Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#541

Post by mips_r4300i » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 5:58 PM UTC

Covzire wrote: post #229

losvedir wrote: post #41

As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…

Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs? They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1 student, how is that sustainable?

Every day just after 5pm, sitting in my college's Engineering atrium, I would start to see a veritable army (dozens and dozens) of youngish, well-dressed people walk out to the parking lot and leave. They weren't faculty, because I knew all of the faculty, and they weren't students. They had little embossed metal nametags.

I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#542

Post by cpascal » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #380

cpascal wrote: post #118

I think universities can probably come up with a different set of non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater access to some equally needing students that are looked over by racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education, and college admission could be…

> lift underrepresented communities out There already is, though - study hard!

This isn't always possible, though. You could grow up with parents and teachers who do not push you to study. Perhaps you are malnourished or abused. Having the environment and support to study hard is something not all students have. You cannot hand wave studying as the solution to the disparity in educational outcomes.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#543

Post by jensensbutton » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #408

pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, […] Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. This is a nice story, but actually not true. If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed…

> If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians.

This logic makes absolutely no sense. Why can't they have a legacy admits AND discriminate against Asians? Are you seriously trying to claim Ivy League schools don't have legacy admits?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#544

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

naveen99 wrote: post #516

arcticbull wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lottery? Seems to be the foundation of the immigration system.

Why stop at the students, choose the professors by lottery too, Nih grants by lottery… May as well just burn limited resources. Lottery math doesn’t work. Someone has to fund the lotteries. And lotteries funding lotteries ain’t going to do it. Someone has to actually produce something of value for there to be value to allocate.

I think the argument here is that once you've already filtered down to qualified candidates by primary criteria, then you can lottery off the rest instead of performing a secondary sort.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#545

Post by rahimnathwani » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #66

forinti wrote: post #28

I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10% or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and would even span across dimensions which are not even considered currently.

> I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing, because they would be much easier to accept. Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities. I think that merit…

  Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist

This is an uncharitable interpretation. AIUI part of the motivation for overhauling the admissions system was precisely to reduce the proportion of Asian Americans admitted, in order to satisfy some diversity goal set at the state level.

So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#546

Post by kernal » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

blagie wrote: post #353

mtklein wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We…

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universitie…

>2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.

So the person that got into Stanford by writing #BlackLivesMastter 100 times was just a coincidence?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#547

Post by CrazyStat » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #231

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…

[flagged]

> Create and support plebian race-based factions and pit them against one another so they can't fight the elites.

So pretty much the opposite of class warfare?

Class warfare would be warfare between classes. What you're describing is racial warfare intentionally engineered to avoid class warfare.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#548

Post by pie_flavor » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

oluwie wrote: post #331

bouncing wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.

Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.

They have been claimed for years; what is known is that they beat the hell out of every other way of judging students, especially subjective ones. When standardized testing was adopted in the first place it was rightly heralded as a tremendous win for diversity.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#549

Post by graeme » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

oluwie wrote: post #331

bouncing wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has long had most of the best universities in the world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.

Standardized tests have been known for years as an very unfair way of judging students. People with resources to prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare for them. High school grades have been consistently found the be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do in college.

Could you name a metric where rich people get less of a boost due to their wealth and status than standardized tests?

To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative you need the other half of the comparison.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#550

Post by adventured » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:06 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #222

skrebbel wrote: post #162

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people…

> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia ), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether peopl…

> but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.

The KKK has nothing to do with it fundamentally. Matters of racism and similar (it doesn't just have to be about race, this is a problem of collectivism, of which racism is a subset) will dominate the politics of any highly diverse nation (diverse not necessarily pertaining only to race of course), and without exception.

See: what has been going on in Sweden the past decade (it has gotten worse as Sweden has gotten more diverse). Or see: the forever riots in France by the poor minorities there that have never integrated into French culture.