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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

It seems a bit silly to ask academics to enhance DEI initiatives. These are initiatives created by administrators to solve issues that administrators have caused.

I also don’t like the surface level diversity metrics that schools target: reported race and gender. Of course these are historically important, but they’re also proxies for class which is a far more important type of diversity in my opinion. I see education as a driver of economic and social opportunity, so it doesn’t mean much to have an insular elite class of wealthy but mixed gender and multiracial graduates. Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways.

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> Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways.

Not only that, the opposite doesn't. There are fewer black kids than white kids who grew up in affluent / middle class families, but not so few that you couldn't fill every diversity slot at an elite university with them.

Which defeats the proper purpose of the program. You're supposed to be giving opportunities to people who didn't have them and bringing different perspectives into the student body, not further advantaging the most privileged subset of the people who can check the important box on the form who grew up in the same neighborhood as the other elite students.

> Targeting class diversity naturally gets you racial diversity anyways.

Not always true. Look at the SHSAT. If you looked at the poor kids and took the top scores, it would be mostly Asians.

The same thing applies for admissions to the Ivies. If they set aside 25% of their incoming class to be from the bottom 25% of the income distribution they'd fill most of those slots with Asians.

> Not always true. Look at the SHSAT. If you looked at the poor kids and took the top scores, it would be mostly Asians.

But they’re simply gaming the admission systems by studying rather than spending all their waking hours on TikTok and Fortnite.

> But they’re simply gaming the admission systems by studying rather than spending all their waking hours on TikTok and Fortnite.

That is the point, is it not? The whole reason for higher education is to study and research. The point of higher education is not to spend all your waking hours on TikTok and Fortnite. Shouldn’t the people dedicated to studying get in? I’m unsure how that’s gaming the system. It seems like the system is working as intended.

I think you missed something there...

> Not always true. Look at the SHSAT. If you looked at the poor kids and took the top scores, it would be mostly Asians.

That's assuming you're filling these slots solely on the basis of highest score and not, for example, setting a threshold score below which you might not expect those students to be able to succeed in that environment and then choosing from the remainder by lottery.

After all, if the point is diversity, "students with near-perfect standardized test scores" might not be the most heterogeneous group. And the kids with the near-perfect scores should be able to get in without consideration of their income level.

Yes it depends on where you set the threshold. If you try to keep as close to your academic standards as possible, but also admit some kids from the bottom 25% of income then you'll get mostly Asians. If you set a much lower threshold and do a lottery as you propose it depends much more on the composition of the applicant pool.

> mostly Asians

So what? A few generations ago they said the same thing about Jews which was why they added extra admissions criteria in the first place. If one person has proven to be more academically qualified than another, they should be admitted. It doesn’t matter if they’re Jewish, Asian (which is an entire continent so it’s a bit silly to lump them all together, as if someone from China and someone from India have any kind of shared experience) or whatever.

I'm not taking issue with the outcome described. I'm pointing out that targeting class diversity will not always result in racial diversity as claimed.

SHSAT is an NYC-only HS thing, right? Are there any other US cities or regions doing similar at HS admissions level (ages 12-14)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialized_High_Schools_Admis...

I don't know. But it's well known that this test is based on academic achievement and that low-income Asians do very well.

only if you live in NYC. If you don't live in NYC you won't ever have heard of it.

The test and controversy have been heavily covered in national media for years.

I live in California, I read national media for decades, and I've never heard of it.

When I google for it, the top-10 news hits for it are mostly NYPost, City Journal, NBC New York, NYDailyNews, also Manhattan Institute, TheNation.

Even if you google "SHSAT site:latimes.com" you only get hits for NYT, etc.

SFChronicle has only ever mentioned it once, and that was in 2021 in the context of the local (SF) debate about Lowell HS's entrance exam: (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-s-Lowell-isn...). Googling "site:sfchronicle.com SHSAT" only has that one hit.

> Which defeats the proper purpose of the program.

Or, cynically, is the point of the program. There has to be a large interest group who wants to keep lower classes out of the universities and DEI would make a good smokescreen. Get some disadvantaged kids the likes of the Obama children and Clarance Thomas' son. Then there is no space left for Wei Wang who gets great marks but who is probably an oppressor because his family are solidly middle class and not moving in the right social circles.

We got told to accept a less promising candidate for an internship program based on their "racial diversity". It was discovered later on that their wealthy father knew the CEO from when they both went to Harvard. Our DEI program had just given an opportunity to a child of a privileged background, apparently based on the color of their skin, and this was something we were meant to be proud of and totally wasn't nepotism. After that I've refused to engage in DEI schemes which don't consider class, and there are few which do.

> their wealthy father knew the CEO from when they both went to Harvard.

Sounds like bog standard nepotism remained intact regardless of efforts to bypass it.

You can at least be certain that had it not been for DEI there would have been some other pressure exterted to much the same end.

> It seems a bit silly to ask academics to enhance DEI initiatives. These are initiatives created by administrators to solve issues that administrators have caused.

Some suspect they’ve gone too far and want to make sure they won’t be the only ones holding the bag. “Look, they signed the papers too and all agreed to participate, don’t blame just us”.

The issues DEI tries to solve run far deeper than being caused by administrators.

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