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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that.

In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.

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I think if black students would otherwise be over-represented at the school it would make sense.

So Asian's are 5% of the US population [1] but make up 20% of the admitted applicants [2]. While African American's, representing 13% of the country [1] and a shameful legacy of mistreatment make up 12% of admitted applicants [2].

The problem is that admissions isn't based solely on your capabilities as a student at the time of application, but also on your potential to grow. Asian's tend to be fairly successful in the US (especially 2nd and 3rd generations) [wish I could find stats for this right now], if you start in a good environment with two intelligent well-meaning parents a 780 in math is impressive, if you're the son of a single mother with a father in jail and 3 younger siblings you share responsibilities for that 520 in math looks spectacular.

If I ever see Asian's in this being denied social mobility I'll raise torches and pitchforks, but in this scenario Harvard is a limited resource that provides immense social mobility for students from the lower echelons of society, if admissions were rooted solely in test scores and grades then these students with potential, but not the resources from birth, will be denied a chance to benefit from a prestigious education.

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[2] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

edit: I appreciate people's rights to disagree, but I find it frustrating that the preference has been to downvote this rather than engage in meaningful dialogue.

Asians aren't just discriminated against relative to black students, they're also discriminated against relative to white students. Your distractions like "shameful legacy of mistreatment" and "single mother with a father in jail" don't work so well then, do they?

> If I ever see Asian's in this being denied social mobility

All the ones that would've been admitted if they were white. You just have to treat them as individual sentient people instead of a mass statistic.

Edit: For that matter, compare Asians with academically demanding parents and white people and black people with academically demanding parents. Looking at that subset of the population, Asians are discriminated against, keeping the variable you were considering constant. Then consider Asians with single mothers and white people and black people with single mothers. Asians in that strata are discriminated against, too.

You are down voted because you dodged the question. The question is a positive, not a normative one: would you believe it if someone claimed blacks were secretly deficient in the way you claim Asians are?

Also, do you have any stats suggesting that the black student with a 520 sat is likely to outperform the Asian with a 780? If I present stats showing that blacks underperforming their sat and Asians over perform, will you favor pro-asian and anti-black discrimination? If not, your reply is a bit dishonest.

Okay, so this concept of 'secret deficiency' is not what I purported, hard to measure does not make something secret. I will explicitly state that Asian applicants, with an admission rate of 4:1 relative to their racial representation in society, will typically start at a higher socio-economic standing relative to blacks (and whites if you want to talk means here).

To give you a positive answer: If blacks were over-represented at Harvard and asians under-represented then I would definitely accept the argument.

Now, as to the concept of 'outperform,' it depends on how 'performance' is defined. I don't care about academic performance as much as I do about long-term social mobility. If you can demonstrate that asians who attend college accomplish even the same amount of social mobility as blacks I would take a difference stance here.

People coming in with ultra-high SAT scores typically wont represent the underprivileged and the underprivileged will typically receive the most benefit (∆-socioeconomically) from the prestigious education out of all applicants.

Can you create a model that admits everyone based solely on GPA and test score while also addressing the challenges faced by the underprivileged? How does social mobility fit into your desire for fairness in admission towards asians? (honestly, not trying to be antagonistic, I'm curious what you think about this because we clearly differ on opinion here but this point is valid)

edit: so that would be 'deficits relative to their established peer group' then.

You originally claimed that "quite possible that there are other deficits" that Asians suffer. Glad we have established that is unlikely.

If I wanted to address the "challenges" of the underprivileged, I'd simply give a preference to those who can demonstrate it. This is not currently politically favored because even highly privileged blacks underperform poor whites and Asians. (I can dig up stats on that if you like.)

No need to use race as a bad proxy when you can actually measure the underlying variable you claim to care about.

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