9 ms·

The language in this article is positively Orwellian. Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions Wher

by 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.
- 83hrdiuhaewkfjn 12y ago
  So basically it's OK b/c harvard did it?
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  This is done in the name of diversity because it's officially legal that way. Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity. Compare what happened to my roommate's dad: a sensitivity training guy came to give a lecture at his company, and was easily prodded into saying that workplace diversity increased along with the share of women. 40% women is more diverse than 30% women (sure). 70% women is more diverse than 60% women (hmmm). In the college context, "diverse" is more likely to be a code word for "black" than for "female", but the semantic drift is just as real; it's quite possible to describe a class as, oh, "40% diverse".
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    An acquaintance of your roommate's dad didn't understand the meaning of diversity so therefore Harvard doesn't either? I don't follow.
    - 12y ago
wozniacki 12y ago
Although I sense that none of the following is likely to pacify the general grating sentiment of the arguments here, I will venture anyway: “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who get in. Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children interesting!” For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting. But the good news is that when colleges use this set of criteria, kids can focus on shaping their teenage years in a way that isn’t just about trying to build up resume line after resume line, and instead focus on a more holistic sense of self. That seems like a far more sensible way to move through high school than spreading oneself too thin trying to get a slew of positions one can’t really ever concentrate on. That encourages a dilettantish approach to learning and society that is just the opposite of what the liberal arts have traditionally tried to encourage.[1] I mention this not because it captures the whole truth of the way one gets into Harvard. But because it is almost alluring an argument that anyone - whether a Harvard, a YC, a Hackerspace / co-living community, the approval process at a highly prized co-op building in New York, a dating app ( The League [2] ) - could use ( and do use ) "to winnow out the chaff", so to speak. Is it fair that a co-op uses some strange criteria to let a bigwig, say a political donation bundler, with connections, have the penthouse and not you ? No. Would you dare fight the co-op and take them to court to prove you are just as "interesting" as the bundler? Are you likely to win? Are you not likely to appease the co-op board through some other means because you know it is the socially-acceptable way to do so and suing them is just going to make you a social outcast and expunged from the social diaries of the well-heeled? Is it fair that a group of people self-select themselves to be part of a dating club, so as to not being put through the grief of having to date a person who doesn't - from all social cues and signalling - doesn't belong? [2] Is it wrong? Yes. Is it illegal? No. Their lawyer is sure to say that no one is stopping you from building your own app and inviting people only you approve of. After all it is a private app. I could give examples of even more explicit discrimination in daily life that go unchallenged. One cannot cherry-pick an issue when it suits them and choose to shift it to the back-burner when it doesn't. Discrimination is rampant, persistent and has become acceptable in all manner of ways - both latent and in plain sight. It is too important an issue to be fought in piece-meal, from one aggrieved party to another. We ought to have a much bigger, much more encompassing and thorough discussion of what it means to be discriminated - whether the person is non-Jewish white, Jewish, Asian, Black, Hispanic or the rest. [1] How to Get Into Harvard http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-get-into-harvard/373726/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-... [2] The League http://www.theleagueapp.co/ http://www.theleagueapp.co/ edit: formatting
rayiner 12y ago
I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance about this. I went to a selective admission high school where due to anti-AA reforms the Asian population has grown from about 30% to 66% in just 15 years: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-shift-at-thomas-jefferson-high-as-asians-make-up-66-percent-of-new-class/2014/04/08/78374f7a-bf23-11e3-b574-f8748871856a_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-s.... Most people perceive the change negatively. Some objectively good qualities have been diminished: collegiality has been replaced by cut-throat competitiveness. External perceptions of prestige have gone down even as SAT scores have gone up, partly due to racism but also partly due to back-channel whispering about increased cheating. That being said, I acknowledge that many of the same reasons I don't like the shift were and still are used to keep Jews out of elite schools. And I agree that on the whole it's wrong. At the same time, I also recognize that this is a problem of assimilation. People want to preserve aspects of their culture they believe to be virtuous. But our institutions have limited capacity to assimilate and inculcate new groups with our values. I think discrimination against Asians in higher Ed should end. I'm a little wary of what road that will lead us down.
- nailer 12y ago
  I too went to a selective admission high school that was mostly asian, in Australia, which never had AA to get rid of in the first place. We ate a lot of vietnamese food, learnt how to to say Nguyen properly, played Big 2, laughed at FOB Asian parent's pressure and a had a good time. By the second generation people are assimilated but still have their own culture and we were united far more often than divided.
skywhopper 12y ago
I'm curious what your evidence is that "universities have formal policies" discriminating against Asian Americans. Because you realize, I hope, that the study being cited only made inferences about "bonus points" on the assumption that SAT score is the only worthwhile factor to be considered in admissions decisions. There is no evidence that I see that Asian Americans are being discriminated against by policy due to their race.
- patio11 12y ago
  I'm going to treat this objection in good faith. Quoting from their most-recent-of-several amici briefs on the matter: Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. [[Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke]], 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). [[Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.]] They go on: [[Amici accordingly urge the Court]] to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to [[allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity]] as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process. I have taken the liberty of using [[double brackets] to direct your attention to the really salient bits. There's the whose-who of American universities saying, in pretty clear language, to the Supreme Court, that they would find it very inconvenient if the Supreme Court were to illegalize their racial discrimination programs. Are you still unconvinced that American universities operate racial discrimination programs? If your objection is the more narrow "I agree that American universities often operate racial discrimination programs, but disagree that those racial discrimination programs disfavor Asians", I'd be more than happy to find you citations of of which groups particular formal racial discrimination policies discriminate in favor of. This will, inevitably, fail to find Asians on that list. If you disagree with me on this prediction, please name three representative universities and I'll happily do the legwork on finding their written statement of which races are favored by their formal racial discrimination programs.
skwirl 12y ago
"Orwellian" has become one of HN's least useful snarl words that now communicates nothing aside from "I disagree with this point of view and consequently the way it is framed." If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%. You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable? Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation? It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.
- philwelch 12y ago
  "To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination. If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education? If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.
  - 12y ago

by patio11 12y ago

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.

83hrdiuhaewkfjn 12y ago
So basically it's OK b/c harvard did it?
thaumasiotes 12y ago
This is done in the name of diversity because it's officially legal that way. Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity. Compare what happened to my roommate's dad: a sensitivity training guy came to give a lecture at his company, and was easily prodded into saying that workplace diversity increased along with the share of women. 40% women is more diverse than 30% women (sure). 70% women is more diverse than 60% women (hmmm). In the college context, "diverse" is more likely to be a code word for "black" than for "female", but the semantic drift is just as real; it's quite possible to describe a class as, oh, "40% diverse".
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  An acquaintance of your roommate's dad didn't understand the meaning of diversity so therefore Harvard doesn't either? I don't follow.
  - 12y ago

wozniacki 12y ago

Although I sense that none of the following is likely to pacify the general grating sentiment of the arguments here, I will venture anyway: “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who get in. Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children interesting!” For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting. But the good news is that when colleges use this set of criteria, kids can focus on shaping their teenage years in a way that isn’t just about trying to build up resume line after resume line, and instead focus on a more holistic sense of self. That seems like a far more sensible way to move through high school than spreading oneself too thin trying to get a slew of positions one can’t really ever concentrate on. That encourages a dilettantish approach to learning and society that is just the opposite of what the liberal arts have traditionally tried to encourage.[1] I mention this not because it captures the whole truth of the way one gets into Harvard. But because it is almost alluring an argument that anyone - whether a Harvard, a YC, a Hackerspace / co-living community, the approval process at a highly prized co-op building in New York, a dating app ( The League [2] ) - could use ( and do use ) "to winnow out the chaff", so to speak. Is it fair that a co-op uses some strange criteria to let a bigwig, say a political donation bundler, with connections, have the penthouse and not you ? No. Would you dare fight the co-op and take them to court to prove you are just as "interesting" as the bundler? Are you likely to win? Are you not likely to appease the co-op board through some other means because you know it is the socially-acceptable way to do so and suing them is just going to make you a social outcast and expunged from the social diaries of the well-heeled? Is it fair that a group of people self-select themselves to be part of a dating club, so as to not being put through the grief of having to date a person who doesn't - from all social cues and signalling - doesn't belong? [2] Is it wrong? Yes. Is it illegal? No. Their lawyer is sure to say that no one is stopping you from building your own app and inviting people only you approve of. After all it is a private app. I could give examples of even more explicit discrimination in daily life that go unchallenged. One cannot cherry-pick an issue when it suits them and choose to shift it to the back-burner when it doesn't. Discrimination is rampant, persistent and has become acceptable in all manner of ways - both latent and in plain sight. It is too important an issue to be fought in piece-meal, from one aggrieved party to another. We ought to have a much bigger, much more encompassing and thorough discussion of what it means to be discriminated - whether the person is non-Jewish white, Jewish, Asian, Black, Hispanic or the rest. [1] How to Get Into Harvard http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-get-into-harvard/373726/ http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-... [2] The League http://www.theleagueapp.co/ http://www.theleagueapp.co/ edit: formatting

rayiner 12y ago

I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance about this. I went to a selective admission high school where due to anti-AA reforms the Asian population has grown from about 30% to 66% in just 15 years: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-shift-at-thomas-jefferson-high-as-asians-make-up-66-percent-of-new-class/2014/04/08/78374f7a-bf23-11e3-b574-f8748871856a_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-s.... Most people perceive the change negatively. Some objectively good qualities have been diminished: collegiality has been replaced by cut-throat competitiveness. External perceptions of prestige have gone down even as SAT scores have gone up, partly due to racism but also partly due to back-channel whispering about increased cheating. That being said, I acknowledge that many of the same reasons I don't like the shift were and still are used to keep Jews out of elite schools. And I agree that on the whole it's wrong. At the same time, I also recognize that this is a problem of assimilation. People want to preserve aspects of their culture they believe to be virtuous. But our institutions have limited capacity to assimilate and inculcate new groups with our values. I think discrimination against Asians in higher Ed should end. I'm a little wary of what road that will lead us down.

nailer 12y ago
I too went to a selective admission high school that was mostly asian, in Australia, which never had AA to get rid of in the first place. We ate a lot of vietnamese food, learnt how to to say Nguyen properly, played Big 2, laughed at FOB Asian parent's pressure and a had a good time. By the second generation people are assimilated but still have their own culture and we were united far more often than divided.

skywhopper 12y ago

I'm curious what your evidence is that "universities have formal policies" discriminating against Asian Americans. Because you realize, I hope, that the study being cited only made inferences about "bonus points" on the assumption that SAT score is the only worthwhile factor to be considered in admissions decisions. There is no evidence that I see that Asian Americans are being discriminated against by policy due to their race.

patio11 12y ago
I'm going to treat this objection in good faith. Quoting from their most-recent-of-several amici briefs on the matter: Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. [[Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke]], 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). [[Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.]] They go on: [[Amici accordingly urge the Court]] to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to [[allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity]] as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process. I have taken the liberty of using [[double brackets] to direct your attention to the really salient bits. There's the whose-who of American universities saying, in pretty clear language, to the Supreme Court, that they would find it very inconvenient if the Supreme Court were to illegalize their racial discrimination programs. Are you still unconvinced that American universities operate racial discrimination programs? If your objection is the more narrow "I agree that American universities often operate racial discrimination programs, but disagree that those racial discrimination programs disfavor Asians", I'd be more than happy to find you citations of of which groups particular formal racial discrimination policies discriminate in favor of. This will, inevitably, fail to find Asians on that list. If you disagree with me on this prediction, please name three representative universities and I'll happily do the legwork on finding their written statement of which races are favored by their formal racial discrimination programs.

skwirl 12y ago

"Orwellian" has become one of HN's least useful snarl words that now communicates nothing aside from "I disagree with this point of view and consequently the way it is framed." If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%. You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable? Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation? It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.

philwelch 12y ago
"To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination. If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education? If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.
- 12y ago