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> recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy while chanting social-justice keywords Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions progr

> recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy while chanting social-justice keywords Indeed, Harvard aggressively defends its admissions program as "holistic" while rating Asians as having lower personal ratings that they define as measuring "likeability", "courage", and "kindness" [1]. You might ask yourself how an institution which claims to be anti-racist exhibits behavior of the opposite kind. [1]: https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/harvards-own-study-reveals-university-showed-favoritism-toward-certain-students/ https://nypost.com/2018/10/19/harvards-own-study-reveals-uni...

fighterpilot 5y ago
What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort discussed in the article or the informal sort where each college copies their competitors' quotas.
- scarmig 5y ago
  College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet school in Virginia, often ranked the top high school in the US. Admissions is (or was) based mostly on an admissions test, with a smaller portion based on middle school grades. In recent years, the student body was 70% Asian, 20% White, and the rest other minorities. Despite literally decades of trying to increase percentages of Black and Hispanic students at the school with outreach programs and tutoring, percentages have never exceeded single digits. So what did the school board do? They scrapped the admissions process altogether, in favor of a "holistic" one [1]. Lesson? Be careful if you're in a minority group that over-achieves your population demographics, because you will be punished for it. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jefferson-high-admissions-fairfax/2020/12/18/d09a2b3c-40b9-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...
    - higut4 5y ago
      Unless you create your own country like Israel.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Importantly, the proposal that activists sought was not a "holistic" process but instead a merit lottery. For all of the whinging that people have calling the activists racists, they wanted a system that still would have overrepresented asian students compared to the local population and had minimal opportunity for creeping bias through subjective systems. And there were programs that successfully increased representation of black and hispanic students at TJ several decades ago - but these programs were halted. We'll see how it plays out.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago
        "Under the new rules, Fairfax will first identify all eighth-graders who meet certain academic criteria: those who achieve an unweighted GPA of at least 3.5 while taking Algebra I or a higher-level math class, in addition to math and science honors courses and either an English or social studies honors course." "In a bid to ensure geographical diversity, a certain number of seats will be allotted to every middle school in Fairfax County, to be filled by eighth-graders at that school who meet criteria." Doesn't seem very meritocratic to me. Doing a lottery among everyone with a 3.5 is basically saying select every student that isn't failing. High school GPAs are highly inflated to the point that most people who would be competitive in the current application system have above a 3.9. The geographical diversity quota is de facto a race quota due to redlining and cultural enclaves. I don't know how you can possibly argue that accepting students from all over the district objectively through merit is worse than a geographic quota per middle school. And what happens when you diversity admit these students who, by the admissions test, are not as competitive? The vast array of clubs and other high school competitions become dominated by the most competitive students, i.e. they're going to look like what TJ looks like now: 70% Asian according to the article. In effect you're tossing unprepared students into the deep end to get screwed for the college application process because they have 0 chance at securing any sort of extracurricular activity for themselves. The real kicker here is that by the article's quoted data, 70% of the school is Asian. If you really wanted racial diversity in line with the population you'd also be pushing for increased white representation along the lines of a 150% increase in # of white students admitted. But that's not what these activists are talking about, which is how you know their ideas are just politically motivated garbage.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?
    - rkk3 5y ago
      > surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism Are they disproportionately killed & policed? It depends on how you cut the statistics for your narrative. As a % of population vs % of Violent Crime vs % of Homicides etc etc. This is not to say there are no benefits about going into an encounter White.
    - threatofrain 5y ago
      https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f2c03-d500-49c6-89fc-f282013132e3.html https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f... Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership. Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once. https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
    - rebelos 5y ago
      You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets. The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States#2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014. The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that. Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence: > A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area. The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.
  - yaboy 5y ago
    Clearly you’ve never been pulled over by a cop for a DWB — Driving While Black.
    - gregors 5y ago
      I found it very interesting during college I drove a beater car. I got pulled over by cops ALL THE TIME. For some reason all that magically changed when I managed to purchase something nice. Curious? no?
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      They're saying it's the most explicit form of institutional racism, since it's (1) so blatant and out in the open and (2) centrally mandated instead of a byproduct of a few renegade individuals. That's not to say that it's necessarily the most impactful form of institutional racism.
    - kingsuper20 5y ago
      Have you? How did it go down?
      - fighterpilot 5y ago
        Nobody knows if a specific pullover is a DWB pullover (i.e. one motivated by racism, unconscious or conscious) or a legitimate outcome of a random draw. That kind of phenomenon can only be teased out with a lot of data.
    - scarmig 5y ago
      Explicit vs impactful. All told, I'd rather get into an inferior school over discriminatory treatment by police for life, with an outside chance of a genuinely horrific situation occuring that'd cost me my life. But the discrimination against AA applicants is institutional and intentional in a way that police discrimination against blacks is not. For AAs, the solution is simple: stop discriminating against someone just because they're Asian. The question of how to get more equitable policing is endlessly discussed and debated, because it's subtle and relies on personal psychological biases, not policies intentionally constructed to discriminate.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Honestly, anybody that says Asians are institutionally discriminated against because they are a slightly lower percentage at Harvard, even though there are a lot of Asians at Harvard, is basically saying people of all kinds, including other Asians like me that can’t get into any kind of elite school don’t matter and are inferior. It’s insulting, at this point, and the anti-AA Asian groups that further this ideology are marginalizing themselves for it.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      If you read the article I linked, you'd know that they aren't just a slightly lower percentage but are systematically rated lower on the "personal" axis by Harvard admissions officers simply because they are Asian. It's insulting, at this point, that people like you continue to claim there's no systemic discrimination despite _court discovered evidence_ to the contrary. The only other explanation for the gap in personal ratings is that you think Asians as a group have less of those traits than other races, which is racist in itself.
      - rejectedandsad 5y ago
        That is irrelevant. The degree to which some people state the importance of this is extremely insulting to Asians like me that went to state schools that are not terribly selective.
        b9a2cab5 5y ago
        I am an Asian who went to a state school and I don't think it's irrelevant. Regardless of Harvard's prestige giving a whole class of people lower "personal" ratings because of their race is racism, pure and simple. I even see startups like Canvas/Jumpstart [1] that explicitly allow recruiters to filter applicants by race. I don't know how this isn't illegal and I hope someone sues them. I took a look at your post history and it seems very bitter about lost opportunities due to "elite" schools being preferred. As a fairly recent grad from a state school I offer my own perspective: private schools like Harvard offer much better support and less cutthroat competition, but if you can rise to the top in state schools then you have the same opportunities as everyone else. Making 300k at Facebook is more than accessible to half the UC's including ones you wouldn't consider elite at all. I know many people working at Big 4 accounting, bulge bracket banks, big tech, startups, VC, etc. [1]: https://www.canvas.com/ https://www.canvas.com/
  - tasogare 5y ago
    And somehow, bullshit notions like systemic racism, which could for once be used for real, is suddenly not used at all. This shows what "anti-racism" really is: a political discourse serving the interests of a few groups, to the exclusion and detriment of others.
    - okaram 5y ago
      Wait ... is it a bulshit notion, or real?
- rkk3 5y ago
  They have been honing the tactics for 100 years now, originally developed to exclude the Jews from WASP Universities.
- smlss_sftwr 5y ago
  Same with the UC system, if you look at the Asian/Asian-American demographic it's in some cases close to double that of comparable non-race blind institutions. When I was going through the college application process in my day, the unspoken Asian/Asian-American quotas for top private institutions were accepted as a given rule of the game which led to some pretty vicious rivalries among my peer group (whether accurate or not, there was a notion that our district was allocated a sub-quota of the overall quota, so it was perceived to be a zero-sum game as to who would get HYPSM offers each year). Even if the recent court rulings weren't in their favor, it's heartening to see newer cohorts of Asian-American applicants start to challenge the rules directly instead of solely focusing on their internal competition
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. To clarify for those who don't understand your point, Caltech is unique among elite universities for not using affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.
nradov 5y ago
So then the smart choice for any applicant would be to select whichever race checkbox on the form gives the greatest advantage. Since race is an artificial social construct with no clear objective definition there's nothing wrong with hacking the system to your advantage. Or just leave it blank.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  They’ll just look at your family name and make an educated guess based on school demographics and your hobbies, or look you out or parents up on social media. They’re not stupid. They know who they’re discriminating against
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    But they don't really care about what the applicant's race is. What they care about is how that person contributes to the metrics they're trying to maximize, or in the case of Asians, minimize. To them, a 1/4 Black person 3/4 Asian person, and a full Black person, are exactly the same thing, as long as they're both incrementing the same number in their diversity report.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      Ah but they do. See this person that was Indian (but raised in Nigeria!) but pretended to be black to get into med school [1]. "I was always in a state of terror that I would be found out. During one interview at Case Western Reserve University, I was confronted by a black doctor and admissions committee member. He barraged me with questions about my family and personal background. I said that my family came from Nigeria. It was technically correct because my Indian parents had lived in Nigeria before moving to the United States. Finally he said, eyes cold, in more of a question than a statement, “I read your application. It says you’re black.” I nodded." [1]: https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains-why-he-pretended-to-be-black/ https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
      - 5y ago
treeman79 5y ago
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. - Animal Farm.

fighterpilot 5y ago

What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. It appears to be collusion either of the sort discussed in the article or the informal sort where each college copies their competitors' quotas.

scarmig 5y ago
College admissions' treatment of Asian American applicants is the most explicit form of institutional racism in the US today. It's the kind of racist discrimination that, if applied against any other group, would get the perpetrator sued to oblivion.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a magnet school in Virginia, often ranked the top high school in the US. Admissions is (or was) based mostly on an admissions test, with a smaller portion based on middle school grades. In recent years, the student body was 70% Asian, 20% White, and the rest other minorities. Despite literally decades of trying to increase percentages of Black and Hispanic students at the school with outreach programs and tutoring, percentages have never exceeded single digits. So what did the school board do? They scrapped the admissions process altogether, in favor of a "holistic" one [1]. Lesson? Be careful if you're in a minority group that over-achieves your population demographics, because you will be punished for it. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jefferson-high-admissions-fairfax/2020/12/18/d09a2b3c-40b9-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...
  - higut4 5y ago
    Unless you create your own country like Israel.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Importantly, the proposal that activists sought was not a "holistic" process but instead a merit lottery. For all of the whinging that people have calling the activists racists, they wanted a system that still would have overrepresented asian students compared to the local population and had minimal opportunity for creeping bias through subjective systems. And there were programs that successfully increased representation of black and hispanic students at TJ several decades ago - but these programs were halted. We'll see how it plays out.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      "Under the new rules, Fairfax will first identify all eighth-graders who meet certain academic criteria: those who achieve an unweighted GPA of at least 3.5 while taking Algebra I or a higher-level math class, in addition to math and science honors courses and either an English or social studies honors course." "In a bid to ensure geographical diversity, a certain number of seats will be allotted to every middle school in Fairfax County, to be filled by eighth-graders at that school who meet criteria." Doesn't seem very meritocratic to me. Doing a lottery among everyone with a 3.5 is basically saying select every student that isn't failing. High school GPAs are highly inflated to the point that most people who would be competitive in the current application system have above a 3.9. The geographical diversity quota is de facto a race quota due to redlining and cultural enclaves. I don't know how you can possibly argue that accepting students from all over the district objectively through merit is worse than a geographic quota per middle school. And what happens when you diversity admit these students who, by the admissions test, are not as competitive? The vast array of clubs and other high school competitions become dominated by the most competitive students, i.e. they're going to look like what TJ looks like now: 70% Asian according to the article. In effect you're tossing unprepared students into the deep end to get screwed for the college application process because they have 0 chance at securing any sort of extracurricular activity for themselves. The real kicker here is that by the article's quoted data, 70% of the school is Asian. If you really wanted racial diversity in line with the population you'd also be pushing for increased white representation along the lines of a 150% increase in # of white students admitted. But that's not what these activists are talking about, which is how you know their ideas are just politically motivated garbage.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  I say this as an Asian person: surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism, no?
  - rkk3 5y ago
    > surely black folks getting disproportionately policed and killed is a bigger manifestation of institutional racism Are they disproportionately killed & policed? It depends on how you cut the statistics for your narrative. As a % of population vs % of Violent Crime vs % of Homicides etc etc. This is not to say there are no benefits about going into an encounter White.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f2c03-d500-49c6-89fc-f282013132e3.html https://www.axios.com/latinos-killed-by-police-estimate-858f... Asians are remarkably vulnerable to dying by police. They are also extremely under-represented in the police force, unlike black Americans. In the Bay Area, police officers are paid very well. These are stepping stones to middle class membership. Also, discussions of racism in education may just completely exclude Asians, as if they aren't even worth mentioning even once. https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
  - rebelos 5y ago
    You can only believe this if you've fallen for the spin perpetrated by media outlets. The number of unarmed Black civilians killed by police each year is so small that you can fit the entire list of names and details since 2014 (31 total) on a few pages of generously-spaced HTML table rows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States#2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ.... This is against approximately 10 million arrests per year and some multiple of that in total police encounters. While it's tragic that the count is nonzero, any rational person should be amazed that the incidence is so vanishingly low, given the uncertainty inherent to policing. It's truly remarkable that it isn't much much higher. I couldn't find statistics about police killings of unarmed White people, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is higher than 31 since 2014. The only reason you think there is (or was) an epidemic of police shootings of unarmed Black people is because the media has worked very hard to maximally exploit cherrypicked cases to get you to believe that. Furthermore, Black communities are often strong advocates of retaining or even increasing police presence: > A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 [2020] surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area. The reason for this is obvious. Persistent socioeconomic inequality has had the same devastating impact within Black communities as it has had everywhere else in the world: increased criminality.
- yaboy 5y ago
  Clearly you’ve never been pulled over by a cop for a DWB — Driving While Black.
  - gregors 5y ago
    I found it very interesting during college I drove a beater car. I got pulled over by cops ALL THE TIME. For some reason all that magically changed when I managed to purchase something nice. Curious? no?
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    They're saying it's the most explicit form of institutional racism, since it's (1) so blatant and out in the open and (2) centrally mandated instead of a byproduct of a few renegade individuals. That's not to say that it's necessarily the most impactful form of institutional racism.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    Have you? How did it go down?
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      Nobody knows if a specific pullover is a DWB pullover (i.e. one motivated by racism, unconscious or conscious) or a legitimate outcome of a random draw. That kind of phenomenon can only be teased out with a lot of data.
  - scarmig 5y ago
    Explicit vs impactful. All told, I'd rather get into an inferior school over discriminatory treatment by police for life, with an outside chance of a genuinely horrific situation occuring that'd cost me my life. But the discrimination against AA applicants is institutional and intentional in a way that police discrimination against blacks is not. For AAs, the solution is simple: stop discriminating against someone just because they're Asian. The question of how to get more equitable policing is endlessly discussed and debated, because it's subtle and relies on personal psychological biases, not policies intentionally constructed to discriminate.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Honestly, anybody that says Asians are institutionally discriminated against because they are a slightly lower percentage at Harvard, even though there are a lot of Asians at Harvard, is basically saying people of all kinds, including other Asians like me that can’t get into any kind of elite school don’t matter and are inferior. It’s insulting, at this point, and the anti-AA Asian groups that further this ideology are marginalizing themselves for it.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    If you read the article I linked, you'd know that they aren't just a slightly lower percentage but are systematically rated lower on the "personal" axis by Harvard admissions officers simply because they are Asian. It's insulting, at this point, that people like you continue to claim there's no systemic discrimination despite _court discovered evidence_ to the contrary. The only other explanation for the gap in personal ratings is that you think Asians as a group have less of those traits than other races, which is racist in itself.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      That is irrelevant. The degree to which some people state the importance of this is extremely insulting to Asians like me that went to state schools that are not terribly selective.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago
        I am an Asian who went to a state school and I don't think it's irrelevant. Regardless of Harvard's prestige giving a whole class of people lower "personal" ratings because of their race is racism, pure and simple. I even see startups like Canvas/Jumpstart [1] that explicitly allow recruiters to filter applicants by race. I don't know how this isn't illegal and I hope someone sues them. I took a look at your post history and it seems very bitter about lost opportunities due to "elite" schools being preferred. As a fairly recent grad from a state school I offer my own perspective: private schools like Harvard offer much better support and less cutthroat competition, but if you can rise to the top in state schools then you have the same opportunities as everyone else. Making 300k at Facebook is more than accessible to half the UC's including ones you wouldn't consider elite at all. I know many people working at Big 4 accounting, bulge bracket banks, big tech, startups, VC, etc. [1]: https://www.canvas.com/ https://www.canvas.com/
- tasogare 5y ago
  And somehow, bullshit notions like systemic racism, which could for once be used for real, is suddenly not used at all. This shows what "anti-racism" really is: a political discourse serving the interests of a few groups, to the exclusion and detriment of others.
  - okaram 5y ago
    Wait ... is it a bulshit notion, or real?
rkk3 5y ago
They have been honing the tactics for 100 years now, originally developed to exclude the Jews from WASP Universities.
smlss_sftwr 5y ago
Same with the UC system, if you look at the Asian/Asian-American demographic it's in some cases close to double that of comparable non-race blind institutions. When I was going through the college application process in my day, the unspoken Asian/Asian-American quotas for top private institutions were accepted as a given rule of the game which led to some pretty vicious rivalries among my peer group (whether accurate or not, there was a notion that our district was allocated a sub-quota of the overall quota, so it was perceived to be a zero-sum game as to who would get HYPSM offers each year). Even if the recent court rulings weren't in their favor, it's heartening to see newer cohorts of Asian-American applicants start to challenge the rules directly instead of solely focusing on their internal competition
TMWNN 5y ago
>What's telling is how similar the Asian admit percentage is between the top colleges except for Caltech. It wasn't always like this, but they've all (ex-Caltech) converged on almost the same number now. To clarify for those who don't understand your point, Caltech is unique among elite universities for not using affirmative action in undergraduate admissions.

nradov 5y ago

So then the smart choice for any applicant would be to select whichever race checkbox on the form gives the greatest advantage. Since race is an artificial social construct with no clear objective definition there's nothing wrong with hacking the system to your advantage. Or just leave it blank.

barry-cotter 5y ago
They’ll just look at your family name and make an educated guess based on school demographics and your hobbies, or look you out or parents up on social media. They’re not stupid. They know who they’re discriminating against
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  But they don't really care about what the applicant's race is. What they care about is how that person contributes to the metrics they're trying to maximize, or in the case of Asians, minimize. To them, a 1/4 Black person 3/4 Asian person, and a full Black person, are exactly the same thing, as long as they're both incrementing the same number in their diversity report.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Ah but they do. See this person that was Indian (but raised in Nigeria!) but pretended to be black to get into med school [1]. "I was always in a state of terror that I would be found out. During one interview at Case Western Reserve University, I was confronted by a black doctor and admissions committee member. He barraged me with questions about my family and personal background. I said that my family came from Nigeria. It was technically correct because my Indian parents had lived in Nigeria before moving to the United States. Finally he said, eyes cold, in more of a question than a statement, “I read your application. It says you’re black.” I nodded." [1]: https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains-why-he-pretended-to-be-black/ https://nypost.com/2015/04/12/mindy-kalings-brother-explains...
    - 5y ago

treeman79 5y ago

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. - Animal Farm.