The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.
But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america
2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.
And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
Sounds like OP certainly deserved it to me. Instead we have these perverse incentives to go to "elite" schools purely because of the school's name (not because you're really getting that much of a better education than you would in a different top 100 university). These schools end up with thousands of applicants who definitely deserve to get in, but they need to cull the group of perfect candidates somehow because of practical considerations like faculty to student ratio. Whether they discriminate using race, or implement a lottery system, there's plenty of candidates that deserve the entry but don't get in because of practical limitations.
I certainly didn't get perfect scores on the SAT and I certainly wasn't valedictorian.
This mentality is very gross, and treats life like it's a fair game with clear winners and losers. Life is messy, and you can still do every single thing right and end up worse off. Likewise, you can, and many people do, fail "up" into extraordinary positions of power due to no merit of your own.
Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals.
When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc?
My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.
I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unknown outside a ~150 mile radius, and only somewhat recognized within it.
From what I could tell, the content, pace, and amount & sort of assigned work were all pretty similar.
What differed? Two main things:
1) The guest lecturers—cheap state school, none, or unremarkable ones; the fancy schools, both more common to have them, and universally very impressive credentials, possibly someone you've heard of even if you don't really follow the topic, basically, their guests were "celebrities", at least within a field.
2) How engaged the students seemed to be—not at all, at the cheap state school; very, at the fancy schools.
This is for undergrad. The ways they differ may not be the same in grad school.
Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.
https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
Otherwise I agree with you. It’s in the past. We all have advantages and disadvantages, whether genetic or societal. There’s no reason to feel bad about something in the past you had no control over.
vs...
250k-1M/yr
The difference is being middle class to being upper class/upper-middle class.
The school district differences are stark. So yes, these kind of things make a big difference.
We really just need to remove power from the AMA/AGCME in this specific case. It hurts everyone except the Physician cartel members.
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.
So nothing happens
If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.
For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.
Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.
If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScien...
What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.
> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.
Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.
Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.
Affirmative Action is talked about as positive discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-less.
Every decision is discrimination. Basis and purpose is what matters.
That is true, which is why it is illegal in my country to discriminate based on things that you are. In my country, we value equality and believe that everyone should be treated fairly and without discrimination. Laws are in place to protect individuals from discrimination based on factors such as race, gender, religion, age, disability, and other protected characteristics.
Discrimination based on who you are, such as your inherent traits or characteristics, is considered unjust and contrary to the principles of equality. The focus should be on a person's abilities, qualifications, and merits rather than factors that they have no control over.
I don't think Anatole France really had thought things through when he wrote that quote...
Snooping at your comment history, you're talking about Finland?
In general, there are massively fewer people sleeping under bridges in places that get seriously cold. How much of this is just climate?
(Ex: in the US, Boston and San Francisco have very different numbers of people sleeping rough, while both being very liberal places for the US)
Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be racism free, the degree to which it is focused on just proves that the US isn't free of racism. Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
I don't know what's right or wrong really but I can say that the rapidness of the shift was definitely shocking to me. There's a lot of disagreement between Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z on the topic because of it.
Nothing "reversed" about it. Racism is racism.
This is the second time the current Supreme Court has reversed a previous unconstitutional Supreme Court decision. I love it!
Believe me, this has been considered and tried in various contexts. The problem is that in the end schools and companies find out that they don't achieve the "right" mix of ethnicities and genders and so it's back to square one.
In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.
In an already racist system, doing something like economic class based support (example: 20% of college admissions need to come from poor households) would just mostly go to the privileged race and perpetuate the systemic racism.
Your post is also an illustration of what white privilege can look like. I know you said you’re not American, but the tone matches to a T. White people don’t realize the negative effects of racism on others and others family history and can’t even conceive of it. From having cab drivers not willing to pick you up, to not getting a job or being passed over for promotions, let alone going to schools that are under funded. And as a side effect of that racism towards non-whites, white people benefit by getting the can, the job, the promotion, the good schools that the non-whites, but equally qualified did not.
And as the head paragraph states, that gets embedded into society in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family.
According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
The per capita income for "whites" in the US is $36,962
The per capita income for the following groups is higher than that: Indian, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
Similar results for median household incomes.
I couldn't easily find the data but I've seen previous reports of sub-groups of "blacks" that also have higher median incomes than whites (as a group). Ahh, here is an article talking about the success of Nigerian immigrants, as an example.
Please explain how to reconcile this data with your statement.
Minorities, like the Uyghurs, were exempt from the 1-child policy and they got extra points on the national college exam.
It is, but it is an attempt to right a wrong, which isn't an easy thing to do or measure. It's a moralistic endeavor and moralistic endeavors can become monsters in their own right.
>To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race.
It's become a political football, because of this, I think it's perpetuating it more than it would be naturally. Morgan Freeman articulated this well many years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnpIhqSLto
>Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
It's funny, this is done to ensure that historically oppressed races are measured for success / failure. It seems to support to your reverse racism comment.
>Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
I agree, that's why AA was struck down. It's a clear violation of the 14th amendment. This was known at the time and known in the early 2000's (2003?) when this came up before. It's always been considered an emergency measure that would need to end because it was a clear violation of equal protection under the law clause of the 14th.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”
Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country
Honestly, I think this is 100% the responsibility of parents. They are the ones that need to break the generational cycle of whatever they're facing. Beyond that - as you say - needs based approaches to this.
I don't understand why we as a society can't simply have "Oh you got more than 95% on your standardized test scores? 100% full scholarship to any college and any degree you wish without paying it back." That is how you fix a society if you ask me, by rewarding hard work and merit.
Just take from some and give to others
But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in life?
My guess is not, in which case it would be justified under the principles behind it.
Having successful minorities that continue to produce success multi-generationally is a good thing. It brings people out of poverty, creates positive examples for people that look like someone who is struggling, creates more wealth in the targeted communities which can be spread around, etc.
As The Boss said, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"...
But not the same “cream” - that’s what the current cream is trying to preserve
> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs
I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.
AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.
Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.
The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).
Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.
It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.
Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.
"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:tex....
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.
But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?
> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?
"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.
With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.
Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].
Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.
I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.
But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.
This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tennis%...
I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.
It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.
Also, given that the split of actual humans in the workforce is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.
For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.
If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.
> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.
Equal opportunity to participate, yes.
It starts with a basic belief—do you agree that US Society is disadvantageous for certain racial demographics?
And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.
In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.
One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.
But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district.
Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Because if someone can't go to MIT, they're doomed to a life of abject poverty? Really?
A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.
OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.
Into that medical school. There are others.
Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.
It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from.
Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding).
Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it.
These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.
I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house
The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
> where most research has been done for white ethnicities
The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
I was referring to redlining. See https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
> The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
Of course, and any difference in equity associated with the house. Around 75% of whites own a home versus 45% of blacks. And as you know -- homeownership is the single largest source of wealth for most people in the US.
> The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Of course. I'm talking about proportional representation. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4670264/
> Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
The person I was responding to seemed to be making that assertion. And I never said that discrimination was the only way to remedy past discrimination.
The part that's disheartening is that so many people are so up in arms about affirmative action -- and how its discriminatory. But consider everything else we discussed (and there's a lot more) as having no real impact. I mean, why are we even talking about it...
It's a hard problem.
I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
[1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
> Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.
Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other.
The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.
Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out:
1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.
2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.
3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better.
4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools.
5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same.
Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it.
Breaking conditioning is hard.
This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.
thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
- You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units
- A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in.
- There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units
- This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in
This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz.
The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model:
- You have 100 people in a work force.
- 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years.
- Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months.
Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in.
This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
Maybe you’re just being too kind.
So the person that got into Stanford by writing #BlackLivesMastter 100 times was just a coincidence?
Of course there are more people who deserve to be there than there is room. But keeping it small allows it to achieve something special that being bigger wouldn’t allow. Those that do make it in are by and large absolutely top talent.
So it’s not just education and network that matters. I’d argue culture is one of the most important under-appreciated aspects. And MIT culture is top notch.
I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.
A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.
At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.
I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.
the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools
if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.
I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
"better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions
After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!
Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks.
IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.
Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.
But we've known this for a long time, and still refuse to deal with it. With some resources you can deal with this issue.
For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.
I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.
But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it.
I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged.
I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...