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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#41

Post by dahfizz »

woodruffw wrote: post #21
dahfizz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admission slots are not artificially scarce. You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You're still avoiding the question. Is your position "I support inclusion, only when resources are not scarce?"

> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sens…

Okay, sure. In a perfect world we would have enough resources for everything. In the real world, affirmative action policies disadvantage asian people.

> Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.

The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#42

Post by _v7gu »

woodruffw wrote: post #9
kristianov wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That they are Honorary Whites.

Nobody believes this, unless that's a particularly tortured way of describing the model minority[1] phenomenon. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority

> Nobody believes this

Citation needed for that one.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#43

Post by woodruffw »

Manuel_D wrote: post #36
woodruffw wrote: post #4

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 .

Proportional representation is inherently fixed sum. If X% of one group is too low and you want to increase it, then increasing that representation must also reduce the representation of other groups. There's no way around this. The change to subjective admissions criteria that led to a drop from 73% Asians to under 50% at Thomas Jefferson could be said to be more inclusive of the races that saw increased representat…

> Proportional representation is inherently fixed sum. If X% of one group is too low and you want to increase it, then increasing that representation must also reduce the representation of other groups. There's no way around this.

The overall quality of America's educational system is not fixed-sum. We should be creating a dozen more TJs for every one that currently exists.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#44

Post by abledon »

jedberg wrote: post #37
chernevik wrote: post #13

Set standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.

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.

A colleague i know also argues that people tend to hire/promote people who look like them (subconscious bias that they prefer their own 'kind' / stemming back to tribal era etc)

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#45

Post by mattnewton »

endisneigh wrote: post #23

the problem is and always has been that the particular school you attend has too much weight, irrespective of ability or aptitude. if college admissions were high school blind then this wouldn't even matter to begin with. simply being great, regardless of which school you attend would be enough. re: TJH admissions: > In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that i…

> As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5,

GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC.

Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price.

That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#46

Post by refurb »

jedberg wrote: post #37
chernevik wrote: post #13

Set standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.

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.

"If the standards include GPA, that's not very fair to someone who went to a school that doesn't offer AP tests."

Sure but the schools who choose to not rely on academic merit any more are just bringing everyone else down instead of raising up the few who need it. Seems like a terrible solution.

San Francisco just turned Lowell High, one of the best high schools in the country, from merit based to lottery. This is despite the school being full of minority students who excel academically. Now they're screwed and their spot will go to some kid who was advanced a grade because their old school didn't want to hold them back.

Well done?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#47

Post by woodruffw »

dahfizz wrote: post #41
woodruffw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to be a genius to imagine why you can't admit 100 million students into a particular school. You don't admit 100 million students to an excellent school. You make 1 million excellent schools and admit 100 students to each. There is no reason for there to be a scarcity of excellent education in our wealthy, developed country. I support actions that make the world a more just place in the Rawlsian sens…

Okay, sure. In a perfect world we would have enough resources for everything. In the real world, affirmative action policies disadvantage asian people. > Affirmative action makes the world a more just place. The question you have been dancing around: why is it just to disadvantage Asians in favor of other minorities? What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

There is none, because there is no mainstream progressive position associated with discriminating against Asians. You can refer back to my original comment for why that is.

Edit: To be clear: what I'm claiming is that the "progressive" position is better associated with improving education overall. It's only through a particularly warped partisan lens does it become this ridiculous squabble over artificially scarce resources.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#48

Post by goodoldneon »

yhoneycomb wrote: post #38
goodoldneon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal isn't to disadvantage Asians in particular. It's about balancing demographics by giving advantages to under-represented groups, which inherently means giving disadvantages to over-represented groups. Affirmative action is messy because it's getting in the middle of zero sum games (e.g. college admissions and hiring). But diversity is a significant problem in many parts of American society, and just about eve…

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?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#49

Post by _v7gu »

tuna-piano wrote: post #26
gruez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's not racism if you're being discriminated against but have power" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306 >On 28 May, Ms Mitchum emailed Merriam-Webster to point out that racism is "both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin colour".

No 17 year old college applicant has power. What would you call treating a 17 year old different based on their skin color? If we can't use the word racism anymore, then I'll call it bigoted.

Except the legacy admits, who are always miraculously exepmt from the increasing "equality" in college applications.
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