<p>And then? AFTER that? corporations and privately held companies can be taken to court and held accountable for not hiring university grads based on their rank in both the university they attended and the university itself. Objective hiring practices.</p>
<p>It will be fantastic.</p>
<p>EVERYONE will be free.</p>
<p>I think, then, too, we should do away with private universities, actually. I think the only real solution is to nationalize everything. This is the only way we will assure “objective” admission standards and the cultural and financial supremacy of those who test the best.</p>
<p>This is the only acceptable solution, the only path to a truly viable “meritocracy.”</p>
<p>page 37: Racial and Ethnic Composition of Majors</p>
<p>biology and life sciences: 11% Asian
Computers and Mathematics: 16%
Physical Sciences: 11%
Engineering: 14%
Health: 13%</p>
<p>In comparison:<br>
Social Sciences: 8% Asian
The Arts and Humanities: 7%<br>
Psychology and Social Work: 5%</p>
<p>Page 16: Top Ten Degrees for Asian Bachelor’s Degree Holders</p>
<p>Computer Engineering
Statistics and Decision Science
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Other Foreign Languages
Electrical Engineering
Military Technologies
Biochemical Sciences
Applied Mathematics
Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration</p>
<p>The Ivy League is composed of universities devoted to the Liberal Arts. They have many majors in the humanities to fill with prospective majors. Insisting that test scores must be the only criteria for admission willfully ignores the Ivies’ departments of History, English, Anthropology, Sociology, (etc.)</p>
<p>The vast majority of Harvard’s degrees are awarded in the humanities. [College</a> Navigator - Harvard University](<a href=“College Navigator - Harvard University”>College Navigator - Harvard University) Only 27% of Harvard’s 2011 Bachelor’s degrees were in fields related to math, computer science and the hard sciences. 73% were in other fields.</p>
<p>It is more expensive to educate a lab scientist than a History major. Equipment and lab space are finite. The universities support many fields of study. Any argument must control for the applicants’ areas of interest.</p>
<p>Good grief, argbargy! Why don’t you just convince all those poor Asian applicants to simply convert to Judaism and be done with it, since that must obviously be who HYPSM wants instead? Then Asians will have a shot at nearly half the incoming class.</p>
<p>But wait! Why shouldn’t gays and their GL-whatever variants get their own share? Say 20%. Now gay Jewish Asians will have a shot at two-thirds of the incoming class. One third should be more than enough room for athletes, legacies, URMs, internationals and non-Jewish whites lumped together, don’t you think?</p>
<p>The ONLY measure of merit in college admissions is based on test scores. Please stop making all of your lame arguments about wanting a diverse campus setting with artists and actors and philosophers.</p>
<p>The only reason to admit anyone is just top down scores. </p>
<p>Anything else is simply discriminatory and against the principles of a free market society.</p>
<p>No, because that wouldnt serve my overall goal of doing away with all private universities and then forcing objective hiring practices (!) as poetgrrrrrrl frothed.</p>
<p>ah, the angry retort with the accusations of frothing. :D</p>
<p>I am ON YOUR SIDE argbargy.</p>
<p>Testing only, stat based admissions. This is all we need. This, alone, will lead to the utopia of a meritocracy and free market country. All we need to do to get there is to tell the private universities and companies how they MUST behave.</p>
<p>It will be perfect. I think we should start right now.</p>
<p>How can that be, when (according to your link) 37.8% of the bachelor’s degrees Harvard awarded were in social studies (including psychology), 12.3% in biological sciences, 14.3% physical science, math, computer science, and engineering, and 3.2% in visual and performing arts? The biggest of the “humanities” majors is history at 9.3%, but history is both humanities and social studies to some extent.</p>
We don’t remember that, because we tend to look away when you say rude stuff like that. Plus, I’m rubber and you’re glue, and what you say bounces off me and sticks to you.</p>
<p>The arguments have been laid out quite clearly, and there simply isn’t any proof of HYP racism against Asians. Some suggestive evidence, maybe, but not proof. I understand that this is frustrating to some folks.</p>
<p>Yes, the humanities question is a bit of a challenge in the new plan.</p>
<p>How do we decide who in school #1, let’s call it H, just for fun, gets to major in their area of interest? </p>
<p>Why! Test scores of course!</p>
<p>So, highest scorers get to have their first choice major and as you go down the line, those whose scores are weak, say only 2340 or something, will have to study the areas left over.</p>
<p>Then, after the test score cut off, at school #2, let’s call that school P, for the sake of something to call it, the highest scorers at THAT school will get their first choice major and so on down the line.</p>
<p>Or, and this is the other alternative: We could tell the schools which majors they HAD TO offer based on test scores. So, if 88% of all admitted students wanted engineering? They would HAVE to offer that many spots to the engineering students.</p>
<p>That might be the best way to do it. The most “objective,” anyway.</p>
<p>Yeah. I’m pretty sold on that one. let us admit based on test scores and allow the schools to offer all the seats necessary in any one dept to those with the highest scores.</p>
<p>that way, there is absolutely NO chance of subjectivity creeping into this process.</p>
<p>I divided the fields into hard sciences/math and everything else. 477 degrees were awarded in:</p>
<p>221 Biological and Biomedical Sciences
36 Computer and Information sciences and support services
42 Engineering
91 Mathematics and Statistics
87 Physical Sciences</p>
<p>Everything else, for me, falls into Humanities/soft sciences.</p>
True, but you have to believe that the schools are lying about it to believe that there is. I think somebody with an accusation like that has the burden of proof, and it hasn’t been met, or even approached.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. In theory, the school may not intend to apply racial discrimination, but individual admissions readers may be (perhaps unconsciously) biased.</p>
<p>Given the intentional opaqueness of the admissions process in question, it is unreasonable for an outsider to really come to a solid conclusion on this matter, or how much any other criterion for admission matters.</p>
<p>I don’t have an opinion on this issue, because I don’t have the data that would be needed to form one. So, Hunt, it seems pointless to me to ask people to meet the burden of proof, when they have no way of accessing the data relevant to the issue. I think that the consistency in the fraction of Asian-American students in the classes, from year to year, looks a bit suspicious, frankly. (I am not Asian-American.)</p>
This is possible, but if this is the explanation, it’s harder to know what the schools should do about it. Training, I guess.</p>
<p>As to the burden of proof, people who think somebody else is doing something wrong always have the burden. I agree that in this case proof might be awfully hard to come by, at least written proof, because there could be a conspiracy without anything being in writing. But I find it quite persuasive that no former adcom has ever admitted that this kind of racism was going on.</p>
<p>It is possible to retain holistic admissions but be race-neutral. No one is saying the Constitution forbids the use of teacher recommendations and personal statements or giving preferences to first-generation college students. I have criticized the use of subjective measures that have not been validated, but I have not suggested banning them.</p>
<p>We can wait four years to find out. Do you have access to the intended majors of the class of 2011, at the time they began their studies? Students change their plans. Students are more likely to switch out of math and the hard sciences than into them. Thus, the percentages of hard science, math and computer science majors will be lower among the graduates than the entering freshmen. </p>
<p>While that may be in a court of law, that is not necessarily the case with people’s opinions. Nor does insufficient proof necessarily mean that the accusation is false if the accused is good enough at obscuring it.</p>
<p>Using the stats-centric argument, there is no doubt, to me at least with all the publicly available data, that Asian Americans are fighting uphill battles in elite college admission.</p>
<p>Using the holistic-evaluation view, however, it is hard for either side to make a convincing case since we just do not have access to the data.</p>