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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
- TeeMassive 5y agoWhat is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?
- _v7gu 5y ago"Bad personality scores", according to Harvard.
- kristianov 5y agoThat they are Honorary Whites.
- woodruffw 5y agoNobody believes this, unless that's a particularly tortured way of describing the model minority[1] phenomenon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority
- bpodgursky 5y ago"White adjacent" is a real term used non-ironically by (at least some) progressives to describe Asians and some Middle Eastern groups.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI was recently informed that the term BIPOC is for every non white person except south and east and southeast Asians. That one threw me for a loop. Perhaps there should just be a word for descendants of people with lower socioeconomic status/power/opportunities.
- syspec 5y agoWhoever told you that is an idiot, and the term biopic is also idiotic. It basically means EVERYONE except white people - I think that does more harm that good
- JohnWhigham 5y agoPerhaps there should just be a word for descendants of people with lower socioeconomic status/power/opportunities. That'd be getting too close to the actual problem in society, we can't have that!
- woodruffw 5y agoI've heard "White adjacent" before, including someone using it to describe me. I think that phrase, however you might feel about it, has a substantially different connotation than "Honorary White."
- SyzygistSix 5y agoAs stupid as the term seems the idea that they don't have the same problems that other minority communities currently have and enjoy the same degree of accomplishment and privilege (as much as I hate to use that word) as white people isn't entirely invalid.
- _v7gu 5y ago> Nobody believes this Citation needed for that one.
- rand85632 5y agoReverend Jessie Jackson counts Asians as being White
- distantaidenn 5y agoWhat weight does Jessie Jackson's opinion hold? Believe it or not, he's often a target of jokes in Black America.
- woodruffw 5y agoThere is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians. Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they are interested in more inclusion.
- gruez 5y ago>Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they are interested in more inclusion. Seems like a cop-out to me, especially when dealing with scarce resources (ie. admission slots). The policy of "more inclusion" by giving preferential treatment to one group, ends up excluding everyone else. edit: reworded "Your policy" to "The policy" to avoid making it about the parent.
- woodruffw 5y ago> Seems like a cop-out to me, especially when dealing with scarce resources (ie. admission slots). Your policy of "more inclusion" by giving preferential treatment to one group, ends up excluding everyone else. I never agreed to artificial scarcity in the form of admission slots, and so I'm not interested in defending any particular consequence of that system.
- gruez 5y agoSorry for being unclear, the "cop-out" was a criticism with that position (ie. that we can do stuff because they're "inclusive" but ignore the consequences), not with you specifically.
- woodruffw 5y agoYep, this demonstrates (IMO) the actual problem: we want to have our cake (an artificially elite educational system) and eat it too. I want to an artificially elite high school (one of the best in the country), and I would much rather see everyone and not just the presumed elite treated the way I was.
- colordrops 5y agoThere often isn't a coherent logical explication of the policies and ideas being pushed around racial justice. Or, there is, but it involves many things that can't be said out loud, so the reasoning is obfuscated and distracted from.
- jquery 5y ago
- gruez 5y ago"It's not racism if you're being discriminated against but have power" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306 >On 28 May, Ms Mitchum emailed Merriam-Webster to point out that racism is "both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin colour".
- tuna-piano 5y agoNo 17 year old college applicant has power. What would you call treating a 17 year old different based on their skin color? If we can't use the word racism anymore, then I'll call it bigoted.
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- _v7gu 5y agoExcept the legacy admits, who are always miraculously exepmt from the increasing "equality" in college applications.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoIt is indeed racial discrimination, but it isn't institutional racism. There is a very definite difference between the two. Lots of people on many sides of the issue like to conflate the two when it is convenient, and some are just ignorant of the difference.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoI haven't encountered any. When confronted with the evidence of anti-Asian discrimination, I see mostly denials that it is happening, with claims that performance on standardized tests is not a measure of competency, and thus that the admittence rate for Asians being disproportionately low relative to their standardized test results is not a sign of unfair discrimination.
- Animats 5y agoclaims that performance on standardized tests is not a measure of competency That's mostly an attempt to get around this: Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US White IQ: 99. Average US Black IQ: 85-90. Most comments focus on the black-white gap, but the Asian/non-Asian is substantial. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-score-gap-why-it-persists-and-what-can-be-done/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThose average figures hide something pretty interesting. IQ scores are defined against a white norm of 100. They are often broken down into components, with "verbal" and "spatial visualization" components being very common. By definition, the white average is 100 on these components. Blacks have a lower average, but (compared to the white profile) they look "flat"; their reasoning scores are similar to their verbal scores are similar to their spatial scores. Ashkenazi Jews also look flat, but with elevated averages. East Asians aren't like that. The average figure represents a verbal score that is depressed relative to whites, but an elevated reasoning score and an extremely elevated spatial score. The difference in profile has been widely noted in popular culture. (For example: https://ifunny.co/picture/asians-because-your-calculus-sure-as-hell-isn-t-gonna-3YVYaPV52 https://ifunny.co/picture/asians-because-your-calculus-sure-... .) But it doesn't seem to come up much in IQ discussions. (Native Americans have a profile similar to East Asians, but with low scores.)
- Animats 5y ago
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- goodoldneon 5y agoThe goal isn't to disadvantage Asians in particular. It's about balancing demographics by giving advantages to under-represented groups, which inherently means giving disadvantages to over-represented groups. Affirmative action is messy because it's getting in the middle of zero sum games (e.g. college admissions and hiring). But diversity is a significant problem in many parts of American society, and just about every proposed solution is messy, ineffective, or both.
- com2kid 5y agoAmerica needs to build more colleges. Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.
- mschuster91 5y agoOr fix the demand side. Right now, megacorps are abusing colleges as a filter to weed out people who can't cope with high stress environments or keep deadlines and, even more egregious, load the cost for a lot of what used to be employer-paid on-the-job training onto the students via student loans. A "bullshit job" should not require a college degree.
- gruez 5y agoHow would that "fix" look like? Awareness campaigns? "ban the box"?
- mschuster91 5y agoBan companies from requiring college degrees unless they can prove a college degree and the associated skills/knowledge are mandatory to fulfill the job.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- randomifcpfan 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y agoThe truth is unspeakable because it is unpalatable in its full form, but one can attempt to guess that it comes from the idea that, in a vacuum, all races would be represented equally at universities and that any deviation from that presents an outcome resulting from humans artificially inducing changes in the total population applying. i.e. the idea that if a high number of Asians are making it in despite low prevalence in the total population, then it is because we have created a system that serves them disproportionately (and therefore unfairly).
- refurb 5y agoAccording to the recalled head of San Francisco's School Board, anyone who succeeds in the current system are using "white supremacist" thinking to get ahead: "“Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins wrote, using asterisks in place of a racial slur. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r is still being a n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’”" https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-school-boards-san-francisco-0f13b0a16562f4e30bdc575a84285a6b https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-school-boards-... Of course the more likely reason is that this is nothing more than a power grab and any data point that suggests minorities can succeed in the current system is an arrow at the heart of their political theories.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lazide 5y agoThey’re too successful as a group and it makes everyone else look bad (near as I can tell)
- SyzygistSix 5y agoI think it is "their community is not continuing to suffer the problems of lack of success and achievement that other minorities are."
- lazide 5y ago6 of one, half dozen of another. Have you ever worked at a place where you were doing (objectively) well, perhaps by introducing new tech, or optimizing existing processes, or even just because you were working your ass off, but your coworkers were angry because they weren’t doing so well and you were causing problems for them? If so, was that healthy? Did it serve the companies (or long term groups) interests?
- thehappypm 5y agoSuccessful demographics are evil. They must have become successful via exploiting others.
- gruez 5y agoSome people believe that a certain group of people have "undue influence over the media, banking and politics"[1]. What is that group? The answer might surprise you, it's quite versatile! *obligatory disclaimer that I'm not equating the groups of people or their mistreatment, nor condoning any of their mistreatment. [1] taken from wikipedia
- jjcc 5y agoI think somehow it's based on the idea of "give more opportunities to the weak" which seems more humane. It's not the policy only in the State. Believe or not, there's a similar policy in China that if a student is ethnic minority then s/he can get extra scores on the university entry exam named GaoKao which is equivalent to SAT. To take advantage of the preferential treatment, there are quite some fake "minority" students who might have some blood of ethnic minorities. The favorable treatment is not limited to GaoKao. Personally I'm not totally against the policy in general. It's true that weak groups need to be taken care of. But there are many problems: 1.It doesn't reflect the real academic capability for the students who got extra scores. Eventually some of them can not catch up the pace of normal courses. 2.It created another stereo type and bias towards those students. The are considered to be less competent but actually some of them are excellent. 3.There's no social problem like eastern Asia countries that the minorities are very small group. No body complain. In US it's a totally different situation that could cause tension.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Believe or not, there's a similar policy in China that if a student is ethnic minority then s/he can get extra scores on the university entry exam named GaoKao which is equivalent to SAT. I was amused, looking up the admission thresholds for 清华, to see that Uyghur applicants get their scores docked by an amount that I assume equals the boost they got for being Uyghur. No such readjustment seems to be applied for Mongols, Tujia, or etc.
- analog31 5y agoThat's a leading question. I live in a town that's associated with progressivism, and know a lot of people who would not object to being called progressives. Honestly I haven't heard anybody endorsing discrimination against Asians, much less justifying it.
- chmod600 5y agoThe basic idea is that there are lots of positive feedback loops, so initial conditions matter, and people can end up in a spiral up or down. The theory goes that adjusting things along the way can correct for those positive feedback loops. There are two big problems though: One is that it tries to correct by using race as a proxy. Middle class black americans and African immigrants get the advantages, poor asians get left out no matter how hard they work, and poor black americans get forgotten. The second mistake is assuming that the tweaks are effective and don't have unintended consequences.
- yibg 5y agoThe rationale also seems strange to me. If we're talking in economic terms, Chinese Americans (taking one subgroup) didn't start out wealthy but rather historically were a poor, marginalized group (etc Chinese exclusion act). So at least in that case initial conditions didn't seem to matter.
- colordrops 5y agoInitial conditions don't just include amount of wealth and oppression, but also culture. This is a much more sensitive subject though that most aren't willing to touch publicly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TulliusCicero 5y agoThere isn't one. The progressive response is generally deflection. I'm a progressive myself (albeit one that disagrees with the party line on this particular issue), and it's blatantly obvious that progressives that support anti-Asian discrimination like this are well aware of how messed up it is and how bad it looks, so they try to deflect, rather than engage directly.
- pinephoneguy 5y agoThey're capable and are therefore oppressive.
- Miner49er 5y agoIt's not about discriminating against Asians, it's about ensuring that they aren't being racist against black and Hispanic students. Without these policies, Harvard would likely have significant less black and Hispanic students. AFAIK, that's the progressive justification. They think if schools don't have similar demographics to the country as a whole, or the area they are located in, then some form of racism (using the critical theory definition here) is occurring.
- AnnikaL 5y agoThe article is behind a paywall :(
- syspec 5y agoClassic discrimination.
- boomboomsubban 5y agohttps://archive.is/9ANBY https://archive.is/9ANBY
- chernevik 5y agoSet standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.
- woodruffw 5y agoThere is nothing a priori wrong with offering different educational treatment based on academic standards. The problem arises when you try to produce an "empirical" measurement of academic excellence on real human beings (and particularly children): children spend their entire days under the control and potential neglect of others. One day's failure on an empty stomach[1] is another day's success. [1]: In case it isn't abundantly clear, this is a stand-in for a complex of issues.
- lazide 5y agoThe challenge of course is abilities matter for society in a huge number of ways - irrespective of personal circumstances. We need the best surgeons, engineers, leaders, teachers, etc. - not the best weighted by some sort of ‘difficulty during upbringing’ score.
- Wiseacre 5y agoHow many Einsteins are out there that never had the upbringing and resources he did?
- lazide 5y agoYou aren't going to fix that by only letting folks with terrible upbringings in important positions. You'd need to start fixing those terrible upbringings, and likely wait a few generations.
- Wiseacre 5y agoWho is saying only one thing should be done? You can see free lunch programs and free daycare but you can also see that is not a panacea by itself.
- endisneigh 5y agothe problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. re: TJH admissions: > In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that it would be requiring schools to step up their efforts in diversity. Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand’s response was fairly simple. To create a new, broader admissions pool, he proposed eliminating the $100 application fee, the standardized test, and teacher recommendations in favor of a “merit lottery.” The district would be carved into regions, and each region would be given 70 seats in the incoming TJ class. As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, you would have as good a chance at getting in as any other student from your group. What exactly is the problem with this?
- woodruffw 5y ago> the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. Concisely said. Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system.
- gruez 5y ago>Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system. Which way? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri... (Not saying this study is necessarily predictive of "inequality in schools", just that we shouldn't expect it to be a sure thing like you suggest)
- mattnewton 5y ago> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC. Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price. That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.
- tyjen 5y agoI'm a confused by the equity claim to justify discriminatory behavior with what seems like heavy emphasis on race. It seems difficult to achieve equity without transparent, and standardized methods emphasizing a holistic assessment covering visible and invisible, immutable and mutable characteristics--each of which impact individual outcomes. I understand that tackling overrepresentation and underrepresentation is important; but, when emphasizing race to the degree that these academic institutions are, isn't this leading to representation disparities within the racial categories themselves? The racial categories are a very American centric and limited term, and arguably rooted largely as social constructs that loosely define the ethnic populations they cover. For example, and I don't mean any offense or to call any group out specifically, Koreans are overrepresented compared to Cambodians at the academic institutions listed in the article per their population proportion. This doesn't seem to be captured and accounted for under the current system. The same underlying disparity potentiality applies to whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc... The interpretation being, that it's a sort of half-committed approach to equity that isn't really leading to equitable outcomes if that makes sense, and may even be exacerbating ethnic marginalization within the racial categories. Another question is, if this isn't leading to genuine equity of outcomes and instead passing discriminatory behavior onto smaller, marginalized ethnic groups, what do you do then? Do you revisit implementing an improved meritocracy system, or implement an equity based system with greater accuracy and precision to prevent this? This doesn't even begin to tackle the issues current racial categorization creates with multiracial people and the essence of "purism."
- uejfiweun 5y agoYou have to understand, this is the last dying throes of a liberal fire that has been raging for hundreds of years. Liberalism has achieved great things in the west, including expanding the rights of women, minorities, and LGBT individuals. We are all better off for its achievements. However, the low hanging fruit is taken, and now the same activists that once fought for noble goals are reduced to taking ever more divisive measures in pursuit of an unattainable ideological purity. The hyper focus on race, the election of Trump, the increasingly bizarre language of the modern liberal intelligentsia - these are all symptoms. Expect these crazy racist programs & ideas to intensify in the next 10 years until the whole movement collapses in on itself like a dying star (it may have already started, look at SF school board elections).
- ayngg 5y agoI feel like these affirmative action policies are attacking the wrong aspect of scholastic achievement that doesn't need to be addressed as urgently as other problems in the system. These policies benefit students that are already having some degree of success, but they don't help the students that really need help, the students that have serious trouble with their education like those described in [1]. Those students are basically pushed through via no child left behind and then graduate (or drop out) and immediately fall through the cracks of society into a poverty trap that is very difficult to escape without a real education, skills or opportunity. I think this is the place where the most gains are possible which can then lay the foundation for improving communities that seem perpetually stuck in poverty. In comparison, those getting into a top institution via AA would most likely experience some degree of success even if AA didn't exist. For those that benefit from AA to get into elite institutions, this can paradoxically end up being harmful as they are often thrown into the deep end where they have to compete with peers that are the brightest in the world since they have had to go through all of the supplementary development necessary to compete with the best of the best to get accepted [2]. [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student-passes-3-classes-in-four-years-ranks-near-top-half-of-class-with-013-gpa https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
- SyzygistSix 5y agoAgreed. People in this thread seem to want to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because it is obvious that any kind of equity solution isn't going to be solved by changing the demographics of Harvard grads.
- pessimizer 5y ago> In comparison, those getting into a top institution via AA would most likely experience some degree of success even if AA didn't exist. An extremely disproportionate amount of the benefits of attempts to fix the damage done to black Americans goes to black elites. It's a colonial pattern, where the goal seems to be to generate a tiny clique of representatives who can be treated like diplomats/negotiators for the entire group. The problem is that black Americans are a group only to the extent that they face the same racial treatment by the US, but not through being actually coherent or deeply obligated towards one another. The bulk of black people are supposed to see "representation" and "role models" as some remediation through some trickle-down of inspiration and drive. Black people have plenty of inspiration and drive, what they lack is family wealth; paradoxically, efforts to fix that have concentrated on black people who do have family wealth. It's annoying but obvious why Asian people would be upset; they're seeing top 0.5% privileged black people getting a benefit from a historical discrimination that has affected them the least (as compared to other black people.) But that's really what meritocracy is: the people who have the most get the most. It certainly doesn't help that fictional depictions of black people in television and movies tend to depict them as wealthier and more educated than the white people on the same programs, and disproportionately likely to be in management positions. People are bathed in images of black elites (produced by other white people), and when hearing about Ivy League discrimination have to know who that benefits.
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- SamReidHughes 5y ago> The conservative WSJ using Asians as a wedge against Black people, Actually, they're using them as a wedge against universities, because (in their opinion) they're communist-infested indoctrination centers that scam humanities majors out of six figure sums of money. Harvard would be ruined if it had to turn itself into UC Berkeley. There's also the angle of chipping off some of the Chinese- and Korean-American electorate. > Corporations implement AA because it’s shown diversity increases profits for a number of reasons. I suppose you could cite some weak sociological studies and pretend they're strong research while ignoring those that find the opposite correlation. > I see very little curiosity about why AA might be a good thing. There is an actual argument there, but you're not giving one, the user "markdown" is. Edit: Sorry you got flagged again. I guess HN's mob censorship strikes in both directions.
- jquery 5y agoAll this post-racial idealism would land a lot better if we didn’t just get over 4 years of Trump, and if he wasn’t polling better than our current President. Given that, all these concerns about our precious post-racial paradise if it weren’t for those meddling progressives seems more than a little self-serving and disingenuous. I wonder how much confidence these keyboard warriors would have in person if they had to tell a black person’s lived experience of American racism was nonsense.
- SamReidHughes 5y agoIt sounds to me like you're still living in a world like the one right after the 2016 election where Democrats were all echo-chambering themselves that Trump is anti-Semitic. Party smears, versus reality.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ipnon 5y agoIt's discrimination any way you slice it. You can't lower the bar for one person without raising it for another so long as the class sizes remain the same. If elite universities are about providing education (a valid point of critical contention), then systematically barring Asians from entry is the same class of injustice litigated in Brown v. Board of Education. It's not enough to say you can learn calculus just as well at the University of Massachusetts. "Here we find our first indication of the strength of preferences for underrepresented minority students. African-American students have nearly an 80 percent better chance of being admitted than their white counterparts, while the Hispanic advantage is reflected in almost 50 percent higher odds compared to whites. By contrast, Asian applicants and those from other races face lower odds of admission on the order of 17 or 18 percent—in relation to comparable whites." https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/admission_preferences_espenshade_chung_walling_dec_2004_full.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/...
- markdown 5y ago
- friedman23 5y ago> but it's good for society I feel like you've taken this position as a fact without having any evidence supporting it.
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- zo1 5y agoAnd if I follow your premises, I come to a different conclusion entirely. You're essentially advocating for society to perpetuate this "tropical, laid-back paradise" for the group, absolving them as a group to grow and better themselves (also implying that they can't grow on their own, absent discrimination). At the same time, you forget that this reverse-discrimination is usually justified under the guise of "perpetual" repression by the other group. It's a mess all-around and we're just adding additional layers of complexity and blame to go around. I.e. now you're punishing completely innocent people and breeding resentment, whilst telling the other group that they have essentially a repressive enemy. That is Not good for society. I honestly don't know how we convinced ourselves that this entire thing is good. We will be judged by our future generations.
- supernova87a 5y agoTwo points: 1. For all the logical/social contortions, judgment calls, distorted selection standards, tuning, and subjective assessments involved to create the "desired" class of students (thousands and thousands of hours of applications, reading, discussion by admissions officers, students writing essays that emphasize their overcoming disadvantage)... how much better an outcome or result does this create than simply allowing some objective standard to dictate who gets in, or random selection above a certain bar? Is there any way to say how much better we do for so much effort? Other countries apply strict bars for admissions -- do they do worse? Why do we think that this produces any much better outcome? Is it just to make us feel better? 2. By what principle are administrators of universities limiting their actions or extent of tuning? Do they apply this believed solution to university admissions just because that is their domain and have it under their control? What makes them think that this is the solution to inequality? And if this is the solution, why are they so meek about it and don't instead completely overemphasize every group that needs more representation? How do they know when they've achieved the goal? How do they know whether a new goal needs to be set? When "equality" on some dimension is achieved, will that be the end of it? Is there an end to this? Will other groups be not so lucky to get such attention when their turn comes? Unsatisfactory answers to all these questions make me not support how AA is implemented in the US.
- j7ake 5y agoWould it be more fair to weight applicants by household income rather than race? For example, given two equally strong applicants, but one is from upper class and the other lower class, it seems clear that the lower class applicant is stronger, because they were able to achieve similarly with fewer resources.
- guynamedloren 5y agoThought provoking, but the cynical side of me says that this is easily gameable.
- carabiner 5y agoThis is already done with first-gen college students having advantages in admissions. Income is highly correlated with race, but also confounded by the cost of living (say, cities vs. rural areas). A waiter in San Francisco might make $50k (well above the median US income) but basically be at poverty quality of life while raising a child in the city. Colleges also have access to databases on high school qualities, and so they have an idea of the rigor and depth of high school programs around the world, and thus know if a 3.8 GPA was hard earned or inflated. Basically there is a vast number of factors that adcoms try to control for, but it's not easy. If you read College Confidential forums, you'll see how adcoms are well aware of all of these considerations and have been struggling to integrate them in an equitable and rational way for their entire careers.
- carrionpigeon 5y ago
- yibg 5y agoThis seems very much related to the equal opportunity vs equal outcome debate. Affirmative action seems to be very much about equal opportunity. What I don't quite understand is why the fixation on race? Why not on family income or any number of other parameters that impacts education, future earning potential etc?
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoNo, affirmative action is literally equal outcome at the expense of equal oportunity.
- carrionpigeon 5y agoThis is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population. As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria. 'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoYeah, you make great points. Equal opportunity should be upheld as a feature in an American styled democracy, whereas equal outcome is the proposed result in communist styled forms of governance. In this case, partitioning a fixed number of seats to a certain group of people based on race, wealth, gender (or any other categorization) such that it matches arbitrary demographic percentages year over year is an explicit adherence to equality of outcome. On the other hand, a strictly meritocratic allocation would represent a step towards equality of opportunity.
- Foobar8568 5y agoNapoleon Bonaparte roughly once said that elite education was to important to let it available for the mass.
- Laura69 5y ago[flagged]
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- carrionpigeon 5y agoOur institutions reflect our public discourse, and right now, discourse is dominated by race. When it comes to school admissions, the elite schools and colleges want to see their students in places of influence and power. It helps attract more talented students, helps grow their influence networks, and attracts donations and other sources of large sums of money. Ivy league and other top-tier schools dominate placements in industry, the Supreme Court, and public institutions. When race is a factor for consideration (e.g. Biden only considered black women for the Court vacancy), it will be a factor for these schools. If they instead accepted based on standardized test scores and became 50-60 percent Asian, it would mean that most of their students (by virtue of being Asian) would get shut out of positions of influence and power. Those positions would instead be filled by students from other schools. One must always remember that elite schools exist to grow their own prestige. An honest hard-working student at Harvard Medical School who then opens a small private practice in his hometown, doing good for his community and his family, is, in the eyes of the elite, a waste of an education. These schools want students with talent and ambition who will be well-placed to change the world. On the other hand, for lower-tier schools, I see little justification (from their perspective, not from a universalist ethical point of view) borderline-quota affirmative action policies.
- hunglee2 5y agoNot the main point but 'Asian' is also way too big - and includes many groups who are as disadvantaged as any other ethnic group in the US. What they really mean is East Asian (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese) and South Asian (mainly Indians) but I am assuming kids from Hmong, Nepali etc ethnicity will also be graded down on this basis. Gross unfair in the overall case, but egregiously so in this specific context
- pl0x 5y ago
- notch656a 5y agoI worry skin-color based discrimination will only become worse from affirmative action. For instance, medicals schools are known to accept, all else equal, lower MCAT and GPA from 'black' persons (or at least those who identify themselves as such). It poisons the well and makes a patient question whether their doctor got into school due to their 'black' or other 'disadvantaged' skin color, a question that could be better eliminated if affirmative action-like considerations were eliminated in medical school.
- falsaberN1 5y agoPlease don't say "latinx". It's offensive to Spanish speakers. Not to mention unpronounceable. It is not a word designed by Spanish speakers and it shows. We have our own terms, use those if you want to be inclusive.
- pl0x 5y ago
- pl0x 5y ago
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
- anonymoushn 5y agoPlease let us know how the racial quotas for Asians are good.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoAsians not getting into Harvard are the rare birds getting killed by wind turbines. The people who care about the rare birds are not anti-renewable, and people who complain about the birds dying actually don't care, they want to kill a lot more birds with their fossil fuels. So do I need to explain to you why killing birds is good? Or can I just point out that it's a stupid gotcha attempt.
- anonymoushn 5y agoYou're commenting on a post about quotas for Asians saying that everyone who opposes quotas for Asians is racist. It seems plausible that they could just be Asian parents or something. Is the removal of gifted math classes from SF public schools due to the overrepresentation of Asians an example of wind turbines, in your view? Were quotas for Jews at Ivies bad? Would quotas for Asians at the same time have been bad? Would quotas for Jews now be bad? Does the badness of racism against Asians and Jews depend mainly on whether AA for other racial groups exists at the same time? Is it generally good in your view to divide people into precisely eight groups (White, White-Hispanic, African, African-Hispanic, AAPI, AAPI-Hispanic, Native American, and Native American-Hispanic), and then pick some of these groups to admit fewer poor people and disadvantaged people from and others to admit more wealthy and privileged people from? Would you like to explain in person to Arabs fleeing U.S. wars and applying to U.S. universities that it's important that we discriminate against them because they are white and enjoy lots of unfair advantages in their lives compared to other applicants?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
- jpgvm 5y agoSo they should. Anything other than an objective standardized test is just asking for bias. Australia gets by just fine with standardized testing only, don't see why America can't as well. If you make the cut then you can qualify for scholarships if you are disadvantaged because of means, etc. To be fair though Australia is overall more equal in terms of schooling outcomes but to pretend that it's a university/college problem that the rest of the schooling system is fucked is preposterous. By the time someone is at the age to go into university the damage has been done. Give the spots to those that deserve them because of ability. It's not the job of the school to rebalance society that is the governments problem.
- 3qJD3eCM 5y agoSo, I was involved with admissions in a selective graduate program. Not undergraduate but I saw some of the same issues arise. I have a lot of thoughts about this all. The end result of a lot of this, my guess, is that schools will drop standardized tests as admission requirements. That's what happened at my institution. Standardized tests are also biased. They are definitely biased toward individuals who are representative of the typical test-taking participant in background, who have more test-specific preparation beyond ability, and toward individuals who are more familiar and skilled with standardized test-taking in general. The purpose of standardized tests, nominally, is to select on aptitude, ability, or achievement, independent of the test, not to become the thing selected for. People seem to forget this. All the other things -- grades, experiences, and so forth -- are also biased in their own way, but in ways that counter the bias of tests. The reasons for having multiple criteria are so the different forms of bias sort of cancel each other out, or can be evaluated against one another. Stepping back a bit, I have colleagues at institutions who heavily use standardized tests rotely, and they complain heavily about ending up with students who just want to be told the correct answer, without thinking independently or questioning material. That is, overly obsessed with grades, or missing the fact that established textbook information is often incorrect, or incomplete. This is the fear. Schools want you to be right in the "real world" even if it means getting a lower test score or grade. (Importantly, these colleagues are at institutions with low numbers of Asian applicants to begin with for other reasons, mostly geography.) Having said that, there's definitely racism afoot. Interestingly to me, people seem to be assuming that this always takes the form of quotas or something, where the racism is in favor of blacks or hispanics, and against Asians. This might be true in many cases, but racism can operate simultaneously against both. I have had colleagues who have argued heavily against black-hispanic applicants because test scores were too low, and then against Asians with good test scores because of interview characteristics. What people might be missing here in this HN thread is that this racism was coming from persons advocating for use of standardized tests. At some level this can happen because typically there are more than enough applicants with high enough test scores, and because there are other reasonably objective criteria that are also legitimately important, so you have to use something other than the test to make decisions. The net result of this all was to conclude that tests were problematic in both directions, that it underselected some people of disadvantaged backgrounds and overselected other people of other types of backgrounds. Not because of race quotas per se, but because of test bias. There were too many experiences of people with very good real-world qualifications in every other respect, but low test scores, or high test scores and every real-world indication of problems, even among individuals who were all white. The response to racism with regard to test selection was to just drop the test requirement, because in situations with racism, it was being used to exclude underprivileged individuals, and also not helping people who were experiencing other forms of racism. It was basically concluded the test was becoming a distraction and not functioning that well.
- vertnerd 5y agoIf you have an admission process based on a standardized test and everyone named "Smith" decides to game the system by prepping heavily for the test then you will have a lot of students named "Smith" in your school. The answer is not to create a quota for people named "Smith". The answer is to create admission criteria that are not easily gamed.
- Gareth321 5y agoIs studying hard really "gaming the system"? The rules are clear for everyone: learn the material and you will do well. The solution here seems simple: provide additional study support for people not named Smith. Unfortunately, most of the academic achievement gap is because of what happens in the home, and this is a place where lawmakers have been reluctant to intervene for obvious reasons. Lawmakers cannot force parents to prioritise studying or academic achievement, and while parents from certain demographics continue to show lower involvement and encouragement in their children's academic outcomes (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h... - data here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/ https://www.bls.gov/tus/) the gap will persist.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoStudying to pass the SAT is gaming the system if ideally we want well-rounded, whole people to be the elite leadership in the future. Not that including extracurriculars doesn't weight admissions towards the children of current elites. But the idea is that multiple metrics cancel out the biases of the individual metrics. And I understand some people are okay with elite education and others think that is itself the problem though.
- 0des 5y agoWell rounded and whole is an odd term. Can you explain that another way? Everyone who becomes sufficiently specialized and proficient in one thing is limited in the breadth of their experiences due to their metaphorical 10,000 hours being spent somewhere else (study).
- cudgy 5y ago> They don’t like the way unions leveraged a pandemic to put their members’ interests ahead of the children’s. This seems like a cheap shot. I assume the article is mentioning teacher’s unions, which should logically prioritize the teacher’s interests over children’s. Don’t they exist to advocate for teachers and not students by definition?
- xiaodai 5y agoI once mentioned something like Asian groups have a much tougher time and the guy just went "well, then why stay here? just go back to China" then he laughed and walked away.
- rg111 5y agoThis is a sad case of Goodhart's Law playing into reality. People in power have chosen one metric as a measure of progress of historically oppressed races- enrolment in college degrees. And that is costing everyone dearly.
- dandare 5y agoI know this is a controversial topic, but the very same is happening when IT companies deliberately hire and promote women to increase diversity. Like race, gender is an immutable characteristic and if you target it to positively discriminate one individual you negatively discriminate the other individual. HR departments have measures and targets to report on and they will find a way to make their bosses happy.
- niemandhier 5y agoIt is easy to rage against perceived injustice, but maybe this is just a case of "All predictors become bad if they become the target"? In the end the goal of admission processes is to select a certain type of individual. Since some degree of objectivity is needed they created a system that tried to select the desired people based on objectively measurable factors. Maybe a subset of the american asian culture is over fitting the used predictors, so that in the end the process is not selecting the correct type of person anymore, and they just don't know how to fix it.
- darkerside 5y agoSome people get _more_ angry about systemic racism than the old fashioned personal hatred kind.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoBoth are an issue but they have some different solutions. I would think institutions are ideally set up to reduce the amount of both.
- xvector 5y ago> so that in the end the process is not selecting the correct type of person anymore Whether it's intentional or not, "correct type of person" really does sound like a dog-whistle. TJ, at least, hasn't defined any additional objective measures for said type of person. They are simply lowering the admissions bar to brute-force a reduction of Asians, without describing what quality Asians are supposedly lacking that makes this necessary. It's modern-day systemic racism, but people don't care because it targets a minority that's historically done well for itself.
- avnfish 5y agoI think this is just a logical conclusion of the US's wider mentality towards higher education. It seems to me that the US considers the main purpose of a high quality college education is to produce good economic and cultural elites. Thus, the focus for these colleges is on identifying and fostering 'good citizens' - those that have the highest potential to be shaped into a well-rounded and ethical stewards of this economic and cultural capital. It follows that these citizens are to be drawn from and reflect the diversity of the US. I suppose the thing that's odd is that - uh - education and academics feels very secondary in all of this? For example, for college admissions in my country (the UK), you take national subject-orientated coursework and exams at age 16 and 18 on topics like History or Chemistry, write an essay about the subjects you want to study at university and then maybe have an extra exam or interview that's run by the university. And we're not even a particularly academics-driven culture. I'm sure other commenters can more succinctly describe the US college admissions process, but it really does seem to elevate the importance of (1) extra-curriculars + cultural + social action (2) high school class grade percentiles (3) standardised 'IQ-adjacent' testing and (4) motivations and outlook. What's missing from this list is identifying and developing the next top wave of scholars that might have a narrow but deep interest in an academic field.
- cyber_kinetist 5y agoThe thing is, ordering your student's scores from top to bottom and selecting the Nth best, is going to create a pointlessly competitive system where students strive only to get the best scores and not get actually meaningful education (ex. South Korea, China). Even things like giving more points to extra-curricular activities, volunteers, and good admission essays, are eventually going to be gamed and impose tons of unnecessary stress at the students. (And these additional 'social' metrics can hinder the selection of eccentric intellectuals, since it systematically filters out the ones regarded as "outcasts" and encourage normalcy and complacency among the students). My proposal is then: the top X% of students based on test scores will probably have roughly similar intellectual skills, and the much more gifted 0.1% of students are not going to be revealed simply through test scores, examinations, or admission essays. So my solution: take the top X% and filter them through a lottery. In that way you can motivate students to achieve a certain baseline minimum while also minimizing the stresses of college admission (although for this to work well you also need to ensure that universities throughout the nation are funded, supported, and operated more equally, so a talented student who failed to get into one of the top-rated schools because of bad luck can still get a decent-enough education, and then transfer to a better school later)
- bongoman37 5y ago
- hownottowrite 5y agoAs far as Thomas Jefferson High School goes, this is a multi-decade issue. The Washingtonian covered it well in 2017 and it’s only gotten more complex since then: https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-school-in-america-thomas-jefferson-fairfax-discrimination/ https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/04/26/is-the-no-1-high-sc...
- swframe2 5y agoWhen Dartmouth accepted women they increased the class size so they still admit the same number of men. It seems like a good compromise. I'm sure it is not perfect but I think it should be better than holding the class size fixed. (Note that many school buildings are quite old. A school could replace their smallest buildings with larger ones so as to not need more land. Furthermore, this is something alumni can make happen by stipulating it with their donations; no need to go to court.)
- rayiner 5y agoI attended TJ, back when it was about 30% Asian. I’ve always felt like the school should do more to get more underrepresented minorities. I’ve found the recent efforts very off-putting however. It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians. I’m reminded of Alison Collins in San Francisco, who called Asians “house n—-ers” and said they use “white supremacist thinking to get ahead.” https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board-tweets https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board.... Not everybody out and says stuff like this, obviously, but I sense the sentiment lurking under the surface in a lot of modern social justice discourse. In order to fit Asian economic success into their framework of “white supremacy” they end up making some extremely offensive assumptions. For example I’ve seen respectable articles arguing that the “model minority” stereotype arises from white people “allowing” Asian to be successful, to use them as a “wedge” against other minorities. I’ve been told to my face that Asians aren’t “grateful” enough to Black people for the Civil Rights movement and we “owe them.” You see a form of this in particular the discussion around TJ. For example, opponents of merit-based admissions act like test prep is basically cheating, and elevate its effectiveness to mythic proportions. I prepped for the TJ test and SAT. It consisted of going to some Indian dude’s house for an hour every Saturday for a summer. Not private tutoring—six or eight kids crowded around a small dining room table doing practice problems. If that’s a game changer what does that say about American K-8 math education? And they act like the cost makes it unattainable for anyone else. But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families. My uncle does math tutoring in Canada. His students are all immigrant kids from the high rise subsidized housing complex where he lives with my aunt and cousin. (My cousin lived there until he got his engineering degree and MBA and moved to a nice apartment in Toronto.) The modern social justice folks blame all economic disparities on white people, and thus don’t even have the intellectual tools to explain what’s happening with Asians except through some distasteful assumptions.
- autoexec 5y ago> But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families. It seems that more than half the families in the US are "destitute" then (https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/most-americans-cant-afford-unexpected-expenses https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/most-americans-cant-afford...) and it's been bad for years (https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-emergency-expense-federal/story?id=63253846 https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...)
- alfor 5y agoTake a look at the book Live not by lies to understand what is coming. We used to value truth and individual responsibilities and we are moving in the direction of group/class thinking. Judging people by the ’group’ or race they belong is going to end badly, I wonder if there is examples where this thinking lead to good outcomes.
- Kharvok 5y agoPeople find the truth that standardized testing and school placement is mostly expressive of IQ uncomfortable. IQ is mostly genetic. When this doesn't evenly distribute across people groups people find it problematic. Again, this truth is uncomfortable. North east Asians in the US at or below the poverty line score better on average on the SAT than African-Americans from households with incomes above 100k. If there was a socioeconomic lever to pull we should pull it. The evidence says there is not. Look it up. I don't think we can create true equitable solutions until we get past these myths that everyone is just the right environmental conditions away from high academic achievement.
- a_c_s 5y agoIQ is neither fixed for a given person over their lifetime nor is it objectively measurable across different populations.
- alxtye 5y agoIQ tests are probably the most reliable tests in psychology. IQ is generally stable from the age of 6. Hundreds of studies have demonstrated a 15 point or 1 standard deviation difference between the intelligence test scores of African Americans and White Americans.
- Kharvok 5y agoThis is untrue.
- giantg2 5y agoIt seems ridiculous that we are denying opportunities to people who have worked hard and done well on the objective measures. Especially when it comes to public schools, the opportunities should be equal. Set objective criteria for acceptance, advanced placement, etc. Then stick to it. We shouldn't be holding opportunities away from someone because if their heritage, or someone else's heritage. We have a STEM academy in our area that's based on effort and interest. It will only take maybe 7% of the students from the overall student population for those grades. It's based on essays and teacher recommendations. You only need a C average to qualify grade-wise. It seems completely subjective. A coworker was trying to get their kid in and it sounded like a nightmare. If this opportunity isn't based on some objective measure and doesn't constitute an advance placement (C average in the regular track), then make this opportunity available for all who want it! If demand outpaces capacity, then either set objective measures or make it a lottery. Denying some kid an opportunity because you feel like they don't want it as much as some other kid, or you feel they don't work as hard, is BS.
- alistairSH 5y agoSet objective criteria for acceptance, advanced placement, etc. Then stick to it. We shouldn't be holding opportunities away from someone because if their heritage, or someone else's heritage. The new criteria were objective, just different. They dropped the admissions test, which was a sort of SAT-lite exam, instead relying more on previous academic achievement. The impact of this was brining women to near parity in the most recent class. From an economic standpoint, the incoming class is 25% poor vs past classes around 1%. Black students went from 1% to 7%. And Hispanic from 3% to 11%. And bringing Asians from ~70% of the class to 54% of the most recent class (where they make up 20% of the county population). All this without much impact on the average GPA of the incoming class. My take is the combination of entrance exam and exam fees were hurdles to other students. It's clear the previous entrance standards weren't working, with Asians and rich students massively over-represented.
- giantg2 5y ago"Among other things, standardized testing requirements were eliminated, and subjective admission criteria were added in an effort to deny slots to Asian-Americans and boost enrollment among blacks and Hispanics." Emphasis mine. They added subjective criteria. That's the problem. Removing standardized tests and relying on GPA or something would be fine.
- mollerhoj 5y agoYou have to turn the argument on its head: We're not trying to achieve equality of representation of races because it would be racist not to do so (if anything its actually racist to admit entrance based on race). We're trying to achieve equal representation because not having it feeds rasist thinking (its becomes too easy to assume peoples level of education based in their race).
- pl0x 5y ago
- paperandpen 5y ago