Asian-Americans Suing Harvard Say Admissions Files Show Discrimination

@BKSquared Couldn’t agree with you more.

All things being equal (which I know can never be the case), let’s assume the following scenario:

Student A and Student B, both of which have overcome great poverty, working after school to help supplement the family income, stays up late to put in the long hours to keep grades and other stats high. Both are among the top of their graduating class, both have 1550 on the SAT and both have teachers who genuinely love them. Both have taken the time to help out in their community etc…

Is it fair to hold Student A to a higher standard because he lives in Chinatown? I hope not.

The Asian-American population in the USA has grown and Asian applicants to Harvard have doubled since the early 1990’s, yet the % of Asian-Americans admitted since the early 90’s have basically remained constant.

I don’t want to say the word quota, but it doesn’t appear to be a coincidence.

The Native American populations also grew by 27.7 % according to the 2010 US census, does that mean we deserve more spaces too? And the the NA applicants have increased by 52% in the last few years according to Forbes Feb 2017 article, and Asians got a 3.4% increase in admissions this year to over 24 % of the class. Native Americans admissions increased from 1.1% to 1.8%! What are they complaining about! @WildestDream I put your argument side by side to NAs and Asians already have more! Not convinced they are 'hard done by" in the admissions stakes.

@IamNotaRobot, did you really just make analogy between human beings applying to selective colleges and animals in a zoo? Really? And that analogy is supposed to make race-based quotas (yes, I know, they’re not called that anymore) somehow more acceptable and less racist to me? Really?

This is a bit like saying women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Perhaps true at one time, but was always rather misleading.

To understand if there is a real penalty against Asians, you have to control for several things, including legacy, income, ECs, and intended major. The last is probably most significant, as Asians are concentrated in certain majors, and to a lesser extent, certain ECs.

In other words, for highly desired majors like biology, math or computer science, there could be brutal competition for admission, regardless of race. And many Asians are self-selecting themselves into these competitive majors. But the college still needs to fill slots for its history and Classics majors, and admissions for those spots might be less competitive in terms of SAT scores.

I suspect that after controlling for these factors, this higher required SAT score largely goes away.

^^It’s stereotyping to say Asians are self selecting for competitive majors. Just like it would be to say we all play the violin and love Math. Let’s get away from stereotypes of all kinds. Asians are interested in all majors across the board like everyone else. Or should we pigeon hole other minority groups too into only “some” majors because of their ethnicity?

I agree with many of the comments by various posters above. Personal qualities and characters, ECs, LoRs, Essays, etc. all matter. However, these attributes are not inconsistent with academic excellence. And in fact, they are positively correlated with it. How do we know those academically excellent applicants who were denied admission don’t have these attributes without the colleges being more transparent?

You are using the term “stereotyping” incorrectly. It is not stereotyping to say that Asians are over-represented in certain majors, anymore than it is to say that the majority of people living in New York or Houston tend to vote Democrat. Both are simply facts.

Stereotyping would be if I saw someone from New York and said “Oh, you must be a Democrat”, or saw an Asian on a college campus and said “You must be in STEM”

Yes, that’s right. So you are assuming that Asians are only applying to certain majors when in fact they are applying to the college. There’s no reason to be exluded or quota’d based on major.

That 140-point statistic comes from a study published in 2009, and here’s a quote from the author in 2015: “I stop short of saying that Asian-American students are being discriminated against in the college application process because we don’t have sufficient empirical evidence to support that claim.”

http://reappropriate.co/2015/05/espenshade-data-are-not-proof-of-anti-asian-discrimination-edu4all/

The real issue is that there are finite numbers of seats, lots of buckets to fill and constituencies to satisfy, and Asians are underrepresented in the candidate pools to fill many of the buckets. Leaving aside the question of whether Asians are more concentrated in certain majors (which I believe to be true, by the way), it’s pretty clear that there are relatively few Asians in the running to be recruited athletes, connected legacies, faculty brats, children of celebrities, from remote states, etc., and there are obviously no Asian URMs (at least as that term is generally understood). All of these are buckets that the schools set aside seats to fill. After the schools fill the buckets, what’s left is divided among everyone else and the Asians end up de facto capped.

I’m skeptical that anything will be found in Harvard’s files saying, in effect, “we have to keep a lid on the number of Asians”, because I don’t think it works that way and because Harvard is smart enough to instruct its admissions staff not to put anything like that in writing. What the plaintiffs are hoping for is that Harvard will be too embarrassed to allow details of all the preferences it gives to various other groups to see the light of day, so will settle and admit a few more Asians just to make the problem go away.

“What the plaintiffs are hoping for is that Harvard will be too embarrassed to allow details of all the preferences it gives to various other groups to see the light of day, so will settle and admit a few more Asians just to make the problem go away.”

A group that is already overrepresented as part of the US population, BTW.

the author is from Princeton… what else is he going to say? he’s going to tow the party line.

the results speak for themselves. I see a lot of contorted rationalizations to try to explain why Asians need to score 140 points higher than whites…

yet if the same Asian student were another race with the same stats (white etc) they have a greater chance to get in.

it’s obvious there are unofficial quotas for the races at selective colleges. let’s be real.

oh and I agree none of this will be found in any internal official documents for obvious reasons.

To add to @DeepBlue86 's analysis – One of the buckets is for international applicants, and from what I have seen Asians are well-represented there. Both Asians from Asia and Anglo-Asians, Asian-Canadians, Asian-Australians, etc. There are also many ethnic Asian students who prefer not to identify themselves as such on their applications, and who thus are not counted in the statistics, even if it’s perfectly clear that they are ethnically Asian. Whatever the reported figures for Asians at Harvard are, the actual number is several percentage points higher.

Someone said above that the percentage of Asian students hasn’t changed in 40 years. That’s completely wrong! Forty years ago, I doubt ethnic Asian students represented as much as 10% of the class at Harvard. They were well under that number in my class at Yale 40 years ago – maybe 6 or 7%, if that. The past 40 years has seen both massive Asian immigration to the U.S. and massive gains in private wealth in Asian countries, which – together with the high value placed on quality higher education by many Asian cultures and families – has led to a huge increase in demand for slots at Harvard from ethnic Asian applicants.

The data I have seen from the 1990s and early 2000s do make it look as if there were something of a 15% cap being applied to the representation of ethnic Asians. But since then – and since publication of the studies highlighting that data – I believe the representation of ethnic Asian students in admitted classes has increased meaningfully.

I don’t believe for a second that any admissions staff at Harvard ever said “Let’s not admit more than 15% Asians.” It’s not just a matter of the university instructing them to be more circumspect about saying such things. It’s a matter of that being morally repugnant to just about everybody. Even if someone said it and meant it, I don’t believe anyone else who was in the room would let the speaker get away without challenge saying that. And someone of the scores of people who have passed through the Harvard Admissions Office over the years would have been disgusted enough to reveal the discrimination in detail.

I do believe that something was happening to hold down Asian admissions. It was probably a mix of (a) over-concentration of candidates in certain interest/activity groupings (math, economics, biology; tennis, piano, cross-country), (b) lack of real sophistication about what colleges like Harvard valued, e.g., individuality more than grades or test scores, and © failure on the part of admissions staff to understand what individuality looked like in applications from some Asian applicants. All of those factors have changed over time, and they were never absolute in any event. It was a funny kind of discrimination against ethnic Asians that admitted lots and lots of them year after year.

The lawsuit is about potential discrimination against one ethnic group. I don’t know whether there is or there isn’t. But there’s a larger point in seeking transparency. Obfuscation and opacity are not what these colleges are about. They should welcome openness, including openness in their admission.

Espenshade was at Princeton when he wrote the original book, which was published by Princeton University Press and is an extensive critique of admissions practices at universities such as Princeton, so it’s pretty clear he isn’t anyone’s puppet here. He’s just an academic concerned that non-academics are misinterpreting what he wrote.

If you have facts that disprove anything I said above, @sbballer, I’d be glad to hear them. In the meantime, I’ll give you a real-life example with which you may be familiar: there are over 80 players on the Stanford football team and, based on the photos and bios, I’d guess five percent or so are Asian. Why is that? Are Stanford and its coaching staff discriminating against Asians? Or could it be there aren’t that many Asians who are plausible recruits for the over 80 spots Stanford reserves for the football team?

Open-ness is the first step. Then once the process is transparent, students will want fairness and equal standards. It’s nothing less than MLK JR dreamed for.

Note that I said over-represented, not only apply to. To verify, let’s look at some undergraduate data from Columbia University, which has a School of Engineering that is separate from The College (we’ll ignore Barnard and General Studies here):

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/opir/abstract/opir_enrollment_ethnicity_1.htm

We can see from this table that undergraduate Engineering has 423 Asian students out of 1656, or 25.5%. In contrast, the College has 809 Asians out of 4667, or 17.4%. I would call that over-represented in engineering within the context of Columbia University. Wouldn’t you?

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/asian-americans-rejected-harvard-need-resist-anti-affirmative-action-narrative-ncna863496

Do applicants to Columbia declare an intended major? 25% Asian for an engineering school seems too low.

@bicoastalusa Applicants to Columbia don’t have to declare majors but they do have to choose whether to apply to the college or the school of engineering. This choice limits the selection of majors down the road. However, by far the most popular major in STEM in recent years has been Computer Science, which is offered by both the college and the engineering school. I imagine there are a lot of STEM students in the college, which also includes the traditional math and science students.