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As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a

As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it. I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged. I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it. So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...

strikelaserclaw 3y ago
Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say Indian heritage?
- peruvian 3y ago
  I’m a white Latino and no, we don’t. Maybe on paper if someone assumes I’m mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I’m hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I’ve often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when alone but not with me. The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
  - erickhill 3y ago
    I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles. He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences. But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    It also doesn't help that 1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america 2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.
zapataband1 3y ago
If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.
- peruvian 3y ago
  This. “I got mine so no one else needs it”. And sorry GP but you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as well and it was fairly clear.
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    The problem is that it’s a zero sum game - if you’ve benefited from it, then someone else was discriminated against on the basis of their race for your benefit.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      That's simply not true, it is largely on colleges to improve staffing and facilities to accommodate more students. It is well-known that populations generally increase so especially public schools should probably try to understand and address that. Due diligence is something we should ask of our publicly funded services. It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
    - zapataband1 3y ago
      Someone else, who historically was a white person that benefited from their race in every other aspect of society
  - dmix 3y ago
    Everyone obsesse about Harvard/MIT but AA affects every school and not all of them give you a fancy big name on a resume. And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
azinman2 3y ago
If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.
- brightball 3y ago
  Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes. Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals. When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc? My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
  - euix 3y ago
    What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.
    - joh6nn 3y ago
      "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ― Stephen Jay Gould
brodouevencode 3y ago
> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs > I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments. AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
- falcolas 3y ago
  > AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed. Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place. I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
  - 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
    MIT's acceptance rate for women is more than double that of male applicants (11% v 5%)?
    - falcolas 3y ago
      Those NBs are really making some inroads into MIT then, aren't they?
  - Maxion 3y ago
    > Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place. Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
kenjackson 3y ago
Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority. Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  He wonders because there’s been systemic sustained racial discrimination for the benefit of people of his race. It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    Do white people in general feel that way because of systemic sustained racial discrimination for their benefit? I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
    - Auracle 3y ago
      Most white/Asian people (especially men) living now haven’t really had any “systemic” advantages. It’s been the opposite for a while now. If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
      - kenjackson 3y ago
        This is an oft debated topic. Some possible examples of system advantages include family wealth. Blacks historically weren't allowed to have jobs that paid, or were paid less than whites for the same work. Or weren't allowed to own real estate. Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans). Even as early as this year there have been cases of discrimination relating to real estate and race. So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from. Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding). Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it. These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.
whateveracct 3y ago
Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a cut above them academically. I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting. [1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)
- prottog 3y ago
  > Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting. This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
mywittyname 3y ago
My friend, you absolutely deserved to go to MIT. I'm sure the person you "beat out" for your spot landed at a different, but equally impressive college and had an experience that they wouldn't trade for anything. > Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it. So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.
chasil 3y ago
Our world has foolish ideas with regard to class, and it is best to set them aside. Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other. The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.
mtklein 3y ago
Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
- SCAQTony 3y ago
  "It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." — Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)
- blagie 3y ago
  I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. 2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge. 3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better. 4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools. 5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same. Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it. Breaking conditioning is hard.
Covzire 3y ago
Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?
- mips_r4300i 3y ago
  Every day just after 5pm, sitting in my college's Engineering atrium, I would start to see a veritable army (dozens and dozens) of youngish, well-dressed people walk out to the parking lot and leave. They weren't faculty, because I knew all of the faculty, and they weren't students. They had little embossed metal nametags. I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.
deleted 3y ago
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surement 3y ago
> I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.
- athenaRising 3y ago
  If MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in. I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
  - surement 3y ago
    > if MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in "better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions
ben7799 3y ago
You have standard high achiever imposter syndrome and probably would if you were white/non-hispanic as well. You deserved to be there...
shultays 3y ago
I was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the first hire from country X" After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
xienze 3y ago
> I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same... What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!
TheBigSalad 3y ago
Take every advantage you can get. Don't be sorry.
sanderjd 3y ago
I love this confessional personal anecdote of ambivalence. I often wonder how so many people seem to be so sure about how they feel about seemingly everything. But you, I relate to.
1024core 3y ago
I grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action" to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more) seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result, you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, whereas somebody from the "general" class scores 90 and still doesn't get in. Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks. IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.
- known 3y ago
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- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources, but for a lack of familial support. I live in a state where those inner-city schools receive substantially more funding (per student, and total) than ones in wealthy suburbs. Yet, guess what, the wealthy suburbs still have wildly better outcomes. Turns out the parents working several jobs to try to make ends meet have less time to push their kid to succeed than the stay-at-home moms. Why are poor neighborhoods predominantly made up of groups that are minorities in the American population? Because America, within the last few generations by law, and up through today by social convention, has given fewer opportunities to succeed to these marginalized groups, including in education. Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.
balls187 3y ago
Do you think this ruling will help or hurt people who identify as Hispanic?
az226 3y ago
Harvard has said that 85% of students who apply would do well academically, but they only accept like 4%.
tqi 3y ago
I think the idea that anyone "deserves" to what they get is misguided at best. None of us got to where we are on our own, so I think all that we can really judge ourselves on is how we use the opportunities that we are given. For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme... Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
- e40 3y ago
  I completely agree. I think these scores were merely a made up metric so they could discriminate against Asians.
e40 3y ago
This smacks of (and I don't mean this in an unkind way) of pulling the ladder up after you use it. Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.
justbored123 3y ago
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xdennis 3y ago
> checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.
yibg 3y ago
Not American and not familiar with American history so apologies if this is a stupid question. The reason as I understand it for AA for black Americans is the history of slavery. What is the reason for applying AA to hispanics?
- mjh2539 3y ago
  Hispanics have historically been discriminated against in the United States. They are (or were) predominately Catholic in a country that is (or was) predominately not Catholic.
  - yibg 3y ago
    Then haven't Catholics in general? Why limit it to Hispanics?

strikelaserclaw 3y ago

Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say Indian heritage?

peruvian 3y ago
I’m a white Latino and no, we don’t. Maybe on paper if someone assumes I’m mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I’m hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I’ve often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when alone but not with me. The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
- erickhill 3y ago
  I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles. He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences. But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  It also doesn't help that 1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america 2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.

zapataband1 3y ago

If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less about any future generations who could've used this ladder to better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father, whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.

peruvian 3y ago
This. “I got mine so no one else needs it”. And sorry GP but you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as well and it was fairly clear.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  The problem is that it’s a zero sum game - if you’ve benefited from it, then someone else was discriminated against on the basis of their race for your benefit.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    That's simply not true, it is largely on colleges to improve staffing and facilities to accommodate more students. It is well-known that populations generally increase so especially public schools should probably try to understand and address that. Due diligence is something we should ask of our publicly funded services. It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
  - zapataband1 3y ago
    Someone else, who historically was a white person that benefited from their race in every other aspect of society
- dmix 3y ago
  Everyone obsesse about Harvard/MIT but AA affects every school and not all of them give you a fancy big name on a resume. And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.

azinman2 3y ago

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

brightball 3y ago
Something else that isn't really factored into most of these conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to limited class sizes. Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals. When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc? My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
- euix 3y ago
  What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and undeserving.
  - joh6nn 3y ago
    "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ― Stephen Jay Gould

brodouevencode 3y ago

> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs > I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments. AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.

falcolas 3y ago
> AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed. Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place. I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
- 1234letshaveatw 3y ago
  MIT's acceptance rate for women is more than double that of male applicants (11% v 5%)?
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Those NBs are really making some inroads into MIT then, aren't they?
- Maxion 3y ago
  > Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place. Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?

kenjackson 3y ago

Why do you think you didn’t belong? I know a lot of white and Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And several were valedictorian, but I’m not sure it was the majority. Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.

catiopatio 3y ago
He wonders because there’s been systemic sustained racial discrimination for the benefit of people of his race. It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  Do white people in general feel that way because of systemic sustained racial discrimination for their benefit? I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
  - Auracle 3y ago
    Most white/Asian people (especially men) living now haven’t really had any “systemic” advantages. It’s been the opposite for a while now. If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
    - kenjackson 3y ago
      This is an oft debated topic. Some possible examples of system advantages include family wealth. Blacks historically weren't allowed to have jobs that paid, or were paid less than whites for the same work. Or weren't allowed to own real estate. Or weren't given access to the same loans (including federally subsidized loans). Even as early as this year there have been cases of discrimination relating to real estate and race. So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from. Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding). Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it. These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.

whateveracct 3y ago

Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a cut above them academically. I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting. [1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)

prottog 3y ago
> Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting. This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.

mywittyname 3y ago

My friend, you absolutely deserved to go to MIT. I'm sure the person you "beat out" for your spot landed at a different, but equally impressive college and had an experience that they wouldn't trade for anything. > Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it. So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.

chasil 3y ago

Our world has foolish ideas with regard to class, and it is best to set them aside. Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other. The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.

mtklein 3y ago

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.

SCAQTony 3y ago
"It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." — Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)
blagie 3y ago
I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity. 2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge. 3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better. 4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools. 5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same. Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it. Breaking conditioning is hard.

Covzire 3y ago

Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?

mips_r4300i 3y ago
Every day just after 5pm, sitting in my college's Engineering atrium, I would start to see a veritable army (dozens and dozens) of youngish, well-dressed people walk out to the parking lot and leave. They weren't faculty, because I knew all of the faculty, and they weren't students. They had little embossed metal nametags. I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.

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surement 3y ago

> I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.

athenaRising 3y ago
If MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in. I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
- surement 3y ago
  > if MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in "better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions

ben7799 3y ago

You have standard high achiever imposter syndrome and probably would if you were white/non-hispanic as well. You deserved to be there...

shultays 3y ago

I was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the first hire from country X" After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well

xienze 3y ago

> I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same... What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!

TheBigSalad 3y ago

Take every advantage you can get. Don't be sorry.

sanderjd 3y ago

I love this confessional personal anecdote of ambivalence. I often wonder how so many people seem to be so sure about how they feel about seemingly everything. But you, I relate to.

1024core 3y ago

I grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action" to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more) seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result, you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, whereas somebody from the "general" class scores 90 and still doesn't get in. Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks. IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.

known 3y ago
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OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources, but for a lack of familial support. I live in a state where those inner-city schools receive substantially more funding (per student, and total) than ones in wealthy suburbs. Yet, guess what, the wealthy suburbs still have wildly better outcomes. Turns out the parents working several jobs to try to make ends meet have less time to push their kid to succeed than the stay-at-home moms. Why are poor neighborhoods predominantly made up of groups that are minorities in the American population? Because America, within the last few generations by law, and up through today by social convention, has given fewer opportunities to succeed to these marginalized groups, including in education. Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.

balls187 3y ago

Do you think this ruling will help or hurt people who identify as Hispanic?

az226 3y ago

Harvard has said that 85% of students who apply would do well academically, but they only accept like 4%.

tqi 3y ago

I think the idea that anyone "deserves" to what they get is misguided at best. None of us got to where we are on our own, so I think all that we can really judge ourselves on is how we use the opportunities that we are given. For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme... Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

e40 3y ago
I completely agree. I think these scores were merely a made up metric so they could discriminate against Asians.

e40 3y ago

This smacks of (and I don't mean this in an unkind way) of pulling the ladder up after you use it. Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.

justbored123 3y ago

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xdennis 3y ago

> checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.

yibg 3y ago

Not American and not familiar with American history so apologies if this is a stupid question. The reason as I understand it for AA for black Americans is the history of slavery. What is the reason for applying AA to hispanics?

mjh2539 3y ago
Hispanics have historically been discriminated against in the United States. They are (or were) predominately Catholic in a country that is (or was) predominately not Catholic.
- yibg 3y ago
  Then haven't Catholics in general? Why limit it to Hispanics?