Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell is the one chart showing the same student as Asian, 25%, White, 36%, Hispanic 77%, and Black 95%.
This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.
The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.
> This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past
Affirmative Action is institutionalized discrimination, at least when used to promote some groups over others. (Though it didn’t start that way; it started as a call to be purely race-blind in hiring.) I wouldn’t call it racism though, because it’s not based on any belief that races have different capability, it is purely intended to correct systemic bias based on the belief that races are equally capable.
> it was past due to get rid of it
This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here. The whole problem with cultural bias is it’s sticky and difficult and people don’t believe they have biases. Today’s politics has done a lot to convince me that we haven’t solved it yet, but at the same time I’ll be the first to point out that we’ve come a long way even in my lifetime. The last little bit might take longer to fix than suffrage did just because of how subtle the issues are. If we take any preferential treatment off the table, preferential treatment that tries to artificially force equal opportunity, the question is what’s the alternative? We might have momentum, and do nothing might work, but what if it doesn’t? Wouldn’t that also be a form of institutionalized discrimination, effectively, like it was before Affirmative Action existed?
Lots of problems in society that are hard to fix. But there's nowhere else in society where our solution to a problem is to subject people who had nothing to do with the problem to unfair treatment. "Two wrongs don't make a right" is a good general principle.
Re: two wrongs/people who had nothing to do with the problem
Obvious counter examples: plenty of people have been drafted and died in wars they did not cause or start. Also, people pay taxes to educate others, which (hopefully) fixes a problem they didn't cause or start. The list just goes on and on. In fact, I think it's a fair argument to say that modern society is fundamentally based on the opposite your claim, that people who had nothing to do with all sorts of problems willing submit to unfair treatment because they believe that they,or people they care about, will be better of in the long run for having done the right thing, even if it's difficult and somewhat unfair. In general it's called being an adult. Yeah, sometimed it sucks, sometimes it's unfair, but generally it's better for everyone in the long run.
It depends how you conceptualize fairness. If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair.
No, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Where else in our society do we justify imposing a moral wrong on a specific individual on the premise that moral wrongs may have been committed against other individuals?
The death penalty is an example of two wrongs making a right in the minds of many people. It’s also at the same time an example of two wrongs not making a right. Imprisoning people is wrong, unless the government does it? All so-called lawful punishments of individuals are a form of hope that two wrongs do make a right.
Whether affirmative action is a wrong is your presumption, and it’s hotly contested, absolutely not universally agreed upon, which makes your use of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ a straw man.
There are plenty of things wrong with preferential affirmative action, but I reject the framing that it’s evil, this is essentially an ad hominem attempting to quash any debate of the actual relative merits or the outcomes.
I feel like we can’t make forward progress if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons that history has happened the way it did. See Chesterton’s Fence.
I disagree with your charaterization of the problem as exclusively a moral wrong... Was it only a moral wrong? Was the only effect a moral one? Or were there physical or tangible effects, too? For example, were there economic affects?
I'm not claiming to know the solution to the problem of ~200 years or slavery and ~100 years of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and further discrimination. I am saying that doing nothing about it seems pretty fucked. I am saying that claiming that it's immoral to do something about it, which you seem to be doing, makes you look like the worst kind of offensive and racist asdhole, too.
Yep. Maybe a little bit like a sports handicap, you’re not trying to give someone a better chance of winning than everyone else, you’re trying to give them equal chances based on historical data.
Gemini gave me an okay analogy: “If a pendulum is knocked permanently off-center by a structural bend or a magnetic field, the only way to center it again is to apply an equal and opposite force. Affirmative action policies attempt to apply this counter-weight to straighten the broader societal scale.”
I’m not sure but is there a question about whether we actually had pre-existing unfairness? Blacks got the legal right to vote in 1965. Before that was effectively institutionalized racism, fully entrenched cultural bias, right?
Discriminating against an individual based on their race is a moral wrong, unlike applying pressure to a pendulum. So your example doesn’t work because it doesn’t raise the disputed moral question.
Our system of morality and justice operates on individuals, not groups. It’s fundamentally mistaken to view the issue in terms of a pendulum that represents group outcomes.
There were things like redlining, where blacks could only buy housing in certain areas. Those areas also tended to have worse schools, so the next generation of blacks was less well educated than whites of equivalent intelligence. That led to worse jobs, which led to worse financial outcomes, which led to living in worse parts of town, which led to the next generation having less education...
So, yes, there was pre-existing... "unfairness" may be too strong for some of it; it wasn't all unfairness. Some of it was the effects of past unfairness, even if the (deliberate) unfairness was no longer present. The pendulum was in fact bent, to at least some degree.
But I like the analogy, because you only apply the counterforce until the pendulum is straight. Then you stop. Things were bent enough that affirmative action may in fact have been necessary. But it should not be necessary forever. Even if it was the right thing to do, there comes a time when the right thing to do is to stop.
(Then you get into "is now the right time", and things get a whole lot murkier...)
> If you believe that some people have a pre-existing unfair bias in their favor, then applying a countermeasure is indeed fair.
What definition of "some people" and "unfair" are we using?
I ask because I'm pretty sure that Obama's daughters "have a bias in their favor" in comparison with my lily-white nieces. (The parents of said nieces make around $40k/year.)
Is it fair to apply "countermeasures" to benefit said daughters relative to said nieces?
You can argue that said nieces have an unfair bias relative to similarly situated black children, but that's not how these systems tend to work.
I totally agree that there are lots of problems with just assigning the benefits based on coarse categories like "race". My point is just what I said in the quote: a process that seems "locally" unfair may produce a more "globally" fair result. Or it might not! I mean, you have to do it right. But if your goal is to produce a fairer result you might do things even though they seem unfair from a different perspective.
You shouldn’t make “blanket judgments” that apply to every individual Bangladeshi. In a context where you’re evaluating individuals, you should do so without regard to their ethnicity or nationality. In the context where you’re talking about masses, then it’s permissible to draw inferences about aggregate characteristics.
Simple example: at the doctor’s office, I want them to measure my height, without regard to the fact that I’m Bangladeshi. But that doesn’t mean that medical journals must blind themselves to the fact that a group of 10,000 Bangladeshis is going to have a much lower average height than a group of 10,000 Germans.
If only it were actually that simple and fixed with platitudes. Culture and belief is passed on from generation to generation, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the persistent problem in the first place. How do we fix a problem that we already have historical evidence that when left alone doesn’t go away on its own, that people who weren’t the original cause of the problem still, in fact, perpetuated it? How can we know people have nothing to do with the problem today, given that there are still discrepancies in outcome? I’m not defending Affirmative Action, the question at hand is what’s the alternative proposal?
It's not a "platitude" it's an aphorism. It reflects the principle--already ancient to Plato 2,400 years ago--that we don't solve injustice by shifting that injustice onto innocent third parties. If you can prove wrongdoing by specific people then you can punish it. But if you define treating someone differently based on skin color as a moral crime—which I think is necessary for a multi-ethnic society to function—then you can’t use differential treatment to reengineer outcomes.
Apart from enforcing neutral principles, the other solution is individualism. We need to stop reinforcing the salience of race and racial communities and treat people as individuals.
It feels like a platitudinal aphorism to me, it’s trite and cliche and overused and was delivered as if it’s insightful in hopes of ending the debate. Google appears to agree vigorously that “two wrongs don’t make a right” is a platitude.
One problem with that platitude is that there are plenty of ways that two negative things can balance each other out or become positive in some way.
Aren’t you making deep cultural presumptions and imposing your own opinions? Affirmative action is controversial, and it’s had unintended consequences when used, but what’s the rationale for claiming it’s a “wrong” or “injustice”? Not everyone believes that.
You’re also deliberately ignoring the point that there might be no such thing as innocent third parties, but only people who aren’t aware they’re part of the problem, even if it’s subtle and unintended.
History already tried the Laissez Faire approach, and it didn’t work. Chips fell in a bad place. This isn’t about proving wrongdoing or punishment, it’s about acknowledgement of a problem, and reflection and self-improvement as a group.
Okay, that’s true, it’s one of the available choices. That’s a rather extreme position to take, given the history of slavery, racism, and sexism in the U.S. We know for a fact that outcome discrepancies were caused by racism before 1965. The discrepancies have been on the decline since then. So, when exactly, did equal opportunity start? We didn’t have it in 1966 yet, despite the law. Did we have it in 1980? Outcomes have closed since then, so no, obviously not. When, then? What reason is there to believe outcomes discrepancies aren’t a problem, given that society generally believes they are?
Easily. Racism is the belief that certain races are inherently inferior. Positive discrimination in affirmative action is based on the belief that all races are equally capable, and seeks to adjust outcomes temporarily in order to counter balance the effects of cultural bias.
People will think “if XYZ group has a handicap maybe it’s because XYZ group is genetically inferior?” XYZ members themselves will think that and it will subconsciously affect them. People around them will think that and it will subconsciously affect their opinions towards them.
If you point out that XYZ group is only handicapped because they’re statistically environmentally disadvantaged, then it follows, why not handicap everyone with that disadvantage, or any comparable disadvantage? Why not handicap ABC minority? Some members of ABC will be jealous of XYZ and subtly discriminate against them (for this reason; these members would otherwise).
It creates the background conditions it seeks to destroy. Instead, handicap on things like health and income, which are more obviously fair and necessary (most people can accept that bad health and income are an especially serious disadvantages in today’s world).
Yes this is true, that can and has happened. I don’t think it’s true as rule, but it’s a valid point. Still, the most important question is what is the alternative?
We are closer to ending sexism and racism than we were 70 years ago before any affirmative action existed, right? Who’s to say that all the backfiring and unintended consequences that have happened aren’t better than the parallel universe in which maybe slavery still exists? Would it have happened faster with no quotas or boosts for groups that were historically discriminated against? Maybe yes, that’s possible, but we can’t know. What we do know is that we’ve made forward progress, even if imperfectly.
The thing that tends to be forgotten when people talk about affirmative action being preferential treatment is that the previous ‘in’ group was already getting preferential treatment, and maybe still is. We did not start from a level playing field. The core idea is to try to balance the pre-existing preferential treatment out. Unless you can resolve the cause of that, an easier way to attempt to handle it is to try to artificially make the preferences equal. The idea is not to give preferential treatment as an outcome, it’s to remove preferential treatment. This is related to how discrimination is not racism, and why positive discrimination is different from negative discrimination.
> We are closer to ending sexism and racism than we were 70 years ago before any affirmative action existed, right?
Correlation does not imply causation
> Who’s to say that all the backfiring and unintended consequences that have happened aren’t better than the parallel universe in which maybe slavery still exists?
They are better, but it's a low bar and an even lower one
> Would it have happened faster with no quotas or boosts for groups that were historically discriminated against?
Maybe, but even if "no", keeping the quota may cause a backslide.
Artificially balancing preferential treatment by applying it badly in the wrong direction is a duct-tape solution. Sure, it may have been justified after the Civil Rights Act. But it's not ideal and doesn't seem justified anymore, when we can easily positively discriminate for traits that are more obviously and universally negatively discriminated against, like income.
This is not relevant to what I said. We are closer to ending sexism and racism due to legislation, which is causal. We took specific actions to try to end sexism and racism and we know they had a positive effect.
> Artificially balancing preferential treatment by applying it badly in the wrong direction is a duct tape solution
I agree! It was meant to be a duct tape solution, from the start. It was meant to be temporary and end preferential treatment and go away.
> it may have been justified after the Civil Rights Act
I agree with this too, the justification was probably much stronger 60 or 70 years ago. It is weaker now… and that might be an indicator of its success.
Applying it badly has happened, and it’s lame and sucks, but that’s not an inherent feature or outcome of the core idea. Some might rightly say it was predictable.
The big open question is whether turning off all affirmative action will close that remaining gap, or leave us with a little bit of persistent systemic bias, or worse, a backslide. If that does, the next question is what to do.
> This might be true, but there are still achievement and pay gaps in the US. There are lots of debates about why, and I don’t want to start one. I’m just curious how else to solve systemic biases if they’re still here.
If you're unwilling to have a debate on why achievement and pay gaps exist, then you should be unwilling to assert that systemic bias is a problem, or even that achievement and pay gaps are a problem.
You didn't think the 50% admit rate for athletes, 40% admit rate for deans interest ie large cash donors, and 35% legacy admit rate were "the whole think"?
Legacy and donor admissions aren't the gotcha against race neutral admissions that you think they are. In fact, they go hand in hand. It's not a coincidence that the universities with strong legacy preferences all practiced affirmative action. Legacy students actually have slightly better grades and SAT scores than average, but this would unlikely to be the case if they used purely merit based admissions.
I didn’t say it to be a gotcha. But let’s admit that legacy admissions and athletes represent a non meritocratic social goal, and then ask why those are legitimate social goals but racial diversity is not one?
The problem is that affirmative action creates more opportunities to think about race, which leads to more resentment and discrimination. For example, in America, Italians used to be discriminated against, but today they are basically treated the same as all white people. If we had affirmative action for Italian Americans, they'd likely still be discriminated against today.
Honestly, the combination of extremely discriminatory, extremely corrupt, extremely predatory and then again discriminated differently by the fact if they are a sportsball player or not is rather amusing and at the same time baffling when observed from the other side of the globe.
Of course it is too late by now, by have Americans considered maybe abolishing all that and admitting students only based on the exam results, with preference given to the kids with better results (or no preference)? And replacing professional sportsball with a 1 lesson/week of general fitness? Maybe then they won't need to get so much debt to study too.
If we are talking about a meritocracy and access to opportuity this doesn't even have to be about fairness the reality is if there are talented people that dont do as well on tests simply because they cant afford private tutors and prep courses maybe it makes sense to factor that in.
But there is also a legitimate reason to pursue fairness. When a society loses upward mobility and becomes a calcified caste social unrest becomes an existential threat. When we ignore that disparity compounds and locks people out of the social system we risk destroying the very system that we benefit from.
That is not true. Disparate impact has never meant "literally anything that produces disparate impact is against the law." I guess until the Trump admin has started using it to mean this when it affects white people.
What data do you have to support the assertion that affirmative action is no longer necessary to ensure proper representation of minorities on campus?
I'm open to arguments that there are better ways to achieve the goal of equitable access to higher eduction, but looking at enrollment numbers, the problem is far from solved.
The open question is the meaning of "proper representation:"
- One which maximizes Harvard's power network?
- Most likely to succeed in the future?
- Representative of the general public by race?
- Representative of the general public in other ways (e.g. religion, political affiliation)?
- Academically, best-qualified right now?
- Academically, most potential? At birth? Now?
- Most likely to donate?
Etc.
However defined, Harvard has much modest discrimination by race compared to discrimination by religion, political affiliation, or home town.
Harvard is 95% liberal, and much more so at the faculty level. If you look at the further-out evangelical, born-again Christian groups, or more conservative Muslim groups, the discrimination is even more extreme. Atheists are vastly over-represented, in contrast.
Until one is aligned on goals and definitions, one can't speak of goals being met or unmet. Harvard can be -- and indeed, is -- racist against blacks by one definition, against whites by another, against Asians by a third, and so on.
I would prefer to have colleges [elite or otherwise] be generally representative of the population by race, religion, socio-economic background, etc.
The problem, as I understand it, is "best qualified" is massively impacted by things like race, parental income, and other factors outside the control of college applicants. Society is far from a meritocracy.
In what way is that not meritocratic? The goal isn't to find the most Christlike figure born to the humblest beginnings and tempted thoughout his life by literally Satan to fall off the good path; it's to find the actually realized best qualified person.
If you're the smartest, most knowledgeable, most conscientious, most humble person because you had a fantastic support system, well you're still genuinely a great person. If you are a D student with a felony criminal record because everyone around you was a horrible influence and your parents abused you, you're still genuinely terrible.
I've seen parents in a store together where one just "supervises" their toddler watching youtube or something while the other shops. Meanwhile I'm there reading to my kids while my wife shops. I'll not be surprised if my kids have better outcomes in large part due to the family they were born into, because I do that on purpose. Society should incentivize people to devote ourselves to raising the best next generation we can. Trying to define merit via some counterfactual hypothetical person instead of the actual person in front of you makes no sense. In fact it's counterproductive as you end up incentivizing people to do things like send their kids to worse schools so they can appear relatively better.
40+% of the slots at Harvard are taken up by ALDCs. That's most of the white students slots. If you're like, say, our vice president, you have quite literally a snowball's chance in hell of making it in.
I doubt people are incentivized the way you think they are. Smug attitude aside, everyone wants best for their kids. Many people don't know how. They don't know how because their parents, grandparents, and no one in their community knows how. You end up in what research calls a culture of poverty.
That common among, but not exclusive to, many low-income black communities, due to a history of Jim Crow and slavery, but also in many immigrant communities, and white communities in places like, again, where our vice president comes from.
Improving outcomes for such communities means:
1) Improved economic growth
2) Improved social stability
Representation at Harvard means such communities might trust science. I have very little sympathy for white liberal university faculty complaining how some groups don't believe in climate change when those same faculty are giving those same groups every reason to distrust the academic establishment.
There's also no law which says schools should be meritocratic.
Admissions departments can and do optimize for things like future donations, political influence, and so on.
What specific ethnic groups do and do not count as minorities? What specific ratio of people from various ethnic groups admitted to college campuses counts as "proper"? Why specifically do the enrollment numbers at college campuses today count as a "problem"?
If you treat prestige acceptance rates as a derivative of the progression of racial policy, it absolutely makes sense why affirmative action is in place given the history of racial justice in America.
Can you really claim that the trend won't reverse if purely meritocratic admissions are reinstated (disregarding legacy admits...although very unfair to disregard since their racial makeup heavily tracks with asian/white/etc)
It's simply a single lever to change the racial makeup of the upper class. And certainly it goes both ways, but to simply remove it with no solution implies a regression to the former system, which was all but equal, much less equitable.
Why are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with his gentlemanly C's, his dad puts in a word with his golf buddy and it's off to Wall Street. Kareem shoots his resume off through online portals but no one bites. He goes to law school and takes on even more debt. Johnny's sister, Sally, passes the bar on her third try and is hired by a white-shoe law firm. Et cetera.
You conveniently left out the fact that all the "easy" tracks (athletics, legacy, donor) are heavily skewed toward white applicants. It's interesting how everyone is riling about affirmative action, while at the same time nobody bats an eyelid about those nepotism tracks. And those definitely seem to be institutionally biased against black and Hispanics (in particular the Athletic track it seems, considering the proportion of black athletes in professional sport).
Yes but there's some nuance. I don't think Harvard admission is necessary for Affirmative Action goals. We're talking about a tiny minority of people who attend. In my own opinion, we're looking at rival elite groups fighting with each other.
The SFFA lawsuit targeted Harvard specifically and made the claim not that Affirmative Action was a problem but that secretive racial policies to help whites at the expense of Asians were. There wasn't any direct evidence of it and it's kind of laughable to think Harvard would do that. The SC didn't evaluate that claim and just struck down using race for admissions. But that doesn't mean you can't ask people to write a diversity essay about their race and grade them on that.
Harvard's present demographics[1]:
Of students in the class who self-identified their race, 11.5 percent
identified as African American or Black, 41 percent identified as Asian
American, 11 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and nearly 2 percent
identified as Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
I don't know why they collate it like this. This doesn't include international students who aren't identified by ethnicity. So based on percentage of the demographic, it would appear this is saying whites underperform on admissions substantially compared to everyone else which seems unlikely to me.
I was listening to a podcast where the host and the guest were both Black and both had been to Harvard. This was before the Supreme Court ruling. They joked that it was well known that the Black students at Harvard who were descendants of American slaves were about 10% of the Black student body at Harvard. There were a lot of children of Nigerians and 3rd world tycoons and such.
I think there is a good argument for a help up for people whose communities are still impacted by the history of American slavery (and all its ills) but giving these slots to children of the wealthy and often immigrants does not feel right.
If you talk to admissions officers, over drinks, they'll tell you that poor black students from marginalized US communities have abysmal performance at elite schools. The decision to admit rich black students is very deliberate.
There are many reasons why. Schools in the US are locally-funded, and a marginalized community might have 25% of the per-student spending of a rich community (actual, typical figures). Until inequities like that are addressed, there is little elite education can do to help, even if it wanted, which it doesn't.
The point of an exclusive university is to be, well, maximally exclusive. That's the literal opposite of inclusive.
In my state, the poor Black inner city schools have the highest per-student spending in the state (and some of the highest in the country), as the state government funds them heavily. Performance remains abysmal
However, there are *many* such effects. Whack one, and I can point to a dozen others.
Until and unless they're systematically addressed, it's actually very hard to either make progress or even draw good conclusions.
What's needed is a project to address *all* of the obvious ones, comprehensively, ideally on a national scale, but initially, at least on a pilot scale.
There is more to this story. I have heard Harvard (and its ilk) described as a smallish university attached to a massive investment fund. One of the criteria for admission is how much you and your family will be "good for" donations to the university. They much prefer students from rich families, even if they are the children of disagreeable dictators.
The price portion of this hits hard. My oldest starts college in 2 year and then his younger brother follows 2 years later. We make enough to not qualify for need based aid but not enough to just write a check, merit based aid + a meager 529 and our savings is their only hope besides debt.
Further, both are male, hetero, only 1/4 hispanic, and my wife and I are not drug addicts or alcoholics so they'll get nothing from the "whole student" review. There's a huge swath of the population in this boat. The middle/upper-middle class pays for everyone else as always.
Thats why its called price discrimination: you are trying to get as much money as possible from each buyer without regard to fairness. Heroin dealers at least set a fixed $/oz because they know that word getting around that someone gets it cheaper would get them shot.
> We make enough to not qualify for need based aid
Are you sure? If you're household income is <$340k (depending on details) you'll still get some scholarship, and as long as your household income <$200,000 tuition is free.
This is going to screw me hard. I didn't make a meaningful income (>$95K) until I was 35, 10 years ago; I got a PhD, did a 4 year postdoc, and was an assistant non-tenure-track professor for 3 years. My monthly student loan payments were $1800/month. I changed jobs to HFT, and we have lived comfortably but not able to save much. I have 3 kids aged 17, 15, and 13, the oldest is applying to colleges very soon. 2 years ago I changed jobs again, and now make $700K on paper, but it is 60%+ bonuses, half of which is in a 3 year RSU. So, my take home pay is about $400K cash, taxed in a high bracket; I paid $145K or so in taxes this year. I have about $150K saved, $350K in 401K, and my mortgage is at $500K, with $300K to go. We are finally stable, e.g. we can take a vacation or 2, we can afford groceries without worrying, and can do travel baseball, but it also isn't an extravagant lifestyle or anything.
Now, this is a pretty phenomenal position to be in for most Americans, I can't complain too much. But, my oldest (white, straight, varsity basketball, 4.7 GPA, 35 ACT, 36 on Math) wants to go to a school like USC or Vanderbilt, and we will get 0 aid help. I refuse to let my kids suffer through student loans like my wife and I had to; at one point I made $2500/month as a postdoc, and $1800 went to loans while I had 2 kids under 2. My search history at that point was pretty grim, involving what circumstances life insurance would pay out, etc.
So, assuming all 3 kids go to a $100K/year type school, and we pay cash, that is $12 MILLION dollars over the next decade I will be paying (ignoring inflation, etc). This is the worst case, etc, but still bleak. And, apparently Stanford CS students can't get job offers, so they are entering a horrific job market. I don't think any college is worth that, not even Ivys, but not going to a good college is still worse. If I had a crystal ball 10-15 years ago, we would have left the country.
The Dartmouth analytics say that is true. The top 1% is taking from the top 10% in admissions.
That said, your view that they need "trauma" to get in is very wrong. You need to find a hook. The hook should be positive and not negative. (Why should they let you in to the private club?)
Source: I've gotten my kids into 6 Ivies. Non-athletes, white, public schools, and I am not a doner.
All this stuff is self identifying too, so there are far more dishonest applicants than someone with a single LatAm grandparent marking themselves hispanic.
It's a bit of an interesting Chesterton's fence. For most of human history your job is whatever your dad's job was (with a large degree of hand waving). It makes sense because there's at least some genetic disposition there and you're likely willing to train your children for free. Instead we pay strangers massive amounts of money for make work training that is often only loosely related to productive skills.
Obviously a lot of reasons to do it this way. But you gotta think at some point not working for 4 years while paying ~2x median annual wage has gotta go the way of the dodo.
For all these completely anonymous, AI-generated investigative pieces that are hitting the front page of HN every week, I'd love to see the prompts. Because I suspect they say more about what the proprietor of the site is trying to achieve than the article itself.
Alright, I’m going to try to weigh in on this subject in good faith. Wish me luck!
I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh and attended a very good public school. I had friends who lived only ten or fifteen minutes away but attended schools that were substantially worse by nearly every measurable standard. How should a university compare our applications on an apples-to-apples basis?
Some people would say, “Just use standardized test scores.” And sure, those can be part of the equation. But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education. The list goes on. How exactly should those advantages be measured? Is it a university’s job to account for them?
Others may disagree, but if I were on a university admissions team, I would say that it is...at least to some extent. I wouldn’t want a completely homogeneous student body. I would want every admitted student to clear a reasonable academic floor, but beyond that, I would value diversity in backgrounds, opinions, interests, intended majors, and life experiences.
In my opinion, the issue is much more complicated than people often make it out to be, and I don’t personally believe there is some vast liberal boogeyman behind it. I don’t think the process is perfectly fair to everyone, nor do I think perfect fairness is possible in the first place. But I also don’t automatically agree that it is wrong for universities to try -- however imperfectly or ham-fistedly they might do it -- to understand the broader context in which an application was submitted.
> But I attended a better school, benefited from years of stronger teaching, had access to better preparation materials, and had supportive parents with disposable income to invest in my education...Is it a university’s job to account for [my advantages]?
I would argue: no. There are always applicants with even more advantages than you, and those with fewer.
Standardized tests level the playing field IMO. Money can only help you so much. Talent and hard work become the dominant factors.
Mommy and daddy can't pay for expensive hobbies, finagle unpaid internships at prestigious non-profits, or anything else. Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding. Think Leetcode: how much does coaching help a SWE vs just being good at coding and solving 2000 problems?
Now you may say: under-privileged students often have less stable home environments. So they have less time to grind problems. This is true. But it's also true for admissions as they're done today. They have less time, money, and opportunities for hobbies, volunteer work, sports, and internships. They can't hire essay coaches or admissions consultants.
Thrusting students into a more challenging academic environment than their current demonstrated abilities merit doesn't help anyone. On the other hand if poorer students can demonstrate merit without spending much money, just by writing a single test, this is as egalitarian as possible.
> Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding...
Eh, not so sure. My son got a 32 on the ACT the first time he took it, and after 4 months of private tutoring got a 35, with 36 on math. Could he have grinded himself and got there? Possibly, but I doubt it. Having someone who knows what they're doing and holding him accountable was invaluable.
You know your son well enough to say he wouldn't have done the grind by himself. But that's not the same as proving that coaching is always superior to grinding. Or that a motivated grinder can't beat a less motivated tutored student.
Why does it matter? How deep do you want to go to hunt for advantages? Are there no other places than Ivy League schools where one not so advantaged can get an education? Do you want the doctor saving the life of your loved one be the most qualified or one who ticked the disadvantaged boxes?
I suppose I just disagree that someone from a less affluent or privileged than me with got a 1400 SAT is less qualified than me (1510) simply because one number is larger than the other. These numbers don't exist in a vacuum.
Unfortunately as much as we love the idea of rewarding merit, it isn't actually "fair" in the truest sense of the word. Because everyone is born into different conditions, no one ever has the same opportunities, so you may be more capable than someone else through no fault of your own. Choosing the worse educated out of identically scoring students is one of the few times we decide to tip the scales. Unfortunately again good employment opportunities feel like a zero sum game right now.
OK but what would your goal there be? What do you think an existing admissions team's goal is in various different universities? What if some desire to build an elite club but can't say it on record? And is that such a bad thing?
What's the point of giving preferences to athletes at places like computer science department? Would not it make more sense to create an athletic department and accept all athletes there so they do not have to struggle with math?
Also, they could make a separate department for the riches where there also is no math.
The entire premise of the NCAA for the longest time was "They aren't employees, they are getting a good education for free and playing sports in their off hours!"
This has long been a farce though. They would be put in made up classes with no actual work and given fake grades.
When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think this is an interesting way to frame it. Left to its own devices, Harvard would only devote around 60% of its undergraduate program to simply educating very very bright students. The other 40% is/was for les vieux riches, athletes, generally connected kids, and racial diversity.
While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.
"The published cost of attendance is a fiction almost no one pays."
"Net effect: a $175k household with a house and a 401(k) is judged "full pay," pays near-sticker from already-taxed income, and receives essentially nothing."
I never know how to resolve these two statements. In our case, my daughter happened to choose a good public university. Maybe that is what they mean.
I gave up with a dreams of returning to school when I realized in my early 20s, despite paying my own rent, bills, taxes, etc, the financial aid system considered me a dependent of my father still and lumped his income in with the calculations done to determine what I get/don’t get.
conflates a couple of things: the legacy tip itself and the fact that legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles to begin with (they come from advantaged households). A skeptic can fairly say "of course legacy admits do well, they're better applicants"
> legacies tend to have stronger academic profiles
Maybe for Harvard, but I'm not sure a legacy for some random private liberal arts school nobody has ever heard of (or $STATE University) will be any more academically gifted than someone whose parents both went to college anyway.
Maybe we need to differentiate between "legacy of a school" and "legacy of a school with a historically high academic quality"
Sure, but not at the admittance rate that legacies get. There's been stats & studies showing for example some Ivys with ~3% admit rates having something closer to ~12% for legacy applicants.
Most people applying to an Ivy are already self-selecting as pretty exceptional applicants (putting aside the delusional) and the legacy admits had same/worse SATs, etc.
edit: just looked it up, Harvard is at ~34% legacy admit rate versus regular 6% admit rate..
“Among the admitted legacies, grades and test scores were indistinguishable from non-legacy students. Both groups had an average SAT score that surpassed 1430.”
At Harvard, my understanding is that the legacy admits have slightly higher test scores than non-legacy admits.
You can invert nearly anything in the US with the right justification. You can cite the environment to ensure roads don’t have bike lanes, you can cite anti-racism rules to treat individuals by their race, to protect a man from a small home you can put him on the street. It just is how it is.
The framework to do it was introduced to prevent Jewish people from going to universities where it was found that when it was impossible to keep the Jewish people under 25% of enrollment it rapidly became possible once they accounted for well-roundedness.
The Jewish people of the age, like Asian people today, seem to have been narrow and pointed like a spear where others were like a sphere. Such is life. We aspire to spherical homogeneity. Other shapes need not apply.
There's a wonderful exchange in the movie Interstellar that speaks to this:
Cooper: You're ruling my son out for college now? The kid's fifteen.
Principal: Tom's score simply isn't high enough.
Cooper: What's your waistline? 32? With, what, a 33 inseam?
Principal: I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.
Cooper: You're telling me it takes two numbers to measure your own ass but only one to measure my son's future?
The point being is that a person, and their future, should not be distilled into a single number like an SAT score because people are far more complex than a single number. I would also contend that splitting them into a few numbers, such as by subject area, doesn't help either.
The SAT has 2 components with separate scores. The SAT score is usually the sum of both, but there's no reason colleges can't weight one section more than the other.
If you really care about multiple dimensions, add more types of standardized tests - general science (or specialized - separate physics, chem and bio sections), history, geography, whatever.
Or tell students to take the standardized tests that most closely map to their preferred major.
I still contend strongly that it is wrong to distill a person into a collection of numbers. They are not.
My mother was a special ed teacher who eventually became a diagnostician whose job it was to determine eligibility for services. Part of this job was to give a standardized test to a child to see if they met state set criteria. That said, this was only part of an assessment and was used along with parent preference, teacher recommendations, and other people involved with the process at the school. Outside of meeting state criteria, the numbers in the test were used to identify areas of strength and weakness to help understand a child and put this in perspective of a broader story. For example, if a child struggled with math, was it because they couldn't read well, struggled with the math itself, was distractable? There were also other instances where the test scores themselves were misleading. For example, did a child perform poorly because they were sick, or the AC of the building broke, or they set a test date on a school holiday when the child knew the other kids had a day off?
My point in telling this story is that the raw score in a standarized test can be helpful, but it does not tell a complete story. It is part of a broader assessment. The SAT and college admission is not different.
Purely using a test score does provide an objective score to rank a collection of applicants, but I still contend strongly that it misses the point. Depending on your point of view, college is meant to educate a populace, provide job training, give economic opportunity, or a whole host of other goals. One can use test scores a proxy to determine which applicants best approximate these goals, but I think we should consider whether they really help achieve this.
I'll also mention that using tests scores is not entirely "fair" either. I'd a friend who dated a guy who worked for Kaplan, one of the test prep companies. They had very good data about how much their test prep improved test scores. They were also very expensive. As a result, money and wealth can be used pretty directly to improve one's score. It's difficult for a university to fully address wealth inequality in society. However, since tests can be gamed so easily, I would caution against their over use.
> I still contend strongly that it is wrong to distill a person into a collection of numbers
No one's saying a person is a collection of numbers.
> My point in telling this story is that the raw score in a standarized test can be helpful, but it does not tell a complete story. It is part of a broader assessment
And that's very noble and well-meaning. But it can also be used to discriminate and deny opportunity. Raw scores, on the other hand, are hard data. You either have them or you don't. Do factors outside of one's control go into them? Absolutely. Those factors are all-pervasive and will influence anything you might use to determine merit.
> Kaplan, one of the test prep companies. They had very good data about how much their test prep improved test scores.
Of course they would say that. Even assuming it's true, Kaplan test prep books are only around $50 on Amazon. You could also get them for free from a public or school library (or the high seas, if that's your thing).
As I understand it, Kaplan has apps and dashboards and more material if you're a subscriber. Is there data about the marginal score improvement using that versus just the books?
When you get right down to it, everyone's starting point is different. Reducing the number of variables improves opportunity IMO.
My continued assertion is that "hard data" can be misleading, wrong, and discriminatory. It requires judgement to understand what it tells us and whether there is error in the collection of the data itself.
As far as Kaplan, I don't have metrics to share, but what I saw shocked me at the time. It appeared as though they collected data as to how much their test prep improved scores and it was pretty dramatic. And, they were smart enough to distinguish between their test prep books and their in person tutoring. In person tutoring worked better and by a lot, but it all helped.
As far as tests, I've never contended that they shouldn't be done, but that these scores need to be part of an overall portfolio. I have in fact sat on admittance boards for graduate school and the two dominant factors other reviewers used were GPA and where they went to undergrad. Both of these were hard metrics and full of bias. I'll also contend that they weren't particularly effective in identifying students who successfully completed the program.
Something to consider, I do think test scores can help screen candidates. For example, if one is going to admit into a math program, then their quantitative score should probably be above a certain level. After that, I personally don't think it matters. In that way, one could just set minimum criteria to be accepted, which includes GPA, tests scores, research, jobs, whatever, and then randomly select from that group. That would certainly eliminate a huge amount bias, though not all, but most people hate this approach because it contradicts this belief that we live mostly in a meritocracy. They want rankings and they want to know who number 1 is. My continued argument is that it's impossible to distill a person down to a hard ranking in a reasonable matter, especially with test scores, and it's not necessary for college admission since one can select a group of applicants for acceptance without ordering them.
> I still contend strongly that it is wrong to distill a person into a collection of numbers.
Welcome to the adult world, where you are distilled into a collection of number each step of the way: look at credit scores, performance reviews, etc.
> I'll also mention that using tests scores is not entirely "fair" either.
Unfortunately we didn't come up with a better way to rank a group of people on scale in a reasonable amount of time. So tests are a necessary compromise. I also know plenty of examples where people aced their tests by just spending $30 on a prep book and studying hard.
Thankfully, I also work in the adult world and this world requires judgement.
As an example, my wife is a physician. She and her colleagues use metrics to help assess a patient, but ultimately treatment is based on their judgement. Purely relying on hard numbers, such as what an EKG gives, would lead to dead patients. Many of them. I am a mathematician. My world revolves around hard computational numbers, yet my algorithms will often given misleading results. Determining when that is requires judgement. Despite a push too the contrary, good hiring managers assess applicants and take responsibility for both good and bad hires. This requires judgement.
And, yes, I can also find examples where someone either didn't study or used a book and did well on their SAT. That said, in person test prep with a tutor absolutely has a large, positive effect on test scores, much more than simply a book. Kaplan has the internal data. It's absolutely worth the money if one can afford it. Most can't.
Some random chart feedback. I found the use of red for elite colleges and then the use of red to mean white applicants to make the article slightly harder to read and understand. Recommend changing using completely different colors from that chart to he next one, because they are completely unrealted axis and
It feels like with fewer foreign students college's will have to open more slots to those who can be reasonable ready to be successful and also pay full rate.
How likely is it to be a certain demographic given certain stats? Pretty much says it all.
The race factor is irrelevant in practice. Even more so when you look at literature indicating that your success is actually more predictive from high school success than college attendance.
In other words, if you get into Stanford you will likely succeed even if you don’t go.
"Hooked" is any foot in the door aside from merit such as sports recruitment, child of staff, child of alumnus, or international student. Unhooked is everyone who has to get in on merit alone.
Looking at this without consideration for two factors (number of applicants and the number of applications per applicant) is borderline malpractice.
I can’t pull older numbers on my phone at the moment but in the last 12 years the number of applications to colleges (applicants*applications) has risen 50%.
So correct for the reality that…
1) that immediately skews your denominator and changes your percentages.
2) the upper middle class students are the most likely to apply to the most schools (because they can and don’t have the other paths)
3) more and more marginal students who previously would not have gone to college are getting encouraged to apply.
I know this is probably a /s but in the UK you apply through a service called UCAS not directly to the university, and UCAS only allow you to apply to 5 universities.
This is institutionalized racism. Perhaps Affirmative Action was needed in the past to kickstart the disproportionate enrollment demographics, but it was past due to get rid of it.
The most interesting part following SCOTUS' ruling is that Harvard said it wouldn't change their ways, and nobody enforced the ruling.