I genuinely believe there is no solution here which will make everyone happy.
Even you were to have a fully meritocratic system it would still be massively biased to towards rich students and against African-Americans.
Rich parents simply have more resources to ensure their kids get whatever educational resources they need to get the grades needed for admission to elite universities.
We still don't know why African-Americans underperform other ethnic groups academically, but this is a reality and while this reality exists any fully meritocratic system will work against them. Our unwillingness to ask why African-Americans underperform is a huge part of the problem here. And I'll note this isn't just a US thing, it's similar here in Europe.
There really is no solution here – at least not at the level of university admissions.
The problem is deeper... At least one of the issues is that the quality of ones education depends a lot on the neighbourhood they grow up in. And African-Americans generally grow up in less affluent neighbourhoods. Minimising that difference and ensuring kids from all backgrounds have decent shot at getting the grades they need for university in my opinion should be the primary focus.
> I genuinely believe there is no solution here which will make everyone happy.
This is true of every social problem. The goal is never to make everyone happy. We can't give up making progress just because "perfection" is unobtainable.
>We still don't know why African-Americans underperform other ethnic groups academically...
I want to pick at this a little, because we do know.
Generational trauma is a thing. I can point to specific ways that my parents raised me, to counter specific ways that my grandfather raised my father, which were in turn responses to how my great grandfather raised my grandfather. So why is it surprising that the factors that dictated the lives of the great grandparents of currents students shouldn't also influence how those students act today? Especially when certain aspects of the lives of those great grandparents are still very much in force today?
Even if this is part of the explanation there are many other factors which seem likely to be related.
Just off of the top of head: African-Americans are more likely to be raised in single mother households. African-Americans are more likely to live in neighbourhoods with bad public schools. Due to socioeconomic factors they're less likely to have access to nutritious meals. They may be more exposed to negative social influences (gangs, rap music, criminality, etc).
What I don't understand is why these academic statistics are so correlated worldwide. In the UK there is no "generational trauma". African migration only really started in the UK post-WWII. While there was discrimination this is the case for practically all immigrant groups in the UK. Indians were arguably just as discriminated against, for example. Yet, Indians today do extremely well in the UK. They also do extremely well in the US. So what's going on there?
It's difficult to say this without inviting abuse, but I worry that some of this is likely to be genetic. Obviously there are other factors at play too, and perhaps they are the majority, but in my opinion this doesn't fully explain what we see.
But the larger point I would make is until we actually understand what drives these group differences, and then take measures to level the playing field, we'll never fix inequalities between ethnic groups. At least not without state force.
> In the UK there is no "generational trauma". African migration only really started in the UK post-WWII. While there was discrimination this is the case for practically all immigrant groups in the UK.
Wikipedia claims that most of the post-war immigrants came from the West Indies, predominantly Jamaica. You don't suppose there might be some generational trauma bundled into a group of people who were only in the Caribbean because of the British slave trade, lived on an island dominated by British colonial practices and culture attitudes towards those former slaves, and were now moving onto the (overwhelmingly white) British islands, the home of their great grandparents' former masters?
You raise an interesting point about Indians. In most of the statistics for the US I could find, the only non-white ethnic group that didn't show markedly lower performance was the vague "Asians". I have some rank speculation about what's happening there, but its just that.
To be clear, I'm not saying I have any strong opinions on what's causing these differences, I'm just suggesting that it's likely multi-faceted and some of the causes are likely to be difficult to discuss because it will require us to make negative claims about groups of people, eg, "African-Americans have cultural values which do not align well with academic success".
I'm not sure I understand what "generational trauma" is but I'm certainly not dismissing it as part of the explanation.
My problem isn't with people like yourself – you seem very open to discussing this. My issue is that the public and politicians are not open and instead debate whether we should ignore the fact a fully meritocratic system would effectively discriminate against African-Americans, or if we should instead use state force to correct for these differences. It's just the wrong debate to have and it will never produce a good solution to the problem. The questions you're asking are the valid ones – even if I believe the answers are likely to be more complex.
There's this meme on top of a painting of a (maybe Victorian era?) couple, where the man says something to the effect of "what goes on in a woman's mind?" and the woman replies "well, I think ..." to be cutoff by "its a mystery", and then "if you'd let me..." to be cutoff by "I guess we'll never know".
This refrain of "its multi-faceted" and "we don't really know" feels a bit like that. We do know what causes all of these issues. Each and every contributing factor is well documented in isolation. So I'm responding to that.
However, we are (as you say) in full agreement that the actual answers are complicated. I'd go further and say the reasons why those are the answers are themselves complicated, and because they take more than an election cycle to effect. My claim is that it will take generations to rectify, if ever.
I don't have stats, but judging by the ambient discourse around inclusion and diversity at elite institutions, France is one such country.
Now, it's a bit of a weird situation because, officially, there are no "races" in France. There are no blacks, no whites, just people. But the government is working on tackling the terrible performance of schools in "priority areas" (read: impoverished neighborhoods and tows, which are "immigrant-heavy"). There's also been some dancing around the elite schools and their feeder prep-schools, which aren't very "representative" (read: "diverse" but without saying "race").
Is your point that there are close to no African-Americans in Europe? You're probably right.
But I think kypro's point was rather about the local minorities in Europe, which are most likely not any kind of American, although many of them are of African descent (with the caveat that a sizeable proportion of those are not "blacks").
My point is that this sub-thread is full of bullshit. I asked kypro for statistics, but he didn't answer and you intervened with conjecture based on "ambient discourse".
Even you were to have a fully meritocratic system it would still be massively biased to towards rich students and against African-Americans.
Rich parents simply have more resources to ensure their kids get whatever educational resources they need to get the grades needed for admission to elite universities.
We still don't know why African-Americans underperform other ethnic groups academically, but this is a reality and while this reality exists any fully meritocratic system will work against them. Our unwillingness to ask why African-Americans underperform is a huge part of the problem here. And I'll note this isn't just a US thing, it's similar here in Europe.
There really is no solution here – at least not at the level of university admissions.
The problem is deeper... At least one of the issues is that the quality of ones education depends a lot on the neighbourhood they grow up in. And African-Americans generally grow up in less affluent neighbourhoods. Minimising that difference and ensuring kids from all backgrounds have decent shot at getting the grades they need for university in my opinion should be the primary focus.