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Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

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Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#71

Post by muh_gradle »

crazypyro wrote: post #52
throwawaysea wrote: post #12

This ruling is a travesty and I hope the Supreme Court overturns it when this is appealed. It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory. Take a look at the distribution of students by race in the University of California system, where they're not permitted to discriminate in this manner, thanks to Prop 209 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_20..…

Harvard has a 25%+ Asian American undergrad class, (edit)~~2.5x (Harvard's is ~60% of UC's) more than the latest number listed on that wiki page, so your final statement is factually incorrect`~. I quoted wrong number. It's 25% vs 40%. https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

We all know that number should probably be higher if we're actually caring about academic performance.

Affirmative action doesn't actually bother me as much as legacy based admissions. Just absolutely idiotic that it's accepted.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#73

Post by metzby »

deogeo wrote: post #37

For perspective, here are the Harvard vs US demographics, sorted by most to least represented [1,2,3,4]: Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x) Asian American: 25.3% vs 5.3% (4.77x) Native Hawaiian: 0.6% vs 0.2% (3.00x) Native American: 1.8% vs 0.7% (2.57x) African American: 14.3% vs 12.7% (1.13x) Hispanic or Latino: 12.2% vs 17.6% (0.69x) non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) [1] https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/adm…

I didn't see "non-Jewish" white in the source. Did you add up the rest and subtract from 100?

I think these should be able to add up to more than 100. E.g., someone who is both Hispanic and Black.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#76

Post by gameswithgo »

umvi wrote: post #19

It's like we have these two irreconcilable ideas: - Diversity is good - Discrimination is bad When 50% of the world's population is from China/India, how do you both promote diversity and not discriminate?

To me the obvious thing is to aim to eliminate racial/national/gender bias as much as possible by blinding admission/hiring processes to those things. Then on top of that offer spots for people who have had to deal with exceptional difficulty. Whether that be physical handicap, racial prejudice, economic, etc. There are companies/grants that take an approach like this. Its going to be subjective but perfect is the enemy of good. Then let the percentages land where they may. Having quotas or racial/gender preferences is crazy.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#77

Post by notyourday »

magic_beans wrote: post #66
notyourday wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long time ago a daughter of a friend of mine received a letter from Congressional Black Caucus congratulating her on a phenomenal achievement. The letter congratulated her, Shoshana, a minority in a prestigious public school of overcoming the adversity caused by her circumstances in becoming one of 50 students in a school with the 99th percentile GPA and how the congressmen and women of the caucus were applauding h…

> The school was a bit shocked when she arrived to see a 5'1 girl dressed in a way typical of Orthodox Jews. What "school" inspects every single arriving Freshman? This read like an invented story. Additionally, there is not much overlap between Orthodox Jewish and African-American surnames.

> What "school" inspects every single arriving Freshman?

Pretty much every single school that makes freshmen live on campus, which is pretty much every single school.

> Additionally, there is not much overlap between Orthodox Jewish and African-American surnames.

I'm going to make an educated guess you do not happen to live either in any of the urban areas with large Jewish and African-American populations or you at least do not happen to socialize with both groups. I can virtually guarantee you that you would have a very hard time sorting names in Bed-Sty, Flushing, Cheltenham, area around City Line Ave, Norristown, etc.

The policies to prop any group always bite because those policies presume that the other groups won't figure out how to profit off them and those policies typically do not have a way to stop a determined adversary.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#78

Post by magic_beans »

charliesharding wrote: post #59
moate wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's so much to unpack here, IDK where to even start. "I don't see color" doesn't feel helpful to many people of color. If you believe that there are prejudices, and you want to fix them, saying "everyone immediately needs to stop being prejudice and everything will be better" isn't actually a solution we can enact. What if people don't suddenly decide it's in their best interest to not be racist? *Edited to remov…

It doesn't feel helpful to be viewed as an individual as opposed to simply a member of a group? Not every person with x skin color has the same experiences... You're taking racism and running the other way with it instead of just rejecting the premise of viewing people as tribe members as flawed. You shouldn't judge people by the groups they happen to belong to. Individuals should be judged on a case-by-base basis.

I gather you're not a minority.

Re: Federal Judge Upholds Harvard's Race-Conscious Admissions Process

#80

Post by snagglegaggle »

mfer wrote: post #46
umeshunni wrote: post #10

Wow - this sets a bad precedent. This might now encourage companies to now discriminate against Asias in hiring as well. There are already murmurs in the Valley about how there are too many Asians in tech.

Hiring and employment is different from college selection processes. Students attending a university are not employees. There are federal laws on equal opportunity employment and California has enacted additional laws. If anyone is caught discriminating on employment based on race it's directly against federal law.

Discrimination based on race for college admission is illegal. There is Title VI (https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq43e4.html) which may seem limited, but in general restricting economic activity based on race is illegal unless it is exclusive and unadvertised.

Even if it weren't, it should be obvious something wrong is happening...

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