
Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago - kompressor
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html
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frgtpsswrdlame
I wonder how much of this underrepresentation reflects the underrepresenation
of poor students in general.

 _At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League – Dartmouth,
Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown – more students came from the top 1 percent of
the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent._

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-
colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html)

 _No other kid from my block in East Flatbush was so lucky. At their truly
public schools (not charters, not magnets, but common schools available to
every family in the neighborhood), they routinely faced atrocious conditions
including gun violence, overcrowding, and a curriculum that emphasized
obedience over innovation. As outsiders to the college-prep “feeder system,”
which includes a small number of competitive high schools including Philips
Academy and Trinity, the students who persevere despite these formidable
demands and manage to graduate, are rarely seen as “high-achieving” by schools
like Yale. From the perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the
challenges presented by economic scarcity, the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse
captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student who lives in a
shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and
younger siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race
blinds many university trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to
the reality that they undervalue students who always have to run uphill._

[https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/why-
iv...](https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/why-ivy-league-
schools-are-so-bad-at-economic-diversity/284076/)

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ihsw2
This sounds like an issue with the public elementary and secondary education
systems more than anything else -- affirmative action can only do so much for
those that qualify, but if eligibility does not increase in lock step with
population then there are some basic problems that need to be addressed.

Perhaps college endowment funds[1] should invest in supporting elementary and
secondary education systems rather than private equity.

How many freshmen are children of first-generation immigrants? The percentage
likely pales in comparison to children of second-generation immigrants as
climbing the financial ladder is (generally speaking) a basic requirement to
raising children than can attend college as well as having the capability to
fund their attendance.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment)

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AnthonyMouse
The problem is it isn't primarily the schools, it's the whole environment. A
poor student has no time to study because he's busy raising his little sister
while his single mother is working two jobs. His neighbors at home try to sell
him drugs or recruit him into a gang instead of suggesting that he join the
lacrosse team with them.

We keep focusing programs on the very bottom as if the solution is to get
literally everyone in the 1st percentile up to the 5th, while ignoring that
the 5th percentile is still miserable. What we ought to be doing is fighting
the impediments for people at the bottom to break into the middle.

Like, people sell drugs but not sandwiches because the amount of bureaucracy
involved in operating a sandwich cart is higher than the margins on
sandwiches. Meanwhile selling drugs is fully illegal but the margins are high
enough to make up for it.

We've inflated the price of real estate so artificially high by constraining
supply that a) people have trouble affording a place to live, but also b)
people have trouble affording a place to _work_ \-- you can't open a shop if
you can't pay the rent.

We keep all of the structural factors that cause their fathers to be in prison
rather than in business and then find it shocking that the effects of losing
parental income and involvement are more than nothing.

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ihsw2
Honestly I don't mind that drug dealers get the book thrown at them, play
stupid games/win stupid prizes, furthermore the equivocating and rationalizing
around drug dealing having great margins is disingenuous at best and malicious
at worst.

There's more to the situation than microeconomic theory and approaching it
from a purely economic point of view is dangerous.

If we're going to be serious about why fathers are in prison then it stands to
reason that we focus on keeping families together, the vast majority of women
that enter single motherhood fall into poverty and welfare. Not only that but
they never get out of it and they have to endure mental illness (eg:
depression, obesity, addiction) which further complicates family life.

Telling these young women that they're better off alone, that they can find
better relationship opportunities, and other pie-in-the-sky ideological
claptrap is reckless and negligent. It is truer now more than ever that the
traditional family unit is the best institution for ensuring a child's future
is secure.

No I'm not saying women should endure abusive relationships but for heaven's
sake we have to be honest about the fact that they're better off settling down
early than "finding themselves" which we all know is primarily promiscuity,
alcoholism, and drug abuse.

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jack6e
The presentation of these statistics is misleading and reads like a common
case of "find some numbers to support this great narrative I want to write."
Comparing total college-age population with final enrollment assumes that all
groups apply to these universities in equal proportion, and that all
races/cultures hold the same assumptions about the value of a university
education for prosperity/success/happiness. The narrative seems to suggest
that university is the primary means to wealth and advancement, thus if blacks
and Hispanics are under-represented, they are necessarily disproportionately
under-privileged.

If the goal is to evaluate possible university-driven under-representation, an
honest statistic would be comparing application rates to acceptance rates per
race. Or if the objective is measuring social mobility, examining the
percentage of college-age persons attending technical schools, working as
skilled labor, earning a certain percentage above the poverty line (or a
reasonable percentage of median household income), or attending university,
would reveal differing career choices while also showing which percentage of
each race falls outside of a normal path to upward mobility.

Maybe I am cynical, but I think white over-representation has more to do with
economic disparity, which results in cultural disparity between rungs of the
economic ladder, such that upper-middle class society (within which whites are
over-represented) overvalues university as the de facto path to prosperity and
success. But even among whites, there are still a lot of first-generation
university students. This is not driven by race, but by socioeconomics -
parents who worked blue collar jobs without an education, earned their way
into middle/upper-middle class circles, which then inculcated either their
children, them, or both with the expectation of university attendance.
Measuring those realities, their causes and effects, is where real solutions
to these disparities will be sought.

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dragonwriter
> Comparing total college-age population with final enrollment assumes that
> all groups apply to these universities in equal proportion, and that all
> races/cultures hold the same assumptions about the value of a university
> education for prosperity/success/happiness.

No, it doesn't. It simply measures underrepresentation. Variations on those
axes aren't assumed away, because while those may _explain_ some or all of the
underrepresentation (at least, intermediate mechanisms, if not root causes),
they do not _negate_ it's existence.

> Maybe I am cynical, but I think white over-representation has more to do
> with economic disparity, which results in cultural disparity between rungs
> of the economic ladder

In terms of race issues, that's exactly the polar opposite of cynicism, and
well into pollyannaism.

~~~
jack6e
Sorry, I think in editing I deleted my intermediate sentence. You are right,
it measures under-representation, but the narrative and assumption is that
under-representation in university is problematic, worrisome, an issue. I
think that assumption is false, and assuming that under-representation is an
issue that can be fixed, or should be fixed, relies on assuming that there is
some cause that does not originate with the individual. If individuals simply
do not choose to attend university, then that is not a problem that should be
forcefully fixed. If instead individuals from each race equally desire and
apply to university, and _still_ under-representation exists, then measuring
it is useful. But in that case measuring application to acceptance is more
accurate.

~~~
dragonwriter
> but the narrative and assumption is that under-representation in university
> is problematic, worrisome, an issue

Sure, but even if the mechanisms you suggest are assumed away (they aren't)
are part of the mechanism of underrepresentation, it would still be all those
things. In fact, I would see increasing racial divergence in either the
perceived value of college _or_ the rate of application _independent_ of the
perceived value of college and extremely worrying signs.

But, really, before people accept the value of explaining the trend toward
increasing black/hispanic underrepresentation, they need to understand that
the exists; in case you haven't noticed, there is a very powerful (if entirely
non-factual) narrative exact opposite is the case, driven by an increasingly
powerful political faction, including the leadership of the executive branch
of the US government.

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omegaworks
Why was this flagged? With an ongoing engineering skills gap and an increasing
nativist political climate around the world, inequalities in American
education will make or break the tech economy in this country. If we avert our
eyes from the systemic problems here, there might not be a stream of H1B
candidates eager to implement your 'disruptive' ideas. We need to ensure
quality education is accessible to every demographic here.

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misja111
No doubt this is because of the ever increasing cost of going to college in
the USA. This favors kids with parents that can pay for some part it, and
black and hispanic households tend to have less money than other etnic groups.

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cupofjoakim
The US should probably look at adopting free higher education. It's pretty
good, works very well in Sweden and Germany and so on.

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jdavis703
This won't fix the problems of certain groups being excluded though. We have
free public schools in the U.S. and these are still some of the most
segrarated insitutions, the overwhelming majority of children go to school
where their ethnic group or race is the majority.

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DarkKomunalec
Amazing to see what a steep drop of whites each of those charts show, in many
cases their share more than halving in as little as 35 years. And despite such
a dramatic decrease, it _still_ doesn't keep pace with the demographic
changes.

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cabalamat
From the article:

> The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since
> 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of
> college-age Americans

Leading to an "underrepresentedness" figure of -9 (or -10 on the graph in the
article, which is probably due to rounding).

But that's a stupid way of calculating underrepresentedness. E.g. if a group
has 8 % of the population but none go to university they would be
underrepresented by -8, less than blacks but clearly 8->0 is a much larger
diparity than 15->6.

~~~
adjkant
I think raw numbers can be helpful, but for comparison in that context,
percent underrepresented is probably a better number. So black students are
60% underrepresented. In the second case, it would be 100% underrepresented.

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nippples
Could any share of this be due to fringe far-left groups targeting minorities
for their "fuck everything about the system and STEM education is bad"
recruitment campaigns?

~~~
spamizbad
I'm not aware of such efforts, beyond twititer snark, and I'm pretty far left.
But assuming it exists: No, the vast majority of Blacks and Latinos are part
of the political mainstream.

