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Standardized tests could also be considered a way for picking the right kind of person: namely, people who know that standardized tests are something to prepare

Standardized tests could also be considered a way for picking the right kind of person: namely, people who know that standardized tests are something to prepare for. I’ve tutored students at both elite and underperforming high schools. Students at elite schools, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, are highly aware of the importance of standardized tests. Some of the underperforming high schools don’t even administer the PSAT. Many, if not most students at the low-income schools think the SAT is an IQ test where the results are predetermined. I’ve had kids go from the low 30th percentile to the mid 80th percentile with just a few months of tutoring. After I’ve taught them how to practice the test, they improve dramatically. I’m not making them smarter, just passing along some cultural and educational capital they literally would not get otherwise. Their parents and teachers do not know this stuff. As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans." If you're Asian and you're reading this, never forget that the above is what progressives believe about how society treats Asians: transgressions against you get simply waved away. Think twice about supporting them. For the record, I am Asian and a liberal but definitely not progressive.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- charlesu 6y ago
  You’re right. I was wrong to minimize the struggles of Asians in this country. There is real discrimination against Asians. Your comment and others have changed my view. Thanks for helping me work through my own blind spots on this issue. I didn’t mean to wave away your pain.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Bravo
JamesBarney 6y ago
Studies disagree that you on avg. see large gains from test prep on the SAT. https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. Looks like the courts found that Harvard's admissions system did not qualify as legally discriminatory, but did nonetheless somewhat disadvantage Asian-American applicants. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-law...
908B64B197 6y ago
> As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. Are there any elite school (so sourcing students from the same pool of applicants) that don't include race in their admission process? Would be interesting to compare the demographics.
- nsp 6y ago
  I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad. There is the in-state vs out of state tuition distinction, so it's not exactly the same pool as east coast universities. Sources: https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/student-life/diversity/#:~:text=The%20undergraduate%20student%20body%20at,2%2C463%20males%20and%202%2C139%20females https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit....
  - charlesu 6y ago
    > I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad. These are interesting stats but they don't actually mean anything unless you can prove that the applicant pools for Caltech and Berkeley are similar to that of MIT. It's entirely possible, that Caltech and Berkeley have a higher proportion of Asian applications. It's also possible that underrepresented minorities that could be admitted to Caltech or Berkeley pick Harvard or Princeton because they're more well-regarded and more diverse. I wouldn't be surprised. Elite schools compete for the same kids.
    - 6y ago
supernova87a 6y ago
>...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face.... So, as long as you see some people of a given race and it meets some arbitrary % in your mind, that's enough, is that the argument you're making? No discrimination going on then? This level of lack of critical thinking here is astounding, and it's sad (actually scary) that opinions like this might guide admissions policies.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Harvard makes an effort to create a diverse class of students. That includes race but it also includes geography. Is Harvard excluding kids from New Jersey and New York because it goes out of it's way to admit kids from Nebraska and Montana?
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    Look, sir, friend, random person on the internet -- I'm likely not going to change your mind, and I'm not going to revisit this thread again after I click away, so take this just as one person to another giving some advice as if we were strangers talking to each other honestly with no consequences. Check yourself once in a while that you don't go falling the hole of deceiving yourself that you're right, using any cobbled together argument you can find. Because you sound like you're ready to trade off people's lives using whatever traits you think are equivalent, in the name of diversity or some symbolic goal you wish to achieve. When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better. When Harvard says that no matter how good you are, because you're Asian, your achievements will be weighed a little less because we have enough of them, I cannot believe that you are unable to see how that's different. And your principles of how you judge whether there are "enough" Asians, well, sir, they could equally be used by someone to say there are "enough" black students or Hispanic students, or any minority, by someone less well-intentioned. I would rather have the approach where no one is deciding that there's "enough" of some group based on their favored characteristic of the day.
rayiner 6y ago
> The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools are capping the percentage of Asians--you can see this by comparing against schools that don't practice holistic admissions. Affirmative action and lottery-based admissions in particular is, in at least a narrow and direct sense, contrary to "the interest of Asian-Americans" just as its contrary to the interests of white Americans. Standardized testing offers a direct path to the middle and upper middle class for Asian immigrants (as well as other immigrant groups such as Nigerians who come to the U.S. with lots of education but not necessarily money). Asians have extremely high levels of income mobility in the U.S.--an kid growing up in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20%; double the odds for a white kid born in the bottom 20%. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh. Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc. In "How to be an Anti-Racist," Ibram X. Kendi defines "equity" as the representation of a group in an organization reflecting the representation of the group in the general population. Any other distribution, he declares, is the product of systemic racism. I don't think Kendi was thinking about the implications of that statement for non-white, non-Black people, but they are alarming for Asians, Jews, Nigerians, etc. Imagine cutting Harvard down from 20% Asian to 5-6% Asian. Or Google or Facebook! What do you think that would do to Asian income mobility? Now, I happen to support measures to reduce disparities for ADOS people, because all Americans have a common obligation to remediate the nation's history of slavery and segregation. To that end, I support things like traditional affirmative action. At the same time, Asians are a minority and have to be realistic about the fact that they are not similarly-situated to either white people or Black people and do not have identical interests to either group. Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.
- charlesu 6y ago

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

> "As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans." If you're Asian and you're reading this, never forget that the above is what progressives believe about how society treats Asians: transgressions against you get simply waved away. Think twice about supporting them. For the record, I am Asian and a liberal but definitely not progressive.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
charlesu 6y ago
You’re right. I was wrong to minimize the struggles of Asians in this country. There is real discrimination against Asians. Your comment and others have changed my view. Thanks for helping me work through my own blind spots on this issue. I didn’t mean to wave away your pain.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Bravo

JamesBarney 6y ago

Studies disagree that you on avg. see large gains from test prep on the SAT. https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

>As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. Looks like the courts found that Harvard's admissions system did not qualify as legally discriminatory, but did nonetheless somewhat disadvantage Asian-American applicants. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-law...

908B64B197 6y ago

> As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. Are there any elite school (so sourcing students from the same pool of applicants) that don't include race in their admission process? Would be interesting to compare the demographics.

nsp 6y ago
I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad. There is the in-state vs out of state tuition distinction, so it's not exactly the same pool as east coast universities. Sources: https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/student-life/diversity/#:~:text=The%20undergraduate%20student%20body%20at,2%2C463%20males%20and%202%2C139%20females https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit....
- charlesu 6y ago
  > I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad. These are interesting stats but they don't actually mean anything unless you can prove that the applicant pools for Caltech and Berkeley are similar to that of MIT. It's entirely possible, that Caltech and Berkeley have a higher proportion of Asian applications. It's also possible that underrepresented minorities that could be admitted to Caltech or Berkeley pick Harvard or Princeton because they're more well-regarded and more diverse. I wouldn't be surprised. Elite schools compete for the same kids.
  - 6y ago

supernova87a 6y ago

>...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face.... So, as long as you see some people of a given race and it meets some arbitrary % in your mind, that's enough, is that the argument you're making? No discrimination going on then? This level of lack of critical thinking here is astounding, and it's sad (actually scary) that opinions like this might guide admissions policies.

charlesu 6y ago
Harvard makes an effort to create a diverse class of students. That includes race but it also includes geography. Is Harvard excluding kids from New Jersey and New York because it goes out of it's way to admit kids from Nebraska and Montana?
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Look, sir, friend, random person on the internet -- I'm likely not going to change your mind, and I'm not going to revisit this thread again after I click away, so take this just as one person to another giving some advice as if we were strangers talking to each other honestly with no consequences. Check yourself once in a while that you don't go falling the hole of deceiving yourself that you're right, using any cobbled together argument you can find. Because you sound like you're ready to trade off people's lives using whatever traits you think are equivalent, in the name of diversity or some symbolic goal you wish to achieve. When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better. When Harvard says that no matter how good you are, because you're Asian, your achievements will be weighed a little less because we have enough of them, I cannot believe that you are unable to see how that's different. And your principles of how you judge whether there are "enough" Asians, well, sir, they could equally be used by someone to say there are "enough" black students or Hispanic students, or any minority, by someone less well-intentioned. I would rather have the approach where no one is deciding that there's "enough" of some group based on their favored characteristic of the day.

rayiner 6y ago

> The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans. My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools are capping the percentage of Asians--you can see this by comparing against schools that don't practice holistic admissions. Affirmative action and lottery-based admissions in particular is, in at least a narrow and direct sense, contrary to "the interest of Asian-Americans" just as its contrary to the interests of white Americans. Standardized testing offers a direct path to the middle and upper middle class for Asian immigrants (as well as other immigrant groups such as Nigerians who come to the U.S. with lots of education but not necessarily money). Asians have extremely high levels of income mobility in the U.S.--an kid growing up in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20%; double the odds for a white kid born in the bottom 20%. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh. Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc. In "How to be an Anti-Racist," Ibram X. Kendi defines "equity" as the representation of a group in an organization reflecting the representation of the group in the general population. Any other distribution, he declares, is the product of systemic racism. I don't think Kendi was thinking about the implications of that statement for non-white, non-Black people, but they are alarming for Asians, Jews, Nigerians, etc. Imagine cutting Harvard down from 20% Asian to 5-6% Asian. Or Google or Facebook! What do you think that would do to Asian income mobility? Now, I happen to support measures to reduce disparities for ADOS people, because all Americans have a common obligation to remediate the nation's history of slavery and segregation. To that end, I support things like traditional affirmative action. At the same time, Asians are a minority and have to be realistic about the fact that they are not similarly-situated to either white people or Black people and do not have identical interests to either group. Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.

charlesu 6y ago