I didn't know affirmative action was a thing. Being a minority who entered/graduated University, I hate to think that I could possibly have been admitted into University because of my status as an ethnic minority rather than because I was actually qualified.

Dirty little secret... a wide range of people experience imposter syndrome at elite schools.

I knew I was surrounded by many people who are way more smarter than me but I still thought I was well above average; at least for the first couple of years.

1. Race is, for the most part, relatively easy to determine. Some of the other groups you mention are less easy to determine.

2. The laws came into being in a time that very (extremely?) qualified minorities were being passed over for basically racist reasons. Once an entitlement like this is given in the US (to anyone), it is typically difficult to take away. Fwiw, I personally don't believe that we are at a race-blind state such that taking away preferences should be eliminated, but I believe that these preferences will persist even after a point that we become "race blind" just due to the nature of the system. Any politician who votes to end affirmative action is essentially condemning themselves to the label of "racist" (rightly or wrongly). This will only potentially be resolved, imho, when being mixed is the norm "race", so racial identity will largely be an anachronistic concept. I'm not sure when we will see that state, if ever.

3. If something like low socioeconomic status (SES) is considered, then whites will again likely be over-represented. While some races might be disproportionally low SES, white people have a higher absolute number of low SES members. The difference is that an aspirational white person who wants to social climb has a much easier time of it than a person from other races.

4. Note that race is not the only factor in affirmative action. There is an implied consideration of being discrimated against, being low SES, etc. This is why Asians are typically not considered "oppressed minorities". Interestingly, race blind admissions tend to favor Asians more than whites by a lot. Check data on Berkeley and Stuyvesant for data on this topic.

If people want to fight against racism we'd be better off with groups that are fighting against people being treated differently because of their race--regardless of what race they happen to be. Imagine an organization that is just as upset about Asians needing higher test scores to get into Ivy League schools as they are about a black person being treated worse by the police than someone with lighter skin in the same situation.

Sure. For instance: the NAACP is actively working to improve conditions for black people. The reason they do that is that as recently as my own birthday (I'm 40), African Americans were actively excluded from American life; for instance, they were redlined out of neighborhoods across Chicago and concentrated into lower-income neighborhoods that were allocated poorer services. And that's just what happened within my lifetime. Go back just a few years earlier and black people couldn't reliably vote, and were beaten and attacked with dogs for marching for their own rights.

It's not surprising that someone without African American heritage would look at this and see only an effort to improve outcomes for black people. Obviously, that's what it is. Also, though, what it is is necessary: a corrective for multiple centuries of --- let's call it what it is, I guess: institutionalized oppression.

It sounds you feel that the way to right the wrongs of racism against blacks in the past is to practice racism against other races today. I know you aren't alone in this view, but I disagree for the following reasons:

First of all, if we agree that racism is morally wrong, then I don't see how practicing racism today can be considered a morally right solution to racism in the past.

Second, even if we can morally justify penalizing the descendants of slave owners in order to create benefit for the descendants of slaves, categorizing people based on the color of their skin isn't a good way to do this. There are white people whose lineage had nothing to do with owning slaves and there are people whose African ancestors owned, captured and sold people into slavery.

Poor academic and other performance is just one small symptom of larger systemic issues.

In order for the US to move in a positive direction broken social divisions must be smoothed, opportunity for all must be increased, and the military industrialization of community servants must be reversed to return those groups to helping instead of harming citizens.

Like culture, which is sadly, by choice.

There are plenty of studies and articles out there on the effects of systemic racism if you are interested.

I do agree that we can do better in acknowledging and enacting policy to recognize and minimize the difference between economic classes.

First, the numbers for underrepresented students are pretty terrible. I spent some time doing outreach programs for graduate students, so I'll speak to that. AMS runs a survey of recent Ph.D. graduates in math and I just pulled the report for the 2013-2014 year (http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/2014Survey-...). During that period, 920 U.S. citizens received a Ph.D. in math. Of those, 25 were African-American and 29 were Hispanic. That means that of those that graduated, 2.7% were African American whereas they comprise 13.2% of the population and 3.1% were Hispanic whereas they comprise 17% percent of the population. Clearly, there's a disconnect here, which should raise eyebrows.

As to why the numbers are that bad, it's complicated. In truth, it's hard to sell graduate school to underrepresented students since they tend to be poor. Imagine if you're the first person in your family to graduate from college with a technical degree. You can go out and immediately start making something like $60-70k/year on a job or make $25k/year as a graduate student for the next eight years. Eventually, a graduate degree pays itself off, but it's a hard sell especially with family pressure. That said, this does correlate with poverty.

In addition, there is a bias in admissions in favor of students who went to tier-1 research or Ivy League schools. Students from schools like Columbia are seen as better candidates than students from state schools. This hits underrepresented students hard in two ways. One, fancy schools are expensive and they tend to be poor. Two, family structures are such that it's less accepted for a student to move that far away from family, so they go to a state school and perhaps get a wonderful education, but they have a disadvantage getting into graduate school since they didn't go to a fancy school.

Also, as I alluded before, family and cultural issues different between races. Successful recruitment needs to be mindful of family structures and how to engage the family into making the transition to a graduate school that is likely not in their hometown easier. Candidly, we don't have good research universities in every town and family ties and values differ between races.

Now, bringing a student into a program that they're not qualified for is terrible for everyone around. It's bad for the student since it crushes their confidence and waists their time if they fail. It's bad for the department since it saps what little money they have for stipends. Good outreach programs spend their time and money looking for qualified students and encouraging and sometimes helping them to work through the process. That takes time and money, which is why these programs require funding.

As a last note, also be aware that in the past, there was explicit segregation based on race at the university level and that kind of imbalance takes a very, very long time to rebalance. For example, Rice University disallowed non whites from attending until 1964. Though, for a time, certain Asians were seen as white enough to make the cut. How long it takes to rebalance that equation is certainly up for debate and I personally don't know how long. That said, there is a moral argument that certain institutional disadvantages require rebalancing and that we may not be finished with that process.

So, yes, there are bad programs out there, but I contend there are some really good programs that have found some diamonds in the rough. Getting these students into school has been good for the community and country. Yes, this costs money. Yes, this money could be allocated elsewhere. I will contend, though, that many programs have paid off their tax dollars in spades.

The applicants who are most discriminated against are Asian applicants. Asians are basically the Jews of yesteryear when it comes to college admissions.

A common criticism is that Asian applicants "game" the system by getting good grades, scoring well on standardized exams, and loading up on extracurriculars. Compare that with sending your kids to an elite private feeder high school. That's not gaming the system at all /s

Affirmative action in today's implementation is less about equal opportunity and more about equal outcome. I don't even see it as a race thing as even the POC applicants that benefit from these policies are almost always economically advantaged. What we need is economic affirmative action. If you come from property you should get second consideration. Infinitely harder getting good grades while impoverished vs a 4.0 at the local 40k/year private high school Ivy feeder.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the educational benefits that flow from having a diverse student body can justify using race as one factor among many in a “holistic” evaluation, while rejecting blunt racial quotas or race-based point systems. But what that permits in actual practice by universities — public ones as well as private ones that receive federal funding — is often murky.

It would have also behooved a general audience to be given some history: https://www.britannica.com/event/Bakke-decision

It's not an easy issue.

It is impossible to provide easier admission to college for one race without making it harder for other races. Treating people differently because they are of a certain race is the definition of racism. That part is simple.

Now there are all kinds of arguments about whether letting in lower scoring students of one race are actually beneficial to their race and there are lots of people arguing that if someone was descended from slaves they should be given preferences that exceed what they would get based on their own skill, but it doesn't change the fact that affirmative action is a way to create a type of racism. People can argue that this type of racism is a good thing, but it is still treating people differently based on their race.

Then have a third party verify the student's ranking at how the student performed via local peer group (could be a derivative of their neighborhood, school, county, state, etc).

The local peer group rank calculation could influence the decision without revealing any advantage/disadvantage (perhaps a statistician could discuss the mechanics of how to make this most appropriate)

Example admission summary: Candidate XYZ graduated top 12% from their school, top 10% from their county, and top 24% from their state. Candidate played no sports, but participated in two academic societies, and accumulated 200 hours of volunteer service. The candidate was employed for 3 years before applying for university.

Why?

In my college, at least differences in opportunity were somewhat recognized resulting in release of all old tests instead of it being hoarded by HKN, a quiet place to study for everyone, and financial aid so that a student wouldn’t have to take basically a full time job to pay for school.

We need to ensure opportunity all along the educational path. The current US system is blindingly obviously tilted.

Edit: I also said that there isn’t equality of opportunity for education in the US.

Furthermore examples of equality of opportunity were having equal access to previous tests, equal access to quiet study areas, and financial aid so that students didn’t have to take on full time jobs to afford college.

None of these included norming test scores or norming job performance measures.

> Scores should be normalized by income, stability of household, then holistic factors such as extraneous circumstances, health, etc.

Did you want to refer to hypothetical admission scores? There used to be US colleges that admitted on a points system (and some very low-prestige ones still do), but they've stopped doing that since giving objective points based on race was ruled illegal for public schools.

You responded to the question "Why should scores be normed?"; I think it's fair to interpret that as providing a reason, in your own mind, that scores should be normed. If you don't want "because" read into your answer to "why?", you need to bring up the fact that your comment is not intended as a response to its parent.

> How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Not as many times as you seem to want to. Why post three separate replies, all saying the same thing, within five minutes of each other?

1. Stop making a college degree a requirement for relatively pedestrian jobs.

2. Make education at any level widely available and very cheap or free to those who want it and demonstrate the motivation to perform well in their studies.

Most current education, even that at the high school level, is completely wasted because the participants and their communities simply don't value it (or worse, negatively value it). Note that this disdain for education is largely race-blind.

http://www.collegeconfidential.com/admit/legacy-applicants-h...