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Comment by GenerocUsername | Hacker News Reader

Kuntz Law: in ANY/ALL resource constrained systems, giving advantage to 1 individual directly gives disadvantage to another.

This is true whether it is seats on a bus, distribution of aid money, or college admission.

You cannot give race based preference without simultaneously race based discrimination

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In a purely meritocratic system, the result is the same as well due to the effects of crowding. If you have 100 applicants for a position, 90 of them from one background and 10 of them from another, the odds are that under a pure meritocratic position that all of your hires will end up being of one specific background.

Which results in a downstream effect of other perfectly good candidates being filtered into lower quality institutions due to no reason of their own.

I fail to see how meritocratic systems would force any such selections.

Systems can and should select for the best candidates.

Seems like the justification for group-based preference would have to be a well-defined final outcome, like socioeconomic improvement years post-graduation, than simply being representative of the population as a whole.

That's true and the reason why the real answer is dealing with the resource constraints. Economic growth solves a lot of problems.

Ivy league schools have finite space for new students, you can't really fix this with more money. In the first place these schools don't need more money, they're some of the richest institutions in the country and only growing richer: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/ivy-leagu...

So I think a policy fix is in order.

>You cannot give race based preference without simultaneously race based discrimination

If this is true, would that by extension mean the official platform of the Democratic party openly supports and endorses racial discrimination?

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-Democr...

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