Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination • Hacker News Board

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#91

Post by leephillips » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 4:58 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #56

woodruffw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Proportional representation is inherently fixed sum. If X% of one group is too low and you want to increase it, then increasing that representation must also reduce the representation of other groups. There's no way around this. The overall quality of America's educational system is not fixed-sum. We should be creating a dozen more TJs for every one that currently exists.

But that's not what is happening. What's happening is that Thomas Jefferson is now using race as a factor in admissions, resulting in reduced representation of Asians. To narrow down more surgically on the issue here: > Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they ar…

What you say is as inarguable as 1+1=2. That's why it's fascinating to watch people twist themselves into rhetorical knots to avoid the obvious truth.

The reason for disadvantaging Asians (and Jews) is that it has always been fashionable to do so. This was true long before the Chinese Exclusion Act and, in the US, it seems it may always be true.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#92

Post by SllX » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 4:58 AM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #23

the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. re: TJH admissions: > In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that i…

This is the stated reasoning.

It came out in the court case that the real reasoning was to discriminate on the basis of race without saying they were discriminating on the basis of race, and they weren’t very careful about hiding the fact that the changes were racially motivated in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Here’s the opinion: https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...

The whole opinion is worth reading, but the meat starts from the middle of page 5 onward. Their explicit goal was to change the racial makeup of the school for political purposes, and so the case hinges less upon the changes themselves than the racially motivated reasoning behind them.

If you are interested and would like a far better explanation than I can provide that goes into the opinion, the context around the case and alternatives, consider the latest episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast released on February 28th, 2022[1].

[1]: Link to the episode page here but you are better served searching it in a podcast app like Overcast. https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-dow...

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#93

Post by hedora » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 4:59 AM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #70

dahfizz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, yes. But if the group of people who meet your standards does not exactly match the demographics of the general population, you will be held accountable.

Why should there be an expectation of uniformity? Subgroups of people come from different families and cultures, and at an aggregate level (not necessarily individuals) will have different values. Those values will lead to different talents and interests. Those different talents and interests will lead to meeting and failing different sets of standards. Wouldn't it be a boring world if things were entirely uniform? C…

It's all about incentives.

It's easier for education departments to shoot the messenger (the college admissions board) than admit the K-12 system they're responsible for is hopelessly racist.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#94

Post by x3n0ph3n3 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:01 AM UTC

tyjen wrote: post #80

I'm a confused by the equity claim to justify discriminatory behavior with what seems like heavy emphasis on race. It seems difficult to achieve equity without transparent, and standardized methods emphasizing a holistic assessment covering visible and invisible, immutable and mutable characteristics--each of which impact individual outcomes. I understand that tackling overrepresentation and underrepresentation is im…

> The racial categories are a very American centric and limited term, and arguably rooted largely as social constructs that loosely define the ethnic populations they cover. For example, and I don't mean any offense or to call any group out specifically, Koreans are overrepresented compared to Cambodians at the academic institutions listed in the article per their population proportion. This doesn't seem to be captured and accounted for under the current system.

You've really hit the heart of the logical conclusion of intersectionality that those espousing it fight to avoid: individualism. Once you have to start accounting for subgroups of subgroups, you reach the fact that the smallest subgroup to account for is an individual person.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#95

Post by mjevans » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:03 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #66

mattnewton wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC. Any one of these m…

> GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold. Here's some source https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/

Not exactly sure where the real cutoff might be, that too probably varies with the curriculum, but generally yeah. Either someone gets something or they don't, and if someone gets how to do the work they can be taught and thus will at least do OK learning most other things they care about.

If someone doesn't get how to do the work, but does care, that's probably a medical defect. Hopefully we can treat that someday, if not today. Getting lead out of the pipes and similar efforts would sure help.

If someone doesn't care, that's entirely another matter and we should be more introspective as a society about how to fix it. That's more a political problem than a science problem.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#96

Post by jquery » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:06 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#97

Post by roenxi » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:10 AM UTC

tyjen wrote: post #80

I'm a confused by the equity claim to justify discriminatory behavior with what seems like heavy emphasis on race. It seems difficult to achieve equity without transparent, and standardized methods emphasizing a holistic assessment covering visible and invisible, immutable and mutable characteristics--each of which impact individual outcomes. I understand that tackling overrepresentation and underrepresentation is im…

> ... when emphasizing race to the degree that these academic institutions are ...

There is a fairly classic manoeuvre where the elites feel threatened by the middle class, so they form an alliance with the lower classes to fight them. Eg, a lot of tax & spend policies make it harder to accumulate wealth in the middle class but the very wealthy can shield themselves.

If Asians are not benefiting from being a racial minority, I do wonder if admission policy is focused more on race or more on excluding people who look middle class. I see some mention of Harvard. The point of Harvard is to politely set up the next generation of leaders. Not educate the masses.

Possibly the article offers a view on this, but it is paywalled.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#98

Post by jltsiren » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

goodoldneon wrote: post #22

TeeMassive wrote: post #2

What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

The goal isn't to disadvantage Asians in particular. It's about balancing demographics by giving advantages to under-represented groups, which inherently means giving disadvantages to over-represented groups. Affirmative action is messy because it's getting in the middle of zero sum games (e.g. college admissions and hiring). But diversity is a significant problem in many parts of American society, and just about eve…

College admissions and hiring are not zero-sum games. It's possible to provide good education and good jobs to everyone, according to their ability.

Elite status is the real zero-sum game, because it's exclusive by definition. Elite universities don't provide substantially better education than those dedicated to educating the masses. They are elite because they offer elite status and opportunities for networking with the future elite.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#99

Post by analog31 » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

TeeMassive wrote: post #2

What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

That's a leading question.

I live in a town that's associated with progressivism, and know a lot of people who would not object to being called progressives. Honestly I haven't heard anybody endorsing discrimination against Asians, much less justifying it.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#100

Post by ipnon » Wed, Mar 02, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

It's discrimination any way you slice it. You can't lower the bar for one person without raising it for another so long as the class sizes remain the same. If elite universities are about providing education (a valid point of critical contention), then systematically barring Asians from entry is the same class of injustice litigated in Brown v. Board of Education. It's not enough to say you can learn calculus just as well at the University of Massachusetts.

"Here we find our first indication of the strength of preferences for underrepresented minority students. African-American students have nearly an 80 percent better chance of being admitted than their white counterparts, while the Hispanic advantage is reflected in almost 50 percent higher odds compared to whites. By contrast, Asian applicants and those from other races face lower odds of admission on the order of 17 or 18 percent—in relation to comparable whites."

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/...