Hacker News Reader

Comment by velavar | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to why affirmative action in the US has always been race-based and not economic-status or household income based? Asking as someone with no skin in the game; I'm merely curious if anyone has any constructive opinions on why they think economic status based affirmative action may/may not work?

View on HN

Socioeconomic status is a much better goal if you want to "even the playing field" but it has serious flaws.

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?

Race is easy to game too, in fact far easier. I know people who were around 5% Hispanic who would then write Hispanic on college applications. They're technically not lying.

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.

> Race is easy to game too, in fact far easier.

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.

Realistically, we should eliminate the category of hispanic entirely. It is orthogonal to race and the easiest one to game.

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.

How do American colleges police the statement of race?

There was even a United States senator who claimed to be Native American, was awarded academic positions based on that, but a DNA test proved her native ancestry to be so minuscule as to not even be measurable.

The part about 'was awarded academic positions based on that' is debatable, e.g. this claim was investigated by a newspaper (article below is titled 'Ethnicity not a factor in Elizabeth Warren's rise in law'):

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/09/01/did-claim...

I think it is pretty hard to investigate this and prove it false, as such decisions are often very opaque.

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.

Elizabeth Warren

This is pretty easy to bypass by looking at parents' tax returns from the past 20 years, plus their assets.

Because no one has ever worked for cash and lied about it?

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.

There are so few people this would apply to (wealthy individuals with large amounts of unreported cash income who are applying to college) that its not even worth considering as an edge case for college admissions.

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.

> There are so few people this would apply to (wealthy individuals with large amounts of unreported cash income who are applying to college) that its not even worth considering as an edge case for college admissions.

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-...

This seems like multiple reports on a single batch of incidents connected to sketchy accounting of foreign capital (and in Canada). What about this doesn't scream "edge case" and needs to be handled as a general case of college admissions and not by anti-money-laundering?

There are enough disadvantages to having your money be "dirty" in this way that I'm not sure it really moves the needle?

There's no way this is an easier way to game admissions than throwing around "clean" money, right?

Then it's no longer an issue for college admissions officers to police, but the IRS.

The term "socioeconomic" is really malleable, when in actuality you probably meant "low income" or "poor". This might be a better measure, but can be gamed also as you point out. This however doesn't necessarily mean the measure is bad.

No, i meant socioeconomic factors...

"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.

> "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."

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.

> why affirmative action in the US has always been race-based and not economic-status or household income based?

We have both. We reserve the term “affirmative action” for race-based tilting. But means-based aid is also significant.

> 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?

I'm a Harvard alumnus but obviously don't speak on behalf of Harvard. The Harvard admissions office does consider folks from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and does not only look at race. There is a dirty history to the origins of schools steering away from entrance exams towards more holistic admissions, but it really is the case that they consider what opportunities were available to students based on the high schools they attended, whether applicants had time for extracurricular activities or were busy working a job or caring for a family member, and plenty of other circumstances that are not just limited to pure meritocracy and race.

The US has traditionally built laws to hinder one race in particular. Affirmative action targeting race aims to compensate for some of those

That's true, and those laws are supposed to right decades of misappropriation of education, finance, basic rights back to those that were wronged. The intent is sound, but the execution of it? I'm not sure it's been done fairly. Consider this:

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.

Unspoken, but because they are perceived to be “working too hard” to succeed. For example, there are very few among the homeless population in CA.

AA is not designed to solve this problem—of past transgressions that have been largely overcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com