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By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should car

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look back on them with scorn.

davidwihl 8y ago
I really don't see it as Harvard enforcing racial quotas but rather looking at the whole student not just academics and standardized test scores. I applaud them for attempting to create a diverse and varied student body. Do you have a better alternative or would you select a student body just by GPA and standardized tests?
- ronyeh 8y ago
  Very easy. Admissions should be race blind and name blind. Everything else, including socioeconomic background, can be included in the admissions packet.
  - eganist 8y ago
    Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included. The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage. To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males. Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      > The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.
      - eganist 8y ago
        > Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator. (circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-... (Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed... (Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-in-higher-education-is-very-real/ http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i... The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting. And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration. If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure. TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.
        ekianjo 8y ago
        > with imposed inadequacies in family structure. If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies? Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-todays-black-problems-welfare-did/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...
- superioritycplx 8y ago
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/13/about-face-hospital-will-disperse-portraits-past-white-male-luminaries-put-focus-diversity/0pICgbpsw7QoHFFJQQEZOJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/13/about-face-hosp...
- gizmo686 8y ago
  So, you disagree with the allegation that the admissions office was biased against Asian-Americans in the personality test?
- albntomat0 8y ago
  That's not what the article said. The key point is that Asian applications scored well in "whole person" metrics when evaluated face to face, from teachers, high school counselors, and alumni interviews, but much worse when graded by Harvard admissions officers, on supposedly similar categories. All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated, as they are all trying to measure the same things.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated I wouldn't go so far. If your measures always correlate, why have separate measures? The point is when one measure disagrees with the others, it should say something meaningful. In this case, the disagreement appears to say "this student is Asian."
    - albntomat0 8y ago
      My understanding of it is that they are multiple samples of the same underlying distribution (the applicant's subjective characteristics). Multiple references who know/have interacted with the applicant attest to his/her personality strengths & weaknesses, and the average of all of them should result in an accurate measure of the person. If one of your "sensors" consistently measures lower than the grouping of the others, then you look into why that one is giving faulty readings, if it does so over a large sample size.
  - davidwihl 8y ago
    I read the (poorly written) article and disagree with it. I suggest you read Harvard's request for summary judgement (linked in the article) to see how carefully they weigh a multitude of factors.
- sremani 8y ago
  >> -- staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities each year -- under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities sounds more like, we do not have a hard quota but we have a wink-and-nod quota.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societally acceptable margin of error. The problem is that these two goals are in conflict for at least two reasons, one big and one small. The small reason is that a person’s most salient “performance” metrics might involve direct relationship to their role in a religious community, race-related organization, etc., such that it is impossible to treat it like a truly demographic-blind process. The big reason is that for whatever performance criteria you pick, like grades, test scores, essays, community involvement, etc., there is endemic and generational discrimination and privilege issues that can mean even if you truly did not want to make decisions based on race, religion, nationality, etc., you inadvertently did just by using proxies for societal scale discrimination or disadvantage in those categories. So in the end, you can see why a big organization or corporation is terrified and would rather use quotas to explicitly control the relative ratios and acceptance ratios on a category-by-category basis. I’m not trying to defend it. I think it’s a bad thing. But what do we do? It seems like a lose-lose. - If you ensure perfect decision blindness to race, religion, nationality, etc., you’ll end up admitting a cohort of students that greatly favors basically wealthy white people, because whatever proxies you do use will encode longterm privilege deeply enmeshed in them, way beyond whatever we are consciously aware of. - If you do explicitly consider race, religion, nationality, etc., to try to manually control rates of admission per each possible category, you can ensure the admitted cohort has the overall demographic statistics you want, but only by explicitly making race, religion, etc., as major driving factors that are explicitly and consciously weighted into the admission decision.
- acomjean 8y ago
  Harvard is the position of Ranking and admitting students. They have a fair number of very high scoring academic performers so they use some other metics. They use 4 criteria: Academic, extracurricular, personal, and athletic. Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/files/expert_report_-_2017-12-15_dr._david_card_expert_report_updated_confid_desigs_redacted.pdf https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file... Also for that report: "These data show that even if Harvard wanted to admit every student with elite academic credentials, it could not. Harvard admits roughly 1,800 domestic students each year, yet thousands of applicants have impeccable academic qualifications.9 For example, based on the statistics in Exhibit 2, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect GPA, it would need to reject at least 6,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants. Similarly, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect Math SAT score, it would need to reject nearly 2,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants." ( I didn't go the Harvard, but I do work there)
wallace_f 8y ago
>While well intentioned How long can elite bureaucrats play games of selecting winners and losers before we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt? Barriers to entry to competition will always be deleterious to results. Especially when those barriers to entry are based on financial incentives and racism. And let's be honest, anyone familiar is fully aware that at the very least, you can quite easily coast through Harvard if you don't care about your GPA or major. The discussion should be about 'what's stopping us from giving everyone open access and opportunity,' not 'we must reject thousands of qualified candidates, let's have a law suit to decide the correct number of Asians.'
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 8y ago
  I think that the issue that the “elite bureaucrats” are trying to wrestle with is what defines a University. Is it a factory for high GPA? A community? Some other thing? I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and your disposes bureaucrats have a point. My parents left the big city and moved to the country when I was in middle school. I went to a big public university. I’ve seen a few perspectives of these matters and I’ll tell you straight out that the culture in the melting pot urban environment of my youth was more vital and functional than the mostly white farm town or 90% south/east asian sciences programs that I attended in college. University should challenge your view of the world, and a community of rich suburbanites and tiger-mom kids isn’t where that will happen. We should attack the discrimination of employees based on university pedigree — that’s the nasty thing that enables bad behavior, and the thing turning colleges into the monsters is education/entertainment/branding machines that they have become.
Alex3917 8y ago
> By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society That's not really accurate. If you look at the Coleman report, the main study that was done in the run up to school desegregation and forced busing, it showed a bunch of negative impacts to changing the racial balance of institutions too quickly. That research was largely ignored, which in part lead to white flight, inner city gangs, and a bunch of other issues we still haven't really recovered from to this day. Contrast this to the integration of gays in the military, which was done over a few years rather than all at once and went much more smoothly -- you didn't see any major issues or society-wide backlash as a result. The point is that policies that ignore race often make racial issues more salient and pronounced as a result, rather than leading to a society where race isn't a factor or whatever. That's not to say that Harvard isn't doing anything wrong, but it's naive to assume that ignoring race is going to lead to some sort of post racial society. C.f.: http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html It's actually still one of the biggest studies ever done and probably that ever will be done, because it was conducted before they really understood the math behind representative samples and statistical significance, so it had way more participants than were actually needed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    > how did forced busing lead to inner-city gangs? White students (the vast majority) targeted the black students, who then formed gangs to protect themselves. There is a good multi-decade ethnography of the effects of various changes in public policy and society on one particular high school here: https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067496201X https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067... The high school is anonymized, but iirc it's somewhere in Syracuse, NY. Note that (at least afaik) that's not directly where our modern national-scale gangs come from, although White flight and the collapse of cities surely did contribute there also.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago
ekianjo 8y ago
> As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial It did always use to be like that. In the 70s and 80s there was a focus back on individuals regardless of their race, gender or origin. This trend to put quotas goes with the wave of political correctness that started pretty much in the early 90s.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  Affirmative Action started much earlier than that.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    At the government level, certainly - but in the realm of private enterprise this is way more recent.
- dogruck 8y ago
  Yes, but when they used purely merit-based standards, some groups consistently scored lower than other groups. That was deemed unacceptable, so discrimination was reintroduced to the process.
JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
Edit - Could I ask why I was downvoted? I'd like to know where I went wrong here. Forgive the question, but that is a general statement to a specific case, and I am having trouble seeing the clear path between your statement and the article. Can you elaborate? Are you taking the position that any and all attempts to shape admissions into universities based on race are misguided and regressive? The specific case here being discriminatory or not seems to be more related and less vague, you've generalised the article into a statement that is kind of hard to elaborate on. Regardless of whether racial quotas (hard or soft) are a good thing or not, I would certainly think it is an important data point, and at the very least demonstrates a weakness in society that merits attention. If one race is by far receiving admission over all others, then I do think there should be moved being made to ask why, and how to fix the problem. The specifics of this particular incidence seem more pertinent to this article rather than a statement on racial quotas as a whole.
- PakG1 8y ago
  I read an academic paper yesterday that read exactly like you. It's crazy hard to parse the words without my eyes glazing over. I fear universities try to teach students to sound clever and intellectual, not clear and comprehensible. I just had to vent because I have to slog through a large number of academic papers over the next few weeks and if they're all like this, I might weep from agony. Besides that, parsing your logic, I think you completely missed parent's point.
  - JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
    I apologise, but that is my genuine question, and my genuine thoughts. The way I wrote that is because on issues like this, people get quite charged one way or another, so I wanted to avoid anything personal and just hear the specifics. I'm definitely putting myself into the deep end on this stuff, so I want to hear more on the arguments from both sides - and also the specifics on this case because a lot of it slides past my understanding, and I'd like to know how off base I might be (or not be). I'm kind of sad I'm getting downvoted, and not really told why - I can't halt my opinions if I don't know why they're so against the grain (or against rules or something). What is the parent's point that I missed?
rayiner 8y ago
Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero. With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable. History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?” EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  >Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Says you. The whole concept of race is an aritifical construction, a barbaric vestige of the past that should be rightfully recognized for what it is, and cast off. >Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Even if society were totally race blind, some of that disparity would remain—it would be the legacy of when society wasn’t race blind. You can’t fix that injustice by ignoring race. Of course you can. The issue is economic equality, not race. In your paradigm, just making a whole bunch of white people a lot poorer would be a fine solution, as there would be no economic disparity between "races". We need to strive towards a society where everyone has economic security and prosperity regardless of the tone of their skin or any historical prejudices their ancestors may have suffered at any time. >I think history will remember “race blindness” with derision. I think history will remember those who clung to the barbaric vestiges of the past with derision and as an impediment to social progess. We need a society that aims to lift all people out of poverty and powerlessness, not just the ones whose ancestors were discriminated against. Clinging to the injustices of the past and codifying racial polarization into law is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to evolve as a society.
KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
How is discrimination against Asian-Americans well intentioned? It seems like your comment is referring to affirmative action, while the subject at hand is active discrimination against a minority.
- gourial 8y ago
  Because Harvard administrators think the upper echelons of society - which a Harvard education can lead someone to - should reflect the racial makeup of the broader society as a whole by default. While they must discriminate negatively against Asian Americans to achieve this goal, this discrimination is justified in their minds. I'm not defending it, just recognizing discrimination is not an end for them but a means to what they consider a just society.
  - kryogen1c 8y ago
    What a bold and interesting claim! Do you have any evidence for it? I have a hard time believing the admissions board would take such a stance for such a petty reason
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Why should it, if the input is skewed? Suppose administrating Harward requires high economics and management skills. Only say 10% if total population has those skills and 1% is black... How do you know if the input is biased? Easy, check it. Then fix the problem at the source if possible.
- brighteyes 8y ago
  Not sure what GP was referring to, but those issues are related. If Asian-Americans were 40% of Harvard (as they should be based on merit), instead of 17% (as they are now) then that would mean fewer spaces for everyone else. In particular, it would make achieving the goal of affirmative action - proportionate representation for black and Hispanic students - much harder.
curun1r 8y ago
We can only become "post-racial" by acknowledging the role that race plays in our society. Otherwise, too much systemic and subconscious discrimination will get swept under the rug. Too many people who claim to want to be blind to race are either naive or willfully wanting to perpetuate conditions that are not equal based on the long history of discrimination in our society. And Harvard's admissions aren't just about selecting the best collection of individual students. It's about selecting the best cohort of students. It's not just teachers that educate students, it's other classmates and a diversity of perspectives benefits all students. A good chef doesn't just choose all the most expensive ingredients, they try to balance flavors. Admissions departments should do the same, since their goal is to maximize the post-graduation success of the class they assemble, not to capture as much pre-admission achievement as possible. For me, college was a time when I broadened my perspectives greatly. I can remember a discussion on, somewhat ironically, affirmative action in admissions, in which an African-American student said he didn't support it. His reasoning, which was eye opening to me at the time, was that he had no way of knowing whether he actually belonged there and worried that people looked at the color of his skin and assumed he got into school because of his race and not his intelligence. Up until that moment, I'd always looked at affirmative action as benefiting minorities at the expense of more deserving students. But I'd never consider the emotional toll it took on minorities. And that moment also drove home the fact that I'd never have gotten to hear that perspective if he hadn't been in that discussion group and, therefore, my education had been improved by his presence. After I made those points, it seemed to hit him that his presence there was valuable to the rest of us and not just the more limited way he'd seen it before. It was a bit of a kumbaya moment and several students remarked that their views of affirmative action had become more nuanced and (pardon the pun) less black and white. The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective in a college class. Lumping Southeast Asians, East Asians and South Asians together, for example, feels wrong to me. Similarly, lumping American caucasians with Russians, Scandanavian or Spanish people feels equally reductionist. Within the overly-broad racial categories, there's a lot of diversity that isn't necessarily recognized.
- scabarott 8y ago
  >The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective... This. Logged in just to upvote your comment. The broad racial categories we currently use are just idiotic. It's like using nothing but a blunt mallet for every household repair job. Some more nuance in racial categorization or even just doing away with it altogether and using something else (place of origin, ethnicity, economic circumstance) would probably be a good thing as a whole.
eh78ssxv2f 8y ago
> As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal Can you explain what's your definition of "post-racial"? I have seen it defined at least 2 ways: (1) Past the period the anti-racism laws were enacted (2) The period when the effects of racism are over. There are many ways to measure it. One possible way is to check if races that were victims of racism have proportional representation in jobs.
jsoc815 8y ago
There are many moving parts to this case and the issue(s) it concerns. Highly recommend people read (about) the following book by Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion At Harvard, Yale, And Princeton. Would also recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission. Prof. Frank Wu's insight might also be useful here (from ~1:10 onward): https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8 https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8
IvyAdmisions 8y ago
I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college. Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably. The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian. In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.
- NE2z2T9qi 8y ago
  The fact that you feel so comfortable saying something that sounds so vicious and dismissive of many many years of students' hard work and aspirations is pretty disconcerting. But even if what you say is true, isn't it a university's mission to expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends? Any university worth its salt should be able to mold and guide a proven high-performer quite easily. Finally, if you actually believe what you say, then just admit race-blind and name blind. I'd bet a lot of money that many of your "boring Asians" wouldn't seem quite so boring to you if you didn't know their ethnic makeup.
  - IvyAdmisions 8y ago
    I didn't stick around past two years because I regularly had to make decisions based on assumptions that I outlined above and I just wasn't comfortable with it. It felt bad reading a pretty good application from a kid in Puerto Rico, but passing because "We'll see much better Puerto Ricans in the NYC schools when we review those". Those kids didn't know they were competing, but they definitely were. I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.

davidwihl 8y ago

I really don't see it as Harvard enforcing racial quotas but rather looking at the whole student not just academics and standardized test scores. I applaud them for attempting to create a diverse and varied student body. Do you have a better alternative or would you select a student body just by GPA and standardized tests?

ronyeh 8y ago
Very easy. Admissions should be race blind and name blind. Everything else, including socioeconomic background, can be included in the admissions packet.
- eganist 8y ago
  Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included. The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage. To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males. Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    > The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.
    - eganist 8y ago
      > Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator. (circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-... (Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed... (Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-in-higher-education-is-very-real/ http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i... The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting. And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration. If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure. TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.
      - ekianjo 8y ago
        > with imposed inadequacies in family structure. If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies? Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-todays-black-problems-welfare-did/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...
superioritycplx 8y ago
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/13/about-face-hospital-will-disperse-portraits-past-white-male-luminaries-put-focus-diversity/0pICgbpsw7QoHFFJQQEZOJ/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/13/about-face-hosp...
gizmo686 8y ago
So, you disagree with the allegation that the admissions office was biased against Asian-Americans in the personality test?
albntomat0 8y ago
That's not what the article said. The key point is that Asian applications scored well in "whole person" metrics when evaluated face to face, from teachers, high school counselors, and alumni interviews, but much worse when graded by Harvard admissions officers, on supposedly similar categories. All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated, as they are all trying to measure the same things.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated I wouldn't go so far. If your measures always correlate, why have separate measures? The point is when one measure disagrees with the others, it should say something meaningful. In this case, the disagreement appears to say "this student is Asian."
  - albntomat0 8y ago
    My understanding of it is that they are multiple samples of the same underlying distribution (the applicant's subjective characteristics). Multiple references who know/have interacted with the applicant attest to his/her personality strengths & weaknesses, and the average of all of them should result in an accurate measure of the person. If one of your "sensors" consistently measures lower than the grouping of the others, then you look into why that one is giving faulty readings, if it does so over a large sample size.
- davidwihl 8y ago
  I read the (poorly written) article and disagree with it. I suggest you read Harvard's request for summary judgement (linked in the article) to see how carefully they weigh a multitude of factors.
sremani 8y ago
>> -- staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities each year -- under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities sounds more like, we do not have a hard quota but we have a wink-and-nod quota.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societally acceptable margin of error. The problem is that these two goals are in conflict for at least two reasons, one big and one small. The small reason is that a person’s most salient “performance” metrics might involve direct relationship to their role in a religious community, race-related organization, etc., such that it is impossible to treat it like a truly demographic-blind process. The big reason is that for whatever performance criteria you pick, like grades, test scores, essays, community involvement, etc., there is endemic and generational discrimination and privilege issues that can mean even if you truly did not want to make decisions based on race, religion, nationality, etc., you inadvertently did just by using proxies for societal scale discrimination or disadvantage in those categories. So in the end, you can see why a big organization or corporation is terrified and would rather use quotas to explicitly control the relative ratios and acceptance ratios on a category-by-category basis. I’m not trying to defend it. I think it’s a bad thing. But what do we do? It seems like a lose-lose. - If you ensure perfect decision blindness to race, religion, nationality, etc., you’ll end up admitting a cohort of students that greatly favors basically wealthy white people, because whatever proxies you do use will encode longterm privilege deeply enmeshed in them, way beyond whatever we are consciously aware of. - If you do explicitly consider race, religion, nationality, etc., to try to manually control rates of admission per each possible category, you can ensure the admitted cohort has the overall demographic statistics you want, but only by explicitly making race, religion, etc., as major driving factors that are explicitly and consciously weighted into the admission decision.

acomjean 8y ago
Harvard is the position of Ranking and admitting students. They have a fair number of very high scoring academic performers so they use some other metics. They use 4 criteria: Academic, extracurricular, personal, and athletic. Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/files/expert_report_-_2017-12-15_dr._david_card_expert_report_updated_confid_desigs_redacted.pdf https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file... Also for that report: "These data show that even if Harvard wanted to admit every student with elite academic credentials, it could not. Harvard admits roughly 1,800 domestic students each year, yet thousands of applicants have impeccable academic qualifications.9 For example, based on the statistics in Exhibit 2, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect GPA, it would need to reject at least 6,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants. Similarly, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect Math SAT score, it would need to reject nearly 2,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants." ( I didn't go the Harvard, but I do work there)

wallace_f 8y ago

>While well intentioned How long can elite bureaucrats play games of selecting winners and losers before we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt? Barriers to entry to competition will always be deleterious to results. Especially when those barriers to entry are based on financial incentives and racism. And let's be honest, anyone familiar is fully aware that at the very least, you can quite easily coast through Harvard if you don't care about your GPA or major. The discussion should be about 'what's stopping us from giving everyone open access and opportunity,' not 'we must reject thousands of qualified candidates, let's have a law suit to decide the correct number of Asians.'

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Spooky23 8y ago
I think that the issue that the “elite bureaucrats” are trying to wrestle with is what defines a University. Is it a factory for high GPA? A community? Some other thing? I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and your disposes bureaucrats have a point. My parents left the big city and moved to the country when I was in middle school. I went to a big public university. I’ve seen a few perspectives of these matters and I’ll tell you straight out that the culture in the melting pot urban environment of my youth was more vital and functional than the mostly white farm town or 90% south/east asian sciences programs that I attended in college. University should challenge your view of the world, and a community of rich suburbanites and tiger-mom kids isn’t where that will happen. We should attack the discrimination of employees based on university pedigree — that’s the nasty thing that enables bad behavior, and the thing turning colleges into the monsters is education/entertainment/branding machines that they have become.

Alex3917 8y ago

> By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society That's not really accurate. If you look at the Coleman report, the main study that was done in the run up to school desegregation and forced busing, it showed a bunch of negative impacts to changing the racial balance of institutions too quickly. That research was largely ignored, which in part lead to white flight, inner city gangs, and a bunch of other issues we still haven't really recovered from to this day. Contrast this to the integration of gays in the military, which was done over a few years rather than all at once and went much more smoothly -- you didn't see any major issues or society-wide backlash as a result. The point is that policies that ignore race often make racial issues more salient and pronounced as a result, rather than leading to a society where race isn't a factor or whatever. That's not to say that Harvard isn't doing anything wrong, but it's naive to assume that ignoring race is going to lead to some sort of post racial society. C.f.: http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html It's actually still one of the biggest studies ever done and probably that ever will be done, because it was conducted before they really understood the math behind representative samples and statistical significance, so it had way more participants than were actually needed.

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- Alex3917 8y ago
  > how did forced busing lead to inner-city gangs? White students (the vast majority) targeted the black students, who then formed gangs to protect themselves. There is a good multi-decade ethnography of the effects of various changes in public policy and society on one particular high school here: https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067496201X https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067... The high school is anonymized, but iirc it's somewhere in Syracuse, NY. Note that (at least afaik) that's not directly where our modern national-scale gangs come from, although White flight and the collapse of cities surely did contribute there also.
adrianratnapala 8y ago

ekianjo 8y ago

> As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial It did always use to be like that. In the 70s and 80s there was a focus back on individuals regardless of their race, gender or origin. This trend to put quotas goes with the wave of political correctness that started pretty much in the early 90s.

skookumchuck 8y ago
Affirmative Action started much earlier than that.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  At the government level, certainly - but in the realm of private enterprise this is way more recent.
dogruck 8y ago
Yes, but when they used purely merit-based standards, some groups consistently scored lower than other groups. That was deemed unacceptable, so discrimination was reintroduced to the process.

JauntyHatAngle 8y ago

Edit - Could I ask why I was downvoted? I'd like to know where I went wrong here. Forgive the question, but that is a general statement to a specific case, and I am having trouble seeing the clear path between your statement and the article. Can you elaborate? Are you taking the position that any and all attempts to shape admissions into universities based on race are misguided and regressive? The specific case here being discriminatory or not seems to be more related and less vague, you've generalised the article into a statement that is kind of hard to elaborate on. Regardless of whether racial quotas (hard or soft) are a good thing or not, I would certainly think it is an important data point, and at the very least demonstrates a weakness in society that merits attention. If one race is by far receiving admission over all others, then I do think there should be moved being made to ask why, and how to fix the problem. The specifics of this particular incidence seem more pertinent to this article rather than a statement on racial quotas as a whole.

PakG1 8y ago
I read an academic paper yesterday that read exactly like you. It's crazy hard to parse the words without my eyes glazing over. I fear universities try to teach students to sound clever and intellectual, not clear and comprehensible. I just had to vent because I have to slog through a large number of academic papers over the next few weeks and if they're all like this, I might weep from agony. Besides that, parsing your logic, I think you completely missed parent's point.
- JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
  I apologise, but that is my genuine question, and my genuine thoughts. The way I wrote that is because on issues like this, people get quite charged one way or another, so I wanted to avoid anything personal and just hear the specifics. I'm definitely putting myself into the deep end on this stuff, so I want to hear more on the arguments from both sides - and also the specifics on this case because a lot of it slides past my understanding, and I'd like to know how off base I might be (or not be). I'm kind of sad I'm getting downvoted, and not really told why - I can't halt my opinions if I don't know why they're so against the grain (or against rules or something). What is the parent's point that I missed?

rayiner 8y ago

Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero. With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable. History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?” EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Says you. The whole concept of race is an aritifical construction, a barbaric vestige of the past that should be rightfully recognized for what it is, and cast off. >Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Even if society were totally race blind, some of that disparity would remain—it would be the legacy of when society wasn’t race blind. You can’t fix that injustice by ignoring race. Of course you can. The issue is economic equality, not race. In your paradigm, just making a whole bunch of white people a lot poorer would be a fine solution, as there would be no economic disparity between "races". We need to strive towards a society where everyone has economic security and prosperity regardless of the tone of their skin or any historical prejudices their ancestors may have suffered at any time. >I think history will remember “race blindness” with derision. I think history will remember those who clung to the barbaric vestiges of the past with derision and as an impediment to social progess. We need a society that aims to lift all people out of poverty and powerlessness, not just the ones whose ancestors were discriminated against. Clinging to the injustices of the past and codifying racial polarization into law is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to evolve as a society.

KKKKkkkk1 8y ago

How is discrimination against Asian-Americans well intentioned? It seems like your comment is referring to affirmative action, while the subject at hand is active discrimination against a minority.

gourial 8y ago
Because Harvard administrators think the upper echelons of society - which a Harvard education can lead someone to - should reflect the racial makeup of the broader society as a whole by default. While they must discriminate negatively against Asian Americans to achieve this goal, this discrimination is justified in their minds. I'm not defending it, just recognizing discrimination is not an end for them but a means to what they consider a just society.
- kryogen1c 8y ago
  What a bold and interesting claim! Do you have any evidence for it? I have a hard time believing the admissions board would take such a stance for such a petty reason
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- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Why should it, if the input is skewed? Suppose administrating Harward requires high economics and management skills. Only say 10% if total population has those skills and 1% is black... How do you know if the input is biased? Easy, check it. Then fix the problem at the source if possible.
brighteyes 8y ago
Not sure what GP was referring to, but those issues are related. If Asian-Americans were 40% of Harvard (as they should be based on merit), instead of 17% (as they are now) then that would mean fewer spaces for everyone else. In particular, it would make achieving the goal of affirmative action - proportionate representation for black and Hispanic students - much harder.

curun1r 8y ago

We can only become "post-racial" by acknowledging the role that race plays in our society. Otherwise, too much systemic and subconscious discrimination will get swept under the rug. Too many people who claim to want to be blind to race are either naive or willfully wanting to perpetuate conditions that are not equal based on the long history of discrimination in our society. And Harvard's admissions aren't just about selecting the best collection of individual students. It's about selecting the best cohort of students. It's not just teachers that educate students, it's other classmates and a diversity of perspectives benefits all students. A good chef doesn't just choose all the most expensive ingredients, they try to balance flavors. Admissions departments should do the same, since their goal is to maximize the post-graduation success of the class they assemble, not to capture as much pre-admission achievement as possible. For me, college was a time when I broadened my perspectives greatly. I can remember a discussion on, somewhat ironically, affirmative action in admissions, in which an African-American student said he didn't support it. His reasoning, which was eye opening to me at the time, was that he had no way of knowing whether he actually belonged there and worried that people looked at the color of his skin and assumed he got into school because of his race and not his intelligence. Up until that moment, I'd always looked at affirmative action as benefiting minorities at the expense of more deserving students. But I'd never consider the emotional toll it took on minorities. And that moment also drove home the fact that I'd never have gotten to hear that perspective if he hadn't been in that discussion group and, therefore, my education had been improved by his presence. After I made those points, it seemed to hit him that his presence there was valuable to the rest of us and not just the more limited way he'd seen it before. It was a bit of a kumbaya moment and several students remarked that their views of affirmative action had become more nuanced and (pardon the pun) less black and white. The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective in a college class. Lumping Southeast Asians, East Asians and South Asians together, for example, feels wrong to me. Similarly, lumping American caucasians with Russians, Scandanavian or Spanish people feels equally reductionist. Within the overly-broad racial categories, there's a lot of diversity that isn't necessarily recognized.

scabarott 8y ago
>The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective... This. Logged in just to upvote your comment. The broad racial categories we currently use are just idiotic. It's like using nothing but a blunt mallet for every household repair job. Some more nuance in racial categorization or even just doing away with it altogether and using something else (place of origin, ethnicity, economic circumstance) would probably be a good thing as a whole.

eh78ssxv2f 8y ago

> As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal Can you explain what's your definition of "post-racial"? I have seen it defined at least 2 ways: (1) Past the period the anti-racism laws were enacted (2) The period when the effects of racism are over. There are many ways to measure it. One possible way is to check if races that were victims of racism have proportional representation in jobs.

jsoc815 8y ago

There are many moving parts to this case and the issue(s) it concerns. Highly recommend people read (about) the following book by Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion At Harvard, Yale, And Princeton. Would also recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission. Prof. Frank Wu's insight might also be useful here (from ~1:10 onward): https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8 https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8

IvyAdmisions 8y ago

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college. Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably. The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian. In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.

NE2z2T9qi 8y ago
The fact that you feel so comfortable saying something that sounds so vicious and dismissive of many many years of students' hard work and aspirations is pretty disconcerting. But even if what you say is true, isn't it a university's mission to expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends? Any university worth its salt should be able to mold and guide a proven high-performer quite easily. Finally, if you actually believe what you say, then just admit race-blind and name blind. I'd bet a lot of money that many of your "boring Asians" wouldn't seem quite so boring to you if you didn't know their ethnic makeup.
- IvyAdmisions 8y ago
  I didn't stick around past two years because I regularly had to make decisions based on assumptions that I outlined above and I just wasn't comfortable with it. It felt bad reading a pretty good application from a kid in Puerto Rico, but passing because "We'll see much better Puerto Ricans in the NYC schools when we review those". Those kids didn't know they were competing, but they definitely were. I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.