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Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process
- baggy_trough 7y agoAbsolute madness. Of course they discriminate against Asians.
- tasogare 7y agoSomehow racism is fine when it’s targeting Asians and Whites.
- FakeComments 7y agoThe whole premise of “woke” movements is they’re the right kind of bigots — just like the bigots in the 1950s said. Progressivism is a cancer for egalitarian societies. And frankly, that black politicians can keep their job while associating with the Nation of Islam black supremacist group speaks to the long term double standards in government. For those who don’t know, the Nation of Islam is the group of black supremacists who gunned down Malcolm X when he stopped teaching black supremacy and instead preached universal brotherhood, following Malcolm X’s trip to Mecca. Obama associated heavily with one of their previous leaders, Louis Farrakhan — the man suspected to have ordered the assassination of Malcolm X. In fact, the entire Black Caucus had lunch with that black supremacist. https://www.ajc.com/news/local/could-this-long-lost-photo-have-derailed-obama-2008-campaign/jC8NKhQr6a72VjRYY9o0EM/ https://www.ajc.com/news/local/could-this-long-lost-photo-ha...
- umeshunni 7y agoThey do. The court just ruled that racism is fine.
- magic_beans 7y agoThere are thousands of amazing universities in the US that are not Harvard.
- colpabar 7y agoIs that what you'd say if a baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding?
- yucca_plant 7y agoThe entire problem is that we categorize people into different buckets. "White", "Black", "Asian", etc. Admissions must be race blind. In general our society must be race blind. "White" people were once Polish, Italian, German, etc. Yet these identities have melted away over generations in large part because society did not and does not actively reinforce these identities. By forcing people into these buckets we reinforce the very divisions that we want to overcome.
- moate 7y agoThere's so much to unpack here, IDK where to even start. "I don't see color" doesn't feel helpful to many people of color. If you believe that there are prejudices, and you want to fix them, saying "everyone immediately needs to stop being prejudice and everything will be better" isn't actually a solution we can enact. What if people don't suddenly decide it's in their best interest to not be racist? *Edited to remove off topic comment
- homonculus1 7y agoThat may not be sufficient, but setting institutional standards that treat people differently based on skin color is guaranteed to perpetuate racial division and prejudice.
- charliesharding 7y agoIt doesn't feel helpful to be viewed as an individual as opposed to simply a member of a group? Not every person with x skin color has the same experiences... You're taking racism and running the other way with it instead of just rejecting the premise of viewing people as tribe members as flawed. You shouldn't judge people by the groups they happen to belong to. Individuals should be judged on a case-by-base basis.
- magic_beans 7y agoI gather you're not a minority.
- cpr 7y agoWhat they should have been examining is why "legacy" (read: people who have already donated, or are likely to donate seriously to Harvard) candidates are so favored... (Speaking as an old Harvard alum ('76).)
- wendyshu 7y agoDoes it really need an explanation?
- Invictus0 7y agoWhere can I read the decision? Article is paywalled. Edit: here it is: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.165519/gov.uscourts.mad.165519.672.0_2.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.165519/...
- moate 7y agohttps://www.npr.org/2019/10/01/730386096/federal-judge-rules-in-favor-of-harvard-in-admissions-case https://www.npr.org/2019/10/01/730386096/federal-judge-rules... Also links to an SC case that will likely be cited should they decide to take up this one (which seems unlikely IMHO).
- dang 7y agoWe changed the URL to that from https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-determines-harvard-s-race-conscious-admissions-policy-is-constitutional-11569958184?mod=rsswn https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-determines-harvard-s-race..., which is hard-paywalled.
- doctorpangloss 7y agoThey ought to do more to at least make students feel less discriminated against. The question is really how to add transparency and systemization to the process in a way that cannot be gamed. I don’t think everyone believes standardized testing is the answer, so what is it? My personal opinion is that they will actually create separate admissions pools, under the cover of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The transparency will be about “Fine, for this specific program, we will simply admit the top 400 test scorers” or whatever. Each department will have its own admissions policy and students will be able to choose which to apply to. Everyone gets the same education, opportunities and degree. They will wind up with the same exact class but at least the deal being cut with students is more transparent.
- cpr 7y agoThis is a truly hard problem. I read somewhere (citation needed) that if truly race-blind admissions were used in the UC system, they'd have 98% Asian students. (As a dead white male, that's amusing. Just shows how culture affects outcomes.)
- Glyptodon 7y agoDoes this mean 98% of the students meeting guaranteed UC admission thresholds are Asian or is that something California did away with? (IE ~98% of the top 9% however that's defined I think.)
- CallOfTheWilde 7y agoThis only applies to the "least elite" UC schools (Merced and Riverside, or perhaps just Merced at this point).
- moate 7y ago>>The question is really how to add transparency and systemization to the process in a way that cannot be gamed. You can't make a system that can't be gamed if there's people making judgement calls involved. You can't build a perfect system that makes everyone happy. You just need to build a system you're happy with. No matter what you do, someone with a 4.0 isn't getting into Harvard, and they're going to be pissed about that.
- umeshunni 7y agoWow - this sets a bad precedent. This might now encourage companies to now discriminate against Asias in hiring as well. There are already murmurs in the Valley about how there are too many Asians in tech.
- munchbunny 7y agoWhy do you think that? Discriminating by race for hiring is explicitly illegal, so wherever it's happening, it's already happening despite the law.
- javagram 7y agoDiscriminating by race for college admissions is also explicitly illegal. (Edit: see https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html ) The law only matters inasmuch as it can be enforced. If judges decline to enforce the law when they believe it’s in the interest of diversity to discriminate against a specific race like Asians, it could equally apply to employment where similar diversity initiatives are taking root.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mfer 7y agoWhile IANAL... There is a difference between general admission and "programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance". While I'm not saying this is right, it appears to be the current letter of the law. If, for example, race were a determining factor in who works on one of the R&D projects at Harvard that is funded by federal money it would be different than this situation. Does each student at Harvard get federal financial assistance through Harvard? Not state financial assistance but federal. The different matters to the letter of the law. It looks like the devil is in the details.
- javagram 7y ago
- throwawaysea 7y agoThis ruling is a travesty and I hope the Supreme Court overturns it when this is appealed. It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory. Take a look at the distribution of students by race in the University of California system, where they're not permitted to discriminate in this manner, thanks to Prop 209 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...) - it is very different (more Asians) compared to private schools like Harvard.
- crazypyro 7y agoHarvard has a 25%+ Asian American undergrad class, (edit)~~2.5x (Harvard's is ~60% of UC's) more than the latest number listed on that wiki page, so your final statement is factually incorrect`~. I quoted wrong number. It's 25% vs 40%. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
- throwawaysea 7y agoThe wiki says the UC system has about 40% Asian American students. This suggests race conscious admissions do indeed (as the name suggests) discriminate based on race, at institutions like Harvard.
- crazypyro 7y agoI quoted wrong number. Sorry.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoNitpick: Comparing UC to Harvard isn't that straightforward. The UC system is California's, it disproportionately takes people from California, and California does have more Asians than the country as a whole, as well as more than the Northeast region in which Harvard is based.
- muh_gradle 7y agoWe all know that number should probably be higher if we're actually caring about academic performance. Affirmative action doesn't actually bother me as much as legacy based admissions. Just absolutely idiotic that it's accepted.
- newfoot 7y agoHarvard does tend to favor wealthy legacies though: "According to The Harvard Crimson, 43.2% of legacy students and 20% of athletes in Harvard’s Class of 2019 come from households that earn more than $500,000 a year, compared to just 15.4% of the overall class. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow said that many of the legacy students applying to the university would be in the most desirable applicant pool regardless of their status. “Their applications tend to be well put-together," Bacow told NPR. "They have deep knowledge of the institution. So it's a self-selected pool, which, as a group, by almost any metric, looks very, very good relative to the broader applicant pool.” " https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphia-harvard-admissions-legacy-athletes https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...
- JumpCrisscross 7y agoDoes anyone have a link to the opinion?
- edflsafoiewq 7y agohttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzqBPL57yCRWHZGE7A6U6re3cGX-KTEl/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mzqBPL57yCRWHZGE7A6U6re3cGX...
- umvi 7y agoIt's like we have these two irreconcilable ideas: - Diversity is good - Discrimination is bad When 50% of the world's population is from China/India, how do you both promote diversity and not discriminate?
- rolltiide 7y agoThen you start focusing in the diversity within those extremely large countries and groups of people. So further partition once the US becomes saturated with a more accurate representation of who lives on this planet.
- theonlyklas 7y agoWhy does the US need to be first?
- rolltiide 7y agoBecause this is a thread about Harvard, a US college, being scrutinized under US laws in the US court system.
- AdrianB1 7y ago50% of the world and admission at Harvard in USA are different groups, so the comparison is flawed. If you would use USA population structure, that is a relevant argument.
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- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ridaj 7y agoWhat I don't get is, what happens if you don't declare a race, or declare "Other", during admission? Why wouldn't Asian candidates do that?
- tastygreenapple 7y agoThe real question is "why doesn't everyone mark 'African American' " I always self-identify as an african american woman where possible.
- thepaperone 7y agoThere's plenty of people who put AA as their race just to get a boost to their chances.
- chillacy 7y agoIt's can be discerned anyways based on your full name and sometimes admissions essay.
- zucker42 7y agoOften your name gives it away.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- filoleg 7y agoOften, but far from always. Actual scenario that happened to me: had an asian-american colleague whose first name was a generic western name, while his last name was german (due to someone on his dad's side of the family being german).
- notyourday 7y agoA long time ago a daughter of a friend of mine received a letter from Congressional Black Caucus congratulating her on a phenomenal achievement. The letter congratulated her, Shoshana, a minority in a prestigious public school of overcoming the adversity caused by her circumstances in becoming one of 50 students in a school with the 99th percentile GPA and how the congressmen and women of the caucus were applauding her determination and would be delighted if she were to include that letter in her college application. She did. And was admitted to one of the Ivys. The school was a bit shocked when she arrived to see a 5'1 girl dressed in a way typical of Orthodox Jews. P.S. You should look up other stories coming out of Masterman which is located in North Philadelphia. This is not even in the top 100.
- dcolkitt 7y agoThis specific ruling at the lower court is mostly inconsequential. DOJ will immediately appeal, and I don't think anyone doubts for a second that it will ultimately be decided by SCOTUS.
- SamReidHughes 7y agoIt wasn’t the DOJ filing this lawsuit.
- larrik 7y agoI didn't think the DOJ was involved here?
- favorited 7y agoIt's absolutely hilarious that the person you're replying to is so sure what's going to happen next without even knowing who the plaintiff is.
- dcolkitt 7y agoQuit being pedantic. The DOJ is openly backing the lawsuit. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/01/harvard-race-affirmative-action-admissions-015815 https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/01/harvard-race-affirm...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- okmokmz 7y agoI'm out of the loop, but isn't this the same kind of affirmative action that makes it more difficult to be accepted into elite universities as a white male? I was under the impression that this kind of discrimination was perfectly legal. When I was applying for college I constantly heard about how white and asian males had a much more difficult time getting scholarships and getting accepted to Ivy league, and other highly selective, universities but I don't know how true that really is
- deogeo 7y agoFor perspective, here are the Harvard vs US demographics, sorted by most to least represented [1,2,3,4]: Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) [1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics [2] https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... [3] https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifestyle/ https://features.thecrimson.com/2016/freshman-survey/lifesty... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews, upper estimate used
- balls187 7y agoWhere is your source used for the US Demographics for freshman aged students?
- SachaMichel 7y agoSo the single percentage point difference in the african american demo is what people are going nuts about ?
- keketi 7y agoNo, what they are going nuts about is what it would be without discrimination in their favor.
- FakeComments 7y agoAs usual, white people are the real victims of modern discrimination, while being scapegoated by the minorities who benefit. Welcome to woke! See my other comment for another example of enabling racism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130049
- tareqak 7y agoDo the admission statistics also have the representation further broken down by how they were admitted (affirmative-action, scholarship, legacy-admission, normal, etc.)?
- 40acres 7y agoUnfortunately this is bigger than Harvard and the Asian American students are 'collateral damage'. Fundamentally, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow permeates every facet of American life, education especially. You can't fix hundreds of years worth of discrimination without tipping the scales in a way that seems discriminatory to others, seems like the Judge in this case understands that.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoThis is Jim Crow.
- kkggyftfxdfg 7y agoLol are you fucked?
- baggy_trough 7y agoImmoral and unethical nonsense.
- 40acres 7y agoIs it really? Think about the often used phrase in regards to subjects like this: 'equality of opportunity' vs. 'equality of outcome' think of all it would take in America to come close to equality of opportunity: you would need vast levels of education and housing reform at the minimum. That reform would no doubt 'disadvantage' those who have benefited from the discrimination and lack of access that others have dealt with. Fundamentally it looks like an institution like Harvard taking into account this context when determining admissions. This is beyond the individuals who may or may not participate in the discrimination itself because the outcome of that discrimination is everywhere now, no one can escape it.
- mrrrgn 7y agoThere's no way that you can form a tally from the sum total of a person's entire lineage in order to equalize them according to their ancestors struggles. Attempts to do this seem mostly to act as a laundering scheme for financial privilege. Now all someone from a wealthy family needs to do to justify their admission to elite institutions is to find some great great grandparent who plausibly suffered a systemic injustice. I see the good intentions here, but I get the impression that well meaning rule oriented people are being used to further the very injustices they mean to solve.
- oh_sigh 7y agoFrankly, this is good for the plaintiffs, because they will almost certainly be able to be heard at the Supreme Court, and the time is as right as any for a reversal of race based standards based on the general composition of the USSC.
- rongenre 7y agoClearly the university business is ripe for disruption.
- ummonk 7y agoThis ruling was expected. The judge had been stalling on making a ruling to make it take time to work its way through the appeals courts and get to the Supreme Court where the policy might actually get ruled unconstitutional.
- thrill 7y agoUnlikely to be ruled unconstitutional with the current makeup of the Supreme Court. A case brought against the University of Texas in 2016 ruled 4-3 basically the same way, with one justice recusing and another justice had died and not yet been replaced.
- gnicholas 7y agoReally? Kennedy is gone and was replaced by Kavanaugh. Kennedy was in the majority (pro-AA) in the 2016 case, and I would venture to guess (based on nothing more than the discussions in the legal circles I'm in) that Kavanaugh would not be as friendly to affirmative action as Kennedy was. If I were a betting man, I'd put the odds north of 2:1 that this will be overturned if the current SCOTUS sees it.
- thrill 7y agoKagan, an Obama nominee, skipped the Texas case. I think it'd be ruled the same way this time.
- ravitation 7y agoIt was a 4-3 decision in a 8 member court (with Justice Kagan recusing herself, as you mentioned). It's a 5-4 reverse decision now based on ideology alone.
- gnicholas 7y agoI would guess it would be 5-4 against Harvard, with Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts in the majority. Which one of these would you have ruling in favor of Harvard's AA plan?
- user982 7y ago"Race-conscious" is a handy euphemism.
- crazygringo 7y agoIt's not though. Although you may disagree, in common usage when referring to policy that affects groups: "Racism" is continuing to disadvantage a group that is already at a disadvantage -- blatantly unfair. A "race-conscious" policy seeks to give advantage to a group that is at a disadvantage, which necessarily will disadvantage a group that is at an advantage. In this thinking, once the disadvantage goes away, then the policy can go away too. Even if you disagree with race-conscious policies, conflating them with racism is disingenuous.
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoRacism is discrimination on the grounds of race. Stop re-inventing language.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoNobody is entitled to go to Harvard and focusing on one institution does a disservice to folks (including Asian Americans like myself) who didn’t get into any elite institutions unlike many of the plaintiffs
- tathougies 7y agoIndeed no one is entitled to go to Harvard, but Harvard is also not entitled to federal research grants that are being funded by taxing Asian Americans under the same laws as other Americans, so I guess we are at an impasse.
- wendyshu 7y agoI wonder how much public support there would be for ending the grants.
- CobrastanJorji 7y agoHarvard's endowment is around $40 billion. They're awarded about $600M in Federal grants per year. Though I'm sure they'd prefer to keep receiving them, they'd be just fine without them. It seems like turning down Federal grants and handling admissions as they like would satisfy everyone.
- tathougies 7y agoI mean that's fine. I'm not out to get Harvard. They have every right to their private wealth. Just don't expect governmental recognition and public praise.
- bluecalm 7y agoWould everyone be satisfied if a restaurant or a store discriminated based on race even if it doesn't take any federal funds? Racist policies are racist. Hopefully Supreme Court takes it and strikes it down.
- travisoneill1 7y agoThe real money is paid directly to students through federal student loans and then to the university.
- nannePOPI 7y agoReading about things like this I love the way we select people for university in Italy. There is a written test, multiple-choice questions. Those who score higher, pass. Yes, it sounds like a system that favors test takers, but there are so many seats to take that if you don't score enough you really don't deserve the place (I say this as a person who was never smart not good at tests). Nobody will consider anything else. Sadly, I've noticed a slight shift towards a more american way of talking about things like race and sex, even in universities, but I hope the legal system is strong enough to keep having neutral admissions. Our economy is already in a bad place, last thing we need is young people being discriminated for anything but their ability to perform a task, even if arbitrary.
- tathougies 7y ago> There is a written test, multiple-choice questions So we have this in the United States but it has been accused of being discriminatory because the outcomes differ by race. You can't make this stuff up people!
- throthrothis 7y agoThis is what is called White privelege my friends.
- droithomme 7y agoThis has been true since the 1978 Bakke decision. Judge is only upholding clearly established SCOTUS precedent.
- rr-geil-j 7y agoThis feels reminiscent of 'diversity hires' where females and/or members of the LGBT+ community are preferred not because of competency/merit but to improve a company's diversity metrics. Disclaimer: I haven't experienced this myself. I only read/heard of these complaints from other people.
- kache_ 7y agoThis ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit. To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placement in that university.
- opportune 7y agoThis is one of the things about affirmative action that bothers me the most. If it's known that people in X subset of students are held to lower standards, then in a Bayesian sense it hurts the people in X subset who would have got in if held to the same standards. Harvard is notorious for glade inflation, but at other institutions the same phenomenon can hurt people's ability to complete harder degrees. I remember reading a paper claiming that affirmative action resulted in lower minority graduation rates/higher transfer rates in STEM because it put people in academic environments that they weren't prepared for; they could have likely had more success completing a STEM degree if they had attended an institution where they fit more of a median student academic profile
- mywittyname 7y ago> people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit. Said people have those perceptions regardless.
- wendyshu 7y agoIs there a study on this?
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoAsians should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.
- ARandomerDude 7y agoImagine the uproar if you had instead said > Whites should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.
- zhugeIiang 7y agoWhy not both?
- ARandomerDude 7y agoIf by "why not both?" you mean "why aren't people outraged about both comments?" then I agree completely. That's why I said what I did. People seem to think racism against whites isn't racism. By reversing the roles, hopefully it's more obvious that it's equally wrong.
- ravitation 7y agoJust so people are aware, this doesn't "set a bad precedent." It doesn't set any kind of precedent, because the precedent is extremely well established. This ruling is directly in line with numerous SCOTUS decisions: Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), Grutter v. Bollinger, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, etc... These cases are cited throughout the opinion. The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that race is admissible as part of an admissions decision as long as that admissions process stands up to strict scrutiny.
- blisterpeanuts 7y agoBakke established that specific quotas are not legal, but race as one of multiple factors is permissible. If Harvard's admissions policies include any kind of quota, they will probably be ruled illegal.
- ravitation 7y agoThe first line of the opinion's conclusion is that Harvard's admissions process survives strict scrutiny. If it were found to be dependent on quotas, this would likely not be the case, based on the previously mentioned well established precedent.
- gnicholas 7y agoMy understanding is that there was no written evidence of a hard quota presented. However, the rise in the percent of college-bound Asians has grown dramatically in recent years, but the share of Asians at Harvard has not increased commensurately. An appellate court could find that this fact, combined with other circumstantial evidence, indicates that quotas were used — even if not put in writing. Also, it is well known that "strict scrutiny" is interpreted differently in the context of affirmative action than "traditional" discrimination. So when a judge says something survives strict scrutiny, the analysis provided may be more akin to intermediate scrutiny (applied to sex-based discrimination) or rational basis (applied to pretty much everything else).
- sgustard 7y agoIn response to this, schools will continue to devalue the importance of test scores, and lean more on the interview, essay, "personality" and "well-roundedness" of the candidates. Make the process more subjective so that you cannot be shown to be biased according to some numeric criteria.
- userbinator 7y agoIt will undoubtedly happen that someone hired due to diversity and not skill will do something very wrong, and possibly cause great harm to others. I wonder what the reaction will be then...? Luckily, the world still follows the laws of physics.
- dlp211 7y agoPeople have been put into undeserving positions for the history of humanity.
- NTDF9 7y agoI wonder what judges and people would think if Asians started an Asian majority/conscious university? To me this seems like a slippery slope.
- zarro 7y agoI don't see how it is possible for someone to argue that discrimination based on race isn't racist and prejudiced. I also think the presupposition that an increase in "diversity" is always "good" isn't necessarily always "true".
- dbjacobs 7y agoI think its clear that Harvard's selection process is more about predicting (and admitting) those who will be successful than those who are most deserving (by some definition of deserving). This is how they increase their brand's value. I'm not sure how you realign an institutions incentive's to change this priority.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoIt's pretty clear that Harvard's selection process is more about letting in wealthy and legacy students. This population tends to be more successful in life.
- opportune 7y agoElite institutions need to juggle a few responsibilities: They need to let in the children of the ultra wealthy for the status symbol, money, and networking for students. They need to let in the children of high paying donors (not always the same group as above) for the money. They need to let in a lot of smart students to give legitimacy to the above groups and create new families of donors. They need to have a demographic profile that roughly approximates the US demographic profile to not appear racist. They also need to have a balanced gender ratio, not overly favor a single region, etc. They want to have a balanced class, i.e. not everyone studying computer science and economics, people who can play trombone, people for the Fencing team. You can argue that it's basically all about giving legitimacy and prestige to the ultra donors and wealthy, but it's also about introducing high-achieving people from less privileged backgrounds to those from more privileged backgrounds in the hope that you will get new generations of wealthy donors.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago>They need to have a demographic profile that roughly approximates the US demographic profile to not appear racist. They also need to have a balanced gender ratio, not overly favor a single region, etc. I don't think this is true of any Ivy League institution (that the racial demographics mirrors that of the nation). The gender ratio and "regionality" are well-balanced, however.
- blhack 7y agoHow about: who cares? Isn’t this hacker news? Aren’t we all supposed to be hackers who are upending the existing system? How about we build our own Harvards where anybody who wants to study can come and learn whatever they want? And the network comes from being surrounded by other people who cared enough to learn. We don’t need these places anymore. We’ll find our own funding and do our own research and screw the system. We’ll build our own system.
- filoleg 7y agoOr you can just attend a school in CA, where this kind of admission process has been made illegal [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_209 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20...
- toroszo 7y agoyes sir! oops, is that not inclusive enough? I would like to rephrase then: yes person!
- cm2187 7y agoWell, there is a growing movement of conservatives that are unimpressed with this and with the general politics of universities, and who are becoming anti-college (and the booming cost of the said colleges provides additional arguments). I think it is a bit dangerous, but in essence it joins your argument. I personally think that the education aspect of colleges is massively overrated, that the quality of the university pretty much all comes from the quality of its recruitment (its students). The teaching is typically very average (researchers aren't necessarily good professors). But if the game is that this badge is required to land a high paying job, a kid today doesn't really have a choice. It's kind of a prisonner dilemna. We could have a system where the name of the university wouldn't matter that much. That's pretty much how Germany works if I understand correctly.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoYou can believe exactly that but still acknowledge that institutions like Harvard have a certain amount of power, and believe that if they use it in a discriminatory way that's bad.
- gist 7y agoWhat is interesting about this entire issue and the discussion is this. It's what I will call the 'Sophia Loren without a nose is not Sophia Loren' paradox. If you have a University like Harvard and you have it whereby students are admitted strictly on merit and further if you have more people than can be accommodated by merit then is it still Harvard? If you have a celebrity that is admitted to Harvard (or any 'top' school) is it possible that that person provides more or a better experience in some way to other students then someone who was raised or related to a less notable person? Pretend for a second you attend school with the daughter of a US President or the son of the head of a major corporation. Do you think that that would provide in itself benefits to other students than in the environment they were raised in? Indirectly in some way?
- zhugeIiang 7y agoStuyvesant used to have 13% African American students in the 1970s, matching the overall population. The test system didn't change, but the African American demographics in Stuyvesant dropped to 1%. Does this mean that the impacts of discrimination increased over time?
- terminal_logic 7y agoWhat was gained from diversity?
- 40acres 7y agoWhen it comes to affirmative action cases like these people need to think a bit deeper than Harvard or even race in general. This involves our own collective notion of what is 'fair' and what is 'justice'. I recently heard that the Spanish government is offering citizenship to a subset of the Jewish population that was kicked out of Spain during the Inquisition. Is this 'justice' for the descendants of those Jews? Is this 'fair' for migrants to Spain who have arrived legally but may be denied the benefits of Spanish citizenship? Has your child ever stomped their feet and crossed their arms when they perceived to be on the negative end of a 'fair' or 'just' ruling by you? Is it fair to the spouse and child of someone who has been committed of a crime that they are institutionalized? Is it fair to the employees of WeWork that they won't get to exercise their shares because it's CEO is a fraud?
- zhugeIiang 7y agoI propose creating a school that only looks at quantitative measures, gives a single test once a year that is grueling in mathematics, science, logic, reading, and writing. They just pick the top x-percentile of students. If there is a tie, students are picked randomly. We can call it the HackerNews Academy.
- munchbunny 7y agoWe would call that "China," and the Chinese system presents its own social problems.
- pnako 7y agoThat would be Ecole Polytechnique (or indeed all engineering schools in France).
- Meekro 7y agoOthers here have pointed out, quite correctly, that this ruling follows a long string of precedents. But with the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, I wouldn't be surprised if we see affirmative action knocked down in the next few years. Fisher v UT (2016) gave us a look at where the justices stand, and the three most conservative justices at the time (Roberts, Alito, Thomas) wanted to strike down UT's affirmative action policy. If the new conservatives (Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) join them, we could have a new majority that believes affirmative action at a public college is always unconstitutional.
- mruts 7y agoAs a person living in Africa, this is probably because Africans are willing to work much much harder than American blacks. Also the culture is less toxic.
- streb-lo 7y agoWe're offering personal anecdotes as facts on here now? Really?
- pessimizer 7y agoThe comment is illustrative of the fact that a portion of the people counted as remediation for American slavery and discrimination are not only not the descendants of American slaves, but actively parrot bigoted attitudes against them.
- bsanr2 7y agoUnfortunately, they are also subject to the bigotry native blacks are subject to - one of the wealthiest majority-black counties in the country, whose population has swelled recently with highly-educated African and West Indian immigrants, still deals with lower housing values and the attendant ills (lower quality public schools, etc.), for example. It's not just about slavery.
- dang 7y agoRacial flamewar will get you banned here. We've warned you about posting flamebait to HN many times before. Would you please stop that, and instead review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended? We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130576 and marked it off-topic.
- opportune 7y agoI wanted to go to Harvard, and didn't get in, so I went to a slightly less prestigious school instead. I had perfect test scores and grades so I potentially could have been part of this lawsuit, and I used to be super bothered by affirmative action. But now I don't really care. Even if you don't get into your favorite top school, if you're actually a strong applicant you're likely to get into at least one, or if not, somewhere like Berkeley. Not getting into the tippy-top schools only hurts you if you want to do high octane finance (which these days is less attractive than tech IMO), and maybe puts you slightly behind where you could have been regarding internships or where you land your first job/grad school. I felt like I had "caught up" to where I would have likely been if I had got into Harvard by the time I hit 23. I had to work a bit harder and smarter than if more opportunities were handed to me on a silver platter, since I went to a slightly worse school, but it wasn't a big deal. Meanwhile there are probably people who got into Harvard for which it was actually a completely make-or-break, life-changing event in their lives. Arguably, they deserved, and certainly needed it, more than someone like me.
- paulcole 7y ago> I had perfect test scores and grades If Harvard wanted to admit 1,000 kids with perfect test scores and perfect grades they’d just take the first 1,000 applicants and call it a day. They can be and are much choosier than that. Why wouldn’t they be? If you have the choice between a 4.0/1600 kid and a 4.0/1600/world-class pianist, who would you take? When applying to Harvard grades and test scores aren’t even worth mentioning. If you’re counting on those to get you in then you’ve got almost no shot.
- opportune 7y agoSure, but there are at least 4 other colleges that are about as prestigious and selective as Harvard for STEM. Back in my day I think it was something like 1000 kids a year got perfect scores between the two standardized tests, and the class sizes at all of these places is about 1600 (except Caltech which was like 250). I agree it is about more than grades and test scores, and I did have other stuff too, but that's beside the point. Arguing about that is missing the point of what I intended - what I meant is that if you are one of the better applicants, which I do think I was quantitatively (obviously not good enough lol), you don't need to go to Harvard. Whereas for some of the people getting in who might not have without affirmative action, getting into Harvard is actually life changing.
- cobbzilla 7y agoRecent article on Harvard "legacy" admissions by Tyler Cowen of MR: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-23/harvard-s-legacies-are-nothing-to-be-proud-of https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-23/harvar... The "oh wow, that's odd" part: "The most shocking number in the paper is this: Of the white students admitted to Harvard, more than 43% are in the so-called ALDC category — that is, they are recruited athletes, legacy admissions, applicants on the “dean’s interest” list and children of Harvard faculty and staff. Furthermore, in the model constructed by the authors, three quarters of those applicants would have been rejected if not for their ALDC status."
- abhisuri97 7y agoYeah. Reading the opinion, it looks like SFFA only could make an argument via statistics and it failed to establish how those statistics related to reality. About 20-30 pages of the opinion are about comparing and contrasting Card and Acidiacono and honestly...it seems to me that both models are just inconclusive. Neither ends up taking into account what goes through the mind of an admissions officer and leaves out (what are arguably) critical components in an applicant's profile. In general, it does not seem there is a way for us to point to statistics and say "look...this is discrimination" there are human factors involved that are too complex (whether that be school support ratings, racial biases of interviewers/admissions officers, or just luck of the particular application cycles we have data on). I'm unsure whether the supreme court would take this case on...there doesn't seem to be much here that SFFA could argue in its favor.
- underpand 7y agoThe difficulty of arguing the case is by design of Harvard Admissions and it's very problematic. The point of holistic admissions is to make it almost impossible to prove discrimination even if it clearly exists.
- zarro 7y agoI don't get why a private University can't decide who it wants or doesn't want to attend its school regardless of the metrics it chooses. For instance, I don't think that matching a Universities demographics to the "national" or "global" demographics is likely to produce highest caliber candidates. What if Jewish and Asian candidates consistently outperform other candidates, why shouldn't a private school be allowed to accept more of the candidates it thinks "deserve" it more? If people don't like the policies of institutions that do this, or think they are ineffective, over time other institutions will outcompete/outperform them.
- lozenge 7y agoBecause life sucked for black people in the 60s and they managed to change the law?
- zarro 7y agoI don’t see how that has anything to do with forcing a private institution into serving customers it doesn’t want to. The argument is: Imagine you and a friend have a private tutoring business. You should be able to have the freedom to pick whatever customers you want, your not a slave, your not obligated to provide a service for someone if you don't want to. Over time if there is demand for private tutoring that you and your friend aren't willing to meet, there will be others who will provide that service because there is profit in it.
- nql 7y agoWhy should that logic only apply to colleges and not businesses in general?
- lozenge 7y agoYour laissez faire approach was tried and it didn't work. For example, the backlash from white customers and suppliers could be enough to make it "not worth it after all". Only when the law made private businesses treat all customers equally regardless of race, could outcomes begin to equalise. Just like we require certain minimum wages and environmental laws, disallowing racist behaviour in businesses is just something that the government can and should impose on commerce.
- jletienne 7y agoi'm interested if wealth is an omitted variable here. how does a 10k increase in household income effect probability of acceptance.
- thowthisaway 7y agoSo we use tell the kids to study hard, get good grade and test well in the SAT/ACT. What exactly do we tell them now? How exactly do you tell a kid to be "awesome"?
- ngngngng 7y agoMy kid is mixed race so he can check whatever is fashionable at the time on his college applications.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoMy kid is also, unfortunately, he probably isn’t going to get many advantages from either white or asian.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 7y agoThere are 5,300 colleges and universities in the US alone. Maybe you tell them "Harvard's not the only option"?
- thowthisaway 7y agoBut why? why can't it be an option? question is, there's only a few things in life you can control, SAT and grade being one of them. How do you work on something that you have no control over?
- ceejayoz 7y ago> But why? why can't it be an option? Because universities have decided (rightly, IMO) that just taking the applicants with the top GPA and SAT scores and no other criteria doesn't give a very vibrant student body. Chances are a school like Harvard already has more "top student" scorers in this fashion than they can accept. > How do you work on something that you have no control over? "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference." There are plenty of things you can work on that colleges love to see. Volunteering, neat science projects, interesting life experiences, sports and performing arts, etc.
- growlist 7y agoInterested to know: are there any hard numbers that define when we will have achieved egalitarian nirvana?
- supernova87a 7y agoI think the thing I find most objectionable about the AA policies is that they proceed from an intellectually lazy and flawed premise -- that a group's representation following a selective process should exactly equal its representation in the general population. That is demonstrably false from general experience in life.
- dlp211 7y agoIt's only false because of the extreme inequality of opportunity in this country.
- pg_is_a_butt 7y agoRacism is racist, hypocrites.
- ikeboy 7y agoOf course it's constitutional, Harvard is a private organization and basically none of the constitution applies to them. The question was whether it violates federal law - specifically Title VI. The confusing part is that Title VI prohibits actions by private entities receiving government funding that would violate the constitution, were they carried out by a state entity. The opinion uses "constitutional" as a short-hand for "is in compliance with Title VI, which means it would be fine for a public college to do it as well under the constitution".
- underpand 7y agoI always thought that it was illegal for private organizations to racially discriminate. I know it is illegal for them to racially discriminate for employment. Is discriminating against customers/users (students in this case) fair game?
- ikeboy 7y agoIt's illegal in many contexts under federal law if the business is a "public accommodation". It's not unconstitutional. It may be against state laws in other contexts as well. Note the title here and at NPR originally said that the Judge said it was constitutional.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoAnyone got a link to a pdf of the judge's decision?
- CivBase 7y ago"Race-Conscious Admissions" obviously implies that a candidates race influences the criteria they must meet for admission to the university. So Harvard is obviously trying to balance the racial demographics of their students according to some ratio. What I really want to know is what ratio they are balancing towards and why that particular ratio is better than any other. I could pick any arbitrary ratio. How about a ratio that matches the modern demographics of Cambridge? Or Massachusetts? Or the United States? Or North America? Or all of Earth? Or the demographics of the US in 1636 when Harvard was established? Or the demographics some designer thinks looks good in pictures? Or the demographics of the wealthiest 5% of US citizens? Or the demographics of the poorest 5%? So on and so on. What is the incentive? Is it political? Is it just a ratio that Harvard admins think will keep them safe from political criticism? That clearly didn't work. Are they getting a kickback somehow? Is it a personal agenda to promote education in places the admins agree lacks it? Is it simple bigotry? I doubt the answers would change my mind, but I'm still very interested.
- FakeComments 7y agoEvery group but whites and Hispanics are over represented at Harvard. Whites are the most under represented group. Whatever their goal, it’s not matching the demographics of the US and constitutes purposeful racism to accomplish a social agenda. See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080
- zhugeIiang 7y agoWe have to consider not about who gets into Harvard. What is more important is the incentive structure that our education system is creating. If our system rewards people who play "victimization" games, that would encourage the next generation to prioritize writing stories that complain about the barriers in their way. If we had a system that rewarded learning a skill like mathematics, reading, writing, and only focused on these, we would have the next generation devoting more time, money, and energy to obtaining mastery over these. You can look at China, where families and students spend thousands of dollars on tutors, and some tutors are millionaires. Encouraging investment and dedication to learning is a good thing. True, you might take it too far, but it is far better to have an educated population that can think for itself. The SAT should transition to something like the National Exam in other countries. Offered only once a year, entirely free, very rigorous, and encompassing all subjects. This will provide both the carrot and the stick for the next generation to apply themselves to education. We need a culture that loves education and learning, not just sports and drama.
- lunaru 7y agoHow about a balanced culture that can appreciate eduction, sports AND drama? We don't need a culture where everyone strives for excellence in one dimension. That's a very boring world and implicitly creates a pyramid/caste system where the high academic achievers get the lion's share of attention and praise. There's a reason National Exams in Asian countries are sometimes viewed negatively.
- zhugeIiang 7y agoSports and drama are fine as long as they aren't the overriding factor. The research on the Harvard statistics show that playing a sport will increase your admission chance from 10% in the top academic bracket to 50%. Sport, legacy (rich), or dean's list (kushner rich). I would say given the rapid economic growth of Asian countries, the success of Asians around the world, and the need of America to import Asian engineering labor, we have a lot to learn from Asia. Just look at the 2012 CIA debacle in China. The entire CIA informant network in China was decapitated because China has superior engineers that hacked the CIA communication system. We need to open our eyes and realize that playing silly games have left us weak. We have a weak minded electorate that elects a weak minded president while China is racing ahead with CRISPR and rail guns.
- nybsop 7y agoif society's intuitions began instituting racist rules like this, would everyone have to become racist just to compete?
- shiado 7y agoI find it quite funny that the judge donated to Elizabeth Warren in 2012, a candidate who infamously listed herself as Native American on her Harvard affirmative action forms. The solution is clear. Just lie about your race.
- dmak 7y agoIsn't there a more fundamental issue? The category "Asian-American" is too broad and covers so many people.
- choiway 7y agoThe issue of discrimination is real but the intent of this lawsuit is not as honorable as you think. Check out the commentary online about the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, and their anti-affirmative action bias.
- dba7dba 7y agoI am readying stories about legacy admissions. Let me tell you about a little conversation I had about legacy admission to IvyLeague/Stanford. A family I know (both mom/dad are children of immigrants) had a kid who got into Harvard and/or Stanford. (not specifying which one to protect identity). Both parents went to public college for undergrad and then went to top school for law/medicine. Their kid went through K-12 in private school. When their child got into the top college for undergrad, I asked how many from that same high school got into the top Harvard/Stanford. Mom said 3 got into that college. And later, dad said 6 from the high school got into same college, and mentioned 3 out of 6 were legacy admissions. As far as the mom was concerned, the legacy admissions didn't even count as real admittance. :)
- lsh123 7y agoAs a private company, Harvard can have any admission process it wants. However, it should have zero federal or state grants if their admission process is using race (or gender, or ...) as part of the decision.
- part3 7y agoSpeaking as an Asian, I don't feel sorry for any of the disappointed asians, because they'll make a beeline for voting for Democrat candidates. A dumber community of people, I have never seen.
- dhairya 7y agoSo a couple of disclaimers. I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst (this was about 3ish years ago). My group worked closely with collecting and analyzing institutional data to advise senior leaders in strategic decision making and policy. Our group provided some of due diligence analysis when the lawsuit first surfaced. I personally didn't work directly with the lawsuit, but I was around those conversations.I also did work on the preliminary demographic analysis for the Inclusion and Belonging Taskforce (https://inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu/ https://inclusionandbelongingtaskforce.harvard.edu/), which emerged around the same time as the lawsuit was gaining traction. I just wanted to offer some observations from my time there. 1. Admissions at Harvard is actually more competitive than most folks realize. There was a running joke that Harvard was moving towards a 0% acceptance rate. With the common app, Harvard has seen an increase in applications every year but the amount of seats available is fixed (~2,000). This year it was about 43,000 applications. That number of available seats is not quite that. The Dean of College has a reserved set of seats that he use at his discretion. There's a set of reserved seats for athletic scholarships. So the actual number smaller of available seats is smaller. 2. Each application is looked at least twice. The entire admissions department locks itself away for about 2 weeks and reviews all the applications. Each officier is responsible for a geographic area and each application is reviewed by 2-3 different officers and scored using an internal rubric. The rubric counts many factors (some of which is discussed in the lawsuit). After meeting a few of the admissions officiers, I have a lot of empathy and respect for them. They were all kind, considerate and very patient folks. 3. I can't speak too much what goes into the admission selection (confidentiality) but there are many factors that play into it outside of just grades and scores. It's worth noting that exceptional candidates are easier to identify (Olympic athletes, students doing groundbreaking research, students with amazing life stories), but they make up small portion of the applicants. Most of the applicants are highly qualified (high test scores, gpa, extra-curriculars) and if there wasn't a limited number of seats, would have been admitted. 4. The troubling narrative that surrounds around race-conscious admissions policies is the implication that under-represented minorities would not meet admissions standards. This is simply not true. Nearly all the students considered for admissions (under represented minority or otherwise) were in in atleast the 98% if not higher. They also had high GPAs and other factors. All the students were very qualified and accomplished. I often wondered if you had a lottery system, would that be better? 5. The variation in SAT score at the upper end corresponds to very tiny percentile differences. The difference between say a 1400 (95%) student and 1600 (99.9826%)is small and honestly (my view) meaningless. 6. One of the interesting things I had to do was review the original case literature on affirmative action. A theme that folks don't talk about is the diversity is not just race/ethnicy that was actually considered in the case law. Geographic diversity and social location do play into Harvard assemement. And the underlying literature is fascinating. Cognitive development literature shows college-age young adults are still developing their world views and college is space where they will run into uncomfortable situations. When faced with the choice of challenging their views or retreating to saftey of thier lived experiences, diversity places a critical role. But not in the way might think. Having others who different from you (not just race, but geography, lived experiences and other factors) plays a significant role. So say you have a student that goes to a local college with the same geographic makeup and lived experiences as their highschool but is otherwise racially diverse, that student is less likely to exposed to experiences that challenge thier world views and help them develop. 7. Harvard and really all other elite college's admissions policies are based on scaricity and it seems outdated. I know the common argument is that scarcity is what drives prestige but Harvard Business School literally allows outsiders to buy their into its network. HBS has like 3 day executive education programs that allow you to say you're an HBS grad and have access to their alumni network for the small cost of 80k (yeah 80k for 3 days!). Now Harvard's campus is pretty tiny and there is limited space, so that makes sense from the on-campus perspective. But it also has the infrastructure to allow students to attend remotely through its DCE program and Harvard X courses. The stigma of continuing education aside (which is complicated and often unfair), the university should open its traditional programs up. There is precedent for this in the UK at top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, and ICL all of which offer thier main degrees to remote students (of course at price). And there's many problems with this suggestion (who gets access to on-campus vs remote, pricing, fairness, etc) but it's something Harvard and others like it should consider. Sorry ended up being so long. Hopefully it provides some other views to consider as you think about college admissions.
- terminal_logic 7y agoThank god we're not speaking German... Thank god we have diversity and hate crime laws instead of colonizing mars and beyond... The weak will reap what they sow.
- traderjane 7y agoThis is but Man in High Castle-inspired fantasy. Maybe if Britain had taken over the world, there would be nothing to Brexit from.
- KaoruAoiShiho 7y agoIMO the smoking gun for racism is this: https://imgur.com/IeJeUDw https://imgur.com/IeJeUDw Asians have the highest "personality" scores among alumni interviewers who meet with the applicants and the lowest "personality" scores among admissions officers who don't.
- shadowgovt 7y agoHacker Newsies employing all their training in computer engineering and sciences to the questions of racial discrimination. I, for one, cannot wait for the n-gate summary of this thread. It'll be one for the ages.
- chicob 7y agoNon-American here. I have never witnessed the dynamics of reparation policies. The closest thing we have in Portugal, if it could be so called, is the Jewish Law of Return, a bureaucratic shortcut for granting Portuguese nationality to descendants of 15th and 16th century Portuguese Jews that were forced to flee the country, escaping persecution. In Portugal, the concept of race has been recognized on the fly, and only in terms of the Constitutional Rights of citizens in the case of discrimination. This might change in the near future. As such, I follow this subject in American politics and news, since the USA are an obvious case-study. As I see it, the fact that the concept of race is meaningless in anthropological terms, as informative as it can be, is not helpful in fighting prejudice in general or racism in particular. A bit like explaining basic geometry to a flat-earther: in most cases, it is pointless. On the other hand, it seems to me that acknowledging the dynamics of the division of people by racial categories (self-reported or not) is a dead end, and one that might betray its very purpose. At best, this strategy will sustain the social conscience of the issues of race, without eroding the poisonous constructs associated with it. As in other areas of discrimination, like gender, strategies that favour outcome in detriment of opportunity might have some value to it, as this is a kind of social bailout that could just work. In some European countries, positive discrimination works only as a temporary exception. But unlike social concepts like gender, or nationality, whose fundamental aspects are less troublesome (there being, as far as I know, no equivalent of transgenderness in race) or whose arbitrariness (like geography) can be critically questioned in different fora, race has the problem of been deep rooted in physical appearance and prejudice. I don't see how a humanist society can deal in a meaningful way with such a stratification without risking to reinforce racist preconceptions. Am I missing something?
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- WomanCanCode 7y agoDisappointing ruling. This will encourage other universities to discriminate in the admission process however they see fit as long as they claim to use 'diversity' as a measure.
- ehmaybe 7y agoShould the goal be to achieve parity with global demographics instead? It seems without some sort of control the worlds most prestigious universities would only admit the wealthiest from the most populous regions - meaning white, Chinese and Indian students, no?