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‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

139 points by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Molaxx 8y ago
I don't get why they don't use lotteries. Have a grade cutoff, then choose at random. You should get unbiased results. The remaining bias is grade bias which would reflect poor schools and their corellation with ethnicity. Which will give a clearer startegy for intervention.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  This is the solution. It also solves the problem that all your candidates are cluster so tightly together by grade score that it is impossible to separate them by any ranking process. Just set the threshold to enter the lottery and go from there.
frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
>Harvard says it also considers “tips,” or admissions advantages, for some applicants. The plaintiffs say the college gives tips to five groups: racial and ethnic minorities; legacies, or the children of Harvard or Radcliffe alumni; relatives of a Harvard donor; the children of staff or faculty members; and recruited athletes. I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors. To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. If asians are underrepresented among donors and legacies it would explain the discrepancy pretty well.
- throwa_way_ 8y ago
  >I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors. Why can't they do that. Of course they can do that, most Universities in the US do that. >To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. No, they are specifically discriminated against, read the linked article.
  - rspeer 8y ago
    I recognize that in a literal sense you can claim to support diversity and also have legacy admissions. What GP meant is that you shouldn't, because it makes the claim a lie. Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity.
    - tzs 8y ago
      For the sake of simplicity, let's assume all legacy admissions are white males, and that the diversity they claim to promote is racial and gender diversity. > Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity That's only true if the number of white males that would be admitted in a fully diverse class is not large enough to accommodate all the legacy admissions. I suspect that this is not the case, and so legacy admissions are essentially orthogonal to diversity considerations. Dropping the assumptions stated in the first paragraph, the above argument remains correct as long as each category considered for diversity analysis has more admissions than the number of legacy admissions in that category.
      - rspeer 8y ago
        I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children. Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people. This is classism, in particular. Of course class is correlated with race, but even if it weren't, this would be fucked up.
        tzs 8y ago
        Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those. To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others. About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are overwhelmingly white. My point was that Harvard can admit those 290 legacy students without affecting its racial diversity easily, because fully diverse Harvard would have 613 non-Hispanic white students per 1000 students. They could arrange that every legacy admission who would not have made it but for being legacy displaces another non-Hispanic white student, so had no affect on racial diversity. I would not be at all surprised if among the white applicants Harvard has enough from each income level that they could even make it so each legacy admission that would not have made it if not legacy is displacing a non-legacy who is white and in the same income range.
- darawk 8y ago
  > To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. Those are equivalent things. Whether you frame it as boosting the scores of every other group, or cutting the scores of Asians, the net effect is the same, and should be considered the same activity.
- SenseiMaster 8y ago
  > To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment During "lopping" time, they use ethnic stats and ethnic profile to downgrade people from "admit" to "waitlist" or "deny", so it can be characterized as "negative treatment". > As the admissions process winds down, the dean and the director of admissions review the pool of tentatively admitted students and decide how many need to be “lopped,” by having their status changed from “admit” to “waitlist” or “deny,” the court papers say.
- duxup 8y ago
  I think you can say that. It just depends on how the numbers turns out, but then we also have to agree on what the right "diversity numbers" are.
- privateSFacct 8y ago
  This was part of the study, and even controlling for legacy and athletes, Asians still underrepresented. Harvard absolutely INSISTS it doesn't discriminate against Asians though - their president came out with a pretty strong statement about correcting the record.
- Veelox 8y ago
  >To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. I am going to make some assumptions and I apologise if they are wrong. I am going to assume that you think racism is wrong. I think that includes structural rasism. That is, policies, procedures, and practices by institutions that systematically disadvantage on race over another. From you above comment, it seems like you believe other racial minorities get an excplicit tip as a matter of policy. It also seems like you believe whites get an implicit tip due to the due to the process of how legacies work. Yet, you seemed to stop a step short of calling this structural rasism against Asian Americans. Is there something I am missing for why you didn't take that last step?
  - kjeetgill 8y ago
    This is a delicate issue so I'm afraid your fantastic post won't receive a response from anyone who didn't agree with you 100%. I felt I should chime in. Why that last step is a little different for some of us. Truthfully, I don't know. 'Structural Racism' feels different that regular direct explicit racism. I don't feel as confident making blanket statements about it at least. I can certainly think of structurally racist scenarios that feel totally and completely wrong. Casting in movies and entertainment for instance. But other times it's less clear. At the very least there's a point where a desire to be charitable and give someone the benefit of the doubt starts to fade into the picture. I don't wish to speak to the exact matter at hand. I'm catching up on the story still.
  - sadamznintern 8y ago
    Structural racism for African Americans is longstanding issues of disproportionate policing, a massive wealth gap as a result of block busting and red lining, and the educational disadvantages that come with it. If the only thing Asians have against them is having to go to Cornell or a state school instead of Harvard I think those complaining should rethink their priorities.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      Asian people have been discriminated against and oppressed plenty throughout (recent) history, just because the Asians in the US are doing well doesn't mean there is no discrimination - we're just seeing that minorities who come here through skilled immigration pathways tend to be more successful, but don't worry, we're cracking down on that now and you'll see the reversion to the mean occuring in Asian kids soon enough.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Regardless of race, giving preferential treatment to relatives of donors seems like pure cronyism. If a small town government does things like that, we roll our eyes and lament backwards rural towns.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  If anything, it would make race a "we better not talk about this" smokescreen of anger and eggshell stepping to act as a moat around the real discussion.
kart23 8y ago
College admissions aren't about sat scores anymore. I graduated from high school this year, and know 2 people going to Harvard. It doesn't matter if you get perfect sat scores, it matters about what you do outside of school, and whether you spend all your time studying or actually doing something that will contribute to society. Numbers just aren't enough to admit students by, since if they admitted everyone with perfect scores, they would have way too many students.
- pc86 8y ago
  Apparently it also matters where your parents went to school, what your father or mother does for a living, and what color your skin is.
- chevman 8y ago
  I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.
  - throwa_way_ 8y ago
    Except for if you read the article you would see that it's not arbitrary, but based on racial discrimination.
    - cycrutchfield 8y ago
      That has not been proven at all.
    - darwin142 8y ago
      So you are saying Affirmative Action should be illegal?
- throwa_way_ 8y ago
  Race is a big factor.
throwawayanon12 8y ago
Would love to see a concerted movement to arrange a boycott of Harvard by Asian students - having a graduating class without any Asian students would send a very a strong symbolic message.
- repsilat 8y ago
  If they received substantially fewer Asian applicants they would probably adjust the thresholds to keep the balance how they want it. It would be nearly impossible for a boycott to be so effective they could not get a "Harvard-balanced" class, whatever that means. This lawsuit already sends a pretty strong symbolic message, though (in addition to whatever practical effect it might have.)
- raincom 8y ago
  It won't happen. Imagine there are 3800 Asians, with perfect SAT, validictorians, excellence, etc. You can make 95% people boycott, the other Asian applicants will apply even if they sign to the pledge. It is better for professors of Asian descent to leave, and not join, Harvard. That will send a better message.
privateSFacct 8y ago
The stats on how they scored asians were pretty incredible. Asian personalities were only 2 or better at the top decile (top 10%), african-americans scored 2 or better 8 deciles in (top 80%, only the worst 20% didn't score 2 or better). Personalities were scored on: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly. This was a key scoring measure because it was the one area Asians got crushed in (and was very subjective). They actually used I think a similar subjective scoring tool in the past to keep out other groups. Interesting article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...
- paidleaf 8y ago
  > Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly. Considering asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority group in the US, it does seem odd. Also considering harvard alumni interviewers generally rated asian personalities just as high as everyone else's, I wonder why there is such a divergence from american culture at large/alumni and admissions' officers? I wonder if there are transcripts or video recordings of interviews and a methodology these admissions officers used. It would be great if harvard released all data ( minus identifying info ) and we could look through the dataset.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    > asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority By who? What data is there? A stereotype is not evidence; repetition doesn't make it more likely. Nor can we infer from a stereotype - or even real data about assimilation - something about the personalities of individuals.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      When people complain about diversity in Silicon Valley, Asians don't count.
speedplane 8y ago
The article says that there are only 1600 spots at Harvard, and of the applicants "3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, and more than 8,000 had straight A’s" (doesn't say how many had all three). Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this) or expand the university and accept more students and make the school larger. It boggles my mind why they don't expand the school. The US population and GDP increase, the demand for education and exemplary leaders in society increase, Harvard's endowment and prestige increase, yet their class size remains the same. I'd say they have an obligation to increase class size.
- Veelox 8y ago
  >Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. I think you are missing the point OP is making. The top 80% of blacks score well on the subjective stuff. Only the top 10% of Asians score that well. With that, there are a few possibilities. 1) Blacks are more interesting than Asians. 2) Personality is uncorrelated with test scores. 3) Harvard is purposely scoring to change the racial split of the class. Of those, I think 3 is most likely. I am open to discussion but I think Harvard is to smart to be doing it on accident and the racial split is to politically acceptable to be by chance.
  - speedplane 8y ago
    I wish you were right, because if the issue was just a few racist admissions officers, then the solution would be simple: fire them and get non-racist ones, problem solved. However, there is a fourth, more likely explanation: 4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students. From the article, it seems that Harvard focuses on establishing student diversity that roughly tracks the US population, bringing in big money donors, bringing in legacy students, and finding leaders that have traits similar to other successful leaders in the past. None of these values have the intent to reduce Asian admission, but that is their undeniable effect. It means that Asian students don't face a single racist admissions officer, they face a facially race-neutral system that has a discriminatory effect. To fix it, you can't just fire a few people, you need to make much larger changes. My original point was that the only fair and effective solution would need to require a larger class size.
Veelox 8y ago
I think the part of the issue that bothers me most is how much of a double standard there is between what counts as racism against African Americans and rasism against Asian Americans. Objectively, if you have two identical applications to Harvard except one is labeled black and the other is labeled Asian, the black one has a higher chance of success. They do the same thing with fake job applications with white names and black names. When whites get called back at higher rates that rasism. Yet when it's Harvard doing it to Asians, that's okay. This just rubs me the wrong way. Edit: this post has 30+ votes at 4 hours old and went from the front page to not the top 3 in less than 30 minutes. Looks like mods nuked it.
- dang 8y ago
  Mods didn't. Users flagged it.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Thank you for the info.
- gaius 8y ago
  As a non-white who doesn’t fit into any of the pre-defined buckets, race-specific programmes have always bothered me too. I never play the race card to gain advantage but hypothetically if I’m as generally discriminated against as a member of group X but there’s a quota for X that I’m not eligible for then I’ve been double-discriminated against.
  - cowpewter 8y ago
    I've never thought about it that way, but as a mixed-race white/asian, I wonder if including that information rather than just letting them assume "white" from my name actually hurt me rather than helped me when I applied to (and did not get accepted to) the ivy league 20 years ago.
    - gaius 8y ago
speedplane 8y ago
I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental problem was solved, many of these others would melt away on their own.
- strstr 8y ago
  Z-list probably isn't illegal (despite it being pretty disheartening).
  - speedplane 8y ago
    Of course it isn't illegal. Folks with money and power create the rules, and obviously one of the first rules you'd make is that those with money and power can use that money and power to get what they want. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right or it should be. And you could potentially make a case that it's illegal, even though it's flimsy and you'd probably would lose. Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit. That's false advertising, and potentially even fraud. I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree. Again, they'd almost certainly lose, but my point is that there are existing legal hooks into this bad behavior.
    - chii 8y ago
      > Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit. they didn't lie - they do pick the best and brightest. But they don't claim that's the _only_ people they pick.
    - drb91 8y ago
      > I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree. In my experience the social access of the Z-list is the primary draw of an “ivy-league” education.
xkcdefgh 8y ago
Why is SAT so ridiculously easy that thousands have perfect score?
- chii 8y ago
  It's a metric you can actively improve on by studying. Ala, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- tzs 8y ago
  It's not. A perfect score puts you in the top 0.0348% (2014 test). That about 1 in 2900. It only seems like a lot because millions take the test.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  There's a lot of kids taking it, and it needs to be able to differentiate kids in a country with very wide ranging abilities. If you made it harder there'd probably be a whole load of people bunched up at the bottom.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Okay serious question, which has the larger negative societal impact - making it harder to differentiate between the top tenth of a percent of college applicants, or making it harder to differentiate between the bottom ten percent of college applicants?
- verylongname 8y ago
  It was "recentered" in 1995. The right side of the distribution was essentially truncated. A 1600 on the pre-1995 SAT was quite an accomplishment (I don't have data at my fingertips, but in most years, fewer than 10 students achieved a perfect score of 1600 and only a few dozen scored 1550+). By contrast, several hundred students a year scored 1600 on the recentered test. The scoring system has been changed several times since 1995 and I have no idea how the current system compares to the pre-1995 system or the recentered test given for some years afterward. Many, including myself, suspect that one of the motivations for the recentering was to give colleges cover for their admissions decisions. It is pretty hard to turn down students who get 1600s when only 7 or 8 students a year do so. It is easier to "shape" a class without provoking criticism when a large percentage of students score 1500+.
lordnacho 8y ago
This is terrible to read about from a European perspective. - It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives. If 50 or 60 rich kids a year out of a pool of what? A few hundred people rich enough to be z-listed? Maybe not even that. Versus the busload of ordinary kids who need to slip through the eye of the needle. - Athletes I guess are a special American thing where universities are involved. Maybe not Harvard, but some of the others will let people attend for free. Which isn't even then terribly fair, because they make a lot of money off those kids, possibly a lot more per person than a comparable athlete would get in the free market. That's if their sport is one of the popular ones. - You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article. At the end of this, I still don't quite understand how you communicate all this stuff in your admissions form. Do they have a drop-down for ethnicity? If they did, I would game it, knowing that they seem to like Vietnamese people more than Chinese. And where do you say "my name is Smith, but please check the donation register for ...". I've got a hard luck story as well, is that what the essay is for?
- sadamznintern 8y ago
  >You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article. None of the folks that I think exemplify the American dream that I know personally went to Harvard or even an elite school.
- 1337biz 8y ago
  Coming from a European perspective as well, I do understand the idea behind Harvard's admission process. They want to mold a group of people that are coming from the money, brain, physical and societal elite. It is not a school, it is an elite network generating institution. The academic aspect is their legitimacy generating element. If you take this viewpoint, everything they do makes sense.
lozenge 8y ago
'Yet another was “bright & busy” but it was “a bit difficult to see what would hold him in during a lop.”' 'admissions officers then fine-tune the final class using a form that lists five pieces of information about the applicant; they give an example of a form that has spaces for the applicant’s name, LIN (lineage), ETH (ethnicity), ATH (athlete), and HFAI (financial aid).' It's undeniably racism. I wonder what the outcome would be if one or two Ivies stick their necks out and institute race blind, legacy blind admissions.
- verylongname 8y ago
  See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    There may be some geographic bias there because California’s Asian population is much higher than the US as a whole.
    - pc86 8y ago
      I would be interested to see if there is any bias toward state of residence for a school as widely known and respected as CalTech.
      - extra88 8y ago
        Of course there is. Harvard has a disproportionate number of students from New England, and more specifically Massachusetts, as well. Plenty of smart kids don't want to be too far from home or travel a long way to an unfamiliar environment. As for CalTech's rep, I'm just one person on the East Coast and wasn't a Tech-type student but I forget it exists all the time. If someone asked me to name a West Coast school to compare to MIT, "Stanford" would be all I could think of.
  - 8y ago
aiyodev 8y ago
It’s worth reminding everyone that Harvard is the reason there’s any discrimination in the admissions process. Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone. But Harvard wanted to covertly discriminate against Jewish applicants. The reason why you have to write essays about your extracurricular activities, for example, is because a Jewish applicant back then typically wouldn’t have any. It’s also when legacy admissions began for the same reason. Why the hell are we still allowing this? It should be grades and test scores only.
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  Hell no. Optimizing solely for grades and test scores will get you rote-memorizing robots with zero personal skills and minimal potential. A completely merit-based, objective admissions system simply does not exist.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    You are making a reasonable, but baseless claim. You are saying that 4.0 GPA students with 1600 SAT scores have zero personal skills, are robots, and have minimal potential. We know though, that SAT is a one of the best available predictors of outcome.
    - cycrutchfield 8y ago
      I am saying that grades and SATs are just two factors in predicting potential. Saying that we should only use those two factors when we have a wealth of other factors to complement them is sheer naivety.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    Lumping test scores and grades together seems to obscure that one was intended to fix issues with the other. I think that a purpose of the SAT was to combat the undesirable effects of judging people solely on grades. It's meant to be a measure of aptitude, exactly because your grades can reflect how good your school was, how much you memorized, your economic/social class, grade inflation, and so on. People who do well on the SAT (or at least who did on the old SAT back in the early 90s and before) did not necessarily study at all for it.
IvyAdmisions 8y ago
From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med. Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots. What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now? So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class. This cohort of students happens to be disproportionately asian. No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  We don't discriminate against asian people, just their problematic culture.
  - IvyAdmisions 8y ago
    Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that history will judge this line of argument poorly.
vinceguidry 8y ago
This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube describe these political methods. Randomness seems to have fallen out of favor ever since, I think it might have died with the Romans. But imagine Harvard actually making public policy that they're just going to randomly select the the top applicants. They still won't be able to shape the demographics the way they want. Ensuring that they get to define the concept of a diverse student body is so important for them that they're fighting tooth and nail to preserve it. I stated the last time this came up that this was an existential issue for Harvard and the whole concept of the Ivy League. But now I see it as a public policy and individual rights issue. Should Harvard have the right to shape their student body demographically? And if not, what does that make Harvard? What distinguishes the Ivy League from other universities? Obviously Harvard is of the opinion that this is a bet-the-company moment for them.
- majos 8y ago
  Interestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    My intuitive grasp of the issue is that the game eventually resolves down to virtual randomness as candidacy features become indistinguishable. The military phrase at hand is 'damning with faint praise'. One word in one performance report can put you out to pasture. Literally everybody knows this so anything even the slightest bit off glares at you like a giant grinning rictus on a 40 foot movie screen. "who did he piss off to get 'excellent' instead of 'superlative'?" In an environment where literally everyone involved is so sensitive to noticeable features, transparency becomes opaqueness and all decisions are based on the whims of the oligarchy. When all the whims are satisfied, that's where the process becomes indistinguishable from random. There's no criteria left with which to make a decision, let's just pay lip service to merit while just picking names out of a hat to keep them all honest. Everywhere else where this dynamic manifests, selection processes are not even half as public as those of the top educational facilities in the world's most powerful country. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, after demographic shaping wishes are satisfied, Harvard's selection criteria for the remaining candidates can't be meaningfully distinguished from random.
fmajid 8y ago
They just repurposed a system that was designed in the 1930s to keep Jews out, to keeping Asians out. The smoking gun is how the admissions committee's ratings for “personality” differ so much from alumni volunteer interviewers.
- IvyAdmisions 8y ago
  Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.
  - betterunix2 8y ago
    ...Jews and Asians have no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle?
  - grandinj 8y ago
    What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps? In the case of Jews, they can hardly be called unambitious given the number of writers and scientists they produced. In the case of Asians, ambitious engineering, scientific and business persons do not seem to be short supply.
    - paidleaf 8y ago
      > What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps? Look at the quasi racist stuff this guy wrote. He obviously doesn't like asians for some reason. "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 guy claims to have been an admissions officer at an ivy league school. Doesn't seem likely.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        I think he might have fit in at Dartmouth?
deleted 8y ago
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jessaustin 8y ago
You don’t have son of a police officer. Well that's an obnoxious qualification to help one into a selective school. In future I won't be as concerned with mundane corruption like the free coffee and donuts in any quick-trip they feel like shaking down...
bytematic 8y ago
When will people understand that “We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.” is a good thing. This always gets me a negative reaction, people want college admissions to be straight top scorers, job prospects to be picked as the people with the top qualifications. I don't get it and it doesn't benefit anyone.
- kough 8y ago
  Most people understand this. The lawyer bringing the suit has chosen to do so in order to help abolish affirmative action.
- asdfologist 8y ago
  That's the same argument these colleges used to keep Jews out in the 30's. Now they're saying Asians have bad personalities so they shouldn't be admitted. This sounds ethical to you?
- wang_li 8y ago
  In practice your statement reduces to holding up a color wheel and making sure the special colors are given a benefit in the selections process and unfavored colors receive a disadvantage in the process.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I think the plaintiffs don’t misunderstand this claim, they just think it’s cover for “we don’t want that many Asians” in this case.
- ghein 8y ago
  It's because the language and approach with respect to Asians (and specifically Chinese, Korean, Japanese backgrounds) echoes the explicitly racist efforts of top universities, especially Harvard, in the early 20th Century against Jews. Holistic applications in the Ivy League were created solely to keep the Jewish population to a manageable level. This for people who relatively recently experienced severe racist treatment by the government, currently experience racist treatment in pop culture (Lauryn Hill's racist treatment of Koreans in Doo Wop for example, or Spike Lee's movies), and see local governments creating intentionally racist policies (Philadelphia's attempt to ban security glass in liquor stores).
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Part of what we should be asking is why Harvard is even relevant? That these Ivy League schools have such an outsized influence in politics and American culture should be something that should be examined and debated.

I don't get why they don't use lotteries. Have a grade cutoff, then choose at random. You should get unbiased results. The remaining bias is grade bias which would reflect poor schools and their corellation with ethnicity. Which will give a clearer startegy for intervention.

danieltillett 8y ago
This is the solution. It also solves the problem that all your candidates are cluster so tightly together by grade score that it is impossible to separate them by any ranking process. Just set the threshold to enter the lottery and go from there.

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago

>Harvard says it also considers “tips,” or admissions advantages, for some applicants. The plaintiffs say the college gives tips to five groups: racial and ethnic minorities; legacies, or the children of Harvard or Radcliffe alumni; relatives of a Harvard donor; the children of staff or faculty members; and recruited athletes. I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors. To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. If asians are underrepresented among donors and legacies it would explain the discrepancy pretty well.

throwa_way_ 8y ago
>I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors. Why can't they do that. Of course they can do that, most Universities in the US do that. >To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. No, they are specifically discriminated against, read the linked article.
- rspeer 8y ago
  I recognize that in a literal sense you can claim to support diversity and also have legacy admissions. What GP meant is that you shouldn't, because it makes the claim a lie. Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity.
  - tzs 8y ago
    For the sake of simplicity, let's assume all legacy admissions are white males, and that the diversity they claim to promote is racial and gender diversity. > Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity That's only true if the number of white males that would be admitted in a fully diverse class is not large enough to accommodate all the legacy admissions. I suspect that this is not the case, and so legacy admissions are essentially orthogonal to diversity considerations. Dropping the assumptions stated in the first paragraph, the above argument remains correct as long as each category considered for diversity analysis has more admissions than the number of legacy admissions in that category.
    - rspeer 8y ago
      I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children. Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people. This is classism, in particular. Of course class is correlated with race, but even if it weren't, this would be fucked up.
      - tzs 8y ago
        Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those. To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others. About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are overwhelmingly white. My point was that Harvard can admit those 290 legacy students without affecting its racial diversity easily, because fully diverse Harvard would have 613 non-Hispanic white students per 1000 students. They could arrange that every legacy admission who would not have made it but for being legacy displaces another non-Hispanic white student, so had no affect on racial diversity. I would not be at all surprised if among the white applicants Harvard has enough from each income level that they could even make it so each legacy admission that would not have made it if not legacy is displacing a non-legacy who is white and in the same income range.
darawk 8y ago
> To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. Those are equivalent things. Whether you frame it as boosting the scores of every other group, or cutting the scores of Asians, the net effect is the same, and should be considered the same activity.
SenseiMaster 8y ago
> To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment During "lopping" time, they use ethnic stats and ethnic profile to downgrade people from "admit" to "waitlist" or "deny", so it can be characterized as "negative treatment". > As the admissions process winds down, the dean and the director of admissions review the pool of tentatively admitted students and decide how many need to be “lopped,” by having their status changed from “admit” to “waitlist” or “deny,” the court papers say.
duxup 8y ago
I think you can say that. It just depends on how the numbers turns out, but then we also have to agree on what the right "diversity numbers" are.
privateSFacct 8y ago
This was part of the study, and even controlling for legacy and athletes, Asians still underrepresented. Harvard absolutely INSISTS it doesn't discriminate against Asians though - their president came out with a pretty strong statement about correcting the record.
Veelox 8y ago
>To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. I am going to make some assumptions and I apologise if they are wrong. I am going to assume that you think racism is wrong. I think that includes structural rasism. That is, policies, procedures, and practices by institutions that systematically disadvantage on race over another. From you above comment, it seems like you believe other racial minorities get an excplicit tip as a matter of policy. It also seems like you believe whites get an implicit tip due to the due to the process of how legacies work. Yet, you seemed to stop a step short of calling this structural rasism against Asian Americans. Is there something I am missing for why you didn't take that last step?
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  This is a delicate issue so I'm afraid your fantastic post won't receive a response from anyone who didn't agree with you 100%. I felt I should chime in. Why that last step is a little different for some of us. Truthfully, I don't know. 'Structural Racism' feels different that regular direct explicit racism. I don't feel as confident making blanket statements about it at least. I can certainly think of structurally racist scenarios that feel totally and completely wrong. Casting in movies and entertainment for instance. But other times it's less clear. At the very least there's a point where a desire to be charitable and give someone the benefit of the doubt starts to fade into the picture. I don't wish to speak to the exact matter at hand. I'm catching up on the story still.
- sadamznintern 8y ago
  Structural racism for African Americans is longstanding issues of disproportionate policing, a massive wealth gap as a result of block busting and red lining, and the educational disadvantages that come with it. If the only thing Asians have against them is having to go to Cornell or a state school instead of Harvard I think those complaining should rethink their priorities.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Asian people have been discriminated against and oppressed plenty throughout (recent) history, just because the Asians in the US are doing well doesn't mean there is no discrimination - we're just seeing that minorities who come here through skilled immigration pathways tend to be more successful, but don't worry, we're cracking down on that now and you'll see the reversion to the mean occuring in Asian kids soon enough.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Regardless of race, giving preferential treatment to relatives of donors seems like pure cronyism. If a small town government does things like that, we roll our eyes and lament backwards rural towns.

whatshisface 8y ago
If anything, it would make race a "we better not talk about this" smokescreen of anger and eggshell stepping to act as a moat around the real discussion.

kart23 8y ago

College admissions aren't about sat scores anymore. I graduated from high school this year, and know 2 people going to Harvard. It doesn't matter if you get perfect sat scores, it matters about what you do outside of school, and whether you spend all your time studying or actually doing something that will contribute to society. Numbers just aren't enough to admit students by, since if they admitted everyone with perfect scores, they would have way too many students.

pc86 8y ago
Apparently it also matters where your parents went to school, what your father or mother does for a living, and what color your skin is.
chevman 8y ago
I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.
- throwa_way_ 8y ago
  Except for if you read the article you would see that it's not arbitrary, but based on racial discrimination.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    That has not been proven at all.
  - darwin142 8y ago
    So you are saying Affirmative Action should be illegal?
throwa_way_ 8y ago
Race is a big factor.

throwawayanon12 8y ago

Would love to see a concerted movement to arrange a boycott of Harvard by Asian students - having a graduating class without any Asian students would send a very a strong symbolic message.

repsilat 8y ago
If they received substantially fewer Asian applicants they would probably adjust the thresholds to keep the balance how they want it. It would be nearly impossible for a boycott to be so effective they could not get a "Harvard-balanced" class, whatever that means. This lawsuit already sends a pretty strong symbolic message, though (in addition to whatever practical effect it might have.)
raincom 8y ago
It won't happen. Imagine there are 3800 Asians, with perfect SAT, validictorians, excellence, etc. You can make 95% people boycott, the other Asian applicants will apply even if they sign to the pledge. It is better for professors of Asian descent to leave, and not join, Harvard. That will send a better message.

privateSFacct 8y ago

The stats on how they scored asians were pretty incredible. Asian personalities were only 2 or better at the top decile (top 10%), african-americans scored 2 or better 8 deciles in (top 80%, only the worst 20% didn't score 2 or better). Personalities were scored on: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected. Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly. This was a key scoring measure because it was the one area Asians got crushed in (and was very subjective). They actually used I think a similar subjective scoring tool in the past to keep out other groups. Interesting article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-american-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...

paidleaf 8y ago
> Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly. Considering asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority group in the US, it does seem odd. Also considering harvard alumni interviewers generally rated asian personalities just as high as everyone else's, I wonder why there is such a divergence from american culture at large/alumni and admissions' officers? I wonder if there are transcripts or video recordings of interviews and a methodology these admissions officers used. It would be great if harvard released all data ( minus identifying info ) and we could look through the dataset.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority By who? What data is there? A stereotype is not evidence; repetition doesn't make it more likely. Nor can we infer from a stereotype - or even real data about assimilation - something about the personalities of individuals.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    When people complain about diversity in Silicon Valley, Asians don't count.

speedplane 8y ago

The article says that there are only 1600 spots at Harvard, and of the applicants "3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, and more than 8,000 had straight A’s" (doesn't say how many had all three). Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this) or expand the university and accept more students and make the school larger. It boggles my mind why they don't expand the school. The US population and GDP increase, the demand for education and exemplary leaders in society increase, Harvard's endowment and prestige increase, yet their class size remains the same. I'd say they have an obligation to increase class size.

Veelox 8y ago
>Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. I think you are missing the point OP is making. The top 80% of blacks score well on the subjective stuff. Only the top 10% of Asians score that well. With that, there are a few possibilities. 1) Blacks are more interesting than Asians. 2) Personality is uncorrelated with test scores. 3) Harvard is purposely scoring to change the racial split of the class. Of those, I think 3 is most likely. I am open to discussion but I think Harvard is to smart to be doing it on accident and the racial split is to politically acceptable to be by chance.
- speedplane 8y ago
  I wish you were right, because if the issue was just a few racist admissions officers, then the solution would be simple: fire them and get non-racist ones, problem solved. However, there is a fourth, more likely explanation: 4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students. From the article, it seems that Harvard focuses on establishing student diversity that roughly tracks the US population, bringing in big money donors, bringing in legacy students, and finding leaders that have traits similar to other successful leaders in the past. None of these values have the intent to reduce Asian admission, but that is their undeniable effect. It means that Asian students don't face a single racist admissions officer, they face a facially race-neutral system that has a discriminatory effect. To fix it, you can't just fire a few people, you need to make much larger changes. My original point was that the only fair and effective solution would need to require a larger class size.

Veelox 8y ago

I think the part of the issue that bothers me most is how much of a double standard there is between what counts as racism against African Americans and rasism against Asian Americans. Objectively, if you have two identical applications to Harvard except one is labeled black and the other is labeled Asian, the black one has a higher chance of success. They do the same thing with fake job applications with white names and black names. When whites get called back at higher rates that rasism. Yet when it's Harvard doing it to Asians, that's okay. This just rubs me the wrong way. Edit: this post has 30+ votes at 4 hours old and went from the front page to not the top 3 in less than 30 minutes. Looks like mods nuked it.

dang 8y ago
Mods didn't. Users flagged it.
- baud147258 8y ago
  Thank you for the info.
gaius 8y ago
As a non-white who doesn’t fit into any of the pre-defined buckets, race-specific programmes have always bothered me too. I never play the race card to gain advantage but hypothetically if I’m as generally discriminated against as a member of group X but there’s a quota for X that I’m not eligible for then I’ve been double-discriminated against.
- cowpewter 8y ago
  I've never thought about it that way, but as a mixed-race white/asian, I wonder if including that information rather than just letting them assume "white" from my name actually hurt me rather than helped me when I applied to (and did not get accepted to) the ivy league 20 years ago.
  - gaius 8y ago

speedplane 8y ago

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental problem was solved, many of these others would melt away on their own.

strstr 8y ago
Z-list probably isn't illegal (despite it being pretty disheartening).
- speedplane 8y ago
  Of course it isn't illegal. Folks with money and power create the rules, and obviously one of the first rules you'd make is that those with money and power can use that money and power to get what they want. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right or it should be. And you could potentially make a case that it's illegal, even though it's flimsy and you'd probably would lose. Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit. That's false advertising, and potentially even fraud. I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree. Again, they'd almost certainly lose, but my point is that there are existing legal hooks into this bad behavior.
  - chii 8y ago
    > Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit. they didn't lie - they do pick the best and brightest. But they don't claim that's the _only_ people they pick.
  - drb91 8y ago
    > I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree. In my experience the social access of the Z-list is the primary draw of an “ivy-league” education.

xkcdefgh 8y ago

Why is SAT so ridiculously easy that thousands have perfect score?

chii 8y ago
It's a metric you can actively improve on by studying. Ala, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
tzs 8y ago
It's not. A perfect score puts you in the top 0.0348% (2014 test). That about 1 in 2900. It only seems like a lot because millions take the test.
lordnacho 8y ago
There's a lot of kids taking it, and it needs to be able to differentiate kids in a country with very wide ranging abilities. If you made it harder there'd probably be a whole load of people bunched up at the bottom.
- pc86 8y ago
  Okay serious question, which has the larger negative societal impact - making it harder to differentiate between the top tenth of a percent of college applicants, or making it harder to differentiate between the bottom ten percent of college applicants?
verylongname 8y ago
It was "recentered" in 1995. The right side of the distribution was essentially truncated. A 1600 on the pre-1995 SAT was quite an accomplishment (I don't have data at my fingertips, but in most years, fewer than 10 students achieved a perfect score of 1600 and only a few dozen scored 1550+). By contrast, several hundred students a year scored 1600 on the recentered test. The scoring system has been changed several times since 1995 and I have no idea how the current system compares to the pre-1995 system or the recentered test given for some years afterward. Many, including myself, suspect that one of the motivations for the recentering was to give colleges cover for their admissions decisions. It is pretty hard to turn down students who get 1600s when only 7 or 8 students a year do so. It is easier to "shape" a class without provoking criticism when a large percentage of students score 1500+.

lordnacho 8y ago

This is terrible to read about from a European perspective. - It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives. If 50 or 60 rich kids a year out of a pool of what? A few hundred people rich enough to be z-listed? Maybe not even that. Versus the busload of ordinary kids who need to slip through the eye of the needle. - Athletes I guess are a special American thing where universities are involved. Maybe not Harvard, but some of the others will let people attend for free. Which isn't even then terribly fair, because they make a lot of money off those kids, possibly a lot more per person than a comparable athlete would get in the free market. That's if their sport is one of the popular ones. - You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article. At the end of this, I still don't quite understand how you communicate all this stuff in your admissions form. Do they have a drop-down for ethnicity? If they did, I would game it, knowing that they seem to like Vietnamese people more than Chinese. And where do you say "my name is Smith, but please check the donation register for ...". I've got a hard luck story as well, is that what the essay is for?

sadamznintern 8y ago
>You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article. None of the folks that I think exemplify the American dream that I know personally went to Harvard or even an elite school.
1337biz 8y ago
Coming from a European perspective as well, I do understand the idea behind Harvard's admission process. They want to mold a group of people that are coming from the money, brain, physical and societal elite. It is not a school, it is an elite network generating institution. The academic aspect is their legitimacy generating element. If you take this viewpoint, everything they do makes sense.

lozenge 8y ago

'Yet another was “bright & busy” but it was “a bit difficult to see what would hold him in during a lop.”' 'admissions officers then fine-tune the final class using a form that lists five pieces of information about the applicant; they give an example of a form that has spaces for the applicant’s name, LIN (lineage), ETH (ethnicity), ATH (athlete), and HFAI (financial aid).' It's undeniably racism. I wonder what the outcome would be if one or two Ivies stick their necks out and institute race blind, legacy blind admissions.

verylongname 8y ago
See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.
- cycrutchfield 8y ago
  There may be some geographic bias there because California’s Asian population is much higher than the US as a whole.
  - pc86 8y ago
    I would be interested to see if there is any bias toward state of residence for a school as widely known and respected as CalTech.
    - extra88 8y ago
      Of course there is. Harvard has a disproportionate number of students from New England, and more specifically Massachusetts, as well. Plenty of smart kids don't want to be too far from home or travel a long way to an unfamiliar environment. As for CalTech's rep, I'm just one person on the East Coast and wasn't a Tech-type student but I forget it exists all the time. If someone asked me to name a West Coast school to compare to MIT, "Stanford" would be all I could think of.
- 8y ago

aiyodev 8y ago

It’s worth reminding everyone that Harvard is the reason there’s any discrimination in the admissions process. Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone. But Harvard wanted to covertly discriminate against Jewish applicants. The reason why you have to write essays about your extracurricular activities, for example, is because a Jewish applicant back then typically wouldn’t have any. It’s also when legacy admissions began for the same reason. Why the hell are we still allowing this? It should be grades and test scores only.

cycrutchfield 8y ago
Hell no. Optimizing solely for grades and test scores will get you rote-memorizing robots with zero personal skills and minimal potential. A completely merit-based, objective admissions system simply does not exist.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  You are making a reasonable, but baseless claim. You are saying that 4.0 GPA students with 1600 SAT scores have zero personal skills, are robots, and have minimal potential. We know though, that SAT is a one of the best available predictors of outcome.
  - cycrutchfield 8y ago
    I am saying that grades and SATs are just two factors in predicting potential. Saying that we should only use those two factors when we have a wealth of other factors to complement them is sheer naivety.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  Lumping test scores and grades together seems to obscure that one was intended to fix issues with the other. I think that a purpose of the SAT was to combat the undesirable effects of judging people solely on grades. It's meant to be a measure of aptitude, exactly because your grades can reflect how good your school was, how much you memorized, your economic/social class, grade inflation, and so on. People who do well on the SAT (or at least who did on the old SAT back in the early 90s and before) did not necessarily study at all for it.

IvyAdmisions 8y ago

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med. Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots. What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now? So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class. This cohort of students happens to be disproportionately asian. No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
We don't discriminate against asian people, just their problematic culture.
- IvyAdmisions 8y ago
  Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that history will judge this line of argument poorly.

vinceguidry 8y ago

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome. These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube describe these political methods. Randomness seems to have fallen out of favor ever since, I think it might have died with the Romans. But imagine Harvard actually making public policy that they're just going to randomly select the the top applicants. They still won't be able to shape the demographics the way they want. Ensuring that they get to define the concept of a diverse student body is so important for them that they're fighting tooth and nail to preserve it. I stated the last time this came up that this was an existential issue for Harvard and the whole concept of the Ivy League. But now I see it as a public policy and individual rights issue. Should Harvard have the right to shape their student body demographically? And if not, what does that make Harvard? What distinguishes the Ivy League from other universities? Obviously Harvard is of the opinion that this is a bet-the-company moment for them.

majos 8y ago
Interestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  My intuitive grasp of the issue is that the game eventually resolves down to virtual randomness as candidacy features become indistinguishable. The military phrase at hand is 'damning with faint praise'. One word in one performance report can put you out to pasture. Literally everybody knows this so anything even the slightest bit off glares at you like a giant grinning rictus on a 40 foot movie screen. "who did he piss off to get 'excellent' instead of 'superlative'?" In an environment where literally everyone involved is so sensitive to noticeable features, transparency becomes opaqueness and all decisions are based on the whims of the oligarchy. When all the whims are satisfied, that's where the process becomes indistinguishable from random. There's no criteria left with which to make a decision, let's just pay lip service to merit while just picking names out of a hat to keep them all honest. Everywhere else where this dynamic manifests, selection processes are not even half as public as those of the top educational facilities in the world's most powerful country. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, after demographic shaping wishes are satisfied, Harvard's selection criteria for the remaining candidates can't be meaningfully distinguished from random.

fmajid 8y ago

They just repurposed a system that was designed in the 1930s to keep Jews out, to keeping Asians out. The smoking gun is how the admissions committee's ratings for “personality” differ so much from alumni volunteer interviewers.

IvyAdmisions 8y ago
Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.
- betterunix2 8y ago
  ...Jews and Asians have no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle?
- grandinj 8y ago
  What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps? In the case of Jews, they can hardly be called unambitious given the number of writers and scientists they produced. In the case of Asians, ambitious engineering, scientific and business persons do not seem to be short supply.
  - paidleaf 8y ago
    > What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps? Look at the quasi racist stuff this guy wrote. He obviously doesn't like asians for some reason. "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 guy claims to have been an admissions officer at an ivy league school. Doesn't seem likely.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      I think he might have fit in at Dartmouth?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jessaustin 8y ago

You don’t have son of a police officer. Well that's an obnoxious qualification to help one into a selective school. In future I won't be as concerned with mundane corruption like the free coffee and donuts in any quick-trip they feel like shaking down...

bytematic 8y ago

When will people understand that “We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.” is a good thing. This always gets me a negative reaction, people want college admissions to be straight top scorers, job prospects to be picked as the people with the top qualifications. I don't get it and it doesn't benefit anyone.

kough 8y ago
Most people understand this. The lawyer bringing the suit has chosen to do so in order to help abolish affirmative action.
asdfologist 8y ago
That's the same argument these colleges used to keep Jews out in the 30's. Now they're saying Asians have bad personalities so they shouldn't be admitted. This sounds ethical to you?
wang_li 8y ago
In practice your statement reduces to holding up a color wheel and making sure the special colors are given a benefit in the selections process and unfavored colors receive a disadvantage in the process.
gnicholas 8y ago
I think the plaintiffs don’t misunderstand this claim, they just think it’s cover for “we don’t want that many Asians” in this case.
ghein 8y ago
It's because the language and approach with respect to Asians (and specifically Chinese, Korean, Japanese backgrounds) echoes the explicitly racist efforts of top universities, especially Harvard, in the early 20th Century against Jews. Holistic applications in the Ivy League were created solely to keep the Jewish population to a manageable level. This for people who relatively recently experienced severe racist treatment by the government, currently experience racist treatment in pop culture (Lauryn Hill's racist treatment of Koreans in Doo Wop for example, or Spike Lee's movies), and see local governments creating intentionally racist policies (Philadelphia's attempt to ban security glass in liquor stores).

patrickg_zill 8y ago

Part of what we should be asking is why Harvard is even relevant? That these Ivy League schools have such an outsized influence in politics and American culture should be something that should be examined and debated.