They have to come from somewhere. The majority of American students prefer business, health-related fields and the humanities. If more Americans wanted to study and work in engineering, there would be fewer foreign students and fewer foreign engineers here.
Nadella is not a diversity hire by any stretch of the imagination, as others have said, being an Indian male works against you wrt diversity not for you. Wisconsin and U Chicago (Booth) definitely did not think he was adding to their diversity goals.
The Microsoft CEO is selected based on meritocracy as it should be. If American universities donāt want foreign students, thatās their loss, and I am sure other countries will benefit. I am for considering diversity only when applicants are ātiedā on merits.
The purpose of diversity requirements is to compensate for flaws in how merit is measured. In addition, studies have shown that more diverse teams come to better solutions to problems than less diverse teams.
the research on diverse teams is not conclusive, from Harvard Business Review:
āWhile diverse team composition does seem to confer an advantage when it comes to generating a wider range of original and useful ideas, experimental studies suggest that such benefits disappear once the team is tasked with deciding which ideas to select and implement, presumably because diversity hinders consensus. A meta-analysis of 108 studies and more than 10,000 teams indicated that the creativity gains produced by higher team diversity are disrupted by the inherent social conflict and decision-making deficits that less homogeneous teams create.ā
āMost studies assume that the relationship between diversity and creativity is linear, but recent evidence suggests that a moderate degree of diversity is more beneficial than a higher dose.ā
I have also seen studies on gender diversity where teams with more women than men are more productive than teams with mainly men.
If youāre okay with the wealthy elite having advantage attaining high merit, vote for meritocracy. If your goal is to have the college population match the general population, vote for diversity. You can vote for both, a mix, a compromise.
@theloniusmonk ā no one on this thread says Nadella is a ādiversity hireā, by which I take it you (and other posters) mean that he was somehow less deserving but was given a job because of his race/background whatever. No one is claiming this. No one is even suggesting it.
Measures of merit may be designed to favor the wealthy elite. An example would be the holistic admissions process of super-selective colleges. Although need-blind when reading individual applications, the criteria used tend to skew the admissions class toward making the wealthy elite greatly overrepresented, and those from low SES greatly underrepresented.
Or measures of merit may not necessarily be designed to favor the wealthy elite, but once they are used, the wealthy elite will deploy money to help their kids score well on such measures of merit. Consider all of the things that the wealthy elite spend on to help their kids get higher high school GPAs and standardized test scores.
Obviously, there is no guarantee for any individual kid, since the kid must do some of his/her own earning of merit even from an advantaged starting point. But a kid of similar ability and motivation coming from a wealthy elite family is advantaged in ability to earn measures of merit compared to one from an ordinary family.
āBut a kid of similar ability and motivation coming from a wealthy elite family is advantaged in ability to earn measures of merit compared to one from an ordinary family.ā
However this is a long way from the definition of merit vs diversity at the beginning of this thread, where the issue of concern to some was that poor Asian kids were receiving a high share of admissions offers to certain NY high schools. Iām not aware of complaints about rich white New Yorkers being overrepresented.
It highlights that when people are āvotingā for āmeritā or ādiversityā, those words mean different things to different people. For example, the University of California promotes diversity in its student body (e.g. by admitting disadvantaged students with lower test scores), but are banned (by the voters) from considering race as a factor in admissions.
Nadella was not admitted into any American University because American universities see value in diversity. He was admitted because engineering departments value meritocracy over diversity. Or a more cynical view is full pay grad students are a profit center for the university.
NYC high school students are generally lower SES (high percentage free and reduced price lunch eligible by typical standard, until the district decided to just give free lunch to all students), although the specialized high school that people like to write about here had a smaller percentage of lower SES students than overall. Some here have claimed that higher SES families in NYC tend to strongly favor private schools for their kids (an example of money allowing avoiding having to fight through a highly competitive gateway).
@theloniusmonk - along the same lines with your diversity studies, Robert Putnam did a study to determine the strength of diverse communities. He discovered that as the diversity in a community increased, the trust and social cohesion decreased. Not that surprising when you think about it, why would you feel close to people when you share little or no common interests?
Itās a huge challenge for the USA and other western nations where multiculturalism is championed rather than assimilation.
People will assimilate if you let them but do not force them. Unfortunately, newcomers and minorities often face hostile discrimination (i.e. not letting them assimilate and be accepted as full members of the community) or hostile attempts to suppress whatever cultural features they bring that are not harmful to anyone else (i.e. forcing them to assimilate in a way that feels like giving up their freedom).
Adding to @ucbalumnusā commentā¦ There are also post acceptance issues that make assimilation nearly impossible. Simple activities like sharing a pizza or going to a movie can be prohibitively expensive for some, even if they are attending a school with a āFree rideā.
I think itās a really good clarification: Do most assume assimilation when they hear diversity?
I donāt even know what āassimilateā means. Do Jews suddenly have to celebrate Easter because this is predominantly a Christian country? Do South Indians suddenly have to eat meat because most people here do? Do people have to stop speaking their native language outside the home? Do they have to put out carved pumpkins on Halloween?
And if they choose not to do the above ā does that mean theyāre not assimilated?
As Iāve posted before, and Iām sure someone could look up, that I teach literacy to mostly illegal immigrants. On the question of assimilation, I wonāt speak for anyone else, but the reason I do what I do is to help people become a little less easy to exploit. If there is a certain level of understanding of basic words and social customs, then people can protect themselves just a bit. I know you were being sarcastic, but being able to function at a basic level, particularly when you are a parent, is a really big deal. Most of the people Iāve worked with over the decades really did want to become āAmericanizedā to a certain point and do things that the believe are common here, albeit with their own cultural flavor. I think thatās a very good thing. One of the reasons why my daughter chose not to attend Stuyvesant is because it is not a welcoming and inclusive place that respects differences, itās just not. On a personal level, I know many immigrants from different parts of the world who have lived so tightly-enclosed in ethnic enclaves that they donāt speak any English at all and have zero connection with the country in which they now live. I donāt think that benefits anyone, but it is doable if one chooses.
Iām sure you know people like that Zoosermom.
I have worked with refugees and immigrants too. In my experience, the second generation is almost always fluent in English, and tap into popular culture of the country through school activities, TV, popular media and the internet.
Assimilation today is much faster than it was in the pre-mass media days. I donāt think this is a bigger problem than it was a century ago.
I think thatās very true. My point was that assimilation could mean different things to different people.
Here, we absolutely agree, Zoosermom. Which is why I donāt like when people throw the word āassimilationā loosely, without saying specifically what they mean.
This is beginning to sound like an āalternative factsā discussion.
Assimilation is the process of understanding. I think for this discussion, itās fair to assume that understanding is gained through interaction. It doesnāt mean that you have to ābecomeā something else, as much as understand the context and meaning of another (individual and/or group).