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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs.

Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept.

Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.

There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere. This premise is much more controversial and not universally supported.

Should women have the exact same percentage acceptance into computer scientist or welding programs? Or should it be a 50/50 split and anything short of that screams discrimination.

It boils down to equal opportunity vs equalized outcomes. They are not same … one has almost universal support the other seems to be taken directly out of a dystopian novel.

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> There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere.

Of course we need to be more specific than just "percent of population". For example, the average age of whites is older than for minorities. So we shouldn't expect the total population percentage for whites college students to line up with their percent enrollment in college, not in the total adult population.

But considering age is just one factor. Of course we need to consider others in order to be equitable. If Harvard admits students with 1500+ SATs, then shouldn't we be looking at that population? It turns out that population is 43% Asian and 45% white. [1]

Interestingly this lines up with Caltech's percentages almost exactly. UC Berkeley, where affirmative action is banned, has roughly the same percentage of Asian students, but many fewer white students.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...

Yeah, this is conflicting with their another topic: diversity. Diversity and Equity are contradictory. If you accept diversity, you accept people of different groups should and could behave differently. Then you should accept that with these different behavior, the outcome should be different.

If you accept Equity, then you accept whatever group you are in, the outcome should be the same. Then this defeats the diversity.

> The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept. Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.

The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.

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