Everyone’s proportion of STEM degrees has been increasing over the past decade.
The OCR handing of the Princeton case by looking at 1000 reviews comments would not allow them to perform the statistical analysis for a group of 3 elite colleges (probably HYP) used by Espernshade (2005) which showed:
From the same paper:
Cass Cliatt, a spokeswoman for Princeton (from Inside Higher Ed, June 11,2008):
However
The holistic review considers items that would be very difficult to study statistically. It specifically does not reward only those with the highest grades and scores. Now, you can think this is a pretext to enable discrimination against Asians, but you’re not going to be able to prove it with statistics. You’ll need some other kind of smoking gun–and there hasn’t been one in the years that this has been a controversy. The OCR report on Princeton is, in my view, pretty devastating to anybody who thinks there is deliberate discrimination going on.
Exactly. And that was my point way back up-thread. There is no way that the feds could have found anything, even if they tried. They just dragged out the investigation until the claimant had successfully graduated college. Perhaps just a coincidence? 
Not me, but others certainly may. My pretext, such that it is, is just basic common (statistical) sense that you so clearly laid out in your quote above, hunt.
“The OCR report on Princeton is, in my view, pretty devastating to anybody who thinks there is deliberate discrimination going on.” Not really. People who conclude there must be deliberate discrimination going on from a 50 point difference in SAT scores, when we know that is just one of many components to the application, are going to say the report was biased. That was entirely predictable.
Plenty of kids can’t even reproduce an SAT score within 50 points in multiple takes. It’s not that big a difference. How many of you would tell a kid with a 2300 to retake the SAT because they could get a 2350 and that would be a significant boost to their application?
The original complainant graduated from college years ago (from Harvard, which, interestingly, also rejected him, but later accepted him as a transfer from Yale).
My point is that statistics based on grades and scores will never be enough to prove discrimination at a college that uses holistic review. In this situation statistic evidence of a disparate impact will not be enough to show wrongdoing. Only something like overt stereotyping, or statements suggesting a discriminatory policy will suffice. That’s what OCR was looking for, and what it didn’t find.
@Hunt wrote
The holistic review can be very EASILY analyzed statistically. The OCR report states that the AOs assigned numerical scores to the non-academic (EC, etc) ratings.
From the OCR report:
https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/investigations/02086002-a.pdf
Just redact the applicants’ names and release a spreadsheet with the race, non-academic ratings, GPA, legacy status, test scores, & institutional priority, and let the public decide.
Duke similarly assigns ratings to non-academic qualities (ECs, essay, leadership, recs etc). The asian applicants were also scoring the highest ratings for the non-academic qualities.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
refer to Table 1
Duke Admissions Office Rank
White | Black | Hispa | Asian |
4.246 | 3.684 | 4.029 | 4.571 | Achievement
4.655 | 4.302 | 4.706 | 4.861 | Curriculum
3.432 | 3.138 | 3.236 | 3.465 | Essay
3.470 | 3.237 | 3.246 | 3.427 | Personal Qualities
3.804 | 3.467 | 3.478 | 3.918 | Letters of Rec
I see no indication that white liberals are particularly interested in the prospect that selective colleges are discriminating against Asians. Indeed, since many Asians who complain about this also complain about affirmative action for URMs, the opposite may be true.
In looking at things on the web connected with this thread, I noticed Yale reported the class of 2019’s demographic profile in a new way:
[quote]
The following is based on self-reported information solicited from all students once they arrived on campus. A total of 41.1% of freshmen are US citizens or Permanent Residents from minority groups. Categories do not add up to 100% because 19% of freshmen indicated two or more ethnicities and are therefore counted in more than one category.
African American 10.0%
Asian American 21.8%
Hispanic/Latino 13.3%
Native American 2.3%
White 59.6%
International 11.0%/quote
I couldn’t find equivalent lists from Harvard and Princeton.
By doing away with the “multiracial/more than one race” category, of course, it can’t be compared to earlier classes. Nor can it be compared to other universities. It does, however, solve the question of how to categorize students who would otherwise be reported as “multiracial.”
That is not a new thing. Experiments to test this type of thing have been going on for years:
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
and not just in the US:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/how-an-ethnic-sounding-name-may-affect-the-job-hunt/article555082/
OCR also compared “Applicant 1’s” application with two students from his high school class who were admitted (one Asian and one non-Asian) and concluded that, in fact, they were better than him. Ouch.
Oh folks, just jump to the Race in College Admissions thread, where you can vent and speculate to your heart’s content.
You don’t know. You think you smell something, so you call “Rat!” And when they guy (or gal) comes and looks behind your walls and in your yard and says, no evidence of rodents, you insist he didn’t look hard enough or used the wrong tools, or belongs to some secret society to dupe you…because you know. As if you had x-ray vision. Or you read it somewhere, said by someone else with an axe to grind.
Espenshade. So many quote him without reading him. The study is old, looked at few points, has not conclusively expanded or revisited…AND he, himself, says it’s a mistake to base anything on that limited look at just a few variables- basically, stats and race- and not the rest of the app, not comments, and not conversations.
Why do we need to keep saying, decisions are not all about stats?
Btw, despite numbers of recent grads in STEM, the newer turn is that Harvard and others are looking to up the number of non-STEM admits. It’s in print.
But yes, some large pool of kids from concentrated geo areas, wanting similar majors…is not going to dominate the class. Not in holistic and not for a college limited in size and particular dept resources.
What so may fail to examine is how, in this case, Asian Americans from areas other than those geos which present massive numbers of apps- and with various intended majors- fare in admissions. Look at the whole pic, not just the gross figures which so easily convince you.
None of my own comments are anti-Asian American. They’re good kids.
It is quite unfortunate and wrong for the OCR to come to this conclusion. Let’s get one thing straight, EVERYBODY is a victim in America.
EVERYBODY.
Since no man is an island, everybody belongs to some group in America, and as long as you are a member of any group, you are a victim. Take a look, if you belong to any of the following group(s), you are a victim:
Native Americans - victims of white colonialism
African Americans - victims of slavery, racism, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, poverty, bad schools, culture
Hispanics - victims of racism, poverty, bad schools, gang culture
White males - victims of reverse racism
Jews - victims of anti-semitism
Muslims - victims of Islamaphobia
LGBT - victims of homophobia
Illegal immigrants - victims of a broken immigration system
Legal immigrants - victims of nativism, H1-B indentured servitude
Southeast Asians - victims of the model minority myth
East Asians - victims of ORM, Ivy League race quota, America’s fear of the yellow peril, stinky tofu
South Asians - victims of America’s fear of terrorists, stinky curry
Criminals - victims of society, broken families, poverty, mental illness
Prisoners - victims of a broken criminal justice system
Drug addicts, drug dealers, drug cartels, drug mules - all victims of America’s War on Drugs
Bad students - depending on who you ask, victims of poverty, bad parents, bad teachers, unequal funding, culture, teacher’s union
Good students - victims of tiger mothers
Clueless young people - victims of helicopter parents
Young and unemployed - victims of globalization
Middle age and unemployed - victims of agism
Subprime loan borrowers - victims of greedy Wall Street bankers
Student loan borrowers - victims of escalating college costs
The 99% - victims of the 1%, the “system”
Women - the weaker sex has been the victims of sexism and male domination since the dawn of mankind, when Adam got to eat the apple, and Eve got all the blame!
The only thing anyone is not a victim of in America is slothfulness, complete lack of talent or drive, because in America, everybody is special, everybody is a winner, everybody deserves to go to college, and everybody is above average. But rest assure, everybody is a victim…of somebody else.
Don’t forget people who are victimized by being brainwashed into being dittoheads.
“Just redact the applicants’ names and release a spreadsheet with the race, non-academic ratings, GPA, legacy status, test scores, & institutional priority, and let the public decide.” The public cannot decide because the public doesn’t know how many tuba players they need.
If Espenshade data was from HYP this would suggest that his technique for detecting ethnic preferences during admission is not affected by the holistic admission process.
For the same reason, OCR can’t decide. They can only analyze statistical data if they want to “prove” something as more likely than not. (Of course, hopefully they have a higher standard than that!)
If the data is provided for multiple years and ideally from multiple HYP’s, then the trend over time if any will show up. Tuber players cannot be what every school needed every year, and whatever they need shouldn’t work against one racial group every year. Of course, we don’t know if that was the case because they refused to provide the relevant data reason apparently being they didn’t want to “mislead” the public.
" whatever they need shouldn’t work against one racial group every year. " That’s an unfounded assumption, and I don’t believe it’s true. For instance, they need football and basketball players and I do believe that works against one racial group every year.
If Espenshade data was from HYP-
From Princeton Press: “The book’s analysis is based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience, collected from more than nine thousand students who applied to one of ten selective colleges between the early 1980s and late 1990s.”
Also from P, “The NSCE is a collaborative study involving 10 academically selective colleges and universities for the purpose of examining the racial and social class dimensions of college admission and campus life. Institutional data on all applicants for admission in the fall of 1983, 1993, and 1997 were supplemented with survey information on more than 9,000 students.”
I believe someone on CC recently speculated on which colleges- “selective,” not exclusively tippy tops.