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Comment by digitaltrees | Hacker News Reader

You didn't think the 50% admit rate for athletes, 40% admit rate for deans interest ie large cash donors, and 35% legacy admit rate were "the whole think"?

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Legacy and donor admissions aren't the gotcha against race neutral admissions that you think they are. In fact, they go hand in hand. It's not a coincidence that the universities with strong legacy preferences all practiced affirmative action. Legacy students actually have slightly better grades and SAT scores than average, but this would unlikely to be the case if they used purely merit based admissions.

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

I didn’t say it to be a gotcha. But let’s admit that legacy admissions and athletes represent a non meritocratic social goal, and then ask why those are legitimate social goals but racial diversity is not one?

The problem is that affirmative action creates more opportunities to think about race, which leads to more resentment and discrimination. For example, in America, Italians used to be discriminated against, but today they are basically treated the same as all white people. If we had affirmative action for Italian Americans, they'd likely still be discriminated against today.

Honestly, the combination of extremely discriminatory, extremely corrupt, extremely predatory and then again discriminated differently by the fact if they are a sportsball player or not is rather amusing and at the same time baffling when observed from the other side of the globe.

Of course it is too late by now, by have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results, with preference given to the kids with better results (or no preference)? And replacing professional sportsball with a 1 lesson/week of general fitness? Maybe then they won't need to get so much debt to study too.

> have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results

No, because that's "not fair" to some groups.

If we are talking about a meritocracy and access to opportuity this doesn't even have to be about fairness the reality is if there are talented people that dont do as well on tests simply because they cant afford private tutors and prep courses maybe it makes sense to factor that in.

But there is also a legitimate reason to pursue fairness. When a society loses upward mobility and becomes a calcified caste social unrest becomes an existential threat. When we ignore that disparity compounds and locks people out of the social system we risk destroying the very system that we benefit from.

For the last 50 years you would get in severe trouble for using test scores alone thanks to disparate impact.

That is not true. Disparate impact has never meant "literally anything that produces disparate impact is against the law." I guess until the Trump admin has started using it to mean this when it affects white people.

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