Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#21

Post by Kaiyou » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

stirbot wrote: post #18

These are clearly driven individuals who will excel anywhere. In fact when you consider grade inflation, they'd be better of going taking a scholarship from a flagship state university. Especially for STEM majors. Affirmative action is an attempt to break the cycle of educational under-performance for certain groups in America. It's a blunt tool that needs to be improved, not discarded.

The problem I see is that higher education never really improved performance of anyone. The way it historically worked was that higher education institutions would admit only the smartest people around and so only the smartest people would come out of them, too. Smartest roughly equates to highest performing.

Employers would then be able to use the certificate from those institutions to filter for only the smartest people since those were already filtered for to begin with to be eligible to get such a certificate.

If you put people into higher education that ain't already the smartest, you will get people coming out of higher education that ain't the smartest and employers will learn the hard way that the certificate in question is worthless and will begin to filter through other means. Now those students sit on debt they have no way to pay off, since high paying employers will find the smartest people around some other way.

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#22

Post by whenanother » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

JaceLightning wrote: post #5

Leave Asian Americans?? Asian Americans have the highest income of all groups of Americans.

highest taxable income per household. if you have a demographic of people who tend to live with their extended family their entire life. then they will always come out on top. once again people got tricked by comparing people of different cultures with a single stat. this is how the powerful trick people.

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#23

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#24

Post by jbob2000 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

stirbot wrote: post #18

These are clearly driven individuals who will excel anywhere. In fact when you consider grade inflation, they'd be better of going taking a scholarship from a flagship state university. Especially for STEM majors. Affirmative action is an attempt to break the cycle of educational under-performance for certain groups in America. It's a blunt tool that needs to be improved, not discarded.

This assumes that educational under-performance can be fixed by more education.

By my own experiences, the people who I have seen do well academically tended to have stable support systems (whether that is direct family or a mentor, or a solid group of friends, it doesn't matter). And likewise, the people who I have seen do poorly have broken or missing support systems (divorced or absent parents, bad friends or community).

Affirmative action does not solve the support system problem. All it does is throw people who can't swim into the deep end. I am not sure why people are confused as to why these people then drown.

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#25

Post by Simulacra » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 7:13 PM UTC

This article is poorly written. Early on the reporter really steps her foot into it by practically insulting the kid. Then he bristles at her and responds as if he's being attacked. It's cringing and I'm learning more about these two people than I needed to.

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#26

Post by frustrated_90 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

ajscanlan wrote: post #12

streptomycin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do that too, but it can't solve the racial distribution problem which colleges care a lot about: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/1995-SAT...

Originally I was against the idea of affirmative action but I've came around to it, but I still don't understand the need to solve for racial distribution rather than socioeconomic distribution. In my mind affirmative action's goal should be to break the cycle of poverty, where smart kids have poor/uneducated parents which holds them back and they grow up to be poor/uneducated themselves and so on. It's my understand…

I read a paper on this - if you cut the data by social-economic status, the number of 'qualified' black students would be just over 2%, and I think the colleges are targeting 8% of each incoming class (they don't call it a quota but it is, since it stays consistent each year regardless of overall applicants' demographic changes).

Re: Where Does Affirmative Action Leave Asian-Americans?

#27

Post by frustrated_90 » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 11:40 PM UTC

whenanother wrote: post #10

they got rid of affirmative action in california. the asians were the only minorities to see growth in the number of acceptances to uc. however, it was no where near the rate of growth of their population demographic. most of the new spots went to foreign students. once again the faculty went back to being exclusively white male. also all state government jobs hiring practices were no longer scrutinized for discrimin…

I mean, the UC is a merit based educational institution - why should the ethnicity of the faculty matter? If they are the expert in their field and can teach, then who cares if they're white/black/asian/alien.