NY Times Op Ed: Is Harvard Unfair to Asian-Americans?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>Gibby, I agree with you 100%.</p>

<p>I saw somewhere that test scores correlate pretty well with achievement outside the classroom as well as inside, so admitting the top 1650 applicants by SAT scores and grades would be fine, I think. If 70% of them were Asian, great! We should all favor that because it would mean that we’d be surrounded by truly the top of the top at Harvard, which is a great way to learn and push yourself. (I am white, but I couldn’t care less about skin color of my classmates.)</p>

<p>Plus, if what I read on this board about law schools admitting people based only on grades and test scores (which I don’t believe, although people insist that it’s true), then HLS shows what would happen if only grades and test scores were considered. People there were wonderful and so I see no reason to think that Harvard undergrad would not also do fine under those admissions criteria.</p>

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<p>No wonder the US is getting freakish snow & cold in Nov. When the NYT & WSJ have the same op/ed opinion on this subject, hell must be freezing over.</p>

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<p>^^ I hadn’t realized the WSJ had a similar article: <a href=“Harvard’s Asian Problem - WSJ”>http://online.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-problem-1416615041&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I don’t like the idea of admission solely based on test scores. It emphasizes one element of who a student is to the detriment of so many other equally important aspects.
The need to quantify every element of the criteria necessary to be admitted is a significant mistake in my opinion.
To think that it wouldn’t create an almost complete preoccupation with the standardized test isn’t realistic, it would detract from students high school experience as well as their contribution to their schools and their communities.
The Harvard admissions process is incredibly rigorous, and comprehensive. Is it perfect? No, there are a handful of students that perhaps shouldn’t be there but not many.
I can’t imagine it being all about the test. SAT prep beginning in eighth grade? Kids taking the SAT or ACT time after time trying to eak out another few points? Like there isn’t enough pressure on these kids already! There are countless reasons why I don’t believe this is a good idea or the “answer”.
The holistic admissions process isn’t perfect but many schools including Harvard do an outstanding job with it.</p>

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<p>Nobody is advocating an admission process based on just test scores. The issue is whether this holistic admission process is designed to maintain a pre-determined racial diversity. If it is Harvard’s intention to keep the Asian Ameircan students to 17%, it should be upfront with it. </p>

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<p>There were a number of posts advocating just that.
The suggestion is that Asians are being discriminated against because their “test scores” are higher on average than any other demographic group.
24 percent of Harvards class of 2018 identifies as Asian. </p>

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<p>Again, </p>

<p>Please explain to me how anyone can assume that they have an absolute, unconditional right to a place at any private school? </p>

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<p>

No one is proposing admissions based only on scores. Your comment betrays your poor understanding of data. </p>

<p>One should expect a range of scores (i.e. a cloud of data like a Naviance scatterplot) since scores are not the sole criterion for selection. The problem is that for different demographic groups, the clouds of data points don’t overlap, indicating that different bars are being set for different groups. </p>

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<p>I think there are two issues. (Please allow me to speak in generalities – of course I know things aren’t so black and white but please indulge me)</p>

<p>One: it should come as no surprise that the avg SATs of incoming pre-engineering students might be higher than the avg SATs of the lacrosse recruits. Is this a different bar for different groups? Yes. The fact is there are many many more pre-engineering applicants than recruitable larcrosse players. Thus, it would be a near statistical impossibility for the SAT avg of the recruited lax players to surpass the pool of accepted pre-engineering students.</p>

<p>Two: can a private school like Harvard set soft quotas for sub-categories? Numbers of internationals, numbers of male students intending to study nursing or science/math education, numbers of women engineering majors, numbers of music/theatre/dance geniuses, number of women volleyball players, number of lower SES applicants… If you say YES to number TWO, then number ONE must occur.</p>

<p>Why isn’t there a major movement on behalf of international applicants? It’s 100% clear that as a group, they get screwed over the most. Their apps have increased MUCH greater than domestic students. But their presence in top US colleges has remained very static. Where’s the outrage? Where are the demands for “equity” or “transparency” or “change to more meritocratic admissions”? Instead no one makes a peep. Why? Cuz we only want to give up X numbers of “OUR” seats to those Chinese, Korean, Indian, Russian, kids… Double standard much?</p>

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<p>

There’s no outrage because there’s no legal issue w limiting the number of international students. </p>

<p>The basis of the lawsuit is that H is violating Title IV of the Civil Rights Act which prohibits institutions of higher ed that receive federal funding to discriminate on the basis of race. Int’l students are distinguished by their country of residency or citizenship, not by race. Residency & citizenship are mutable conditions; race isn’t. </p>

<p>Institutions of higher ed that receive US taxpayer money should rightly give priority to US citizens. If foreigners don’t like that, then they should examine whether colleges in their own country use tax dollars/yuan/euros/etc to cater to foreigners first.</p>

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<p>^^^ I agree with @GMTplus7. U.S. schools benefit from so many federal, state, and local tax moneys: Federal financial aid and loans that flow into tuition, no property taxes, financial contributions are tax-deductible, no capital gains tax on the endowment, etc. The outright or implied mission of any U.S. school is to educate U.S. students, just like the schools in France are there for the French. Many schools all over the world also take international students to spread their culture, for diversity, and to bring unusual talent to the school. But it is not a scandal to limit the number of these students since taxpayers are underwriting the enterprise and it is not one country’s job to educate everyone who wants to take a fancy degree and then use it in another country.</p>

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<p>You guys say it should have diversity and such, the whole subjective component- so why can’t they just evaluate applications race-blind? If the essays make them sound like an asset, and diverse, then they would be accepted, and if not then they wouldn’t be. All it would do is take of the lens of race from admissions. I’m not Asian and I still think that’s the fair thing to do. They shouldn’t have a lower chance of admission based on something they can’t change. Now, if they all appear to lack diversity in interviews and essays, then automatically less would be admitted, but part of their apparent lack of diversity is probably only due to stereotyping.</p>

<p>I feel like my friends who are not stereotypical Asians in their extracurriculars, personalities, etc. Will have a lower admission chance than I do purely because of their race. That’s terribly unfair in my eyes.
And if colleges say that it isn’t that they discriminate, it’s that the subjective factors are more solid in non-Asian applicants, then it can’t hurt to be race blind, right?</p>

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<p>Steven Pinker of Harvard argues that Harvard should ONLY use standardized testing for admissions.</p>

<p><a href=“Harvard, Ivy League Should Judge Students by Standardized Tests | The New Republic”>http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Some interesting points he makes:</p>

<p>1) Regarding the SAT being a useless high-stakes test: “Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music, and theater.”</p>

<p>2) Regarding the claim that SAT “just measures parental income”: “Paul Sackett and his collaborators have shown that SAT scores predict future university grades, holding all else constant, whereas parental SES (socio-economic status) does not. Matt McGue has shown, moreover, that adolescents’ test scores track the SES only of their biological parents, not (for adopted kids) of their adoptive parents, suggesting that the tracking reflects shared genes, not economic privilege.”</p>

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<p>But 4thfloor, Harvard’s active recruiting of students who solely don’t have the best SATs should tell you that they consciously have considered that option and have passed on that path. Are they allowed to do that? Are they allowed to recruit the best women’s field hockey team they can? Are they allowed to court that international level cellist or vocalist or painter? Are they allowed to accept the daughter of the Russian billionaire who’s been at a Swiss finishing school for the last 15 years?</p>

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<p>

There already is an elite prep school “entrance” exam for HYPM; it’s called crew & squash. </p>

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<p>^^ Haha! So true.</p>

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<p>The only way to avoid this controversy is to </p>

<p>(1) Completely avoid asking “any RACE related info” in the applications
(2) College applications should NOT ask about parents name/birthplace/citizenship/background. Because that also gives clear clue on the students RACE.
(3) Completely hide the “Student Name”, which is otherwise another clue on the students RACE.</p>

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<p>^^ I’m sure Harvard knows this but unless they decide to abandon affirmative action, they’re not going to do as you suggest.</p>

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<p>@T26E4: The question of how much Harvard is “allowed” to do with holistic admissions – whether it uses this to create an outcome of racial quotas – is that this lawsuit is about, isn’t it?</p>

<p>But academics-only admissions, the kind advocated by Steven Pinker, is what Cambridge and Oxford do. And if Harvard did the same, it would still have Natalie Portman (perfect SATs), Yo-yo Ma (skipped two grades in school before college), Terrence Malick (Phi Beta Kappa/AB Philosophy, published translation of Martin Heidegger), Kevin Hu (Math 55er; Violinist, Harvard Symphony Orchestra; Concertmaster, Chicago Youth Symphony), and of course dropouts Bill Gates (Math 55er) and Mark Zuckerberg (some start-up out there), just among a few that I bothered to look up.</p>

<p>@Falcon1: exactly. But to be serious, evidence exists to shown that while holistic admissions at highly selective institutions provide a small boost to Black enrollment (mostly to middle and upper-middle class African-Americans, athletes, and Africans or recent immigrants from Africa), the overall effect is to make the school “whiter and richer,” which makes sense because just think how much more >>>expensive<<< it is to package kids for holistic admissions!</p>

<p>So it turns out that holistic admissions is effectively a form of affirmative action for rich whites. Besides preppy sports (your and GMTplus7’s “crew & squash” example), another emerging form of affirmative action for whites is the learning disabled category. It has been found that psychiatrist certifications for learning disability for high school applicants seem, curiously, to concentrate in certain high-wealth zip codes like Greenwich, CT, certain pockets of Long Island, NY, etc.</p>

<p>On the other hand, most people are completely mistaken to think that the advantage for whites comes from the legacy preference. A Yale study several decades ago discovered that while Yale legacies did indeed get Yale fat envelopes at higher rates than average, Yale legacies also got HARVARD and PRINCETON fat envelopes at higher rates than average there. It is not the legacy status per se. Rather, the same environmental, cultural, family, and genetic factors that made the parents Yalies also made their children highly competitive applicants everywhere else.</p>

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<p>Apart from test scores, for what other attributes are some demographic groups being held to a higher standard? For kids of similar economic background, is a violin in the hands of a hispanic kid counted as more meritorious than a violin in the hands of an asian kid?</p>