Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants

https://apnews.com/e97f08eb935989840bda430bb7a32e15

by pizza • 6 years ago

558 679 6 years ago

The age-old question of whether we want equal opportunity or equal outcome...

x3n0ph3n33• 6 years ago

Harrison Bergeron is the logical conclusion to fundamentally equal outcome. Is that a society anyone really wants to live in?

d33lio3• 6 years ago

Show me any evidence that this isn't literally what the far left wants? CA is moving to remove hiring anti-discrimination protections, as if nothing could go wrong with that line of reasoning...

jgalt2122• 6 years ago

Not for me. But I don't thinks its' A or B, but some blend and it's always been some blend. House of Commons and House of Lords. Representatives and Senators, Electoral College, etc.

I believe the right discussion to have is where do we as society want to be between the two outcomes. Not do we want A, or do we want B.

pickledish• 6 years ago

Man, I've been frustrated when I see that story recently; it reads like a bad caricature of what a lot of good movements are trying to accomplish. In reality the goal (though not always perfectly executed of course) is always about raising people up, not tearing people down (like the handicaps in the story)

5mk• 6 years ago

As an aside, I find it interesting how Harrison Bergeron is so commonly misinterpreted as a satire of the left. When one considers Vonnegut's personal beliefs and the strawman portrayal of communism in the story, it really should become clear that it is actually a critique of Cold War/anticommunist hysteria. A satire of anticommunist satire, if you will.

_jal• 6 years ago

...In the same way that cannibalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism.

Don't get me wrong - the impulse is there and some people think that way. Just like are absolutely people who would peddle filet of Steve.

But amplifying the marginal to discredit the general is fundamentally dishonest, and we won't do that here, right?

jhowell6• 6 years ago

There has never been equal opportunity. This is clear. The reasons why opportunity has not been equal is becoming more clear, regardless which side of the nature versus nurture debate you fall on. Equal outcome should not be the goal (test scores and grades are not the best nor only indicator the likelihood of success). The goal should be equal access.

kyleee• 6 years ago

Do you want equal opportunity for everyone? Is "equal access" a synonym for equal opportunity or do you have something else in mind?

chrisco2554• 6 years ago

In that case, we simply need to publish all lectures online free of charge.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

The goal should be equal access.

You mean equal opportunity then.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

Truly equal access would not result in equal graduation rates or equal outcomes.

I don't think "equal access" is really what the crowd most ardently pushing this would accept.

mucholove• 6 years ago

Is Yale an outcome or an opportunity?

PeterisP• 6 years ago

Equality of outcome would mean that the race/ethnicity/etc proportion of people admitted to Yale would be similar to the appropriate proportion in the general community instead of being wildly different.

Equality of opportunity would mean that if two equally qualified persons of different races/ethnicities/etc have the same chance of getting admitted.

The big issue is that you can't have both, mostly due to various family and childhood circumstances that mean that different groups have different rates of "getting to X years old with qualifications/skills/preparations Y".

For Yale admissions, you can have one, or the other, or a compromise in the middle. You can have a situation that's unfair/unequal according to both criteria, but you can't get both "types of equality" at the same time, as increasing one generally requires to trade off or sacrifice the other.

d33lio3• 6 years ago

It's only a matter of time before "asian privilege" becomes a common phrase and / or people start campaigning to no longer classify asian / pacific-islanders as a "minority".

dx87• 6 years ago

I've already seen people jokingly use the term "schrodinger's minority" to refer to Asian's and Indians. They're excluded from minority statistics when trying to push for more diversity hires, but included in minority statistics when trying to show how many succesful businesses are run by minorities.

a_t48• 6 years ago

I wonder what the overlap between that and "model minority" is.

Decker872• 6 years ago

I heard someone once joke that Asians and Indians are granted non-minority status because of their high math scores.

admiralspoo2• 6 years ago

As an asian, I've already been told by a colleague to check my privilege...nevermind my skin color is darker than most blacks in the US.

olliej5• 6 years ago

I mean the systemic racism against black people in America is far worse than Asian people for a long time - Ivy leagues didn’t have blanket bans on Asian students, so they started getting the legacy admission benefits a long time ago.

This isn’t to say that Asian Americans don’t experience a ton of discrimination, but rather that the penalties for being black are systemic and reach out a long way.

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

To be fair, privilege isn't only based on skin color. Only you can decide if your colleague was out of line in that instance, of course.

Consider that most people here on HN have some level of privilege simply by being in the tech field, which is highly paid and respected right now.

rconti3• 6 years ago

It's already common (in the US) to hear diversity initiatives as being about inclusion of non-SE Asian minorities (as these groups are 'overrepresented').

It used to be enough, from a rhetorical perspective, to talk about representation of "minorities" (or, "minorities and woman" because women are a very slight population majority in the US).. but then once a minority became "overrepresented", they had to find a better way to describe the groups whose inclusion they're looking to increase.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

In serious "oppression olympics" circles, I've seen it claimed that they're "not people of colour", aka they're white.

Which is an indirect way of achieving the same ends.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

To some degree, shouldn't that be the goal?

I mean, asians are likely to always be a minority in the US, as in, there are fewer of them then there are caucasians. But if they reach the point where they are no longer disadvantaged or discriminated against... isn't that what we want? Not just for asians, but for everybody?

doktrin• 6 years ago

people start campaigning to no longer classify asian / pacific-islanders as a "minority".

I'm not aware of any organized campaigns to this effect, but the idea that Asians aren't "real" minorities / PoC is one that sometimes gets tossed around in progressive circles.

e.g.

https://www.insider.com/the-internet-is-debating-who-to-call...

Arguments put forth range from the purely visual ("some asians are fairer than white people") to the socioeconomic ("asians don't give back to the black communities in which they own businesses"), or variants thereof.

I guess it's a gentle reminder in these relatively polarized times that relations between minority groups in the US have historically been tense, be it black-latinx, black-asian or black-jewish. It might feel like there's a detente right now due to the focus being on the state and the white power structure et al - but the underlying animosity is real enough. Humans are tribal to a fault, and that will never change.

toomanybeersies• 6 years ago

Slightly tangential, but why are Pacific Islanders often considered in the same "ethnic group" as Asians in the USA?

They're about as similar as North Africans and Europeans.

skissane9• 6 years ago

Slightly tangential, but why are Pacific Islanders often considered in the same "ethnic group" as Asians in the USA?

Up until 1997, the US government's official racial classification system contained a race called "Asian or Pacific Islander". In that year, they modified the system to split that race into two new races – "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander". However, more than 20 years later, the old system still gets used sometimes (e.g. the University of Pennsylvania's published diversity statistics), but most institutions in the US have moved to the new system (and I think as time goes by the old system becomes less and less common.)

Now, why they did originally group these two groups together? I'm not entirely sure why. There are some historical connections between the two groups – the Pacific Island languages (Hawaiian, Maori, etc) belong to the Austronesian language family, which is believed to originally come from Taiwan, and contains several major languages of Southeast Asia (e.g. Malay, Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog) – but I'm not sure whether that history plays any role in the decision to originally group them together. The original grouping was established by OMB Circular No. A-46, dated May 12, 1977 – I have been unable to find a copy of that document, maybe it contains some explanation of why they did it.

They're about as similar as North Africans and Europeans.

The US government officially classifies North African and Middle Eastern people as "White". Some Arab Americans and Iranian Americans don't agree with the label "White", and don't be surprised if the system gets changed sooner or later to split out a separate label such as "Middle Eastern or North African": https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-census-middle-east-no...

xiaolingxiao4• 6 years ago

Any background why the fed is going after yale, but not Harvard Princeton MIT, Penn or Stanford?

rconti3• 6 years ago

Timing, I'm guessing.

The Justice Department had previously filed court papers siding with Asian American groups who had levied similar allegations against Harvard University.

olliej5• 6 years ago

Harvard has already faced this and had it shut down. Because it’s the fed maybe they’re subject to some kind of double jeopardy type thing? Or just tying different courts?

skissane9• 6 years ago

SFFA vs Harvard isn’t over yet. Harvard won at District Court level but SFFA is appealing. It is likely to ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, but it is probably going to take a few years for the case to get there.

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

A federal judge in 2019 cleared Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants

mrosett• 6 years ago

To be clear, Yale absolutely does discriminate against Asian applicants. As far as I can tell, they justify it using the same language about "personality" that they used to justifying discriminating against Jews in the the first half of the 20th century.

jhowell6• 6 years ago

Seems like this statement might need a little support to make its point without being inflammatory, or worse inaccurate.

edit: typo

jonathanyc• 6 years ago

That a supposed lack of personality was used as cover for discrimination against Jewish applicants to universities is well-known. I’m not sure why you’d express concern over that reference being inflammatory ex nihilo.

There are citations for that point specifically in this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions...

Harvard itself found a bias against Asian-American applicants in an internal investigation in 2013, but had never made the findings public or acted on them.[1] Plaintiffs and commentators have compared thetreatment of Asians with the Jewish quota in place in the early 20th century, which used deficient personalities as the reason for excluding Jews in elite universities.[4][1]

- https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

The "well-rounded" fraud against Jewish-Americans is one of the most well-established direct educational discrimination of recent US history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Lawrence_Lowell#Admissions_...

Lowell wanted a quota, but couldn't get it and introduced this well-roundedness thing and weirdly and totally coincidentally Jewish people found themselves unable to match up. Turns out they were all one-dimensional human beings less skilled at all those other things White Americans were capable at. It is sheer good fortune Lowell was there to rescue us from these nerdy egg-heads. Close one.

dmurray• 6 years ago

Source for the "personality" language? In everything I've seen from US universities, they justify race-based admissions policies primarily with language about "diversity".

rconti3• 6 years ago

This is what it is referencing:

One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard’s consideration of applicants’ soft skills—things like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “integrity,” and “courage”—in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of SFFA of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans’ chances of getting in.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/harvar...

MichaelRazum3• 6 years ago

It reminds me a bit what my parents told me about the soviet union. So basically it was kind of the same. Too much jews in the universities, so lets discriminate them. The same is going on here, as far as race plays any role. Kind of sad to see this kind of decision making around the globe.

mc32• 6 years ago

I’ve heard the same thing regarding the SU. If you were the wrong ethnicity even if you got the right answer and showed all your work the professor could say, “yes, but you used the wrong solution” and other such nonsense.

dmch-1• 6 years ago

Russian empire had the same policy. They justified it by the fact that unversities were financed by public money, and it would be unfair if most of the student, who this money would go to, turned out jews due to "this group's propensity" to education.

jpxw3• 6 years ago

It reminds you of the Soviet Union because the underlying philosophy is the same. Equality at all costs.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

These are loathsome comparisons. The experience of Jews in the Soviet Union in 1991 and before are not comparable to the experience of east Asians in America in 2020.

For every similarity you might imagine there are 1,000 more important dissimilarities. Surely if you are sincere about reducing discrimination "around the globe" you wouldn't be doing this kind of stylized generalization.

playing_colours• 6 years ago

You can find here https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 infamous "Jewish Problems" that were given to select applicants during entrance exams to the math department of Moscow State University. They were designed to prevent Jews from getting a passing grade.

boruto• 6 years ago

India also has this in the form of reservation system. f.e., for the prestigious IITs

Less than 14.5% of the total seats are available for the general category students.

The total category wise distribution in the IIT’s for academic year 2019–20 is as follows

* OBC-NCL – 27%

* Scheduled Caste (SC) – 15%

* Scheduled Tribe (ST) – 7.5%

* Persons with disability (PwD)- 5% in each category (namely OPEN, GEN-EWS, OBC-NCL, SC and ST)

* 2 seats in each institute for ‘Defense service candidates’ Foreign nationals- up to 10% (supernumerary)

* Female candidates- 17% (supernumerary)

* Economically weaker section- 4% currently(It will go up to 10% in a couple of years)

Total percentage of reserved seats - 85.5%

This quota system is present in all govt funded and public sector jobs and colleges.

pps433• 6 years ago

On the bright side, we now have collections of "coffins" [1] - problems that have a simple solution that is difficult to find. Those were given to undesirable applicants to justify weeding them out.

[1] http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/coffins.html

golergka3• 6 years ago

They used to present applying Jews with special problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

This practice was supposed to end with sovient union — but my school, which always had a fair share of jews that applied to math department in MSU, taught those in 00s, and athough discriminiation wasn't as blatant then, I'm not sure that it completely went away.

dirtyid2• 6 years ago

This years UCSF admissions also caught a stir. Asian admission cut in half from 40 in 2019 to 22% in 2020. Student demo suggest it was cut from 60% the years prior.

dba7dba2• 6 years ago

You sure about that? That number sounds so extreme that I have to see official source to believe it...

gfaure• 6 years ago

What is most galling about this is that even if we assume that culture X yields candidates with personality characteristics undervalued by culture Y, _racial background doesn't indicate culture_. How should a second-generation Taiwanese American raised predominantly in American culture answer the race question on their application?

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

African American. Everyone should answer the race question with whatever they think benefits themselves the most, because race is bullshit.

icelancer7• 6 years ago

Discrimination against Asians and Jews is very similar in most respects, I agree. Definitely seems to be that way here.

rbecker3• 6 years ago

Yale is 20-27% Jewish [1,2], while the US is just 1.7-2.6% [3]. Few other groups would have the gall to call 10x over-representation as being discriminated against.

[1] https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-univer...

[2] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews

atroche• 6 years ago

Would be interested to see if Asians whose families have been in the USA for many years get in at different rates to e.g. immigrants or the children of immigrants. It would indicate that perhaps Yale et al. really do care about "personality", and aren't just being racist.

walamaking2• 6 years ago

Measuring the nth degree from 1st-gen immigrants is a pretty poor proxy for "personality".

leafboi2• 6 years ago

I would say most universities who don't have a huge asian student body are probably discriminating against asians.

jollofricepeas2• 6 years ago

Actual statistics of the Yale student body by ethnicity:

- American Indian or Alaska Native 0.3%

- Asian 14.7%

- Black or African-American 5.8%

- Hispanic of any race 9.8%

- Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander 0.1%

- White 42.7%

- Race/ethnicity unknown 1.0

SOURCE:

https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts

jollofricepeas2• 6 years ago

US population by ethnicity (2019)

- Black or African American alone, percent(a) 13.4%

- American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent(a) 1.3%

- Asian alone, percent(a)5.9%

- Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent(a) 0.2%

- Two or More Races, percent 2.8%

- Hispanic or Latino, percent(b) 18.5%

SOURCE:

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219

newfriend2• 6 years ago

Note: these do not add up to 100%, because they are ignoring international students. So whatever comparison you're trying to do with US demographics needs to be normalized.

fraudsyndrome• 6 years ago

Not sure what assumptions are to be made by comparing this with US population by ethnicity except that they should be match up - which I don't agree with.

Also are Jewish people considered White in this case? I simultaneously see that they are referred to as minorities but also don't see them represented in statistics such as these when comparing ethnicity in X with ethnic population in the US.

jbullock35• 6 years ago

Those percentages are a little different from the percentages given (along with much other detail) by Yale's Office of Institutional Research: https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/w004_enroll_racegen....

The percentages at the link above are labeled as "University-wide Enrollments," which seems to mean that they account for graduate students as well as undergraduates. But the DOJ finding is only about undergraduate admissions.

enriquto4• 6 years ago

Hispanic of any race

what does that even mean, exactly? I fail to see how can it be defined to be non-intersecting with the other categories.

piokoch• 6 years ago

I am really curious how those Yale guys check applicants race. Some kind of skin color pigment measurement (sorry, you are a bit too white to qualify as African American, next person please)?

Or do they measure someones eye shape to "detect" Asian people?

How about Jews, is nose measurement sufficient (they need to dig really hard in their archives to find some Nazi "scientific" statistics on that...) or they just ask to take off pants during interview to check if someone is not hiding his race?

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

language about "personality"

More on this, although it's about Harvard not Yale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

kevingadd• 6 years ago

Kind of a complicated assertion here:

The investigation also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”

The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity

If they're "racially balancing" their classes, that does sound like it is a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity in their classes. Whether or not that's actually a noble or appropriate goal is a different question, but it sounds like it's allowed...

Of course the definition of "balance" here is tricky. Corresponding ratios to the overall racial balance of the country? The state? Overall racial balance of all applicants? Of all alumni?

olliej5• 6 years ago

Of all alumni is dangerous because these schools banned black students until the 70s.

Then when allowing them actively worked to limit entrance.

Finally they all operate with legacy admissions so the racist bans on applicants have a long tail

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

Which schools?

The school in question never formally disallowed blacks.

"Yale’s first black graduate was Courtland Van Rensselaer Creed, who received his medical degree in 1857 and went on to have a prominent practice in New York City"

virtuous_signal4• 6 years ago

Remember when The College Board was developing an "adversity score" but then dropped it in the face of criticism?

I honestly wish we would just do that. We would actually have something quantitative instead of vague generalizations about "personality". The methodology could be scrutinized, and centralized (instead of every college coming up with its own special formula), and we could stop talking about this every X months.

HPsquared2• 6 years ago

We'd just talk about the weightings of the various "adversity factors" instead, it's the same problem.

virtuous_signal4• 6 years ago

Right, at the beginning sure, and ideally it would quickly improve. But why have all of these institutions do it individually, and out of the public eye? I doubt some random Yale admissions specialist has unique societal insights that the other institutions don't.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

Except racking up points for your adversity is the point of such policies.

Avoiding doing so basically means you need to rack up the inverse - privilege points - except you're not allowed to do that, so it turns into obscure "penalty points" hidden in euphemisms.

s1artibartfast5• 6 years ago

at least it would be more intellectually honest and transparent.

president• 6 years ago

We would actually have something quantitative

They're called standardized tests

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

To engage in this conversation you sort of need to accept the premise that colleges are being used to correct historical (and even current) injustices, and then go from there.

You may not think it's the "right" thing to do, but it's the premise on which this topic is based and figuring it only muddies the quality of the conversation.

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

adversity score

Hm - so people who faced more "adversity" would be propelled to the top of the list? I can see that going horribly wrong: if it worked perfectly, you'd end up with yo-yo generations where one generation went to a good college and had a successful career (and if you don't believe one thing follows from the other, why bother with the adversity score at all?) while the next would be relegated to struggling, giving their children the needed "adversity". Realistically, though, you'd have smart parents finding the right mix of adversity to give their kids a leg up just just the way they find the right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today.

Decker872• 6 years ago

Nah, you'd just have wealthy people deciding how they calculate the score and making sure they can tweak the numbers to show their kids are disadvantaged.

TheDong• 6 years ago

You know, I'll take "yo-yo generations" over what we've got now. Right now we've got "a massive wealth divide". "yo-yo"ing would imply that some people that are right now stuck on the bottom would at least have some time a bit higher up.

That sounds like a strict improvement over the current system, where those that struggle adversity are stuck trying to pull themselves up by their bootstrap forever.

If that means my parents made decent money, but I can't get into a good school and have to struggle a bit? Sure, fine, that's still nothing compared to those who have parents with no money and also can't get into a decent school.

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

What mechanism do you imagine would push high income families down the socioeconomic ladder?

Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.

If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.

twobuy• 6 years ago

right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today

This is close, but I imagine it would be more akin to temporarily relocating to a different school district, then selling / moving out after the children hit college age.

Note that this type of thing does aalready happen, albeit not to the extremes you're imagining. Imagine one parent retiring early or temporarily so that total family income qualifies for certain loans or grants.

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

That kind of quantitative methodology was scrutinized in Gratz v. Bollinger, and judged to be illegal.

virtuous_signal4• 6 years ago

The adversity score in this case wasn't directly related to race, but I think some facts about your school and neighborhood, so not illegal in the way that assigning point values to certain races would be.

monoideism3• 6 years ago

Family income is a pretty good proxy for any adversity score.

Because of the African American income gap, it would also serve to boost AA enrollment, particularly from disadvantaged inner city kids, while still not discriminating against the white kid growing up amid grinding poverty in rural Appalachia.

It’s not a perfect indicator, but it’s a very good one. On average, it even picks up on adversities such as many medical/physical disabilities, since families usually take a big financial hit on account of such issues.

oblio• 6 years ago

That's a great idea that will never happen. Rich people will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.

polartx• 6 years ago

"poor kids are just as bright as white kids" - joe biden

guerrilla• 6 years ago

This would be really nice. It's objective, quantitative, scalable and I think fair. This gets to the real problem too because if dynamics ever changed and some other groups we disadvantaged at large, they woukd automatically be advantaged here. Thus it automatically adapts to the situation. Not saying its perfect, but it'd be a great improvement.

xibalba• 6 years ago

I'm not sure an adversity could ever be anything but subjective.

Nasrudith3• 6 years ago

A full fledged accurate adversity score (as much as such a thing can be objectively quantified) brings to mind some very weird perverse incentives resulting from it from the sheer desperation for an edge. From deliberately sandbagging income around admission (transferring to a lower paid start up).

Not to mention potential absurd implication and emergent from a model like "due to statistical outliers the best thing for getting an average middle class child into the Ivy League is to both survive cancer and to survive a school shooting". It could rapidly turn into an absurdist comedy sketch about misery poker.

three_seagrass2• 6 years ago

Lots of soapboxing in the comments here.

The Justice Dept made the exact same allegations against Harvard, and last year a Federal Judge found that Harvard was constitutionally in the clear.

SCOTUS has said that race can be narrowly used in admissions to promote diversity, which Yale says they are doing. The fact that the Justice Department wants Yale to cease all uses of race in admissions (despite this interpretation) is suspect.

bllguo4• 6 years ago

unfortunately i find it hard to take the justice dept. seriously these days. it's become a political tool.

i say this as someone who would have been directly affected if this claim were true

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

When wasn't it, at just at the high-profile margins?

Its daily work currently consists of fighting sex-trafficking and other inarguably good pursuits... The claim that the DOJ is any more political today than a decade or three ago doesn't seem borne out by the facts, IMO.

jcampbell1• 6 years ago

The rules around AA and the courts has been in a constant state of change since 1964. AA was justified as a temporary solution, thus there is no stare decisis which people can agree. I think it is unpredictable what the courts will do. The issue is setup to be never settled.

SpicyLemonZest4• 6 years ago

Indeed, one of the major precedents in favor of affirmative action (Grutter v. Bollinger) anticipated that it would no longer be needed after 2028.

jdkee• 6 years ago

1. The Harvard case is being appealed. It could certainly work it’s way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

2. The facts are not entirely clear how Yale is using race but a “disparate impact” analysis may yield some insight.

wbl• 6 years ago

No, the judge found that despite Harvard having introduced the current system to discriminate, and the current system discriminating, the plaintiffs hadn't shown Harvard maintained the system to discriminate against them.

admiralspoo2• 6 years ago

The whole undergraduate system in the US needs dismantling and rebuilding. it is costly, wasteful, discriminatory and largely about signaling than any skills. If race-based admissions moves to STEM graduate school, then we're in trouble.

https://medium.com/swlh/y-combinator-not-lambda-school-is-un....

chrisco2554• 6 years ago

The higher education sorting hat has really got to be disbanded. It is increasingly at odds with the 21st century.

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

That's a nice thing to say, but it's utterly unrealistic when 29,000 students apply to Yale every year.

So you need a system to decide who gets in and who doesn't. Just like a job interview, you don't just hire people at random. Some kind of system is necessary.

ProfessorLayton2• 6 years ago

This is a symptom of issues that still very much exist in the 21st century. In the US access to a good education is closely tied wealth, which is closely tied to homeownership and property values, which are in turn still benefiting from discriminatory housing policies [1].

As an example, the Bay Area has some of the best schools and most expensive real estate in the country. This is due to a lack of supply, yet to this day it is illegal to build high density and inexpensive housing in the vast majority of lots so that the less wealthy can start building equity, which again is a huge portion of wealth. Ordinances like high minimum lot sizes and low coverage were deliberately designed to make it more expensive for POC to buy into a neighborhood. This is covered extensively in The Color of Law, and is a great read [2].

Perhaps the better approach is to fix these systemic issues so that schools didn't have to compensate for them.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segreg...

chrisco2554• 6 years ago

Yeah but in the 21st century it's ridiculous to associate physical buildings with good education. There's no reason, today, why students can't consume lectures from several world class instructors at scale. Video lectures are not even inferior to the actual experience. Do you know how many lectures are skipped entirely by students in college? Do you know how many students are distracted by phones and laptops in lectures? This whole system needs to be retooled. The main thing students need from college is enforced accountability and pacing to keep them from dawdling. This can be done with proctors and tutors coupled with world class video lectures from top professors.

freen• 6 years ago

I wonder what the makeup of the 14% of the incoming freshman class that are legacy’s is...

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity

Sounds like SCOTUS will agree with Yale on this one.

olliej5• 6 years ago

Weird that they don’t mention that the vast majority of legacy entries are white, followed by Asian.

Any school that had racist policies that banned black and other PoC that still has legacy admissions is fundamentally biased in favor of white applicants, and will always be.

The bar for legacy entry is incredibly low, far below GPA requirements for any affirmative action has ever been.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

Isn't that obviously going to wean itself out of existence in a generation or two, if whites are (as alleged) being discriminated against so heavily?

olliej5• 6 years ago

It will take more than a couple of generations, because the children of people who got legacy admittance also get legacy admittance, which removes available slots for people who don't just have the benefit of being born to the right parents.

That's the big cudgel right: look at the racial spread of legacy acceptances, and if that does not match (within reason) the average racial spread then legacy admittance is adding a discriminatory pressure against those races that are less represented.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action. It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.

Although it's perplexing just how...nasty?...the discrimination against Asians is. I can't imagine ever trying to justify that "all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college, as is proven to be what the colleges are doing here.

Utterly unacceptable, IMHO.

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

proven

Nothing was proven. This is just an allegation right now.

Wait until the court date. And then the SCOTUS overruling the decision, because like you said: discrimination is required for affirmative action. And universities like Yale are specifically allowed to discriminate for that purpose.

For any allegation to stick, the Feds will have to show that the reason was not for diversity. Which, obviously, it is.

throwaway1892624• 6 years ago

I may get a lot of hate for this... But I think affirmative action has opposite the desired effect. The majority groups are dicriminated against by design. I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place. I think it makes them worse.

The government should find a way to benefit minorities without outright descrimination against those that doesn't fit their definition. My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.

lotsofpulp2• 6 years ago

My personal favorite idea is improving schools. If we diverted enough money and resources to primary schools in poor areas, we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action without just switching the groups we discrimate against.

The problem is student outcomes aren't linked to how much money and resources the school has, they're linked to how much money and resources the parents (and the network of the parents) of the children have. Networking is the primary benefit of top tier schools, and so unfairly giving a chance to those without the network is the only way for them to move up the ladder as a group.

This will necessarily displace individually who might deserve to be there more, but the problem is an intractable one due to the outsize gains of being part of that network.

I am not endorsing affirmative action, or discrimination against certain "successful" minorities, simply offering a chain of reasoning for it.

nickff• 6 years ago

Increased spending does not seem to help much; perhaps the money is not being well allocated.[1][2][3]

[1] http://www.npri.org/imgLib/20110228_Fed_ed_spending_vs_resul...

[2] https://rogerkerr.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/derugy-column-...

[3] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

Why not both?

Give more money to public schools, and support affirmative action until those network effects start occurring naturally.

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

I don't think this does anything to fix the tensions causing racism in the first place.

The purpose of affirmative action isn't to cure racism, broadly defined as racial animosity or something similar. The purpose of affirmative action is to correct the harm caused by previous institutional bias (edit: a given institution previously systematically excluded a group and now is making up for that exclusion). Racial animosity and so-forth should be dealt with in other fashions.

coredog64• 6 years ago

AIUI, it’s even worse, as the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are well off members of the minority group (e.g. the kids of doctors and dentists) rather than students whose SES would be significantly improved by a degree from a prestigious institution. This is because admission is the first hurdle, not the last, and being well off removes potential sources of stress.

leereeves• 6 years ago

The majority groups are decriminalized against by design

I think autocorrect failed here. Did you mean to say "discriminated against by design"?

jpxw3• 6 years ago

Not only that, but it becomes impossible to tell whether someone in a group benefited by AA is in a given position because of AA, or because of their merit. This is harmful to people in those groups.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

I happen to agree: the worst penalty is in schooling, and the most bang-for-interventionary-buck is also in schooling.

It's also not visible to peers in adulthood, and thus not a source of jealousy or mistreatment or suspicion, as many AA recipients detail experiencing.

It's also the most moral way to address something which - IMO - deserves addressing, but which currently is addressed quite immorally.

See: the OP article.

jayd162• 6 years ago

If you assume all groups are on average equal but certain groups are underrepresented you must assume that the selection process is flawed. If the process is flawed than correcting the process can be seen as removing bias, not adding it.

Do you feel like any correction at all is discrimination, the correction of is flawed in some specific way, or do you feel like its a matter of overcorrection?

lliamander2• 6 years ago

Regarding schools, I think there is evidence that charter schools and school vouchers have a significant positive impact for the most disadvantaged kids.

arwhatever• 6 years ago

The funding bill could be crafted so that disproportionately high, or nationally-leveling, funding could be sent to schools in ZIP codes with the lowest average incomes, and the law could exist in perpetuity such that it would always assist the most disadvantaged ZIPs without regard for the ebb and flow of various identity groups over time.

boogies• 6 years ago

we could achieve similar outcomes to affirmative action

Hopefully much better, affirmative action harms even the minorities it attempts to help, let alone others like Asians: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...

raxxorrax6• 6 years ago

You are correct because it forms obvious common interest groups. That is at least one factor. Maybe I should scrap the "obvious" since it seems to be beyond elite university staff.

My neighbor looks pretty similar to me but that doesn't mean we get along (My neighbor is pretty cool and doesn't look like me at all, but the concept should be clear).

slg4• 6 years ago

I don't mean to be edgy here, but this is necessarily true in service of affirmative action.

I think it depends on the goal. Is the goal to rank all students and then send the top X number of students acceptance letters? Or is the goal to set a baseline of what it takes to be an successful student at Yale and then select a diverse group of students that all meet that baseline criteria? The former makes it a direct competition between students. You have to choose if applicant A is better than applicant B. The latter instead looks at each applicant individually and whether they would be a successful student. They are now competing against the overall population of applicants instead of any other individual applicants. Considering the number of students who could be successful at a school like Yale is always going to greatly exceed the number of applicants who are admitted, the Asian student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against just like the Black student who could do the work at Yale but is rejected is not discriminated against.

googlryas• 6 years ago

Even with the baseline+diversity system, you have a situation where people will be rejected because they are of race X - but if everything was exactly the same about them except they were of race Y, they would have been accepted. To me, that seems like textbook racism.

Also, the diverse argument doesn't hold much water to me, because they basically only want a diverse group in terms of race, but not other factors such as income diversity, height diversity, ugliness/beauty diversity, national diversity, parental-scholastic-achievement diversity, athletic diversity, etc.

Imagine if an NBA team said "Sorry, we can't hire you, we have too many black people playing right now"

dahfizz2• 6 years ago

Opponents of AA would argue that there is not one baseline, though. There are not enough candidates of race X and Y to meet diversity quotas, so the baseline criteria is lowered for students of those races. This means that a candidate of race Z has to work harder and achieve higher to be considered above the baseline.

There's not great data about college admissions out there that I could find, so I don't know if this is true or not.

hardtke• 6 years ago

The problem with any discussion of "ranking" students is that it is impossible to define the ranking system. Is the goal to produce the highest GPAs at Yale? To maximize future donations? To produce the greatest number of Supreme Court justices? I had a friend in college who was recruited because the marching band needed a baton twirler. To make matters worse, some programs (such as computer science) are over impacted and it may be the case that the "top" students all want to be in the same programs.

keenmaster• 6 years ago

It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.

Not true. There is a third way. This is a problem of artificially induced scarcity. Instead of recognizing the problem for what it is, we are creating a false dichotomy of choice between merit and justice. We sacrifice one for the other, blind to the possibility that we can have both.

I will use a metaphor comparing seats at great universities to slices of pie:

When a bakery finds that customers are routinely fighting to buy the last few pieces of pie, it should simply bake more pie. The U.S. government isn't just one of the biggest pie bakeries around, it also subsidizes all the other bakers and loans money to their customers. No one has more leverage than them. If they say "you must make more pie," the other bakers must fall in line, or else they stand to lose a lot of money and decline relative to their peers.

If X # of university applicants are admitted due to affirmative action, the government should mandate that the university expand its capacity by X students. Otherwise, the government should threaten to remove all subsidies (including loans to students pursuing an education at that institution).

For its part, the government should also fund an increase in capacity at the best public universities. Perhaps it should even create new universities to help solve this problem. While people deserve the best education they can get, private universities do not deserve public monies if they refuse to increase positive externalities at the perceived expense of their prestige.

hogFeast• 6 years ago

Yep, I am somewhere else in the world but benefited (although somewhat indirectly) from a similar kind of process and it is ludicrously unfair, arbitrary, and there is almost no oversight of how decisions are actually being made.

The only effective system is one that is fair to all. You can't make up for socioeconomic differences this way. College isn't a magic pill if you are disadvantaged. And I would be genuinely surprised if it actually helped the people it is aimed to help because unfair systems are always co-opted by the people who have advantages.

Also, I went to school in the West with many students from Asia. They worked harder. That is it. It wasn't a fair sample, the school attracted kids who wanted to work and attend university in my country. But they out worked everyone else bar one or two people. I am not sure exactly what the allegation is here: that working harder is cheating?

norswap• 6 years ago

The article mentions the law makes allowance for this:

The Supreme Court has ruled colleges and universities may consider race in admissions decisions but has said that must be done in a narrowly tailored way to promote diversity and should be limited in time. Schools also bear the burden of showing why their consideration of race is appropriate.

Apparently the accusation is that Yale goes beyond what is reasonable.

skywhopper• 6 years ago

What are you referring to? I've not seen the claims you describe, and they aren't mentioned in this article.

From what I've heard the main datapoint in support of the claim that Asians and whites are being discriminated against is the average SAT score and GPA of successful applicants. But even if you don't believe that those numbers are inherently biased, I hope no one would claim they represent the totality of a person's qualifications for attending college, or their value to the institution and their fellow students.

clairity• 6 years ago

the point is that the group that should be taking the hit from affirmative action is (wealthy) white people, who have been disproportionately benefitting from an unfair system for the history of the country, not asians, who, while more successful than average, have also experienced discrimination and unfairness through most of that history.

foogazi3• 6 years ago

It's obviously impossible to enact affirmative action without the corresponding penalty on outgroup members.

Can be done with increasing seats, so same count of existing racial profiles + additions for the affirmative actioned populace

lopmotr2• 6 years ago

The end result would be indistinguishable from excluding those others. They could even just do it with words on paper with a statement like "We're accepting 100 fewer students next year." followed the next day by "We're accepting 100 extra students from our preferred races next year".

s1artibartfast5• 6 years ago

I don't agree with with Yale's position, but I also didn't see anywhere that they make your statement:

"all Asians" have personality defects that make them disproportionately bad candidates for college

I think it is important to accurately reflect their position if we, as a society, want to have a rational discussion about the role race should play in college admission.

A more accurate characterization of the Yale claim is that asians, on average, have personalities which detract from their application.

This is a much more complicated assertion to refute, because differences between races can and do exist, as demonstrated by above average test scores among asians.

jessaustin6• 6 years ago

Have you met an Asian American? Would you or Yale repeat that ridiculous slur of personality ("asians, on average, have personalities which detract...") about any other racial group? How do you feel about the "Karen" phenomenon?

Test scores are problematic because tests have some measurable level of bias. The answer to that isn't to codify drastically more bias into the process.

pyrophane• 6 years ago

I'd rather colleges were just forced to give up legacy preference.

totalZero4• 6 years ago

Why do schools need to know the race and ethnicity of their applicants in order to make merit-based admissions decisions? Even things like geographical location and economic adversity can be anonymized and quantified. It seems like a no-brainer to hire some accounting firm to filter applications for racially identifying material before they are reviewed by the admissions board.

elliekelly• 6 years ago

I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students. And there is definite value in a diverse class: differences of thought, background, opinion, and lived experience make for a much more interesting discussion in the classroom.

shajznnckfke• 6 years ago

Important correction: affirmative action at these schools mostly doesn’t take spots away from white people. It mainly takes them from Asians, because Asians outperform whites on quantitative metrics like grades and GPA. IMO this is a critical piece of information, considering the place affirmative action holds in the politics of white resentment. White people who didn’t get into top schools: turns out you can’t blame affirmative action!

Affirmative action as practiced by top schools is completely consistent with the white power structure, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering these institutions are part of that power structure.

skissane9• 6 years ago

I think this gets to the crux of the issue that's almost impossible to solve for in a "blind" way: if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students

Why not provide racially neutral class-based / disadvantage-based affirmative action instead? You get points if your parent(s) are poor. You get points if you have a single parent. You get points if you or your parent(s) have been on welfare. You get points if your parent(s) are in or have been to prison. You get points if you went to a high school with a low average academic achievement. You get points if your parent(s) have a history of homelessness or drug addiction or serious mental illness. You get points if you reside in a low income area.

That would produce a diverse student body without any direct consideration of race.

xiaolingxiao4• 6 years ago

If you dont' look at race, you might get > 50% asian like CalTech, which only look at scores.

icelancer7• 6 years ago

> if you don't look at race you're going to have a very wealthy, white, suburban, homogenous class of admitted students.

The data says otherwise. You'll have a HUGE amount of Asians and Asian-Americans. Not whites.

acwan93• 6 years ago

Counterexample: The University of California system, which prohibits considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions due to Prop 209 passed in 1996.

The UC system has a sizable Asian population as a result (and my personal experience), but also admits a diverse student body every year.

glglwty• 6 years ago

Randomly admitting Indians will give you great diversity in backgrounds. Randomly admitting 4chan users will give you great diversity of thought. Of course that would absurd because those are not about race...

cvhashim• 6 years ago

Could be aiming for a diverse mix of students?

bllguo4• 6 years ago

i don't think it's that simple. I honestly think race and ethnicity make a difference. Disclaimer: I'm asian and I would certainly have been affected by discrimination against my race in college admissions. Certainly I've felt bitter about certain school rejections.

On the other hand, there are multiple instances I can remember interacting with people of other ethnicities in uni and thinking "wow, I can't _ever_ see myself thinking that way" - and I think I'm better off for it. IMO, diversity of culture and thought is real.

If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity. Fair? I suppose so. But is it good for society? That is harder to answer.

totalZero4• 6 years ago

If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity

If this is the case -- which I believe it is not -- then you are arguing that a meritocratic approach (normalized for factors that affect access to education) would skew toward white and Asian people. I recognize that you're speculating, but I don't believe there to exist a top-tier university that has actually put such a filter into practice for its admissions process, so there's insufficient data to verify your claim.

In response to your speculation, I speculate what you would find is that, normalizing for economic and social factors, race makes little difference....If a pure merit-based approach actually skewed the playing field toward whites and Asians, it would already have been put into place long ago. The whole problem with racism is that it damages the ability for people to be judged on their merits.

Jerry2• 6 years ago

Why do schools need to know the race and ethnicity of their applicants in order to make merit-based admissions decisions?

School admissions in the US are almost never based on merit alone. If all these elite schools never saw the name or face or skin color of their applicants, their student bodies would look way different than they are now.

axlee• 6 years ago

I'd say, for those schools, last name might be more important than face or skin color.

EVdotIO• 6 years ago

There is one hold out on affirmative action for admissions, CalTech.

ggggtez10• 6 years ago

in order to make merit-based admissions

You made a mistake already. These decisions are not purely merit based. Meritocracy isn't real. It never was.

What you are seeing is looking at race on purpose. Because racism is a real thing. There are studies that even if you remove the names and photos of people from their resumes, white people will prefer to accept other white people. They intuitively know, because their resumes will look "familiar". You have to go out of your way to solve the problem, you can't just be colorblind.

totalZero4• 6 years ago

So what do you want to do, establish a wholly separate admissions path that intentionally seeks out people from traditionally less powerful races, in order to counteract your personal perception that there is such a thing as a "white" resume?

MaximumYComb3• 6 years ago

I'd argue that high socioeconomic people on these selection boards would be likely to select high socioeconomic students. The sports, hobbies, etc will all be familiar. This isn't a "white" issue.

Miner49er• 6 years ago

How can you know how hard a person had to work without knowing how they grew up? Part of merit is understanding that not every student starts with the same footing. Those that start off worse might not seem as good on paper, but worked harder to end up where they did.

Part of understanding this is race, location of growing up, schools, and parent's wealth.

totalZero4• 6 years ago

You can quantify a lot of these things, and those things that cannot be quantified can be hashed with a pre-existing mapping that captures the relevant information in a way that doesn't reveal irrelevant genetic traits.

For example, high schools nationwide are constantly ranked and compared. If you have an identifier that simply says "rural tier 3 high school," it's unclear what the race of the applicant is.

A parent's income can be shown based on decile of Americans, without revealing the race of the applicant.

Geography can be given in a way that is nonspecific enough to prevent educated guesses about the applicant's heritage.

I contend that race doesn't tell you much more about how hard a person had to work, if you already have all of the preceding factors evaluated.

hardwaregeek6• 6 years ago

Before we even consider race blind admissions, we'd need to remove legacy admissions, athletic admissions, the buddy-buddy relationships that most private school college counselors enjoy with admissions officers, standardized testing (demonstratively biased against underrepresented minorities) and the entire cottage industry of college essay writers.

You may respond that a lot of these benefits are about wealth, not race. However the two are connected. Black Americans on average have a tenth of the wealth of a white family.

babesh23• 6 years ago

Standardized testing is not biased against underrepresented minorities. The study that UC commissioned found that performance in the tests correlated with college performance and was not biased.

Underrepresented minorities are as a whole not as optimized for the system. Some of that is that cottage industry of essay writers etc, SAT prep courses, etc... but some of it is objectively not being as prepared. Now some of this is also due to growing up in worse environments for academic performance but this is a real difference in performance.

I have interviewed Stanford students. There is a step difference between the Asian/white students and the underrepresented minority students in their performance. The underrepresented minorities were still smart but the Asian/white students behaved like they were a year or two ahead in school.

simonsarris2• 6 years ago

conflating standardized testing with the rest of that list seems very counterproductive.

read_if_gay_3• 6 years ago

Black Americans on average have a tenth of the wealth of a white family.

And the median?

bananaface3• 6 years ago

A poor asian family might have a hundredth of the wealth of a rich black family. Race is a terrible proxy for wealth. If wealth is the issue, use wealth.

simmanian6• 6 years ago

It's easy to engage in a zero sum game of fighting for the "fair" share of the pie, but I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other. I honestly think we are already headed in the direction of providing a more open education through the internet. COVID has probably accelerated the process.

I hope we can find ways to lift each other up rather than bring each other down.

klipt• 6 years ago

By definition elite qualifications will always be scarce. Everyone can attend college, if we include things like community college. Not everyone can attend Harvard. Some community colleges may even be better at teaching, but they'll never have the prestige.

thrav2• 6 years ago

The question they’re asking is, does it need to be, or is this antiquated?

Is there a good reason to pit people against each other? Is it possible to provide a great education for everyone who wants one and meets some base qualification, etc.

I think the answer is pretty clearly that the best education, in many fields, will always require proximity and therefore scarcity. I just wrapped an OMSCS degree, and as much as I loved the program and the education, missing the on-campus experience definitely makes it a different thing.

Not because I learned any less of the material. More so because I walked away with very few relationships and very little spontaneous creativity amongst peers.

Some of that is on me for doing it while working full time, but it would’ve been hard regardless.

Many people consider those community aspects to be the some of the most valuable qualities of the college experience.

simmanian6• 6 years ago

True, but these qualifications hold power only as long as people care about them. I believe the main benefit of attending these prestigious institutions is largely in networking -- getting the chance to know powerful people (some say this fact alone means our education system is failing greatly). But what happens when you have harvard on your resume but took all the lectures remotely? What happens when people realize you can do great and amazing things by taking courses on X online learning service and start building things? What happens when these people create a support network for other like-minded people?

I personally want to see it happen. There are ways we can win in life without bringing others down. Sometimes that means creating a new path.

analyte1232• 6 years ago

Even "attending" is starting to matter less (see the sky-high graduation rates for these schools). An Ivy League undergraduate degree is best described a patent of minor nobility, honored by all Western bureaucracies including governments, NGOs, and corporations.

biophysboy7• 6 years ago

This scarcity problem was the issue I had with the free college proposals last year. It basically proposed that we should make everyone professionals. But, this isn't possible! For every manager, there are 10 workers. "Working class" jobs are necessary. The solution should not be give everyone an escape from hell, it should be make the jobs less hellish. Better wages, better healthcare, more respect and dignity overall.

Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".

newen2• 6 years ago

That's not how it works in other countries with free college. You have to pass admissions which are very competetive and obviously not everyone gets in.

rurp2• 6 years ago

Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".

This seems self evident to me and I'm always surprised at how much pushback people get for saying that sending 100% of kids to college isn't some especially useful magic bullet.

Personally I have a college degree and have been through trade schools in two different industries. The trade schools were much cheaper, much shorter, and vastly more useful to my earning potential than going to college. I loved the college experience but it felt much more like a middle class luxury than an economic necessity.

TouchyJoe2• 6 years ago

10 people don't need 1 manager. The company'd be best served if all 11 people worked and managed themselves, like adults.

IdiocyInAction• 6 years ago

The problem is that status is positional. Everyone wants to have more of it and it is inherently scarce.

ghj2• 6 years ago

Online lectures might be able to scale, but communication platforms and social networks cannot.

I would say more than half of what you learn is from your peers. People who by design were already filtered to be at a high baseline of competence and are forced to go through the same curriculum in the same timeframe as you.

No professor or expert can explain a concept better than someone similar to yourself who recently figured it out. There's also an immense amount of camaraderie built from helping each other grow. All of this is lost when you're just one of millions watching a video where most of the public discussion is dumb.

A little artificial exclusivity isn't a bad thing.

simmanian6• 6 years ago

I agree for the most part. I've met some of my best friends in college while working on lab assignments through the night. But I think that we can't form meaningful communities through online learning platforms only means there are a lot of improvements (=opportunities) to be made in the market.

37r6euueue• 6 years ago

Fairness in academics should be based on merit. Handing out tokens just codifies a belief that certain groups are inferior to others. The social justice rhetoric only exists to justify treating certain races and sexes as a disability

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

I totally agree. If Ivy League colleges wanted to be truly diverse, and fair, there is a very simple solution: set a minimum bar in terms of things like grades, class rank, AP scores, and perhaps some objective measure of extracurricular activities. In very competitive schools, you'd still have many times the number of qualified than you do spots. So than you have 2 options: increase or class size, or take people at random. Of course, either of these options take away from the exclusivity of the institution in the first place, which really is the raison d'etre of the Ivy League.

acituan2• 6 years ago

I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other.

I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.

Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.

Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).

So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.

simmanian6• 6 years ago

I view that today's labor market and education system are interdependent on one another, so I don't think we disagree in that regard.

Status is always bound to be a scarce good

I think this hits the core of the problem. The REAL problem is that these institutions are more or less made in our image. Many people want prestige, status, power, so people create institutions that have zero-sum dynamics. Some people observe that this is just how the world works and will always work. But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo. I believe we have the capacity to innovate for increased sustainability in our institutions and more importantly our lives.

supernova87a6• 6 years ago

I've had a couple of observations about this whole process, and I would love to be convinced (either way!) with real data / evidence.

1) For all the contortions that universities in the US go to, to adjust and hand-tune their population -- does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff? Would such a class (chosen by simple, unbiased score cutoff) be so much worse at innovation, leadership, (alumni donations??) than a class chosen by our heavy judgement-laden process? Sports, maybe?

What is all this extra effort and political decision-making worth, in actual outcome? Many other countries use purely exam based entrance. Or allow anyone in, and test them once there and kick out if they don't pass. What is the value of the "high judgement" method of admissions? Is it that you're more likely to produce a president or CEO?

2) To echo Justice O'Connor's final question on the matter in oral arguments, when do we know that we're done with this policy? Who says we're done and fixed the situation? How will we know we've reached a point where we can agree that we've achieved something that was the goal, or is it just arbitrary, up to whomever is in power at the moment? If not, will this just go on forever? Is that not ripe for some bad side effects, or worse, corruption of the process?

3) Why have universities adopted themselves as the place where this modification of outcomes should be applied? As I understand it, the problem of diversity etc. etc. happens long before the college/university stage. Attempting to fix it at the end does no one very much good, than if the effort was applied earlier in students' lives. Or, the metrics by which you decide if it's working become softer and softer.

I struggle to find satisfactory answers to these questions, and therefore don't find myself convinced for why AA is reasonable (or legal).

polyomino• 6 years ago

The alumni admissions point is an interesting one. I wonder how one's propensity to donate is affected by their perception that they were chosen by the institution vs. they were selected by a deterministic process.

jmoss203• 6 years ago

1) The incentives are different for different universities. Less elite universities don't (generally) do all this because, you're right, there's no point. More elite universities do, because they're incentivized to.

Elite universities play a zero-sum game with one another for the far right tail of prestige/power/access. Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either. The other part of the game is played not with the graduate but with _everyone else_. Harvard is Harvard (to most people) not because of the mean Harvard grad's success, but because everyone else couldn't get in. Those two incentive structures point more or less at what we've got: painstaking care taken to identify a very small group of candidates, who are then _highly_ credentialed (ex: grade inflation). (All while retaining the aura of meritocracy.)

babesh23• 6 years ago

The effect of AA on these universities is that they gradually lose their prestige amongst the population they discriminate against. Supposedly amongst the Asian population, UCB is held in as high a regard as Stanford. UCB was mandated by law to not discriminate by race. Stanford could do so.

chii3• 6 years ago

Part of that game does depend on producing the right sort of graduates -- but no exam will find them, and the sorts of things that identify them aren't generally the sorts of things you can grade/fail them on either

And this is just a way to show class/status with more steps. The fundamental problem is that there exists positions in society where holding it isn't merit based, but connection and class based. Harvard is a vector for which some people of a lower class are allowed to ascend - but only under the auspices of the current crop of upper-class.

simonsarris2• 6 years ago

does it produce a meaningfully better class than if they used a simple score cutoff?

It depends on the goal. Is it to produce the best possible set of mathematicians, etc, at graduation? Or is it to pick the candidates that are the most likely to benefit the current network of alum and their sphere of influence? If its the latter, a simple cutoff is a terrible idea.

jkhdigital2• 6 years ago

Just listened to a great Revisionist History episode that floats the idea of a college admissions lottery: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/44-the-powerball-revo...

There seems to be some emerging evidence that election processes, even those which supposedly require significant expertise (e.g. selecting NIH grant recipients), don't perform meaningfully better than random selection. Which, to be honest, shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone steeped in Kahneman and Tversky's behavioral psychology.

This isn't a new idea of course; after the admissions bribery scandal last year Barry Schwartz revisited the idea which he had originally proposed fifteen years prior: https://behavioralscientist.org/do-college-admissions-by-lot...

idemprotent• 6 years ago

I agree but, the rich don't like lotteries. Lotteries are for the lower classes (in reference to them)

presentation• 6 years ago

I don't think the purpose of these policies are to produce a "better" student population, but are more that a) there are too many qualified applicants for the number of seats and they need a good alibi to justify cutting people basically randomly, and b) the racial aspects are more of an advocacy choice to try to make up for past racial injustices by ironically biasing the system racially.

The latter issue, I don't see a clean cut way to rectify - as an Asian American I get the feeling of being discriminated against, but I also see the power of giving the most discriminated minorities more opportunity to exploit the power that elite degrees bestow.

Personally I end up being OK with affirmative action policies - as much as I'd like a fair system, an unfair system built on past injustices make that impossible, and I'd rather exclusive universities adopt these unfair policies to shift the balance back.

perpetualpatzer• 6 years ago

If this is a topic that interests you, I'd encourage you to listen to the oral arguments/ opinion announcements from the landmark supreme court cases: Bakke [0] and Grutter [1], the latter of which parent references.

The legal underpinning, at least, of considering race in admissions actually IS to make a better class and in turn, a better experience for students.

I also find it a more compelling moral argument than the past injustices or tilting the scales arguments. If the goal is reparations for past injustices, surely japanese internment should count for something. If the goal is to balance the economic scales, we should penalize underrepresented students from wealthy families (and frankly, the preference should be along economic, not racial lines). If the goal is to ensure students don't graduate thinking black (or non-asian, or athletic, or poor, ...) people are dumb because I didn't meet any in my prestigious college class, that seems to me a worthwhile goal that is legitimately furthered by trying to create a diverse class. To GP's point, I don't have data, but also think that outcome is hard to measure.

[0]https://www.oyez.org/cases/1979/76-811 [1]https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-241

modriano• 6 years ago

My college experience was made massively more enlightening because it exposed me to people from very different backgrounds. I grew up in a nearly 100% white suburb of Detroit, and even though I only had to walk 5 blocks north from my house to be in nearly 100% Black Detroit, I had never had a real conversation with a Black person until college, where both dorm life and coursework put me in close frequent contact with many people from diverse backgrounds. My undergrad degrees were in physics and mechanical engineering, and many engineering courses involved group projects where you end up spending maybe 100+ hours with the group members over the course of the semester. This situation specifically lead me to a number of eye-opening conversations and experiences where I discovered my own blind spots. For example, one time when I was driving to Home Depot with a Black electrical engineer groupmate and friend, I was pulled over for no obvious reason. I'm white and my father was an FBI agent so I have always been comfortable around law enforcers, so I asked what the issue was but the officer gave a vague non-answer (I made a "suspicious turn") and asked my friend for his ID. I asked the officer for clarity and why he would need the ID from a passenger if it was a moving violation, to which he asked how I knew the passenger. I explained we were engineers going to pick up supplies for a project, and I could see in his demeanor relax, right before he said "that explains it, something just didn't seem right" and let us go. After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious. I was able to better see part of the world that was hidden from me because I was with a Black person who I met through school. Without the coursework, I wouldn't have developed that friendship, and without the friendship, I couldn't have started a real conversation about what it was like being Black in America and what other stuff like that happened to him.

That's just one example (one of the most impactful for sure) of the great extracurricular educational value I got out of being around a diverse group of people.

As a high schooler, I held similar views to many of the people commenting on this link, that affirmative action was unjust. Today, I know that my educational experience was greatly improved by my exposure to people with very different lived experiences, educational backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. My understanding of the world and the problems to be solved is so much richer because of these experiences and connections, and universities absolutely improve the quality of the education by promoting and facilitating these connections. Even excluding the societal benefits of affirmative action (eg helping a systematically oppressed population gain access to better economic opportunities), affirmative action is a smart and good policy for universities to embrace.

thinkingemote• 6 years ago

There is a difference between the positive effects one wants and the methods to achieve these effects. It is also valid to criticize and propose alternatives to policies which seek to give the same results but without other side effects. Other countries do things differently but want the same end result, some organisations do things differently from others but also desire the same result.

giardini• 6 years ago

modriano says>After heading on, I ignorantly wondered what that was about as there was no legal basis for it, and my friend asked if I seriously didn't see that the cop just thought it was strange and possibly a sign of trouble/distress that me, a bookish white young man was driving with a Black young man. I couldn't see that in the moment, but in retrospect it was obvious.<

But it was not obvious!

There are many alternative explanations for what happened. I suggest that you create a list of alternative explanations as an exercise; there are an infinite number of them. This will allow you to admit that you really do not know why the police officer stopped you!

You accept your friend's explanation as if it were the only one that makes sense! Consequently everything that follows from your friend's explanation is likely flawed. I would ask that you reconsider and learn to leave final explanations indefinite. Part of life is not knowing.

I see futile efforts by people trying to understand others all the time. They concoct explanations that shatter under the slightest scrutiny. Even the brightest people fall prey to the belief they can explain others' actions w/o at least asking that person (sometimes worthwhile, but also often misleading!).

Wrong and/or unsupported explanations are assumptions and have an effect: they fix thinking along a path that is likely wrong. Learning to live with "I don't know." will allow you to think more clearly without incorrect assumptions and also more clearly reveal the limits of your knowledge, showing it to be far more limited than one might wish to admit.

"When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME!"

- unknown

goblin89• 6 years ago

The problem with universities simply selecting by score is that it reinforces the inequality feedback loop. Education tends to correlate with wealth. Wealthy people are really good at investing into educating their descendants. Selection by score becomes equivalent to selection by wealth/heredity.

Used properly, “hand-tuning” of university population could offset biases liable to be introduced by a seemingly-unbiased simple score cutoff in presence of social inequality—though I wouldn’t go as far as to claim it works as intended.

I found this discussion with Daniel Markovits quite enlightening, even if I don’t agree with the 100% of it: https://samharris.org/podcasts/205-failure-meritocracy/. If it’s partially paywalled, sorry—I think there are other resources online that convey his ideas (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/arts/meritocracy-trap-dan..., etc.).

bitxbit• 6 years ago

They need to make clear it’s discrimination against Asian AMERICANS.

atom-morgan• 6 years ago

And? Why the exception for African Americans?

throwaway5752• 6 years ago

Free advice: there is no reason this suit could not have been brought in the prior 3 years. It is shameless election year politics via the courts. Whatever you think of the merits of the case, realize what this is from the timing and the unprofessional release accompanying the filing.

"Yale College could fill its entire entering class several times over with applicants who reach the 99th percentile in standardized testing and who have perfect high school grade point averages, but we do not base admission on such numbers alone," President Peter Salovey wrote. "Rather, we look at the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants." (https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/08/13/us/politics/ap-u..., the other post on this on the front page)

This argument will be shown to have merit. Simply put, the question of whether to have a class that represents the population vs the applicant pool is at the discretion of the college. A lower ratio of acceptance by race is not de facto indicative of individual discrimination. They can pick and choose a class from the top tenth of a percent of the graduating seniors in the US. Every student there is elite.

downvoteme1• 6 years ago

Just wondering if it is a crime to lie about your race n college applications. What if a bunch of Asians just decided to write black on their college admissions applications - - Will the colleges rescind the applications.

Also do mixed race individuals get to pick either white or black on college applications?

fmajid4• 6 years ago

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/living/feat-mindy-kaling-...

khawkins• 6 years ago

On a very related note, California Prop 16 will be on the ballot in November, seeking to remove the following text from the CA constitution:

The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

drusepth• 6 years ago

I wonder what impact the ordering of those clauses has on people reading/voting. I didn't even notice "or grant preferential treatment to" until the ~third read through, still trying to figure out why anyone would vote to repeal this.

Alternative ordering for comparison:

The State shall not grant preferential treatment to, or discriminate against, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

supernova87a6• 6 years ago

It will be interesting to see whether the BLM movement and attitudes plays a factor into this proposition's turnout, or cases like this one cause other people to rethink their support.

raxxorrax6• 6 years ago

"Are we the baddies?"

vowelless• 6 years ago

The issue is not really that they discriminate (which is bad). But the fact that they have arbitrarily made this into a Zero Sum Game.

Why an organization with 30 BILLION in endowment cannot admit more than 2000 eighteen year olds baffles me. If you want to admit more POKs then increase the class size and hire more professors with that vast amount of money.

I realize places like Yale try to be like old, exclusive country clubs. But if that’s the case then they should be taxed on that money.

gruez• 6 years ago

I realize places like Yale try to be like old, exclusive country clubs. But if that’s the case then they should be taxed on that money.

How would this be enforced? That private universities can't get tax exempt status if they don't spend a certain % of their net assets each year? Doesn't this effectively penalize organizations operating on an endowment funding model?

jessaustin6• 6 years ago

Lots of people have wanted to do just that for a long time. At least this proposal gives the universities a (perhaps temporary) way out.

8f2ab37a-ed6c2• 6 years ago

The whole idea of an institution being "elite" is that it restricts access. The smaller the % of applicants to make it through, the more prestigious the placement. It's a high-end night club with VIP access for the rich, famous, and the connected. And with a long line outside the door to signal that many are fighting to get in.

Elite universities are luxury brands, and by definition a product is no longer a luxury if everybody gets one.

If you just want a quality education, you can get it anywhere else. What people are complaining about here is that don't get to access an intentionally carefully-restricted item.

I'm not going to be writing to my senator because you don't get to drive a Lamborghini. Get in a Corolla like the rest of us, you'll be just fine.

slaymaker1907• 6 years ago

It can get extremely competitive for universities to attract the top talent in terms of professors. All these students need someone to teach them.

hardwaregeek6• 6 years ago

Before we get our pitchforks out here, let's remember that Yale's percentage of Black students is 7.4%[1]. That's not exactly a gigantic portion. In fact Yale is on the lower end compared to Harvard's 14.3%[2] and MIT's 12% [3]. If Yale is truly discriminating in favor of Black and Hispanic students, well, they're not doing an excellent job of it.

[1] https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/factsheet_2018-19_0...

[2] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

[3] https://web.mit.edu/facts/enrollment.html

dba7dba2• 6 years ago

Meanwhile, I read on this thread that UCSF admitted less Asians.

It was 40% last year. It's been now cut to 22%.

That is a gigantic shift of a demographic of a new medical school class. Within one year.

virtuous_signal4• 6 years ago

It's actually not very hard to see how discimination-in-favor can be compatible with overall low numbers. The simplest way is if they comprise less than 7.4% of the applicant pool. Another way is if they comprise less than 7.4% of "qualified" applicants, in some definition of qualified. But those breakdowns of the applicant pool are typically not shared except from lawsuits.

swimfar2• 6 years ago

But what percentage of college students are black? (sincere question, couldn't find the answer from a quick search). Without knowing that I don't think it's fair to say they aren't doing a great job. Just because other colleges are doing better, doesn't mean Yale is doing bad.

edit: This report says 14% of college enrolled U.S. residents were black in 2017. But that makes it sound like it doesn't include international students.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

hardwaregeek6• 6 years ago

According to this [1], Black students make up 15% of the enrolled student population. Therefore Harvard, MIT and Yale are all under par.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

Petrova3• 6 years ago

Most of the black students are probably African immigrants. I see it all the time. If you just browse through LinkedIn and look at black Harvard/Ivy League alumni you'll immediately notice all the African immigrants

xiaolingxiao4• 6 years ago

This is very true, and speaking as a non-black/african person, I noticed they're very different culturally. They carry a sense of national pride related to their home country, and draw from it constantly. I'm thinking about Nigerian immigrants specifically.

hardwaregeek6• 6 years ago

Yes, that's a very interesting phenomenon that should be taken into account. Likewise I've wondered what the sub-demographics are of Asian ethicity students. It's a little ridiculous to lump children of Vietnamese boat people in with nouveau riche direct from China.

supernova87a6• 6 years ago

I think you will find this article very relevant. Yet it's 15 years old. This issue has not gone away.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

supernova87a6• 6 years ago

But here is the fallacy you have to be very careful about.

You cannot say that just 7% is low or 14% is high. Even looking at other universities. You have to know what source population that is being drawn from, and what is the criterion for drawing.

It could be that 4% of people applying to Yale are black, 3% are qualified, and 7% outcome is already overrepresented. Or it could be "terrible" if 10% are applying, and 7% are qualified.

You have to look at what % pass the filter you are applying, to those who apply. With that further criterion applied, any of these figures could be "reasonable".

It is not true that a selective process should simply match the proportions of <x> group that you see in the general population. That is the wrong and very misguided / misrepresented way of reporting the problem. But too often it's the politically simple (or intellectually lazy) approach to framing the issue.

It sounds good to say "we should look like our customers". But that is often not true for a selective process. It is true, if and only if, the qualities you're selecting for are represented in an unbiased way, among the people who are your customers, and among those who apply.

setpatchaddress• 6 years ago

How is everyone's first reaction not that this is Trump electioneering? I have no idea if there's merit here or not, but the replies below seem to largely fail to acknowledge two facts:

(a) All top schools weigh race and gender. They consider student body diversity important. You can disagree that they should, but it's true.

(b) Bill Barr's DOJ is one of the least trustworthy entities in the USA on this subject this side of the KKK.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

Sigh.

This is something that has been pursued by the DOJ for years.

The lawsuit that began this process was in 2014.

Also, allusions to the KKK are just obscene. You can have political views, but shoehorning them in while exhibiting such ignorance about the underlying facts of the case just destroys the quality of the conversation.

IMO.

cluse• 6 years ago

I think if Yale had a true meritocracy for admissions, they would have a majority Asian student body.

And I think if they actually admitted all of the Asian students that fulfilled their acceptance criteria, they would probably want to expand the school so that a more diverse student body could fit into Yale.

Out of curiosity, I wonder how much larger Yale would have to be, in order to retain all th Black, Hispanic, and Native American students that they currently have, while also including the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.

Would Yale be twenty-five percent larger? Twice as large? What's the scale here?

jessaustin6• 6 years ago

...the white and Asian students who were discriminated against.

I know you're repeating a framing from TFA and from numerous other sources, but the discrimination against Asians primarily benefits whites, because there are so many more of them. There simply aren't enough BIPoC students to make room for the Asians who would be accepted if the discrimination against them stopped, as implied by your "majority Asian student body" comment. (Also, lots of BIPoC students are not "just over the line" and perform as well as or better than Asian and white students.) The eventual result of this lawsuit will be a much lower percentage of white students, while BIPoC percentages might drop slightly.

protomyth• 6 years ago

I would love for them to report enrolled Native Americans and what tribes they are from did they attend high school on a reservation. I keep discovering Native Americans who don't actually have any connection to any tribe.

chmaynard• 6 years ago

This is election-year flack, pure and simple. Can we trust anything the Dept. of Justice does? The Attorney General is clearly a proxy for Trump's desire to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Barr's first priority is not enforcing the law, it's enabling Trump's twisted agenda.

fmajid4• 6 years ago

Yale discriminates in favor of Whites. If admissions were based purely on merit as they are at Caltech or Berkeley, you would have far more Asians and far fewer Caucasians. This was also true when they discriminated against Jews (using the same techniques) at a time when Jews were not considered White.

_--___-___• 6 years ago

By your own post, you seem to consider Jews a separate population from gentile whites. If that were the case, I'd suggest you double check the relative (to national proportion) population of non-athelte/legacy gentile whites at Yale and similar schools before making posts like this.

ip26• 6 years ago

I wonder if you could build a model to assign handicaps to each applicant? Forget racial quotas, just assign a modifier to each applicant based on the difficulty they have likely faced in their lives. Race, but also household income, zip code, alma mater, siblings, how many parents, etc... Then just hide all that info from the review board.

In that way, you could get right at what is most interesting- which students are actually the most impressive.

Past student body provides the training dataset- just define what measures a successful student whom you are happy to have. College GPA, graduation date, post-graduation compensation, whatever.

Wolfenstein98k16• 6 years ago

In my opinion, policies like this stem from having good intentions, but intervening where there is just friction instead of where there is most value.

Intervening at Ivy League admissions is a surefire way to benefit those minorities who are currently the least inhibited, while expending a lot of social (and potentially "real") capital to do so.

Intervening much earlier in the process would be much harder, but would provide relatively more assistance to those who are so disadvantaged as to otherwise end up nowhere near college admissions anywhere, much less the Ivy Leagues.

nataz2• 6 years ago

Man, I remember appplying to colleges and being rather selective about how I self identified. I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).

On almost all my applications I identified as Asian (better chance of acceptance and scholarships!).

The only exceptions were Ivy and California schools which even in the late 90's were obviously discriminating against Asians. You know it's bad when you identify as white to get a diversity edge.

Even today at work,I regularly get ignored for diversity metrics. Being an Asian American is so weird.

scruple6• 6 years ago

My brother-in-law is half Vietnamese and half Chinese. He asked me to review his personal statement and help him with college applications a few years back. I encouraged him to self-identify as Vietnamese instead of Chinese. He was accepted to multiple Ivy's (but ended up staying in state in the end) where his Chinese friends were all rejected. They are otherwise indistinguishable. Even their personal statements were all more-or-less on the same level, at least the few that I helped out and recall. They all learned a pretty valuable lesson there.

xiaolingxiao4• 6 years ago

Why is Vietnamese the right kind of Asian?

ucgradtemp3• 6 years ago

I was accepted by a graduate program at one of the more selective UCs. An alum of my college who was a current student at the UC contacted me to invite me to a recruiting shindig for accepted minority students (she knew I was Asian from the club activities on my resume). But when she found out what my specific racial background was (half white and half Chinese), she said I would not be invited. The only people who were invited to the recruiting trip were those from other Asian backgrounds (anything but Chinese/Korean/Japanese), or students who were black or hispanic.

Instead of an all-expense paid visit spanning from Thurs-Sun and including sitting in on lectures, I was allowed to come for a single Sunday-only event. I spent more money on that trip than I had ever spent on anything in my life, except for my college computer. I was pretty ticked that the school was treating different minorities differently, and that for all the money I spent I couldn't even visit a class in session (since I was only allowed on Sunday). I remember meeting a half-Chinese / half-Vietnamese guy there, who regaled me with tales of the wining and dining that the favored-minority students had enjoyed.

I should note that this was way after Prop 209 (barring affirmative action at the UCs) was passed. I ended up attending the UC, and I asked an administrator about how recruiting trips like this were legal (he happened to be a lawyer). He gave some hand-wavey answer about federal pre-emption that, if true, would have completely gutted Prop 209.

icelancer7• 6 years ago

This is true about one of my workplaces. Diversity this, diversity that. As a Director, I remind them that I'm not white. They seem to handwave it away and not count it despite Asian-Americans being underrepresented in this line of work. Such is life.

EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.

ralfd• 6 years ago

Interesting thought. Is it racism if you feel minority but are counted among the majority?

If I would immigrate to the US I would count as white, even though I would be a clueless foreign stranger and would have difficulty connecting culturally with many. Still I wouldn't count as "diverse".

prohobo3• 6 years ago

This is fully in line with Woke ideology. It seems a lot of people still don't understand it, and it's extremely important to read up on critical theory, postmodern theory, and social justice if you want to understand why things like this are happening to you.

Essentially, Woke ideologists believe that identity groups are in a constant struggle for power, and they describe two main classes: the oppressed, and the oppressors. They are also rooted in Marxist ideology, believing in the emancipation of the oppressed by seizing the means of production - except where Marxists strictly focused on economic means, critical theorists focus on narrative and cultural means.

In terms of economics, trade and industry, Asians are considered part of the oppressor group along with Whites and Jews. Asians are part of a narrative where they are known to be high earners and hold powerful positions in a wide array of industries. That's why they don't care about your ethnicity, because it's irrelevant to their stated goals of emancipating the oppressed.

0x000000002• 6 years ago

If you have been paying attention you may have seen the term “BIPOC” pop up overnight. This is a less handwave-y way of excluding Asians when it is convenient.

throw140820202• 6 years ago

This is exactly why people say "all lives matter", because there has been a significant focus on black, female, and LGBT lives, but not for disadvantaged people in general. There are many of them.

eli_gottlieb4• 6 years ago

EDIT: If you're an Asian-American you get used to this kind of "model minority" discrimination / racism. It just is what it is. My guess is it is similar for Jewish people.

Oh yes, with a similar side-dish of people claiming we're spies who control the world.

retox2• 6 years ago

Replace White with European and it's comparable to saying Asian.

vonmoltke3• 6 years ago

It's not. Spanish and Portuguese people are European, but in the US they're "Hispanic", and so not really "white". Conversely, people from Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa frequently get lumped in as "white".

white-flame2• 6 years ago

I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).

Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'.

To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)

nataz2• 6 years ago

Valid point.

Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location.

Defending either definition would be an exercise in absurdity and I'm not even going to try.

retox2• 6 years ago

Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced

This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

"white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).

No, it's not. There aren't “technically” multiple light-skinned races. While there are a few different models of race, they tend to descend from the old three-race (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid) model and tend to have only a few more categories than those old models, which are now more commonly labelled White, Asian, and Black, with Native American typically added and, in the case of the US Census, “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” also added as a distinct category. (Both of the latter would generally have previously been considered part of the Mongoloid category.)

globular-toast• 6 years ago

"white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).

Nowhere near as weird as "black". Not only is there more genetic diversity within Africa than anywhere else, anyone who has a single drop of black in their lineage is considered black, unless they have completely white skin. It's a ridiculously broad bucket.

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

"Black" is not just Africa. It also encompasses many Caribbean nations, and probably some others that escape my mind at the moment.

Also, portions of Africa have white populations. South Africa, for example. And North Africa is Arab.

Ethnicity ≠ geography.

blanche_• 6 years ago

European here, is stating your ethnicity normal on uni applications? What is the reasoning behind that? To me it seems very odd as being female in IT I try to hide it when I can (having resume without photo etc) and I would be outraged if we had to state our ethnicity/religion/other on resume.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

Yes, it is fairly normal. US universities attempt to control the percentages of each ethnicity using a short list of ethnic buckets.

I believe certain government universities are not permitted to do this (the UC system?)

EDIT: Found it. The UC system can't do it because Prop 209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...

swebs• 6 years ago

is stating your ethnicity normal on uni applications?

Yes

What is the reasoning behind that?

Affirmative action requirements. Students can check the box for "prefer not to answer" if they wish. Though I don't know if that gives you better results than admitting to be white or asian.

cwhiz2• 6 years ago

People don’t know what to do with Asians because, as a group, they achieve better than white people. However, this shouldn’t be possibly in systemically racist white America.

babycake• 6 years ago

But they don't achieve better than white people, they just have that perception based off school grades. When it comes to life, that is career, they tend to not get promoted as much or be in much executive positions.

Petrova3• 6 years ago

Honestly at this point the US should just adopt the East Asian college entrance model.

One exam per year at the same time with no exceptions.

Completely race blind and no additional criteria other than school class rank and average school exam score.

heraclius2• 6 years ago

In practice it seems that affirmative action primarily takes from Asians and unconnected whites to give to blacks. I have no objection to the latter—indeed, I can see some justification in taking from educated middle class Asians like me—but the obvious people from whom to take places are those who get in on connexions (most of whom are white). If this creates a shortfall, the obvious solution is to dismantle a bureaucracy that was clearly unneeded, say, 40 years ago. Unfortunately there is no political incentive to do this—the Republicans will almost certainly attempt to restore a situation by which blacks end up in the grand scheme of things disadvantaged, with no correction at university admissions, whilst the progressive narrative is controlled by mostly white liberal bourgeois class interests, and therefore will continue to find some other group to make the sacrifices it deems (not incorrectly in this case!) necessary, and happens to create not inconsiderable employment for them, inter alia—indeed, one might go so far as to say is necessary for their broader control of the capitalist system by holding onto cultural power within education.

walamaking2• 6 years ago

Maybe universities should consider adding an optional box to specify if the applicant is willing to give up their potential seat for an affirmative action candidate. /s

heraclius2• 6 years ago

I don’t see why this is would actually be a bad idea—it just sounds like the offer wouldn't be taken up much. Most systems that allow people to express some preference to be kinder to someone else probably won’t end up causing harm—the worst case is that they just don’t cause anything.

supernova87a6• 6 years ago

By the way, you all know this is going to come up in California this fall? Because there is a proposition on the ballot (Prop 16, ACA 5) to repeal the current CA Constitutional section that government shall not discriminate based on race.

https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ballot-measures/pdf/aca-5.p... http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...

"The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

darkengine• 6 years ago

Washington has a similar law, and a referendum to repeal it was on the ballot last year (I-1000/R-88). It was narrowly defeated (ie, the law was not repealed). Interestingly, according to Ballotpedia, there were many newspaper editorials in favor of repealing the anti-discrimination law, but only one against (in the WSJ [1]), and it also makes mention of the issue of Ivy League admissions.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/legalizing-discrimination-11571...

flo58• 6 years ago

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of...

This has been an open secret since at least 2012.

Quotas restricting Asians, and affirmative action benefiting Jews, who make up an astounding full quarter of the student bodies of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, despite being only 2% of the population, which is 5x their rate of admission at Caltech, an elite school with a famously merit-based, AA-free admission process:

The campus is located in the Los Angeles area, home to one of America’s largest and most successful Jewish communities, and Jews have traditionally been strongly drawn to the natural sciences. Indeed, at least three of Caltech’s last six presidents have been of Jewish origin, and the same is true for two of its most renowned faculty members, theoretical physics Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.

The author is apparently Jewish himself, BTW.

justanotheranon• 6 years ago

my solution to this problem is the same as my solution to the tech megacorp oligopily problem.

there are too many students chasing to few colleges. there should be 20 Yales, 30 Harvards and 50 MITs. just like there should be 10 Microsofts, 20 Googles and 50 Apples. if competition for credentials wasnt so pirate cut throat due to induced artifical scarcity, then society wouldnt be nitpicking over admissions quota minutia.

imagine a world where we cut the Pentagon's budget by 15%, and poured that $150 billion into turning every Community College into a University on par with Yale and the Ivys. imagine a world where unemployable grad students were not ground up and churned out through a system that only has teaching jobs for a fraction of them.

the solution to all higher education problems is to radically increase the supply to meet the demand.

dont you want humanity to have an orbital base around Alpha Centauri someday? how else are we going to achieve that?

raxxorrax6• 6 years ago

Very true, especially with the modern logistics of education.

Today we could show the best lecture any prof has ever given to a village in nirvana that got running water 10 years ago. That doesn't replace direct mentoring, but would still elevate education to new standards.

Special schools for particularly gifted people should exist, but the product today is more prestige than quality of education (which is good, but not the primary selling point anymore).

vivjay30• 6 years ago

The real discrimination is continued legacy and athletic admissions which artificially inflate the number of white students (discriminating against Asians and other minorities).

43% of white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, or related to donors. Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

ausjke• 6 years ago

1. it's all about diversity and equality these days, meaning every thing should be distributed proportionally based on race population and by gender. the ultimate goal will be wealth re-distribution(or, communism), until then, it is not going to stop.

2. especially in hi tech and elite universities.

3. NBA is an exception, actually all sports can be an exceptions.

4. Asian is not considered as minority when it come to college admissions, what doe minority mean?

5. MIT and many other STEM universities has 50:50 boys and girls, if not so, it's called gender discrimination.

...

So, let's throw out SAT/ACT/GPA and admit people via 'holistic' review, i.e. totally subjective, which means, the more miserable you're the better chance you will have, we joked as parents the best we can do for our kids is going to jail, do drugs, go bankrupt, so our kids can get some benefits. Nice family, law-biding family are basically punished.

I have not seen anywhere more communism like in USA now, you cut the corner because of your race or gender, merit-based is racism, we're going to hell.

I wish those AA pumpers will get a doctor who was admitted/graduated/career-ed based on AA rules, when they need a cure the most at hospitals.

bighead777• 6 years ago

the United States population is equivalent to 4.25% of the total world population while accounted for 15.2% of global gross domestic product (GDP). The world definitely need more diversity in the wealth distribution , let's start by just cutting every single American's income every month by 11% and donate it to other countries in the world.

leafboi2• 6 years ago

The findings detailed in a letter to the college’s attorneys Thursday mark the latest action by the Trump administration aimed at rooting out discrimination in the college application process, following complaints from students about the application process at some Ivy League colleges.

I'm an Asian liberal and I think trump is an idiot but the reality is that all people, as altruistic or immoral as they appear to be, are, in fact, complex amalgamations of good, evil, intelligence and stupidity. My judgement of trump is just a biased simplification of reality and the complexity of his character.

Props to trump for supporting this initiative.

ur-whale• 6 years ago

The thing I never understood about the US is why asking for someone's "race" (or whatever the current PC term for it is) on a form, government or otherwise, is not flat out illegal on account of being a) entirely meaningless b) downright insulting c) guaranteed to produce the kind of outcome we're discussing here.

ecmascript• 6 years ago

As a european I don't get why americans are so obsessed about race. I would never even think of writing about my skin color on a university application. That seems very foreign to me. People today are making the same old mistakes, just treat everyone the same and it'll sort itself out over time.

Such an obvious thing imo, but now it's simply popular to discriminate against whites and asian people. Awesome, we've come full circle.

Moway• 6 years ago

It's partly due to specific historic reasons, but it's also just a consequence of different groups or races sharing a country.

I'm afraid you might start to see similar things in Europe with the demographic changes: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190321IP...

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

I feel sorry for Yale (et al) in this case because they're being presented with a very hard problem (defining and measuring merit in a reliable non-game-able way), one that likely has no widely accepted solution, and one that we as a society have actively decided to completely ignore in favor of everyone looking out for themselves.

omginternets• 6 years ago

I sympathize as well, but I think the problem is much more fundamental; I think there is no universally acceptable solution.

- If you think merit is a function of de facto performance, you will not deem it justified when the bar for admission is lowered for under-performing groups.

- If you think merit is a function of effort[0], then you will not deem it justified when everybody is held to the same standard of performance.

The reason this is such a touchy issue, I think, is that both approaches result in a de facto racial (and/or other immutable-trait-based) hierarchy. In my estimation, the determining ideological factor in picking a side is whether one prefers implicit vs explicit hierarchies.

[0] There's probably a better word than effort, but it's not coming to mind.

nudpiedo• 6 years ago

I see how everyone speaks about the discrimination against Asian males, but what about white males? If Freedom is not for everyone then no one is trully free.

In this rebel youth aim to destroy older "conservative" ideas apparently someone broke some of the oldes hard earned lessons by mankind about freedom and equalty.

colmvp• 6 years ago

To be clear, I'm not saying I don't care about the discrimination against white men, but generally speaking white men have more societal advantages in North America than Asian men such as likelihood in getting positions in leadership roles at companies, political positions, as well as desirability in online dating. My hunch is that's why it's not as 'highlighted' (for lack of a better term) than Asian men who are discriminated against.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

I don't even blame Yale, I blame the stupid government incentives to do this. The question of your race should never even be raised.

jenkins6g• 6 years ago

This "finding" is absolutely tasteless. Studies found that SATs have little to no correlation to graduating from a university, same thing with GREs in grad school. African American students are proven year over year to have far less educational resources in their communities, live in poverty, etc. And far less African Americans apply to get into Yale compared to their white or Asian counterparts and the ones that do apply have a better shot of getting in due to their hard work than the African Americans that don't apply. And on top of that still has to deal with inequality across the board. So yes, to the 5% of Yale students that are African Americans, their acceptance was very well deserved. Knock off the bs about IQ this and IQ that. Try that crap in the real world at your job and see how far that gets you.

charlesu8• 6 years ago

HN is weirdly silent about identity politics except for threads like these. Threads about discrimination in tech get a few dozen post, a third of which are to the tune of “does this belong on HN?” But an article about discrimination at a college with a horrific engineering program and no cachet in the tech industry gets 500 posts.

Can anyone explain why this belongs on HN or why it gets so much attention? I don’t understand it.

tgv2• 6 years ago

Possibly because commenting on those threads is a minefield, so nobody votes for them and they end up quickly forgotten.

charlesu8• 6 years ago

This thread is a minefield. Any claims about discrimination on race or gender is going to ignite controversy. Why is it OK to talk about this subject despite the fact that it’s in no way relevant to tech?

Why is this on HN?

JuliusPullo• 6 years ago

Has it occurred to any of you that somebody might just want to intentionally make us hate each other with this "racism" BS? To keep us divided? In the end, who really cares if someone is black, white, Korean, or half Vietnamese? Denying an earned admission to someone because that someone is of the color, sex, religion or original nationality not in fashion at the time for the leftist taste only serves to make us dislike each other more and more.

cossatot• 6 years ago

In the end, who really cares if someone is black, white, Korean, or half Vietnamese?

Yale, in this case.

thunkshift1• 6 years ago

Why race information is needed for college and job applications?

fatjokes• 6 years ago

With no data backing this up, I feel like people would be happier with quotas.

If Asians were told that at most X% of school Y could be Asian to save room for other ethnicities for social reasons, they could probably accept that better than being told that it was because they were being categorically determined as having shitty or empty personalities.

rasengan0• 6 years ago

Some numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...

Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants

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