While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look back on them with scorn.

With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable.

History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”

EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.

Must we? There's another comment here about no one seeming too bothered that the NBA doesn't contain very many Asians. Is it already too racist to believe that there are certainly trends in race, and that everyone is different and should be considered on their individual merits alone?

As a (Asian) friend once remarked, "raise the bar on us and we just jump higher. Lower the bar on the Blacks and they try even less, because they know they don't have to do as much."

Indeed, it seems all that making it harder for Asians and easier for Blacks has done is pushed the Asians harder to achieve even more, which certainly isn't helping equality much. A pretty good demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.

Just think about the racist stereotypes held by Americans towards Chinese and Japanese people during and prior to WWII.

Those stereotypes were not of the successful violin playing overachiever, I can promise you that.

Thus, for anyone willing to look in the mirror, all sorts of implicit biases and stereotypes or prejudices - racial or otherwise - must be called into question if you want to live a life of intellectual honesty with oneself.

When was the last time you heard about african Nobel prize winners? Or african artists/composers? African philosophers or generals?

The asians have Confucius, Sun Tzu, etc. speak for them.

Whom do the africans have?

That's pretty funny. So, are you including Ancient Egypt for Africa or only later? Because, as you know, so much is derivative of that civilization.

Otherwise, slightly more recently, do Shaka Zulu, Ras Mengesha Yohannes, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, count for generals? How about Mandela, Soyinka, and Tutu for Nobel prize winners?

And, of course, for more fun we can reference other categories of "achievement", the value of which is culture-specific, then ask which other cultures have matched those "achievements".

Asians still have advanced countries, on par with the biggest and largest white majority countries, do they not? Modern Egypt is a backwards country that is not even in top 100 countries by GDP, HDI, or whatever combination of meaningful metrics to describe a country's civilization level you might choose.

Peace prize is meaningless since Arafat and Obama got one too.

Literature prize is better (though nowhere near as good as hard sciences).

In Soyinka's case though, you don't have much of a leg to stand on, because he was educated in a British dominion and moved to the UK at the still tender age of 20.

> do Shaka Zulu, Ras Mengesha Yohannes, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, count for generals?

No. The first two were either backwards (Shaka argued for strategies that were essentially a zerg rush vs firearms) or woefully unequipped by the standards of the time. Indeed, Shaka's most known victory featured 10:1 numerical superiority. It was also a pyrrhic victory in the grand scheme of things, as the British sent competent officers later and steamrolled the Zulu.

As for Ziyad, few things are known about him and where's his "Art of War" or "On War"?

First, to throw out comparisons between two "groups" with completely different histories results in facile conclusions and fallacious attributions of causation (i.e. just like yours). Second, the idea that African Americans or Asians each represent a homegeneous group is just incorrect. Third, you don't account for billions of impoverished Asians who have not cleared that high-bar. Indeed, those who make it to Western nations like the U.S. are exceptional by definition.

Likewise, you talk about blacks needing a higher bar to clear as if slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing biases, misconceptions (i.e. like yours here) and outright discrimination aren't high enough. Indeed, by any reasonable acknowledgement of history, African Americans should be extinct. Yet, many are actually thriving. That is self-determination and "bar-clearing" that rivals or exceeds just about anything you can find in this country.

Remember, we're only ~150 years outside of slavery. There are people alive today whose lifespans overlap with those of formerly enslaved family members. And, of course, there are many alive today who lived through Jim Crow--that is codified discrimination. And, implicit and explicit biases are still rampant. Does that give you any sense of irony for suggesting that African Americans simply need a higher bar to clear?

Please stop comparing the African Americans who are struggling most with the exceptional Asians (or others) who have made it to American shores. Please expand your understanding of the real challenges that African Americans have historically faced and continue to face and reckon with the astounding achievements they have realized in spite of this.

Asians have not been systematically denied entry to the NBA for hundreds of years. I do not deny that there are ethnic differences or cultural priorities. But if a group of people has been systematically told for a very long time that they cannot achieve anything beyond being a slave, then that oppressed group would probably not bother to engage in technical or scientific pursuits, nor would they have time to pursue higher education because they were not allowed to do so.

Think about that: a group of people have been systematically given a chance to prove themselves, while another group was systematically prevented from doing the same. It's a systemic issue that requires a comprehensive solution. It must start with assuming the very assumption that you are questioning, since how else could start from a clean slate?

(1. And no, race blindness is not starting from a clean slate, it's denying the systematically-imposed disadvantages that already exists. 2. Your examples posing asians against blacks and asians rub me the wrong way, a bit like race baiting although I don't know you enough or the tone of your explanations to say for sure.)

But I did just fine, there was plenty of opportunity to succeed in other ways. But would the schools have benefited with a single person from my state or city, instead of more people from a big city prep school on the west coast? My family was much poorer than the typical white rich legacy at an ivy league. But i was white. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference and I'm fortunate, I doubt it hurt me.

I don't feel like I had a bad experience, but I'm just throwing this out there for the people complaining about prejudice because they are asian. My current company is full of successful, well educated asians, yet there were almost no black devs at google. Same for women. It was partly because there weren't any to interview or hire.

As an Asian who've experienced discrimination first hand, I am saddened that necessary differences in the gravity of error correction, as applied to group discrimination, is not obvious to everyone. Correcting the effects of slavery is much more important because its effects are much more pervasive. Getting rejected by a top school is not as dire for a group as a while, especially for someone in a group that is not even a minority at those schools. But I could see how someone could say what you said (but hopefully with at least a bit of explanation to back it up?).

Although the "denial of opportunity" seem systematic in both cases - Asians applying to Ivy League schools and enslaved African Americans in my examples - the latter is not due to space constraints. In contrast, Asians have not been or are under-represented. To me, that fact justifies a top school's effort to make access fairer to historically under-represented groups, whose cultural tendencies have been shaped long-term by outright denial.

Uh, source?

You're just making an arbitrary value judgement. Who are you to compare the effects of racism-against-blacks against the effects of racism-against-asians? You're making an arbitrary value judgement and then using that value judgement to justify systematic discriminations against Asians.

You're also ignoring the fact that Asians were enslaved too in Japanese internment camps -- and what's more that slavery was more recent than African-American slavery.

Weird to see you throw your own ethnicity under the bus in your haste to agree with the racist value judgements of elite bureaucrats tbh.

The way I see it, one group is arguing from a place of historical hardship, and the other is arguing from a place of privilege. I don't mean someone growing up poor in Appalachia as being privileged simply because s/he is white; to me, that historical background definitely counts towards raising diversity. I'm just trying to put myself in other people's shoes. It's not necessarily about race or ethnicity or recentness of oppression, it's the compounded interest of those oppressions and inability to rise out of that enforced debt. Our institutions have to factor that historical indebtedness.

Unless you really put yourself in another person's shoes, I honestly don't think this discussion will go anywhere. I mean, imagine growing up poor in a single household family, going to lowly ranked high schools, being disproportionately more likely to be stopped over and imprisoned for minor offenses, and getting questioned about academic abilities constantly.

I find this comment goes deeper when I followed Jeremy Lin's progression into the NBA. I suggest anyone who is interested in your comment should read too. Lin wasn't systematically denied entry, but the kind of stuff he faced and endured based on his race - which was admitted to by a coach, was pretty bad.

And I feel this type of behavior that he faced - when your race is in the minority of the place you're trying to get to/be at - can be applied elsewhere. Like Black people thinking that others might think that they got there based on affirmative action and not by merit, or Asian Americans thinking that others think there are "too many Asians" here or the likes.

In some situations, minorities aren't being outright denied by law/whathaveyou but they are put in potentially "hostile" environments where they might feel like they don't belong, which can be akin to being denied socially.

Having said that, I still hope that the difference in priority and importance is obvious between: (a) correcting the impacts of hundreds of years of systematic outright denial of opportunity in all aspects of life, and (b) a top school's rejection of an applicant who do not belong to an under-represented group and who will likely get admitted in another top school or another very good school.

(b): under-represented because of the monolithic term Asian given to them. A lot of which are in poverty but seem to be overlooked based on being Asian. Someone else also mentioned the supposed under-represented group of Jewish people who stand at 1% but account for 40% of the cohort. Whoever gave those numbers was on this thread too - although I do believe a ratio similar to that is the real figure anyhow.

Says you. The whole concept of race is an aritifical construction, a barbaric vestige of the past that should be rightfully recognized for what it is, and cast off.

>Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Even if society were totally race blind, some of that disparity would remain—it would be the legacy of when society wasn’t race blind. You can’t fix that injustice by ignoring race.

Of course you can. The issue is economic equality, not race. In your paradigm, just making a whole bunch of white people a lot poorer would be a fine solution, as there would be no economic disparity between "races". We need to strive towards a society where everyone has economic security and prosperity regardless of the tone of their skin or any historical prejudices their ancestors may have suffered at any time.

>I think history will remember “race blindness” with derision.

I think history will remember those who clung to the barbaric vestiges of the past with derision and as an impediment to social progess. We need a society that aims to lift all people out of poverty and powerlessness, not just the ones whose ancestors were discriminated against. Clinging to the injustices of the past and codifying racial polarization into law is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to evolve as a society.

You would have to deny evolution and genetic inheritance to think that different groups of people living apart for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments didn't result in selection via external forces to better survive in those environments. Just look at the body type difference between an eskimo and a sub-Saharan african.

Instead if we just introduce quotas, the system is not going to improve. Having 50 more blacks admitted to Harvard does not change anything for millions of African Americans who get lower quality education. This is just the easy way out for politicians.

That's what is happening here, but with Asians. Imagine you're Asian but not from a privileged background. Now not only you have to claw yourself out of that, not only you have to deal with not being white, but you also have to fight against the school's racial quota.

Odds aren't great for you. Worse, its' not just some society bias, it's not just people's racism...it's literally a rule. We're in 2018. Let's not have rules that screw over underprivileged people by race just because some subgroups of those race might make the statistics look in their favor.

No that is wrong. It’s not some elite white subgroup. According to the BLS: “Among the major race and ethnicity groups, median weekly earnings for Black men working at full-time jobs were $723, or 72.5 percent of the median for White men ($997).” That’s not even counting large differences in employment rates.

Put another way, if whites took a pay cut so they made the same as blacks, $1.6 trillion of national income would disappear, a number comparable to the total income of the entire top 1% ($2 trillion).

We’re not talking about elites. The median white person is much better off than the median black person.

Blacks are less than 10% of population in California and about 33% of population in Alabama. That it self will skew numbers in certain way.

http://www.usacityfacts.com/al/economy/

Your assertion that difference in American black/white incomes is largely due to differences in geographic distribution is wrong.

Isn't this how that is expected to look if the difference is due to elites? The total difference is equal to the amount made by the elites, almost all of whom are white. And that's assuming the "elites" are only the top 1% and not e.g. the top 20%.

Or look at it from the bottom side. The population of white people who make less than the median black person in the US is larger than the black population of the US.

Think carefully about if racial equality is truly your end goal. I agree that in a perfect world, there would be racial equality. I also agree that there were, and are, forces pushing us away from racial equality and that those forces are harmful.

Consider two children, one black and one white, who are in an approximately equal position. Why is it beneficial to give advantages to the black child just because his condition was caused by generations of discrimination, instead of, say, crappy parents. Perhaps it would be easier to consider the population of "low class" people [0]. Under what theory is it beneficial to discriminate in within this population?

This is not to say that, from a practical perspective, affirmative action is always wrong. For instance, if you have a white applicant and a black applicant that, by all available metrics, are equal; it is entirely possible that the black applicant is actually a better choice for reason that statistically exist, but which you fail to capture in your metrics. But, unless you are arguing that there are actually meaningful differences between the races, you are simply using race as a proxy for some measurable property(s). It would be better if we could measure that property directly (although, we often cannot).

If we simply force racial equality without address the root causes of the inequality, then we have two problems: The first problem is the harm caused by the initial racism. The second problem is the harm caused by the racism inherent in our method of forcing equality. There is also the benefit caused by incidentally addressing the root cause of the inequality; but since that is not what we are measuring, it is not clear how well we are doing with that.

[0] Yes, in general low class whites are better off than low class blacks. But the curves have enough overlap that it is possible to construct a population where the expected value of a white person is equal to that of a black person. That is the type of population I am talking about.

A difference in outcome by itself in no way lays a requirement on society to 'drive that disparity to zero.' This is a baseless, indefensible assertion and leads to utter chaos when applied across society in the myriad ways one may analyze 'inequalities of outcome.'

Secondly and more to the point, there is no reason to privilege race over any other of the millions of filters with which to slice up society to find inequalities of outcome. And even if there was, showing a correlation between one of those filters (race) and an inequality does in no way show injustice 'based on race' no matter how emphatic the assertion.

People with different hair colors, or heights, last names, pet types, and sibling orders on average don't have identical outcomes. And these differences in outcome by themselves are not unjust, are mere correlations, and therefore do not require fixing. Just read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut; it's not long.

A second point above which needs addressing is that it simply does not follow logically that differences in outcome must be a result of 'social inefficiencies and failures.' Culture and biology are some other obvious causative factors, but there are others. There is no reason to adhere to a reductionist view in which everything is caused by social pressures.

There aren't massive systematic factors working to negatively affect specific slices of those population groupings. It's not a good comparison.

That's not to say that Harvard's approach is necessarily the best way to tackle this issue. But it's very difficult to argue that there isn't an issue at all.

Yes there are massive systemic factors working against people disadvantaged in those factors, and yes it is a good comparison. Look up the average height of CEOs sometime and then tell me height discrimination isn't a thing.

Outcomes are what they are, all you can do is make the process fair and let people do what they would like to. There are infinite groupings you can make of people (race just 1 aspect) and no matter what you pick, you will see group A be better or worse on some metric than group B.

Wanting to equalize outcomes based on random aspects is a recipe for chaos. Even if we reset the world tomorrow and gave everyone exactly the same resources, the inequality would appear within minutes. Therefore there is no purpose beyond emotional feel-good to say that everyone should be the same at the end because it only leads to misery by all.

The premise is flawed - beyond wishful thinking, do you have any reasons to believe in equal capabilities across e.g. all racial groups for any given activity? Because there is vastly more research showing the contrary.

> They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”

Because at some point, we're gonna have to move on from this perpetual oppression and victimhood mentality. What solutions do you propose to correct "generations of oppression" that do not oppress other racial groups?

And yes, the only way to remove discrimination is to eliminate it completely. Anything short of that is still just discrimination by a different name.

Reminds of the "I Don't See Race" skit by CollegeHumor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qArvBdHkJA

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

That's not really accurate. If you look at the Coleman report, the main study that was done in the run up to school desegregation and forced busing, it showed a bunch of negative impacts to changing the racial balance of institutions too quickly. That research was largely ignored, which in part lead to white flight, inner city gangs, and a bunch of other issues we still haven't really recovered from to this day.

Contrast this to the integration of gays in the military, which was done over a few years rather than all at once and went much more smoothly -- you didn't see any major issues or society-wide backlash as a result.

The point is that policies that ignore race often make racial issues more salient and pronounced as a result, rather than leading to a society where race isn't a factor or whatever. That's not to say that Harvard isn't doing anything wrong, but it's naive to assume that ignoring race is going to lead to some sort of post racial society.

C.f.: http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html

It's actually still one of the biggest studies ever done and probably that ever will be done, because it was conducted before they really understood the math behind representative samples and statistical significance, so it had way more participants than were actually needed.

I'm not defending it, just recognizing discrimination is not an end for them but a means to what they consider a just society.

Suppose administrating Harward requires high economics and management skills. Only say 10% if total population has those skills and 1% is black... How do you know if the input is biased? Easy, check it. Then fix the problem at the source if possible.

Edit: I'm not pretending to be obtuse here - I'm actually questioning why an elite university should be representative of US demographics rather than the world.

I don't know how anyone can come up with a racial quota and call it fair.

Harvard has roughly 20% international students, whereas the US as a whole has about 0.6% lawful non immigrants[1].

[1]https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Nonimmi...

The percentage also rises with higher degrees - people often finish their undergrad in their home country, then go to the US for their graduate degree. But undergrads are the bulk of college student bodies.

So overall, most college students in the US are from the US.

Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably.

The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian.

In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.

I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.

Highly recommend people read (about) the following book by Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion At Harvard, Yale, And Princeton.

Would also recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission.

Prof. Frank Wu's insight might also be useful here (from ~1:10 onward): https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8

And Harvard's admissions aren't just about selecting the best collection of individual students. It's about selecting the best cohort of students. It's not just teachers that educate students, it's other classmates and a diversity of perspectives benefits all students. A good chef doesn't just choose all the most expensive ingredients, they try to balance flavors. Admissions departments should do the same, since their goal is to maximize the post-graduation success of the class they assemble, not to capture as much pre-admission achievement as possible.

For me, college was a time when I broadened my perspectives greatly. I can remember a discussion on, somewhat ironically, affirmative action in admissions, in which an African-American student said he didn't support it. His reasoning, which was eye opening to me at the time, was that he had no way of knowing whether he actually belonged there and worried that people looked at the color of his skin and assumed he got into school because of his race and not his intelligence. Up until that moment, I'd always looked at affirmative action as benefiting minorities at the expense of more deserving students. But I'd never consider the emotional toll it took on minorities. And that moment also drove home the fact that I'd never have gotten to hear that perspective if he hadn't been in that discussion group and, therefore, my education had been improved by his presence. After I made those points, it seemed to hit him that his presence there was valuable to the rest of us and not just the more limited way he'd seen it before. It was a bit of a kumbaya moment and several students remarked that their views of affirmative action had become more nuanced and (pardon the pun) less black and white.

The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective in a college class. Lumping Southeast Asians, East Asians and South Asians together, for example, feels wrong to me. Similarly, lumping American caucasians with Russians, Scandanavian or Spanish people feels equally reductionist. Within the overly-broad racial categories, there's a lot of diversity that isn't necessarily recognized.

This. Logged in just to upvote your comment. The broad racial categories we currently use are just idiotic. It's like using nothing but a blunt mallet for every household repair job. Some more nuance in racial categorization or even just doing away with it altogether and using something else (place of origin, ethnicity, economic circumstance) would probably be a good thing as a whole.

- don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc).

- ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societally acceptable margin of error.

The problem is that these two goals are in conflict for at least two reasons, one big and one small.

The small reason is that a person’s most salient “performance” metrics might involve direct relationship to their role in a religious community, race-related organization, etc., such that it is impossible to treat it like a truly demographic-blind process.

The big reason is that for whatever performance criteria you pick, like grades, test scores, essays, community involvement, etc., there is endemic and generational discrimination and privilege issues that can mean even if you truly did not want to make decisions based on race, religion, nationality, etc., you inadvertently did just by using proxies for societal scale discrimination or disadvantage in those categories.

So in the end, you can see why a big organization or corporation is terrified and would rather use quotas to explicitly control the relative ratios and acceptance ratios on a category-by-category basis.

I’m not trying to defend it. I think it’s a bad thing.

But what do we do? It seems like a lose-lose.

- If you ensure perfect decision blindness to race, religion, nationality, etc., you’ll end up admitting a cohort of students that greatly favors basically wealthy white people, because whatever proxies you do use will encode longterm privilege deeply enmeshed in them, way beyond whatever we are consciously aware of.

- If you do explicitly consider race, religion, nationality, etc., to try to manually control rates of admission per each possible category, you can ensure the admitted cohort has the overall demographic statistics you want, but only by explicitly making race, religion, etc., as major driving factors that are explicitly and consciously weighted into the admission decision.

Agreed. However, it seems to rest on confusing race for class. How about we just focus on class and get all the benefits (pick up the poorest; policy that attempts to correct those suffering generational discrimination) without the negatives that come with race based policy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file...

Also for that report:

"These data show that even if Harvard wanted to admit every student with elite academic credentials, it could not. Harvard admits roughly 1,800 domestic students each year, yet thousands of applicants have impeccable academic qualifications.9

For example, based on the statistics in Exhibit 2, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect GPA, it would need to reject at least 6,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants. Similarly, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect Math SAT score, it would need to reject nearly 2,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants."

( I didn't go the Harvard, but I do work there)

I would claim that this score would strongly suffer from racial bias. A cohort admitted based on this score would look like a cohort where certain racial groups historically disadvantaged would appear to have been directly disadvantaged by the admissions choices, despite the process being fully race-blind.

And the same for religious affiliation, gender, able-bodiedness, and various other designations.

So while nobody consciously evaluating admission criteria would have ever considered e.g. race, it nonetheless would have been a major determining factor in the decisions.

The question is if society does not want that outcome, then what steps is the university allowed to take to fix it? It seems explicitly considering e.g. race ahead of time, to ensure an acceptable cohort demographic distribution, is not OK. So then what else?

>>“A university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness,’” Justice Kennedy wrote, quoting from a landmark desegregation case. “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.

>>“But still,” Justice Kennedy added, “it remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court...

I guess being transparent about how you are doing admissions is probably the best way forward, but it leads to lawsuits when the data doesn't look like expected. Expect statistical analysis of this data from both sides saying what they want.

Is it a factory for high GPA? A community? Some other thing?

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and your disposes bureaucrats have a point. My parents left the big city and moved to the country when I was in middle school. I went to a big public university. I’ve seen a few perspectives of these matters and I’ll tell you straight out that the culture in the melting pot urban environment of my youth was more vital and functional than the mostly white farm town or 90% south/east asian sciences programs that I attended in college.

University should challenge your view of the world, and a community of rich suburbanites and tiger-mom kids isn’t where that will happen.

We should attack the discrimination of employees based on university pedigree — that’s the nasty thing that enables bad behavior, and the thing turning colleges into the monsters is education/entertainment/branding machines that they have become.

It did always use to be like that. In the 70s and 80s there was a focus back on individuals regardless of their race, gender or origin. This trend to put quotas goes with the wave of political correctness that started pretty much in the early 90s.

All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated, as they are all trying to measure the same things.

I wouldn't go so far. If your measures always correlate, why have separate measures? The point is when one measure disagrees with the others, it should say something meaningful. In this case, the disagreement appears to say "this student is Asian."

The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage.

To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males.

Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.

Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.

(circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...

(Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed...

(Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i...

The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting.

And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration.

If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure.

TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.

If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies?

Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...

People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.

So by penalizing the whole band of Asian races to even out admission, a whole bunch of materially disadvantaged Asian populations end up less favored than their African counterparts.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs.

I think this sometimes gets overlooked - no matter what form it takes, the system of college credentialism is in itself fairly arbitrary and removed from actual merit. It shouldn't be surprising that such a system tends to run into a lot of problems.

under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities sounds more like, we do not have a hard quota but we have a wink-and-nod quota.

During the college applications process, I noticed I was receiving vastly different responses than my girlfriend (wife now) who was African American.

Perhaps you could chalk it up recommendations or personal projects. But my girlfriend and I were both A students that made the varsity swimming team. She was African American and had 5/7 full tuition responses including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. While I only was accepted into Columbia, with partial financial assistance. We both wanted to attend Yale at the time and this put a dent in our future plans.

I have also experienced a similar scenario in the "pre-interviewing" resume selection phase, right out of college with no experience. My friend group noticed comparatively that those who were not White or Asian tended to get faster and more initial responses to schedule an interview. (I will note that this occurred exclusively when submitting for large Fortune 500 companies, and not for smaller business such as startups. Perhaps some selection bias) However after a while with some work experience on the resume, this doesn't manifest as much.

It is my belief that university admissions and diversity initiatives need to focus more on individuals than race. The goal should be equality of opportunity and evaluation rather than equality of outcome.

I promise you your application was viewed as "well, here's another really smart asian kid who's otherwise unremarkable from the other 1000 we'll see". Meanwhile, hers was treated like precious gold.

If admissions can never see that information they are much less likely to be able to discriminate against it.

Of course, if someone doesn't like the result, and not enough black/asian/jewish/white/whatever kids get in, then someone sues.

But to me, this is the only way of making it on the merits. As soon as you introduce that information into the process, bias takes over.

Also, waaaaaay more asians need to be running for Congress. It's getting better but they're still underrepresented slightly (4.8% of reps are asian while 5.6% of americans are).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_politi...

3/9 of the Supreme Court Justices are listed as Jewish.

Not sure what your argument is. The definition of "smartness" seems to be very subjective in this case.

In general, that will still require taking race into account. https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02413 "Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning" discusses various fairness measures in the context of deciding loan applications based on credit scores. The issue is that you only know whether someone was qualified once they pay the loan back, and credit scores are not a perfect predictor of that, which on top of that is differently imperfect for different races. If you want equal opportunity (defined as "the probability of a qualified application being accepted is equal independent of race"), you need different thresholds to compensate for the different prediction error rates.

I don't have data, but I would assume that many Ivy League applicants are straight A students with a varsity sport, so recommendations and personal projects (and luck) are actually very important for admission to very selective colleges.

You also noted a difference in financial aid, but note that Harvard, Yale and Columbia all state that their financial aid is based only on need, not on merit.

What they shouldn't do is try to say: Asian people have worse personal characteristics, when evaluated by our admissions committee, even though no such deficit is found by the face-to-face interviewers. That's not propping up one race for well-intentioned reasons, but rather suggesting that a specific race is timid, not leadership qualities, worker bees, and many of the other negative stereotypes assigned to Asians.

Can you imagine what the newspapers would say if Harvard just said that Jewish people, on average, had worse personalities? Say, less honest and forthcoming than other ethnic groups?

Harvard’s admissions committee began using the euphemistic criteria of “character and fitness” to limit Jewish enrollment.

From: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinion/is-harvard-unfair...

Race is only a proxy for what really happens in these admissions processes. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 20,000 students who apply.

You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club doesn't cut it), play an instrument (well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.

What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?

So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.

This cohort of students happens to be massively asian. No one was out to discriminate against asian people when I worked where I worked, their applications were just very problematic at scale.

This has been endlessly discussed to death. It is a factor because it is a factor in society(common eg: black names not getting callback for an interview). It is a factor because social inertia exists. Ignoring it and putting your head in the sand is not moving forward, places like harvard to want to take corrective measures to offset the inertia. Yes we would like to live in a race blind society but it cannot happen overnight.

Because many people still believe in stereotypes. But whether stereotypes have any truth to them is a different question entirely.

[0]: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/college-gender-gap-remains-s...

I don't agree with racial quotas, but there has to be some form of normalization for students whose parents/culture/childhood environment didn't value education.

Why? Colleges are literally places of education. It doesn't seem odd that children who focused on their education would be highly-represented there.

Intervening earlier may make sense - promote education in environments where it's less focused on.

Since Bob came from an environment that did not value education, we might expect to see an improvement from the mere fact that he is now in an environment that does value education. In contrast, since Alice already came from such an environment, we would see no such improvement (from that cause).

I can picture many different things matching this overall impression. Perhaps Alice is the child of two university professors and has vaguely drifted to near-perfect scores without really having to work. Alternately, she has slaved over her books desperate to please her parents and is at the end of her rope.

Similarly, Bob might be a self-educated polymath who has transcended his background, or a crammer who has carefully done everything exactly right to produce the highest score possible, but is almost entirely uneducated outside of the areas that produced good-looking admissions.

I do recall hearing that (at some point in history) the army looked into this and found that black soldiers did better then their white counterparts with an equal score entering. Further, this is presisly the result I would expect to see in the face of generic anti-black bias. For instance, if there was some force that depressed black SAT scores by 10 points and had no other effect, then a black student would be expected to perform as well as a white student who scored 10 points better on the SAT.

The Asians traditionally don't value basketball playing, and why don't the basketball teams try to normalize for students whose childhood environment didn't value basketball playing? Why don't the colleges try to normalize for introverts or working bees whose environment didn't value extroverting or leadership?

You can't possible judge that unless you resort to stereotypes. How do you tell an Asian/Jewish student whose parents didn't put immense value on their education to one that did. You simply can't without making sweeping generalizations based on someone's appearance.

What about the percentage of Jewish students in comparison to their population (US or worldwide)? It kind of debunks that part of the argument when you bring that up. I don't believe this is whataboutism since it should be in the same context and it's already happening.

I received a resume recently for a junior software engineer role. Under the 'Education' section was a paragraph that listed a prestigious university and entrance year, but under it stated something like, "I was accepted to this university, but rather than attend and go over $100,000 in debt, I taught myself computer science and coding for 3 years with online tutorials. Here are the projects I did over that time," with links to a github repo showing the projects from his self study.

I gave him a phone screen, and while he wasn't a fit, I did not exclude him because of the nature of his education.

I think more hiring managers in companies that are struggling to find talent will begin to accept this narrative about education. The signal to me (if it checked out) was his acceptance to a prestigious school, and his lack of attendance was not very important to me, provided he could do the work.

If your goal is to underpay someone at all costs, then I agree getting creative with the types of candidate backgrounds you’ll consider might work.

Otherwise, college experience is just another way of getting some signal or info about a candidate’s talent. It’s not a guarantee of anything, just an often useful signal.

Which is what?

Harvard's admissions policy promotes a particular vision for its students' racial composition.

This case is very unfortunate, because it literally pits racial categories against one another, and claims that Asian-Americans are being unfairly disadvantaged by affirmative action applied to Hispanic and Black applicants, whose likelihood of successful admittance is proportionally much higher, in part due to their race. What's unusual is Asian-Americans apply to Harvard at much higher rates that they occur in the population, which complicates the math, and encourages some reflection about the roles of affirmative action, e.g. whether it intends to counterbalance a pipeline shortfall, or improve absolute outcomes among groups whose society-wide outcomes have lagged behind, or to right past wrongs. These are questions worth asking among ourselves when we see that in some cases, and when faced with the allocation of a limited number of a resource (a chance for a Harvard education) to a large group of people.

It's hard to avoid thinking that this may be an edge case of affirmative action that was purpose-selected by this group to force the courts to consider a larger issue.

The problem with this is that a lot of students from disadvantaged minorities don't get the same opportunities growing up. They might be just as capable as non-disadvantaged students, but get worse grades because they had to work after school to help pay the bills, or didn't have internet access at home, or a variety of other reasons.

This is why in some systems, there is a different entry stream for minorities. It's been a while since I applied to university, but I believe that in New Zealand for subjects that have a grade cutoff for entry, Maori (indigenous) students have a lower cutoff for entry to account for this.

Of course, this is a blunt instrument in affirmative action. There are plenty of Maori kids who grew up in a middle class environment who are no worse off than white kids, but still get the same affirmative action as poor Maori kids, and there's white people who get left out because they grew up in a disadvantaged environment.

If you could come up with a model that works better than just bluntly delineating by race, that would be great. But it's hard to factor for every variable. Maybe you could base it on the median income for the zipcode of the school that the student went to, but then you'll be fooled by creative accounting and wealthy families sending their kids to poor schools.

Uhm, don't delineate by race. Trying to fix this by forcing equality of outcome is akin to trying to manage your resources in a 'planned' economy, you will always do more damage then good.

If you have the money to spend, then spend it by fighting poverty, pull more people into the middle class.

For example if I were a parent I would just give all my money to my siblings with the understanding that they provide it to my kids under my management, state my income as $0 or even negative, and watch my kids' college acceptance letters roll in.

It's impossible to use finances as an admissions variable because finances are already so heavily gamed by modern accounting practices.

Meanwhile Harvard keeps being racist AF. Don't they know about Goodwins law!?!? Lol

I'll try and dig it up when I can but I do remember reading that as a result, Asian Americans got shafted the most (they are still a minority) while white women benefited the most from affirmative action.

People genuinely believe the model minority myth of Asians/Asian Americans and think that this is okay for them.

Officially speaking, no, as that would be blatantly unconstitutional if done by the government (including public universities), or illegal if done by private organizations.

The official justification was that having a diverse student body provided a benefit to the entire student body; so an underrepresented student actually provided more value than an otherwise equal over represented student.

It's also historically not a small issue either. The same was true for Jewish students a few generations ago, and Harvard acted then as it did now - to limit the representation of those groups and prevent them from being a big chunk of the student body. This also isn't new about Asian-American students, for that matter - for many years now the evidence has been piling up that colleges are discriminating against them. So bringing this up isn't like someone found an interesting theoretical problem with college admissions policies - it's a huge long-standing issue.

I'm not sure I see the problem here. Top colleges are educational institutions. So what's the problem if people who come from a cultural background that highly emphasizes the importance of education greatly outnumber people who come from cultural backgrounds that eschew education? No one ever complains that Asian-Americans are underrepresented in country music and NASCAR.

If these institutions were to ignore race altogether as a factor, then of course people who come from pro-education backgrounds are going to outnumber those who don't. Why is this a problem? This is just an effect of a culture (or subculture) getting the outcome it's working for. This doesn't mean outlier individuals in anti-education cultures are barred from it, as they're free to compete too, and a truly race-blind system will choose some of them as well.

This isn't right. That alone is enough of a reason to be against it.

Ethics is never a question of goals,if that was the case anything can be justified with an end goal which appears worthy enough.

There is this subversive ideology about acheiving equality. People are created equal regardless of the "race" social construct. If you have to make someone equal then they were not born equal.

If someone can't get into harvard due to historical disparities against their group then what needs correction is not harvard but instead their current sociological conditions.

How can a person not feel completely insulted when they get accepted into a school or a job solely for the sake of their skin color? I would feel humiliated.

This society needs to get back to the basics. If you accept something as wrong then also accept it as wrong for everyone, else scratch out any reference of equality under the law.

Not to be nitpicky, but to ensure you don't actually try to use the phrase again...that's exactly what ethics are about.

Even if it would somehow go up to 90%, and people viewed that negatively, why does that matter? Those people are wrong.

http://abc7ny.com/education/parents-students-protest-plan-to...

Does it matter?

Nobody seems to care.

But if a software company or university has too many or too few Asians, then this is some kind of civil rights issue?

Instead of securing equal rights, this country has turned into securing special interest rights. Everything from marijuana prohibition to gay marriage to discrimination goes through its own movement.

Why cant we just all defend everyone's right to life, liberty, and justice?

Everyone deserves equal rights granting equal opportunity. Demanding equal results is to just demand some be Harrison Bergeron'd and others be given reward without merit.

A student from low income parents will probably have gone to a poorly resourced school, they will have never had tutoring, they may have had to start working a job after school, affecting their study. They may not even have access to a computer or the internet outside of school hours (another reason why public libraries are an essential public service). Even the food you eat growing up can have an effect on academic performance. If you're not getting a good breakfast or lunch, there's no way you're going to be able to learn effectively.

A lot of these students are just as smart and capable as students from better off backgrounds. But their school results will be lower. Once they end up in the same environment as their wealthier peers, they tend to catch up quickly. If you look at the pass rates at Harvard by ethnicity [1], you'll see that they're very similar for all ethnicities (with the exception of Native American).

Delineating by race is a very blunt tool for affirmative action, and there are questions as to it's effectiveness, it also means that White people from poor backgrounds get left out, and black or hispanic people from wealthy backgrounds get an unfair leg up. But it's not fair to simply say "if you have good grades, you go to a good university". Equality is not equity.

[1] https://www.scholarships.com/colleges/harvard-university/gra...

It also mocks the idea that underpreformence of certian ethnic grups is because of "racism" and "white privilege".

Why is such an evaluation is even necessary? What is its purpose? To give higher scores to one's relatives and friends? And how do you measure the wideness of respect?

Well, if it is completely private institution then it might be fine but if they use government money such subjective ratings are a good opportunity for corruption.

People like to believe we live in a meritocracy and Asian Americans as a group did better than other races - so they put in "well-roundedness" which ends up being super subjective but a reason for them to deny others based on other factors not relating to scores.

The respect part is a cop-out as it plays on peoples bias. This is where social stereotypes of groups as a whole tend to work it's magic. Asian Americans are seen as "not able to lead", "worker bees" etc. Even though there is no objective measure for that, just peoples bias and this leads them to apply certain characteristics to groups (based on names/photos) no matter what their application looks like.

In general, selecting for good personality traits make sense. In the extreme, only selecting for test scores and grades ignores all of the characteristics that make a person good in real world endeavours (ex: all of the recurring HN stories about genius coders sucking at team work).

That said, evaluating for these in a consistent, non-biased way, at a scale of 40k/year seems incredibly difficult.

As in that case, the activity leads to great discussions about what is fair, what are the goals of a university, and what may a private university choose?

(Note that the purpose of the collusion was to price-fix to avoid competition, which is the exact opposite of the example given.)

Racism is alive and well. Only our notions of which types are acceptable have changed. Do the ends justify the means?

Why should a student who has worked hard all his life be punished for being Asian?

Why don't we try instead teaching those who are left behind how to get a at the top?

And by the way I'm not "white" at least not in the new racist standard, I'm a Latino (as if that meant anything, a race or an ethnicity? No one knows).