If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note these ones—you broke all of them here:
"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
The Ivy League schools haven't exactly been discreet about their desire to admit fewer Asians.
If some people base their opinions this way for validation: I’m a minority.
Nip it in the bud, take it to court, call it out for what it is. Race based discrimination has no place in this society, find another way, especially for any institution that takes any state or federal funding, you can totalllly curb stomp that approach.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
There's a reason why lawyers are the second biggest financial contributors to the Democrats among professions:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBwtxXnUUAIAm8W?format=jpg&name=...
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
Anti-discrimination lawyers are licking their lips at the prospect of sueing SpaceX next, this time for sexual harassment:
https://www.space.com/spacex-sexual-harassment-allegations-l...
The explanation provided by the essays is coherent and resonates with I have seen.
The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use IQ tests to hire applicants. It is totalitarian in nature and needs to be scaled back to enable a free society where a sanctimonious elite is not using the force of the state to reshape private citizens.
Take it to federal court, then take it to federal appeals court. If the 9th circuit doesn’t match conservative land, do the same in another circuit.
You’re playing the helpless victim while having way more resources than the “protected classes” that you feel are oppressing your way of life, all because you (and the organizations that didnt appeal) are afraid of the PR. The protected classes dealt with way more than “potentially bad PR” to create this reality so just take the L and get the courts to correct it.
The wokification of US law was established by the Civil Rights Act. As far back as the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that using IQ tests to vet job applicants is a form of prohibited discrimination under the CRA.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...
Just the Ivies? UW is explicit: they want racial "equity". Meaning they won't admit more Asians, as a percentage, than the population they are picking candidates from. And they promote it as a good thing: https://www.washington.edu/raceequity/diversity-and-equity-f...
The easiest way to get into UW is to be (graduate high school) from eastern Washington, they actually have a state mandated quota for that.
People who read college applications are "guided" by Universities using a system of feedback so they can get whatever outcome they want. Read more about that here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/lifting-...
College admission officers don’t get access to race and such when reviewing applications. Yes, they can add points to it, but that happens after the rest of the application is reviewed, and can’t be done without explicitly saying they are doing it.
Read the NYT story I linked to, to understand how application readers are gently guided to consider race, without explicitly being told to do so.
Excerpt from the story:
"I received an e-mail from the assistant director suggesting I was not with the program: “You’ve got 15 outlier, which is quite a lot."
She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution.
The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period.
So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer.
I am not sure if she was bitter about it.
And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/caltech-college-admissions-...
That’s why they have things like essays and consider extracurricular activities. Most of the selective Universities specifically exclude people with high grades and very little else that they were involved in.
Moreover, I recall reading at some point that at least some of the Ivy’s, during at least the first half of the 20th century, specifically avoided students with the highest grades in favor of those who were more like a B+ average and were more social, which they determined through the very subjective means of interviewing students on campus. (I’m old enough that I recall some of my friends visiting Universities for such meetings, but I have no idea if they still meet prospective students like this).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/09/14...
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...
I believe the specific things I am talking about were discussed in relation to introversion and The Ivy’s specifically wanting to lean toward extroverts who were well-rounded and had good social skills.
It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
If you want a healthy society, you need to set aside the individual in order to create balance across the society. That might mean some high achievers losing out on their first choice college, it might mean affirmative action, etc.
Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Sure, go ahead and see what happens when you disconnect negative behavior from negative outcomes. I'm sure that has no long-term consequences for your civilization.
Getting back to Harvard, everyone who goes there will be extremely competent. You seem to be suggesting that they'll be accepting slackers and truants.
Now. Once they start admitting students absent an IQ test, don't be surprised when it's prestige and the assumed quality of it's graduates is diminished.
>It inevitably leads to the one or two cultures dominating positions of leadership in government, commerce, etc, inevitably breeding resentment and racism.
By that logic, the alternative is you get more people in government, commerce etc. who are significantly less conscientious and dutiful? That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
Not significantly so, no. These are still cream of the crop within their group.
> That doesn't exactly sound like a great thing for society.
It's not ideal, but far better than the alternative.
"greater equality" is tautological when you have instituted equality of outcome, but does it produce greater happiness? I don't believe it to do so. It reduced overall outcome - as those who are forced down will not produce as much as they could've.
I didn't go to China and become resentful when I noticed their leadership was Chinese. But I did immigrate to America, then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
Of course not. You're a visitor.
> then eventually become resentful when I noticed white people & asians were discriminated against out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You probably need your eyes checked. White people run the United States, and Asians make up an outsized proportion of US college admissions.
> out of some twisted sense of fairness.
You haven't been reading my comments. I already addressed this. It's not supposed to be fair at the level of the individual. You need fair representation of a broad cross-section of the populace in order to achieve optimum happiness across the population.
Given what you're replying to, it sounds like you're suggesting that Asian Americans dominate power in this country, which I must be misinterpreting because that's ridiculous. I do agree with the general sentiment that what high achievers deserve is not necessarily what's good for society, but I'd say we should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
(1) each job being filled by the person who's better suited for it than any other person
*versus*
(2) each job being filled by a person who's better suited for it than for any other job
You can't have both of the situations above hold. They are in conflict. And it's hard to be honest from the point of view of hiring people, that (1) is basically not a realistic option. Everybody says their goal is to hire the best person for a job without acknowledging that the best person is not, and should not, be available.
Is (2) optimal for society? I'm not sure, but I think society is closer to that than (1). But "meritocracy" sounds more like (1) to me.
They are not in conflict at all, this is what the basic welfare theorems of economics say.
It's just that #2 and #1 are impossible to achieve because it requires perfect information about each person and each job, and a unified labor market, which just isn't realistic, as information has a cost and labor markets are fragmented.
In the real world, we are lucky to get some aspects of both #1 and #2, in the sense that people do search for jobs best suited for them, but imperfectly, and employers do search for workers best suited for each job, but imperfectly, and you kinda meet in the middle. If you want, you can call "meritocracy" the freedom of the employer to hire the best worker available, but I'm not sure of a snappy phrase to describe the freedom of the worker to search for the best job available. Maybe someone came up with a label for that. But really they are flipsides of a process that leads to an optimum, they are not two opposing forces where one makes the other impossible. It is like buying and selling, the supply curve does not make the demand curve impossible; both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet. If you mess with either the demand curve or the supply curve, you do not end up at the optimum price, you end up losing welfare somehow.
Obviously anything that can reduce frictions helps you get closer to the meeting of 1 and 2. For example, greater availability of job boards and pay transparency, working condition transparency to get information about available jobs to workers, or things like more accurate information about worker skills and talents to employers (e.g. meaningfulness of degrees play a role here as do rigorous interviews). Really both worker and employer are facing a murky question trying to figure out "how good is the other side here?". Both need as much information as possible.
It is the costliness of information that keeps us away from 1 and 2 simultaneously.
Yes they are. Imagine World War II. The best person to dig a particular ditch might be Alan Turing. But that's completely different from the best job for Alan Turing being digging that ditch.
>both curves meet at an optimum price which is where supply and demand meet
I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
Is this stuff at all familiar?
No, Alan Turing would be pretty bad at digging ditches, and there would be many people who could do the job just as well or not better than he.
So in that environment, the code breaker team needs someone, and the ditch digging team needs someone, and if it turns out that Alan is in the ditch and Joe doing an awful job breaking codes, then the code breaking team will try to fire Joe and hire Alan, and the ditch digging team wont mind switching Joe for Alan. Thus this swap is a pareto improving trade, and there are no pareto improving trades in equilibrium, therefore no equilibrium process would settle on Alan in the ditch and Joe breaking codes.
So look, this is an actual body of science and math that you can't just dismiss without understanding and thinking about. There are legitimate criticisms of welfare theorems -- the ones I outlined, namely around lack of perfect information -- does the code breaking team know how good Alan is at breaking codes? Does Alan know there is a job opening other than ditch digging? Etc. It is all about information, but to just pretend that the welfare theorems don't exist because you haven't thought of them or they don't seem intuitively "true" to you is neither a good avenue of exploration nor of debate. These are, after all, theorems. You attack theorems by attacking their hypotheses, not by "disagreeing" with them or just asserting that they are false.
> I think that optimum and equilibrium are different things and a single price cannot be optimum even if it is the equilibrium.
This is, mathematically, false. But it's also irrelevant because there is not one price, there is a single price vector. Alan and Joe don't earn the same wage. The budget of the ditch project and code breaking project are also not the same.
It's a contrived example that illustrates something general. It could still be true - maybe Turing would have some insight that let him do half as much labor. But whether it's actually true for him is irrelevant.
Let's say the manager of a McDonald's started out making hamburgers and does it better than any of the other employees, but doesn't normally do it any more, unless there's a crisis and they have to fill in when nobody else is available. Or some software engineer at Google would be better at processing data for litigation purposes than anyone in that industry, yet they outsource the work.
It is purely happenstance that these institutions have even had to consider caring about how they gatekeep genpop’s upwards mobility for the last half a century.
They literally have no reason to care. They believe attendees want higher education for the pursuit of academic knowledge and are so disconnected from the desperate reality. And they’re right, they can weather this fad.
The ombudsman closes the thick book in the monestary, blows dust off the back, walks outside and says “there are third generation people with Asian heritage in this country? huh, how about that.” Goes back into their monk quarters after replacing the wax, lights another candle and goes back into the books. This is how these institutions function. They don’t know anything about how passionate, desperate or how much energy has been put into simply getting in, they don’t know why its important to people except for them loving the attention and pride and money.
That's fine, but the question is, who gets to decide? Individuals.
> Equality of outcome feels horrible at the level of the individual, but across a society, it leads to greater equality and happiness.
Receiving unearned money doesn't lead to happiness due to lack of fulfillment. Having earned money taken away doesn't lead to happiness due to a lack of reward. Equality of outcome always ends up killing the initiative and freedoms needed for prosperity to support such a society to begin with.
"Equality of outcome" == "greater equality"... Well yea, assuming outcome is definable and changing those outcomes to be "equal" is possible, by definition, things would be more "equitable" by that same definition.
"Greater happiness" - I assume you mean greater overall societal happiness. That's quite a subjective claim. I'm not sure that's even a measurable thing, but do you have any evidence of this?
That's what votes are for on this site.
The ideology of Equality of Outcome has literally lead to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people worldwide(Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot).
It's like a human menagerie. Imagine choosing the animals for a zoo. Even if it were agreed which kind of animal was best (I like zebras), a zoo full of nothing but zebras would lose the interest and support of the public. Therefore, some "lesser" animals must be included, to provide the variety that makes it a zoo.
The "elite" college needs a curation process, and it has to be opaque, or it will be easily gamed, and the student body will turn into a freak show, spoiling its brand. There is enough demand, and little enough true variety among high school students, that a straight numerical admissions threshold will produce a class of effectively identical students.
No, the biggest issue is the size of the student bodyis kept stagnantly small to maintain exclusivity. Perhaps this made sense in an analog age but at some point in the digital world of plenty this will get/needs to be disrupted.
The game changer will be when some University figures out how to become the Apple of higher education. Previously high end phones achieved prestige by adding diamonds, gold plating, a high price tag and only a select few stores that people in the know could find (i.e. the Nokia Vertu).
Somehow Apple figured out how to maintain prestige/exclusivity while essentially servicing the entire market.
It will be a breakthrough for humanity when a University figures out how to replicate this combo of prestige and quality at scale for higher education.
You think it hasn't been tried?
First, there's a chicken-or-egg problem. By virtue of being one of the oldest universities in America, Harvard was originally an elite institution that was powered by the tuition paid for by the children of elite parents. To start a new "Harvard-but-bigger", you need to figure out where the "elite" part comes from. In the absence of a pre-existing elite alumni body, you need to enforce rigorous academic standards on your early graduating classes and let your reputation grow from there. But, you also need to deliver the rigorous academic standards at scale.
MOOCs were one attempt, but it's impossible to defend against cheating online. It's hard enough to stop cheating in real-world exam rooms, letting people go through examinations at home makes it impossible.
If you require people to show up in-person, then you reach physical limits to scale very quickly. Even if you try to combine MOOC-style lectures with building out a network of controlled examination centers in the real world, the attempts to expand American standardized testing abroad show that you begin to run into problems of corrupt test center administrators. It's like the fast food franchise model, where the restaurant corporate headquarters finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the same standards across all of their franchised locations, except that with examinations, your day-to-day users want your standards to be compromised.
The community colleges in my state are so great. They do such a huge service, and they do it economically. You can get a 4 year degree by spending 2 years at a community college and the other 2 at a state university. That's like the bargain of the century. The CoCo's keep an eye on the curriculum at the big schools, so the students are prepared, and there's no hassle with transferring credits. And their focus is on teaching.
Disclosure: One of my kids attends the big school, the other is at one of the regional schools, both are in good situations.
I think that the "elite" schools can be left to their own devices, on their own funding, and turn themselves into a freak show if they want. Public attention should turn towards supporting and developing better access to education for the rest of us, starting with the community college system.
In a few decades, I hope we will look back on privatized higher education, the way we look on privatized health care today.
* Take about 2/5 of students from the elites
* Take about 3/5 of students who are brilliant
Students of the elites look smart by association. Students who are brilliant are brought into powerful, moneyed social networks. It works well for everyone involved.
The focus on alumni donations is a little bit overblown. Harvard has way more money than it needs. What Harvard looks for is a lot richer than that. The alumni base is part of the national -- and increasingly international -- power structure. A president of some country, a high court justice, or similar sorts of power positions can be at least as important as a billionaire. Likewise, branding is important. The current push on DEI is to make sure that (1) the brand doesn't suffer (2) DEI-focused positions are filled by elite school alumni, and not focused on actual change to power structures.
(Though obviously not in this case because you correctly called it out)
Ivy League this year will have material overrepresentation of Latino and Black kids, substantial overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish kids, and up to 10% 'Children of Alumni', another overrepresentation.
Which leaves those not in those groups out in the lurch.
And one’s ability to pass the SAT proves only that one can pass the SAT. It just proves they were privileged enough to have some one teach them “the tricks and tactics to pass the test” - not understanding, not potential, and not intelligence.
In the late 1990s I practiced and bumped my score up about 100 points. Do I think it made a difference to the college I went to? Doubtful.
I think the better question is: Do the tests accurately predict if a student will do well in college? That's their point, and if schools have better ways to predict if an applicant will succeed, there's no point in using the test.
The dismay here is not due to a believe that testing correctly plucks the best minuscule number of deserving applicants that get in. It’s that everything else that is used is worse.
I find it to be extremely destructive to spend all your time complaining about problems, and none finding solutions. That’s more or less what Maxism is: a long list of faults with capitalism and a half-baked untested idea of what could maybe be a solution. And we’ve seen the damage that ideology has done.
Maybe instead of lowering standards, we should push kids to practice.
You just stated a very objective and valuable thing: they benefit people who practice. And it turns out that the will to practice doing things you don't know how to do is the most important skill you can have in life.
You can say that about GPA too.
Sure, as long as they have the free time to devote to that (which they may not, if they have to work through high school). Alternatively, they can hire an (expensive) tutor, which can help.
If scores are an important factor for admission, then that selects for people who:
* are good at standardized testing
* or, have the extra time and/or money to improve their score
There are, of course, many other things at play here; but it's a start!
It doesn't make too much sense to over indexing on this when it is already discounted in a significant way.
BTW Canada didn't have SAT requirement for college application I think they are doing OK. They do look at GPA during high school though.
This doesn't track. College admissions tests are a huge area of concern when it comes to institutionalized racism (due to the racial wealth gap). They don't test anything other than an applicant's ability to do well on the test, and that is primarily determined by (a) the applicant's to spend time studying for the test and (b) the applicant's ability to utilize resources to study for the test.
(a) tips testing in favor of the wealthy because poor people cannot afford to spend time studying, and (b) tips testing in favor of the wealthy because poor people cannot afford to spend money on test prep materials.
Compound this with the fact that the tests are fairly expensive themselves, so even retaking the test is often out of the question for people with few means, compared to wealthy students who can retake the test as many times as they like.
The idea that entrance exams balanced things in favor of people from lower socioeconomic classes is, and always has been, a bunch of malarkey.
You are looking at this absolutely, not relatively. The rest of the admissions criteria have similar issues you raise, if not worse. (Essays and interviews especially risk class bias)
> They don't test anything other than an applicant's ability to do well on the test, and that is primarily determined by (a) the applicant's to spend time studying for the test and (b) the applicant's ability to utilize resources to study for the test.
Citation needed here. They are quite predictive of college success (GPA) which is why they are used.
I do appreciate this point, but I still don't think it's enough to warrant keeping exams in-place. I think we should remove them while also striving to improve the rest of the college admissions process. Having a metric that claims to level the playing field but actually does not is, in my opinion, more harmful than other metrics that are less straightforward. It gives false hope and also allows for a more dastardly scheme of classism, since it is centralized instead of managed separately by each university.
> They are quite predictive of college success (GPA) which is why they are used.
I think they are indicative of socioeconomic standing, which in turn is predictive of GPA. Students who can afford tutoring, or who have parents who have free time to help while growing up, or who do not need to take on extra jobs, or who don't generally worry about other such stressors that are typically due to low socioeconomic status are consistently shown to achieve greater academic success at all grades, even as early as first grade. Socioeconomic status is the #1 predictor of academic success, and this is reflected by college entrance exams.
Keep in mind that it is in the best interests of these organizations to intentionally avoid addressing this point. Also, it's worth remembering that college entrance exams trace their origins back to purported tests of general intelligence that were in fact designed with intentional cultural bias to prevent non-white students from finding admission at universities. (This was later addressed and somewhat rectified, in some ways, but my points is that the organizations responsible have a history of not really caring about crafting a test in the best interests of the student.)
No. It's the opposite. I asked OP why he wouldn't simply NOT aspire to attend if he found the school's "social justice ideals" so disagreeable.
>OP cannot compete on a level playing field
What is a "level playing field"? That statement begs the question that you or OP can and should be defining Harvard's admission criteria in the first place. That's what you're missing. It's their prerogative to set the playing field. Your preferred criteria are irrelevant. And, the kicker is, it's a pretty good bet they know better.
>at all and his accomplishments are meaningless
That's hyperbolic to say the least. I'm sure they're meaningful to Harvard and elsewhere. Likewise, the experiences and capabilities of some whose talents may be reflected outside of a standardized test are meaningful.
>Admitting people based on racial criteria is racist
That's an unserious, facile argument that ignores 400+ years of history that continues to this day. It's been estimated that racism, starting with slavery, has cost Black Americans over $70 trillion. There's a legacy attached to that which clearly disadvantages black people. Further, redlining, unequal pay, etc. continue. If it's racist to acknowledge these facts, then it is also racist not to.
The things you say about racial injustice are true, however if correcting this were truly the goal Harvard and the other ivies would remove legacy admission preference. They won’t because their core mission is to provide a route for the wealthy and powerful to pass down social status to their heirs.
The function of anyone else there is to obscure this core mission.
I'd say it's more a projection of that system. If you eliminated elite colleges entirely, the system wouldn't simply vanish.
Is that something current people who had no choice in what happened deserve to be punished for? and yes, I recognize this applies both ways, but every time this topic comes up it seems like we forget that no college applicant had much of a choice regarding the circumstances that led to the admissions criteria being the way they are, so the claim that one needs to be biased for/against a group because of historical issues isn't entirely morally sound. In the end you are still punishing some group of innocents.
Personally I think that instead the focus should be on trying to balance the field at the high school level. If everyone is brought up to a similar level of education by the end of high school, there is no need to bias admissions themselves, instead the university can just offer financial aid to poorer students. Alternatively things change so that the university one goes to doesn't really matter for future career prospects. In my opinion the former is easier to achieve.
Yes, it does work both ways but, while you acknowledge that, it's kind of like you want to read past that part quickly.
Because, what you're essentially saying is, "yes, this one group had a 400-year head start at the expense of that other group. But, why punish them for that?"
This line of discussion, BTW, overlooks a few other oft-overlooked points:
1. There is real value to having a student body that reflects the broader population--good for the school, the students, and the broader society
2. All of these students are of top quality. They're not eschewing a bunch of Einsteins to admit a bunch of dullards.
3. Harvard has an abysmal 4.6% acceptance rate. The overwhelming majority of applicants are being rejected for all kinds of reasons. The idea that qualified people are losing their seats en masse due to racial preferences is wildly inaccurate.
4. There's never been an objective, quantitative admissions process in any case. It's kind of funny that people are so focused on the SAT score, as if that was part of some numeric point-scoring system.
I just don't really see how that changes the fact that it's unfair to the person rejected because of an immutable characteristic. Your argument about having a student body that reflects the broader population has that same 'disconnect' to me, is it fair for an equally qualified candidate to be rejected just because they don't fit a statistic that they're powerless to influence?
That same point is also exactly why I think the focus should be on bringing everyone to a similar level in high school, so given equalizers for class differences like sufficient scholarships specifically targeted at poorer families (and similarly preventing the rich from paying their way in), every group has an equal chance of admission, which, along with a purely merit based admission criteria should naturally result in a student body representative of the population.
It's my mistake for not clarifying that I'm not saying that the SAT is somehow important in this. I'm solely talking about this idea of intentionally applying racial bias to the system. Personally I'm quite happy that these standardized tests are going away for the same reason that they aren't particularly objective and success in them depends on the guides and coaching you can get access to, and how many times you can afford to try.
I think we all do, to be honest. But, I shouldn't have phrased my response in a way that suggested you were being disingenuous. Sorry if it came across that way.
What I was trying to say is that was the really important bit and deserves more focus IMO.
>I just don't really see how that changes the fact that it's unfair to the person rejected because of an immutable characteristic
Well, the short answer is, that there may be some who are so rejected, but there are also real individuals on the other side.
And, this brings up a really important point, that I think presents the challenge when discussing these things. That is, we kind of oscillate between the macro and micro levels without announcing it.
So, we're talking about these ongoing and historical effects that really are generational and persistent, so bear down on Black people in ways that disadvantage them today. And, generally, you have many White people who benefitted from that equation and passed those advantages down to individuals. Not all, but certainly many, and even neutrality is better than disadvantage.
Now, we'll acknowledge that it's not fair to the Black individual. However, when any talk of remedy is had, there's an intense focus on whether an individual White person might be perceived to be negatively impacted. And, the conclusion generally runs along the lines of "well, you can't fight racism with more racism".
But, then, what about the individual Black person, who continues to be disadvantaged? He/she just becomes an externality; the by-product of a history and system that are really hard to address.
So, this treats the Black person at the macro level ("we must fix the system!") and the White person at the micro level ("we must now apply treatment evenly to every individual!").
However, if we do attempt to address the issue, then we charge the individual Black person with receiving any perceived benefits, and we forget about the system that operates at the macro level. So he is treated in the micro at the least advantageous time for him.
But, going the other way, we tend not to attribute generational/systemic advantages to White people at the micro level. So, individually, they are seen only as victims of efforts to remediate, and we push those advantages up to the system at the macro level. So she is treated in the micro at the most advantageous times.
The other part is that we tend to talk about this as if it's only the legacy of our history that we're remedying, when there are very real, persistent systemic issues from redlining to mortgage rates to unequal pay and more. So, these are ongoing advantages and disadvantages being mitigated. It's not as simplistic as a head-to-head match up wherein a Black person benefits from a diversity policy that directly disadvantages a White person.
Those two individuals are part of a larger system that doles out advantages and disadvantages in various ways and at various times.
Harvard is currently 39% white, 8% black, and 20% Asian.
This seems to indicate that Harvard should focus on bringing up the number of white students admitted and reducing the number of asian students. Whites are underrepresented by half.
I feel like you said this as an example of an obviously disagreeable point, but I unironically hold this view.
Expanding opportunity for a group is always good; I'm all in favor of funding high-quality schools in historically underfunded districts, or providing free after-school programs to help kids whose parents are working, or to expand tutoring. These are all things that will disproportionately help those groups who have been marginalized throughout history.
I am absolutely against, however, grading an individual differently due to their historic group membership. If an Asian student is applying to college, there is nothing that student could have done differently to avoid the opportunities they were born with, so it seems eminently unfair to punish that specific individual for something they have no control in and had no say in. Charge the student more if they're rich, sure, but don't discount the merit of a student solely because of their group membership.
tl;dr: I'm all for investing in marginalized groups to level the playing field, but scoring individuals differently for things they have no control over feels flat-out wrong.
>I'm all for investing in marginalized groups to level the playing field, but scoring individuals differently for things they have no control over feels flat-out wrong.
I hear you, but what you're kind of doing there is drawing the lines around what you'd feel comfortable with, not what might actually be most effective. And, your comfort is generally tied to addressing things at the macro level. When we talk of groups, people tend to find it more acceptable than when they consider individuals being affected. But, of course, policies, including harmful ones, have historically been aimed at groups and groups are comprised of individuals.
>seems eminently unfair to punish that specific individual
Likewise with this sentiment. But, if we look at it as "punishing" individual people on one hand, then we're discounting the negative effects (i.e. punishment) experienced by individuals in the original group from previous and ongoing policies. That is, we're kind of unevenly oscillating between the macro and micro views, wherein the previous individual's "punishment" is lost in the group, but the current individual's is clear, present and personalized.
The other thing is that those individuals in advantaged groups are frequently also the direct benefeciaries of favorable policies that they didn't earn. Where do we sort that?
Because, in that context, even "merit" takes on a different meaning, relatively speaking.
It's all suboptimal, but we got to this place by embarking on a massive, multi-century campaign of codified disenfranchisement of some groups in favor of others, to include violence, murder and redistribution of trillions of dollars in wealth. Millions of individuals were harmed as a result. I wish this entire discussion was unnecessary, but if earnestly attempting to address this means that a relative few individuals, say, go to Duke instead of Harvard, then it's unfortunate, but these things don't reasonably show up on the same chart.
"That statement begs the question that you or OP can and should be defining Harvard's admission criteria in the first place" This argument can then be applied to any school or workplace. Upset that google has started prioritizing White candidates, refer to your argument, who are you to question it? Upset that Princeton suddenly said they had too many minority students, who are you to question it? It doesn't work that way, anyone is free to question anything and blindly accepting things because someone says that these people know better is not a good thing in a free society.
"If it's racist to acknowledge these facts, then it is also racist not to" No one is ignoring racism and its history but rather I am arguing that college admissions is not the place to address them. College should provide an equal arena for everyone to compete for admissions based on academic and extra-curricular achievements. Intervention to bring minority applicants up to a competitive level should be done in early childhood up through highschool. The SAT is simply a series of questions that test academic achievement, getting rid of a test because a group does not do well on it is a race to the bottom in much the same way as removing advanced math from a highschool curriculum is.
The problem should be fixed at the source, if Harvard wants to make an impact, take a few billion of their endowment and donate it to local school districts that are struggling to provide for their children.
"That's an unserious, facile argument that ignores 400+ years of history" I'm going to ignore the insults. Coming to a resolution that helps the affected minority should not be based on punishing one group to raise up another. It should be focused on raising all groups up to an equal stage, that can only happen if work starts with the young.
You're right, its Harvard's call to do what ever they want and to spend their endowment however they want but everyone is entitled to an opinion and to proffer a proposal on a message board. Discrimination based on race is the definition of racism, that's not an opinion, its simply the factual definition of the word.
From the oxford dictionary, racism is defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized." Note: typical means usually, not always.
I appreciate your view point; as a father of young white kids, I disagree with it but I understand how you are likely approaching this from an equal but opposite position.
Edit: Harvard's current racial demographics white: 39% Asian: 20% Black: 8%
Whites are already underrepresented as a portion of the general population by 50%. Blacks are underrepresented by ~5%
I still believe western democracy, as embodied by America is a positive force on the world. At least when you compare it to the alternatives: China, Russia and the Middle Eastern countries. Our institutions of higher education are the envy of the world and we'll lose that as we abandon our ideals of objectivity, meritocracy and actual fairness. Other countries will fill the power vacuum and exert influence on world affairs in a negative way.
That's pretty melodramatic.
But, maybe don't assume that, because they expand or modify their admission criteria or attempt to achieve some balance that is reflective of broader society, they're letting in waves of completely unworthy people. I mean, that's a pretty absurd notion, right?
Their admission rate is a lowly 4.6%. They're getting the cream of the crop. Admission to top schools (or any schools) has never been the imaginary 100% objective panacea that you're swooning over, wherein someone edges out the next candidate by a point on their SAT score. And, I would argue that we wouldn't want such a system that so overlooks the near limitless variables embodied by humans. Neither does Harvard.
>I still believe western democracy, as embodied by America is a positive force on the world...we'll lose that as we abandon our ideals of objectivity, meritocracy and actual fairness...
More melodrama. But, these "loftier" concerns are convoluted and contradictory. That is, if you really believe in western democracy and are concerned about it continuing to be a "positive force in the world", then you shouldn't want a monolithic group of people shaping that world. You should see the value of democratic participation by all groups.
Harvard used to accept everyone who met their entrance requirements until the mid-1920s. More details here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competiti...
You can say that it's "gameable" in response to time and resources spent studying, but that's actual learning, so of course that would result in higher scores.
It's one thing to say "Some people don't have enough time/resources", but it's another to pretend that these tests carry no signal.
It is also incredibly time and resource dependent, as you have surmised. Guess which strata of society tends to come out on top in that environment?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
A lot of their students pay with publicly secured student loan debt.
Just wanted to clarify that it can feel disingenuous to play the private card in these situations.
Would you rather have such a doctor treat you if you were to say, go to a hospital, or would you rather put your life in the hands of someone who is there to fill some coined up quota?
Because racism? And sexism?
What part of 'We are hiring this race and not that' do you not understand to be at least on some level problematic?
I mean maybe we should do some of that, but it'd be a bit odd not to recognize the 1st order issue with it.
Well, they'd say their social justice policies are addressing racism and sexism.
>What part of 'We are hiring this race and not that' do you not understand to be at least on some level problematic?
The part where people pretend that's all there is to it, thereby ignoring 400+ years of ongoing history.
>be a bit odd not to recognize the 1st order issue with it.
Perhaps it would be, if we completely omitted the most important context. Details are everything.
Harvard is one of the core institutions for inducting new members of the US elite, aka the people who will be placed into positions of power over the next 10-20 years.
Deciding who gets in primarily on racial and gendered grounds without even a fig leaf requirement of intelligence or academic competence is going to deeply wound US culture. This is supposed to be an ideology abandoned in the 60s. Abandoned for good reasons, I might add. The universities are publicly and purposefully screwing up decades of social progress and the shockwaves could be broad because racial ideologies do tend to get out of control.
College entrance exams do not test for intelligence or academic competence. They test for ability to do well on the exam, which is governed primarily by a student's socioeconomic status.
What is the signal Harvard uses to test for intelligence or academic competence? So far I only have learned that SAT and ACT are not it. Whaat is?
There does not exist a meaningful test of general intelligence that outputs a number that is equally meaningful to people from all socioeconomic (or even cultural) backgrounds. Similarly, there does not exist a meaningful test of academic potential (aside from a student's existing academic record).
College entrance exams are a scam meant to make money for the people who manufacture them. I say this as someone who did pretty well on every standardized exam I took, and felt guilty because I knew students who performed worse and had fewer college prospects than I did because of it, even though I knew they were better students who would easily out-perform me at the more prestigious institutions to which I was admitted in most meaningful metrics.
"Objective" entry is never coming back to college admissions.
Broaden your definition of admissions.
Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.
They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.
IQ tests are a very reliable proxy for academic performance potential. Is this even in dispute?
IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.
But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.
needs sources, and unbiased ones.
The burden of proof lies with the person making a claim.
OP's point was "This sucks, they're doing away with objective criteria."
Child comment's points was "They are indeed doing away with objective criteria. These criteria are not valuable though "
The only claim made there was the child comment's claim that these (admittedly objective) criteria are not valuable. That claim was not backed up.
Actually, standardized testing does not represent objective criteria for a number of reasons, so that's an incorrect assumption.
But, my point was why do we also just assume that it "sucks" to do away with it? Where's the evidence that they are effective criteria?
If we're demanding proof that they are not effective, then it's fair to question how we established they are effective in the first place. Else, it's really just a default assumption that represents a positive assertion (i.e. an unsubstantiated claim).
I've been on HN for several years. The quality was once much higher than it is now, but HNers have always been willing to call out posturing and logical holes.
>You have absolutely nothing to contribute but useless rhetoric. I asked for sources to whomever I responded to,..
Right. And if you already agreed with SquishyPanda's statement, you would not have requested a source. So, I just asked you to source why you believe what you believe. Why is that any different? In fact, that answer would add more to the thread.
I mean, if you believe standardized tests are valid for the stated purposes, then that's the positive assertion. Have you questioned it?
If not, then why not? If so, then what did you conclude and on what evidence? Please share.
>Just don't waste my time with these pointless comments of yours.
To be fair, I asked you for a source, just as you did of someone else. You wasted your own time with your unsolicited rant.
You make a distinction without a difference in this case, and what other variables are you controlling for? Class rank? That can't be gamed, you think? Rich people will always game the system, whatever it is. In many cases, the alternatives are AP exams, which aren't even available in all schools.
What criterion would you suggest? A lottery?