"Here we find our first indication of the strength of preferences for underrepresented minority students. African-American students have nearly an 80 percent better chance of being admitted than their white counterparts, while the Hispanic advantage is reflected in almost 50 percent higher odds compared to whites. By contrast, Asian applicants and those from other races face lower odds of admission on the order of 17 or 18 percent—in relation to comparable whites."
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/tje/files/...
People of all races also overwhelmingly oppose consideration of race in hiring: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america....
In California, Prop 16 failed in every single majority Hispanic county. It’s a minority of mostly white progressives pushing this stuff.
I think if you look a little closer you'll find that many members of that "white" minority are in fact not White (or Hispanic, Black, or Asian.)
There it is much more explicit and written in the law. For some subjects, the criteria it takes for one cohort to get admission in the top college is the same one in which the other cohort will not even get admission in any college in the top 20. You can see this in undergraduate level admissions the most. I read interesting stats on this long time back, will need to see if I can find them.
However, in case of South Asia/India, the argument is positive discrimination now to correct for negative discrimination in the past. The same argument can't be made in US though against Asians.
Ironically, Teltumbde advocates for replacing reservations with American-style affirmative action.
That isn't unpractical realism, nothing else is required. Of course some will have a huge head start and culture towards education is a very important factor. But you can shelve the false justice which is just racism with another motivation.
Could this indicate that there're many bright people in India, who are mostly self taught, because they belonged to the "wrong" group and so couldn't study at University (or at least not the one they wanted) ?
Whilst, if someone has studied at a top university, it doesn't mean that much?
I don't think India makes this "penance for primordial sins" argument.
There's a current high correlation between somebody's caste and somebody's socio-economic status which is reservation is supposed to solve. It has loopholes surely and in some parts of the country, completely useless. But overall it is effective in increasing social mobility and social cohesion.
I'll also add, the paper you linked sort of muddies the waters on your point.
> Based on complete data for three applicant cohorts to three of the most academically selective research universities, we show that admission bonuses for athletes and legacies rival, and sometimes even exceed, the size of preferences for underrepresented minority applicants.
That is to say, there is a lot going on in the admissions process, but it isn't clear to me that much is gained by insisting on a racial perspective. With all that stated, it seems obvious that Asian Americans should fight against discrimination that statistically disadvantages them based on their identity. It's unfortunate that a quality education is a finite pie we have to divvy up into thin slices.
If you look at those particular stats, sure, it doesn't sound particularly objectionable. But if you look at others: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15/politics/harvard-affirmative-...
> Under questioning from SFFA lawyer John Hughes, Fitzsimmons detailed some of the recruitment efforts that begin the selection process. Harvard mails recruitment letters to black and Hispanic high schoolers with middle-range SAT scores, Fitzsimmons acknowledged, yet only sends such letters to Asian Americans if they have scored more than 200 points higher.
> According to charts Hughes displayed, Harvard sends such recruiting letters to black, Hispanic, and Native American students with top grades who hit at least 1100 on the combined math and verbal SAT score (the top score is 1600). To receive such letters under similar circumstances, Asian American men must have a combined score of 1380, and Asian American women, a combined score of 1350.
So, an individual Asian student needs to score much higher to have a chance at Harvard, compared to students of other ethnicities. That's very blatantly racial discrimination.
This amounts to, "sorry, we have enough people of your color, so we're gonna make it harder for you to get in." That's wrong. Period.
Really? I find it very easy. Racial discrimination is wrong. Period. You're pointing to a social discrepancy and saying "eh, maybe racial discrimination is okay because it might make the demographics more equal." I urge you to fully consider what this entails. If we want to live in a multicultural society, we must accept that different groups have different values, preferences, and practises. We choose to allow groups to be different, so we must accept that this means groups end up in different places.
Asian parents in the U.S. exhibit high propensity to encourage that their children study more than all other ethnic groups(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...) (data here: https://www.bls.gov/tus/). Unsurprisingly, Asian children grow up to earn more than all other ethnic groups, and display lower levels of crime. In other words, this cultural difference results in an income and wealth disparity.
I am not of Asian descent, and I believe that a child should not be studying their childhood away. Who is right? Should I be making my children study 13 hours every week? Or should the Asian parents have their children study less? After all, if the existence of a disparity alone is morally wrong, one group must bend.
Or can we accept that different groups are different. This is indeed the premise behind multiculturalism. This will result in disparities between groups as a necessary and healthy outcome. Not something to be feared, but something to be celebrated as an expression of free will and cultural autonomy.
Bringing Blacks and Hispanics into the conversation is a red herring used by elite universities to defend the indefensible. If you want to see what a truly meritocratic admissions policy would look like, at least in STEM, just see Caltech, where Asians make up 44% of the student body, not the paltry 15% quota the Ivies have consented to grant them.
https://www.registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statist...
The other thing to consider is that “diversity” somehow fails to consider class. Have you noticed how universities prattle on about racial statistics but getting stats on socio-economic background is like pulling teeth, if you can get data at all?
Good that it's not then? With modern technology, one can get started on ultra cheap automated courses (not necessarily just static lectures, can be interactive/VR experience like good computer games), coupled with one on one help from paid and volunteer tutors around the world. Than those who show potential can in due time be given access to expensive research equipment and world renoun professors. All without a need to make a life making or breaking decision based on a single admission process. Let students decide for themselves if and when to conclude that a subject is not for them. Current system amounts to artificial gatekeeping of success.
[1] In my opinion there is no similar justification for preferences in favor of Hispanics. Studies show that Hispanics are similarly situated to previous generations of white immigrants: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Their income disparity is explained by recency and character of immigration, and disappears over time. You see the same phenomenon about Asian groups that comprise primarily refugees. Vietnamese people were as poor as Black people in the 1970s. Today their household income is slightly higher than white people. By contrast, Black and indigenous people face persistent disparities that are not disappearing over time.
The numbers are a little misleading because 25% of the students have their race listed as "non-resident alien", aka no race assigned.
Removing that group and adjusting the other percentages accordingly gives:
* 55% White (61.5% of US population)
* 20.4% Asian (5.4% of US population)
* 12.2% Hispanic (17.6% of US population)
* 7% Black (12.3 % of US population)
* 4.7% Biracial (3.1% of US population)
I was just curious about the numbers and how they stacked up to the national average, and thought others might be as well.
I think this belief is part of the problem. Information is infinitely replicable at zero cost, but we create barriers to its dissemination. If there are kids who are eager and able to learn material, they should have access to that it. And if they have mastered the material, they should be granted recognition of that objective fact. Any other policy means we are deliberately dumbing ourselves down.
On the other hand, perhaps we need to dissect what it is we mean by "education", because while access to information can be unlimited, the number of places at Harvard IS limited. Inasmuch as membership in an exclusive social club is limited, and inasmuch as the Harvard class is an exercise in social engineering, I can see wny one may want some representation for various groups.
In short, knowledge doesn't need to be a finite pie. It only appears to be so because some domains are gate-kept by limited admissions numbers in order to protect the supply of labour in those professions. The tech industry shows that when we don't have professional licensing, talent can find a way regardless of credentialism.
If this is the objective, then we need to start a lot earlier than the point of university admissions. Also, "circumstances of their birth" would need to be broadened to encompass quite a bit more than just race.
Then you don't have the "did we do enough for XYZ group", the RNG will simplify both decision making and justification. If there's x% of XYZ passing the minimum score, that's how many will be in your class.
Private high schools that had segregation policies ran the risk of having their tax status revoked messed with by the IRS.
Colleges get tons of money from the federal government, which is conditional on not discriminating - and keeping federal government happy.
So private secondary schools still have a fair amount of leeway. Not infinite, but in reality they don’t have to worry about lawsuits like this.
Colleges do.
I'm against affirmative action altogether but the best kind mostly avoids this problem: only consider ethnicity when it helps the application. Consider whites, Asians, Jews, and others as part of the same category.
Of course, if you look at grade schools, it looks like racial minorities are 'overrepresented' compared to the general population, so it's possible there's just fewer young white people.
I understand that tackling overrepresentation and underrepresentation is important; but, when emphasizing race to the degree that these academic institutions are, isn't this leading to representation disparities within the racial categories themselves? The racial categories are a very American centric and limited term, and arguably rooted largely as social constructs that loosely define the ethnic populations they cover. For example, and I don't mean any offense or to call any group out specifically, Koreans are overrepresented compared to Cambodians at the academic institutions listed in the article per their population proportion. This doesn't seem to be captured and accounted for under the current system. The same underlying disparity potentiality applies to whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, etc...
The interpretation being, that it's a sort of half-committed approach to equity that isn't really leading to equitable outcomes if that makes sense, and may even be exacerbating ethnic marginalization within the racial categories.
Another question is, if this isn't leading to genuine equity of outcomes and instead passing discriminatory behavior onto smaller, marginalized ethnic groups, what do you do then? Do you revisit implementing an improved meritocracy system, or implement an equity based system with greater accuracy and precision to prevent this?
This doesn't even begin to tackle the issues current racial categorization creates with multiracial people and the essence of "purism."
There is a fairly classic manoeuvre where the elites feel threatened by the middle class, so they form an alliance with the lower classes to fight them. Eg, a lot of tax & spend policies make it harder to accumulate wealth in the middle class but the very wealthy can shield themselves.
If Asians are not benefiting from being a racial minority, I do wonder if admission policy is focused more on race or more on excluding people who look middle class. I see some mention of Harvard. The point of Harvard is to politely set up the next generation of leaders. Not educate the masses.
Possibly the article offers a view on this, but it is paywalled.
The only this article points out correctly is that "Elite" universities, and therefor most modern day research in every field, is tainted by Racist Aristrocratic idealogies. They protect their own kind at the expense of all others.
If you are dreaming of an elite school, you are the problem. You give them power.
A long while back at University, I noticed very wealthy students on student income schemes that were only meant to be accessed by students whose parents qualified as low income status. The bar to qualify was quite difficult, if you had one parent employed in a job then it was unlikely you would qualify.
I asked how they could qualify, while almost everyone had to work part time jobs to cover costs.
It turns out their parents paid themselves a very low salary in order to qualify.
It definitely would hurt their bottom lines, since most of the private elites also provide non-loan financial aid out of their endowments to people who can’t otherwise afford to go. That only works if only a few poorer people make it over the bar.
Public schools should step up more here, as it is their mission.
You've really hit the heart of the logical conclusion of intersectionality that those espousing it fight to avoid: individualism. Once you have to start accounting for subgroups of subgroups, you reach the fact that the smallest subgroup to account for is an individual person.
1. Admitting children-of-elites for funding and advancement purposes 2. Admitting extremely high-competent students to build an alumni reputation 3. Maintaining a demographics profile that the general population will see as legitimate
Fundamentally, today's racial quotas and preferences are in place for the same reason as why Harvard discriminated against Jewish students in the 1920s and 30s. If they didn't, the university would be seen as an attempt by outside demographic groups to install elites by a significant section of the population.
I can accept that some people have an issue with current liberal ideas because they think they don't work. If so, what is going to work? Or is the current state inevitable in order to have the high-functioning economy that the US has?
Certainly more Harvard grads isn't the solution. But finding a path to even good high school educations and any college has been elusive to say the least.
I hadn’t thought about this this way before - eventually anyone with an inclination to “rage against the machine” will have to really pinpoint that energy and drill down and down until it seems like a parody.
Not saying we’re there now, but an interesting thought exercise.
It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians. I’m reminded of Alison Collins in San Francisco, who called Asians “house n—-ers” and said they use “white supremacist thinking to get ahead.” https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board....
Not everybody out and says stuff like this, obviously, but I sense the sentiment lurking under the surface in a lot of modern social justice discourse. In order to fit Asian economic success into their framework of “white supremacy” they end up making some extremely offensive assumptions. For example I’ve seen respectable articles arguing that the “model minority” stereotype arises from white people “allowing” Asian to be successful, to use them as a “wedge” against other minorities. I’ve been told to my face that Asians aren’t “grateful” enough to Black people for the Civil Rights movement and we “owe them.”
You see a form of this in particular the discussion around TJ. For example, opponents of merit-based admissions act like test prep is basically cheating, and elevate its effectiveness to mythic proportions. I prepped for the TJ test and SAT. It consisted of going to some Indian dude’s house for an hour every Saturday for a summer. Not private tutoring—six or eight kids crowded around a small dining room table doing practice problems. If that’s a game changer what does that say about American K-8 math education? And they act like the cost makes it unattainable for anyone else. But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families. My uncle does math tutoring in Canada. His students are all immigrant kids from the high rise subsidized housing complex where he lives with my aunt and cousin. (My cousin lived there until he got his engineering degree and MBA and moved to a nice apartment in Toronto.)
The modern social justice folks blame all economic disparities on white people, and thus don’t even have the intellectual tools to explain what’s happening with Asians except through some distasteful assumptions.
Ironically, this is scouting round a theory I have long espoused – the failure of American K-8 math education has nothing to do with teaching, and everything to do with culture.
Sure, going to some Indian dude's house every Saturday for a summer and prepping is not objectively hard in itself. But think of how many cultural factors had to be overcome for that to work out:
- Your family bothered enough to think about sending you there, rather than spending time keeping up with the Joneses for the latest model of garden sprinkler
- Your family quietly put down one thousand(!) dollars towards additional education instead of complaining about the schooling endlessly over $15 bottomless mimosas on Saturday
- You were extremely uncool by the standards of American culture for doing any kind of test prep. On Saturdays at that. The cool kids were off skateboarding or something, right?
- You stuck it out for a whole summer. Who does that? It's cool to blow it off, man. Chill out!
I think the big problem is that most Americans completely ignore these cultural factors, end up having bad outcomes in math, and then often blame it on the "terrible" school system. Asian-Americans just happen to have enough counteracting factors in their own culture that nullify some of these influences that drive away people from math in the United States.
----------------------------------------
Edit: Just to make it clear, the takeaway from my comment is intended to be "We should value STEM fields more in American culture, start paying your classroom teachers $200k", not "Every kid should be forced into test prep". Test prep is terrible and should be replaced by teaching the fundamentals of math and science much better. Maybe that would have caused 'rayiner to work at NASA instead of being a lawyer!
And test prep is fine. For the most part, it’s teaching you intuition about numbers, vocabulary, and logical reasoning skills. I’d much rather my kid drill SAT questions than study half the stuff in the school curriculum these days.
- Your family quietly put down one thousand(!) dollars towards additional education instead of complaining about the schooling endlessly over $15 bottomless mimosas on Saturday
You really think economically disadvantaged families are sitting around sipping mimosas and worrying about garden sprinklers? Wow.
Build a raseberry pi robot with a friend, start a club with friends, figure out how to build a fort in a tree, sell lemonade, build a website with friends, find out what you like to do <- I feel like these will be more important job skills compared to memorizing Boyle's law [ a relation concerning the compression and expansion of a gas at constant temperature 1662 ].
You will have decades of sitting, staring at broken SPA apps - smelling someone cook fish in a microwave. You will never get that 3rd grade summer back.
I live in Arlington, so not Fairfax, but in a neighborhood that borders Fairfax (and not really that far away from TJ either). The median household income for our census tract was about a 3rd of the county's average, ~$40k vs ~$120k when I looked into it a few years back. Which is also indicative of the Fairfax areas around me. It's not like America has much in the way of generic social support to make it easier for folks like that to spend a couple thousand on some extra tutoring, plus the cost here is higher because there are so many affluent folks to drive up the price of a tutor. This also isn't a small number of people, it's a really dense area down here relative to other parts of Northern Virginia (including parts with substantially better transit access and more walkable communities).
Northern Virginia has some pretty unique pockets, my zip code is one of the most diverse in the entire country[0], and a bit south of me in Fairfax is the only other one Virginia has in the top 100, but also quite a bit of poverty in those same unique areas. Idk, I just wouldn't paint with such a broad brush, when I know very few folks on my block with kids could just spend a few thousand on extra tutoring.
[0]https://medium.com/@waldoch/measuring-neighborhood-diversity...
Taking life challenges and starting points into account is more of a meritocracy, because you are accounting for the difficulty they had to get to where they are.
For example, say you have two kids with the same high SAT score. One kid has been given every chance to succeed - test prep, rich parents, best schools money can buy. The other kid was raised by a single parent in a poor neighborhood at a bad public school with no test prep or anything like that. They have to work a job to support their family. On paper they have the same score, but the 2nd kid clearly has more merit, in my opinion. They would likely surpass the other kid if given the same privileges they had.
It is very likely that increased preparation of the test reduces the tests ability to predict aptitude. If you were testing aptitude for kicking a football, and some players practiced every day and some never kicked a ball before, the test would overrate the players with practice and underrate those who didn't. Send both groups to football kicking practice for 8 hours a day and the test stops being useful.
That said, it is really easy to measure this. And the fact that the proponents of the affirmative action don't prove this factor is significant suggests it probably isn't. All you have to do is see the correlation between asian/white scores and their grades and the correlation between black and hispanic scores and their grades.
I have no experience with Fairfax county school testing, but in law school testing (LSAT), the scores for black and Hispanic students still accurately* predict their law school and bar exam performance. The LSAT isn't biased.
*as accurately as it predicts anyone's performance.
> But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families.
Selling my blue collar parents on $1,000 to slightly improve my chances of getting into a slightly better school so I could spend even more money? That’s absolutely not happening. I’d have gotten a pat on the back and told there’s no shame in community college.
I think you misjudge how people see that value proposition. There are certainly blue collar parents who see value in a prestigious education, but most maybe rightfully don’t.
I even knew many parents are guiding the children to take up programming at a very young age. `Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg went through this. We should to`.
My mom made damn sure that I went to the best possible schools, did all of the afterschool programs (including the expensive ones like band) and went to summer camp. She had to beg, borrow, save and sacrifice to make sure that happened.
If you grew up in a two parent household you're already significantly ahead of the game by a huge margin.
This strikes me as extremely out of touch. I would think this cost is unattainable for a large chunk of American families.
If it were true, and the cost was so clearly worth it, then why isn't every kid in America doing test prep?
"Do these Asian students have an unfair advantage because their affluent parents can afford to pay for expensive test prep, as Mayor de Blasio has suggested? At Stuyvesant, as critics of the de Blasio plan have pointed out, 46 percent of students qualify for free or subsidized lunches, a common measure of very modest financial circumstances. Many of the Asian families whose children go to Stuyvesant and the other specialized schools are poor. Many of them are immigrants, or the first people in their families to be born in the United States. Many of them live in households where English isn't spoken. They are not children of privilege gaming the system, but newcomers working to realize the American dream.
...
But in addition to pushing their children, China- and Korean-born parents, according to the "tiger mom" theory, sacrifice their own immediate needs to provide their kids with the resources they need to succeed."
But reasonable test prep is very obviously obtainable from a monetary perspective. My own SAT prep was mostly a $20 workbook, and my score improved immensely by the third practice test. Even $1,000 can be achieved if it’s made the top priority besides food/shelter. And my impression is that for many Asians, that’s where the priority sits.
Americans mostly don’t do after school reinforcement education because it’s not in our culture —unlike Asian cultures where buxibans are pretty much the rule. People will putt around in very old cars which need replacement in order to afford being able to send their kids to after school classes.
We’d rather get new sneakers, iPhones or whatever else peer pressure tells us to do.
Our pop culture reinforces the “be a dope” stereotype as cool and the studious kids as “nerdy”. That’s all you need to know.
Wow I resemble that remark, down to the part about the Indian dude's house. We didn't have a few thousand dollars to spend though, we just photocopied practice tests and worked on the same test together.
American k-8 math education is a hot mess and the statistics have borne that out for years. Less than half of 8th graders rank "proficient" in math (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...).
> But it’s a few thousand dollars if that (as low as under $1,000) which is reachable to all but destitute families.
And you've hit the nail on the head.
https://www.healthmattersalexandria.org/demographicdata - the median household income for African American families in Alexandria is $55k / year. A thousand a month is 20% of income, only 10% less than is recommended for spending on rent. Private tutoring for African American families is like renting two apartments. For the median Asian-American family in Alexandria, that private tutoring is only about 10% of income. And, as a side note, the fact that the median breaks so differently between two racial demographics points to the interplay between race and class in the United States that has historically made issues like this so challenging to address. Programs designed to minimize class disparity can look like racial programs.
America's historical racial disparity is a hard problem to solve. People know what the outcomes are that they want, but "the pipeline is leaky and full of acid," as the saying goes. I'm not sure the solution is to bootstrap students who would otherwise miss the mark into magnet school by changing the selection criteria to cause the magnet school to more accurately reflect the local demographics around the school... But I understand the impulse to try, because honestly, I don't think anyone knows what will work.
But the assumptions are based on socio-political history. It's fairly well know that the asian american population is very whitewashed primarily because most asians ( chinese, vietnamese, etc ) were pro-white collaborators who fled china, vietnam, etc after their side lost wars ( chinese civil war, vietnamese war, etc ). These are people who sided with their european/american colonial masters against their own people. And another group are asians historically dominated by white nations ( philipines, japanese, etc ). There have been demographic studies that showed that most asian americans date and marry white. It's so skewed that asian american communities will disappear in a generation or two without asian immigrants.
> I’ve been told to my face that Asians aren’t “grateful” enough to Black people for the Civil Rights movement and we “owe them.”
It was the civil rights movement of the 60s that ended the ban of asian immigration. Without the civil rights movement, there hardly would be any asians in the US. Asians were specifically banned from the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
Oddly enough, asian women were the only gender specifically banned from the US. Looking back it's bizarre, but it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875
It was only in 1965, as a result of civil rights movement, that the ban was lifted. 99.99% of the asians here today came after 1965.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
I'm against affirmative action, against woke culture, etc. But there are kernels of truth on every side. I certainly don't think you owe anyone anything, but there is a reason why other minorities might think you do. This issue also shows that everyone has issues with everyone. And everyone will fight against everyone when the pie gets smaller and smaller.
It seems that more than half the families in the US are "destitute" then (https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/most-americans-cant-afford...) and it's been bad for years (https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...)
Poor immigrant families in New York where the parents work in Chinese restaurants can afford $995 for test prep because they plan for it in advance.
If you click on the report in your own link, the survey summary even says as much:
"If faced with an unexpected expense of $400, 61 percent of adults say they would cover it with cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement—a modest improvement from the prior year. Similar to the prior year, 27 percent would borrow or sell something to pay for the expense, and 12 percent would not be able to cover the expense at all."
In the study, the Fed asks respondents whether they are able to pay all of their bills in full. Only 17% say they can’t pay some bills. The Fed also asks respondents how a $400 emergency expense that they had to pay would affect their ability to pay their other bills. 85% percent report that they would still be able to pay all their bills. Only 14% say that the emergency expense would result in their not being able to pay some bills. The situation is bad for that 14%, but that figure is much closer to what you would expect in a normal distribution, unlike the sensationalist 40% figure that makes the rounds.
Also, these kinds of surveys capture a point in time, and don't reflect changing affluence of an individual over the course of their life. One study[3] of historic income tax returns found that 40% of working Americans spend at least 2 years in the top 10%. A full 62% spend at least 2 years in the top 20%, and over 54% spend at least 3 years there[4].
If this comes as a surprise, one can sanity check this by comparing the median household income (after taxes, transfers, and benefits) in the US with those of other countries; the US is #1[5].
And NB: even for those that are destitute, the US has a huge safety net, where the poorest fifth of American working age households are better off than those in Canada, Denmark, Britain, and Germany because their market income is higher and their taxes are lower, after accounting for all monetary benefits[6]. That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement (people still slip through the cracks), but it's by no means as dire as many make it out to be.
Given all this, it takes a lot of motivated reasoning to be able to argue that "more than half of the families in the US are destitute".
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...
[3] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure?id=10.1371%...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
For those that benefit from AA to get into elite institutions, this can paradoxically end up being harmful as they are often thrown into the deep end where they have to compete with peers that are the brightest in the world since they have had to go through all of the supplementary development necessary to compete with the best of the best to get accepted [2].
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
An extremely disproportionate amount of the benefits of attempts to fix the damage done to black Americans goes to black elites. It's a colonial pattern, where the goal seems to be to generate a tiny clique of representatives who can be treated like diplomats/negotiators for the entire group. The problem is that black Americans are a group only to the extent that they face the same racial treatment by the US, but not through being actually coherent or deeply obligated towards one another. The bulk of black people are supposed to see "representation" and "role models" as some remediation through some trickle-down of inspiration and drive. Black people have plenty of inspiration and drive, what they lack is family wealth; paradoxically, efforts to fix that have concentrated on black people who do have family wealth.
It's annoying but obvious why Asian people would be upset; they're seeing top 0.5% privileged black people getting a benefit from a historical discrimination that has affected them the least (as compared to other black people.) But that's really what meritocracy is: the people who have the most get the most.
It certainly doesn't help that fictional depictions of black people in television and movies tend to depict them as wealthier and more educated than the white people on the same programs, and disproportionately likely to be in management positions. People are bathed in images of black elites (produced by other white people), and when hearing about Ivy League discrimination have to know who that benefits.
Australia gets by just fine with standardized testing only, don't see why America can't as well.
If you make the cut then you can qualify for scholarships if you are disadvantaged because of means, etc.
To be fair though Australia is overall more equal in terms of schooling outcomes but to pretend that it's a university/college problem that the rest of the schooling system is fucked is preposterous. By the time someone is at the age to go into university the damage has been done.
Give the spots to those that deserve them because of ability. It's not the job of the school to rebalance society that is the governments problem.
Because when the results align along racial boundaries and votes (and therefore power) can be won by 'combating' that 'discrimination' policies follow accordingly.
Asian Australians disproportionally destroy the affluent white Australian population on standardized tests as they fucking should because they prepare more and work harder.
As a result they have priority access to medicine and law degrees, again, as they fucking should.
If someone is going to work harder for something they simply deserve it, that is all there is to it.
Agree. "De-bias" is actually the same thing as bias. The only way to solve bias is to increase accuracy of measurement, not introduce new error terms with a negative sign.
The end result of a lot of this, my guess, is that schools will drop standardized tests as admission requirements. That's what happened at my institution.
Standardized tests are also biased. They are definitely biased toward individuals who are representative of the typical test-taking participant in background, who have more test-specific preparation beyond ability, and toward individuals who are more familiar and skilled with standardized test-taking in general. The purpose of standardized tests, nominally, is to select on aptitude, ability, or achievement, independent of the test, not to become the thing selected for. People seem to forget this. All the other things -- grades, experiences, and so forth -- are also biased in their own way, but in ways that counter the bias of tests. The reasons for having multiple criteria are so the different forms of bias sort of cancel each other out, or can be evaluated against one another.
Stepping back a bit, I have colleagues at institutions who heavily use standardized tests rotely, and they complain heavily about ending up with students who just want to be told the correct answer, without thinking independently or questioning material. That is, overly obsessed with grades, or missing the fact that established textbook information is often incorrect, or incomplete. This is the fear. Schools want you to be right in the "real world" even if it means getting a lower test score or grade. (Importantly, these colleagues are at institutions with low numbers of Asian applicants to begin with for other reasons, mostly geography.)
Having said that, there's definitely racism afoot. Interestingly to me, people seem to be assuming that this always takes the form of quotas or something, where the racism is in favor of blacks or hispanics, and against Asians. This might be true in many cases, but racism can operate simultaneously against both. I have had colleagues who have argued heavily against black-hispanic applicants because test scores were too low, and then against Asians with good test scores because of interview characteristics. What people might be missing here in this HN thread is that this racism was coming from persons advocating for use of standardized tests. At some level this can happen because typically there are more than enough applicants with high enough test scores, and because there are other reasonably objective criteria that are also legitimately important, so you have to use something other than the test to make decisions.
The net result of this all was to conclude that tests were problematic in both directions, that it underselected some people of disadvantaged backgrounds and overselected other people of other types of backgrounds. Not because of race quotas per se, but because of test bias. There were too many experiences of people with very good real-world qualifications in every other respect, but low test scores, or high test scores and every real-world indication of problems, even among individuals who were all white. The response to racism with regard to test selection was to just drop the test requirement, because in situations with racism, it was being used to exclude underprivileged individuals, and also not helping people who were experiencing other forms of racism. It was basically concluded the test was becoming a distraction and not functioning that well.
I know that standardized tests aren't devoid of faults.
But, if you want to replace them, you have to replace them with something better.
Just because something has faults, it doesn't mean we abandon it. We find something better, and then replace it.
That is not being true for admissions.
Double-blind standardized tests are not only safe against bias, but also against corruption.
If we were to simply abandon things with fault, we would have to get rid of democracy, marriage, and food, among other things.
This is a sad case of Goodhart's Law playing into reality.
People in power have chosen one metric as a measure of progress of historically oppressed races- enrolment in college degrees.
And that is costing us dearly.
I was under the impression that the main variable we were trying to predict in admissions was collegiate academic performance.
High school grades are highly correlated with collegiate academic performance. High school grades + standardized test scores taken together are even more correlated.
This study:
https://50.cresst.org/2020/05/20/cresst-recommendation-for-n...
Found that eliminating standardized tests in admissions actually benefited Asian applicants while hurting Black applicants.
No objective admissions metric will ever be perfect, but grades and standardized test scores are fairly good. I wonder how long until there's a push to eliminate high school grades as an admissions metric.
All the bias happens well before the tests. Fix the bias at it's root, don't blame standardized testing regimes for exposing the inherent biases in the system.
Also for what it's worth, I encountered more cheating Chinese students in my time in college than any other race by far. They even had email lists where they'd circulate around all the test prompts and homework answers. So let's not pretend like grades and test scores are some end-all be-all of academic achievement.
Even private institutions are legally prevented from discriminating on the basis of protected class, such as race. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case against Harvard later this year to rule on just this, and there is a good chance the plaintiffs succeed in ending the practise of racial discrimination in college admissions.
HR departments have measures and targets to report on and they will find a way to make their bosses happy.
1. For all the logical/social contortions, judgment calls, distorted selection standards, tuning, and subjective assessments involved to create the "desired" class of students (thousands and thousands of hours of applications, reading, discussion by admissions officers, students writing essays that emphasize their overcoming disadvantage)... how much better an outcome or result does this create than simply allowing some objective standard to dictate who gets in, or random selection above a certain bar?
Is there any way to say how much better we do for so much effort? Other countries apply strict bars for admissions -- do they do worse? Why do we think that this produces any much better outcome? Is it just to make us feel better?
2. By what principle are administrators of universities limiting their actions or extent of tuning? Do they apply this believed solution to university admissions just because that is their domain and have it under their control? What makes them think that this is the solution to inequality? And if this is the solution, why are they so meek about it and don't instead completely overemphasize every group that needs more representation?
How do they know when they've achieved the goal? How do they know whether a new goal needs to be set? When "equality" on some dimension is achieved, will that be the end of it? Is there an end to this? Will other groups be not so lucky to get such attention when their turn comes?
Unsatisfactory answers to all these questions make me not support how AA is implemented in the US.
I suppose the thing that's odd is that - uh - education and academics feels very secondary in all of this?
For example, for college admissions in my country (the UK), you take national subject-orientated coursework and exams at age 16 and 18 on topics like History or Chemistry, write an essay about the subjects you want to study at university and then maybe have an extra exam or interview that's run by the university. And we're not even a particularly academics-driven culture. I'm sure other commenters can more succinctly describe the US college admissions process, but it really does seem to elevate the importance of (1) extra-curriculars + cultural + social action (2) high school class grade percentiles (3) standardised 'IQ-adjacent' testing and (4) motivations and outlook. What's missing from this list is identifying and developing the next top wave of scholars that might have a narrow but deep interest in an academic field.
My proposal is then: the top X% of students based on test scores will probably have roughly similar intellectual skills, and the much more gifted 0.1% of students are not going to be revealed simply through test scores, examinations, or admission essays. So my solution: take the top X% and filter them through a lottery. In that way you can motivate students to achieve a certain baseline minimum while also minimizing the stresses of college admission (although for this to work well you also need to ensure that universities throughout the nation are funded, supported, and operated more equally, so a talented student who failed to get into one of the top-rated schools because of bad luck can still get a decent-enough education, and then transfer to a better school later)
People should have as much control over their destiny as possible. They should have the opportunity to better themselves through hard work.
No, that is a non-sequitur. Being an "economic and cultural elite [...] well rounded and ethical steward" does not mean that the proportion of Asians in higher education must be forcefully decreased. Are Asian-Americans not valid "economic and cultural elite[s]?"
No, the only thing that would logically follow your statement is a rigorous meritocracy that filters to let individuals rise to the top based off of objective measures. Race should not be considered - doing so is plainly racist.
re: TJH admissions:
> In 2020, during the summer after George Floyd’s death, the Virginia state government announced that it would be requiring schools to step up their efforts in diversity. Fairfax County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Brabrand’s response was fairly simple. To create a new, broader admissions pool, he proposed eliminating the $100 application fee, the standardized test, and teacher recommendations in favor of a “merit lottery.” The district would be carved into regions, and each region would be given 70 seats in the incoming TJ class. As long as you applied and had the minimum required GPA of 3.5, you would have as good a chance at getting in as any other student from your group.
What exactly is the problem with this?
GPA is not a useful measurement across schools in the US, because the scope of difficulty and curriculum varies widely between states and municipalities. It's also easy to game in schools that offer advanced courses- just don't take them. At my school, the people who had the highest GPA did so by avoiding classes like AP calculus BC.
Any one of these measurements in a vaccum is going to have problems. The GPA without the school and curriculum is like knowing that something is 25% off without knowing the original price.
That being said, the lottery is probably a better method than people give it credit for. It's guaranteed to have the fair distribution over time people want if the lottery is administered fairly.
Didn't Google do some hiring study and find that grades didn't matter as long as they were above a 3.0 or something? I know there is a lot of noise in grades, but there's probably some threshold.
Here's some source https://web.archive.org/web/20210610101258/http://qz.com/
It came out in the court case that the real reasoning was to discriminate on the basis of race without saying they were discriminating on the basis of race, and they weren’t very careful about hiding the fact that the changes were racially motivated in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Here’s the opinion: https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...
The whole opinion is worth reading, but the meat starts from the middle of page 5 onward. Their explicit goal was to change the racial makeup of the school for political purposes, and so the case hinges less upon the changes themselves than the racially motivated reasoning behind them.
If you are interested and would like a far better explanation than I can provide that goes into the opinion, the context around the case and alternatives, consider the latest episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast released on February 28th, 2022[1].
[1]: Link to the episode page here but you are better served searching it in a podcast app like Overcast. https://advisoryopinions.thedispatch.com/p/judge-strikes-dow...
They should clearly eliminate the test fees and make free prep material available for those who can't afford them. Conduct free preparation classes for anyone to attend etc. A lot can be done to make standardised tests more accessible. That would serve a greater purpose.
Ironically, they used to have a set number of seats for people that had bad grades and aced the standardized tests. Blacks, Hispanics and other economically disadvantaged groups were over represented in that admissions pool. (So eliminating the tests will reduce the number of minority kids. According to the WSJ, they did this in Virginia in an attempt to boost enrollment in those groups. UC claimed that was their goal, but the study that they commissioned specifically to evaluate the policy change said it would reduce minority admissions.)
Doubly-ironically, a while back, California colleges had explicit quotas for Asian kids to keep them from "taking over". They eliminated the quotas and promised to never do it again.
They're still making a big stink about how the student body isn't representative enough. Guess which group is the only overrepresented one in California. (Hint: It's not the Caucasians.)
The structural racism in this state continues to amaze me.
When everyone is a valedictorian, nobody is.
The problem with the TJ case was that the administrators changed the admission criteria with the express purpose of racial rebalancing...and there are e-mails..
Could it also be that they want the better education? The names on the buildings aren't the only differences.
The problem is that demand is way too high for magnet / college prep type education. The solution is to designate more schools as such but as with anything the devil is in the details.
Concisely said. Blinding applicants' high schools would reveal the inequality in treatment latent in our educational system.
Which way?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
(Not saying this study is necessarily predictive of "inequality in schools", just that we shouldn't expect it to be a sure thing like you suggest)
(Note that many school buildings are quite old. A school could replace their smallest buildings with larger ones so as to not need more land. Furthermore, this is something alumni can make happen by stipulating it with their donations; no need to go to court.)
As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.
'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'
For example, given two equally strong applicants, but one is from upper class and the other lower class, it seems clear that the lower class applicant is stronger, because they were able to achieve similarly with fewer resources.
Edit: I should also add that the student and both parents were black. This probably played a large role in the offers.
You could renovate a house or something in the meantime, wrapping up your cash in that endeavor (little money in the bank on paper, except in the 'family home' while simultaneously having no income, offloading it as soon as the scholarships roll in.
If you read College Confidential forums, you'll see how adcoms are well aware of all of these considerations and have been struggling to integrate them in an equitable and rational way for their entire careers.
Just because it can be gamed doesn’t mean it’s not a good metric
Did this happen?
A real cynical view would say that top universities benefit more from accepting students from rich families than poor.
Especially when it comes to public schools, the opportunities should be equal. Set objective criteria for acceptance, advanced placement, etc. Then stick to it. We shouldn't be holding opportunities away from someone because if their heritage, or someone else's heritage.
We have a STEM academy in our area that's based on effort and interest. It will only take maybe 7% of the students from the overall student population for those grades. It's based on essays and teacher recommendations. You only need a C average to qualify grade-wise. It seems completely subjective. A coworker was trying to get their kid in and it sounded like a nightmare. If this opportunity isn't based on some objective measure and doesn't constitute an advance placement (C average in the regular track), then make this opportunity available for all who want it! If demand outpaces capacity, then either set objective measures or make it a lottery. Denying some kid an opportunity because you feel like they don't want it as much as some other kid, or you feel they don't work as hard, is BS.
The new criteria were objective, just different. They dropped the admissions test, which was a sort of SAT-lite exam, instead relying more on previous academic achievement.
The impact of this was brining women to near parity in the most recent class. From an economic standpoint, the incoming class is 25% poor vs past classes around 1%. Black students went from 1% to 7%. And Hispanic from 3% to 11%. And bringing Asians from ~70% of the class to 54% of the most recent class (where they make up 20% of the county population).
All this without much impact on the average GPA of the incoming class. My take is the combination of entrance exam and exam fees were hurdles to other students.
It's clear the previous entrance standards weren't working, with Asians and rich students massively over-represented.
Emphasis mine. They added subjective criteria. That's the problem. Removing standardized tests and relying on GPA or something would be fine.
We used to value truth and individual responsibilities and we are moving in the direction of group/class thinking.
Judging people by the ’group’ or race they belong is going to end badly, I wonder if there is examples where this thinking lead to good outcomes.
In the end the goal of admission processes is to select a certain type of individual. Since some degree of objectivity is needed they created a system that tried to select the desired people based on objectively measurable factors.
Maybe a subset of the american asian culture is over fitting the used predictors, so that in the end the process is not selecting the correct type of person anymore, and they just don't know how to fix it.
Whether it's intentional or not, "correct type of person" really does sound like a dog-whistle. TJ, at least, hasn't defined any additional objective measures for said type of person. They are simply lowering the admissions bar to brute-force a reduction of Asians, without describing what quality Asians are supposedly lacking that makes this necessary. It's modern-day systemic racism, but people don't care because it targets a minority that's historically done well for itself.
People in power have chosen one metric as a measure of progress of historically oppressed races- enrolment in college degrees.
And that is costing everyone dearly.
North east Asians in the US at or below the poverty line score better on average on the SAT than African-Americans from households with incomes above 100k. If there was a socioeconomic lever to pull we should pull it. The evidence says there is not.
Look it up.
I don't think we can create true equitable solutions until we get past these myths that everyone is just the right environmental conditions away from high academic achievement.
This seems like a cheap shot. I assume the article is mentioning teacher’s unions, which should logically prioritize the teacher’s interests over children’s. Don’t they exist to advocate for teachers and not students by definition?
Ivy league and other top-tier schools dominate placements in industry, the Supreme Court, and public institutions. When race is a factor for consideration (e.g. Biden only considered black women for the Court vacancy), it will be a factor for these schools. If they instead accepted based on standardized test scores and became 50-60 percent Asian, it would mean that most of their students (by virtue of being Asian) would get shut out of positions of influence and power. Those positions would instead be filled by students from other schools.
One must always remember that elite schools exist to grow their own prestige. An honest hard-working student at Harvard Medical School who then opens a small private practice in his hometown, doing good for his community and his family, is, in the eyes of the elite, a waste of an education. These schools want students with talent and ambition who will be well-placed to change the world.
On the other hand, for lower-tier schools, I see little justification (from their perspective, not from a universalist ethical point of view) borderline-quota affirmative action policies.
Subgroups of people come from different families and cultures, and at an aggregate level (not necessarily individuals) will have different values. Those values will lead to different talents and interests. Those different talents and interests will lead to meeting and failing different sets of standards.
Wouldn't it be a boring world if things were entirely uniform? Can you really say that different cultures even exist if the differences are so trivial that they don't really make any difference to your life?
Of course, nobody should be locked into a cultural stereotype. If they, individually, meet the standards, they should be treated as anyone else who does.
Like the NFL or NBA?
The problem arises when you try to produce an "empirical" measurement of academic excellence on real human beings (and particularly children): children spend their entire days under the control and potential neglect of others. One day's failure on an empty stomach[1] is another day's success.
[1]: In case it isn't abundantly clear, this is a stand-in for a complex of issues.
We need the best surgeons, engineers, leaders, teachers, etc. - not the best weighted by some sort of ‘difficulty during upbringing’ score.
For example if the standards include "child of an alumni", that's not very fair. If the standards include GPA, that's not very fair to someone who went to a school that doesn't offer AP tests.
And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.
Some of this is pretty on-point. 'child of alumni' is somewhat dumb standard. I guess part of it is looking at standards and ensuring they're based in rational, and logical ideas.
However, if the issue with the standard being good GPA is that it's not fair to someone who went to bad school. The issue isn't the standard, it's the school. A better attempt to increased enrollment is to focus on ensuring better schools are provided to those students.
> And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.
That's correct. However, it's not clear to me how lowering standards is good? It's simply lowering the quality of students overall. Again, the solution falls to actually improving the level of quality of education for the under-represented groups instead of lowering standards.
In general, this discrimination is the definition of racism. Replace Blacks with White, and replace Asians with Blacks and you can be pretty clear how similar it is to racism of the past.
Quoting a paragraph from the article with slight changes:
> Among other things, standardized testing requirements were eliminated, and subjective admission criteria were added in an effort to deny slots to African-Americans and boost enrollment among white Americans.
If I saw that in a newspaper, I would conclude that's some racist stuff right there. If I remember correctly, most of the world, including America, in general decided a while ago that this Racism thing is not good.
so make AP classes run/subsidized by the state, rather than trying to assign quotas to college admissions.
Sure but the schools who choose to not rely on academic merit any more are just bringing everyone else down instead of raising up the few who need it. Seems like a terrible solution.
San Francisco just turned Lowell High, one of the best high schools in the country, from merit based to lottery. This is despite the school being full of minority students who excel academically. Now they're screwed and their spot will go to some kid who was advanced a grade because their old school didn't want to hold them back.
Well done?
There are two big problems though:
One is that it tries to correct by using race as a proxy. Middle class black americans and African immigrants get the advantages, poor asians get left out no matter how hard they work, and poor black americans get forgotten.
The second mistake is assuming that the tweaks are effective and don't have unintended consequences.
It's not the policy only in the State. Believe or not, there's a similar policy in China that if a student is ethnic minority then s/he can get extra scores on the university entry exam named GaoKao which is equivalent to SAT. To take advantage of the preferential treatment, there are quite some fake "minority" students who might have some blood of ethnic minorities. The favorable treatment is not limited to GaoKao.
Personally I'm not totally against the policy in general. It's true that weak groups need to be taken care of. But there are many problems:
1.It doesn't reflect the real academic capability for the students who got extra scores. Eventually some of them can not catch up the pace of normal courses.
2.It created another stereo type and bias towards those students. The are considered to be less competent but actually some of them are excellent.
3.There's no social problem like eastern Asia countries that the minorities are very small group. No body complain. In US it's a totally different situation that could cause tension.
I was amused, looking up the admission thresholds for 清华, to see that Uyghur applicants get their scores docked by an amount that I assume equals the boost they got for being Uyghur.
No such readjustment seems to be applied for Mongols, Tujia, or etc.
Affirmative action is messy because it's getting in the middle of zero sum games (e.g. college admissions and hiring). But diversity is a significant problem in many parts of American society, and just about every proposed solution is messy, ineffective, or both.
Elite status is the real zero-sum game, because it's exclusive by definition. Elite universities don't provide substantially better education than those dedicated to educating the masses. They are elite because they offer elite status and opportunities for networking with the future elite.
People can bring up "systemic discrimination", but using Affirmative Action as the cudgel to solve this isn't fixing the issue, it's a stopgap that will probably make it worse.
Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.
"“Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins wrote, using asterisks in place of a racial slur. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r is still being a n(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’”"
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-school-boards-...
Of course the more likely reason is that this is nothing more than a power grab and any data point that suggests minorities can succeed in the current system is an arrow at the heart of their political theories.
I'm a progressive myself (albeit one that disagrees with the party line on this particular issue), and it's blatantly obvious that progressives that support anti-Asian discrimination like this are well aware of how messed up it is and how bad it looks, so they try to deflect, rather than engage directly.
Many progressives believe in affirmative action, which doesn't say anything about the particulars of the groups that aren't being explicitly included. Nobody at all is interested in exclusion; they are interested in more inclusion.
Seems like a cop-out to me, especially when dealing with scarce resources (ie. admission slots). The policy of "more inclusion" by giving preferential treatment to one group, ends up excluding everyone else.
edit: reworded "Your policy" to "The policy" to avoid making it about the parent.
The change to subjective admissions criteria that led to a drop from 73% Asians to under 50% at Thomas Jefferson could be said to be more inclusive of the races that saw increased representation. It's also correct to say that it's more exclusive of Asians.
There is no "mainstream Progressive (sic) justification" for discriminating against Asians, because there is no progressive political platform built on discriminating against Asians.
If you have limited open positions and you use race to determine who gets them then you are excluding 1 person for every 1 person you are including.
In a contingency, the inclusion of a group will result in exclusion in other groups.
*obligatory disclaimer that I'm not equating the groups of people or their mistreatment, nor condoning any of their mistreatment.
[1] taken from wikipedia
AFAIK, that's the progressive justification. They think if schools don't have similar demographics to the country as a whole, or the area they are located in, then some form of racism (using the critical theory definition here) is occurring.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306
>On 28 May, Ms Mitchum emailed Merriam-Webster to point out that racism is "both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin colour".
I live in a town that's associated with progressivism, and know a lot of people who would not object to being called progressives. Honestly I haven't heard anybody endorsing discrimination against Asians, much less justifying it.
i.e. the idea that if a high number of Asians are making it in despite low prevalence in the total population, then it is because we have created a system that serves them disproportionately (and therefore unfairly).