about if they only got in through the quota and are in reality not good enough. 3. There is a stark difference in the percentage of male/female/black/white/etc that go into different fields. Basing it on the wider population would not even be close to approaching a representative percentage. Also: local differences, which basically makes the whole attempting to represent the percentage of the population moot.
As an example: There are barely any women working in sewers, should they have quotas for getting about 50% of the sewer workers to be female?
In short: Quotas are bad for everyone, are especially hurting those they claim to help and are completely misguided anyways.
My main point focused on something that I find more important: will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
> will we end up in a situation where both views are considered equally legitimate even if they are conflicting?
I personally can't see the standpoints being equally legitimate due to my above problems with it. But for the general population? I think that both can be legitimate in their eyes.
I took your point. I was thinking of legitimate as in official decisions. There are already laws that implement gender or racial quotas in a work environment. Many companies already advertise this [0] and even public institutions were discussing it at least as far back as a decade ago [1]. One would logically have to assume that they're equally valid for a university. If the issue is indeed that Yale is using such quotas to maintain a certain balance between the different groups based on the population ratios but the courts agree with the Feds that this is illegal then we'll be left holding 2 equally (il)legitimate but contradictory views on the problem: quotas are legal, positive measures to achieve balanced participation and representation [2] but at the same time they are illegal because they discriminate against the other groups.
Since the details of the Yale case aren't all that clear right now we'll have to wait for the judgement. They may actually do something more onerous than that I assumed above.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgenehuang/2017/02/14/seekin...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH...
There are Asians out there that have put in enough effort to get into Yale (which is quite a high bar) and then been excluded because ... well, they're Asian. That isn't going to compare to anything positive or pleasant. Racism should be condemned in strongest possible terms.
> The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union...
True, but horrific ideology in the government is a totally different kettle of fish than that ideology in a non-government organisation.
If my neighbours don't really believe in property rights, I'll call them hippies and laugh about their eccentric antics. If my government doesn't really believe in property rights I'd give serious thought to fleeing the country.
Same ideology, but different levels of power.
How exactly are you going to do that?
a take on this problem by an asian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8VP_873kA4
Less than 14.5% of the total seats are available for the general category students.
The total category wise distribution in the IIT’s for academic year 2019–20 is as follows
* OBC-NCL – 27%
* Scheduled Caste (SC) – 15%
* Scheduled Tribe (ST) – 7.5%
* Persons with disability (PwD)- 5% in each category (namely OPEN, GEN-EWS, OBC-NCL, SC and ST)
* 2 seats in each institute for ‘Defense service candidates’ Foreign nationals- up to 10% (supernumerary)
* Female candidates- 17% (supernumerary)
* Economically weaker section- 4% currently(It will go up to 10% in a couple of years)
Total percentage of reserved seats - 85.5%
This quota system is present in all govt funded and public sector jobs and colleges.
https://nvshq.org/article/obc-non-creamy-layer-income-limit-...
A lovely piece of divergence between the Indian and British Englishes!
That takes your general category availability to much higher number than 14.5% that you believe.
This practice was supposed to end with sovient union — but my school, which always had a fair share of jews that applied to math department in MSU, taught those in 00s, and athough discriminiation wasn't as blatant then, I'm not sure that it completely went away.
>UCSF upcoming class reveals heavily shaped racial mixtures. Other schools will probably follow? “The stats are in: @UCSFMedicine's Class of 2024 is 23% Hispanic/Latinx, 22% Asian, 20% White, 19% Black, and includes 4 Native Americans” (twitter.com)
https://www.reddit.com/r/premed/comments/hkvv6r/ucsf_upcomin...
When asked to select his race, Ota didn't realize "Caucasian" applied to him – after all he's Czech, not from Caucasus! So he checked "Other" instead. An honest mistake.
As a result, he got in no problem.
[1] https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-univer...
[2] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
===
Columbia: ~1,500 of 6,298 undergrads (23%) ; ~3,500 of 22,861 graduates (15%)
Cornell: ~3,000 of 15,043 undergrads (19%) ; ~500 of 8,984 graduates (6%)
Pennsylvania: ~1,750 of 10,019 undergrads (17%) ; ~1,800 of 12,413 graduates (14%)
Brown: ~1,000 of 7,160 undergrads (13%) ; ~200 of 3,173 graduates (6%)
Yale: ~800 of 6,092 undergrads (13%) ; ~1,500 of 7517 graduates (20%)
Harvard: ~780 of 6755 undergrads (11%) ; ~2,500 of 4,698 graduates (53%)
Dartmouth: ~420 of 4459 undergrads (9%) ; ~100 of 2,149 graduates (5%)
Princeton: ~450 of 5,428 undergrads (8%) ; ~250 of 2,946 graduates (8%)
===
The eight original Ivy League universities in order of graduate %
===
Harvard: ~780 of 6755 undergrads (11%) ; ~2,500 of 4,698 graduates (53%)
Yale: ~800 of 6,092 undergrads (13%) ; ~1,500 of 7517 graduates (20%)
Columbia: ~1,500 of 6,298 undergrads (23%) ; ~3,500 of 22,861 graduates (15%)
Pennsylvania: ~1,750 of 10,019 undergrads (17%) ; ~1,800 of 12,413 graduates (14%)
Princeton: ~450 of 5,428 undergrads (8%) ; ~250 of 2,946 graduates (8%)
Cornell: ~3,000 of 15,043 undergrads (19%) ; ~500 of 8,984 graduates (6%)
Brown: ~1,000 of 7,160 undergrads (13%) ; ~200 of 3,173 graduates (6%)
Dartmouth: ~420 of 4459 undergrads (9%) ; ~100 of 2,149 graduates (5%)
===
https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/search#radius=null&sele...
https://www.mastersportal.com/articles/1958/what-are-ivy-lea...
- American Indian or Alaska Native 0.3%
- Asian 14.7%
- Black or African-American 5.8%
- Hispanic of any race 9.8%
- Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander 0.1%
- White 42.7%
- Race/ethnicity unknown 1.0
SOURCE:
- Black or African American alone, percent(a) 13.4%
- American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent(a) 1.3%
- Asian alone, percent(a)5.9%
- Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent(a) 0.2%
- Two or More Races, percent 2.8%
- Hispanic or Latino, percent(b) 18.5%
SOURCE:
- White alone, percent 76.3%
It's apples vs oranges when we compare to the US population.
And I'm sure there are many world-class universities in India, China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey... Are they pretty close to proportional if you look at global numbers? For example, Kyoto University or Peking University, both world class institutions, does their student body reflect the global population, or the Japanese/Chinese population?
Or...
I expect the demographics of hn users to be more similar to global demographics rather than us demographics.
Also are Jewish people considered White in this case? I simultaneously see that they are referred to as minorities but also don't see them represented in statistics such as these when comparing ethnicity in X with ethnic population in the US.
Why don't you think they should match up?
Note that it's not strictly zero sum either. Huge grants by previous may have opened the university to more people than are admitted by legacy admissions -- yielding greater participation by non-legacy than previously possible.
People are choosing one small slice of what goes on with a university -- admissions right now. They are glossing over the fact that it is other people who made the university great over the years to the point that it is desirable at all. Those people made it great by donating money and going on to bring prestige to the university. Ignore them and lose the prestige and money.
Nobody is glossing over that fact. I am simply saying that if anything outside of a student's merit is "discrimination", then taking into account the alumni status or past contributions of [not that student] is also "discrimination".
They are not the student's merits to weigh, they are the relative's merits.
One particular cultural value is caring a whole lot about education and prestigious degrees (see the test prep industry in most of asia).
I have no problem with people who value education getting an edge in admissions. So even in a race-blind world, I am okay with outcomes not matching population statistics. Because in a world where you're solely judged based on your values that's exactly what you'd see.
But what's happening is that two different people can both adopt this same "education" value and have different outcome because of their race. The opportunities are not equal, not for blacks, not for asians.
Citation?
Is there an a priori reason they must?
But if you want to judge it by looks, I look like an Arab. Like hundreds of thousands of other Jews.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23914667
שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶם ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ :-)
PS. do you have any opinion on סרוגים (the show)?
The percentages at the link above are labeled as "University-wide Enrollments," which seems to mean that they account for graduate students as well as undergraduates. But the DOJ finding is only about undergraduate admissions.
what does that even mean, exactly? I fail to see how can it be defined to be non-intersecting with the other categories.
Or do they measure someones eye shape to "detect" Asian people?
How about Jews, is nose measurement sufficient (they need to dig really hard in their archives to find some Nazi "scientific" statistics on that...) or they just ask to take off pants during interview to check if someone is not hiding his race?
More on this, although it's about Harvard not Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Why an organization with 30 BILLION in endowment cannot admit more than 2000 eighteen year olds baffles me. If you want to admit more POKs then increase the class size and hire more professors with that vast amount of money.
I realize places like Yale try to be like old, exclusive country clubs. But if that’s the case then they should be taxed on that money.
How would this be enforced? That private universities can't get tax exempt status if they don't spend a certain % of their net assets each year? Doesn't this effectively penalize organizations operating on an endowment funding model?
Elite universities are luxury brands, and by definition a product is no longer a luxury if everybody gets one.
If you just want a quality education, you can get it anywhere else. What people are complaining about here is that don't get to access an intentionally carefully-restricted item.
I'm not going to be writing to my senator because you don't get to drive a Lamborghini. Get in a Corolla like the rest of us, you'll be just fine.
And I think if they actually admitted all of the Asian students that fulfilled their acceptance criteria, they would probably want to expand the school so that a more diverse student body could fit into Yale.
Out of curiosity, I wonder how much larger Yale would have to be, in order to retain all th Black, Hispanic, and Native American students that they currently have, while also including the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.
Would Yale be twenty-five percent larger? Twice as large? What's the scale here?
I know you're repeating a framing from TFA and from numerous other sources, but the discrimination against Asians primarily benefits whites, because there are so many more of them. There simply aren't enough BIPoC students to make room for the Asians who would be accepted if the discrimination against them stopped, as implied by your "majority Asian student body" comment. (Also, lots of BIPoC students are not "just over the line" and perform as well as or better than Asian and white students.) The eventual result of this lawsuit will be a much lower percentage of white students, while BIPoC percentages might drop slightly.
[1]: https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/factsheet_2018-19_0...
[2]: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
It was 40% last year. It's been now cut to 22%.
That is a gigantic shift of a demographic of a new medical school class. Within one year.
edit: This report says 14% of college enrolled U.S. residents were black in 2017. But that makes it sound like it doesn't include international students.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
You cannot say that just 7% is low or 14% is high. Even looking at other universities. You have to know what source population that is being drawn from, and what is the criterion for drawing.
It could be that 4% of people applying to Yale are black, 3% are qualified, and 7% outcome is already overrepresented. Or it could be "terrible" if 10% are applying, and 7% are qualified.
You have to look at what % pass the filter you are applying, to those who apply. With that further criterion applied, any of these figures could be "reasonable".
It is not true that a selective process should simply match the proportions of <x> group that you see in the general population. That is the wrong and very misguided / misrepresented way of reporting the problem. But too often it's the politically simple (or intellectually lazy) approach to framing the issue.
It sounds good to say "we should look like our customers". But that is often not true for a selective process. It is true, if and only if, the qualities you're selecting for are represented in an unbiased way, among the people who are your customers, and among those who apply.
I believe the right discussion to have is where do we as society want to be between the two outcomes. Not do we want A, or do we want B.
It might be a little on-the-nose, but I think it is a sincere takedown of the authleft (and moreso: crab mentality). These views can and do come from within the left - like Orwell, most notably.
Don't get me wrong - the impulse is there and some people think that way. Just like are absolutely people who would peddle filet of Steve.
But amplifying the marginal to discredit the general is fundamentally dishonest, and we won't do that here, right?
Do you think that "we simply need to publish all lectures online free of charge" is a good answer for the plaintiffs?
You mean equal opportunity then.
There are a lot of examples of equal access to programs in this country, by the letter of the law, but in practice locally, folks were unable to access these opportunities.
The FHA most immediately comes to mind. The letter of the law of FHA versus local implementation by local banks, bank executives, realtors, mortgage brokers, even home sellers were able deny opportunity though technically these programs were accessible to all.
I don't think "equal access" is really what the crowd most ardently pushing this would accept.
Equality of opportunity would mean that if two equally qualified persons of different races/ethnicities/etc have the same chance of getting admitted.
The big issue is that you can't have both, mostly due to various family and childhood circumstances that mean that different groups have different rates of "getting to X years old with qualifications/skills/preparations Y".
For Yale admissions, you can have one, or the other, or a compromise in the middle. You can have a situation that's unfair/unequal according to both criteria, but you can't get both "types of equality" at the same time, as increasing one generally requires to trade off or sacrifice the other.
This has been an open secret since at least 2012.
Quotas restricting Asians, and affirmative action benefiting Jews, who make up an astounding full quarter of the student bodies of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, despite being only 2% of the population, which is 5x their rate of admission at Caltech, an elite school with a famously merit-based, AA-free admission process:
The campus is located in the Los Angeles area, home to one of America’s largest and most successful Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionally been strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed, at least three of Caltech’s last six presidents have been of Jewish origin, and the same is true for two of its most renowned faculty members, theoretical physics Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.
The author is apparently Jewish himself, BTW.
Also do mixed race individuals get to pick either white or black on college applications?
Such an obvious thing imo, but now it's simply popular to discriminate against whites and asian people. Awesome, we've come full circle.
I'm afraid you might start to see similar things in Europe with the demographic changes: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP...
The Justice Dept made the exact same allegations against Harvard, and last year a Federal Judge found that Harvard was constitutionally in the clear.
SCOTUS has said that race can be narrowly used in admissions to promote diversity, which Yale says they are doing. The fact that the Justice Department wants Yale to cease all uses of race in admissions (despite this interpretation) is suspect.
i say this as someone who would have been directly affected if this claim were true
Its daily work currently consists of fighting sex-trafficking and other inarguably good pursuits... The claim that the DOJ is any more political today than a decade or three ago doesn't seem borne out by the facts, IMO.
There's also a perfectly reasonable argument on the facts to drop the case against Flynn - not least of all what appears to be motivated entrapment and no appropriate cause to investigate in the first place - but this becomes a politically charged argument and I feel it's inappropriate on HN.
Please research from non biased non spin news and look at actual documents unsealed.
There's probably some edgy contrarian aspect going on, but do note that this was spurred by a lawsuit brought in 2014 by those alleging that they were discriminated against.
The DOJ took it up, but at one level it would be obscene if they didn't - imagine the inverse (some evidence of anti-black admissions procedures is found), and the DOJ - who is tasked with prosecuting hate crimes and other civil rights-style issues - did not take it up.
In this case I almost feel like the Republican DOJ is being looked at sideways because one of the alleged victim parties is white... Had it been blacks and Asians, I doubt anyone would've cast aspersions on the Obama DOJ for taking up the charge.
TL;dr this sort of topic is the DOJ's bread and butter, and since it began via lawsuits from the affected parties I don't think there's much cynical "discretion" going on in this particular case.
You mean like publicly abandoning ongoing investigations of systematic racial discrimination by local police departments while dismissing the entire idea of conducting such investigations when there was evidence in hand as an intrusion on law enforcement?
The DOJ did that almost immediately when the current Administration took over.
> this sort of topic is the DOJ's bread and butter, and since it began via lawsuits from the affected parties I don't think there's much cynical "discretion" going on in this particular case.
The DOJ doesn't join or follow every, or even most, discrimination cases filed by private parties which are minimally viable and state claims which would also provide a public cause of action, so I have no idea on what basis you jump from “started by a private lawsuit” to “therefore doesn’t have much cynical discretion involved”.
2. The facts are not entirely clear how Yale is using race but a “disparate impact” analysis may yield some insight.
>The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.
2. especially in hi tech and elite universities.
3. NBA is an exception, actually all sports can be an exceptions.
4. Asian is not considered as minority when it come to college admissions, what doe minority mean?
5. MIT and many other STEM universities has 50:50 boys and girls, if not so, it's called gender discrimination.
...
So, let's throw out SAT/ACT/GPA and admit people via 'holistic' review, i.e. totally subjective, which means, the more miserable you're the better chance you will have, we joked as parents the best we can do for our kids is going to jail, do drugs, go bankrupt, so our kids can get some benefits. Nice family, law-biding family are basically punished.
I have not seen anywhere more communism like in USA now, you cut the corner because of your race or gender, merit-based is racism, we're going to hell.
I wish those AA pumpers will get a doctor who was admitted/graduated/career-ed based on AA rules, when they need a cure the most at hospitals.
The investigation also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity
If they're "racially balancing" their classes, that does sound like it is a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity in their classes. Whether or not that's actually a noble or appropriate goal is a different question, but it sounds like it's allowed...
Of course the definition of "balance" here is tricky. Corresponding ratios to the overall racial balance of the country? The state? Overall racial balance of all applicants? Of all alumni?
Then when allowing them actively worked to limit entrance.
Finally they all operate with legacy admissions so the racist bans on applicants have a long tail
The school in question never formally disallowed blacks.
"Yale’s first black graduate was Courtland Van Rensselaer Creed, who received his medical degree in 1857 and went on to have a prominent practice in New York City"
In that way, you could get right at what is most interesting- which students are actually the most impressive.
Past student body provides the training dataset- just define what measures a successful student whom you are happy to have. College GPA, graduation date, post-graduation compensation, whatever.
Can anyone explain why this belongs on HN or why it gets so much attention? I don’t understand it.
Why is this on HN?
> Why is this on HN?
Relatively many students and recently graduated under the members, more than on e.g. reddit?
So you need a system to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Just like a job interview, you don't just hire people at random. Some kind of system is necessary.
As an example, the Bay Area has some of the best schools and most expensive real estate in the country. This is due to a lack of supply, yet to this day it is illegal to build high density and inexpensive housing in the vast majority of lots so that the less wealthy can start building equity, which again is a huge portion of wealth. Ordinances like high minimum lot sizes and low coverage were deliberately designed to make it more expensive for POC to buy into a neighborhood. This is covered extensively in The Color of Law, and is a great read [2].
Perhaps the better approach is to fix these systemic issues so that schools didn't have to compensate for them.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...
First, there's k-12, and not just higher education, which the quality and access thereof is impacted greatly by wealth — Nicer, more expensive homes tend to also have nicer school districts.
It is not a leap to say that a student from a disadvantaged background had to struggle a lot more to learn than one that didn't. Either because of costs (Supplies, tutors, extracurricular activities etc.), or environment (Parent's help and education, support). This is why higher education attempts to compensate for opportunity: They understand the cards are stacked against some groups more than others.
Yes anybody from any race/ethnicity can face these struggles, but remember that a lot of these disadvantages are still _structurally engrained_ to target a particular group. These aren't slight advantages, and housing isn't the only issue, but taken together it has resulted in white families having 6.7x more wealth than a typical black family.
Intervening at Ivy League admissions is a surefire way to benefit those minorities who are currently the least inhibited, while expending a lot of social (and potentially "real") capital to do so.
Intervening much earlier in the process would be much harder, but would provide relatively more assistance to those who are so disadvantaged as to otherwise end up nowhere near college admissions anywhere, much less the Ivy Leagues.
https://medium.com/swlh/y-combinator-not-lambda-school-is-un....
If Asians were told that at most X% of school Y could be Asian to save room for other ethnicities for social reasons, they could probably accept that better than being told that it was because they were being categorically determined as having shitty or empty personalities.
- If you think merit is a function of de facto performance, you will not deem it justified when the bar for admission is lowered for under-performing groups.
- If you think merit is a function of effort[0], then you will not deem it justified when everybody is held to the same standard of performance.
The reason this is such a touchy issue, I think, is that both approaches result in a de facto racial (and/or other immutable-trait-based) hierarchy. In my estimation, the determining ideological factor in picking a side is whether one prefers implicit vs explicit hierarchies.
[0] There's probably a better word than effort, but it's not coming to mind.
there are too many students chasing to few colleges. there should be 20 Yales, 30 Harvards and 50 MITs. just like there should be 10 Microsofts, 20 Googles and 50 Apples. if competition for credentials wasnt so pirate cut throat due to induced artifical scarcity, then society wouldnt be nitpicking over admissions quota minutia.
imagine a world where we cut the Pentagon's budget by 15%, and poured that $150 billion into turning every Community College into a University on par with Yale and the Ivys. imagine a world where unemployable grad students were not ground up and churned out through a system that only has teaching jobs for a fraction of them.
the solution to all higher education problems is to radically increase the supply to meet the demand.
dont you want humanity to have an orbital base around Alpha Centauri someday? how else are we going to achieve that?
Today we could show the best lecture any prof has ever given to a village in nirvana that got running water 10 years ago. That doesn't replace direct mentoring, but would still elevate education to new standards.
Special schools for particularly gifted people should exist, but the product today is more prestige than quality of education (which is good, but not the primary selling point anymore).
In this rebel youth aim to destroy older "conservative" ideas apparently someone broke some of the oldes hard earned lessons by mankind about freedom and equalty.
One exam per year at the same time with no exceptions.
Completely race blind and no additional criteria other than school class rank and average school exam score.
Sounds like SCOTUS will agree with Yale on this one.
43% of white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, or related to donors. Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...
I'm an Asian liberal and I think trump is an idiot but the reality is that all people, as altruistic or immoral as they appear to be, are, in fact, complex amalgamations of good, evil, intelligence and stupidity. My judgement of trump is just a biased simplification of reality and the complexity of his character.
Props to trump for supporting this initiative.
Yale, in this case.
(a) All top schools weigh race and gender. They consider student body diversity important. You can disagree that they should, but it's true.
(b) Bill Barr's DOJ is one of the least trustworthy entities in the USA on this subject this side of the KKK.
This is something that has been pursued by the DOJ for years.
The lawsuit that began this process was in 2014.
Also, allusions to the KKK are just obscene. You can have political views, but shoehorning them in while exhibiting such ignorance about the underlying facts of the case just destroys the quality of the conversation.
IMO.
Any school that had racist policies that banned black and other PoC that still has legacy admissions is fundamentally biased in favor of white applicants, and will always be.
The bar for legacy entry is incredibly low, far below GPA requirements for any affirmative action has ever been.
That's the big cudgel right: look at the racial spread of legacy acceptances, and if that does not match (within reason) the average racial spread then legacy admittance is adding a discriminatory pressure against those races that are less represented.
"Yale College could fill its entire entering class several times over with applicants who reach the 99th percentile in standardized testing and who have perfect high school grade point averages, but we do not base admission on such numbers alone," President Peter Salovey wrote. "Rather, we look at the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants." (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/08/13/us/politics/ap-u..., the other post on this on the front page)
This argument will be shown to have merit. Simply put, the question of whether to have a class that represents the population vs the applicant pool is at the discretion of the college. A lower ratio of acceptance by race is not de facto indicative of individual discrimination. They can pick and choose a class from the top tenth of a percent of the graduating seniors in the US. Every student there is elite.