gourial

Because Harvard administrators think the upper echelons of society - which a Harvard education can lead someone to - should reflect the racial makeup of the broader society as a whole by default. While they must discriminate negatively against Asian Americans to achieve this goal, this discrimination is justified in their minds.

I'm not defending it, just recognizing discrimination is not an end for them but a means to what they consider a just society.

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats.

While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look back on them with scorn.

There are only 3 options we have for dealing with families illegally crossing into the country. Separate children from families, place families together into detention centers, or let the families go free.

The 3rd option we cannot tolerate, and the second option is irresponsible as it's possible many children are being smuggled by human traffickers into the country and may not actually be related to the adults they are with.

Therefore separating children from parents, while uncomfortable, is the only responsible solution we have to a very challenging problem.

Given the significant numbers of people trying to illegally crossing into the country from the southern border - over 50,000 last month - the border must be fortified so the complications and challenges of dealing with illegals can be avoided altogether.

We should be moving more towards standardized tests, not moving away.

They are one of the most background-blind ways of establishing student intelligence and creativity, as they have been shown in studies to measure the ephemeral 'g' value representing general intelligence very well.

Now, critics say that impoverished students do worse on the SAT than students from wealthy families, but the fact is that study resources for the SAT exist for free on the internet as well as for low cost in the form of study manuals. Poor students from certain communities probably don't have the same encouragement to study for the SAT as other groups, especially wealthy families. Fortunately, cultivating a culture which encourages study for standardized tests in theory costs nothing.

This puts poor students on a much more level playing field than if we base elite college admissions on things like high school quality, which is already a huge determinant of admissions at top colleges. Unfortunately students can't use free online resources to get into top private high schools. Doing so requires their parents to be well off enough to afford the high cost.

Judging students based on grades is also very difficult because of grade inflation, which obscures things.

We will never be able to fully eliminate the influence of wealth on college admissions, but standardized tests offer the best conceivable way to fairly judge students of all backgrounds.

Because Israel deserves to be supported. They are an open, liberal democracy surrounded by people that hate them and are forced into a very difficult position by their enemies.

The real question is why does the world take such a myopic and shallow view of Israel? Again Israel is forced to do what it must by its enemies. This is a perspective that is ignored by much of the world.