[T2_t2]

As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement. I wonder if this is a consequence of the "every kid gets a trophy" phenomenon, where merely showing up is seen as the key.

Not once in that article were graduation rates from colleges, or post-college outcomes, mentioned. Surely, that is the most important factor in improving racial outcomes, getting people into education that improves their lifetime outcomes.

It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes. Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it. http://spectator.org/articles/64739/little-understood-engine... has a good summation of this argument.

I don't think it is really enough to make every college have the right racial mix, if what comes out the other end is a graduate pool that divides along not racial lines, but course lines. If Asians and Whites dominate the degrees that pay well, and Blacks and Hispanics the lesser degrees, we'll be left with a population that is educated, sure, but likely in more debt without much improvement in earnings potential. That hardly seems like a great outcome to me, and seems the complete opposite of what the goal should be.

[dragonwriter]

> As a non-american, your obsession with race confuses me for one very specific reason: it is all about involvement, and never about achievement.

As an American, your comment confuses me for one very specific reason: it doesn't at all reflect the actual dialogue about race I've experienced in this country (from all sides of the dialogue), in which very much is about achievement.

> It is weird to me that the US has made the inbetween goal the only goal, e.g. rather than aiming to close racial gaps in outcomes like income, lifespan, likelihood of being a victim of violence etc and promoting policies that can be shown to achieve that, the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes.

Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome. Its also an outcome that is proven to improve other outcomes (both for the person experience it, and in future generations, since not only is education attainment measured in highest level attended shown to be a significant influence on income and other outcomes for the person receiving it, its also shown to be a strong factor in educational attainment of that person's children.)

(And, of course, affirmative action and other diversity efforts in colleges aren't the only mechanism, nor is college attendance the only goal, in improving the condition of historically-disadvantaged groups in the US. So the whole criticism of this being the only goal -- which seems to be based on nothing other than the fact that its the focus of the article -- is entirely misplaced.)

[T2_t2]

> Attending formal education at a higher level is, itself, an outcome.

See, there it is again - SHOWING UP. You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life" - simply "attending". That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student". In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

Step back, there are four important factors that make up the value of college: 1. Attendance - how many people go to college. 2. Graduation - where total graduates, not a percentage, dictates success. Because 25% of 4 is worse than 10% of 100,000 in addressing disadvantage. 3. Degree choice - the choice of degree is almost as important as getting one. 4. Post-graduation outcomes - like career earnings, opportunities, stability etc.

Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve - and specifically I think what society wants is more absolute numbers of graduates of good degrees, who go on to great post-graduate success. That seems, to me, a pretty uncontroversial summation of the issue.

The goal of uni quotas is to improve 1, so that 2, 3 and 4 improve. It isn't to address historical rates of attendance. But I could be wrong, and if the case is that the goal is simply getting more blacks and Hispanics to go to uni for at least a day/semester, outcomes be damned, then I withdraw my argument.

I think that the idea of addressing disadvantage is a lofty, important and praise worthy goal. And because it is such an important goal, policy choices have to be effective, and rigorously shown to be effective, because failure only fails the most disadvantaged more.

My fear is that a lot of people judge policy by INTENTIONS, not OUTCOMES, and this leads to inbetween goals of attendance trumping deeper issues.

As an analogy, the push to change people from "I donated so I feel good" to "my donations DID good" is a huge mental shift that effective altruists are championing. If quoatas help improve life outcomes, they need to stay. If they don't, if they put black and Hispanic students in positions to fail or almost worse, to choose lesser paths, then they should be replaced by something better.

Rather than quotas, what is needed is policy that puts black and hispanic students into colleges where they get the largest number of the best degrees for to improve their lives. Going to an Ivy league school to flunk out is worse than going to a tier 2 school and graduating with honors.

I could be wrong about the inbetween goals being a focus, and there may be a whole raft of research that shows these inbetween goals achieve positive outcomes making them the metric to focus on. I'd honestly like to be proven wrong, and know that these policies are on the right track, but it seems to me that the circle of policy to outcomes is rarely fully closed, and with even 15 years of data, the outcomes achieved should be dictating policy, not something more immediately measurable, but ultimately less important, like attendance rates.

TL;DR good outcomes dictate the quality of a policy, not intentions.

[dragonwriter]

> See, there it is again - SHOWING UP.

Whatever you call it, it is in fact an outcome, and one with a demonstrated influence on other outcomes of interest, so its one that it make sense to target as a means of targeting those other outcomes.

> You didn't say "getting a degree" or "graduating to a high paying job" or even "putting themselves in a position to succeed in life"

Incorrect. I didn't mention the first. I did mention future income as something that increased attendance of formal education is demonstrated to affect, even short of getting a degree.

I didn't mention the third because it is a fuzzy concept, of which the second (which, again, I did mention) is a concrete operationalization.

> That's the problem - merely attending isn't enough to address any historical disadvantage other than "spent at least a day on a college campus as a student".

You assert this, but there is considerable evidence that further educational attainment, even at the level between "graduated high school" and "some college", has positive influence on other outcomes, including future income and one's childrens' future outcomes, including their own level of educational attainment.

> In a list of historical disadvantages, this is just above "has used a ski lift at least once" in importance.

I am aware of no evidence supporting that the difference between "some ski lift use" and "no ski lift use", controlling for other known contributing factors, has any significant positive contribution to one's future income or other important outcome measures, either one's own or one's children. So, no, I don't think this is correct, at all.

> Attendance does not address true disadvantage unless the other three also improve

While I'd want graduation and other factors that assume graduation to improve as well, the actual evidence is inconsistent with the claim that attendance without graduation has no effect on reducing disadvantage.

[tomp]

> Whatever you call it, it is in fact an outcome, and one with a demonstrated influence on other outcomes of interest

Maybe, but if you optimize only this metric (enrollment) while disregarding all others (graduation), then you'll soon get ineffective results and the "demonstrated" influence will no longer hold true - simply enroll minorities, regardless of their knowledge or intelligence, and make sure most fail the next year. Will you be satisfied? Will it still correlate with the desired outcome?

[sharpplanar]

Consider these are bureaucratic metrics used to show the effectiveness of policy changes. It is difficult and after a certain time perhaps even inaccurate to measure outcomes, it is really easy to measure college admissions by race and ethnicity.

I think for the government the goal is get students from low socio-economic background to college because it shows their policies at lower levels of education are working. You are thinking in the wrong slice of time. You are thinking birth to job, when really the focus for these metrics is on birth to college because for that group of people they will be the first in their family to ever go past high school, some might be the first in their family to even finish high school and as dragonwriter said that metric is a huge indicator of positive future outcomes.

You said you aren't from the US and I am not sure how familiar you are with our geography or culture but Education in the US is tough, the population is diverse and spread out over a huge area, I mean freaking huge. If you took the population(1) of students in the US K-12th grades it would be the 27th largest country in the world(2), ahead of Canada, Spain, and Switzerland. Think about that for a moment in terms of just the number of human beings being managed on a daily basis the US education system is more complicated than those three countries. This is part of why finding metrics that effectively measure quality is so hard and number and composition of students going to college is an easy one.

Another thing to consider which you pointed out in 3 and 4 is degree choice and jobs. First, degree choice, US universities offer degrees that don't directly connect to careers, if a student chooses a bad degree their outcome (job prospects, pay, lifetime earnings potential) will stink. So measuring the outcome gets very complicated at that level. Second, post graduate success, how do we measure success? If someone is happy making 25k a year living in a tiny beach community for the rest of their life are they less successful than someone who goes into finance and is making a 7 figure salary before they are 30?

In a perfect would everyone would get the best outcome for them, that makes them truly happy and makes their life and the world a better place. Measuring it wouldn't even matter because it would be happening for everyone. But, until we make it to a post scarcity society measuring the incremental change in a metric that is a good indicator we are moving in the right direction is the best option.

(1)http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 (2)http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-...

[curryst]

> it is all about involvement, and never about achievement.

The ultimate goal is achievement, but that's much harder to achieve without creating more borderline racist policies. Unless you're going to adopt affirmative action for grades as well, and punish professors for fair grading, it's hard to affect those rates.

> the US has made the goal to close it in opportunity, assuming (hoping?) that will improve outcomes

Affirmative action is meant to be a way to help reverse some of the ill effects of slavery and racism that have had long lasting impacts that even today can depreciate the opportunity of racial minorities. The goal is to even out that playing field and provide an equal opportunity, not an equal outcome. What an individual chooses to do with that equal opportunity is up to them.

> Seems to me that more blacks and hispanics at college who don't graduate or, almost worse, choose easier subjects with worse career options, perpetuates the problem rather than solves it.

This is partly a difference in what you see as the problem. Is your goal equal opportunity or equal outcomes? If your goal is equal opportunity, what someone does with that opportunity is up to them. They may choose to go to a university where they are in over their heads, but that's a choice that they made and doing poorly is a consequence of that choice. They may also choose to take an easier degree than to go to a less selective college, again, that's up to them.

[kuschku]

But how does putting people with worse grades in college help?

It doesn't fix the actual issue: access to quality primary and secondary education.

If a person going to a school with mostly minorities and underpaid staff never heard of complex numbers, then their math study won't be successful, no matter if they need a 3.5 or 3.0 GPA to attend.

Sure, attendance rate goes up, but the outcome is the same.

You need to target the roots of the issue, not the outcome.

[hsitz]

College admissions are hardly the only arena where affirmative action operates. And of course it's not an ideal solution, but it's at least a start.

Where are you from? Quite possibly your country also has some similar sorts of policies, even if it lacks the huge minorities that have suffered past discrimination to the extent some have in U.S. You can start by checking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

[kuschku]

Actually, Germany has been replacing Affirmative Action in most areas in the past years with purely random, or purely achievement-based systems.

Due to the simple fact that hiring people based on direct affirmative action violates the constitution.

Even the famous "womens quota" in Germany is just a quota that 30% of each gender have to be represented in a company’s board.

(The official statement of the constitutional court regarding affirmative action, which is called "positive discrimination" here, was that "even positive discrimination is, as the name says, still discrimination")