Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago

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

I don't agree with your comment that it is genetics I think it is more environmental. If you take two smart people. Deprive one of them from sleep, water, food and then give them an IQ test in a dimly lit room that is freezing cold but don't do this to the other person on average the person who was not subject to all that crap will do better. This is the uneven playing field that AA was supposed to correct. If these racial based IQ test took into account the socio economic status of maybe 2 generations before the actual subject and normalized for that I wonder if the difference would be as big or even there at all.

As a big proponent of civil rights and the whole civil rights movement I hope that I'm not misunderstood.

Reverse discrimination refers to discriminating against say non-hispanic white males because they are non-hispanic white or male. It seems obvious to me that making admission choices to increase minority representation at universities is tautologically decreasing the representation of other groups and is reverse discrimination. The question to me is, "Is this a good thing?".

Here in Texas, it works in a way that is not quite obvious. The University of Texas as Austin is a desirable state University. It was once all white (1950), clearly race was being used to discriminate against minority applicants--an unfair and condemnable practice. By 1996, the University, in an attempt to increase minority representation, had been using race as one of the factors in admission, blacks with lower academic scores were admitted ahead of whites with the same scores (clearly reverse discrimination). In 1996, Federal Appeals court ruled against the University and for a white student that made that claim.

The University stopped considering race, but minority representation started to drop and the University found a way in 1997 to discriminate between applicants to change the minority representation again, this time without explicitly mentioning race. It automatically admitted the top 10% of every high school graduating class, regardless of actual academic achievement. This discriminated against the high schools with high performing students. Since these schools were usually found in more expensive suburban neighborhoods that had well funded school districts and mostly white student bodies (so although there was no longer any explicit reverse discrimination, it still produced the same result, minority students were being admitted with lower test scores, etc).

This practice of admitting students based on where they went to high school helped but didn't completely achieve the goals that UT had for the make up of it's student body. In 2003, UT began to use race in addition to the 10% rule and now discriminates in favor of minorities that do not automatically qualify under the modified top 7% rule, this has resulted in a number of law suits that race based discrimination is happening, which it clearly is.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I detest the idea that race is used to discriminate against anybody including groups like Jews, Asians, and whites. I live in a school district that has a very high performing public high school. A friend recently got perfect scores on the SAT and I believe that he got very close to a perfect score on the ACT. He had a very high GPA and was a varsity athlete on a top rank team. He now attends Stanford, but was only around the top 13% of his graduating class. He didn't even bother to apply to the University of Texas. No one needs to feel sorry for him, he's a genius going to Stanford; I feel sorry for so many of his classmates that would have been very successful at an affordable University that can't get in despite working so hard in high school.

Do you have any evidence tying the IQ race-gap to biology? It seems you're making quite a large jump there with not a whole lot of evidence.

> I think it's as much or less of a jump to say "a group with low IQ has that because of their genes, as IQ is genetic" than to say "a group has low IQ because of socioeconomic factors", but then again I'm a certified member of the Church of STEM.

But while IQ capacity is heritable, it's equally well demonstrated that various adverse environmental factors (exposure to virtually all of which are increased on probability/severity by low socioeconomic status) negatively impacts IQ.

Of course, when a population is enslaved and subjected to artificial selective emphasizing suitability for menial labor, genetics are themselves a product of adverse socioeconomic position; of course, with even moderate interbreeding with outside populations, that effect should erode, though it will take many generations to be reduced to background noise.