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Comment by overrun11 | Hacker News Reader

Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

These selection criteria are meant to match students with schools filled with students of the same ability level. Of course there will always be factors in life that make it harder or easier for people to succeed.

Having had exceptionally difficult life circumstances doesn't somehow change the fact that you need to have already mastered Algebra to succeed at MIT for example.

We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

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To be clear, this is about university admissions where their goal is to identify the most capable people for the school, and a smart but poor person might very well be the most capable (even if it’s not clear on paper given their previous lack of resources). This IS merit-based, but it’s an attempt to find the diamonds in the rough.

Someone with an IQ of 140 but poor might not have accomplished as much as a rich person with an IQ of 100, so on paper the rich person looks better, but correcting for circumstances the poor (smart) person is wayyy better. This is meritocratic.

And I’m certainly not suggesting you take the objectively worst person, especially in a job market. Universities are given public money to provide societal benefits. If they aren’t properly able to give people opportunities, they don’t deserve my tax dollars.

> Or we could acknowledge that society functions best when the most qualified people are chosen and decide to only discriminate on merit.

The problem is that we have never actually done that. "Legacy admissions" is a fine example of that failure. Large donations influence admissions decisions. Biases (unconscious or conscious) can take two people of equal merit and cause an admissions officer to prefer one over the other.

There have already been studies showing that simply changing a person's name (either to present a different gender or race/national origin) on a resume can result in a different hiring decision.

A purpose of all of these equity initiatives is to compensate for the reasons why we already suck at giving people opportunities based on merit. Some of them are ill-advised and end up not working, but that doesn't mean we should just throw our hands up and accept the status quo.

And I certainly don't expect us to wave a magic wand and turn ourselves into perfectly rational, unbiased robots who actually do select purely on merit. Which wouldn't even fix the problem, anyway. But I feel like people like you who tout this "merit" thing are also pushing something impossible to accomplish.

> We should focus more on mitigating the extent that difficult circumstances hinders learning not just manipulating selection criteria after it already has.

This is harder, but I agree the right place to focus our energies. The problem is that the people that want to solve the problem are those in higher education. The people at the root of the problem are probably the same ones that don't want to solve it. A bit of a catch-22.

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