<p>Inasmuch there is little to nothing new or newsworthy in the complaint, the answer from Harvard promises to be enlightening. I guess that the thought of admitting Jian Li to help dodge the bullet fired at their Princeton friends did not work for too long.</p>
<p>Tempest in a teapot --no pun intended-- or the case that could bring down AA ... Las Vegas might start taking bets. </p>
<p>PS On a personal basis, inasmuch as I do not think that the evidence will satisfy the requirements for a judgment, one could applaud the fact that the claimants are FINALLY looking at the correct avenue to present their case. As opposed to spinning their wheels in the closed circles. </p>
<p>I looked at the document. I’m not a lawyer. Is that what passes for legal argument these days? It was a confused mishmash of bits and pieces aggregated from all over, little of it having anything to do with the Harvard of 2014.</p>
<p>A very poorly written complaint. Usually you don’t argue your cnase in the complaint, you state it: Harvard is in violation, Harvard did this bad thing, Harvard did that bad thing. Not a strong complaint.</p>
<p>If Harvard went to a system of admitting on stats only, Harvard may end up looking like UC-Berkeley, very Asian. </p>
<p>UNC might be a slightly tougher call. Although state universities are likelier to be ruled by statutes prohibiting the use of race in admissions, North Carolina is also obliged to admit at least 82% of each freshman class from within the state - where African-Americans outnumber Asians by almost 10-1.</p>
<p>The first statement is utterly irrelevant as the “application rate” bears no statistical relevance to the outcome of a selection. There is no validity in claiming than an increase of 100 percent of a particular pool of candidates should yield an equal increase in admitted applicants. That is statistical voodoo, and not unlike most of the claims in that lawsuit. </p>
<p>The same applies to the qualification of the pool. The claims are always based on the a small percentage of top applicants that are rejected by the big name schools that happen to have 10 percent or less admit rates. Unless the claimants had access to the closely kept admission files, there is no way to present claims about the quality of an entire subgroups. Cynically, the same group that objects to be viewed as “all looking alike” seems to sell the notion that the entire pool of Asians happens to be equally qualified. </p>
<p>Further, the fact that the admissions have remained stable are de facto ruining the argument of a racial discrimination. For this to be demonstrated through simplistic mathematical averages, the percentage of over-representation of a certain groups should have dipped below the point of equal representation AND the number of URM should have gone the other way. The reality is different: the fastest growing segments of the population are NOT become more represented at school such as Harvard. Again, the stability of admission rate shows the contrary of what is claimed, which is an indirect way to ask for more … over-representation! And a higher pace than it has been so far in terms of population represention. </p>
<p>Lastly, most arguments of racial preferences will fall flat when the SES are introduced as a variable. The schools will have little problems indicating that they accept LOW numbers of poorer students on a rather uniform scale. In so many words, the schools should be able to demonstrate that they accept more Asians than any other race when they consider family income. If there is an inherent “discrimination” at a school such as Harvard is that they have paid MUCH closer attention to race than they have at increasing the number of lower SES students. And for that last part, we DO have compelling evidence courtesy of Carnevale et al. Evidence that goes well beyond the weak sauce a la Espenshade that is built on the flimsiest and narrowest of evidence such as SAT scores taken out of context. </p>
<p>There won’t be any winners, but the outcome if debated correctly might end --once for all-- a discussion that has gone nowhere for the longest of times. </p>
<p>Of course, one should complain about legacies! In a perverse way, this might backfire as generations of the students that were part of the 14 to 18 percent (a number that is a gross over-representation population wise) should yield … great proportions of legacies. By the time the legacy preferences might be abolished, the biggest victims will be none other than today’s claimants! Go figure! </p>
<p>And, fwiw, the claims are hardly targeting an issue of staying “very white” as the preferences are benign. The targets of the claims are more colorful in nature. As in brown and black, to be precise. </p>
<p>This particular phrase is troubling:
"Statistical evidence
reveals that Harvard uses “holistic” admissions to disguise the fact that it holds Asian
Americans to a far higher standard than other students and essentially forces them to
compete against each other for admission. "</p>
<p>If Asian Americans have higher scores on average, then even if admissions were done by pure lottery (take 1 out of every X Asian-Amer, whites, Hisp, Afr Am, etc.) then the “lottery-admitted” Asian American pool would have higher stats than the lottery-admitted white pool, the lottery-admitted Hisp pool, and so forth. That doesn’t prove “holding to a higher standard” - it just means that the overall pool “floats higher.”</p>
<p>Oh, good grief. This might be THE most desperate attempt ever of a student to get into Harvard. </p>
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<p>Someone did a fair amount of research for this but failed to look at how many other kids with perfect scores are rejected every year.</p>
<p>The obsession with Harvard as the be-all, end-all still runs deep, apparently. Because (of course) the goal of this lawsuit is for the kid to be admitted as a transfer. </p>
<p>Although I did not benefit from being a legacy anywhere and my kids cannot by law (the school I went to does not recognize or favor, by law, legacies or even employees of the school), I think that schools have a legitimate reason to give a preference to legacies. Harvard might not need the cash from alums, but other schools do. There is good will in having generations attend the same school that can’t be measured in money.</p>
<p>UNC, and other public schools, are in a different position. They have a mission to serve their citizens, but how they get there varies. Some state schools have more than half the students from OOS. Some have several smaller campuses and serve the populations that way. </p>
<p>If UNC is required to admit the most qualified by stats, it could end up hurting the AA population even if they do have a 10-1 advantage. Harvard admits far more Asians as a percentage of the student body than they make up in the general population, but the suit is that the race should never be considered, even as a percentage of the population of that state.</p>
<p>It seems that with all of the comparison to the “Jewish problem” of years ago, both Jewish and Asian-American representation are very high at elite schools compared to their % in the population as a whole. </p>
<p>Anecdotally, all I can say is … every single time my (white, Jewish) kids share with me a picture of a club they’ve joined, or an outing that they’ve gone on, or a gathering of friends, etc. there is simply no shortage of Asian-Americans. Even my S’s girlfriend is both Chinese and Jewish :-)</p>
<p>Does this lengthy complaint any discussion of the representation of Asians in their preferred departments/majors? If they overwhelmingly want to major in STEM, are they in fact under-represented in that group? Are schools not allowed to admit students with a diversity of academic interests?</p>
<p>Why can’t a private institution do whatever it pleases? Does the government find some way to mess with their business via grant qualifications and such? Just curious. </p>
<p>I enjoyed reading The Chosen. I would summarize the admissions history at HYP as a struggle within the university, between professors and administrators, over whether the institutions would prefer eggheads or gentlemen. It’s a debate over whether the university should prize intellect, or future leaders. I don’t personally think high test scores are proof of intellect. Standardized tests tend to favor people who are strong in both math and critical reading. I can think of many very successful people who favored one side or the other. To argue that “stats” should carry the day is arguing for the Bright Well Rounded Kids, to the exclusion of the Pointy kids.</p>
<p>When a population is concentrated in certain geographic areas, that hurts members of that population when they apply to colleges that value geographic diversity. This affects both Asians (and Jews, too, though to a lesser extent.)</p>
<p>Thought experiment (to borrow a phrase from Hunt). Let’s suppose every Asian-American in the US lived in Massachusetts. Would it be “acceptable” for Harvard to decide they want to restrict only x% of their incoming class to people from Massachusetts, and that they would rather get a lower-scoring kid from elsewhere than a higher-scoring kid from Massachusetts? In this hypothetical, that would impact Asian-Americans proportionately more than anyone else since they’re all clustered in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>I also note that no one has ever sued or tried to sue Harvard because they disproportionately admit kids from Exeter, Andover, Choate, and the other elite NE boarding schools. Isn’t that discriminatory too?</p>
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