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Comment by MikeUt | Hacker News Reader

> Here are some more of the fiercely held arguments for dumping the tests: Test scores don’t reflect the character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager; the tests force students from underfunded schools to compete against “affluent whites” who can afford expensive test prep;

While the article does offer some rebuttal to that claim, I'd like to give a stronger one*: California is 31% white, University of California students are 25% white - they are underrepresented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Stude...

*Edit: On second thought, grardb is correct: Comparing with K-12 demographics, as the article does, is better.

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I'm not following how that's a stronger rebuttal than the one in the article:

> But white students are also underrepresented, if only ever so slightly, at the UC: They make up 21 percent of the undergraduate population and 22 percent of K–12 schoolchildren.

If we're talking about college admissions, I think the percentage of white K-12 students is more important than the percentage of white people of any age. Obviously, some people start attending college later in life, but that number isn't high enough to make the demographics of the general population more important than the demographics of K-12 students.

>Test scores don’t reflect the character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager;

One of these two is a better metric for who will actually pass college courses though.

Im kinda curious what exact "character-forging aspects of life as a poor teenager" lead to not just better school outcomes but better life outcomes in general?

The only thing that comes to mind is possibly empathy towards the less fortunate, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to result in better life outcomes for a person in our modern society. But let me stress "possibly" because there seems to be plenty of examples of people who dont have any kind of empathy towards others who grew up as poor teenagers.

Considering that international students are overwhelmingly nonwhite, I don't think those numbers really hold up.

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...

According to the article, university and K-12 students in CA are also overwhelmingly nonwhite. You'll need to be more specific.

I know many public universities court international students because they have to pay full price.

The article also concludes that whites are underrepresented in UC, although they use even more relevant numbers.

Does anyone else think the % of the student body metric is misleading? Shouldn't it be a % relative to college age population?

Universities are, in general, not responsible for high-school dropouts.

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