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Comment by siliconc0w | Hacker News Reader

Diversity in education may be more valuable to Harvard (and, probably, the rest of us) than a few tenths of a GPA point or handful of SAT points. This seems perfectly valid. (IMO) Diversity helps creates better solutions to better problems than you're likely to get with slightly higher performing but less diverse populations.

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I would say that fairness is more important than diversity. Setting different goals for different races is a racism no matter how diverse you could get in the end.

About GPA/SAT: According to Goodhart's Law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." However, a measure is required and should be consistent.

Asians are not born to be good at GPA, American Asians are good at that because the universities admission system and immigrant policy are specifically designed to select students who are good at school. The first generation of Asians in the US are most grad students from foreign countries.

It is interesting that you argue fairness should be the goal. If diversity results in a universitiy doing better overall (which some studies suggest it can) then presumably it is akin choosing high GPA students in that it is done for the purpose of achiving their goals as an institution.

Put another way: If fairness is your goal what about the kids who don't have a high GPA score? What happened to their fair chance to go to Harvard?

Agreed. But, diversity is not limited to race alone, there are many kinds of Asian people, with diverse backgrounds and different beliefs. Is that not worthy of consideration?

Assuming this to be true(and I generally do), you end up with a different problem - that of resentment. There are groups of people who will be upset that they couldn't get into a school because they were the "wrong" race. So you still have a racism problem at the end of the day; just a lesser-known version. This is where I prefer things like BlackGirlsCode.com to try and work on these issues "on the side"[1] to raise academic performance, so the school in the big public spotlight like Harvard don't have to take sides in the controversy and just admit people based on scores, achievements, whatever... just not the controversial stuff like gender, race, etc.

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1. When I say "on the side", I basically mean that probably nobody is going to be upset at BlackGirlsCode.com enough to actually file a lawsuit(and have a chance at winning) the way Harvard is getting sued now. Is this fair/right? Probably not, but I think this is the best way to navigate the shaky terrain of public opinion & racism.

>Diversity in education may be more valuable to Harvard

And fair to those who have no control over their genotype?

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