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Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against Asians?
- wfunction 13y agoI don't get is, how is this surprising? When affirmative action is letting more people from some group in than they normally would, then isn't it kind of obvious that other groups will take the hit? It's not some magical force... when A + B is to be constant (total capacity), then increasing B decreases A.
- litewulf 13y agoIf that is the case, then why do Asians underperformed compared to Whites? If affirmative action is meant to help underrepresented groups, shouldn't the overrepresented group be the one "taking the hit"?
- cobrausn 13y agoOver represented by what metric?
- cglee 13y agoAsians underperform? Please explain.
- streptomycin 13y agoAsians are the overrepresented group.
- wfunction 13y agoOverrepresented? Is the Asian to non-Asian ratio is higher fir college students than for qualified applicants to those colleges?
- streptomycin 13y agoYou'd have to define "qualified" first to answer that question... but anyway, that's not what overrepresented means.
- wfunction 13y agoWhat does it mean then?
- streptomycin 13y agoThere is a higher proportion of X in Y than there is of X in the total population.
- wfunction 13y agoThat's like saying children of age 6 are overrepresented in kindergarten, because there is a higher proportion of kids of age 6 in kindergarten than in the total population! The "natural" (equally-represented) proportion isn't that in the total population, it's the proportion in the population of interest, which in this case is the set of qualified applicants.
- streptomycin 13y agoThe meaning of words does depend on context of course. Regardless, rest assured that when you hear someone say "overrepresented" and they are talking about higher education, they are using the definition I gave you above.
- wfunction 13y agoWell then the word is quite uninteresting and meaningless.
- newnewnew 13y agoThe novel thing is that non-white students are being negatively affected.
- wfunction 13y agoWell, if minorities are being positively affected, then majorities (in this case, Asians + whites) must be negatively affected. How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
- esrauch 13y agoIf white and Asian students are the majority, they should be selected against based on their proportion of that majority. I believe some are suggesting that Asian students are being unduly discriminated against when compared to white students.
- asdfologist 13y agoYou don't get it - the parent's point is that your argument doesn't explain why Asians take a much bigger hit than whites. "Asian applicants have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with comparable test scores."
- wfunction 13y agoWhat's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race? If it's > 1, then obviously Asians will take a bigger hit, since they're the majority, that's the whole point of my comment. If it's <= 1 though then yes, the situation is very interesting indeed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wfunction 13y ago
- booruguru 13y agoDude, did we read the same article? White students are favored over Asians with better scores. Asians are being penalized for being Asian.
- ajross 13y agoJust as latino students are "favored" over whites with better scores, and (at the top of the SAT range in the graph) black students are "favored" over latinos. You can't win here. Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students. Identifiable ethnicities have different median qualifications. So someone has to lose in that tradeoff. The point upthread was simply that usually when you see this argument made it's a complaint that whites are being "penalized". This time it's asians. But despite being a novel spin, it's still the same story.
- Crake 13y ago"Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students." They could try looking for actual diversity, then, instead of just an aesthetically pleasing mixture of superficial skin colors. Accepting 100 multiracial kids who all attended the same boarding schools is going to be way less diverse than a selection of 100 kids from different levels of income. Actually, I believe income quite dominates race in terms of predicting academic success these days--the interracial achievement gap looks quite small by comparison. (As well it should, in a country currently headed by a black president.)
- ajross 13y agoThat does nothing. You just swap out "my" arbitrary definition of "diversity" for your equally arbitrary one. Any definition that doesn't have a 1:1 frequency map with "objective stuff we otherwise use for admissions qualification" is subject to the same thing. And of course those objective measure are themselves subject to debate and (gasp) subjectivity. There's no winning here. Don't fool yourself into thinking you know the right way to do education selection, and stop sneering at all the people who want different things than you do.
- dopamean 13y agoWhen I got to Penn my freshman year I very quickly came to the very unscientific conclusion that the admissions office probably could have filled the entire freshman class with very smart Asian students who had better grades and test scores than me. I am black and was never a stellar student in high school but I had great test scores. I often felt that if I had been Asian or white I may not have been admitted.
- nahname 13y agoHow does that impact your view on the position or carrier you have obtained? Is it all part of the game? Just curious how affirmative action is viewed in your eyes, as someone who believes they benefitted from it.
- dopamean 13y agoTo be honest, I have never put much thought into it. There were so many kids at Penn who were legacies, athletes, or from very wealthy families that I never felt like I may not have "deserved" to be there. There may have been affirmative action for minority students but there were similar types of things for many white and Jewish students as well. A lot of kids go to college every year based on something other than merit or race and so it never really bothered me that my race may have helped me get in. Does that make sense?
- nahname 13y agoI think so. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
- scubaguy 13y agoIt's pretty clear the point is not that discrimination against Asians is a secret. The point the author is making is that this kind of discrimination is wrong.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mmorett 13y agoAn "inconvenient truth" is a better way to describe it.
- CapitalistCartr 13y agoI get so tired of seeing this sloppy thinking. Discrimination isn't bad. Its an essential part of clear judgement. Prejudicial discrimination is bad because its piss-poor discrimination. Of course universities are discriminating against a wide variety of people; they can't accept everyone. The question is whether its prejudicial, as in they've pre-judged these people because of a group they belong to before they've looked at them as an individual.
- jsnk 13y agoDo you think discrimination by public institutions is not bad?
- CapitalistCartr 13y agoI think you misunderstood my post. Your question is exactly the problem I addressed. Universities HAVE to discriminate; they cannot accept every applicant. The question is how are they doing it, is it a good way, and is there a better way. You discriminate every time you purchase one product over another, take one job over another, live in one area over another, befriend one person over another, etc. We all do. The key to doing it well is clear, analytical judgement about such decisions. Personally, I haven't seen much of that in University admissions at any school.
- jsnk 13y agoI am ok with private businesses or individuals going about their own business with whatever racist, homophobic, sexist policies. I don't care. I simply won't visit them or pay for their service. I read my fair share of Rothbard, Friedman and Block. Discrimination in the sense of making choice so long as the choice doesn't violate the rights of other is ok, even if it is morally despicable. This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.
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- wfunction 13y ago> “Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind.” Yes, because using quotas would be illegal. But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment. Wasn't the whole point of the UC v. Bakke case to say that quotas are illegal, but race is still a legitimate factor to consider in admission? This sentence means nothing.
- twoodfin 13y agoWould quotas be illegal for a private university?
- OGinparadise 13y agoThey accept government funds and grants so I think that the government can force them to do almost anything.
- twoodfin 13y agoThat's not true. They couldn't, for example, demand editorial constraints on the Harvard Crimson. Private organizations don't give up their rights, including their right to free association, just by accepting government dollars.
- wfunction 13y agoYou misunderstood what the parent was saying. By "force them to do X" he meant the government can refuse to fund them if they didn't do X (which forces them to abide by the government's rules if they are accepting its funds), not that the government can legally mandate them to do X unconditionally.
- twoodfin 13y agoConditions placed on the recipients of government expenditures are not unrestrained by Constitutional limitations. Witness the Supreme Court throwing out some of the strings attached to ACA's Medicaid expansion.
- OGinparadise 13y ago“Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind.” ....but we do value diversity :) and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.
- tsotha 13y ago>It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B... Uh huh. Substitute "Blacks" for "Asians" and somehow suddenly it's no longer okay.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoThis makes no sense. This kind of sloppy thinking on a topic like this does nothing to further the discussion.
- newnewnew 13y agoUnfortunately "sloppy thinking" pretty accurately describes the liberal orthodoxy that runs elite colleges.
- Crake 13y agoIt makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another. I guess the idea that we should stop with race based discrimination altogether is too novel yet. So long as this is the case, the cycle will continue to repeat.
- tsotha 13y agoJerry Pournelle is fond of saying something to the effect of "Back in the '60s people thought I was a radical because I said we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color. Today people think I'm a radical because... I say we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color."
- learc83 13y agoThey're not directly using quotas, but they get the same result by putting less emphasis on test scores and grades. There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.
- Lukeas14 13y agoFor anybody interested in running their own numbers, there is a wealth of demographic data on college admissions available called IPEDS from the National Center for Education Statistics. http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx
- pionar 13y agoAnd once again, if the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is no.
- stared 13y agoA nice, if lengthy, article on that topic: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - for example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).
- freyr 13y agoThe full TL;DR of that article is that Jews are "the new WASPs" (e.g. are over-represented relative to recent performance on measures like STEM competitions) and both Asians and non-Jewish whites are "the new Jews." The author suggests that top Asian students are being discriminated against (implicitly or explicitly), and it's unclear whether top non-Jewish white students are being discriminated against, or whether they apply in much smaller numbers to the Ivies.
- endtime 13y agoWhich part of the article says that Jews are over-represented? It says that blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics) are over-represented, but all it says about Jews is that they were under-represented and that this effect starting fading in the 50s.
- geebee 13y agoI think freyr is commenting on the ron unz ("Myth of American Meritocracy") article, not the priconomics blog entry.
- gyardley 13y agoI assume you're referring to the Priceonomics blog post, while the comment you replied to was talking about Ron Unz's article in The American Conservative. In the article from The American Conservative, the claim that Jews are over-represented is rather hard to miss.
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- gtr32x 13y agoThe current educational system utilizes SAT scores with a variety of other sources for determining acceptance. While there are other factors such as athleticism, social endeavors etc. SAT score is still often viewed as one of the key determining factors. It is of no doubt that Asians that apply to these top universities as a whole have higher SAT scores. However it does not say of their other qualities, those were perhaps the reasons why there was a lower acceptance rate for them. In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better. One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true. Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.
- jsnk 13y agoYou did mention it in the last paragraph, but let's reiterate that. In the end, it is plain racism against Asians, solely for being Asian. People can continue to shroud this fact with more comforting language such as "diversity" that's politically salient, but end result for Asians is all the same, plain old racism. No one is saying that SAT is the sole standard of admission. But does anyone really believe that Asians as a group collectively are so horrible in admission standard (with exception of SAT score) that huge disparity in number of Asian applicants and Asian admissions are justified?
- rdl 13y agoI've always wondered what happened if you lied, particularly if you had an ambiguous or misleading name. (If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)
- roguecoder 13y agoI was made uncomfortable enough honestly reporting my racial background I can't imagine kids actually doing that. I am of mixed race, had a culturally non-White upbringing, but look as White as Wonderbread. College was a very weird experience, because I felt like I was either unfairly infringing on the challenges of the students who were obviously minorities at my school, or I had to ditch most of my upbringing and pretend to be as White as I look.
- SPSteinbeck 13y agoJust like a young Barack Obama. You could be president one day :)
- fyi80 13y agoCare to guess how many African-American college applicants are white Jewish South Africans? Plenty.
- mindcrime 13y agoMaybe they do, but this whole discussion is missing the point that going to an "elite" university is not an essential step in having a successful life and career. I quoted a bunch of this data in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to search for right now, but the gist is, you have approximately as good a chance of becoming CEO of an S&P 500 company if you go to the University of Wisconsin as if you go to Harvard. So even if your goals are at the extreme upper end of the spectrum, you aren't necessarily hurt by not going to an Ivy League school. A well known, well regarded State university puts you on pretty good footing as well. None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine. Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
- rdl 13y agoI think you confuse the odds of a given exec being from Harvard vs. OSU with the odds that a Harvard student becomes an exec vs. that an OSU grad becomes an exec. All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.
- mindcrime 13y agoIn retrospect, you may be right, when factoring in the different size of the student populations. But nonetheless, I stand by the point that going to a good State school is a perfectly sufficient step to have a good - even amazing - career. Keep in mind that there are only, well, 500, S&P 500 CEOs. But a pretty damn successful and amazing career might be being the CEO of a multi-million dollar textile manufacturer in South Carolina, that nobody on HN has ever heard of. Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
- cdoxsey 13y agoThomas Sowell recently released a new book on this subject: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race-ebook/dp/B00BAH8D6K/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1366837955&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race-ebook/dp/B00BAH... Clearly discrimination against Asians was one of the unforeseen consequences of affirmative action. What's particularly sad is it doesn't even help the people it was supposed to. For example: "Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were 'modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an increase in black and Hispanic degrees.'"
- natrius 13y agoThe comparison between Caltech and the Ivies is a bit unfair. Caltech is in California, which has more Asians, and people tend to attend schools near home. Adding in Stanford would be illustrative.
- roguecoder 13y agoThis turns out to explain most of the "overrepresentation" of jewish students as well: there are lots of highly-ranked universities around NYC and Boston.
- fyi80 13y agoThe geography imbalance, which exists, is not even close to explaining the disparity between general population and Ivy League attendees.
- cube13 13y agoYup, I'd like to see Stanford as well. I'd also like to see what the breakdown for asians that are US citizens versus foreign nationals or immigrants. The other problem is that this article automatically assumes that private schools are "elite", and public schools aren't. That's true for certain fields-law and finance, for example, are dominated by the ivy league schools. STEM, on the other hand, is a much more even distribution. Many of the engineering programs at most of the Big 10 state schools are considered to be some of the best educations you can get, and the UC system is full of very good programs. UIUC's CS program is considered one of the best in the nation, as are Purdue's ME and aeronautical engineering programs.
- natrius 13y agoAs far as public schools go, the article only excludes the UCs because they can't consider race. In fact, it uses Berkeley as a peer for the elite private schools. There's no other public school that has a reputation across all disciplines similar to the elite private schools, so I don't think the article made any real oversight. There are many programs within public schools that are considered peers, though.
- david_shaw 13y agoI can't speak to whether admissions officers are, consciously or not, discriminating against Asians. What I can contribute, however, are my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences with Asian households, and my own personal experience with the college application process. I am not Asian. Probably because of my own interest in sciences and mathematics, many of my friends in high school were Asian. They tended to excel in schoolwork, in no small part because they were under huge amounts of pressure from their parents. I'm not saying that all Asian families "force" their children to study ad-nauseum, but the "high expectations Asian father" Internet meme is at least somewhat based in truth, stereotyped or not. Because of this pressure (and supportive culture of success), Asians tend do incredibly well in school, as well as on standardized tests... but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students "well-rounded," which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value. My personal college application process involved SAT scores that were very good, and a GPA that was solid but somewhat average. However, I had done several sports in high school, done a considerable amount of community service, had three technical jobs (two as a developer, one as a security analyst), and released open source software--all while passing my classes. I was passionate about computer science, and I believe that that helped me gain admission to very good universities. I'm not trying to "blame the victim" with this comment--it may very well be that admissions officers harbor prejudices against Asians--but I also think it's worth noting that when you're talking about the top-tier of our education system--the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world--great grades aren't enough to gain admission.
- fatjokes 13y agoI'm willing to believe that this is what US universities are aiming for (i.e., "well-roundedness", passion vs. nurture, etc.) However, believing than an Asian kid did well on his scores / science competitions simply because a lot of Asian kids are pressured at home is called prejudice and extremely unfair to the kid in question. One (Asian) acquaintance of mine had great passion to be a computer scientist and pursued it against the wishes of his parents... who wanted him to be a doctor.
- newnewnew 13y ago
- jcampbell1 13y agoYes. We should just take race off the applications, like we did on loan applications decades ago. If you want an affirmative action proxy, we can just use high school data, and zip code information, and questions like "did your parents attend college?"
- fyi80 13y agoThis is of course much better, to avoid AA going to rich black kids over poor white kids.
- fatjokes 13y agoYes. Now what is anybody going to do about it? Asian-Americans lack the numbers and the political clout as African- and Hispanic-Americans. Asians do not have a Sharpton. It's also tough to sympathize with a bunch of kids protesting how they weren't let into Harvard / Princeton / etc. It's unfair, and it sucks for them. Jews got around it after Asians came around and took their place. Who can Asians wait for?
- gyardley 13y agoJews 'got around it' due to sustained media and political pressure in the 1950s - we didn't wait for anybody. Nor did Asians take our place - quotas against Jews in elite universities were largely lifted before the widespread adoption of affirmative action, which is when Asians' problems began. If you want to do something about it, don't wait for some other minority group to come along and be the goat, organize. There's a lot more Asians than Jews in this country - you should be able to build an organization at least as effective as the Anti-Defamation League. And for god's sake, at least stop voting for politicians who support affirmative action. If you vote for politicians who discriminate against you, those politicians are going to quite reasonably conclude that you don't really care about being discriminated against.
- Crake 13y agoI think it will first take realizing that they don't deserve to be discriminated against. A lot of my asian friends are just like, oh well, nothing to be done about it. It's an attitude I find quite perplexing. Even the ones that do care about it do so only mildly--nowhere near the level of outrage that is mustered by a hispanic or black person when they (increasingly more rarely, today) encounter a similar problem.
- chii 13y agoTheres a bit of culture of submitting to authority in the asian zeitgeist. This is probably because of that.
- danielna 13y agoWhile it is a very easy "excuse" to hide behind, I believe in holistic admissions qualifications. I think charts of SAT score x race x admissions are as good of a metric of assessing a potential student as college GPA are of assessing a potential employee. To some degree there's a baseline expectation for the practical purposes of filtering (with lots of outliers for various reasons), but at the end of the day it doesn't say much about how intelligent or capable someone really is. Intelligence and capability can't be reduced to a test-taking skill. I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.
- tobylane 13y agoAsian-born student life sounds like it involves a lot of after school classes, and group cramming sessions. Maybe this leaves less time for community service and class representative. If Asians do less of this they'd not be chosen compared to all the other 'equally' 'perfect' applicants.
- jlgreco 13y agoThe question I think is how we are weighting extra-curriculars. How does piano compare to... say.. windsurfing? I'd put both about on the same level as far as merit goes (one taxes the mind and dexterity, the other taxes the body and dexterity, both are fairly out of reach for the underprivileged). If the "holistic admission" thing is being used to disqualify Asian candidates I would expect that two students with equal grades would be disadvantaged if they played piano rather than windsurfed. From my anecdotal experience, I find this very plausible. (I'm a white guy who had extraordinarily poor grades in highschool yet was accepted to the school of my choice. My Asian peers almost universally far outclassed me in academic skill (proper student discipline in general); if you told me that I was accepted because I was on the swim team instead of another student with better grades who played the piano (both forms of self-improvement, not community service), I would not be surprised. Very disappointed, but not surprised.)
- lifeformed 13y agoWhen I was an Asian student (I'm still Asian), my strategy was to apply to good-but-not-elite schools, and spent my time trying to load up diversity scholarships and merit-based scholarships. I got a full-ride to a great non-elite school; there are plenty of schools like the one I went to that would love to have more non-white students, and are even giving away money for it. I'd much rather go to a good school for free than to go to an elite one and be in debt.
- stevenameyer 13y agoI would be interested to see how prevalent this is at top institutions around the world. I can be fairly confident that my program does not do this as my class is very far from diverse. (the large majority of students being asian males) I have heard of a little bit of black magic that is involved in the acceptance process but in order to accept people who are more likely to succeed in the program. But race definitely does not come into play.
- jug6ernaut 13y agoThe sad part is there will always be discrimination, all attempts to counter discrimination are in themselves discrimination. Until students/people are judged purely off their merits there will ALWAYS be discrimination. The truly sad part is it is openly acceptable to discriminate against whole groups of people purely based on statistics of whole groups. If this isn't the definition of stereotyping i don't know what is. Just because one's motivations are sound doesn't mean we should unanimously assume so are there actions. Judge people for who they are, not where they are from.
- fyi80 13y agoDefine "merits". That is a huge problem in itself, as traditional measures of merit encode cultural discrimination.
- jug6ernaut 13y agoI suppose that depends on what the goal of a school is. If the goal is to teach(which i think everyone can agree is there purpose?), then cultural discrimination, or any discrimination has no place in it education process. In school students are judged by their grades, so should they be in the selection process. Any deviation from this IS discrimination, again assuming the goal is to teach.
- chii 13y agoyou can stop discrimination when there are enough position so that everyone gets to have the same quality education, anywhere (and no one has to miss out).
- Xcelerate 13y agoAlright, what's up with this weird article shuffling on HN lately? This was in the top position on the home page. I refresh the page, can't find it anymore, spend a few minutes checking my browser history, and suddenly it's at the bottom of the home page. This happens a lot lately, and it's confusing me. Could we at least get a moderator note when the article is moved or a different color to let users know it has been moved? EDIT: Holy cow, now it's on the 2nd page. What the heck? (And I bet I'm never going to get an explanation either.)
- martythemaniak 13y agoWell... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't. But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted. It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people. Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
- niggler 13y ago"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics" I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
- slg 13y agoThe hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.
- niggler 13y agoAt the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts. It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
- nacho2sweet 13y agoI worked on the web side of a non elite but good universities student recruitment department. I would hear stories all the time of Asian parents coming in and handling their whole child's enrollment process. Many of the administrators found it kind of funny/horrifying/sad all at the same time.
- nchuhoai 13y agoAsians are fairly poorly represented compared to their raw "paper intellegence" in the business, cultural and politics of the United States. The following statements will include many generalizations, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that most Asians are studious, but rather shy, passive. Asians tend to generally not be viewed as "strong" personalities or leaders, but "born followers" that know how to get the job down quickly. It doesn't help that China always copies everything. As much as stereotypes are deceiving and ill for our society, I tend to think they hold a small, but ruthless grain of truth in them. and i am Asian.
- candybar 13y agoWhat's interesting to me is that elite colleges are doing this under the pretense that qualifications other than SAT and grades, like life experiences, character, community involvement, etc, matter greatly, but statistics suggest that Asians without the scores and the grades are even more out of luck when it comes to the top schools. Admissions officers are not some kind of mind reading wizards who are able to churn through thousands of applications and figure out who are amazing people despite bad test scores and grades and who are frauds despite high test scores and grades, merely based on short descriptions of what they did outside of classes. They are underpaid paper pushers forced to judge people who are likely smarter than they are, with very little information. There are two main reasons for the holistic evaluation. One, to give themselves plausible deniability when they need to tweak the student body to fit institutional purposes. Two, to introduce sufficient randomness into the process to reduce the incentive to game the process. The truth is that top private schools are in the business of soliciting donations from wealthy donors and selling an image of prestig while avoiding major controversies. Having a heavily Asian-dominated student body doesn't serve any of those goals. They are politically weak, not a threat to organize and are seen as foreign by a large portion of the population.
- tokenadult 13y agoSome basic facts about college admission in the United States: 1) Most colleges admit large numbers of students who are officially reported as "race/ethnicity unknown." (The graphic in the submitted article, showing race/ethnicity questions from a college application, is dishonest by omitting the part on the application that says that whole section is optional, as it must be by federal regulation.) 2) The definition of "race" categories in current United States regulations is arbitrary, acknowledged by the Census Bureau to be unscientific, does not match categories used in any other country, and has changed several times in my lifetime. 3) "Jewish" has never been an officially regarded category in the United States for tracking data on the issue of college admission, but Jews once faced considerable barriers getting into many colleges. 4) The subset of United States high school students who are college-ready by what courses they have completed during high school has a much different "race" composition from the general United States population. Several of the replies in this interesting thread speculate about details of the practice of colleges in the United States, so I will refer here to the definitive FAQ about "race" in United States college admission, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/admissions-hindsight-lessons-learned/1366406-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-10-a.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/admissions-hindsight-les... so that those of you who like to look up reliable sources and check facts are able to do that about this contentious issue. The FAQ will have to be revised, of course, after the Supreme Court issues its opinion in a pending case (cited in the FAQ). Full references to the facts listed above can be found in the FAQ.
- mustafakidd 13y agoIsn't it strange that middle easterners have to go through life being treated as non white and dealing with all sorts of social issues around that - especially in the past decade - and yet get no "benefit" when it comes time for admissions?
- Crake 13y agoRace based discrimination that favors any given minority will only come after the political/social upheaval that disadvantaged them has ceased to exist, more or less. At least, you have to reached the peak of your civil rights movement for that particular group, so that it's "obvious" that it's not just a "political opinion" to discriminate against them. This is why you presently see homeless GLBT kids who don't qualify for federal financial aid, while wealthy hispanic/black kids at private high schools get easy admits and full rides to wherever they apply. It'll happen for middle easterners only once people no longer mind them--of course, then people will think it unfair that they are so oppressed, and whatever the current group-to-be-hated of that decade is will be further discriminated against in favor of correcting for a social pressure that has long since disappeared.
- spitx 13y agoThere are several problems with corralling peoples of varying regional backgrounds into a neat label or two. This poses a problem for the sake of consideration of applicants for admission into institutions of higher learning not unlike it does for consideration of peoples for any other purpose. The immediate problem is of the question of homogeneity. Although both Asian, are people of Filipino extraction similarly prone to academic excellence as their Chinese counterparts? Although both Black and hailing from much the same coordinates, do Haitians benefit from a culture that values the merits of higher education as do their Jamaican and other Carib brethren? Although all White, are the rates of adoption of fields of study uniform among Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans and all other non-Hispanic white Americans? ( The former president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has famously commented on how few numbers of Irish-Americans, as opposed to other whites, are to be found in high-finance. He has made more controversial statements about women in science and mathematics which are less relevant here. ) The more sensitive problem - and one that the universities seek to handle delicately - is the problem of producing a class of pupils that is deft at handling problems of the larger world that are not entirely limited to the narrow confines of their chosen area of study. Over the course of hundreds of years, universities have come to learn that a purely academically flourishing candidate, otherwise deficient in certain key qualities that make for a ringleader, is less than ideal for those larger missions. This has led to the emergence of the much vaunted, deservedly so, "well-rounded candidate". The candidate who sets himself or herself apart in matters of moral earnestness, social conscience and a world view. He who is not just driven by an achievement trophy-besotted vigor that sees education as a means to a higher rung. I'll leave it to the discursive minds here to explicate on the matter of how various groups including “piano playing, hard working" Asians fare in this regard and if that positively accounts for the disparity in acceptance rates for those groups.
- cpr 13y agoAs much as I loathe Larry Summers' economics (he's a Goldman grad, after all), I have to defend him against the casual slur implied above. He didn't "make controversial statements about women," he simply asked a question about a fact, which is why men are far and away the (high end) outliers in math and science, and whether there might be something based on nature (vs nurture). For asking this un-PC question, he was basically driven out of the presidency at Harvard. When you can't even ask questions about reality without getting pilloried, you know things are rotten in academia. (Summers was a year ahead of me at school, though I didn't know him then.)
- lucidrains 13y agothis is true for medical schools too
- lucidrains 13y agothis is all really just a debate of how to strike a balance between diversity and fair admissions. all a moot subject anyhow as we move towards open collaborative learning online.
- ekm2 13y agoIt is interesting how SAT scores are unconsciously used as an indicator of low iQ in the black population while simultaneously being used to show that high asian scores in the test is an indicator of hardwork,not brilliance.
- conjecTech 13y agoHonest question: How well do good academic scores in high school correlate with success in non-scientific majors? I go to a top-tier engineering university, and I know of multiple individuals who had perfect SAT scores and GPAs in high school that have been utter disappointments, and I've known people who by no reasonable metric should have gotten in that break curves in nearly every class. Hell, I was the first of 3 boys to get accepted here through normal means, but both of my older brothers ended up transferring in and subsequently graduated with GPAs of 3.96 and 4.0, with one now working on a PhD in physics under a Nobel Laureate and the other working in investment banking. I've honestly started to question how much predictive power these tradition metrics actually have among the subsets of students who think they have a good enough chance of getting in to a school to apply in the first place. If anyone knows of any good studies on the subject or perhaps has a data set that could be used for such analysis, please let me know.
- niggler 13y agoI'd like to propose an alternate interpretation: There is some desired heterogeneity of intellect. Elite Colleges aren't just looking for sharp mathematicians. They want to attract sharp physicists, sharp philosophers, sharp linguists, sharp artists, sharp musicians, sharp poets etc. Now, in my experience there is a set of areas in which asians excel, but that doesn't comprise 100% of all areas. There are many areas where predominantly white people dominate. If you weight the distribution of ethnic origin along those lines, I suspect asians will be underrepresented relative to the distribution measured by SAT scores.
- fixxer 13y agoCan't speak for Harvard, but I'm at a pretty good public engineering school and I'm quite confident that we aren't discriminating against Asian students. If anything, they are sought after to help keep the lights on (they are the only ones paying full tuition).
- fyi80 13y agoAre you referring to Asian-Americans, or Asian international students? Public schools love the international student tuition money these days, it's such a farce, turning "public" education on its head.
- fixxer 13y agoAsian internationals. I hear rumblings that U.S. schools are falling out of favor with Chinese, but I haven't seen evidence and my colleagues have more applicants than ever.
- kyro 13y agoA former admissions officer of a good medical school in California once told me that the way it works is that they separate applicants based on ethnicity, and they then look at the top 5% of each stack. His words were "so if you're Asian with a 3.9gpa, good luck, you're a dime a dozen. But if you're an African American with a 3.4gpa, you're getting in." On top of that, many who share my ethnicity -- a minority in even our native country -- put down African American or, what's now the trendy thing to do, Underrepresented Minority, because they know it gives them a huge edge over the competition. I don't fault them for it. The whole application process is one big game and they're learning how to play it to their advantage.
- tokenadult 13y agoThe procedure you describe was declared illegal in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, so I doubt that the statement you heard accurately describes the medical school's admission procedure. The first comment I posted in this thread, which links to an extensive FAQ about college admission procedures in the United States, gives the citation for the Supreme Court cases on the issue and the current federal regulations. AFTER EDIT: If, on the other hand, the statement is factually correct about that school's procedure, some denied applicant has a very good basis for a lawsuit under current federal law.
- argonaut 13y agoTokenadult, what the parent said is not necessarily a quota. For many good medical schools, if you sum up the top 5% of every ethnicity of apllicants, you still get far more applicants than there are spaces. edit: what I said about public schools is incorrect.
- kyro 13y agoI don't think that case applies at all to what I'm saying. What I was told was that the applicant pool that gets looked at is comprised of the top 5% of every ethnic category. There was no implicit or explicit mention of seats allotted for minorities, which seems to be the subject of the lawsuit you mentioned.
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- seanmcdirmid 13y agoEven state schools have some sort of quota based on region. For example, its much easier to get into UW if you are from Eastern Washington than if you are from Western Washington (otherwise, UW would be dominated by kids from the Seattle area).
- coherentpony 13y agoNot at Cambridge or Oxford. Recruiting international students is what they do especially for science or mathematics, where education in these areas is a lot better in some Asian countries than the UK.
- cimorene12 13y agoThis is not a question. It's a statement. I knew about reverse racism in college admissions when I was 10 and starting to go to a college admissions counselor. I would also like to add this to the conversation: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions-test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admis.... When the criteria to get into elite schools is completely objective, Asians get in disproportionately (what is called overrepresentation) because their families put a higher emphasis on education and doing well on tests. Not every Asian family has a Tiger Mother, but a significant portion of the Asian family places a lot of emphasis on academic achievement. I found the discussion about Jews to be interesting, because Jews in some ways are close to Asians. Jewish culture also places emphasis on scholarly achievement, but to a lesser extent than, for example, Amy Chua. That's why her mother-in-law and husband, who are Jewish, objected sometimes to Chua's overly rigorous methods.
- lukejduncan 13y agoI don't remember if my college applications (not an ivy league school) asked my ethnicity, but on principle I always answer "prefer not to say" anytime I'm asked in a form. It's just a dumb criteria for anything.
- jrokisky 13y agoJudging talent is extremely difficult, especially when the pool of candidates is at arguably the most volatile point in their lives. I think setting some standard benchmark is necessary, but diversity needs to be guaranteed. (Even if it is as heavy-handed as basing it on race)
- AlexeiSadeski 13y agoThis is the opposite of news. The fact that whites actually benefit from affirmative action, to the detriment of Asians and Asian Indians, has been well known and obvious for a long time now.
- james1071 13y agohttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
- yosho 13y agoBeing an Asian American that fits the model minority stereotype, I already expressed my thoughts on Quora, specifically on affirmative action and racism which you can read here: http://qr.ae/TEVfO http://qr.ae/TEVfO It's fairly obvious to me that colleges do discriminate against Asians, and that this reverse racism does need to stop whether it's intentional or not. Everyone here talks about how Asians are like this or like that... the reality is that Asians are a pretty diverse group of people, and while you do have your nerdy, book worm types, you also have Asians who were captains of their basketball team or who played football or another major sport. Most people who are at the top of their class are extremely gifted in more ways than one and good parenting isn't the only factor that gets them there. I have cousins who have 'tiger-mom' parents but their grades are still suffering. We need to stop generalizing everyone into the same buckets, that's part of the problem. I'm all for diversity, I would love to see colleges adopt a race blind admission process and focus on all the criteria that they value and see what happens. I almost guarantee that we will see the Asian acceptance rates rise even with the focus on "diversity". Right now, it seems like it's straight forward discrimination at play that is guised as diversity seeking... since by diversity, what they're really saying is that we want less Asians in our top schools.
- hashmymustache 13y agoI don't disagree with you, but I'm curious how you explain the test performance disparity across races. If you look at the top public high school, TJ, blacks/hispanics compose 4% of the class at 25% of the population while asians make up 60% of the class at 5% of the population. Is it because asians are that much more naturally gifted? I realize with regard to affirmative action that race is a poor proxy for socioeconomic status, but it is statistically practical with regard to cultural values. You mentioned "I went to an Ivy League school, I fit the Asian model minority stereotype pretty well." How much did your parents influence your priorities in weighing education? One of the issues seems to be that colleges are attempting to address institutionalized racism too late in students' lives.
- newnewnew 13y agoIf a child grows us with a crummy culture with regards to education, has he experienced "institutionalized racism"? I feel like the english language is being rapidly perverted.
- lsc 13y agoThis brings up another question. Just how far are these things verified? What would happen if I checked the box marked "African American" - would they ask for documentation? If, somehow, someone decided to look into my ancestry, and they didn't find any other people identifying as the race I checked on my admissions form, what would be the consequence? Would I get in trouble or something? There's gotta be case law on this...
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- eliben 13y agoWhy does ethnicity play a role in the USA in 2013? Is someone born here to parents who came from Asia considered "Asian"? Because he/she looks Asian? And what if he/she is 4th generation in the USA and looks Asian, is that considered Asian? This is baffling.
- jellyksong 13y agoThis issue is pretty close to my heart because I'm a high school senior this year. I'm also Asian, play an instrument, have perfect SAT scores, and applied for a STEM major (well, half STEM). I was also rejected/waitlisted from every one of my top choices. To be honest, I'm not really sure now to respond to this article. From the point of view of a student applying to college, these "discriminations" exist pretty universally, and not just to Asians. The notion that race, gender, wealth, etc play a role in college decisions is very widespread among my classmates and peers at other schools. I don't view it as particularly bad, though, even if these colleges will never publicly admit such a thing. College is not a completely merit based system. I think that we all like to believe that it is, but colleges also have duties outside of admitting the best students. They have to keep their alumni happy, somehow obtain outside funding, keep its population diverse enough (this is ambiguous and controversial, but I think it's a legitimate concern). Most importantly, a college also has the duty to improve society, and that's where a system like Affirmative Action comes into play. It's not perfect, but it does allow for a great deal of social mobility where society would otherwise resemble something like plutocracy. After all these considerations, there's only a fraction of each year's class that they have for purely "merit" based acceptances. And at the level that these elite colleges are at, it's almost impossible to differentiate between candidates. So this small group of accepted students is essentially random (or I like to tell myself). There was a quote by a Yale admissions officer who lamented that he could've filled 3 identical classes with students on the waitlist. Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that one of the benefits of our society, especially in the entrepreneurial community, is that success is ultimately the result of hard work and talent. College is not the end-all and certainly not the determinant of your future.
- rossjudson 13y agoYou're right about diversity, and accepting the impact it has on the process. You should probably be pissed about the legacies, though. Why doesn't Yale set up a second school called, say, "Yale Legacies", and fill it up with the same?
- chubot 13y agoMan you sound like me 15 years ago :) I am Chinese American, got almost perfect SAT scores, top of my class, etc. I got rejected from all the schools Asian parents like (Harvard, MIT, I think Yale, etc.) I ended up going to Cornell (I think my other choices were UPenn and CMU). Anyway, it ended up great. There were tons of things that interested me in school; I got very high grades but didn't concentrate on them. I played in bands and partied. I developed a reputation for being the guy who stayed out all night and still got 100 on all the tests people were cramming for. There is freedom in not trying to compete with others. Like everyone, I had some rough years after college, but with a decade of hindsight it all turned out great. I also did better on the Asian parent metric of making more money than peers who went to Harvard, etc. I think it was mainly by valuing honest work (i.e. problems people actually have) rather than working on things that are supposed to be hard or prestigious. If you follow the advice of a lot of Asian parents, you'll end up working hard and not smart. It sounds like you have a great head on your shoulders, and a great outlook on the situation, so good luck to you!
- dingjian98 13y agoIn my view, the top universities' admission process is just like how the VC select start-ups. The school's goal is to seek the maximum return just like any other investors. What will this student bring to the university as the return of the investment, it could be more chance to get donation from a potential entrepreneur, academic fame from a genius, or a beautiful story of a student coming from some difficult background. And also, this seems aligned with the long term success defined by the main stream. No sure for the public school, though no problem with the private school.
- realitygrill 13y agoAllow me to posit that a primarily intrinsically-motivated Asian student dealing with high-pressure immigrant culture is in a particularly shitty situation: 1. Feels forced to spend the extra time - at diminishing returns - to do well at everything with a grade attached. This comes at the expense of passion-based activities, regarded as 'useless' or invalid as a 'line item for the resume'. (There is wide understanding that you need extracurriculars to look good. As pg says, these are mostly bogus.) 2. The pressure itself is killing your intrinsic motivation, which means the surviving applicants are primarily conformist types. 3. Even if you somehow make it through intact, colleges will assume the stereotype and view your application through those lenses.
- eagsalazar2 13y agoI had a prof I was friends with after graduating tell me they 100% did judge test scores and gpa of asian applicants differently than other races. His stance was that they wanted to select the very "best" applicants. Where best in his mind meant most likely to do great research and otherwise be brilliant. gpa and test scores are just one way to assess that. His experience was that with asians, gpa and test scores were a particularly bad metric for determining brilliance because the culture demanded 4.0 and perfect test scores more than in other cultures. Discrimination? Racism? I don't think so. Dangerously subjective? Definitely. But I'm not sure he was doing the wrong thing given the observable fact that there was low correlation between gpa/scores and performance. Not sure what is right either.
- bane 13y agoMaybe another way to think of it is, "Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against The Kinds of Things Asian Tiger Moms Think Will Get Their Kids Into Their School?" At risk of sounds discriminator and stereotyping, the number of Chinese and Korean kids applying for college with 4.0 GPAs, perfect SATs with awards for Math and who play either expert level piano or violin is just simply not interesting anymore.
- MyNewAccount99 13y agohow do colleges even know the race of the students applying? that part is not required and some college forms don't even ask for it.
- digitalzombie 13y agoHa! Jokes on ivy league! I only applied to UCs! But yeah I often hear lots of my Asian friends talked about changing their race. Like if they're half white they would rather put white down. I joked about being blackanese. Wow, good for Cal tech though, non race specific admission likewise for the UCs.
- kenster07 13y agoSo much tiptoeing. The answer is 'yes.' They do. I had a tougher high school course load, a better GPA, significantly higher SAT I and SAT II scores, and comparable extracirriculars to everyone in my class who got accepted to elite university X. Thing is, I'm Asian, and they were all more coveted minorities. The good news is, your university does not determine your future. You do. Once class is out and you're in the real world, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is PRODUCING VALUE.
- sodomizer 13y agoWhat bothers me most about elite colleges is that they're based on sheer amount of work, not actual ability. Thus you get a lot of droids who are good memorizer/regurgitators but not necessarily all that wise, perceptive, creative, etc. In my experience, schools discriminate against groups which they see as proxies for this group, such as doctor's kids, nerds, Asians, because having too many of them will mean a miserable "is this on the final?" campus with no commitment to learning.
- radiusq 13y agoWhile I disagree that people should be discriminated based on ethnicity, I do think that a lot of asians who fit the bill as high GPA and high SAT are not doing themselves any favors by just sitting on those qualifications. In my professional experience working with a lot of early high-achievers (asian or not) they tend not to do that great in the professional world: lack of innovation, lack of creativity, willingness to only follow- not lead. Many also seem to get burned out by the time they start their career and start to show lack of discipline. I think theres a lot of value in looking beyond that GPA/SAT. We don't want a lot of identical personalities on a campus nor in the workplace. High GPA/SAT does not necessarily breed the innovation and creativity that makes this country strong (how's China doing on that front?). Lets make the conversation about that. Thats really what this should be about.
- andrewchoi 13y agoAsian American student at an Ivy League school currently here, if you'd like anecdotal evidence. Ask away!