11 ms·

For perspective, here are the Harvard vs US demographics, sorted by most to least represented [1,2,3,4]: Jewish: 14.0% vs 2.6% (5.38x) Asian American:

• balls187 7y ago
  Where is your source used for the US Demographics for freshman aged students?
• SachaMichel 7y ago
  So the single percentage point difference in the african american demo is what people are going nuts about ?
  • keketi 7y ago
    No, what they are going nuts about is what it would be without discrimination in their favor.
• FakeComments 7y ago
  As usual, white people are the real victims of modern discrimination, while being scapegoated by the minorities who benefit. Welcome to woke! See my other comment for another example of enabling racism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130049
• tareqak 7y ago
  Do the admission statistics also have the representation further broken down by how they were admitted (affirmative-action, scholarship, legacy-admission, normal, etc.)?
  • deogeo 7y ago
    There was an article about legacy admissions, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037400 Tables start at page 40.
• metzby 7y ago
  I didn't see "non-Jewish" white in the source. Did you add up the rest and subtract from 100? I think these should be able to add up to more than 100. E.g., someone who is both Hispanic and Black.
  • deogeo 7y ago
    I subtracted Jewish from white, since "Out of this 2,831,000 religious Jewish population, 92% are non-Hispanic white": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Assimilation_and_population_changes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Assimilation_and...
    • metzby 7y ago
      Where did you get the number of white? I'm saying you can't sum ethnicities because many people are multiple ethnicities.
      • deogeo 7y ago
        Subtracted everyone else from 100%. I think they made people pick either only one ethnicity in their polls, or they were lumped under 'other'. The numbers I get are close to https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/student-life/diversity/ https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s..., so while not totally accurate, I'd say they're reasonably good.
• habosa 7y ago
  As a Jewish person I feel weird seeing "whites" being broken into Jewish and non-Jewish. What about other religions? Why include religion at all? In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this. In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and also turn it on/off at different phases of your life. You also can't see religion from the outside (with some exceptions for example a Sikh turban). That's not true for race.
  • charliesharding 7y ago
    I think it's because Jews are also an ethnic group
    • deogeo 7y ago
      That is correct, at least in regards to how the statistics were gathered: "To ensure that we did not overlook religiously unengaged Jews, we asked students for their religion and whether they considered themselves Jewish aside from religion; then, we asked about their parents’ religious identities. Students who considered themselves Jewish in any way were counted in our estimates." -- https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... "Jewishness in the United States is considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religion
  • Kenji 7y ago
    Judaism is a religion as well as a race. Many Jews have characteristic traits like facial features that clearly show a shared ancestry. This is not the case with e.g. Christianity, where Christian races are all over the place. This is why Judaism is special in those regards.
  • strikelaserclaw 7y ago
    Aren't Jews a race and a religion? Plenty of non religious Jews out there.
• sct202 7y ago
  Some of those things are linked to the applicant pool, for example normal White people (non-legacy/athlete/deans list/faculty child) only make up 40% of the normal people applicants to Harvard. ( http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf page 42 Panel B: Racial Distribution of Applicants by ALDC Status)
• jdoliner 7y ago
  These numbers are next to meaningless, Harvard doesn't just accept people from the US, so we should be looking at population percentages of the world. I assume that people who don't fit in any category are shunted into one of them based on skin color. For example a Jamaican is, I assume, counted in the African American bucket, and compared against the African American population, even though they're neither American nor African. And as with all things race it's largely a question of how you draw the lines. Jamaicans are African Americans, white American Jews are separate from whites though. And who could say what bucket the billion people in India are in, Asian American maybe?
  • wendyshu 7y ago
    Fyi about 1/10 of Harvard College students are international
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    > While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. > They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...
    • Invictus0 7y ago
      Other commenters have attributed that disparity to the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education rather than a problem of Harvard admissions.
• gnicholas 7y ago
  This is somewhat useful, but it would be more useful to know what percent of the total college-going population these racial groups make up. And what percent of the 1600-SAT (for lack of a better proxy) population they make up.
  • EForEndeavour 7y ago
    I'd be curious to meet or read about those Harvard students with the lowest SAT scores of their cohort (assuming the minimum is not 1600), since they must be extraordinary in some other ways.
    • spullara 7y ago
      Based on the analysis done for the court case, they are their athletes.
      • sjg007 7y ago
        This is why you row I guess...
• darawk 7y ago
  Fascinating that non-jewish whites are actually the least proportionally represented. I've never heard that mentioned anywhere before.
  • dmix 7y ago
    Wasn't that the whole idea of affirmative action?
    • darawk 7y ago
      My understanding was that affirmative action was supposed to correct the under-representation of minorities by eliminating the over-representation of non-jewish whites. Not that it was designed to under-represent them.
      • seattlebarley 7y ago
        Have you been living in our world for the past five years or so? Surely you've figured it out by now.
      • geodel 7y ago
        Seems your understanding is totally out of touch with SJW/Woke wave sweeping across the world. Pointing out statistics may brand you as apologist of racism, perpetuating while privilege etc.
        • mffnbs 7y ago
          Seems your understanding is drunk and lost all of its tact earlier in the night.
          • dang 7y ago
            Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure you're posting in the intended spirit.
• underpand 7y ago
  These numbers are grossly misleading. US population numbers are meaningless. Harvard doesn't consider all US born students. They have an academic floor. Most of the US population does not meet the academic floor. Low achieving students are effectively not in the applicant pool even if they apply. A more accurate representation of the applicant pool would be the USA demographics that meet the 10th percentile SAT score at Harvard. However, even with this more accurate pool, the accepted population would differ because different races have different average scores within this pool. The races with lower averages would be expected to be underrepresented in the accepted pool compared to the applicant pool.
  • zhugeIiang 7y ago
    http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf See page 45. Asians have a much higher bar and lower probability of getting in after balancing for same academic level. Seems like discrimination to me.
• ur-whale 7y ago
  Is "Jewish" a race? Or a religion? Or a culture? And how does harvard assert the "race" of someone in the first place? This is all extremely confusing.
• quotz 7y ago
  Haha sounds like there is discrimination against non-jewish white people... Liberals seem to be saying the opposite
• dhairya 7y ago
  It's worth noting that religion is not a demographic category that explicitly factors into admissions or collected. Students are not required to disclose their religion (sexuality for that matter as well). Those figures are collected through various student surveys and may not fully representative. Also international students are counted separately from the race/ethnicity categories. This is due to how the government classifies and collects information about race and ethnicity (see IPEDS definitions below). https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-definitions https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-de... I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst. I actually submitted the final reports (institutional demographics and other stats) to US Department of Education. If anyone is curious, a large portion of the aggregate demographic statistics is open and available to the public: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  I'm guessing if you took age into account (i.e. the average age of a white person is older than the average Hispanic person and the average Harvard attendee will be younger than the average person) then the positions on the bottom two might swap over. The average age of people who identify as two races is markedly lower than other groups though they're a relatively small group, so not sure how that works out. But there's roughly as many people who identify as both white and native American as just native American. If Harvard only lets them choose one, which I guess they must if it adds up to 100%, then that could have a big impact on those numbers depending on how people react to that.
• shawdotion 7y ago
  Interesting. I find that the black community (including myself) will quickly point to the reason of Affirmative Action, and what it is trying to accomplish. I find it fair if a historically marginalized group require over-representation to "break" it's cycle. Yet I find something troubling. I'm concerned that many of the flagship arguments that are still often brought forth by this community have propositions that continue to look less and less stable. There is a perpetual cycle that the average African-American faces, often said starting from slavery. It has frequently been said that starting with proper education, will this cycle begin to unravel. Though there's been significant attempts to equalize opportunity of education for decades, yet there's been virtually no improvement in the racial performance gap (Black-White). The main reason I commonly see for this gap is socioeconomic status and parental education. College Board prompts every testing student for their family income status, race, gender, etc. I'd love CB to dump every categorical statistic they've collected, but they do provide a summary every year. Every year they're able to give basic statistics on performance of the different groups based upon the groups stated above. What I find really interesting was for 2 separate years (2003, 2008) College Board made public test performance by race x income. College Board had also released 'Reaching the Top: A Report of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement The book' (1999). The book generally stated that black students whose parents were college-educated scored lower than white students whose parents did not graduate high-school. Both datasets show that black students from high socioeconomic families were scoring comparatively to white students from low socioeconomic families. I see this as deeply troubling. Though there is an large list of variables that are not publicly accounted for, it would make more sense for discussion to be shifted towards the discovery of the cause of the gap. I fear that Affirmative Action is inherently unjustified and examples like similar to OP's post will continue to hurt the opportunities of the talented. (2008) [JBHE] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/why-ses-does-not-explain.pdf https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/why... (2005) [JBHE] http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html [Teachers College Record] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Poverty_and_SAT_Scores_Modeling_the_Influences_of_Family_Income_on_Black_and_White_High_School_Students'_SAT_Performance https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove... Extra bit, attempt to model 1995, caution on the rhetoric but quality article: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm
• droithomme 7y ago
  Those statistics are weird because they have several things that are thought of races, and then suddenly there's this religion designation, which is not a race. Why is this specific religion singled out and identified differently?
• alfromspace 7y ago
  non-Jewish white: 33.0% vs 58.9% (0.56x) How strange - are these people allowed to benefit from affirmative action?