When did anyone say admissions were fair, and what is the definition of “fair” in the admissions process?
Repeat after mr; it’s NOT all about stats.
And quit finding reasons to generalize Asian Am kuds afd, as a group, boring or only involved in their work. Not so.
This is an extremely complicated issue with shades of grey but many like to paint it as black or white. I think both sides (even Edward Blum) have a point. Many Asian Americans believe that affirmative action is a societal good and believe that it is necessary in elite college admissions today. However, many of these same Asian Americans also recognize that elite college admissions is somewhat to grossly unfair to them. It bristles me somewhat when people can’t see the obvious reality of elite college admissions faced by Asian American applicants. I have no obvious remedy to this situation. I do wish that Harvard and other elite institutions would at least recognize the hurdles faced by Asian American applicants that applicants of other race do not face instead of steadfastly holding to the position that no discrimination exists at all.
Asian American overrepresented at X univ?!
some race athletes over represented at NBA NFL, we have no problem. And I definitely have no problem. Why can’t X univ have 90% of white or 90% of Asian or 90% of Hispanic? I have no problem X univ has AA overrepresented.
X univ is private Univ. Do we have problem a private high school has mostly white or AA ? why we treat a college differently? over represented/ under represented are political unhealthy toxic vocab.
@dragonmom3
“If applicants don’t like their admissions policies, they are free to apply elsewhere.” I agree too! Hope ppl order wedding cake embrace this. If a baker doesn’t bake cake for your weeding, go somewhere else 
Where’s this thread going? lol.
To say this is simply discrimination because you think AsAm’s face hurdles others don’t, for these single digit admit colleges, is to miss the complexity of admissions. This isn’t just about student needs (and wants.) Or that anyone thinks these 300 or those 3000 kids “should” have gotten in.
The institution has complex and multifaceted needs. Geo diversity, distriution of majors, gender balance…wait, are you going to say more men should be admitted because they score higher on the SAT?
Fact is, it’s holistic, not just stats.
To paraphrase another thread, What if we had admissions and no Asian American were calling "discrimination? Not before results and not after. What if, for the 37,000 kids Harvard denies, kids understood it’s a multiplicity of factors?
A little primer on “holistic” admissions. Back in the day, Harvard professors were upset by all the idiotic legacies and inbred prep school kids the admissions department was handing them and lobbied the administration for a meritocratic admissions policy. The policy was implement, and before you could say “too many jews” the Harvard administration decided that too many jews were being admitted. The solution? “holistic” admissions where “character and personality” were important factors. Factors where jews “naturally” fell short. Sound anything like Harvard’s current bull***t rating of the personality of asian students?
This is not the 1920s. People need to become ionformed about the process today, not keep falling back on nearly 100 years ago.
H is a private. It makes the decisions it makes. Not every kid who wants in will be admitted. The primary criterion is not stats.
But too many are too sure these kids are discriminated against, because…their stats are higher. How does that make sense?
There is nothing wrong with the bright, hardworking Asian kids. But this is not a public U, this not rack and stack, and there are only 2000 spots, not every kid will get one.
And the fact a lawsuit was filed (not the first Blum has promoted, not by a long shot,) doesn’t mean anything, without the right proofs. One study is not proof. Nor is an article slanted to make it seem the plaintiffs have the superior case.
“” if Harvard considered only academic achievement, the Asian-American share of the class would rise to 43 percent from the actual 19 percent.
This is roughly in line with the proportion of Asians at Caltech, which focuses on academic excellence.""
After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent.
That’s a lot of spots for athletes and legacies, to account for a 28% drop in Asians!
Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.
Given that Asians had the best extracurriculars (see above), the additional drop here reflects the “personal ratings” (I agree with @lookingforward that this probably mostly is associated with letters of recommendation).
What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans.
So another 31% drop for Asians (and whites) for affirmative action. That is a lot. One thing I find a bit odd is that Harvards proportion of African Americans (14.6 percent for class of 2021) is actually a couple percentage points higher than the African American population in the U.S. (12.7%).""
imo, those NUMBERS CITED don’t have enough clarity and merit. as a staring point, percentage based statistical numbers must be calibrated to 100%. then the margin of error/uncertainty must be highlighted.
i’d imagine it is increasingly difficult, if at all possible, to add up any of the numbers to 100%. (for example: how do you define then count someone as URM/Asian/White////with many categories, social, geo, gender, athletic, legacy, religion, and so on/// as the years went on, some of the terms became sensitive and got banned while others were added over a span of many years/generations? At any given time, and even today, the box for many of the categories (when it comes to racial statistics), it is 1/8 or 1/16 for native; 1/8 or 1/4 for black; 1/2 for jew/white/asian/islanders… oh, btw, most of the time, it goes by the applicants’ self-reporting and quite often those categories are not mutually exclusive. as a result, the joint section(s) became the unknown, the undefined, the others, the margin of error, the margin of evidence, the margin of defense… those numbers don’t have enough clarity and merit. period. when the margin of error is 20%~30%, it makes no sense to debate the differential of 5%, 12% or 19%. people from all sides game the system.
if we were to take a non-number approach, hopefully, we all can agree harvard and caltech both have been excellent but different educational institutions, and have great but different faculties, and have great but different student bodies.
then we may ask ourselves why the differences exist. to what degree it was driven by admission policy and process. what was the intent and the effect of those policies. are they morally legally historically competitively comparatively sounding practices? but without access to more internal insight, or even with more and complete internal insight, who
should decide/judge what are morally legally historically competitively comparatively correct.
or are we asking why many more of the applicants from many sub-groups REJECTED by harvard and by caltech?
america is america because of our openness and the resulted diversities. holistic is imperfect but far better than any one single standard.
Many posters continue to say H can do as they please since they are private which most everyone would agree with. The thing is though they are not really private as they get tremendous public assistance. If they give up all public assistance, except perhaps anything given typically by cities/states to other businesses (think Amazon) then let them continue to limit Asians or whoever else they want but that is not the case. Hopefully, the case goes forward and more details emerge re their past decisions.
Also, what many do not realize is that it does not take the absolute “best and brightest” to succeed at H or the other top colleges. Most that enter will graduate with very high GPA’s therefore H is willing to admit some that have much lower stats than the top kids.
Harvard sold admission spots to Jared Kushner and his brother Joshua for a total of $2.5MM, an amount which represented the investment return achieved on its then roughly $20B endowment in about two hours. (Jack Meyer at HMC sure had a great run back then, but then again didn’t everyone?)
The Kushners were not very well known then - this was nothing like dropping standards through the floor to take prominent politicians’ kids - and in hindsight probably not such a great move on Harvard’s part given the bad publicity.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-story-behind-jared-kushners-curious-acceptance-into-harvard
How many other spots have been purchased in recent years for kids whose fates did not take such a serendipitous turn as Kushner’s, and whose identities remain obscured despite the sheen from their diplomas (usually in an easy concentration like Government)? As @lookingforward likes to say, people need to educate themselves about what these schools are really looking for.
The academic top kids at these schools are amazing, truly humbling. We are talking no more than 10% of the class at Harvard. And of course there are all sorts of amazing kids who shine in other ways. But as anyone who has been to the HYP schools will tell you (if he is honest), there are plenty of dullards and coasters as well. It’s not a huge challenge to do reasonably well, and there is plenty of room for the Harvard admissions office to play all sorts of shenanigans with who they let in. And they do.
Then why can’t a little mom and pop breakfast place set up different standards - by race - for whom they will let into their shop?
Lawsuits like this will force colleges to release more data and become more transparent about their admission process. Transparency is the first step toward fairness. Transparency and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Racial profiling in admission is as despicable as in policing, and it should be investigated just as well.
@SatchelSF I think there is a difference in serving the public pancakes versus creating a community at a college and can see a need to ensure that there is not a room full of kids from the same backgrounds or of the same sex. Perhaps in doing this H needs a little bit of room to select a female who wants to major in math over a male, but from what I have read H has taken this too far and uses diversity, etc as a means to bring in legacies and accomplish other goals than having different views/opinions.
This being said, I would be very happy to have certain top universities (or high schools) be strictly merit based as there is surely benefit to grouping the best and brightest.
@lookingforward "Where’s this thread going? lol.
To say this is simply discrimination because you think AsAm’s face hurdles others don’t, for these single digit admit colleges, is to miss the complexity of admissions. This isn’t just about student needs (and wants.) Or that anyone thinks these 300 or those 3000 kids “should” have gotten in.
The institution has complex and multifaceted needs. Geo diversity, distriution of majors, gender balance…wait, are you going to say more men should be admitted because they score higher on the SAT?
Fact is, it’s holistic, not just stats.
To paraphrase another thread, What if we had admissions and no Asian American were calling "discrimination? Not before results and not after. What if, for the 37,000 kids Harvard denies, kids understood it’s a multiplicity of factors?’
I assume you are responding to my earlier post. I wholly understand the complexities of elite college admissions and recognize the holistic nature of it and never once implied that it is all about scores and grades. However, I am stating that it is evident that Asian American applicants face hurdles, difficulties and perhaps discrimination that applicants who are white, black, and latino don’t face. To me this is just self evident. My point is that Harvard and other elite institutions have to do what they do to in admissions in order to achieve a balanced class. These admissions processes basically serve a societal good and I am not against that. But at the same time, it is abundantly clear to me that Asian American applicants receive the short end of the stick due to this process.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Nowhere, apparently. It’s just a debate at this point, and most of the recent posts belong on the race thread anyway. As it’s too time-consuming to clean-up, and I doubt there is anything novel left to say, I’m closing.