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Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

>in order to make merit-based admissions

You made a mistake already. These decisions are not purely merit based. Meritocracy isn't real. It never was.

What you are seeing is looking at race on purpose. Because racism is a real thing. There are studies that even if you remove the names and photos of people from their resumes, white people will prefer to accept other white people. They intuitively know, because their resumes will look "familiar". You have to go out of your way to solve the problem, you can't just be colorblind.

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So what do you want to do, establish a wholly separate admissions path that intentionally seeks out people from traditionally less powerful races, in order to counteract your personal perception that there is such a thing as a "white" resume?

It probably gets worse than that. Eventually, if you pursue the task with gusto, it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit. And then, if those you just let in aren't doing so well, you have to just let them pass. And so, eventually, you have to just give them degrees. And then, if those people who were just handed degrees can't convince anyone to hire them, you have to just give them the job..

>it has to boil down to just letting people in regardless of merit.

Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.

> in order to counteract your personal perception

I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves.

I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.

I'd argue that high socioeconomic people on these selection boards would be likely to select high socioeconomic students. The sports, hobbies, etc will all be familiar. This isn't a "white" issue.

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