An overview of affirmative action, the Bayesian approach and how Asians in the US should respond

17 min readMar 16, 2021

Tren is a typical Cambodian kid in his neighborhood. He migrated to the US with his parents in pursuit of a better life. His mother stays at home, and his father works in construction, making ends meet. Living in a Cambodian neighborhood with barely 20% of the high school graduation rate, he studied hard and became the first of his class, a valedictorian, and with a perfect GPA. His dream school is Harvard, and he hopes all these high school achievements could help him get in. However, he was rejected. As a matter of fact, many applicants with similar socio-economics backgrounds, test scores, and extracurricular activities were admitted, but they belong to other race groups. Many people doubt that there is any problem, since Asian Americans consist of 20% of the Harvard student body [1]. In comparison, only 6.5% of the overall US population are Asian. Asian American parents, on average, are more educated, have access to better education resources for their children, and therefore their children are likely to achieve more. However, most Asian Americans in Harvard are Chinese, Korean, or Indian Americans. Actually, merely 20% [2] of Cambodian Americans have a bachelor or higher degree, way below the national average of 32%.

Consider Jane, a black high school student from a historically black neighborhood in Chicago. She is also a top student in her class. Jane aspires to study film in college and become a director, and UCLA is a natural choice. Unfortunately, she also got rejected, just like Tren. Most of the other applicants who get admitted are generally from more well-off families, so their parents have more resources to support them. Better resources, better portfolio. The college selection process seems unfair to her. Jane is only one of the countless African American students in a similar situation. There are achievement gaps among African Americans in college admission, employment, and many other social settings, due to various reasons, including racism, education, and lack of resources. See [3].

Jalen is from the same neighborhood as Jane. He has always been a model student, and it does not surprise his family that he is admitted to the University of Chicago to pursue his dream to become a scientist. His college time is mostly happy and fulfilling. He got in one of the more competitive labs in his junior year. Nonetheless, his college life is not perfect. Almost all his labmates are white, from well-off families, and they talk about things he does not understand. While not studying, sometimes he feels like he does not belong here. Even worse, spending most of the time in a circle of well-off white classmates, at times, he feels like he does not belong to black community either. Similar experiences can be found in [4][5].

Stories like these are happening every year to millions of people in the United States and worldwide. If college admissions do not consider race or socio-economic background, it seems unfair for some applicants from rougher backgrounds to get rejected for the lack of education resources. On the other hand, if the college admissions slightly prefer a particular cohort of applicants based on race or socioeconomic background, it seems unfair to those who study hard, have higher test scores, but got rejected only because of their race. Furthermore, the admission criteria based on a certain broad category, such as race, often wrongly classify certain subgroups as benefited, so they have an even smaller chance to get admitted to colleges, like our friend Tren in the story.

The discussion of whether and how to take a positive step to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and culture from which they have been historically excluded, is called “Affirmative Action”. [6]

One of the most famous examples of affirmative action is the case of ”Students for Fair Admissions v.s Harvard’’ [1]. The lawsuit is filed by the organization Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) and other plaintiffs against the Harvard University, claiming that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in undergraduate admissions. The plaintiffs claim that Harvard University deliberately keeps the percent of admitted Asian students low. In 2019, the federal judge ruled that Harvard University did not unjustly discriminate against Asian Americans while admitting the system is not perfect. SFFA appealed the case, so the case is still ongoing. Another more recent example is California Proposition 16. [7] The proposition aims to repeal another act Proposition 209 in 1996, and allow the government institutions to consider race, sex, and ethnicity in public employment, public contracting, and public education. Proposition 16 was eventually rejected by the California voters. Affirmative action policies not only exist in the US. In China, there is a related policy that gives preferential treatment in the college admission process for ethnic minority groups, which is called “少数民族高考加分政策” in Chinese. [8] Similar approaches are enforced in a variety of forms in many other countries, such as India, Denmark.

Affirmative action is a controversial subject. The controversy primarily stems from the steps taken that result in preferential selection. The preferential selection seems unfair to those who are not preferred. In the following, the paper will discuss the arguments for and against affirmative action. Notably, the paper will present an argument for affirmative action, uses the Bayesian probability theory. Later the alternative plans for affirmative action are evaluated. The paper ends with a discussion on how Asian immigrants and Asian Americans should react to affirmative action policies that appear against their interests.

Arguments for the affirmative action

One of the earliest arguments for affirmative action is proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson, in the paper “Preferential Hiring”[9], where she argues to prefer women and African Americans in the hiring process, on the ground that the preference would remedy the past exclusion of said groups of people from the workforce. By preferring women and African Americans in the hiring process, the past wrongdoings are assumably made up. However, the argument does not hold up. The past wrongdoings were conducted by the people of the past. It is not clear how the burden is on the current job seekers to remedy the wrongdoings their predecessors may or may not have conducted.

Another popular argument for affirmative action concerns the importance of diversity, or demographic representation. Specifically, by preferring the disadvantaged race or gender in the hiring or college admission, the workplace or school lets people from diverse backgrounds in. There are several benefits of having a diverse demographic representation in the school or workplace. First of all, diversity increases productivity. Several research projects [10][11] support this. Among the reasons for the increase of productivity are that the organization seeks diverse perspectives, that the organization could better serve diverse groups of customers, and that diverse opinions avoid employees stuck in “echo chambers”. Equally important, if not more, is the argument that a diverse environment is more friendly to the minority group members. The point can be illustrated by Jalen’s experience. He lacks a sense of belonging in the lab because there are not many people of a similar background. This issue concerns not only the current but also the next generation. In this case, Asian Americans serve as a good example. While Asian Americans are overrepresented in the industries such as food, technology, finance, they are significantly underrepresented in other industries such as entertainment, sports, and senior corporate executives. Jeremy Lin in NBA inspires many Asian American kids (and Asian kids around the world) to pursue basketball as a viable career option, and Hasan Minhaj lets Muslim and Indian Americans know that they can be successful comedians.

One of the most important arguments is that affirmative action promotes equality. It is affirmative action that gives everyone equal opportunity, not the lack of it.

I will spend most of the time with this argument. The argument goes like this:

Opportunity: opportunity in hiring, college admissions, or other social settings.

Society: For simplicity, society means American society, but the argument applies to every country.

Society should strive for equality.
By definition, equality means providing equal opportunity to everyone in society.
Currently, not everyone in society has the same opportunity.
By 2, 3, society is not equal.
Collective effort is required to enforce equality at a societal level.
Conclusion: By 1 and 5, the government should actively intervene so that the opportunity is equal for everyone, by means of affirmative action.

Premise 1 is uncontroversial. Any society needs to strive for the equality of its people. The reason is apparent. In principle, equality is a matter of fundamental human rights and dignity. Historically, philosophers have stressed the importance of equality as a fundamental moral principle. Aristotle formulated the equality principle as “treat like cases as like”. Kant stipulated equality as the basis of principles underlying a state. Nowadays, human equality is treated as a basic human right by the United Nations [12] and most countries alike. Here, equality as a basic moral principle could be treated as an axiom.

On the utilitarian ground, equality brings many benefits, and conversely, the lack of equality is detrimental to society. Many studies contribute to this topic. According to [13], income inequality results in various social problems, such as adverse effects on physical and mental health and security. Another study [14] found that social comparison affects happiness and self-esteem. Inequality inevitably leads to the said social comparison in the study. Many more studies like those discussed above give empirical evidence that society is worse off if inequality prevails. A society where everyone is treated equally is a society with more collective utility.

The interpretation of premise 2 is central to the debate of affirmative action. The discussion pertains to the question of “the equality of what”. [15] Specifically, this is the discussion of whether equality means everyone is treated equally without the consideration of extra information (privileges, obstacles, etc.), known as formal equality, or it means resources and opportunities are equal for everyone in the society, taking their privileges and obstacles into accounts, known as proportional equality. The form of equality this argument supports is the latter one. For a rigorous definition, equality is formulated with the probability theory notion presented below:

In hiring and college admissions settings, equality of opportunity means that,
Pi(success | social background, hardworkingess, and other social factors) = Pj(success | social background, hardworkingess, and other social factors) for any individual i and j in the society.

In plain words, the definition is “Equal opportunity means that the probability of success, given the social background and the degree of hardworkingness, plus other potential factors, is the same for every individual in the society.” This is a probabilistic formulation of the idea of proportional equality. The reason to define proportional equality is the rigor of the analysis, as I will present shortly.

Instead of arguing for proportional equality, it is more straightforward to see how formal equality fails. Through Bayes theorem [16], we can rearrange the formula as:

P(success | social background, hardworkingess)
= P(social background | hardworkingess, success) * P(success) / P(social background)
= P(success) * (P(social background | hardworkingess, success) / P(social background) )
~ P(success) * P(social background | hardworkingess, success)

P(social background) could be removed because, without extra information, we assume everyone has the same social status. The definition of proportional equality could then be rewritten as:

Pi(success) * Pi(social background | hard-working, success)
= Pj(success) * Pj(social background | hard-working, success), for any individual i and j in the society.

Under the definition of formal equality, society ought to guarantee an individual’s success, regardless of social background and hardworkingness. In the above formula, strict equality advocates for the same P(success) for all individuals. The problem of P(success) is that it ignores the P(social background | hard-working, success) component in the proportional equality definition. Given both i and j are equally hard-working and both are successful, if i has higher social status, that is, Pi(social background | hard-working, success) > Pj(social background | hard-working, success), then:

Pi(success) * Pi(social background | hard-working, success) > Pj(success) * Pj(social background | hard-working, success)

or:

Pi(success | social background, hard-working) > Pj(success | social background, hard-working)

or:

Pi(success | social background, hard-working) = Pj(success | social background, hard-working) + ε, where ε > 0

To interpret the consequence of formal equality in plain language, it goes as follows:

For individuals i and j in the society, if i is of higher social status than j, then all other factors equal, j is epsilon less likely than i to achieve the same success.

The above statement also could be interpreted as: For individuals i and j in the society, if i is of higher social status than j, then all other factors equal, j needs to take extra efforts, equal to the amount of ε, to achieve the same success as i. The above statement certainly does not sound equal, and could not become the very definition of equality. Thus, the alternative definition of equality, proportional equality should be preferred.

Many empirical studies support premise 3. [17] shows that only 38% of African Americans and 39% of Latin Americans enrolled in college, while for Asian Americans, the number is 64%. While research such as [18] suggests that Asian Americans excel academically because they try harder, the socio-economic parity among races is also a factor. [19] A similar pattern also exists in the tech industry. [20] One could not say that Asian Americans have more opportunities than other races in all fields. [21] is an example of how Asian Americans are underrepresented in the entertainment industry, which is partially responsible for the negative image of Asian males [22] and the associated racism. All the above researches suggest that, without active intervention, the opportunity is not equal for everyone in the current US society.

Premise 5 simply says it is the government’s responsibility to enforce equality. The reason is that by far government interference is de facto the most effective way to enforce any policy. Therefore, the burden is on the rejectors of premise 5 to lay out a more effective non-governmental inference plan. Premises 4, 5, and 6 together conclude that the government should enforce equality through a certain form of affirmative action.

Arguments against affirmative action

If the above argument is sound, then most objections to affirmative actions are the details of affirmative action in the United States.

One of the most influential objections to affirmative action pertains to the story of our friend, Tren. The current race-based affirmative action does not reflect well on whether an individual is disadvantaged. For instance, setting the racial quota in the college admission for Asian Americans ignores the fact that, while Indian Americans and Chinese Americans have on average higher SAT scores and social status, Cambodian Americans and Laotian Americans [23] have lower social status and lower SAT scores. Moreover, even among Chinese Americans, there exists diversity in social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Simply categorizing all Asian Americans into one category makes it harder for many subgroups within the Asian American community to get into college, making the disadvantaged more disadvantaged. It exacerbates the inequality through the effort against inequality.

Equally important is the objection that Asian Americans tend to spend more effort on college applications. They take more SAT preparation tests, spending more time crafting extracurricular activities. If Asian Americans study harder, all other factors equal, they deserve to have better opportunities than other groups of people. Indeed, many studies support this claim. [24] However, the fact that Asian Americans study harder does not rule out the relative superior socio-economic and education background from the equation. The policymakers should strike a balance between the hardworkingness and the socio-economic background. If we take the hardworkingness into the equation, then affirmative action policies should increase the opportunity for the disadvantaged minorities to compensate for the disadvantages in the socio-economic and education background, but not to the point where the policies diminish the extra effort Asian Americans put into. This requires careful planning and quantifications, and will be very challenging.

The last objection is that affirmative action gives a clear advantage to particular groups of people over others, and this action discourages the competition and decreases the efficiency accordingly. This argument is more relevant to the preferential hiring scenario. The argument objects to preferential hiring because the hiring process might bring less competent people to the institution, and the institution’s overall performance might be suboptimal. However, the argument does not hold up. We should assume that the institute only hires qualified candidates, and otherwise would be ridiculous. Therefore the candidate can fulfill the job requirements, despite a slight loss of efficiency. In this scenario, there exists a tradeoff between efficiency and equality. Any responsible institute should choose equality over a slight slip efficiency, and if not, the government or people should help the enforcement. Moreover, going back to the second argument for affirmative action, a diverse group of people is beneficial to the organization. For example, it brings a diversity of thoughts and discourages politics. Thus the diversity hiring actually increases efficiency.

In summary, the first two arguments are not against affirmative action in principle and instead argue against a specific implementation of affirmative action. The third argument does not hold up. Together with the arguments for affirmative action, it is safe to say that we should at least support an ideal form of affirmative action.

Is there a better form of affirmative action?

The objectors of affirmative actions argue against race-based affirmative action. They say that race is a crude approximation of the hardship people experience in hiring and college admission. One potential solution is to implement a more granular version of affirmative action. For instance, instead of enforcing the racial quota on all Asian Americans, the category can be subdivided into Vietnamese Americans, Chinese Americans, Cambodian Americans, etc. This plan indeed will result in less inaccurate predictions of background factors, such as socio-economic background or hardworking-ness. Nevertheless, it still does not solve the fundamental problem the first argument against affirmative action means to address. There indeed exist many poor Chinese/Indian Americans and many wealthy Black/Cambodian Americans. The former will still become the victim. If we further subdivide the people into subcategories, the policy will be messy and hard to implement, and still could not avoid the prediction failures.

Many people propose that, instead of race-based affirmative action, the better policy is based directly on socio-economic background. That is, the preferential treatment is given to people not disadvantage not based on race, but based on their socio-economic background. This type of affirmative action prevents the prediction failures mentioned above, and therefore is fairer. Poor Chinese Americans and poor Latin Americans alike would benefit from the system. Compared to a more granular form of race-based affirmative action, affirmative action based on socio-economic background is a more accurate reflection of a person’s background. Therefore, it is a fairer estimation of hiring and college admission opportunities.

People might point out that this solution fails to address racial diversity. To address the concern, first of all, at least in the United States, the socio-economic background and race have a positive correlation, and therefore, by giving people of the lower socio-economic class a better chance, there will be more racial diversity in college or the workplace. Secondly, there also exist different cultures within the same race. Poor white Americans from the Appalachian region come from a distinctly different culture than rich white Americans from New England.

Nevertheless, the problem with the social-economic background approach is precisely the fact that it leaves out the race factor in the equation. Race plays a huge factor in contemporary US culture, and the lack of the racial representation of some races inevitably results in discrimination and inequality. Surveys such as [25] suggest that, despite being wealthy, black people still get constantly discriminated against. In a later discussion, we will discuss the negative image of Asian males due to the lack of positive representation of Asian males in the entertainment industry. Giving poor people more chances in the entertainment industry does not lift the negative image of Asian males. The race-based affirmative action policies, such as preferential hiring in the entertainment industry, do.

Socio-economic background also poses a practical challenge. Defining the concept of socio-economic background is tricky. Do we define the concept with respect to the annual income, total net worth, or something else? How can we know people’s net worth if honestly providing the information means a disadvantage for wealthy kids’ college applications? Before we sort these practical issues out, the implementation of this scheme remains a challenge.

Affirmative action as an Asian American

Affirmative action policies have been continuously debated within the Asian American community. Based on the above arguments, here I want to discuss whether Asian Americans should support affirmative action policies that seem to hurt Asian American communities.

The most straightforward reason to support Affirmative Action policies, even though it might hurt the Asian community, is that affirmative action promotes equality in principle. If affirmative action means the society will have more equality, then a responsible Asian American person should support it.

Another reason is that despite the higher chance to be admitted to colleges, being an Asian American has many disadvantages in some of the other areas. For example, Asian Americans are underrepresented in the entertainment industry [26]. The lack of media representation of Asian Americans, especially Asian males, is partially responsible for the negative image of them [22] and the associated racism. Asian Americans are underrepresented in American sports, which gives an impression of inferior athleticism, even though it is not valid [27]. Many Asians in the business experience the so-called bamboo ceiling [28], which means it is hard to move up the career ladder, despite the higher chance to gain employment in the first place. The phenomena mentioned above are the results of the cultural background, institutional racism, and many more factors. Asian Americans should strive to eliminate these issues, and the idea of affirmative action could be a tool that helps achieve this goal.

Many researches have, on the contrary, demonstrated that Asian Americans actually benefit from the current affirmative action policies in college admission. [29] provides a good summary of findings on how Asian Americans could benefit from affirmative action policies. Keep in mind that most of the data analysis on the effects of affirmative actions on Asian Americans is conducted via institutes that demonstrate potential political bias. They might not be rigorous enough to be considered serious research. For example, in [30], the analysis fails to remove the confounding factors, unforeseeable factors that highly correlate with time. Therefore, the analysis is potentially invalid, and we could not say that Asian American college admissions rate increase is because of the affirmative action policy.

There are also reasons to disagree with affirmative action policies. Besides the argument that Asian Americans might work harder [24], I want to discuss another reason briefly. Tren may disagree with the current affirmative action policy since the policy prevents him from going to his dream college. He could raise the voice about his experience and hope the policy could account for it. Not only does raising his voice help address the detrimental side of the current policy, but also, ethically, he could be justified to raise the voice for his community and his community only. The modern branch of feminism philosophy, called the ethics of care, believes that an individual is justified to prioritize the personal relationship over the distant relationships since personal relationship, and caring for the cared-for, is ontologically basic to humanity. [31] As a Cambodian American disadvantaged by the current affirmative action in Harvard, Tren cares for himself and fellow Cambodian Americans. Despite affirmative action being fairer overall, it is ethical for Tren to object to the current affirmative action.

Conclusion

The paper discussed the arguments both for and against affirmative action. The paper also briefly touched upon how Asian Americans could think of affirmative action, both in the ideal form and in practice. I personally favor the argument that, while current affirmative action policies might not be fair for a certain group of people, and therefore subject to improvement, the ideal version of affirmative action should be supported, since it aims for the right kind of equality in society. The incremental change for the better should be strived for, so that the negative sides of current affirmative action policies could be overcome.

Reference

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard

[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecondary/news/2018/08/29/455316/gaps-debate-asian-americans-affirmative-action-harvard/

[3] https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/may2018/achievement-gap

[4] https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2020/06/what-ive-learned-about-being-black-scientist

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01883-8

[6] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/affirmative-action/

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China

[9] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265014?seq=1

[10] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212567114001786

[11] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920090304