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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

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321–330 of 624 posts

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#321

Set standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.

The debate is about what standards to set. The people who do well at standardized tests and GPA think those should be the metrics by which admissions are judged. Harvard has other ideas.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when you find that x% of XYZ passing the minimum score isn’t exactly the same x% of XYZ in the population, what then?

To how many decimal points are you measuring “exactly”?

In the cases cited in the article, I strongly suspect “zero decimal places of percentage” is sufficient to show discrepancies (that discrepancies of full percentage point or more will be present, given the admissions rate for one group changed from 73% to under 50%).

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, an individual Asian student needs to score much higher to have a chance at Harvard, compared to students of other ethnicities. That's very blatantly racial discrimination. > This amounts to, "sorry, we have enough people of your color, so we're gonna make it harder for you to get in." That's wrong. Period. "The law of unintended consequences" ... what are they going to do if the target demographic (in this case…

If you're saying that we should allow individuals and companies to create their own identity policies free from government oversight, then we should allow individuals and companies to discriminate any way they want. Don't want to hire blacks, gays or Jews? Allowed. To be honest, there is a legitimate argument that this type of discrimination would be better handled through the free market. But I doubt the people who…

Is creating a purely merit-based institution really an identity policy though? I see it as an identity-blind policy, unless you define identity to include merit.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#324
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or it is classist. Or is just plain failing.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#325

What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

It's not about discriminating against Asians, it's about ensuring that they aren't being racist against black and Hispanic students. Without these policies, Harvard would likely have significant less black and Hispanic students.

AFAIK, that's the progressive justification. They think if schools don't have similar demographics to the country as a whole, or the area they are located in, then some form of racism (using the critical theory definition here) is occurring.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#326

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…

What exactly is the problem with this?

The problem with the TJ case was that the administrators changed the admission criteria with the express purpose of racial rebalancing...and there are e-mails..

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#327
post #144
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.

So in workplace the gender-death the split isn't 50:50. Why aren't we very hard working to make it reality? By either making some work more dangerous or forcing people the gender-split on dangerous work?

Because it is not nearly as big of a problem as an entire racial and social class failing to be educated, having a high crime rate, and resulting in mass incarceration.

It would be nice if the so-called fiscal conservatives cared as much about wasting the money addressing the issue after it is a problem as they do when trying to address it before it is a problem.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#328
post #100

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…

Despite the increased chances of admission, black students make up a modest 5% of the (e.g.) Harvard student body compared to Asian students and white students at 13% and 40% respectively. Ultimately, I can't justify the idea of rejecting students based on race, but when I look at those demographics I just don't see much to get worked up about. From a more cynical angle the problem almost seems like "the total percen…

Black representation is one thing, but it’s almost a red herring. You can make Harvard 10-12% Black without changing the demographics too much.[1] The bigger question for Asians I think is competition with elite whites. A “proportional representation” type system handicaps Asians against whites, for no comprehensible reason. Harvard is 13% Asian, but Caltech is 40%. Why should white students be insulated from that competition?

[1] In my opinion there is no similar justification for preferences in favor of Hispanics. Studies show that Hispanics are similarly situated to previous generations of white immigrants: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Their income disparity is explained by recency and character of immigration, and disappears over time. You see the same phenomenon about Asian groups that comprise primarily refugees. Vietnamese people were as poor as Black people in the 1970s. Today their household income is slightly higher than white people. By contrast, Black and indigenous people face persistent disparities that are not disappearing over time.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#329

I attended TJ, back when it was about 30% Asian. I’ve always felt like the school should do more to get more underrepresented minorities. I’ve found the recent efforts very off-putting however. It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians. I’m reminded of Alison Collins in San Francisco, who called Asians “house n—-ers” and said they use “white supremaci…

> But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families. It seems that more than half the families in the US are "destitute" then ( https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/most-americans-cant-afford... ) and it's been bad for years ( https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em... )

That addresses sudden expenses that people can cover without resorting to credit, not planned expenses. Two very different things—a lot of folks who couldn’t make a $1,000 unexpected payment for cash flow reasons wouldn’t blink about $1,000 extra in a 5-year car loan where they can plan around the extra expense. Americans are chronically cash poor because their expenses rise to meet their income.

Poor immigrant families in New York where the parents work in Chinese restaurants can afford $995 for test prep because they plan for it in advance.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#330
post #171
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.

Asians are way under represented in sport teams. Who will be held accountable?

They are trying to. Right now their kids supposedly spend all their time working on their GPA and SAT scores.
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