5 ms·

Are Elite Colleges Biased Against Poor Whites?

15 points by cwan 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago
The book seems to say a fairly obvious point, which is: If you attempt to diversify by socioeconomic status (including race), those that are overrepresented be SES and race will appear to be penalized. This is due to the fact that admission to elite colleges is a zero sum game. There are X number of spots. If you somehow diversify to get Z more members of group A then there will be Z less spots to go around. Not really rocket science. To me the two big questions really are: 1) Are race and SES the right things to seek diversity, if anything at all? This is oft debated. 2) Is merit the right measuring stick for admission in general? This is rarely debated.
- eli 16y ago
  Merit as determined how? By SAT scores? Doesn't that give a bit of an advantage to people who could afford SAT prep classes?
  - ams6110 16y ago
    How much are SAT prep classes worth anymore? 30 years ago maybe, but today thanks to government requirements, kids go through yearly or twice-yearly standardized testing from elementary to high school. A significant amount of instructional time is spent on practice tests and strategies. How much more is a high school junior going to learn about these tests in a prep course?
    - eli 16y ago
      Sure, it's debatable. AFAIK, the only people who have paid for studies of the classes are the companies that produce the classes. And those studies, of course, show a significant improvement. There's no debating that SAT scores are highly correlated to income. And there's very little evidence that SAT scores are reliable predictors of college success.
- eli 16y ago
  But (at least the intent) is to penalize the overrepresented groups because they have already benefited from being born at the right place to the right parents at the right time. That's why there are they're overrepresented in application numbers. The point is to counteract bias already present in the application and evaluation process.
  - hga 16y ago
    This of course explains the great disparity in minority vs. poor white student admissions....
- yalurker 16y ago
  You've missed the point. The "fairly obvious point" would be that ALL whites are disadvantaged by providing a certain quota or advantage to non-white applicants, but that's not the point here. The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa. The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?
  - dgabriel 16y ago
    This isn't new, and has little to do with diversity programs. Frankly, it's not the unqualified poor minority students keeping you out, it's the unqualified wealthy legacy students. That group is almost certain to gain admittance to a prestigious school, while the minority group member has to fight just as hard as you did.
spamizbad 16y ago
This looks like a legit organization but it appears to be a project of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
- jerf 16y ago
  So, because it's a conservative thinktank talking about the issue, poor whites are not in fact being discriminated against? I wish I could cancel issues just by getting a partisan organization to talk about it! I mean, the point is simple math. If you have a certain number of people you are going to admit, and you give bonuses to certain groups, you are equally penalizing others. People shouldn't be permitted to pretend otherwise because that's disingenuous; if you're going to do that, do it forthrightly and honestly. The fact that it's a challenge to forthrightly and honestly say "We want to discriminate against poor white people" sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.
  - eli 16y ago
    No, it is not that simple. The question isn't "Does a poor white applicant have the exact same odds as a poor black applicant?" The question was, "Are we biased against poor whites?" If you believe, as many do, that there are fewer minority applicants because of institutional racism and therefore you decide to weight their applications higher is that biasing you selection process? Or is it cancelling out bias present elsewhere in the system?
    - chc 16y ago
      If A and B are two rivals that are the same modulo one factor, but A has worse odds than B, then we must conclude that the system has a bias against subjects with that particular set of properties. You may justify it as an attempt to cancel out some other bias, but it seems mathematically incontrovertible that a negative bias exists with a set of numbers like that.
  - spamizbad 16y ago
    > So, because it's a conservative thinktank talking about the issue, poor whites are not in fact being discriminated against? Actually, my beef is with Think Tanks in general - I don't care what ideology they ascribe to. I should have made that more clear. Think tanks exist to produce content that promotes the views of various Washington factions. They are arbiters of neither fact nor truth. They're political campaigns for ideologies, except instead of stump speeches you get blog posts and various "white paper" studies. It's not intellectually wholesome content, and skates a very fine line between propaganda and "informational content."
starkfist 16y ago
I'm not sure they do anymore, but elite colleges and elite prep schools used to have a hillbilly quota. In this sense they are biased against poor whites, and they know it, so they provide(d) an "affirmative action" program for some of them. My father was born and raised in a town of about 1000 in Montana and received full-ride scholarships to Philips Andover and Princeton, which he believed were mostly due to this quota. He turned both down because he was into football, and eventually received a full-ride scholarship to play college football.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I doubt they do any more. America's "elite" seem to have lost all respect for America's poor whites; they're "rednecks" and "white trash" who live in "trailers" or "McMansions" and shop at Wal-Mart and watch NASCAR and blah blah stereotype stereotype. If you're a poor non-white you're a victim of society, but if you're poor and white you're an ignorant hick. Poor whites are pretty much the only group upon whom it is socially acceptable to look down, nowadays.
  - dgabriel 16y ago
    That is not an accurate characterization of how the institutions themselves see poor whites. You may find some outspoken idiot students who hold these beliefs, but you'll find outspoken idiots who think lots of foolish things.
  - starkfist 16y ago
    I don't believe America's "elite" really ever had any "respect" for poor whites, per se. My family has a Scandinavian background and I went to a college which emphasized this cultural history, so we had to take a history classes about things like the plight of Norwegian immigrants in the 1860s. The elite english corporatists who employed poor scandinavian whites to build railroads and whatnot mostly viewed them as stupid but hard working laborers who chewed tobacco, drank too much and spoke a hilarious sing-song germanic language. I actually think this stereotype still exists a bit in places where there are still vestiges of WASP culture. When I lived in Boston my employers, who were local Brahmins always called me "hard working" which was a euphemism for "stupid, but gets the job done." (In contrast, they called their Harvard educated employees "clever") When it comes to receiving the hillbilly quota scholarship, my grandparents happened to be poor and living in the middle of nowhere but also had advanced degrees in mathematics and religion and were employed as schoolteachers.
eli 16y ago
I agree that class should be more important than race in making these decisions, but it's also true that, on average, poor minorities have more disadvantages and more to overcome than poor whites.
- tcskeptic 16y ago
  That is an interesting assertion, what is it based on? My experience working for a year in Appalachia (late 90s) tells me that rural poor whites have a pretty rough time of it, my experience tutoring in Cabrini Green (when it was still enormous, early 90s) taught me that poor minorities have it terrible as well. I have no idea how to compare the disadvantages each has to overcome, let alone quantify one set vs. another. I think the experience of the rural poor in this country is often overlooked compared to the inner city. They are in my experience both utterly pathological societies, I cannot imagine having the sustained discipline to escape either one.
  - eli 16y ago
    Like I said, I think it should be based on class primarily (if not exclusively) instead of race. But there is still racism in this country and it overwhelmingly is against minorities.
    - endtime 16y ago
      >But there is still racism in this country and it overwhelmingly is against minorities. The only racism I have ever experienced in the US has been from "minorities" (i.e. non-white people), usually directed toward white people.
      - dgabriel 16y ago
        That's because you are not a minority, and of course you don't see it on a daily basis. Out of curiosity, what sort of racism have you experienced?
        16y ago
codva 16y ago
The 4H example in the article was odd. If you are president of 4H and want to go into some sort of agricultural field, what they hell are you going to do at Harvard or Yale anyway? You aren't even applying to those schools. You are going to a large land grant university, where the top agricultural programs are located. In a sense the deans at these elite colleges are correct. The odds of the 4H President being happy at Harvard are probably quite low.
- yalurker 16y ago
  And why the heck would a kid in band go to Harvard? He should be getting in a van and going on tour. And why would a kid in the chess club go to Yale? He should be playing chess. And why would a kid on the baseball team... The typical over-achieving student is going to be in dozens of activities, none of which necessarily correlate with their future career. Agriculture might seem really weird or foreign to you, but for much of America being in FFA/4H/Eagle Scouts/whatever is just as normal as band, chess or sports.
  - william42 16y ago
    Actually, I seriously doubt a good baseball player is going to be going to an Ivy League school, for a simple two-word reason. Athletic scholarships. Ivy League schools have none.
  - codva 16y ago
    If the kid in band wants to be a touring rock musician, then he absolutely should get in the van and go on tour. Or maybe get a degree as a back up and then go on tour - but I probably wouldn't recommend spending Harvard money on that degree. My daughter is an officer in 4H - a horse club. I'm quite familiar with the organization. My point was that for those kids that fit the stereotype that the authors were picking on, high achievers with interests that don't fit the "elite" school stereotype, the admissions folks may have a point. The Harvards of the worlds may not be the best school for those kids. It's not necessarily evidence of bigotry.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  Unless it's this 4H club: http://www.air4h.org/about/ http://www.air4h.org/about/
sprout 16y ago
The thing is, there is a substantial bias that aids poor people in general, not in the admission process, but in the process of actually going to school. Even though the private colleges have price tags up in the $40k+ range, the average middle-class family will end up paying around $20k, and truly poor people generally pay as much if not less than they would for a state school. The admission process is a crapshoot, and I don't really see any reason to whine about arbitrary stuff like this. They have to rule some people out, it's mostly random once you get past a certain point, and even if it isn't, I don't think it's particularly harmful. Not everyone can get in.
theoden 16y ago
Not to mention the fact that the rich/urban whites admitted to elite colleges are actually mostly Jews: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Harvard.html http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Harvar... Also see this excellent article on the same subject: http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=2923 http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=2923 "When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."
- Mod_daniel 16y ago
  Really? A link to an article that opens with a quote from Kevin Macdonald? I knew that the comments for this one would probably be a minefield but this is absurd. Take the antisemitism elsewhere.

15 points by cwan 16y ago

The book seems to say a fairly obvious point, which is: If you attempt to diversify by socioeconomic status (including race), those that are overrepresented be SES and race will appear to be penalized. This is due to the fact that admission to elite colleges is a zero sum game. There are X number of spots. If you somehow diversify to get Z more members of group A then there will be Z less spots to go around. Not really rocket science. To me the two big questions really are: 1) Are race and SES the right things to seek diversity, if anything at all? This is oft debated. 2) Is merit the right measuring stick for admission in general? This is rarely debated.

eli 16y ago
Merit as determined how? By SAT scores? Doesn't that give a bit of an advantage to people who could afford SAT prep classes?
- ams6110 16y ago
  How much are SAT prep classes worth anymore? 30 years ago maybe, but today thanks to government requirements, kids go through yearly or twice-yearly standardized testing from elementary to high school. A significant amount of instructional time is spent on practice tests and strategies. How much more is a high school junior going to learn about these tests in a prep course?
  - eli 16y ago
    Sure, it's debatable. AFAIK, the only people who have paid for studies of the classes are the companies that produce the classes. And those studies, of course, show a significant improvement. There's no debating that SAT scores are highly correlated to income. And there's very little evidence that SAT scores are reliable predictors of college success.
eli 16y ago
But (at least the intent) is to penalize the overrepresented groups because they have already benefited from being born at the right place to the right parents at the right time. That's why there are they're overrepresented in application numbers. The point is to counteract bias already present in the application and evaluation process.
- hga 16y ago
  This of course explains the great disparity in minority vs. poor white student admissions....
yalurker 16y ago
You've missed the point. The "fairly obvious point" would be that ALL whites are disadvantaged by providing a certain quota or advantage to non-white applicants, but that's not the point here. The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa. The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?
- dgabriel 16y ago
  This isn't new, and has little to do with diversity programs. Frankly, it's not the unqualified poor minority students keeping you out, it's the unqualified wealthy legacy students. That group is almost certain to gain admittance to a prestigious school, while the minority group member has to fight just as hard as you did.

spamizbad 16y ago

This looks like a legit organization but it appears to be a project of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

jerf 16y ago
So, because it's a conservative thinktank talking about the issue, poor whites are not in fact being discriminated against? I wish I could cancel issues just by getting a partisan organization to talk about it! I mean, the point is simple math. If you have a certain number of people you are going to admit, and you give bonuses to certain groups, you are equally penalizing others. People shouldn't be permitted to pretend otherwise because that's disingenuous; if you're going to do that, do it forthrightly and honestly. The fact that it's a challenge to forthrightly and honestly say "We want to discriminate against poor white people" sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.
- eli 16y ago
  No, it is not that simple. The question isn't "Does a poor white applicant have the exact same odds as a poor black applicant?" The question was, "Are we biased against poor whites?" If you believe, as many do, that there are fewer minority applicants because of institutional racism and therefore you decide to weight their applications higher is that biasing you selection process? Or is it cancelling out bias present elsewhere in the system?
  - chc 16y ago
    If A and B are two rivals that are the same modulo one factor, but A has worse odds than B, then we must conclude that the system has a bias against subjects with that particular set of properties. You may justify it as an attempt to cancel out some other bias, but it seems mathematically incontrovertible that a negative bias exists with a set of numbers like that.
- spamizbad 16y ago
  > So, because it's a conservative thinktank talking about the issue, poor whites are not in fact being discriminated against? Actually, my beef is with Think Tanks in general - I don't care what ideology they ascribe to. I should have made that more clear. Think tanks exist to produce content that promotes the views of various Washington factions. They are arbiters of neither fact nor truth. They're political campaigns for ideologies, except instead of stump speeches you get blog posts and various "white paper" studies. It's not intellectually wholesome content, and skates a very fine line between propaganda and "informational content."

starkfist 16y ago

I'm not sure they do anymore, but elite colleges and elite prep schools used to have a hillbilly quota. In this sense they are biased against poor whites, and they know it, so they provide(d) an "affirmative action" program for some of them. My father was born and raised in a town of about 1000 in Montana and received full-ride scholarships to Philips Andover and Princeton, which he believed were mostly due to this quota. He turned both down because he was into football, and eventually received a full-ride scholarship to play college football.

hugh3 16y ago
I doubt they do any more. America's "elite" seem to have lost all respect for America's poor whites; they're "rednecks" and "white trash" who live in "trailers" or "McMansions" and shop at Wal-Mart and watch NASCAR and blah blah stereotype stereotype. If you're a poor non-white you're a victim of society, but if you're poor and white you're an ignorant hick. Poor whites are pretty much the only group upon whom it is socially acceptable to look down, nowadays.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  That is not an accurate characterization of how the institutions themselves see poor whites. You may find some outspoken idiot students who hold these beliefs, but you'll find outspoken idiots who think lots of foolish things.
- starkfist 16y ago
  I don't believe America's "elite" really ever had any "respect" for poor whites, per se. My family has a Scandinavian background and I went to a college which emphasized this cultural history, so we had to take a history classes about things like the plight of Norwegian immigrants in the 1860s. The elite english corporatists who employed poor scandinavian whites to build railroads and whatnot mostly viewed them as stupid but hard working laborers who chewed tobacco, drank too much and spoke a hilarious sing-song germanic language. I actually think this stereotype still exists a bit in places where there are still vestiges of WASP culture. When I lived in Boston my employers, who were local Brahmins always called me "hard working" which was a euphemism for "stupid, but gets the job done." (In contrast, they called their Harvard educated employees "clever") When it comes to receiving the hillbilly quota scholarship, my grandparents happened to be poor and living in the middle of nowhere but also had advanced degrees in mathematics and religion and were employed as schoolteachers.

eli 16y ago

I agree that class should be more important than race in making these decisions, but it's also true that, on average, poor minorities have more disadvantages and more to overcome than poor whites.

tcskeptic 16y ago
That is an interesting assertion, what is it based on? My experience working for a year in Appalachia (late 90s) tells me that rural poor whites have a pretty rough time of it, my experience tutoring in Cabrini Green (when it was still enormous, early 90s) taught me that poor minorities have it terrible as well. I have no idea how to compare the disadvantages each has to overcome, let alone quantify one set vs. another. I think the experience of the rural poor in this country is often overlooked compared to the inner city. They are in my experience both utterly pathological societies, I cannot imagine having the sustained discipline to escape either one.
- eli 16y ago
  Like I said, I think it should be based on class primarily (if not exclusively) instead of race. But there is still racism in this country and it overwhelmingly is against minorities.
  - endtime 16y ago
    >But there is still racism in this country and it overwhelmingly is against minorities. The only racism I have ever experienced in the US has been from "minorities" (i.e. non-white people), usually directed toward white people.
    - dgabriel 16y ago
      That's because you are not a minority, and of course you don't see it on a daily basis. Out of curiosity, what sort of racism have you experienced?
      - 16y ago

codva 16y ago

The 4H example in the article was odd. If you are president of 4H and want to go into some sort of agricultural field, what they hell are you going to do at Harvard or Yale anyway? You aren't even applying to those schools. You are going to a large land grant university, where the top agricultural programs are located. In a sense the deans at these elite colleges are correct. The odds of the 4H President being happy at Harvard are probably quite low.

yalurker 16y ago
And why the heck would a kid in band go to Harvard? He should be getting in a van and going on tour. And why would a kid in the chess club go to Yale? He should be playing chess. And why would a kid on the baseball team... The typical over-achieving student is going to be in dozens of activities, none of which necessarily correlate with their future career. Agriculture might seem really weird or foreign to you, but for much of America being in FFA/4H/Eagle Scouts/whatever is just as normal as band, chess or sports.
- william42 16y ago
  Actually, I seriously doubt a good baseball player is going to be going to an Ivy League school, for a simple two-word reason. Athletic scholarships. Ivy League schools have none.
- codva 16y ago
  If the kid in band wants to be a touring rock musician, then he absolutely should get in the van and go on tour. Or maybe get a degree as a back up and then go on tour - but I probably wouldn't recommend spending Harvard money on that degree. My daughter is an officer in 4H - a horse club. I'm quite familiar with the organization. My point was that for those kids that fit the stereotype that the authors were picking on, high achievers with interests that don't fit the "elite" school stereotype, the admissions folks may have a point. The Harvards of the worlds may not be the best school for those kids. It's not necessarily evidence of bigotry.
dgabriel 16y ago
Unless it's this 4H club: http://www.air4h.org/about/ http://www.air4h.org/about/

sprout 16y ago

The thing is, there is a substantial bias that aids poor people in general, not in the admission process, but in the process of actually going to school. Even though the private colleges have price tags up in the $40k+ range, the average middle-class family will end up paying around $20k, and truly poor people generally pay as much if not less than they would for a state school. The admission process is a crapshoot, and I don't really see any reason to whine about arbitrary stuff like this. They have to rule some people out, it's mostly random once you get past a certain point, and even if it isn't, I don't think it's particularly harmful. Not everyone can get in.

theoden 16y ago

Not to mention the fact that the rich/urban whites admitted to elite colleges are actually mostly Jews: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Harvard.html http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Connelly-Harvar... Also see this excellent article on the same subject: http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=2923 http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=2923 "When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."

Mod_daniel 16y ago
Really? A link to an article that opens with a quote from Kevin Macdonald? I knew that the comments for this one would probably be a minefield but this is absurd. Take the antisemitism elsewhere.