Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans • Hacker News Board

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#121

Post by chimeracoder » Sat, May 16, 2015, 7:23 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #120

chimeracoder wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harvard vs. state school is far less important than med school vs. no med school. > The broader problem with med school is that we should have more med schools accepting more students, and then there wouldn't be such a stark "med school vs. no med school" scenario. Since the bottleneck is residency programs , not the number of people who receive MDs, all this would do is increase the number of people who have taken…

I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems…

> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing?

I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine.

> Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine?

Yes, because medical school isn't where you learn to practice medicine; residency is.

> Then we should increase residency programs.

There are so many political barriers to allocating the kind of funding necessary for this that it's not a realistic expectation anytime for the foreseeable future.

> I'm no expert in the field, just seems to me like more doctors would be a good thing, same way it would be good to have more of any profession that's highly in demand.

Sort of - but the medical field is rather complicated to a degree that would be tough to summarize in an HN comment. In short, yes, this general principle is true, but in the case of medicine, there are enough confounding factors that it's not as simple as "more residency programs → more and better care". If you could hold everything else constant, yes, that may be the case, but in practice, this wouldn't happen in isolation, and there would be a lot of other effects.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#122

Post by asdfologist » Sat, May 16, 2015, 7:39 PM UTC

whybroke wrote: post #107

yid wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy Nobody, including the College Board, has ever made a claim remotely close to this.

The article only mentions "very subjective Holistic admissions" and only mentions SAT scores, citing them alone as proof of discrimination. By looking at that nothing else, the article is implying SAT scores should be the sole criterion for admission selection. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author, I assume he believes it corresponds to talent and post graduate success and these are the reasons for selecting…

The article isn't implying anything. It's reporting on a complaint, and the author isn't taking sides.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#123

Post by streptomycin » Sat, May 16, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #121

streptomycin wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? Also, what do you mean residency programs are the bottleneck? Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine? Then we should increase residency programs. Whatever. I'm no expert in the field, just seems…

> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine. > Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine?…

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-... says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years.

But the whole system seems weird to me as an outsider.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#124

Post by geographomics » Sat, May 16, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #105

geographomics wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that unless you're privy to all the information that the admissions staff are using to judge acceptance, including the quality of the competition and a myriad of other factors that you or I may not have considered, it's a bit of a stretch to assume your friends were racially discriminated against. I don't know how many people you're talking about, but assuming it's a relatively small number, the rejection of…

I would agree for you, except it's well known that Asians are discriminated against in undergrad college admissions, so it's not a stretch for me to imagine the same thing in med school admissions. Indeed, one of the comments replying to me showed MCAT distribution by race for accepted med students is similar to the SAT distribution by race for accepted undergrad students.

Yes but even if it could be confirmed that racial quotas that are significantly unfavourable toward Asian applicants exist for some medical school admissions, that doesn't mean it was the reason for your friends being rejected.

We just don't know if they would have been accepted in an equivalent system without these alleged discriminatory policies, because gaining a medical school offer depends on such a myriad of other factors.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#125

Post by contravert » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

calbear81 wrote: post #84

shiven wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the end result schools like Harvard are trying to avoid. Why? That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book. How is it my fault that I was born smart, worked hard to capitalize on my innate abities and then competed on a standardized test to perform better than folks who just happened to pop out of a different vagina or uterus? Nice way to fuck me for no fault of mine. For those saying not getting into H…

To the question of why, Harvard believes that standardized tests are simply one of many factors that should be taken into account when deciding on who to admit. In building a student class, they value diversity not of race but of backgrounds and experiences. Perhaps that correlates closely with race since much of our country's socio-economic divisions also fall along racial lines in many places. As an Asian myself, p…

The less measurable your admissions criteria, the more subconscious bias seeps into your decision making process. You can not extricate the perverse stereotypes that exist in society when making a decision whether a candidate is "diverse" or "well-rounded".

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#126

Post by geographomics » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

notsony wrote: post #112

geographomics wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to conclude that from those statistics alone, as we don't know the distribution of MCAT and GPA scores within the self-identified Asian applicants - a higher mean may be because it is positively skewed. In that regard, it would be interesting to see the median values too. Or the stats for the rejected cohort.

From a comment on Reddit so research required but it could be true that it comes down to money: "As an applicant to medical school. On the day of my interview at my state school, a director basically told everybody that the school favored Hispanics/Latinos because the school is given state/federal? money if they churn out a lot of Hispanic/Latino doctors. My stomach dropped when I heard that. As other have pointed ou…

If that anecdote is true, it means the medical school would have a bias against anyone who doesn't identify as Hispanic/Latino, and not necessarily a specific bias against Asians.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#127

Post by chimeracoder » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #123

chimeracoder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I figured we could use more doctors because doctors are so busy and expensive. Economics 101 type reasoning. Am I missing something? Would having more doctors not be a good thing? I never said that it wouldn't; I said that having more medical schools would have literally zero impact on the number of doctors practicing medicine. > Do we really have tons of MDs running around who aren't allowed to practice medicine?…

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/health/2014/05/26/Some-med-... says this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo. I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years. But the whole…

> this year there were 26,678 residency positions and 412 people who didn't match. Even if we opened more residency positions, we'd still need more medical schools too, right? Because 412 doctors isn't enough to make a dent in the status quo.

Well, for starters, some of that is self-selecting, in that the only people who feel they are competitive candidates for a residency even apply. Overall, there are about 15,000 more applicants than first-year residency positions as of last year - 40,394 total.

Also, that 412 number is looking at the people who didn't match, which isn't actually the same as saying how many were "unaccepted". Residencies don't work like undergraduate admissions. The residency matching is a complicated two-way process that separates by field, so the 412 aggregate number isn't actually answering the same question. This is implied by the discussion of primary care residencies halfway down the article you link, but if you're not already familiar with the process, you wouldn't notice it.

Finally, that is only looking at students in the United States who did not match. Many residents in the US attended medical school outside the US. In fact, it's very common for US students who don't get into medical school in the US to go to medical schools in the Caribbean instead, and then come back to the US to do their residency so they can practice in their home country.

> I mean, we'll need another 412 doctors just to account for population growth in a couple years.

The number of residency programs is increasing, so population growth isn't the concern. The original topic of discussion was increasing the availability of doctors - in other words, increasing the number of residency programs by an order of magnitude, rather than incrementally, as has occurred almost every year since 1952.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#128

Post by contravert » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:21 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #9

Isn't Harvard allowed to do this as a private institution? What's the education department going to do about it?

Harvard's endownment earned over 12% annually averaged over 40 years (http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...). I bet the government would love to tax some of that money.

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#129

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:22 PM UTC

iaw wrote: post #118

yummyfajitas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that. In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.

I think if black students would otherwise be over-represented at the school it would make sense. So Asian's are 5% of the US population [1] but make up 20% of the admitted applicants [2]. While African American's, representing 13% of the country [1] and a shameful legacy of mistreatment make up 12% of admitted applicants [2]. The problem is that admissions isn't based solely on your capabilities as a student at the t…

[deleted]

Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

#130

Post by SamReidHughes » Sat, May 16, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

iaw wrote: post #118

yummyfajitas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that. In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.

I think if black students would otherwise be over-represented at the school it would make sense. So Asian's are 5% of the US population [1] but make up 20% of the admitted applicants [2]. While African American's, representing 13% of the country [1] and a shameful legacy of mistreatment make up 12% of admitted applicants [2]. The problem is that admissions isn't based solely on your capabilities as a student at the t…

Asians aren't just discriminated against relative to black students, they're also discriminated against relative to white students. Your distractions like "shameful legacy of mistreatment" and "single mother with a father in jail" don't work so well then, do they?

> If I ever see Asian's in this being denied social mobility

All the ones that would've been admitted if they were white. You just have to treat them as individual sentient people instead of a mass statistic.

Edit: For that matter, compare Asians with academically demanding parents and white people and black people with academically demanding parents. Looking at that subset of the population, Asians are discriminated against, keeping the variable you were considering constant. Then consider Asians with single mothers and white people and black people with single mothers. Asians in that strata are discriminated against, too.