Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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Affirmative action in college admissions serves a different purpose; it's explicitly not a pure merit-based evaluation, and really is poorly understood.

A sort of basic understanding of how to implement it would be to assume you have a points-based system for admission, which takes into account things like previous grades, standardized test scores, etc., and normally has a minimum threshold of n points for admission.

One way to think of affirmative action is that it says "people from this group, on average, will score k points lower not because of a lack of ability or intelligence, but because of a lack of opportunities earlier in life due to social inequalities", and then asks questions about whether a score that is within k points of n should be admitted.

The real implementations are more complicated, of course, but this is the basic idea. The main problem with it is that starting to apply remedies for inequality after someone has already lived through 18 years of it -- and 18 important, formative years at that -- is nowhere near enough.

The best way I've heard it put is that the admission process seeks to measure the "velocity" of a potential student and not just position. If someone has come from much further behind than another, they may be a better candidate for the school despite being at a slightly lesser relative position at the time of application.

And has it been evaluated in this regard?

Yeah. Almost certainly not. But the woman who said this to me was obviously a true believer and at the time it touched my geek sensibilities far more than the cynical vision of a pantone swatch of skin colors with hash marks behind them required to maintain state funding.

Some things you just really want to believe.

>One way to think of affirmative action is that it says "people from this group, on average, will score k points lower not because of a lack of ability or intelligence, but because of a lack of opportunities earlier in life due to social inequalities"...

Which is why the people actually helped by affirmative action tend to be middle class people from favored ethnic groups who had opportunities.

"Affirmative action" is a terribly divisive, blunt tool which creates more injustice than it remedies. The idea a poor white guy from a broken home in Appalachia is somehow starting out behind a middle class black girl with an intact family in Southern California is laughable.

I've always thought if you were going to have any kind of affirmative action, it should be class/income based rather than race and gender based.

Sure the most powerful people in the world are usually white men, but as you said that doesn't really mean much to the average poor rural white kid.

Also income is also highly correlated with race, so disadvantaged minorities would benefit disproportionately anyway.

In what way is affirmative action poorly understood? What you have described is simply the bar being lower for certain groups, which is exactly how affirmative action is understood by most people.

Your explanation doesn't account for Asian Americans.

There's been plenty of affirmative action related to Asian Americans in university admissions. What often happens is that strict reliance on grades and test scores gives an oversupply of people who are of Asian descent or Jewish and when the university's management and alumni see that, they push for affirmative action to get the white Christian men percentages up to a high enough number that the largely white Christian men of the university's management and alumni feel comfortable.

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