Originally Posted by
ThumbsUp
Yes it is, but it’s like we’re living in different realities. If you stacked all of the candidates ordinally based on objective criteria, and then said we have 50 slots and anyone below this line is cut, you would not achieve a 50 percent minority acceptance goal historically. It’s only when performance is a secondary factor of the equation that you would achieve that.
Your argument seems to imply that accepting the best into Aviate is secondary to race and gender.
I think a lot of people are under this impression that you can objectively rank your candidates from 1 to 75,000 and just pick the top 10K. But we’re talking about admission to a flight school. Most applicants will have zero flight time or aviation experience, so what metrics are you going to use to make those rankings? Aptitude tests? (Can be helpful, but certainly not definitive.) In person interviews are far from objective. (How many excellent pilots have you known that interviewed here & didn’t get the job?) The Hogan? High school grades? (You’re gonna cut a guy who eats & breathes aviation because the other guy rocked it on his AP Chem test?)
How do you tell that #526 is 1 ranking better than #527, and so on? Show me a ranking system that does this & I’ll show you a consulting firm that walked away with $10M of our profit sharing by pulling the Hogan 2.0 entirely out of their backsides.
If you believe that it is, in fact possible to rank people that specifically, then I can totally follow your logic that a diversity initiative must necessarily involve compromising standards. I don’t personally believe that it is possible, which pretty well sums up the point where our realities diverge.
And understand, I’m not even arguing that implementing a diversity target is the right way to do things, just that as long as they are doing it in choosing from among well qualified candidates, it is a social, not a safety issue.