A challenge to affirmative action that isn’t really about affirmative action | Hacker News Reader

A challenge to affirmative action that isn’t really about affirmative action

washingtonpost.com

41 pointsdonsupreme10 comments

Affirmative action has no place at that end of the pipe. You need to be addressing the root cause of lower inputs for minority students instead of pretending that admitting them has the same rate of success that admitting higher scoring students does.

As a society we seem to think it's on everyone to make a difference at every level but unless the earliest stages have bought into that it's way less effective than it sounds. Inequality is a society wide problem that needs society wide solutions, implemented by governments to reduce these gaps at their origin.

Once we see change there it will filter through the system naturally as long as you are making these sorts of biased "personal score" systems illegal.

What you're saying essentially means that we can no longer use cheap and/or uneducated people for things from kindergarten, even creches to high school. PLUS of course, all sorts of supporting services, from sport clubs to child protection. Anyone who doesn't have the qualification that matters (ie. a university diploma in a STEM field, in this case, NOT pedagogy or ...) should be removed and kept out of those professions. We have to use qualified people, who have the qualification we target for the kids, and have to kick most of the current ones out, maybe even make it illegal for them to continue to their chosen profession anywhere.

Additionally, we would need to provide various ways for kids to spend more of their time at school (how else are you going to lessen parents' influence)?

And then, after holding on to such an investment for 18 years (a bit more), we will begin to see results?

Aside from the cost, because this would mean 300% raises, minimum, for teaching staff, this would be a social bloodbath, and the education sector will fight anything that goes 1% in that direction to the death.

Yeah, basically.

If you want a school system that doesn't suck you do have to pay for it.

Same goes for the rest of social support structures.

America might not be ready for this but plenty of other countries have managed it fine so I'm sure with how filthy rich America is they can work it out.

This is another good example of double-think from 1984. The Harvard admins believe in two mutually exclusive things: (1) that the minority students are obviously as capable as everyone else, and (2) that blind-exams where backgrounds of students aren't known would reveal undesired (i.e. "racist" in the newspeak) results. The art of double-think is watching your own mind and stopping it whenever it tries to connect the two opposites with logic.

Watching my wife trying to be accepted into some programs, it appears colleges get around this by giving bonus points (literally) to things that happen to be rare for the group they're penalizing. Penalizing appears to be bad, but if you flip it, so all but certain group get this positive boost, it's, apparently, ok.

How is excluding otherwise-qualified Asian students for less-qualified students of other ethnicities any different from the Jewish quotas at top colleges that existed in the first half the 20th century?

Asian American students' academic achievements are largely due to differences in culture. Without structural and societal changes, there's just no good way to lower Asian admission rates without artificially penalizing Asians as a whole.

We have become so accustomed to ubiquitous anti-White racism that this article can make subtly racist remarks with righteousness and carelessness.

The crux of this suit is that it is unconscionable that White children are not the most objectively, consciously, deliberately penalised race. When non-Whites underperform academically relative to Whites, there is an onus on the administration to artificially penalise Whites by adjusting admission rates in spite of this disparity; when non-Whites outperform Whites academically, it is cited here as evidence of heinous systemic racism if this is not reflected in admission rates.

In regards to the personality assessment, it is not even open to consideration that White overachievement might be merited. In fact, the disdain for Whites is so deep and native in these people that for White students to be rated highly for their character is itself evidence of manipulation or corruption. It is impossible. Utterly incompatible with their concept of Whiteness.

White students: Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I have not followed this at all. Forgive my ignorance.

Wasn’t there a time when China money and students from China were overrunning Ivy League schools? Was this an attempt to finally put an end to this?

Slightly unrelated, in California, there is a problem with China money being brought in to buy homes in cash in certain school districts.

I think that is a problem in almost every western city

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