
Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago - rafaelc
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
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sctb
I suspect users are flagging these submissions because of the abysmal
comments, and they're not wrong to. If were going to have a discussion it
needs to be up to the civility and intellectual standards of the site.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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dredmorbius
I would suggest otherwise.

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frgtpsswrdlame
What would you suggest?

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dredmorbius
As noted: otherwise.

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gwern
Note how systematic and inexorable the graphs are; it's not any individual
college or policy or region. I suspect that this is a mechanical effect of top
colleges keeping enrollment essentially static even as the population
continues expansion; this means that getting in becomes ever harder (see for
example average SAT scores at MIT or Harvard), which in turn changes group
admission ratios by the usual tail effects - when you have two normal
distributions with different means, the further out you go, the more lopsided
the fraction becomes. If you have a mean difference of, say, 100 SAT points
between two groups, that leads to a relatively small difference in the number
from each group passing a low cutoff like 900, but it means that there will be
hardly any members of the lower group reaching 1600 compared to several from
the higher group. The tails thin out too fast. (The tails effect is likely
also related to the Asian overrepresentation.) Presumably the larger effects
in elite colleges are why the NYT investigator focused on them rather than
national aggregates, which will show smaller shifts as the lower-scoring
students can still go to the unselective colleges.

So as long as Harvard et al keep their incoming classes small and the number
of prospective college students remains high or keeps increasing, the
imbalance will continue. A few elite colleges may be able to poach from each
other to improve their numbers (like Harvey Mudd) but obviously they can't all
do that.

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whatnotests
Best comment in this thread. Thank you.

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rayiner
The article goes astray in the very first paragraph. "Even after decades of
affirmative action." The period starts after the Supreme Court's 1978 decision
in _Regents v. Bakke_ which put significant limits on how affirmative action
programs can be structured. More generally, the entire 35-year period
(starting 1982) takes place during a conservative retrenching from the civil
rights era.

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sokoloff
The denominator used is "college-age population". I wonder what the charts
would look like if they used "4-year college attendees".

I'm not saying that's the only way to look at things, but if the overall
attendance rate for 4-year colleges is lower because a large swath of the
population self-excluded from 4-year colleges, it would surprise me if that
effect _didn 't_ show up in the data.

Now, you could fairly ask why that large swath selected out of 4-year college,
but the answer there probably isn't in the recruitment and admission processes
of the specific colleges even though that's where the problem appears.

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jimrandomh
There is something very funky about the numbers used in this article. All
their charts are measuring "enrollment gap", defined as (percentage of
college-age population) minus (percentage enrollment). But this conflates
changes in enrollment with changes in population. This is especially obvious
when looking at the graph for Hispanics, where the number of college-age
Hispanics has greatly increased from 1980 to 2015; the "gap" has grown from 3%
to 9%, but without using a ruler, it's hard to tell whether the actual
percentage of Hispanics attending college has gone up or down!

This makes me feel like the author of the article is trying to deceive me, and
I'd much rather get numbers from somewhere else.

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misja111
Thread about this same article from 4 hours ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15089419)

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yequalsx
To fix inequality of opportunities one would be well advised to start with the
way k-12 schools are funded. It's too late for most disadvantaged students by
the time they are old enough to go to college.

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rayiner
Some of the best-funded and worst-performing school systems are ones in inner
cities with high minority populations. Baltimore, MD public schools spends
more per student than the wealthy D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, MD,
despite having a lower cost of living.

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yequalsx
Sure. But many of the worst performing schools are under funded. You can find
outliers either way. There's also the fact that the way k-12 schools are
funded causes socio-economic segregation. People with means congregate
together due to schools (among other reasons). I don't know if this would be
true but maybe if there was genuine equality of funding throughout the country
then maybe there would be less socio-economic segregation.

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rayiner
There is more or less equality of funding (at least, between rich and poor
counties in the same state):
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-23-states-
richer-school-districts-get-more-local-funding-than-poorer-
districts/?utm_term=.eee2b4649c2a).

> Federal spending — including through Title I, money meant to bolster
> programs for poor children — is serving as an equalizer, according to the
> federal data. When federal dollars are included, just five states are
> spending less in their poorest districts than in their wealthiest.
> Nationwide, the average disparity drops from 15 percent to less than 2
> percent.

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yequalsx
From what I've read school funding for k-12 varies widely throughout the
country.

[http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of-
Fundi...](http://www.asha.org/Advocacy/schoolfundadv/Overview-of-Funding-For-
Pre-K-12-Education/)

[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-fundin...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/05/18/the-k-12-funding-
crisis.html)

I'm no expert on the issue but I have seen schools in poor neighborhoods
lacking in computers and with dilapidated equipment. In rich districts I've
never seen this. I doubt that just looking at numbers as in the Washington
Post article is sufficient to get to the bottom of the issue. Of course, I'm
not certain I'm right either.

Whatever the reason I think there is no doubt that some schools are run down
and have crappy learning environments. They certainly, on the outside, give
the impression of being underfunded.

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jeremyflores
Oh great, another race/gender-based discussion to elicit the best that the HN
community has to offer.

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DarkKomunalec
Amazing how quickly the proportion of whites dropped in a mere 35 years, in
every single one of those charts. Pretty soon they'll have to get used to
being a minority in the US as well.

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kool1
I bet it's all those pesky good for nothing lazy asians that spend their
entire time doing useless things like studying and trying to make it in life.
They're the reason smart and honest blacks and hispanics are being pushed out
of top universities. We really need to do something about this.

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sctb
We've banned this account and the others by the same user.

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Danihan
More like "because of Affirmative Action".

Just treat people as fairly as possible. The other way doesn't work.

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rayiner
We're going to play poker. Everyone will start with a randomly determined
number of chips. But people whose HN handles start with A-H will get, on
average, 40% less to start with. Aside from that tiny nit, it'll be a totally
fair game.

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fiter
Is the alternative that we play poker and after every N rounds the chips are
redistributed so that everyone has the same amount?

At what point(s) should redistribution happen? At what point(s) should it stop
to allow better decision making?

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leejoramo
At the point when you realize that the original distribution is out of line
with your current moral and ethical values.

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fiter
Non-sarcastically, I think this is a completely reasonable subjective way to
resolve the issue. It's what our political systems are doing.

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W3AVE
Being "underrepresented" speaks absolutely none as to the cause of such a
state. I would be interested in more comprehensive data on college
applications, and the acceptance/rejection of said applications.

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W3AVE
_gets negative karma for attempting to discuss_ thanks fam

