> there has to be some form of normalization for students whose parents/culture/childhood environment didn't value education.

Why? Colleges are literally places of education. It doesn't seem odd that children who focused on their education would be highly-represented there.

Intervening earlier may make sense - promote education in environments where it's less focused on.

Consider two children, Alice and Bob, who appear equal on objective measurements while applying to college. Alice comes from an environment that heavily values education; Bob comes from one that does not. Despite this, they both achieved equal academic results. Further, if admitted, they will both find themselves in the same education valuing environment (college).

Since Bob came from an environment that did not value education, we might expect to see an improvement from the mere fact that he is now in an environment that does value education. In contrast, since Alice already came from such an environment, we would see no such improvement (from that cause).

This assumes that the sum total of Alice and Bob's ability to perform in higher education is measurable by their admissions portfolio.

I can picture many different things matching this overall impression. Perhaps Alice is the child of two university professors and has vaguely drifted to near-perfect scores without really having to work. Alternately, she has slaved over her books desperate to please her parents and is at the end of her rope.

Similarly, Bob might be a self-educated polymath who has transcended his background, or a crammer who has carefully done everything exactly right to produce the highest score possible, but is almost entirely uneducated outside of the areas that produced good-looking admissions.

Yes. In reality, we are talking about populations. It is still possible that the type of confounded you describe applies at the population level as well, which is why I qualified my statement with "might expect". This is an empirical question that requires empirical evidence to answer. Further, universities have this empirical evidence (although I am not aware of what it actually says).

I do recall hearing that (at some point in history) the army looked into this and found that black soldiers did better then their white counterparts with an equal score entering. Further, this is presisly the result I would expect to see in the face of generic anti-black bias. For instance, if there was some force that depressed black SAT scores by 10 points and had no other effect, then a black student would be expected to perform as well as a white student who scored 10 points better on the SAT.

Sure, if they are equal on all objective measurements, your theory may be valid. But Asian-American students etc. have far better objective measurements than other groups, on average. So if you just break ties, as you suggest, you're not going to move the needle much.

I was looking at the marginal case because it is the easiest to see. Once you accept that this is the case (which, as I pointed out in another comment is an empirical question; it is not a-priori obvious that I am correct), the question becomes how big is the effect. If it is sufficiently large, then it would be sufficient to overcome significant differences in objective measurements. Again, this is an empirical question.

I think earlier intervention makes much more sense. If you grow up in an environment which doesn't value education, and you yourself doesn't value education, the education in college may not help you much. The degree may help you some, the education may leave some prints in your head, but it won't be much. Like any training or education, if you don't value music much, the probability music benefits you much is also low. And you may not be happy taking the education, unless the education is, well, not so educating, but more like hanging out with the brotherhood or other socializing. Not saying it's not good, but it's definitely not so academic.

The Asians traditionally don't value basketball playing, and why don't the basketball teams try to normalize for students whose childhood environment didn't value basketball playing? Why don't the colleges try to normalize for introverts or working bees whose environment didn't value extroverting or leadership?

> but there has to be some form of normalization for students whose parents/culture/childhood environment didn't value education

You can't possible judge that unless you resort to stereotypes. How do you tell an Asian/Jewish student whose parents didn't put immense value on their education to one that did. You simply can't without making sweeping generalizations based on someone's appearance.

This is a thing I haven't seen discussed much either when people are talking about whether it'd be okay for Asian Americans to be 40% of the quota if it was based off of merit.

What about the percentage of Jewish students in comparison to their population (US or worldwide)? It kind of debunks that part of the argument when you bring that up. I don't believe this is whataboutism since it should be in the same context and it's already happening.