In response to this trending YouTube video, Why Do Asians Do So Much Better Than Other Races in America?, I thought it would be good to pen down some of my thoughts. America celebrates diversity but we have no such concept here in Singapore. Are we missing out on something?
I want to be clear about the target. I have no objection to a diverse class, team or workplace. My objection is to diversity as a selection criterion, and to the assumption that every institution should mirror the population. Those are different things, and most of the argument happens in the gap between them.
The NBA's Selection Test
The NBA has one of the cleanest selection processes of any institution I can think of. The test is the activity itself. You play basketball, in front of people whose jobs depend on winning, and your performance is visible to everyone. Nobody needs a committee to decide who deserves a roster spot.
It also punishes discrimination automatically. A team that passes over a better player because of his race, or takes a weaker one to balance the roster, loses games. Losing games costs revenue and eventually the jobs of the people making the decisions. This is Gary Becker's old argument: in a competitive market discrimination is expensive, so it erodes without anyone enforcing a rule. The league reportedly kept informal quotas on Black players in its early decades. They did not survive teams that ignored them and won.
The result is a league where roughly three-quarters of players are Black, according to the annual Racial and Gender Report Card from UCF's TIDES institute (74.3% in 2015-16, with international players making up about 22%). Nobody audits this. Nobody calls it a failure of inclusion. Everyone understands that the composition is an output of selecting for performance, not an input.
Academia Has No Scoreboard
So how does academia get away with what the NBA cannot? I think the answer is structural rather than moral.
There is no scoreboard. A university cannot easily measure whether its admissions decisions were good, and nobody loses games when they are bad.
There is no competitive penalty. Seats at top schools are rationed and applicants far outnumber places. Prestige comes from how selective you are, not from how well you selected. Discrimination is free.
Diversity was an explicit goal. From Bakke in 1978 to Grutter in 2003, the Supreme Court allowed race to be considered in pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity. Academia did not so much get away with it as do it openly, with legal cover, for 45 years.
Subjective criteria create discretion. The Harvard "personal rating" is the example. Harvard's own 2013 internal analysis reportedly found that on academics alone 43% of the admitted class would have been Asian American, against 19% in reality. Harvard said that report was exploratory and based on incomplete data. The trial judge found no racial animus, though she acknowledged that some admissions officers may have subconsciously adjusted ratings along racial lines.
In 2023 the Supreme Court held that the Harvard and UNC programs violated the Equal Protection Clause. They failed strict scrutiny, used race as a negative and a stereotype, and had no endpoint. The Court also found the claimed benefits of diversity too vague to measure. That is the scoreboard problem again: you cannot hold a program accountable for an outcome nobody can measure.
The Benchmark Problem
Take the numbers from the lecture. Stuyvesant made 777 offers, three to Black students and roughly 70% to Asian students, in a school system that is about 20% Asian. Which number is the right one? Population share? Test-taker share? Applicant share? Each gives a different answer, and picking one is arbitrary. When the class was asked what number would be acceptable, the answer was "somewhere in the hundreds". That is a feeling, not a standard.
The NBA has no such problem because it has no target. The roster is whoever is best. Black kids shoot hoops after school while Asian kids attend tutoring or prep courses. It's no suprise why the proportion of Black and Asian representation in NBA and Stuyvesant are the way they are.