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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

#161
How about: who cares? Isn’t this hacker news? Aren’t we all supposed to be hackers who are upending the existing system?

How about we build our own Harvards where anybody who wants to study can come and learn whatever they want? And the network comes from being surrounded by other people who cared enough to learn.

We don’t need these places anymore. We’ll find our own funding and do our own research and screw the system. We’ll build our own system.

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

#162
post #96
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…

As a Jewish person I feel weird seeing "whites" being broken into Jewish and non-Jewish. What about other religions? Why include religion at all? In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this. In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and al…

A lot of the responses here are talking about ethnicity or Jewish identity, but I think when it comes down to it, Jews are considered white mainly when other white people want to consider them as such.

I would bet that your average Ashkenazi Jew (it is worth noting there are multiple different Jewish ethnic groups) has more genetic commonality with an average person of Ukrainian descent than that Ukrainian person has with someone of Irish descent. So why are the Ukrainian and Irish person both white while the Jewish person isn't?

And also let's point out that there is no distinction for any other group of Middle Eastern people. They instead have to choose between being Asian, African, or European.

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

#163
post #143

This feels reminiscent of 'diversity hires' where females and/or members of the LGBT+ community are preferred not because of competency/merit but to improve a company's diversity metrics. Disclaimer: I haven't experienced this myself. I only read/heard of these complaints from other people.

This ends up hurting females and L/G/B/T people in our industry because people will have a preconception that they may have been hired for reasons other than merit. To bring it back to the article, imagine being a black harvard graduate. People may judge you as lesser compared to asian harvard graduates, because they know that you've been held to different standards, even if you had the merit and deserved your placem…

This is one of the things about affirmative action that bothers me the most. If it's known that people in X subset of students are held to lower standards, then in a Bayesian sense it hurts the people in X subset who would have got in if held to the same standards.

Harvard is notorious for glade inflation, but at other institutions the same phenomenon can hurt people's ability to complete harder degrees. I remember reading a paper claiming that affirmative action resulted in lower minority graduation rates/higher transfer rates in STEM because it put people in academic environments that they weren't prepared for; they could have likely had more success completing a STEM degree if they had attended an institution where they fit more of a median student academic profile

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

#164

Asians should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

Imagine the uproar if you had instead said

> Whites should just boycott Harvard. Overall quality of Harvard grads will drop and Harvard will become nothing.

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

#165
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Jewish person I feel weird seeing "whites" being broken into Jewish and non-Jewish. What about other religions? Why include religion at all? In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this. In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and al…

Aren't Jews a race and a religion? Plenty of non religious Jews out there.

What is a race exactly for humans?

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50% of the world and admission at Harvard in USA are different groups, so the comparison is flawed. If you would use USA population structure, that is a relevant argument.

This might come as a shock to you, but people from outside the US also attend/apply to US universities.

About 10% at Harvard. Not negating my argument.

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

#167
What is interesting about this entire issue and the discussion is this. It's what I will call the 'Sophia Loren without a nose is not Sophia Loren' paradox.

If you have a University like Harvard and you have it whereby students are admitted strictly on merit and further if you have more people than can be accommodated by merit then is it still Harvard?

If you have a celebrity that is admitted to Harvard (or any 'top' school) is it possible that that person provides more or a better experience in some way to other students then someone who was raised or related to a less notable person?

Pretend for a second you attend school with the daughter of a US President or the son of the head of a major corporation. Do you think that that would provide in itself benefits to other students than in the environment they were raised in? Indirectly in some way?

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

#168
post #5

What they should have been examining is why "legacy" (read: people who have already donated, or are likely to donate seriously to Harvard) candidates are so favored... (Speaking as an old Harvard alum ('76).)

Does it really need an explanation?

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

#169
Stuyvesant used to have 13% African American students in the 1970s, matching the overall population. The test system didn't change, but the African American demographics in Stuyvesant dropped to 1%. Does this mean that the impacts of discrimination increased over time?

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

#170

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..…

> It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory.

Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field. So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.

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