<p>I am guessing that there are very few posters out here who would deny that it is more difficult to get into a top Ivy if you are identified as Asian than if you are not. Whether it is a good or bad thing, the whole debate about holistics admissions, etc. is a different thread (many different threads, actually!). But I think where this article runs amok in terms of factual accuracy is when it implies that there is an overrepresentation of Jewish students at those schools, with the implications that this is some nefarious plot by university presidents, the media, and ad coms to accomplish this. The methodology behind his assumptions just is not strong enough to support this – it is missing the components of cultural preferences for applying to Ivy League schools, willingness/ability to pay, legacy impact, etc.</p>
<p>My question would be, if it is the case that Asian candidates are at a disadvantage in Ivy League admissions, why is that so? Does the author really think the heads of the Ivy League admissions offices meet in a secret mountain hideaway each fall to set the annual Asian quotas? Why not consider the alternative, that there are characteristics of the Asian applicant pool as a whole that put Asian applicants at a statistical disadvantage. Of course the pool is not made up solely of violin-playing math nerds, but their number are high enough to skew the stats. Just as students from NY or Mass have to have better stats than a kid from rural Idaho in order to stand out, so Asian applicants need to have abilities and interests that set them apart from the crowd of smart, accomplished Asian kids.</p>
<p>I would seriously doubt that an Asian quarterback and poet with high grades and scores would find himself at a disadvantage in Ivy League admissions.</p>
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<p>Bovertine, I think you should stop shamelessly pandering for rep points, but I’m giving you some anyway because I like you. ;)</p>
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<p>I have not been convinced of that yet, and I have been following the arguments and evidence since I joined CC.</p>
<p>Looking only at the statistical make-up of H’s student population based on the “rough” data that we have, I would say that non-Jewish Whites are wildly under-represented at H. Something like 65+% of the US population identifies as non-Jewish White, but only something like 12% of H students are non-Jewish White. Of course, this does not prove anything other than the fact that they are wildly under-represented, but it <em>could</em> mean that it is more difficult to get into H if you are identified that way than if you are not.</p>
<p>Not to derail this discussion – or maybe precisely TO derail it – Hunt, what did you do to get THREE little green boxes? Wait, don’t tell me: you’re Jewish?</p>
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<p>I was going to say because American Jews generally ARE white, until I saw Bay’s post above. 12% non-Jewish white? Now I feel oppressed :D</p>
<p>(though I am not Jewish, my last name would probably suggest that I am so my kids would probably be counted in this “study” as Jewish…)</p>
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You mean like when the author criticizes the number of Asians at Columbia but comparing the % at Columbia to the Asian population % of NYC trying to make the case Asians are under represented. I’ve run the numbers at the state level and Asian are more over represented at the Ivies compared to the UCs compared to the populations from which they draw … my analysis was too high level and has a ton of holes … but better than the geographic analysis in the article.</p>
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You’d have to unpack this statement a bit to determine if people agree with it or not. Discussions of this topic have often confused two issues: (1) whether affirmative action for URMs disadvantages Asians (and whites); and (2) whether selective colleges discriminate against Asians as compared to white students on the basis of race. The first question’s answer is obviously yes, and the discussions are all about whether it’s a good idea. The second question is a lot harder to answer, and my view is that there hasn’t been any conclusive evidence that selective schools are doing this. About the best you can say is that if you look at grades and scores alone, a decent argument can be made that there would be more Asians at top schools than there are. But when you add in things like geography, legacy, major choice, athletics, etc., it’s a lot harder to say that anything improper is going on. I personally don’t think looking at the number of Jews in current classes is a helpful way to analyze the issue–although it is instructive to note how selective schools formerly used holistic methods to depress the number of Jewish admissions–so they could be doing that to Asian students now, but it’s not at all clear that they are doing so.</p>
<p>They are depressing the admissions of women though. Perhaps enough women favor gender balance to make that not a problem.</p>
<p>One interesting thing…I often see SAT/ACT scores used as the yardstick to measure Asians/whites/URMs when discussing who gets an admissions bump and who doesn’t here on CC.</p>
<p>The latest NACAC report ranks that particular measure 3rd behind college prep course grades and rigor. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1425587-nacac-2012-state-college-admission-report.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1425587-nacac-2012-state-college-admission-report.html</a></p>
<p>I wonder if there is a similar discrepancy with those measures, which are really still strictly academic, like there are on test scores?</p>
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<p>I think there is value in looking at it, in the sense that here we have another identifiable minority (2% of US population) who managed to be admitted to top colleges in an over-representative number, similar to Asians (4%). It of course is not exactly the same, because there is no check-box on the app for religion/cultural identity, but not all Asian applicants check a box either.</p>
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That’s because no one can finish reading the article. ;)</p>
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How do people with Italian surnames do? Or Swedes? Seriously, I’d say that one thing that has happened with Jews is that they have assimilated significantly, especially with respect to being interested in many different fields of study. Yet, as a group, they still retain a strong commitment to education.</p>
<p>Bovertine,</p>
<p>I think data is out there. The one piec eof data I did find most interesting related to the National Merit Scholarships where Jewish students used to account for 30% of the awardees and now 6%. Of course, he has the “last name” problem here, but I suspect ther ehas been a pretyt significant decline and wonder why (both the decline and no impact on Harvard’s admissions). </p>
<p>Hanna, good point. But then you would be grouping applicants by race/ethnicity into different pools and then comparing each pool on its own mertis until you filled the soft quota. Yet, Harvard in its latest S Ct brief in Fisher (see Scotus Blog, brief by Brown University et al) denies doing anything remotely like this. Also, I suspect such a system would not pass S Ct muster and seems much more intrusive than anything Texas was doing in Fisher.</p>
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<p>On the other hand, some argue that some of these non-academic preferences like legacy, geography, developmental, political relationship, athlete, etc. are somehow improper or corrupt, or that the disparate racial and ethnic impact makes them improper (a line argument sometimes used, generally unsuccessfully when used alone, in employment lawsuits, though certainly people can have suspicions about the motives if there is not enough that is provable in a court of law) or otherwise undesirable.</p>
<p>Given the opaqueness of holistic admissions in the schools in question, the best people on the outside can do is speculate, not prove, stuff one way or the other. Given the schools’ institutional needs (regarding current and future donations and political relationships), it is not surprising that they want to maintain this opacity in admissions.</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear that those non-academic preferences were used in the past to limit the number of Jews. But it’s not so clear that there’s a problem if they have the effect of limiting some group, as long as there’s no intent to limit them. (And I think it’s useful to point out that at all of the Ivies, the percentage of Asians is something like three or four times the percentage of Asians in the general population–the argument is that if you just looked at stats, there’d be even more.)</p>
<p>Bay,</p>
<p>Something like 65+% of the US population identifies as non-Jewish White, but only something like 12% of H students are non-Jewish White."</p>
<p>I think the figures for the last decade at Harvard have been 25% non-Jewish white, 25%Jewish, 11-12% Black (would say AA except a large portion of these students are internationals), 9-11% Hispanic, 16-21% Asian, with the rest not identyfing race or American Indian (very small percentage).</p>
<p>It is the lack of fluctuations over time that surprises me, not so much the axctual percentages.</p>
<p>Re the Jewish figure, as I have posted before (and see many others have made these points here too) this could result from more Jewish applicants and a concentration in NE (I suspect many top midwestern and southern students do not even think about applying to Harvard), legacy boosts, Unz using the wrong proxies for intelligence etc., Unz messing up on his last name analysis, and a myriad of other factors.</p>
<p>“then you would be grouping applicants by race/ethnicity into different pools and then comparing each pool on its own mertis until you filled the soft quota. Yet, Harvard in its latest S Ct brief in Fisher (see Scotus Blog, brief by Brown University et al) denies doing anything remotely like this.”</p>
<p>Nah, you don’t need to actually do that. If everyone understands that the next class should look roughly like the last, and the applicant pool doesn’t change too much, this will take care of itself. It’s especially easy to do because unlike females or athletes, Jews are concentrated in a handful of geographic areas and even particular towns/high schools. Officer responsibilities are divided geographically. If Joe handles schools on the Upper West Side and Angela covers Weston, Florida, they’ve got lots of Jews, and Bob’s beat in San Antonio has few. Harvard probably admits more Jews from the Dalton School every year than it does from the state of Tennessee.</p>
<p>Hannah,</p>
<p>Not sure I understand how the numebrs can come out so similarly each year w/o soft quotas. Also, “If everyone understands that the next class should look roughly like the last” would not that understanding be a soft quota?</p>
<p>Good point re the applicant pool. I would expect some variation from year to year, but perhaps this is less so at Harvard which gets the cream of the crop and has feeder schools as well as (I suspect) AOs guiding their students there based on past results. </p>
<p>Still, even acknowledging these points, 25% for the same group (whether Jewish or non-Jewish white) seems unlikely to happen just by happenstance even with a pretty homogenious applicant pool. Also, if this is the case as you posit, why would Asian admission percentages be declining over time? </p>
<p>On a different note, the key graph Unz uses (although misleading as to its Asian population figures) shows little variation in racial composition over the last decade at all of the Ivies, with the exception of Brown. I would not think the other Ivies would have such homogeneity in their applicant pools, especially Cornell and Penn due to the very large number of applicants they receive relative to most of the other Ivies and my suspicion that some border-line students (at least by CC standards, lol) take shots at these schools more so than HYP.</p>
<p>“would not that understanding be a soft quota?”</p>
<p>Of course it would. That’s the definition of a soft quota as I understand it. But you don’t need to explicitly group the applicants into demographic pools and compare them to one another to make that work.</p>
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<p>Too lazy to find out what year the 30% comes from, but didn’t the author just count surnames for NMSF in California? Also, Jewish population tends to be concentrated in states with higher NMSF cutoff scores. Have the NM folks always had state-by-state cutoffs, and if so, have those cutoff scores always varied so much from highest to lowest?</p>