Bruh... 
That’s not the eligibility requirements for the CTY program. It’s the eligibility requirements for the scholarship, i.e. for a particular kind of financial aid they grant.
Is any of that money from the government? That makes a big difference.
I don’t actually know. Johns Hopkins is a private university, but I have no idea if the scholarship has any public funding, if it comes from JHU’s general budget, or from a private endowment (which commonly come earmarked for specific demographics).
As much as I disagree with the principle of picking people for a job based on non-achievement criteria (e.g. there aren't enough women in field X, let's hire more women instead of qualified candidates only), which can corrupt the performance of an organisation and lead to failure, I fail to see why these policies would be an issue for an *educational* institution.
Surely we want as *many people* as reasonable practicable to be educated, and selecting people who have historically lower achievement in a given field, is better than selecting more of the same candidates who could get into any other university?
Surely a monetary scholarship should be based on two things only:
1) Aptitude
2) Economic need.
(and other requirements like being a citizen or whatnot)
What does "traditionally underrepresented student group" have to do with that?
It has a ton to do with it, insofar as systemic discrimination in USA
created a lot of the disadvantages that caused those demographics to be underrepresented, or even outright discriminated against. It’s not just those demographics’ lower incomes that pose barriers to education. For example, we know that just having a “black” name means a kid’s schoolwork is scored more harshly.* We know that black students are disciplined
far more severely for the same infractions, which has its own domino effect of follow-on academic consequences.
Ultimately, remember that nobody worth listening to is actually advocating for equality of outcomes for everyone, divorced from merit, effort, etc. But what many of us, myself included, consider highly important is equality of
opportunity. JHU itself, despite being literally one of the world’s most renowned medical schools, is actually situated right next to some of the very worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. I think it’s got to be unusual for a university of that caliber to be literally on the front lines of the urban decay directly caused by systemic racism, and I would assume that this informed a lot of JHU’s focus when studying socioeconomic issues and public health, since it’s not just some far-away abstract problem. Meanwhile, one of the JHU hospital campuses is right in the middle of what could diplomatically be called “low income white” neighborhoods. So that, too, is very close to home. Upshot being that if there’s a university that I would trust to take a fair, respectful approach to race and whatnot in admissions, financial aid, etc., it’d be Hopkins.
(Well, JHU and the university I went to, whose president has become nationally recognized for producing a far above average graduation rate for black students. Lots of universities have no trouble getting black students to enroll, but actually making sure they graduate can be more challenging, often due to issues at home. So this is a big deal. And that’s a university known primarily for hard sciences and engineering, rigorous academics, and for letting students get hands-on lab and research experience far beyond what’s typical. So definitely not by looking the other way and letting them slide by.)
*here in Switzerland, the same effect was observed towards ex-Yugoslav names. They did some kind of experiment where the same schoolwork was graded, sometimes under a Western European student name, sometimes with a Yugoslav sounding name, and the latter was graded appreciably lower on average. Similarly, they found that for any given level of academic success, kids with “-ic” names were more likely to be steered towards less-academic trades than equivalent performers with more Western European names. I find this interesting because the ex-Yugoslavs are just as white as Western Europeans (and whiter than Southern Europeans!), so skin color isn’t even the issue. Heck, if many people can discriminate even within their race, then many are definitely going to do it to people outside their race...
Discriminating on race alone would be a bad factor, Dave.
Yes, but that seems to be implied here.
What else does "traditionally underrepresented student group" mean? We all know what it means to today's world - white males need not apply. Asian's too most likely.
From reading the website, it sounds as though there are multiple financial aid solutions available (they say they don’t want money to be a barrier to participation for any qualified child). So if this one specific one doesn’t work, another one should.
An example scholarship should look at family income, whether members of the family previously had held a professional job or degree, and aptitude, though I would argue the bar for aptitude should be *fairly* reduced to account for the poorer position someone is in when applying to that scholarship (e.g., it'll take someone with A/B grades, instead of A+)
I wouldn't disagree with that. Personally I'd put a lot of value on a interview to see how keen they are. Some people just don't care about what they are doing and are just there because they can get it for free.
Absolutely. Given how prestigious JHU is, i suspect that they have tons of qualified applicants far in excess of available slots, so they can be selective, and would incorporate an interview.
I think you would find that you would get more under-represented groups if you did this - so there'd be more minorities and yes, poor white families too.
I'm pretty sure that if you are a poor white male, you don't meet the requirements of this scholarship. You don't even have a chance.
It could be. But since it seems there’s other financial aid types too (and that poor whites nonetheless do not share all the disadvantages that blacks and Native Americans have), I don’t think this is necessarily bad.
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