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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students. And there is definite value in a diverse class: differences of thought, background, opinion, and lived experience make for a much more interesting discussion in the classroom.

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> I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students

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 think your assumption here is that if you were to filter based on those things you'd get an outcome that would be representative of the total population. But I don't see why you think that. Look at relatively poor Asian kids in the NYC public schools system. Even if you were to apply your filter there, they would still likely end up massively over-represented. Similar (but less dramatic) outcomes are likely even with Whites. Even factors like social class and family income don't carve things up in such obvious ways.

Why must the outcome "be representative of the total population"? If group X is Y% of the national population, must group X also be exactly Y% of the student body at universities? It is inevitable that, in anything, some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented, partly just by random chance, partly due to all kinds of complex cultural and historical reasons. To the extent under-representation is due to bad historical reasons (past oppression/persecution/discrimination/etc), then yes I think something should be done about it. But why not do that at the individual level, of the individual who is socially disadvantaged due to that history of oppression?

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.

Humans all suffer the same regardless of race. The goal is to reduce suffering in the end right? If targeting on disadvantage rather than race doesn't produce the "right" racial mix, so what?

Yup. You would get a higher percentage of high achieving poor Asian kids. These were the kids held up as model minorities 20 to 30 years ago.

1. You are assuming that they are not already taking non-racial attributes into account. Intersectionality is a well-understood concept and sits at the heart of most diversity initiatives

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.

> the fringes of the applications

Like a would-be 30% population of Asian students?

I think it still makes some sense to ask if someone is Black or Native American due to their unique history in America (slavery and genocide), but tossing people into these buckets based on their ancestral continent is absurd.

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.

Should individuals from other groups that have suffered recent genocide be treated similarly to those you named? Does it matter if America carried out the genocide inside its own borders? What if the country said little while very bad things happened? What if America fought but could not stop the very bad things? The Armenians and at least three more recent groups come to mind depending on those answers.

The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids.

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 Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids.

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

But is that how the universities behave?

Yale reports statistics based on these “buckets” on their own website - https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts (you have to scroll down to the section labelled “University-wide Enrollments by Ethnicity (% of non-international enrollment)” and click to expand it)

You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?

You should look closer at average test scores of admitted students by more fine grained ethnic groups. My high school discriminated by particular ethnic groups: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, etc...

Are those figures – i.e. test scores of admitted students broken down by fine-grained ethnic groups – publicly available for Yale? (Or any other similarly prestigious US university?)

https://features.thecrimson.com/2013/frosh-survey/admissions...

Harvard

Tap on SAT by Ethnicity

Look at Pacific Islander vs Asian. That is as close as I have found so far.

Pacific Islander vs Asian isn't "fine-grained". They are two distinct "buckets" in the US government's standard racial classification system, to which I linked earlier [1]. It is just that the "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander" bucket sometimes gets its name abbreviated to "Pacific Islanders". "Pacific Islander" is a collective term referring to the indigenous peoples of the islands of the Pacific Ocean, which peoples are divided into three main ethnolinguistic super-groups – Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians – and Native Hawaiians are a Polynesian people. New Zealand's Maori are another Polynesian people.

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

https://humanvarieties.org/2015/10/30/asian-american-subgrou...

The lawsuit asserts that they discriminate on the basis of both race AND national origin.

Important correction: affirmative action at these schools mostly doesn’t take spots away from white people. It mainly takes them from Asians, because Asians outperform whites on quantitative metrics like grades and GPA. IMO this is a critical piece of information, considering the place affirmative action holds in the politics of white resentment. White people who didn’t get into top schools: turns out you can’t blame affirmative action!

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.

>> if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students.

The data says otherwise. You'll have a HUGE amount of Asians and Asian-Americans. Not whites.

Counterexample: The University of California system, which prohibits considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions due to Prop 209 passed in 1996.

The UC system has a sizable Asian population as a result (and my personal experience), but also admits a diverse student body every year.

If you dont' look at race, you might get > 50% asian like CalTech, which only look at scores.

I sure some people who apply to Caltech apply to Yale, but most people who apply to Yale probably aren’t applying to Caltech. Even if Caltech practiced AA, it would still have very few underrepresented minorities.

Randomly admitting Indians will give you great diversity in backgrounds. Randomly admitting 4chan users will give you great diversity of thought. Of course that would absurd because those are not about race...

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