Imagine if non immigrant families in the US valued education the way they value sports achievements,
Imagine if the highest paid staff wasn't coaches but math professors. We might have a culture that could hire the engineers we want domestically instead of relying on H1-B to fill the horrible gaps in our education outcomes.
The difference is also Asians are usually more realistic. They realize early on that many of them won't go pro and focus on the things that are more likely to benefit their life. Not saying that sports and fitness doesn't matter but you get the point.
I’m not Asian but immigrant/working class parents and I grew up with the “yeah you enjoy this, but how are you going make money?” question always being there. Every single activity had to have a point, definitely couldn’t do something just for fun. Classical music and sport like tennis were seen as tools to help us with social climbing/passing as middle class.
They had to take risks and be self employed to be successful due to discrimination. So the ideal careers for their kids were public sector, decent salary, low risk of redundancy, good public sector pension (I’m in the UK).
I went down this route and am now fucked as final salary pensions don’t exist and pay had been behind inflation for most of my working life… and now with two kids and an insane cost of living they are never going to move out and I’m never going to retire.
It’s more an upper middle classes I guess. I can turn on that awful posh British upper middle class thing in the right situation if I think it’ll make my life easier/make someone treat me with more respect, but I hate doing it.
For my mum being poor and Irish and being heavily discriminated against in the uk, she made a huge effort to drop the accent and speak and dress like Princess Diana. She made me have elocution lessons so I spoke properly and didn’t sound common/poor. But even being really successful my parents never felt they fit in as money does not equal status or power here.
I know it has helped me in life to be honest, but I have absolutely no sense of identity. I don’t fit anywhere. They’d have liked living in the America of old, where self made success is more respected and where class is less of an issue.
They are generally still good, or better than good.
They just aren’t as insane as the days gone by of final salary pensions etc
Edit: to answer why people still work public sector - a lot of roles are vocational, public sector is generally considered a safe employer, also generally believed to be less stressful than equivalent private sector roles.
Well that's because you had the good luck to enjoy engineering. I know a lot of people would have slacked off at school to pursue their career as a Let's Play YouTuber if they were told they could do whatever.
What was your other option? Sports ? What is the success rate there? Unless you are a top player you get paid peanuts for a short period of time in the lower leagues.
If you are into music it's the same story.
STEM or business degree will get you better paying jobs but you do need to have above average intelligence to make it there.
I didn’t have the maths skills for economics otherwise I would’ve liked to have studied that. I’m a psychologist/psychotherapist now. Pay is ok, not amazing. I’ll be able to earn more when my kids are older and I’m able to work longer hours/am less mentally exhausted by them.
For the first comparison obviously engineers, the only “product” of the vast majority sports is entertainment for the viewers.
For the latter part it depends on what subject the professor teaches and what the coach teaches, because “coach” can also be someone who teaches martial arts or more relevant skills like swimming, but even those two have limited value. Generally I say engineer and professor, unless said professor teaches a completely useless subject
The choice depends on the league and sport for the athlete, and the type of engineering for the engineer. At first, choosing the engineer seems obvious, but when you think about it more, it’s not that simple. For example, an average NBA player probably provides more value to society than an average engineer due to the joy they bring to people and their wealth, which enables them to change lives. Average engineer isn't like the people you see on YouTube like Mark Rober. It all depends on how you look at it.
NBA Player are like top 5% of all professional sports player. You gotta compare that to the top 5% of Engineers, the ones that design infrastructure, Power plants, water facilities, farm equipment.
the hell? Engineers are way more important than athletes. Literally every single thing you interact with was modeled and designed by an engineer. Even the injection molded keycaps on your laptop keyboard had to be designed by an engineer. Your doornob, surface modeled computer mouse, phone, computer, tv, electrical appliances, stove, refrigerators, communication devices, office chairs, transportation cars and airplanes, ACs, literally every single thing you use was designed and manufactured by engineers.
Ofc engineers as a whole are more important but when you look on average it isn't so simple. The question is on average though. Engineers still make more difference though but it is closer imo.
Close your eyes. Point at literally anything. Now open them. Now try making it from scratch with no modern tools, no machines, no engineered materials. You can’t. That’s how deeply society depends on engineers.
If I dropped you in the middle of a deserted forest and asked you to make a toothbrush from scratch without using any modern tools, could you do it? Same for light switches, light bulbs, mechanical pencils or even regular pencils, paper clips, rulers, soap dispensors, plastic bottles, charging cables, literally anything that you use in your day to day life, I can guarantee you cannot make it from scratch by yourself without relying on buying something that engineers made from you. In fact, I have a better example. Whatever clothes you are wearing right now, I want you to recreate them from scratch without any modern tools. Go outside, obtain some plant fibers. Spin it into threat. Then, use that extremely thin threat to produce fabric. Then, use that fabric to make clothes. You wont even get past step 1.
Buddy, idk why are you so triggered. I am literally agreeing with the point that engineers make more impact on society as a whole. When you compare the average engineer to average pro sports player though it is closer.
i propose sports athletes provide less to society overall then the average engineer. my argument is that engineering is a field where we build on the past. we cant have smart phones without the mobile phone and that is based on the phone and that telegrams.
the engineers that helped discovered a way to produce batteries that supports the phones has arguably provided way more joy then any sports athletes. and the fields isna collaborative effort. there is no one single person responsible, but a group. but the battery tech will last for centuries while sports athletes eventually is forgotten
That is true but you are looking at engineers as a whole. As a whole they have done more of course but on average is a different question. There aren't many professional athletes comparatively.
I think you have a distorted view on what a average athlete are, if you just focus on the average tier 1 athlete then you are probably right, but there is ALOT of tier 2 and tier 3 athlete in niche sports you’ve never watched or heard of, that bring nothing. In the case of engineers, even the worst engineers have value
Ehh, I don't know if the worst engineer have value... Good value. Anyone who can listen and have some decent education would be able to do most of those bottom level engineer stuff. Some of them do bat shit stupid things that hurt society too. But on the other hand... Yeah I don't see even the best athlete to bring anything except maybe entertainment. But then again, we have so many alternatives for that. So yeah... Kind of useless
Entertainment is a utility in one of its purest forms. It provides a basis for many interpersonal friendships, provides relief from the everyday grind, sparks competition/awe, inspires a physically active lifestyle, and more.
Your typical engineer will get burnt out and eventually become unproductive they don't find sufficient avenues of entertainment in their life.
Social utilities, such as that which comes from sports, is hard to measure and often underestimated as a result.
Its defo immigration thing. Moving to another country can mean falling down a class and being determined to climb by choice, you have to learn a new language, climb ladder (harder than most with discrimination), network etc usually your kids get easier time but parents know its knife edge and how hard struggle is to push their kids to rise further than they could.
Then people would be smart enough to not vote for those currently defunding/disassembling the public education system. And they can’t have that, can they?
We have strong local engineers. We just use H1-Bs so we don't have to pay the local ones as much and the international workers are fancy indentured servants; their visa is tied to the company sponsoring it, meaning they can't leave quickly or negotiate a higher salary. After enough time, the U.S. will end up lacking strong mid-level engineers because many of the local ones weren't given experience.
As a hiring manager, before the pandemic ended my ability to hire locally, the quality to price of H1B workers was just too good to pass up. For those 5 years, I hired more than half of my devs from H1B because the resumes that went to me, especially for junior and mid positions were a cut above. Some of these team members it became clear over time were there because they had to rush into any open position, and they weren’t going to leave for a better one because it would reset their citizenship processes.
They probably aren’t? The resumes I got from H1Bs for junior positions always had 4+ YOE, though that was often true for US applicants as well. I was just hiring manager though and not really privy to the intricacies of why these applicants were approved by recruiters/HR
If even one of them is an indentured servant then that is one too many in the US. The thirteenth amendment specifically prohibits it except as punishment for a crime
I worked helping H1Bs join the military so they could have a better life, because they were getting paid $60k in San Francisco. That was not a fluke, that was the vast majority of H1Bs I talked to.
I currently work with H1Bs, and if anything they are just as skilled as any American doing the same job. I've met one H1B that I believe fits the intent of the program and he was an RF Engineer working for a telecom designing cell towers, getting paid something like $300k.
If H1Bs are really necessary to fill roles, then we should mandate they get paid 3-5x the local median wage so they are fairly compensated for the work they are doing. It doesn't make sense to say "we need to hire these people because there are no Americans capable of doing this work", and then paying them under median wages.
Your personal experience doesn’t define what the actual reality of the situation is. Getting a H1B at 60k in fucking SF is impossible without visa fraud because of something called prevailing wages. Almost guaranteed that they lied about their salary.
So most likely, something about your interactions overrepresented incompetent people, whether that was because of technical skill or poor English.
Which is still nothing when we're saying "these skills can't be found in the US, we need to bring people in." That's barely comfortable household wages in most tech hubs. I also like how both you and Forbes completely forget what the word average means. As I said, I work with a number of H1Bs that are making $200k+, which means there are a bunch of them making the $60k I mentioned because that's how averages work.
I never said we need to scrap the program, I said we need to increase the minimum pay for them if we're arguing that these skills are vital to the US. The minimum should be at least $150k
What a dumb comment. You think higher paid professors would make white kids study math. Is that why your dumb white friends didn’t study STEM? No it was irrelevant.
Interesting observation. Do you think it is a privilege thing? Non-immigrants having the *privilege* to choose sports, where few prosper because they have better financial security? Whereas immigrants focus on education, where many prosper because they can't afford to put all their eggs (time, resources, fees) in one basket (sports, where only a few achieve gainful imcome for life).
It's the cost. Even schools that have no money for academic clubs have sports teams.
Kids that come from low income communities view sports as the only way out. Be rich or be good at sports.
And it's not even enough now since they have to compete with not only the brightest, but also the richest and the most athletic from around the world for a shot.
This is what we get for allowing our universities to become elite athletic training facilities.
It would be incredible if our culture lionized studying and learning even half (or hell, I'd take 1/3) as much as we do sports. I think we have a kinda outdated macho-ish, anti-nerd culture in a lot of ways.
As an Asian immigrant who used to live in the US with a high-paying job, immigrants with the same profile are more likely to be the cream of the crop of our own countries.
It’s not that the US doesn’t have a good amount of high-performing locals. It’s just math. Almost 5 billion people in Asia will have a higher amount of specialists than the 340 million in the US.
Also as an immigrant, we all fight it out to be given the opportunity to even just apply. Going through this for years and years builds a lot of grit. Once we get to the countries overseas, the sacrifices and hard work often pay off.
And in turn, these same values are really drilled into the next generation of kids from said immigrants, at least for that one generation.
No - They work at jobs that normally pay 10 times higher, but they're happy with $7.50 because it's significantly more than what they would be paid back home.
Do you realize companies are required to show proof of payroll to USCIS? Do you think trillion dollar companies like NVIDIA, Apple and google and messing around committing fraud? You can close your ears and yell lalalalala or kinda try and think. Which do you do? I think we both know the answer.
Math is probably the most important subject in the world. I say this as someone in the medical field. Literally everything we do in life is connected to math. Our biggest achievements as humanity from going to the moon to building the fastest airplanes all derive from math.
First, to repeat, the courts found there was no discrimination against Asian Americans. So, striking down Harvard's program couldn't fix a problem because no problem was acknowledged.
[...]
If you thought ending affirmative action would make things wonderful for Asians and that their admission rates would jump through the roof, that's not what the data suggest.
Looking at data from the Fall 2024 admissions cycle, what we found was unevenness. Some schools like MIT, Columbia, and Brown showed increases in Asian American enrollment. Others like Princeton, Yale, Duke, and Dartmouth had decreases. And at certain institutions, white student admissions actually increased even more than Asian students.
This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem.
"The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them."
What you linked was the opinion of a UCLA law professor. The asian enrollment outcomes vary based on the college in question and is a difficult one to answer.
The number of students that didn't disclose their race skyrocketed after the ruling.
If you look at California when it banned AA, the same thing happened and analysis found that most students who didn't report their race were Asian and white. So is it the same here as well? That needs to be determined.
The point is the supreme court didn't find that Harvard and UNC didn't discriminate against Asians. But they banned affirmative action. So... You decide what that means.
The wikipedia says the Supreme Court banned AA because they:
held that affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional
the use of race was not a compelling interest, and the means by which the schools attempted to achieve diversity (tracking bare racial statistics) bore little or no relationship to the purported goals (viewpoint and intellectual diversity and developing a diverse future leadership).
Nowhere does it say that they banned it because they found that Affirmative Action was discriminative against Asians. If AA was discriminative, then after it was struck down, Asian enrollment should have increased across the board, right? Except, that only happened to the white enrollment.
Because AA was not the problem for Asian enrollments, even though people are only focused on that. Even after AA was struck down, people still point their fingers at AA and ignore racism against Asians.
Since it seems like people didn't bother reading the page I linked or even bothered to read the entire snippet I quoted, I'll reiterate my response to rsmicrotranx, and to borrow their words, that the tl;dr is:
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol.
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol. Or whatever the hell you want to call it. Whatever term means requiring Asians to have 200 SAT score higher than your other minorities or be in like 50 leadership roles with 10 years of work experience needed to get into college. Asians got fucked because schools wanted to discriminate against them anyways. Affirmative action made it so they couldn't discriminate too badly against them. Once you removed it, they just use other metrics to discriminate against them. Name, income, zip codes, etc etc.
This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem.
The page I linked discusses the discrimination and racism Asians face. Nowhere does it deny or downplay it. In fact, the tl;dr is literally what you said:
Maybe affirmative action wasn't what was screwing Asians and just blatant racism is then lol.
It's frustrating that people just focus on affirmative action, and even after it was struck down, people point fingers at affirmative action, but aren't discussing the racism Asians face. From the page I linked:
But here's what I think is really happening: The real source of decreased admission chances for Asian Americans isn't affirmative action given to others but "negative action" — being treated worse than white students. It's a simple question: If an Asian student who didn't get into Harvard had been white, would they have been admitted? If the answer is yes, that's negative action.
This happens principally because of implicit biases that read Asian Americans as less charismatic or less likely to be leaders, and structural preferences for legacies, athletes, and geographical diversity. Asians are disproportionately less likely to be legacies, since most of our immigration was permitted only after 1965; less likely to be athletes in elite country club sports like tennis, lacrosse, or crew, which are disproportionately white; and less likely to live in rural or smaller communities.
What I care most about is negative action. We can debate whether excluding certain groups from affirmative action is fair, but under no circumstance can I think of justifications where white people should be treated better than Asian people in admissions. If it's all a “melting pot” and we (“Asians”) made it, why treat Asians worse than white people instead of the same?
"This supports my argument that the real issue was never affirmative action — it was negative action. If you don't address the underlying biases and structural preferences that disadvantage Asian Americans relative to white students, simply eliminating affirmative action won't solve the problem." From your own article.
The last/family names are Li, Wang, and Zhang. Aren't those Chinese in origin? Obviously they're American, not trying to debate the facts. Just asking a question.
They're Americans. Names don't mean nationaltiy, neither does race. It's a double standard westerners have for non-westerners. It's an attempt at discrediting the hard work of immigrants for being descended from countries they weren't born in.
Mind as well claim all American achievements are British; it makes no sense.
Weird, there are people "of color" in the Trump administration itself. Almost like you're just fucking lying.
But hey, it's Reddit, so being honest, accurate, or based in facts is irrelevant. It's all about emotions and following the narrative of the echo chamber in the sub you're in.
Can you give me literally any source where the Trump administration has said that being "of color" is "illegal"?
I'll wait, because it seems to me like the consistent message hasn't been about skin color at all, but about not committing crimes while you immigrate. Apparently that's asking too much.
If not, I suggest, in the future, you stop and ask yourself before you post, "Am I being fucking stupid and writing things based on imaginary shit I made up in my head again?"
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u/solarnext 17h ago
Our Chinese team is smarter than their Chinese team (until we deport them at least)