I want to comment on the anti Affirmative Action arguments here.
I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year, our AP Computer Science teacher hooked up a few of us with internships at the finance firms, specifically in tech (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). Now, sure, I did really well and studied really hard to get into my high school. However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship besides taking AP Computer Science. My Computer Science "expertise" was hardly valuable. I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country.
In the end, that internship did wonders for me getting into college and getting future jobs. And plus, I made 3k that summer. And yes, I finished a useful project at the firm. But the reason I had that opportunity was totally orthogonal to earning the opportunity. I know we like to boast about being a meritocracy and all that, but this is one of those cases where it was correlation, not causation.
Because you're not the person AA hurts. AA doesnt hurt top 1% people, it hurts say top 10% people who are in the wrong ethnic group and lose out to people in the correct ethnic group. Just ask a lower class Asian person with top 10% MCAT scores, and why he lost a med school spot to a middle class URM person with top 20% scores.
But isn't that how you achieve systematic equality? For example, say there are two races X and Y. X is the overachiever (doesn't even have to be a majority, there could be a 50/50 population), while Y is the underachiever, for whatever historical reasons these two groups faced. So, to get Y on the same level as X and restore a meritocracy, you must admit more of Y, even if X does better in some cases. Meritocracy only makes sense if everyone starts off with the same advantages. Otherwise, the populations must converge until such a point is reached. It becomes an argument for shortchanging certain populations for the greater good of society, to undo the disparity of the past. Is that not why AA exists?
It's absolutely fine to give extra advantages to people with low incomes. That's economic progressivism.
It's wrong to give extra advantages based on genetics, essentially saying that some people "genetically poor" or "genetically rich", which is what Affirmative Action does.
I think what you're saying is a great way to describe what advantages accrue with wealth, even middle class wealth.
Essentially you had the system work in your favor and in turn knew how to work to system. You got a warm intro into an internship, this helped you get into college afterwards. These kinds of subtle boosts are mostly a function of being in the right place within the system and knowing how to pull the right levers, and if you don't know to look for those levers, you'll never know they're there and be disadvantaged as a result.
In your case, it was being in the right place and having the flexibility to take that internship. For someone else it might be knowing how to work the college financial aid system, or something else. I look back and see that throughout my academic career, if I didn't have people who knew how the system worked telling me, "you should do this, and this is how", I don't think I'd have gotten where I am.
Essentially, I got a better shot at things even though I was no more qualified on a purely intellectual basis.
AA is an imperfect tool to give people some of those same advantages, and I'm a little ambivalent about it. But I think it or something like it is probably necessary to give everyone an equal shot.
The test to get into the prestigious high school is orthogonal to race.
Given that the top percentile of the test takers are the children of immigrant parents who don't understand American culture and whose primary language is not English, the tests appear to be very objective.
The way I see it is if your numbers for race as a whole don't match the underlying distribution you probably have a selection bias in there. I'm not sure affirmative action is the right move but I don't know how you can deny a selection bias against certain groups (racial or otherwise) and I think that we need some way to try to correct for it
Programs like this promote the very discrimination that they are intended to counteract. People of all other races will see this and argue - correctly - that black students at Howard now have an advantage over them at one of the premier employers in the tech industry. This is wonderful for Howard students, and probably for black CS students looking for employment at Google in general, but not so great for everyone else.
You cannot fix racism by implementing racist programs. You do it by removing race from the hiring equation to the maximum extent possible and focusing on the skills of the applicant. This kind of program will, and should, backfire on Google.
I want to suggest a native way to reduce the effect of affirmative action.
1) Join forces to donate to educational institutions specifically to increase the number of students they enroll. If there are X spots being reserved for AA, then ask the school to add X additional spots not usable for AA. Donate specifically for them to build additional dorms, classrooms, etc.
For some schools, their endowment is so large, they don't really need the donation, they just need pressure. I think pressuring them to expand should be more likely than pressuring them to end AA.
2) Invest in poor communities. AA stems from the desire to end a cycle of poverty. If we worked to "upgrade" poor communities then the need for AA would greatly decrease. So invest to improve K-12, housing, and businesses in poor communities.
I use the word "invest" because real estate in poor areas are usually under market. I think you can make a really good return if you build high quality housing. Just make sure you are willing to sell/rent to the current residents at below market prices. You should still be able to make a profit from the housing you build that is sold/rented to the middle class looking for better deals in your "upgraded" community.
There doesn't have to be a zero-sum battle between those who benefit from AA and those who don't.
I'm very happy to see this. I grew up in a town that, before I was born, decided to actively integrate (from being an historically all white, wealthy suburb) and I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community. I'm in mountain view now and it's all "silicon valley white", and something actively needs to be done. I worry when I realize my kid can go a week or more without seeing a black person, and I'm disappointed in myself when I realize I have no black friends (when as a kid they were my neighbors).
You don't consider the thousands of immigrants who grew up in completely different cultures with different primary languages in Asia and Europe as diversity?
Instead, you consider the American born Black person whose primary language is English and who grew up with American culture as "diversity"?
Drive through the neighborhoods of Chicago, through enclaves of Irish, Polish, German, and Jewish people. You won't miss them: the signage will abruptly change to Polish, or the streets will be full of men in suits wearing their hair in payots. This is a form of diversity, to be sure. But it's not the kind we're concerned about.
The problem here is the word "diversity", which is very easily hijacked to distort discussions. I think we're all pretty much on the same page that the concern being addressed here is the exclusion of specific, prominent ethnicities from SFBA tech culture, not the absolute number of different ethnicities being represented.
Of course immigrants and different languages increase diversity. But it's also true that other people from within the US are critical to developing a balanced view of the world. A black person is going to have a very different experience that I will as a white dude, and we are all poorer for it when we don't know people with those experiences. The same goes for the white farmer who grew up on a ranch in Nebraska, I would love to know more of those people, they see the world differently than I do.
It's fine if you want to lament the lack of black people in any given domain, but to generalize and say there is no diversity at all because a lack of black people is short changing not only the efforts of many people, but many people as well.
What would an optimal diversity level be in your opinion? Should your child see a black person on a daily basis? Should the black people your child sees be from a diverse socioeconomic range? Should the black people be a mixture of African Americans and literal Africans?
My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way there.
(Not trying to offend anyone, but feel safer with throwaway account.)
This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration.
It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome.
But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore.
Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.
First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way.
Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
> I'm certain I'm better off for growing up in a diverse community.
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
That plus living in a city like most young people are starting to do today, I find exposure to different cultures to be highly accessible with little investment. This is not really the result of forced integration policies but simply through technology, market options (restaurants, entertainment, etc) and proximity in dense housing areas.
It's interesting that not long after the Civil Rights act passed (which included legislation to make mandatory increases in housing and school integration) that there was a big migration from cities to suburbanization starting in the 1970s - reducing integration in both schools and housing. Most people falsely believed 'white flight' to be a cultural thing when if fact it was largely the result of regulatory policy making. There's a great book about how local government policies was the largest cause of this shift towards suburbia: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933115157/
I've read that statistically today's schools in the US are even more segregated than even before the civil rights act. Yet one could argue that despite this the young generation is the most open and accepting to other cultures than ever before.
So I'm not sure that (mandatory) integration policies are a necessary construct in order to improve social conditions and relationships between communities/races - as much as it used to be. The solution may simply be to reverse a lot of the existing legislation that pushed so many communities away from dense naturally integrated urban areas to small towns and suburbs.
Trying to improve economic and quality of education via integration is another question (I'm mostly looking at cultural considerations). Although I've also heard of mostly black charter schools in poor communities doing as well as public schools in upper class neighbourhoods. So, again, on the surface that seems to be more about access to quality services rather than racial integration.
You have to be careful not to mistake the chicken for the egg.
I'm curious how much the internet has helped bridge this gap today and whether this idea of diversity through government-backed forced integration policies are really relevant/useful anymore. It seems very difficult to grow up in a culturally homogeneous environment today, you'd basically have to be a Luddite to accomplish that.
In my opinion the internet makes it just as easy to be culturally homogeneous if you want to. There are many people that, due to interest or necessity will be exposed to a variety of cultures, but you can just as easily filter your internet usage so you engage mostly with people that are like you. It doesn't help that on the internet, in text discussions, you don't know what someone's background is without research due to anonymity. For example, by default I assume everyone on HN is an upper middle class or wealthy white male in his mid-20s to early 40s, unless otherwise stated in the context of the comments, even though I know this isn't true. This creates the problem of, instead of viewing internet communities as diverse collections of people, they are viewed as stereotypical hive minds, further enforcing discrimination and stereotyped views of large groups of people.
It's true that schools are more segregated. It's also true that there's abundant evidence that bussing programs had strong positive effects for the students who used them. These programs were systematically dismantled in the nineties, though, largely because of racist policies in the communities receiving the bussed students.
Desegregation works. Saying that the issue is access to quality resources reduces to separate but equal policy, doesn't it?
So, let's say you were born in China. Would you have a similar level of anxiety about never seeing anyone outside of your ethnic group? I find it very odd how white people are seemingly the only ethnic group so hung up on seeing people of different races one day-to-day basis.
On a related note, if being around so many white people bothers you so much, why aren't you living in, say, East Palo Alto or Richmond?
I think this is part of the implicit contract of the American 'melting pot'. A vanishing percentage of Americans are actually descended from America, and for better or worse, integrating or failing to integrate people has been a major part of our history-- from slavery and genocide to New York being arguably the most important city in the world.
So, what could be seen as white people seeming to have a pathological need to observe those with different melanin is, I'd argue, a representation of our awareness of that compact. If we're all living here, and they're all living there, is it possible that they're not too happy, or that they're being forced to live with substandard lives or living situations? If that's the case, that could potentially breed societal instability and rupture, as happened in the '60's and '70's.
From my personal perspective, I don't necessarily want to live in Compton or Camden, but it's certainly the case that I want people who live there to be able to move to where they want in America-- "not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character".
Edit: You can't just replace White with Chinese: unless Chinese people enslaved and murdered a race of people for hundreds of years, then segregated them in tiny ghettos while charging higher rents than other 'Chinese' had to pay, to finally - allow - them to leave the ghetto only to "redline" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) any community that crossed the color line, outlaw discrimination - after - poverty had set in... (not to mention Chinese-flight, I mean, white-flight from communities that reached a tipping point of racial integration.)
The issues of race in American are legacy issues that won't just dissolve in time. And full dissolution cannot take place if the underlying issues of poverty are not corrected (read: aggressively attacked). This is but a small step in that direction.
I don't understand this line of thinking for a couple of reasons:
1) Framing diversity as being about white people avoiding anxiety by surrounding themselves with people from other ethnic groups is egocentric and weird. Pushing for diversity is ideally about expanding access to lucrative careers, not bringing in people-as-window-dressing.
2) On the note of lucrative careers, comparing membership in a well-paid, prestigious career field within (say) the United States with being born in a more ethnically homogeneous country is disingenuous. It's the very fact that we don't live in a mono-culture that should make us wonder about the high correlation between being white and male and being in our field.
It's more telling than you might realize that you took their complaint to mean "I'm upset I'm around so many white people" and not "I'm upset a part of the population isn't included in my area / culture". It certainly makes the rest of your comments less surprising.
Only in some areas. I grew up in one of those flyover states, according to wikipedia the demographics of my town were 97% white while I was a teenager (~94% white now).
I much prefer being in more diverse areas, but I don't think where I grew up was somehow bad or wrong. It is a very middle class place, so it's not like the minorities were being pushed out, there just weren't many non-white people that wanted/want to live there! ...but to be fair, a lot of white people don't want to live there either, it's quite boring.
The history of housing discrimination in the US would challenge the notion that a middle class suburb would not push out minorities. This practice was rampant in the period after WW2 and continued into the 70s and 80s. It has little to do with notional affordability.
I think the appropriate dig is "where are the Hispanics in tech" and "where are the Hispanics in tech building explicit bridges to their communities." HBCUs are the result of affluent blacks fighting for land grants at the turn of the 20th century since many states refused to grant land for the formation of integrated colleges and universities. This program, love it or hate it, is 100+ years in the making.
"Better off" seems subjective, especially when looking at the particulars.
I didn't grow up in a diverse community, and living in one now I certainly feel the lack. How do you quantify a cultural divide? How do you quantify what it means to you?
Given your comment, I can guess, but that would be rude.
I'm sure there are awesome monocultures and ideologies one can wrap themselves in permanently, but every one I've been in for an extended period looks like a prison in hindsight.
One thing I struggle with is measurement of progress. For example, what Google is allowing here with Howard U is obviously good for the AA community. However, is Google in general doing things that are good or bad for AAs in general? It's difficult to say.
Excessive advertising can be used to poor people's disadvantage by creating more debt by encouraging more unnecessary expenses. AAs consist of a disproportionally large percentage of poor people and have chronically low wealth levels [1]. One could argue Google is bad for AAs by making advertising more mainstream and accurate.
In any case, at least they're trying, PR or not. Some companies do nothing. I do feel strongly about this because the amount of segregation in Boston is ridiculous.
You kind of touch upon the question of an incrementalist approach to social change, which works within a flawed system versus a more radical approach, which says "the system is radically flawed, we must change it drastically."
"The system" here being, imho, the role advertising plays in our society.
When a positive outcome is almost certain, there's less need for fine measurements. For example, how much effort is it worth to determine whether tech job placement for Howard University students goes up by 2x or exactly 2.15x?
I disagree that a positive outcome is almost certain. What's happening here is effectively Affirmative Action, and that's hardly a positive outcome in everyone's eyes.
For example, Google could just simply give internships to those at HBCU's, an action one may see as definitely positive. However, if for whatever reason those students fail to perform, in the eyes of the non black colleagues, stereotypes of incompetence will be created, if not exacerbated. Black people are punished more harshly for signs of incompetence of similar magnitude than Whites [2].
A somewhat similar thing happened with minority lawyers, as law schools tried to prop up the supply with affirmative action policies [1].
Which is why having additional instruction and additional acclimation to the Silicon Valley environment, which Google and Howard are doing here, is so important - to creating a culture where diverse engineers can thrive.
>When a positive outcome is almost certain, there's less need for fine measurements.
Gonna have to strongly disagree, here. Declaring that a "positive" outcome is "almost certain" is an invitation for punting on specifically defining what that "positive" outcome is and then hand-waving any measurement of progress. This is especially dangerous when the "positive" outcome comes at non-trivial expense.
But in this case? It seems like they're trying to optimize the pipeline from college into the work force. It seems like it would be trivially measurable.
Let's not talk about how Google made access to an entire world of information 100x easier and cheaper, so anyone with a cheap tablet or phone can get information you used to need a $1k encyclopedia for.
Let's not talk about how Google drove Android, a platform which gave a huge number of people internet access by giving them $100 phones or tablets.
Let's not talk about how Google has (done its best) to scan every book ever written to make books available online and free.
Google has done vast amounts to level the playing field, making top-tier services like Gmail and Google maps free, where previously people had to pay for Garmin navigation or Outlook or w/e.
The kind of argument the OP makes is shallow, petty, and out to use a hammer for every grudge. Yeah, Google makes money via ads. No, that doesn't mean they are racist, sexist, or whatever the hell you feel like making up just to complain about advertising.
They're not saying that Google is "out to get" poor people - they're saying that Google's advertising practices cause disproportionate harm to the poor. I don't think that Google's executives mean to diminish the welfare of the hardest off, but that they're (possibly willfully) ignorant of the broader consequences of their business model.
This collaboration with Howard, as well as the other humanitarian/public services you've mentioned, seem to support the latter.
The top comment was a hit piece, not an attempt at honest conversation.
It's whataboutism, to distract from the actual conversation. "Oh, Google is doing a good thing, but what about all the bad things they do"
If you feed it, you talk about what they want you to talk about, which is inherently negative about Google in this case. It's a standard tactic of state-sponsored propaganda machines (not that I think it is in this case).
I think we are in need of an open discussion on redefining "diversity".
Race is not a good metric for diversity. Nationality completely trumps it.
People of the same nationality with the same primary language have much more in common with each other. You can actually see this dynamic play out at work where people hang out with others from the same nationality. Americans hang out with Americans, Mandarin Chinese hang out with Mandarin Chinese, Indians with other Indians (don't know enough about Indian culture to split this group up further), Germans with Germans, etc.
With this metric, tech is one of the most diverse fields in the world.
Seen through this new point of view, the racial categories are very shortsighted. The difference between Indian and Chinese (or even Chinese and Korean) cultures is immense, yet they are assigned as part of the same category. African Americans have their own category, yet they are culturally and linguistically(same native language) very similar to white Americans.
Now let's move onto the controversial "disadvantages" discussion.
African Americans generally have family whose native language is English and who understand American culture and can impart these skills and knowledge to their children. They have the language and cultural knowledge to fight for their interests and a powerful organization (NCAAP) to back them up. With these advantages, African Americans are basically seen as honorary Americans similar to white Americans. These advantages even put them in a better position than white immigrants (and sometimes their American born children who have a harder time assimilating).
With these advantages and affirmative action based advantages(educational programs, scholarships, diversity internships and hiring, easy access to colleges/universities from affirmative action[works out to something like +150/2400 SAT and +0.2 GPA which is huge when competing in top percentiles]) middle class and upper middle class African Americans are very privileged.
Edit:
And on disadvantages in the workplace.
Americans are the largest group and the language spoken is English, so Americans (of any race) and native English speakers are privileged.
It's kind of wild you think the NAACP is this huge factor tipping the scales. I'd guess that's a product of consuming alt-right news, which tends to massively amplify organizations and figures within the black community that can be smeared as corrupt, but who knows.
Every study I've read relating to economic mobility points to having economic leverage in the first place as the greatest factor. Blacks have a disproportionately low share of wealth ownership in America (can't cite this atm), which combined with systematic biases puts them at a pretty significant disadvantage. Speaking English isn't enough to counteract that.
You make some interesting points re: how to categorize diversity, but it sounds like you're just moving the goalposts.
This doesn't make any sense. It ignores so much, including obvious things like gender (white women from the US are still disadvantaged in our field, despite having the same language, ethnicity, and nationality of the most privileged class).
It seems like you wrote a reactionary comment, rather than a well thought through one.
African Americans are very culturally different than white Americans. The fact that people just assume that they are the same is one of the reasons that African Americans are in the situations that they are in and get the wrap that they do. Also, the assertion that the NAACP is powerful enough to put African Americans on equal footing with white Americans is just wrong.
Is this legal? Is this really a school that only allows people of a certain race? I don't mean scholarships or other affirmative action type stuff. An actual entire school that excludes based on race?
If this succeeds, how will Google and Howard keep whites and Asians from taking too many positions in the class? Outright racial discrimination in university admissions is still illegal, and Howard couldn't seriously argue that they're engaging in affirmative action (their student body is over 90% black)
● Google’s Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE): This four-week experience is for 8th graders to gain exposure to CS. This summer we will have around 130 students, and we hope to further expand this content to organizations and schools around the country. We are looking to test this new model with MS2 in Washington, DC this summer.
● LEAD Program for Computer Science: This is a rigorous and exciting summer residential program for underrepresented minority students in grades 9-11, held at four universities in its upcoming inaugural year..
● Trailblazer Award: This is an award (in Europe) that is given internationally for participation in national science fairs. Winners are all treated to a 2-day Trailblazer retreat with fellow winners to learn more about the possibilities of a career in CS.
● Counselors for Computing: This program trains counselors to teach their fellow guidance counselors the benefits of CS degrees. Through our partner members at NCWIT, we are hoping to scale impact through these critical influencers.
● CS4HS is an initiative sponsored by Google to promote CS and Computational Thinking in high school and middle school curriculum by hosting CS teachers at campuses worldwide to learn about leading edge practice in the field.
● Computer Science Teachers Association: We are an ongoing supporter of the CSTA and, in particular, recently hosted their CS&IT symposium for 200 CS teachers at our Mountain View campus.
I have to say just how excited I am about this. I know two black developers. TWO. I've worked with numerous female developers and know plenty more. I've worked with hispanic, asian, white and european developers (no native american that I know of). I think that this is a great move to help bring in more diversity (and certainly a very different perspective)
Yes, instead of the students learning anything, when you send a student to the university you're returned a new student which is almost the same only with more knowledge.
The reason we even have HBCs in the first place because most universities did not accept black people. So HBCs were created by black people and their allies.
Many HBCs pre-date the civil right changes and school integration prior to the 1960. Many of them go back to the Civil war and some event pre-dated the war.
There's also HSI, short for Hispanic Serving Institutions. This concept was create in the mid-1960s. Unlike HBCs, institutions could be designated HSI as a result of a federal law. And the law didn't require that these were primarily representing hispanics. Instead the law allowed general institutions to be labeled HSI if they enrolled a certain percentage of latina/latino students along with some additional socio/economic pre-conditions.
As you can see HBCs / HSIs are somewhat different concepts and have a different history. Additionally, in recent years there's been an iflux of hispanic students to HBCs as well.
I hope that other large organizations like Google have more partnerships with HBCs/HSI/Native/Tribal educational organizations. This seams like a start, no real to not cheer it on.
There's no reason to pit groups against one another... it's much better to work together. There's a great datapoint in the history of the VRA (Voting Rights Acts) the people who became enfranchised with the first passing of it fought for expanding the VRA via the 1975 amendment to expand the VRA to other groups including Hispanic/Native/Tribal & Asian minorities. Prior to that states and manipulates in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, south California were actively working to suppers the Hispanic (such as the Chicanos) vote.
Historically-Black Colleges and Universities are a product of the history of absolute exclusion of blacks from other institutions in much of the US.
While Hispanics have faced disadvantages and discrimination, they have not faced the kind of outright exclusion that blacks faced for about a century under Jim Crow.
Anecdotally, I went to Tennessee State and we had a fairly decent population of Caribbean students, including Caribbean Hispanics from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
If you build a company without thinking too much about diversity and it finds itself unbalanced in race and sex when it has thousands of employees, the math becomes daunting. 10% set-asides would take decades to get you near balance.
This is why extraordinary efforts have to be made, and made at scale.
It's nitpicky and maybe trivial, but I'm happy to see them use the word "Black" so prominently. I always got peeved at "African American." If we're going to discuss race, nationality doesn't really figure into the equation.
Then again, if you start talking scientifically, the concept of "race" is shaky at best, but there's no denying the cultural implications of the idea.
It is nitpicky but not so trivial. As I understand it, once upon a time you would have German Americans and Italian Americans as distinctive subgroups in the United States with their own unique cultures. But Negroes couldn't really say they were Nigerian-American or Angolan-American, largely because most colored people did not know exactly where in Africa they came from. In a historical context it makes sense that a subgroup defined by both culture and appearance would be intentional in adopting a name. This is especially true when the names given to them: negroes, colored folk, and even black had racist baggage associated with them.
I personally don't mind African American for the same reasons I don't mind Asian American. Both subnational groups are comfortable with their designation I believe.
Speaking of Asian Americans, are you peeved with the term "Asian American"? Would you rather them self-identify as "yellow"? I ask because I like consistency.
Well, I am surprised to see that pretty much every study I have seen confirming the phenomenon had been conducted before those meta-analyses, and is in fact almost 10 years old or more. Healthy skepticism created. Thank you!
> However, if for whatever reason those students fail to perform, in the eyes of the non black colleagues, stereotypes of incompetence will be created, if not exacerbated.
It's not really a concern. Nobody's worried about competent students underperforming.
I really must be missing something. You even said it yourself:
"Nobody's worried about competent students underperforming."
I didn't say this, nor did you... so who are you replying to? Unless you assume all black students will be competent or somehow black students don't have regular instances of incompetence like their white, asian and hispanic peers?
Is this a way to use blacks to increase the supply and decrease the salary of software engineers?
Regardless the people that go to Howard are pretty well off anyway. Its a private U so either you have money or enough educations/connections/... to get a scholarship.
Edit: Im not criticizing this. I think it is great.
Howard is prestigious for an HBCU, but it's not Harvard. HBCU's deal with a notorious lack of funding, so the connections that you assume are not always there. I can say this specifically applies to Howard.
I went to a really prestigious high school in New York City. For the summer of my junior year, our AP Computer Science teacher hooked up a few of us with internships at the finance firms, specifically in tech (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.). Now, sure, I did really well and studied really hard to get into my high school. However, I did practically nothing to earn that internship besides taking AP Computer Science. My Computer Science "expertise" was hardly valuable. I knew just about as much as any other AP CS kid in the country.
In the end, that internship did wonders for me getting into college and getting future jobs. And plus, I made 3k that summer. And yes, I finished a useful project at the firm. But the reason I had that opportunity was totally orthogonal to earning the opportunity. I know we like to boast about being a meritocracy and all that, but this is one of those cases where it was correlation, not causation.
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