Espenshade said he had no smoking gun. His data is not “HYP,” we’re past that. He is not a relevant source to base this claim on. Among what he didn’t examine was the impact at privates of building a class representative of multiple geo areas, while publics have a primary responsibility to their own state residents.
Asian Americans do not occupy 80%, even at UCB, the flagship for California, with the highest number of Asians in the country. On a quick look, I saw “Asians” at 35-40%, there. 31% at UCLA. The admit rate, this year, per UCB, was roughly 40% for Asians. An increase of almost 5% over last year. Interestingly, roughly the same % increase for Blacks, per UCB.
Not to mention that it’s hard to rest a position on a study from 1997, it’s barely relevant to 2015. Things move fast. Ten years ago, roughly 22750 applied to Harvard, this past year, it was over 37k. You can’t assume. And you can’t just take a slice of the picture and extrapolate. By all means, keep digging.
Hunt, I need to say something about this conviction many have that URMs “would not be admitted but for their race.” That holds if you do a hard stats comparison only. (And after the fact.) This isn’t all just about “diversity,” digging lower, just to achieve some numbers. When you have a process that wants to see certain energies, nothing says the lower stats kids aren’t showing that in spades, more energy, vision, commitments, etc, than those kids whose main claim to fame is some hs titles. It’s one reason I mind the surface-only view.