Themes in academic literature: prejudice and social justice | Hacker News Reader

Themes in academic literature: prejudice and social justice

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64 pointsfrumpish57 comments

Use of such themes and terms is increasingly mandatory for academics, even in the hard sciences:

https://unherd.com/thepost/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-is...

What happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College (before he became a pundit speaking far outside his subject area) is now happening to everyone. There is less and less room for a Weinstein or a Thomas Sowell in American academia.

It’s my belief that this coerced monoculture of identity politics and ideology will significantly degrade the quality of American universities, to say nothing of K-12 education. The long term effects on American economic competitiveness and the ability to attract foreign students will be severe.

Given the perverse incentives of US university funding, this ride only ends when Chinese and Indian grad students look elsewhere and the federal government turns off the guaranteed loans faucet. I don’t see the latter happening without dramatic political upheaval. Until then, colleges will continue not caring whether they’re preparing students well for the workforce or merely puffing them full of the latest political buzzwords.

…why would identity politics lead to this series of events? Because it somehow restricts speech?

China has very restricted speech compared to America and Chinese researchers manage to publish just fine.

China has a history of brain drain to the West for exactly this reason (and others, like quality of living):

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-...

Speaking based on my own experience with young Chinese colleagues in academia and industry, this flow was already reversing before 2020 kicked idpol into hyperdrive.

And never mind the anti-Asian hate crimes, where we aren’t allowed to notice or discuss common characteristics of the perpetrators (not that it stops folks from noticing or discussing). Michael Burry of Big Short fame recently found the Justice Department burying relevant data on the perpetrators:

https://twitter.com/michaeljburry/status/1556003057699209218

This seems particularly alarming to me. Why would it be hidden?

People keep noticing patterns that others would prefer not to e noticed. If data isn’t collected it can’t be used to argue against your politics. For a non-US example see how the French state does not collect data on ethnicity or religion. It makes it more difficult to see how [social outcome] is uniquely distributed whether it be highest level of education, likelihood of convict of a crime or anything else of interest.

This was done in Japan during the second world war. They unified under the idea of a singular identity similar to in China of the Han ethnicity which mind you is over 2000 years old and for the most part the Han people do not live in China but rather migrated to Korea. When you can pretend ethnic groups do not exist you can systemically and permanently create castes which make those who are visibly different from others into members of an invisible caste which they cannot escape.

In the US the Technology industry made the same mistake when it allowed the Hindu Caste to take over the immigration policies during the 90s to early 80s.

>They unified under the idea of a singular identity similar to in China of the Han ethnicity which mind you is over 2000 years old and for the most part the Han people do not live in China but rather migrated to Korea

>In the US the Technology industry made the same mistake when it allowed the Hindu Caste to take over the immigration policies during the 90s to early 80s.

Would you have links to more expansive elaborations on these, have never heard these and they're intriguing

What was written about Japan and China is absolute bollocks and I have no reason to believe what was written about the “Hindu Caste” is any more reliable.

Han was the name of a Chinese dynasty. It became the ethnonym of the core Chinese ethnic group later though Tang has also been used as such to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other similar uses.

More or less everything written about Japan was false. Before the Black Ships, the Matthew Perry expedition when the US forced Japan open, ending its policy of isolation Japan was amazingly close to mono-ethnic for a pre-modern state. There were the Japanese proper, the Ainu and the Ryukuans/Okinawans and that was it. Not allowing your people to leave and come back rather damps down on foreign populations and absent constant replenishment immigrant communities assimilate. Insofar as Japan has a caste system it long pre-dates WW2. The eta/burakumin are still treated badly. The absolute dumbest thing about the comment was not referencing Japan’s long standing othered ethnic minority, the Zainich Koreans who were stripped of Japanese citizenship after WW2 given that Korea was no longer part of the Japanese state.

Yeah I didn't have enough knowledge to a offer a contrary and wanted to understand this opinion through sources since I hadn't seen these takes before.

While the original comment was not at all clear what it MAY have been referring to is a Japanese document from the WWII era called “An investigation of global policy with the yamato race as nucleus” which seems to have been based on similar Nazi writings and argues for the superiority of the Japanese race in an effort to raise racial consciousness and justify colonialism etc. Though as far as I know the Japanese have absolutely never viewed themselves as part of a larger unified Asian group.

Yea black on Asian crime being framed as white violence is insanely weird.

So far the play more seems to be "demonize 'wokeness' and use it to drum up support for undermining and defunding institutions, then blame their failures on the wokeness alone."

> Until then, colleges will continue not caring whether they’re preparing students well for the workforce or merely puffing them full of the latest political buzzwords.

What colleges should care about re their students' preparedness for different vocations remains a somewhat open question: that their role is to prepare students for the workforce is a popular view but not the only mainstream one. If you're going to caricature one end of that spectrum as "puffing them full of buzzwords" then the other should be described as vocational training.

I think most people would agree that a college education should have some amount of both professional preparedness and abstract learning for its own sake. Why so many outsiders feel so invested in where these institutions find balance here is confusing and unsettling to me. There are something like five thousand colleges in the US, many of them originally founded explicitly to pursue or reject a specific ideal of what is worth learning and how. I didn't pay attention to any of those controversies, conflicts and schisms and iirc neither did the national media.

Overfunding via federally-guaranteed loans is what led to bloated administrations and tuition fees in the first place, so yes it ought to be rolled back. A lot of the “woke” stuff comes from diversity equity and inclusion staff who are part and parcel of the bloat, and constantly seeking to justify their own position:

https://www.fox28spokane.com/study-shows-university-diversit...

You're also begging the question by implying ideological coercion is just "abstract learning."

>>I think most people would agree that a college education should have some amount of both professional preparedness and abstract learning for its own sake

>You're also begging the question by implying ideological coercion is just "abstract learning."

I'm actually fucking astonished. Peak orange website -- the "liberal" in "liberal arts" doesn't actually refer to a political standpoint. It refers to exposure to a broad selection of Western intellectual tradition, the better to help students become more informed citizens, and to help prevent/allow detection of gross category errors/intentional facetious conflations like the parent post.

Broad selection… curated, taught, and graded by people with certain viewpoints which have been increasingly shifting toward the extreme end of one side of the political spectrum (whether they believe it, or are simply playing it safe)… churning out generations of graduates who just happen to come out the other side with the exact same viewpoints and a distinct lack of tolerance for anyone who doesn’t agree with the ideologies they were exposed to.

> It refers to exposure to a broad selection of Western intellectual tradition

The same Western intellectual tradition that's constantly denounced as the marker of privilege and oppression of non-Western peoples? True liberal arts teaching is almost dead in U.S. academia, it only survives at a few small schools that don't even try to pretend that their curriculum (and indeed, as a rule, their student body as well) isn't "privileged".

You know, the function of Western intellectuals in criticizing the dominant authoritarian ruling class isn't exactly a new phenomenon. In fact, it's baked right in to the literary canon -- an unbroken line can be drawn from Plato's writings of (the possibly fictional!) Socrates; to renaissance-era artists inserting insulting portrayals of religious figures into church ceilings; to Machiavelli, Swift, and Pepys hiding effective, scathing criticism behind faux seriousness and allusion. On and on, Kafka, Orwell, Huxley -- even unto public intellectuals like Feynman or Mr. Rogers testifying before Congress, convincing The Man to do The Right Thing not with strength of arms or legalized bribery, but through reasoned argument, and appeal to the mores and standards that tie our culture together.

Without the prizing of artisan skill, without the sanctity of life, without the gloried explorer, how could Feynman have convinced anyone that we can do better than accepting brittle O-rings and dead astronauts? Without the concept of the fellowship of man, a bunch of ancient Greek philosophy about how to act, and kindergarten-level "sharing is good", how could Mr. Rogers have convinced Congress to fund public television?

How could either public intellectual have managed if their politician, ruling-class audience didn't share the values their arguments drew on?

And, like, listen man, we've been noticing and trying to comment on "privilege and oppression of non-Western peoples" since Moby Dick; Heart of Darkness is only 120 years old.

>True liberal arts teaching is almost dead in U.S. academia, it only survives at a few small schools that don't even try to pretend that their curriculum (and indeed, as a rule, their student body as well) isn't "privileged"

Another thing the study of Western thought enables is the easy recognizance of sophistry like the No True Scotsman fallacy. Note this example doesn't even bother to cover its metaphorical tracks, openly using the word "true" without providing any evidence for the claim, or even a single example of "true" liberal arts teaching.

Yes, and? Conflating wokeness with all that’s good about a liberal arts education per se is what the comment I replied to did, that’s how it begged the question and why I pointed it out. Reading comprehension and understanding of the term “begging the question” are some of the skills I treasure from my own liberal arts education.

Conflating a liberal arts education per se with wokeness is what you've done, by merely asserting that it's so, in your root level comment. That's called "begging the question"!

In that comment, you suggest that colleges' healthy function is "preparing students well for the workforce", and imply there's currently extant failure mode that's "merely puffing them full of the latest political buzzwords" [0]. One doesn't need to explicitly state one's disrespect for the didactic function of post-secondary education, in favour of a purely vocational one; it's clear with a little reading comprehension.

'giraffe_lady's interpretation seems correct, and nor does your reply contest the structure of their comment, which assumes that you believe in what you wrote above about vocational preparation. Now, though, you cudgel me with the suggestion that no, actually, you totally do value the liberal arts, and it's my fault that I didn't hallucinate your support for that position while you argue for workplace prep. I, myself, usually argue in a manner consistent with my own previous views. It's a Western value -- intellectual honesty -- often highlighted in liberal arts coursework.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416829

> many of them originally founded explicitly to pursue or reject a specific ideal of what is worth learning and how. I didn't pay attention to any of those controversies, conflicts and schisms and iirc neither did the national media

Is that the case now though?

> Why so many outsiders feel so invested in where these institutions find balance here is confusing and unsettling to me.

Because they’re publicly funded or subsidized—and seeking even more funding—under the premise that they will help students find jobs. Just about nobody is voting to have tax dollars go to schools so kids can learn social science buzzwords.

> It’s my belief that this coerced monoculture of identity politics and ideology will significantly degrade the quality of American universities, to say nothing of K-12 education. The long term effects on American economic competitiveness and the ability to attract foreign students will be severe.

I don't disagree with you, but I think one of the understated tragedies is that this shrill weirdo extremism (usually an ideology of privileged mainstream people with white savior complexes; note, for example, that most Latinos consider "Latinx" ridiculous) distracts people from the populist, inclusive platform of legitimate leftists (as opposed to corporate centrists taking virtue-signaling stances while not changing anything they actually do). The staunch but watered-down (from an economic perspective) "leftism" that is becoming mandatory on college campuses is a product deliberately engineered by Kapital to make upper-middle-class liberals and leftists (yes, there's a huge difference, but 85% of the country sees us as the same) look a certain way, and one that doesn't suit our goals.

Thing is, our society is still as racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, and classist as ever; it's just that the rich have gotten good at using chatter about these issues (chatter of a kind that will never actually progress toward solving them, because that's not what capital wants) to divide people.

It doesn't advance the objectives of liberals or of leftists to have wankers going on about how "math is racist" (it isn't). It just makes us look like idiots.

This stuff is not the product of advocacy for capitalism or the free-market. It's literally watered-down Maoism, of the kind that would've been common in Europe and elsewhere starting in the 1970s - complete with its promise of a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its resolute getting rid of everything that's old, traditional and therefore privileged, bourgeois or otherwise "counter-revolutionary". The whole ideological stance of so-called social justice is really, really old-hat to those who are familiar with this stuff, but North American populist leftists remained a naïve, susceptible population for rather obvious reasons - ideological conflict was not nearly as salient there in the past decades as it would've been elsewhere in the West.

Yeah, I hate when woke liberals and college administrators go on about their Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and subverting the bourgeois counter-revolution, good grief.

Indeed, Karl Marx himself famously noted how history sometimes repeats itself: First as tragedy, then as farce.

It certainly was annoying in my school days in the early 2000's. Though, oddly enough the one professor I had who was adamantly capital-S Socialist and anti-capitalist was less annoying than many of the students who played at it.

I dread to think of what that school is like now.

> Though, oddly enough the one professor I had who was adamantly capital-S Socialist and anti-capitalist was less annoying than many of the students who played at it.

It's easy to hate capitalism, but it's hard to be a legit leftist. Our ideas are morally correct, but need a lot of work and have been implemented poorly so many times--and, of course, if we grew up in the US, we were trained to be hypersensitive to the negatives of "socialism" and to exaggerate the failings of (in fact, not great) socialist experiments like the USSR.

One of the biggest problems with communism and socialism is not that our ideas are bad, because they're not, but that there's nothing in history or science that prevents a complete thug or scumbag from calling himself a socialist. In fact, lots of thugs and scumbags have: you've got Stalin (psychopath) and Ceausescu (rot in hell) and Chavez (fucking idiot) for evidence of this. There's no admission test to becoming "a socialist" in political theater; you just have to say you care about the poor.

At least in the US, the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas, and therefore have a more nuanced understanding of their pitfalls and virtues--as well as the benefits of other systems (e.g., the computational power of markets vs. central planning) and the strategic need to replicate them somehow... whereas 19-year-olds in the 4.9% who believed in the system when they were getting top grades and told they had the world by the balls, but have gone socialist after losing an internship or a girlfriend to a Preston von Twattenberg VI and becoming redpilled about how our society actually works, are still arguing from emotion (and who can blame them?) and only time will tell whether they (a) build up intellectually consistent bases for their beliefs, and (b) continue to hold their (correct but, in the US, still unpopular) ideological convictions as they get older.

> the people like your professor tend to have a lot of experience defending their ideas

Eh, I'm not so sure about that. One class (it was a sociology and media course) he had us watch a movie that was basically a bad indie prior art for The Purge.

Rather appearing like finely honed his ideas, it looked more like a very superficial understanding of capitalism (specifically American capitalism, since it was topically focused on American media).

In just 10 years we went from Wall Street being the real problem with America, to rednecks in Ohio being the real problem. It looks deliberate—if you were trying to disempower the working class, what better way to do so than to recenter the conversation around “isms” that are inherently more prevalent among less educated and less cosmopolitan people?

But I don’t think it’s deliberate. Wokeness has become pervasive among highly compensated young professionals who otherwise spend their days turning the gears of capitalism: exporting American jobs to China, automating away people’s livelihoods, or figuring out how to monetize internet addiction.

I think it’s a defense mechanism. These kids go to school and are socialized to demonize the white capitalist system, then go get jobs in that system and need to reconcile those ideas with their personal self interest.

You make a great point (several, in fact) and I don't disagree. This said, I think the ultra-dogmatic "woke" impulse, which on its own is well-intended, starts in college, before these kids have to actually implement any capitalist machinery themselves.

Still, I agree that a lot of it has to do with the fact that college is an age at which people get severely redpilled: they go from being big fishes in small ponds (smart kids at suburban high schools) to guppies in a world where the rules are completely different and parental advantages matter a whole lot more than they were taught (as they learn immediately when coming in contact with mediocre rich kids who got into Ivies, while equivalently middling kids from their hometowns go to community colleges if at all, and who will continue to easily get opportunities they will require hard work and extreme luck to get anywhere near).

What's really interesting to me in the past six years is that we've seen a complete change in what "left" and "right" mean. The left, as you've noted, has been deliberately steered in a direction that is harmless to capital ("the jocks in your high school are why you can't have universal healthcare, so you shouldn't feel bad about outsourcing their jobs"); but the right, now that the pro-establishment conservatives from the 1990s are as anachronistic as the dinosaurs, is now as anti-elitist as we (my "we" meaning true leftists, the 2-4 sigma leftward fringe, the socialists and anarchists and communists and punks) always were. The horrible thing about it, though, is that this "populist" movement, even though these people have become quite aware of how society is rigged against them, has been steered into dangerous conspiracy theories, bizarre revenge fantasies, and the revival of some terrible ideas (e.g., racism, antisemitism) that should have died a long time ago.

Also: I shan't get into details because I'm a banned HN "unperson" who changes his username every couple of months, but we know each other and I've enjoyed your company every time we've met. I hope you're well.

I think you hit the nail on the head

Maybe it'll end when men stop going to college. Apparently men are going to college at lower and lower rates.

This could be interesting if it's a sign of loss of faith in the state and education system.

What happened to Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College?

Here's Bret explaining it on Joe Rogan's show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-st73zhZL3A

Benjamin Boyce (he was an Evergreen student at the time) did a much broader scope documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQAJ-7t4QOo&list=PLRdayXEOwu...

He got chased by a mob of students with baseball bats for refusing to absent himself during the “Day of Absence” when woe people weren’t allowed on campus. For the maximally charitable to Evergreen College version of events see Wikipedia.

> In May 2017, student protests disrupted the campus and called for a number of changes to the college. The protests involved allegations of racism, intolerance and threats; brought national attention to Evergreen; and sparked further debate about free speech on college campuses.[18] During the protests, protesters entered one of Weinstein's classes (which he had held in a public park) and confronted him, loudly accusing him of racism, demanding that he resign, and forcing the class to break up.[19][20] Weinstein was advised by the Chief of Campus Police to temporarily stay away from campus for his safety.[21]

> Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, brought a lawsuit against the school, alleging that the college's president had not asked campus police to quell student protesters.[22][23] Weinstein also said that campus police had told him that they could not protect him, and that they had encouraged him to stay off campus. Instead, Weinstein held his biology class that day in a public park.[24][25] A settlement was reached in September 2017 in which Weinstein and Heying resigned and received $250,000 each, after having sought $3.8 million in damages.[18]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein

The most fundamental change in American academics over the past 40 years is their wholesale corporatization and the resulting loss of academic independence, coupled to a fundamental change in culture towards secrecy instead of openness (as per the desire to protect profitable intellectual propery aka 'trade secrets'). This is perhaps more prevalent in the science and engineering divisions, but the social wing is now acting more like a corporate propaganda division.

Notably, 'academic wokeness' doesn't extend to criticizing another trend in the USA, the destruction of the middle class and the economic division of the country into aristocrats and serfs. This is mirrored in 'corporate inclusivity' - i.e. the apparent goal is to make the ethnic-racial-religious-gender makeup of the wealthiest 1% identical to that of the poorest 15%, while maintaining the economic divide.

The whole thing reeks of psychological manipulation and state/corporate propaganda.

I think it's more direct than that, most of the people preaching academic wokeness are actively against the existence of a middle class and see the middle class as an enemy, because the middle class is the successful outcome of balanced capitalistic policies. By forcing the divide, it allows them secure power by speaking to the serfs and using their support to bolster themselves, while they maintain a privileged position amongst the elite. This has always been the case with academics, and why academia preached the very means of their own downfall in the earlier part of the 20th century in those nations that decided to take up arms against the bourgeoisie.

You're also absolutely correct that anybody with an understanding of political philosophy is appalled at the replacement of the more dire and obvious economic challenges that come with class stratification with endless ink being spilled about DEI that doesn't include any acknowledgement of economics or class. It's obvious that most of the DEI work, especially in the academy, is a distraction from truer economic divides which exist within Western society, and that the ideology acting as a replacement for personal religion does not have any measuring boundaries to allow for a balanced perspective.

> the destruction of the middle class

Except that poor people in the U.S. have far more material comforts than many in the "global middle class". The real untold story is the destruction of social capital in the U.S. and the tight-knit community structures and institutions that used to maintain and foster it - which is also the more relevant factor behind the very real, enduring marginalization of the lower classes.

>Notably, 'academic wokeness' doesn't extend to criticizing another trend in the USA, the destruction of the middle class and the economic division of the country into aristocrats and serfs.

Plenty of academics criticize neoliberal capitalism. They're just also materially fueling it and lie to themselves about it.

And yet, the departments that are most derided for being "woke" by the right (the humanities) are the only ones who are critical of American hypercapitalism and the hollowing out of the middle class. If you want honest analysis of the economic ills of our system, you need to go to the humanities departments.

Bret Weinstein voluntarily resigned his position at Evergreen; Thomas Sowell is still a member of Stanford's Hoover Institution.

If you want a case of an academic being drummed out of academia for their beliefs, the best example is that of Nikole Hanna Jones, the woman behind the 1619 Project, a MacArthur Fellow, and Pulitzer Prize winner who was denied tenure primarily at the request of a wealthy conservative donor.

As for a monoculture, I don't agree, but I concede, American universities have, in modern times, leaned liberal. American universities are also the envy of the world, and objectively are the best on the planet. If it isn't broke, why fix it?

And why trust the same people who gave us Donald Trump to fix anything?

>why trust the same people who gave us Donald Trump to fix anything?

What? Where did anyone say anything about 'people who gave us Donald Trump'?

Yes... Bret Weinstein "voluntarily" resigned his position at Evergreen... after being hunted by a mob with baseball bats.

Nikole Hanna-Jones--author of the egregiously historically inaccurate 1619 project and an "academic" with no PhD, no academic publications, no teaching experience--was offered a non-tenure 5-year contract at UNC. Then when UNC eventually buckled under woke pressure and offered the 5-year contract with tenure, Jones rejected UNC and accepted a tenured position at Howard instead.

Very comparable situation.

This comment is the perfect storm of all things pernicious with a lot of modern discourse I see surrounding wokeism. Let's see; * liberal interpretation of the word "voluntary," * presenting Nikole Hanna Jones as a martyr for social justice when in reality she is no such thing, * no mention of the political allegiance or ideology of the people behind those awards as if they were objective and neutral third-parties (they're not), * no elaboration on the 1619 Project and its MANY faults, chief among them being its status of more of a work of fan-fiction than historical reality as attested by the author herself, * exaggerating the degree to which American universities are neutral; they are not, they are fully captured institutions of the left for better or worse (note that I am neutral on this point) * mandatory mention of Donald Trump for maximum effect, * all of the above presented with an aggravating demeanor of a petulant apologist for bad politics, all while pretending to be some sort of centrist(?) (or at least that is how I interpreted your attitude. I could be wrong. Let me know.)

If you do consider yourself some kind of leftist or at least an advocate for social justice, can you stop with this manner of addressing your purported adversaries online? I can't think of anything more frustrating than crypto-wokeists. It fans the flames of animosity and strengthens the spirit of reaction. You're not fooling anyone with this plausibly-deniable posturing.

Of course I could be wrong myself and read into your comment more than you intended :).

Figure 2 is pretty awesome. It's a proof-of-concept approach using words like AI, graphene, exoplanet, prozac, etc. This is a great way to track the rise and fall of academic trends in general.

However, as far as the rest of the study, the researchers could have addressed the hypothesis that the rise in 'prejudice and social justice' terminology in academics and media is a way of avoiding the (arguably) more fundamental problems of wealth inequality and class conflict. This would have involved looking for terms like 'wealth inequality', 'minimum wage', 'housing costs', 'unemployment', 'unions', 'class conflict', 'inherited wealth', etc.

All told I don't think any of the above socioeconomic factors are the most important problems facing human civilization - resource exhaustion and ecological and climatic destabilization are far more likely to pull the rug out from under the whole project. That of course would amplify inter-group conflicts, but that's a side effect, not the central driving factor.

Slight anecdote on test scores. In H.S. a friend and I both scored the same on a college admissions exam. A few months later after studying my score went up a couple points while his jumped dramatically to the highest percentile. I asked him how he managed to make such a jump and he told me he took prep classes specifically designed to help him score higher. I looked it up and the prep classes cost was hundreds of dollars per course.

I bring this up to say that I see many arguments here that diversity means lower test scores. But test scores are a mechanism that can be gamed with wealth. It's nice to think you scored what you did because of how smart you are, but if it's possible for someone to become dramatically "smarter" in a short period of time, then I think it speaks to the invalidity of the system.

Similarly, on the SAT I took a prep course where I enjoyed and did all the math work, kind of slacked off on the reading, and on the official test got a 800 math, 680 reading score. I finished the math before the allotted time, by a few minutes.

I don't think this has anything about being smarter - it's all about knowing the kinds of questions and their format, which is the key benefit of the prep work - you'd get to skip the time-consuming step of trying to understand the question format (analogies, really?) and just get down to solving it, giving you more time.

Studies show test prep makes very little difference: https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

Also, “hundreds of dollars” as a one time expense per kid isn’t unaffordable even for poor people. The selective admissions schools in NYC are full of poor Asian immigrants: https://nypost.com/2014/07/19/why-nycs-push-to-change-school....

> Studies show test prep makes very little difference

Your cited studies show a 10-37 average increase, which means some prep improves half the preppers even more.

> Also, “hundreds of dollars” as a one time expense per kid isn’t unaffordable even for poor people.

Saying this shows how out of touch you are. Speaking of New York, the recent under-10 chess championship was won by a refugee in a homeless shelter. Yes, hundreds of dollars is out of range for his family.

> The selective admissions schools in NYC are full of poor Asian immigrants

Middle class in Asia can be poor in New York City.

> Saying this shows how out of touch you are. Speaking of New York, the recent under-10 chess championship was won by a refugee in a homeless shelter. Yes, hundreds of dollars is out of range for his family.

No, it shows how out of touch you are. You can’t craft general rules for society around the unique circumstances of people who are literally at the very bottom. They need special help outside the regular system.

But for ordinary poor kids, a few hundred dollars is not out of reach. What is beyond their grasp, however, is the cultural and social capital that would be required for upward mobility in the inevitability subjective regime you’d have if you got rid of the SATs. Poor asian kids, who grow up in the bottom 1/5th of the income distribution, are more than twice as likely to end up in the top 1/5th as adults than poor white kids. That’s because the gate keeping metrics in this country are objective, and not based on social connections or cultural knowledge.

> Middle class in Asia can be poor in New York City

Yes, so what? If your family is making $35,000 household income (the poverty threshold in NYC), what does it matter whether your family was middle class back in old country? And these kids are dealing with language and cultural barriers on top of the limited financial resources.

Seems like a sound point.

Poor asian kids [...] are more than twice as likely to end up in the top 1/5th [...] That’s because the gate keeping metrics in this country are objective, and not based on social connections or cultural knowledge.

Seems like a reach.

The point of that article, and of the first study it cites, is that the effect of test prep is radically reduced when you control for the other confounding factors. That's an important concern if you're a wealthy parent wondering whether to sink extra money into test prep, but it doesn't answer the equity concern about whether unprivileged kids are at material structural disadvantage in this testing. Those confounding factors, whose controlling in the study reduces the benefit, are likely all SES factors.

By way of example, simply taking the SAT twice has an undisputed significant beneficial effect --- potentially over 100 points on the verbal? I made both my kids take both the ACT and SAT, and take them both twice. An underprivileged kid might only be taking the one test their school asks them to take.

The average score improvement from retakes seems to be modest: https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-retaking/

As far as I can tell, most American kids don’t prepare for the SAT even with free or cheap methods. The cost of test prep seems like a red herring.

I probably agree about test prep itself. But retaking the test, and taking both the ACT and the SAT (unless you know exactly where you're applying and hit your mark with one of the tests, which is something sophisticated families do but not everyone), is totally normal in high-SES households, and not normal in low-SES households. And that's just one SES-based detail; there are others (again: everything else they had to control for).

And, I mean, this kind of has to be true. Otherwise, you're ultimately going to get checkmated into arguing that low-SES working class folks are just genetically predisposed to do poorly on college entrance exams, which nobody believes.

Obviously, degree attainment tracks SES for other reasons: low SES prospective students have to be in a position to forego 4 years of income and job experience, as well as the prospect of moving away from their families to higher-SES areas in order to take advantage of the earnings potential of those degrees. But there are stark difference just in entrance exam scores themselves between high- and low-SES students (and between Black and white students, with SES fixed).

You’re using SES as a proxy for cultural factors. My uncle immigrated to Toronto and never managed to get a real job. He tutors kids in the local low income immigrant community in math. Those kids are prepping for standardized tests. By contrast, my wife’s mom lives in a lower middle class city on the Oregon coast. Most of these people have been in America for 200+ years, and they’ve been poor the whole time. They don’t study for the SAT. I’ve been utterly shocked at how blasé they are about their own economic status. The folks like my wife who are exceptional leave and go become high SES somewhere else. Many other kids are smart and just dragged down by the local culture.

I don’t think we understand structural poverty. I think in part that’s because we focus on income alone, and race, but not on factors like subculture. The secret to unlocking the mysteries of structural poverty involve figuring out why white people in Oregon or West Virginia are poor while folks like Mormons managed to build solidly middle class societies despite persecution and moving to the middle of nowhere.

Um, sure, yes to all of this? I was just responding to your "test prep doesn't make a difference" comment upthread.

A sociology department costs a university a lot less than a new laboratory.

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