Wired: IBM's School Could Fix Education and Tech's Diversity Gap 176
theodp writes: Wired positively gushes over IBM's Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), saying it could fix education and tech's diversity gap. Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology, allowing them to earn a high school diploma and a free associate degree in six years or less. That P-TECH's six inaugural graduates completed the program in four years and were offered jobs with IBM, Wired reports, is "irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work" (others aren't as impressed, although the President is drinking the Kool-Aid). While the program has only actually graduated six students since it was announced in 2010, Wired notes that by fall, 40 schools across the country will be designed in P-TECH's image. IBM backs four of them, but they'll also be run by tech giants like Microsoft and SAP, major energy companies like ConEdison, along with hospital systems, manufacturing associations, and civil engineering trade groups. They go by different names and are geared toward different career paths, but they all follow the IBM playbook.
ah (Score:1)
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Nah. Tech giants are interested in programing...erm grooming...erm educating future drones.
It's somewhat tongue in cheek but also I have to look at both sides. Yes, these companies want STEM grads ... heck they need them. And I think the H1-B thing is finally catching up enough with companies that they see the twilight coming.
The answer? Take poor kids and give them enough education (and, of course, propaganda about how great these companies are) to meet the same requirements.
Then you remember they're p
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IBM has had the "Consulting by Degree" program for years. Takes newly graduated students and gets them up to speed for a consulting career in IBM:
http://www-935.ibm.com/service... [ibm.com]
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It means he saw that once on a pamphlet.
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It means that justice - mercy = truth
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I think you've confused news with history. A news site isn't the best place to read about things that have happened in the past.
Confidence oozing out of every orifice (Score:1)
irrefutable proof that this solution might actually work
Irrefutable proof that it might work.
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that is offensive.
what if minorities are just not smart , indeed sir you are offensive... i am going to refrain from what I want to say
They are not the bottom, they are a group that never gets a chance to even compete and by not competing they get the auto status of failing. Allow competition. which many are scared of.
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My true narrative is that most minority family institutions are broken and that fact is what keeps minorities from succeeding. The lack of and destruction of family structure has a definite impact on people. There are plenty of people that pull themselves up by their own will. And they get my kudos for traveling that road successfully. But by far the most represented in the higher socio-economic levels are those from strong family structures. This support and guidance and resource cannot be replicated,
Go to IBM U! (Score:2)
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No need! They're training poor people to be corporate minions. They can pay them about the same as those in Brazil except you don't have to fly someone all the way down there, build them a nice house, import nice cars, security, and food, to crack the whip over your slave^^^^^employees.
indoctrination (Score:2)
I doubt this is useful except as a method of turning out corporate drones all with the same mental DNA. Where do the arts flourish in an environment dominated by business concerns. Technology is only an enabler, it isn't an end in itself and this destined to produce uni-dimensional beings who cannot and will not think for themselves.
Brilliant (Score:3)
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I agree this is kind of bad.
Why not partner with a college, and get students with a four year degree in a tech field. This just proves that the Big boys can use a little extra cheap labor that they are going to employ for 1.5 years and let go. And they will find they are unemployable with those skills. A four year degree is necessary in the tech field.
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A four year degree is necessary in the tech field.
I have to disagree. I know plenty of people who do not have a 4 year degree and are making 6 digits. I happen to be one of them. In my case I went to college for 3 years but never completed my credits because I had to work to pay my way through school.
Some of my friends that did 4 and 6 years aren't further ahead than I am and if anything they are behind because they lost 2 years to end up in the same place. I can also point you to people that did go to school for 6 years that are now ahead of me so please
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So one can get a 4 year HS degree and 2 year AA, now combined into a 6 year HS+AA degree. Brilliant!
Keep in mind that these students aren't very good at math.
yep, PC camo (Score:2)
Well that's great... (Score:2)
We'll just shoehorn people into fields they may not want to follow. Up next: We'll see IBM and the government fixing the dangerous jobs industries like mining and commercial fishing, while ensuring men don't have problems being called pedophiles for becoming k-12 teachers. And while we're at it, we'll ensure that there are more males entering psychology related fields. Should work out well, since women now make up the majority of the student body in universities.
I can't wait to see women enjoying a long
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We'll see IBM and the government fixing the dangerous jobs industries
I don't know what precisely you're getting at, but the unions did HUGE amounts or work in this regard and the safety of these industries has increased dramatically from 100 years ago. Where do you think OSHA and etc came from?
Sure safety is an ongoing problem and it's been an awfully long road from "insanely dangerous victorian style" to now, but to pretend the government does nothing is just flat out wrong.
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Mashiki, you make this same mistake every time. It's not about shoehorning people into things just to make up numbers. Never has been. It's about giving everyone an opportunity. That includes men who want to become teachers, and in my country there are a lot of incentives for them because we understand that young children need both male and female role models.
If you have evidence that women who want to be oil field workers are being discriminated against or prevented from following their chosen careers for
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It's about giving everyone an opportunity.
Well that's great, since the opportunity already exists right? Never mind that those barriers in said oil field workers don't actually exist, much like they don't in tech. They're jobs that don't draw existing groups because said groups have no desire to go into that field. You seem to be repeatedly making the same mistake in believing that if you throw money at something, while claiming 'we want diversity' at the cost of quality isn't a recipe for failure.
Re:Well that's great... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mashiki, this is getting old now. Like clockwork, you make your second standard mistake: assuming that women are not interested in tech.
Care to explain why in the past more women went into technology than do now? Or why these courses are generally quite successful at attracting girls to study them?
A pure bit of conjecture here. During the mid 70's the first group of women who were liberated frmo their traditional roles were entering the fields. I worked with many of them in a university research environment. There were indeed a number of men who had difficulty accepting them, although most of us had no issues.
Those guys who often were actually real nasty to these women? They either ignored them or the put the guys in their place. After a few years, those guys either came to respect the ladies, or simply had to retreat to let their misogyny fester in private.
Regardless, the ladies in general displayed abilities comparable to the men.
And we tended not to think a whole lot about gender - at least as applied to work.
Over the years however, the numbers of ladies there dropped off somewhat, finally settling down to today's anemic representation
Why?
Efforts to get young ladies interested in the fields were out and out failures. The polling results showed that tech fields were just about at the bottom of the career preferences. And these were the daughters of Scientists and Engineers.
In our workplace, we attempted to attract as many women and treat them as well as possible. I voluntarily gave up a number of promotions in order to free up promotion space for a woman (silly quota system)
But still the numbers shrunk.
Why?
In the end, I came to the conclusion that after an initial period of time when women were trying out different careers, they eventually as a group settled on careers they actually liked.
I do not buy the idea that the anemic reasons given that young ladies are kept out of STEM by dongle jokes or pictures of Playboy model's faces, or all of the other lame reasons given that end up painting an exceptionally offensive picture of women as incredibly weak people, who can be cowed by any criticism or anything that they don't agree with. Those first generation liberated women I worked with at the time, would have laughed at that idea.
People can disagree with me, but my observations are based on experience and trying to get young ladies interested, not some modern male pushback against third wave feminism.
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The problem with your hypothesis is that the opposite happened. In the 80s and up to about the mid 90s when efforts were being made to attract more women to CS the numbers were higher. It was only when we reached the 2000s that things started to go wrong. Part of it could be the dot-com bubble perhaps, although in the late 90s in particular it was a very lucrative time to be in CS. Lots of jobs, big money paid for fixing the millennium bug etc.
The schemes were a big success, but we stopped doing them. We th
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The problem with your hypothesis is that the opposite happened.
This is an extraordinary claim! I worked with many women at that time t and your claim that I am making a hypothesis really needs backing up. Or are you making claims against my veracity?
I'm talking about women in the 1970's who were not encouraged in any way shape or form. That is not a hypothesis. The ladies were completely the equal of any man, and no one was going to stand in their way. Dongle jokes? They'd get the joke and laugh at it.
, Let me tell you of a story that would apparently have today's y
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The problem with your hypothesis is that the opposite happened. In the 80s and up to about the mid 90s when efforts were being made to attract more women to CS the numbers were higher
That is factually wrong. Women participation in both education and the workforce peaked in the mid-80's. So no, the programs in "the 80s and up to about the mid 90s" did not work. Participation was still in decline.
And I was talking about the mid-late seventies in the first place. But you are correct in what you wrote.
Anyhow, my entire argument revolves around the idea that women are not weaker than men, and that if they want a particular job, they can go get it.
It seems that is an unpopular view.
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Mashiki, this is getting old now. Like clockwork, you make your second standard mistake: assuming that women are not interested in tech.
Care to explain why in the past more women went into technology than do now? Or why these courses are generally quite successful at attracting girls to study them?
Well, except I didn't make a mistake. I'm going off the actual employment records that happily list exactly what fields that women are drawn to, it's not tech. It's the humanities and psychology areas.
Oh, and someone else already gave you the reason why. Of course, in my own case at Waterloo, we had about 70 women in the applied mathematics course, by the end of the year there was one. The rest had left and went into...did you guess humanities, history, or psychology related areas. So, sure they're suc
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It's about giving everyone an opportunity.
They already had the opportunity. There are already Pell grants and many, many scholarship and loans available for poor kids in the ghetto to go to college. All they have to do is do halfway decent in high school and graduate. Even if their high school teachers are shitty, all they have to do is read the textbook and pass the tests. There haven't been any real barriers in their way in a long time now.
The problem isn't access, it's attitude. It's like Chris Rock once famously observed: in too many black neig
Which diversity gap? (Score:3)
Which diversity ratio is perceived to be out of balance, and why does it need artificial programmes to fix?
Children : Adults?
Hispanics : Asians?
Men : Women?
People who drive to work : People who cycle?
Geniuses : Morons?
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It's not about the ratio, it's about giving everyone and opportunity. The ratio is merely a simple, easily digestible measurement that is beloved by journalists.
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Well, that's what I think it should be too. Too often, however, I see misanthropes reviewing companies and, despite the place being an equal-opportunity employer, criticising a less than 50:50 gender balance, skewed age balance, or lack of ethnic diversity.
The problem is that companies listen to these people.
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I believe the article was written in the US. So since in the US things are US-centric it would be referring to minorities in the US. Also as a context clue the summary list US companies that were interested in the program. ( starting to see a theme yet? ) Wired is also a US magazine.
I am happy to clear that up for you.
So what white minded angle were you fishing for troll?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas. [...] A large part of the problem is that there is an active segment of society that doesn't want to deal with the moral issues that lead to this situation
Oh, you mean like the courts deliberately destroying black families by 1) being more willing to arrest black people, and 2) being more willing to convict black people? Families go to hell right quick when a member gets locked up. Meanwhile my dad DUI'd over and over again and they didn't even take his license because he was a white hispanic. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to be white too, but only because some racist fucks will treat me less like an animal.
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While there are cases of innocent blacks being locked up, certainly some actually are guilty. They were rightly locked up.
That doesn't address my statement at all.
Your dad not being locked up when he actually was guilty is the failure here and doesn't mean that blacks who actually are guilty shouldn't have been locked up.
Nor did anyone but you suggest that anyone was thinking that. The suggestion was that white people don't get punished when they are guilty, while at best, black people are. But in fact, locking my dad up wouldn't have served society. Actually doing something to help him with his alcoholism would have. Probably starting for treating him for PTSD about which he was in denial, starting with his childhood and moving through going to Korea. Sentences are often commuted in
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That's a failure of the system at punishing white people. You have a point only if you can show that most blacks are being punished when they're actually innocent. If they're guilty, then they should be punished.
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If they're guilty, then they should be punished.
No, if they're guilty, then they should be rehabilitated. Your medieval mindset only leads to more crime.
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The way to fix that is better sex education. Works everywhere it is tried. Better off children tend to have access to better sex education, from their schools and from their parents.
Indeed... it works great, combined with BC (Score:2)
A study was run a couple of years ago that collected a group of low-income women, delivered comprehensive sex education, and gave them free access to the birth-control method of their choice.
In the fevered imagination of DittoHeads, the poor women would proceed to choose poor (or no) birth-control methods (or use them incorrectly), get knocked up (which is somehow supposed to be a money-maker... still haven't figured that one out), and become leeches on society.
What ACTUALLY happened? Exactly as you would
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Another great example is Bangladesh. In the 1960s the fertility rate was around 9, i.e. the average number of children that a woman had in her life was 9. These days its under 2.5, mostly due to education.
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You can certainly run a relationship into the rocks, or never form one, for moral/behavioral reasons; but in order to have a successful family unit, especially over a time frame long enough to be relevant to childrearing outcomes, you usually have to meet some other requirements:
The labor market is a major fac
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Female labor force participation has never actually been particularly minimal: women(and children) were a staple of factor workforces from the start of the industrial revolution; and the 'piecework' and 'putting-out' distributed domestic production of
If only that were backed with the facts... (Score:3)
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas.
You know, we actually HAVE real statistics instead of wild imaginings culled from whatever websites you are glued to... your theory that the "black community" struggles today vs. the 50's and 60's because of the collapse of the nuclear family is directly contradicted by statistics (from the National Center for Health Statistics, a CDC arm), which show that the birthrate amongst unmarried black women is currently about half what it was at the end of the 60's, and this trend has continued despite a steep drop
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racists typically are not interested in facts.
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It could be changed, by reforming the welfare programs to stop making having welfare babies out of wedlock pay. There are a lot of possibilities for doing this, such as not giving out welfare benefits on a per child basis, not giving out services to the parent but directly to minors (a soup kitchen type setup). Also get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The problem with the way that many of these programs work is they give more money to the parent or every illegitimate child, the parents can then use thi
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It could be changed, by reforming the welfare programs to stop making having welfare babies out of wedlock pay. There are a lot of possibilities for doing this, such as not giving out welfare benefits on a per child basis, not giving out services to the parent but directly to minors (a soup kitchen type setup). Also get rid of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The problem with the way that many of these programs work is they give more money to the parent or every illegitimate child, the parents can then use this money how they want, on themselves.
You make it sound like the biggest problem is that women sit down and say "You know what? I think I need a baby so I can screw the welfare system."
AFAICT, the actual problem is that not having control of reproduction leaves the women unable to implement long-term goals of not being on welfare. In which case there would be more impact from making access to long-term birth control like IUDs and implants cheap and easy.
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Another way it can be changed is actually enforce sodomy/cohabitation laws (ban out of wedlock sex) and make divorces almost impossible to get. All of these laws were once in place but were dismantled by Liberals. So stop telling us nothing can be done about the problem, the only reason nothing would be done about the problem is you Liberals would stand in the way of doing these things, you are the ones that pushed for all of this madness of divorce on demand, the breakdown of marriage, the legitimization o
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college transfer after this? how meny credits will (Score:2)
college transfer after this? how many credits will a 4 year school take from this?
There are issues with moving to a different school like
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_new... [nbcnews.com]
"Columbia wouldn’t accept credits for a class Hernandez had taken and passed in meteorology, for example, she says. “My dean said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that covers.’ I would think that would be so simple: It’s, like, about the weather.”
"For example, while some credits from one school may be acc
Early college was not invented by tech companies. (Score:2)
Before the great depression, instead of going to college after completing high school, students went to college when they were ready. The expectation to stay in high school until the age of 18 was created to shrink the workforce and artificially reduce the unemployment rate. Not long after, Robert Maynard Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, began promoting early entrance to college for students who were ready.
The first dedicated college was SImon's Rock College, where entering students are t
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Catch 22 (Score:2)
I mean, is anyone seeing the issue here? Offering these people a job is a small price to pay for IBM to 'irrefutably proof' the success of their program. I'm not saying their program is not good, but really, we should maybe have an external source assess this.
How about.. (Score:2)
When you have to malipulate people into entering a segment of industry, there is something very, very wrong.
Typo in the article? (Score:2)
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids from low-income backgrounds for careers in technology,
I think they meant to say:
Backed by IBM, the P-TECH program aims to prepare mainly minority kids for low-income careers in technology,
Given IBM's lack of interest in hiring or retaining American workers, that must surely be what they meant.
I wonder... (Score:2)
I don't understand (Score:1)
Saturate the workforce (Score:1)
Problem with educational models (Score:2)
S.C.I.M.I.T.A.R. (Score:1)
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Oh no it's theodp! (Score:2)
Seriously, is theodp sleeping with one of the Slashdot editors or something? They publish one of his biased, totally misleading anti CS education rants practically every single day.
The rebirth of trade schools (Score:2)
Is this the rebirth of trade schools?
IBM backs four of them, but they'll also be run by tech giants like Microsoft and SAP, major energy companies like ConEdison, along with hospital systems, manufacturing associations, and civil engineering trade groups.
This is either a new form of trade schools, or some kind of corporate takeover of education.
I think it's a bad program (Score:2)
I was reading the article and they get people through the system faster by cutting out "extra" courses in high school such as science and history so they only concentrate on English, Math, Technology, and workplace learning in the freshman year. WTF?!?! It's bad enough that they are cutting out the other classes. How are you supposed to learn what you like if you don't get exposed to all of these different things? But what the hell is workplace learning?
How about this (Score:1)
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TBH, the link is more in the social norms of the group. The stereotype exists because, unfortunately, it's common.
Working poor? Yes, dual income + assistance barely puts food on the table.
Public assistance poor? They don't typically work. Have full access to medical programs, food, free education, etc. Heck, non-working parents on welfare apparently get an allowance for *daycare* as I understand it. In theory those parents have all the time in the world to spend raising their kids. They could learn r
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Tens of millions? Not even close, according to the Bureau of Labor Statics [bls.gov]:
"The number of families with at least one member unemployed decreased to 6.5 million in 2014 from 7.7 million in 2013."
"In 2014, about 43 percent of all families included children under age 18."
"Among the 34.4 million families with children, 88.7 percent had at le
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True. But what is the solution to bad parents?
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Re:Diversity gap is irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
"Individuals have different potential and interests, but over a population of millions it averages out."
It doesn't mean that the averages over sub-populations are the averages over the whole population. Potentials and interests may well be multi-modal.
"Or are you saying that some races and genders are just inherently inferior?"
Why are you dragging value judgements like "inferior" into this?
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It doesn't mean that the averages over sub-populations are the averages over the whole population. Potentials and interests may well be multi-modal.
Do you have any evidence to support that hypothesis? Remember that you are the one arguing against what is being done, the onus is on your to make your case. At least IBM is trying to prove their position by making it happen, with some success.
Why are you dragging value judgements like "inferior" into this?
Because you dragged value judgements into it when you started talking about potentials. I was answering your claim that different individuals have different potentials, which is true but misses the point that over a population it would average out at similar to other
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"Do you have any evidence to support that hypothesis?"
*You* asserted that "potentials and interests ... it averages out", whatever that means. Trying to imagine a concrete meaning, one comes up with "there is such a thing as average potential and interest". Which, even if it were true, it's irrelevant, because it is obvious from observation of routine life that different groups of people have different interests. (And no, I'm not dividing up by interest first, then discovering everyone in that group has
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You aren't even making sense now. My meaning is clear in the context of your original post. Potential in CS. If you meant something else, you communicated it so badly that the meaning has been lost.
Are you trying to say that you think some populations may have less potential for CS? Or just individuals. If you mean just individuals, then I agree with you but I don't see what it has to do with this scheme. It's like arguing that there is no point teaching maths at school because some kids are not good at it.
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"Potential in CS."
So ... are you asserting that everyone has the same "potential in CS" -- with just the right amount of education it will come bubbling forth? Sorry, that is simply not credible. Go ahead and convince us otherwise.
"It's like arguing that there is no point teaching maths at school because some kids are not good at it. It makes no sense at all."
Lucky then that no made that argument. It makes sense to teach everyone some math, independent of their "potential in math", whether said potential
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"No. You are totally confused."
Then please say again in small but concrete words, what you meant by "Individuals have different potential and interests, but over a population of millions it averages out.". What does it mean to "average out"? How is such average actionable?
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The issue is most minorities never get the oppertunity to raise to the top. They do not have access to the same sources as everyone else. If given those same supports that others have taken for granted they tend to raise as you say in the same numbers and percentages ... and often higher percentages than others.
Re:Diversity gap is irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue is most minorities never get the oppertunity to raise to the top. They do not have access to the same sources as everyone else.
Neither does some poor white kid in Appalachia. Is IBM going to give him a job too?
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Newsflash: Not everyone has the same everything. That's communism.
Discrimination is one thing...and it's wrong.
At the same time this amounts to reverse discrimination. Any random minority* is automatically given assistance in any of a number of ways which give them advantages not available to many others. Of course, it's only if you fit in the right group that's crying about how they're wronged and oppressed. I'd love to see how well a white male scholarship fund does.
*Minority has a star since what's
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The course doesn't exclude white children from disadvantaged backgrounds, in fact it includes them. So yeah, they might give him a job if he can meet the required standard.
Instead of complaining that there isn't enough charity to go around so no-one should have any, why not try to improve things yourself?
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While I agree that poverty should be a factor in these kinds of programs, there is still the difference that it's very unlikely that a poor white male from Appalachia who does manage to get into a desirable position probably is going to be told that it's due to affirmative action instead of his natural abilities.
Basically, it sucks to be poor, but being white is still an advantage. Rather be poor and white any day over being poor and black, no question what-so-ever.
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That is one advantage, yes. If one is perceived to have earned their position through hard work/talent then one is more likely to continue to advance because they will be considered for future promotions/opportunities. If one is perceived to have gotten their position as a handout, then one is less likely to advance further because they will be less likely to be considered for future promotions/opportunities.
Another disadvantage of being perceived to have gotten a position through affirmative action is that
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Theodp is trying to gin up another #gamergate around the issue of STEM training programs for girls and minorities. He's been posting these biased summaries ("the President is drinking the Kool-Aid" - real professional of Soulskill for letting that in) on a daily basis here, for years.
He's an ass. Work on your job skills, theodp, and you'll always have a good paying job. Yes, that means you have to work more than 40 hrs/week when you account for self-study, but that's what being a professional is about, a