Mickey Kaus writes at the Daily Caller:
But when you think about it, a non-college world in which high school graduates acquired the skills they wanted on the web or in ad hoc classes and proved their worth by performing well in actual jobs might be a preferable form of meritocracy. a) There would be no “signaling” of status for life, the way an Ivy League degree now signals status for life. The elite wouldn’t necessarily be getting Ivy League degrees; b) post-high school life would become a mad scramble for skills in which luck would inevitably play a greater role. That’s a good thing if it prevents people from concluding that richer = better. More than ever, richer might just = luckier; c) A skill-by-skill scramble would value a multiplicity of discrete talents–are you a good computer programmer? a painter? a musician? writer?–instead of one general talent (“smarts”). You wouldn’t need to be well-rounded to join the elite. You’d just have to be good at something. It’s harder to insinuate that a programmer is better than a musician or writer the way it’s currently possible to insinuate that a high-SAT Yale grad is better than someone whose scores could only get him into a state school. …
This is an interesting point: that the kind of "holistic" college admissions that the Supreme Court endorsed in its 2003 pro-affirmative action ruling in Grutter claims to evaluate everybody in some overall "holistic" sense that, in effect, says some people are better overall than other people. The purpose of the Supreme Courts' call for holistic admissions was to fuzz up the margin so nobody could be certain than affirmative action was being practiced. But holistic admissions, by their stated goal of analyzing all aspects of the applicants, suggest that people can be ranked holistically (i.e. overall).
In contrast, consider Caltech, which doesn't do much affirmative action and doesn't really care that much about qualifications outside of test scores, grades, and evidence of extreme science or engineering talent / desire. I went to high school with one kid who got into Caltech and my younger son went to school with one kid who got into Caltech. Both of these Caltech-bound kids were extremely Aspergery to the point of autism. The reaction of other kids to these guys getting into Caltech was: "Hey, that's cool! You must have really high test scores! (I'm still glad I'm not you.")
On the other hand, Harvard trumpets that it has holistic admissions, and most students take away the implied lesson that those who get into Harvard are just overall better than you are.
Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is, but every high school student I talked to about the movie was of the opinion that they wished they were as awesome as Mark Zuckerberg.
"Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is, but every high school student I talked to about the movie was of the opinion that they wished they were as awesome as Mark Zuckerberg."
ReplyDeleteMy beef with the persona known as Mark Zuckerberg is that not visiting facebook doesn't guarantee not seeing copious amounts of pictures of Zuckerberg. I'm sick of the guy!
It occurred to me while only reading the headline about his eating plan that the kid (who no doubt will always look 17) may be on the verge of overexposure. This probably means two more years of seeing his FACE daily while reading some frivolous headline about the creature unless of course I stop reading the news as well as continue avoiding facebook.
Is there no safe place for the childless middle-aged?
Your sort of thing, Mr Steve?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1391346/The-browning-America-Time-lapse-map-shows-minorities-majority.html
"But when you think about it, a non-college world in which high school graduates acquired the skills they wanted on the web or in ad hoc classes and proved their worth by performing well in actual jobs might be a preferable form of meritocracy."
ReplyDeleteBeyond this, you and Kaus go a little haywire. I see nothing wrong with drastically changing the structure/content of education for the masses. What good does it do to make even the least competitive universities into bad copies of the Ivy League? The only people who could possibly be worried are liberal arts graduates of elite schools who were hoping to become professors.
The best and the brightest will still go to traditional universities that will be fewer in number. Everyone else will get training more directly related to a particular career path. There has to be a direct correlation to productivity, lifetime earnings and even job satisfaction. I for one thought we had already learned this lesson. No doubt the current economic downturn will reiterate it.
Everything after Kaus' first sentence is non sequitur.
I think where Kaus is coming from is that it impossible for government to enforce equality in most outcomes, including education, career path, achievement, political power and income, and it can be very destructive to try. But government and other major institutions should at least try to not accentuate inequality, especially the sort of across-the-board inequality that could be called, because it is, a class system.
ReplyDeleteOne definition of a class system is a political order in which the same people who do well in other aspects of life also effectively control the government and so can preserve and extend their success for their children. Liberals are most worried about the influence of money on political campaigns. But it is also true that a political system that 1) shifts power to government, 2) concentrates governing power in the central government, and 3) confers much of this power in courts, is ripe for the sort of upper-class control liberals affect to dread.
Yup, CalTech and MIT don't hold much cachet with the general public due to the type of people who go there.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey would probably describe those campuses as concentrations of the most beta of beta males. It's the same reason colleges don't want their Asian student populations to get too high. Even if it did improve academic performance, the college would turn into a drab, gray place worthy of Shanghai Polytechnic. The deans want to keep their campuses interesting and dynamic.
That's one of the reasons that NYU, despite not being Ivy, is so hard to get into. It gets huge numbers of applications because of the perceived dynamism of its urban campus.
I don't see how a "mad scramble for skills" decouples financial success from hard work, smarts, skills. But set that aside. He thinks a "lottery" approach to distributing riches is somehow better? How?
ReplyDeleteWhat a worthwhile college would teach:
ReplyDeletehttp://justnotsaid.blogspot.com/2011/01/practical-college.html
Well, I like that Kaus' system quite a lot. However I think you're wrong, some people are better overall than others. Harvard, etc, just chose the wrong god metric.
ReplyDeleteI thought Zuckerberg came off as a truly horrible person in that movie. But what I (and I suspect at least some of the high school kids you talked to) identified with was how awesome it would be to have founded such a huge company and say f--- you to anyone I wanted.
I have often suspected chess rankings served as a kind of honest signal for expertise potential in the Soviet Empire. My experience in following the careers of researchers is that chess masters always turn into very productive scientists. There isn't much on the internet about it but Bankers Trust of New York seemed to have picked up on that in hiring currency traders in the 1990s. (e.g. There's a minor mention about this in..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Dlugy )I wonder, do the Olympics and sports in general show something a similar pattern?
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't _Grutter_ that established holistic admissions (aka "the Harvard plan"). It was _Bakke v. UC-Davis_.
ReplyDeleteThere were two important pieces of _Bakke_.
First, colleges cannot decide on their own to "cure" any social problem by discriminating using classifications subject to "strict scrutiny" (e.g. race). UC-Davis cannot just decide on its own to cure the societal lack of black doctors by setting aside a specific number of admissions slots for which blacks (and only blacks) could apply.
Second, colleges, due to their unique responsibility to educate and transmit culture, are permitted to discriminate holistically using the "Harvard plan" in which points are given for a wide variety of social/ethnic/cultural characteristics to insure a good classroom mix of students and hence good discussions and student-to-student education.
Colleges, the _Bakke_ decision affirmed, are special in that they need to have a diversity of opinion in the classroom, and therefore they are entitled to bias their admissions process to produce classrooms full of a diversity of opinions and beliefs and (therefore) discussions.
As long as colleges give "points" for race (and legacy status, and athletic ability, and religion, and ..., and ...) and do not set aside specific slots for race, they are in the clear.
_Bakke_ is where the cultural obsession with "diversity" came from. "Diversity" is the magic word one must use to justify overt racial/ethnic/gender discrimination.
So why is Caltech permitted to have a tiny number of NAM's relative to the population? First, NAMs don't want to apply. Second, if dumb NAMs were preferentially admitted they would flunk out within a few months. You either know calculus and diffeqs or you don't.
Suprisingly to some, Caltech DOES discriminate for NAMs. However, if your average student IQ is at the 140+ level, the NAM to white IQ ratio is exceedingly small. At those ethereal IQ levels, even a strong affirmative action program will produce results that look like gross racial discriination to your average citizen. La Griffe du Lion explains this phenomenon well.
So getting into Hahvahd is about showing that you are of the same tribe, or at least have the same tribal instincts, as the people who run it?
ReplyDeleteY'all are screwed.
This is a poorly thought out proposal by Mickey Kaus.
ReplyDeleteBy further eliminating any objective standards and public transparency, you just encourage more nepotism.
As bad as college admissions are, at least they at claim to hold to published objective admissions standards and can be critiqued by the public at large.
By doing away with this and making it a free for all, you only allow those with the money, connection and artificial preferences to hoard more opportunities despite lacking any proven merit or work ethic.
The problem is very, very few job markets are competitive and efficient the way Mickey Kaus assumes (eg Silicon Valley Startups).
Most jobs can be done by a wide variety of people and many can be done by complete incompetents and lazy bums (eg support staff at fed agencies in DC).
Under Kaus' proposal, most jobs would be filled by sons, daughters, nephews, friends, neighbors, etc of those in decision-making positions, not by anyone who has proven their ability and desire via tests, coursework and even the college or degree they worked to get accepted into and graduate from.
This would lead to more unmerited, static and wider class division in the US - not less.
I read the Kaus posting, and I thought this comment was worth reposting here:
ReplyDelete"I was enjoying the Leonhardt piece until the same sentence Mickey highlights. Here’s the problem with the whole SAT angst: Kids aren’t failing to win admittance to Ivies, Stanford, MIT etc. because of their SATs. Read places such as College Confidential where the admits and rejects and waitlists post their scores, GPA, strengths (under represented minority, won a Siemens) etc. The reject list is chock-a-block with kids with perfect SATs, 5’s on AP tests, valedictorians, salutatorians. In short, tons of worthy kids get rejected in part because the Harvards of the world market to them to apply so that a) they reach more low-income kids and b) drive up their selectivity numbers by rejecting more kids. The strength of the Leonhardt piece is in addressing the lack of income diversity. A diamond in the rough has a chance of knocking the SAT out of the park, but does he have a chance at doing 800 hours of community service, while soloing with a prestige orchestra, while serving as captain of the lacrosse team and raising money for school construction in Ghana? Maybe but I would wager that there are a lot more low income and lower middle class kids who can nail the SAT than have the opportunities, dollars and parents with time to have them secure all those things beyond GPA and test scores that the highly selective say make the “right fit” for their institution. The great stat I have yet to see out of the colleges isn’t their student body breakdown by race and Hispanic/non-Hispanic but their breakdown by family income."
The comment muddles up the idea of colleges discriminating against Whites and colleges discriminating against low income people (though arguably the group they really have a problem with are low income Whites), but I also get the sense that admission practices have become a way to game the system to fill colleges with people from certain backgrounds, just as was done openly pre-World War II. That said, I haven't applied to college in over twenty years and don't have college aged kids, so my impressions on this are probably badly out of date.
Also notable was Kaus' comment about efforts to open up college to poor people right at the moment when poor people are deciding that college isn't worth it.
Not only did we get a post-World War II aberration when college admissions became relatively meritocratic, one outcome of that period to make college much more central in white collar hiring decisions. Colleges are going back on the meritocratic stuff, but prospective employers and employees haven't caught on yet. They will.
The "don't worry so much about formal education and scramble to learn a skill" idea Kaus outlines was exactly what people, or at least non-slaves and non-serfs, did throughout most of human history.
An aspie Nobel Laureate on Caltech vs Harvard (he attended both): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/05/vernon-smith-at-caltech.html
ReplyDeleteYou could also ask Steve Hsu (not aspie, as far as I can tell):
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/05/100-thousand-brains.html#comment-203814127
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html
"Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is..."
ReplyDeleteSN is actually an apology for those 'flaws'.
You know the Jewish narrative that says 'Jews got good at business because they were oppressed and weren't allowed to own land, etc'.
SN says Zuckerberg had to be an 'asshole' because the world is unfair and unkind to nebbish Jews. It's pure BS. In other words, Zuck had to fuc* over others cuz they would have fuc*ed him--and have been fuc*ing his kind for so long. It's a variation of revenge of the nerds.
Though Zuckleberry isn't ver nice, he still comes across as better than the OTHER guys, just like Michael Corleone is still preferable to the rival gangs in GODFATHER(and even in part II).
Compare Zuck with Winklevoss. Thoug Zuck may have 'stolen' their ideas, he actually works at it while Winkles work out rowing to be big popular jocks. It's like Dershowitz contrasted with the rich guy in REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. Zuck comes off better.
Compare Zuck with Saverin. Though Saverin is a nice guy and does get fuc*ed over by Zuck, he's weak, like Fredo. He doesn't have the balls push the vision through. He's too much of a soft Jew who wants to be accepted by Wasps than have the chutzpah to create his own empire.
Compare Zuck with Parker. Parker has vision and pizzazz but no conscience and is too reckless. Zuck, in the end, does have a sense of limits.
So, the conclusion. Zuck is an asshole but in a world of dumb jock assholes who feel entitled & wanna use you as a serf, chicken-cowards who lack balls, reckless rock-n-rollers who have no sense of limits, and etc, Zuck is better than the rest. Same reason why we cheer for Tony Montana against other gangsters who seem to be worse.
A year or two after Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, HLS commissioned a secret research study to determine why black students were so unhappy and retention was poor.
ReplyDeleteSome big consulting firm designed and conducted the study and presented the "confidential" report to the law school.
It wasn't really confidential, however, since back then HLS provided unrestricted gopher and anonymous FTP access to their departmental computers over the Internet.
The report interviewed dozens of black students, quoted them a length and found that the greatest dissatisfaction of black students at HLS was the institutional expectation that they "represent" black folks.
What they uniformly loathed was being called on in class to (as they perceived it) offer a black perspective to the discussion.
According to _Bakke_, however, their racial classroom contribution--the diversity they add--is the only legal justification for racially biased admissions discrimination for them and against white kids.
So the very thing that gets oherwise lesser-qualified NAMs into college is the thing they do not want to contribute.
Which points to the core absurdity of "diversity".
"Diversity" stand for hte notion that skin color determines thought.
That if you know someone's skin color, you know that they will think and act in certain ways that are different than people with a different skin color.
But if you actually BELIEVE this and ACT on it, you will be fired.
Imagine saying at a "diverse" business meeting, "Bob, you are black. Please tell us what black people think about this question? What is your perspective as a black man?"
Bob gets noticeably uncomfortable, someone reports you to HR and you get a warning for "lack of sensitivity". If it happens again, you are fired.
There is also the ideal of affirmative action for all at elite liberal arts colleges and universities -- those that receive government money and/or tax exempt status. Wouldn't necessarily apply to schools of science and engineering. The goal would be a cultural elite -- in law, journalism, education, public administration, etc. -- that reflects the ethnic and geographic diversity of America. I believe Congress has the authority to make this a reality.
ReplyDeleteAt the grad level (Phd not MBA or Law) in technical areas (and I include economics in this), Harvard is as aspie and meritocratic as Caltech or MIT. In fact, most of the top schools Phd programs look very meritocratic. It's only the undergrad Ivy programs that are larded to the gills with admits for AA, legacy, sports, etc.
ReplyDeleteMy theory is that AA at the undergrad level distracts people from how elitist the grad programs and faculty hires are.
Businesses would actually have to be able to test employees for needed skills under the non-college world model without the fed stepping in because the test had a disparate impact.
ReplyDeleteregarding eliminating affirmative action, isn't it a mixed bag?
ReplyDeleteif you eliminate affirmative action, you'll have to find a different justification for keeping asians out.
because while you are in favor of boosting white student levels, you don't want to swamped by Asian kids..
"On the other hand, Harvard trumpets that it has holistic admissions, and most students take away the implied lesson that those who get into Harvard are just overall better than you are."
ReplyDeleteBetter, or darker.
"This is a poorly thought out proposal by Mickey Kaus.
ReplyDeleteBy further eliminating any objective standards and public transparency, you just encourage more nepotism.
...
This would lead to more unmerited, static and wider class division in the US - not less."
Maybe that's the idea. Get to the top. Pull the ladder up.
Elite colleges mostly serve as conduits to rent-seeking positions, both public and private, in society.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the fields we traditionally associate with rent-seeking, such as law, finance, politics, etc., fields we generally tend not to associate with it, such as medicine and the hard sciences, are actually rife with rent-seeking. A career in the hard sciences working in academia or corporations feeds on rent-seeking via federal funds and grants, legal regimes and regulations won by corps, etc.
These positions and rent streams pre-exist any individual elite college graduate. The elite college serves to fill them.
If we don't want bland schools with lots of asians, then lets add in some Mexicans or blacks to add some flava.
ReplyDeleteCaltech plus mexicans sounds like more fun than caltech plus alot of Smiths an Jones.
What do run of the mill gentile whites add anyway? Fantasy football?
An element of possible relevance here is how well high school seniors can evaluate and predict within circles of social interaction how each will likely do in work, education, love life, etc. For some time now, entities such as the FBI , have sought for psych profiling purposes, the marginalia and inscriptions put in a persons's high school graduation annual from those he/she has interacted with.
ReplyDeleteIf entering college freshmen who are attending higher education within their state of residence were given some degree of "group/team"
status based on mutually chosen team members from high school acquaintances, a very uncanny holistic appraisal could be gotten. Thus, to SOME significant EXTENT, the grades of each member of the self-chosen team Could be enhanced or diminished by the overall team performance, by sustained enrollment. Tuition rates each semester for each member of the team could be edged upward or downward, depending on team performance. The details and the mathematical underpinnings for such a modest "socialism" overlay would be complex but in reach.
"if you eliminate affirmative action, you'll have to find a different justification for keeping asians out."
ReplyDeleteRight. White people invented a system of anti-white discrimination and put up with it for 40 years because they knew one day there'd be millions of n/asian immigrants.
"if you eliminate affirmative action, you'll have to find a different justification for keeping asians out.
ReplyDeletebecause while you are in favor of boosting white student levels, you don't want to swamped by Asian kids.."
In a dream world they should get rid of all govt supported colleges and then each ethnic group can have their own schools if they want. You could also have a multicultural school. Colleges might only be needed for certain subjects like science and medicine.
Of course, in another dream the 65 immigration act wouldn't have happened and they would have enforced the borders. Also, people would have been able to freely associate.
"Middle-aged Syracuse grad Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network was supposed to be about what a flawed individual Harvard's Mark Zuckerberg is, but every high school student I talked to about the movie was of the opinion that they wished they were as awesome as Mark Zuckerberg."
ReplyDeleteI would much rather be one of the Winklevoss twins. MUCH rather. Even with his billions, I'm willing to bet the Winklevoss still score more quality vag than that Jewish midget with the funny face.
The only way to break up a semi-hereditary elite (Mark Steyn has also written on this) is to break up the institutions.
ReplyDeleteThat means a power-destroying move to gut out the Federal (and State) governments, push as much power downwards to localities, and spit out the majority of power-decisions (economic/social winner/losers) to the average joe.
PLUS a huge "creative destruction" turnover of business entitites. As much as possible. A start-up only cares about results, not how "diverse" an applicant is or his/her social network (that comes into play only when the company is not a start-up). Pretty much any able candidate can get hired when start-ups bid up labor (and labor markets are TIGHT). Meaning of course restrictions on H1-Bs and the abuse of Infosys of B1 visas.
Infosys is being investigated for abusing the B1 Visa system by applying for and getting very cheap B1 visas (meant for short-term labor installing machines or attending confereces) for long term, years work. That sort of cheap immigrant labor undercuts any sort of "results oriented" meritocracy and guarantees rent-seeking hereditary aristocracies.
ReplyDeleteOT, Gallup's new survey has most Americans estimating America's gay population at 25%. Why the overestimation (probably at about 2-3%). Because people believe what they see on TV, rather than their own eyes. Since their social interaction is so limited.
Thus they believe in the "magical negro" formulation (ala Spike Lee and David Ehrenberg the Black LAT writer) and the Wise Latina and the idiot White guy being worthless.
Among them, that nerdy White guys who developed the Apollo Moon launch system, or the Space Shuttle, or the U2, or the SR71 Blackbird, are "worthless" and the real value comes in LeBron James dunking the Basketball or Cornell West spouting evil Whitey rhetoric.
b) post-high school life would become a mad scramble for skills in which luck would inevitably play a greater role.
ReplyDeleteAnd adult life would begin at age 18 instead of 26 or so, as it does for elites today.
Maybe that's a good thing, but Kaus' system would otherwise result in a much less civilized society, and the impact would fall disproportionately on people from the working class. Colleges teach people how to be middle class (or upper middle class in the case of the elite schools). While most people come to Harvard already well trained in UMC behavior, the small group who was not quickly learns it. The same could be said about the flagship campus of a state school, except that they're training people for a lower rung of the status ladder.
First of all, a university education at even a fairly competitive school teaches some basics of culture that many students may not have learned in HS or at home. More important, it teaches the prevailing manners and mores of the middle/UM class. This is generally a good thing and is quite meritocratic. A striving, ambitious poor or working class person can learn in the course of four years at a selective university how to look, sound and act like someone from a higher social class. This is enormously helpful in later life and is in fact a primary purpose of university education, even though no one will admit it.
We would be a less mobile society without this training system because poorer people would have a more difficult time learning what is acceptable for a middle class person and what isn't. If you grew up in an environment where every male has huge, visible tattoos, shaves his head (or grows his hair long), and drives a shiny new, monster-sized pick-up truck, how are you going to learn that all these things are in fact barriers to moving up in social status unless you spend time in a place where you can learn a new set of rules?
Hasn't anyone at this site ever read "The Chosen" (not the one about Hasidim, I'm sure you'd hate that)? Of course the author, Jerome Karabel, is also a leftist proponent of "class-based affirmative action" but he's basically written up the same thing Steve does repeatedly.
ReplyDeleteIn the afterword he states his preference for university admissions that are more like Japan's and less like Northwestern's or Duke's. The late Lord Young is also mischievously name-checked.
"Jerome Karabel, is also a leftist proponent of "class-based affirmative action""
ReplyDeleteBut as white Americans are being replaced from the bottom up isn't that just another of the myriad schemes people are dreaming up to increase anti-white discrimination?
OK, who's pretending to be Whiskey. I think I know but I'm not sayin'.
ReplyDelete"We would be a less mobile society without this training system because poorer people would have a more difficult time learning what is acceptable for a middle class person and what isn't."
ReplyDeleteMost of that cultural learning comes from survey courses: Music Appreciation, Art Appreciation, Film Appreciation, etc. I believe this could be studied in the last two years of high school for the most part. And of course public speaking and expository writing/research are necessary components of any training program. I think many career focused programs at community- colleges or private institutions include a strong writing component (one that focuses on punctuation, spelling and grammar rather than believing the student got this somewhere between 8th and 10th grade). I'm also not averse to people being able to pick up degrees and certificates along the way as long as they are able to earn a decent living (and start their adult lives) well before age 30. :0)
Remember what happened to that late blooming Russian elite...
Holistic admissions is just code for white (at the expense of Asian) affirmative action. whites don't work particularly hard in school, but they do visit rainforests and play lacrosse, so it only follows they should be rewarded for it.
ReplyDelete"Holistic admissions is just code for white (at the expense of Asian) affirmative action"
ReplyDeleteHolistic admissions is an attempt to make college admissions even more anti-white.
"...whites don't work particularly hard in school, but they do visit rainforests and play lacrosse, so it only follows they should be rewarded for it."
ReplyDeleteOh please, Asians excel in limited areas and have usually taken the class previously though unofficially. The fact is that Asians don't work particularly hard at those classes they do well in precisely b/c they are seeing the material for the second time.
You're gaming the system. We all know it with the exception of Asians who seem to forget how many practice tests of the SAT they take before getting a high score and the hours spent at tutoring in the summer and on weekends just to appear "naturally" smarter in math and science.
Dude, if it takes seeing the material twice to win in the globalizaed world, then whites are going to have to do it too. this nonsense about holistic candidates is white people trying to stem an inexorable tide. also, as to native talent, east asiqns are generally brighter than whites, about 5 iq points on average, as has been documented by lynn et. al.
ReplyDelete"also, as to native talent, east asiqns are generally brighter than whites, about 5 iq points on average, as has been documented by lynn et. al."
ReplyDeleteYou need to be specific. If Asians were performing better in any fields other than science and math, they'd be running the place. They'd also hold more teaching jobs at all levels.
And "lynn et. al" doesn't mean diddly nor does "5 IQ points on average".
As for taking courses twice, I'm not certain the rest of us need to do this. It's in those artificially elevated SAT scores and the psychological intimidation from years of being told Asians were just better than us they have an advantage.
Picturing Asians having spent endless summers and weekends trying to get ahead by taking classes before they took them for credit will build confidence in non Asians to the degree that picturing your audience naked can make giving a speech easier.
BTW, are you drunk?
AA is based on the idea that if results don't match ethnic head count then it's discrimination. Only white people are under-represented on headcount.
ReplyDeleteN/Asians aren't under-represented on headcount. Jews aren't. Blacks aren't. Hispanics aren't. Mid-latitude Asians aren't.
If N/Asians (or people claiming to speak for them) say it would be fairer if everything was based on SATs then fine.
If however they're saying white people should lose out to the headcount argument at one end of the spectrum and lose out to SATs argument at the other end of the spectrum then that is blatantly anti-white.
I work for a software startup, and there are lots of H1-B immigrants there. Some of them are even white (for the most part, jewish).
ReplyDeleteYou see Tommy, Bobby, from where I sit, either HBD is applicable in ALL walks of life, or it is applicable in NONE.
ReplyDeleteNow, this is the part where you have your Eureka moment and say"OK truth, here it is, you forced me to say it:
Dumb, unaccomplished white people can benefit from factors such as education and mentorship, and go to Harvard with 2.8 GPAs,* dumb unaccomplished black people can not!"
Of course you sound like some weirdo, liberal, bleeding heart, racist, social worker, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
*half-white, half Asians, too, Tommy