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Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

> Any open criteria for "merit" will quickly turn the student body into a monocultural freak show.

So just to spell the quiet part out loud, what you're saying is that admissions based purely on merit would mean the student body would become entirely Asian, and this would be a "freak show" that's bad for the university's image?

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The same group in society has been lamenting “too many Jews” in higher education for generations — and has several Supreme Court cases against their discrimination.

Quotas to DIE have all been ruled to, in practice, amount to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, but some people truly believe Harvard and UNC were right to discriminate against Asians.

I think if you look at polling, people’s feelings on admissions is heavily influenced by whether the criteria helps/hurts them. Especially when it comes to students and parents.

Which makes sense. If it came to your kid, would you give up their spot at an Ivy for the “common good” (assuming you saw it that way)?

Or would your definition of what’s right/wrong change to fit the practicals of the circumstances?

For a large majority purely numerical merit based wouldn't change what school they could go to, but it would make it so much easier for them to plan and know where they can go since now its no longer based on the whims of some random bureaucrats.

So most people would benefit, a tiny minority who currently unfairly get into elite colleges would be hurt.

That’s certainly one possibility for “merit” but “merit” could mean lots of things. Stanford goes big into athletics. Perhaps merit could mean they’ll only take students who placed in the top 10 in their state in some athletic competition. Perhaps merit means if your parents didn’t attend, you won’t get in.

Merit doesn’t have to mean SAT scores.

It could mean many things, but you’d still need to explain the monocultural freakshow remark.

I think you injected a lot of assumptions in there.

Only that "monocultural" is a dog whistle for "Asian". If you have a plausible alternative hypothesis for what that could mean, I'm all ears.

You are interpreting “cultural” too narrowly. It could also just mean that if you only focus on grades you get the kind of people who get good grades—-and not the people who don’t do as well grade wise, or have other priorities and bring a diversity of experience to campus culture. This doesn’t have to be a dog whistle for anything racial.

monocultural means all the students spent all their free time doing the type of stuff that helps get you into elite institutions and none of their time doing other things. By hyper focusing on a few activities that are known to be liked by admissions you create a monoculture.

Nah, he's just describing CalTech. :-)

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