Hacker News Reader

Comment by RigelKentaurus | Hacker News Reader

Talk to Asian American parents like me about how we feel about this AA nonsense. No matter how you look at it, it penalizes our kids for being hard workers.

At the startup I work at, the unwritten hiring rule is that the college major is important, while the college itself is not. A STEM degree from Chico State is worth a lot more than a history or anthropology degree from Harvard/Brown.

View on HN

While I agree with you, the type of people looking to get into Harvard aren't just looking for a STEM job at a startup. They are looking to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc. That sort of thing usually tends to value where you went. Not only for the credibility of the paper but the social networks you gain.

> They are looking to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc.

Yeah, and their degrees don't matter to get those jobs either. I mean of course it matters, but it's still the same degree they could get elsewhere.

The network of well connected powerful people they meet at Harvard is what enables them to become CEOs, judges, politicians, etc.

I wasn't talking about coding jobs. Even jobs in marketing or program management go to STEM students from "lesser" schools. I don't even look at sociology or language degrees anymore.

Well that seems awfully discriminatory of you. Some of the best programmers I have ever met have sociology and language degrees.

gonna be a surpise when society finds out about the bamboo ceiling. and people aren't rushing to promote asian american ceos

>> No matter how you look at it, it penalizes our kids for being hard workers.

Do you think that as a general group, AA students are being hard workers more than other groups of students?

Looking at GPAs, ECs, and test scores, I strongly think so. I suspect it's because of the family culture, and parents modeling correct behavior at home. It's not about AA vs. other ethnicities. My MBA class had a number of second generation Nigerian Americans, who had a similar culture with high expectations from kids.

One could argue then that a student in another group that had similar or slightly lower GPA, EC, and test scores to those in the AA group achieved their scores by virtue of having a higher raw intelligence or personal drive since they weren't from a culture where parents set high expectations for their children.

In other words: penalize Asian American kids for being born into intact, hard-working families. Subtract 300 points from their SATs and subjectivity give them low personality scores. Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.

> Aim for equality of outcomes instead of equal opportunities.

No, that's not the goal.

For the ones that don't just want a quota, it's about how you measure the baseline of equal opportunity.

Let's imagine, for the sake of simplicity, a situation with only good motivations and where race has no correlation with anything else:

Learning more because someone helped you is a good thing.

Learning more because of intrinsic motivation is even better.

If two candidates have the same score, but one got their on their own, they are the better candidate.

Which implies that sometimes a candidate that has a worse score but has more motivation is a better candidate. Depending on the ratio of how much worse and how much motivation.

Favoring them would not mean the other candidate is penalized for their family environment. It's saying that different ways of reaching a test score matter different amounts. The raw test score isn't your level of qualification.

And trying to find the candidate that will do best is definitely not favoring equality of outcome at the cost of equal opportunity.

Note: None of this is a defense of the specific way Harvard does anything. None of this is a promise that Harvard admissions have good motives.

So when whites were considered genetically superior you chose them and now that you consider Asians to be genetically superior, you chose against them. How very "heads I win, tails you lose"

Yes, I did all that.

But no, that's not it at all. If someone is genetically superior, this method favors them. It "disfavors" having a good environment. And by "disfavors", I mean that a good environment is still favored, but less so than individual attributes.

And again, no promises that such a method is actually representative of what Harvard is doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com