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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit cynical, that deemphasizing and obscuring objective measures (SAT, GPA, etc.) might be motivated by wanting control demographics.

For instance, like Harvard trying to keep itself from getting too Asian, which echos how it tried to keep Jews out back in the '30s.

If the goal is actually diversity, my mom had a proposal: have transparent minimum requirements, then simply pick eligible applicants from a lottery. You can control diversity vs. academic performance by adjusting the test score bars.

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The thing is, minimum requirements are flexible. If they're trying to fill out an empty coxswain role on their rowing roster then they will happily dip their requirements a bit, but they couldn't make those lower requirements the minimum & form a lottery based on them because they don't want most of those students.

Without defending them (I don't like how they operate) they couldn't control diversity through this method. Applications from students with very high GPA's & SAT scores are disproportionately from students from certain ethnic backgrounds, e.g., Asian students whose average SAT scores are roughly 20% higher than the population average [1]. In a case like that, I honestly don't know how to balance between equally qualified students having the same chance of being admitted vs. representative diversity. (Not that I think their current diversity levels are actually representative)

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171

> Asian students whose average SAT scores are roughly 20% higher than the population average

This wasn’t always the case. For a long time Asians scored below White Americans. However the former’s average scores have surged while the latters have stagnated at best. I don’t think there’s a single clear explanation for the surge in Asian SAT scores, but cultural issues like enthusiastic parenting as well as test prep and tutoring are almost certainly significant contributors. The effect of tutoring on academic achievement is massive, as much as two sigma.

Whatever it is, Asians found a way to greatly improve their average scores, so if we want to increase diversity without lowering standards it would be best for other groups to adopt similar or better preparatory strategies.

> there’s a single clear explanation for the surge in Asian SAT scores

I do - it's immigrant self-selection since the 80s-90s.

Asians who immigrated in the late 20th and early 21st century are oftentimes the "elites" of their home country, asians who immigrated in the early 20th century were often laborers (ie. often poor people from Japan/China/Korea) or refugees (ie. Vietnam).

If them studying hard is what got them there it makes sense to demand that from kids as well.

Now I wonder about more recent African immigration. And I don't mean refugees, but professionals. How do they compare to genera population.

It's actually a question tangential to some of the work I do, so I'm familiar some of the literature on this topic.

There is a performance gap, and it's known as the "immigrant paradox" [1]. In short, research results show that achievement between imigrants & non immigrants of similar income levels is mixed. At earlier grades there is sometimes a performance gap that somewhat disappears in later grades. The gap may also be more pronounced in lower quality schools and disappear in better schools.

It's not a fully understood phenomenon, but I've seen speculation that families and their children that have been through the upheaval of immigrating to a new country may be a little more resilient to the sometimes-constant upheaval forced on families by poverty. And that native families at lower incomes are also more likely to be single-parent families.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624018/

I agree on tutoring, but those resources are heavily gated by socioeconomic status. As such, many pockets of the population can't simply choose to adopt those strategies. Certainly those who can do so aught to, but our educational system would need reforming before if it's to be done without leaving a large part of the population behind.

It’s really not about socioeconomic status. Sure, being rich is a convenient way to afford a tutor, but plenty of poor Asian immigrants scrimped and saved every penny while working 12+ hour days to provide their children with the best education possible.

Fortunately if there’s one thing the past decades have shown beyond all doubt, it’s that cultural attitudes towards basically anything can be shifted with clever media portrayals and other persuasive devices. It’s not outside of the realm of plausibility to convince underperforming groups to shift their priorities in a way that greatly improves academic success.

You're partly correct, but (possibly?) incorrect because of the "socio" part of socioeconomics.

You're probably right that it's relatively rare that a family couldn't save every last penny possible to pay for at least a little of those benefits (though still not nearly as much as other families). Although there are families where parents are already working crazy hours and still really don't have money to spare, where a surprise $300 car repair means rent will be late and the next few weeks of food will be peanut butter sandwiches and spaghetti.

But there are two factors on the "socio" side that also hinder things even when finances are a little less extreme:

1) Families that lack a strong educational tradition may not really understand the dynamics of what is necessary to achieve the highest levels of academic success. Sort of like not having strong financial planning skills because they were never taught to you... You don't know what you don't know, so you aren't aware of what it takes to be successful.

2) There's at least a little bit of a mental health aspect to things. I can't easily put it into words, (and I might be wrong) but it seems like it could be bad in some ways to exist on that extreme of a level, for kids to practically never see their parents because they're always working, and for the family as a whole to have little ability to catch their breath and have... I don't know, a bit of decompression. Again it's hard to put into words, but I can say that I grew up pretty poor, and it was stressful as hell even without being at the very extreme edge of things, needing food banks etc.

> For a long time Asians scored below White Americans.

Note that there were very few Asians in America prior to the refugee immigration waves in the 1970s and 1980s. (0.7% of the population in 1970 to 2.9% in 1990.) By 1989, Asians were out-scoring whites in the SAT math: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/09/12/s...

I think this is a great idea! Sadly, I don't think the goal of the admissions staff is to let in a diverse class. It slowly has become a race-to-the-bottom of "which applicant will enable me to tell the coolest story at the cocktail reception" (note this announcement's focus on highlighting individual members of the incoming class).

Is there even an argument that it's not anti-Asian? Here's the percentage of each group scoring above 700 on the SAT:

Asian 25% White 6% Hispanic 2% Black 1%

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

Why is the response to lower the bar instead of promoting what Asians do to achieve such success?

The SAT is out of 1600

Obviously this is referring to an individual section. Please take more time to consider the arguments of others before posting. This comment does not enhance the level of discourse of HN.

That graph doesn't support your point. The Y-axis is the percentage of each ethnic group that achieved a certain score range. The statistic you are looking for is the percentage of the total population that scored in each bucket grouped by ethnic group.

Say you have a population that consists of 60 Asians and 940 non-Asians (which roughly matches the racial demographics of the United States) where 25% of Asians and 5% of non-Asians score above a 700 on the SAT math section. There would then be 15 Asians and 47 non-Asians who pass the bar. That means the Asian percentage of this theoretical group of qualified students would be ~24%. For comparison, Asians make up 27% of Princeton undergrads. Without the statistic I mentioned, you can't determine whether or not Asians are underrepresented.

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