Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In reading further down that thread, I had a question about one of the tweets - why would a "zero discrimination" admission environment result in 65% of admitted college students being Asian-American?

Assuming a completely unbiased and equal opportunity environment from birth until college (which obviously is not the situation, this just a hypothetical), wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation?

The 2020 census results have 6% of respondents identifying as Asian or Asian-American. Obviously wealth disparities such as access to education create over and under representation for groups, but a 10x over-representation being "proper" seems a bit high to throw out there without some citations...

That 65.8% seems high to me using benchmarks of UC and Stuyvesant, but it is true Asians would be “grossly over represented” at top schools if not for affirmative action. Thus the current push to enforce affirmative action on the UC system. Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform.

> Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform.

I guess it depends on how you classify a minority - e.g. population, education, gender, wealth, income, etc.

Asian-Americans are certainly one of the smallest demographic groups in the US, and even smaller if you split them further by the ethnicity they most identify with (Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, etc.), but as far as UC's student population goes, they do represent the majority of students by a long shot at 40%. The next largest group is the Latino students at 30% of the population and then "white" students at 20%.

> wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation?

No, even if you took out all wealth disparities. Different demographics (this is a big generalization but that’s literally the question) value different things. And so those that value college would be overrepresented in college - same would apply in other competitive areas eg sport.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com