Why is race the end all be all grouping? Maybe we should group by favorite dinosaur.
I’m (mostly) white. The first 5 years of my life I grew up in a trailer house. My wife is also (mostly) white, and both sides of her family lost everything during the Great Depression. Is there any good reason a rich black kid should have been out ahead of us in admissions, just because of his skin color?
Sure, though your dice might not be weighted the way you thought. Rather, you might want to look at the pipeline. Asian culture is particularly education focused, so is it surprising that Asians are overrepresented in areas heavily associated with education?
Oh, definitely. There are exceedingly common trends amongst east-Asians (Chinese/Koreans/Japanese) though, as there's a shared lineage there, both genetic and cultural. Take a look at all three countries, as well as the Chinese diaspora. They definitely share similarities on how they treat education.
But my point is, you get an overrepresentation of "Asians" due to the increased focus. This leads to an increased flow of more qualified candidates due to the greater investment from the "Asian" population. The issue for African American underrepresentation is in my opinion, the pipeline, not the admission.
By figuring out why they're under represented and fixing those?
Is it income disparity? Single parent households? Lack of funding for schools in poor communities? Why can't we focus on addressing those and leveling the playing field rather than picking one way to group people (by race in this case) and artificially tipping the scale? Why not by gender, or family income, or height or beauty? Those all have impacts to life outcome too.
You stop blaming their issues on the white boogeyman and instead knuckle down to fix the hard problems that don’t have sexy solutions (e.g. single parent households, poor nutrition, high-crime proximity, lack of access to studying material, etc).
None of those things you listed are a problem for the upper half of minority households by income. For example, the upper-half of blacks have a higher median income than whites (including if you control for age) and no poverty.
And the bottom half, most of those aren't the kind of shitty parents you're suggesting they are, either.
Outside actual poverty, the kids are still getting fed, going to school, maybe they're one console generation behind two-parent households but even that's not such a big deal now...
Kids from single parent households are something like half as likely to graduate high school and considerably more likely to end up in prison. It's a big deal.
To be fair to SamReidHughes, almost none of that can be attributed to the fact that the household is missing a parent. Kids from single-parent households where the missing parent is missing through coincidence, such as by dying in an accident, perform at the same level as kids from two-parent households.
Why do groups matter at all? Shouldn't the individual be what we measure? How much is this individual disadvantaged, regardless of their group or set of groups? Adjust for that, rather than arbitrary groupings.
I’m (mostly) white. The first 5 years of my life I grew up in a trailer house. My wife is also (mostly) white, and both sides of her family lost everything during the Great Depression. Is there any good reason a rich black kid should have been out ahead of us in admissions, just because of his skin color?