Hacker News Reader

Comment by gurkendoktor | Hacker News Reader

No disagreement about ethics, but:

> This is a basic truth of economics.

Is this basic truth backed up by anything tangible? Ethnic Chinese already face unfair hurdles by the current push against standardized testing. But one more obstacle would suddenly make the US unable to compete? With whom, anyway - the only worthy competitor I can think of is hardly egalitarian.

It seems like dangerously wishful thinking to me that liberal ethics, or just basic fairness, automatically translates into economic strength.

View on HN

>>>Ethnic Chinese already face unfair hurdles by the current push against standardized testing.

Please elaborate on this argument.

Hard to pick a neutral source about this, how about this:

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

> According to his testimony, if an Asian-American applicant with certain characteristics (like scores, GPAs, and extracurricular activities, family background) would result in a 25% statistical likelihood of admission, the same applicant, if white, will have a 36% likelihood of admission.

(And that is with standardized testing in the mix, it stands to reason that the gap will grow with further emphasis on "personality".)

I don't have data to prove that these statistics apply to Chinese-Americans specifically, that's an assumption on my side. Whether this is morally wrong is up for debate, but I thought it was relevant in the context of national competitiveness.

Asian-Americans (in particular ethnic Chinese and Indian) have, on average, far better ACT/SAT scores than white or black applicants to good US universities.

It is an open secret that in order to balance admissions (i.e. racially discriminate) against the former and in favour of the latter, most universities downweight test scores in favour of other subjective categories like "personality" scores where Asians magically get far worse scores than people of other ethnicities. A quite divisive practice, as it is quite clearly racist, but serves "affirmative action" of raising black representation in good schools.

See the famous case "Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College", to be litigated in front of the SCOTUS this year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com