10 ms·

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

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 6y 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 6y 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.
- skissane 6y 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.
  - logicchop 6y ago
    I think your assumption here is that if you were to filter based on those things you'd get an outcome that would be representative of the total population. But I don't see why you think that. Look at relatively poor Asian kids in the NYC public schools system. Even if you were to apply your filter there, they would still likely end up massively over-represented. Similar (but less dramatic) outcomes are likely even with Whites. Even factors like social class and family income don't carve things up in such obvious ways.
    - skissane 6y ago
      Why must the outcome "be representative of the total population"? If group X is Y% of the national population, must group X also be exactly Y% of the student body at universities? It is inevitable that, in anything, some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented, partly just by random chance, partly due to all kinds of complex cultural and historical reasons. To the extent under-representation is due to bad historical reasons (past oppression/persecution/discrimination/etc), then yes I think something should be done about it. But why not do that at the individual level, of the individual who is socially disadvantaged due to that history of oppression? I have no problem with the idea that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get some special consideration. But compare two individuals: (a) a person from an under-represented racial/ethnic minority who comes from a privileged background (e.g. parents who are university professors, politicians, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc) (b) a person from the ethnic/racial majority (or a minority which is not considered to be "under-represented") who grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from child abuse and neglect, parental drug addiction and criminality, homelessness, etc. How is a system fair if (a) gets given a preference but there isn't one for (b)? That's why I think affirmative action should be based on individualised assessment of social disadvantage, not group membership.
    - babesh 6y ago
      Yup. You would get a higher percentage of high achieving poor Asian kids. These were the kids held up as model minorities 20 to 30 years ago.
    - colordrops 6y ago
- acwan93 6y 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.
- xiaolingxiao 6y ago
  If you dont' look at race, you might get > 50% asian like CalTech, which only look at scores.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    I sure some people who apply to Caltech apply to Yale, but most people who apply to Yale probably aren’t applying to Caltech. Even if Caltech practiced AA, it would still have very few underrepresented minorities.
- icelancer 6y 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.
- glglwty 6y 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 6y ago
Could be aiming for a diverse mix of students?
bllguo 6y 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.
- totalZero 6y 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.
  - bllguo 6y ago
    I appreciate your take. I know that UC schools and Caltech are commonly held up examples of "meritocratic" approaches to admissions that skew heavily Asian - but your rebuttal would be that I haven't normalized for socioeconomic factors, right? I can definitely buy that possibility. Would be great if we can see some data, but I don't know if that's readily available. That said, from personal experience, I would still contend that _cultural_ diversity is valuable to uphold. I don't think diversity of thought stems solely from socioeconomic background.
Jerry2 6y 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 6y ago
  I'd say, for those schools, last name might be more important than face or skin color.
- EVdotIO 6y ago
  There is one hold out on affirmative action for admissions, CalTech.
  - chillee 6y ago
    The UC system is also race-blind. Correspondingly, you see 33% asian in UCs, and 43% asian at Caltech.
    - babesh 6y ago
      It isn’t quite race blind. It is race blind if you pass the initial bar. After that they take subjective things into account like your essay.
      - babesh 6y ago
        The well known hack for the essay is to emphasize how you grew up poor, disadvantaged, first in family to go to college, escaped war, etc... Apparently helpful both for college and medical school.
    - ucgradtemp 6y ago
      In my experience, it is not race-blind (see above comment). Also, Professor Sander at UCLA is suing the UC system over alleged violations of Prop 209. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19/new-lawsuit-suggests-u-california-has-been-considering-race-admissions https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...
ggggtez 6y 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.
- totalZero 6y 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?
  - logicchop 6y ago
    It probably gets worse than that. Eventually, if you pursue the task with gusto, it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. And then, if those you just let in aren't doing so well, you have to just let them pass. And so, eventually, you have to just give them degrees. And then, if those people who were just handed degrees can't convince anyone to hire them, you have to just give them the job..
    - ggggtez 6y ago
      >it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    > in order to counteract your personal perception I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves. I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.
Miner49er 6y 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.
- totalZero 6y 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.
hardwaregeek 6y 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.
- babesh 6y 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.
  - babesh 6y ago
    The best white/Asian kids seemed to be much more experienced with actual computers and computing. Classes taught in schools cannot compensate for this. It’s the difference between learning about programming in school and actual on the job programming or better yet hacking with strong friends for a year. It’s a huge difference in confidence, comfort, and dexterity. It isn’t necessarily a difference in raw ability.
    - babesh 6y ago
      One good step is mentorship, outreach, and internship programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids starting from elementary school. The tech giants should just embrace this.

elliekelly 6y 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 6y 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.
skissane 6y 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.
- logicchop 6y ago
  I think your assumption here is that if you were to filter based on those things you'd get an outcome that would be representative of the total population. But I don't see why you think that. Look at relatively poor Asian kids in the NYC public schools system. Even if you were to apply your filter there, they would still likely end up massively over-represented. Similar (but less dramatic) outcomes are likely even with Whites. Even factors like social class and family income don't carve things up in such obvious ways.
  - skissane 6y ago
    Why must the outcome "be representative of the total population"? If group X is Y% of the national population, must group X also be exactly Y% of the student body at universities? It is inevitable that, in anything, some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented, partly just by random chance, partly due to all kinds of complex cultural and historical reasons. To the extent under-representation is due to bad historical reasons (past oppression/persecution/discrimination/etc), then yes I think something should be done about it. But why not do that at the individual level, of the individual who is socially disadvantaged due to that history of oppression? I have no problem with the idea that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get some special consideration. But compare two individuals: (a) a person from an under-represented racial/ethnic minority who comes from a privileged background (e.g. parents who are university professors, politicians, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc) (b) a person from the ethnic/racial majority (or a minority which is not considered to be "under-represented") who grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from child abuse and neglect, parental drug addiction and criminality, homelessness, etc. How is a system fair if (a) gets given a preference but there isn't one for (b)? That's why I think affirmative action should be based on individualised assessment of social disadvantage, not group membership.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Yup. You would get a higher percentage of high achieving poor Asian kids. These were the kids held up as model minorities 20 to 30 years ago.
  - colordrops 6y ago
acwan93 6y 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.
xiaolingxiao 6y ago
If you dont' look at race, you might get > 50% asian like CalTech, which only look at scores.
- charlesu 6y ago
  I sure some people who apply to Caltech apply to Yale, but most people who apply to Yale probably aren’t applying to Caltech. Even if Caltech practiced AA, it would still have very few underrepresented minorities.
icelancer 6y 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.
glglwty 6y 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 6y ago

Could be aiming for a diverse mix of students?

bllguo 6y 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.

totalZero 6y 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.
- bllguo 6y ago
  I appreciate your take. I know that UC schools and Caltech are commonly held up examples of "meritocratic" approaches to admissions that skew heavily Asian - but your rebuttal would be that I haven't normalized for socioeconomic factors, right? I can definitely buy that possibility. Would be great if we can see some data, but I don't know if that's readily available. That said, from personal experience, I would still contend that _cultural_ diversity is valuable to uphold. I don't think diversity of thought stems solely from socioeconomic background.

Jerry2 6y 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 6y ago
I'd say, for those schools, last name might be more important than face or skin color.
EVdotIO 6y ago
There is one hold out on affirmative action for admissions, CalTech.
- chillee 6y ago
  The UC system is also race-blind. Correspondingly, you see 33% asian in UCs, and 43% asian at Caltech.
  - babesh 6y ago
    It isn’t quite race blind. It is race blind if you pass the initial bar. After that they take subjective things into account like your essay.
    - babesh 6y ago
      The well known hack for the essay is to emphasize how you grew up poor, disadvantaged, first in family to go to college, escaped war, etc... Apparently helpful both for college and medical school.
  - ucgradtemp 6y ago
    In my experience, it is not race-blind (see above comment). Also, Professor Sander at UCLA is suing the UC system over alleged violations of Prop 209. https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19/new-lawsuit-suggests-u-california-has-been-considering-race-admissions https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...

ggggtez 6y 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.

totalZero 6y 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?
- logicchop 6y ago
  It probably gets worse than that. Eventually, if you pursue the task with gusto, it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. And then, if those you just let in aren't doing so well, you have to just let them pass. And so, eventually, you have to just give them degrees. And then, if those people who were just handed degrees can't convince anyone to hire them, you have to just give them the job..
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    >it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  > in order to counteract your personal perception I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves. I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.

Miner49er 6y 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.

totalZero 6y 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.

hardwaregeek 6y 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.

babesh 6y 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.
- babesh 6y ago
  The best white/Asian kids seemed to be much more experienced with actual computers and computing. Classes taught in schools cannot compensate for this. It’s the difference between learning about programming in school and actual on the job programming or better yet hacking with strong friends for a year. It’s a huge difference in confidence, comfort, and dexterity. It isn’t necessarily a difference in raw ability.
  - babesh 6y ago
    One good step is mentorship, outreach, and internship programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids starting from elementary school. The tech giants should just embrace this.