As well as "redlining existed in the lifetimes of the student's parent's generation, limiting intergenerational wealth and transfer to a degree that, all else equal, limited the opportunities for that group in many more ways that other groups did not experience."
Be sure to include the outcomes of racially motivated structural policies into your assessment and you will shortly recognize "the soft bigotry of low expectations" is a different metric altogether (one that PG has spoken on, where the average performance in-group is much higher than overall average, indicating you only hire cream of the crop from that group).
Yeah, but it leads to absurd results, where the black daughter of two doctors, with 500K+ in annual family income is given preferential treatment, while the Chinese-American son of a janitor is discriminated against.
Do you have any proof of that being the case? If the Chinese son makes it clear to the admission team about the hardships he overcame, surely that would be to his advantage.
Completely anecdotally, but I had two Asian colleagues from poor households. One got a full ride to Harvard and the other to MIT. Whereas, the smartest person I've ever personally known was accepted to Harvard but not given any financial aid. He was a white male with a drug-addicted mom raised by his grandma in the slums.
“If the Chinese son makes it clear to the admission team about the hardships he overcame, surely that would be to his advantage.”
It is definitely not an advantage, since the janitor’s kid is unable to pay tuition and unlikely to donate money to the school. These schools are primarily focused on maintaining their huge endowments and their over-hyped reputations.
You're advocating an arbitrary system over a rules system. Who decides whether the sob story the janitor's son tells is sufficient? Is having two drug-addled parents better than one?
In a rules based system, you get in or don't based on your qualifications and prerequisites. You can predict how the system will act in restricting you. It is fairer.
In a system where everyone must be judged, it leads to exercises in capriciousness, which is what we're seeing now. "We have too many that look like you, we need a different assortment of appearances." That's arbitrary. "Your story made me sadder than his story, you get in." That's an awful way to run a system.
That's how you get aristocracy with arbitrary power. It's what every monarch of the old systems lorded over the peasants. We're just recreating it in technicolor in all of our non-governmental systems, and it just seems so utterly foolish. The claims for why we're doing it seem noble, but they always seem that way. What this arbitrary mechanism always achieves is the opposite of its stated intent.
I think this was excellently reasoned. Wish there was something I could add, but it’s all there.
This has been my argument against “post modernism” and “my truth” nonsense. You can’t have a legal or social system that is selectively applied because of a story or your feelings.
My understanding of people claiming privilege is that, under ceterus paribus ("all else equal") assumptions, certain groups have worse socioeconomic outcomes than others.
or perhaps the upper class seeks to divide and rule the working class and so therefore initiated racial discriminating in hiring and admissions in order to further the divide and rule strategy?
