14 ms·

For Asian Americans, a changing landscape on college admissions

120 points by o0-0o 12y ago

b6 12y ago
I want a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much. In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today. Other people seem to want the same thing, but they advocate a world view that specifically considers ethnicity, and sex, and other body attributes. I feel certain it's well-intentioned, but it's racism, sexism, etc. Further, that worldview encourages codifying racism and sexism, and making them part of our workplaces. It has become normal for universities to tweak points on admissions applications, and for big companies to publish pie charts about their progress toward diversity. But this is just more racism and sexism. If you have to add an ethnicity column to your employee database and periodically release ethnicity pie charts to show how unracist you are, I hope it is obvious that something is very wrong. We shouldn't try to use old bad ideas to increase justice. Justice will increase naturally when we discard old bad ideas. Every day, we're putting down bricks, building the world of the future. Let's put down the kind of bricks that suit the world we actually want.
- nl 12y ago
  In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today. You realize that your first sentence does not imply your second sentence is a good policy automatically, right? It might, but there is no automatic relationship there. If you are prepared to have an open mind on this, I'd strongly encourage you to watch https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work. I think that your goal of a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much is admirable. However, in an imperfect world - especially one in which some people explicitly disavow that goal - it is worth considering what a policy like yours will actually achieve. What that video linked above to find out.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Talent, ambition, and drive are all also "body attributes". Are you hoping for a world where they don't matter?
patio11 12y ago
The language in this article is positively Orwellian. Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination. Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media." But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students." Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened. Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.
- patio11 12y ago
  Incidentally: the Harvard Jewish quota was described externally as their plan to increase "geographic diversity" (there's that word again -- doing a lot of work for a full century) in the applicant pool and to combat anti-Semitism. I love this, just like I love that Yale's present racial discrimination plan is administered by the Office for Equal Opportunity.
  - selimthegrim 12y ago
    Tulane's got the most geographic diversity in the country. It's 45% Jewish. Someone ought to mass email their admissions material to these institutional equity offices with a smiley face.
- lamuerteflaca 12y ago
  Just to be contrarian here is an answer that I stole from somebody: thaumasiotes says: Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today. Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.<< So I guess is OK if Hardvard does not become homogeneous all in the name of diversity. I'll swallow it. Edit: Yes, I know it is legal. I cannot comment about peoples motives since I don't know them.
doctorstupid 12y ago
Sending affluent students to volunteer in poor neighbourhoods to get them into college is disgusting.
- VinhSama 12y ago
  When I was in 12, I volunteered to help feed the poor at a soup kitchen. When I was in high school, there was a mandatory volunteer requirement of 40 hours just to graduate. Volunteering isn't disgusting, it's valuable experience. It's no different than putting volunteer experience on a resume to get a job. Volunteers are in short demand; it'd be much more disgusting to deny help just because their intents aren't purely altruistic. Heaven forbid you help someone and help yourself at the same time.
  - gaius 12y ago
    Uhh its not volunteering if its mandatory...
    - superflit 12y ago
      This. Volunteer has to be free from pressure. But we have a society that try to push "moral"values instead of freedom and pursuit of your OWN happiness (obeying laws).
  - seekingtruth 12y ago
    The most salient lesson I got out of spending my high school summers doing volunteer construction is that I hate poor people.
    - lamuerteflaca 12y ago
      I know the feeling. I wake up every morning hating myself for being poor.
      - seekingtruth 12y ago
karmacondon 12y ago
“I don't want to be racist or anything,” Lawrence said. “Everyone works hard and struggles. But there's this feeling that it's going to be harder for us.” No, it's going to be harder for someone who's parents can't afford tutoring academies named "Little Harvard", tennis lessons, violin lessons or 4 hours of extracurriculars a day. This sounds like someone who has been given every advantage in life complaining about not being given more advantages. Maybe more of them should do volunteer programs in poor communities so they can think about how difficult it would be for those kids to get into Harvard. After seeing what a life of poverty is like, having your SAT score adjusted down by a couple of points will seem like quite a bargain.
- Rygu 12y ago
  According to you, it's even more racist then. Because, what about the asian students that come from poverty? Why is the adjustment (still can't believe they do this) based on ethnicity and not on the parents income or bank account?
  - personlurking 12y ago
    This occurs in Brazil with racial quotas at university. The only problem is that most Brazilians have some African blood (some say one drop is enough to claim they are black). It'd make more sense, as you mentioned, if it were based on income.
  - pastProlog 12y ago
    > asian students that come from poverty In Fanshen, its is noted in pre-PRC China, poor peasants in the countryside could not afford livestock, so peasants used their own shit as fertilizer. Sometimes peasants would even steal one another's shit. That is poverty. Taiwanese families who are getting press because they want their kid to get into Harvard by taking the place of the poor black kid whose family was in the US before 1808 are not poor.
- alextgordon 12y ago
  Classic racism. Say that the target group (Jews, Asians, whatever) is wealthier/smarter/more powerful than average, then use that to penalise all members of the group. I'm amazed the American left falls for this stuff.
throwaway-ofc 12y ago
Is it true that non-jewish whites are more underrepresented than even hispanics or african americans, while at the same time needing higher scores to be accepted?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 12y ago
  I think that's plausibly true at Harvard, but it's mathematically impossible for that to be true overall.
negamax 12y ago
So throwing away meritocracy for vote appeasement? Nice
- sounds_like 12y ago
  Sounds just like that time they threw away a rug. Something something meritocracy.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  You might be surprised to learn that "meritocracy" was word coined in the process of satirizing the idea of meritocracy.
jkot 12y ago
Is not racial discrimination illegal in US?
- tsotha 12y ago
  No. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against white and East Asian men, thanks to our Humpty Dumpty court system.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  If it is - that shoots down affirmative actions ... it is complicated.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today. Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.
- imjustsaying 12y ago
  Apparently, racial discrimination is not always illegal in the US. In 1942, the federal government used racial data gathered by the census[0][1] and rounded up over 100,000 Japanese into concentration camps. [0]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-c... [1]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census-role_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census...
  - ricree 12y ago
    That's largely a non-sequitor, as 1942 would have predated most of the laws jkot would be referring to.
wodenokoto 12y ago
Of course people shouldn't be rejected by their race. But according to the article, "all" asians have the same profile. If this is true, I can understand why some of the similar profiles are rejected in the name of diversity. Once an SAT score is sufficiently high, it makes sense to look at other things. I can see why a college would want 50/50 gender, and a wide spread of social backgrounds. If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around. This doesn't bear any resemblance to current admissions policies. Discrepancies between races in average SAT score at a given college are in the hundreds of points, not the low tens.
  - WesternStar 12y ago
    Yes but no one takes the writing portion as a real measure of anything concerning scholastic ability and its the most coach-able part of the test and even back when I was taking it a 200 point difference was taken to be no guarantee of differing levels of academic ability.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      The difference has been hundreds of points since long before the merging of the writing test into the SAT. And yes, a 200 point difference is, and always has been, a large difference. I think the standard deviation is generally in the ballpark of 120 points.
      - WesternStar 12y ago
        They rescaled the test in 1990 so that the std deviation would be 200 points. So if that's the case that's really odd.
gambiting 12y ago
I find penalizing scores of Asian Americans to be exactly as racist as improving scores of African Americans and other ethnicities. If we, as a society, believe that all people from all ethnicities are equal, why do we do this? I could understand if we boosted scores of people coming from poor families, but changing scores based only on ethnicity? How is that not racist?
- intopieces 12y ago
  >all people from all ethnicities are equal All people from all ethnicities are equal in the sense that they deserve an equal oppertunity to succeed. However, that has not happened. Certain ethnic groups (black people) have been systematically disadvantaged. They continue to be under-represented in higher education and over-represented in the prison system. Affirmative action does a good job at getting black people into college, which generally helps a person later in life when they want to get a good job.
  - pokpokpok 12y ago
    AND helps their children and grandchildren do well for themselves, breaking a socioeconomic cycle
  - gambiting 12y ago
    It's not black people who are disadvantaged - but people coming from poor, ghetto communities who are. The fact that they are black is secondary. Like I've said, I would be completely ok with them being given extra points due to coming from a very poor/criminal families. No problem here. But a simple system "black? extra points. Asian? negative points" is nothing but racist. Is a black person from a rich family getting extra points? If yes, why? Is an Asian person from a poor family still getting negative points? If yes, again - why? It literally doesn't make any sense.
    - intopieces 12y ago
      You're now shifting the conversation from the broad admissions policy to specific admission merits of individuals. The policy of promoting the admission of black students as a whole has been successful. It's not racism when a minority/disadvantaged group is given a leg up on a group that already has an advantage. The effect is so minimal that it really isn't worth discussing.
rjdagost 12y ago
Racial discrimination, neatly quantified: "Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission."
- skywhopper 12y ago
  Note that no school actually penalizes Asian Americans by 50 points or gives 230 points to black applications. This study appears to assume that one's SAT score is the only factor that should be used in college admission and that race is the only explanatory factor for the disparity between admission and scores. But admissions policies that granted extra "points" based on growing up in a poorly performing school district or the economic status of the parents would also likely generate this sort of distribution.
nether 12y ago
CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2010/12/why_caltech_is_in_a_class_by_i/ http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2010/12/why_caltech_is_in_a_...
- Anechoic 12y ago
  This is not true according to CalTech's Common Data Set filings [0] (see section C7) [0] http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    This is an issue of some interest. For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting. When we look at the CalTech statistics, racial biases are not apparent (admittedly, we have to do this in a very rough way because universities will generally fight tooth and nail to prevent researchers from looking into the effect of race on admissions). And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered", which is the least significance a variable can have before being "not considered". If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, based on massive discrepancies between the records of admitted freshmen of different races, why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement that race is considered, based on a lack of such discrepancies?
    - Anechoic 12y ago
      For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting. Do "we know they're doing it anyway"? When Prop 209 passed, minority enrollment dropped. And there are any number of factors that the system may consider that are not race, but may be correlated with race. In any event, the numbers I can find show black and latino admissions combined are less than expected based on CA and national numbers. And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered" I was responding to a poster that said "CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all" - CalTech itself disagrees. I was not commenting on the extend or magnitude of that consideration. If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, I'm not sure I accept this premise. why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement Occam's razor. In any event, we know that CalTech does target minorities via outreach programs [0] so it would not be out of character for them to consider race. And anecdotally (I'm black), I was heavily recruited by CalTech despite my showing no interested in attending and having below (CalTech) average SAT scores (and above average grades/school rank/extra curricular) [0] http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/resources/rfus http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/resources/rfus
Edmond 12y ago
I think people who complain about discrimination against Asian students in places such as Harvard should ask themselves, why do people want to go to Harvard? It sure as hell isn't because that is the only place you can get an excellent education. While Harvard is obviously great as an academic institution, people want to go to Harvard for the prestige. Do you think that prestige would be there if they were to allow the place to essentially become an academic ghetto for any given ethic group (Asian, Jewish or any future group)? Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores. Complaining about not being accepted to a place like Harvard even though you scored a perfect SAT or some other test taking metric shows a misunderstanding of what these highly prestigious institutions are about.
- jessriedel 12y ago
  We know what top universities would look like if they selected purely for academics. They would look like CalTech. > Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur .... You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores. CalTech has more nobel prizes per capita than any of the Ivies. Dunno if CalTech loses out on Macarthur (maybe) or Pulizer (probably), but if so it's because CalTech is a technical university. There's no reason you couldn't have an all-academically selected university focusing on the humanities. > or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. This is obviously not the reason that Harvard has racial preferences. Yes, we can agree that it is reasonable for Harvard and other high-prestige universities to select for things besides academics (ambition, social savvy, sports, extracurriculars). But the complaint being leveled is that they shouldn't pick explicitly on race.
  - Edmond 12y ago
    I think you're making my point, only people hanging out on HN and other similar circles know what CalTech is...Go out there and ask random people about CalTech... :) CalTech is a first-rate academic institution but it's prestige is limited to those who actually know what it is about. My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so. Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.
nutjob123 12y ago
Aren't you allowed to abstain from declaring race on college applications?
- jqm 12y ago
  Maybe, but you certainly aren't allowed to abstain from declaring your name.
  - Glide 12y ago
    Which is why a lot of people have legal western names while using an ethnic name at home.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  Why abstain if you can declare being African-american? Instant bonus points + narrowing discrimination as a side benefit.
ausjke 12y ago
Don't know what to say other than feeling upset. The losers are more on the middle-class of poor Asians and the Whites obviously. Due to the increasingly large number of the black and the Hispanic voters, these situation will not change, if not getting worse. Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out. I'm fine with helping the economically disadvantaged students, but manipulating the admission by skin color or race? Top universities just like NBA, only the best players shall attend, skin color shall not be the reason you can stay there. Not to mention there are so many other public/private universities to choose for everyone.
- Larrikin 12y ago
  From what I've read most of the black and Hispanic students are not dropping out due to course work, but an inability to pay for it. Furthermore, taking out more loans is often not the best idea since many of the students do not make the connections in those schools to get the best paying jobs and usually end up with similar jobs as their peers that went to less prestigious and cheaper schools.
- hga 12y ago
  "Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out." Yes, there's been a fair amount of research on this. Essentially, once you get beyond the very very top, I'm not sure what beyond Harvard and MIT (and of course CalTech), there just isn't a large enough pool of qualified candidates. So at each "level" a large fraction of these students admitted and accepting belong in a school one or two levels down, where they could thrive.
thelogos 12y ago
Some people may find this surprising, but you shouldn't. It's simply how the world works. It's repugnant but life is not fair. Racial discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also legacy admission and athletes grade fixing. It's also not uncommon for rich parents to hire a professional ghostwriter for the admission essay. College admission as a whole is extremely subjective even if they try to pretend it isn't. After that there's the rampant grade inflation. We can go on and on. Make no mistakes though, these aren't just inefficiency that happens by oversight. Someone __always__ benefit. They certainly don't feel sorry for you. They may use fancy euphemism to justify their decisions, but we're all adults here. Nobody really believes that bullshit. College is a business and the only thing you can do is take your money somewhere else. Until society is ruled by some AI, we'll always have these kinds of problem. Some things I would recommend if people really want to give away their money and support these evil institutions, 1. Change your name, first and last 2. Check a different box when they ask for your race (or any other bullshit like religion, etc.) Changing your name has _massive_ implications besides college applications. Humans love to judge especially when they have nothing at stake. If you don't believe me, just apply to a few jobs with different names.
bane 12y ago
I'm married into a first generation Asian family and this is a constant topic of conversation on that side, especially now that their kids are getting ready for college. The problem ultimately stems from a huge wave of mostly Korean and Chinese immigrants (but by extension other East Asian and Pacific Island nations get penalized as well), who grew up in poor countries (or when their countries were poor), suddenly finding themselves with enough money to immigrate to the U.S. and "escape". They put down roots, work their tails off and start having families. They don't want their kids to have to struggle like they did (and they want to ensure they set themselves up well in retirement), but they have incredibly unsophisticated views of what 'success' means in America (often as a result of working so much they never really had a chance to integrate well into their adopted country). However, they understand passing tests, having deep cultural histories around test taking to get ahead in life. So they look for the most prestigious work you can test into. And bam, at the intersection of hard work, prestige signaling and test taking you get a fairly limited set of occupations, which these parents instinctively laser beam their kids at. Good schools want extracurriculars? No problem! Let's use the prestige button on that, prestigious schools must want the most prestigious extracurriculars, and those are obviously piano and violin (and sometimes opera). Let's toss in some prestige sports as well, and now these kids and splitting time studying endlessly for tests to become a doctor or lawyer, practicing piano/violin and playing tennis/golf/figure skating. Repeat until the parents think they're maximizing the fitting function for university acceptance and you end up with entire social networks and minor industries around SAT test taking, piano and violin teachers and tennis/golf/figure skating coaches. And you know what? For a very long time this worked. Asian Americans have been extraordinarily and consistently "successful", far over-represented in university admissions and in select professions. But there was no secret, it was literally hard screaming, crying, kicking work. There's no cheating. While their other raced peers studied for an hour every night before turning on the XBox. They studied till midnight, every night, and then spent all day Saturday at private school, then studied till midnight again, then spent most of the day on Sundays doing prestige extracurriculars. Their parents were often poor, working crap triple-D jobs, or triple shifts at convenience stores. They lived frugally and invested every single drop of blood in their kids. Even if they were often wrong headed about how they did it, it worked and anybody can do it. But on the university side, as parents start to find the optimal mix to acceptance, application packets start to look not just virtually identical, but absolutely identical. Imagine you're tasked with figuring out which 10 of 1000 applications all with the last names Kim, Chin, Hu, Lee, Park, Wang or Choi should be accepted: - All have 4.0 GPAs - All have AP degrees from High School - All have extracurriculars that are selected from the set of {violin, piano, opera, tennis, golf} - All went to the best High Schools in their respective areas - All submit essays with some story about their parent's difficult immigration, usually involving stories of poverty and unbelievable work hours in menial jobs. Maybe with some kind of "escape from the communists" or "swimming to safety across Hong Kong Harbor" or something. I know 3 Chinese Americans who's parents have almost identical "swimming escape from China and lived in Kowloon Walled City for 3 years before making it to America" stories. - All have perfect or near perfect SAT scores What the universities are of course realizing is that it becomes a random sample at this point. There's no criteria they can use to discern one 'Kim' from another 'Lee'...every applicant literally looks exactly the same. There's no "fair" way to select from this applicant pool, and this pool has quite literally self-grouped. So, clumsily, the universities are trying to throw big rocks in the pool. These are starting to no longer accept the products of this application optimum, especially if they have Asian-American last names. It's getting heard, and in the parts of the Asian American community I'm privy to, mothers are stressed out that all those years of forcing their kids to master Bach aren't going to count for much. They're in a mad scramble to figure out the next optimized path, but the universities are smart to it now. They also don't come from cultures where the notion of cultivating meaningful hobbies is well understood. My niece loves waterpainting and flower arranging. Gifts of art supplies and arrangement books are met with skepticism and sometimes scorn. She won't have time to be forced to practice piano if she's dilly-dallying around with another painting! Yet, a portfolio of prints and some awards from local flower shows would be exactly what the universities are now looking for. The idea that maybe she should be encouraged to develop her own innate interests is lost while he parents look for the next magical prestige signalling instrument for her to be forced to study. My other family back in the home country are trying to understand it better, but they still haven't gotten over the idea that being "a hobby photographer" doesn't have to mean spending $25,000 on pro-level camera equipment. Coincidentally, the second generation of Asian Americans are having kids and those kids are often growing up without all this mess, but still affected by the continued wave of new first generations. Now Rebecca Choi, who's parents didn't push her through the Harvard funnel is getting impacted by Hee Soo who did. But Rebecca is interested in becoming a writer, has a 3.2 GPA, stinks at math, dyes her hair pink, listens to rock music, is trying to learn to play guitar, volunteers as a drill coach for her local girl's basketball league. Had a pregnancy scare her junior year. Has experimented with drugs a little. Her SATs were above average, but not spectacular. If she was another minority she might make it into a tier-1 school. If she was white she probably wouldn't. But now because Hee Soo's parents tiger mom'd her through the perceived application optimum, Rebecca, for no other reason than being a Choi, gets a 50 point application deduction. Does this mean the system worked? Rebecca would just be an average white kid if she was Rebecca Smith.
skywhopper 12y ago
The study at the core of this article appears to make the assumption that SAT scores are the only factor that ought to be considered when making college admissions decisions. But I don't think that's right. Certainly the mission of these universities is not solely to educate the best test-takers in the world. And unless I missed it there's also no evidence that the schools studied actually do use race in their admissions decisions. There are a variety of other factors that could be considered which would end up skewing the admissions results on the basis of race. Should colleges not be allowed to give extra consideration to students from poorly performing schools simply because doing so might have the effect of giving "bonus points" to African American or Hispanic applicants?
GrandTheftR 12y ago
MLK said this in his famouse speech "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." [0] This is so sad with what many colleges/states are pushing for now. I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, which the children were born into, but not discrimination based on skin color, which the children were born with. [0] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth115056.html#meSsLUb8M6r42ETO.99" http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth115056....
- skywhopper 12y ago
  One's SAT score is not a measure of the content of one's character. In any case, the study being quoted here did not give any evidence that race was even being used as a factor in admissions decisions. If you favor giving bonus points based on one's economic status, then that will correlate to the same sort of results this study revealed, with black and hispanic populations being over-represented versus an admissions policy based purely on standardized test scores.
- Anechoic 12y ago
  MLK said this in his famouse speech MLK also said: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic." I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, [..] but not discrimination based on skin color The problem is that research has shown that institutional discrimination is not just based on economics, but also on race (for example, Prager's research showing that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job callback than a black applicant without a criminal record). Ignoring race isn't the answer. As for what is the answer, that's a much harder problem which is why we're still wrestling with it.
thinkofnothing 12y ago
I'm one of those Asian-Americans that applied to only "elite" schools due to constant parental pressure and did "enough" to get accepted to most. Although all this happened a decade ago, the challenges these days seem mostly the same, if not trite, in the sense that Asians seem to typically over-value institutionalized education and focus on a narrow set of activities for whatever cultural reason ... leading to racial bias from colleges and conventional life choices from Asians. For me though, I just enjoyed trying a bunch of different stuff out and was fortunate enough to excel at a variety of things that I guess these colleges weren't expecting from an Asian. These interests include(d) linguistics, journalism, public speaking, student government, graphics + layouts + grids, game design, acrobatics, and somehow even ended up as an Eagle Scout (shrug) ... on top of hyper-accelerated math, science and tech stuff expected I guess of Asian students. Didn't sleep much though. Also, after attending one day of Harvard's Campus Preview Weekend, my gut said "uh ... no," and went to MIT instead. Very happy about that choice in hindsight, purely based on the people I met and the meritocracy instilled in the students; I doubt I use even 25% of course material in the stuff I work on these days. The most important lesson that I did learn at the end of the day is that general society is led to believe that people should/can master only one or two tasks, a possible relic from industrialism. Instead, people should aim to become polymathic, which becomes exponentially easier by learning across diverse interests and realizing that there are many common threads across seemingly different fields -- a personal and particular implementation of "learning how to learn." * As a side note, San Gabriel Valley? Never been so can't really guess, but I would bet that Cupertino schools were much tougher. Thankfully, we had a certain neighborhood fruit company that inspired some of us to become pirates instead of joining the navy, and to experiment with Learning Some Divinity (eventually).
highoctane51 12y ago
> "But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity." As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
highoctane51 12y ago
> "But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity." As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
Bahamut 12y ago
This is not surprising, most asians already know this - I encountered this during admissions when I applied to undergrad for the class of 2006. I was one of the most stellar candidates from the NY tristate area (NYC area) with some of the best test scores & a diverse set of extracurriculars, and a history of excellence in regional/national math competitions & advanced coursework (Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra in 10th grade), but my being Korean definitely hurt (combined with my having wrote a bad essay, which helped give a reason to say no/waitlisted in a year where many colleges lost millions of dollars from the Enron scandal). In the end, it didn't matter as much since I always had strong confidence in my ability to adapt and to look ahead, and my path turned out to be beneficial in many different ways. Obstacles such as this are difficult to overcome though, and it helped home in that I need to be that much sharper in order to succeed.
jrochkind1 12y ago
> Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points Compared to what? White applicants, statistically? Why are white people the "default" which everyone else is measured against, do white people not have a race/ethnicity? There is no 'objective' measure of what SAT score "should" get you into a university. Most universities use things other than SAT scores to decide admissions (things in addition to affirmative action/diversity, I mean, too). Some universities may rely/weight SAT scores more than others. There is no SAT score that is "supposed to" guarantee you admission, "before accounting for race". It doesn't work that way. If you think it would be more "fair" to rely exclusively on SAT scores, you can make an argument for that, but a test is not in fact some objective measure of 'reality', it's just one test. The idea that it's just a fact that "Asian Americans are penalized by 50 points"-- it's an under-specified statement, and it doesn't actually mean much. I think this is an example of the assumptions/biases in the language of this article and those quoted in it, in general.
kaitai 12y ago
I was part of a program that changed to graduate admissions based solely on subject GRE score. The first such resulting class was 88% Chinese, 4% Taiwanese, and 8% white American. Did they do that well as a class in graduate studies or in academia? No. Some were great, some were terrible, just like every other year. The years where admission was done based on prior math research instead resulted in a more interesting group of students, although again some were great, some were terrible. It's well-known that in subject GREs Chinese students score very well compared to American students of any racial or ethnic background. (As a Chinese friend asked, "Why don't you Americans just study for it, like we do?") However, subject GRE scores are not that predictive of success in a graduate program. Research skills, writing ability, grit, and the simple capacity to get stuff done are not well-predicted by multiple choice exams. It is useful to know that students who do well on, for instance, the math subject GRE can do triple integrals quickly. That's about it. So, since subject GREs don't predict graduate success, and SATs are not that well-correlated with college success either [1], admissions committees use other factors to evaluate students. In fact, a number of schools do not require any standardized test [2]. These other factors range widely and include high school grades, which are most predictive of college success, volunteer work, interestingness, etc. And they do include race and geographic origin. Small colleges in the Midwest are currently targeting California, Texas, and Florida for recruitment because of their huge numbers of graduating seniors, and the coastal schools let in some token Midwesterners to provide some leavening to their provincial views of flyover country. There is discrimination against Asian Americans in admissions in the US. It's not written into policy explicitly: it's just like discrimination against women and blacks today, taking the form of discussion of "fit" or subjective evaluation of how interesting someone's work is. It should stop, and the comparison to the "Jewish quotas" is apt. At the same time, test-based admissions are ludicrous, and evaluation of extracurricular activities and accomplishments given the student's environment are necessary. I had friends at Caltech who went to high schools that didn't offer calculus: smart people come from all sorts of backgrounds. [1] https://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity_of_the_SAT_for_Predicting_First_Year_College_Grade_Point_Average.pdf https://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity... [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/study-finds-little-difference-academic-success-students-who-do-and-dont-submit-sat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/study-finds-l...
ericschmidt 12y ago
I'm not saying it's wrong and I'm not saying it's right, but the fact is: Affirmative action means the college admissions process is racist against asians and whites. End of story.
noobermin 12y ago
Here's an out of the box idea that doesn't address racism but addresses another aspect of this: may be we should focus effort (research grants and moneys) on non-elite schools and bring the general average university up to a better level, then people, asian or otherwise, wouldn't feel that much less accomplished if they got into a some large public uni that happens not to be an ivy-league school. It boggles my mind how we have the best schools in the world while at the same time have an average college educated adult who has skills below the average [0]. That could be part of the reason why so many people are shoving against each other on the way to Stanford, because if they get into some random state uni, they know they won't have a quality education. May be if we fixed that, we'd increase N, the number of spots available for everyone, and we wouldn't reach the pigeon-hole limit so quickly that colleges wouldn't have to start discriminating against anyone. [0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-rank-below-average-global-survey-basic-education-skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-ran...

120 points by o0-0o 12y ago

b6 12y ago

I want a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much. In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today. Other people seem to want the same thing, but they advocate a world view that specifically considers ethnicity, and sex, and other body attributes. I feel certain it's well-intentioned, but it's racism, sexism, etc. Further, that worldview encourages codifying racism and sexism, and making them part of our workplaces. It has become normal for universities to tweak points on admissions applications, and for big companies to publish pie charts about their progress toward diversity. But this is just more racism and sexism. If you have to add an ethnicity column to your employee database and periodically release ethnicity pie charts to show how unracist you are, I hope it is obvious that something is very wrong. We shouldn't try to use old bad ideas to increase justice. Justice will increase naturally when we discard old bad ideas. Every day, we're putting down bricks, building the world of the future. Let's put down the kind of bricks that suit the world we actually want.

nl 12y ago
In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today. You realize that your first sentence does not imply your second sentence is a good policy automatically, right? It might, but there is no automatic relationship there. If you are prepared to have an open mind on this, I'd strongly encourage you to watch https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work. I think that your goal of a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much is admirable. However, in an imperfect world - especially one in which some people explicitly disavow that goal - it is worth considering what a policy like yours will actually achieve. What that video linked above to find out.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
Talent, ambition, and drive are all also "body attributes". Are you hoping for a world where they don't matter?

patio11 12y ago

The language in this article is positively Orwellian. Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination. Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media." But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students." Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened. Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.

patio11 12y ago
Incidentally: the Harvard Jewish quota was described externally as their plan to increase "geographic diversity" (there's that word again -- doing a lot of work for a full century) in the applicant pool and to combat anti-Semitism. I love this, just like I love that Yale's present racial discrimination plan is administered by the Office for Equal Opportunity.
- selimthegrim 12y ago
  Tulane's got the most geographic diversity in the country. It's 45% Jewish. Someone ought to mass email their admissions material to these institutional equity offices with a smiley face.
lamuerteflaca 12y ago
Just to be contrarian here is an answer that I stole from somebody: thaumasiotes says: Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today. Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.<< So I guess is OK if Hardvard does not become homogeneous all in the name of diversity. I'll swallow it. Edit: Yes, I know it is legal. I cannot comment about peoples motives since I don't know them.

doctorstupid 12y ago

Sending affluent students to volunteer in poor neighbourhoods to get them into college is disgusting.

VinhSama 12y ago
When I was in 12, I volunteered to help feed the poor at a soup kitchen. When I was in high school, there was a mandatory volunteer requirement of 40 hours just to graduate. Volunteering isn't disgusting, it's valuable experience. It's no different than putting volunteer experience on a resume to get a job. Volunteers are in short demand; it'd be much more disgusting to deny help just because their intents aren't purely altruistic. Heaven forbid you help someone and help yourself at the same time.
- gaius 12y ago
  Uhh its not volunteering if its mandatory...
  - superflit 12y ago
    This. Volunteer has to be free from pressure. But we have a society that try to push "moral"values instead of freedom and pursuit of your OWN happiness (obeying laws).
- seekingtruth 12y ago
  The most salient lesson I got out of spending my high school summers doing volunteer construction is that I hate poor people.
  - lamuerteflaca 12y ago
    I know the feeling. I wake up every morning hating myself for being poor.
    - seekingtruth 12y ago

karmacondon 12y ago

“I don't want to be racist or anything,” Lawrence said. “Everyone works hard and struggles. But there's this feeling that it's going to be harder for us.” No, it's going to be harder for someone who's parents can't afford tutoring academies named "Little Harvard", tennis lessons, violin lessons or 4 hours of extracurriculars a day. This sounds like someone who has been given every advantage in life complaining about not being given more advantages. Maybe more of them should do volunteer programs in poor communities so they can think about how difficult it would be for those kids to get into Harvard. After seeing what a life of poverty is like, having your SAT score adjusted down by a couple of points will seem like quite a bargain.

Rygu 12y ago
According to you, it's even more racist then. Because, what about the asian students that come from poverty? Why is the adjustment (still can't believe they do this) based on ethnicity and not on the parents income or bank account?
- personlurking 12y ago
  This occurs in Brazil with racial quotas at university. The only problem is that most Brazilians have some African blood (some say one drop is enough to claim they are black). It'd make more sense, as you mentioned, if it were based on income.
- pastProlog 12y ago
  > asian students that come from poverty In Fanshen, its is noted in pre-PRC China, poor peasants in the countryside could not afford livestock, so peasants used their own shit as fertilizer. Sometimes peasants would even steal one another's shit. That is poverty. Taiwanese families who are getting press because they want their kid to get into Harvard by taking the place of the poor black kid whose family was in the US before 1808 are not poor.
alextgordon 12y ago
Classic racism. Say that the target group (Jews, Asians, whatever) is wealthier/smarter/more powerful than average, then use that to penalise all members of the group. I'm amazed the American left falls for this stuff.

throwaway-ofc 12y ago

Is it true that non-jewish whites are more underrepresented than even hispanics or african americans, while at the same time needing higher scores to be accepted?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 12y ago
I think that's plausibly true at Harvard, but it's mathematically impossible for that to be true overall.

negamax 12y ago

So throwing away meritocracy for vote appeasement? Nice

sounds_like 12y ago
Sounds just like that time they threw away a rug. Something something meritocracy.
Zigurd 12y ago
You might be surprised to learn that "meritocracy" was word coined in the process of satirizing the idea of meritocracy.

jkot 12y ago

Is not racial discrimination illegal in US?

tsotha 12y ago
No. It's perfectly legal to discriminate against white and East Asian men, thanks to our Humpty Dumpty court system.
venomsnake 12y ago
If it is - that shoots down affirmative actions ... it is complicated.
thaumasiotes 12y ago
Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today. Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.
imjustsaying 12y ago
Apparently, racial discrimination is not always illegal in the US. In 1942, the federal government used racial data gathered by the census[0][1] and rounded up over 100,000 Japanese into concentration camps. [0]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-c... [1]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census-role_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census...
- ricree 12y ago
  That's largely a non-sequitor, as 1942 would have predated most of the laws jkot would be referring to.

wodenokoto 12y ago

Of course people shouldn't be rejected by their race. But according to the article, "all" asians have the same profile. If this is true, I can understand why some of the similar profiles are rejected in the name of diversity. Once an SAT score is sufficiently high, it makes sense to look at other things. I can see why a college would want 50/50 gender, and a wide spread of social backgrounds. If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around. This doesn't bear any resemblance to current admissions policies. Discrepancies between races in average SAT score at a given college are in the hundreds of points, not the low tens.
- WesternStar 12y ago
  Yes but no one takes the writing portion as a real measure of anything concerning scholastic ability and its the most coach-able part of the test and even back when I was taking it a 200 point difference was taken to be no guarantee of differing levels of academic ability.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    The difference has been hundreds of points since long before the merging of the writing test into the SAT. And yes, a 200 point difference is, and always has been, a large difference. I think the standard deviation is generally in the ballpark of 120 points.
    - WesternStar 12y ago
      They rescaled the test in 1990 so that the std deviation would be 200 points. So if that's the case that's really odd.

gambiting 12y ago

I find penalizing scores of Asian Americans to be exactly as racist as improving scores of African Americans and other ethnicities. If we, as a society, believe that all people from all ethnicities are equal, why do we do this? I could understand if we boosted scores of people coming from poor families, but changing scores based only on ethnicity? How is that not racist?

intopieces 12y ago
>all people from all ethnicities are equal All people from all ethnicities are equal in the sense that they deserve an equal oppertunity to succeed. However, that has not happened. Certain ethnic groups (black people) have been systematically disadvantaged. They continue to be under-represented in higher education and over-represented in the prison system. Affirmative action does a good job at getting black people into college, which generally helps a person later in life when they want to get a good job.
- pokpokpok 12y ago
  AND helps their children and grandchildren do well for themselves, breaking a socioeconomic cycle
- gambiting 12y ago
  It's not black people who are disadvantaged - but people coming from poor, ghetto communities who are. The fact that they are black is secondary. Like I've said, I would be completely ok with them being given extra points due to coming from a very poor/criminal families. No problem here. But a simple system "black? extra points. Asian? negative points" is nothing but racist. Is a black person from a rich family getting extra points? If yes, why? Is an Asian person from a poor family still getting negative points? If yes, again - why? It literally doesn't make any sense.
  - intopieces 12y ago
    You're now shifting the conversation from the broad admissions policy to specific admission merits of individuals. The policy of promoting the admission of black students as a whole has been successful. It's not racism when a minority/disadvantaged group is given a leg up on a group that already has an advantage. The effect is so minimal that it really isn't worth discussing.

rjdagost 12y ago

Racial discrimination, neatly quantified: "Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission."

skywhopper 12y ago
Note that no school actually penalizes Asian Americans by 50 points or gives 230 points to black applications. This study appears to assume that one's SAT score is the only factor that should be used in college admission and that race is the only explanatory factor for the disparity between admission and scores. But admissions policies that granted extra "points" based on growing up in a poorly performing school district or the economic status of the parents would also likely generate this sort of distribution.

nether 12y ago

CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2010/12/why_caltech_is_in_a_class_by_i/ http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2010/12/why_caltech_is_in_a_...

Anechoic 12y ago
This is not true according to CalTech's Common Data Set filings [0] (see section C7) [0] http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  This is an issue of some interest. For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting. When we look at the CalTech statistics, racial biases are not apparent (admittedly, we have to do this in a very rough way because universities will generally fight tooth and nail to prevent researchers from looking into the effect of race on admissions). And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered", which is the least significance a variable can have before being "not considered". If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, based on massive discrepancies between the records of admitted freshmen of different races, why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement that race is considered, based on a lack of such discrepancies?
  - Anechoic 12y ago
    For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting. Do "we know they're doing it anyway"? When Prop 209 passed, minority enrollment dropped. And there are any number of factors that the system may consider that are not race, but may be correlated with race. In any event, the numbers I can find show black and latino admissions combined are less than expected based on CA and national numbers. And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered" I was responding to a poster that said "CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all" - CalTech itself disagrees. I was not commenting on the extend or magnitude of that consideration. If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, I'm not sure I accept this premise. why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement Occam's razor. In any event, we know that CalTech does target minorities via outreach programs [0] so it would not be out of character for them to consider race. And anecdotally (I'm black), I was heavily recruited by CalTech despite my showing no interested in attending and having below (CalTech) average SAT scores (and above average grades/school rank/extra curricular) [0] http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/resources/rfus http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/resources/rfus

Edmond 12y ago

I think people who complain about discrimination against Asian students in places such as Harvard should ask themselves, why do people want to go to Harvard? It sure as hell isn't because that is the only place you can get an excellent education. While Harvard is obviously great as an academic institution, people want to go to Harvard for the prestige. Do you think that prestige would be there if they were to allow the place to essentially become an academic ghetto for any given ethic group (Asian, Jewish or any future group)? Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores. Complaining about not being accepted to a place like Harvard even though you scored a perfect SAT or some other test taking metric shows a misunderstanding of what these highly prestigious institutions are about.

jessriedel 12y ago
We know what top universities would look like if they selected purely for academics. They would look like CalTech. > Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur .... You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores. CalTech has more nobel prizes per capita than any of the Ivies. Dunno if CalTech loses out on Macarthur (maybe) or Pulizer (probably), but if so it's because CalTech is a technical university. There's no reason you couldn't have an all-academically selected university focusing on the humanities. > or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. This is obviously not the reason that Harvard has racial preferences. Yes, we can agree that it is reasonable for Harvard and other high-prestige universities to select for things besides academics (ambition, social savvy, sports, extracurriculars). But the complaint being leveled is that they shouldn't pick explicitly on race.
- Edmond 12y ago
  I think you're making my point, only people hanging out on HN and other similar circles know what CalTech is...Go out there and ask random people about CalTech... :) CalTech is a first-rate academic institution but it's prestige is limited to those who actually know what it is about. My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so. Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.

nutjob123 12y ago

Aren't you allowed to abstain from declaring race on college applications?

jqm 12y ago
Maybe, but you certainly aren't allowed to abstain from declaring your name.
- Glide 12y ago
  Which is why a lot of people have legal western names while using an ethnic name at home.
dennisgorelik 12y ago
Why abstain if you can declare being African-american? Instant bonus points + narrowing discrimination as a side benefit.

ausjke 12y ago

Don't know what to say other than feeling upset. The losers are more on the middle-class of poor Asians and the Whites obviously. Due to the increasingly large number of the black and the Hispanic voters, these situation will not change, if not getting worse. Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out. I'm fine with helping the economically disadvantaged students, but manipulating the admission by skin color or race? Top universities just like NBA, only the best players shall attend, skin color shall not be the reason you can stay there. Not to mention there are so many other public/private universities to choose for everyone.

Larrikin 12y ago
From what I've read most of the black and Hispanic students are not dropping out due to course work, but an inability to pay for it. Furthermore, taking out more loans is often not the best idea since many of the students do not make the connections in those schools to get the best paying jobs and usually end up with similar jobs as their peers that went to less prestigious and cheaper schools.
hga 12y ago
"Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out." Yes, there's been a fair amount of research on this. Essentially, once you get beyond the very very top, I'm not sure what beyond Harvard and MIT (and of course CalTech), there just isn't a large enough pool of qualified candidates. So at each "level" a large fraction of these students admitted and accepting belong in a school one or two levels down, where they could thrive.

thelogos 12y ago

Some people may find this surprising, but you shouldn't. It's simply how the world works. It's repugnant but life is not fair. Racial discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also legacy admission and athletes grade fixing. It's also not uncommon for rich parents to hire a professional ghostwriter for the admission essay. College admission as a whole is extremely subjective even if they try to pretend it isn't. After that there's the rampant grade inflation. We can go on and on. Make no mistakes though, these aren't just inefficiency that happens by oversight. Someone __always__ benefit. They certainly don't feel sorry for you. They may use fancy euphemism to justify their decisions, but we're all adults here. Nobody really believes that bullshit. College is a business and the only thing you can do is take your money somewhere else. Until society is ruled by some AI, we'll always have these kinds of problem. Some things I would recommend if people really want to give away their money and support these evil institutions, 1. Change your name, first and last 2. Check a different box when they ask for your race (or any other bullshit like religion, etc.) Changing your name has _massive_ implications besides college applications. Humans love to judge especially when they have nothing at stake. If you don't believe me, just apply to a few jobs with different names.

bane 12y ago

I'm married into a first generation Asian family and this is a constant topic of conversation on that side, especially now that their kids are getting ready for college. The problem ultimately stems from a huge wave of mostly Korean and Chinese immigrants (but by extension other East Asian and Pacific Island nations get penalized as well), who grew up in poor countries (or when their countries were poor), suddenly finding themselves with enough money to immigrate to the U.S. and "escape". They put down roots, work their tails off and start having families. They don't want their kids to have to struggle like they did (and they want to ensure they set themselves up well in retirement), but they have incredibly unsophisticated views of what 'success' means in America (often as a result of working so much they never really had a chance to integrate well into their adopted country). However, they understand passing tests, having deep cultural histories around test taking to get ahead in life. So they look for the most prestigious work you can test into. And bam, at the intersection of hard work, prestige signaling and test taking you get a fairly limited set of occupations, which these parents instinctively laser beam their kids at. Good schools want extracurriculars? No problem! Let's use the prestige button on that, prestigious schools must want the most prestigious extracurriculars, and those are obviously piano and violin (and sometimes opera). Let's toss in some prestige sports as well, and now these kids and splitting time studying endlessly for tests to become a doctor or lawyer, practicing piano/violin and playing tennis/golf/figure skating. Repeat until the parents think they're maximizing the fitting function for university acceptance and you end up with entire social networks and minor industries around SAT test taking, piano and violin teachers and tennis/golf/figure skating coaches. And you know what? For a very long time this worked. Asian Americans have been extraordinarily and consistently "successful", far over-represented in university admissions and in select professions. But there was no secret, it was literally hard screaming, crying, kicking work. There's no cheating. While their other raced peers studied for an hour every night before turning on the XBox. They studied till midnight, every night, and then spent all day Saturday at private school, then studied till midnight again, then spent most of the day on Sundays doing prestige extracurriculars. Their parents were often poor, working crap triple-D jobs, or triple shifts at convenience stores. They lived frugally and invested every single drop of blood in their kids. Even if they were often wrong headed about how they did it, it worked and anybody can do it. But on the university side, as parents start to find the optimal mix to acceptance, application packets start to look not just virtually identical, but absolutely identical. Imagine you're tasked with figuring out which 10 of 1000 applications all with the last names Kim, Chin, Hu, Lee, Park, Wang or Choi should be accepted: - All have 4.0 GPAs - All have AP degrees from High School - All have extracurriculars that are selected from the set of {violin, piano, opera, tennis, golf} - All went to the best High Schools in their respective areas - All submit essays with some story about their parent's difficult immigration, usually involving stories of poverty and unbelievable work hours in menial jobs. Maybe with some kind of "escape from the communists" or "swimming to safety across Hong Kong Harbor" or something. I know 3 Chinese Americans who's parents have almost identical "swimming escape from China and lived in Kowloon Walled City for 3 years before making it to America" stories. - All have perfect or near perfect SAT scores What the universities are of course realizing is that it becomes a random sample at this point. There's no criteria they can use to discern one 'Kim' from another 'Lee'...every applicant literally looks exactly the same. There's no "fair" way to select from this applicant pool, and this pool has quite literally self-grouped. So, clumsily, the universities are trying to throw big rocks in the pool. These are starting to no longer accept the products of this application optimum, especially if they have Asian-American last names. It's getting heard, and in the parts of the Asian American community I'm privy to, mothers are stressed out that all those years of forcing their kids to master Bach aren't going to count for much. They're in a mad scramble to figure out the next optimized path, but the universities are smart to it now. They also don't come from cultures where the notion of cultivating meaningful hobbies is well understood. My niece loves waterpainting and flower arranging. Gifts of art supplies and arrangement books are met with skepticism and sometimes scorn. She won't have time to be forced to practice piano if she's dilly-dallying around with another painting! Yet, a portfolio of prints and some awards from local flower shows would be exactly what the universities are now looking for. The idea that maybe she should be encouraged to develop her own innate interests is lost while he parents look for the next magical prestige signalling instrument for her to be forced to study. My other family back in the home country are trying to understand it better, but they still haven't gotten over the idea that being "a hobby photographer" doesn't have to mean spending $25,000 on pro-level camera equipment. Coincidentally, the second generation of Asian Americans are having kids and those kids are often growing up without all this mess, but still affected by the continued wave of new first generations. Now Rebecca Choi, who's parents didn't push her through the Harvard funnel is getting impacted by Hee Soo who did. But Rebecca is interested in becoming a writer, has a 3.2 GPA, stinks at math, dyes her hair pink, listens to rock music, is trying to learn to play guitar, volunteers as a drill coach for her local girl's basketball league. Had a pregnancy scare her junior year. Has experimented with drugs a little. Her SATs were above average, but not spectacular. If she was another minority she might make it into a tier-1 school. If she was white she probably wouldn't. But now because Hee Soo's parents tiger mom'd her through the perceived application optimum, Rebecca, for no other reason than being a Choi, gets a 50 point application deduction. Does this mean the system worked? Rebecca would just be an average white kid if she was Rebecca Smith.

skywhopper 12y ago

The study at the core of this article appears to make the assumption that SAT scores are the only factor that ought to be considered when making college admissions decisions. But I don't think that's right. Certainly the mission of these universities is not solely to educate the best test-takers in the world. And unless I missed it there's also no evidence that the schools studied actually do use race in their admissions decisions. There are a variety of other factors that could be considered which would end up skewing the admissions results on the basis of race. Should colleges not be allowed to give extra consideration to students from poorly performing schools simply because doing so might have the effect of giving "bonus points" to African American or Hispanic applicants?

GrandTheftR 12y ago

MLK said this in his famouse speech "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." [0] This is so sad with what many colleges/states are pushing for now. I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, which the children were born into, but not discrimination based on skin color, which the children were born with. [0] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth115056.html#meSsLUb8M6r42ETO.99" http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth115056....

skywhopper 12y ago
One's SAT score is not a measure of the content of one's character. In any case, the study being quoted here did not give any evidence that race was even being used as a factor in admissions decisions. If you favor giving bonus points based on one's economic status, then that will correlate to the same sort of results this study revealed, with black and hispanic populations being over-represented versus an admissions policy based purely on standardized test scores.
Anechoic 12y ago
MLK said this in his famouse speech MLK also said: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic." I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, [..] but not discrimination based on skin color The problem is that research has shown that institutional discrimination is not just based on economics, but also on race (for example, Prager's research showing that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job callback than a black applicant without a criminal record). Ignoring race isn't the answer. As for what is the answer, that's a much harder problem which is why we're still wrestling with it.

thinkofnothing 12y ago

I'm one of those Asian-Americans that applied to only "elite" schools due to constant parental pressure and did "enough" to get accepted to most. Although all this happened a decade ago, the challenges these days seem mostly the same, if not trite, in the sense that Asians seem to typically over-value institutionalized education and focus on a narrow set of activities for whatever cultural reason ... leading to racial bias from colleges and conventional life choices from Asians. For me though, I just enjoyed trying a bunch of different stuff out and was fortunate enough to excel at a variety of things that I guess these colleges weren't expecting from an Asian. These interests include(d) linguistics, journalism, public speaking, student government, graphics + layouts + grids, game design, acrobatics, and somehow even ended up as an Eagle Scout (shrug) ... on top of hyper-accelerated math, science and tech stuff expected I guess of Asian students. Didn't sleep much though. Also, after attending one day of Harvard's Campus Preview Weekend, my gut said "uh ... no," and went to MIT instead. Very happy about that choice in hindsight, purely based on the people I met and the meritocracy instilled in the students; I doubt I use even 25% of course material in the stuff I work on these days. The most important lesson that I did learn at the end of the day is that general society is led to believe that people should/can master only one or two tasks, a possible relic from industrialism. Instead, people should aim to become polymathic, which becomes exponentially easier by learning across diverse interests and realizing that there are many common threads across seemingly different fields -- a personal and particular implementation of "learning how to learn." * As a side note, San Gabriel Valley? Never been so can't really guess, but I would bet that Cupertino schools were much tougher. Thankfully, we had a certain neighborhood fruit company that inspired some of us to become pirates instead of joining the navy, and to experiment with Learning Some Divinity (eventually).

highoctane51 12y ago

> "But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity." As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success

highoctane51 12y ago

Bahamut 12y ago

This is not surprising, most asians already know this - I encountered this during admissions when I applied to undergrad for the class of 2006. I was one of the most stellar candidates from the NY tristate area (NYC area) with some of the best test scores & a diverse set of extracurriculars, and a history of excellence in regional/national math competitions & advanced coursework (Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra in 10th grade), but my being Korean definitely hurt (combined with my having wrote a bad essay, which helped give a reason to say no/waitlisted in a year where many colleges lost millions of dollars from the Enron scandal). In the end, it didn't matter as much since I always had strong confidence in my ability to adapt and to look ahead, and my path turned out to be beneficial in many different ways. Obstacles such as this are difficult to overcome though, and it helped home in that I need to be that much sharper in order to succeed.

jrochkind1 12y ago

> Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points Compared to what? White applicants, statistically? Why are white people the "default" which everyone else is measured against, do white people not have a race/ethnicity? There is no 'objective' measure of what SAT score "should" get you into a university. Most universities use things other than SAT scores to decide admissions (things in addition to affirmative action/diversity, I mean, too). Some universities may rely/weight SAT scores more than others. There is no SAT score that is "supposed to" guarantee you admission, "before accounting for race". It doesn't work that way. If you think it would be more "fair" to rely exclusively on SAT scores, you can make an argument for that, but a test is not in fact some objective measure of 'reality', it's just one test. The idea that it's just a fact that "Asian Americans are penalized by 50 points"-- it's an under-specified statement, and it doesn't actually mean much. I think this is an example of the assumptions/biases in the language of this article and those quoted in it, in general.

kaitai 12y ago

I was part of a program that changed to graduate admissions based solely on subject GRE score. The first such resulting class was 88% Chinese, 4% Taiwanese, and 8% white American. Did they do that well as a class in graduate studies or in academia? No. Some were great, some were terrible, just like every other year. The years where admission was done based on prior math research instead resulted in a more interesting group of students, although again some were great, some were terrible. It's well-known that in subject GREs Chinese students score very well compared to American students of any racial or ethnic background. (As a Chinese friend asked, "Why don't you Americans just study for it, like we do?") However, subject GRE scores are not that predictive of success in a graduate program. Research skills, writing ability, grit, and the simple capacity to get stuff done are not well-predicted by multiple choice exams. It is useful to know that students who do well on, for instance, the math subject GRE can do triple integrals quickly. That's about it. So, since subject GREs don't predict graduate success, and SATs are not that well-correlated with college success either [1], admissions committees use other factors to evaluate students. In fact, a number of schools do not require any standardized test [2]. These other factors range widely and include high school grades, which are most predictive of college success, volunteer work, interestingness, etc. And they do include race and geographic origin. Small colleges in the Midwest are currently targeting California, Texas, and Florida for recruitment because of their huge numbers of graduating seniors, and the coastal schools let in some token Midwesterners to provide some leavening to their provincial views of flyover country. There is discrimination against Asian Americans in admissions in the US. It's not written into policy explicitly: it's just like discrimination against women and blacks today, taking the form of discussion of "fit" or subjective evaluation of how interesting someone's work is. It should stop, and the comparison to the "Jewish quotas" is apt. At the same time, test-based admissions are ludicrous, and evaluation of extracurricular activities and accomplishments given the student's environment are necessary. I had friends at Caltech who went to high schools that didn't offer calculus: smart people come from all sorts of backgrounds. [1] https://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity_of_the_SAT_for_Predicting_First_Year_College_Grade_Point_Average.pdf https://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity... [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/study-finds-little-difference-academic-success-students-who-do-and-dont-submit-sat https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/study-finds-l...

ericschmidt 12y ago

I'm not saying it's wrong and I'm not saying it's right, but the fact is: Affirmative action means the college admissions process is racist against asians and whites. End of story.

noobermin 12y ago

Here's an out of the box idea that doesn't address racism but addresses another aspect of this: may be we should focus effort (research grants and moneys) on non-elite schools and bring the general average university up to a better level, then people, asian or otherwise, wouldn't feel that much less accomplished if they got into a some large public uni that happens not to be an ivy-league school. It boggles my mind how we have the best schools in the world while at the same time have an average college educated adult who has skills below the average [0]. That could be part of the reason why so many people are shoving against each other on the way to Stanford, because if they get into some random state uni, they know they won't have a quality education. May be if we fixed that, we'd increase N, the number of spots available for everyone, and we wouldn't reach the pigeon-hole limit so quickly that colleges wouldn't have to start discriminating against anyone. [0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-rank-below-average-global-survey-basic-education-skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-ran...