> You will probably fall back to the line that black students would have had a higher GPA if they weren't discriminated against in other areas of society, but then it's not the school doing the discriminating. And this is the core of the problem. Instead of selecting the best students, universities have decided to select who they think hypothetically would have been the best student in a perfect world, and doing a very poor job of it.
It's more complicated than that.
If someone is in a bad environment, they can have a worse GPA and be a worse student at that moment, but once they get into the college environment they will be a better student, not just "could have been".
> And their arrogance in appointing themselves the corrector of all societal ills and their myopic focus on only gender and race differences in doing so has pissed a lot of people off.
Appointing themselves the corrector? For anyone that does have that motivation, they'd probably gladly welcome more cooperation. And those two getting most of the focus is because they get most of the discrimination.
> but once they get into the college environment they will be a better student
How, exactly? Not that this really matters b/c universities today are credentialing scams where no one fails out.
> And those two getting most of the focus is because they get most of the discrimination.
Citation needed. And if they were being at all quantitative about this, at least I would have some sympathy.
The giveaway is that they are being completely dishonest about what they are doing. Harvard fought like hell to prevent their admissions process from coming out in discovery. If they were honest, they would make it public anyway. What do they have to hide? Well, just that they weren't running any remotely reasonable process to model how good of a student someone is under normalized conditions. They were artificially lowering the "personality scores" of Asian students to keep them out.
Consider two students with equal intelligence and equal skill at studying.
One lives in a rich suburban neighborhood where schools are well-funded and the parents have the time and money to supply constant extracurricular attention to their children.
The other lives in a single-parent household in a historically redlined urban neighborhood where the school budgets are peanuts and he has to work a part-time job on the side to help support his family.
Which one is going to have the more impressive transcript in college applications?
It’s not that people will be exactly equal but rather you can validate admission criteria by comparing graduation rates and GPA’s.
If men and women graduate at similar rates and have similar GPA’s then your admission criteria are presumably reasonably unbiased. If men have lower GPA’s and graduate at lower rates then presumably their admission criteria should be raised to account for biases you aren’t aware of.
If however you underrepresent men relative to the general population you may want to focus on attracting more of them through advertising.
From an outside perspective this might seem unfair. Why is the school spending so much money mailing to young men while requiring more extra curricular activists to be admitted? It’s a question of equal standards vs equal opportunity.
It's more complicated than that.
If someone is in a bad environment, they can have a worse GPA and be a worse student at that moment, but once they get into the college environment they will be a better student, not just "could have been".
> And their arrogance in appointing themselves the corrector of all societal ills and their myopic focus on only gender and race differences in doing so has pissed a lot of people off.
Appointing themselves the corrector? For anyone that does have that motivation, they'd probably gladly welcome more cooperation. And those two getting most of the focus is because they get most of the discrimination.