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.
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.
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?
All these people were damn good at their jobs, but it was rather interesting how the demographics fell.
People don't like to admit that minorities get treated differently just because of how they look.