81–90 of 205 posts
If I were Asian, my "college strategy" would be to not apply, since I wouldn't want to be an indentured servant for the next 15-20 years of my life paying off usurious student loan debts to crotchety Western institutions that are currently enjoying bubble tuition rates without offering remotely commensurate value.
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I really don't like what you are insinuating. You appear to be implying that some people are inferior due to the ancestry of their parents Is this just willful blindness? Do you really believe all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential? It's hard to study academia because we don't understand the brain well enough, but do a little reading about ethnicity and genetics as it relates to sports.
I don't think "all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential" is an interesting statement one way or the other. I believe individuals are more interesting than arbitrarily chosen groups. I believe we should judge people on their own merits , rather than choosing groups, taking averages of those groups, and then using those groups to make judgements.
If I were Asian, my "college strategy" would be to not apply, since I wouldn't want to be an indentured servant for the next 15-20 years of my life paying off usurious student loan debts to crotchety Western institutions that are currently enjoying bubble tuition rates without offering remotely commensurate value.
I'm very curious to know what could provide a greater return on investment than spending four years at Harvard for free.
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I think taboos exist for very good reasons. The fact that something is a taboo does not, in and of itself, mean that it needs to be challenged. The problem is that very few people are rational. There are a lot of people who gain courage to do very unpleasant things once they've heard arguments that they can use as internal justifications, when they are not themselves sophisticated enough to understand how sound the a…
I completely disagree with you. You might want whatever taboos you like, I'm ok with that and won't challenge them. But heck, if you are going to discuss something then you must be free of taboos in that particular mater, or else your opinion is just bananas. I mean, of what value is your opinion on something you're afraid of talking about? EDIT: I don't want to be a downvote bitch. But it I am noticing my comments o…
For example, talking to children about sex with children is a major taboo. Supporting this taboo doesn't mean an opinion on the immorality of sex with children is automatically invalid.
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The more common downside is that some qualified guys are passed up in favor of others that are just "promising" but have the right skin color.
I chose my above words carefully: It was an issue of SATs, not qualifications in general. Prior to affirmative action, SATs were the be-all-and-end-all of equilibration for GPAs; A GPA of 3.9 at the Bronx school of science was not the same as 3.9 at Rural High. Along came some studies showing that the SATs (esp English) had some cultural biases. The admissions depts were truly trying to figure out: Which candidates w…
I was 13, I think, when I went to compete in the all-Ukrainian math olympiad, back a bunch of years ago when it was called a "republican" olympiad because Ukraine was a republic in the USSR and not a separate country. It was a long event: delegations from all the regions came and were housed in a sort of summer camp for two weeks. As we were getting registered, one of the organizers who was getting everyone's details…
It reminds me: I believe in Feyman's day, Jews were fighting a similar problem to Asians now. I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a calibration point. Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much for arbitrary social reasons. We've all heard and read about how hiring at places, such as elite financial institutions, will simply discard any application from a person who didn't go to an elite university. No one wants to lose out on opportunity.
Why can't elite universities increase enrollment to increase the number of opportunities? They have the endowments for it. I'm not aware of any Ivy struggling to pay its bills.
If society thinks that people who attend these schools are a better value, then wouldn't it be of benefit to try to expand capacity?
It seems like an artificially created scarcity. Do top schools feel their brand is diminished if they start accepting 2k students vs 1.5k?
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I don't think "all ethnicity are perfectly matched in their potential" is an interesting statement one way or the other. I believe individuals are more interesting than arbitrarily chosen groups. I believe we should judge people on their own merits , rather than choosing groups, taking averages of those groups, and then using those groups to make judgements.
While I am all for treating individuals as individuals, this discussion thread is not about individuals, it is about groups.
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While I am all for treating individuals as individuals, this discussion thread is not about individuals, it is about groups.
I thought the thread was about college admissions, which at their best, really ought to be about individuals, not groups.
I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages. They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people. Serious double standard there.