No one here is saying it’s just about stats. And no one here is advocating for the elimination of holistic review.
But it’s intellectual dishonesty to not acknowledge that the racial percentages changed significantly at previously race-conscious HOLISTIC schools that went to race-blind HOLISTIC (e.g. UMich, UCs, Florida, etc).
Public schools are not as interested in curating a class as the super-selective private schools appear to be, although general outlines are sometimes the subject of political pressures.
However, they tend to explicitly have caps on majors that are enrolled at capacity, so that admission thresholds can vary by major (either when applying to the school, or when applying to the major after enrolling and taking the prerequisites). For example, here are San Jose State University’s admission thresholds in recent past years:
http://info.sjsu.edu/static/admission/impaction.html
Note that the eligibility index in the frosh thresholds is GPA * 800 + SATCR + SATM, or GPA * 200 + ACT * 10. For transfers, the GPA listed is the GPA that the applicant has from transferable courses at prior college(s). So that means that if a student (of whichever race, ethnicity, gender) applies to a popular major (e.g. computer science, animation, or accounting at SJSU), his/her chance of admission is less than if s/he applies to an unpopular major (e.g. geology, materials engineering, or arts other than animation at SJSU). So if a particular demographic group happens to concentrate its applications in popular majors, it may see a worse admission rate if its applicant pool has a similar distribution of relevant qualifications as others.
If resultant racial percentages are solely the consequence of non-racially-biased holistic criteria, then Princeton et al. should just go the way of U Mich and eliminate race-conscious admissions.
I know the link was about minorities, but do you mean UMich at 12-13% Asian proves something positive, while Harvard at 15.6% and Princeton at 19.8%, prove bias? Maybe you want admits to be proportional to the number of applicants, for Asian Americans, (while somehow not examining race/ethnicity.) ? Or to disregard geo diversity and majors.
I know there’s a flip side to this argument.
I’m not comparing UMich to Princeton. That’s apples and oranges.
I’m comparing UMich to UMich:
a comparison of race-conscious admissions BEFORE the affirmative action ban vs. race-blind admissions AFTER the affirmative action ban. UMich used holistic criteria both before & after the ban, yet after the ban the racial percentages changed.
The racial percentages changed significantly at ALL the schools when they had to comply w an affirmative action ban.
^^^Yes, but other factors also came into play. For example, a new category (two or more races) was added, and that played a role in lowering the Black/AA % as some % of Black/AA students started to identify in this category. I’m not saying removing affirmative action didn’t impact the %, only that other factors should also be considered.
By the way, in 2002, UMich overall 6 year graduation rate was 84.2%, Black Females were 69.8%, and Black Males were 58.5%. In 2013, the overall graduation rate was 90%, Black Females were 83.2%, and Black Males were 69.1%. To me, that implies that URM’s are doing better after UMich removed race based admissions; fewer students, but also better performing students (on average).
The UF student newspaper recently did a great piece on changing demographics at UF (and the decrease in black/African-American enrollment).
http://www.alligator.org/news/campus/article_5dbce54c-cd32-11e4-92f6-cf8d1bc442ee.html
@GMTplus7 I’m afraid I don’t follow.
Isn’t the point of the thread to see if there is discrimination specifically against Asians in Ivy colleges? We all know AA is (was) being used by AOs in other universities ( with the Ivies having insisted that there is no bias against Asians in their holistic process). The original lawsuit was filed against Princeton, not UMich, as you’re very much aware. These two colleges look for very different things in an applicant. Some of the UC’s as I understand have a majority of Asian students. Are they biased against black and white people? No. But their admission needs probably differ.
I understand you were illustrating a point on how “race-blind” admissions would change the racial percentage of each class, but that does not necessarily mean that ALL percentages of Asians will increase (or decrease) as they did in these cases.
@Gator88NE That’s actually a good point.
What I don’t understand is this: why would a student apply to a university that he/she believes is biased against them?
IMO, some people just don’t want to think that maybe they were not the best applicant ever for this particular college and that others may have had qualities the University wanted but they themselves lacked.
I agree with what @Hanna said.
No, that wasn’t a factor except right after the US Census introduced the multi-race option in 2000.
The schools that were banned from using affirmative action, went to race-blind admissions in different years, ranging from 1997 to 2008. In the first year each of them went race-blind, the racial percentages of the admittees changed significantly.
If Espenshade data was from HYP, then his technique was able to show racial biased admission decisions were taking place even if a holistic admission process was used. He did this by first showing that he could predict the percent likelihood of admission using SAT scores. He was then able to show bias in admission using race, Legacy status and recruited athlete status. One should be able to use the same technique to determine if Princeton has a bias against STEM.
Espenshade was a Princeton faculty member. After the OCR investigation started he said this (inside Higher Ed. 2009):
Before the OCR investigation he wrote this:
Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities, SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 85, Number 5, December 2004
And then this:
The Opportunity Cost of Admission Preferences at Elite Universities, SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 86, Number 2, June 2005
Can you explain for those of us who haven’t read the last article you cited why it is that the Asians would occupy 80% of the seats vacated by removing racial/ethnic preferences yet only 18% of the seats not vacated by removing racial or ethnic preferences? There is obviously something big going on with those particular seats but I’m not sure what it is. Would Asians be flocking to fill the African American studies programs more so than whites and be admitted in large numbers to keep those programs afloat? Or?
I can answer this. It happens every time there is a failure of proof that selective colleges are discriminating against Asians in favor of whites. Since it is not really disputed that selective colleges are admitting URMs who would not be admitted but for their race, this is an easier target for those who want to complain about race-based admissions decisions. But it’s really a red herring.
If you read the OCR report on Princeton, it’s obvious that Princeton considered URM status to be a plus factor, but that there was no evidence that being Asian was a negative factor (or that being white was a plus factor, either). That’s because the issue of whether URMs are getting a preference is A DIFFERENT ISSUE from whether Asians are being discriminated against in favor of whites. I have to repeat this point in every conversation we have on this topic.
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.
@lookingforward, I understand what you say about URMs, and it’s certainly true that many URMs at highly selective schools would be admitted irrespective of race. However, I think it is simply the case–which I fully approve of, by the way–that URM status is a significant enough plus factor that some students would not be admitted without it. I don’t see that as a problem, nor do I think URMs are being admitted who are unqualified. One reason I continue to make this point is to answer the constant refrain, “If URMs can get in without consideration of race, then why don’t selective schools stop considering race?” The fact is that URM admission at top schools would substantially decline without affirmative action, and I think that would be a very bad thing.
Here’s the relevant Espenshade/Chung article: https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webOpportunity%20Cost%20of%20Admission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20June%202005.pdf
Quick read: Their basic model is really simplistic: They essentially reduce all admissions variables to race, athletic something or other (they say “recruited athletes,” but their “recruited athletes” have less than a 50% admission rate, so they are not talking about anything like actual athletic recruitment), legacy status, U.S. citizenship, SATs, and randomness. The number of athletic and legacy candidates is comparatively small in their dataset (the 1996-1997 admission season), so those preferences have a fairly small effect on overall numbers. As a result, when they run their simulation without taking race into account, essentially it becomes a model where the only meaningful variable is SAT scores, and the class is shaped to conform to the SAT distribution among unhooked white students. If you do that, Asians replace most of the Black and Hispanic students.
But no one does anything like that, or would.
One of the things I really noticed, reading the article, is how wildly out of date the numbers are. The overall admission rate for U.S. citizens at the three elite colleges in the study is over 23%; legacies are a little less than 50%; anyone with SATs over 1500 (out of 1600) is 40%. As noted above, recruited athletes are just under 50%, too, which is a total puzzler, because experience tells me that number is more like 95%, if not 99%. (The number of athletes admitted for the three colleges is also significantly greater than current Ivy rules would permit for recruited athletes.) In short, the world being modeled is not the world of today, and not really the world of a generation ago, either.
Another interesting point: In the study, international applicants are considered in the race distribution numbers. You can tell that because the sum of all racial categories equals the sum of all applicants, including international applicants. But it wasn’t clear to me how international applicants were handled in the simulations, because the relevant tables don’t have those numbers. (I may not have read hard enough, but I couldn’t find any discussion, either.)
True dat. Furthermore, folks in these here parts don’t talk about their neighbor being wealthy or a millionaire, they just say “he’s a potato farmer”.
Right, Hunt, we aren’t fully “there” yet. An interesting group to follow will be Hispanics. I believe, as new figures come out over the next years, we’ll see a rise in stats at the top end. My basis is, at this point, anecdotal, my limited sample.
And ime, despite the certainty of many on CC that race is a major consideration, a literal “preference,” there are still hoops to get through, for the competitive colleges.
Right. The stats break for URM isn’t all that huge. The URM kids who are being accepted at the most selective schools are all highly accomplished students. There are not URM kids getting into Harvard who would have to settle for community college without affirmative action.
It’s worth noting that the situation was meaningfully different during the '80s and '90s, when all of the data that Espenshade et al. rely on was gathered. Elite colleges were accepting a higher percentage of minority applicants, with significantly lower stats than today. The studies of that data assign a much stronger effect to affirmative action than I think it has today.
Yes, I realize that Idaho is pretty white, ucb. I’m not sure what your point is.
But if you want to nitpick here, if the kid is a farmer’s kid in the sense that his parent(s) WORK on the farm rather than OWN the farm, the kid could very well be Hispanic, about 70% of ag workers are. In fact the kid could BE the farmer, since ag workers lack the child labor regulations that other types or workers have. Or, the kid could be black because prisoners are being used to work farms in Idaho now that there’s been a crackdown on illegal Mexican immigrants working them. And even in white Idaho, black people are disproportionately represented in Idaho state prisons (and actually quite a few are native American too).
So, if the Idaho farm kid IS white, and the NYC Stuy kid is Asian, will the Idaho kid’s acceptance be taken as evidence of discrimination against Asians? Maybe, but I’m not hearing a ton of attacks on preference for white people in this thread, more against URMs. For instance:
^ these are places AA was eliminated.And Asian enrollment did increase, and URM enrollment decreased.
^ but, what impact did eliminating AA really have when, eg, FL State is 2.5% Asian and U FL 7.5%? (Per the info I saw.)