Given the tight association between income and race, I think it would almost inevitably look exactly like a clear racial preference of the sort that's illegal under common anti-discrimination language. This is the kind of thing that lands companies in court. Even if they win, it's a huge blow to PR and expensive.

Obviously you are allowed to look at income history in some manner, but a lot of the people concerned here won't have any significant income history. So what you're really doing is filtering by the economic status of a student's family. That's inevitably going to be fraught.

> you could specify that certain positions are intended as an aid program for lower-income applicants (as defined by an income range) and it would take a special kind of douchebag to apply for such a position if they weren't low-income, even without you verifying their income

If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.

Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.

> Given the tight association between income and race, I think it would almost inevitably look exactly like a clear racial preference of the sort that's illegal under common anti-discrimination language. This is the kind of thing that lands companies in court. Even if they win, it's a huge blow to PR and expensive.

Given the number of companies that blatantly use income to discriminate against underprivileged races and suffer zero consequences, I think your concern here is unfounded.

> If you're looking at telling what feels like a little white lie to get a big boost to the next five to seven decades of your life, how easy is it going to be for you to pass on the chance? You personally are clearly willing to take the hit for the greater cause of justice, but I do not have faith that millions of people each year who know they are competing for a limited number of opportunities will share the strength of your conviction.

That's not a "little white lie", and having a moral compass that you're willing to follow over money isn't some sort of abnormal thing.

Your opinion fits with a general anti-pattern in aid programs where people spend more money trying to verify eligibility for aid than they would spend letting a few outliers game the system, meanwhile excluding people who are legitimately eligible because the verification process presents barriers.

While I'm not willing to accuse you of either of these things, I will say that this view often comes from people who assume everyone is as amoral as they are, or who are actively trying to undermine the aid programs so they can defund them.

Ultimately your opinion makes no sense. You're worried that some of the candidates might lie and you'd hire high-income candidates when you meant to hire low-income candidates. So you just throw up your hands, and say nothing can be done, and then hire high-income candidates because that's what happens when you make no effort to do otherwise. You literally don't even have to spend more money to try to hire lower-income candidates. It begins to sound like you're just not interested in solving the problem.

> Ultimately, I think we're in a tough spot. At scale, there are enough people suffering that it's easy to find and tell stories about how bad it is for them. Yet solving these major hardships experienced by real people is far harder than tugging on heartstrings.

I'm not tugging on heartstrings. Nowhere have I mentioned any of the hardships which low-income people experience. I'm literally proposing solutions which you're shooting down with incredulity and this straw man argument.

If there's money to be made, Hacker News is all about solving hard problems. But suddenly when it involves taking some responsibility for a social problem, it's hard and that's it!