Eliminate everything to do with race from college admissions.
A relatively simple way of determining race with a high degree of probability is through a person's name (1). Next would be a person's location. After that, a person's primary school location. Or any lists of a person's interests/extracurricular activities. You cannot eliminate determination of race in college admission (or nearly any other application process).
Affirmative action is inherently a cause of racial bias (decisions are made based on the color of ones skin).
Yes, that's right. And on the other side there already exists racial bias. The analogy is steering a car, when you have a car that pulls to the right, you counter steer it to the left in order to go straight. In a car you can eventually address the root cause of the steering issue by taking it to a mechanic (assuming you drive straight to get there!). There is no mechanic to solve the root cause of racism - you can only address the symptoms and promote awareness. With no other alternatives to address racism in the application review process, the only solution is to apply equal and opposite bias to address the symptom of inequality. AA is specifically intended to discriminate against non-minorities in order to counter balance the discrimination that already exists against minorities.
(1) http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm...The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.
In addition, race greatly affects how much applicants benefit from having more experience and credentials. White job applicants with higher-quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower-quality resumes. Having a higher-quality resume has a much smaller impact on African-American applicants, who experienced only 9 percent more callbacks for the same improvement in their credentials. This disparity suggests that in the current state of the labor market, African-Americans may not have strong individual incentives to build better resumes.
You cannot eliminate determination of race in college admission (or nearly any other application process).
Sure you can. Just don't show the admissions committee real names, inform the committee only of a school ranking (not the specific school), and blank out specific extracurriculars that give away racial information.
Even better, you can just use a point system where everything is objectively measured. Strangely, many colleges dropped point systems after the supreme court ruled you cannot racially bias a point system (but you are allowed to racially bias a non-point system).
AA is specifically intended to discriminate against non-minorities in order to counter balance the discrimination that already exists against minorities.
If this were the true intent, you would expect that the college grades of AA beneficiaries and normal students would be similarly distributed. Do you believe this to be the case?
If this were the true intent, you would expect that the college grades of AA beneficiaries and normal students would be similarly distributed.
As a natural result of AA or as an AA policy? The existing discrimination is with access/opportunity. The intent of AA is to counter balance access/opportunity discrimination. Over (much) time, results of counter balanced access/opportunity will equalize and AA will become less essential. The goal is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
Perhaps college admission practices might be limited to a point system, but then you ignore the bias that exists in primary school. A point system itself is discriminatory against minorities. AA counter balances that.
The net result of a biased filter is that the victims of the bias must perform at a higher level to pass through the filter.
I.e., suppose the filter were set to exclude students of quality Q < 10, but were biased against black students to the tune of 2 points. Then we'd expect non-black students to have a quality distribution bounded below by 10, and black students to have a quality distribution bounded below by 12.
If we gave black students a bonus of 2 points, their quality distribution would again be bounded below by 10.
Of course, if our original filter was unbiased, then we expect the quality of black students to drop to 8. What do we see in the real world?
A point system itself is discriminatory against minorities.
By definition, a point system which ignores race cannot be discriminatory. It literally lacks the ability to discriminate.
admitStudent :: Student -> Boolean
admitStudent student = -- code does not refer to student.race
...
If you disagree, you should be able to provide a pure function for which this test fails:
Are you suggesting that blacks have a higher rate of dropout due to AA enabling Q=8 blacks into schools? Firstly, your premise is flawed because if prior to AA only Q=12 blacks were admitted to schools, you would expect a higher rate of dropouts if Q=10 blacks are admitted - assuming we exclude a host of other significant factors for the purposes of analyzing your over-simplified algorithm. Secondly, your premise is flawed because graduation rates for blacks have been steadily increasing for decades. From 28% in 1990 for black males to 35% in 2006 and 34% in 1990 for black females to 45% in 2006 [1]. Harvard itself has an overall graduation rate of 98%, and a black graduation rate of 95% - hardly disparate.
Regarding your second point: A point system can, and is, absolutely discriminatory. The points come from somewhere. In this case, lower level education results. The only way a point system admission policy would not be discriminatory is if low level education results were not derived based on racial bias. Unfortunately, they are. Low level education will pre-select non-minorities for higher points values. So a point system college admission policy may be devoid of intentional bias, but only because it ignores the established bias of the pre-selected point values it receives as input. That in itself is therefore bias (and now that you know it, well, it would be intentional).
Are you suggesting that blacks have a higher rate of dropout due to AA enabling Q=8 blacks into schools?
Dropout rates are dependent on a lot of factors, including financial aid and similar things. College GPA is a much better measure.
In terms of college GPA, if the admission system is biased in favor of a group, then the GPA of that group should be below average. If the admission system is biased against some group, then their GPA should be higher.
If AA nullified existing bias, then the GPA of black students should be more or less the same as the GPA of white students. Is this the case?
The only way a point system admission policy would not be discriminatory is if low level education results were not derived based on racial bias.
If true, this suggests that there should be a gap between low level education results and standardized test scores (which are immune to racial bias, since the scantron doesn't know the race of the person filling in the bubbles). Does this gap exist?
I.e., do black students have systematically low GPAs, but SAT scores comparable to whites/asians?
Similarly, if you want to minimize racial bias in the system, you should favor standardizing testing standards as much as possible - i.e., focus more on SAT and AP, less on GPA. Do you favor this?
Dropout rates are dependent on a lot of factors, including financial aid and similar things. College GPA is a much better measure.
GPA is dependent on a lot of factors, including teacher bias, prior experience with instructional learning and similar things. Dropout rates are a much better measure.
If true, this suggests that there should be a gap between low level education results and standardized test scores (which are immune to racial bias, since the scantron doesn't know the race of the person filling in the bubbles).
It suggests no such thing. It would only suggest that if you believed every child taking a scantron test had received equal levels of prior education.
The fundamental flaw with your logic is that you believe incorrectly that everyone has equal opportunity at some point and you've decided to base all of your calculations off of this mythical point in time that everyone has equal opportunity and therefore any deviations from averages is a sign of actual inferiority in the capacity to take the average advantage of that equal opportunity. The reality is that no one ever has equal opportunity - from the moment of birth on. Black children are often born into a far more disadvantaged environment than white children. To overcome that disadvantage and succeed takes considerably greater amounts of effort, if not innate intelligence in some percentage of cases, to equal the success levels of those white children born to environment lacking that disadvantage. Everything prior to college admissions was not equal opportunity, everything prior to a scantron test was not equal opportunity. Equality of opportunity is not normalized after a scantron test, it is not normalized after college admissions and it does not normalize through college and post college.
Two people are sitting down. One has a 50 lb weight tied to his arms. Everything else being equal, which of those two will need to expend a greater amount of work effort to stand up? Does the fact that the individual with the weight took 25% longer to stand up mean he is less capable than the one with no weight? If they both took that same amount of time to stand up, which one would be more capable?
AA doesn't cut the weights off - nothing can do that. But it is a method of recognizing that those weights are there and accounting for them to some degree.
Black children are often born into a far more disadvantaged environment than white children.
If that were the case, you'd try to measure disadvantage. Lots of information is already available to admissions counselors - family income, what schools were attended, etc.
In reality, AA benefits primarily upper middle class black children. AA is not about disadvantaged backgrounds and it's disingenuous to pretend it is.
Equality of opportunity is not normalized after a scantron test...
You previously discussed discrimination. I pointed out that a scantron can't discriminate. Now you are moving the goalposts.
I pointed out that a scantron can't discriminate. Now you are moving the goalposts.
A scantron cannot produce an equalized result because everything leading up to the test was already unequal.
I'm not moving the goal post - I'm simply pointing out that every goal post you set up (first it was college admissions, then it was scantron tests) is not arrived at from a position of equal opportunity. The "goal post" is prior to birth - every one has equal opportunity at that point, of course no one gets to choose to whom they're born. Once born, there is no more equality of opportunity.
Affirmative action is idiotic, likely from the start. It seems entirely wrong applied to most every situation. For example, would it make sense to force restaurants to always have a demographically aligned percentage of black patrons at any given moment? How about local little-league baseball teams? school clubs? technology events?
> "discriminate against ... in order to counter balance the discrimination"
Doesn't that sound like a bad idea?
A relatively simple way of determining race with a high degree of probability is through a person's name (1). Next would be a person's location. After that, a person's primary school location. Or any lists of a person's interests/extracurricular activities. You cannot eliminate determination of race in college admission (or nearly any other application process).
Affirmative action is inherently a cause of racial bias (decisions are made based on the color of ones skin).
Yes, that's right. And on the other side there already exists racial bias. The analogy is steering a car, when you have a car that pulls to the right, you counter steer it to the left in order to go straight. In a car you can eventually address the root cause of the steering issue by taking it to a mechanic (assuming you drive straight to get there!). There is no mechanic to solve the root cause of racism - you can only address the symptoms and promote awareness. With no other alternatives to address racism in the application review process, the only solution is to apply equal and opposite bias to address the symptom of inequality. AA is specifically intended to discriminate against non-minorities in order to counter balance the discrimination that already exists against minorities.
(1) http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.htm... The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.
In addition, race greatly affects how much applicants benefit from having more experience and credentials. White job applicants with higher-quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower-quality resumes. Having a higher-quality resume has a much smaller impact on African-American applicants, who experienced only 9 percent more callbacks for the same improvement in their credentials. This disparity suggests that in the current state of the labor market, African-Americans may not have strong individual incentives to build better resumes.