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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests. That’s why it is the privileged elite who decry tests and call for “diversity.” Under the guise and mask of diversity they try to maintain and entrench their privilege while giving the occasional breadcrumbs to the truly historically disadvantaged.

I can’t for the life of me understand how the daughter of Bill Gates is the same as a poor African American from the ghetto.

Diversity initiatives are almost always a subterfuge or false flag operation.

Diversity apparently includes fencing and rowing at most elite colleges. Just another filter with the benefit of virtue signaling and posturing.

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Privileged white people who wants to preserve their privilege says that the poor white people are the problem and then kick those out in favor of black people. But the privileged white people are still there. And people wonder why poor white people don't like all of this "diversity" rethoric.

You may find that the black people they favor are also privileged. IE a Nigerian 1-percenter is just as black for affirmative action metrics as an African American from a broken family living in inner-city Baltimore, but the Nigerian is probably 1000x more likely to be accepted into an American college.

Yes exactly. That is why the diversity metric that would actually alleviate the situation of poor blacks like being income based is NOT used as that would also cripple the rich white elites.

I never understood this. Imo the moral justification behind affirmative action is that the upper echelons of society should represent the demographic makeup of society in general. Importing people who look like the people who you try to represent is the opposite of representation.

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests.

That is demonstrably not true. Wealthy people can and do spend legions on test prep and tutoring.

But that said, I generally agree with some of the underlying sentiment, which is that many wealthy people value education and status that can be attained through scholastic achievement in a way that many poor people do not. I think that even if you had loads of high quality, free SAT prep classes and tutors that you'd still see a large test score gap.

This is an unscientific point. One, test prep doesn’t help that much. Two, it’s not that expensive: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/06/21/...

> For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.

$650 is a lot of money for a lot of people

Who is downvoting this?

Money helps with any metric.

If your GPA is bad, a tutor will help far more with GPA than test prep will help with your SAT and cost far more.

School project, if you live in a household where one parent doesn't have to work, they can basically do your whole project moving a 50 to a 95.

Extra curriculars, these require a large investment of time and money that is harder for a single working parent to pull off.

College entrance essays. You can literally just pay someone to write them.

You can't look at SATs in a vacuum. You have to compare it to the other possible metrics which all privilege the privileged more.

Not really, for a one-time per kid expense. Asian immigrants are among the poorest people in NYC and they scrape it together.

In a lot of places these days it's really easy to get a $15/hr job (I mean that's like entry-level fast food work, ubering, etc.) So $650 works out to slightly more than a week's work, be super conservative with taxes/expenses/benefits and let's say 2 weeks.

So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say this just highlights how some communities value educational attainment and others do not.

Sure, it's much easier to come up with $650 if you're rich than if you're poor, but that's true of just about anything. $650 is certainly within the reach of nearly everyone, it just depends on whether your parents are willing to sacrifice for it.

I could afford private flights on my salary, for my example, and it’s true: “it’s just more hours.”

The only thing is… I can’t find more hours in my week.

And the real bigger issue is, even through I can afford it, it may be hard to justify it because it amounts to a major opportunity cost.

For a working class family, they probably are going to find it difficult to source $650. …Especially if no one has gone to college and no one even knows the importance of that $650.

If $650 seems like nothing, all that you are saying is that your social group is limited to people who find $650 to be nothing. It’s like the Lucille Bluth banana quote in living…

Nobody is saying it’s nothing. But virtually nobody is so poor that saving up $650 per kid one time is beyond teach.

I'd think it's less about test prep than it is about a stable home and family environment, how well/poorly local schools are funded, access to public libraries and the leisure time required of both parent and child to able to use all of the above. All of which is a lot more than $650 and all of which favors wealthier people.

> When you are privileged you have no extra weight or leg up over someone else on standardized tests

American kids from poor families do worse on average than kids with more money on the SATs.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

You still have advantages in how the tests are written. The questions still privilege people who grow up speaking a specific version of English

For sure. Although one thing that has baffled me is that all Swiss Germans do their school work in traditional German and NOT the language they speak. Swiss Germans understand Germans but the vice versa is not always true:

The dialects of Swiss German must not be confused with Swiss Standard German, the variety of Standard German used in Switzerland. Most people in Germany do not understand Swiss German. Therefore, when an interview with a Swiss German speaker is shown on German television, subtitles are required.[6] Although Swiss German is the native language, from age 6, Swiss school students additionally learn Swiss Standard German at school and are thus capable of understanding, writing and speaking Standard German with varying abilities mainly based on the level of education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_German

I’m ESL and no they don’t. They privilege people who read a lot.

I generally agree but it’s definitely an advantage to have money, I got tutoring and practice tests from an early age. Someone poorer would have to work twice as hard

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