<p>Keila,
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the use of race as an admissions factor, so your analogy is flawed. It would be legal to give out bread to some who are not at the front of the line or to some who are dressed in rags, if the purpose is to create a diverse group of satiated people. :)</p>
<p>I think you misunderstood my analogy. Hunger does not equal race necessarily- it equals need by a certain group. For example, a poor asian who applies to college is yes, disadvantaged economically but not in terms of race.A black/hispanic poor person is not only disadvantaged economically but also socially-ergo a double penalty. </p>
<p>To explain this better not having AA is like giving bread and teaching lessons to people who are either well dressed or not too hungry. These people eat the bread and find jobs using your teaching lessons- jobs which they will not be disadvantaged for because they are wearing nice, neat clothes.
However, you neglect people who are either hungry or wearing rags or both which disadvantages a whole set of people. You misconstrued my analogy, all due respect of course.</p>
<p>BTW, monstor I mean AfricanAmericans are starving to death because underrepresentation at elite colleges actually amounts to a larger loss for them because they are more likely to be judged on their race/not their works.</p>
<p>
Affirmative action only further promotes misconceptions and creates unfair judgments based upon ethnicity. Look at this whole thread and you’ll find a chock-full of what I’m talking about.</p>
<p>I disagree monstor- after all, say what you may about AA- if a black person/why is it always a black person?) got into Yale the interviewer must admit that he/she must be slightly intelligent so that elevates him/her over others in his/her race. I need to find the study that shows this errr
also, I pose a question to you monstor why is the debate over AA always posed in termsof the black white racial divide ? Hispanics,and white women also benefit from AA. In fact, white women are the largest beneficiaries of AA. So don’t loook to a black person for stealing your spot at Harvard look instead at a white woman who ,say, wants to be an egineer.
believe it or not, 50 years ago only 38% of women went to college( the feminine Mystique). the amount has risen to 50%- victory for AA.</p>
<p>^ White women are actually disadvantaged in college admissions, though this varies from case to case. I’m going to avoid that argument as gender balancing is an entirely different situation altogether.</p>
<p>I still don’t understand exactly what in your argument legitimizes the existence of racial affirmative action.</p>
<p>shrinkrap: I see where you are coming from. It was insensitive of me. I am not a physician, but I do have an idea of the risk factors you are talking about.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am being rational. It is those folks who keep on saying things like “maybe”, “factor x”, “half empty is not the same as half full” etc. are being cynical, don’t you think?</p>
<p>Since the elite privates serve as a feeder to the highest level of government and industry, to understood what happened during the Bush years and the beginning of the Obama years, one must know where these power brokers learn their craft. Sorry to say, but I don’t believe Americans are being well-served; the world has certainly not being well-served. Don’t you think it behooves us to learn more about the education of the ruling class, and why we are in the “pickle” that we are in?</p>
<p>Personally, I want no part of them, school, person or otherwise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Didn’t I say hoping to “catch” a spouse, a job (actually THE job, not a job), or simply to bask in their “glory”? </p>
<p>When I start to see arguments over who is better off, I wonder why we are not arguing who is best off? Once more, the strategy of “divide and conquer” is working brilliantly. I simply can be believe folks are this blind to it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>They don’t study SAT or ACT.</p>
<p>
I think there has been a lot of cross-posting in this thread, so I think I responded to this. I’m not saying that whites and Asians are both equally “harmed” by AA, but the study suggests that they are both harmed. You have to go a few steps further, though, to figure out why Asians are “harmed” more than whites. It may, of course, be a desire to prevent “too many Asians,” but there may be other factors as well. Which leads to:</p>
<p>
It matters because Harvard is not just looking for engineering majors; it also wants English, classics, anthropology, music, art, polital science, etc., majors. It is also looking for singers, wind players, dancers, actors, community service people, and athletes in a broad range of sports. If you were recruiting players for a baseball team, and all the Asian applicants wanted to play catcher, you probably wouldn’t recruit many Asians. What’s more, some selective schools want people who aren’t one-dimensional, and thus they value people with interests in several areas. It doesn’t have to be that way, but there are eight Ivies and only one MIT.</p>
<p>
This is harder to measure. I certainly see in my D’s high school–which includes an IB magnet–that Asian kids are disproportionally represented in a few ECs and sports. There are a few in the other ECs and sports. Just to give one example, Asians are greatly overrepresented in the violin section of the school orchestra, and underrepresented in band and chorus. This is not a criticism, but is simply a fact based on cultural norms. This observation has been borne out by reading the profiles of large numbers of high-performing Asian students on CC. Take a look, and you will see multiple tennis-and-violin playing Asian students who want to major in premed or engineering. You can call it a stereotype–I call it an observable cultural norm. If it’s really common, it will limit Asian admissions to the most selective schools.</p>
<p>^ I agree that tennis-and-violent Asian students who want to study premed or engineering are common. But as a band student, at least in my school, Asians are also quite overrepresented among high woodwinds in the wind ensemble: 3/7 flutes, 4/6 clarinets. The Lit Mag, which I am editor-in-chief of, often jokes about our 75-80% Asian membership depending on the year.</p>
<p>I guess I am skeptical that these biases can account for such a large gap between Asian and white students, especially when Asians are rated higher on both objective and subjective factors. The argument wrt legacy and athlete biases is more convincing, although I’d like to see more concrete evidence.</p>
<p>“tennis-and-violent Asian students”: Virginia Tech is giving Asians a bad rep…</p>
<p>
But how many brass? How many percussion? How many saxophones or double reeds? That really illustrates my point–you have culturally based concentration in certain areas by Asians. And again, partly for cultural reasons, many of those Asian students do very, very well at those activities (which may be why they can be rated better on “subjective” criteria). It would be interesting to look at someplace like Harvard on an intended major-by-major basis and see how the admissions worked between Asians and white students.
Again, I’m not at all denying the very real possibility that schools are intentionally limiting the number of Asian students. I’m just saying that it’s complex.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think you can draw any conclusions as to the appropriateness of particular admissions decisions by just looking at the number ratings for the objective and subjective factors. Like Hunt said, its more complex than that.</p>
<p>For example, a white, Asian and Hispanic student may have equivalent numerical scores, but their individual accomplishments are going to be different. If a college selected students just by their scores, it could end up with too many bio majors or 200 chess club presidents, or 300 website designers. You may not care that every 4th student you meet is a web-designing, chess-playing bio major, but admissions officers do - they want you to experience more variety in your peer relationships, so they may choose the State rodeo champion who scored a little lower rather than take another bio-chess-website guy.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And who here is proposing that colleges use tests as the only factor of admission?</p>
<p>If you want to select state champions who may or may not have the highest SAT scores, go ahead. I don’t recall reading any posts that expressed disdain for admissions officers’ choosing students who have placed first in large statewide, regionwide, or nationwide competitions. That doesn’t have anything to do with race.</p>
<p>fab,
You misread my post. The “numerical scores” I was referring to are the quantified scores of objective and subjective factors used in the Duke mismatch study, that Keilaxandra was talking about.</p>
<p>My apologies. I reiterate, however, that “If you want to select state champions who may or may not have the highest SAT scores, go ahead.”</p>
<p>“But how many brass?”</p>
<p>Not enough lung capacity.</p>
<p>
I was reading on another thread about a kid who is an EMT. Is something like that objective enough for you to be OK with colleges weighing it against grades and stats? I think you’re going to find it very difficult to draw the kind of line your post suggests.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am talking about selecting state champions over applicants who have higher total subjective and objective scores, not just higher SATs. I’m saying that looking just at the fact that Asians may have scored on average, higher than every other race in the subjective/objective categories that Duke reduced to a numerical score, does not mean that Asians must necessarily deserve or have a right to be selected for admission. There may be a significant number of other applicants who have special or unique qualifications (legacy, athletics, geography, national jump-rope champion, worlds fastest oyster-shucker, EMT, etc) that make them more desirable than the rest of the applicant pool. Just saying that showing quantified subjective scores does not necessarily prove that Asians are discriminated against.</p>
<p>No, I don’t find it “very difficult to draw [that] kind of line” for one reason: I don’t believe “grades and stats” should be the only determinants of college admissions.</p>
<p>Unlike some others, I do not see “URM” status as being equivalent to winning multiple events at a large statewide competition over several years. Thus, I have no objections to “select[ing] state champions who may or may not have the highest SAT scores.”</p>