"Race" in College Admission FAQ & Discussion 10

Applying to College
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<p>Philvotist,</p>

<p>“Oh, but the existence of soft quotas is a known fact. JBHE even quotez Harvard promising to limit its black admits to 200 kids so that other universities might have strong black applicants as well.”</p>

<p>Interesting, because Harvard submitted a S Ct brief in the Fisher case (link below), along with other top colleges, claiming that it uses a holistic admissions process that does not involve quotas. </p>

<p>tech.mit.edu/V132/N31/fisher/Brown<em>et</em>al.pdf</p>

<p>This is the type of double speak by Harvard et al that will give the S. Ct. cover to gut affirmative action. Originally, I had supposed that Kennedy (who dissented in Grutter and is now the swing vote in Fisher replacing O’Connor in this role) would not want to be known as the Justice who gutted AA and thought he would strike down the UT system but on narrow grounds. As these stats come out though, and are well known by folks who closely follow college admissions (some of whom will be informing the S Ct) I now think AA will go by the way side entirely in Fisher. </p>

<p>While on its face the 14th does not apply to private colleges, federal civil rights laws do extend the 14th’s protections to private settings and thus this decision will impact Harvard, and other top private schools, almost as much as UT.</p>

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<p>The notion of soft quotas is a reality but I understand that young, idealistic people think that the strongest, smartest, fastest and best should always win out and succeed over their lesser competitors. </p>

<p>Is there a time in all history when merit based a only a few arbitrary, yes arbitrary, tests was the only standard of success?</p>

<p>Has there ever been a time when merit was the only factor considered in the American college admissions process either before or after the advent of affirmative action?</p>

<p>The existence of historically black colleges and universities is a monument to myth of merit based admissions.</p>

<p>That being said, a diverse student body is a strategic necessity in a diverse and “browning” nation and world. </p>

<p>While I’m not a proponent of quotas, I agree with the notion of competing for top talent wherever it exists and schools looking outside their pipelines of rich, white kids and smart asians to looking in places they haven’t traditionally looked for talent.</p>

<p>I’m not bothered by the notion that schools that went above and beyond to keep blacks and women and others down and out are now realizing the error of their ways. That they now want student bodies comprised of 5% - 10% talented black students is minuscule compared to the 100% they once denied access based on melatonin.</p>

<p>The character issue is joke as well since good character at one time included slave owners and racists and sexists and anti-Semites who knew how to set a table and behave gentlemanly in spite of themselves. </p>

<p>My point - the meritocracy we all long for never existed before. We all give preference to our family, friends, people who have things in common with us, people who think like us and agree with us and look like us.</p>

<p>The genius of the modern college admissions process is the effort to overcome those evolutionary preferences, to outside the box and to be willing to open the doors to a very limited numbers of spots to those with raw talent but with whom they have little in common.</p>

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<p>Lots of grammar issues-typing on iPad is a bear.</p>

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<p>If you’re restricting your attention to elite universities, where presumably (keyword) merit would matter most, the answer to both your questions is NO. Racial classification (and religion) both mattered, even though neither is relevant to merit.</p>

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<p>I do too. I doubt you’ll find very many who oppose that, though some surely do. But to me, that’s not what the elites are doing because it requires way too much effort. They’d rather take the easy way out: admit wealthly so-called “underrepresented” minorities. They get the same photo opportunities at far less cost.</p>

<p>I think that without racial preferences, elites will be FORCED to make this notion a reality.</p>

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<p>Madaboutx,</p>

<p>In the Chosen, Jerome Karabel (a sociologist at UCB) provides an exhaustive (600-plus pages) review of the historical admissions practices at HYP and at the same time examines the beginnings of “holistic” admissions practices. For many years in the 19th and early 20th centuries, HYP primarily used tests to determine entrance. Initially, the tests were wildly skewed in favor of the St. Grottlesex crowd, requiring knowledge of greek and latin, which were not generally taught in public schools. </p>

<p>But in the early 20th century under the influence of reformers like Woodrow Wilson at Princeton and Charles Eliot at Harvard, and spurred on by faculty complaints about the poor quality of students, these tests dropped greek and focused more on subjects available to public school students. Reliance on these tests increased the academic quality of the student bodies at HYP, but resulted in a new “problem” – an influx of Jewish students that threatened the protestant elite alumni bases of each schools (eg, Harvard about 25% Jewish in the first decade of the 20th century). </p>

<p>To pacify the alums, Harvard, circa 1910 or so under its new president Lawrence Lowell, announced limitations on Jewish enrollment and endured a public backlash. Harvard then accomplished the same results, limiting Jewish enrollment to about 10% – via a “holistic” approach focusing on intangibles like leadership, character etc loosely modeled after the criteria for the Rhodes Scholarship. In addition to tests, this approach relied on subjective factors like recommendations, essays etc. </p>

<p>The holistic approach succeeded in limiting enrollment of Jewish students at Harvard to about 10% of each class, but in a much quieter way than the publicly announced quotas. Y and P did the same thing, without the initial public announcements. Thus, began holistic admissions practices that continue to this day.</p>

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<p>^Part of the genesis of holistic interviews was also to weed out likely homosexual applicants too. Can’t forget that nugget of bigotry too.</p>

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<p>^And when these tests 19th century test were used as the basis of admission, they would not on favor certain people, they would discriminate against populations of people without the means to study Greek/Latin.</p>

<p>Therefore, elite university never was historically about intellectual and academic merit, it was about class and only a certain class could be admitted.</p>

<p>The problem today is that a few folks would like to blame their failure to get admitted to one of the elites on discrimination. The truth is that admission to the elites has always been a gift. A gift that wealthy and mostly white people gave to themselves and their children year after year.</p>

<p>Today, getting in to the elites is still a gift. There is always someone who tests better, has better ECs or a better life story than someone else but doesn’t get admitted. And who receives these gifts is a private matter for private institutions to sort out.</p>

<p>In fact, if a university did decide to allot a certain number of spots to a particular ethnic group, that would discriminate against the guy who may merit acceptance but happens to be the one more than needed.</p>

<p>Thankfully, to the extent that America still does reward merit, an elite education is not the single determinant factor to success in this nation.</p>

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<p>Just because they’re private doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want.</p>

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<p>Re: Tokenadult’s link to the Unz article – The article, regardless of the author’s political stance, is deeply flawed in both its reasoning and its command of facts. Unz jumps to conclusions about trends and behaviors without researching underlying causes and motivations, busily trying to build a case out of disparate pieces of information that do not form the cohesive whole he would like them to form.</p>

<p>Beyond that: while I first encountered this article framed as a treatise on the bias against Asian-American students, what struck me most about the piece, beyond its methodological flaws, was its overwhelming anti-semitism.</p>

<p>I think the issue of bias could use thoughtful analysis, but Unz’s essay does not provide that.</p>

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<p>I posted Unz’s article here on CC but did not finish reading it until yesterday. Although he may have a lot more data than I, he said little that I have not been saying for years: Whoever has the power gets to define it. Life is that simple.</p>

<p>I don’t see any anti-Semitism though. AFAIK, Unz is Jewish.</p>

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<p>[ul]
[<em>]An editorial from the New York Times: [“Class-Based</a> vs. Race-Based Admissions"](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/class-based-vs-race-based-admissions.html]“Class-Based”>Opinion | Class-Based vs. Race-Based Admissions - The New York Times);
[</em>]Study referenced in the editorial: [“A</a> Better Affirmative Action”](<a href=“http://tcf.org/publications/2012/10/a-better-affirmative-action-state-universities-that-created-alternatives-to-racial-prefences]“A”>http://tcf.org/publications/2012/10/a-better-affirmative-action-state-universities-that-created-alternatives-to-racial-prefences);
[li]Study’s authors’ response to Times’ editorial: [“Considering</a> Race and Class in College Admissions”](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/opinion/considering-race-and-class-in-college-admissions.html]"Considering”>Opinion | Considering Race and Class in College Admissions - The New York Times)[/li][/ul]</p>

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<p>Ridethewave,</p>

<p>What part of Unz’s statistics don’t you like? Among the problems I see with them – he does not know the number of applications from Jewish students compared to everyone else, his use of high level math contests as a proxy for intelligence seems limited, and his attempts to discern Jewish academic performance on those tests (as well as honors at Harvard) via guessing on their religion based on last names. </p>

<p>Nevertheless, I think these flaws only go so far in explaining why 2% of the population has 25% of the slots at Harvard and has for so many years maintained that approximate percentage (as have other groups, as noted in my e-mail above). Thus, I am glad he raised these issues and am waiting for a factual rebuttal of his stats, which I have not yet seen.</p>

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<p>Stitchintime, </p>

<p>I find it interesting that no one in any of the NYT pieces looks at the relative percentage of AA’s (subject to historic discrimination) versus internationals (who have not and are almost invariably very wealthy) that top colleges use to fulfill the URM numbers. I have seen statistics that as much as 28% of the URM’s at Harvard, for example, are international.</p>

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<p>Data help convince.</p>

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<p>Anti-Semitism is not limited to non-Jews. Not participating in competitions doesn’t mean lack of competitiveness, it may well reflect diminishing values of said competitions.</p>

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<p>One commentator examining why Unz’s main graph (showing increasing asian population and flat ivy enrollments) is misleading. Not a full rebuttal by any means, but at least a start.</p>

<p>[The</a> Visual Presentation of Misleading Information, Anti-Asian Bias Edition – Uncertain Principles](<a href=“http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2012/11/28/the-visual-presentation-of-misleading-information-anti-asian-bias-edition/]The”>The Visual Presentation of Misleading Information, Anti-Asian Bias Edition | ScienceBlogs)</p>

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<p>^^His argument would have been more convincing if he actually bothers to read the article. As is, he comes across as nit-picky… he is even unsure if the graph was done that way deliberately or not.</p>

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<p>Canuckguy, I do some of this for a living, and he’s right - a double y axis is a bad and misleading way to graph data, and it’s inappropriate to compare the raw numbers to the percents. Having said that, the data isn’t wrong - just poorly presented. ,</p>

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<p>I got an email from Cornell inviting me to a admissions chat with admission officers and students. The email was sent from the email: <a href=“mailto:diversity@cornell.edu”>diversity@cornell.edu</a> and in the lady’s signature it said she was the multicultural recruiter. Being academically successful and black can have it’s experiences lol.</p>

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<p>And its advantages. </p>

<p>At what point do we level the playing field? From the immigrants who came through Ellis Island to the Jews post WWII, there have been many who faced discrimination and oppression and had to make it without anyone paving the way. AA is institutional discrimination fundamentally contrary to the the Constitution and the rights we seek to preserve.</p>

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<p>Okay, are we comparing what the immigrants went through to what enslaved african americans went through?</p>

<p>Because there’s a slight difference between the two in terms of degree of discrimination and oppression involved.</p>

<p>African americans, until their liberation, went for several generations without any of their number knowing how to read or write or possessing any academic skills. Starting awhile before the 17th century, they got shoved into one way of life completely unprepared in any way for what would be demanded them, and then shoved again at the end of the civil war into another with little assistance and again no preparation.</p>

<p>So to compare the oppression and adversity that this group overcame to get even as far as it has today to the struggles that immigrants to America went through — that seems a bit disingenuous.</p>

<p>A little perspective would be nice, in consideration of the reason things are the way they are. Your post seems to suggest that somehow African Americans, compared to other cultural groups like Asian Americans and Jewish Americans, just lacked the willpower and perseverance to overcome the weight placed on them.</p>