<p>Yes (referring to post #197), that’s one of the interesting things about Chicago. The universities there were absolutely major civic projects, and people gave money and energy (lots of both) even if they were not alumni. The same names appear on buildings at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, as well as other institutions around Chicago. There are other examples of that, of course, in other places (Yale and Harvard have overlapping names as well), but it’s particularly striking in Chicago.</p>
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<p>Of course, that may not have helped the daughter with college admissions as much as the legacy and celebrity attributes (celebrity due to the well-timed publishing of the book during college application season in her senior year of high school).</p>
<p>Indeed, the piano and/or violin may be worse than other music for elite college admissions purposes due to the lack of contribution to diversity (in a non-racial/ethnic sense) when there are numerous other piano and/or violin playing applicants.</p>
<p>Yes, that’s been said on CC for years – that it’s not so much discrimination against Asians per se but the fact that they cluster into a small group of interests and EC’s and colleges want diversity in interests and EC’s - amplified by regionality in that they are concentrated in certain geographic areas and like it or not, colleges want geographic diversity too. Hunt’s orchestra analogy is a great one here. I don’t know why so many supposedly “smart” people don’t get that, but whatever.</p>
<p>ucb ^ Ie, too many violinists? A long involvement with music, like some sports, shows commitment and implies the skills improved, some higher level is reached, over that long commitment period.<br>
But, remember, taking lessons and practicing are not what’s key. How you then use music to engage weighs, too. So, you get plenty of kids who just have a line in ECs. And then kids who may hit a double for taking it a step further. </p>
<p>When kids say to me, but it’s just music, I always try to get them to identify what “more” they did with it.</p>
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<p>However, doesn’t an actual orchestra have a lot of violin players (about as many as all of the woodwind and brass instruments put together)?</p>
<p>On the other hand, it may have only one piano player.</p>
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The answer to both of these is the same: Jews assimilated into norms of academic and EC diversity, without abandoning their commitment to education and work ethic.</p>
<p>So non-Jewish whites, on average, aren’t stupider–they’re lazier. (Or, I should say, we’re lazier.) This is also the reason that Asians are represented at the Ivies at four times their representation in the population, in my opinion. If hard work was the whole story, there would be even more.</p>
<p>I find chart two interesting in that it looks like a cluster of elite schools have all decided to peg the asian admit rate in the high teens which it has now been converging to for a decade. That smells like something is up. </p>
<p>With a rising asian population one would expect that the asian line should be trending upward. </p>
<p>I dont think that is explained away by this hand waving at clustered interests. Chua’s premise (even if we accept that it is 100% accepted and followed by Asians of all stripes) is to fit her children’s profiles to what the colleges say they want. Saying that every Asian kid hit the same EC check boxes is ridiculous.</p>
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Sure, but if there are very few Asians trying to get those woodwind and brass seats, it limits the maximum number of Asians you can have in the orchestra. And what percentage of seats at the university are STEM seats (assuming that Asians are competing for all the STEM seats, which I think may not be the case either)?
But she didn’t really do that. Rather, she made them do the most stereotypical “Asian” activities. Nobody said every Asian kid does these things–but it’s percentages that count.</p>
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<p>This, and IQ, and geography are irrelevant for explaining why Harvard has relatively few non-Jewish Whites, because Harvard does not select its students via academic merit or IQ or geography alone. </p>
<p>Harvard hand picks every single one of its admitted students using holistic criteria, correct? So they may choose any number of any students of any religious background, if that is what they want to do. They obviously know as much about the Jewish identification of their students as we do.</p>
<p>If the explanation is that Harvard does not pay attention to the religious affiliation of its applicants, then I ask you, do you believe that it true? And if they do not, why not? </p>
<p>Affirmative Action exists, because without it, the application of the admissions template used by universities excludes certain proportional segments of American society, that colleges have decided are important to include.</p>
<p>My conclusion is that Harvard is satisfied with a grossly underrepresented non-Jewish White student population (as well as the current populations of all other identifiable groups), or they would change it by choosing different students to admit.</p>
<p>In all the years D2 was in a local orchestra and All State, they never featured a pianist. Otoh, the one highest skilled piano playing kid in her hs accompanied school plays, musicals, events, taught and mentored, took her music skills over to chorus, did ECs, incl comm service, etc. Same kid is a math wiz, poor URM now at an Ivy. Those othr music lessons kids? Flew under the radar. Not at prestigiousity schools.
(I know, I am succumbing to anecdotes.)</p>
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I don’t believe that Harvard thinks that whether somebody is a Christian or a Jew has a significant effect on diversity in today’s culture, any more than I think they are trying to create diversity by gettting people of Irish, Swedish, or Italian backgrounds, or redheads vs. brunettes. I don’t think Harvard cares at all about being either too Jewish or not Jewish enough.</p>
<p>If the explanation is that Harvard does not pay attention to the religious affiliation of its applicants, then I ask you, do you believe that it true? And if they do not, why not?</p>
<p>Do I believe it is true H does not try to guess an appplicant’s religion? YES. Why? Because there is no reliable way to know, because there is no time to fuss and fret over whether Kaplan is Jewish, Unitarian, Buddhist, Methodist or Pentacostal. Because what matters is what comes thorugh on the CA- don’t all the threads about all this hint that not all kids maximize their self-presentation?</p>
<h1>211, 212</h1>
<p>Neither one of those explanations counters my conclusion that Harvard is satisfied with a gross under-representation of non-Jewish White students. Just saying.</p>
<p>If you arent satisfied now, wait until you read
<a href=“Home | Legal Affairs”>Home | Legal Affairs;
<p>Gross under-representation of non-Jewish white students compared to what?
The ethnic makeup of the population within X miles of Cambridge, MA?
The ethnic makeup of students who pass some presumed minimum standard / are qualified for admission?
The ethnic makeup of the students who apply to Harvard?</p>
<p>If it is your contention that non-J white students are grossly underrepresented, is it also your contention that every racial / ethnic group should be represented evenly at par based to its incidence in the population at large?</p>
<p>BTW, I would also note that if you divided the world into Asian, Jewish white, non-Jewish white and black (just for the sake of argument), you would find Asians and Jewish whites disproportionately high in the applicant POOL in the first place relative to their incidence in the population. </p>
<p>So even if Harvard decided to just admit every 10th applicant at random, they would “overrepresent” Asians and Jewish whites. Would that be discrimination against non-Jewish whites?</p>
<p>As “others” apply, it changes the applicant pool. That’s not discrimination against those who were there first, though.</p>
<p>Let’s take a school like Vanderbilt, who said publicly - we want more Jewish students. They did outreach in major east coast metro areas, blah blah. Let’s assume that pre-this push, the % of applicants to Vanderbilt who were Jewish was 5%. Now, post-this push, it’s 15%.<br>
EVEN IF Vanderbilt took every nth applicant now, they’d now have 3 times as many Jews as before. Was that “discrimination” to non-Jewish whites, or is it just a shrinking pool?</p>
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<p>But colleges didn’t say they wanted or valued high level mastery of piano and violin above and beyond other extracurriculars that a student might do. </p>
<p>Anyway, it’s a dumb strategy at the aggregate level, which is why the “I don’t know what they want in Ivy admissions! I wish I knew!” is a silly question. The moment they say they want X … everyone flocks to X … and therefore it becomes less differentiating and therefore less desirable. </p>
<p>It’s rather like my years in developing new products at a major corporation, in which we were always being asked to develop products that were simultaneously 1) unique and ground-breaking and 2) fully tested and guaranteed not to fail.</p>
<p>Look, Harvard knows a lot more than we do about kids’ religious affiliations, because a large percentage of kids probably tell it, in their essays, schools, and ECs.</p>
<p>That said, I don’t believe Harvard gives a hoot about anyone’s religious affiliation anymore. (Well, they may be mildly interested in increasing the representation of non-Western religious groups.) Sure, in the past they probably had separate limits on Jews, Catholics, Baptists, whatever, but that certainly died more than a generation ago.</p>
<p>I think Harvard does care more about ethnicity. Certainly it has wanted to increase representation of so-called URMs, and maybe (just maybe) it has wanted to not be too Asian. In any event, the effort to favor some groups, to increase international enrollment, and to not discriminate too much against other groups who are way over-represented at Harvard compared to their presence in the general population – and that’s Jews and Asians – by mathematical necessity is going to result in under-representation of whatever other groups you want to define – white Catholics, white Protestants, HAPA Lutherans. </p>
<p>Is Harvard “satisfied” with that under-representation? I guess, but only if there is no difference between “satisfaction” and “not caring”. And Harvard may not care because there are still plenty of them around – their voice is hardly missing from the Harvard scene. In global terms – and Harvard does think globally – everyone but the Asians and Hispanics are grossly over-represented.</p>
<p>What we don’t really know at all is the proportions in which those groups are represented in the applicant pool, and the relationship of qualifications to numbers. I think we probably do know from various studies that Asians are not accepted in proportion to their applications or test scores, but we don’t really know anything about the various subgroups characterized as “white”, not to mention who is in the “unreported” category. From my anecdotal experience, more Jews and Asians get accepted to Harvard than WASPs or white Catholics, but from my anecdotal experience the results wouldn’t change if you stripped all identifying information from the applications.</p>
<p>The violin section of an orchestra only comprises a percentage of the membership - but you also have to consider that there are other musical ensembles as well - the brass choir has no violins, nor does the band. If there is a Jazz band, it might have a violin, but certainly not many. Same with the marching band (incidentally, one of the best bands at our regional competition had an asian girl playing electric violin - if she applies to and Ivy, I bet she has a better chance than many other asians, because she convinced the band director to include her in the marching band - she did something unique).</p>
<p>I was in several competitive music ensembles in high school, sponsored by Boston University and New England Conservatory. In the orchestras, the string sections were predominantly asian, but there were few asians in the other sections. There may be a point that to the admissions staff their applications all start to look alike. It’s not just a matter of not needing any more violinists, but of finding a way to make yourself stand among a large crowd of eligible students. If you look identical to 10 other applicants, you are no longer unique. If the asian families all decided to have their kids play oboe, because it is an underrepresented instrument, you would still have the same problem.</p>
<p>PG,
Does Harvard admit in proportion to the racial/ethnic makeup of its applicants? I don’t think so. Harvard hand picks the demographic representation that it wants. </p>
<p>I am not setting forth any particular recommendation for non-Jewish White representation at Harvard. You rightly pointed out that some top colleges recruit applicants of a specified religious affiliation. If Harvard felt the need for more non-Jewish White students, it could do that too. Obviously, it doesn’t want any more.</p>
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<p>Ah but HYP does. In any other setting (lending anyone?) the Justice Department would be suing them to disclose their methodologies, which obviously exist in some codified form. </p>
<p>I am guessing that about 25% of seats are reserved for people of influence. Probably 45% are awarded on merit, resulting in the suspicious 15-17% rate for asians. After all they need someone to base the universities’ reputations on. 30% are awarded to feel good minorities so that alumni can, well, feel good. That way there is a spot for a homeless LA girl with mediocre test scores but with a high Q-score.</p>