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Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans

108 points by thewhizkid 11y ago

paulhauggis 11y ago
"It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale." It's odd that affirmative action is basically basing everything on color of your skin and not the content of your character. I was under the impression that it was supposed to prevent this.
- adventured 11y ago
  The entire point of affirmative action was to provide unearned opportunities based on the color of your skin. With the theory being that over time it would help boost the well being of minorities (at the time mostly African Americans). That by forcing open opportunities, the next generation would do better, and the generation after that would do even better, and so on.
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    "Affirmative action programs" differ. But in general, they're to control the racism of gatekeepers, these bureaucrats who choose who gets a decent education. There are better solutions. For instance: free lifelong quality education to all. But naturally, elites would rather waste society's wealth on wars (international killing) and prisons (the most jailings in the world)... than silly things like knowledge and healthcare. Affirmative action is a modest, successful effort to chip away at the self-destructive inequalities of society. Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      > Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves. Asians have white privilege now? We can certainly see what your Officially Not Racist biases are.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      > Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves. Since when do Asians have white privilege?
  - themartorana 11y ago
    At the expense of other individuals. I personally don't believe affirmative action continues to serve its original purpose, although I've always been against it and gender discrimination as well. I only have one life. Being told it's ok that I was denied an opportunity because I'm white and I'll be ok is easier to abstract into a broad formula, but harder to take when, on merit alone, I'd be given that opportunity and my life as a human being would be better for it. Affirmative action was arguably a way to accelerate towards true unbiased judgement, but any purpose it served has run its course and now it's rather harmful, IMHO.
pervycreeper 11y ago
I wonder what the basis of their complaint will be considering that race-based preferences in admissions has already been upheld in the US supreme court.
iaw 11y ago
Yeesh. The basis of their complaint seems to be rooted in test score (and possibly grade analysis) but they neglect the increased homogeneity that it represents. Asians may have a tighter distribution of metric based qualities with a mean at the higher end of the spectrum when you cut by race but it's quite possible that there are other deficits that cannot easily be highlighted through a metric based comparison alone. It's hard to form a full opinion without the type of information you'd only have access to as a member of the admissions comittee.
- chroma 11y ago
  Would you defend Harvard if they had a de-facto quota for Jewish applicants? This is a trick question. Harvard (and other Ivy League schools) did discriminate against Jews[1], and their justifications were quite similar to what we're hearing today. These universities switched from grades and test scores to a more "holistic" evaluation, allowing them to surreptitiously limit the number of Jewish students. The game is the same, only the names have changed. Use all the rationalizations and euphemisms you want, but the truth is this: Ivy League schools are rejecting many of their most-qualified applicants solely because of their race[2]. These policies need to end. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus... 2. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/asians-large.jpg http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
  - iaw 11y ago
    I responded to another comment below[1]. I understand that it is easy to view these policies as racism but if you think about the people that spots are being freed for there is a larger net social gain. I knew this would be unpopular when I posted it, and I am personally biased, but I don't think one can make the argument that Asian's lack socioeconomic mobility in the same way as some of the other races. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that. In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.
solve 11y ago
Have to wonder if it forms a feedback loop: - Asians are getting higher scores than others, so they're required to get higher scores to be admitted. - Parents of the next generation know that their children need even higher scores, so they force their children to work continuously harder.
- letitgo12345 11y ago
  I think the problem is that in addition to affirmative action, asians are being compared against other asians rather than against the candidate pool at large (thus effectively having quotas).
anon-obviously 11y ago
The complaint argues that elite schools “that use race-neutral admissions” have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard. Interestingly, Ron Unz did a lengthy expose on this issue in 2012, and arrived at similar conclusions: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... He found ample evidence of anti-Asian quotas at Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, and perhaps more controversial, evidence of what appears to be a form of affirmative action in favor of Jews: In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.51 The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern. Jews comprise a mere 2% of the population yet a massive 25% of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The contrast with Caltech and UC schools with more merit-based admissions processes is quite stark: But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university. Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses (Unz himself is Jewish, in case you're wondering.)
- trynumber9 11y ago
  It's partly location. Asian-Americans are more heavily concentrated on the West Coast (hence Caltech and UC's high Asian admissions). Jews are more heavily concentrated on the East Coast (hence Harvard, Yale and Columbia's high Jewish admissions).
trhway 11y ago
reminded - our professors at the University love their Asian students (Russian Universities got a lot foreign Asian(China) students in the recent decade) because, as one professor put it, "they are hard-working and eager to learn, not lazy arrogant bums like you people were back then".
lordnacho 11y ago
Isn't Harvard allowed to do this as a private institution? What's the education department going to do about it?
- letitgo12345 11y ago
  Harvard is subsidized by the govt (in the form of low interest loans to students) and via grant money for research.
  - beaner 11y ago
    re, the first part: So you're saying that if I run some private business, and the gov't gives a loan to somebody else to buy the product I'm selling, that makes me a publicly funded business and forces me to abide by rules for businesses that are publicly funded? I don't think that makes sense.
    - argonaut 11y ago
      Government financing / backing / regulation of student loans is much more complex and closely bound to colleges than you are making them out to be.
    - interesting_att 11y ago
      If we posted stipulations on all the grant money we give universities, every elite university would quickly follow through with it. It's too much money to throw away, even for Harvard.
- deleted 11y ago
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- contravert 11y ago
  Harvard's endownment earned over 12% annually averaged over 40 years (http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance-history.html http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...). I bet the government would love to tax some of that money.
aphexairlines 11y ago
The population continues to grow while people continue to value a handful of schools with fixed campus sizes. What a nightmare it must be to be a parent or a high schooler these days.
ChicagoBoy11 11y ago
Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc. The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action. The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a whole host of other factors. The complaint is utterly silly, because it fails to realize that nowhere is the claim made that the admissions process seeks to select the best students according to the SAT -- it seeks to select the students who best add something novel to that year's entering class. A VERY STRONG argument could be made that race ought to be something which can't enter into that calculus. And I agree with that. But, from the moment a school adopts Affirmative Action (and the US supreme court upholds it), then this is just the sort of thing we can expect to see.
- interesting_att 11y ago
  A private school can use whatever criteria it wants if it believes it enhances the experience. But why should Asian American tax dollars go to a university that clearly discriminates against them? Harvard shouldn't be able to get public funds and engage in systemic racism.
  - afshin 11y ago
    Well, consider your answer to this question: Why should childless adults pay taxes that go toward a school system that educates children, despite the fact that they don't have children? Whatever your answer to that is, it is probably closely related to the answer to the question you posed. My own interpretation is that the whole point of paying taxes and building services is to cover the larger society's needs, not simply my own needs.
    - interesting_att 11y ago
      I see some strength in your analogy, but two main differences: 1) Tax money spent on sending kids to college helps everyone, even the non-parents, since more educated people = better world. Affirmative action doesn't help Asians in any conceivable way. Does it even help society at large? No one arguing for it shows reliable data that it creates significant community benefit. 2) You can always have a child in the future if you choose to. You can't become non-Asian if you were born Asian.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
There's bias against Asians everywhere. The difference is remarkably pronounced between asian men and asian women. Hollywood, for example: Asian women? Minority. Asian men? nonexistent.
- deleted 11y ago
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- MollyR 11y ago
  My younger brother feels this a ton. I wish I could do something for him. Lately he's found some peace in some korean tv shows and movies.
freyr 11y ago
I knew it! I had near-perfect SAT scores and a very high GPA, but I was rejected by many schools that accepted my friends with lower scores. Now it makes perfect sense. Except I'm white and my high school classmates were Asian and Indian. I'll never understand the admissions process.
- Garbage 11y ago
  Aren't Indians Asians?
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > Aren't Indians Asians? Depends on what variety of English you speak whether the term Asian normally includes Indians or not. For Brits, Asian primarily means "From the Indian Subcontinent" which includes Pakistan for them, IIRC. For Americans, Asian primarily means "From East Asia" which is China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Of course, in an academic context, Asian means "Anyone from the Asian Continent" which includes some but not all Russians, all South Asians, all East Asians, all Central Asians, all Middle Easterners (except Egyptians), and whoever else depending on how certain lines get drawn.
    - lnkmails 11y ago
      This confuses the hell out of me as an Indian living in America. Mostly it's me wondering if I am included in the stereotype or not. Otherwise I don't really care.
seiji 11y ago
This is the same problem as the housing crisis. What happens when you have limited resources (housing, dorms, teachers) and a group of people who are superior in some way end up wanting to use all your resources (buy all housing, be smartest and get admitted everywhere)? With money, we end up with capitalism doofus blindness and say "you got money, you EARNED that money, clearly, so do whatever you want" even though in modern "foreigners buying real property" practices, it's corrupt/graft money breaking SF/London/NYC/LA/Seattle/Vancouver housing markets in a worldwide government sanctioned oligarch money laundering scheme. With intelligence/capability, it's trickier. The popular belief is every human brain starts as a blank slate with unlimited capability. By that logic, if you don't get accepted somewhere, it's your own damn fault. But, that's so obviously wrong. I know plenty of people who are physically smarter than me. In certain problem-solving capacities, they think faster, better, and in more immediately creative ways than I do (what I lack in immediate ability I make up for in long-term effort). And so do their siblings and their parents and their grandparents going back many many years. But, just because I'm lesser, should I be thrown to the gutter while _only_ high quality education goes to the "truly smart" people? Then that's where race rears its ugly head. If you only select people with a certain strand of hereditary smarts, you end up with a campus with a majority of people from background X where X feel "at home" there and welcome, but then your minorities C, D, E, F, G, H feel, well, minority. A popular solution to the "too many high achieving people from the same background" bugaboo is to try and make the minorities less minority by boosting their numbers though allowing sub-perfect acceptance (not sub-par, just sub-not-the-absolute-best-ever). But, you have a fixed resource to allocate (class sizes, dorm rooms), so that kicks out some of the (glut) of perfect achievers you would have otherwise accepted. Then it comes down to politics. Conservative = "me me me, i'm perfect me me me, kill the lessers." Liberal = "we're all in the together, so maybe you should step aside from this opportunity to let others advance too." You end up with a spectrum from top-down solutions ("no more than 20% of people from X background") to a bottom-up solutions ("only compare people of Y background from other Y background, then start acceptance from non-majority application piles first"). Neither is "fair" to the other, but if you don't pick a society-optimal fairness system (which is inherently unfair to those rejected), you get a completely unfair system of privilege boosting privilege (inherent privilege obtained by upbringing or genetic lottery). (Completely ignoring the other soft acceptance categories of "will this student eventually give us (or will their children eventually give us) lots of money in donations or bring us fame as a legacy.") There's no actual solution to preventing the over-allocation of fixed resources in the presence of superior consumers; all we're left with is compromises on the spectrum of "superiors only" versus "helping everybody in society." Thought experiment: if space aliens (superior consumers) landed and offered to sell us antigravity fabric and replicators for $9 trillion USD ('fixed' resources), would we just give them all the money? (Extension: what if they wanted $1 trillion USD worth of bitcoin and you can't even generate that much? Fiat wins again!)
streptomycin 11y ago
Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not really an impediment to your life and career unless you want to become a congressman or a supreme court justice or whatever. Where it does bother me is med school. I've seen several of my Asian friends who were just ridiculously obviously great applicants either fail to get into med school or struggle to get into med school over several years. I'm not talking about someone who you see and think "yeah he could be a doctor", I'm talking about someone who you see and think "wow this person has it all - smart, charismatic, hard working, intellectual curiosity, top notch GPA, tons of extracurriculars - this is a no brainer, he'd be a great doctor". All my friends of other races who seemed similarly qualified to me had no trouble getting in on their first try. And getting into med school or not is a big fucking deal. In some cases, we're turning away people who would be incredible doctors and making them pursue other careers, which is a huge waste. Those are just anecdotes of course, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed the same thing.
- deleted 11y ago
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- geographomics 11y ago
  Maybe it's just that the accepted applicants were of the same quality or better, in terms of their predicted suitability to practice medicine. The fact is that not everyone can get into such highly competitive programmes, and unfortunately some have to lose out.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    That wouldn't explain my observations, where excellent non-Asian applicants were shoe-ins on their first try and Asian applicants of the same quality had to try multiple times, some of them never making it in at all. If it was just a numbers issue and not everyone could make it in, you wouldn't expect such a clear racial difference. Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality of various candidates. But given what we know about undergrad admissions, it's not a stretch to imagine the same thing in med school. It's just that med school acceptance is much more impactful than undergrad.
Bahamut 11y ago
This doesn't surprise me, as an Asian American myself. I went to a high school that, while it wasn't the greatest in my county, routinely sent a student to Harvard every year - it was one of those schools that Harvard & other Ivy League schools tended to cherry-pick its minorities from (over 70% black/hispanic I was told the statistics were, in one of the wealthiest counties in the US). I had extremely strong credentials overall - generally strong standardized testing scores (1250 on the SAT in 7th grade with a 740 Math/510 Verbal split, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 780 SAT II Biology, 780 SAT II Physics, 750 SAT II Chemistry, 750 SAT II Writing, 1450 on the regular SAT with a 750 Math/700 Verbal split), college math & physics credits while in high school (Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, etc.), lots of extracurriculars & achievements, and a recommendation from an Ivy League physics professor. However, I slipped up on my essay since I wasn't a good writer then (which clicked for me the summer before college strangely enough) - that slip up was all it took to get deferred rejection from schools like Harvard in a year where a lot of the private colleges were weakened by the Enron scandal & consequently took 3/4th of the normal enrollment. On the flip side, in just the class before mine, there was a girl who had nowhere near my scores or achievements (in fact, I heard her SAT score was a 1320) who was accepted to Harvard - the kicker was that she was half latino. At the time this happened, I was extremely angry/bitter - I ended up attending a public university, which ended up being a blessing in many ways. I ended up learning a lot in non-academic aspects, but a lot of that was from force of character as someone who pushes himself to break barriers and challenge himself to succeed on difficult situations. I still believe those schools made a bad mistake, but I've accepted that admission is not necessarily a merit based decision for these schools, and to concern myself with what I can control.
- MollyR 11y ago
  I have a story very similar to this as well. I'm glad you got over the anger/bitterness, but I and many of my friends have not. It's tough when your friends and family still consider you to have failed. I'll never forget the shame and disappointment after sacrificing so much of my life. It makes life hurt when you have to work an order of magnitude harder to achieve the same result.
octottoman 11y ago
I'm not even going to post this with my real account. I wonder if we'll even be able to have a discussion about this without me getting downvoted into oblivion. Asians have the highest GPAs and SAT scores, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks. As such, blacks are given the benefit of the doubt, where as Asians are judged more harshly. Statistically, these groups have differing average IQs in the same order that I just described, with Asians at the top (actually Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by Asians) and blacks, sadly, at the bottom. This isn't to say a black individual can't have a high IQ or an Asian individual can't have a low IQ, just that on average they cluster around certain numbers, so a black with genius-level IQ is rarer than an Asian one. Whether or not you believe IQ measures intelligence accurately or comprehensively, the fact is that it correlates strongly with academic performance and SAT scores. I also will concede that "race" has questionable biological validity, and it gets really fuzzy when one is the offspring of one or more "mixed-race" parents". Still, race/IQ statistics in all of their generalities are a source of existential depression for me. Most of the data is touted boldly by people I despise and used to bolster viewpoints that I find deplorable, but there seems to be at least some truth to it. The idea of discriminating based on one's race seems unfair if we lived in a world where literally everyone has the same capacity to succeed but merely chooses not to. But what if that's not the case? If Asians generally can attain high test scores and high GPAs due to an innate advantage, could that mean the admissions standards should be stricter for them and more lax for other groups? The alternative is that certain groups completely dominate academia with ease, while other groups are barely represented at all -- which is probably already the case to a large extent. I don't think there are any easy answers. Trouble arises with an Asian individual with a relatively "average" IQ faces the admissions process, and trouble arises because the black individuals who manage to get in have above-average IQs. Still, I support the idea of affirmative action for the reasons that I previously described. Asians might have a harder time while other groups get a bit of a head start, but if you have a high IQ you will ultimately have the capacity to carve out a high-paying career in ways that someone with a relatively lower IQ never will.
- mrowland 11y ago
  There's evidence[1] that there's no difference in intelligence between races at a very young age, and that tested differences only emerge later. This suggests that the IQ differences seen later are a result of societal factors and not something innate. 1: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_racial_differences_in_the_mental_ability_of_young_children.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_rac...
ausjke 11y ago
Affirmative Action is to care for minorities, aren't Asian Americans minorities in this country? What's the definition of Minority in US? Why are so many blacks in NBA? The best solution is to set up a few Asia-American self-funded private schools across the country, where academics becomes the major admission criteria and your race does not matter, of course this has to be stated carefully otherwise you still could be sued for "discrimination" becomes some group of people will be least represented as expected. Affirmative Action will not make those who can take advantage strong, as strong comes from serious competition only, they will make that group stay weak for good. It's simply unfair to those kids who spent most of their time learning, what a shame to Harvard and the Supreme Court.
reader5000 11y ago
American uni system is so incredibly obsolete. 95% of why a college degree is valuable is for the signal "hey I went to uni of X degree of prestige [and therefore am probably of Y degree of intelligence/ambition]". Why do young Americans need to spend $100k just to signal their iq level to employers? Why do young Americans need to compete with each other to do so? Maybe to get into Harvard you need iq > 130. As the population grows, there are more kids with iq > 130, but # of Harvard seats does not increase. There needs to be a low cost and widely accepted way to signal iq that does not create unnecessary competition and cost for people starting out. Also with AI coming along the corporate obsession with iq will be obviated as well. Nobody gives a shit how well you did on the SAT when goddamn Skynet can diagnose 5000 medical conditions per second with quadruple human accuracy.
madengr 11y ago
Go to any engineering school in the US, especially grad school, and it's almost all Asian. Out of 28 students in my DSP class, 25 were Asian, and that was 20 years ago, although maybe it has changed.
whybroke 11y ago
So if the Ivy league schools are not actually choosing the best students, wouldn't that mean that Ivy League graduates do worse after graduation than alumni form other schools that don't use the Holistic admission process? More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy, and success in life directly relates to intelligence and hard work then the SAT alone should be the prefect predictor of success after graduation regardless of which university you graduate from. Particularly if, as alleged, employers don't care about your school after you've been in the work force for a number of years. If Ivy League's continue to generate the most successful people then their holistic approach is better at choosing the best candidate than the SAT or... Or the ivy league diploma works like a tile of nobility to a great degree nearly guaranteeing success in life to all its holders regardless of wit. In this case the argument really is what proportion of races should get these titles, each person looking to advantage their own.
- yid 11y ago
  > More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy Nobody, including the College Board, has ever made a claim remotely close to this.
  - whybroke 11y ago
    The article only mentions "very subjective Holistic admissions" and only mentions SAT scores, citing them alone as proof of discrimination. By looking at that nothing else, the article is implying SAT scores should be the sole criterion for admission selection. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author, I assume he believes it corresponds to talent and post graduate success and these are the reasons for selecting candidates.
    - asdfologist 11y ago
      The article isn't implying anything. It's reporting on a complaint, and the author isn't taking sides.
      - 11y ago
thrcp971 11y ago
This focus on affirmative action is sort of like people who say they are against "government handouts", and focus on welfare, while ignoring corporate subsidies. It's misplaced attention on what "minorities" are (or should be) getting, while overlooking the benefits that the wealthy receive. Also, many people's understanding of the minority groups at Ivy League institutions seems flawed.* The reason affirmative action exists is only partially as a benefit to minorities. Sure, they benefit (as do some whites and Asians), but affirmative action also acts as cover for legacy benefits in the admissions process. You see, the day affirmative action falls, lawsuits will be filed to remove legacy preferences. If you're going to get rid of preferences, the argument will say, then get rid of them all! Do you think that wealthy donors will have the incentive to lay heavy money on the endowment if they don't receive some benefit for their children in the form of legacy admissions? Or, as Sandra Day O'Connor said in the oral arguments in one of the affirmative action cases related to a state school: "I want my sons to go to Stanford" (paraphrased), her alma mater. Did I mention that the Supreme Court justices attended Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Northwestern? If you think this is primarily about minorities, think again. Wealthy people will protect themselves, but in this case, people are so focused on race that nothing need be done--legacy clauses continue to fly under the radar. You can expect to see Affirmative Action end when the wealthy are prepared to give up the benefits their children receive. How long do you think that will take? *In terms of African-Americans/Latinos, consider the following: 1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American students. 2 - The first black student graduated from Harvard in 1869. Over the past ~150 years, there have been enough black graduates such that a fair number of black applicants now have the legacy boost to their admissions. 3 - Affirmative Action was meant to rectify the disadvantages minorities received. Such as denying black soldiers access to the GI bill, while white soldiers used it to receive an education. Was that fair? And how much does education impact the future of a family? Multiply that by a few generations and you see why Affirmative Action still exists.
- throwawayaway 11y ago
  > 1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American students. i've heard of african immigrants doing better, economically. but never students, any sort of supporting link to this point?
peterchon 11y ago
What would be interesting to see if we replace all applicant's informations were anonymous and everyone got reviewed strictly based on merits.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  Sure, but children from poor (or inexperienced) communities have fewer opportunities to do what Harvard considers to be merit.
avalonalex 11y ago
The article is not true, Chinese president Xi Jingping's daughter goes to Harvard and many her high school class mates in China think she is just an average student.

108 points by thewhizkid 11y ago

"It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale." It's odd that affirmative action is basically basing everything on color of your skin and not the content of your character. I was under the impression that it was supposed to prevent this.

adventured 11y ago
The entire point of affirmative action was to provide unearned opportunities based on the color of your skin. With the theory being that over time it would help boost the well being of minorities (at the time mostly African Americans). That by forcing open opportunities, the next generation would do better, and the generation after that would do even better, and so on.
- calibraxis 11y ago
  "Affirmative action programs" differ. But in general, they're to control the racism of gatekeepers, these bureaucrats who choose who gets a decent education. There are better solutions. For instance: free lifelong quality education to all. But naturally, elites would rather waste society's wealth on wars (international killing) and prisons (the most jailings in the world)... than silly things like knowledge and healthcare. Affirmative action is a modest, successful effort to chip away at the self-destructive inequalities of society. Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves. Asians have white privilege now? We can certainly see what your Officially Not Racist biases are.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > Naturally, many try to attack it to claw back more unearned white privilege for themselves. Since when do Asians have white privilege?
- themartorana 11y ago
  At the expense of other individuals. I personally don't believe affirmative action continues to serve its original purpose, although I've always been against it and gender discrimination as well. I only have one life. Being told it's ok that I was denied an opportunity because I'm white and I'll be ok is easier to abstract into a broad formula, but harder to take when, on merit alone, I'd be given that opportunity and my life as a human being would be better for it. Affirmative action was arguably a way to accelerate towards true unbiased judgement, but any purpose it served has run its course and now it's rather harmful, IMHO.

pervycreeper 11y ago

I wonder what the basis of their complaint will be considering that race-based preferences in admissions has already been upheld in the US supreme court.

iaw 11y ago

Yeesh. The basis of their complaint seems to be rooted in test score (and possibly grade analysis) but they neglect the increased homogeneity that it represents. Asians may have a tighter distribution of metric based qualities with a mean at the higher end of the spectrum when you cut by race but it's quite possible that there are other deficits that cannot easily be highlighted through a metric based comparison alone. It's hard to form a full opinion without the type of information you'd only have access to as a member of the admissions comittee.

chroma 11y ago
Would you defend Harvard if they had a de-facto quota for Jewish applicants? This is a trick question. Harvard (and other Ivy League schools) did discriminate against Jews[1], and their justifications were quite similar to what we're hearing today. These universities switched from grades and test scores to a more "holistic" evaluation, allowing them to surreptitiously limit the number of Jewish students. The game is the same, only the names have changed. Use all the rationalizations and euphemisms you want, but the truth is this: Ivy League schools are rejecting many of their most-qualified applicants solely because of their race[2]. These policies need to end. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus... 2. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/asians-large.jpg http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
- iaw 11y ago
  I responded to another comment below[1]. I understand that it is easy to view these policies as racism but if you think about the people that spots are being freed for there is a larger net social gain. I knew this would be unpopular when I posted it, and I am personally biased, but I don't think one can make the argument that Asian's lack socioeconomic mobility in the same way as some of the other races. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557216
yummyfajitas 11y ago
Suppose black students were accepted at far lower rates than their SAT scores suggested they would be. Would you accept the argument that blacks are secretly deficient in some hard to measure way? I'd sure be suspicious of that. In any case, it would be great if Harvard could provide some stats showing exactly how Asians are deficient. Will be interesting.

solve 11y ago

Have to wonder if it forms a feedback loop: - Asians are getting higher scores than others, so they're required to get higher scores to be admitted. - Parents of the next generation know that their children need even higher scores, so they force their children to work continuously harder.

letitgo12345 11y ago
I think the problem is that in addition to affirmative action, asians are being compared against other asians rather than against the candidate pool at large (thus effectively having quotas).

anon-obviously 11y ago

The complaint argues that elite schools “that use race-neutral admissions” have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard. Interestingly, Ron Unz did a lengthy expose on this issue in 2012, and arrived at similar conclusions: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-... He found ample evidence of anti-Asian quotas at Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, and perhaps more controversial, evidence of what appears to be a form of affirmative action in favor of Jews: In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.51 The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern. Jews comprise a mere 2% of the population yet a massive 25% of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The contrast with Caltech and UC schools with more merit-based admissions processes is quite stark: But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university. Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses (Unz himself is Jewish, in case you're wondering.)

trynumber9 11y ago
It's partly location. Asian-Americans are more heavily concentrated on the West Coast (hence Caltech and UC's high Asian admissions). Jews are more heavily concentrated on the East Coast (hence Harvard, Yale and Columbia's high Jewish admissions).

trhway 11y ago

reminded - our professors at the University love their Asian students (Russian Universities got a lot foreign Asian(China) students in the recent decade) because, as one professor put it, "they are hard-working and eager to learn, not lazy arrogant bums like you people were back then".

lordnacho 11y ago

Isn't Harvard allowed to do this as a private institution? What's the education department going to do about it?

letitgo12345 11y ago
Harvard is subsidized by the govt (in the form of low interest loans to students) and via grant money for research.
- beaner 11y ago
  re, the first part: So you're saying that if I run some private business, and the gov't gives a loan to somebody else to buy the product I'm selling, that makes me a publicly funded business and forces me to abide by rules for businesses that are publicly funded? I don't think that makes sense.
  - argonaut 11y ago
    Government financing / backing / regulation of student loans is much more complex and closely bound to colleges than you are making them out to be.
  - interesting_att 11y ago
    If we posted stipulations on all the grant money we give universities, every elite university would quickly follow through with it. It's too much money to throw away, even for Harvard.
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contravert 11y ago
Harvard's endownment earned over 12% annually averaged over 40 years (http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance-history.html http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance...). I bet the government would love to tax some of that money.

aphexairlines 11y ago

The population continues to grow while people continue to value a handful of schools with fixed campus sizes. What a nightmare it must be to be a parent or a high schooler these days.

ChicagoBoy11 11y ago

Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-American === Harvard Accused of Favoritism towards African-Americans/Latinos/etc. The former just has a sexy title. The latter we've known all along because these schools openly state that they embrace affirmative action. The matter of fact is that the school is incredibly strategic in how it makes its admissions decision, taking into account not only race, but geography, and a whole host of other factors. The complaint is utterly silly, because it fails to realize that nowhere is the claim made that the admissions process seeks to select the best students according to the SAT -- it seeks to select the students who best add something novel to that year's entering class. A VERY STRONG argument could be made that race ought to be something which can't enter into that calculus. And I agree with that. But, from the moment a school adopts Affirmative Action (and the US supreme court upholds it), then this is just the sort of thing we can expect to see.

interesting_att 11y ago
A private school can use whatever criteria it wants if it believes it enhances the experience. But why should Asian American tax dollars go to a university that clearly discriminates against them? Harvard shouldn't be able to get public funds and engage in systemic racism.
- afshin 11y ago
  Well, consider your answer to this question: Why should childless adults pay taxes that go toward a school system that educates children, despite the fact that they don't have children? Whatever your answer to that is, it is probably closely related to the answer to the question you posed. My own interpretation is that the whole point of paying taxes and building services is to cover the larger society's needs, not simply my own needs.
  - interesting_att 11y ago
    I see some strength in your analogy, but two main differences: 1) Tax money spent on sending kids to college helps everyone, even the non-parents, since more educated people = better world. Affirmative action doesn't help Asians in any conceivable way. Does it even help society at large? No one arguing for it shows reliable data that it creates significant community benefit. 2) You can always have a child in the future if you choose to. You can't become non-Asian if you were born Asian.

crimsonalucard 11y ago

There's bias against Asians everywhere. The difference is remarkably pronounced between asian men and asian women. Hollywood, for example: Asian women? Minority. Asian men? nonexistent.

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MollyR 11y ago
My younger brother feels this a ton. I wish I could do something for him. Lately he's found some peace in some korean tv shows and movies.

freyr 11y ago

I knew it! I had near-perfect SAT scores and a very high GPA, but I was rejected by many schools that accepted my friends with lower scores. Now it makes perfect sense. Except I'm white and my high school classmates were Asian and Indian. I'll never understand the admissions process.

Garbage 11y ago
Aren't Indians Asians?
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > Aren't Indians Asians? Depends on what variety of English you speak whether the term Asian normally includes Indians or not. For Brits, Asian primarily means "From the Indian Subcontinent" which includes Pakistan for them, IIRC. For Americans, Asian primarily means "From East Asia" which is China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Of course, in an academic context, Asian means "Anyone from the Asian Continent" which includes some but not all Russians, all South Asians, all East Asians, all Central Asians, all Middle Easterners (except Egyptians), and whoever else depending on how certain lines get drawn.
  - lnkmails 11y ago
    This confuses the hell out of me as an Indian living in America. Mostly it's me wondering if I am included in the stereotype or not. Otherwise I don't really care.

seiji 11y ago

This is the same problem as the housing crisis. What happens when you have limited resources (housing, dorms, teachers) and a group of people who are superior in some way end up wanting to use all your resources (buy all housing, be smartest and get admitted everywhere)? With money, we end up with capitalism doofus blindness and say "you got money, you EARNED that money, clearly, so do whatever you want" even though in modern "foreigners buying real property" practices, it's corrupt/graft money breaking SF/London/NYC/LA/Seattle/Vancouver housing markets in a worldwide government sanctioned oligarch money laundering scheme. With intelligence/capability, it's trickier. The popular belief is every human brain starts as a blank slate with unlimited capability. By that logic, if you don't get accepted somewhere, it's your own damn fault. But, that's so obviously wrong. I know plenty of people who are physically smarter than me. In certain problem-solving capacities, they think faster, better, and in more immediately creative ways than I do (what I lack in immediate ability I make up for in long-term effort). And so do their siblings and their parents and their grandparents going back many many years. But, just because I'm lesser, should I be thrown to the gutter while _only_ high quality education goes to the "truly smart" people? Then that's where race rears its ugly head. If you only select people with a certain strand of hereditary smarts, you end up with a campus with a majority of people from background X where X feel "at home" there and welcome, but then your minorities C, D, E, F, G, H feel, well, minority. A popular solution to the "too many high achieving people from the same background" bugaboo is to try and make the minorities less minority by boosting their numbers though allowing sub-perfect acceptance (not sub-par, just sub-not-the-absolute-best-ever). But, you have a fixed resource to allocate (class sizes, dorm rooms), so that kicks out some of the (glut) of perfect achievers you would have otherwise accepted. Then it comes down to politics. Conservative = "me me me, i'm perfect me me me, kill the lessers." Liberal = "we're all in the together, so maybe you should step aside from this opportunity to let others advance too." You end up with a spectrum from top-down solutions ("no more than 20% of people from X background") to a bottom-up solutions ("only compare people of Y background from other Y background, then start acceptance from non-majority application piles first"). Neither is "fair" to the other, but if you don't pick a society-optimal fairness system (which is inherently unfair to those rejected), you get a completely unfair system of privilege boosting privilege (inherent privilege obtained by upbringing or genetic lottery). (Completely ignoring the other soft acceptance categories of "will this student eventually give us (or will their children eventually give us) lots of money in donations or bring us fame as a legacy.") There's no actual solution to preventing the over-allocation of fixed resources in the presence of superior consumers; all we're left with is compromises on the spectrum of "superiors only" versus "helping everybody in society." Thought experiment: if space aliens (superior consumers) landed and offered to sell us antigravity fabric and replicators for $9 trillion USD ('fixed' resources), would we just give them all the money? (Extension: what if they wanted $1 trillion USD worth of bitcoin and you can't even generate that much? Fiat wins again!)

streptomycin 11y ago

Personally I'm not too concerned about this at the undergrad level. So you don't get into Harvard and you have to go to a state school or whatever, that's not really an impediment to your life and career unless you want to become a congressman or a supreme court justice or whatever. Where it does bother me is med school. I've seen several of my Asian friends who were just ridiculously obviously great applicants either fail to get into med school or struggle to get into med school over several years. I'm not talking about someone who you see and think "yeah he could be a doctor", I'm talking about someone who you see and think "wow this person has it all - smart, charismatic, hard working, intellectual curiosity, top notch GPA, tons of extracurriculars - this is a no brainer, he'd be a great doctor". All my friends of other races who seemed similarly qualified to me had no trouble getting in on their first try. And getting into med school or not is a big fucking deal. In some cases, we're turning away people who would be incredible doctors and making them pursue other careers, which is a huge waste. Those are just anecdotes of course, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed the same thing.

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geographomics 11y ago
Maybe it's just that the accepted applicants were of the same quality or better, in terms of their predicted suitability to practice medicine. The fact is that not everyone can get into such highly competitive programmes, and unfortunately some have to lose out.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  That wouldn't explain my observations, where excellent non-Asian applicants were shoe-ins on their first try and Asian applicants of the same quality had to try multiple times, some of them never making it in at all. If it was just a numbers issue and not everyone could make it in, you wouldn't expect such a clear racial difference. Of course my anecdotes could just be flukes or I could be misinterpreting the quality of various candidates. But given what we know about undergrad admissions, it's not a stretch to imagine the same thing in med school. It's just that med school acceptance is much more impactful than undergrad.

Bahamut 11y ago

This doesn't surprise me, as an Asian American myself. I went to a high school that, while it wasn't the greatest in my county, routinely sent a student to Harvard every year - it was one of those schools that Harvard & other Ivy League schools tended to cherry-pick its minorities from (over 70% black/hispanic I was told the statistics were, in one of the wealthiest counties in the US). I had extremely strong credentials overall - generally strong standardized testing scores (1250 on the SAT in 7th grade with a 740 Math/510 Verbal split, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 780 SAT II Biology, 780 SAT II Physics, 750 SAT II Chemistry, 750 SAT II Writing, 1450 on the regular SAT with a 750 Math/700 Verbal split), college math & physics credits while in high school (Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, etc.), lots of extracurriculars & achievements, and a recommendation from an Ivy League physics professor. However, I slipped up on my essay since I wasn't a good writer then (which clicked for me the summer before college strangely enough) - that slip up was all it took to get deferred rejection from schools like Harvard in a year where a lot of the private colleges were weakened by the Enron scandal & consequently took 3/4th of the normal enrollment. On the flip side, in just the class before mine, there was a girl who had nowhere near my scores or achievements (in fact, I heard her SAT score was a 1320) who was accepted to Harvard - the kicker was that she was half latino. At the time this happened, I was extremely angry/bitter - I ended up attending a public university, which ended up being a blessing in many ways. I ended up learning a lot in non-academic aspects, but a lot of that was from force of character as someone who pushes himself to break barriers and challenge himself to succeed on difficult situations. I still believe those schools made a bad mistake, but I've accepted that admission is not necessarily a merit based decision for these schools, and to concern myself with what I can control.

MollyR 11y ago
I have a story very similar to this as well. I'm glad you got over the anger/bitterness, but I and many of my friends have not. It's tough when your friends and family still consider you to have failed. I'll never forget the shame and disappointment after sacrificing so much of my life. It makes life hurt when you have to work an order of magnitude harder to achieve the same result.

octottoman 11y ago

I'm not even going to post this with my real account. I wonder if we'll even be able to have a discussion about this without me getting downvoted into oblivion. Asians have the highest GPAs and SAT scores, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks. As such, blacks are given the benefit of the doubt, where as Asians are judged more harshly. Statistically, these groups have differing average IQs in the same order that I just described, with Asians at the top (actually Ashkenazi Jews at the top, followed by Asians) and blacks, sadly, at the bottom. This isn't to say a black individual can't have a high IQ or an Asian individual can't have a low IQ, just that on average they cluster around certain numbers, so a black with genius-level IQ is rarer than an Asian one. Whether or not you believe IQ measures intelligence accurately or comprehensively, the fact is that it correlates strongly with academic performance and SAT scores. I also will concede that "race" has questionable biological validity, and it gets really fuzzy when one is the offspring of one or more "mixed-race" parents". Still, race/IQ statistics in all of their generalities are a source of existential depression for me. Most of the data is touted boldly by people I despise and used to bolster viewpoints that I find deplorable, but there seems to be at least some truth to it. The idea of discriminating based on one's race seems unfair if we lived in a world where literally everyone has the same capacity to succeed but merely chooses not to. But what if that's not the case? If Asians generally can attain high test scores and high GPAs due to an innate advantage, could that mean the admissions standards should be stricter for them and more lax for other groups? The alternative is that certain groups completely dominate academia with ease, while other groups are barely represented at all -- which is probably already the case to a large extent. I don't think there are any easy answers. Trouble arises with an Asian individual with a relatively "average" IQ faces the admissions process, and trouble arises because the black individuals who manage to get in have above-average IQs. Still, I support the idea of affirmative action for the reasons that I previously described. Asians might have a harder time while other groups get a bit of a head start, but if you have a high IQ you will ultimately have the capacity to carve out a high-paying career in ways that someone with a relatively lower IQ never will.

mrowland 11y ago
There's evidence[1] that there's no difference in intelligence between races at a very young age, and that tested differences only emerge later. This suggests that the IQ differences seen later are a result of societal factors and not something innate. 1: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_racial_differences_in_the_mental_ability_of_young_children.pdf http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/testing_for_rac...

ausjke 11y ago

Affirmative Action is to care for minorities, aren't Asian Americans minorities in this country? What's the definition of Minority in US? Why are so many blacks in NBA? The best solution is to set up a few Asia-American self-funded private schools across the country, where academics becomes the major admission criteria and your race does not matter, of course this has to be stated carefully otherwise you still could be sued for "discrimination" becomes some group of people will be least represented as expected. Affirmative Action will not make those who can take advantage strong, as strong comes from serious competition only, they will make that group stay weak for good. It's simply unfair to those kids who spent most of their time learning, what a shame to Harvard and the Supreme Court.

reader5000 11y ago

American uni system is so incredibly obsolete. 95% of why a college degree is valuable is for the signal "hey I went to uni of X degree of prestige [and therefore am probably of Y degree of intelligence/ambition]". Why do young Americans need to spend $100k just to signal their iq level to employers? Why do young Americans need to compete with each other to do so? Maybe to get into Harvard you need iq > 130. As the population grows, there are more kids with iq > 130, but # of Harvard seats does not increase. There needs to be a low cost and widely accepted way to signal iq that does not create unnecessary competition and cost for people starting out. Also with AI coming along the corporate obsession with iq will be obviated as well. Nobody gives a shit how well you did on the SAT when goddamn Skynet can diagnose 5000 medical conditions per second with quadruple human accuracy.

madengr 11y ago

Go to any engineering school in the US, especially grad school, and it's almost all Asian. Out of 28 students in my DSP class, 25 were Asian, and that was 20 years ago, although maybe it has changed.

whybroke 11y ago

So if the Ivy league schools are not actually choosing the best students, wouldn't that mean that Ivy League graduates do worse after graduation than alumni form other schools that don't use the Holistic admission process? More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy, and success in life directly relates to intelligence and hard work then the SAT alone should be the prefect predictor of success after graduation regardless of which university you graduate from. Particularly if, as alleged, employers don't care about your school after you've been in the work force for a number of years. If Ivy League's continue to generate the most successful people then their holistic approach is better at choosing the best candidate than the SAT or... Or the ivy league diploma works like a tile of nobility to a great degree nearly guaranteeing success in life to all its holders regardless of wit. In this case the argument really is what proportion of races should get these titles, each person looking to advantage their own.

yid 11y ago
> More simply, if the SAT is the perfect determinate for intelligence and energy Nobody, including the College Board, has ever made a claim remotely close to this.
- whybroke 11y ago
  The article only mentions "very subjective Holistic admissions" and only mentions SAT scores, citing them alone as proof of discrimination. By looking at that nothing else, the article is implying SAT scores should be the sole criterion for admission selection. Giving the benefit of the doubt to the author, I assume he believes it corresponds to talent and post graduate success and these are the reasons for selecting candidates.
  - asdfologist 11y ago
    The article isn't implying anything. It's reporting on a complaint, and the author isn't taking sides.
    - 11y ago

thrcp971 11y ago

This focus on affirmative action is sort of like people who say they are against "government handouts", and focus on welfare, while ignoring corporate subsidies. It's misplaced attention on what "minorities" are (or should be) getting, while overlooking the benefits that the wealthy receive. Also, many people's understanding of the minority groups at Ivy League institutions seems flawed.* The reason affirmative action exists is only partially as a benefit to minorities. Sure, they benefit (as do some whites and Asians), but affirmative action also acts as cover for legacy benefits in the admissions process. You see, the day affirmative action falls, lawsuits will be filed to remove legacy preferences. If you're going to get rid of preferences, the argument will say, then get rid of them all! Do you think that wealthy donors will have the incentive to lay heavy money on the endowment if they don't receive some benefit for their children in the form of legacy admissions? Or, as Sandra Day O'Connor said in the oral arguments in one of the affirmative action cases related to a state school: "I want my sons to go to Stanford" (paraphrased), her alma mater. Did I mention that the Supreme Court justices attended Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Northwestern? If you think this is primarily about minorities, think again. Wealthy people will protect themselves, but in this case, people are so focused on race that nothing need be done--legacy clauses continue to fly under the radar. You can expect to see Affirmative Action end when the wealthy are prepared to give up the benefits their children receive. How long do you think that will take? *In terms of African-Americans/Latinos, consider the following: 1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American students. 2 - The first black student graduated from Harvard in 1869. Over the past ~150 years, there have been enough black graduates such that a fair number of black applicants now have the legacy boost to their admissions. 3 - Affirmative Action was meant to rectify the disadvantages minorities received. Such as denying black soldiers access to the GI bill, while white soldiers used it to receive an education. Was that fair? And how much does education impact the future of a family? Multiply that by a few generations and you see why Affirmative Action still exists.

throwawayaway 11y ago
> 1 - Many of black students admitted to Harvard aren't black Americans, they are Africans, with test scores and grades on par with Asian-American students. i've heard of african immigrants doing better, economically. but never students, any sort of supporting link to this point?

peterchon 11y ago

What would be interesting to see if we replace all applicant's informations were anonymous and everyone got reviewed strictly based on merits.

learnstats2 11y ago
Sure, but children from poor (or inexperienced) communities have fewer opportunities to do what Harvard considers to be merit.

avalonalex 11y ago

The article is not true, Chinese president Xi Jingping's daughter goes to Harvard and many her high school class mates in China think she is just an average student.