> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country.
I mean, this is all kind of window dressing for elite institutions to be elite, right? There are millions of people qualified to attend these university, Harvard gets to hand select from all of them who gets to join their walled garden based on whatever Harvard Admissions is into right now. Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics.
If these universities actually cared about minority enrollment, they could always expand the size of their enrollment. But none of them want to admit that the only real cache of their education is the exclusivity.
Everything makes sense when you think of Harvard and similar universities as selfish private institutions that want to maximize their reputation. They want the children of world leaders, billionaires, and actual super-geniuses. They don't want to dilute their brand with thousands of extra students with mundane backgrounds that end up being moderately successful professionals who make mid-six-figures. Affirmative action students give the school more credibility among URMs, so they offer more to Harvard than a somewhat more qualified Asian who isn't quite IMO medalist level.
> they could always expand the size of their enrollment
There are reasons beyond manufactured exclusivity for why this doesn’t work. College education isn’t just about students soaking up material. We need more online vocational schools where that’s the sole purpose. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.
“...but we also recognize principles such as inclusiveness and equality, which many members of the Harvard community consider of paramount importance to our mission..."
Expanding the size of enrollment isn't just something that can flipped like a switch. One cannot simply build a high-rise dormitory without increasing the capacity of all other facilities in lockstep - and a university designed to be fully walkable can only accommodate so much simultaneous construction.
And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to take into account an applicant's merit-based performance relative to the opportunities they received growing up - and it is difficult to evaluate this fairly without taking into account the opportunities that might have been denied to the applicant as a result of their race.
To put it another way, two hypothetical applicants from two families with different races but equivalent wealth etc. in the same community may have been treated incredibly differently based on their race. An admissions office forced to be "blind" to an applicant describing this discrepancy in opportunity would be less effective at evaluating applicants based on merit.
> Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics
Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes.
> they could always expand the size of their enrollment
Really the feds could (and imo should) force them to do so, given a ton of their money come from federal grants. It's always been insane to me that private schools can receive 50k+ per grad student from my taxes, knowing that most people will never get in. Also insane how the elite UCs for example educates more people than the entire ivy league combined.
I look at this through the lens of the San Francisco public schools. When I went to the magnet high school there, Lowell, they had explicit race based standards. We all got scores out of 70 based on our standardized tests and middle school grades. The differences were pretty stark.
Chinese kids needed a 68, which could mean they got just one B. White kids needed a 62, black and latino even lower. So I totally get why Chinese families were screaming. The standards for them were way higher than for other races.
But also just as jarring, the middle schools that fed this system were incredibly biased. My middle school, Hoover, had a segregation system that split the school in half. The honors half had at most one black kid per grade. We even had a different lunch period.
The honors half was being groomed for schools like Lowell or at least to look at High School as an on ramp to college.
It's not like we didn't have a lot of black students. We actually bussed in two, maybe four busloads of black kids from another neighborhood. But only one of those was ever admitted to honors. I just can't believe that there were no kids on those busses that were smart. I knew a lot of them through sports and they were plenty smart, together, hard working.
If this level of segregation can happen in San Francisco, I can't imagine how bad it is in the rest of the country.
It's complicated, and you can have your own takeaway, but mine is that merit often defined wrong. I'm on the lookout for people who did more with less, or even did equal or near to it with less. To me, that is more a measure of merit than top line measures like test scores.
The whole idea behind it is stupid and racist... "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit"... then when people complain, they add the "socioeconomic" factors: "if you're a certain color, you're too poor to compete on merit, but instead of looking at your family income, we'll look at your skin color".
I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western countries.
I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.
People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.
I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?
People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.
I think we want to focus on outcomes...
Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.
I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?
I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)
So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.
(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)
This sort of thing is endemic to most parts of the world, and I doubt the rest of the world will come around in that period. The political forces that drive this will likely be as strong in fifty years, just as they were as strong fifty years ago.
Are news outlets not allowed to include links to actual source material or something? Why is it that I almost always find these links in HN comments rather than the article itself? It's really annoying and I genuinely don't understand why this is so common, just like not linking to the actual studies for "science" news. To me it just seems sneaky, like if the article is correct, why not link the source so I can verify that myself? I know most people won't do that, but it feels like including the source when once exists and is already publicly available should be a hard requirement for any piece of journalism.
I'm curious as to why affirmative action in the US has always been race-based and not economic-status or household income based?
Asking as someone with no skin in the game; I'm merely curious if anyone has any constructive opinions on why they think economic status based affirmative action may/may not work?
I'm a Harvard alumnus but obviously don't speak on behalf of Harvard. The Harvard admissions office does consider folks from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and does not only look at race. There is a dirty history to the origins of schools steering away from entrance exams towards more holistic admissions, but it really is the case that they consider what opportunities were available to students based on the high schools they attended, whether applicants had time for extracurricular activities or were busy working a job or caring for a family member, and plenty of other circumstances that are not just limited to pure meritocracy and race.
> A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans were in favour of affirmative action programmes. A separate poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, however, found that 74% of Americans - including a majority of black or Latino respondents - believed that race should not be factored into college admissions processes.
I think my takeaway is that even if you give a horrendously unpopular program a catchy enough name, people will think they like it.
Affirmative action isn’t just for college admissions, and outside of college admissions, affirmative action programs generally do not involve decision preferences, but are limited largely to training programs, outreach efforts, and other funnel-shaping efforts.
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
> Students for Fair Admissions, accuse Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in order to boost representation from other groups.
Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another minority group?
Well when the narrative is that all white people are at least slightly racist and that only white people can be racist to begin with, white people aren't really allowed to advocate for themselves, and any instance of it would immediately be designated as a hate group.
I'm waiting for the day that "caring about discrimination against asian americans" is listed by the ADL as a dog whistle for white supremacy.
How well you do academically is influenced predominantly by genetics. It’s unfair to idolize these institution as something to aspire to and worship. Doing so is a gross misallocation of precious resources as a society. Instead they should be viewed as trade school for academically gifted. We should find different ways to harness the remaining 95 percentile. Striking it down would be the step in the right direction
> Nine US states - including California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan - currently prohibit the use of race as a factor in admissions for public universities
Sounds like instead of doing polls on opinions and "gut think" that there are already large real-world examples that can be examined precisely to see what that policy does or doesn't accomplish.
I think this is being framed poorly. The "-based" in "race-based" suggests that race is a dominant factor. But it sounds like the real question is, can admission decisions consult race even as a minor consideration.
> The court is hearing challenges to their admissions policies, which consider race among many factors when evaluating applications.
> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country.
In which case -- sure, perhaps this is a valuable conversation to have. But if one considers the efficient frontier of tradeoffs between the goals of having the most "meritocratic" class of students with the best grades and test scores or most AP credits etc, or having a "representative" class which reflects the diversity of the nation, I'm guessing there are bigger opportunities for improvement. Legacies and athletic recruitment, perhaps?
If the explicit consideration of race is removed from admissions, are there not plenty of ways for admissions offices to try to consider similar factors other than personal academic performance, which would leave the plaintiffs still unsatisfied? Non-race factors for which admissions offices could try reflect national statistics in incoming classes:
- percent public school vs private school
- percent households which rent vs own their primary residence
- distribution over home values in admits' zipcodes of residence
- share of admits who had a parent incarcerated for some portion of their childhood
- personality big 5 scores
We get indignant in public about different treatment on the grounds of race. But I think students and families get frustrated because of the (inevitable) feeling of a loss of control when being judged based on criteria out of their control. If instead of race, one had the sneaking suspicion that one was not admitted because there were too many other private school, owned-home, 800k - 1.2M home, non-incarcerated-parent, high-conscientiousness applicants ... would you feel better?
Standardized tests are an opportunity for students to distinguish themselves no matter what school they're stuck in. Yes the wealthier students on average study more for the SAT, but anyone can study for it with widely available materials. UC Berkeley got rid of the SAT/ACT requirement and is making their own test instead; if other schools did this, having so many different tests would ironically favor those with the most resources.
And what's the alternative? There's not a lot else to go off of since GPAs are whatever.
> The fact that we get any Black students in under-resourced neighborhoods testing within 100 points of White students, who have been prepping for the test since the eighth grade, that is a miracle of over-performance
We should stop differentiating people by race, but whichever side loses this particular case can take solace in the fact that it won't make a huge difference either way. Studies have shown very little difference in average long-term career outcomes between highly selective and less selective colleges, after controlling for SAT scores and high school class ranking. Let's stop fetishizing schools like Harvard.
That's what always gets my goat. People seem to be less concerned with actual equality and improving things and more interested in claiming symbolic prizes.
Why bother trying to make to her schools and opportunities better when what we really want is just to cash in a piece of the pie for ourselves. Another example is the push to STEM for women and minorities, it's not about actually learning the skill or contributing it's that being a coder is seem as an easy path to the good life and so we want to get in on that. If it were really about equality or income there would be more people pushing for representation in being an oil worker as those guys make great money too, but it just isn't seen as high status.
The average person is not someone who moves the needle in society and it's not what you would target if you were a parent pushing to give you child the best achieving something remarkable. You want to give your child an outsized chance to end up the very top top of the band: successful founder a large business, national level politician, C-level executive, high successful doctor, well compensated finance professional, managing partner at a law firm. Or more crucially to be know those people and get opportunities the average person does not through their network.
If both places produce the same average outcome, then you would be crazy to not pick the place that is several times more likely to have an amazing outcome.
I’m of two minds here. Obviously race based admissions is unfair. But Harvard isn’t trying to admit the next generation of scholars, it’s trying to admit the next generation of power. Will that generation be 75% Asian, the way a class would be if formed with standardized testing? Doesn’t seem likely.
The problem is there but the current AA is not helping.
Here is what might work:
- Harvard is required to do only merit base admission
- Harvard is required to increase diversity. They will be required to achieve that by investing in high schools in poor areas. Basically university will recruit poor students by helping them during middle and high schools. Something like opening Harvard middle or high school.
(This is one of things what communists did right after WW2)
[+] [-] legitster|3 years ago|reply
I mean, this is all kind of window dressing for elite institutions to be elite, right? There are millions of people qualified to attend these university, Harvard gets to hand select from all of them who gets to join their walled garden based on whatever Harvard Admissions is into right now. Notice that they don't care about diversity of viewpoints or politics.
If these universities actually cared about minority enrollment, they could always expand the size of their enrollment. But none of them want to admit that the only real cache of their education is the exclusivity.
[+] [-] Aunche|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
There are reasons beyond manufactured exclusivity for why this doesn’t work. College education isn’t just about students soaking up material. We need more online vocational schools where that’s the sole purpose. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
"Do Unto Other Harvard Students" - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/do-unto...
“...but we also recognize principles such as inclusiveness and equality, which many members of the Harvard community consider of paramount importance to our mission..."
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btown|3 years ago|reply
And more generally, you have the use of applicants' race backwards - the entire point of affirmative action is to take into account an applicant's merit-based performance relative to the opportunities they received growing up - and it is difficult to evaluate this fairly without taking into account the opportunities that might have been denied to the applicant as a result of their race.
To put it another way, two hypothetical applicants from two families with different races but equivalent wealth etc. in the same community may have been treated incredibly differently based on their race. An admissions office forced to be "blind" to an applicant describing this discrepancy in opportunity would be less effective at evaluating applicants based on merit.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|3 years ago|reply
Ever talked to someone from Harvard? (they'll usually tell you in the first 4 minutes you meet them telling you they went to school in Boston). They admit quite a number of conservative people if that's what you're worried about, and even their more left people are pretty center-right, as in they really don't want to pay more taxes.
> they could always expand the size of their enrollment
Really the feds could (and imo should) force them to do so, given a ton of their money come from federal grants. It's always been insane to me that private schools can receive 50k+ per grad student from my taxes, knowing that most people will never get in. Also insane how the elite UCs for example educates more people than the entire ivy league combined.
[+] [-] tonystubblebine|3 years ago|reply
Chinese kids needed a 68, which could mean they got just one B. White kids needed a 62, black and latino even lower. So I totally get why Chinese families were screaming. The standards for them were way higher than for other races.
But also just as jarring, the middle schools that fed this system were incredibly biased. My middle school, Hoover, had a segregation system that split the school in half. The honors half had at most one black kid per grade. We even had a different lunch period.
The honors half was being groomed for schools like Lowell or at least to look at High School as an on ramp to college.
It's not like we didn't have a lot of black students. We actually bussed in two, maybe four busloads of black kids from another neighborhood. But only one of those was ever admitted to honors. I just can't believe that there were no kids on those busses that were smart. I knew a lot of them through sports and they were plenty smart, together, hard working.
If this level of segregation can happen in San Francisco, I can't imagine how bad it is in the rest of the country.
It's complicated, and you can have your own takeaway, but mine is that merit often defined wrong. I'm on the lookout for people who did more with less, or even did equal or near to it with less. To me, that is more a measure of merit than top line measures like test scores.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
The whole idea behind it is stupid and racist... "if you're a certain skin color, you're too stupid, to compete on merit"... then when people complain, they add the "socioeconomic" factors: "if you're a certain color, you're too poor to compete on merit, but instead of looking at your family income, we'll look at your skin color".
I have no idea how something like this gets support in developed western countries.
[+] [-] dongobongo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|3 years ago|reply
How do you measure merit, though?
People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.
I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?
People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.
I think we want to focus on outcomes...
Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.
I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?
I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)
So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.
(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)
[+] [-] syrrim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balozi|3 years ago|reply
-https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx (live)
-https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio/2... (recorded)
[+] [-] colpabar|3 years ago|reply
Are news outlets not allowed to include links to actual source material or something? Why is it that I almost always find these links in HN comments rather than the article itself? It's really annoying and I genuinely don't understand why this is so common, just like not linking to the actual studies for "science" news. To me it just seems sneaky, like if the article is correct, why not link the source so I can verify that myself? I know most people won't do that, but it feels like including the source when once exists and is already publicly available should be a hard requirement for any piece of journalism.
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|3 years ago|reply
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Okay. So we're talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.
MR. WAXMAN [representing Harvard]: Race in some -- for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor...
[+] [-] BryanBeshore|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velavar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennend3|3 years ago|reply
The most obvious is it is incredibly easy to game:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/income...
Any ideas on how students with no income managed to own $57 million in houses?
Would these people qualify for a socio-economic advantage when applying for school?
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
We have both. We reserve the term “affirmative action” for race-based tilting. But means-based aid is also significant.
[+] [-] smeyer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8note|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|3 years ago|reply
> A 2021 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans were in favour of affirmative action programmes. A separate poll released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, however, found that 74% of Americans - including a majority of black or Latino respondents - believed that race should not be factored into college admissions processes.
I think my takeaway is that even if you give a horrendously unpopular program a catchy enough name, people will think they like it.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|3 years ago|reply
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
[+] [-] throwaway-9000|3 years ago|reply
Why does this argument need to be framed entirely as discrimination against Asian Americans? Affirmative action clearly harms White people too. Are White people so incapable of advocating for themselves that they can only point out a policy is bad when it harms another minority group?
[+] [-] colpabar|3 years ago|reply
I'm waiting for the day that "caring about discrimination against asian americans" is listed by the ADL as a dog whistle for white supremacy.
[+] [-] pcurve|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway-9000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukas099|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|3 years ago|reply
Sounds like instead of doing polls on opinions and "gut think" that there are already large real-world examples that can be examined precisely to see what that policy does or doesn't accomplish.
[+] [-] BaculumMeumEst|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|3 years ago|reply
Sorry.
[+] [-] betaby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] durkie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
Also American schools: https://i.redd.it/1gt966pyolw91.png
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/yfq52x/annual_update...
[+] [-] abeppu|3 years ago|reply
> The court is hearing challenges to their admissions policies, which consider race among many factors when evaluating applications.
> Institutions like Harvard say they consider an applicant's race as one of several factors - including economic status and religious belief - in order to build classes that accurately represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the country.
In which case -- sure, perhaps this is a valuable conversation to have. But if one considers the efficient frontier of tradeoffs between the goals of having the most "meritocratic" class of students with the best grades and test scores or most AP credits etc, or having a "representative" class which reflects the diversity of the nation, I'm guessing there are bigger opportunities for improvement. Legacies and athletic recruitment, perhaps?
If the explicit consideration of race is removed from admissions, are there not plenty of ways for admissions offices to try to consider similar factors other than personal academic performance, which would leave the plaintiffs still unsatisfied? Non-race factors for which admissions offices could try reflect national statistics in incoming classes:
- percent public school vs private school
- percent households which rent vs own their primary residence
- distribution over home values in admits' zipcodes of residence
- share of admits who had a parent incarcerated for some portion of their childhood
- personality big 5 scores
We get indignant in public about different treatment on the grounds of race. But I think students and families get frustrated because of the (inevitable) feeling of a loss of control when being judged based on criteria out of their control. If instead of race, one had the sneaking suspicion that one was not admitted because there were too many other private school, owned-home, 800k - 1.2M home, non-incarcerated-parent, high-conscientiousness applicants ... would you feel better?
[+] [-] throwaway2203|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] room505|3 years ago|reply
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/20/opinion/affirmative-a...
Edit: TLTR: Dump standardized college admission tests as an admissions requirement, end legacy admissions and tap corporate activism.
[+] [-] hot_gril|3 years ago|reply
And what's the alternative? There's not a lot else to go off of since GPAs are whatever.
[+] [-] trention|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puffoflogic|3 years ago|reply
That is disgustingly, outrageously racist.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buscoquadnary|3 years ago|reply
Why bother trying to make to her schools and opportunities better when what we really want is just to cash in a piece of the pie for ourselves. Another example is the push to STEM for women and minorities, it's not about actually learning the skill or contributing it's that being a coder is seem as an easy path to the good life and so we want to get in on that. If it were really about equality or income there would be more people pushing for representation in being an oil worker as those guys make great money too, but it just isn't seen as high status.
[+] [-] Game_Ender|3 years ago|reply
If both places produce the same average outcome, then you would be crazy to not pick the place that is several times more likely to have an amazing outcome.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spoonjim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlogan|3 years ago|reply
- Harvard is required to do only merit base admission
- Harvard is required to increase diversity. They will be required to achieve that by investing in high schools in poor areas. Basically university will recruit poor students by helping them during middle and high schools. Something like opening Harvard middle or high school.
(This is one of things what communists did right after WW2)