Not the main point but 'Asian' is also way too big - and includes many groups who are as disadvantaged as any other ethnic group in the US. What they really mean is East Asian (Chinese, Koreans, Japanese) and South Asian (mainly Indians) but I am assuming kids from Hmong, Nepali etc ethnicity will also be graded down on this basis. Gross unfair in the overall case, but egregiously so in this specific context
Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
181–190 of 624 posts
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#182No post body was provided.
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do we know what 'race' someone is, do we just ask them or do we test for DNA. The more you drill down into the race question the more absurd it seems, and you quickly realize people either mean culture or some DNA pseudo-science.
Both those ways of determining race get the same answer 99.9999% of the time.
Taking at face they're 99.9999% the same, are you opting towards the self selection option, the DNA option, or some combination of the two?
Can you walk me through which DNA algorithm you're referring to that matches self-reported 'race' 99.9999% of the time?
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#184It'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…
But then you have to also not discriminate against white students. I'm aware that at super elite schools this discrimination usually helps white people, but in a lot of other situations it doesn't.
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not beat around the bush here. It's "messy" because it's racist against Asians.
How do you suggest we increase admissions for under-represented groups?
Why is race the end all be all grouping? Maybe we should group by favorite dinosaur.
I’m (mostly) white. The first 5 years of my life I grew up in a trailer house. My wife is also (mostly) white, and both sides of her family lost everything during the Great Depression. Is there any good reason a rich black kid should have been out ahead of us in admissions, just because of his skin color?
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#186[flagged]
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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#187No post body was provided.
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some positive discrimination can somtimes be beneficial, but doing it based on racial group is just asking for problems. How does it even work practically? What stops an Asian American from saying they are African American?
When the name on the application is John Nguyen instead of Lamar Johnson it's pretty easy to tell.
So you're African American if your dad is African American and your mom is Asian American, but Asian American if it's the other way around?
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#189Would it be more fair to weight applicants by household income rather than race? For example, given two equally strong applicants, but one is from upper class and the other lower class, it seems clear that the lower class applicant is stronger, because they were able to achieve similarly with fewer resources.
If that were true, then the rich kid/middle income kid performance gap would have declined or been eliminated once everybody got access to the internet, because everybody then has an internet connection, school textbooks, and paper.
Did this happen?
Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be more fair to create admission quotas based on family economic status, but I can’t imagine that would ever be put into practice because it would hurt the wealthy too much. The universities wouldn’t like the financial impact either. But if true equality of opportunity were the goal, then that’s how you’d need to do it I think.
It can be gamed. A long while back at University, I noticed very wealthy students on student income schemes that were only meant to be accessed by students whose parents qualified as low income status. The bar to qualify was quite difficult, if you had one parent employed in a job then it was unlikely you would qualify. I asked how they could qualify, while almost everyone had to work part time jobs to cover costs. I…
I remember nearly the same in Germany. When I was at university governmental student loans were a thing (still are). I didn't qualify, as my single dad earned too much (while having to pay the credit on the house and money was always tight). I worked two jobs next to my university.
Quite a few economics and law students driving new BMWs, Mercedes and the likes received student loans (they only needed to be paid back in part, so quite a good investment to cover living expenses one could say) as their parents mostly lived from dividends with the family income from salaries (from their parent owned companies) were by design very low to reduce tax burden and had the nice side effect for their daughters and sons to qualify for government subsidized student loans.
The system is setup to be gamed by those who have the financial means to do so without actual need to do so. While those with a need but no means need to pay (for those others).
It was quite grotesque. Not few of these kids had higher end cars and more spending money than their professors. While still being subsidized by the state.