[News:</a> Testing for ‘Mismatch’ - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/20/mismatch]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/20/mismatch)
Essay evaluations from Duke adcoms on a 1-5 scale (5 being best):
Whites: 3.52
Blacks: 3.26
Asians: 3.58
Hispanics: 3.31
I’m sick of people trying to rationalize that Asians must be getting rejected because their qualitative components are comparatively weak. It’s a blatant lie and yet I cannot count how many times people try to argue this point despite evidence pointing in the contrary direction.</p>
<p>If this issue has been discussed before, I apologize; my question is about the distribution of the ORMs, the URMs, and the majority within the “elite” colleges - would it be an incorrect observation that the URMs and ORMs tend to gravitate towards specific differing courses of study, and so their percentages are actually higher in those areas? </p>
<p>What I’m trying to get at is whether the typcial unsuccessful 2300 Asian wasn’t really displaced by the 1900 URM because the Asian wouldn’t have been interested in the major that got the URM admitted.</p>
<p>If this is true, I know this will make the college stats more unwieldy, but wouldn’t we get a clearer picture by having the tangible measures - SATs, GPA, class rank, selectivity - listed by: college of arts - A, B, C, business school: P, Q, R, engineering: X,Y,Z, etc.,</p>
<p>If the quote I just posted is correct, Asians aren’t being rejected in favor of less qualified white applicants in the first place. Again, if that’s true, this is really just another discussion of the pros and cons of affirmative action for URMs.</p>
But trends, as a whole, can and must be quantified. There must be some sort of a quantification for something resembling a vague standard. If you’re arguing the validity of the quantification in the study then you’re suggesting that nothing can truly ever be quantified, and any argument against affirmative action can never move anywhere because of the “holistic” premise that affirmative action supporters can infinitely shield themselves under. We might as well suggest Asian-Americans, by mere coincidence, are all writing crappy essays and that African-Americans, by mere coincidence, are writing phenomenal essays, and make conclusions based on that. Without accepting quantification, such an argument could exist.</p>
<p>A few academics (viz. Jerry Kang, Frank Wu, and William Kidder) commented on Espenshade and Chung’s famous / notorious 2005 study which concluded that Asians would be the biggest winners if affirmative action were ended. They criticized only the interpretation of the results, not the results themselves or the methodology. They emphasized that there is a difference between “affirmative” action, which is supposed to help protected minorities, and “negative” action, which is treating Asian applicants worse than equally qualified white applicants.</p>
<p>Thus, Mssrs. Kang, Wu, and Kidder do not deny that there are extant policies that are detrimental to Asian applicants. Rather, they seek to point out that “affirmative” action isn’t one of these policies; it’s “negative” action that should be abolished.</p>
Not exactly. Think of a white man, an Asian man, and a black man on a bus. There are only two seats and the white man and the Asian man are currently sitting in them. The black man wants in. In order to make room, the white man, instead of giving up his own seat, kicks the Asian out of his own seat.</p>
<p>It’s a very rudimentary and obviously differs from the nuances of racial affirmative action, but it has the general gist of racial affirmative action. In order to discriminate in favor of somebody, you have to make room by discriminating against somebody else. And instead of equal negative discrimination against Caucasians and Asians, solely Asians are facing negative discrimination in order to make way for positive discrimination for minorities, and in that sense, Asians are being singled out for discrimination.</p>
<p>Rereading your interpretation of that particular line, I don’t see how you made the inference that both whites and Asians are facing equal negative discrimination when it explicitly states that whites are negligibly affected whereas Asians are significantly affected, in the exact lines that you quoted.</p>
<p>this is a white country (was, is, and will always be) and higher institutions exist mainly to serve the white population. all the nonwhites are there for diversity purposes, and will always be.</p>
<p>sucks? most definitely. so what do we do? accept it, and MOVE ON.</p>
<p>Since everybody wants to complain about private schoolsn admission policies, why don’t I hear anybody complaining that the 2300/4.0 applicant from NY got passed over for the 3.8/2150 from North Dakota, or the 3.65/2050 from Arkansas? Seems to me to be the same thing you are arguing, just geographical vs. race. Are you not mad that somebody got your perceived seat by simply being from a under represented state?</p>
<p>What are your thoughts on Jian Li? Three years ago, he basically did what you suggested a few pages back. Was he wrong to do that?</p>
<p>To answer your (rhetorical) questions, it’s possible that the other applicants wrote better essays or made more significant contributions in their respective extracurricular activities than the New Yorker.</p>
You’re missing the point of this thread by making such exaggerated generalizations. While racial affirmative action is significant, it’s far from a deterrent to all Asian-Americans aspiring to attend college at all. Affirmative action doesn’t even exist outside of the elite tier of schools. Nevertheless, just because a problem is relatively minor, doesn’t mean that it should be condoned nor should it be recognized as anything other than a problem.</p>
<p>CodeH, that is my point, why only talking about discrimination of race? There are many factors that go into building a class at any institution, not all being perceived as fair by all. You may have an advantage over a wealthy asian because you are a QB applicant. Everybody has plusses and minusses in this process.</p>
<p>I’d say that’s a misinterpretation of the thread.</p>
<p>One of the implications of Dr. Espenshade’s research is that if racial preferences were abolished, the percentage of Asian students would increase, though not to some obscene yellow peril figure like 90%, as was previously mentioned many pages back.</p>
No. But, if they wish, they can attempt to convince their parents to move for the sake of getting into a better school. What’s important is that location is not inherent; it is not permanent in the sense that it literally cannot change.</p>
<p>Does that mean I am in complete accordance with “state” affirmative action? No, but the issues that spring out of it are far less problematic than racial affirmative action for the aforementioned reason of permanence. Perhaps there is little focus on the issue because of its relative insignificance.</p>
I’m assuming that the scenario the study describes is (1) the elimination of preferences for URM and (2) the admission of the people with the highest stats, regardless of race. If so, the result could mean, I suppose, that the URM admissions were taken out of the Asians “share” of admissions. But after the change, all the whites who were admitted before still get admitted, with a few more. Does the study clearly show what would happen if you leave the URMs in, but fill the rest of the slots based on stats alone? If that shows that white applicants would lose spots to Asian applicants, then I think it would support suspicion of discrimination against Asians. There could be some factors that disadvantage Asian applicants–for example, they might be less distributed across likely majors and might be involved in fewer different ECs–so some of the difference might be explained by reasons that don’t involve invidious discrimination. I know CC is hardly representative, but from reading here you’d think that 90% of high-performing Asian students were interested in math/hard science/engineering, and play tennis and the violin. If that were really true–or even partly true–it would have an impact at schools that genuinely practice holistic admissions.</p>