Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

The language in this article is positively Orwellian.

Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions

Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination.

Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media."

But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students."

Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened.

Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.

View on HN

"Orwellian" has become one of HN's least useful snarl words that now communicates nothing aside from "I disagree with this point of view and consequently the way it is framed."

If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.

You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable?

Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation?

It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.

"To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination.

If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education?

If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.

That's not a useful definition of discrimination, as it would also mean that students with low test scores are being discriminated against. In fact, the only way to not discriminate would be to simply admit everyone.

Well, if you begin from the premise that "discrimination" is first and foremost something bad, and only has any semantic content as a secondary affair, your comment might make sense. But usually you take words as you find them. Students with low test scores are being discriminated against, and everyone thinks that's fine. That's not racial discrimination, though -- a distinction which is specifically called out in the comment you respond to.

The alternative to admitting everyone, if you're determined not to discriminate along any dimension, is to admit by lottery. This will produce results which are biased in various ways, but not because of any distinctions you drew.

Hey that's not a bad idea. What if admissions were simply taken out of the hands of universities and conducted as a lottery by some independent third party. Then the purpose of universities is to simply educate those who come through their doors rather than engage in the business of trying to advance their position in college rankings through the admissions process.

I suspect that what you'd see is massive flight from the public system.

Students with low test scores are discriminated against. That's what the word means. It has a negative connotation because usually people use it to describe discrimination based upon things that are usually unjust to discriminate based on, like sex and race.

Isn't it in Harvard's self-interest, and the interest of its students, to have a diverse (racially and in many other ways) student body that prepares students for a diverse world?

My understanding of Harvard's point of view is they want a particular mix of strivers and old money. This is not the same thing as racial diversity.

It need not be mutually exclusive with racial diversity.

The point is that they are investing in the growth of their endowment by seeking to maximize future donations from successful alums. With that goal it is straightforward to select exclusively from the two groups most likely to meet it.

I'm sure Harvard has more than one goal to balance in their admissions process.

Harvard's interest lies in keeping itself as the power center of America: produce the future wealthy and powerful, eduate the kids of the current powerful and wealthy. If the current powerful and wealthy has diversity, it is good for them: that is, they would recruit a kid of Chinese billionaire, instead of the kid of City Wok in South park.

Are people who do not attend multicult schools really at a disadvantage in life? Who says Harvard and other elite schools have any interest in "diversity" in "many other ways" than racially? Do their admissions policies include quotas for different religions, political ideologies, professional interests, extracurricular interests, etc.? No, their interest in "diversity" ends at skin color.

A cynic might say that, since Harvard is part of the predominantly-WASP establishment it's in their self-interest to keep their student body predominantly WASPy, with a diverse smattering of minorities. If Harvard turned around one day and based admissions solely on academic merit, they would end up churning out lots of well-educated Asians and Jews, and let's face it, it's not like white people are going to let Asians and Jews run the country so Harvard loses its status as the academy of the nation's leadership.

>If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty.

This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?

I would say the disparity in IQ scores is another symptom of the same problem rather than a fundamental cause. I don't think black people are fundamentally stupider than Chinese people, for instance.

>If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.

That is not logical at all.

How can it be discrimination when 2 racial groups are admitted in opposite class-to-population ratios?

Blacks at 6% < 13% AND Asians at 29% > 5.3%?

The AND conjunction is key. It would be clear discrimination if both groups' percentages were less than the representative population.

And by the way, if such a hypothetical black person didn't know: the Asians are already an "undesirable" applicant group. It's somewhat of an open secret in admissions that "we don't want anymore Asians."[1] That the maligned group still gets 29% in the uphill battle against that condescension is astounding.

Also, I'm not sure where the logic of blacks as 13% of population should or would translate to ~13% of Harvard student body. Let's look at each layer of qualifications for an elite school:

Of the students that achieve SAT scores of ~2200+, are 13% of them black?

Ok, let's pretend Harvard removes SAT scores from consideration and only looks at GPA. Out of all the valedictorians at high schools, are 13% of them black?

Ok, let's eliminate SAT and GPA. Just evaluate students on course workload. Of the students that took AP (Advanced Placement) classes such as AP Calculus, AP English, etc, are 13% of those enrolled black?

How is it Harvard's problem of discrimination if their student body doesn't happen to have ~13% blacks? The only way to do that would be to relax the tough academic standards until it's meaningless. No SAT, GPA, or course transcripts.

I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years. The 6% blacks at an elite school may be low but hopefully, the vast majority of those 6% actually belong there by genuine academic qualifications.

[1]http://cornellsun.com/blog/2011/11/14/no-asians-need-apply/

Posted this elsewhere in the thread but I'll say something similar again: I love that here on HN, where from working in the industry I can sensibly assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place? You probably took the SAT, do you honestly think its' a great talent indicator or a mediocre one? How many courses are out there that promise to improve your score and how much money do they cost? Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one. Is that a great metric to decide people's futures. Who has access to SAT prep courses? Wealthy people (and people who know the system well and budget to game it).

Grades? You want to talk about grades? If the culture is overall discriminatory, how can we trust subjective evaluations from that culture?

Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity. If the system is gameable why should we take its metrics seriously? And if we can't take the metrics seriously we shouldn't be upset about ignoring the metrics and making subjective choices.

I worked in standardized testing for ten years for SAT's competitor and am very familiar with the SAT as well, and phenomenal effort was made detect and correct for racial, gender and cultural bias. I cranked out crates of statistical analysis using SAS analyzing every demographic breakdown looking for statistical anomalies in answers so they could be excluded from scoring (and mainly preventing pretest items from ever being scored items in the first place.) If blacks (or whites, or women, or Eskimos) performed statistically significantly worse on a question, then it was thrown out of scoring.

> Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one.

Yeah, they have a financial interest in promoting their snakeoil. They teach you how to not be a fuckup before you take the test (get good sleep, don't go drinking) and a few general facts about the test to minimize wasting time, they don't teach you how to "beat" the SAT/ACT, that hasn't been a thing since the 80's.

I didn't say cultural bias was an issue, you're twisting my words. And the people I know who vouch for the effectiveness of test prep classes don't even teach them anymore, they taught them mostly as a summer jobs or jobs out of college before they found more of a career path job. They have no reason to vouch for the effectiveness of the classes, they are speaking about personal experience.

And you honestly don't think the classes help at all? Seeing sample questions, taking sample tests, and learning strategies to handle questions you don't know. You might as well say structured practice doesn't help. And sure you could say "why don't the kids from less affluent families practice just as much?" but if your parent doesn't know how the game is played the sixteen year old kid still isn't as prepared as the kid who has affluent parents. And the scores aren't going to reflect ability as much as they reflect whether you come from a household that prepares you for standardized tests.

The demographic information collected for the test is a proxy for culture, since we really don't have any idea. We just detected if individual test items were gotten wrong substantially more often for any individual demographic categories. In the end it really doesn't matter why people got it wrong, just that statistically it's a strong sign it's a bad question.

Yes, the tests help. But they just help you reach your maximum potential. You're not hacking the test, you're hacking yourself. You can get basic prep courses for not much money. Yes some people cannot afford that, but that is a problem with secondary education that test prep even exists. There is no way you can make a test that doesn't discriminate against people that don't get enough sleep or show up hung over or the person didn't figure out the basics of taking standardized tests through primary and secondary education.

I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years.

As a black person who was accepted to (and graduated from) MIT, and had SAT scores less than my peers (but excellent grades and extracurriculars) allow me to respond: I feel fine.

If you had "excellent grades" (GPA), you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about. Your MIT peers had excellent grades and so did you. You got admitted without some artificial lowering of standards to mirror a 13%-black-ratio of the population at large. I'm sure some Caucasian MIT students had lower SAT scores than you as well. As a whole, all the students at MIT had legitimate academic chops to get admitted. MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the University of North Carolina academic scandal.

you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about

At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the North Carolina academic scandal.

Interesting fact: MIT coaches do have input into the admissions process.

The NC scandal was not about reducing admission standards in the name of discrimination, it was about stacking athletic teams. That's a whole different (and real) topic than this thread, especially since your post referred to Harvard.

>At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.

Understood. However, you're addressing something I didn't say. I wasn't accusing elite universities of dumbing down existing standards. I was talking about about how the universities would hypothetically have to lower the academic thresholds to fulfill someone's idea that 13% of Ivy Leagues should be black to mirror the 13% in the general population.

>, it was about stacking athletic teams.

Right. But, what's the reason-behind-the-reason that it gets framed as "stacking athletes" so that it looks like it has nothing to do with academics?

In reality, it's the academics (or fiction of it) that made it a scandal in the first place.

Let's remember that it's a football scholarship. It's supposed to be scholars who go to school and happen to use football participation to pay for tuition. For many reasons (societal, circuses & bread, etc), it has mutated into athletes who need to fake the academic process to play for the school. Since society has not embraced an alternative structure for 19-year olds to play televised minor-league football outside of college institutions, that's how academics got twisted to fit a non-educational agenda. Football isn't getting in the way of school; it's school that is getting in the way of football.

As for making the black percentages at ivy leagues match the population at large, I'm not exactly sure what the other posters who dismiss SAT + GPA + AP course transcripts are proposing. If elite schools are academic institutions (instead of unpaid football teams), and SAT+GPA+AP classes are cultural discrimination, what do they propose the schools look at? The color of the skin? If football doesn't have much to do with academic qualifications, the amount of pigment in the skin doesn't either.

You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?

A local news station recently did a piece on a former basketball player brought in on scholarship to the local big U who was functionally illiterate. He seems to have had enough resolve to turn himself around but it baffles me how someone like that could be expected to be a "scholar athlete" when they are incapable of college level scholarship. It also speaks to the failure of secondary education that high schools will issue diplomas to unprepared students solely to keep their graduation rates up.

You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?

I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT. I know of students with worse grades than me that were admitted to MIT. MIT considers many factors. Based on my experience there, that is a good thing, YMMV.

> I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT.

Were they Black, Asian or White?

> I know of students with worse grades than me

Were they Black, Asian or White?

Were they Black, Asian or White?

Asian and white.

Were they Black, Asian or White?

All of the above.

I don't know what "stacking athletic teams" means, but the NC football scandal that I'm familiar with involved the school providing fake classes for their football players, to maintain the illusion that they were "student-athletes" instead of just "athletes".

Your response was on point, concise and well made. I was going to craft a many paragraph response but yours summed up the essence of mine in far fewer sentences. Well done.

How would you feel if Asian claimed to be African-american (in order to get bonus points)?

If said Asian did it in an attempt specifically to bolster his/her admissions chances, I'll feel the same way I would feel if that applicant reported a fraudulent extracurricular activity on their application.

Why do you think it would be a fraud?

Isn't race self-reported anyway?

What exactly qualifies you as an African-american that people who you or I qualify as Asian - can not legally claim?

Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable?

Straightforward: "Do American universities routinely intentionally discriminate against Asian applicants as a consequence of formal policies designed to ensure that happens?" Binary question with a single, verifiable answer.

The objective, verifiably true answer to that question happens to be "Yes." You can be in favor of it, if you like, but disagreeing that it is actually policy beggars the imagination.

Straightforward: Do you think the SAT and high school GPA are excellent metrics (note that I'm not asking are they decent metrics that measure something, I'm asking do you believe they are excellent metrics)? It seems to me that the SAT is a gameable system and that some groups (people who are wealthy, people inclined to spend money on education) are more likely to spend money on the types of things that help them game the system (SAT courses that guarantee certain score improvements because they teach the student how to game the system). If one group has less money they are less able to game the system. Or if you are from a less affluent family that doesn't even realize there are New England, SV, NYC & LA parents paying for multi-thousand dollar SAT prep courses that your child is competing with.

And high school grades are subjective evaluations, often from mediocre teachers, that are likely to themselves be subject to bias because the subjective evaluators have many of the same biases as the culture at large.

I agree that SAT/GPA are gameable. Can you find an alternative that is not gameable, but which is better than the blacbox of HYP admission machine? If you can't, what is there to argue, except to favor the blackbox policies of HYP.

Flipping that argument:

Do American universities routinely discriminate against African Americans and Latinos as a consequence of reliance on standardized tests and curricula on which they are known to receive lower scores?

Adjustment for the bias in these measures might correct for discrimination, not create it.

The purpose of admissions testing for almost any organization (businesses for prospective employees, military for recruits, schools for students, basketball teams for players) is to find those who are most likely to succeed at what they will have to do if admitted.

The only question is whether these measures are good or bad at predicting who is likely to succeed. In the university case, that means do well in classes and graduate. If they are bad predictors, they need to be replaced with good predictors. If they are good predictors, the problem for groups who are "known to receive lower scores" is not the measurement.

The fact that Massachusetts routinely receives lower temperature scores than Florida is not evidence that thermometers are bad.

A college's ultimate goal isn't for their students to get good grades and test well.

A college's promise is to prepare students for life, and at present that means life in a diverse world.

Success beyond academia may be predicted well by SATs and high school grades in some fields, but certainly not all.

You just completely missed the entire thrust of my argument, which is not whether something meets patio11's criteria of discrimination, but the very question of what constitutes discrimination, and how your point of view and cognitive biases lead you to your own criteria, and not anything "objective" or "logical" or "scientific."

Your response to my point - "It's a question of values" - was to simply re-state your value.

If you grew up black in a black community, black piato11's straightforward definition would probably be: "Do American universities engage in recruiting and admissions practices that ensure that black students are significantly underrepresented among the student body?" This is also a binary question with a single, verifiable answer. At may elite U.S. universities, the answer is a resounding "yes," whether or not the "yes" is intentional.

You are operating at a level where not only do you believe the question itself has already been decided, but it doesn't seem to even have occurred to you that the question itself was ever in question, and that anyone might have a different view at all.

I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance about this. I went to a selective admission high school where due to anti-AA reforms the Asian population has grown from about 30% to 66% in just 15 years: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-s....

Most people perceive the change negatively. Some objectively good qualities have been diminished: collegiality has been replaced by cut-throat competitiveness. External perceptions of prestige have gone down even as SAT scores have gone up, partly due to racism but also partly due to back-channel whispering about increased cheating.

That being said, I acknowledge that many of the same reasons I don't like the shift were and still are used to keep Jews out of elite schools. And I agree that on the whole it's wrong. At the same time, I also recognize that this is a problem of assimilation. People want to preserve aspects of their culture they believe to be virtuous. But our institutions have limited capacity to assimilate and inculcate new groups with our values.

I think discrimination against Asians in higher Ed should end. I'm a little wary of what road that will lead us down.

I too went to a selective admission high school that was mostly asian, in Australia, which never had AA to get rid of in the first place. We ate a lot of vietnamese food, learnt how to to say Nguyen properly, played Big 2, laughed at FOB Asian parent's pressure and a had a good time. By the second generation people are assimilated but still have their own culture and we were united far more often than divided.

Incidentally: the Harvard Jewish quota was described externally as their plan to increase "geographic diversity" (there's that word again -- doing a lot of work for a full century) in the applicant pool and to combat anti-Semitism. I love this, just like I love that Yale's present racial discrimination plan is administered by the Office for Equal Opportunity.

Tulane's got the most geographic diversity in the country. It's 45% Jewish. Someone ought to mass email their admissions material to these institutional equity offices with a smiley face.

Just to be contrarian here is an answer that I stole from somebody: thaumasiotes says: Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today. Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.<<

So I guess is OK if Hardvard does not become homogeneous all in the name of diversity. I'll swallow it.

Edit: Yes, I know it is legal. I cannot comment about peoples motives since I don't know them.

So basically it's OK b/c harvard did it?

This is done in the name of diversity because it's officially legal that way. Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity.

Compare what happened to my roommate's dad: a sensitivity training guy came to give a lecture at his company, and was easily prodded into saying that workplace diversity increased along with the share of women. 40% women is more diverse than 30% women (sure). 70% women is more diverse than 60% women (hmmm). In the college context, "diverse" is more likely to be a code word for "black" than for "female", but the semantic drift is just as real; it's quite possible to describe a class as, oh, "40% diverse".

An acquaintance of your roommate's dad didn't understand the meaning of diversity so therefore Harvard doesn't either?

I don't follow.

No, the guy your company brings in to give diversity pep talks doesn't rise to the level of "acquaintance".

Fine, now how about answering my question?

In particular,

> Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity.

strikes me as incorrect. They made a much more convincing case than you did.

Did the person (being quoted from three steps away, I'll note) actually say that "70% women is more diverse than 60% women" or are you just assuming that's what was meant because the person agreed with the general statement that more women would improve diversity? In most workplaces that is true.

As the story was told to me, the question was specifically probed of passing 50% women, which is obviously the tipping point at which additional women make you less "diverse" in the dictionary sense. I provided the particular numbers 70% and 60% so my comment would read better, since I can't recall the exact wording as it was told to me. Very true that I can't personally attest to this. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's more likely that my roommate's dad (an engineer at Raytheon, if it helps you one way or the other) made it up to have something to complain about to his family, or whether he noticed something ridiculous, tested it, and complained to his family.

> the question was specifically probed of passing 50% women

Over what organizational unit? It makes a crucial difference: diversity within a team (more generally: a gerrymeandered division of the company) can fall at the same time as the total diversity across the encompassing company rises.

> You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's more likely that my roommate's dad made it up... or whether he noticed something ridiculous

3rd possibility: something seemed ridiculous because he didn't understand it.

Some colleges are now actually giving men a diversity boost so that their schools aren't 65% female.

Reminds me of a kerfluffle that happened a couple months back, mentioned on Volokh:

All the newspaper headlines were proclaiming that the startup world was getting less diverse, and people were very upset at the racism of the tech community. But as it turned out, white representation in the tech sector had actually decreased. The only reason that the numbers said it was becoming less diverse was that Asian people weren't being classed as a non-white minority.

This is actually going to be a big change going forward. Asian, Indian, South American, middle eastern, etc will be totally assimilated into white culture. Just like Italians and Irish were, despite initial discrimination.

Take a step back and put this identity politics madness into context. Basically you get penalized for working hard and following the rules. Imagine you're a working-class White or Asian family, not eligible for state aid, and your child is trying their best to get into college. How would you feel if you also found out:

> "Apply only for California state aid through the California Dream Act of 2011. Several state financial aid programs and many private scholarships are open to AB 540 students. Other undocumented students are encouraged to apply as there are often campus based aid and private scholarships available to them.

There are two types of grants available as Cal Grants: the entitlement grants and the competitive grants... Under entitlement grants, eligible student are guaranteed a Cal Grant A if they have at least a 3.0 grade point average... Cal Grant A and B Competitive Awards are available for students who do not qualify for the entitlement grants. The competitive grants are not guaranteed. Each year 22,500 competitive grants are awarded. "

[1] LATimes comment via http://web.csulb.edu/president/government-community/ab540/pd...

I don't understand this comment: why would a working-class white or Asian-American family not be eligible for state aid? I assume it would be because their income is too high or the kid's GPA is too low. Wouldn't those same regulations apply to the Dream Act kids too? If you're rich and undocumented you still don't get aid, and if you're undocumented with a crappy GPA you don't get anything either.

So do you feel that poor US citizens are actually getting a worse deal? How?

(I can see the argument that people who go back to, say, Mexico, and wait for a legal family visa to come to the US, are getting a raw deal. That's certainly true: as of January 2015 the US govt has finally gotten around to dealing with people who submitted their paperwork in 1994. http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy... )

Yes, I'm hearing a lot of this kind of chatter in the asian american community. In the Korean and Chinese communities(where I live anyways), a lot of people are paying very very close attention to this. A lot of anger is rising, and it crosses age groups in their community. At my old college(ivy league, so big school), there was a large undercurrent of racial tension. A lot of students, even 2nd generations asian americans, mostly hung out with groups drawn along racial lines. I honestly fear these attempts to curb racism/discrimination are increasing it significantly.

Which start-up would you rather work at?

The one which hires the best developers they can find without any regard to race or gender?

Or the one that turns away good developers because they have diversity quotas in hiring?

The one that "turns away good developers", since you put it that way.

Because good developers aren't all going to look like me, but people's hiring practices tend to make them hire people that look like them under the phony guise of "these are the good people".

(And what makes you think they're turning away good developers for diversity quota reasons, and getting crap instead?)

I don't think the two are comparable. At work your goal is to grow and make money as a company. At elite schools they aim to educate their students to better their futures. Colleges are attempting to shape people not make a billion dollars. And I love that here on HN, where from working in the tech industry I can only assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place?

Has any company actually figured a way to implement the first choice? Hiring is highly subjective. We don't have any foolproof way of figuring out who the best developers are (it's not a well-defined question) and no one has yet come up with a practical way to avoid unconscious bias.

The closest thing I've heard is asking someone to remove identifying information from resumes before screening them. (Blinding the screener.) That should at least help you get a diverse set of candidates coming in. I would think positively of a company that does that.

But the interviews themselves will still be biased and the only question is whether you realize this or you're fooling yourself.

Here's the thing: it doesn't actually matter how many blacks, gays or women you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same few CS programmes, then you have not achieved diversity in any meaningful way. The point of diversity in a business sense, is a strategy to avoid getting caught in an echo chamber. Any organization that is forcing it with quotas, has missed the point.

Although I sense that none of the following is likely to pacify the general grating sentiment of the arguments here, I will venture anyway:

  “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,”
  Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an
  audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the 
  Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That
  means admissions officers rely on intangibles like 
  interesting essays or particularly unusual 
  recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent
  of applicants who get in. 

  Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: 
  “Make your children interesting!”

  For parents and students alike, that’s both good news 
  and bad news. The bad news is that of course it’s much
  easier to say that than to actually make it happen, 
  though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow
  their passions as a way to develop an interesting 
  personality. It’s much easier to complete a checklist, 
  however daunting, than to actually be interesting.

  But the good news is that when colleges use this set 
  of criteria, kids can focus on shaping their teenage
   years in a way that isn’t just about trying to build
  up resume line after resume line, and instead focus on
  a more holistic sense of self. That seems like a far 
  more sensible way to move through high school than
  spreading oneself too thin trying to get a slew of 
  positions one can’t really ever concentrate on. That
  encourages a dilettantish approach to learning and 
  society that is just the opposite of what the liberal 
  arts have traditionally tried to encourage.[1]

I mention this not because it captures the whole truth of the way one gets into Harvard. But because it is almost alluring an argument that anyone - whether a Harvard, a YC, a Hackerspace / co-living community, the approval process at a highly prized co-op building in New York, a dating app ( The League [2] ) - could use ( and do use ) "to winnow out the chaff", so to speak.

Is it fair that a co-op uses some strange criteria to let a bigwig, say a political donation bundler, with connections, have the penthouse and not you ? No.

Would you dare fight the co-op and take them to court to prove you are just as "interesting" as the bundler?

Are you likely to win? Are you not likely to appease the co-op board through some other means because you know it is the socially-acceptable way to do so and suing them is just going to make you a social outcast and expunged from the social diaries of the well-heeled?

Is it fair that a group of people self-select themselves to be part of a dating club, so as to not being put through the grief of having to date a person who doesn't - from all social cues and signalling - doesn't belong? [2]

Is it wrong? Yes. Is it illegal? No.

Their lawyer is sure to say that no one is stopping you from building your own app and inviting people only you approve of. After all it is a private app.

I could give examples of even more explicit discrimination in daily life that go unchallenged.

One cannot cherry-pick an issue when it suits them and choose to shift it to the back-burner when it doesn't.

Discrimination is rampant, persistent and has become acceptable in all manner of ways - both latent and in plain sight.

It is too important an issue to be fought in piece-meal, from one aggrieved party to another.

We ought to have a much bigger, much more encompassing and thorough discussion of what it means to be discriminated - whether the person is non-Jewish white, Jewish, Asian, Black, Hispanic or the rest.

[1] How to Get Into Harvard

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-...

[2] The League

http://www.theleagueapp.co/

edit: formatting

This is a great post.

Harvard in particular is about building leaders. If you want great front-line employees it would seem there are other hundreds of other schools that can do that.

When it comes to having great leaders, race matters. I wish it didn't, but its naïve to think otherwise. That said, simply awarding points for race (if that's what is actually done -- or if they have just regressed it to show the differential) seems inefficient.

You want people with great upside to make a positive change in the world. Being around some of the highest SAT/GPA people in the world for my life has shown that most end up having good, but mundane careers. And what I find surprising is that I probably could have predicted which of my cohort, colleagues, and associates would go on to have outsized impacts -- and it was rarely (or more like never) a product of their SAT score.

Sports is one of the better professions where performance trumps almost everything. If you talk to NFL scouts you'll find that they look numbers, but they realize that the numbers come with very strong context. Incredible passing numbers in the SEC are different than from a DIII school. They want to know if you've peaked in college, or if you have upside in the NFL.

The NFL also does something similar to college -- they have later rounds in the draft, because they have a large enough roster to take some risks (and practice squads). These later rounds are where they often take riskier players. This is where Seattle takes a slower cornerback named Richard Sherman or a shorter QB named Russell Wilson. Based on the tape, neither of these players should be in the NFL, much less excelling. But the upside potential was huge on them -- so Seattle picked them.

I'm sure Harvard could have found someone with better numbers than Barack Obama, but the upside on him was huge.

Given the ridiculous importance our society puts on race, I'm not against using race a metric. I'm just not sure we're efficient about it.

My take from the article was that they just broke out the average entry SAT score of each race. Which concluded Asians needed 50 points more than whites to get into Harvard while Blacks needed 200 points less.

But as said elsewhere, Harvard isn't looking at SATs solely - they are looking for "interesting" or future leadership potential.

I'm curious what your evidence is that "universities have formal policies" discriminating against Asian Americans. Because you realize, I hope, that the study being cited only made inferences about "bonus points" on the assumption that SAT score is the only worthwhile factor to be considered in admissions decisions. There is no evidence that I see that Asian Americans are being discriminated against by policy due to their race.

I'm going to treat this objection in good faith.

Quoting from their most-recent-of-several amici briefs on the matter:

Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. [[Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke]], 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). [[Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.]]

They go on:

[[Amici accordingly urge the Court]] to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to [[allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity]] as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process.

I have taken the liberty of using [[double brackets] to direct your attention to the really salient bits.

There's the whose-who of American universities saying, in pretty clear language, to the Supreme Court, that they would find it very inconvenient if the Supreme Court were to illegalize their racial discrimination programs.

Are you still unconvinced that American universities operate racial discrimination programs?

If your objection is the more narrow "I agree that American universities often operate racial discrimination programs, but disagree that those racial discrimination programs disfavor Asians", I'd be more than happy to find you citations of of which groups particular formal racial discrimination policies discriminate in favor of. This will, inevitably, fail to find Asians on that list. If you disagree with me on this prediction, please name three representative universities and I'll happily do the legwork on finding their written statement of which races are favored by their formal racial discrimination programs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com