How DEI Screws Black Math Nerds Over
One of my friends is the youngest child in a large Catholic family. She was her mother’s “Surprise! It’s not menopause!” baby.
The firstborn in her family adopted a baby girl from Ethiopia sixteen years ago, so she and the girl have always been close, more like cousins than aunt/niece in some respects. That child is fantastic at mathematics. Most of the adults in her family are typical Americans — did well in algebra in high school and enjoyed it, but remember little. The math they do in real life is mostly limited to checkbook balancing.
So I get to be the one who helps the girl with her homework, when she has questions, which is great fun for me.
She’s old enough now to be considering colleges, and my friend recently sought my advice. The girl has straight A’s in every subject and an impressive resume of extracurriculars, and wants to aim high.
The problem is…how can the adults in her life tell if she’s really prepared to succeed?
My friend and her family are familiar with the work of Heather MacDonald and the evidence for mismatch theory—that black kids who intend to major in STEM fields end up transferring to easier subjects because they get accepted to programs that they’re not prepared for. And yet, if she can handle Harvard, Princeton, etc., why not? Why hold her back?
So we talked about it. Black kids in her academic decile have a 56.1% acceptance rate to Harvard. Source for chart.
But the girl isn’t just black. She’s also a naturalized American, and a young woman with both passion and an impressive record in a STEM field. That’s a metric ton of diversity points. She would improve their statistics in multiple areas all at once.
Realistically, if she applies to Harvard, she’s highly likely to get in.
But what if she’s not ready for it? What if the math department at Harvard is too much for her? The worst case scenario would be that she finds out she can’t handle the math program at Harvard and ends up majoring in studio art or English or history. That would be a devastating change of life path for her—a much worse outcome than being a top student in the math department at State U and, perhaps, trying to do graduate school at Harvard or another top school.
My advice was to make sure the girl takes the SAT, ACT, and AP Calculus BC exam, and to treat those three metrics as the objective measures that decide what she is truly prepared to handle. If she gets superior results on those three tests in mathematics, she should be fine. If she does well but not amazing, then consider the State U path. At the very least, have a blunt conversation with her about the fact that a Harvard acceptance provides zero information about her likelihood to succeed at Harvard.
And that’s just so shitty. It’s reality, but it’s brutally unfair to her. She shouldn’t have to think about that. She should be able to just aim as high as she wants and let success or failure mean what success or failure means, without having to consider the extent to which she’s being used by wealthy, white, Woke idiots to make themselves feel better.
I have written about how efforts to support women in mathematics, while well-intentioned and not wholly destructive, still have enormous negative unintended consequences. I wasn’t completely sure that I was hired on merit and not for diversity points until, a few months into my job, I was given sole responsibility for a project that had massive and far-reaching consequences. And I was recently promoted to Senior Data Scientist after just shy of three years. That means that while I still have a demonic chorus in my head, the singers whose favorite tunes are “Imposter Syndrome” are silent now, which is a blessing.
But that’s a burden I shouldn’t have ever had to carry, and it’s one that my friend’s niece should never have to think about.
The law of unintended consequences applies to everyone and everything.
Personal Update
It’s been a sparse month or so on new content, mostly because work has been extremely stressful and difficult. The whole story is too boring to share, but here’s a TLDR version of the main problem. Because I handle all kinds of client data, my work computer is subject to strict security procedures. I live alone and my computer has both fingerprint and facial recognition, so you would think that would be enough, right? Given that in order to get into my computer without my participation, an intruder would need to remove my finger or head, my employer should be pleased.
But corporate bullshit is corporate bullshit, so naturally I also have to have a ridiculously complicated password that gets changed every 30 days. Unlike a reliance on the face and fingerprint recognition, the password stuff is quite easy to hack. Just look on my dry erase board. The thing that looks like a password? Try that.
Well, my company’s system had some kind of glitch the last time I had to update my password. It resulted in my computer going haywire to the point that it had to be wiped clean.
And, naturally, the same problem meant that OneDrive (the cloud to which my work is supposed to get backed up daily) wasn’t working (not that it’s ever been that reliable).
I lost a month’s worth of work.
And my boss didn’t want to extend my deadline. He wasn’t consciously being an asshole; he’s just clueless. He’s one of those people who thinks that ‘coding’ is akin to waving a magic wand, and since I knew what my findings were the first time, doing the coding again should be easy and fast, right?
I tried repeatedly to explain that just because I knew that the mathematical modeling I had done said that the client should do X and could expect a return of Y, that didn’t mean I could re-do the coding quickly. And yes, I had to re-do the coding. I didn’t remember the numbers on every single one of my findings, but that didn’t matter. Even if I remembered them all perfectly, we could not recommend to the client that they do things that will affect tens of thousands of people’s jobs and millions of dollars without being able to show our work—without the math being laid out, step by step. He just didn’t quite understand this, and I ended up having to risk pissing him off by getting other people involved to advocate for my position. (To his credit, he took it well and has not been upset with me over it.)
I eventually got a partial extension, but not nearly enough of one, and had one of the most stressful months of my life trying to meet the deadline.
(It was more complicated than this, with several other complicating factors at play, but that’s the gist of it.)
My deadline now met, I’m taking some time off work. And since my work schedule is back to normal, I will be back to writing regularly. I’ve got a draft essay reflecting on the mistake almost everyone is making, six months into the Israel/Hamas war, a couple of book reviews in progress, and some creative writing pieces done in longhand that I just need to get typed up.
I also got some progress made on my novel, which gives me some hope that I can finish it.
More Offline Time (re: Comments)
I recently took about 54 hours to be almost entirely offline, and it was glorious. I want more offline time desperately. If I’m disciplined about my various side hustles, I should be able to be offline from bedtime on Saturdays until Monday morning, and my plan going forward is to do that every week that I possibly can.
I feel an obligation to pay attention when I leave comments on, which means that going forward I may leave them off more than I have in the past. Or I may leave them on for the first eight hours or so after publishing an essay and then turn them off; I’ll be experimenting with different approaches. Just an FYI for those of you who enjoy commenting and reading the comments.
In re your maths prodigy.
Strongly agree on the "get objective test results". However I will note, as someone who did first year Maths at Cambridge and then switched to Computer Science, that even if you have all the objective marks in your favor top level undergraduate mathematics is tough. There's nothing wrong with re-evaluating after a year and picking something slightly less intellectually challenging. Had I not got into Cambridge and gone to one of my second choices perhaps I would have finished my maths degree instead of switching, but given that I always wanted to work with computers a fall back to Comp Sci was not exactly a big deal.
Mind you I'm not sure that Harvard actually has a premier Math program, I'd need to check the syllabus. My impression is that Harvard has dumbed down a lot of its courses and that may include mathematics. My advice to the young lady would be to find a school where wokeness is minimized and/or where there are clear objective grades offered that don't involve non-mathematical bits because she is, utterly unfairly, going to be tarred with the brush of DEI (Didn't Earn It) even though she did..
Sorry about the job crapola and congratulations on achieving disconnected nirvana. I'm writing this from a hotel in the middle of rural Japan where the cell coverage is iffy and the wifi didn't work for several hours. Once I got over the 'OMG I'm out of reach" initial though, it was surprisingly relaxing. The world did not actually fall apart in my absence and rural Japan in the springtime is ridiculously beautiful