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Comment by alchemist1e9 | Hacker News Reader

MIT has a limited number of seats to receive possibly the best education in the world. The idea that anything but merit and quantitative assessment of such should be used to fill those seats is self destructive to a society. Next they should remove all collection of race information, just as it is illegal in France to ask your race or ethnicity for anything. If it means 75% of the seats are Asian-Americans so be it. The overall cost to society of not educating the most skilled for the future far outweighs any so called diversity virtues. Sorry to be blunt. I’m expecting the downvotes and perhaps even ban/block/retaliation for my “incorrect” views. I don’t care anymore if you are offended by opinions that don’t agree with your belief systems.

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I guess I just don't agree that a university--and its students--is best-served by just lazily admitting the top scores on a single standardized test and ignoring everything else. But, yes, that's probably a different belief system than the one you have.

Obviously not only a single standardize test is needed, your projects, extracurriculars, all relevant to a cold quantitative analysis of a candidate’s ability to perform and receive the highly advanced education. Do you need someone’s racial and ethnic background as part of that process? why? for what purpose? diversity of backgrounds is supposedly the value it provides, I understand the argument but don’t agree with it.

A lot of the things you list are not "cold quantitative analysis." I don't have strong feelings about considering racial/ethnic data but I expect a lot of qualitative factors would end up being racial/ethnic proxies.

Let's say you have a Black student and a white student that have the exact same everything on their application. I feel like it makes sense to admit the Black student, because it is very likely that they have persevered more.

It’s an awfully slippery slope. I understand the idea and it’s good intentions, however it requires calculation of “perseverance” and comparison between humans in a very difficult way.

What if the Black student’s last name is Obama and the White student was an orphan?

Then their applications could not possibly be the same.

No two applications can be the same, so thats beside the point.

You better do some extra digging to figure out who is more qualified by some metric, otherwise you incentivize "oh well they look too similar, let's go with our preferred race" more often.

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