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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

> you don't believe some races will get in without help.

What if they didn't? What if the Supreme Court decision results in zero (or near zero) black people being admitted into Ivy League schools?

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Then I would say the Ivy League is doing something very wrong. When California and Washington passed ballot initiatives prohibiting race-conscious admissions, demographics shifted a bit but black admissions were nowhere near zero.

Is that to say the California and Washington schools now have the appropriate demographics? I'm curious to know what those numbers are.

In CA at least, there is a large gap: Despite those changes and others, the proportion of freshmen from underrepresented racial groups, including Blacks, Latinos and women, attending the UC campuses, averaged 20% before Prop 209, then dropped to 15% in 1998, then slowly increased over the next 20 years, reaching a peak of 37% in 2016, according to the system. However, the percentage of underrepresented students graduating from high school had doubled to over 56% by 2016. Source: https://edsource.org/2020/students-at-californias-top-tier-u...

I know you are quoting from your source, but this blew my mind:

> underrepresented racial groups, including Blacks, Latinos and women

Women are not an underrepresented racial group, and in fact make up the majority of students at the University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

The analysis checks out (excepting the "women" part, which I assume is some kind of typo), but the "underrepresented racial groups" framing hides important parts of the story. Both black and white students are accepted in proportion to public school demographics; Hispanic students are the single largest ethnic group despite being underrepresented. (https://apnews.com/article/education-race-and-ethnicity-79f7..., https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/ad/ceffingertipfacts.asp)

So unless you take the perspective that colleges ought to engage in direct racial balancing against local graduating classes, it's very hard to tell a story about diversity or implicit bias here.

In that unlikely hypothetical, I would say that the problem then lies elsewhere if there are zero competitive black applicants. Fix that problem.

You would have to ask black students don't qualify when equally impoverished students of other races do.

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