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Comment by ryan_j_naughton | Hacker News Reader

> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans

While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions.

There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.

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You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?

> Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.

What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?

> Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?

Don't give them ideas

The ideas are there.

The willingness to overtly implement them has been relatively low since the late 1960s.

> You can join any private club you want with any composition of well-rounded people. What does that have to with higher education?

I believe that a key component of an effective education is studying the roots of philosophy. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that mandates freshmen take a philosophy class.

I also believe that a key component to an effective education is exposure to peers who come from a wide variety of different backgrounds and life experiences. Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions.

"Surely you agree that the State should not prevent me from forming a private university that considers the creation of a diverse student body as one minor factor in admissions."

The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in college admissions has at least restricted race from that consideration.

Looking at demographics we were beginning to approach a point were affirmative action would have helped out white communities.

The decline and fall of white power America. If only MLK had lived to see it.

That's not at all what the SCOTUS case focused on.

Realistically, formal higher education is not simply a private matter. It's a part of the complex web of accreditation, government subsidies and entrenched social institutions (not necessarily state institutions).

A university is a public accommodation. You can certainly create a book club among your friends and forbid people of the opposite gender to join or require everyone to be of a different gender, maybe you can even call it a university; but that wouldn't be the same as doing such thing on the level of a large educational facility that e.g. provides the degree of Juris Doctor that allows you to take a bar exam.

So to answer your question, "Surely you agree that the State should not...", I would say "it depends on the particulars".

Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.

>What’s next? Cities imposing such restrictions? Should NYC or Austin require people to pass vibe check to ensure that the city life is vibrant?

That's pretty much what HOAs and micro-managerial local ordinances are. The whole point of them is that they make it an expensive hassle and generally crappy to either live in an above your social class. It gets kind of plausibly deniable on a city level when you've got nice neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods and they just differentiate by the degree of enforcement.

Obviously none of this stuff is water tight. It's all a sick game of relative probability. Some low class new money professional sports/entertainment types will retire to some waspy neighborhood in the Hamptons and persist but less of those people will do so than if places like that didn't actively try and be a nuisance to live in for the "wrong type of people". Likewise some guys who have a dozen cars in their yard will persist in their locations as the neighborhood gentrifies around them, much to the annoyance of their neighbors, but most of them will cash out and move out because having your neighbors constantly calling the government to harass you using laws that didn't even exist when you moved in gets real old real quick.

> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community.

Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians.

Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.

The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?

Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.

And your experience comprises how many cases?

You are making a lot of assumptions here. People don’t find others interesting conversationalists if they have the same background. Maybe if all you focus on is skin color, you may be right, but does somebody in Ukraine have the same background as somebody who grew up in South Florida? Does somebody who grew up in the San Francisco have the same background as somebody who grew up in Marin?

If all you look at is race, you might say yes, but these are very different life experiences. Also, there is such a thing as somebody being so different that it’s not possible for others to relate to them. Likability is not unimportant when it comes to working in a team.

Laptop professionals are remarkably similar wherever in the world you find them these days. London, New York City, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, etc. have all been converging on a similar set of tastes, fashions, beliefs, and consuming habits. So it's possible to have great geographic diversity, without introducing much diversity in terms of culture, class, political and religious beliefs, etc.

And conversely great diversity without geographic diversity or racial diversity. Diversity is oversimplified and measured incorrectly from the DEI perspective.

There’s definitely some racism, but intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.

Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist. Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool. Overfitting arbitrary criteria is easy, but not productive.

> intangible qualities can also boost some Asian students who otherwise look like basically everyone else applying to top schools.

In theory maybe. In practice the overwhelming majority of the time it's just used to admit fewer asians.

> Easily quantifiable check boxes don’t verify that someone is an interesting conversationalist.

If we actually cared about whether people were interesting conversationalists in an objective sense (rather than just interesting to the person making the admissions decision - which mostly just comes down to having the same cultural background), we'd figure out a way to test it. These universities never tried, because they never actually cared about interesting conversationalists in the first place, it's always been nothing but a fig leaf.

> Arguably schools are better served by slightly lower standard and a random pick vs everyone whose parents have been min maxing the process since preschool.

Then make it random, if that's the goal - have an actual fair lottery between everyone who meets the standard. But again, it was never about being random.

> cultural background

Language isn’t culturally agnostic. If classes where taught in Malagasy being well read would refer to a different set of books.

> Then make it random, if that's the goal

That’s not the goal, the point is any system that can be gamed will be gamed. You can’t game random, but you can easily have someone else write a kids collage admission essay which becomes more likely the more you weight it and the higher bar you set.

> we'd figure out a way to test it.

In many ways that’s why the SAT is preferred over the ACT. Having a large vocabulary, being able to express yourself, being able to think logically are all reasonable proxies. It also explains why the math section excludes calculus questions as transcripts already show if someone took calculus so they can focus on something else.

This is quite similar to the strongest argument for legacy admissions, even if the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful don't have the best test scores they contribute significantly to the value of going to that institution for other students by virtue of offering them access to those who are going to inherit wealth and power.

> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body

Value To Whom, university administrators?

Has benefit to students ever been demonstrated and proven?

Can you clearly state what is your hypothesis?

1 - it is preferable to be well rounded instead of narrowly specialised ?

2 - this preference can be taught at the age of ~18 and is not innate, and is not ingrained at early childhood ?

3 - excluding narrowly focused students and getting well-rounded ones instead benefits these students?

4 - university administrators are competent as assessing these yearning of the soul from a student’s essay?

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