US Supreme Court to weigh end to race-based college admissions
bbc.com
bbc.com
I mean, this is all kind of window dressing for elite institutions to be elite, right? There are millions of people qualified to attend these university, Harvard gets to hand select from all of them who gets to join their walled garden based on whatever Harvard Admissions is into right now. Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics.
If these universities actually cared about minority enrollment, they could always expand the size of their enrollment. But none of them want to admit that the only real cache of their education is the exclusivity.
There are reasons beyond manufactured exclusivity for why this doesn’t work. College education isn’t just about students soaking up material. We need more online vocational schools where that’s the sole purpose. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Berkeley is highly exclusive [1], albeit 3x less so than Stanford [2]. The class-size difference, about 12,000, is noise against the millions of degrees conferred to Americans every year.
Meanwhile, Stanford produces different graduate as a result of its process. Forcing homogenisation to one model for ideological purity is misled.
[1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
[2] https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/14/stanford-admit-rate-dro...
Berkeley has its own way of filtering students once they're admitted. This is most obvious with the computer science majors, of which there are two that involve almost the same coursework. EECS is super hard to get into to begin with. Whereas anyone in the school can intend L&S CS, but there's a rather high GPA cutoff (at like 30th %tile but don't quote me) for declaring, and you're effectively barred from most upper-div CS classes until you've declared, usually second year IIRC.
If you miss the cutoff for L&S or one of the other exclusive majors, you end up in an alternative. CS usually becomes the other CS: cognitive science. Yes it's a real field, but at Berkeley that just means you couldn't make comp sci. Cog sci has very few classes within its own major; instead everything is cross-listed with other majors, and you have a very hard time getting a spot in the class. The other common duo is Haas vs economics.
And many of the required lower divs are "weeders," huge classes with low average grades that students perceive mainly as obstacles to the upper divs.
I'm not saying this is a bad strategy, though.
And data seems to back this out - entirely online degrees don't nearly drive as much success as the in-person experience.
So universities are certainly not going to admit that the content and learning portion of their experience are not important. But moreover I suspect what Harvard and others don't want to admit is that they don't fully understand what makes alumni successful, and are terrified of changing the recipe too much.
Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes.
> they could always expand the size of their enrollment
Really the feds could (and imo should) force them to do so, given a ton of their money come from federal grants. It's always been insane to me that private schools can receive 50k+ per grad student from my taxes, knowing that most people will never get in. Also insane how the elite UCs for example educates more people than the entire ivy league combined.
Nope. Fewer than 10% of students are conservative.[0]
> and even their more left people are pretty center-right...
Nope. ~65% self-identify as "Very Progressive" or "Progressive"! [0]
There is no pretending that this is an accident, given that conservatives outnumber liberals by ~40% in the general population! [1]
[0] https://features.thecrimson.com/2022/senior-survey/national-... [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328367/americans-political-ideo...
You seem to have misunderstood the article you cited, from the article:
>The percentage calling themselves conservative has been steadier over time and, at 36%, is the same today as in 1992.
Age and conservatism are largely linked, so I would take this with a grain of salt as your average college class is going to be very young.
I found a Pew study[0] that breaks down the political leanings of Millennials, and it tracks very closely to the Harvard numbers:
57% fall into either "Consistently Liberal" or "Mostly Liberal", while only ~12% fall into "Consistently Conservative" or "Mostly Conservative".
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...
People frequently tell me I don't understand what endowments are for. Harvard has $51 billion. If we take an average of 5% per year and this assuming they make a $2.5bn return on that investment each year (and raise zero money in addition to it), that would allow them to pay for 25k students (at $100k each. I'm rounding up by like $20k btw). That's more than Harvard has at any given time, by a few thousand.
I get that endowments are supposed to be safety mechanisms and allow funds for things like new buildings, tuition assistance, and gaining more investments. But at what point do we recognize that these are just money making schemes. Many public universities have multi-billion dollar endowments. Money held away and not being used is not adding value to our economy. I'd argue that education adds a lot of value. But that's an argument for cheaper education, not allowing it to become a highly profitable system. Clearly what is happening right now isn't sustainable.
Also 5% is not a safe spending rate.
And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to take into account an applicant's merit-based performance relative to the opportunities they received growing up - and it is difficult to evaluate this fairly without taking into account the opportunities that might have been denied to the applicant as a result of their race.
To put it another way, two hypothetical applicants from two families with different races but equivalent wealth etc. in the same community may have been treated incredibly differently based on their race. An admissions office forced to be "blind" to an applicant describing this discrepancy in opportunity would be less effective at evaluating applicants based on merit.
For a particular cohort of second-gens, you were going to an "elite" institution or you were going to state—the family finances weren't going to support sticker price without a near-full scholarship.
Well, your implication here is that accessible, affordable colleges are clearly a second-rate experience. I'm not necessarily disagreeing here, but it's something academia themselves have not admitted.
Your example forgets that they are still allowed to look at financial/hardship data to determine merit. So presuming that someone with identical upbringing must have had a harder life because of the color of their skin only exists to perpetuate bias.
I'd certainly like to live in a world where students of the same age, with the same family income/savings etc., with the same teachers and classrooms, with equally supportive parents, would have equivalent opportunities throughout their K-12 careers. In such a world, I would indeed be the one "perpetuating bias" with my comment. But we live in a world where the race of those students, controlling for everything else, is statistically shown to have an impact on things we'd generally agree are an important part of a child's learning experience.
Now, we might reasonably disagree on whether admissions departments are overreaching in trying to ensure that their merit-based decisions take these factors into account. And we might reasonably disagree as to whether the government should have the ability to intervene if such overreach were found to exist. But the idea that any of this is only being done to perpetuate bias, ignores the fact that bias already exists.
There are so many better ways to do this than race, and they have zero interest in looking at any them. Measures that are both more accurate and more objective like.
Do your parents have a college degree? What's you family income?
What opportunities that affect GPA/SAT are going to be denied to anyone because of their race?
"The point of academia is to make more academics. Bachelor and Master degrees are their funding source."
"Do Unto Other Harvard Students" - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/do-unto...
“...but we also recognize principles such as inclusiveness and equality, which many members of the Harvard community consider of paramount importance to our mission..."
Chinese kids needed a 68, which could mean they got just one B. White kids needed a 62, black and latino even lower. So I totally get why Chinese families were screaming. The standards for them were way higher than for other races.
But also just as jarring, the middle schools that fed this system were incredibly biased. My middle school, Hoover, had a segregation system that split the school in half. The honors half had at most one black kid per grade. We even had a different lunch period.
The honors half was being groomed for schools like Lowell or at least to look at High School as an on ramp to college.
It's not like we didn't have a lot of black students. We actually bussed in two, maybe four busloads of black kids from another neighborhood. But only one of those was ever admitted to honors. I just can't believe that there were no kids on those busses that were smart. I knew a lot of them through sports and they were plenty smart, together, hard working.
If this level of segregation can happen in San Francisco, I can't imagine how bad it is in the rest of the country.
It's complicated, and you can have your own takeaway, but mine is that merit often defined wrong. I'm on the lookout for people who did more with less, or even did equal or near to it with less. To me, that is more a measure of merit than top line measures like test scores.
I agree with this, and the problem is how many schools look directly at race for that. This reminds me of predictive policing ML models that take race as a factor. Yes it gets more accurate results than if it didn't use that information, but that doesn't make it fair.
Giving Asian students a significantly lower chance to get into Harvard, because they're considered "more privileged" based on race alone.
In statistical systems you often have to take in race as a factor to remove it as one. You can't debias a system if you can't determine the bias. There are many things that highly correlate with race: a notorious one being zip code (byproduct of red lining). But there's also a lot of non-obvious ones and considering historical data is used, the machine will find those correlations. So only with that data can you then analyze and tweak your model to remove the racial biases.
> In this example, I'd wonder why ZIP code is even an input.
The school you go to is strongly correlated with zip code. So... if any of your schools are considered on your college app (hint: they are) then you have extracted the zip code (which again, points back to red lining[0]). In the crime example, the zip code is going to also correlate with the frequency and type of crime as crime (especially when broken down into types of crime) is not homogeneously distributed across a country/state/city (to be honest, not even a zip code! But the more you zoom in the more accurate you get. Aggregation bias is a pain).
This stuff is a pet peeve of mine. Our tiny human brains weren't designed to figure out how all these things are connected. That's why we use data science and statistics. It is why data science and statistics is so fucking hard too! Even more so when you get into causal statistics. Contributions may frequently be obvious post hoc, but they rarely are a priori (which is why "novelty" is so absurd). The world is extremely complex and we have long chains of causality that we have to work with. The problem here is our brains are designed to simplify things. To take first or second order approximations. The problem with this is that these approximations are not sufficient for navigating the major issues we face in the modern world. These low order approximations often lead us in the wrong direction rather than being a small step in the right direction. If you're taking a gradient descent in a complex feature space (thousands of features/dimensions) then approximating it in 2D will get you nowhere near an equilibria. There's probably dozens, or hundreds, of features that are highly significant. All before we get into the mess of coupling and confounders.
This is a problem because: 1) we fight over things we're not even qualified to have an opinion on; 2) the actions we take are frequently determined by popularity with a hint of analysis and the popularity is determined by low order modeling; 3) because we have a limited view of our actions we can easily convince ourselves that low order approximations are good because they work locally (spacial and temporal) but not over the global solution space (humans are notoriously terrible at long term thinking/planning and this too is highly correlated with income levels/life stability).
Our modern world is highly dependent upon specialization but we have a culture that tries to convince us that expertise in an extremely narrow domain generalizes really well. It doesn't and that is destroying us. This isn't just a "you" problem, so you're not being targeted. These issues are highly common on HN and anywhere nerds congregate because that cultural pressure convinced us that our self-worth is dependent upon the generalization of our knowledge. Einstein nor Feynman said you don't understand something unless you can explain it to a simpleton/your grandma/a child. Most stuff you can't because domain expertise is required for even basic understanding. So I'm trying to put social pressure to solve this problem and I hope others will join.
tldr: The world is fucking complex, treat it that way
[0] One of the major issues with red lining (there are a lot) is that where you live determines the quality of education you get. School funding is often related to housing taxes. Cheaper houses? Less funding. Less funding? Lower education. Lower education? Increased difficulty in climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Which correlates with crime rates. Which correlates with a lot of things. These downstream effects aren't actually dependent upon race but if you correlate an upstream effect with race then the downstream ones do too.
All I'm saying is at the bare minimum, don't feed race as an input. It's a vague factor that the applicant has zero control over, and a model (or human reviewer) making any assumptions based on race would be inherently racist, which is unjustifiable. Another bad example is how UCSD asks how feminine (rate 0-5) the applicant considers themselves. Only use factors that have some legitimate purpose; at least the high school matters because of grade inflation, but standardized tests are actually fairer. US hiring is this way, where many companies consider it an unwanted risk to even know about protected categories (age, race, religion, marital status, etc). It's far from an airtight solution.
This isn't really about science, and the article is off-topic for HN.
So how do you expect the expert to de-bias the system without some cost function?
Okay, but how is the expert going to judge that the outputs of the model are appropriate? What techniques do they use?
Beyond that, if there's a divergence between races, it is what it is. The expert shares what factors are being considered, and it's politics at that point.
You'd typically do this with a cost function.
> the expert debugs the inputs by temporarily swapping some out and rerunning.
The best way to do this is to use that cost function to optimize your parameters.
> Of course, could do this without race data just by proofreading.
I thought I've adequately demonstrated why this is much easier said than done.
> Beyond that, if there's a divergence between races, it is what it is.
Except it isn't. It depends if the divergence is because you've trained a model on poisoned data (i.e. the historical racism gives momentum to your model). These things are rather tricky.
It really feels like we're going in circles here and I'm trying to get you to understand why we do what we do, but you're avoiding getting specific to support your assumptions. I work with data all day every day. I'm sure you've done some data analysis too, but to do high quality work you have to consider a lot of factors. It's okay to not have this domain expertise. You're a general software engineer and probably far better than I am at that. But it is a bit naive to argue with domain experts about something that isn't in your domain. It would be naive for me to argue with you about your expertise. That's okay though. Our world is highly specialized. No one can know everything. But that's why I wrote so much before, because this is a toxic pattern in our culture that we need to curb.
> The best way to do this is to use that cost function to optimize your parameters. > I thought I've adequately demonstrated why this is much easier said than done.
I understand how this works, but that's specifically what I don't want, for race (or other data that serves no purpose but to indicate the race, like name) to be part of the training data. Those inputs are manually selected at some level.
> I understand how this works, but that's specifically what I don't want, for race to be part of the training data.
Tough. The problem, is that it is really difficult to move. That's what you aren't understanding. Making a model that doesn't explicitly incorporate race doesn't mean you've removed the race variable. It is just hidden now. There's plenty of examples of this happening in real life and they're fairly easy to Google. The historical data you train your model on doesn't suddenly lose it's correlation to race (there's major confounding variables) just because you didn't explicitly incorporate it. Dealing with hidden variables is hard and that's all you're doing.
The forward conclusion is that the rest of the country must be unimaginably worse than SF—which is an easy failure of imagination.
The backward conclusion is that what SF is doing is unhelpful or actively counterproductive—which is not inconsistent with track record.
Tutoring for African-American SFUSD Students Citywide
Posted on September 23, 2021
The Citywide Tutorial Program is partnering with after school programs
across San Francisco to offer homework help and tutoring
for African-American students enrolled in SFUSD schools,
kindergarten through 12th grade.
SFUSD Access and Equity Department and SFUSD State and
Federal Programs Department provide a SFUSD credentialed
teacher to tutor African-American students at each location,
with a virtual option:
The whole idea behind it is stupid and racist... "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit"... then when people complain, they add the "socioeconomic" factors: "if you're a certain color, you're too poor to compete on merit, but instead of looking at your family income, we'll look at your skin color".
I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western countries.
This happens in a democracy because whilst a tiny minority of people care about principles, most people care about power. AA empowered the right people so happened. It's a mistake to try to understand its justification from a first principles approach.
Hold on. You realize Harvard's policies have historically been designed to favor Whites, right? The whole "holistic review" process was invented to favor Whites. See https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
On a completely separate and unrelated note Harvard is also getting rid of objective metrics now.
In the US at least, it doesn't. Affirmative action proposals are consistently rejected by voters and in opinion pools, across races.
Seems like it mainly has support in university admissions offices.
How do you measure merit, though?
People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.
I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?
People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.
I think we want to focus on outcomes...
Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.
I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?
I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)
So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.
(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)
People want “merit” to be the determining factor… but they don’t want to express or discuss what merit actually is.
As someone has plenty of the characteristics commonly associated with merit, but who also has a strong sense of fairness, I’m awfully skeptical of the faith (and I used that word deliberately) people put in the concept. Why the hell do the talents I was born with or advantages I was given make me any more deserving of material wealth than anyone else?
That’s all I see anyone doing with “merit”… it’s used as a “drop the mic” concept that to justify self-serving criteria for conferring material advantages.
Personally, I think ability should confer obligations more than advantages. (A wildly radical concept, I know, in the morally retarded era we live in.)
Both of those have predictive value for success in university.
So if "merit" means "well prepared to learn the material in a university curriculum", these are both useful measures for predicting it.
Yes, of course it makes sense to accept people who most likely to be successful. But what then, after that?
Everyone’s got an opinion, but what’s the use of that if no one understands the problem? Oh well.
-https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx (live)
-https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio/2... (recorded)
Are news outlets not allowed to include links to actual source material or something? Why is it that I almost always find these links in HN comments rather than the article itself? It's really annoying and I genuinely don't understand why this is so common, just like not linking to the actual studies for "science" news. To me it just seems sneaky, like if the article is correct, why not link the source so I can verify that myself? I know most people won't do that, but it feels like including the source when once exists and is already publicly available should be a hard requirement for any piece of journalism.
I think many of these outlets must have a no-external-linking policy. But it really hurts their credibility and even their readability IMO.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we're talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.
MR. WAXMAN [representing Harvard]: Race in some -- for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor...
We have both. We reserve the term “affirmative action” for race-based tilting. But means-based aid is also significant.
Does this refer to scholarships and other forms of tuition assistance, or does it also include admissions criteria as well?
The most obvious is it is incredibly easy to game:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/income...
Any ideas on how students with no income managed to own $57 million in houses?
Would these people qualify for a socio-economic advantage when applying for school?
"What are socioeconomic examples? Social and economic factors, such as income, education, employment, community safety, and social supports can significantly affect how well and how long we live. These factors affect our ability to make healthy choices, afford medical care and housing, manage stress, and more."
Notice it includes "Income"? it includes other factors as well such as poor safety nets, etc.
This is a bit non-sensical. If you take education as an example for college admission, you need to support the ones that are the least suitable for exactly that.
I know you certainly don't mean that, but you said it. Make it concrete and you notice the error. Socio-economic is a handwavy term.
Do you suspect that someone who launders dirty money for a living did their taxes and listed "money launderer" as occupation and reported their income?
Assets like this are often hidden behind shell companies to prevent law enforcement from taking them under "proceeds of crime" charges.
The point isn't to eliminate every possible way college admissions can be gamed but to get the best method that works for the majority of applicants.
You would be mistaken.. This is actually a rather serious problem.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/income...
https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-van...
https://torontosun.com/2016/05/12/311-million-vancouver-mans...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wd7wz4/student-owns-this-31-...
There's no way this is an easier way to game admissions than throwing around "clean" money, right?
There's also just plenty of people that just straight up lie about their race on college applications. It's not like its being verified at all.
I went to high school with a lot of White - Asian mixed kids. None of them wrote Asian on their college applications. I also knew a lot of Indians (like me) who'd select Other in order to avoid being denied opportunities due to being Asian.
Strongly agree.
Here (Canada) we have a pandemic of "pretendians"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretendian
People who make fake claims to gain an advantage.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/did-claim...
My guess is if she marked Native American on any application form or was considered by the insitution to be Native American, it had an impact.
My college counselor told me to mark Hispanic because my parents are portuguese. I did not out of principle because I consider myself pretty standard white.
Asians have been discriminated in many cases in the past as well. Goes way back to the days of slavery:
> After slavery was abolished in the United States, Chinese laborers were imported to the South as cheap labor to replace freed Blacks on the plantations [...] Starting as early as 1865, Southern newspapers began printing editorials and letters calling for Chinese labor to be the new labor supply.[2] This interest was sparked in part by accounts boasting that the Chinese contract labor attributed to the increase in Cuban agricultural imports. The Chinese effectively became the new labor supply but were positioned societally at the same level as African Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Labor_in_the_Southern_...
Then you have the railroads era, WWII internments camp era, the Chinese Exclusion Act, 2021 Atlanta Spa shooting, and more. Then factor in all the other racist policies against Asians: minority roles in film, in white collar job sector, bamboo ceilings, violence/assaults against asians vs police response, US government witchhunt on Asian researchers during Covid, dealing with "Model Minority" myth...
Yet, Asians are constantly excluded when it comes to Affirmative action in these modern times, why is that? We can clearly see they've had an unpleasant history too, so why are institutions increasingly hostile against them? This isn't even restricted to Colleges, even though the lawsuit stemmed from it, we can see it affecting the workplace as well:
> "Asian Americans Are the Least Likely Group in the U.S. to Be Promoted to Management"
https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely...
> "Pfizer defends exclusion of Asian and white applicants in fellowship, says it’s ‘non-discriminatory’"
https://www.yahoo.com/video/pfizer-defends-exclusion-asian-w...
We should embrace Asians to be part of the diversity and Affirmative Action policies, not reject them, so I feel the current implementation of AA needs to be addressed, which I hope the ongoing college lawsuit will do.
AA is not designed to solve this problem—of past transgressions that have been largely overcome.
> A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans were in favour of affirmative action programmes. A separate poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, however, found that 74% of Americans - including a majority of black or Latino respondents - believed that race should not be factored into college admissions processes.
I think my takeaway is that even if you give a horrendously unpopular program a catchy enough name, people will think they like it.
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another minority group?
I'm waiting for the day that "caring about discrimination against asian americans" is listed by the ADL as a dog whistle for white supremacy.
Sounds like instead of doing polls on opinions and "gut think" that there are already large real-world examples that can be examined precisely to see what that policy does or doesn't accomplish.
UC Berkeley chancellor publicly denounced the ban when it was upheld a couple of years ago. Then Cal removed SAT/ACT as an admission requirement. Next admission cycle, she sent out an email to all students and alumni (me) cheering that the school is now more diverse. The percentages of White, Black, Hispanic, etc students in the incoming class all increased. Percentage of Asian students sharply decreased. If you ranked the deltas, it was similar to the ranks of average SAT scores for each group (Asian students have the highest SAT scores, etc). I guess the most diverse class would be achieved using a pure lottery system.
Sorry.
Also American schools: https://i.redd.it/1gt966pyolw91.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yfq52x/annual_update...
> The court is hearing challenges to their admissions policies, which consider race among many factors when evaluating applications.
> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country.
In which case -- sure, perhaps this is a valuable conversation to have. But if one considers the efficient frontier of tradeoffs between the goals of having the most "meritocratic" class of students with the best grades and test scores or most AP credits etc, or having a "representative" class which reflects the diversity of the nation, I'm guessing there are bigger opportunities for improvement. Legacies and athletic recruitment, perhaps?
If the explicit consideration of race is removed from admissions, are there not plenty of ways for admissions offices to try to consider similar factors other than personal academic performance, which would leave the plaintiffs still unsatisfied? Non-race factors for which admissions offices could try reflect national statistics in incoming classes:
- percent public school vs private school
- percent households which rent vs own their primary residence
- distribution over home values in admits' zipcodes of residence
- share of admits who had a parent incarcerated for some portion of their childhood
- personality big 5 scores
We get indignant in public about different treatment on the grounds of race. But I think students and families get frustrated because of the (inevitable) feeling of a loss of control when being judged based on criteria out of their control. If instead of race, one had the sneaking suspicion that one was not admitted because there were too many other private school, owned-home, 800k - 1.2M home, non-incarcerated-parent, high-conscientiousness applicants ... would you feel better?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/20/opinion/affirmative-a...
Edit: TLTR: Dump standardized college admission tests as an admissions requirement, end legacy admissions and tap corporate activism.
That is disgustingly, outrageously racist.
Honestly the boundary between race/money/class/privilege is a pretty rough space to hang around.
And what's the alternative? There's not a lot else to go off of since GPAs are whatever.
Why bother trying to make to her schools and opportunities better when what we really want is just to cash in a piece of the pie for ourselves. Another example is the push to STEM for women and minorities, it's not about actually learning the skill or contributing it's that being a coder is seem as an easy path to the good life and so we want to get in on that. If it were really about equality or income there would be more people pushing for representation in being an oil worker as those guys make great money too, but it just isn't seen as high status.
If both places produce the same average outcome, then you would be crazy to not pick the place that is several times more likely to have an amazing outcome.
- Harvard is required to do only merit base admission
- Harvard is required to increase diversity. They will be required to achieve that by investing in high schools in poor areas. Basically university will recruit poor students by helping them during middle and high schools. Something like opening Harvard middle or high school.
(This is one of things what communists did right after WW2)
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Sorry if I have missed your point?
Also, Biloxi is very affordable![1]
[0]https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/weal...
""Americans have come to view diversity as integral to learning and to trust that the path to leadership is open to all," lawyers representing Harvard University wrote in a court filing."
This is not true, and the Asians who were denied entry based on their race would agree.
What ever happened to access based on merit?
Doctor one has a 3.9 GPA from Harvard medical.
Doctor two barely passed your state's medical school
Which do you want doing your operation?
The "meritocracy trap" often caves into "wealth and privilege" and this is not meritocracy.
My comment is merely that the criterion you are mentioning is actually not a great one for selecting who to perform surgery on you.
I've never been to med school but my understanding is you learn how to be a doctor in residency, where there are no grades. Medical school gives you theoretical knowledge but not the practical knowledge you need to actually do the work.
You might have a stronger argument in other medical specialties where theory is more important. But heart surgeons are more like athletes in a way.
You simply presented a chicken and egg problem...
Does the mediocre surgeon get all the surgeries and therefor become excellent at it?
IMO it would even be helpful for surgeons to do some time as carpenter, mechanic, fitter/turner etc for some time to really drill the hand/eye before they start on humans.
And this is EXACLY what they do, using cadavers, schooling, and internships. Their work on cadavers is graded, much like most of what they do. This goes back full circle, grades do have an input into the quality of a surgeon. It may not be the "best" or "only" indicator but it shouldnt be outright discounted.
People with high GPA's work hard to get them and have a high level of understanding of the topics at hand.
My ex is excellent in math and always scored very high on tests, but she is not very practical.
If i a math problem i'd have full confidence her answer was correct. If i asked her some non-math questions my trust would be adjusted.
Contrary to the a priori hypothesis that care would be compromised by so many of the top cardiologists being gone, they find that adjusted mortality for high-risk heart failure and cardiac arrest is lower at teaching hospitals during the cardiology meetings than during the rest of the year. And although patients were less likely to get a percutaneous coronary intervention for a myocardial infarction during the convention times, there was no associated decrement on myocardial infarction–associated mortality.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
One student went to the most expensive private school and had private tuition. They recieved AAABB. Anothers student went to a poor school and never had private tuition and recieved ABBBB. Which should be accepted for a single University place?
Ask the wrong question and you will rarely get the right answer.
Good lord, this really encapsulates the level of this debate, and how it is about anything but actual merit.
The meritocracy trap obviously does not imply that competence/merit does not matter: it implies only that we should be much more careful and critical about whether we measure competence/merit fairly and properly, especially a posteriori.
I would say that your example illustrates a very shortsighted conception of competence/merit.
Think about the current state of education. Parents with resources over-optimize their kids' education because they understand the inefficiencies in the system and/or understand what it takes to become successful in our society.
This is a perfectly fine response to meritocratic pressure. With tuning to ensure the response is productive learning, versus e.g. rote memorisation, the outcome should be a more-productive citizenry.
In any event, the case is about race-based affirmative action. Nobody is going after means-based anything.
> should be a more-productive citizenry
I'm not sure I care that much about that. Especially w.r.t college admissions. If you wanted to be more productive you'd not even send many people to college in the first place and just have them go straight into the labor force.
This is incorrect. The question of education's impact on GDP per capita is thoroughly researched [1][2][3]. When one broadens to measuring living standards, the results get starker.
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/60b0/ad7223c9ba54c73af7d332...
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09654313.2018.14...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ma-Wadud/publication/48...
Your DNA is not an "external factor". Rather, it's the most internal factor there is.
The important thing to consider is the benefits afforded by meritocracy. When we have adequate filtering mechanisms to help put competent trustworthy people in positions of power, we get less bridges that collapse, less space shuttles that explode, less government officials demanding bribes, and less subtle failures at many levels of the economy. These failures are years downstream of the decisions that set people on their path in life. Most people have not yet mastered their profession; helping this process along is good for everyone.
Those who criticize meritocracy should be honest with themselves as well that these failures can happen.
I feel like a lot of the argument is little more than regret filled excuses and sour grapes.
This is a great populist message but not sure it can be backed up with enough data at any meaningful enough scale to enact policies. Just like if I posited, "Generally, there are a lot of smart, capable and hardworking people who are just surviving check to check." It feels good and there are plenty of anecdotes to back it up, but it's too vague to make policy decisions upon. Raj Chetty's research [0] on social mobility dives into the complexity of it all.
[0] https://rajchetty.com/publications/
Edit:
> But it's only a disadvantage, not a roadblock.
You really nailed the crux of it here in terms of equality of opportunity vs. equity in opportunity. The unhappy compromise to avoid irreparable divisions in U.S. society lies somewhere between removing roadblocks vs. addressing disadvantages.
The equity vs equality is hard to square. Imagine someone who came from real poverty who worked 2 jobs while studying to give his family a better life. He or she makes it, finally, only for them and their kids to be punished for it come admissions time. Is that fair? I don't have great answers, I just feel like everything they try today isn't right, either.
So just like it's not fair for the person working hard and studying to get their family a better life (equality of opportunity), it's also not fair to penalize minors who don't have those types of parents or can't outlast their broken environment to reach a better life (equity in opportunity).
I don't have the answers either but think we should keep trying rather than accept some large number of kids can work hard and still fail due to circumstance beyond their reach. Especially when at the same time, some large number of kids can just be kids and eventually figure it out due to circumstance beyond their reach.
I am not saying this out of some abstract concern about asian kids with perfect scores failing to get admitted to Harvard. While that's definitely a problem, imagine how much more difficult it is for asian kids from poor socio-economic backgrounds to get literally into any decent college. They dont have the socio-economic advantage of upper-middle class asian kids, but have all the disadvantages of coming from a poor family AND then get shafted by race-based affirmative action on top of that. This is just plain disgusting in my eyes.
I realize that this approach might fail to address everything perfectly, but it is better than race-based AA on literally every single measurable metric. So we might as well switch to that, while in search of a "perfect" solution.
However, I would much rather have a tiny percentage of wealthy game it, than a much larger number of poor people of the "wrong race" getting shafted and another number of wealthy people of the "right race" "gaming" it. Because race is pretty deterministic, you don't need to game anything. Poor people of "wrong races" get hurt by the current AA system heavily. While under AA based on socio-economic status, at least the poor won't get screwed over.
Also move the efforts down the prestige ladder. Affirmative action at Harvard does diddly-squat do address anything except allow Harvard to signal its own virtue.
Society would be much better served to take a large fraction of Harvard's endowment, and use it to send disadvantaged kids to state land-grant colleges. You could help a lot more of them, and they'd be less likely to flame out to do culture clash and/or relative lack of preparation.
If you mean poor, say poor.
I literally said "poor" in my example in the second paragraph.
Also, "socio-economic status" is a spectrum between poor and wealthy, including all of them. Just like "race" includes all races. We don't call it "non-white-and-asian-based affirmative action", so i dont see why you have an issue with me not calling it "poor-based affirmative action". It is a sliding scale, with all groups within it having different weights attached. So calling it "poor-based affirmative action" makes zero sense to me.
The weight is decided based on the socio-economic status, hence why we refer to it this way.
In total: One can make up the groups ... and the weights. It's completely arbitrary. That's why socio-economic is closer to astrology than a clearly defined term. Sure, you can make up cool calculations (with statistics even!), but it does not mean anything.
I view this as misguided because while people who wish to discriminate often have good intentions(theoretically discrimination simply means "recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another" after all) it's emblematic of the difficulties of discrimination that the most prevalent description of discrimination is "the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex."
I would say merit is a goal - it's never achieved as an end state and requires constant vigilance to stop entrenched powers from corrupting it.
It’s a complex problem. If the process of evaluating someone’s merits is biased or restricted in some way, then the merits are an inaccurate way of evaluating them.
We’ve seen this exaggerated throughout history. If you deny groups the opportunity to learn how to read then they appear less competent based on their “merits”. When you then take those groups and give them the opportunity to learn how to read, then their “merits” improve over time.
But it’s complex because no two students are the same, nor are any two reading teachers, nor any two reading tests.
So, rather than making it unconstitutional to enfranchise groups, I hope the court comes up with some sort of test to see if a group remains disenfranchised or not. But that’s also an incredibly complex problem.
Sometimes courts when faced with an inherently ambiguous problem use a “reasonableness test”, which is basically taking it on a case by case basis and deferring to the current cultural climate to call BS on suspect claims.
Lower performing applicants aren't going to be taking the same classes and are not going to be achieving the same scores.
I wasn't a high performing student either. Where was my equal opportunity to attend an Ivy League?
I'm not sure how much race plays an impact on difficulty of academic achievement, but I'm sure there's data on it that Universities are using. Black students, on average, probably have to overcome more adversity, since racism does exist. Being able to include that in admissions should mean more of a meritocracy, not less.
For the context of this case, don't forget we're talking about Harvard.
This school, if they wanted, could limit themselves to selecting ONLY from applicants with PERFECT test scores, PEREFECT GPA's, ideal extracurriculars and still have far too many applicants than they could admit. They would then have to resort to either a lottery system to select randomly from this pool of perfect applicants or maybe come up with ever more extreme and rarefied criteria to select the "best" from "perfect". Is that the way to go? Many don't think so.
Is someone earning say, a 3.0 at Harvard better than someone that earned a 4.0 at state? What about the highschool student that graduated with perfect As in a lax highschool? Do you consider AP classes more valuable over the student that took college classes instead? How do you address the fact that these sort of things disproportionately affect different minority groups?
If you start taking a lot of these factors into mind, you end up with something very similar to affirmative action. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Families with more resources apply those resources to the creation of apparent “merit.” Violin lessons, Kumon, French tutors, international travel. The mythology that what we call merit arises de novo with each subsequent generation is pervasive indeed. This investment process is intergenerational wealth transfer by another name; it’s just paid on the front end instead of the back end.
Whether university admission is the right locus of intervention or not is an open question; but kidding ourselves that merit exists solely as a stand-alone property separate from the developmental opportunities purchased by parents is a commonly-held belief that undermines advancement; but I suppose it makes us feel better about the structure of society. But if we were serious about allowing equal opportunity for merit to emerge we’d intervene much earlier than university admission. But then again, I doubt you’d find a consensus about what a just society would look like.
True merit is hard to define and even harder to measure. As another commenter has already pointed out, that measurement has to include challenges and circumstances overcome. Unfortunately, those don't easily reduce to numbers. Sure, we can measure income or wealth, but how do we measure the impact of being denied opportunities to prove oneself? Of being dragged down by family and friends who need help because of the discrimination they also face? Of living in a place with poor schools, poor food, poor health care, for the same reasons? Note that some of these can apply to (especially rural) white people as well as others, but they remain hard to measure.
All we're left with is statistical measures and proportions, which will inevitably result in some errors. No matter what policy is enacted, those errors make it easy to complain about quotas and tokenism. Responses are possible, but less compelling. So we end up back to the fake meritocracy of grades and test scores. "What can we do" say the people who have already benefited and will continue to benefit from a system that ignores systemic inequality.