5 ms·
US universities also had a history of trying to exclude Jewish people [1]. I say history, because the practice has by all accounts stopped, and the current situ
by MikeUt 5y ago
US universities also had a history of trying to exclude Jewish people [1]. I say history, because the practice has by all accounts stopped, and the current situation in the Ivy League [2] is as follows (looking only at non-international students):
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56
The numbers don't sum to 100% because I did not include multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/ http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/ https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
- andrewclunn 5y agoThank you for the informative post, with cited sources. It however doesn't fit the narrative pushed by halls of power and institutions, and must therefor be downvoted. This has nothing to do with who runs or owns those institutions. Absolutely nothing.
- alecst 5y agoCan someone explain why this is being downvoted? I feel out of the loop. Is it factually wrong in some way, or just off-topic?
- reissbaker 5y agoIt is to my knowledge factually correct and on-topic (I upvoted it). That being said, I believe discussion of upvotes/downvotes is against HN guidelines, so we should probably refrain from that here — if you're concerned about abuse you can email hn@ycombinator.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jonnycomputer 5y agoI think talking about upvotes and downvotes should be encouraged.
- MikeUt 5y agoMaybe they don't believe the data? And it's very tedious to check. If that's the case, I suggest to check the data for a few individual universities. Cornell and Princeton are slight outliers, but otherwise individual universities don't deviate much from the average. That should give some credence to the numbers.
- neolog 5y ago$GP is suggesting a high ratio means there isn't any discrimination against a group. For example, asians. But there is discrimination against asians. So $GP's evidence isn't satisfactory.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoThat's not what I inferred
- alecst 5y agoThat's a take I would never have considered. I'm not really up to speed on discrimination against Asians.
- neolog 5y agoPeople smarter than me realized the post was a dogwhistle and moved on.
- whatshisface 5y agoThere's no way to tell whether those numbers are evidence for or against discrimination because there's no control group of culturally blank ivy leagues to compare it against.
- bradrn 5y agoI think the point is that there was extensive discrimination against Jews, but now it’s stopped, and the data show this.
- upbeat_general 5y agoI think the data only shows that they’re over represented compared to the normal population and there isn’t that much discrimination. There’s still discrimination against Asian applicants and they’re also over represented so I don’t think the data shows that it’s necessarily stopped.
- Overton-Window 5y agoWhen Whites are overrepresented we're told it's systemic racism. When Jews are overrepresented we're told it's an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoThank you for doing this work. It would be great to have the spreadsheet or code that generates this table available. Would you be willing to share it?
- MikeUt 5y agoIt's just a trivial excel table. The Hillel sources are a bit tricky to get to - their URLs are: https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/brown-university https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/brown-universit... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/columbia-university http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/columbia-univers... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/cornell-university http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/cornell-universi... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/dartmouth-college http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/dartmouth-colleg... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-university http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-universi... http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/university-of-pennsylvania http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/university-o... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-university http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-univer... http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-university http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-university https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges has a decent summary of other demographic data. For the US, I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... Unfortunately I could not find many numbers from eJP, except those in the https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduates/ https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... article. Perhaps you will have better luck searching.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoThank you!