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I think it still makes some sense to ask if someone is Black or Native American due to their unique history in America (slavery and genocide), but tossing peopl

I think it still makes some sense to ask if someone is Black or Native American due to their unique history in America (slavery and genocide), but tossing people into these buckets based on their ancestral continent is absurd. In the current system, you're essentially punished if you're Asian, but what is "Asian," really? Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans often immigrate to America with advanced degrees, wealth, etc. and they pass those advantages on to their kids, hence the high standardized tests scores / GPAs, but immigrants from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines often come here with nothing in search of a better life, and their children are tossed into the same "Asian" bucket, and punished. Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university, which is important if they still have legacy admissions. Hispanic people might not have the option of getting extra points for having a father that went to Yale, who himself had a father that went to Yale, if Hispanic people were outright excluded in the past. I think we'll eventually move to something close to what you're describing. You could get some points if your parents are poor, or didn't attend college themselves, or don't speak English, but categorizing people into one of a few crudely drawn racial categories has got to end.

RhysU 6y ago
Should individuals from other groups that have suffered recent genocide be treated similarly to those you named? Does it matter if America carried out the genocide inside its own borders? What if the country said little while very bad things happened? What if America fought but could not stop the very bad things? The Armenians and at least three more recent groups come to mind depending on those answers.
babesh 6y ago
The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids. The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?
- skissane 6y ago
  > The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids. The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos [1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
  - babesh 6y ago
    But is that how the universities behave?
    - skissane 6y ago
      Yale reports statistics based on these “buckets” on their own website - https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts (you have to scroll down to the section labelled “University-wide Enrollments by Ethnicity (% of non-international enrollment)” and click to expand it) You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
      - babesh 6y ago
        You should look closer at average test scores of admitted students by more fine grained ethnic groups. My high school discriminated by particular ethnic groups: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, etc...
        skissane 6y ago
        Are those figures – i.e. test scores of admitted students broken down by fine-grained ethnic groups – publicly available for Yale? (Or any other similarly prestigious US university?)
radegast 6y ago
Both slavery and genocide happened over 2 generations ago. How much more time do you need to get over it mentally? Also "Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university" is racist against white people.

RhysU 6y ago

Should individuals from other groups that have suffered recent genocide be treated similarly to those you named? Does it matter if America carried out the genocide inside its own borders? What if the country said little while very bad things happened? What if America fought but could not stop the very bad things? The Armenians and at least three more recent groups come to mind depending on those answers.

babesh 6y ago

The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids. The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?

skissane 6y ago
> The Thai and Philippines kids aren’t tossed in the same Asian bucket. The Asian bucket is actually the Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian kids. The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos [1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
- babesh 6y ago
  But is that how the universities behave?
  - skissane 6y ago
    Yale reports statistics based on these “buckets” on their own website - https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts (you have to scroll down to the section labelled “University-wide Enrollments by Ethnicity (% of non-international enrollment)” and click to expand it) You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
    - babesh 6y ago
      You should look closer at average test scores of admitted students by more fine grained ethnic groups. My high school discriminated by particular ethnic groups: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, etc...
      - skissane 6y ago
        Are those figures – i.e. test scores of admitted students broken down by fine-grained ethnic groups – publicly available for Yale? (Or any other similarly prestigious US university?)

radegast 6y ago

Both slavery and genocide happened over 2 generations ago. How much more time do you need to get over it mentally? Also "Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university" is racist against white people.