It’s a waste of time to discuss affirmative action for URMs in this context. Either you support it or you don’t. By itself, it shouldn’t affect Asian students any more than it affects white students. I suppose that if eliminating affirmative action benefits Asians at a higher rate at some schools than it does white students, that could be some statistical evidence that white enrollment was being supported at the expense of Asians. But without some kind of smoking gun evidence of discriminatory intent, that kind of statistical evidence doesn’t get you too far.
Anyway, affirmative action for URMs remains lawful for private selective schools (like Princeton) as long as they jump through the proper hoops, and the OCR report shows that they are jumping through those hoops. If you don’t like that, you’ll have to change the hoops.
As for the question of whether selective schools are discriminating against Asians in favor of whites, where do people who believe this go next? I don’t know. I think they will face the same results at Harvard, and at any other selective school.
The OCR never preformed a complete statistical analysis of the Princeton admission data. If they did it is possible that they would have found results similar to Espenshade’s study:
And then what? All they could have done then is perform the exact same kind of review they did, because those statistics would have not been enough to show intentional discrimination. I’m sorry, but the Princeton result pretty much puts the stake in the heart of this claim for the highly selective schools. About the best you can do is urge the schools to train their personnel not to succumb to stereotyping–which Princeton already says it does.
Let’s say that a bunch of statistical studies are run, and the end result causes Princeton to say, “Gee, it does look like Asian students need 50 additional SAT points to get admitted to Princeton, for no reason that we can figure out.” What then? As I’ve said, if this were true, the most likely explanation for would be that individual admissions officers are subject to some biases based on stereotypes. If this is the case, Princeton still isn’t violating any law, and there isn’t really anything OCR can do about it. Princeton might decide to do something about it, which would almost certainly take the form of sensitivity training for its personnel. And didn’t Princeton already do this? I guess they could do it some more. What they’re not going to do is blank out all the names on their applications (way too much trouble), or change their overall admissions criteria.
It is possible to examine the admission process in more detail by paying close attention to who handles the admission files and how the final admission decisions were made.
OCR studied, in detail, 1000 specific applications, down to the comments written about each kid. Half of them were randomly chosen, and the other half were from selected high schools. The process was examined in detail. You just don’t like the result, because it doesn’t fit with your belief about what it should have shown.
You keep saying the OCR study was incomplete, but honestly, what you’re pointing to doesn’t make sense, because it wouldn’t make any difference. The OCR did the review that the kind of statistics you are imagining would have led to, specifically a review to see if any differences were because of discriminatory policy or clear bias. They didn’t find any. Again, even if there were statistical evidence of a disparity, without OTHER evidence of bias, there’s no case. And there was no other evidence, so there’s no case. It’s that simple.
Exactly. Holistic admissions disfavors the poor, for example; indeed, the poor cannot participate in the necessary EC’s and are not well represented in the top 10. But the fact that the admissions process ends up with a disparate impact does not make it illegal, unless those admission items were chosen on purpose to disfavor protected classes.
“paying close attention to who handles the admission files” I see, so now it’s morphed from all the colleges are conspiring to discriminate, to only certain staff members at each school are in on this conspiracy?
And, since the numbers of Asian admits were pretty similar between colleges during the period under study, you additionally know that the overall number of students against whom each staff member who was discriminating varied according to what fraction of the total staff in that particular office was participating in the discrimination? And that furthermore these numbers were automatically adjusted as staff members in admissions were replaced over the years? My head is spinning.