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Justice Department sues Yale for illegal practices in admissions
- nowthisisjust 6y agoI'm wet
- o_class_star 6y agoThe whole purpose of the "extracurricular" nonsense that is included in US college admissions is racial and ethnic screening. The original targets were the Jews but now it's the Asians.
- room500 6y agoThat is a strong statement. The ideal for college admissions should be to get a set of students that have the best possible chance to succeed. Unfortunately, a high school student doesn't have much experience with which to base that determination. Extracurriculars are supposed to show that the student is well-rounded and driven - attributes that have been shown to be positively correlated with success in college and careers. How would you want colleges to try to determine if a given student will be successful? Because straight academic scores are not the full picture of a person.
- maxharris 6y agohttps://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-proble...
- username90 6y ago> Extracurriculars are supposed to show that the student is well-rounded and driven - attributes that have been shown to be positively correlated with success in college and careers. If extracurriculars are so important then why doesn't colleges require them to graduate? Why is their admission criteria so different from their graduation criteria? They ought to look similar. If grades are enough to graduate they obviously don't value other things and therefore should just look at grades of incoming students. If however grades aren't enough to say that a person is a good individual then why do they choose to graduate unbalanced people who only got good grades but suck at extracurriculars? Don't they care about their output at all?
- room500 6y agoIronic that you chose a story about Yale, but Yale Law/Medicine famously doesn't have grades. Grades are the easiest way to show that the student is participating, but it isn't the only way.
- o_class_star 6y agoYale Law doesn't have to use grades because it's the top law school and it can push 100% of its students. It's the same with top graduate departments, which have grades but rarely actually give anything below a B. Lower-ranked law schools have to use grades so the top students can actually distinguish themselves and get decent jobs.
- jkingsbery 6y agoI don't have data either way. Do you have a citation?
- ChomskyNormal4m 6y agoThe southern states had laws, somewhat compliant to federal law, that you could vote if your grandfather could vote. A way to keep those of African descent out. Yale has policies to give slots to legacies, effectively the same thing. Only this time the federal government and Justice department is what fights to keep the handful of those of African descent going to Yale. It's what America means. It's what the flag stands for.
- meroes 6y agoMight wanna read the article "The complaint alleges that Yale discriminated against applicants to Yale College on the grounds of race and national origin, and that Yale’s discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular most Asian and White applicants." "For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and Whites have only one-eighth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and White applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit. "
- J5892 6y agoI don't know if you read the article, but the main focus of the lawsuit is that Asians and whites have a much smaller chance of getting accepted than black people.
- marnett 6y agoYes I believe GP is referencing the broader political goal of diminishing/repealing affirmative action laws from the books.
- ChomskyNormal4m 6y agoThe smallest measure of blacks as a percentage of US population would be 12%, and at Yale blacks are half of that.
- J5892 6y ago
- colmvp 6y agoUndoubtedly this'll get removed from the front page but before it does, as someone who is Asian thank God someone calls these institutions out for this racist BS.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoTheir goal is to harm Black applicants. If they truly cared about racism they’d take aim at legacy admissions.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoI'm sorry but did you read the complaint? "Yale expressly agrees to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a cornerstone civil-rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance. " They can "reverse discriminate" for Black applicants all they want, it's when they accept Federal Money it becomes an issue. Yale is potentially on the hook for Billions in back Federal Aid.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoI did. The point is that they’re only targeting the “reverse discrimination” that helps Black applicants, while omitting any mention of their “normal” discrimination — legacy admissions — that helps white ones.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoJake do you care to show me exactly where that is?
- jakelazaroff 6y agoExactly where what is?
- TuringNYC 6y ago
- wyxuan 6y agoCan't help but think in this era of Bill Barr's politicization of DoJ investigations that this is an attempt to directly appease Asian American voters going into Nov.3. I wish I could be less of a cynic, but unfortunately not under this admin. Some interesting notes: > Yale uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process resulting in a multiplied effect of race on an applicant’s likelihood of admission. And Yale racially balances its classes. That is a sentence fragment, not sure why they included it in the press release like that. It seems 'tacked on' and rushed. Also, I've heard a lot about Yale's affirmative action policies, but I haven't heard much about the nationality based admissions policy. I'm interested in knowing how that works.
- justicezyx 6y ago> Can't help but think in this era of Bill Barr's politicization of DoJ investigations that this is an attempt to directly appease Asian American voters going into Nov.3. As a Chinese american, AFAIK, this has been a crucial issue for majority of the community. Could you stop labeling a core issue for a group of people "pliticization"? Show some respect to a group of people that have been systematically discriminated through well-known laws. Even black people are not treated in that fashion nowadays.
- wyxuan 6y agoI'm a chinese american as well, and I also think its an important issue, but I don't think theres any need to bring identity into this discussion. You can't deny that the timing of this decision is suspect.
- rectang 6y ago> Even black people are not treated in that fashion nowadays. If Black Americans were not subject to high levels of structural discrimination, maybe this issue would be less fraught.
- cafard 6y agoActually, what you quote comprises two sentences. The first might be improved by a comma after "process", the second violates the cranky notion that one should not start a sentence with "And". Both are legitimate sentences, though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stale2002 6y agoRegardless of one's opinion on whether college's ought use race as a criteria in admissions, and still receive government assistance, or what the law should be, a simple reading of Title IX makes me believe that such behavior would be clearly breaking the guidelines of Title IX. And I am surprised that the current behavior of most colleges regarding this issue is so pervasive, has gone on for so long, and so far out of line with a simple reading of the law. I would think either the law would have changed, or the behavior of colleges would have been brought in line with the law a long time ago. Here is the law, for reference, as quoted from the article. It feels pretty clear to me. "No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, … be subjected to discrimination under any program … receiving Federal financial assistance."
- thaumasiotes 6y agoIt bothers me that private universities are considered to be "receiving federal financial assistance". There are, as I understand it, two justifications for this: 1. When students borrow money from the federal government, whoever they pay that money to is "receiving federal financial assistance". This makes absolutely no sense. 2. When a government program intended to produce research does so by funding researchers, those researchers' employers are "receiving federal financial assistance". The second one doesn't make sense either; it appears to be exactly analogous to saying that if the federal government engages private contractors to repair damage to the White House, those contractors are receiving federal financial assistance.
- sebmellen 6y agoThis also opens a tricky can of worms as it comes to free speech and movements like BDS, which the Trump administration has sanctioned government contractors from participating in (if memory serves me).
- stale2002 6y ago> it appears to be exactly analogous to saying that if the federal government engages private contractors to repair damage to the White House It could be considered the same. So lets consider that hypothetical. Would people have a problem with a law that said that the government is not allowed to hire a private contractor repair company, that discriminates in hiring, based on race? On its face, I would not find such a law to be unusual or outlandish, to say that the government can't hire a repair company that refuses to employ people of a certain race group, for example.
- slg 6y ago>The complaint also alleges that Yale injures applicants and students because Yale’s race discrimination relies upon and reinforces damaging race-based stereotypes, including in particular such stereotypes against Yale’s racially-favored applicants. I don't know the merits of this case, but I know the second paragraph in this release is a load of BS. The Justice Department is claiming that those African Americans accepted into Yale are actually hurt by being accepted because their acceptance is reinforcing stereotypes that they needed extra assistance to get accepted. This is just the same conservative talking point that we have heard for generations that you can't do anything to help anyone because any assistance just makes them weaker.
- sebmellen 6y agoThomas Sowell argues something along the lines of: "Admitting people into college when they do not have the academic merit to be accepted harms them because they end up failing out of their class, even if they could have been wildly successful at a less rigorous university." Perhaps they're referring to this line of argument?
- slg 6y agoMaybe this is true at schools further down the competitiveness hierarchy, but this isn't going to be true at Yale. The number of people who can do the work at a school like Yale is going be drastically outpace the number of people admitted. They aren't reaching to accept candidates who can't do the work.
- sebmellen 6y agoI don't know. Sowell is a controversial figure, of course, but highly respected and educated. He served as a professor at Cornell, where he said this dynamic was extremely apparent, and it saddened him because there were many such students in his class who would've been top of their grade at a "Tier 2" university. I'll try to find the source, from one of his books.
- 6y ago
- tmpz22 6y agoCalifornian residents are currently voting on whether or not to repeal an act from 1996 that makes it illegal to discriminate admissions based on sex, gender, ethnicity, etc. They're trying to make it easier to base admission on these characteristics [1]. [1]: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
- iandanforth 6y agoI voted for this!
- tuna-piano 6y agoShocked me when I first heard of it! Liberals and racists agree on a fair number of policies regarding race these days. Relevant (satirical) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
- dahart 6y agoI know there are a lot of people coming to the conclusion that affirmative action toward one group counts as negative discrimination toward another - and certainly technically it may. Though just like this Justice Department press release, room is rarely left for nuances like the difference between negative discrimination and positive discrimination, and it seems to be assumed or taken at face value that we're in a zero-sum game, that one race can't be helped without another race being hurt. That might be the case for Yale admissions, but is that really true in general? My main question, without disagreeing with the hypotheses given by the Justice Department, is this: if it's true that blacks are still being discriminated against, and nobody is allowed to compensate for that by taking action, what else can we need to do to solve the pre-existing discrimination, assuming that it's cultural and difficult?
- jjoonathan 6y ago> there are a lot of people coming to the conclusion that affirmative action counts as discrimination - and certainly technically it does Technically? Technically?!?!
- dahart 6y agoI'm attempting to be both diplomatic and open in what I already know is a contentious issue. The whole intent behind this type of positive discrimination is not to hold any specific race back, but to equalize the outcomes for some people that have been systematically disadvantaged in the past. Part of the assumption behind equalizing outcomes is that it might illuminate negative discriminatory behavior, and allow the system to equalize on it's own faster than it would without any intervention. I'd love to hear more about when & whether this works. If it does help fix racism, maybe it's worth some temporary action. If it doesn't help fix the underlying issue, then maybe the Justice Department is doing the right thing.
- jjoonathan 6y agoFighting racism with racism is difficult because racism isn't just a number. If you reject the idea of fighting racism by stomping it out where you find it and instead try to use counter-racism, suddenly you're in the business of determining precisely, exactly the opposite direction of the existing racism. If you screw it up you just add to the problem. See: video-game speedrunners blasting through levels at enormous speed because devs thought that "pushing in the opposite direction" was conceptually easy, but it turned out not to be -- and that's just 3 dimensions! Here we're talking about people's lives, with hundreds of dimensions. There's no way that's going to end well, it's just tossing gasoline onto racial tensions. Sure, the gasoline might extinguish the fire. It's not impossible. I'd place a lot of money on the opposite, though.
- google234123 6y agoAffirmative action has always violated the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection. And this post has been flagged. How unsurprising...
- marnett 6y agoDon’t all these institutions unilaterally discriminate based on socioeconomic background?
- z5h 6y agoI don’t think they care where your money comes from or how long you’ve had it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sgustard 6y agoNo, in fact they publicly state their admissions are "need blind". However, certainly a slice of wealthy and legacy students get favored admission. Those two things are not necessarily in conflict.
- lxe 6y agoOn one hand, as an immigrant I support policies that ensure race or national origin plays no weight in college admissions process. On the other hand, my father who graduated at the top of his class in a small rural school, earned his undergraduate admission through a program in the Soviet Union that helped disadvantaged folks to fairly compete with those who were given a bigger piece of the pie. I don't know if I was where I am today if not for policies like these. I still don't think that race or national origin should play a role here, but maybe some other factors that help the best of us in life's worst circumstances to succeed. Maybe today's financial aid policies accomplish just that. But it's still worth exploring other factors beside finances that potentially successful college applicants need help with.
- causality0 6y agoI grew up in a very diverse suburb and went to schools where no race made up more than 40% of the student population. It's blatantly obvious to anyone who grew up with Asian friends that Asian immigrant cultures, in general, place an enormous emphasis on academic achievement. My Asian friends had a hell of a lot less fun and free time at home than I did. That work was reflected in higher grades. It's not Asian students' fault that mainstream white and black culture in the US is less suited to institutional performance. It's like if you had purple-striped people who all spent their after-school time at the shooting range and then wondered why the army is full of purple-striped people.
- crossroadsguy 6y ago> purple-striped people I Googled. What does it mean? Is it some American reference, or you picked a random race/region neutral analogy?
- manfredo 6y agoThese anecdotes are backed up by empirical observations: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/indicator5_19.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/indicator5_19.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/tables/table_19_1.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2010/2010015/tables/table_19_1.asp https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/08/10/analyzing-the-homework-gap-among-high-school-students/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
- tupputuppu 6y agoIt's more likely due to genes than culture or parenting as adoption studies show: https://medium.com/@syedmhamzatahir/iqs-of-east-asians-5fe6067ca111 https://medium.com/@syedmhamzatahir/iqs-of-east-asians-5fe60...
- rubyn00bie 6y agoUhhh... this pretty much says to me there are a lot of affluent kids being rejected who have done well in school and their parents are flipping shit. More than likely this is solely for the press during an election cycle to win affluent votes/money/donations. Here are Yale's student body demographics, from the department of education's scorecard [1]: 42% White 19% Asian 13% Hispanic 11% Non-resident alien 8% Black 6% Two or more races 0% American Indian/Alaska Native 0% Unknown 0% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Here's the nation as a whole [2]: Non-Hispanic white - 63.4% Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 15.3% Black or African American - 13.4% Asian - 5.9% Native Americans and Alaska Natives - 1.3% Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders - 0.2% Two or more races - 2.7% FWIW- I'm not saying Yale doesn't have acceptance problems but the identification of the problem made in the release above is probably... fucking bullshit. [1] - https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?130794-Yale-University https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?130794-Yale-Universi... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
- iaw 6y agoI think for 20 years there was a clear cut formula to get accepted to the Ivies that was an open little secret for affluent people. That formula has stopped working largely because too many people are using it. To me this is an effort by people who are angry that they can not game the system anymore due to the sheer volume of people that are trying to the exact same way. So they're targeting the people that weren't gaming the system (African Americans by and large) and saying "why are they getting in when I didn't and I did XYZ?" even though the school never said "Do XYZ and you get in."
- benmw333 6y agoCritical Race Theory - otherwise known as "Racial Sensitivity Training" by the media and Chris Wallace - is garbage... University's are rife with this dogmatic steaming pile or excrement.
- sgustard 6y agoThe idea that you'd walk around the campus of Yale and conclude "whites and asians" to be "racially disfavored" is ludicrous.
- maxharris 6y agoHow is that different than things people were saying about Jewish people a century ago? https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-problem https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/harvard-s-jewish-proble...
- manfredo 6y agoIn order to determine whether a certain race is disfavored, you need to look at admissions data. The data for Harvard was staggering [1]. Non-ADLC Asian applicants in the 90th percentile were half as likely to be admitted than non-ADLC Black applicants in the 60th percentile and as equally likely as Black applicants in the 40th percentile. There are definitely valid arguments in favor of Affirmative action, but the notion that this doesn't amount to substantial racial discrimination is nothing less than counterfactual. 1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/04/does-harvard-accept-its-cleverest-applicants https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/04/does-har...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iaw 6y agoHow about this: colleges are seen as places of socioeconomic mobility rather than means of protecting existing stature? Eliminate legacy admissions and make everything race blind but incorporate a generational wealth score. The result for certain groups will likely be the same but the explanation becomes clearer. We can't talk about this issue without looking at the disparity between Asian Americans and African Americans with the former making almost 2x as much as the latter [0] on median in 2010. If we focus on generational wealth groups of students with large real estate, business, and financial holdings would be penalized and a rich African American or poor Asian Americans wont slip through the cracks due to their race. We're past the point where admission can be based solely on merit because if they let in everyone with enough merit the school couldn't handle it. So we have to start looking into the circumstances under which that merit was accomplished, e.g. were they affluent and with greater resources than their impoverished counterparts? [0] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian...
- jakelazaroff 6y ago> Eliminate legacy admissions and make everything race blind but incorporate a generational wealth score. You know, that's a really interesting idea. Sounds similar to Kapor Capital's "distance traveled" metric they use when hiring — basically, what were the candidate's circumstances and how hard did they have to work for their accomplishments. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/kapors-2/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/kapors-2/
- iaw 6y agoWow, I like that article. This line really struck me as an excellent point: "...if you believe you’re a meritocracy and you have numbers like everybody who has released their data, the implicit message is that Caucasian men are better than everyone else. Because that’s who is overrepresented. It’s endorsing a notion that these other people aren’t as good, and therefore that’s why there aren’t a ton of them."
- pcurve 6y ago"For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and Whites have only one-eighth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials." This might be a dumb question, isn't this very common among medical schools, where the numbers are just as bad? Are they also target of potential lawsuits? https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5f035f109555c1787ed64988/5f035f109555c13fc0d64f47_medical_school_acceptance_by_race_ethnicity.jpeg https://global-uploads.webflow.com/5f035f109555c1787ed64988/... Interestingly, Texas tech medical school abandoned affirmative action recently. https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1789 https://www.bmj.com/content/365/bmj.l1789
- hsuduebc 6y agoHello, I'm new here can you please explain me, why this was flagged and taken off from main page? How does this works?
- crazygringo 6y agoGenerally anything highly polarizing and political that doesn't provide anything new to the debate is flagged, because it just descends into predictable political argument, which isn't what HN is for. In my experience this pretty much applies to anything related to affirmative action around race, gender, or political affiliation. Also all of politics generally is off-limits unless it's related to technology.
- hsuduebc 6y agoI see. Thank you for clarification. :)
- kn0where 6y agoThese schools receive a far greater number of qualified candidates than they can or wish to accept. Much like hiring practices at big tech companies, they project the image that with such a large applicant pool they only accept the “best” applicants. As many of us know in the context of tech hiring, “best” often can’t be measured precisely beyond a certain level of competence, and you reach a point where you’re arbitrarily ruling out highly qualified people who weren’t lucky enough to succeed at the particular whiteboarding question in their run of the gauntlet. We call this system “meritocracy” when it’s more of a poorly administered lottery, where everything from cramming for the coding interview to the biases of the interviewer will swing the result one way or another far more than the actual merit of the applicant. I think people want to believe these jobs or college admissions are awarded based on merit, because it feels much more fair to both the applicant or the institution than alternatives of thinning the applicant field such as nepotism, leveraging one’s wealth/class, or flat out discrimination. But the problem with how we’ve implemented our pseudo-meritocracy is that the metric becomes the goal. Our metrics aren’t good enough to actually say student A should be accepted while student B shouldn’t based on some nebulous combo of test scores, grades, extracurriculars, essays, and personal uniqueness compared to the other applicants being considered. It’s much like people working at Google who say “I could never pass the Google interview if I had to take it.” The results are only partly based on actual merit, and partly based on arbitrary criteria that aren’t fair. So, we have a huge applicant pool, and for the sake of argument let’s say 20% are totally qualified based on the regular college admission factors. The school only admits 5%. The school wants to admit the “best” of the bunch, so the admissions committee invents an arbitrary gauntlet of evaluation that succeeds in ruling out 3/4 of the candidates that passed the initial bar. Or, the school could admit they can’t actually predict who will succeed the most, and of the 20% who cleared the bar, randomly choose 1/4 of those students in a lottery to admit. This feels less prestigious to Yale et al, so they won’t do it. Consider that back when these universities gained their prestige, admissions were largely based on wealth and class and being the correct gender and race, and you may wonder if the point of an elite school to preserve a signaling mechanism for an elite few rather than output better graduates/research/etc than other institutions. Personally, I would be happy with a system that rules out the 80% or so that clearly don’t qualify, and of the essentially equally qualified 20% remaining, awards admissions randomly in a lottery but with quotas matching the demographic percentages of the US to try and compensate for the inequities that cause the applicant pipeline to not mirror the demographics of the country. At any rate, by pretending the current unfair system is merit-based and fair, schools like Yale have shot themselves in the foot.
- ogre_codes 6y agoDoesn't the DOJ have something better to do than "protect" the rights of a few rich white (and Asian) guys? I'm not even a fan of Affirmative Action, but this is one of those cases where it sends the absolute wrong message. A lot of states are trying to screw with thousands of people's rights to vote and the DOJ goes after... a few tens of people going to an Ivy League school.
- wudangmonk 6y agoWhat is the end game for this look like in people's mind? do they think that these universities that people are fighting over will start accepting Asians in bigger numbers?. These universities have only one thing of value and that is their exclusivity. If they lose that they are no diffent than any other school. I'm torn on this issue, not because of any injustice against Asians or whites... I couldn't care less about them on this issue, most of them have been groomed since children with tutors, classes and activities to "look good" to these universities. I'm torn because this might be a step towards these places losing their precious exclusivity and become just like any other but I doubt they will let that happen and if this does not happen then whatever happens will not be any good for society.
- siilats 6y agoWow 20% of asian kids are in the top decile (10%) academically but only 0.9% of black kids. Would be super stupid not to adjust this for race in admissions. FBI conveniently leaves this stats of their table on page 23. I copied the data to Google Sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZveGWVtsmd66F84uit3bfrLhQsZh2fsnwUrXImAezTQ/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZveGWVtsmd66F84uit3b...
- siilats 6y agoFBI is essentially saying Yale should admit 20 Asian kids for each Black if they think table 23 should be adopted unadjusted.
- snicker7 6y agoLegally enforced non-discrimination is a very American thing. Other developed countries have legally-enforced quotas (e.g. gendered quotas corporate boardrooms). Some in the American left realize that racial discrimination is the shortest path to equity. It has come to the point where the POTUS banning racial stereotypes in government training is an act of racism.