7 ms·

> I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such. This is

> I would add a generic “culture fit” component to each candidate score which you could use as a hedge to admit legacies without calling them as such. This is not new. This is a battle as old as time. Want to keep out poor people? Require them to live on campus instead of locally at home. Want to keep out the wrong kind of person? Start requiring college essays to get a "culture fit". Or add "geographic diversity" to get less NYC Jews, or require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans. Or conduct interviews so you can see their race in-person without asking for it on a form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_higher_education_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_and_higher_educat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

like_any_other 2y ago
Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities, this is what the demographics of the Ivy League looked like in 2023: https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png
- sequoia 2y ago
  The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness. Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    I'm not suggesting anything, just adding needed context to the discussion. E.g. if you want to suggest that these institutions are rife with systemic white supremacy, be my guest. Just include in your assertions explanations for why there are, per capita, 8x as many Asians, 11x as many Jews, and 1.4x as many Blacks, as there are non-Jewish Whites, in the Ivies, despite Whites' many privileges. Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage. Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Legacies are not well allocated distributions either according to per capita numbers.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      Arguments like this lead to universities severely discriminating against jews in the not so distant past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
      - like_any_other 2y ago
        I haven't made any arguments, I just presented the data.
        drdeca 2y ago
        If you hadn't said "Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities," that might have been true. If you had just said "here is this data", then you would have "just presented the data". You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.
  - musicale 2y ago
    > The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness. The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend. The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
- 512 2y ago
  It's not clear what your point is exactly. It's still possible that Asians, despite being overrepresented, receive some sort of penalty in admissions.
  - jonnybgood 2y ago
    For any penalty Asians receive there are other ethnicities that appear to receive a much harsher one.
    - gameman144 2y ago
      Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?
      - like_any_other 2y ago
        Your skill at crimestop is commendable.
    - gruez 2y ago
      What's the implication here, that asians should just suck it up because others have it worse?
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?
        2y ago
- Adverblessly 2y ago
  Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black. By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation. (Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    > Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times. I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
- matthewowen 2y ago
  As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college) if you look at the ethnic breakdown of children in the US in 2023 (https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population-by-race-and-ethnicity#detailed/1/any/false/2545,871,870,573,869/72,66,67,8367,69,70,71,12/423,424 https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...): 48% non hispanic white 26% hispanic 14% non hispanic black 6% asian 5% mixed 1% native When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.
  - like_any_other 2y ago
    Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?
ryan_j_naughton 2y ago
> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions. There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 2y ago
  > There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians. Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.
  - janderson215 2y ago
    The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
    - lmm 2y ago
      Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
xnx 2y ago
We are witnessing late-stage higher education before AI guts out the education parts.

like_any_other 2y ago

Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities, this is what the demographics of the Ivy League looked like in 2023: https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png

sequoia 2y ago
The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness. Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  I'm not suggesting anything, just adding needed context to the discussion. E.g. if you want to suggest that these institutions are rife with systemic white supremacy, be my guest. Just include in your assertions explanations for why there are, per capita, 8x as many Asians, 11x as many Jews, and 1.4x as many Blacks, as there are non-Jewish Whites, in the Ivies, despite Whites' many privileges. Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage. Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Legacies are not well allocated distributions either according to per capita numbers.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    Arguments like this lead to universities severely discriminating against jews in the not so distant past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
    - like_any_other 2y ago
      I haven't made any arguments, I just presented the data.
      - drdeca 2y ago
        If you hadn't said "Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities," that might have been true. If you had just said "here is this data", then you would have "just presented the data". You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.
- musicale 2y ago
  > The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness. The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend. The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.
512 2y ago
It's not clear what your point is exactly. It's still possible that Asians, despite being overrepresented, receive some sort of penalty in admissions.
- jonnybgood 2y ago
  For any penalty Asians receive there are other ethnicities that appear to receive a much harsher one.
  - gameman144 2y ago
    Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?
    - like_any_other 2y ago
      Your skill at crimestop is commendable.
  - gruez 2y ago
    What's the implication here, that asians should just suck it up because others have it worse?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?
      - 2y ago
Adverblessly 2y ago
Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black. By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation. (Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)
- like_any_other 2y ago
  > Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times. I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.
matthewowen 2y ago
As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college) if you look at the ethnic breakdown of children in the US in 2023 (https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population-by-race-and-ethnicity#detailed/1/any/false/2545,871,870,573,869/72,66,67,8367,69,70,71,12/423,424 https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...): 48% non hispanic white 26% hispanic 14% non hispanic black 6% asian 5% mixed 1% native When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?

ryan_j_naughton 2y ago

> require "well rounded" candidates that do more than pass tests to keep out Asian Americans While I agree with you that vague assessments like "well roundedness" can and have been use for racial discrimination in the past (both intentionally and unintentionally), it doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and solely use standardized tests or test scores to determine admissions. There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Having everyone maxed out on test scores at the expense of such diversity would be a travesty to the thing that makes campus life vibrant.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lmm 2y ago
> There is critical value in assessing these hard to measure qualities for creating a student body. Each student in the university is not simply consuming an educational good in isolation from one another but is also offering their experience and perspective to the community. Yeah and imagine how awful it would be if they got the experience and perspective of asians. Seriously, the supposed benefits of these things are made up and no-one ever checks whether they're assessing the things they nominally claim to be assessing. The racism isn't some accidental side effect, it's the whole point.
- janderson215 2y ago
  The “supposed benefits” of well-roundedness? As GP said, they don’t doubt it is used for discriminatory reasons as well, but are you implying there aren’t benefits to being well-rounded and it is a made up characteristic?
  - lmm 2y ago
    Yes, in my experience "well-rounded" is 100% a made up characteristic that generally means "person like the person doing the assessing". Another reply mentions "interesting conversationalist", which mostly selects for someone having the same cultural background, and is the opposite of "diversity" or whatever this week's excuse for doing this stuff is.

Slava_Propanei 2y ago

[dead]

xnx 2y ago

We are witnessing late-stage higher education before AI guts out the education parts.