Race becomes an unavoidable subject when half a book is focused on the word “exclusion,” since racially based exclusion is the most obvious and visible form of exclusion. The book makes no pretense of this, lets talk about it.
North America, being a pluralistic society, is in the essentially unique position of being faced with massive sociological issues associated with the reality of race. The book postulates that the intelligent management, dissemination, and availability of information can help society deal with issues associated with race, let us examine this further.
It is well known that many Universities practice discriminatory undergraduate admissions practices against Asian students, requiring higher SATs and GPA than Caucasian students. The presumption is that the Asian work ethic emphasizes extremely hard work and rote learning, which make Asian students especially adept at taking standardized exams and excelling at relatively easy pre-secondary education. The assumption is that this puts students of other races at a disadvantage. (In Canada, where colleges do not practice any form of affirmative action or discrimination, elite universities, such as my Alma Mater the University of Toronto, have huge Asian student populations, leading to articles such as these: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/10/too-asian/) The recent tigermother hullabaloo has only entrenched these notions further.
Having gone to UofT, where the phenomenon is visible, I am inclined to agree with the presumptions above. I understand that intelligence is not necessary to excel at High school, which is intellectually undemanding enough such that sheer hard work can easily substitute if one takes the right courses. But a few problems arise when one practices affirmative discrimination to counteract Asian families’ tendencies to make their children work harder:
First, shouldn’t hard work be encouraged and rewarded? If someone worked hard enough because they want to attend a fine university, shouldn’t their drive and determination be appreciated? Second, presumably universities themselves, which pride themselves on their academic standards, also have confidence in the rigor of their regimes of instruction and examination, which presumably requires both hard work and intelligence, and would weed out those students that only possessed one of (either) the two criterion? Third, does insulating other students from the competition presented by hard-working Asian people actually benefit them? Does the school have an interest in maintaining a “party culture” that would be diminished by the presence of too many Asian students? Would the presence of Asian students even do this? Perhaps it would be good to expose hardworking Asian students to a good time, such that they realize that hard work isn’t everything? Fourth, how would one distinguish between Asian students in tighermother families versus Asian students who are not? Fifth, by cutting hardworking Asian students out of top universities, the system simply drives them to lower-tier schools, where they still work as hard (and perhaps not even as hard as they would have to at a top school), and put students of other races in those schools at a disadvantage. Wouldn’t admitting them into the top schools, where they compete against each other, be better of the rest of the student population? Further counter arguments (many of which are permutations on arguments made by anti-affirmative-action groups) abound. All of these things result from using an inaccurate, stereotypical, and generalized proxy to isolate for characteristics that span across race and culture. The schools simply do not have enough information.
In this situation, the manipulation of inclusionary or exclusionary amenities would supply meager assistance for the schools. The attraction of top universities is their academic reputation, and short of downgrading that, their attractiveness to hardworking Asian students would not change. But all of the above concerns would be resolved if more information were to be made available. If the schools know exactly what sort of family background each applicant came from, their work ethic, and can precisely measure their intellectual capacities, racially based selection would diminish. Of course, at some point, the information seeking would run into privacy concerns, as they always do when complete information is the desired level of knowledge.
That privacy concern is in the end, the one problem that information-based social policy-making will always run up against. I would postulate that rather than mandating the total public availability of information about individuals in the hands of the state (not that we shouldn’t do so for some sets of such information), we should allow individuals the choice of making any information they desire public, and give them the platform to make ANY kind of information they chose to make public about themselves. Each institution that must make exclusionary choices should also be allowed to design their own platforms to most efficiently solicit/extract information about an applicant that would be relevant in making a holistic admission/exclusion decision, subject, of course, to identified boundaries (for example race). A quick reading of pages 130-131 makes this scheme seem close to becoming technologically possible, and implementation may simply occur without any state incentivization.
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