Comment by remote_phone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by remote_phone | Hacker News Reader

> One college purchased a data service that ranked high schools and factored those high school rankings into each application. Students from underserved high schools received a lower ranking, an admissions officer explained. It wasn’t a fair process.

This is the crux of the affirmative action fascists. They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.

Backing into an outcome simply based on skin color that they want is racist and truly unfair.

If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas. No one does this. South side Chicago and St. Louis Missouri and Baltimore aren’t filled with stupid people. They are filled with people who have suffered generational poverty, living in some of the most violent areas of the world. If you dump money into schools, jobs, and police in those areas, you will produce a thriving middle class in a single generation and from there you can create hundreds of thousands and millions of educated “underrepresented” people that are COMPETITIVE.

> They picked what they thought was a “fair” set of criteria and it didn’t produce the outcome they wanted. They concluded it wasn’t “fair” because it didn’t produce they wanted. That’s garbage.

No, that's science. If your goal is "more racially- and background-diverse admissions", and you set up a process to achieve that, and then find that your new process didn't work, then the process was wrong. So you come up with a new process.

> If you want certain communities to do better in education, you don’t manipulate the outcome by changing the selection criteria, you produce better candidates. Invest in education and safety in lower income areas.

The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas. As rich as many top-tier private universities are, they don't have the resources to make a dent in this problem. So you have a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't fix the inequity that causes some kids to get a worse primary education, but you can't give them a better secondary education and allow that to flow back into their communities.

You have to break the cycle somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious that US federal and local governments have been failing miserably at improving education and safety in underserved communities. So you decide that you're going to find kids that your regular admissions practices would have rejected out of hand, but have the potential to learn and be successful at your school, even if there are gaps in their education. No, it's not a perfect plan, but what had been going on before wasn't working either. And maybe this won't work. But I think it's a worth trying.

No it is not science. If the objective is to be “fair” then they don’t like the outcome then that’s not science.

If the objective is to increase the amount of certain skin colors, then fine. But call it that. Don’t be racist and then wrap it up in a lie saying that it’s to be “fair”. “Fair” in the way it’s used in the article is entirely subjective, which is not scientific.

When the system is as obviously corrupt as it is now, people lose faith in the system entirely and that’s what’s happened.

> The problem is that universities don't really have the ability to invest in education and safety in lower income areas.

I wasn’t talking about the universities, I was talking about the government. If the government is willing to dump hundreds of billions into Ukraine, I’d rather see that money going into creating businesses, schools and safety in the most egregious areas of our own country and build them up. Create competitive applicants by destroying generational poverty.

Not by bending admission standards and lying to everyone’s face as if we are racist for pointing out their racism. I would much rather see my tax dollars funding this rebuilding of the worst parts of the country than war. And if it produces hundreds of thousands of competitive students one generation from now, we all benefit because they won’t be as underrepresented and we can get rid of these racist policies by radical left fascists that believe that more racism is the answer for racism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com