Indian-American father here, living in the Bay Area. My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged.
I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race. I think there should be some measure of AA on the basis of economic status. It's quite personal for me this year.
My 17-year old is applying to universities to study CS for fall 2023. We live in a highly competitive school district. He's hardworking and studious, as reflected in his 4.0 GPA and perfect 1600 SAT score (thankfully, some schools like MIT have brought back the SAT.) He has always taken the hardest possible AP and college-level classes and has strong extracurriculars. In a normal world, his chances of getting into top-ranked CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) would be decent, but we're Indian-American and are considered over-represented on elite college campuses.
Our school counselor and other parents we've have spoken with have flat-out advised us to: Apply to more lower-tier schools. Amongst the elites, target "hard STEM" schools like MIT, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, where he’s more likely to get a fair shot (Asians are 40+% of the incoming class at these places.) Forget the Ivies — the last thing they want is “another smart Indian male” (the counselor's words, not mine.) You see, that won’t help with “diversity.”
Also — we use a system called Collegevine to keep track of applications. Applicants can input their GPA, SAT scores, extracurriculars etc. to understand their acceptance rate at specific universities based on historical data. For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%. I am not making this up — you can test this yourself.
Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
The post is this since he famously deletes all his Twitter posts:
If you are denying or justifying discrimination against Asian applicants for colleges or jobs, you know exactly how all the most oppressive racists of the past felt.
--
By the way did you ever consider having your child apply to schooling in other countries that are purely exam and test based and somehow produce the engineers that FAANG companies love to hire? The education in those countries are almost free compared to the US and they graduate with minimal or zero debt and get hired for very high salaries by FAANG companies. Just look at the number of foreigners at FAANG companies with undergraduate STEM degrees from the rest of the world. They often do a masters or PHD (for free usually with TA or RA responsibilities) to get acclimated to the US and its nuances which your child does not need.
Among other things, Harvard is accused of adding a "personality" metric to admissions, covering likeability and attractiveness, and consistently scoring Asians low on it, to cancel out less important things like GPA, AP credits and SAT scores. https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/politics/harvard-admissions-a...
What makes you think he’s only going to get a great CS education at the Ivies, Cal, Caltech, Stanford, etc.? Very few of the best graduates I’ve worked with in my ~30 year career studied at those schools - it was places like UW, UBC and Waterloo that stood out to me as producing a high number of high quality, socially adapted graduates.
[edit] and before anyone asks, no I’m not Canadian
For engineering degrees for working within industry, the IVYs don’t get you much. There’s lots of highly ranked STEM universities that’ll open the same number of doors.
Where IVY undergrad matters is if they plan to pursue a PHD. And even that is debatable.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I know he will get a fantastic education at most schools. But he truly is a special kid who gets inspired by super smart people and thrives on challenges, and will do better at Cal, Caltech, Harvey Mudd etc. We're not looking at non-STEM schools and Ivies -- I guess they don't want us and we don't want them.
Just one anecdote but, FWIW, I found that my peers at UBC were significantly smarter and harder-working than my peers at MIT.
Many schools have honours programs or especially challenging degree programs, which will be filled with excellent and ambitious students, even if that school is not an ivy league.
A (perhaps funny) anecdote of my own: I had just started as product manager for a remote engineering team, and it had been briefly mentioned in passing that one member of the team was an intern from UBC. I quickly got a feel for the work ethic and output of the team members (and they were generally great), and just jumped to the conclusion of who the intern was.
Fast forward to the first time I meet them all in person, and I say to who I thought was the intern something like “how have you enjoyed your internship?”. Cue horrified looks, and my engineering manager counterpart swiftly moving in to smooth things over. Turns out the worst performing, least engaged engineer on the team was an FTE, and the UBC intern wasn’t even remotely who I thought it was (they were awesome)!
There is a massive gap between top schools and middle schools in terms of the quality of education, the connections you make, and the opportunities you get. The density of smart people is far higher at those top schools he mentioned.
Connections sure, but what advantage is there in quality of education? It's not like winning a nobel prize makes someone better at teaching organic chemistry, during the one class they teach (aided by a team of assistants who actually deal with the students). If anything I'd say the places with the worst students have the best teachers by both necessity and by experience level. What are you defining as "middle schools"?
Sure, but he’s fixated on ~1% of the “top schools”, and seems closed to the possibility that the other 99% will be just as good (and in some cases better) for his son than that list.
That’s before we even unpack your claim that there’s a clear line between “top” and “middle” schools. I see it as more of a spectrum myself, ignoring “brand recognition” (which is a mostly meaningless metric).
>> Very few of the best graduates I’ve worked with in my ~30 year career studied at those schools - it was places like UW, UBC and Waterloo that stood out to me as producing a high number of high quality, socially adapted graduates.
> But he truly is a special kid who gets inspired by super smart people and thrives on challenges, and will do better at Cal, Caltech, Harvey Mudd etc.
As opposed to UW, UBC and Waterloo, which are filled with less intelligent people? It is laughable.
My theory - you have precisely zero idea what those schools even are.
It's not really about the education. If it were, there wouldn't be a lawsuit about this. This is a pretty simple thing to solve if the goal were just about education. The Jewish Quota that the Ivies did probably led to the rise of MIT and NYU, etc.
The reality is that the most elite universities create kind of a petite noblesse (necessary for moving into the upper nobility) that is very appealing to the middle class. I think the context here is that each race wants to keep the prestigious aspect of these schools in place but have it benefit their own group. We would probably all benefit if we got rid of this bottleneck by creating more stellar universities so that four or five universities don't have a monopoly on cachet but no one is interested in doing that.
I don't see how you could eliminate the bottleneck in prestigious universities since if they are widely accessible, by definition they would no longer be prestigious.
IMHO, the best way forwards is for folks to push for the expansion of the size and power of the middle class by any means possible (government policies as well as simply patronizing small businesses with our money). We don't need a ruling elite that holds power partially by their common participation in 'prestigious' educational institutions. Those institutions demonstrably do not provide the best education, they should not serve as gatekeepers to power.
ya I agree that they shouldn't be the gatekeepers to power. My thought was to make elite universities more competitive against each other. That way maybe the distinction between the top 0.001% and the top 1% matters a lot less because there are lots of elite schools that are all roughly equal. Maybe making more universities or encouraging other schools to step up to compete so that the bottle neck is less so would work. But it's still an education bottleneck.
I am kind of disgusted with the whole thing though. I don't like all this zero sum competition over a name on a piece of paper.
I think in some other countries they have a system where if you make it past a threshold you have a guaranteed spot in their top tier school system. We should do that. We should educate people who have the talent and want to be educated, the specific name should be less important. I think this would ease a lot of tension, make things more fair, and provide the best outcome. But I don't even know if people would want this because the appeal of a super elite degree seems to be pretty enticing.
I have to think about the expansion of power of the middle class. Buying from small businesses would lessen the incentives to have these degrees to some extent. But I have to think about how to apply that to tech. The exact pedigree of a CS degree seems to be extremely important for example even if this is probably meaningless.
The top ranked schools only help with getting your first job, and that's only if you want to work in big tech. Unlike some other industries, you can over compensate by networking or doing side projects if you don't have a high pedigree degree.
> My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars between us and have worked hard to reach where we’re at. We're far from privileged.
Define privileged. You came to the U.S. which means you had the means and impetus to do so. Doesn't that already put in the top 50th percentile of world population? 50 is wild speculation on my part and it could be higher or lower.
I'm almost positive you are more privileged than someone born into a modern indigenous South American or African community. But what does it even matter? "Privileged" is completely relative and irrelevant because anyone who makes it past about the age of 18 is in some sense fortunate.
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
No. You're son will have to overcome unfair and unfortunate circumstances just like you did. Hopefully he has been prepared to do so.
It's odd that the focus of your post is mainly an analysis of whether he is privileged enough to ignore the injustices against his son. All of us have to overcome adversity, but waving the "life is not fair" wand at unjust practices is less useful than advocating for change to a more fair system.
If it makes you feel better, public California colleges cannot employ affirmative action as documented by https://ballotpedia.org/Affirmative_action_in_California, so your son's chances in the UC system should be unaffected by race based quotas. Best of luck to your son on college admissions. Having recently gone through that myself, it's a hell of an undertaking.
If I were a college application reviewer, I would filter for helicopter parents in an attempt to find kids genuinely seeking education as opposed to parents pushing their kids to unhappy places.
Where do you think grades come from? Standardized tests are better because they are standardized (of course), and more fundamental to get at basic problem solving and reading comprehension.
I would argue it is impossible to be good at testing and nothing else. Even with a relatively poorly-designed test, there are valuable skills needed to be "good at it". and the current standardized tests have years of development and constant updating behind them.
Sure but grades aren’t all that indicative of anything in the real world. Some of the worst hires I’ve made were graduates who, on paper, should have been outstanding ICs.
Well they might've cheated. There's a lot of that around.
But if it's a pattern you see from STEM majors from a US school, you could complain to their dean. They usually have industry advisory boards also to get feedback about how students are performing and what is needed.
Or they could have been excellent test takers and not much else. Unless you’re trying to say that cheating on standardized test is commonplace, which would be yet another black mark against them.
This is false. You should read MIT's very helpful blog on why they decided to bring back the SAT. Tl;Dr - the SAT is not a perfect indicator, but in combination with GPA, it is the best predictor of success in advanced education, especially in STEM disciplines. There is very high correlation between grades and SAT scores. Anecdotally, this aligns with my observations too.
I am quite familiar now with the SAT, and have taken the GRE and GMAT myself, and don't understand why any of these standardized tests are considered unfair to certain groups. I think they are a good measure of cognitive ability for advanced studies. People are shooting the messenger.
I think you probably have a different idea about what constitutes success in higher education than the commenter to whom you're replying, and possibly also to admissions officers at prestigious universities.
It can be true that the SAT is a good predictor of university grades, and also that there is more to university life, and life in general, than grades. The parent comment is suggesting that optimizing for grades may not produce the ideal set of university students/graduates. But if you think that graduating with high grades is the whole point of the endeavour then obviously you'll disagree.
Certainly I enjoyed spending my time at university surrounded by people who had more going on than just academic excellence.
Of course there is more to university life than grades. But I strongly disagree with the comment that "all you get are people good at testing, and nothing else". I know a bunch of very high SAT scorers, many of them my kid's friends, and they are not just "good at testing". In general, they bring excellence and hard work to everything they do, including athletics, music and art. In fact, I'd argue that it's almost impossible to be "good at testing, and nothing else".
My father also came to this country with nothing and built himself up, but as someone else mentioned, my father was born in a high caste, he got an education to become an engineer when most people didn't even complete secondary school. There is something to be said about generations of cultural knowledge and success that makes you rise up from "temporary poverty". This is true of most of my family, due to a bad generation of parents they became poor but they used to be pretty wealth a couple generations ago, this is a stark difference in attitude from people who've always been in multi generational poverty, they don't know any succesful people, they don't have any role models, the color of their skin / caste makes them not confident in their abilities to succeed, realistically those people are the ones who need affirmative action. i'm sure your kid is smart enough to succeed in this world even if he went to berkeley instead of stanford.
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
No its not fair which is why its controversial. The real problem is that famous schools are too prestigious right now and there aren't enough of them. Perhaps over time the newer schools who accept all the smart, hardworking students will become recognized for having the best grads.
At this point, I don't think much of famous schools, and might even find them a -minus- on hiring criterion. I'd be much more likely to hire someone from a tier-2 school who doesn't have any of the negative baggage — the wealth and "connections" are kind of a big risk factor to my mind.
Same. I've had two oxford graduates completely crumble in interviews recently who then dared bring it up after flunking the test. That they both did it says alot to me.
City University of New York had an incredible line up of world-class genius graduates, because they took the Jews who were excluded by the Ivies. For some reason that never translated to prestige status for the university.
Vote accordingly. I know many Indian-Americans who do not jive with the Democratic party even in progressive places like California. The system is stacked against them and hard-work / perseverence can only go so far when you need to dodge systemic racism (literally, that's what AA is) that benefits one group over the other based on skin pigmentation.
Asian immigrant class of US is probably the most inspiring story of the American Dream.
Most asians will resign themselves to their low rung in the BIPOC hierarchy and keep voting Democrat--against their self interest--because they won't be able to bring themselves to vote with "country people" in the GOP who didn't go to college.
I have mixed feelings about this. The issue is that there aren't enough elite seats, maybe applying to those schools is a good idea because it starts to create more elite seats. I seriously doubt there would be a serious detriment to your son's education for going to Harvey Mudd for example. I think that the subtext here is the brand name of Stanford and MIT and the Ivies is very desirable and this is less about education.
The brand is real though. Those top tier schools are gateways to power and money. I read through the law suit made against Harvard and other schools and it blames white people, not affirmative action in general. It compares the test scores of white people against Asians and argues that there should be fewer white people. The % of Harvard that is white is 33%. The % of the US is 57.5%. Whites are being shut out of the premier gateways to power in the US. I think AA based on race makes sense in some way because of what these schools mean in reality. It's not just about education.
The test score gap between Asians and whites is not even very broad. So on the one hand, I think all this focus on race is detrimental to life if we use it to judge the most elite people in the country. On the other hand, I think this lawsuit is just more squabbling between races to be the #1. This is a fight about prestige and power and not education, at least in my opinion.
It's not fair, and it's messed up in my opinion. But then I'm an engineer and I highly value meritocracy over everything else. Other people have different values, like racial diversity, whatever they think that means. I think they're idiots, but they think I'm racist. Unfortunately for you and me, the "idiots" are currently running the show.
Ostensibly to you it isn’t “fair” in the way you have described it. But from a different view, your son is very privileged to be in the position he is, I’m sure he will do well wherever he goes for school. You’re in the South Bay bubble that has put so much hype and pressure on these things. Of course, education is important to you as a cultural value and practical matter; but consider that students who are capable can even flourish better in, for example, the community college setting for a few years before transferring (also more financially savvy).
Anyways affirmative action for mostly white people (“legacy admits”) already exists. Removing AA based on race may not result in great outcomes for the underrepresented minorities. Huge disparities exist that cannot be corrected at the university level in entirely; but AA gives the opportunity for URMs to enter these spaces at higher rates than they would at a so called “level” playing field (it is never is the problem).
It’s time to start considering that there is far more to life than what “elite” colleges will have people believe.
Anyone who gets into a top tier school, by preference, legacy, or whatever, is already on a course to do well. They could have settled for the 2nd tier just as well.
The different perspective you are referring to is groups versus individuals. to the degree that they differ, whatever is most fair for one will be less fair for the other. It is objectively true that a group preference will be unfair on an individual level to some people. For example, on an individual basis, legacy admits only benefit legacy applicants. Yet you're using this argument to support penalizing people who are not legacy applicants.
Side point, but I wonder if how many people who are opposed to AA are actually in favor of "legacy admits". Both smell very fishy to me. (No clear academic motive for either....)
I can't tell if these counselors are giving bad advice or the college admissions landscape really is that competitive now compared to 15 years ago. 4.0 and 1600 are perfect scores and trivially, higher than the average scores of admitted students, let alone all applicants.
Every applicant needs stuff on their application besides academics as well, so try to stand out there. They look for unique talents. If they believe that someone is the best X at Y niche that the admissions team likes them they're getting in no matter what.
Also... these schools admit a number of Indian-American males every year. Your son does have a chance. Unfortunately the competition is higher for him due to these unfair rules.
As long as we're talking about fair, is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs? Wouldn't it be reasonable to argue that the second kid getting, say, a nearly (but not quite) perfect SAT score and a 3.9 GPA is at least as impressive, or arguably more impressive, than your little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him?
Doesn’t your argument only highlight how appalling it is to consider something as crude as the race of the applicant?
Even if you disregard how crude the official government racial classifications are (black Americans have much more in common with white Americans than with black Africans, for example, and Pakistanis have much more in common with Afghanis than with the former have with Japanese or the latter have with Swedish, contrary to what the governments racial groupings specify), if you are interested in recognizing hardship and overcoming the obstacles, why not just ask about those directly? When you read the students essay about his jailed father and mother working three jobs, what more do you learn from the mere race checkbox?
I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity. They really are, indeed, trying to achieve a certain color balance among their students, and they really do not care a lot about the diversity that’s more than skin deep. This is really as simple as that, and it’s disgusting.
> I’ll be very explicit here: the universities practicing the policies currently discussed in the Supreme Court don’t care about hardship even close to as much they care about visual diversity.
This is the part that bothers me, they want all the colors of the rainbow but do not care if they are actually helping their students move up in the world.
I went to an ivy, and sure the student body was "diverse" by race but I did not encounter many people from lower classes.
>is it fair that your son, who was given every possible advantage by his well-educated and affluent parents, is graded on the same blind rubric as a kid whose father is a felon for possessing a couple ounces of marijuana and whose mother has to work 3 shitty retail jobs?
That's the exact case I made. The kid with the absentee father has worked hard, and deserves to be helped. But it's independent of race.
>little darling keeping his train on the tracks that you and your wife have laid out for him
I caught the condescending tone here. We live in a good, safe school district but nothing else has been laid out for him. He found all the APs, college courses, internships and applied on his own. The one thing he's not is an entitled, spoilt brat -- he's the exact opposite who takes nothing for granted and works very hard to make full use of his opportunities. It's sad that some people can't see the difference.
> It's sad that some people can't see the difference
Some people don't want to. There's an entire political movement devoted to removing individuality from the equation and seeing people only as oppressed or oppressor races. The heroes and villains are conveniently identifiable by their appearances and any details or personal history deviations from the storyline are disregarded.
You came to the US from India. You are probably upper caste. You almost certainly got a good quality education in India for cheap. Your parents probably had servants.
Bangladeshi-American father here. “Privileged” compared to who? It would be one thing if Ivy League universities accepted Appalachians and rural Georgians stuck in generational poverty. Ironically, people like Clarence Thomas—minorities who grew up in real poverty—are not the main target of AA. The whole reason this is a problem here is that these policies aren’t actually based on privilege. It’s racial gerrymandering—seeking privileged people from overall disadvantaged groups.
Privileged compared to most around him? I'm not comparing OP to the Kennedys but just because he came to the US with a few hundred bucks and worked hard does not mean he is not privileged.
The generational poverty thing is a disingenous distraction. Hypercompetitive environments like the bay area is rife with OP-like cases, the parents go after the boxes to check to get into the top schools, the kids check them. OP's son worked hard and will almost certainly go to a good school, but... Sharma's son went to MIT! All that has happened is that the gaming Indian parents do doesnt work as well as it once did because others wised up to it. I see nothing wrong with promoting someone who has "unforced" talent, and in some cases race may be a poor way in some cases to base that upon, but in general it is not so bad.
The real tragedy is that the most unfair thing these colleges do, which the article mentions, legacy admissions, gets a pass in all the AA talk.
> All that has happened is that the gaming Indian parents do doesnt work as well as it once did because others wised up to it. I see nothing wrong with promoting someone who has "unforced" talent, and in some cases race may be a poor way in some cases to base that upon, but in general it is not so bad.
So what you’re saying is that it’s “not so bad” for colleges to pick the upper middle class Hispanic kid over the upper middle class Indian kid, because you think Indian parents are “gaming” the system.
I’m going to say no, that’s racism, and it should be illegal. If you want to give kids a leg up because they’re from a poor family, fine. But it shouldn’t matter what race they are.
If gaming the system means cultivating good study habits, taking rigorous classes over 4 years, generally pushing yourself to realize your potential, maintaining balance through sports and exercise, we're guilty. These are good habits that will serve him well no matter where he goes.
I think you may be projecting your own thoughts and insecurities here.
In that case you should not be too hung up about him getting admission into a "lesser" (according to you) school. But here you are.
Oh absolutely I am projecting my thoughts. I was lucky but I know many Indians who have been pushed by their parents and are miserable. I also dont think a university environment dominated by such kids will be good either for the school or for them down the line. I am pretty positive your son will have a great experience in whatever school he goes to vs whatever ideal school you had in mind for him. Diversity to me is ipso facto a good thing.
>I was lucky but I know many Indians who have been pushed by their parents and are miserable.
We hang out in different circles. Looks like your default position is that Asian American kids have been pushed to study by their parents. Did it ever occur to you that many kids like to push themselves and test their mettle?
>I also dont think a university environment dominated by such kids will be good either for the school or for them down the line.
You're making up stuff about "university environment dominated by such kids."
That's right, let's admit unprepared kids by lowering the bar. We'll act puzzled when they drop off from STEM programs into easier majors (which is a well known phenomenon, BTW.)
Your comment is quite revealing of the cultural conflict underlying this debate. The dominant liberal white culture--which is adopted by many assimilated desis--holds that people should “follow their bliss” and disapproves of how Asians raise their kids. They view that as part of "gaming" the system, don’t like the incentive structure and competitiveness created when educational institutions are “dominated” by Asian kids. For them, capping the percentage of asians to preserve the culture of the institution is valuable in-and-of itself.
It's not about preservation necessarily - I mean these institutions used to be all white Christian male and we obviously dont want that. But yes, the capping is of value, and in fact even a hedge against the ranking slipping. I guess even people like OP would balk at sending their kids to the #1 school if it had 90% Asians, and then that school wont remain #1 for long. The diversity is of value in other ways - experiences outside of your comfort zone and ones that dont come with a quantifiable meric are wonderful things about a college education.
> I guess even people like OP would balk at sending their kids to the #1 school if it had 90% Asians, and then that school wont remain #1 for long.
Why? Harvard was 90% WASPs when it became #1. Universities in India and China do just fine with 99% Indians and Chinese. What difference does it make?
> The diversity is of value in other ways - experiences outside of your comfort zone and ones that dont come with a quantifiable meric are wonderful things about a college education.
And you can't have those things if you have too many Asian students?
I have a huge problem with people looking at the world through the lens of "privilege". Seems like "privilege" is what they're looking for all the time.
Also, you watered down the term "privilege" to such an extent that it has lost any practical meaning. I came to the US as it is the land of opportunity, and still believe that is the case. In my view, anyone born here, including black and brown people, has sort of won the lottery already. But they're so concerned with "fairness" that they miss taking advantage of the opportunities right in front of them.
It's really clear that most Americans have very little idea about what life is like anywhere else in the world. Getting US citizenship is a golden ticket for people in most developing countries and the immense government support in housing, state welfare/support programs, small business support, etc. is incomprehensible to those of us that weren't with born with it.
I understand a big part of the problem is that many US citizens don't understand what's available, but some almost everyone has smartphones and Google these days, even infrequent attempts to casually browse the internet for self-improvement will yield very large returns for most US citizens in poverty.
Setting aside an obvious problem with AA, if your son is really interested in CS, MIT or Caltech will serve him better than any Ivy League establishment nursery.
> In a normal world, his chances of getting into top-ranked CS programs (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) would be decent, but we're Indian-American and are considered over-represented on elite college campuses.
Let me help put your concerns to rest.
If Harvard et al changed their admissions policies to race blind tomorrow, your son still would not get in.
How do I know this? You are talking about his prospects as an applicant in a way that does not reflect a successful applicant (“another smart Indian male” or otherwise).
I assure you that Harvard and Stanford reject approximately zero “strong admit” applicants. Your son, based on what you have stated here, is not a strong admit applicant.
1. In academics, has your son done anything impressive at a national or international level? Think Westinghouse award, international science fair, or something similar. If not, has he published any academic papers (co-author ok)?
2. In sports, is your son a recruited athlete? Is he a HS varsity athlete who is competitive enough to compete at the university level? If so, has he expressed interest to the school and in the application?
3. In arts, has your son won a spot in a regional or national arts group (like youth symphony), or has he won a regional, national, or international arts competition?
4. In leadership/community, has your son started a successful business or group that has accomplished something meaningful?
5. In terms of non-racial diversity, is your son in a state and school that is under-represented in elite schools? We know that this answer is “no”, and quite the contrary, his school is probably highly-represented, so the school has a ballpark quota (range, not an absolute number). This is probably why his counselors have a good idea where he is in the school pecking order for school references.
> but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances of getting in at the above elite schools from 4-8% to 60+%
Well, I am guessing that those numbers are correct, but I think that some of the story is being left out.
Some (many?) black or Hispanic students with your son’s profile will be actively courted by organizations that will give them the experience they need to stand out (their “hook”).
This may exist for Indian-Americans as well (I have no idea), but that wasn’t really reflected in anything you wrote.
Anyway, most if not all of the black and hispanic undergrads I’ve met at ivies have had a very compelling hook, typically in leadership or sports (iirc, 20% of Harvard’s entering class are varsity athletes, and maybe half of those are recruited, so sports being their “hook” is not rare).
> Is it fair to penalize my son for working hard and being an excellent student?
He is being “penalized” for having too narrow of a focus. That focus may work in some elite schools that have an all or nothing admissions exam (like some schools in India, Japan, China, etc.), but that type of focus is too narrow for many elite US universities.
The Ivies plus Stanford could fill their classes many times over with students who are very comparable to your son in terms of grades and SAT scores. They are looking for something more (the hook).
If the guidance counselors at your son’s school didn’t share that with him or you early in his high school career, then that’s really on them. They should know better assuming that they knew he had ambitions for an elite school.
Many of your points are valid and I don't disagree with them. But you're assuming too much by saying that he has too narrow of a focus. You don't know him. My kid is strong in some areas, not as strong in others. He's realistic and knows that Harvard, Stanford are lottery schools for almost everyone. He has no feeling of entitlement, and neither do I, but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race. And as a dad, I don't like it.
> but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race
No offense, but this is almost certainly a false narrative that you are telling yourself and your son. It’s not healthy.
You summarized everything else outside of his grades and SAT scores as “strong extracurriculars”.
Show me an impressive hook and a few rejections from elite schools, and I will agree that there is likely discrimination of some sort somewhere in the process (possibly his high school, possibly at the elite schools).
I somehow doubt that there is an impressive hook, otherwise you would have mentioned it.
Elite school admission is totally not a lottery for someone with your son’s scores and a strong hook. Quite the contrary, admission to at least one elite school is almost a lock, even as an Indian-American.
That said, most families with really smart kids don’t focus on the strong hook, often because they don’t know that they need to do so. As such, they are left grasping for explanations. Race is an easy crutch to lean on (especially these days), but it is likely not the actual reason.
If you really think that he’s almost there, I recommend throwing in at least one application to an elite school. If he’s not at least wait listed, then he wasn’t even close, and no amount of race blind admissions would change that.
What can "strong extracurriculars" mean if not the things you described? I would expect significant things like sports (which wouldn't be "strong" if not at least varsity which isn't very special anyway, and some awards), and competitions with awards in other areas.
Though I do agree the odds are quite insane lately, with the top schools receiving applications from the top students of the entire planet. Basically everyone has to shift their sights down the rankings as a result.
> What can "strong extracurriculars" mean if not the things you described?
In my experience, a typical parent thinks that a student with 4-year varsity sport participation (more than one doesn’t help if it’s just participation), president of a school club, and member of some group or two (one probably being a local community service group) as being “strong”.
I would call this nice, but similar to 10k-20k other applicants, mainly because it’s fairly easy to manufacture this.
Some sports teams take anyone who is willing to play. It’s often trivially easy to start a club with your friends and declare yourself president (and essentially do nothing). It’s trivially easy to join a group or two and tag along. I have heard of and seen all of these examples that were done precisely to game elite school admissions.
Is this what happened with OP’s kid? Who knows?
What strong in one or more of these same categories might look like:
- all-state first team in a sport, and/or talented enough to be recruited in a sport. If it’s not a school sport, then winner of a regional or larger competition (depends on sport).
- started a club/group that went on to do something meaningful, with “meaningful” roughly being that it was probably worthy of being written up in a local or regional newspaper.
- participated in a group (like a music group or academic group/team) that was highly competitive to join and won regional, national, and/or international competitions.
- participated in a group (like an existing service group) that did something incredibly unique, most likely led by the applicant (e.g., some sort of decent-sized development project, local or international).
One or more of the above, substantiated in recommendations and/or supporting materials (e.g., newspaper articles, bulletins, etc.) will make an applicant much more unique.
> Though I do agree the odds are quite insane lately, with the top schools receiving applications from the top students of the entire planet. Basically everyone has to shift their sights down the rankings as a result.
This is largely not true.
Outside of covid years (those years are outliers), the main reason the acceptance rates are lower is because more people are applying. In general, the overall quality of those additional applications is relatively low — it’s just much easier to apply now (especially with a mediocre application) than it was in the past, and it’s getting easier every year.
Harvard had 60k applicants last year, and about 13k 30 years ago. The strong applicant pool has not increased 4x-5x over the past 30 years.
Is it tougher? Yes, but only slightly, imho. I think the internet has allowed some students who are not in elite university feeder schools to get info on how to be a strong candidate. This info was much tougher to access 30 years ago.
As a simple example, Cal Newport has written some good blog posts and books on how to be an outstanding applicant.
That said, many people don’t avail themselves of this information and still stubbornly think that grades and SATs are the main criteria for elite school admissions.
> ...but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race.
Your measuring stick is 90% blank. How you measure "higher standard" are table stakes in the Ivies.
csa already did a good job explaining this which apparently didn't sway you, so I'm going to try a different tack.
If you ever get the opportunity to meet in person face to face in an intimate setting with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or Arnold Schwarzenegger, I encourage you to avail yourself, and observe as detached as you can. The change in the room is palpable and electric. Their charisma is off the charts powerful.
I'm familiar with Clinton's charisma, and it is stunning to watch at work. It isn't just his extraordinarily comprehensive recall, but also how he deploys it. You can observe the mechanics, like warmly restarting a thread of conversation with someone he last met a few years ago as if he simply turned around from another party guest a few seconds ago. But even among top politicians who employ the same technique, he stands out in the refined fashion with which he delivers it.
Think how many people regularly in your life have that kind of charisma. The Ivies still reject candidates with that level of magnetic personality because they lack in other dimensions.
By using the metrics you use, you are limiting your son and yourself. Those metrics come with a hard ceiling. Where the Ivies are going, there are no ceilings, there are no metrics in the first place. World class admissions means being open to von Neumann-scale, I-didn't-believe-that-possible possibilities to surprise the admissions committee and delight in that.
You don't achieve that surprise and delight with what you have mentioned so far.
Your son sounds like a terrific human being and you are rightfully fiercely proud of him and what you have accomplished as a parent and successful immigrant. Keep pushing forward on that trajectory, for college is not the pinnacle, just another foothill towards that summit reached at the end of our life. He can (and I'm sure will) still achieve incredible heights in his life, Ivy or not, as long as he continues to improve himself and the little part of the universe around him that he can personally make better. Successful dents in the universe have rarely historically come stamped with Ivy diplomas, and I wish someday to read about a dent your son makes and delight in my surprise at where that dent shows up.
> By using the metrics you use, you are limiting your son and yourself. Those metrics come with a hard ceiling. Where the Ivies are going, there are no ceilings, there are no metrics in the first place. World class admissions means being open to von Neumann-scale, I-didn't-believe-that-possible possibilities to surprise the admissions committee and delight in that.
This is worded extremely well.
I think many people grossly underestimate what a motivated and talented high schooler can do, largely due to the conceptual ceilings that are pervasive in our society.
I'm not naive. Places like Harvard select the best of the best, and that students like my son will be common in their applicant pool, etc. The original point I made and stand by was that, AA should be based on economic conditions, not race. Race should not be used as a short-hand for economic adversity. I think colleges just want to see more "black and brown" faces, and Asian Americans (including brown-skinned Indians, like my son) are not the right shade of brown.
Thanks for your sentiments in the last paragraph. He will make a dent!
> Many of your points are valid and I don't disagree with them. But you're assuming too much by saying that he has too narrow of a focus. You don't know him. My kid is strong in some areas, not as strong in others. He's realistic and knows that Harvard, Stanford are lottery schools for almost everyone. He has no feeling of entitlement, and neither do I, but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race. And as a dad, I don't like it.
You are displaying an amazing sense of entitlement.
The reality is that the race is not independent from economic means and social status. Students who are applying who are black or native are at a major disadvantage. In terms of how they were treated personally, how their schools were likely funded, their family wealth, etc. So when someone toggles the race entry, the probabilities factor in the fact that their background is going to be much more compelling.
You have an average wealthy family, without major hardships, in a wealthy area. Your son is doing just ok for his background; not great, not bad. I have seen thousands of such applications and the poster you're replying to is spot on.
Even if the Supreme Court kills race-based affirmative action, universities will use hardship and economic means instead. And that will not change your son's statistics one bit.
Stop blaming underrepresented less well educated poorer people for what your limitations are. That's how you become a racist.
>but I do know that he's being held to a much higher standard than almost anyone else because of his race. And as a dad, I don't like it.
>You are displaying an amazing sense of entitlement.
This is how I objectively know he's being held to a much higher standard. A kid of any other race, to have the same chance of admission to these schools, will need an SAT score 250-450 points lower (depending on race), and a GPA 0.2 - 0.9 lower (again, depending on race), than him. To use Harvard's own statistic, "An Asian American in the fourth lowest decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%) but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%)" They tried to explain it on the basis of soft metrics like "personality". Funnily enough, interviewers didn't judge Asian Americans as low on personality and sociability. Only the admissions staff did. Go figure.
> "An Asian American in the fourth lowest decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%) but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%)"
I absolutely love this stat
Take a minute, and think about what non-AA, non-racist reason this might be true?
I don’t know the exact answer for the 4th decile, but I can make a good guess.
Of all of those folks in the fourth decile across all races, what do you think sets them apart?
It will without a doubt be that they are very highly rated in some other area.
The most likely answer statistically is… wait for it… recruited athlete.
There are other possible answers like child of faculty member, or child of person of interest, or child of key donor. We don’t really know unless we see the specific applications of the folks who were accepted in the 4th decile.
If you want to criticize schools for their policies on recruiting athletes or granting preference to deans/directors lists, you won’t get much pushback from me. That said, it’s very much the reality now and probably for the foreseeable future.
Turning this summary data into a race issue without knowing the details of the specific applicants is simply irresponsible.
> This is how I objectively know he's being held to a much higher standard. A kid of any other race, to have the same chance of admission to these schools, will need an SAT score 250-450 points lower (depending on race), and a GPA 0.2 - 0.9 lower (again, depending on race), than him. To use Harvard's own statistic, "An Asian American in the fourth lowest decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%) but an African American in that decile has a higher chance of admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%)" They tried to explain it on the basis of soft metrics like "personality". Funnily enough, interviewers didn't judge Asian Americans as low on personality and sociability. Only the admissions staff did. Go figure.
Other posters who understand this tried to explain it to you. Even if this law were to change, it would make zero difference. You don't understand what changes these statistics. Race is a shorthand for them. Those people come from a much more disadvantaged background.
Your child comes from a wealthy family with every opportunity and is doing ok for it. Other people come from very far behind and got nearly to the same place. Their gap is much much larger, their effort is much much larger, as a consequence their achievement is higher.
These statistics will not change substantially after the lawsuit.
Moreover, you're totally being blinded by this to blame the wrong people: poor black kids.
Do you realize that the vast majority of applicants at Harvard aren't getting in by merit? They go in through programs related to wealth and legacy. That's where people should be upset.
Instead, you're just walking down a racist path that is obviously false.
1) The ivy leagues (and many other colleges of the US) shifted from a purely meritocratic assessment to an "all rounder" vetting process of potential candidates simply to eliminate the "undesirables" (at that time, mostly jews).
> The first thing to understand is that everything we know about selective college admissions today is less than a century old. So if you go back to 1910 or 1920, the Ivy League schools were not particularly expensive. They were not particularly desirable, in that they didn't have five or 10 or 20 times as many applicants as there were spots. And they weren’t particularly rigorous about vetting students ... So how did we get from there to here today, when these schools are desirable, expensive, and have a very rigorous vetting process?
> The answer is that most of those measures came about as part of the effort to limit the percentage of Jews in the student body. The extensive college application of multiple pages came about because they added questions to figure out if an applicant was Jewish, including What’s your religion? What is your father’s occupation? What is your mother’s maiden name? Where were your parents born? At some schools, they asked you to attach a photograph. Some began to require an interview. And that was in part so they could try to suss out if you were Jewish or not.
> ... the Ivy League didn't really want them. Being first-generation students, these applicants didn't have rich alumni parents who would be likely to donate big bucks. Being from an ethnicity not associated with America's governing class, they didn't help the Ivy League with its biggest selling point — that going to college there provides an opportunity to rub shoulders with America's governing class. And they were seen as boring grinds who studied too hard and weren't much fun.
> The result was a change in admissions criteria to reward "leadership," and "well-rounded" candidates — a thin disguise for "WASPs" — and, following closely on, actual quotas for Jewish students, so that no matter how many applied, their numbers on campus would stay just about the same.
Yeah, it looks like they are doing the same thing with the Asian-Americans today (who have a similar immigrant cultural values like the jewish immigrants of the early 20th century - strong family ties and cultural importance to getting a good education).
2) If you are rich and have money to bribe these colleges, the "minimum qualification" will be "adjusted" to accommodate you. (Source: How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school... ).
3. One goal of standardized tests in the early 1900s was to get the better students and a more diverse group of students into the better schools rather than lean very heavily on feeder WASP private schools (which had been standard up until then). There were societal needs that the the existing admissions processes did not address on a number of levels.
4. Eliot, Harvard president in the early 1900s before Lowell, embraced diversity. "Eliot was bragging to The New York Times about Harvard’s racial, ethnic, and religious diversity as well as its economic class diversity."
5. A racist Lowell became president and implemented a Jewish quota in the 1920s.
6. In the 1930s, Conant, Lowell's successor, gradually eased these quotas and focused on using the SAT as less-biased assessment tool. "Eight years after rejecting the SAT for use in admissions, Harvard begins requiring all prospective scholarship students to take the SAT. The president of the university, James Conant, feels that the test provides an accurate assessment of a student's intelligence. (Conant reasons that the SAT could then be used by Harvard to select scholarship candidates from among students other than those from well-known East Coast private schools.) By 1938, all of the College Board member schools will be using the SAT to evaluate scholarship applicants."
7. In summary, Lowell's Jewish quota was only in place for a decade or so (a dark time to be sure). Prior to and after that, diversity found via various forms of merit were aggressively sought after.
8. Some of your quotes seem to suggest that academically strong students are also boring grinds. It is possible to be strong academically while also being well-rounded, regardless of your race. The definition of "well-rounded" may have been tailored during Lowell's time to exclude Jews, but a modern day definition definitely does not exclude any race by design (e.g., it is possible to be an acclaimed Asian athlete, leader, artist, etc.).
9. There are book-length treatments of the subject of Harvard's history of seeking diversity that are quite compelling (noting that Harvard never was and never has been perfect). Rather than read and quote click-bait articles about the topic, I would encourage folks to read one of these books. Student Diversity at the Big Three: Changes at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Since the 1920s is one possible book, but I'm not sure it's the best (I read a very good one in the 00s, but I cannot remember the title or author). The Chosen is another.
I will close with a quote from the Boston Globe link above:
"Don’t be fooled by those using the Jewish quota of the mid-20th century or charges of discrimination against Asian Americans (also despicable when true, but which the lower courts convincingly found was not the case here) as an excuse to limit the inclusion of Black and Latino students at selective universities. We should be celebrating, not ending, the policies of diversity and inclusion that opened universities to Catholics, Jews, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, women, and other outsiders."
I would add that those CollegeVine calculators (and any acceptance rate calculator) are not based on any real data - extracurriculars really make or break applications at top schools when every applicant is in the 95th percentile. You can't really use that as data, although a lot of the data sets for top schools do support those acceptance rates you mention. If your child's school uses Naviance, that is a far more useful tool in my opinion for looking at acceptance rates since it takes data from your school district.
@thejman5200 That used to be the case, but for the last 2 years, CollegeVine's chancing calculator is pretty close (+/- 4%) to the real acceptance rates (https://www.collegevine.com/admissions-calculator)
Our HS uses both CollegeVine and Naviance. FWIW, Naviance shows my kid's chances ~2% higher on average.
Since race is a social construct with no objective definition, your son can select whichever value he likes in the race field without legal penalty. Or just leave it blank.
Someone asked why he has to apply to elite STEM schools -- he will get a great education anywhere. That may be true, but he's one of those kids who love to be surrounded by people smarter than him and be inspired by them. It's weird but the harder the class, the more fun he seems to have. He wants to be challenged in college. He will thrive at Mudd.
the problem with HM is the population is so small that it's insignificant compared to the other schools. it's much more impacted, so even if their numbers align more with what you want, there are only a few hundred spots
> I am 100% against affirmative action on the basis of race.
The problem with your statement is that affirmative actions is not based solely on race, so it appears that you are attempting to or have mistakenly fallen into perpetuating an offensive myth that the main beneficiaries of it are Black/Hispanic.
The group that has benefited the most from affirmative action are White/Non-Hispanic women.
> My wife and I came to this country with a few hundred dollars...
That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India and were able to take advantage of the opportunity. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.
As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
The context of why affirmative action was created, should not be skipped over, as if it applies simply to one person's situation and benefit. That you don't need something, is great for your situation, but that doesn't mean that's true for other ethnic groups and their situations.
"Affirmative action laws are policies instituted by the government to help level the playing field for those historically disadvantaged due to factors such as race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These laws typically pertain to equal opportunities in employment, education, and business."
> For my son, keeping everything else the same but simply changing his race from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases his chances...
That's gaming the system, for personal benefits, and contrary to the purposes for which affirmative action was created. That would be like a guy saying that if he writes down he's a different gender, he can now cheat his way into getting something he should not (by pretending to be female). If anything, you should arguably be against people falsifying documents or trying to present themselves as something they are not.
>That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.
And not one of those things is in the least bit his fault or responsibility, least of all the fault or responsibility of his son or many other kids in the same situation. It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others. The idea is in fact little better than the implicit punishment-through-bias accorded to other minorities because they or their ancestors were at one time considered inferior. A society can alleviate past wrongs without creating new ones of a similar if softer flavor against yet other collectively defined groups.
>As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.
And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place? Another idiotic and ugly idea: that a country makes itself better and then is right to foist part of the cost onto people who later come to it specifically because it's supposedly become a better and more just place, as if they'd had a part in its previous wrongs.
That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.
> It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others.
Yeah, affirmitive action kinda warped into something akin to the biblical original sin IMO.
Every generation inherits the debts of the past and a duty to pay it down. Just because I was born into this world and personally did not endorse the use of CFCs or the petrodollar system doesn’t mean I’m absolved of being a participant in finding solutions to the nth-order effects these technologies introduce into the world.
> And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place?
Yes. He owes a personal debt because the average wealth of white families is vastly higher than that of black families because they were exploited for 300+ years.
The black student who worked even harder but started much further behind, with far fewer resources, deserves a shot too. Even if they didn't get as far.
You're comparing an ultra-privileged child with a child who comes far behind. So course you need to factor that in!
Otherwise you might as well just look at their net worth and only admit children of the rich, because look, they're so far ahead in life already.
> That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.
You have been contaminated by racism and a lack of caring. You want to live in a world where black people are an endless underclass that you can exploit.
Truly, what the hell? First, the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States. Secondly, many white people in the United States today also managed to build a life for themselves without having done so. Your notion of historical guilt really is more like the absurd religious idea of original sin than a realistic or genuinely fair minded concept of justice and blame.
Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.
Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?
> Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?
Why would you ignore basic facts? White families in the US stole from black families for centuries. Today the average white family has more than 10x the wealth of the average black family.
This must be fixed. It is not a "historical wrong". It is a wrong that is occurring now. Today. To real people. By the wealthy in the US toward minorities who are much poorer.
> the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States
What nonsense.
He moved to a country where white people stole from black people for centuries. Then said "Well, we're rich now, and the theft happened a while ago, so.. good luck!". And now he shares in that stolen wealth. He is as responsible as everyone else.
> Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.
How can you redress a wrong against black and native people if it's illegal to look at whether someone is black or native when giving life-changing opportunities?
Come on.
Just admit it. You enjoy your racism and have zero desire to help anyone. Stop hiding behind "I totally want to help people, as long as literally no one is inconvenienced, without any plan, outcomes, or goals." Please.
I think you have an extraordinarily skewed idea of how wealth is usually created, how productivity works and how legal redress should handle these things in a functional society. All this aside from your very emotional, contextually ignorant claims about me being racist and other people being guilty of exploiting African Americans because those other people happen to have been successful in some way.
An immigrant from India (or anywhere really), who arrives to the US and then works hard to exchange some sort of value for voluntary compensation from others is most definitely not making themselves better off by sharing in "stolen wealth" from some previous century. They're doing what all of us (of any color or creed) do every day to stay mutually economically solvent. By your logic, even modern African Americans would be guilty of the same thing because their increased standard of living is a part of the same economic participation in exchange of "stolen" wealth.
Too much to unpack here in further argument, but i'd suggest more carefully considering these positions.
We agree on the big picture but not the details. Instead of race, why not look at economic position? I think the white family living in poverty in rural Appalachia is probably more deserving of AA than the middle-class Black family in Atlanta today. If there's a kid with a lower GPA/SAT than my son, but he's worked throughout HS, didn't have the same resources we have, he deserves acknowledgement and assistance. Colleges should definitely consider that as a factor. But that is irrespective of race.
I don't think you are seeing the historical context. Race is very much a part of it. America had to overcome slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, etc... These were based on race, not economic position. Affirmative action is an attempt to rectify the long standing American issues of discrimination based on race and other attributes (sex, color, etc...).
Economic position or being at an economic disadvantage is a different argument than what you had originally presented and the attack on affirmative action. America did not develop as, and still is not, a society blind to race, color, or sex. Better that you had made that argument, which would possibly be along the lines of better loans, scholarships, free education, etc...
From what I understood of your comment, a black person in a rich neighbourhood should get preferential treatment over a white person in a poor one? Because historically black people were mistreated?
What if white people are, in the future, treated as second class citizens, should AA then be for white ones?
IMO using racist policy to fight racism is just not going to end well.
Ideally yes, the economic situation should be taken into account as well. But what's the use of enforcing this at college level, when for underprivileged kids (any kind - wrong race, low class, bad neighborhood) the ship of chances sailed away already when they couldn't get through a proper primary school? The OP situation will happen again and again, kids with lower scores will get pushed ahead so the average "smartness" of that school will decrease. Because what is good for one individual can be detrimental in general, and what is positive in general can be detrimental for one individual. Just about any policy will have holes through some people will fall, and even if I propose a quality education starting from grade 1, I'm sure some people will point out somebody getting a hit from it.
In my opinion, a possible solution would be to get rid of district based funding for schools and instead fund schools mostly based on student amount. One problem of that model is that it can result in teachers avoiding certain schools because that school having a bad rep and thus that school having to pick worse teachers.
Another solution I could see working is making it much easier for students to go to other schools than the default one assigned to them. Altough, that runs into issues of areas where there isn't any "wealthy" school nearby.
I get that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve and that, tbh, I don't really have much of a clue how to solve it either. So the best I can do is throwing ideas at the wall to see what is workable, while opposing policies I see that I deem to be actively harmful.
Thinking more about my ideas, I think there is a link, altough can't really argument that one atm, behind "no child left behind" and "bad" schools getting worse.
The problem with getting rid of district-based funding is that the worst schools often already get the most per student funding because the state (at least that's the case where I am!). Ultimately the problem is that more money doesn't necessarily result in better outcomes
I have no idea of specific numbers but this does not seem to fit the anecdotal experience of my city. :/
It is a complex multifaceted situation that might differ based on region, but in my moderately large mid-west city, the difference in curb appeal of the public schools in the wealthy suburbs vs the more urban schools closer to where I lived was wild (and I would expect curb appeal to be the easiest needle to move with just money). Forget the academics and the student environment. The suburb districts were best-in-the-state experiences while some of the high school kids I worked with from the more urban schools just wanted to make it through the day without a knife fight....
In my city, the curb appeal of the wealthy suburbs with good schools is absolutely there too. But the inner city knife-fighting schools actually get more total money per student (because the state makes up the difference and then some). That translates into generally newer school buildings in the city, but generally worse outcomes. Which points to the fact that money isn't everything. Good administration matters. Teacher-student ratios matter. Home life matters. Without those things, more money doesn't solve education problems! Money helps on all those fronts, but it in itself isn't sufficient without good execution
Are we sure that we wouldn't have the exactly same discussion in that situation? Because your son would be - again - pushed aside, just by a different underrepresented group.
>That's gaming the system, for personal benefits, and contrary to the purposes for which affirmative action was created
It should have been abundantly clear to anyone that I mentioned CollegeVine to show how the system works, not that we intend to apply as another race. Sheesh.
TL;DR: According to you, an Indian teenager born in the 21st century should be treated as less desirable during a college admission process, because of things that some white people did to some black people in the 19th and 20th century.
Sorry, this is textbook bigotry to me, and I am dismayed by the fact that this way of thinking infested the American academia and half of its political system.
As a young guy in the 1990s, I knew a few old bigoted Polish Catholics who disliked the Jews because they "killed Christ". Being naive, I was thinking back then that this kind of heritable guilt was on its way out. Nope, I was wrong. The ideology that you describe is arguably even more nonsensical, classifying totally unrelated ethnic groups as "white-adjacent" and assigning them the same or even greater level of malus points.
The most absurd thing about your argument is that OPs ancestors probably lived under British colonial rule more recently than American blacks under their masters, and approximately at the same time when Jim Crow was rampant. And in 2022, white liberals treat them as undesirables once again, and once again for racist reasons; only the details have changed, but not the principle: Sorry, there is too much of your people on the campus already. Begone.
> According to you, an Indian teenager born in the 21st century should be treated as less desirable during a college admission process, because of things that some white people did to some black people in the 19th and 20th century.
Nowhere did I state that. You are putting words into my mouth and making up fake arguments. You are doing a classic straw man. Just stop, with that, and argue actual points that I made.
For the record, I have zero bias against young smart Indian Americans trying to get into college, nor against their parents who have done their best to raise and provide for them.
> Nowhere did I state that. You are putting words into my mouth and making up fake arguments. You are doing a classic straw man. Just stop, with that, and argue actual points that I made.
But that is exactly the result of your preferred policies. You don't just get to push for a policy and then walk away from the consequences claiming they have nothing to do with you.
If you defend race-based affirmative action that lowers chances of Asian youth to get into certain spots - and this is what current affirmative action obviously does - you are fine with the larger picture, even without stating it explicitely.
You cannot disawow the consequences while supporting the mechanism that produced them. It is like saying "I hate reeducation camps and cultural revolutions but I support Maoism".
Why not? His son appears to have put forth the effort and sacrificed plenty, far more than 99% of students, and looks like his son has the smarts and grit for it as well. This should be about these people in this world.
Why are you making it out like it isn't? This is quite literally THE subject. Why is his son being penalized for his skin color?
There is no logical stance for Affirmative Action as it currently stands without admitting that you are for racist policies.
Racism by definition in the English language asserts racial superiority of one race over another. A policy being race aware isn’t necessarily asserting any form of superiority, and is therefore by definition not racist. I realize people want to use the word “racist” because it implies something bad being done related to race, but they fail to realize that the “bad” of racism is racial supremacy - not the “race” part.
Would you happily sacrifice your son's wellbeing for the Greater Good, or whatever some talking heads say that the Greater Good is?
In that case, think hard about yourself, because you just might be sliding into fanaticism, or that kind of suckership that keeps tyrants afloat and fills their armies with cannon fodder since time immemorial.
There are plenty of other over-represented minorities who can share similar stories.
I'm a Korean American male who migrated to the US as a second grader. I did not know any English and my parents were nail salon workers. I was on state assisted lunch program during middle and high school. While my parents had more than $30, we were certainly in lower socioeconomic class.
However, I was fortunate to have loving parents who wanted good things for me and my brother and I was studious/lucky/smart enough to go to a southern Ivy.
You're not being very kind by simply denying the struggles of over-represented minorities.
You don't know me, writing about high caste and whatnot. I remember having $30 in the bank, sleeping in my car in Detroit, and being awakened by gunshots near Wayne State Univ. The reason I'm grateful for what we have is that I'll never forget those days.
I apologize for "high caste" assumption . you didn't address the crux of my comment. You came here with an education and momentum for success which is worth way more than whats in your pockets.
Only a minuscule portion of Indian population has that privilege to get that education and immigrate to the states. Do you really belive you got into that tiny tiny population purely by your own hard work.
Your comment portrays you on par with a poor mexican immigrant who just crossed over. You both had $30 in your pockets when your came over but you credit your success to "have worked hard" implying the mexican immigrant didn't "work hard" as yourself.
What is the value of an Indian education? You overlook the stark difference between rich people in a poor country, and poor people in a rich country. My dad came here with an education, sure. But his village school in Bangladesh had no walls! He had to take a boat to school during monsoon season. That’s what qualified as elite back home at the time.
Add in the fact that affirmative action isn’t about poor people. There are vanishingly few kids at Harvard who grew up in the projects in NYC. You’re comparing two groups of people who are comfortably middle class based on their grandfather’s status.
Its not the value of Indian education, its about having the right in the first place. Education was plainly denied in the name of caste(religious entitlement) and only very few had access to education until recently. As a side effect of british colonilzation everyone had access to education. But still it took several decades after independence(1947) for some one to get college level education. Vast majority of indians are first person to go college.
Now the op has a kid who is about to enter college which means when he arrived to USA he was already had access to college level education although had little money. The
You came here with a strong educational background, either high school or Bachelor's in engineering and significant money in your sponsoring parents bank account.
You are privileged, and I know it because I wanted to study in the United states for a master's degree but my parents couldn't afford it. The students who were able to afford an education in the United states were the rich kids in my class, and 100% of them were upper caste.
Most American students graduate with a 100K+ debt burden. How much debt did you have on graduation?
I forgive you for being blind to your upper caste privileges.
Having said that, I believe SAT scores should be the key factor in admissions.
Astounding to see racism and ignorance represented as virtue signaling so blatantly!
Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?
The average man in India is competing for approx 10% of college seats!
And saying an Indian STEM degree is worth millions in lifetime earnings reveals even more ignorance - outside of a handful of colleges, the India higher education system is considered woefully inadequate, underfunded, pumping out graduates who only succeed out of personal initiative.
Every major corporation in India essentially has a retraining program to actually teach what’s necessary for work. The worker training issue is one of the top challenges faced by businesses there.
Perhaps it’s time you described your own ethnicity and background etc. Let’s learn a little more about where your biases flow from.
If you actually grew up in India in the time period of the OP, or knew anything about it other than nonsense in woke
publications, you would feel ashamed for your tone and envy and render a sincere apology to the OP.
> Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?
And these seats are never filled and go to upper castes anyway?
My class was supposed to be 50% low caste with 25% Dalits in a class of 60. There were literally 2 Dalits in my class. And of late, the OBC categories are being crowded in by upper castes through political action.
A whole 50% of my class was actually "payment seats" where they paid double the fees to get seats with low entrance scores. Basically, a 50% quota for the privileged.
Curious non-Indian here, how did you know that there were exactly two Dalits in your class? Is this a thing people talk about? Were they open about it? Or do you just recognize them on sight?
I am not a Hindu, so my caste radar is fairly weak. I cant tell caste by last name or by religious practices.
Having said that, People ask folks how much they scored in their entrance exam. Then it becomes obvious who were Dalits are - they had the lowest scores. The 2 of them were also fairly underprivileged, so you could guess from their less trendy and not as new clothes too.
50% were payment seats with about the same entrance rank as OBC students. So it was hard to tell the OBCs apart from the payment seat students. India actually has "affirmative action" for the rich in all private universities, which most of Indian H1Bs have graduated from. My parents couldn't afford these seats. The H1B upper castes wont tell you that, and will pretend that rich Dalits are taking over all the seats. No such thing is happening. I have never met a rich Dalit in my life. I am sure they exist, but I have never met them.
Their academic performance improves with time, and some of them are engineering managers at Microsoft now.
> how do you know that some are engineering managers at Microsoft, now?
I am connected to those folks on LinkedIn.
> Also, is "caste radar" a word you made up, or is that a generally-used concept?
I made it up. But I have read content online, where Dalits feel a huge pressure when they are asked which temple they attend, or how they celebrate certain festivals. I don't know what these ritual differences are. Many folks pick up caste from last names, I can only pick up a small subset of them. What I meant to say was that - I can't tell the caste of a person as easily as Hindus. The Dalits I know, I surmised their caste from their entrance rank and many of them didn't hide it.
I merely quoted some stats, stats are not racist. I read through your rant but didn't see an explanation of why only upper caste Indians are emigrating to usa. whats that about? How do only 30% of Indians make up 90+% indians in USA.
Surely a stem degree and an opportunity to get a post graduate stem degree in a blazing hot tech market is worth more than $30.
Do you really think GP and a venezuelan asylee have same amount of privilege because they both came over with $30 in their pockets. Yet that was the logic GP used to justify his lack of privilege.
Read it over again Magoo: the subject is a specific kind of degree and how it opens doors for a specific industry in the Bay Area. A specific industry known for being insanely competitive and requiring almost comical qualifications to get in. Put the pieces together.
People with degrees, especially in stem are small (in compare to all ppl) group of people who are willing to put multi year, intense effort studying non trivial things
So yea, just those traits make them more likely to earn more
Go ahead and give degree to somebody without skills in good paying jobs and see whether that person will be milions ahead too
A degree gets you in the door at all and starts you off with a higher salary (I would say significantly so) than someone with no comparable education. Those two things are a huge advantage, both in terms of money and in terms of the odds that you will be able to start making it at all.
>The reason I'm grateful for what we have is that I'll never forget those days.
Dont forget to be grateful to the black people affirmative action was originally intended to help. They are the only reason you were allowed into the US and could become naturalized. They spent their limited political capital fighting for you when they didnt need to.
> They are the only reason you were allowed into the US and could become naturalized.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this is meant as hyperbole. Still I feel like this comment falls into the same rut that has lead to the current college admissions debate.
Advocating for poor people does not have to be seen as an attempt to disenfranchise or minimize the opportunities of racial minorities.
Not hyperbole. Without the black civil rights fight, Asians wouldnt be able to migrate to the US and become naturalized.
Black Americans arent just poor or racial minorities, they were systematically robbed of the vast majority of their "early US investor" wealth by the state for centuries. They dont and shouldnt fall into the same category of other "racial minorities" and white women when it comes to these programs.
If no one ever responded to anything the way you did it would be an improvement.
I don't think Indian education is noticeably better than other developing countries anyway. Much less poor regions of the US. Especially India a generation ago.
> What does it matter how much money was in your pockets.
Does it not matter? Can we step back and think this through? The op is most likely comparing himself to all the better placed individuals compared to him. Do people in America always think about third world countries and feel humble, modest and welcoming? Everyone's got their own struggles.
> You had the momentum generations of high caste privilege and high caste education focused culture in India that let you achieve that
Surely, you don't feel humble because centuries of evolution put humans at a disproportionate level compared to others.
The op may have got an advantage because of cultural and historical reasons, but is that a conscious decision on his part? I don't think people voluntarily supress lower castes on a day to day basis.
90% of high caste folks might have started the migration to US, but it's just been a couple of decades.
I also don't understand this dichotomy. If higher caste people are affluent and influential in Indian society, what could be the reason for them to move out and make bread in a different country?
Judging from op's hundreds of dollars, they were definitely not affluent. If you are not affluent, you can't be influential. If you are not influential, you have hustle your way through everything, literally everything.
"Mediocre" colleges are only mediocre because the best prospective students shun them. It's a vicious cycle, and breaking it would be quite beneficial.
They're actually not mediocre in any meaningful way these days. Just perception and therefore places where perception is important. which, ironically, should become increasingly dissuaded to not be fooled by rankings due to outcomes like this where top students end up in 2nd tier schools.
I'm glad someone pointed that out. Most Indians I've known have been completely oblivious both to how the caste system favored them, as well as how ludicrously archaic and objectively absurd it is to outside observers.
When the Supreme Court strikes down legalized discrimination against asians, I hope you remember who put those judges there.
Politics is about people voting in their self interest. If you're Asian, that calculus is simple. Trump might be boorish and say mean things, but his side wants to maintain a system that has worked extraordinarily well for Asians. Poor Asian kids have more than double the income mobility of poor white kids. Vietnamese people came to Reagan’s america in poverty, and closed the gap within a generation. The numbers are irrefutable.
Sure, the other side will make an elaborate show of learning how to pronounce your name. But they want to create a system where your kids (and my kids) will be left holding the short end of the stick simply because they're "not the right kind of diversity." Just consider the phrase they love to use "BIPOC." Non-white people all lumped together, our distinctions erased, except for two groups listed as "first among equals." They are telling you who they are, believe them!
> Most of the geographical US has places where non-white people basically feel not welcome.
I'm a visibly non-white immigrant who has lived in a few different states and driven through most, including some very remote areas. I currently live in a Deep South state. I have not felt unwelcome anywhere in this country, nor have I felt more welcome in stereotypically liberal areas compared to stereotypically conservative areas.
No doubt pockets of genuine racism exists, but both at a population level or square miles of land level, such pockets are in the tiny minority. I fear you are exaggerating the level of antipathy against non-white people amongst the so-called "Trump-voting types".
Demand for racism in this country greatly outstrips the supply of it.
> Is it really a good idea to vote so selfishly, not considering unintended consequences of empowering Trump-type people and enshrining a nativist, racist, and supremacist movement?
This strikes me as a feeble attempt by Democrats to refocus the conversation on what people say and/or think and away from the system of legalized discrimination they endorse.
Conservative populism isn't some uniquely "nativist, racist, and supremacist" threat. Trump people are for the most part just insular in the same way most people in my home country are insular: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/rohingyas-camps-becomi.... Democrats--with their affinity for diversity and change for their own sake--are the ones who are radically different.
You're right that, all else being equal, Asians should prefer the folks who don't make fun of foreign-sounding names. But all else isn't equal. The people who are nice to your face want to create a racial hierarchy that will prejudice Asians legally and economically. It is illogical to me for Asians to support that, just because some white Trump voters in Kansas say the same things their folks back home in India or China would say if the shoe were on the other foot.
> Most of the geographical US has places where non-white people basically feel not welcome.
I grew up in a Virginia House district that went Republican by 30-50 points the entire time I lived there. I have been all over the south and midwest. I live in a precinct that went decisively for Trump in 2016. I have never felt "not welcome" in those places. Now, I don't know what white people say behind my back, but I also don't care. They should hear what my parents say about non-college educated white people.
Indeed, the most racism I have encountered in my life has been from white liberals in the last 5-6 years. It's not Trump-people making me write diversity statements about "tell us about how you're not from here and are different from white people." Give me a guy in a MAGA hat who assumes I don't speak English any day of the week over a condescending white liberal who sees my identity as a vehicle for advancing their ideology.
Well perhaps we agree to disagree on this regard to an extent. My own experience in republican-white dominated areas includes attempts to block buildings for minorities, gloss over historical events to favor one side, suppress different viewpoints, forced participation in Christian religious activities even at the governmental level, and deeply ignorant, bigoted takes on the “other”.
Of course this is by no means limited to republicans or whites for that matter, but the effects I have felt most often come from people who are pushing their views in support of this regards; thus I am sensitized to checking overreach of these views.
Class also has a place in all of this. And I am certain from liberal places I have visited they have problems. But for me perfect is not the enemy of good. It’s simply a matter of who more negatively affects, my way of life and those of others, in the views they push. So far, the MAGA crowd will not be gaining my support until they change many of their views and policies.
If educated Asian-Americans want to gain institutional power like the white elites in this country, fine. But I think they’re making a huge mistake and allowing harm to come to others in their quest for “climbing the ladder”. And I will try to do what’s right either way, as many things are not in my control.
> own experience in republican-white dominated areas includes attempts to block buildings for minorities, gloss over historical events to favor one side, suppress different viewpoints, forced participation in Christian religious activities even at the governmental level, and deeply ignorant, bigoted takes on the “other”
What does that even mean? Are people in Texas making you take Communion? Are they beating you for being brown? Yelling profanities in the street? Are they robbing you or denying you jobs?
And if not, how does any of that affect your daily life? That all seems extremely abstract to me. How can it be more relevant than democrats wanting to legalize discrimination against Asians in universities and workplaces? That’s concrete harm. Why should I care what “takes” some white person in Kansas had about people from Muslim countries, when democrats want to legalize discrimination against my kids?
Trump's DoJ went on a fishing expedition for Chinese professors who supposedly had the PRC. This resulted in MIT Professor Gang Chen being indicted for espionage, only to have his case dropped due to lack of credible evidence a year later.
>enshrining a nativist, racist, and supremacist movement?
I see nativism and racism in left wing movements too. In reality, I think race/ethnicity seems to be the subtext of most things nowadays, maybe it always was. No one really explicitly says it but it's pretty obvious. I am not sure why anyone thinks it's okay only for some groups to advocate for policies that benefit their own race but others can not. As if racism didn't beget more racism.
One of the most pernicious consequences of this fixation on race is the definition of a person by an arbitrary social construct. Although they all check the same box, they have very different experiences and cultural backgrounds:
* Black descendents of slaves vs African immigrants [1]
* Chinese Americans vs Hmong Americans (a higher poverty rate than Black Americans! [2])
* A Korean who grew up in Koreatown LA vs one who grew up in Utah
* A Boston Brahmin vs an impoverished White Virginian whose family members were targeted by eugenic boards
That said, Affirmative Action can reasonably make those from marginalized groups feel more welcome. In elementary school for example, I felt very out place among the largely affluent members of my accelerated math class. By contrast, I related much more to the mischievous truants who would later go on to be low-level criminals.
Different waves of immigration also makes a huge difference. I’m part of the wave of people from the subcontinent who came here from 1970-1995, largely before H1B was created. Most Indians I knew growing up were doctors or business owners who moved to southern states. Like most Asians until 2000, they voted Republican. Indians who came to Silicon Valley or NYC after 2000, by contrast, are a very different group who assimilated into a different domestic culture and had a different experience.
It's still mildly uncomfortable depending on how it's used. As a white guy I usually say "they're a black person" or "a person who's black" when referring to a non-specific person. Adding "person" I feel is helpful in the same way it's better to reference "a Jewish person" versus "a Jew"
> African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa.
Eight years ago I was accepted to do a PhD in either economics or mathematics at a local state school, no where near any ranking list. However, I had just separated from the military a year prior after 11 years as enlisted member. I was the first one in my family to graduate college, let alone be accepted for a PhD program.
During the orientation process I had to speak with a young woman about grants and scholarships. She was showing me what was available pulling up a grant or scholarship, each one she selected was for women, people of color, or women of color. After seeing these for ten minutes in a row without one I could I apply for, I made the joke, there doesn't seem to be a lot here for white males. She said I can just apply and let them know I was a white male and I would get like we do for everything else. I ended the process there with a sour taste left in my mouth.
She was unaware of my background, growing up on an island in Alaska in housing built during WWII that was eventually condemned in our last year. Moving to rural NC for my last two years of high school, then spending time in the military, separating from Turkey literally months before the attempted coup.
She saw my race not the diversity I would bring from my experiences.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Everyone should read Robert Caro’s biographies of LBJ.
The destitution and most importantly shame that he experienced as a boy shaped him, both in the amazing way he was able to seize control of the Senate and defeat the racist reactionaries who mentored him, and in the negative way that he embraced and wielded unbridled power and corruption.
I dont really care if George RR Martin ever finishes Winds of Winter. But I will be immensely disappointed if Robert Caro dies before finishing the last LBJ book. He already somehow wrote 3,000+ pages in 40 years and hasn't even reached LBJ's passage of Medicare, Civil Rights, and Vietnam. He's 87 but still working on it apparently.
LBJ did some great things and he did some bad things. I can see that understanding and explaining how someone who had a life of immense consequence came to do both would be immensely valuable. That explanation could help drive the culture towards considering how we can get the former and avoid the latter as much as reasonably possible. If one was successful in that project, it is possible that their work would be more impactful in the long term than the person that they are writing about.
Also, some people are just compelled to do really deep work because they like it.
I was going to point out that class blindness is an intentional ploy but probably wkuld have been downvoted for being a conspiracist. You (or LBJ rather) said it much better.
LBJ notably makes no distinction between looking down with sympathy or looking down with disdain. And as much as I hate him (actually, I really hate Kennedy more, LBJ got dealt a shit hand) I think that so long as the discussion is constrained to the purposes of getting people to empty their wallets that detail can safely be omitted.
WaPo from 1988[1], in a first-hand report by Bill D Moyers, says
> "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both.
To some extent, it is true. Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age.
Race in America, however, is fraught. The history of racism is recent, overt, and systemic. It is impossible to deny the history of racism unless you are an idiot. The question is what, if anything, can be done about it that actually improves things. The answer is probably very little. Affirmative action is problematic and has some negative side effects, but it has probably been a net positive for society. It will also probably be struck down as it is now negatively and unfairly impacting another minority group.
> Realistically, however, it is rare to move more than one or two income brackets from where your parents were when they were your age.
You state that like it's a bad thing. If you can bump a bracket or two per generation, 2 generations can take you from near-penniless to upper-middle class.
But the stats seem to show that it's substantially less common in the US than in a bunch of other developed countries, including countries that literally still have monarchs. A "Global Social Mobility Index" doesn't even put the US in the top 20. It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American, and the American's son is 68% more likely to remain n the bottom quntile than the Swede. That's a pretty big difference.
If we value class mobility enough to talk about the "_American_ dream" maybe the US should actively work on improving that.
These studies of intergenerational class mobility can be highly problematic, because they often just look at income, very much less access to opportunity. The reason being patterns like the following are not uncommon:
1. John is a banking executive who makes millions of dollars a year.
2. John has a son, Jack. Jack sees how much his father worked and decides to take a very different path, becoming a documentary filmmaker. From his family's wealth, Jack never worries much about money, but his nominal income is quite low.
3. Jack has a son Joe who decides he'd rather live in the giant estate of his grandfather than the small suburban house of his father, and goes into banking. He gets help from his grandfather's contacts to land his first job.
Thus, if you look at these 3 generations in isolation, you'd count them as going from the top quintile to the bottom quintile to the top quintile again. But, in reality, nothing about their social status has really changed, nor their access to opportunity.
There was a post on HN from a couple years ago that looked at a study that said the rich families from Florence, Italy in the 1400s were still the rich families today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18872376. The argument was that there was much less actual social mobility than some other studies suggest.
The USA has larger disparaties across quintiles, in large parts due to its history as a country of (sometimes involuntary) immigrants. I think it will be interesting to see how Sweden's favorable metrics here change as a result of their wave of unskilled immigration, which is probably too recent to be fully incoporated in any generational study. I'd also be interested to see mobility in 'absolute' terms, perhaps relative to global percentiles. Moving up 10% in a very disparate country might reflect more social motion than jumping two quintiles in a very flat country.
Also, moving between income quintiles misses other aspects that might be relevant for a broader definition of social mobility: moving into the top 1% or top 0.1% of income and any movement in wealth. I'm not having luck finding a source at this moment, but I recall seeing that the USA performs favorably on this metric compared to europeans with millenial legacies of state-sanctioned hereditary nobility.
A society composed of 99% peasants, who all earn and own about the same amount, and 1% nobles (who dont 'earn wages' and own many times more than all peasants combined) would look very good through many social mobility metrics.
> It looks like if you consider fathers in the bottom income quintile in Sweden and the US, the Swedish father's son is roughly 75% more likely to make it to the top quintile than the American
I'm not sure the American dream is income mobility, though. The American dream is wealth accumulation and amassing wealth often requires trading for a small, even no, income (e.g. founding a startup). At some point you will likely hope to cash out, but those capital gains will only be recorded as income approximately once in your lifetime.
Real life is filled with disappointments and limitations, even with the best social structures in place. The false promise of a social revolution that provides instant wealth and salvation for all is used by populists to gain power, but any attempt to realize this promise leads to worse outcomes for the public.
Even if we levelled all wealth, life would be limited by the finiteness of resources, and only economic development - which this levelling would inhibit - would alleviate such scarcity.
Consider what would have happened if society had followed John Stuart Mills' advice in 1848 and maximized for equal distribution of income, resulting in per capita GDP barely increasing from its $2,000 level over the last 170 years:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848, book IV, chap. VI)
One possibility is that such an egalitarian society would have produced more brilliant engineers and economists, by providing more opportunity to manifest one's talent to lower economic classes. And they then could, perhaps, figure out the unsustainability of their trajectory earlier, and correct it to produce somewhat slower but steady growth without environmental catastrophes, translating to better long-term outcome.
A per capita GDP of $3,000 wouldn't have provided people with the surplus time to dabble in engineering and economics. It's a living standard that today we categorize as extreme poverty.
Eliminating involuntary unemployment doesn’t require levelling of all wealth, it just sets the floor price for labour and maintains a buffer stock of employed people ready to be hired rather than a buffer stock of unemployed people who are less ready to be hired.
Without forcing people to work, it is impossible to eliminate involuntary unemployment. The government using tax dollars to offer people jobs that don't match what they're seeking would result in them refusing to take those jobs, and remaining involuntarily unemployed.
I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper.
They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
> I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper.
This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history.
> They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
Should they? Sure. Will they? History says it is very unlikely.
What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them. Person A decides the split, person B chooses whether to accept the split or reject the split, in which case the $100 is taken back and neither person gets anything.
The problem with your whole philosophy is that it supposes that Person B will accept the split no matter how much it is skewed to Person A, because it is the 'rational' thing to do from an individual's perspective (any money is better than no money). However, what actually happens is that above the 60% - 70% mark, Person B will often reject the split, just to spite Person A.
> They gain nothing from believing in the false promises of demagogues, except the ephemeral contentment of false hope.
Demagogues work to convince people that they are getting an unfair split and that they should reject the split. It makes their job a lot easier to do if people really are getting an unfair split.
>>This is far from universally true, and to the small degree that it is true, it is an aberration from the vast majority of human history.
I think you're interpreting my statement to suggest that people generally prioritize the public interest over their personal interest. I'm not. I'm only claiming that people, ceteris paribus, generally would prefer that society at large prosper. But they would not at their own expense.
>>What also comes to mind is the sociological study where they present two people with $100 to split between them.
This is very true.
Thiel famously believes in Rene Girard's theory that jealousy emerges from the mimetic instinct, and that religious admoninations against it are a social innovation to constrain the dark side of mimesis:
They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy.
Are you calling USA "well structured"? Socialist European nations have much more income mobility than USA has. Few are threatened with penury, most employers pay a living wage, and many more people who have a great idea and the will to build it, do so.
Whether the US is well structured can be debated, but my point is only that even a well structured society can have poverty that cannot be eradicated in a generation.
Consider the US in 1870: per capita GDP was $3,000, so even with a totally noncorrupt and absolutely competent government, and perfect wealth inequality, the entire population would be in poverty by today's standards. Income growth takes time.
As to your point: wages in Europe are lower than in the US, and there is much less funding available for startups.
Europe is also not appreciably more socialist than the US:
Huh. I guess your attitude isn't shared by the two plus million people a year, who literally risk life and limb crossing our boarders, for a shot at being an undocumented alien.
So by thus argument we have nothing to improve in this country untill standards of living sink to the level of North Korea and finally noone will be willing to immigrate
We shouldn't even be talking in terms of generations. Bloodlines exist in biology, but we need to completely disregard them when talking about social issues. Working your ass off so you can send your children to a good school and they can then live a better life than you did should be considered a societal failure, not a success story of economic mobility.
True mobility is when you can work reasonable hours at your horrible warehouse job, enroll in a higher education programme and in 2-3 years, switch jobs to something that pays better. No need to rack up decades of student debt, no need to work crazy long hours or multiple jobs just to afford a place to live.
> Part of the American dream is that the feeling that there is no rigid social class. Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both.
Recently I have been thinking in this vein too... This "American dream" is such a repeated cliché that some may think it's just that: a cliché in the minds of even Americans. But my current hypothesis is that many (most) Americans actually believe it. To the point of being blind of the actual nature of this "meritocracy".
This blindness to the fact that individual agency is not really as powerful as the "dream" states basically reinforces the idea that certain hard to change property of an individual (ie. Race? Gender identity? Sexuality?) must be the core reason for lack of success/progress: the biggot believes not all people are what it takes to succeed, and the biggot's prey believe their core nature/mark is the main reason why others don't support their progress.
> But my current hypothesis is that many (most) Americans actually believe it.
I certainly believe that there is no rigid social class in America and it's definitely possible to move between income brackets with relatively little social stigma. In the UK for example no matter how much money a working class person makes they will never become upper class. Never be welcomed into the top social circles etc., they didn't go to the right schools (pre-college) or dont have the right accent...
I'm not as blind to believe that parental wealth doesn't matter hugely. I also wonder if it might be more difficult to move income brackets in the USA due to the extremely high cost of education.
I believe that as far back as the 60's or 70's, George Carlin was already using his oft repeated line, "they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it". Perhaps you're joining a new awakening (or an awokening).
>>Everyone is a millionaire down on their luck. You only need to work harder or be more clever—ideally both.
Race is an unchangeable, decided at-birth deal. Class on the other hand changes based on how you succeed to that end. People do feel class as something that is not fixed, and can be changed.
In some way getting rid of Racism means changing other people, and changing class requires one to change one's own ways.
The problem when you do not perceive class, is that you view those of the same class as adversaries on your way to the top rather than people on the same boat as you, needing to cooperate to improve your overall position and fix your problems. Lower class problems are other people's problems, because you are not really a part of it or won't be for long more (so you think).
Basic human life conditions should really not be up to a game of "success" that by definition has few winners. In my opinion at least.
> The history of racism [in the USA] is recent, overt, and systemic
I am not from the USA. But did racism not arrive, with the first white colonials, along with class? Why is racial prejudice more recent than class prejudice?
The article specifically calls out legacy admissions and other non-academic preferences for white students. There was an article just recently about fencing being a very expensive sport to participate in and one the generates a lot of college scholarships.
Race wars have been used to obfuscate a class war.
Historically minorities were prevented from being capital owners and as that changed aristocrats appealed to skin color while also routinely sweeping the legs out from under poor whites as they still do today, after enraging them stupid shit like tan suits and public protests.
Thanks to inflation, moving one or two income brackets is closer to staying in the same place. $100-200k year in the 80s is equivalent to $600-700k now. If parents made $50-60k then and junior makes $150k, the number tripled but the buying power is worse.
I don’t really understand why we cling to the hallucinations of elders who, given their ages, when they were educated, are “behind us” when it comes to scientific knowledge and intuition, and are gripped by paranoia and anxieties from Cold War and the world at war in their prime years.
They operate on economic models from a period of heavy demand due to war. Afflicted by sunk cost fallacy, evolved the behavior to disposable consumerism.
The last 80 years of economic growth are entirely due to the rest of the world needing to rebuild and the US having functional infra. There’s no way it was sustainable, as the correctness of such activity is merely one generations memory, not some immutable law of reality.
Any sufficiently numerate person can intuit the game being played. Bigger number! Oo! But prices on the market have gradually been inflated to prevent new workers being able to afford real assets, and as a result of other nations catching up and making the same demands.
Of course, you can make any system work with any definitions. It's just more cumbersome to eg state your theorems in cryptography, if your definition of prime numbers includes 1.
When talking about factors of production, it is useful to differentiate between labour, capital and land.
The main distinguishing factor between capital and land is that land is in fixed supply, but you can produce more capital.
i was going to reply land could be 'fixed capital' but doing some quick wiki shows as you say, land itself may not constitute as "capital" [0]... interesting
Land itself is not included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, even though it is a fixed asset. The main reason is that land is not regarded as a product (a reproducible good). But the value of land improvements is included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, is regarded as the creation of value-added through production.
Depending on your analysis, it can sometimes make sense to include land under fixed assets. Eg when you are running a company your accounting can perhaps treat durable assets and land the same?
If you are looking at whole economies, it's often useful to treat land separately. Even if that's not always done.
But I'm some kind of Georgist at heart, as you might be able to guess.
Capital is used here as a euphemism for land ownership. Net worth being mathematical inference of how well land owner “capitalizes” on the possession of land.
Other asset classes came along because, well, useful land is finite, and to create new wealth holders to act as missionaries for the US dollar. “Yeah even this trash is worth money in the US!”
Valuations are arbitrary numerical assessments based upon the whims of the assessors (assignment of currency value to stuff is a social tradition; there is no science that suggests the universe values any bit of itself what with entropy ripping the universes stuff apart), and routinely inflated to validate investors past decision to “buy into” Murica.
Biology being largely unchanged in centuries (in a meaningful way given the context here), the issues in our culture can easily be assigned to political corruption as usual. All the high talk about separation of powers is laughable as DC pols rub elbows at private social events, discussing not systemic change for the public benefit but how to veil graft as justifiable given their intimate connection to our political norms.
Simple really. Most white collar crime is still the same old “deflect, project, until we can change the rules” as policing is conveniently unfunded.
The mathematical gap between classes must be maintained! Or Sauron himself will emerge from the lava of Mt Doom or some shit.
I say we post up at home, stop going to work except to maintain our communities locally, make Jamie Dimon and co knock on every door in the US looking for rent. But I’m weird that way. Except for 2A, I really lean into progressive doctrine, which often aligns with conservative doctrine but media intentionally stokes this stupid culture war to obfuscate it.
Here in Texas, any student from the top 10% of their high school is guaranteed a place at the flagship University of Texas at Austin.
This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action. Naturally, high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools. We ignore that difference as a policy matter. Top 10% is top 10%.
Maybe the Ivies will move to a similar system in the wake of the current SCOTUS case.
>Maybe the Ivies will move to a similar system in the wake of the current SCOTUS case.
AFAICT, the ivies don't have a problem with filling their graduating class. I believe a place like Harvard even considering the top 10% of students would increase the applicant pool. I'm reciting these numbers from memory, but apparently the size of the incoming class at Harvard is roughly 2,000 students, but there are ~5,000 applicants that scored 95th percentile of the SAT. (Edit: This source [3] says there are 22,000 students who scored in the top 1% percentile; Harvard could likely admit every perfect scorer if it pleased).
While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile.
The real problem is the size of the undergrad class for these select elite schools have remained the same (The harvard class size of 1992 was 2,200[1] compared to 1,954 today[2]), while the US population has grown almost 30% in the same time frame. You have more and more qualifying students fighting for the same number of spots and an organization that is more than happy to split imaginary hairs to keep the class size the same.
> While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile.
You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile:
"Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. ... African-American admits an average of 704."
> You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile:
This is easily the gap between a single individual on two different test days. Which is another way of saying that the difference is not useful in assembling a university's incoming class. Once you get above a certain level, the tests decrease in utility to categorize individuals into tiers. Once you get to a certain level of capability, you're broadly talking about smart people who can graduate from your university. Once you've cleared that bar, there's less utility in determining how far over the bar an individual goes versus looking at other ways (which are not measured on a test) in which an individual can add to their campus, class, and the world.
(Source: worked in SAT/ACT/GMAT test prep. Have administered hundreds of sample tests in whole and in parts.)
They can be, and that's a statement about the distribution and consistency of skill in those activities. I see little reason to believe those distributions apply to SAT taking or general capacity to learn (which is what you're really aspiring to measure).
If we set up an ELO league for best-of-three rock paper scissors, I'd expect score to diverge over sufficiently many hours, but would give almost even odds to a 99th v 93rd percentile candidate.
Sure, that may be true of ELO-based games. In the realm of the standardized tests used for school admission, we also have a lot of data about performance so we can use that data instead of looking for analogues in other fields. And my experience with the SAT & ACT leads me to believe that on these tests, the difference between 1% and 7% could be something as simple as how well the student slept the night before the test.
Can we just stop with these bullshit word games? I'm so tired.
Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion.
There are major problems with policies like affirmative action. But smirking and saying "But... but you said racial discrimination is BAD! But then you DO THE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. So YOU BAD!" is so tiresome.
> Can we just stop with these bullshit word games? I'm so tired.
> Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion.
To me, your second sentence seems more like word games than calling it racial discrimination is.
Sure, I can somewhat rationalize it as not being intended to be racist. In the end AA still results in treating people different based on race. Which, to me, fits the textbook definition of racism.
You are missing my point entirely. In many of the oral arguments for this case the Harvard lawyers insisted that race based affirmative action is ok because race is a factor among many.
Implying that if it was the only factor then it would not be ok. So theirs is not a principled defense of affirmative action but rather based entirely on plausible deniability
You keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here.
You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals.
If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world.
Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people.
I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.
In an other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446363) we see how simply changing race on the application from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases a person chances of getting from 4-8% to 60+%. If there is hundreds of different minor data points, but then a single major data point called race that dominate all the other minor data point, then it doesn't matter that there is hundreds of minor data points.
How strong a bias is is relevant in case of discrimination. If race changes a person chances by over 12 times then that is a very major bias.
Let us say for a moment that Misogyny University wanted to discriminate on the basis of sex. However, it quickly found out that openly doing so is illegal. But they still hated women and wanted none of them.
So, instead of saying that women automatically get rejected, they say that there are many factors that they consider and that sex is only one of them. However, of course when you look at the statistics the admission rate for women is very very low compared to men. But the university insists "one of many factors!"
Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University? Clearly, "one of many factors" can't absolve them of sexism. But presumably they think they can get away with it so long as the decision is opaque enough.
I think you are giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think they deserve it. If you look at their history, they have used the exact same tactics. In fact they invented holistic admission for the sole reason of discriminating against Jews.
> Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University?
Harvard admitted 27% or so Asians in this years class.
They aren’t turning away any “strong admit” Asian applicants.
The real decisions among the marginal candidates are who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted (iirc, that number is over 1000 at Harvard).
Underrepresented groups get a slight edge in this area. Race is one possible criterion for underrepresentation, so is geography, so is economic status, so is expressed major, etc.
Comparing the current relatively low level of consideration given to race to the explicitly exclusionary policy 100 years ago is quite a stretch, imho.
There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA. We should always consider admission rates for a particular student.
And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from? This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
> There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
You seem to assume that the applicant pool is equally strong across races, especially with reference to the parts of the application outside of test scores and grades. I humbly suggest that this is not true.
> It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA.
I would like to see that exact quote. Iirc, that was the stat if they went by grades and test scores, which they never have and most likely never will.
> And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from?
I have worked in an advisory capacity at several elite schools on the admissions process.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made. Most people get it incredibly wrong.
> This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
Maybe.
The real question is if they also rated non-Asian people with similar profiles low on the personality score.
Let me tell you, there are an absurd number of applicants to elite schools that are basically doppelgängers. Strong grades, strong SAT scores, similar essays to thousands of other applicants, no outstanding hook, “standard strong” recommendations, etc. There is nothing that makes these applicants stand out to the reviewer. They may be super pleasant to be around and highly articulate, but so what? So are truckloads of other applicants.
I haven’t seen the comparable numbers for Asians versus other races, but there are no shortage of boring white applicants and boring applicants from every race that would warrant a lower personality score (however that is described).
Additionally, there are a number of reasons that one group or race might have lower average personality scores than another group that don’t involve racism. As a simple made up example, the ratio of “hail Mary” applications to strong applications might impact this. Note that I have no idea what race/group sends a higher percentage of Hail Mary apps than another, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few.
I can tell you one group that definitely exists. Kids of upper middle class parents in the northeast corridor who are pushing their kids to an elite school when their kid absolutely doesn’t care. The vast majority of these applicants probably have low personality ratings because they aren’t really trying that hard to stand out. Is that exclusionary? I dunno… seems reasonable to me.
> With all due respect, it is not possible for you to understand this since your salary depends on not understanding it.
Nice meme you got there. Too bad it's inappropriately applied.
For reference, my salary or income has never been related to my advising of admissions committees/personnel. It has all been volunteer by request.
I will add that I am very connected to the Asian-American community, and I would speak out strongly against any systemic bias that I witnessed or even suspected.
> The Alumni Rating invalidates any doubt about standard strong etc
That's a nice opinion you have. I suspect based on your comment that you have no idea about the strengths and weaknesses of alumni reviews.
> Any statistically minded person would look at this data and easily conclude that they are racist against Asians.
I totally agree that there is a correlation between race and lower evaluations on certain parts of the application review. I disagree on the cause.
If I had to take a guess (and it's just a guess, since I have never seen a proper comprehensive study on this), Asian-American parents encourage their kids to focus on grades and test scores to the exclusion (partial or complete) of other activities more often than White-American parents do. Focusing mostly or exclusively on grades and test scores makes for a weak applicant to an elite school.
A few notes on that last paragraph:
- There are cultural reasons that this might be true (e.g., pure entrance exam-based admissions are common in many/most Asian countries, so the parents may project this idea on schools in the US).
- Many White-American parents overly focus on grades and scores as well, and they are equally befuddled when their kid does not even get wait-listed.
For reference, if this is true, I do not think that it could be provided as justification in the Supreme Court without a comprehensive study that would be very difficult to do accurately (e.g., self-reported data can be fabulously different than observed data), even if the admissions staff and/or guidance counselors anecdotally (with hundreds or thousands of anecdotes) believe it to be true.
The underlying assumption here seems to be that there is a diabolical cabal of admissions staff (some of whom are Asian) who are all acting in-step with each other to oppress Asian-American applicants while miraculously not leaving any smoking guns (e.g., the worst documented slights are things like calling an Asian-American applicant "a typical standard strong" -- that is, direct no admit -- or something similar). It boggles my mind that people actually believe this nonsense.
Here is a picture that is closer to reality:
All strong admit applicants, Asian-Americans included, are all given offer letters. The rest of the applicants that are marginal admits are all grouped together, and then some class shaping happens. There are many aspects of that shaping of the class with folks rated marginal admit. Race is one, sports is another, arts is another, majors is another, geographic diversity is another,... the list goes on. There are no hard and fast quotas against any race, it's just a constant comparison of tradeoffs with different marginally qualified applicants. The admissions staff are extremely stressed about making the best choices for the school and for the students. Once a class is shaped to the liking of the school, offer letters and wait list offers are sent to applicants. Folks are pulled off the wait list typically in a like-for-like situation (it's usually not just ranked, with top ranked getting first open slot).
Note that if you didn't even make the wait list, no amount of race blind admissions would help you. The people I hear complaining the loudest typically were not even wait listed.
IMHO, some of the people shouting "racism" the most are folks who really do not do much to help themselves in the application process by setting themselves apart as a dynamic contributor to the student body. For example, if an applicant wants to study a popular major like pre-med or CS, then they really need to set themselves apart in the rest of their application since they will be compared to a relatively deep and competitive pool of applicants. Sometimes this is not terribly difficult -- for example, one person I know who double majored in CS and Classics at Harvard in addition to several other highly desirable attributes.
My advice to any applicants to elite schools, but especially Asian-American applicants who think that the deck is stacked against them, is to focus on developing their hook and being a (relatively) unique and positive contribution to the student body. Great grades and test scores are table stakes. Focus on going beyond that.
Anyway, I will conclude with this prediction:
If elite schools are forced to omit race from consideration, Black and Hispanic offers will initially decrease slightly, and White and Asian offers will initially increase slightly. My guess is the number for Asians will be about 3%, possibly less. I imagine that there will be significant outreach by a variety of organizations to help Black and Hispanics make their applications stronger.
My point being that there is a natural urge to defend your profession regardless of whether you are being paid for it.
There need not be a cabal. The officials can easily see that there are too many Asians for this year so the just bin some of the applicants. Just the same way they did it for the Jews. The most parsimonious analysis of the data leads to this conclusion.
Of course as you say, maybe studying too much for tests does somehow decrease the "likability, courage, kindness" in a way that does not affect an actual face to face interview with an alumni (!!) . Or maybe the Asian race is inherently unlikable, in a way that does not affect an actual face to face interview with an alumni. One can come up with so many different explanations
I mean how much more ridiculous can Harvard's defense get, really?
> My point being that there is a natural urge to defend your profession regardless of whether you are being paid for it.
I currently run a small PE firm. I don’t see any of my comments being in defense of my profession.
I was a professor in my former career. I have never worked in admissions. That has never been my career, and I feel absolutely no need to defend it.
Furthermore, I am very open to criticizing admissions processes (there is plenty to criticize), but I find myself spending so much time addressing misinformation/disinformation that the really good stuff never comes up (biggest ones being treatment of 13th year recruited athletes as well as opacity in the admissions process that seems unnecessary).
> The officials can easily see that there are too many Asians for this year so the just bin some of the applicants.
This simply does not happen.
> The most parsimonious analysis of the data leads to this conclusion.
“The district court found “no evidence of any racial animus whatsoever” toward Asian-American applicants and “no evidence” that “any particular admissions deci- sion was negatively affected by Asian American identity.’”
“The district court found the testimony of Harvard’s admissions officers—all called by SFFA—“consistent, unambiguous, and convincing” that “there was no discrimination against Asian American applicants with respect to the admissions process as a whole and the personal ratings in particular.” To the contrary, “[n]ot one of them had seen or heard anything disparaging about an Asian American applicant despite the fact that decisions were made collectively and after open discussion about each applicant.”
These are from pp 11-12 in the brief. I strongly recommend reading the entire thing.
> I mean how much more ridiculous can Harvard's defense get, really?
It’s clear to me that you are basing your comments on pre-conceived and poorly informed ideas.
At this point, I assume that you are just trolling for the sake of trolling.
Please read the brief I linked to. It will debunk much of what you claim to be true.
If the Supreme Court overrules the lower courts, it will be for a very technical legal reason — that is, that race is used at all in admissions decisions — and it will not be because any racist-based admissions process had ever been implemented.
Is that point obvious? Perhaps the point is taking race completely out of the equation is going to descimatr Native American Latino and black attendance at Harvard. ~11% of white students will be be replaced by Asian students but the population will remain overwhelmingly white.
I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies.
I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
> but the population will remain overwhelmingly white.
That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asians making up 20% of students in the entire county.
In 2021 they switched to a policy that gave automatic admission to the top X% of students in their respective schools with the goal of increasing black and Latino enrollment. Asian enrollment fell from 73% to 54%, black enrollment went from 1% to 7%, Hispanic enrollment from 3% to 11%, and white enrollment from 18% to 22%: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
Point being, Harvard currently has a freshman class that is < 50% white, so going to a completely race-blind policy would take that down considerably.
My statement was based solely on the 2010-2015 data where 14% more than the 18% of 1950. 18% of 1950 = 351 * .14 = 49 Asian students per year that scored above whites and should have been admitted. This is from the filing, but I can't verify externally.
If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here).
Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.
> I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies.
Grades and test scores are not the primary determination for admissions at elite schools. They say as much on their admissions web sites.
I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that.
Once the applicant has crossed a reasonably high threshold, all of the other stuff is what makes the difference between admit and reject.
Some folks may not like that elite school admissions are more than grades and test scores, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
#3, the hook, is what a lot of folks who complain about elite school admissions completely ignore.
Good recommendations are also important, and these are often not cultivated (and usually they need to be, either organically or structurally).
The applicants who feel like they were “victimized” based on their race were more likely victimized by their parents or guidance counselors for focusing their efforts on the wrong things during high school.
> I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that.
Everyone believes this. The people who disagree with you disagree on the reason. They think it’s mostly racism. You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores.
I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough.
> You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers.
If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process.
One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those).
Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.
>Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability
I don't think my point was clear, Harvard, or most other elite institutions, has never implied to some meritocratic institution where acceptance is based solely on test scores. If that were true, there are ~22,000 applicants with perfect scores; Harvard wouldn't struggle having an incoming class of perfect SAT students.
If Harvard is forced to be "race blind", I highly doubt they would just switch to a completely objective ranking; there's no reason for them to, again, they have never been a meritocratic institution. They will find other subjective hairs to split, such as making interviews count higher or further combing through essays. Given the history of the institution (and some of the more notable graduates it produces), it's not even a given that the school becoming race blind would necessarily benefit asians.
>While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile.
While I'm all for objective nd fair opportunity, I don't think the SAT is an example of this, so admitting people who didn't do as perfectly but still spectacularly on some test metric probably isn't a terrible idea. The question is what other weights they apply to the decision and how objectively fair or not those are.
> Here in Texas, any student from the top 10% of their high school is guaranteed a place at the flagship University of Texas at Austin.
> high schools in underprivileged areas - rural or urban - will produce students who are nowhere nearly as prepared as students from elite or wealthy schools.
The most cynical read of the Texas policy is that it is an end-around of the SCOTUS ruling that relies on continued, widespread school segregation in Texas.
If Texas schools were not segregated by race and wealth, this policy would not have the result of producing the diverse classes that the University of Texas system desires. The university system depends on the unfairness of the K-12 system to achieve its narrow set of policy goals.
> This is widely understood to be a form of affirmative action.
That's a misunderstanding then because that's not affirmative action. Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.
It doesn't ensure you get all the best students. That's true. But that doesn't make it affirmative action.
>Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.
When the 10% of a high school class consists of a statistically outsized proportion of a desired group of people favoring them would be called affirmative action, yes. Just because a policy doesn't pick people out by the color of their skin doesn't make it not affirmative action. (And likewise, just because a policy doesn't call out skin color doesn't make it not racist.)
I've read speculation that this could find itself on shaky legal foundations depending on how SCOTUS rules on the latest affirmative action case? Not a lawyer so can't really tell if that's just FUD or a real concern. I think the TX approach is really interesting and would hate to see it ended.
The TX system creates weird incentives. I know kids have dropped electives because it drops their GPAs making it more difficult to get in the top 10%. And it's worsened because many of the high schools grade higher level course on a 6.0 scale.
I remembered hearing an NPR report about that. There was also something about success rates being higher because they were in the top 10% of the high school, rather than top 10% overall. Students were also given more mentoring, and some of them catch up.
I went to a state school that was a top 25 school at the time. The state did pretty much the same thing.
This was a disaster for the students who were top at their high school, but nevertheless not prepared to go to a top tier university because their high school was not a college prep school. They either flunked out or changed to majors they could scrape by in. They would have been much better off going to a community college for a year or two to level up first.
That sounds like class-based affirmative action, not race-based affirmative action. Is class-based affirmative action even called affirmative action? The article sounds like it would be in favor of class-based affirmative action.
Universities adopting such an approach would be a huge boon to lower tier schools. As a parent you’d question if it’s better to pull your “average” student at a top tier school to be a top student at an “average” school.
can you game this system by moving to a worse area? If you're rich and give your child all the support they need they're almost bound to be in the top 10%.
Though that'd be a likely outcome, it's also good in itself. If you have rich, well educated people moving to impoverished zip codes/shitty school districts to get their kids a leg up, that improves the tax base for those districts and, more importantly, makes a well-educated constituency active in maintaining accountability for that school district.
I’ve known of folks who moved out of frisco and Plano suburbs to prospect when it was up and coming to spare their kids of the “Asian competition onslaught” in frisco and Plano schools. Not sure whether true or how it worked out. But yes, people do try to game it somewhat. I’m unsure how successful they are in the long run.
Ivy’s core issue is they want to use racially biased metrics for admissions like “did your parents go here?” which could be illegal. But they don’t want to admit that those metrics could possibly be illegal when defending their racial metrics to correct for that issue.
Assuming they lose the case things will get interesting.
Texas also has some of the more progressive housing policies, with basically no zoning in places like Houston and fairly high property taxes which disincentivize speculators from sitting on real estate.
In regards to education, they allow a "academic fresh start" for university GPA, allowing those with a difficult start to erase 10+ year old GPA. It can help those with difficult beginnings get into medical school, for instance. The only state I know of with such a policy.
For those missing context, I believe this is a reference to California high schools which provide free lunch to students (and I guess this doesn't happen in Texas...?)
Poor kids get free or reduced cost lunches in all 50 states, thanks to the National School Lunch Program. The income threshold is adjusted annually to account for changes to the CPI. Tens of millions of kids participate in this program every year.
California's innovation is giving free food to middle class kids then taking credit for feeding the poor kids.
There are lots of districts here in Missouri that have decided to make lunches (and breakfasts!) free for everyone in elementary and junior high school because the percentage of low-income families is high enough that that ends up being cheaper than wasting resources on means testing and collections. Regardless of how wealthy her parents are (or how difficult it is for her parents to fill out forms), you can't just not provide lunch to e.g. a 7yo who lost her money. Arguing with children about money doesn't contribute to the educational mission.
> you can't just not provide lunch to e.g. a 7yo who lost her money.
Right, and they don't. I forgot my lunch money frequently as a kid. The school always fed me anyway, after taking down my name to have a chat with my parents (to inquire if I needed to be signed up for free lunches, and to collect the debt since my parents could easily afford it.) They won't let you skip lunch.
Sure, but you're describing a complication that doesn't exist if the district just feeds everybody. I'm not saying that this is always the right decision for a particular district, just that many districts outside California have made it.
I'm not saying that feeding everybody is a bad idea. I support it actually. I'm saying that kids aren't going hungry at school in states other than California. If California solved any problem, it was only reducing the administrative costs of figuring out who needs free lunches. But everybody would be getting fed anyway, one way or the other.
I'm saying that kids aren't going hungry at school in states other than California.
This assumes a great deal about the attitudes and competences of thousands of local administrations across a nation notable for its cruelty and incompetence. There certainly are public school boards who want poor kids to suffer, and there certainly are public school kitchens that can't provide every nutritious meal it is their duty to provide.
My district in Oregon does the same thing. Free lunch is offered to everyone with no means testing. The more well off kids still choose to bring their own lunches most days. Other days lunchroom trades are carried out between the school offerings and food from home but no child goes hungry and the program costs the same as when they had to pay people to deal with paperwork and bookkeeping.
In the 50 states where poor kids get free lunches, the poor kids never handle the money. The school gives the kid free food and get reimbursed by the federal government.
> Nothing the Supreme Court says about the consideration of race in college admissions will affect the more basic problem, that too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently prepared to apply to college.
About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.
What's interesting to me is that people like that seem to pretend as though other places on earth and other models don't exist.
Running schools for profit is questionable on its own and I think it's tolerated because historically University/College education was seen as optional. We've moved away from that in a lot of the sectors that drive the economy these days though and the system hasn't been tweaked (regulated I suppose) appropriately.
It's also straw-manning the very obviously fair observation that college is crazy expensive in the US. He also said that it's good "to have skin in the game" and that debt affords the opportunity to receive a quality education. Yeah, it is good to have skin in the game. No one disagrees with that. The criticism is that it costs 50k/year and you leave with a liberal arts skillset (IE, not uniquely qualified for anything). I'm not even saying liberal arts is bad, but at 50k a year it should have a direct path to a direct, obvious path to a high paying job. It doesnt.
Instead we get platitudes that leave the very obvious problem of rapidly rising tuition unaddressed. Honestly people need to just stop taking out debt for things like that. You mention needing a degree for everything. In some sense you do, because people ask for it, but I don't think you need it. It's just oversaturated.
The last time I looked at the financials for the University of Texas system, they could charge zero tuition for every student and they'd still make a profit every year (mostly from their massive amount of money in investments).
Class can be a big part of racism--often what appears to be racism is really more about class. There are many people who look down on anyone they perceive to be "low class", regardless of race, and who will accept people of other races if they perceive them to be "high class". In areas where the lower classes are over-represented by racial minorities, this can look like racism, when classism is much more the culprit.
I’m in the top 10% of income percentile. But I still got looked at suspiciously as a Black person living in a county that’s 3% Black and as recently as the late 80s was a famous “Sundown town”
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKQdPMeJjk)
I once took my team to lunch and the waitress asked would we be on one check or separate, I spoke up and said one, started reaching for my wallet and she still
handed the check to the older looking White guy that I hired.
No matter how much money I have, there will always be assumptions about me. I have seen this a lot more when working for companies in the South than I do now when I travel to customer meetings now that I work for BigTech and I’m leading projects.
Thought experiment: if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
> if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
Presumably neither of you since in this straw-man neither party has done anything wrong
So you think a Black guy has to “do something wrong” to be considered “acting suspiciously”?
Just like Ving Rhames, was “suspiciously” living in his own house when SWAT knocked on his door because someone thought he had broken into his own house.
That misses how even being rich does not protect you from significant racism. Just look at the well documeted experiences comparing a white or black person driving an expensive car. The black person is multiple times more likely to get stopped by police.
For sure, I completely agree with you there. There is significant racism out there, sadly, regardless of where you look in the socio-economic hierarchy.
Controlling for income doesn't work well, because whites at the same income level tend to have much more wealth than blacks at the same income level. Controlling for wealth, blacks still tend to poorer access to resources (clean water, prenatal care, etc...).
It would be a great achievement if we could simply say that poor blacks were finally as well off as poor whites, but we're still quite a ways away from that.
That said, I don't think the country has the stomach to realistically try to fix that problem any longer.
But these effects are well studied and I'm sure these institutions have plenty of sociologists that could help come up with some models that work at least as good as stereotyping based on skin color.
The idea that generalizing based on race is just easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do we tell racists that they shouldn't prejudge people based on race at the same time that people with good intentions do the same thing?
There was a study I saw as an undergrad that used all the standard factors and also used zip code -- and that worked surprisingly well to explain a lot of the differences. But using race rather than zip code, actually was still better -- and of course zip code may well have simply been a race proxy.
I think zip code though will likely be more satisfying to people. Although the conservative wing of the supreme court has already said that they don't like the top 10% rules for admission, so I suspect they'll also not be kind to zip code since the idea is similar in spirit.
There’s a reason that banks have compliance departments that have to review any statistical models inputs and assumptions for implicit violations of the Fair Lending / Fair Housing acts.
The solution is not to create ever more complicated adjustments but to make sure that all children get great education (and nutrition) from early childhood, even if they are disadvantaged at home.
Rolling it up from the other side by giving top college spots to kids who were disadvantaged in the first place never made sense to me.
Yeah growing up in Germany gave me this illusion that all children can actually get a decent (even if not super spectacular) publicly funded education somewhat independent of social background.
If you can't determine if someone is disadvantaged then I guess they aren't. Labeling someone disadvantaged because of their skin color is just racism. In fact, if ANYTHING is racism, it's that.
If 50% of the nation's wealth was mine, I'd talk about race, skin color, eye color, haircut styles - I'd talk about anything to distract attention from the only fact that matters.
Because historically race was used systemically to limit opportunities for people of color. The last school to be desegregated was in 1963. Think about that.
Forced busing worked too. Got the money more evenly distributed and fostered healthier, more heterogeneous cultures in the schools. Parents just weren't ready for interracial marriage, and were terrified their kids would date 'other'.
> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.
> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.
Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:
> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.
The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.
Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.
People once wanted slavery and explicit segregation, that doesn't mean it's evil to force them to stop. Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities. I've lived in the south where busing had been forced and the north where it wasn't. It does work.
> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]
People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.
> People once wanted slavery and explicit segregation, that doesn't mean it's evil to force them to stop.
Sure, but if it was the slave themselves who preferred slavery to what your courts were forcing on them, one should really step back and ask oneself if he is doing the right thing.
> Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities.
And there is an ample evidence that it made their lives worse, that one could obtain by simply asking them how they feel about the policy. The fact is that you remain completely uninterested in what the people you claim to be helping actually want, and instead prefer to force your preferences on them because you believe it’s better for them and the society. You know who else claimed the same about their policy, and ignored the protests of people affected by it? The segregationists.
That's a pretty straightforward disadvantage. The only solution is to make public schools accept people of color. There's no other way around that. If you don't, they won't.
What we're dealing with now is the legacy of those decisions. They made sense in that context but the context has changed.
What is a disadvantage is that some people of color experience limited opportunity due to differences in generational wealth and other factors.
These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged on their college application than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
My point was, that less than 60 years ago, it very clearly was a disadvantage, because of the system.
> These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
> The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
I agree -- but a college application isn't for an average black student or an average white student. Each application is for one individual student, who had an individual life experience. If we want to help students who struggled in poverty -- let's measure their individual poverty. Then we'll help everyone at exactly the correct rate, rather than on some generalized presumption.
For some of us (me included) living in a racist society is like a fish swiming who does not notice water. I only noticed when I became intimate with a person from a minority race and saw how they were treated. That is when I noticed I live in a racist society.
I love the economist. Their writing is so good, they are biased but know it, and acknowledge it. Biased, but not bigoted. nYet this article misses the point, IMO, or racial quotas in professional schools. They have the liberal individualistic bias, and have not noticed that one. It is their water (I am a liberal myself, but I have had that particular bias removed by my experiences.)
Here (Aotearoa) the point of quotas is not to allow some groups the same access to the privilege of the profession, but it is to help the consumers of professional services get what they need.
For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients. This is not a benefit to the individual professional, it is a benefit to the community.
There is a secondary benefit to the professions themselves. A cultural milieu helps bring new ideas forward.
Whether or not the system in the USA is fit for purpose or not, I do not know. But when deciding I hope the American judges think not, only, of benefit to the individuals but the wider effects on our communities.
>For some of us (me included) living in a racist society is like a fish swiming who does not notice water.
And what was the society answer to racism? More racism but directed towards groups that were deemed "offenders". Somehow, some people decreed that thare is "bad" racism and that there is "good" racism. That there is "bad" discrimination and that there is "good" discrimination. This is obviously false and we should return to the situation where all people have equal rights.
Do you live in the U.S.? Because, as a minority myself, I'm really at a loss to understand what you mean by "[we] live in a racist society."
Also, what the hell is this supposed to mean:
> For doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants (yes) etcetera being from a similar community as your clients is very helpful for your clients.
Most folks at Harvard law are going to go to corporate law firms, where most of the clients are rich white people. Are you suggesting that as a Bangladeshi I'm less helpful to my clients because I'm not from a similar community? Is a lawyer from a less affluent part of Appalachia less helpful?
I can at least understand the justification that quotas are needed to allow access for historically oppressed groups. But the "diversity" justification seems like straight up racism to me. Are we supposed to be the same or are we not?
> Most folks at Harvard law are going to go to corporate law firms, where most of the clients are rich white people. Are you suggesting that as a Bangladeshi I'm less helpful to my clients because I'm not from a similar community? Is a lawyer from a less affluent part of Appalachia less helpful?
Yes. Somebody from the same background as you will have a better chance of connecting, having you understand their priors, having you understand their idoms of speech. Many more things.
It does not make you useless to other people, nor make me useless to Bangladeshi. Also when applied in individual cases it can be misleading and confusing. It is a community effect.
For a very confidant client, or a lawyer who is on the autistic spectrum, it matters much less. But for the Bangladeshi just dropped in from Sirajganj whit some money to invest but few contacts it could be a life saver.
If my customers are racist and I know they'd balk at working with people of a particular race, am I justified in refusing to hire employees of said race? After all I'm just giving customers what they need to get service.
No, not at all. In fact, this rationale was a trope for racist practices around the world. Japanese bath houses would refuse service to foreigners claiming doing so would drive away japanese customers. White employers in the US would refuse to hire Black staff reasoning that customers wouldn't respect them. I read Ben Carson's memoir (I do not endorse his views, as a disclaimer) and in it he details an episode where a white patient refused to be treated by a black physician. His boss told the patient that she'd get the same excellent quality of care that she'd get from any other physician and wouldn't supply an alternative to Carson. As a Latin person, I'd feel perfectly comfortable with a Latin person refusing service from a Black, Asian, white, Jewish, or doctor what whatever category you pick.
Also, as a member of a "marginalized" group I can say the Economist is spot on with the fact that class far more salient in real life than ethnic difference. There's plenty of Latin people that fit the image of a disadvantaged Latin immigrant, struggling to make ends meet. Certainly a greater proportion than whites, but there's plenty of us that aren't underprivileged compared to your average white person. The distinction between a poor Latin immigrant and an American born Latin tech worker like me is far, far greater than the difference between me and the average white tech worker and the poor Latin immigrant with, say, a poor Ukrainian refugee.
I think what you describe is indeed a classist society and not a racist one. Maybe what you lack to see through it is the experience of a cultural milieu with different skin colors. I have studied, worked and am friend with a lot of people with North Africa origins, usually from wealthy families, that are now doctors, engineers, academics, … and clients mostly don’t care because we belong to the same class, what matters is how we dress, how we talk, and the countless other things that signal we are of the same class. Skin color is very a strong correlation with poverty, the latter being the true causality.
Class and race are both social constructs (class is not an economic construct, as the Economist probably would prefer) so they are mixed up and confounded. Highly correlated here.
These sorts of quotas generally do nothing but paper over the fundamental problems and truths that affect various groups. It's a way of concealing failures of education and culture. By making admissions blind to anything but merit (we can talk about how to define merit, of course), it forces people earlier in the chain of causes to confront failure close to home. By keeping responsible parties in the hot seat, you stand a better chance of fixing bad schools and bad cultural norms and accepting truths that those lacking in humility have a hard time swallowing. (Politicians get elected by flattering their base, of course...)
This seems so plainly obvious. I wonder why people don't see it. It seems like there is often a battle between empathy and reason, with empathy winning out. I wish it would stop being taught as an absolute virtue.
The second order effects of affirmative action's repeal are going to be very entertaining. You can get a sneak peek by taking a look at the student body at a school like UT Austin where, by law, 75% of students must be in-state and automatically admitted according to class rank (GPA).
https://admissions.utexas.edu/explore/freshman-profile
You'll notice that when comparing Harvard and UT's student bodies to the US and Texas' demographics, respectively, Harvard's system was closer to the mark in terms of black and white representation.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Most interesting is UT's 40/60 M/F gender ratio. Remember: that 40% of males is almost certainly being boosted by the 25% of admits UT has any real control over. Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale. I think half the population suddenly realizing they were beneficiaries of affirmative action this whole time—and subsequently understanding the nuances of discrimination in this country—will ultimately be a good thing.
As a STEM academic, I can say that I've never seen or heard of ongoing AA for men in any STEM program in any institution whose policies I'm acquainted with. So it seems to me to be misleading to claim, or at least hard to believe, that very many men in college have been beneficiaries of AA for men.
Not in STEM departments, no. Why would you run a pro-male affirmative action programme in a department where men were already over-represented?
But there's affirmative action for men in nursing, teaching, social studies, and similar female-dominated departments. There are active campaigns to recruit more male nurses - and male teachers are more likely to be promoted.
I also know first-hand that vocational ballet schools recruit equal numbers of boys and girls, so they can teach partnering - despite the fact they probably get 30 female applicants for every male applicant!
Of course, a male might find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action is only applied in areas like ballet and nursing which they're not interested in - but that's the whole point of affirmative action.
And if you find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action for female-dominated jobs only provides low-paid, low-status jobs - then feminists are very much in agreement with you about the unfairness of the situation :)
Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.
The points that you have made above are why there are still many more female nurses -- it's not like they will accept every single man, there's simply a lower threshold than there is for women.
I think a lot of the arguments about whether AA makes sense at all should really be reframed as discussions about how much AA makes sense. How do goals like diversity, inclusion, and minimizing inequality weigh against other objectives like rewarding merit and maximizing productivity outcomes? Surely the balance-point is not zero, but it's conceivably much closer to zero than today's policies would imply.
> Because it's possible to have multiple goals at the same time. Reality is a co-optimization problem.
And one thing to consider is that people don't choose colleges just based on academics, they also choose them based on social environments, and as such universities have an incentive to try to create amicable social environments to attract the best students.
Case in point: I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.
> I decided not to go to a good engineering school because it was more than 80% male and in a small town. The social environment was desperately bro-ish. I backpedaled and went to a liberal arts college primarily because of vastly superior social environment.
I assume you're referring to the fact that liberal arts colleges are usually private and more expensive, which is true, but I paid for it with loans, so to the extent that one would be advised to go massively in debt for college, it's possible.
My parents had only saved enough for me to go to a state school, which got me through one semester at a private college, and the rest were student loans, and working often multiple part-time jobs (and full-time in the summer).
The best individual components don't necessarily result in the best system.
There may well be benefits to diversity that are not easily quantified at the individual level.
The classic example of the development team that created a computer vision system that didn't work well at all with certain skin tones but they were unaware of this until feeling it live at a conference comes to mind. They didn't have anyone on their dev teams or QA teams with that skin tone.
There are numerous studies showing that diverse teams come up with better solutions. Diversity pays dividends at the group level, and assessments that only consider things at the individual level may miss that
> There are numerous studies showing that diverse teams come up with better solutions.
There are also numerous studies that show diversity has either no effect or even negative effects on various measures of group performance - the academic literature on this issue is a total mixed bag. Here's how the OECD's [1] summary of the literature on diversity and firm performance:
> "Contrary to the often assumed, direct positive impact of diversity on business performance, research shows that at the firm level, the business case for diversity is not particularly strong. However, while the impact of diversity might be small, there is a strong economic argument against discrimination and non-inclusion based on the sizeable cost associated with it. Finally, the chapter notes ethical reasons for fostering a just and equitable labour market alongside the economic argument for diversity."
The literature also suggests the effects of diversity on group performance, whether positive, neutral or negative, are situation specific, depend on your measure of 'performance', and your definition of 'diversity'. Again, from the OECD:
> "A number of studies make a difference between ‘highly job-related diversity’, such as educational background, job position or function in the company, and diversity aspects that are ‘less job-related’, e.g. gender, ethnicity or age. Measurement of team performance includes multiple indicators, such as efficiency, creativity, innovation and productivity. Findings are somewhat mixed, but impacts of gender, ethnicity or age diversity are found to be either very small or insignificant. Some meta-analyses find no significant impact of gender composition, ethnicity or age on team performance (Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[19]; Schneid et al., 2016[20]), while others find negative, but very small impacts (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22])3. Most studies do, however, find a positive relationship between team performance and having teams with different professional backgrounds and other task-related characteristics (Bell et al., 2011[21]; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007[23]; Joshi and Roh, 2009[22]). Overall, these findings from meta-analyses seem to suggest that team diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity or age do not matter much for team performance. However, there is some evidence that demonstrates the importance of situational settings by examining under what specific conditions diversity dynamics may unfold and how."
I suppose one argument is that men in general are stronger, and it's probably a good idea to have strong nurses around, especially with the current obesity rates. I'm absolutely making things up though, not sure if any studies on that kind of thing have been done recently.
Yes male nurses already get drafted into lifting the heavy patients, and dealing with the ornery patients, just because they're male, so it's no surprise many men nope out of nursing.
True but if female nurses are having issues lifting patients that would then be an opportunity for private enterprise to invent machines/tools that assist with this
Any metric that is not the true metric that is optimized on will lead to worse results if overfit. You need to make sure there's at least a reasonable amount of variance.
> if you find it unfair that the pro-male affirmative action for female-dominated jobs only provides low-paid, low-status jobs - then feminists are very much in agreement with you about the unfairness of the situation :)
This is an interesting point, how much of the salary is determined by presumably impartial market forces, and how much of it is just status and social signalling.
We know status and social signalling play a significant role, otherwise behavioural economics and marketing wouldn't exist.
We also know that the diffrence between salaries of rank and file staff and C-suit executives have increased 15x in the past 20 years, without any corresponding increase in productivity
There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up. But it's hard to see how it would happen unless we'd have equivalent of the draft for low status jobs.
> There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up.
All else equal, if you shoved high status men into nursing they would only serve to increase the supply of workers, thereby reducing bargaining power and thus incomes would be more likely to fall.
High status men become high status because they find places to go where supply is extremely constrained (naturally or artificially). When you are one of few people able to do something that is desired then status and income follow.
The CEO gets there by first being one of a very select number of people who has built trust with the board. The board certainly isn't handing the keys to the kingdom of a multi-billion dollar operation to any random Joe off the street for obvious reasons. When the supply is nearly non-existent and the demand is nearly insatiable, price goes to the moon and so too does status much the same way.
>There is good reason to believe that if you could magically shove high-status men into nursing; nursing salaries would go up.
What is this inherent quality of high status for men?
Generally, status follows the possible utility one can provide for another, whether it be from being able to earn a lot of money, or having connections, having characteristics associated with positive stereotypes, or some other in demand quality.
Higher pay will increase status for whoever gets it, whether it be men or women or majority or minority. But the status follows the utility (or money in this case), not the other way around.
>We also know that the diffrence between salaries of rank and file staff and C-suit executives have increased 15x in the past 20 years, without any corresponding increase in productivity
Seems like evidence against the claim that status plays a significant role in setting salaries, unless their status has also increased massively in that time.
Thanks for providing more context. However, the original claim I was reacting to was that "half the population ... [are] beneficiaries of affirmative action", i.e. that all men in college are beneficiaries of AA. I agree there are exceptions, but I stand by my claim that very few college-attending men benefit from AA for males.
Because there are many programs deliberately designed to benefit women - as in, their public stated goal as well as taking direct (as opposed to indirect, i.e requiring height or strength) steps to limit their benefits to women.
Minority isn't just numerical, it can also mean having a minority of power. For example, in South Africa Black people were (and still are in many ways) a minority even though they were a numerical majority.
One would be pretty hard-pressed to argue that women hold "minority of power. For several decades now, women have had higher college enrollment rates. And among the two youngest generations, the gender pay gap has actually reversed with women out-earning men [1]. One could very well make the argument that discrimination favoring women isn't affirmative action, but rather "punching down" so to speak.
> Abortion rights we're just taken away in a number of states. That's a pretty naked display of power.
A policy change that women are actually more likely to support than men. If it's a naked display of power, it's power of a group that's actually slightly overrepresented towards women.
My Alma matter literally does everything in their power to boost female admits. It’s grown from 1:4 to roughly 1:3 after a decade of new majors, new scholarships, lower admission scores. This all comes at the cost of well qualified Asian and white males.
Multiple studies found White woman are the biggest benefactors of affirmative action.
I can illustrate one way that "diversity" hiring has affected perceptions of a demographic. In the 1980s, I worked around engineering departments a lot. Women were rare, but it seemed to be widely assumed that any woman in engineering would be exceptionally capable and driven.
These days, when I hear discussion about inclusive hiring, regardless of whether people are for or against it, there is a common assumption that allowances will have to be made for employees of lesser ability.
My impression is that this change in attitude started in the mid-1990s.
Oh, certainly. A few years is all black kids and women need to overcome racial and gender prejudices in this country. Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin or the number of their X chromosomes?
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. You can make your substantive points without that, and it's in your interest to, because it will give your comments more persuasive power.
Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives:
> Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character
That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect. The question is whether the net good in counter-balancing other systemic racism is worth the cost. That's not an easy question to answer. Some individuals would be more than happy to take any advantage they can get, and others want to be judged purely on their individual character.
> That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect.
Hey, I'm well aware of the doubt. As an Asian male who went to an elite university, I had doubts about everybody. Black kids, Native Americans, Latinos, women... definitely AA, it goes without saying. The jocks of course got in on their ability to hit balls rather than books. And the private school lifers who've been groomed like show horses since kindergarten are merely highly polished legacy turds. But wait, I think that one white kid from Alaska only got in so the school can say they have students from all 50 states. And the guys from rural Ohio and Nebraska? You know they're the token farmers of the class. The kids whose parents were professors? Nepotism of the intelligentsia. Really, the only legitimate admits beyond suspicion were the other Asian males. Well, except the ones who were the first generation to go to college in their families. You know they got in on some sob story. And the fresh off the boat Asians? They barely speak English, so don't tell me they got 760 on the SAT verbal. Immigrants getting special treatment again. And forget all those Asians who only got in because their parents had an Ivy League fetish. They're just grinders with zero intellectual spark. Perfect for a life as some kind of joyless doctor, just as their parents always wanted.
All these elite schools should not only get rid of AA, but they should only accept Asian guys who have perfect grades and SAT test scores, hail from one of the major coastal cities, have parents who went to non-elite universities, are not athletes, play no instruments, attended public schools, are not first generation immigrants, have no bullshit "altruistic" extracurriculars, and have no disabilities. They would be the only ones who are truly academically qualified without any doubt.
You are joking, but the higher average aptitude of the Asian male in uni mainly comes from them being discriminated against.
If you remove that discrimination, you'll let more of them in, and regression towards the mean will kick in.
For comparison, if you have a 'rich people' club, and they let blue people in when they own more than a million dollars, and green people only when they own more than a billion dollars, the green people in the club will be richer on average.
If you change the requirement to let anyone in who owns at least two million dollars, the gap in average wealth of admitted people from either group will narrow.
It won't necessarily disappear, because the underlying distributions of wealth might be weird. For all we know, after the change the average admitted blue one might be richer than the average admitted green.
It's not just immigrants from Africa or those who share their racial identity, but its also, and probably more importantly, about the lineages who were kidnapped from Africa as slaves and their families who were stolen from for generations which left very little in their communities to pass to their present day ancestors. It's not good enough to have black faces in high places, because there are people who have been systemically destroyed and their visibility is being obscured by those who happen to look like them. We don't need to give even more opportunity to relatively wealthy African immigrants, some of whom hail from families who profited from American slavery.
There are many parallels around the globe but the point is that there is a lot of nuance to consider if AA is to be effective at what I think was the original intention was: to increase equity among those marginalized for the sake of creating a system most closely resembling a meritocracy.
I'm not even sure there's a single 'original intention'. Political projects are always pushed by a coalition of people, everyone with their own agenda.
Maybe. Every once in a while we have someone I consider an AA-only hire, but they don't stick around. OK, I'll be honest, the most recent one I was wrong - even though they lacked experience, they were clearly better than the (white male) person they replaced... and they're still here so I'm happy.
I'm going to imagine a world without "AA hires". I think people still get judged based on their skin color. That's the way rascism works.
So, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Anyway, when an incompetent colleague sticks around for years... I wish I could blame affirmative action and feel good, but nope - instead I'm going to blame management.
I dream of a world where people like you are not comfortably making such casual judgements about people like them but there is no justice in this world
If you lower admission standards for any group, say blue people, than statistically speaking blue people will have a lower average.
Just like when you see the the son of the CEO working at the company, there's a certain probability that he didn't get in based on his performance alone.
Of course, as you suggest, there are sons of the CEO who really are the most qualified candidate for whatever job they are holding. But there's also nepotism.
The titular point of the article was that class is really where the discrimination happens nowadays. Race and gender prejudices still exist but have taken a back seat to class inequality. The article also suggests the primary driver for this--deterioration of public primary schooling. It's very easy to see how wealth can allow some families to leap over this problem.
edit: sorry it sounded like you were being sarcastic? Now I can't tell after your other comment
Without affirmative action, all thats left is meritocracy and nepotism.
So, I imagine an increasing number of black people and women (or anyone else perceived as less deserving) will be seen as "friend of the boss" or "the boss is doing them a favor". Either way, those can be easily addressed and therefore better than being forever labeled as a diversity hire (aka naturally inferior).
> they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires
Only racist losers assume I'm a diversity hire. And I'd actually rather they seethe at the "diversity hire" who just happens to somehow magically drive high-impact projects at every company he's ever worked at culminating in a career that's seen him work on everything from some of the most used apps in the world to self-driving cars.
For that particular brand of loser if it isn't affirmative action it'll be something else:
- Our CTO is from a West African nation, I'm from a West African nation, we bonded over that so actually its neopotism
- Affirmative action may be banned and we dropped D&I but actually the hiring manager has a personal secret agenda to hire blackies
- One of the people that interviewed him was black so obviously they gave me a pass.
But of course let's forget about the legacy admission that landed you in a school, let's forget how you bond with your interviewers over in-office beer kegs and inside jokes from your favorite shows in your shared culture, let's forget about that internship from a family friend, etc. etc.
This isn't a movie I don't think anyone is seething or really cares. They may look at you and wonder where you rank, so it forces you to prove yourself. But in this industry every interview wants you to prove yourself in pointless ways regardless if you have 20 year or 1.
> This isn't a movie I don't think anyone is seething or really cares.
If you think people who assume minorities are diversity hires only exist in movies I'm not sure if you're naïve, clueless, or both.
> They may look at you and wonder where you rank, so it forces you to prove yourself
I mean you want to tell yourself no one cares, but you also want to say that removing AA forces me to prove myself? (actually that's just a really vaguely written sentence, removing AA? or being black? what is "it"?)
Why do white people get so uncomfortable at the thought that other whites can be racist? I didn't say you think of me as a diversity hire, I didn't say any majority of white people think of me as one either, yet you immediately feel the need to start throwing yourself in front of the bullet with statements like "this isn't a movie".
Is this some sort of cognitive dissonance from the people who have these thoughts deep down or something?
I hope you realize that black people are wondering the same thing about you and how unfair it is to black people.
I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist. It is part of mainstream media. What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
> I hope you realize that black people are wondering the same thing about you and how unfair it is to black people.
Interesting... when race hadn't been specified, people wondering that about me was something that only happened in movies.
But the moment I specifically mention white people then "well black people are wondering it too!!!!!"
-
It's almost like you don't care either way as long as you're running interference for the people I'm describing... but why are you doing that?
Again it's not all white people, not even most, assuming minority = diversity hire, and for that reason I initially didn't mention a specific race at all until the first reply I got was someone in full denial mode...
The only people who should feel the need to defend against what I'm saying are people who hold these thoughts. But I'm sure you don't, right?
> I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist.
Yet, again, you felt confident enough to open a comment with patronizing levels of denial at the idea that there are people who think most minorities can't hack it outside of being a token hire... despite page full of comments essentially saying that!
> What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Please don't project personal naivety and ignorance onto me. YOU are the one who thinks that someone assuming a minority is a diversity hire only happens in movies, not I.
The western world weaponized racism amongst blacks across the continent I'm from and we're still seeing the results today in places like Sudan. Maybe you should brush up on your social studies if you were not aware.
Who said you were black or that I was white? White, brown, yellow and others live in Sudan.
Do you believe everyone who visits here is white? I would guess half of the people on here have various shades of color.
Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
I guess you just decided to jump off the deep end with non-sequitur.
I am black and I didn't say I live in Sudan. Sudan is not in West Africa.
I knew you were white because you said people who think minorities are token hires is something that only happens in movies.
Minorities can be racist, but a white person would be the first to say something so naïve.
-
> Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Scraping the bottom of the barrel until your fingers bleed here... I didn't mention your race until you outed yourself with your ignorant remark.
You're white, I'm black, that's the only reason why white and black were mentioned. Which aspect of my original comment relies on a specific race to be true?
-
> Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
When you're out of things to say it's best to desperately shove words into your detractor's mouth.
You know I'm a certain race because the views I presented fit into a category of believes you have? In the end you have shown yourself to be very racist. You should reflect on if judging someone based on race is something you want to promote.
You were scraping the bottom of the barrel but now you're just digging a hole under it.
You're clearly not convinced of anything you just wrote, but you felt the need to say something after being trounced. Unfortunately this wasn't the answer we were looking for.
Maybe just reflect on this conversation and grow as a person.
Research shows that graduation rates for minorities in engineering programs will likely increase if affirmative action goes away:
> Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites. [1]
Actually, there may be even higher graduation rates among URM students in STEM fields - this is the claim of some recent research [1]. URM students have lower persistence rates[2] in STEM fields at most universities. Some claim this is due to racism, but the data shows that the persistence rates is actually the same for all races when normalized for academic preparedness. A student with 700s on their SATs is just as likely to persist regardless of white, Asian, Black, etc. Students with 600s and 500s are less likely, again regardless of race. It's just that there's a lot more URM students attending with lower scores.
The expected consequence of eliminating race-based affirmative action is that URM students will instead attend less selective universities where they're more likely to persist. Sure, the university they graduate from may not be as prestigious. But on the flipside, they'll be more likely to graduate in the field they actually wanted to study. They'll also probably save a lot of money, since changing majors partway through usually means that these students take 5 or 6 years to graduate.
2. "Persistence rate" means the rate at which students complete their declared major. It's rare for students to drop out of university entirely, much more common is that they change to a less demanding major - that is, they don't persist in their initial major.
I thought it was published in 2019 - apparently it was actually 2009. The author worked on a similar piece of research in 2016 and concludes that Bar pass rates would be higher without affirmative action: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/dropout.pdf
I'm not really sure how I feel about this. I'm white, not a woman, and I've been (almost certainly) a diversity hire.
In some ways, someone arbitrarily opening the door for you sheds a lot of load in the short-term. You still need all the grit that a chip on your shoulder gives you in order to succeed in the long run. When you do succeed you'll have to shed that load unless you want to sound like a bitter ass the rest of your life. My point here is, I didn't really need anyone to tell me that I was looked down on (by certain people) for a period of time to know it, and I'm not sure college admissions or jobs that are attracting diversity hires are attracting people who give a shit what you think in the short term.
Your opinion of me will be established long after the initial thought of, "Oh this guy is a diversity hire" has left the space between your ears.
Former military. I had been programming prior to being in the military, but after getting out nobody really wanted to hire me. My skills weren't really relevant any more, so I don't blame them. A couple firms ended up giving me a chance in the network and systems space.
Hiring veterans is completely different from hiring for racial diversity - being former military is a strong signal for many positive qualities that employers look for.
Maybe to some degree, but it's not all that different. The way I look at it, for that job and one other, was that I was underqualified, came with a built-in tax break, and preferential resume review. It's still a form of affirmative action, and its purpose is similar. I'm specifically referring to being a campaign badge class, and to a time period in my career that was when I first got out.
People were accusing people of being "diversity hires", or having "slept their way to top", or similar dismissive nonsense long before AA was in wide use.
"Despite this assertion, the development of the Griggs doctrine has proved anything but friendly to meritocratic objectives. Although the Supreme Court has never held that all workplaces must be racially balanced, lower courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is charged with administering Title VII, have firmly embraced the presumption that the racial profiles of particular workplaces should reflect the racial composition of the broader population."
"Recently, prompted by the racially adverse impact of measures of verbal and abstract analysis — areas in which some minority groups underperform — experts have also developed alternative instruments that employ audio or video techniques, or that make use of so-called "assessment center" protocols based on job simulations, real-time problem solving, or actual work samples."
"Although few disparate-impact lawsuits are actually filed, and though defendants win most of those that are, the specter of disparate-impact lawsuits nonetheless dangles like a Sword of Damocles over employers' heads. The prospect of onerous, unpredictable, and protracted litigation provides employers with a strong incentive to find some way to avoid being sued. One temptation is to satisfy diversity targets by relaxing personnel-selection standards across the board. Firms can also switch to more haphazard staffing methods that tend to obscure informal affirmative action or other race-conscious practices. Some of these tactics pose the risk of yielding a less effective work force, while others (such as the use of race-based criteria) are legally suspect or even expressly forbidden under Title VII."
By definition, it means some people were extended offers that would not have absent positive discrimination. Well, I suppose it could be the case that the level of positive discrimination didn't alter the outcomes, but then the affirmative action program achieved literally nothing.
At least, that's with the typical meaning of "affirmative action". It's a nebulous term that some use to encompass things like blind orchestra auditions. In the tech world this could be equated with anonymous resumes and blind zoom interviews with modulated voices. But few tech companies seem to be interested in this type of affirmative action.
I recently went down a bit of a rabbit hole and learned about "pre-code" Hollywood. There's actually a 1933 movie called "Baby Face" that features a woman who does basically sleep her way to the top of a company (despite being pre-code, it's still quite chaste by modern standards and much is left to implication, but it's not subtle). So the trope does indeed have some history.
I don’t see a problem with more women getting into university if they have better grades. They already dominate humanities and STEM won’t be affected anyway, so job outcomes won’t be heavily affected.
If we want to fix that then we need to help boys in elementary school, not dumbing down the admissions process.
Sometimes reality is exactly what society needs to confront.
I have the same view with censorship. I’d rather let the dummies embarrass themselves in public than hiding them in the shadows and pretend they wont all still believe that crap and never having the opportunity to have their ideas challenged.
Taping over problems often hides the root causes while doing nothing to deal with it.
> I think 50% of the population suddenly realizing they were beneficiaries of affirmative action this whole time—and subsequently understanding the nuances of discrimination in this country—will ultimately be a good thing.
I doubt that if they haven't figured out it's a nuanced thing by now that they will figure that out after the second order effects come into play.
Why not take these non-specific, hypothetical people at face value? If they say they want merit based admissions and that's what we get then they should be happy.
In any case, the gymnastics needed to explain why one was totally wrong and the other is absolutely necessary will bring about an era of US dominance in the sport.
The Supreme Court is not deciding anything with regard to sex-based discrimination right now. I would be surprised if it even mentioned anything in dicta (non-binding comments not necessary to the holding) about this topic.
Also, if/when the question comes up, there is a different standard for sex-based discrimination than race-based. The former is subject to intermediate scrutiny, whereas the latter is subject (in general) to strict scrutiny.
So it is plausible that the Court would determine that some sex-based discrimination is acceptable, and simultaneously determine that no race-based discrimination is acceptable.
The ruling almost certainly would include sex because it's part of the same law that protects against racial discrimination. Title VI of the civil rights act specifically protects these plus religion and nationality. If it applies to race (and it obvious does) it applies to all of them.
It's honestly astounding that anyone finds this racism either moral or legal. It's precisely the same thing that the civil rights act forbids and for good reason.
The rules about sex-based discrimination were not crafted for the purpose of college admissions. This is just how the law has evolved around treating people of different sexes and races differently.
Another consequence of having the looser "intermediate scrutiny" for sex discrimination is that the FBI can have different fitness requirement for male and female recruits. Ditto for armed forces, and for laws relating to pregnancy.
When I was 18 I filled out the section of the form for rural applicants (in the Australian university system), but with the benefit of hindsight I wish I'd left it blank. I'm 95% sure that I would have made it anyway yet the 5% doubt is unpleasant.
There are many, many disadvantages to being educated in rural Australia vs. in the capital cities. Even if you got selected by one of the richer schools who pay for the best teachers and better student/teacher ratios, you are still disadvantages by needing to live away from home (lacking family support) or 4 hours of commuting each day. And it isn't even all about you. Because Universities know about these disadvantages, they know that, on average, a student from a rural area will perform better than an urban student with the same scores. It adds context to the scores.
Unlike, say, when there was a box to tick if you had enough aboriginal blood in your veins. So many people ticked that box for an unfair advantage, completely disconnected and even scornful of the culture but able to claim enough percentage of the race. But lots of students took the money from Abstudy even if it muddied their ethics.
I assume it's a reocurring thought that maybe the commenter you replied to only got in because of the standards being lowered.
Which is something I have heard of from quite a lot of people who may have benefitted from AA. And it's somewhat frequently paired with a huge amount of self doubt.
I was happy to write an essay about my experiences growing up on a farm for my Harvard admission packet. I couldn't care less about whoever hypothetical NYC chess-playing salutatorian I "beat out".
ISTM these "special" circumstances very rarely contribute the bulk of any incoming class. Any "regular" student who really deserved admissions got it, and only marginal strivers with few must-have qualities complain about getting denied in favor of applicants with special circumstances. It's fine for these people to suggest larger class sizes (certainly in the case of Harvard they are correct; I don't know about the Australian system). Their self-interest is showing, however, when they start making lists of people whose test scores they beat by a few points. There's no reason to trust their judgments over those of professional admissions staff.
That is doubly the case for those of us who may have been admitted for these reasons and then went on to collegiate success. Why the hell would we worry about the opinions of those marginal strivers? They should do their best at their safety schools.
I think there's a bit more to this. A lot of men simply don't need a degree when they take up the family business, go to trade school, or start a military career and that's fairly common in the south. I wouldn't call most of those guys disadvantaged.
Drop out rates for the disadvantaged can be high as well regardless of affirmative action getting them in. The difficulties are cultural and I agree that making this situation clearer is a net good.
While it was intended as a joke about the workplace, you raise an interesting perspective. Indeed, establishing bonds with a homemaker is increasingly considered a risky activity, particularly for men, primary due to the courts establishing precedent for ongoing support payments even after services are no longer rendered. Perhaps increased rates of male virginity really is the result of increased scrutiny?
Certainly in the workplace we've seen increased rates of job vacancies, yet employers will do everything in their power to try and avoid hiring you. This is especially apparent in tech (at least until recently) where companies couldn't hire fast enough, but also put the Leetcode screws to you to ensure that they couldn't find anyone to hire. This does suggest that we're becoming increasingly risk averse or that the stakes are higher.
It also depends significantly on where you're talking about. At my college, my class was about 85% male and 15% female. Looks like last year they managed to get it to 68% male and 32% female.
Small differences in the means of two normal distributions still result in huge differences at the tails. Suppose the top 10% of SAT math scorers make the best engineers. This population will be overwhelmingly male even if there is only a modest difference in the mean scores.
> I don't know, it's definitely some fairy thinking on behalf of the plaintiffs. Nothing will change. You'd have to be colossally fucking stupid, as an Asian kid, to think that these Republican motherfuckers are doing this for the benefit of Asians.
They aren't doing it for the benefit of Asians. They aren;t doing it at all. The Supreme Court would be doing it to enforce laws against racism.
>The Supreme Court would be doing it to enforce laws against racism.
You missed GP's point
The Supreme court decides which cases it will hear.
It does not decide what cases should be filed in Federal courts that may or may not end up on their docket.
Whether or not GPs assertion is true (I don't know the facts of the case or the hearts/minds of those who brought it, so I make no judgement there) doesn't make their point moot, or your ignoring of their point less relevant.
> Once AA is overturned, that's it—hands off the scale
Or change it so it is not race based. Instead make it geographical.
Say you want to admit 1000 students from the US. Partition the US into 1000 districts, with 1 student admitted per district.
Gerrymander the district boundaries to make sure that you get the racial demographics you want.
Have fun watching the Supreme Court try to explain why that is not OK but it is OK to gerrymander congressional districts to ensure Black people are underrepresented.
Make it geographical or conscious of class, parental income and geography. That would go so much further in the goal of reducing inequality and increasing fairness than classifying people forcibly on something which we used to say wasn't a scientific classification, race.
High quality college should be available to all who want it and who are actually college material. There are a large fraction of college students who don't belong there and only matriculated to meet parental expectations or because they didn't know what else to do. As a taxpayer I am unwilling to finance this waste.
Why not make the goal "providing the best education possible to the brightest?" Why is reducing inequality the goal of an educational system, while taking as an unstated premise that inequality is somehow unnatural or bad?
sounds like the solution is to mandate that black (and asian and so on) people are required to be evenly distributed rather than congregate in enclaves susceptible to gerrymandering.
It could be a story about mushroom cultivation or mid-century architecture, and NPR would find a way to make it about disparate impact in the black community. The game I play now, is I'll listen until they start in on identity politics. It usually doesn't take longer than 3-4 minutes.
Race is very easy to focus on without making any structural changes in society. A black man was president. So long as it's the right black man, it doesn't change much.
There is still structural codified racism within US borders. For instance, it's illegal for non-native US nationals/citizens to own most property in American Samoa, in effect perpetuating racism against outsiders who are also US nationals.
The "US national" status is a legacy of the Insular Cases, and all the other cases formerly in this bucket have either gained independence (Philippines) or become full US citizens (Guam, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands).
So in the hypothetical case that American Samoa is returned to Samoa, the logical options are to either make all American Samoans citizens of Samoa, or to give them the option to choose between Samoan and American citizenship. In either case the weird "national" status will cease to exist.
Hawaii's housing law that allows historically disadvantaged outsiders like the US-naturalized Filipinos who came in as cheap farm labor to actually OWN land are why half my family even has their own meager slice of property today.
Under American Samoan rules non-native minorities like blacks and filipinos are in effect excluded from property ownership rights of nearly all of American Samoa. I can't believe people here are effectively pro-racism in housing. Codified racism of property rights are not acceptable within US borders.
I was describing the motivation, not supporting it.
But sure, I can understand why a nation wants to preserve some of its self determination, rather than become a remote province with a 75% foreign population.
I can also understand the plight of the local foreign underclass.
I appreciate you "not supporting it" even though you've very selectively chosen to express "understanding" in instances where that understanding aligns with racism. To be clear, you are against racist property ownership laws and thus against the racism of the local government of American Samoa, correct?
>the plight of the local foreign underclass
The disadvantaged minorities (such as Filipinos) I'm referring to who thankfully were actually allowed to own land in Hawaii are almost all US nationals, not foreigners. Under the racist laws of Americas Samoa they would be excluded from land ownership, even as fellow US nationals residing in American Samoa.
For the entire history of this country the elites have pitted the working class against itself along racial lines. The failure of Reconstruction to enable Black agency or punish slaveholders deeply scarred the country and it may never heal from it.
The media and political class continually manufactures the racial divide. We see this now with the culture war about crime narratives.
A
Americans lack class consciousness in part because a plurality of Americans do not have the lived experience of the "working class". The decimation of the labor movement over the past 50 years didn't help either. And those who experience class divide the most, the very poor and homeless, are totally politically disenfranchised.
IMO, this is by design and why politicians and media types play to race instead of class. Because if middle/lower class Hispanic, Black and White people figure out they have a lot more in common with each other than their rich counterparts, it would not be good for the current status quo.
Race, class, gender, age, intelligence, wealth... there are infinite
partitions on humankind, used to divide us. But the future is not
split between the "have" and the "have nots." It will be between the
"will" and the "will nots". Those who submit to domination and those
who choose to remain human.
I’ve heard it said on some podcast that race cropped up as an intentional structure to obfuscate class distinctions:
- post slavery, many formerly enslaved people had better skills than poor white people
- to prevent poor white people from joining forces with these formerly enslaved people as a large class of “the poor” vs. small class of “the wealthy” racial distinctions began to be used more frequently
- this had the effect of basically allowing the “poor white man” to side with “wealthy whites” (regardless of if something was in their best interests or not) because he could console himself with “I may be poor but at least I’m white” — even though the rich whites often advanced laws and regulations that were generally detrimental to the poor as a “class group”.
Is there any hard data on this or is it just heresay/opinion?
As an European, this focus on race, which is basically a social definition is truly crazy.
The first aspect, how do you define people whose parents are from different constructs? How would an "Hispanic" father with an "African American" mother kid be declared ? And don't get me started on multigeneration or if it works just on look (let's forget how genes work) or "lineage"?
By having to decide or denying mixity, it promotes the idea of "pure blood"/master race or blood. Just totally backward idea.
Not that long ago, when my parents were children, there was no such issue denying them the ability to use certain bathrooms or drinking fountains on account of their race, social construct or not, let alone attending the best schools. Thankfully, affirmative action was created by the time they went to college.
Your point is not a bad one. Race is not rigorously defined. And yet, there are large groups of people still suffering significant disadvantage along racial lines, for historic and ongoing reasons. It's not possible to address this in a race-blind way.
In practice, affirmative action policies work essentially on the honor system.
Then perhaps the proper response from opponents of Affirmative Action is to game said honor system. Identify as Black/Native American only for as long is it takes to get in.
> Blunt racial preferences will probably need to be replaced in response to the Supreme Court. But a less socially divisive system based on income could take their place.
This, and the "blind" part of the title seem really jarring to me. Would it be less socially divisive to, e.g. make sure that the incoming class came from families were more representative of the income distribution overall? Or would we have lots of indignant stories about the student with a high GPA who believes they were passed over in favor of a less credentialed lower income student?
I don't think Americans are at all "blind" to class. It divides our neighborhoods, it's signaled in the clothes we wear and the cars we drive and the vacations we put on instagram. Class highly visible everywhere. But we're so extremely well trained that wealth and privilege always go together. The idea of a policy which says to the wealthy, "you can have at most this much of the pie" is very foreign. If people accept that idea when the pie is college admissions, what next? The top 1% can be responsible for at most 5% of the carbon emissions? The top 5% can use at most 10% of the water in drought states? The top 10% can capture at most 30% of economic growth? I think a majority of people at every income level would see this as deeply un-American.
I'm not really bothered by a handful of elite universities which are only attended by wealthy and connected people.
Why is this a problem? Other schools exist which are accessible to people without wealth and connections.
The colleges can let in whoever they want or don't want. We don't need all of them to be an accurate representation of society at large. Plenty of other institutions in society are also not representative - churches, companies, sports teams - and that's just fine.
case in point: Harvard has existed for nearly 400 years before having to deal with a couple decades of the general population thinking genpop needs Ivy League. Harvard will exist for another 400 years after genpop re-invents trade schools or the private sector finds another way to sort for employees.
It's just literally not the school's problem. We've wasted many cycles and divided society by pretending like it is.
This is also way overstating it. Harvard's freshman class is around 1700. If you're a top 1700 high school student you have a great shot at getting into Harvard.
Only 300 people per year get a perfect 1600 on SAT's. If your scores are top 1700 that alone will be enough to get you noticed. It's not like there are 1700+ people in the 99th percentile.
that, and these places aren't a meritocracy, never were, never will be. its a class system, for a class system. After half a millenia of this continent ensuring that the class system is also a race disenfranchisement system, then this will be reflected in admissions whether it is by class, by merit, or by some flawed hybrid that is affirmative action.
People regularly get treated differently due to their race. Effects happen when applying to jobs and also interactions during traffic stops. From Canadian research for the first [1]:
"Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests. The study found Canadians and landed immigrants with names such as "Jill Wilson" or "John Martin" are 40 per cent more likely to be offered an interview than someone with a name like "Sana Khan" or "Lei Li," given an identical resumé. Applicants with mixed names like "Vivian Zhang" had a 20 per cent better chance to land an interview than job-seekers with non-English names, but still less than the English-only names."
For US research for the second [2]: "Blacks were 63 percent more likely to be stopped even though, as a whole, they drive 16 percent less. Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95 percent more likely to be stopped. Blacks were 115 percent more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop (5.05 percent for blacks, 2.35 percent for whites). Contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers."
On HN discussions on racial issues, there is often at least one comment that asserts that people get equal treatment due to race, and any contrary reports are fabricated. My only request is for people to try to practice humility, and at least consider the idea that one's personal experience of life may not be shared by everyone else's (for the rationalist crowd, at least consider that statistical studies should have more weight than beliefs formed from one's personal experience, where n=1).
The only period of time I witnessed open racial hostilities in real life was growing up in a small town. Nearly that entire group of teenagers (at the time) I knew who acted that way ended up struggling with drugs (they were already dabbling in hard drugs when the behavior began, around high school).
I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, I'm saying that in my experience the folks lashing out with racism who I grew up with had serious problems in their home lives that had nothing to do with race. I know every case is different, but anecdotally what I witnessed appeared to be either scapegoating, or learned behavior. Again, I'm only trying to explain what I saw, not excuse the behavior.
My point is that I don't think they actually hated other races (at least at first, I won't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who lives in their own echo chamber for years), because quite frankly their experience with the races they spoke poorly about was extremely limited (I grew up in the frigid north, where most locals are either white or Alaska Native - I don't know why that is, but it is).
When that behavior first started in early high school, I think the few of us who parted ways from that group kind of brushed it off for awhile because... we didn't know what to say, I guess? Folks who by all accounts appeared to be reasonable and entertaining people only a year ago were suddenly dropping racial slurs openly amongst their friend group - which I was peripherally a part of. All of the connections I had to that group either disassociated themselves with those folks like I did, or disappeared because of hard drug use.
>Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…
And yet it seems it does in upper class enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan... It's an interesting and perhaps telling correlation: the college-educated, privileged elite who believe they are doing the right thing by zeroing in on race as the foundational problem of America.
How naive and perhaps blissful to to be so ignorant at how unjust the world is overall, there are so many perhaps urgent issues with suffering people, and we're worried whether companies with average salaries in the multi-hundred-thousand dollar range are diverse enough.
In a microcosm within a big country where the average savings and health and medical insecurity are very serious.
The focus on race, even if race is on a checklist of problems to resolve, borders on scandalous.
The scandal is the list of people whose lives are ruined because they're poor and either experience an absence of medical care or crippling debt. But it's a class issue and that topic is verboten, perhaps because it's non-existent to the groups mentioned in the first sentence above.
Looking at health inequity should be a priority over who is on the board room or what groups occupy what percentages of things. It would make for a more just society in a big way.
There has been a focus on race from the very beginning of the country. The entire point is to prevent class solidarity. The owner class has it, the working class does not and that's by design.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
As Warren Buffet once said, "There is a class war in America, and we won." The race wars and culture wars the upper class have fomented with their corporate media were designed to keep the working class fighting with each other while they changed the tax rules and absconded with everything they could.
I've been active in reforming voting systems since I think that makes a difference to how politics works.
Is there a path or actions that address class issues other than the standard "run for office" and "vote for people who will address class-related issues"?
(Note that it doesn't matter whether they have a point or not. What matters is that now, either way, you'll have to talk about it whenever RCV comes up. There is similar contention around IRV and some other methods; basically anything that disrupts existing power arrangements.)
Find a way to educate lower-class Americans about class, not just race. Ultimately, that should be more effective than reforming voting... if you can figure out how to do it.
>Surveys show that majorities of African-Americans, Californians, Democrats and Hispanics all oppose the use of race in college admissions (and in other areas).
Because it seems like the pro-affirmative action camp is strong. If most people are against it, who is supporting it?
Last year a geophysicist, Dorian Abbot, was invited to give a lecture at MIT about some new results in climate science. His invitation was rescinded because he had once criticized affirmative action in a magazine article.
On one hand, it is telling that even states as culturally blue as CA and WA don't have majority in support of affirmative action. On the other hand, that is still a lot of people in support.
And this is why the term "white privilege" sells so poorly to whites. And why CRT is attacked so vigorously. Everyone likes to think they made it on their own. The guy who inherited a multi-million dollar business thinks he has had no more real advantage than then guy who was raised in an orphanage in Uganda. While I firmly believe that this privilege exists, you just can't legislate based on it, because you'll get no support.
>And this is why the term "white privilege" sells so poorly to whites.
It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
>And why CRT is attacked so vigorously.
Have you read any CRT "scholars?" I have, and they are sickening.
> It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
Whites get advantages that have nothing to do with being more wealthy.
For example, once in the '80s I was driving around the Los Angeles area around 3 AM (I had insomnia and decide to just drive around randomly, and maybe pick up a snack at a 7-11) when I got pulled over for having one of my tail lights out. I was driving a cheap car, had a full unkempt beard and long hair, was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and was in my early 20s. Anyone who saw me would probably think druggie.
I gave him my license and told him the registration was in the glove compartment. He shone his light on the glove compartment while I opened it and dug the registration out from under the $1000 in $20 bills that it was under.
He asked me why I had so much cash.
I told him that I'd responded to a classified ad from someone selling a modem for $1000. I was meeting them later that day and that was the money to pay for it.
He gave my license and registration back, told me to get the tail light fixed, and let me go.
I have no confidence that if I had been a young black man driving a cheap car looking like a druggie at 3 AM with $1000 in small bills in the glove compartment that things would have been so hassle free.
While that is anecdotal, the overall statistics of police stops based on race are damning. This is just in the realm of policing, let alone workplace social dynamics, education, and the list goes on. So while class and white privilege are a venn diagram, their overlap is not at all total.
I don’t necessarily think the research agrees the stats are damning. For example, here is Roland Fryer’s study which concluded blacks are more likely to be pulled over than whites but are actually less likely to be shot.
It seems many people from both sides just decide the data that refutes their opinion is misinformation. The topic of police discrimination is far more nuanced than either the left or right makes it appear.
And it is easy to find anecdotes that support any narrative you want so your links do little to sway me in the same way if I were to share a link of a white person being harassed it would likely do little to sway you.
An empirical survey showing use of lethal force is similar but use of any force is 50% more likely based on race seems to support my point.
Agree about anecdotes. Disagree my opinion cannot be swayed (this is not twitter and I certainly don't fully agree with "the left").
If the assertion is that all rich people are treated the same, regardless of race, then only examples are needed to refute it.
But, beyond anecdotes, the national statistics indicate there are disparities in policing based on race ((1) your citation strongly supports this assertion (2) as an aside and without reference, there are similar damning statistics for incarceration rates and jail sentences, and this is still just in the realm of criminal justice):
"ABC News analysis of police arrests nationwide reveals stark racial disparity
Black people were arrested at a rate five times more than white people in 2018."
"In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts"
Because one does not imply the other. A minority of whites are disproportionately wealthy. Associating the trait of a minority of a group with the majority is racism.
I'm not suggesting one implies the other. Are you saying the only advantage one could possibly have is economic? Or maybe that you'd expect all advantages and disadvantages to be reflected in wealth or lack thereof?
Sue for one, and really the whole of "whiteness studies." I don't know if that's CRT proper, but that's what I was refering to. I read some of "the future of whiteness" and some shorter articles posted in various "communications" journals. From Sue:
>Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.
Or from another "scholar"
>How can we account for the ways in which white people refuse to acknowledge their possessive investment in whiteness even as they work to increase its value everyday? We can't blame the color of our skin. It must be the content of our character.
I can't find it now, but I once read a passage from one of these CRT nutjobs' work that really shed light on their insanity. It went something like
>whiteness and white supremacy is not seen directly but rather is society itself. It is the tapestry we are woven of, and we are therefore blind to it. It exists even where it cannot be seen as it is the source of rather than a detail within society.
They are all somewhat careful with what they say. But their effect is real. They are turning being white into an evil, one that cannot be rectified but is an irremovable stain on one's being.
Of course there is this classic response: "I don't think white people are evil, just whiteness, which you are by necessity a part of because you directly contribute to it."
"White privilege" is like a DSM-5 diagnosis. It's only brought up with a treatment (or remedy) in mind. It's intended more as a tool to bring about a particular outcome, and less as a description of a scientifically measurable reality.
I don't object to the use of "white privilege" to attempt an objective description of reality.
I do object to the notion that more discrimination on the basis of race is the answer. You don't solve a structure fire by adding gasoline.
I object to the use of "white privilege" on first principles:
Interpreted literally, it implies all whites are privileged. This is categorically untrue.
It encourages racism through associating an immutable trait with a negative word. "White privilege" is no more true than saying "Jewish privilege" or "Asian privilege" when referring to trends that do not reflect the whole. For the latter two one would be accused of anti-semitism or racism but for the former it's common parlance. Therefore, to be logically consistent, "white privilege" must also be racist. Associating a negative trait of a minority of a race with the entire race, is in fact, the very definition of racism.
To further exemplify the point whites still hold a majority in the US. This means, by the numbers, there are many more disenfranchised whites than literally any other race. Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. The right wing gets it wrong, the largest welfare recipient group is in fact low income whites. This makes sense when you actually look at the numbers.
The entire structure of the term "white privilege" is designed first to divide and then to discourage. During the BLM riots you had white people groveling, begging for forgiveness, like this so-called "privilege" is some sort of original sin (which is how it is sold) that can only be cleansed through constant, deliberate self-flaggelation. This repentance ceremony is further promoted (and even incited) by the bigoted and racist Kendi and D'Angelo. Both suggest the only solution to this privilege is constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation. CRT is rightly criticized because being encouraged to denigrate yourself for some alleged (in reality, manufactured) original sin is simply gaslighting.
No one should be made to feel this way on the basis of their skin color. It is simply the race hustlers promoting such terms to sow further division. Division among races means they cannot unite and focus on class issues. Racism, as a tool, is the perfect way to induce this division. "White privilege" is one of many examples of this racism.
Why do you believe "privilege" is a negative word?
Also, assuming you mean Robin DiAngelo, what of hers have you read? She's pretty clear in both White Fragility and Nice Racism in advocating against "constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation" because they center the person doing it and take energy away from productive action.
It's essentially saying 'It was an honor to meet him;' that could mean that you were undeserving, or simply that it was something unusual that most people didn't get to do; if it were common, it wouldn't be a privilege, would it?
In the thread's context, usually it's associated with not granting the privilege to someone else, as well - you have a privilege that others do not, one that you do not do anything to deserve.
I don't know about you, but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive. It's intended to have a negative connotation, otherwise there would be no impetus for change.
I also agree that terms like "white privilege" are intended as criticism. However I don't see them as criticism of the individual who has the privilege, but rather of the society whose circumstances gave them that privilege. The term is an attempt to promote systems thinking.
"White privilege" means that you fit in the particular mold that American society pours and casts people out of. Nothing more and nothing less. If you want to object to the jargon on the grounds of being jargon, fine, but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It doesn't mean that all white people are rich, it means that poor white people are in less of a shitty situation than equally-improverished black people. It could be as simple as just living in a better ZIP code with more opportunities in it[0], for example. But it's still a shitty situation, in the same way that third-degree burns are bad but different from a broken arm.
The constant self-flaggelation approach is actually opposed by a lot of anti-racists specifically because it takes focus away from the victims of racism and to people who benefit from it.
>If you want to object to the jargon on the grounds of being jargon
"Jargon" like that is not accrptable. Would you allow it for any other group? And many people use the term white privilege to mean an intrinsic power held by white people as a result of their oppression of blacks. So you are wrong on all acounts.
>but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It's hard to come up with a name for something that barely exists in tbe first place. "You're zip-code is privileged" doesn't invoke the same guilt does it?
Police killing black people for being black as some sort of racist unwritten policy is a myth. The rates shown here make perfect sense. And most (99%?) were armed. Also consider that there are hundreds of millions of Americans. It's difficult to fully grasp just how large that is. The media likes selling stories but that doesn't change the facts. A dozen news articles won't change that.
First, those are cases of black people being arrested or detained, sometimes violently, by police. Not killed. Further, many of them resulted in a successful lawsuits against the police, which should tell you something about the quality of police actions.
Second, keep in mind that data about police violence, including deaths, are complete shit because police are not required to report data and no one has an incentive to do so. (I don't know what Statista's data sources are, but did you notice how the number of "unknown" race deaths increased in 2020 and 2021?)
"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study." (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6..., https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-pol...)
Here's another good article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z I'd suggest following the endnotes. "About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
>By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime.
That is because they commit more violent crimes. Did you know that?
>Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.
See the last point.
In 99.9% of cases, people killed by police are commiting crimes.
Also note that asians have the lowest rate of being killed by police. I suppose it was asians that were the real whites all along? Or perhaps you simply can't make sweeping conclusions from this data.
I did read it. Being killed by police is a function of police encounters while commiting crimes. Additionaly, there will be more police in higher crime areas in the first place. What is the rate when no crime is being commited, and what is the total amount of cases? My guess is the rate is the same and the sample size is really low. Although who knows what the "estimates" your study has "found" are. Also, why do asians have more white privelage than whites? At least under your definition.
Do I need to post a list of articles showing white people being bashed, brutally raped, murdered, pushed under a train or even tortured by black people while they were:
- being in their garden
- going to their car
- jogging
- walking their dog
- eating out at a restaurant
The absurd idea that whites are the ones brutalizing blacks in America is an extremely offensive joke.
Most white people of course don't have multi-million dollar businesses. The real issue is that many white folk just aren't all that privileged in the first place, and once you start applying such broad generalisations to entire populations without nuance it just becomes silly, even if the generalisation is broadly true.
Many people who strongly argue in favour of things like white privilege tend to be well-off, so from their experience the generalisation holds true, but they fail to realize that their experience is not universally shared and dismiss people with things like "racists" or "handbasket of deplorables", without even attempting to understand where the opposition might be coming from.
The entire thing is a catastrophic failure of empathy, which is ironic because the concept of privilege is useful IMHO exactly to understand that your experience is not shared by everyone.
Also, in a society so bent on making money, what do you want the "guy who inherited a multi-million dollar business" to do? Give it up?
No. He is going to do what everyone is doing. Compete with every tool in his arsenal.
And from his point of view, the competition is a whole bunch of people who inherited THEIR wealth and plenty of people MORE wealthy. Does he see himself as having a privilege compared to all of those people?
Is he going to want to give up any privilege he's got? Especially if some of his competition aren't affected?
I'm not saying it is right. But you'll never get them to agree.
There's white privilege in Pensiltucky? Elon Musk knows he wouldn't have made it big without family connections, but the white guy from Western Pennsylvania knows that he was up against a whole lot and made it anyway, against all odds.
Right, and I think generally the high status whites who profess it about whites actually don't mean themselves. They mean all those low status whites who have wrongthink.
Ironically many of them live in liberal, multi-cultural cities filled with rich people who are much more high status than vast swathes of inland rural white people.
I agree. Let me give you another example of privilege -- being able-bodied. It doesn't seem like a privilege, because there are still obstacles you must overcome, but it's just one less obstacle.
IMO, the only thing that makes "white privilege" somewhat interesting, is the extent to which the country made laws and regulations around race. If it were merely tribal preferences of liking people who were genetically closer to you, I'd view it more like being tall as a privilege. But the fact that we used the government and other legal instruments to prop one above the other gives me a certain level of discomfort that I don't have with all the other forms of privilege that exist.
What's the point of playing this privilege game? You know where this ends? Comparing intelligence and other genetic traits and it intersects with eugenics, which as we all know is a great road to start on... Sometimes I really wonder if the privilege olympics people ever took the time to think through where their logical reasoning would lead to.
Ultimately we need to allow everyone to have a life with dignity while creating a system that rewards hard work. It'll never be perfect, and trying to play the "luck" / privilege game ends up in the biggest lottery of all, genetics.
Musk also left South Africa at a time when race relations were boiling and South African racism against whites were heating up. So ironically anti-white racism probably contributed to Musks' rise in North American continent.
A Pensiltuckian will be keenly aware of the fact, no matter where on the political spectrum they are. The distinction is really between traditional left/right and the "woke left", for want of any better term.
This is an argument I have with some of my more lefty friends.
There are problems that have no legislative solution.
I saw this as someone who has voted blue no matter who..
Sometimes the current left wing of the Dems work at cross purposes to themselves. On the one hand we need to legislate laws for everything, and on the other hand enforcing laws is discriminatory & abusive and whats a little broken windows here & there, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette!!
My favorite example is all the gun control rhetoric in NYC while at the same time the Manhattan DA announced he was not going to seek jail terms for non-violent illegal gun possession charges. "LOL nothing matters" is how it feels.
I think the left has fundamentally gotten crime wrong. And I say this as a strong progressive. I understand the rationale with bias in everything from the laws, to police enforcement, to the judicial system, to ability to be gainfully employed after conviction, to impact on family -- but I think it's one of those areas where getting a few constant factors wrong in our calculus made us go in the wrong direction. But that obviously is completely tangential to this article.
"Two days after being sworn in, Alvin Bragg shared a memo with staff Monday noting that his office will not prosecute low-level offenses like marijuana misdemeanors, refusal to pay for public transportation fare, prostitution and resisting arrest, unless given alongside a felony charge. Instead, they would be offered a community-based diversion program."
Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?
The heavy use of the crude tool of locking people up as a solution for crime is a peculiarity of the American judicial approach, in contrast to other Western nations. Certainly there are crimes that warrant it, but possession of something that hasn't caused harm may not meet the bar for this approach, when you look at how counterproductive 'corrections' like this measurably are, and the larger history of its use as a tool of prejudice, poor police work, and the profit motive of privately owned prisons.
John Oliver recently put out an explanation of how bail reform is desperately needed in this country, if you're interested in learning that way. An alarming takeaway I had from it is that half a million Americans are currently in jail awaiting their case to be heard, unable to post bail. They are not convicted, only charged. Some non-zero number of them are innocent, their lives completely upended and in indefinite limbo.
While I completely agree about bail reform, I think you may have a misconception about prison populations (people actually convicted.)
Of the roughly 1 million people incarcerated in state prisons, over 60% are there for violent crimes. About 3.8% are in prison for drug possession - about 40,000. So yes, too many, but not 1 in 150. Now, 1 in 5 people are in jail for some kind of drug offense, but that's not simple possession.
It's definitely worth having the conversation about what to do about that, but don't think that 'possession of something that hasn't caused harm' is the cause of most incarcerations.
Yes, anyone who has walked around NYC in the last 10 years and thinks that theres some sort of mass incarceration of marijuana users is delusional. The smell is basically on any block on any given day, and theres open selling of it from unlicensed mobile dispensaries.
Pretending the jails are filled with non-violent simple drug offenders is someone either ill informed or not wanting to have a serious conversation. Either way, they are probably not in a position to be harmed one way or the other by increased criminal violence because they are high status enough to believe their zip code or income insulate them from it.
Further, to your stat of 60% of incarcerated being their for violent offenses probably undersells how many were "violent". The NY bail reform laws were passed by pols who said it only applied to "non violent" offenses.
However the criminal law definition & intuitive civilian understanding of "non violent" do not necessarily align. There were plenty of cases in NYC post 2019 of people getting pushed down the stairs of subways, or sucker punched on the sidewalk which somehow fell into the "non-violent" bucket, for the purposes of the law.
The whole argument on bail reform would be moot if suspects were getting a speedy trial. We shouldn't be hearing of cases where people are out on the streets able to commit 5 different offenses over 9 months while still awaiting trial on the first charges.
Agreed that if speedy trials were a thing, the local jail and bail reform problem would be greatly reduced. But there has been some refuted talking points around someone commiting 5 or 9 (or whatever made up number) of multiple distinct crimes while awaiting trial. If it happens it's exceedingly rare. Please link me to them if you find them.
It is much closer to 2 million those who are incarcerated with about 400,000 of those from drug possession. Less than half for violent offenses and that's probably an overcount.
I mentioned in 1 in 150 Americans because that's the ratio of 2 million to ~300 million of the US population.
I think it's really, really important to be careful with words when discussing things like this.
PPI did not estimate that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug possession. They estimated that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. In the state system, among people convicted (again, we agree about bail reform, so I wasn't talking about the 500,000 people not convicted, and fed is a totally different animal so focused on what is most likely), only 40,000, according to the PPI estimates, are there for drug possession.
And again, though yes, entering someone's home at night for the purpose of theft is considered a violent crime in some jurisdictions, 600,000 people are estimated to be incarcerated in state prison for violent crimes - of those, maybe you could say that there is an exaggeration in some of the 120k there for robbery. According to that PPI sheet, 140,000 or so are in state prison for murder.
Removing those currently incarcerated while awaiting trial, you have 1.5 million in all prisons and a 453/100k incarceration rate. That's about 4X Canada's. Removing all drug convictions, not just possession, would decrease that number to about 1.25 million. To match Canada's rate, we'd need to have about 350k incarcerated individuals; right now, according to that PPI sheet, we have about 290,000 incarcerated for rape/sexual assault, murder, and manslaughter alone.
gausswho says >"Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?"<
Incarcerated for what and for how long? You're just giving numbers without specifying their offenses nor whether they are locked up awaiting trial or the end of their sentences.
Quick point: CRT have nothing to do with "white privilege". CRT is a subset of critical theory, which basically is a method of research in "humanities" (history, linguistics, archeology, probably others).
Critical theory is a postmodernist (postmarxist?) method, also used by rightwing researchers (Furet immediatly come to mind) to improve our knowledge of certain "facts" beyond the myths our ancestors built.
For example, we applied critical theory to old European cairns, and decided to do more analysis on squeletons we found in the 70s and 80. It appears that we misgendered some, and just because someone was buried with weapons did not mean it was always a man, it could also (in some, limited cases) be a female.
This discovery is actually aligned with the discovery of Celtic law texts (which are very rare, as Celts were mostly an oral culture, sadly).
CRT is basically the same thing, but applied with race. Its basically says "lets review this experiment/discovery from the 50, what could have been a bias of the researchers at the time".
In my opinion, this shouldn't have been separated from critical theory: CRT suffer the same syndrome most of the US does, and the focus on race hide the class issues. My pet theory is that liberals kinda liked the method, but disliked the fact that it was heavily inspired by historical materialism (and carries with it the idea of classism).
Taking a marxist global concept and applying it to a limited scope to avoid disturbing everything too much is basically what they did when they transformed the concept of "emancipation" into "empowerment" for feminism. Sure, short-term it works to keep everything still, at what price though.
My guess is most people don't want to say yes to _everything_ on a survey because it's equivalent to not answering. So it's unsurprising that this would come out low when lumped in with academics. When asked straight up about race I'd imagine the response would be stronger. But of course that's just a hypothesis.
The survey specifically asks about racial discrimination. There is indeed more widespread support for "affirmative action", but not race-based affirmative action. I don't think the supreme court is going to strike down policies favoring first generation college students or low income students, only those focused on race.
In the words of Immortal Technique - Philosophy of Poverty:
"As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue.
Many of us are in the same boat and it's sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole".
Out of curiosity, how many people have flagged this post? It seems to be actively deprioritized by the HN algo? Now this post is in mid second page 613pts 592comments 7 hrs. For comparison the first ten posts now on HN are:
1. Blip: A tool for seeing your internet latency
245 pts 5 hours ago | 88 comments
HN downweights posts automatically based on the rate of commenting. High commenting rates makes the post less visible because it tends to be controversial and therefore not great reading for HN
There's a (conspiracy) theory out there which describes this as intentional. If society is focused on race, it will continue being divided, which is more-or-less going to ensure that peasants won't unite and/or revolt.
You can see this across companies at a lower level (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/amazon-lab... and https://archive.ph/1khJw). Discussions about race will suck all the air out of the proverbial room, will sow division and create resentment. Regardless of political color, people will always have a tiny bit of resentment when it comes to stuff like affirmative action. So instead of being mad at their boss, they're going to be mad at their colleague (who's completely innocent in this) and slowly but surely start accepting right-wing narratives as truth. Holy crap, even more division, right? Nice.
Many Americans are made believe that they are temporarily embarassed billionaires, and if they are just a little bit more comfortable than the next black or other minority, they are on the top of the world.
Somebody here on HN said something that I think perfectly explains my relationship with The Economist: they are right a lot of the time, but they are always really late with their takes. This is a perfect example of something that people have been saying for many decades, and it would have been a good thing to remind us of five or ten years ago. Now, I read it and I'm like "well... duh."
How do you determine the race of a student? "Class" can be designated by objective measures like family income, whether or not parents are university graduates, etc.
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
Race is by definition self-reported, and is easily gamed, as recent high profile stories show. 1950s America everyone wanted to be white. 2020s America everyone wants to identify as something else. This should tell you how the incentives have inverted.
Class is also easy to game and hard to define.
And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3?
How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way?
Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income.
Assets are self reported and hideable.
Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
Educational attainment is pretty easy to judge. Parents almost certainly have linkedin profiles. Census data also asks for education attainment. Incomes and assets are also attainable via tax info. Sure, they can cheat on income taxes, but usually that's making $100M in assets look like $60M. Just based on address they can at least determine the value of your home. An applicant attending Deerfield Academy that reports a family of low income and no parental education is going to ring some alarm bells, and probably isn't going to pass muster.
We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
Both of your examples (linkedin profile & census response) are the very definition of self-reported. Once they become a measure that has negative consequences for your childs college admission, they will stop being as accurately self reported. Further - a single social network is not an objective measure.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%.
It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.
No, distinguishing between the 30%, 55% and 70% is not really relevant. It's mostly about distinguishing the top 5-10% from the rest of the applicant pool. As per the article:
> A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.
It is not nearly so simple for someone in the top 1% to try and pretend to be part of the bottom 60%. Their home address alone would usually be enough to mark them as upper income. Work history is not so easy to hide or fabricate. The government has employment records, and people need to disclose their work history to get future employment.
Separating the 30%, 55%, and 70% isn't really relevant. All of them are lower-class in the context of university admissions. Furthermore, these people wouldn't have the means to hide their assets, and they wouldn't even have that much assets to hide. The median net worth in 2019 was just over $120k [1]. For these people, you mostly just look at income.
> Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
idk, these seem like things that can be reasonably calculated based on current statistics
Many people have given answers to this very good question.
But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student?
- Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors.
- Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too?
- An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then?
Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice.
Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige.
And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
> That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place.
The way I see it, the admissions design goal for prestigious universities is to ensure that the smartest students in the country and the richest students in the country get the same indistinguishable diploma - their diploma - and that way they sustain and reinforce both their prestige and funding.
Meritocracy basically. You want the hardest working and/or smartest at the top in your country to compete with other countries. Let them work hard, take taxes and distribute to the other classes pensions. Everyone wins.
Having PhDs that are presidents seems like a great indicator that the democratic system is not corrupt.
Unfortunately, parental income can be a terrible proxy.
High income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers.
Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital gains, they often do it erratically, so it can be fairly easy to game a university admission that looks at parental income by avoiding income for the years universities request.
Meanwhile, I know people whose parents had very high incomes, but didn't actually have any real, accessible wealth saved, didn't save for their children's education, and had slept walked into too expensive of a lifestyle to divert any of their income.
Because their parents made too much, they got zero financial aid and ended up covered in mountains of loans because their parents didn't actually have the money to give them.
To be fair though, the fault in this case lies exclusively on the irresponsible parents who had the option to provide for their children's education, but opted to leave them to the wolves.
Parental income is a terrible proxy? The abilities of ones guardians growing up is a huge factor in what opportunities someone is offered and a lot of that is dictated by how much money is available for the child. Other aspects like the intelligence, love, care, wit of the parents and child may be larger factors, but that's not something one can quantify on a form.
My oldest will be applying to college in 2027. If it would maximize their chances of admission, I could arrange for my 2026 income tax return to show any 5 or most 6 figure sums that I needed. If I really needed to, I could do the same for 2025 as well.
Showing a household income of $75K in that year/those years won't change the more comfortable financial situation they grew up in.
Brilliant and accomplished people don't always pursue wealth. In certain subcultures it's crass, uncouth, one might even say low class to pursue something too practical or employable, to be too interested in material things and conspicuous consumption. These people aren't rich on paper but they are rich in genetics, habits, attitudes, values, vocabularies, media diets - and they raise brilliant, accomplished kids. Affirmative action for high academic performers subject to low family income would be an almost perfectly tailored handout for this cohort.
Filtering on parental education level might knock most of them out & get better at targeting kids who outperformed their circumstances in more surprising ways. But is the legibility or surprisingness of the kid's outperformance really the point? I think maybe what you'd want to do is give some slots in the meritocracy to kids who are not outperformers at all, but chosen randomly, without regard to academic performance.
For wealthy people, the listed income can be arbitrarily changed if there is a motivation to do so. If having low income benefits their kids admissions to Harvard, then this year the family business will issue no dividends and rather just loan money to the owners, and the CEO compensation will be temporarily adjusted to $30k/year.
I assumed by class they were speaking about the delta between doctors/software engineers at Amazon and warehouse workers at Amazon. I assume generationally wealthy families applying to colleges are already identified by admission departments and their less qualified children's admission is (and would remain) predicated on donating to the library fund.
That's a great way to get a class full of front-line gentrifier families whose breadwinners are academics, journalists, artists, nonprofit staffers, political aides, social workers, etc.
Class is not income, and finding the highest-performing kids from lower-earning families and neighborhoods is an almost perfect strategy for demonstrating the gaps. Of course that's my own background, so I'd take it!
That adds another datapoint. And the schools attended. A lawyer with a JD from Yale and an undergrad from Harvard is in a different class from someone from a low-tier lawschool.
We probably have very different definitions of class that's causing this confusion. The definition of class I'm using is laid across a spectrum from those who sell their labor on one end to those who make money from the ownership of property on the other.
The reason I use this definition is because the economic relations are reflected in social relations. The social relations one has when they primarily live off the earnings of property are qualitatively different from those who don't - this difference forms the basis of class.
Know that this isn't an idiosyncratic definition - the cradle it was born in was the same cradle that bore sociology itself.
My cousin couldn't afford to go to college because his mom made peanuts and his dad ran off. Couldn't get financial aid because he needed both parents' tax returns. Forcing kids to prove they're poor means rejecting poor kids with absentee parents.
Antisocialism is the root of so many of America's problems. Tax wealth, seize inheritance, and don't charge for higher education. Guillotines only work for the people who can afford them.
not a great indicator, but good enough proxy for class: family income.
class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all.
but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
I mean, it basically boils down to money. Set prices high enough and you get those who can afford it. And if you've always been elitest, then alumni admissions will all be upper class as well.
Elite schools practice need-blind admissions and have generous need-based financial aid. The more elite the school, the higher and gentler the taper to full price as you go up the family income scale. Poor kid gets a full ride anywhere. Middle class kid gets a full ride from Harvard, half off Chicago, sticker price at Northeastern.
Only the mediocre private schools (or stingy rich parents) actually price kids out. Almost all of the SES filtering is based on grades, test scores, and essays.
People could revolt and seize power from the American oligarchs, but they won't because there's a system that keeps them fighting against each other.
The idea is to identify divisive topics and keep talking about them over and over and over until people are upset fighting each other, but more importantly, distracted from the fact they could at any moment revolt and reform everything.
Five years ago we could see the continuing national oppression of the Lakota by America, during the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy. Imagine if Russia was trying to ram an oil pipeline through the Ukraine right now. Americans complain the Russians don't respect the sovereignty if the Ukraine, but Americans don't respect the sovereignty of the Lakota.
In the same manner Africans are nationally oppressed by America. This was more evident in my parents time when they couldn't vote, use white bathrooms, drinking fountains, play major league baseball etc. During Robert's life as well. Some of those restrictions have been removed, but looking at statistics we see how Africans are kept out of these places. The Supreme Court generally lessened the overt oppression against Africans since the 1950s, it looks like they are headed back to the old days now.
I don't think Europeans can comprehend the schizophrenia of America's attitude towards those of African descent. Like here, their friends at the Economist (probably some 20 something factotum just out of university) carry this idea on. Of course painting America's national oppression of the Africans it kidnapped to here as just, the natural order of things etc.
I think gender will be the more interesting one. 60% of college students in the us are women. That means a 3:2 ratio of women to men. If affirmative action is disallowed, it’ll accelerate this trend. 6 points more and there’s now a 2:1 ratio. Really feels like the premise for a radically different society.
I find the premise of this article pretty humorous. It’s always a neat little magic trick to tell people that two bad things can’t exist at the same time.
“The solution to classism is to ignore racism! No don’t ask why I feel that way or how I got to that conclusion!”
I wonder how this analogy might play out for a country that is more homogeneous, such as Japan, China, etc. I know there’s cultural discrimination, caste systems and so forth, but is there a race problem there?
The title is very misleading. It is really about 20% - 30% that are focused on race or intersectionality. The whole thing jumpged the shark a while ago.
The narrative of meritocracy is so old and running out of fashion. Merit confers privilege and you can spend privilege in many things but the most important thing you can spend it on is investing in maintaining that privilege via less than mertitocratic means.
Privileged classes have become very good at keeping the privilege: they have built a large moat (wall?) around them at the top floor of the social ladder using the bricks of the ladder itself. It's so hard to climb the ladder and so hard for those at the top to fall.
As an immigrant to US and being a POC with literally no savings, parents dropping me off in college, obtaining scholarships, working tirelessly to succeed in life; I couldn't disagree with you more. Even the most marginalized people in US have better resources than where I grew up.
1) A Bangladeshi immigrant whose parents entered the US as economic refugees
2) A Uyghur immigrant whose parents entered the US as political refugees
3) A rust-belt white whose family and community was ravaged by the opioid crisis
3) A descendent of black slaves whose parents were economy oppressed by Jim Crow and Redlining
How many "credits" do you give to someone who experienced food insecurity? What about the death of a family member? Do they get bonus points if it was a violent death? If so how much? The more you dig into these subjective measurements, the less it measures the candidate and the more you end up measuring the measurer.
Society cannot find right answer to this kind of question intellectually, instead it can only be determined politically. If we go down this path, the the answer we get will be a reflection who the winning political faction is, and what their prejudices are. Today, it is the hyper race-conscious left against Asian Americans. Yesterday, it was white elites against Jews. Tomorrow, who knows?
I agree that GPAs, SATs, and economic hardship are imperfect measures of merit. But what's important is that they are systems that can be interrogated for their inner workings. You can arrive at a decent understanding of how and what is being measured. However, the act of "privilege measurement" is so muddy as to be an enormous invitation for prejudice to seep in.
Depends. For instance, if I went to American Samoa, I would be in effect racially barred from owning most property despite being a US national just like the locals. Real estate ownership is a common element of measurement of success.
And liberalism putting identity politics first divides the electorate and makes it so we can't make any progress on overwhelmingly popular economic policies (e.g. universal health care, college and child care), which is by-design. And the Democrats will continue to take money from corporate interests and happily fail to deliver on any really big policies which would move the needle for the bulk of Americans. Middle and upper class liberals will continue to scream about racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic people--who will continue to be those things and vote Republican and nothing will get done.
But The Economist packaging up the end of Affirmative Action with a message about how maybe that is a good thing because we might restructure it around class (we won't) is a bit disingenuous.
The Economist, FT and Bloomberg are obsessed with both race and class. Not content with the meager profits of economic reporting on a budget, they have become peddlers of social ressentment for a long while.
They are sociologists / journalists / non-technical economists earning 50k (barely percentile 60), and telling us daily how action X is immoral (exactly what bishops and priests used to do).
Journalists don't decide the editorial stance of the publications they write for. In the short term, it's up to an editorial board or editor-in-chief. In the long term, it's up to the owners.
oh come on! all are well known as being right-wing. and all of them are support organs for capitalism. i'm not saying there anything wrong with that - i enjoy reading both the ft and economist. and i like living in a basically capitalist society - the UK
are well known as being right-wing. and all of them are support organs for capitalism
If anyone who believes in capitalism is "right-wing", sure. But by US standards, these are center left publications (like unofficially Democratic party affiliated left, not Bernie/Socialist/Occupy left).
If you want to call them right-wing, show me an article critical of global warming, endorsing a republican besides Liz Cheney, or acknowledging Trump did at least one good thing (without caveats or apologies).
there is a difference between being right-wing and being a complete swivel-eyed loony. those publications are the former. also republicans and democrats are both right-wing (both part of the "money-party", as Gore Vidal called them). sadly.
The reason that communism thrives in racially homogenous societies like North Korea, 20th century Russia or China is because it requires people to believe that everyone is roughly equal and that they only have different economic outcomes because the bourgeois conspire to hold the proletariat down.
In a multi-racial society like the U.S, people are less likely to believe that because of racism. This is why libertarians and racists are often strange bedfellows because they oppose communism together, but for completely different reasons. They would probably be sworn enemies in a racially homogenous society.
"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. This helps explain why American culture is so hostile to the idea of limits, why voters during the last energy shortage rejected the sweater-wearing Jimmy Carter and elected Ronald Reagan who told them it was still “morning in America.” Nowhere does the myth of progress have more fervent believers." - Ronald Wright, 'A Short History of Progress'
Racism was invented long before that, as a proxy of the invention of race (specifically "white" as a racial category) to justify chattel slavery under the pretense of white supremacy.
So you're correct, for certain definitions of "working class," but I find attempts to dismiss anti-racism (and increasingly LGBT ) progressive efforts as being merely a distraction from class struggle to be tone-deaf at best, and counterproductive at worst.
Intersectionality is a thing. Race shapes class - especially in the United States where class was literally built around racial caste and identity - and class shapes race. We can have praxis along more than one dimension.
AA (and also Critical Race Theory) argue that race/racism are the defining structural concept that order economic and social relationships. Marxism argues that it is by wealth or class.
For a fun conspiracy theory, could neoliberalism be pushing this CRT view because it divides and conquers the lower classes by race?
There is an error in the opening paragraph of the article, while it's true Trump added another conservative to the Supreme Court, prior conservative courts have always upheld the legality of affirmative action; indeed, every iteration of the Supreme Court has been conservative since affirmative actions inception.
One would question why affirmative action was legal and constitutional just a few years ago, and as far back as the 1980's, but illegal now.
As for the content of the article, discrimination in the US against blacks, historically and presently, is race based, not class based. This is common sense, perceptualy one only sees someones outer features, not their bank balance or other unknowable signs of class.
At one point blacks (even world famous American blacks) couldn't vote, couldn't attend the commons, couldn't purchase homes in certain affluent neighborhoods, and couldn't be part of certain organizations (and still can't till this day). Curiously, blacks were never compensated for this injury perpetuated against them by their own government.
This sort of discrimination was wholly race based, your income or your social standing was irrelevant. This is why people focus on race and not the red herring that is class.
> This sort of discrimination was wholly race based
You said it right. “Was”, not “is”. In 2022 we need to focus on what’s affecting our society the most, which is income and wealth, not race. Of course racism exits today, but it’s playing a far smaller structural role than the amount of money a person and their family has.
>In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now [i.e. 2028], the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
Lol this is why Trump was elected… it’s what makes the “establishment” of both parties oppose him. It’s why we are constantly reminded by the economist that “republicans and trump are racists”.
Steve Bannon actually explains this quite well in a PBS Frontline interview
It’s infuriating to constantly have the Economist pushing the idea “the country is racist” or “so and so is racist” for many years now. Only to point out what most people know - a poor person in west Virginia is likely to be white, and have more in common with a poor black person from DC than a wealthy white person from DC.
This was a pretty core topic of conversation around Bernie's run for president, and Marxist lefties have been saying this quite consistently. Would be fascinating to see the Economist actually engage with some of that directly.
the problem with the marxists isn't their evaluation of the problem, it's that they can study history and still somehow have picked the 2nd worst solution possible.
Well, 99% of Marxism is "evaluation of the problem." It's highly descriptive, barely prescriptive. The more prescriptive offshoot of Marxism would be Leninism, and I agree that authoritarian command economies are a pretty bad idea.
LMAO at these journalists pretending they're so surprised to find this. As if they had no hand in creating this environment... and as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal.
The goal of whom? Please don't vaguely hand wave about the .1%.
Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
Bezos for one. He specifically bought newspaper to massage the image of billionaires like him. I don't think he's beneth that tactic given that Amazon has huge employee rotation by design because they haven't anticipate running out of people.
I don't think they were particularly successful in that, there was quite a bit of backlash about billionaires blowing millions of dollars on useless vanity projects so they can fly to space on giant space dicks: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/20/jeff-bezos-r...
Isn't this case only when the thing really is obvious and just because you can spot couple of those "obvious cases" does not mean you have spotted every attempt, only the obvious ones.
Possibly I guess, but from my perspective, as someone who reads a wide range of viewpoints, it appears that it's the central and left leaning papers that are the ones pushing the importance of race in America, not the conservative ones like the ones that murdoch owns. The perspective I get from his papers seems more of just generally disliking any black complaint about the society's treatment of them, with the implication that anything wrong with black people is their own fault.
No, there are certainly times where the media reporting is “top-down”. This latest recession has produced some strange reporting around justifying raising fed rates to cause unemployment to reduce inflation, for example.
A more historical example would be on the early days of the 2nd Gulf War and the war drums beating for Iran perhaps a year later (that never materialized into a war)
I agree that it's fascinating, but the race issue is more like a pornography for America. And Americans would prefer to consume the porn than the substance.
> as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal
There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy.
How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
Identity politics was manufactured to distract from the income inequality and divide people so they couldn't focus on the increasing shafting of the American middle class.
I think this is right. They tend to have alternate ways to circumvent the systems they put in place --such as "donor" privileges in university admissions.
It's because class in America has always been fluid, with people going from poor to rich or middle class, and from rich to poor, based on their life decisions, and seizing opportunities.
Perhaps the current events have strangled these opportunities for enough people so class can now be used to divide the population against itself?
Of course it's the truth. Success does not just fall into anyone's lap, save a very few minority of cases that get trumpeted as-if they're normal. There are no shortcuts. Hard work and persistence are what is required to be successful in this country - full stop. And hard work doesn't mean you sweat more...
There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful. Are there advantages some children's parents provide - of course - but that does not preclude rising up based on one's own merit. Your children should do better than you... because they build off your life's work.
People like to criticize the American Dream from their couch while watching TV... bemoaning how unfair life is and how the deck was stacked against them. They do this instead of working to better their own future... ten years later and they're still complaining, having done nothing to change their situation.
Look at the most successful people in this country. What do they all have in common?
Opportunity is only available to those who are in the right place at the right time speaking to the right people. If we consider the fact that the universe is entirely deterministic we can see that the ideas of free will and meritocracy evaporate.
Complete nonsense. You literally make your own opportunities - although not all opportunities are obvious when present and some do not reveal themselves unless other opportunities are taken first.
How do you think the "right place, right time" people get to the right place and right time? It's not an accident - it's years in the making for most people. Some never even realize they're in the right place or at the right time, and miss opportunities. That's just how it goes...
The people we're talking about do not seek opportunities, do not make themselves ready for opportunities and do not posses skills to capitalize on opportunities. This is why they sit at home complaining about life instead of studying harder and working harder or building their own opportunity. They literally expect one day something grand will fall into their lap and they'll be the next billionaire. Life doesn't work that way...
Having both a mother and father at home while growing up is one of the premier biological indicators of future success. Wealth helps, sure, but it's very easily lost if you grow up without perspective.
Is a cell deterministic? Is the physics on which cells operate deterministic? From my understanding, yes
What does that mean for neurons? Those must be deterministic, which means that the complex organisms which cells create are also deterministic. Their behaviors is entirely deterministic
Sufficiently complex systems take on a life of their own. A rock rolling down a hill is deterministic. That same rock rolling down the hill a thousand times, has a statistical distribution pattern.
That's ignoring the trees for the forest and saying that forest growth and death patterns are entirely inexplicable because the system is too complex.
Psychologists use statistical models because we lack the full understanding of the brain, but that doesn't mean that behavior can't be predicted if we did have a full understanding.
Saying that the rock rolling down the hill has a distribution pattern completely ignores complexity. Did it have the same exact starting point each time? How strong was the wind blowing and in which direction? Did a pebble move out of the rocks path from the last run?
If all conditions of the rock rolling down the hill are exactly the same that means that the rock will take the same path each time. Differences create that statistical distribution.
There actually are systems that prevent people from becoming successful and it, at least partially, has to do with quality of education for poor people in certain areas. It isn't explicit, but the purpose of a system is what it does
That only works if your definition of class is purely economical, and you stop looking at the 0.01%
If your definition of class is more European, it's perfectly possible to be upper class and have a down generation, economically speaking, while your network remains upper class, and your children go right up again, as they don't make the same relatively low salary choices of their parents. This is a well measured situation all over the world, and the US is not special. See the well known studies in Italy, where ancestry and class correlations are linked for over a dozen generations.
But let's say all you care about is income, and look at intergenerational income mobility. It's not as if the United State does all that well, and most of the difference is emigration of high class immigrants. The doctor that can't get a job in the US as a doctor, but whose children vastly outearn them, becoming relatively high class quite quickly. See https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration....
An alternative explanation of decreasing class mobility is simply that an extended period of relatively high class mobility has left most people presorted into the class they belong in.
I remember when the elites did a Jedi mind trick on the Occupy Wall Street folks and made them change their focus to race and what bathroom people get to use. It was remarkable.
My anecdata is that as soon as the mega-corporations started waving their pride flags and doing race sensitivity training the masses on my FB/Twitter feed changed their emoji usage right along with them. To be fair this is the same people who immediately forgot that black lives mattered when they traded their BLM fist emoji for a Ukraine flag.
That book was written by authors with a noted conservative agenda so I’m
not sure I would take them at face value, especially given the hyperbolic title.
> He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess
That is a very disingenuous if not flat out incorrect summary of what he said.
That may be one group of people who might be outside of “this mess” and in his category X, but I don’t think that university intellectuals are categorically in class X.
For folks who are interested in a more contemporary class summary, I recommend Michael O’Church’s version:
Interesting; I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised" about anything. Do you have any reason to think that they've expressed opposing views in the past?
>I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised"
it's not as dramatic as feigning surprise, but the mere act of choosing a specific topic to report on makes known the ideas of what a specific journo may think the public will find intriguing.
in other words, "Water is Wet." gets no viewership, but "5 Ways You May Not Know How Water Can Kill" does get views -- likewise when a journalist has a topic like "Why X is Y", we (the reader) can presume that the work holds some novelty other than stating the obvious.
'pretending to be surprised' comes from the premise that class is such an obvious distinction in the United States that stating such is about obvious as stating 'Water is Wet.'
Just wait until they find out the inter-generational conflict they've been fomenting for decades gets the same treatment. Every "Boomer this" or "GenZ that" is a diversion of class-resentment.
Whenever I hear these totalizing opinions I do some searching. The NYT has published an imperial ton of articles on class in the last several years. About the effects on income inequality, on how wealth inequality is now at its highest since WWII, a breakdown of guaranteed income programs by city, a synopsis of a study on poverty reduction, a synopsis of De Blasio's mixed successes and failures on addressing New York income equality, how the effects of New York heat weaves are worse for poorer people...
I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it.
I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.
If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse. Maybe not existing institutions, but certainly there's nothing preventing someone else from taking to the field. Indeed, there is no shortage of media that do focus on class issues, but they are invariably small & marginalized.
Media will literally eat poop in exchange for attention and the wealth and influence that comes with it. Pretending that the reason they're not talking about class is because of some misguided focus of those in the industry is absurd.
It's just... if you don't pretend, then you have to place the blame elsewhere, and nobody wants to.
To clarify, I wouldn't deny that the bar is lowering (as you said, it shows). The narrative scapegoating of the media invariably implies that the media is detached from the public and is following its own agenda on this matter. There's lots of ways that the "media elite" are detached from the public and consequently are disconnected from the marketplace; this is NOT one of them.
The unacknowledged truth behind "Actual news outlets covering actual news have an enormous incentive to cut corners on this stuff", and "that all sells better than Lehrer’s guidelines do" is that it's consumers of media who are firmly driving this trend. If the audience valued Lehrer's guidelines more, there'd not be an enormous incentive to cut corners. If anything, the folks who work in media overvalue Lehrer's guidelines as compared to the market. It's not them who is doing it.
This was interesting until it blamed Jewish people.
If you don't like class systems, blame those who perpetuate them. The extremely wealthy, the royalists and the supporters of caste type systems. Otherwise you're just being antisemitic when you could be making an interesting point.
I didn't make that infographic and I don't have another one without the bottom right part, but it would be weird to invalidate the whole point because whoever made it has said the taboo word.
I also think that it's extremely stupid to blame "all Jews" for anything. But it's equally stupid to call "all white people" privileged, especially if we need to use 2 different definitions of "white" when arriving at the privileged conclusion vs. applying the penalty for it. Both approaches are stupid, divisive and inconstructive, and the more someone pushes in one direction, the more pushback it creates. Focusing on class, or especially "self-made wealth vs. inherited wealth" could do wonders in terms of actually uniting people.
Almost anything a politician does anymore, they can basically always bypass accountability by claiming the impetus is to help advance some racial or other marginalized agenda.
That's all the media and the politicians are ever talking about: the things that separate us, things that make us different from one another. That's the way the ruling class operates in any society: they try to divide the rest of the people; they keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other so that they, the rich, can run off with all the fucking money.
Fairly simple thing... happens to work.
You know, anything different, that's what they're gonna talk about: race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality, anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so that they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class... keep on showing up at those jobs.
The most pathetic thing about the American discourse about Affirmative Action is that everyone has an opinion on what the admissions standards SHOULD be from their perspective on how society should operate.
Some think admissions should be all about merit.
Some think that since the first 18 years of the student's live has been unfair and racist, 4 yrs of college should somehow attempt to rectify that.
Nobody realizes that the colleges don't give a shit about any of that. Admissions are there to maximize the prestige of the college. That's it. To be damned with diversity and society.
Furthermore, nobody seems to recognize that Affirmative Action doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things. College admissions are not really about merit. Affirmative actions is not able to undo the racism and economic equities of this country. It's not able to make black and brown parents push education on their kids the same way that Asian parents do. By the time the student is 18 it's too late - society has done its worst. And so despite the fact that the US has had affirmative action for many many years, social mobility here is worse than France, Italy, Sweden, and Britain. (see https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...)
> For more than 40 years the court had allowed some positive discrimination
I’m not a fan of the term “positive discrimination” at all. It tries to hide the fact that the “positive” effect to one group is necessarily at the expense of another. Whether it’s positive or negative just depends on which group we’re talking about.
Agreed, if you have a finite amount of resources and "positively" favor one group over another, this automatically disfavors another group. When skin color is used for this "positive" favor, we have a term for the impact on the other group: racism. Have we not learned that racism is ALWAYS bad?
Based on comments I read on here this morning about how some people think it’s ok to be racist because you’re basing your disdain for them on the way other people who look like them behave, no.
(To clarify, the comments said, “I dislike people of X color because of the behaviors I’ve observed in people of X color.” And they argued that it wasn’t the same as just hating people based on color, although that’s exactly what it is.)
Isn't it though? I think that's the point: a well-off or even rich black kid from two black lawyers or doctors or whatnot is being favoured over a poor white kid from a (former) coal mining community in West-Virginia. The number of university openings, job openings, grants, etc. are all finite in number, so there is some amount of "competition" involved.
And you can talk about statistics and averages and whatnot all day, but once you start applying averages to individuals – which is essentially what "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" amounts to – you're always going to be wrong in a very substantial number of cases.
The political parties use race because it divides people. They don't use class because they don't want what happened to the French Aristocracy to happen to them; they'd rather have the proletariat fight amongst themselves than to target the "real problem."
In the US rich black people, hispanics, and asians are just like rich white people...but with different decor.
Actually I prefer rich white people, because they do care about the aesthetics of the public arena. Public service etc isn't just lip service for many of them. The whole of Western Europe and the wealthy enclaves (and high-end suburbs) of America are a testament to that aesthetic. That ideal, as shown by Currier & Ives and Rockwell, are the world as it should be.
In Asia and Africa the rich are literally walled in, probably because they're always aware of the threat of violence towards them.
The difference in health insurance coverage between whites and blacks is 4 percentage points. The difference in health insurance coverage between high and low income households is 10 percentage points.
There are some data regarding worse outcomes for children (especially boys) of wealthy black families, compared to poorer white families.
For example, they are more likely to go to jail. [1] I believe there may be similar data regarding income/wealth outcomes as well, but the best I could find quickly relates to middle class black families, not wealthy ones. [2]
Of course, this doesn't mean the families are worse off overall, but it does tend to indicate that there are some things working against black families, even middle- and upper-class ones.
I can make one up. Kanye is black and wealthy and gets much more negative attention than Jimbob over here who is on disability and sometimes even mows the grass around his trailer.
Otherwise, it seems kind of suspicious. Extremely so.
There isn't one, and this thread is going to be absolutely full of similar unsourced claims and leaning into stereotypes, either intentionally or not, so just keep that in mind.
Wealthy black people are worse off than poor white people? Do you have any references for that? I can't imagine anyone would rather be starving and white than rich and black.
I don't think that's true. But the data does show that if you control for most factors, race still plays a factor. That is, it's better to be poor and white than poor and black. That said, I'd rather be a black billionaire than dirt poor and white.
It's focused on race, but not in a nice way. It's been arguing about chattel slavery for 200 years, had a civil war over it, and has been busy ever since trying to decide where racial minorities should live and work, and if slaves turned out of plantations with empty pockets were ever at a disadvantage, or if they just fail to have "merit." It's obsessed with race, which is why Affirmative Action and diversity quotas trigger it so much. You would think that the 70% of the population that end up with 80% of the slots would be satisfied, but they're not if they think a black person might have gotten in with a lower SAT score.
It's also focused on class. Its been constantly attacking people who think that class matters since the 20s, and is rabidly anti- any sort of forced sharing, or restrictions on spending as literal sedition.
The economist also hates the poor, but it's willing to care about the poor for a single article if it helps them attack the blacks.
> Surveys show that majorities of African-Americans, Californians, Democrats and Hispanics all oppose the use of race in college admissions (and in other areas).
