[purephase]

You keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here.

You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals.

If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world.

Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people.

I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.

[belorn]

In an other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446363) we see how simply changing race on the application from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases a person chances of getting from 4-8% to 60+%. If there is hundreds of different minor data points, but then a single major data point called race that dominate all the other minor data point, then it doesn't matter that there is hundreds of minor data points.

How strong a bias is is relevant in case of discrimination. If race changes a person chances by over 12 times then that is a very major bias.

[cuteboy19]

Let us say for a moment that Misogyny University wanted to discriminate on the basis of sex. However, it quickly found out that openly doing so is illegal. But they still hated women and wanted none of them.

So, instead of saying that women automatically get rejected, they say that there are many factors that they consider and that sex is only one of them. However, of course when you look at the statistics the admission rate for women is very very low compared to men. But the university insists "one of many factors!"

Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University? Clearly, "one of many factors" can't absolve them of sexism. But presumably they think they can get away with it so long as the decision is opaque enough.

I think you are giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think they deserve it. If you look at their history, they have used the exact same tactics. In fact they invented holistic admission for the sole reason of discriminating against Jews.

[csa]

> Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University?

Harvard admitted 27% or so Asians in this years class.

They aren’t turning away any “strong admit” Asian applicants.

The real decisions among the marginal candidates are who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted (iirc, that number is over 1000 at Harvard).

Underrepresented groups get a slight edge in this area. Race is one possible criterion for underrepresentation, so is geography, so is economic status, so is expressed major, etc.

Comparing the current relatively low level of consideration given to race to the explicitly exclusionary policy 100 years ago is quite a stretch, imho.