Live data from Hacker News

Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

wsj.com

231–240 of 624 posts

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#231
post #109

Would 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.

The advantage of race is that it's not easily gamed. Using household income would incentivize families to try and minimize income in the years prior to college admission. Additionally, you'd have to deal with how income relates to cost of living (e.g. 100k in Alabama and coastal California aren't the same).

Race can and is absolutely gamed all the time. Case in point: Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Just because it can be gamed doesn’t mean it’s not a good metric

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#232

Earlier 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…

Seriously? So for instance I could just pay myself double this year and nothing next year from my personal corporation, and my kid would somehow pass as having a low income parent?

Surely you have to count things like dividends, income in previous years, assets...

Failing that just make it clear that you know when you're tricking the system and fingers will be pointed.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#233
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one way to do it, but then you just perpetuate the biases inherent in the system. For example if the standards include "child of an alumni", that's not very fair. If the standards include GPA, that's not very fair to someone who went to a school that doesn't offer AP tests. And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.

No idea why this is getting downvoted. Perpetuating biases is a very real issue.

> No idea why this is getting downvoted.

People don't like to admit that minorities get treated differently just because of how they look.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians. Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion ; they are interested in more inclusion .

There is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians. Oh there is one that's forming, indeed. Asian-Americans are now called "white adjacent": https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...

Sometimes they're called "white adjacent". Mostly they're just called "white", or "lily-white".

Here's Eugene Volokh writing about it in 1998: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/asian.htm

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of race is that it's not easily gamed. Using household income would incentivize families to try and minimize income in the years prior to college admission. Additionally, you'd have to deal with how income relates to cost of living (e.g. 100k in Alabama and coastal California aren't the same).

Race can and is absolutely gamed all the time. Case in point: Senator Elizabeth Warren. Just because it can be gamed doesn’t mean it’s not a good metric

Yes, but it’s harder to game. Income is vastly more fluid than racial identity, especially since in this situation it’s more advantageous for your income to go down.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#236
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in high school, one student's parents (one doctor and one lawyer --- very financially well-off) took off work for one year just so they could claim having no income on the FAFSA documentation. She got accepted everywhere , winning across the places she applied over $300,000 in scholarships. The upper-middle class and wealthy can easily game this. Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents we…

Make it require 5 years tax returns.

You'll also get people claiming estrangement from their parents.

It's like one of those AI algorithms that play games, if you don't plug all the holes, the AI figures out how to bunny hop or move all its troops out of range.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#237
post #130

This seems very much related to the equal opportunity vs equal outcome debate. Affirmative action seems to be very much about equal opportunity. What I don't quite understand is why the fixation on race? Why not on family income or any number of other parameters that impacts education, future earning potential etc?

No, affirmative action is literally equal outcome at the expense of equal oportunity.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#238
If you have an admission process based on a standardized test and everyone named "Smith" decides to game the system by prepping heavily for the test then you will have a lot of students named "Smith" in your school. The answer is not to create a quota for people named "Smith". The answer is to create admission criteria that are not easily gamed.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#239
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't encountered any. When confronted with the evidence of anti-Asian discrimination, I see mostly denials that it is happening, with claims that performance on standardized tests is not a measure of competency, and thus that the admittence rate for Asians being disproportionately low relative to their standardized test results is not a sign of unfair discrimination.

claims that performance on standardized tests is not a measure of competency That's mostly an attempt to get around this: Average US Asian IQ: 105. Average US White IQ: 99. Average US Black IQ: 85-90. Most comments focus on the black-white gap, but the Asian/non-Asian is substantial. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

Those average figures hide something pretty interesting. IQ scores are defined against a white norm of 100. They are often broken down into components, with "verbal" and "spatial visualization" components being very common.

By definition, the white average is 100 on these components. Blacks have a lower average, but (compared to the white profile) they look "flat"; their reasoning scores are similar to their verbal scores are similar to their spatial scores. Ashkenazi Jews also look flat, but with elevated averages.

East Asians aren't like that. The average figure represents a verbal score that is depressed relative to whites, but an elevated reasoning score and an extremely elevated spatial score. The difference in profile has been widely noted in popular culture. (For example: https://ifunny.co/picture/asians-because-your-calculus-sure-... .) But it doesn't seem to come up much in IQ discussions.

(Native Americans have a profile similar to East Asians, but with low scores.)

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#240
post #209

So they should. Anything other than an objective standardized test is just asking for bias. Australia gets by just fine with standardized testing only, don't see why America can't as well. If you make the cut then you can qualify for scholarships if you are disadvantaged because of means, etc. To be fair though Australia is overall more equal in terms of schooling outcomes but to pretend that it's a university/colleg…

So, I was involved with admissions in a selective graduate program. Not undergraduate but I saw some of the same issues arise. I have a lot of thoughts about this all.

The end result of a lot of this, my guess, is that schools will drop standardized tests as admission requirements. That's what happened at my institution.

Standardized tests are also biased. They are definitely biased toward individuals who are representative of the typical test-taking participant in background, who have more test-specific preparation beyond ability, and toward individuals who are more familiar and skilled with standardized test-taking in general. The purpose of standardized tests, nominally, is to select on aptitude, ability, or achievement, independent of the test, not to become the thing selected for. People seem to forget this. All the other things -- grades, experiences, and so forth -- are also biased in their own way, but in ways that counter the bias of tests. The reasons for having multiple criteria are so the different forms of bias sort of cancel each other out, or can be evaluated against one another.

Stepping back a bit, I have colleagues at institutions who heavily use standardized tests rotely, and they complain heavily about ending up with students who just want to be told the correct answer, without thinking independently or questioning material. That is, overly obsessed with grades, or missing the fact that established textbook information is often incorrect, or incomplete. This is the fear. Schools want you to be right in the "real world" even if it means getting a lower test score or grade. (Importantly, these colleagues are at institutions with low numbers of Asian applicants to begin with for other reasons, mostly geography.)

Having said that, there's definitely racism afoot. Interestingly to me, people seem to be assuming that this always takes the form of quotas or something, where the racism is in favor of blacks or hispanics, and against Asians. This might be true in many cases, but racism can operate simultaneously against both. I have had colleagues who have argued heavily against black-hispanic applicants because test scores were too low, and then against Asians with good test scores because of interview characteristics. What people might be missing here in this HN thread is that this racism was coming from persons advocating for use of standardized tests. At some level this can happen because typically there are more than enough applicants with high enough test scores, and because there are other reasonably objective criteria that are also legitimately important, so you have to use something other than the test to make decisions.

The net result of this all was to conclude that tests were problematic in both directions, that it underselected some people of disadvantaged backgrounds and overselected other people of other types of backgrounds. Not because of race quotas per se, but because of test bias. There were too many experiences of people with very good real-world qualifications in every other respect, but low test scores, or high test scores and every real-world indication of problems, even among individuals who were all white. The response to racism with regard to test selection was to just drop the test requirement, because in situations with racism, it was being used to exclude underprivileged individuals, and also not helping people who were experiencing other forms of racism. It was basically concluded the test was becoming a distraction and not functioning that well.

Post reply on HN