Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

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"To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination.

If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education?

If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.

That's not a useful definition of discrimination, as it would also mean that students with low test scores are being discriminated against. In fact, the only way to not discriminate would be to simply admit everyone.

Well, if you begin from the premise that "discrimination" is first and foremost something bad, and only has any semantic content as a secondary affair, your comment might make sense. But usually you take words as you find them. Students with low test scores are being discriminated against, and everyone thinks that's fine. That's not racial discrimination, though -- a distinction which is specifically called out in the comment you respond to.

The alternative to admitting everyone, if you're determined not to discriminate along any dimension, is to admit by lottery. This will produce results which are biased in various ways, but not because of any distinctions you drew.

Hey that's not a bad idea. What if admissions were simply taken out of the hands of universities and conducted as a lottery by some independent third party. Then the purpose of universities is to simply educate those who come through their doors rather than engage in the business of trying to advance their position in college rankings through the admissions process.

I suspect that what you'd see is massive flight from the public system.

Students with low test scores are discriminated against. That's what the word means. It has a negative connotation because usually people use it to describe discrimination based upon things that are usually unjust to discriminate based on, like sex and race.

Isn't it in Harvard's self-interest, and the interest of its students, to have a diverse (racially and in many other ways) student body that prepares students for a diverse world?

My understanding of Harvard's point of view is they want a particular mix of strivers and old money. This is not the same thing as racial diversity.

It need not be mutually exclusive with racial diversity.

The point is that they are investing in the growth of their endowment by seeking to maximize future donations from successful alums. With that goal it is straightforward to select exclusively from the two groups most likely to meet it.

I'm sure Harvard has more than one goal to balance in their admissions process.

Harvard's interest lies in keeping itself as the power center of America: produce the future wealthy and powerful, eduate the kids of the current powerful and wealthy. If the current powerful and wealthy has diversity, it is good for them: that is, they would recruit a kid of Chinese billionaire, instead of the kid of City Wok in South park.

Are people who do not attend multicult schools really at a disadvantage in life? Who says Harvard and other elite schools have any interest in "diversity" in "many other ways" than racially? Do their admissions policies include quotas for different religions, political ideologies, professional interests, extracurricular interests, etc.? No, their interest in "diversity" ends at skin color.

A cynic might say that, since Harvard is part of the predominantly-WASP establishment it's in their self-interest to keep their student body predominantly WASPy, with a diverse smattering of minorities. If Harvard turned around one day and based admissions solely on academic merit, they would end up churning out lots of well-educated Asians and Jews, and let's face it, it's not like white people are going to let Asians and Jews run the country so Harvard loses its status as the academy of the nation's leadership.

>If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty.

This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?

I would say the disparity in IQ scores is another symptom of the same problem rather than a fundamental cause. I don't think black people are fundamentally stupider than Chinese people, for instance.

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