Set standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.
Subgroups of people come from different families and cultures, and at an aggregate level (not necessarily individuals) will have different values. Those values will lead to different talents and interests. Those different talents and interests will lead to meeting and failing different sets of standards.
Wouldn't it be a boring world if things were entirely uniform? Can you really say that different cultures even exist if the differences are so trivial that they don't really make any difference to your life?
Of course, nobody should be locked into a cultural stereotype. If they, individually, meet the standards, they should be treated as anyone else who does.
It's easier for education departments to shoot the messenger (the college admissions board) than admit the K-12 system they're responsible for is hopelessly racist.
Like the NFL or NBA?
It would be nice if the so-called fiscal conservatives cared as much about wasting the money addressing the issue after it is a problem as they do when trying to address it before it is a problem.
The problem arises when you try to produce an "empirical" measurement of academic excellence on real human beings (and particularly children): children spend their entire days under the control and potential neglect of others. One day's failure on an empty stomach[1] is another day's success.
[1]: In case it isn't abundantly clear, this is a stand-in for a complex of issues.
We need the best surgeons, engineers, leaders, teachers, etc. - not the best weighted by some sort of ‘difficulty during upbringing’ score.
I don’t see that being part of the discussion anymore though, and haven’t for awhile unfortunately.
It used to be this discussion was about how to take better advantage society wide of folks who had good capabilities by not artificially restricting the set of folks being considered (and helping those who didn’t have an opportunity to learn/try).
The goal posts keep moving though, and now seem to be ‘damn that, just give them a spot regardless’, which is terribly corrosive society wide.
If someone is legitimately awesome and is in an underserved community, they’ll forever doubt their actual capabilities AND everyone else will too, because they know the system has been rigged at some level to favor them based on attributes other than their capabilities.
It’s why nobility generally rotted out from the core too.
Any method of choosing folks that isn’t based on effectiveness and actual quality will rot the system.
It happens all the time, and most of the shiftiness we deal with in everything from healthcare to roads to politics is because we forgot this.
For a past example - The Romans typically considered it on the order of 100-150 yrs for an area (once conquerered) to ‘stabilize’, be functional , and ‘roman’ largely due to the same problems and effects.
Going in and crushing a country (or a segment of a population, like has been happening for awhile) causes problems that take time to work out, requires lots of work on everyone’s part (including education, jobs, cultural factors, working up the economic ladder), policing/removing folks in various places that are making it worse, and it is individual by individual and family by family.
For past examples just look at immigrants who were Norwegians, Irish, Germans, Catholics, Chinese, Japanese. Depending on the minority group we’re talking about depends on the specifics of the transition and amalgamation, but the trends are roughly similar.
We seem as a nation to be trying to do a urgent rush job and then getting so impatient that it isn’t fixed NOW! we’re just screwing everyone over. We’re more likely to get enough backlash to slide into racial/nationalist fascism than succeed if we continue on this path, and that’s far worse for everyone.
Especially the last decade plus.
And it’s mostly because we seem to have lost track of actual reality here. Until people mix, they have very different cultural norms, interests, and priorities. Some won’t want to mix.
Even if they want to do a specific job because of pay but it’s outside of a ‘normal job’ culturally, there will be friction - from their own culture, and from whatever other culture/subculture is dominant there.
This happens even if everyone is the same color, and relatively homogenous. Having been an EMT, good luck being a straight male nurse for instance. Good luck being a stay at home dad in Japan.
So what you see is the higher achievers and the ones less held to a standard are forerunners, kids start to accept/understand it’s possible, older generation dies out, younger generation who sees more possibilities comes in, rinse repeat. 4-5 generations later, it’s done.
It works because the folks earned it, there was policing and removal of the bad actors (critical), who are shitty, etc.
If someone starts getting roles without being able to do the job as well, it undermines this progress, as it builds resentment across a wider range of the population, quality decreases which impacts everyone (and removes popular support), and the in and out group fighting leads to social fragmentation into hard groups instead of mixing.
If you want to see what that looks like, check out Lebanon.
It’s like a form of toxic equality going on - everyone MUST have the same interests, aptitudes, outcomes, and support the same things - even if they don’t want it, don’t support it, or aren’t interested in making the trade offs to get it.
It’s dumb.
For example if the standards include "child of an alumni", that's not very fair. If the standards include GPA, that's not very fair to someone who went to a school that doesn't offer AP tests.
And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.
All these people were damn good at their jobs, but it was rather interesting how the demographics fell.
Sure but the schools who choose to not rely on academic merit any more are just bringing everyone else down instead of raising up the few who need it. Seems like a terrible solution.
San Francisco just turned Lowell High, one of the best high schools in the country, from merit based to lottery. This is despite the school being full of minority students who excel academically. Now they're screwed and their spot will go to some kid who was advanced a grade because their old school didn't want to hold them back.
Well done?
Some of this is pretty on-point. 'child of alumni' is somewhat dumb standard. I guess part of it is looking at standards and ensuring they're based in rational, and logical ideas.
However, if the issue with the standard being good GPA is that it's not fair to someone who went to bad school. The issue isn't the standard, it's the school. A better attempt to increased enrollment is to focus on ensuring better schools are provided to those students.
> And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.
That's correct. However, it's not clear to me how lowering standards is good? It's simply lowering the quality of students overall. Again, the solution falls to actually improving the level of quality of education for the under-represented groups instead of lowering standards.
In general, this discrimination is the definition of racism. Replace Blacks with White, and replace Asians with Blacks and you can be pretty clear how similar it is to racism of the past.
Quoting a paragraph from the article with slight changes:
> Among other things, standardized testing requirements were eliminated, and subjective admission criteria were added in an effort to deny slots to African-Americans and boost enrollment among white Americans.
If I saw that in a newspaper, I would conclude that's some racist stuff right there. If I remember correctly, most of the world, including America, in general decided a while ago that this Racism thing is not good.
so make AP classes run/subsidized by the state, rather than trying to assign quotas to college admissions.
People don't like to admit that minorities get treated differently just because of how they look.