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Comment by Crake | Hacker News Reader

"Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students."

They could try looking for actual diversity, then, instead of just an aesthetically pleasing mixture of superficial skin colors. Accepting 100 multiracial kids who all attended the same boarding schools is going to be way less diverse than a selection of 100 kids from different levels of income. Actually, I believe income quite dominates race in terms of predicting academic success these days--the interracial achievement gap looks quite small by comparison. (As well it should, in a country currently headed by a black president.)

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That does nothing. You just swap out "my" arbitrary definition of "diversity" for your equally arbitrary one. Any definition that doesn't have a 1:1 frequency map with "objective stuff we otherwise use for admissions qualification" is subject to the same thing. And of course those objective measure are themselves subject to debate and (gasp) subjectivity.

There's no winning here. Don't fool yourself into thinking you know the right way to do education selection, and stop sneering at all the people who want different things than you do.

Yes, a white kid from a $500,000/year household clearly has SO much more in common with a white kid from a $20,000 a year household than he does with his black classmate who also lives in a $500,000/year household.

Race based discrimination supporters love to pretend that race is everything when it means less now than it has in the entirety of US history. You can throw yourself in with the "gravity is a social construct" people if you want, but at least there's hard data to back up my beliefs, instead of just collectivist guilt that punishes truly disadvantaged people for the crime of being born with the wrong skin color for that particular decade.

> Race based discrimination supporters ...

Go away.

If calling it what it is makes you feel uncomfortable, you should probably think about why that is.

The right way to do "education selection" is to pick the best students from your applicant pool. I don't see what would be wrong with that method.

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