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Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

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Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#151

Post by atribd »

tdb7893 wrote: post #38
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand the ACLU's statement. Is Harvard's discrimination against Asian-Americans for their race not racial discrimination to the ACLU? Or is it OK because it benefits worse-off races? I'm open to alternatives, I'm not trying to establish a false dichotomy here.

My view on it is that all ethnicities are necessarily equal (no race is smarter than any other) so large scale differences in admissions are the result of cultural and historical circumstances. By picking off most metrics you will get a "better" student body by those metrics but you are also responsible for perpetuating those biases. In addition to this philosophical reasons there is the practical reason that diversi…

> My view on it is that all ethnicities are necessarily equal (no race is smarter than any other)

I'm curious as to why you think that should necessarily be the case.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#152

Post by hackinthebochs »

The subtext of the hand-wringing over this case is that somehow Asians have earned or deserve their spot in Harvard for having X GPA or Y SAT scores, and thus it is "unfair" for people with lower GPA/SATs to be admitted over them. But this is just flat out wrong.

The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT scores. Harvard as an institution wants to increase its prestige over time, and so they want to admit students who will go on to be CEOs, Senators, Presidents, etc. They want to pick the future leaders of society, but this is only correlated with GPA/SAT up to a point.

This is where race-aware admissions is perfectly warranted by Harvard. They want students who are outliers as those people will go on to do great things. But being an outlier of your cluster is important signal. And race is a very important cluster in society. That they structure their admissions to make sure they're getting the outstanding people from a broad range of races and circumstances is Harvard just working in their best interest. If Asian applications are very similar to each other, then they have a good reason to weigh such applications lower because you're no longer an outlier in the sense that is valuable to Harvard.

This isn't a moral issue like some are trying to make this out to be. If there is a moral issue here, its whether any institution should have such an outsized influence on the outcome of a person's life, not whether Asians are being unfairly barred from the king-maker institution.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#153

Post by Jyaif »

risto1 wrote: post #137

Why do people think affirmative action is a good idea? It's not meritocratic. People should be judged based on their skill, not based on their gender, race, or ethnicity. We should be striving for a fair society, not equality of outcome It's insulting to those minorities, it implies that they can't be smart enough to make it without this kind of leg up, and they will never know the extent to which this played a role…

Your initial question is linked to your final remark.

People think affirmative action is a good idea because they think that minorities aren't doing well academically because they don't have role models to identify with. To be clear affirmative action is supposed to be temporary until the culture of minorities that do not do well academically as changed enough.

So paradoxically the goal of affirmative action is to reduce cultural diversity.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#154

Post by jessaustin »

opportune wrote: post #94
creaghpatr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'd love to see Harvard set aside 75% of their spots for a lottery of students who meet an insanely high threshold (98% percentile in the SAT, for example, or some other objective measurement), and then use the other 25% for athletes, legacies, diversity, etc. That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; en…

Over half of all students accepted to Harvard already have test scores in the top 2%

Lots of people dislike the current situation. They might very well prefer a random sampling of the 2% to the weighted-against-asians portion of the 2% that Harvard "already" admits.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#155

Post by jessaustin »

Jyaif wrote: post #143

"Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions" translation: "We don't discriminate, but we discriminate." How can somebody write something that stupid?

Start off with four years of Ivy League undergraduate education...

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#156

Post by educationdata »

mirajshah wrote: post #98
educationdata wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on…

I think you need to source the claim "There is no educational / societal intervention that can reverse its impact on Black kids' education" Consider, just as one example, the paper "Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone" (Dobbie and Fryer 2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/are-high-qual... Here is the abstract: "Harlem Childr…

When I made that claim, I meant at the national /societal level. Of course I didn't mean there is no single successful education experiment.

On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.

In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.

Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#157

Post by castlecrasher2 »

40acres wrote: post #112
nostrademons wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?" Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enri…

I don't think solving the funding issue would directly solve the performance issue because this is a problem with multiple variables like you have mentioned. When we talk about stable 2 parent households we need to consider the fact that many black and Hispanic families are torn apart due to the higher incarceration rates for black and Hispanics when compared to whites, even for doing the same crime. When you split a…

Some of those are good reasons that someone would have a harder time in life, but AA doesn't look at that; it looks solely at your race.

>Minority neighborhoods are also flooded with fast food chains because these corporations have made it clear that they are targeting these populations.

I'm honestly not sure how you can look at that as anything but minorities like fast food so corporations build there.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#158

Post by 2trill2spill »

eric_b wrote: post #48
40acres wrote: post #7

This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion. We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools. We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school…

In Minneapolis the best schools are not the best funded. The North Minneapolis schools, which perform the worst, have the highest funding per pupil by a fair margin. I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.

Not just parents though I graduated from Minneapolis public schools and looking back I would say nearly 1/3rd of teachers should not have been teachers for one reason or another.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#159

Post by castlecrasher2 »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #152

The subtext of the hand-wringing over this case is that somehow Asians have earned or deserve their spot in Harvard for having X GPA or Y SAT scores, and thus it is "unfair" for people with lower GPA/SATs to be admitted over them. But this is just flat out wrong. The issue is that admissions to top universities isn't strictly meritocratic. Or to put it another way, "merit" in this context isn't simply GPA and SAT sco…

What you explain in your third paragraph sounds an awful lot like quotas.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#160

Post by tdb7893 »

atribd wrote: post #151
tdb7893 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view on it is that all ethnicities are necessarily equal (no race is smarter than any other) so large scale differences in admissions are the result of cultural and historical circumstances. By picking off most metrics you will get a "better" student body by those metrics but you are also responsible for perpetuating those biases. In addition to this philosophical reasons there is the practical reason that diversi…

> My view on it is that all ethnicities are necessarily equal (no race is smarter than any other) I'm curious as to why you think that should necessarily be the case.

I'm referring to things that affect ability (things like skin color are different but not unequal in this regard). Even if certain small communities had some variations they become meaningless once you reach the scale of "asian", "european", or even just "chinese" so once your are talking about a group of any significant size it averages out. I used the term "necessarily" because by statistics on that large of a sample they will be equal unless there is a reason to think the underlying distribution between those groups is different (which I don't think there is on a large scale).
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