74% of Blacks at Harvard felt marginalized due to their ethnicity

Student Lounge African-American Students
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I was shocked to find out that 74% of black seniors in Harvard College’s Class of 2015 felt marginalized for simply being black. Harvard always promotes itself as being a leader in diversity and inclusion but apparently blacks by and large don’t quite feel the same.

54% of East Asian and 40% of Latino students felt marginalized due to their race. I strongly believe Latinos have the lowest percentage b/c many of them are white-passing and not easily identifiable as Latino.

Harvard’s Class of 2021 is the first class to be majority minority but I believe it will have little impact on blacks feeling alienated. This shouldn’t deter you from being interested in Harvard but it’s important to be aware of what’s going on there so you can make up in your mind if this is the right place for you … so many other great options out there for African-Americans out there.

The article is below
http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/senior-survey/

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Ha! Glad I didn’t go.

(And this is funny because I didn’t have a choice since I didn’t get in LOL.)

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I think people presume that you are only there because of your race which is unfortunate. I imagine this is true of a lot of the “elite” universities.

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This is an old post, based on old data. But I imagine nothing will have changed. One of the unfortunate consequences of affirmative action is that academically less qualified students are going to feel marginalized. There is simply no way to disguise their lesser ability.

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@SatchelSF Are you assuming is that these students who feel marginalized at Harvard are not as capable as their counterparts? What about the 54% of East Asian students who feel marginalized, are they not as capable despite having statistically higher scores than any other race on average? Marginalization doesn’t refer to feeling left out of the loop academically or being unprepared.

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Yes, in the case of African American students I am assuming the most important reason is the perception, based on reality, that they are on average less qualified. We see this phenomenon in all elite schools and especially in elite professional schools, about which there has been a great deal of research showing the scope of the disparity. For a broad overview of the problem, I like this article very much: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-scandal-of-diversity/

Of course, no one aspect of a student group is going to explain the entire phenomenon of feeling marginalized. It would be interesting to research the roots of why typically more highly qualified East Asian students also feel “marginalized.” I haven’t seen much discussion of this in the research, and based on my own experiences at HYP, admittedly quite some time ago, I do not think it is quite the problem that the Crimson number of 54% would imply. Perhaps there are some survey response selection issues at work here? The Crimson is notorious for playing fast and lose with statistics (for instance, remember all the hoopla about the stats that showed implausibly small gaps in entering Harvard SAT scores by race).

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@SatchelSF I’m sure students admitted with lower scores and less rigorous academic profiles (of any race) feel like they have some catching up to do, and this can have a toll on one’s confidence and sense of belonging, that makes sense. But the statistic reports that these students who feel marginalized feel that way because of their race not because of their preparedness. That is referring to issues of racial bias. I suspect that many East Asian kids might feel marginalized because they are held to a higher standard and because of this their academic achievements are undermined. That is just my theory though, I can’t comment on the credibility of the statistics though.

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My URM daughter said that her classmates at her elite school assumed she was admitted because of her race, till they got to know her and were in classes with her. The same happened in med school, but to a lesser extent. She then graduated first in her class.

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That’s fantastic, @CottonTales ! Congrats to you and your daughter. Your experience highlights one of the tragedies of preference admissions. Namely, that qualified URM get painted with the same brush as all the others. Fortunately, your daughter had the goods to dispell the doubts. My child is URM as well.

Nevertheless, the statistics are what they are. Medical schools have had a particularly problematic history in letting in less qualified candidates. Huge scandals at Harvard Medical School, for instance, in the 1970s and 1980s. I’ll try to locate my cites and post, but it will take a few days at least because I am traveling. Again, congrats on your daughter, you should be so proud!

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“I strongly believe Latinos have the lowest percentage b/c many of them are white-passing and not easily identifiable as Latino.”

Ummm…What? Please stop pitting minority groups against each other. And unless you are part of a specific minority group, please don’t speak for it.

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Well, no.

Affirmative action was not designed, and does not, admit “less qualified” students to colleges. Affirmative action as a policy was adopted by many schools because the admission criteria for most elite colleges are already skewed and designed to benefit students in certain groups (mostly white, mostly wealthy, disproportionately legacy) and are only questionable measures of qualifications/preparedness anyway, especially for students from disadvantaged groups.

Standardized testing is the big one that many people pull out; they will point out that on average, African American and Latino students are admitted to elite colleges with lower SAT scores than white and Asian students. But that’s because African American and Hispanic students have lower SAT scores overall, which is due to a lot of factors - including race. There is a body of research wide and deep that shows that simple manipulations like just telling black students that there is no racial difference on this “version” of the SAT (true or not) completely eliminated the test gap.

The other thing is that lower test scores are predictive of higher achievement in African American (and presumably, Latino) students than they are in white students. For example, one study covered in the Washington Post found that a one standard deviation increase in score only corresponded to a 0.37 increase in college GPA in white students, but a 0.5 increase in black students. Functionally, that means that in a predictive model a hypothetical black student with a lower SAT score may have the same college GPA as a white student with a higher one.

Other criteria include extracurricular activities (wealthier students in whiter school districts have more access to a broader range of these), AP, IB, and honors classes (ditto), summer early college experiences/programs (ditto), and legacy status (ditto times a million).

But when black, Latino, and Native American students go to these elite universities, they graduate at the same rates as their white and Asian peers. There’s no indication that they are less able to handle the pressure or the academic environment.

I would imagine that students of color at Harvard feel marginalized because of their race because Harvard is not a fantasyland utopia; it’s a real institution in the real United States, where real racial tensions and stereotypes still persist. If you did a survey at any predominantly white institution of any repute I bet you’d find similar results. Note also that most low-income students and nearly half of LGBTQ students also felt marginalized because of their identities in those areas - again, because Harvard is a microcosm of the greater world in which we live and those things are marginalized in this world.

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Anyone can feel marginalized not only due to race but due to social standing, economic/academic background and many other issues. Please folks do not feed the fire of division in our world by stating that a small number of people feel they don’t belong therefore they do not. There are many talented and intelligent people of all races at Harvard and elsewhere. No one should every believe that someone was admitted due to their race or background.
I really abhor how some people talk about racism in everything. They see race everywhere. And they imply that everyone is a racist. Very few people are and they should be avoided. Let’s start to look at each other with respect and not try to pigeonhole people.

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@juliet I’m all for affirmative action but I don’t think your factually correct about graduations rates, however the reasons those graduation rates are different is not exactly clear.

Personally I believe the discrepancy in graduation rates is more due to the experience a URM has at an elite university then not being able to do the work. I remember reading an article on a young Latino woman who elected to attend Texas Tech over Harvard (both offered full ride albeit Harvard was due to FA), in the article she didn’t feel comfortable at Harvard with the lack of other Latino’s there and TT was simply a much more comfortable place where she could thrive. Her academics were impeccable.

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@juillet - Your characterization of the research is just about completely incorrect. For instance, your understanding of the original stereotype research (the old Steele and Aronson paper) has been debunked many times. The disparity between blacks and whites did not in any way disappear when the task was recharacterized as non-diagnostic, even in the original paper. See, for instance, here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is-stereotype-threat-overcooked-overstated-and-oversold. If you are interested in the subject, I urge you to read the original Steele and Aronson paper that started this whole line of inquiry, and you will see that the actual results have been typically mischaracterized in the popular press: http://users.nber.org/~sewp/events/2005.01.14/Bios+Links/Good-rec2-Steele_&_Aronson_95.pdf

As for your characterization that African Americans (and other lower testing groups) perform better than their tests indicate, actually the opposite is true. There is a large and deep literature on the “overprediction” of test scores for lower-testing groups: they actually perform worse than their testing would indicate. See, e.g., Rumor 2 here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED562751.pdf. Again, if you start your reading on “overprediction” and “test bias,” you can spend months reading the research showing that minorities tend to perform even worse than their testing would indicate. This overprediction bias (which is actually a bias in favor of lower performing groups) has been noted literally for decades, and is one of the most accepted facts in the literature of psychometric measurement and personnel selection because it appears to be universal on tasks ranging from pure intelligence and academic testing, right through to workplace selection. If you are interested, Professor Linda Gottfredson is one of the foremost experts in the field; her work is very readable even to an interested amateur, and I would start my reading there.

Last, there is no question that affirmative action admits do worse in school than non-preference admits. (Note, importantly, that not all minority admits are race preference admits - some portion are fully qualified under normal admissions standards and they tend to do perform as any other student would.) For instance, the Arcidiacono study, often cited on CC, shows that blacks at Duke were at the 25th percentile by GPA throughout their four years, while white students were at the 60th percentile; in addition, blacks switched to easier majors as compared with other groups, especially after receiving poor grades in the sciences. Read the study here: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf. You will also see in that study that aside from lower SATs and entering GPA, black admits were lower, on average, on every metric that the admissions office employed to make admissions decisions, which included essays, letters of recommendation, “personal characteristics,” and course rigor (see Table 1, p. 7).

There is also extensive data available from the world of law schools demonstrating conclusively that affirmative action admits are towards the very bottom of their respective classes (over 50% were in the bottom 10% and over 70% in the bottom 20%). The seminal work here was done by Professor Sander in 2004; see, especially, Tables 5.1 (p. 427) and 5.3 (p. 431). The most recent data available (2017) show that nothing has changed over the intervening years.

These are just a few of the studies. I am not opposed to programs that help to increase the presence of underrepresented minorities on American campuses, but I do think we need to start being honest about the discussion. At some point, the claim that “racism” is holding certain groups down rings hollows, and is particularly vexing to the many people and institutions trying their level best to accommodate groups with inadequate preparation. My personal feeling is that colleges are doing a decent job, but professional schools are not - the disparities in ability at the professional school level (at least at law and medical schools) are so large and apparent that they are stigmatizing. (Professor Sander also does a nice job talking about the implications of this stigma for high level legal practice here: http://apps.americanbar.org/buslaw/newsletter/0060/materials/ch1.pdf.)

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Here is an example of stereotype threat (or racism against one’s own race) right here on these forums:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/18911117/#Comment_18911117

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Sorry, in post 13 above I inadvertently omitted the cite for the data in the next to last paragraph: http://www.adversity.net/Sander/Systemic_Analysis_FINAL.pdf.