Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions [pdf]

I am so frustrated and angry that there is this discrimination, and people defend it. I feel that people don't take racism against Asian-Americans as seriously as racism against other groups.

Here's more about me. Like many people on HN, I'm a programmer. I'm interested in functional programming, programming language theory, and type theory. These interests caused me to discover pure math (such as category theory), and although I do not know as much about math than about programming, I want to learn more because I find these ideas elegant and beautiful. (For example, the Curry-Howard correspondence, which links programming to logic through the idea that programs are proofs, or HoTT, which gives types higher-dimensional structure based on the idea that equality types are the isomorphisms of an infinity-groupoid.)

I applied as a CS major to several colleges where PL theory had an academic presence, and in my supplemental essays, I discussed my interests and my desire to work with professors and do undergraduate research. I have competitive stats. Although other kids in my school got into my "reaches" (e.g. Cornell), I got rejected, but luckily I got into some "match" schools that did PL theory.

It's hard to say if affirmative action made a difference. Maybe if my application were exactly the same, but I weren't Asian, I would have gotten in, and if my application were the same except that I got an A instead of a B+ in a class, I would also have gotten in. I got waitlisted from some highly competitive schools, so I could have been on the edge. A big part of me not knowing how much my race would have made a difference is how non-transparent college admissions are. It's left up to some nebulous idea of "fit" decided by a group of people sitting at a table, who only have a few minutes to spend on each applicant.

But, what bothers me is the stereotypes. They've turned liking math and CS into a bad thing, at least when it's an Asian kid who's doing it. People defend affirmative action by saying that there are simply too many highly competitive Asian kids who want to study computer science. So, if I want to go to a good school, I shouldn't study computer science, even though that's what I want to do, just because of the way I was born? Among non-CS people, CS is probably seen as the stereotype track to get a high-paying job (and cynically, perhaps it's a popular major for this reason), but hopefully on a site such as HN, people will be more empathetic to the appeal of CS.

I'm also frustrated because most people probably don't know how math really is like. People just see it as nerdy word problems, and they've never heard of ideas like constructive math, programs-as-proofs, Cartesian closed categories, etc that I've become so intimate with. Why is it bad that I love math? Shouldn't you encourage me to learn this? I guess it's similar to the old stereotype of the "nerd" with no social skills, except with a racial element now.

It's a Catch-22 because people hold Asians to a higher standard, so we need to get higher grades and test scores to be competitive, then that feeds back into the stereotype that we are overly studious and have no personality. There is no winning for us in this game. Isn't it an objectively good thing to do well in school? If it were someone who weren't Asian, people would see high scores and grades as a positive thing or even cheer it on as a sign of increasing equality. Like all competitive high schoolers (of all races), we must play the game of having loads of AP classes, etc, but people specifically see Asians doing this as a negative stereotype.

But, on the front of us studying too much and not having personality, if you play an instrument, people will assume that you're doing it because your parents made you, or because of college admissions. Music is truly a beautiful thing and I experienced just how heartfelt it can be. (Sidenote: Watch Hibike! Euphonium or Your Lie in April!) But, just like the universal language of math, people have somehow turned Asians practicing the universal language of music into a bad thing. I can't imagine stronger proof of not being a robot, of being human, than experiencing how music can move you.

I implore you, in the meritocratic tradition of the hacker culture, to speak out against affirmative action and support Asian kids who want to pursue these passions.

EDIT: In fact, "affirmative action" is a euphemism. It's a vague-sounding term (an action that affirms something?) because people don't want to say "racial discrimination." Words have power to influence people, so I should start calling it what it is.

As an Asian American, I logically understand that there is discrimination applied towards us, yet for myself and among my peer group, I feel like we really didn't experience too many difficulties. I imagine my perspective is probably biased, as in California, the public UC system doesn't practice affirmative action, of which my university is a part of.

GPA: 5.46/5 weighted

SAT Reading and Writing: 790

SAT Math: 790

SAT Essay: 19

SAT Math II: 800

SAT Chemistry: 800

P.S: As for California, you're not going to like this: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Articles/loyalty.pdf In order to advance in academia in the UCs, you have to sign a loyalty oath supporting affirmative action!

I got waitlisted from Georgia Tech and UChicago, but they weren't top choices for me, so I don't mind.

Full disclosure: My ECs were weaker. I really liked my essay, but my mom claims that it gave a negative message that I didn't do much in school.

I wrote about how in the past, I didn't care so much about high school and was looking forward to going to college so I could do PL theory, but after watching a heartfelt anime called K-On, I realized how special high school was, and joined a club and made new closer friends there. By the way, thank you HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18787851 and may KyoAni (the anime studio that made K-On) recover from the massacre last year.

An income-based affirmative action would be far more effective in my opinion, as opposed to affirmative action based on ethnicity, which to me just seems like a proxy for socioeconomic status that is objectively worse in its attempts at representation.

As far as I can tell, its just bad comedians who do this. But they do it frequently enough that its practically a trope.

I went to a mostly black high school. My best friend had lower GPA, and lower SAT scores by 190 points. He and I were looking forward to attending same college. We applied to same major. He was admitted. I was wait listed. Ironically, my family was much poorer (trailer park) than his, and he felt much worse about it than I did. He assumed it was due to him being black, but no way to know for sure. I just made a point of visiting him a lot from the state school a few hours away.

Instead of dwelling on it, make the most of the college you DO attend. Remember that in the long run, your work and passions define your success far more than the institution you attend as a dumb 20 year old.

Race based affirmative action is silly, but I tell my son and daughter, who are mixed race (half Asian, white), that they need to focus on what they CAN control, rather than what they can't.

In the meantime, policies in the federal government designed to help descendants of slaves brought to US from Africa are benefiting wealthy people whose highly educated parents came here from Nigeria, because the policies don't differentiate beyond a superficial level. Simultaneously, my good friend whose family came here as barely literate refugees from Cambodia is lumped in same category as an Asian kid whose dad is a surgeon.

It's as idiotic as it is well meaning. Just remember that life will always be unfair, and that anger isn't an ideal way to handle it. You're going to dominate no matter how much these elitist morons try to hold you down.

Honestly, I'm not convinced it helps. I think it's just an incredibly racist thing that colleges say to quietly justify their policies. My grades weren't the best (my high school was well known for not having grade inflation) I got good math scores and even better verbal scores (750/800), produced and directed a full-length play, captained the chess team (which included successfully petitioning the democratic student assembly for a funds allocation for the team, and rallying the team to defeat the regional powerhouse science and tech high school), and couldn't get into good Tech-ey schools that were claiming to "want more interesting candidates. I guess aside from great test scores, I didn't directly have anything to show technically at the time of application, but I did wind up getting a 3rd place in my division at the ISEF the week after getting a rejection from MIT.

My dad wanted me to ask a family friend (carpooled with his kids to elementary school) for assistance who happened to be the chief of the house science appropriations committee. I told my dad not to bother calling in for a favor. That's not a decision I regret as that person wound up being the architect of the PATRIOT act.

Anyways I wound up at UChicago. Don't count them out if they take you off the waitlist. Their theoretical math program is top notch and their CS program at least is well known for having a good OS theory class.

You can make your luck by being open minded to things you don’t know and seeking out mentors. I went to UPenn and confirm the PL GRoup is solid, and the prof in the PL group are really kind people as well. Do you have a particular thing you want to work on in PL?

At Northeastern, I'll probably explore systems programming languages (I know that Amal Ahmed published a foundations of Rust paper) and gradual typing.

It's awesome that you know what you're interested and exploring it, but I'd caution against committing so heavily into one specific part of CS when you applying as an undergrad--that almost read like someone applying to grad school. Most of your courses will be pretty generic (as opposed to specialized). Between those, humanities, other science classes, etc., I'd actually suggest trying to expose yourself to as much as possible. If you still have that passion in four years, by all means go for the master's, but also:

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

I don't mean any of this as discouragement, just that there's so much out there, and so many rich, unexpected connections to make, there will be time to focus later. But don't be undeclared, either.

I ask 2 questions to anyone I know who comes out in support of affirmative action:

1) Is the policy actually effective? If so, what has been the effect?

2) When is the policy no longer needed?

I see far too many people who seem to think its just the way it is and is meant to be in place indefinitely. I think its absurd that the children of Beyonce can have their race considered, but we don't consider the adversity of the children of a poor, white, laid-off coal miner or the poor, hard-working asian immigrant from NYC. Rising above adversity itself is impressive and is definitely a qualifier to consider for admissions.

Think of the rich discussion we can get into about how we determine how someone truly stands out because of rising above the circumstances they grew up in. We could consider things such as average income, percent of households with a single parent, percentage of food secure households and a wealth of other data instead of Race.

I hope we can get beyond Race in the not too distant future, it's definitely a subject we can talk about, but in the context of college admissions I think adversity is far more appropriate to consider.

I would suggest a different major other than CS, or at least go in as undeclared: that should help a little bit. Or try a major that's not typically associated with Asian-american.

Yes, Asians are over represented in colleges. Being Asian won't help you in your admissions.

> I implore you, in the meritocratic tradition of the hacker culture, to speak out against affirmative action and support Asian kids who want to pursue these passions.

How are you unable to pursue your passions-because you didn't get into your first choice school?

> So, if I want to go to a good school, I shouldn't study computer science, even though that's what I want to do, just because of the way I was born?

Speaking of Asian stereotypes--going to a good school isn't really that important in the grand scheme of things.

First, as you note, CMU is incredibly competitive. Here are some stats for students admitted to CompSci last year (taken from https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/school-of-compute...).

  Average Unweighted GPA:3.96
  SAT Middle 50% for Evidence-Based Reading & Writing: 750-800
  SAT Middle 50% for Math: 790-800

Second, as an Asian-American myself, I have some mixed feelings about affirmative action, but over the years have leaned more towards it. One reason is that grades are a useful predictor but only one of many of how well people will do in university and in life. Take a look at Terman's Termites, and how his testing of young students missed future Nobel Prize winners, and how many of the termites just ended up being average. Another is equity issues. There really are underrepresented minorities that have overcome a lot given where they started, but don't have as high test scores. There are also cohort issues, where dropout rates of underrepresented minorities is higher if they don't have as many peers or role models. There are also pragmatic issues, with young men (mostly Caucasian and Asian-American) dominating in Silicon Valley, leading to real blindspots in product design (basically, people tend to design things for others like themselves) as well as the gender issues at large tech companies that have been in the news (I'd recommend reading what Teresa Meng had to say about this at a conference keynote, especially since she's a superstar in her field https://www.eetimes.com/an-engineers-guide-to-sexism/). Also, pragmatically, if there is a difference in grades and test scores between men and women admitted to our CS program, I haven't seen it in students' actual performance once they are here, and I've taught 1000+ students over the past 15+ years.

Third, this is just N=1, but I was not accepted to my preferred undergrad colleges (possibly because of some affirmative action issues), and was only accepted to two PhD programs (Georgia Tech and Berkeley). I'm now a top scholar in my area of research, along with having founded a successful startup. And I still get rejections all the time, for research papers, grant proposals, and awards. In fact, talking to a lot of my fellow professors, they all have stories about significant past failures. One even has his letter of rejection from CMU's PhD program posted on his door.

Yeah, your situation bites. Give yourself a few days to process things, then dust yourself off and get back up to figure out what you're going to do next. You're going to get knocked down a lot in life, and (systemic issues aside) a big difference between people who can really make it and those who don't is being able to deal with that failure and keep moving forward. Also, keep in mind that really good scholars will still succeed regardless of where they go for undergrad. Take a look at the undergrad schools of various successful folks in CompSci, you might be surprised. And if PL is what you're really into, grad school will matter far more than undergrad.

And last, I'd also recommend this article (below) from New York Magazine, asking about why success for Asian-Americans tends to end after school. There's a lot of raw anger in the writing, but I think it will resonate with you, and hopefully give you some good food for thought. https://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/

Good luck!

I had assumed that having specific interests would help me because I knew exactly what the school had to offer (courses, concentrations) instead of a vague "I want to go to your school because it has good CS" / "I want to go to your school because it is prestigious," where other high schoolers may have difficulty thinking of what to say. However, the admissions officers probably never heard of PL, which hurt me.

But, how is wanting to go to a school because of its strength in PL theory any different from a kid who say, likes AI and applied to a school because it has a strong AI program, or a bio major applicant who's really interested in molecular biology or something? I wouldn't think that people would see these kids negatively. (I'm not trying to argue with you, you bring up a possibility that I hadn't realized and I want to consider it.)

I agree with you that having some method to recognize those who have faced systemic obstacles and overcome them is extremely valuable, especially when considering how these things are pretty much impossible to quantify purely through something like GPA or test scores. What are your thoughts on affirmative action based on income rather than ethnicity in light of this?

> How are you unable to pursue your passions-because you didn't get into your first choice school?

I meant that people see Asians liking math or CS as a negative thing and it feeds into the stereotype of having no personality, when there's nothing wrong with liking math or CS.

>> So, if I want to go to a good school, I shouldn't study computer science, even though that's what I want to do, just because of the way I was born?

> Speaking of Asian stereotypes--going to a good school isn't really that important.

It's not so much that I want to go to a "good" school than that I wanted to go to a school where PL had a presence. It's about my interests, not prestige.

In fact, there were "good" schools that I didn't apply to because they didn't have PL, which in hindsight could have been a bad idea given the advice I've received to get a well-rounded education in undergrad and only specialize in grad school.

And being Asian has nothing to do with this. Non-Asian kids also obsess about prestige, going to the Ivy League, etc, but only Asians get the flak, which is where the racial double-standards come in.

There are many reasons why this dynamic could arise. The problem is that it's not entirely gone even now, after like 50 years of "nerds" in engineering and finance having some of the most enviable career paths.

Facing it should be especially hard for Asian kids, as it used to be for Jewish kids in Europe: a different parenting culture helps them achieve more earlier, and actually like studying.

My advice to you would be to:

a) Talk to a counselor about your essay. My fiancee worked at a SAT prep school and she helped tons of people get into Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Ivy League schools. Your essay matters a lot. It's the only thing that shows you're more than a statistic, and gives you a chance to show off your passions. Having someone look at this helps a lot.

b) Apply to as many schools as you can. Don't fixate on individual schools, try to get as many opportunities as you can. College admissions, like job applications, are mostly a numbers game, so the more place you apply to, the higher your chances you'll get into something you like.

c) Don't be too disappointed if you don't get into your first choice. In the end, college is really more about what you make of it, rather than the pedigree of the school itself. I've worked with tons of great engineers with degrees from top universities and small community college alike. College pedigree doesn't determine your success, hard work and discipline do. Having a passion for CS is great too.

Good luck! Don't give up hope, I'm sure you'll get into a good school.

Which people? Perhaps you are projecting. Or, you're just looking at your peer high school students.

I can assure you no one will give you shit if you like math once you get to college. You will be surrounded by people with similar interests as you, and assuming you pursue a career in CS, you will also be surrounded by people who have passionate as that.

(Disclaimer: walked out of my postgrad program after 3 years, because the industry, with all its warts, is so much saner than the academia.)

I would encourage any white or Asian person that’s against affirmative action to also mark themselves as an additional race, even if it’s a lie. What school you get in to (and what job, etc.) should be based on merit. If affirmative action is still to exist now it should be based on income, not race.

The grandparent post did not ask for (imho) the important thing. Namely, what is something significant you have done on a regional, national, or international scale? This can be academic, artistic, athletic, or whatever.

Note that this is not a requirement for admission to any of these schools, but it really helps a lot -- it serves as the one thing that sets you apart when you are not a recruited athlete or an applicant with the right social capital (e.g., come from a powerful and known family)... assuming that you don't fall into these categories.

Also note that many (most?) applicants from a variety of backgrounds (white, Asian... actually pretty much everyone) with "almost perfect scores and GPA" fall into the category of whiffing on this front.

However, I think that this should stay as judging individuals and their circumstances and putting them in the context of the environment, and it should not justify wide-scale generalizations like secret quotas hidden with personality tests, etc. As you point out, such things further anti-intellectualism and penalize Asians and Jews for working hard.

(It would also be more productive to support people in those neighborhoods from the start, such as by supporting elementary schools, instead of waiting until college admissions.)

I completely agree with this.

One of the challenges is that income can be gamed, but I think that this can probably be worked around somehow.

Edit: Maybe the UC implementation would work?

> UC may choose to advance goals like diversity and equal opportunity using a broad range of admissions that are not based on an individual’s race or gender. For example, holistic review in admissions considers income level, first-generation status, neighborhood circumstances, disadvantages overcome, low-performing secondary school attended, and the impact of an applicant’s background on academic achievement.

Why shouldn't those circumstances be taken into account? Perhaps it's because -- as a race -- most Asians are too proud to talk about this in their admissions essays, and moreover, their intellectual accumen would tend to indicate that these -- frankly minor -- issues are not important when considering what school to attend.

What we should really be talking about is why anyone -- Asian or black or whatever -- needs to elicit the sympathy of some old WASP to attend school. The whole 'write a sob story' trope is true because this appeals to popular white culture. It's time that ends, and we let adults run the show.

I also agree that the current situation of having to write a touching essay for some WASP is messed up. To be fair, not all essays are sob stories and people actually warn that it shouldn't be all sob and you need to show how you grew, but the whole idea of essays and personality is so vague and subjective, and kids get so stressed over writing a good essay.

EDIT: Offtopic, but looking at your username, do you happen to be the author of the Haskell BEAM library?

When it comes to tech; there are plenty of open positions ready to be filled with smart programmers. Maybe not at OP's top-choice, but there will be jobs.

I agree that there's something vexing about having this stereotype which can almost dominate or define you. We should certainly fight against being depicted as math/CS loving robots.

However I disagree that this ties into affirmative action. Yes, Asians face discrimination and dehumanization in our lives. But black and hispanic and other people of color face discrimination and dehumanization at such an extreme. Whether that's redlining, discriminatory banking practices or police brutality, there are active forces at play that hurt young people of color and prevent them from getting the best possible education. For instance, the average black family has one tenth the wealth of the average white family^[1].

It's easy to see these policies that are determining resource allocation based on race and not just merit as racial discrimination, but what's important to understand is that the merit part is clouded by racial discrimination of its own. It's just better hidden.

Let me be clear though: this is purely against your affirmative action points. Any potential discrimination against Asians outside of affirmative action is unacceptable.

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-wealth-gap-costs-economy...

Overall, I don't really know what any of us can do about it other than complain on the internet though. Unfortunately I don't really see a viable path forward to changing any of these policies.

This is more of a policy and political (changes cannot happen now otherwise there will be riots ) failure. No system can be perfect meritocracy, sometimes one just needs to suck up. Taking the comparison elsewhere one can argue effectively that where we are born is a matter of luck etc.

Personally i do not question policy intentions however always hope for better implementations in the future.

Is it well meaning? The behaviour of the advocates for these sorts of policies fits vastly closer to

* Want to dehumanise people by seeing them only as a member of their respective groups

* Want an excuse to hate on a particular group of people

* Constructed a story where doing that makes them the good guys

than

* looked at the problems people have

* tried to understand them

* tried to come up with a solution which would improve things

You'll probably say, no I just want equality and at the moment I'm discriminated against, so if we intentionally tilt things towards my group then things will be fair again but that's what they'd say too.

How can you be sure that whatever social movement and/or beaurocracy that gets invented to fix your problem doesn't then cause someone else (women, Russians, "white" people, older people maybe) to be unfairly overlooked (or even just perceive themselves to be overlooked) and complain that actively helping you must surely be at the expense of some poor deserving person they know?

It’s a shame because the OP sounds like someone who would thrive at an mit/cmu, but likely got screwed due to an opaque system optimizing for a completely unknown objective (let me be cynical now—-the objective is optimizing us news rankings by only accepting top gpa/sat that have high yield, a subset of overprepared foreign students that will pay full ticket, and a scattering of “african americans” ie wealthy nigerians).

The system is bullshit. The only thing us universities have going for them is the professors and the fact that you can drop by their office and start a research relationship by extending your hand in good faith.

CMU offers an undergraduate PL concentration where you learn FP and constructive math: https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academics/undergraduate/principles_of... I believe I really would have benefitted from this.

The fact is that being a prestigious or elite school often goes hand-in-hand with having good professors and research. There is a certain unfairness, but it seems inherent that a "better" university would naturally have more resources and more professors would come there. But, we should have more top-level universities to accommodate more people. After all, top colleges are always claiming that they have to turn down qualified applicants every year.

AI/Machine Learning are likely similarly competitive goals currently. No sure about biology, but the connection to medicine probably means it is a similarly problematic choice.

Another big issue could be the reasons behind your plans. Was it an extroverted story of benefiting society with your new skills, or an introverted story of learning about stuff that excites you for its own sake?

So make it wealth based?

>Let me be clear though: this is purely against your affirmative action points. Any potential discrimination against Asians outside of affirmative action is unacceptable.

Why draw the line arbitrarily at affirmative action? Why not housing as well? Maybe a quota on high-paying jobs?

It very clearly is.

These quotas are discrimination in itself. And it becomes more complicated with mixed-race people. At one point one becomes "too white" or "too black" or "too asian"? In Brazil it's become way too complicated and ridiculous [0], for example.

---

[0]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-wit...

We live in Eastern Europe, where even if this things are pushed by some politicians and some media, they still aren't a policy. Anyway, I feel that in most of the Europe there is a backlash against "identity politics", people got enough of it.

Discrimination is bad, no matter how is done.

This name brand college, which everyone has heard of, accepted 3 inferior students, all of them belonging to better affirmative action demographics than me, none of whom had the intellect/desire to even handle AP Calculus AB. One of these students was so shocked that she took a spot at this university instead of me that she sought me out, apologized to me, and opined to me that affirmative action seems to be very unfair. Mind you, these 3 inferior students all came from well-to-do families -- 1 of them much wealthier than my own (and she was the one who apologized to me). They were not inner city kids who had to work 2 jobs while studying to stay above water -- I wouldn't have been angry if this were the case.

You've probably been raised to believe that the ranking of the college you attend is the go-to indicator of intelligence. Now you're realizing that's not really true -- at least not in America. It took me a very long time to make peace with the fact that I had believed in this falsehood all my life, fed to me by my parents and by society. But once I did, I could finally focus on improving my life and the lives of those I cared about, rather than wallowing in bitterness and resentment.

Life isn't fair. The faster you make peace with this, the better off you'll be in the long run. If you manage to keep your head on straight, you'll probably become more successful than many graduates from these universities.

And he's right -- it is a disadvantage in terms of getting into American universities. You can read my story in response to the GP. You can read countless anecdotes online. You can read the stats from the various studies and court trials.

Asian-Americans still do okay in American life in general, after college. One just has to be ready to accept that the university you attend does not have the final say in how your life unfolds.

How do you propose governing people without somehow grouping them?

It feels like the slippery slope that data aggregators go down. The tension between specificity and parsimony. False positives vs false negatives. Okay so no Nigerian children of privilege. But what about Rwandan children of privilege who were refugees after genocide? So to fix this problem, _more_ grouping seems inevitable, but that's the slippery slope. How much invasion into and quantification of peoples' personal lives can we tolerate in the interest of enforcing equality? I don't think these problems have an easy answer, and "not grouping" doesn't really seem like an option either.

My personal take is just to use socioeconomic background (class) as the main factor. But race, gender, and other identifying factors inevitably play a role. There are some special historical traumas, like slavery, that I do think admit special consideration when we define "equal opportunity," even today.

I guess my point is that people will always find something to shit on you for, and the bias against lower ranked schools comes from above. The state schools like Penn State, OSU, Pitt, Michigan, Florida, Illinois etc. are enormous institutions that have a good amount of research going on and are definitely accessible to a motivated high school student. So if you don't get in to an Ivy League school, your opportunities aren't going to be limited as much as you think, and rejection is a great motivator.

Same goes for computer science as such. Most of the work is grunt work in testing, debugging, peer review, etc. As you advance, there may be more time available for pure math work, but that means the amount of communication just goes way up: writing, peer reviews, presentations, management, managing up, etc.

Point being, don't be afraid to develop your application skills. Things like teamwork and communication matter a lot. Computer science is the common major, but most demand is for coders. Of course, what companies need is typically software engineers and (good!) software project management.

Colleges spend a lot of time and money on selecting the smartest students, so companies don't have to. Screening is quite expensive, and anecdotally, people from prestigious universities generally pass interviews at a much higher rate.

Being around smarter and more ambitious people makes you smarter as well. I feel that has a lot more impact than faculty. My top CS school had some senile tenured professors who were barely comprehensible, so we had to learn a lot from each other.

Find happiness and learning even through disappointment and failure and you will have a fulfilling life. Life truly isnt about the destination, it is about the journey (success AND failure).

My cousin is an asian american activist and she sees everything through the lens of a victim, don't be a victim. I feel sad because she cant be thankful for what she has, she can only be resentful for what she is missing compared to white people.

My parents gave me the following lessons:

If you see a problem fix it. If you arent going to fix it, then there is no point to complain about it. Some things can't be fixed, move on.

Life is not fair, there is no value to you in being angry about it. There are a million ways life will treat you unfairly. That IS life.

Success <> happiness. True and everlasting happiness comes from within.

You might be discriminated against. Too bad. Life isnt fair

You might have to work twice as hard as a white person to get the same promotion. Do it. You still might not get the promotion. If you have to, leave and help their competitor to do better.

Someone might not want to rent to you because you are asian (not as much of a problem these days). Find someone that will and be the best renter possible. Pay your rent early, fix things that are broken, leave the place spotless when you leave.

There are actually many more, but Im sure you get the gist of it.

In college admissions check any race you want, but don't pick the one that deducts points. And for your last name put CONTROLGROUP. Done.

This applies if your family is White or Asian (my family is both).

That sounds like it triples down on the stereotypes you're frustrated with being perceived as, but more broadly I think they're basically looking for people who demonstrate self confidence and strong enthusiasm for something productive (the team player aesthetic). This trend is going to continue beyond undergrad admissions in both the formal and informal introductions.

I wouldn't sweat undergrad as much as you've probably been trained to all your life. You have plenty of additional opportunities ahead.

The fact that all of the various workarounds end up targeting people nominally outside the scope is a feature, not a bug.

The bad news is that what you're going through now is real. It's unfair, and it's going to hurt. The truth is that you are seeing the effect of a system that means to optimize superficial representation and not the root cause of the problem of income inequality. People are going to game the system. Folks will get in without merit, and folks without merit that should have it will not get in. Worse yet, when you get out of college, these folks are going to have an advantage over you in the early phases of their career. They'll get undue (even insulting, if you think about it) attention for their racial background, and generally have an easy time getting their foot in the door for top tier roles in investing, startup founding, and corporate strategy. The system will, for a while, be capable of giving them affirmative action. But, the unfair advantage ends there.

Beyond just your own experience, think about what that implies. It means that educational institutions that reject meritocracy are going to slowly crumble as they are no longer compete to be the most intellectually rigorous institutions. I didn't go to an Ivy league university, despite the, ahem, very forceful "advisory" of my parents. I instead went to a tiny liberal arts college where I double majored in CS and Music. My college had a mandatory humanities core, so I learned to read and write and be critical and think. I learned not just to research history, but make sense of it. I learned how to make sense of culture, past and present. I learned how to make sense of computation, data structures and algorithms, and get a grounding of the tools I'd use to make elegant solutions to problems.

When I first started my career, I felt hampered by my lack of a name brand education and my Asian American ethnic identity. I felt passed over by investors when I wanted to start a company (although in retrospect, I think that's in part because I, like almost any other startup founder out of college, was not fit to start a company), and I felt passed over by hot startups and big companies for fast tracker career roles. But, something changed about four or five years through my career.

The problems started getting bigger and less clearly defined -- it made sense, as I was getting more senior and the scope of my work was growing. My hunger and desire to push and prove myself kept growing as well. I continued to look in the mirror and ruthlessly try to improve my worst flaws so that I could be more effective and not stagnate. While it didn't happen immediately, one day I realized on the job that these Ivy league educated folks who I used to feel like were miles ahead of me all of a sudden weren't very far ahead of me at all. In fact, it was more often the case that when we were working together, I would be the one taking the lead. I was the one leading the great charges into the unknown. I was the one writing the script, and figuring out how to get the problems solved. And this was just during the work part of it -- things got even more lopsided during the spirited lunchroom barroom debates about life, the universe and politics -- for some reason, the Ivy league educated colleagues (at least those who seemed to derive a lot of their identity from their pedigree) seemed to have a certain rigidity in thought, a certain degree of haughtiness, and a certain inability to adapt and grow. They often couldn't keep up in debates and conversations compared to folks who went to less pedigreed schools but clearly took their education more seriously.

They couldn't make judgment calls and take risks. They couldn't solve problems both quickly and deeply. My work rivalries were almost never with them. The only other folks I had to compete with for top tier performance and promotion were almost always folks like me. Folks who were sharp, who treated their career like a portfolio, who were ambitious, who wanted every project they worked on to be bigger and better than the last, and who would be dissatisfied if that wasn't the case. This didn't preclude the Ivy league educated colleagues, but I realized that just as in the general population, the percentage of Ivy league educated colleagues with that level of ambition was low. I eventually made it to my destination in the startup world (head of engineering a funded startup with a solvent business model and a blank check) at the same speed as them, if not faster. And now, I'm at a top tier big company, and I realize that a lot of them despite their shiny pedigree wouldn't make it here either.

I guess what I'm saying to you is that I agree with your premises but be careful about the conclusions you draw. You are right to note that affirmative action is ethically wrong. But take that observation further and observe that it is also systemically flawed. Whether it is ethically right or wrong, it simply does not work. The real world careers that you end up in have challenges which are so difficult and challenging that students of institutions who engage in these kinds of appearances over rigor (which is a disturbing amount, especially in prestigious institutions) are ill prepared for its rigors and find difficulty succeeding. It's best to understand that the prestige of institutions that used to be synonymous with their educational rigor is no longer coupled to that, and once you have true rigor competing against prestige, rigor eats prestige for lunch every day of the week. So you didn't get into an institution, and you figure it's because of affirmative action? It's rough, but did you get into an institution that will be good enough? Will you learn the skills you need to learn and then learn the rest on the job? Yes. To be honest, the best educational institution in the world cannot remotely compete with the on the job training you'll get from a good mentor at a top tier startup or tech company. So, focus on your habits, your skills, and your own unique identity. You like PL theory and FP, right? That's great! Try to figure out where it's used in the industry. Send emails to researchers. Make comments on social media. Start blogging. Participate in the public discourse. Once you build up momentum there, you'll be your own brand and it won't matter where you go to university (I say this with the understanding that you did indeed get into a good engineering school anyways, as I saw further on doing the thread -- it just didn't happen to be your absolute first choice).

The truth is these days, where you went to college is such a lossy signal by mid career that it may as well not even matter. There are plenty of ambitious go getters from state schools who far out perform folks who went to Ivy league universities by at least mid career, enough that you should just focus on learning how to learn in college (and for that, I highly recommend expanding your horizons a little into philosophy, history, art and science), and learning how to get ahead after college. Don't be intimidated by prestige games. Maybe things will change one day, but for now, there is still plenty of space to make an impressive fulfilling career by focusing on how to find and solving good, hard problems. If you're at all interested in having an expanded conversation on this, let me know. It might be many years later, but I remember exactly how it felt being in your shoes, and there are so many things I wish someone had told me that I just had to figure out myself in my own career.

The temptation to reduce affirmative action to an economic argument is especially ironic in that many of the mechanisms used to implement it were first used in the opposite direction, to cast university as beyond a purely economic arrangement, as eminently qualified Jewish students threatened to fill class rolls in the early 20th century. Suddenly, test scores were not important, character was. With the swing to hysteria over race in admissions, the inheritors of the legacy of steel drivers and sharecroppers are subject to less-than-genuine arguments centered around money. Suddenly, character is not important, economic uplift is. Hm.

Everyone gets discriminated against and stereotyped in subtle manners. All that varies is what way people are stereotyped.

Even in the USA, the people called "white" aren't considered the pinacle in every area.

(Also, if you want to see real discrimination try being of Chinese descent in Malaysia)

1. The admission committees can certainly influence your life, but don’t let them define your life. For the long run the college you attend could be just a small factor and I think it is getting smaller thanks to the internet and open source.

2. The PL area is small and to some extent limited. Your interests and passion could likely shift in the future. Just keep an open mind.

3. Embrace life. Make friends. Build stuff (think open source) and actively participate in the communities. They usually are very friendly to bright kids. You may find out it could be a lot easier to join the top universities or companies in the future when you personally know and work with the professors or experts. You may even find out you can define your life and those universities matter no more to you.

I certainly was when I started to pay attention around the office. Brilliant people, advanced degrees from top schools... and I had never even heard of half of the schools they had attended for undergrad.

It also struck me that you said you wanted to do undergraduate research. Did you mean you wanted to work as a research assistant- or did you say you wanted to conduct your own research...? I don't think the latter really happens. I could be out of date.

Like when slavery was banned, was it "intentionally tilt things towards African americans then things will be fair again but that's what they'd say too"?

I dont understand the point in putting CONTROLGROUP as your last name, though. Could you explain.

That said, your reality for the next four years is going to a school you might feel is beneath you. Fifteen years ago I saw the same thing at my high school: the Whites and Asians went to the top 50 schools, but their similarly-accomplished, more racially-advantaged counterparts matriculated to MIT or Harvard. Let me fill you in what the future will look like for these two groups:

---For you---

+1 year: Classes are relatively easy. You're near the top of your class.

+2-3 years: You continue to do well. You might even take a graduate-level class, which impresses a professor enough to consider you for a research assistant role. You take it.

+5 years: You're either graduated and taking a job with a high tech company out West, or you're matriculating to grad school. If the former, you may once again end up in a company you see as beneath you because many of the top companies practice racial discrimination due to immense pressure to meet diversity goals. If the latter, you likely "move up" to a better school because racial discrimination is less pronounced at the graduate level.

+10 years: You're either on your second or third job if you got out with a B.S., or your first with a Ph.D. Either way, if you ended up at a lower tier company, you have or will soon have enough professional accolades that will propel you into a company whose reputation matches your abilities. At this point, the college effect is all but erased.

---For them---

+1 year: Classes are difficult. The pace is very fast and most of the class is filled with White or Asian students with national accolades of some kind. They're enrolled in "programs" that help retain minorities so they get extra tutoring.

+2-3 years: They either buckle down or, more likely, fall further behind. Counselors recommend taking an easier major like business.

+5 years: If they buckled down, they graduate and get courted by and receive job offers from 3 of the 5 FAANGs. If they didn't buckle down, they're still in school or, if still in their original major, will drop out soon.

+10 years: If they work at a FAANG, they've likely become disillusioned with the day job and have gotten recruited for internal "leadership" organizations targeting minorities. They take a job either as an assistant to an executive or a manager in a non-technical area of the company like business development or diversity. If they didn't buckle down, they've probably dropped out of school and fallen off the career ladder entirely and will have a very hard road ahead of themselves. The college effect never truly gets erased for minorities, just bifurcates them into more extreme winners and losers.

The most toxic radioactivity is at one center of gravity - black and white.

This is a political singularity - all other dimensions will be crushed but before the vortex is a preposterous racial double standard.

If you want to keep your dignity exit and work a blue collar job like me. I'm going to build two sawhorses.

There is a massive historical element to the position that most black americans find themselves in now. But there is also ongoing racism, which I don't see how you can tackle with only color blind policies.

This seems like such a facile argument. It seems very difficult to combat racism (ie. the common strand of thought in society that sees people only as a member of their racial group) if you can't consider race at all.

How, for instance, could we even make racial discrimination illegal if the state were entirely forbidden from considering the race of its citizens at all?

Affirmative action via wealth is already in place at Harvard.

Shockingly, not all adversity faced by black Americans comes simply from wealth disparities, although that is a large part of it. I'm white and I've seen enough not-so-subtle racism to understand that those things can have a large cumulative effect, even if each individual instance is someone just making a small snap judgement about you.

It's funny that studies like these about intentional affirmative action policies rise to the top of HN, whereas studies showing that black people with the exact same credentials are half as likely to get an interview for a job don't.

Go ahead - it will definitely backfire. I actually could mark that when I applied (I consider myself white, they would consider me hispanic) and I chose not to, kinda gross that you would lie on your application to get ahead of your peers - why not make up an extra-curricular while you're at it?

And wouldn't it make you feel worse to know that you are at a school because you cheated to get ahead?

Definitely, you have to control what you can, and not let the things people say get to your head, I wonder how he came to the conclusions he did.

Uhh yeah I actually totally think programs to give underrepresented minorities opportunities for better housing would be great. The history of redlining is despicable and we need to work to actively reverse it.

Same with jobs. Programs like Microsoft Explore or Google STEP are active attempts to increase diversity. They're wonderful.

I'm just saying that that's in itself something of a problem. Like, I'm angry about the concentration of academic "worthiness" in a select number of institutions. I'd like us to work on reversing that trend, making education more meritocratic, decentralized and accommodating.

For example: it's expensive as hell to house students on a campus like Harvard, Yale, etc. The benefits of doing so are furthermore unclear. In much of the world, you live at home during your university years. Or with roommates in a city. Re-centering university life from these inaccessible campuses and into cities would do a lot to lower the barrier and cost of entry, IMO.

But yeah, not saying that there aren't major advantages to going to a school like Cornell or CMU. Just that these schools are outrageously expensive, inequitable and we have some power to relax their grip on our higher education system by asserting that yes, we can be smart, educated and worthy people (and engineers!) even if we go to more "low-brow" schools.

Let's consider a third group: black and Latinx ("racially-advantaged" is just about the most preposterous euphemism I've ever heard) who also go on to those top-50, non-Ivy schools. Overwhelmingly, their fortunes tend to be better described by your second timeline rather than your first, with FAANG replaced by lower-tier companies.

So darker-skinned college students have a harder time; no matter what school they go to, no matter what effort they put in, and no matter what their career prospects are 1, 5, 10 years after graduation, they're worse off then a comparable white or Asian student.

It's heartbreaking that you so fully and accurately recognize the surface level racial dynamics involved in academics and socioeconomic success, but not only completely mischaracterize the reasons they exist, but encourage their perpetuation.

I assume Asians support AA through some sort of guilt or unity with the other minorities rather than self interest/self preservation.

> income level, first-generation status, neighborhood circumstances, disadvantages overcome, low-performing secondary school attended, and the impact of an applicant’s background on academic achievement

are probably the best possible set of signaling factors in determining whether a person has the ability to overcome adversity.

The downvote keep the party line with what majority is saying is the most annoying thing about this site, but I don't know the alternative. Certainly trolls and the ill informed need to be discouraged but it's always annoying to see a legitimate reasoned opinion greyed out.

BTW, I don't agree with your original comment for whatever it's worth. I do agree with your downvote comment.

Well, let's hear why.

The disintegration of black, and then white social organization at the lower class levels can be tracked - I believe if there existed a revival of tacit knowledge, the trades then the society would be more prosperous and less divided than it is now.

Some of us on the left and right see eye to eye on this and the moderates are the ones who are delusional. The middle class concentration on information processing has damaged the society and their faction does not acknowledge negative results from knowledge. This is not anti-intellectual - the residents in HN must respect the note that every major stagnation in history is accompanied by the formalization of education and society. You all know it is true of computer code - beset by legacy issues.

That is why I take projects like Urbit seriously.

It is okay to complain, but remember that we can't fix all wrongs in the world. We don't have time to wait for society to change. We will and have always found a way to survive and thrive.

My parents grew up in the Vietnam war. My mother had to do her homework in the shelters while American planes were bombing her city. My dad comes from a poor village and lost several brothers in the draft. My grandfather his brother fought against the french colonialist.

Despite all this, they don't hold a grudge against the west, and they still look up to western societies. Being a victim forever is not the way for success and happiness, and you will only hurt yourself in the long run. Practice gratitude, keep your eyes open for opportunities and keep hustling.

Also more complex: ignoring discrimination, even if implicit, creates an environment where our natural human impulses (tribalism/bias) flourish.

College admissions depend much more on things you can't control than most people realize. For example, preferences are often given to children of donors, children of alumni, applicants from different states, and even male applicants (many colleges seek a 50/50 ratio.) At the end of the day, it can be almost random that one person is admitted while another is rejected - perhaps that person was a concert violinist and there were too many violinists who applied that year!

Fortunately it is possible to get an outstanding education nearly anywhere you attend. One data point is that faculty jobs are so competitive that nearly any professor who is hired needs to be some kind of superstar, regardless of the institution. Moreover, most colleges have very useful and often excellent facilities in terms of libraries, computing and online resources, laboratories, performance spaces, gyms, etc., and tend to be full of interesting people who you will learn a lot from. Community colleges in particular are the best bargain in education - affordable tuition, and faculty who are actually there primarily to teach students (rather than publish papers and raise money, which are higher priorities at research universities.)

When someone like that, who is hopefully aware of the mechanisms of race even as they are buoyed on the privilege of wealth, enters an Ivy League school, they carry with them the legacy of black experience while also representing a high chance at academic success. He is not better than his lower-income brother, but his matriculation is not a loss for the concept of affirmative action in this manner. And until the long process of correcting the imbalance in representation in society - particularly elite society - is finished, affirmative action will be necessary. History has proven that certain aspects of our society have to be dragged kicking and screaming into progress and fulfillment of America's founding notions, and AA is one tool for doing so.

if this was in a completely different sector, where a small more powerful subset uses strength, we would use terminology such as 'anti-competitive practices', 'coercion' etc.

I don't have a solution, but strongly feel that addressing the root cause prevents the child from being victimized in the first place, rather than acknowledging his reality and providing the crutches that help him get to a levelling field in the real world.

Do you think that Jonny worried about what his faux peers thought about him in high school? They were equal in age but that was about it. Their opinions could hurt only those who valued them.

Very interested in learning how well you are doing now professionally.

I think what's been discussed so far is that AA ignores the background and full spectrum of personal quality. It's not about whether or not people without necessary resources should be evaluated based on their environments.

The problem is that AA solves the problem lazily based on race.

AA is both ineffective in solving the problem, and unfair to many people, especially asian americans.