College admissions and hiring are not zero-sum games. It's possible to provide good education and good jobs to everyone, according to their ability.

Elite status is the real zero-sum game, because it's exclusive by definition. Elite universities don't provide substantially better education than those dedicated to educating the masses. They are elite because they offer elite status and opportunities for networking with the future elite.

Then try and make the AA group fundamentally stronger to get better qualifications, rather than lowering the bar for them. Giving "unfair" advantages there will only bring racial tension.

People can bring up "systemic discrimination", but using Affirmative Action as the cudgel to solve this isn't fixing the issue, it's a stopgap that will probably make it worse.

America needs to build more colleges.

Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.

Or fix the demand side.

Right now, megacorps are abusing colleges as a filter to weed out people who can't cope with high stress environments or keep deadlines and, even more egregious, load the cost for a lot of what used to be employer-paid on-the-job training onto the students via student loans. A "bullshit job" should not require a college degree.

In California, if an employment test is passed at different rates by different races or genders, that in itself is considered evidence of illegal discrimination. Employers use a college degree requirement as a proxy for competency that doesn’t get them sued by the state.

How would that "fix" look like? Awareness campaigns? "ban the box"?

Ban companies from requiring college degrees unless they can prove a college degree and the associated skills/knowledge are mandatory to fulfill the job.

This won't fix the problem. The older/well known colleges will still be prestigious and demand for them will not reduce.

It will fix it eventually when those new colleges build up a reputation.

It'll take time but it will fix itself.

Let's not beat around the bush here. It's "messy" because it's racist against Asians.

How do you suggest we increase admissions for under-represented groups?

Why is race the end all be all grouping? Maybe we should group by favorite dinosaur.

I’m (mostly) white. The first 5 years of my life I grew up in a trailer house. My wife is also (mostly) white, and both sides of her family lost everything during the Great Depression. Is there any good reason a rich black kid should have been out ahead of us in admissions, just because of his skin color?

You don't.

That shouldn't ever be a goal.

Unfortunately a lot of people don't realise that the real world isn't, and can't be, that way.

Don’t you want to look at my dice if I don’t get a 6 after 50 rolls? 12? I think it’s reasonable at a certain point

Sure, though your dice might not be weighted the way you thought. Rather, you might want to look at the pipeline. Asian culture is particularly education focused, so is it surprising that Asians are overrepresented in areas heavily associated with education?

"Asian culture" is hardly a monolith. It may not make sense to admit ~0 Filipinos because the quota for Chinese students has been hit.

Oh, definitely. There are exceedingly common trends amongst east-Asians (Chinese/Koreans/Japanese) though, as there's a shared lineage there, both genetic and cultural. Take a look at all three countries, as well as the Chinese diaspora. They definitely share similarities on how they treat education.

But my point is, you get an overrepresentation of "Asians" due to the increased focus. This leads to an increased flow of more qualified candidates due to the greater investment from the "Asian" population. The issue for African American underrepresentation is in my opinion, the pipeline, not the admission.

I think part of the argument is that focus is also too narrow and not a good indication of the best students.

I’m sad that you support discrimination.

By figuring out why they're under represented and fixing those?

Is it income disparity? Single parent households? Lack of funding for schools in poor communities? Why can't we focus on addressing those and leveling the playing field rather than picking one way to group people (by race in this case) and artificially tipping the scale? Why not by gender, or family income, or height or beauty? Those all have impacts to life outcome too.

You stop blaming their issues on the white boogeyman and instead knuckle down to fix the hard problems that don’t have sexy solutions (e.g. single parent households, poor nutrition, high-crime proximity, lack of access to studying material, etc).

None of those things you listed are a problem for the upper half of minority households by income. For example, the upper-half of blacks have a higher median income than whites (including if you control for age) and no poverty.

And the bottom half, most of those aren't the kind of shitty parents you're suggesting they are, either.

> And the bottom half, most of those aren't the kind of shitty parents you're suggesting they are, either.

Well, the black bastardy rate at last count was 70%. They're not exactly model parents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...

Outside actual poverty, the kids are still getting fed, going to school, maybe they're one console generation behind two-parent households but even that's not such a big deal now...

Kids from single parent households are something like half as likely to graduate high school and considerably more likely to end up in prison. It's a big deal.

To be fair to SamReidHughes, almost none of that can be attributed to the fact that the household is missing a parent. Kids from single-parent households where the missing parent is missing through coincidence, such as by dying in an accident, perform at the same level as kids from two-parent households.

Yeah, attempts to show causality there have fallen down. And single parents aren't some abstract concept either; they largely aren't neglecting their kids.

And yet no sane parent would want their children to grow up in a single parent household. Studies don't show everything. Anyone with two eyes and ears can see that single parent households are not good for children. Most children that have grown up in a single-parent household can speak to this. If a culture has a high proportion of single-parent households, this needs to be addressed.

Have you tried telling them to step up their game?

Attack the root of the problem by building better schooling in disadvantaged areas so they increase their chance to be accepted?

You realize this article is, in part, talking about admission to a public high school right?

You mean there is no school before that?

Why do groups matter at all? Shouldn't the individual be what we measure? How much is this individual disadvantaged, regardless of their group or set of groups? Adjust for that, rather than arbitrary groupings.

You could try ending legacy admissions or admitting fewer white people.