<p>Hat tip to StitchInTime for linking to the article that in turn links to the comprehensive University of Texas webpage gathering up all the documents related to the current case before the United States Supreme Court. </p>
<p>[VPLA</a> | Fisher vs. Texas](<a href=“Home | Legal Affairs”>Home | Legal Affairs)</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell, in this terrible terrible book called Blink, reports a not so terrible study that demonstrates that simply indicating that you are African American before taking a Standardized Test primes you to do more badly on that test.</p>
<p>This pervading effect that simply being a URM can have seems to justify affirmative action for me.</p>
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<p>You are talking about [a</a> study done by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson](<a href=“http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_08_21_a_choking.htm]a”>http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_08_21_a_choking.htm). Gladwell summarized their finding as follows:</p>
<p>when they [Steele and Aronson] gave a group of Stanford undergraduates a standardized test and told them that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical.</p>
<p>While your description of the study differs slightly from Gladwell’s, your conclusion does not follow given how you described the study. If it were shown that blacks underperform when they explicitly indicate that they are black and do not underperform when they do not indicate that they are black, how does that justify supporting a policy that encourages blacks to indicate that they are black?</p>
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Asians have a tougher time getting into top colleges. It is not the case that fewer apply. Thus that logic is not entirely accurate (if at all accurate). Everyone wants to get into top colleges.</p>
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Wrong. Every college in America receives significant federal funding. Thus they are accountable to the public interest. Need I mention that forgoing federal funding would be devastating? The majority of research is funded by the government or government-sponsored agencies.</p>
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Anecdotal evidence is notoriously unreliable and holds no logical weight.</p>
<p>closertothestars:
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See my point above.</p>
<p>Philovitist:
So what you’re saying is that because URMs hold unconscious stereotypes about themselves that drag down their performance, colleges ought to give than preferential treatment? Heck, then what’s next? Then because of unconscious stereotypes of being 2400 nerd types, Asians ought to be given preferential treatment in college athletics recruiting?</p>
<p>CardinalEdu I think the title of your article is misleading. The SAT scores are only a few years old, but the data from the book he quotes is essentially the same old study from kids who graduated HS twenty years ago.</p>
<p>" 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.*"</p>
<p>The original data also said that a very small percentage of black students takeing that test ( those scoring 1200 to 1300 I think ) got such bump, and that black students scoring higher or lower, were actually “penalized” more than other groups.</p>
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<p>I don’t think Middle eastern can be classified in the white race along with Germans, Swedish or Dutch people. The arabs(middle eastern) and the people from europe are so different on skin and of course ideology. Europeans (including Bosnia, Russia and Est Europe) are white people(not so white like Swedish), but the people from Middle East are Arabs, and their color it is so different with eastern europe people. You can not say the people Pakistan are white, even Pakistan is from middle east. They are more like Hindus people instead white people from Europe.</p>
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<p>This just shows how you meaningless and arbitrary the categories are. Filipinos are not considered Hispanics or Latinos, despite that the Philippines was one of the last colonies Imperial Spain possessed. Whites who have Spanish ancestry (or even just Spanish parents) can call themselves Hispanic and thus receive preferential treatment, though there is nothing special about Spain compared to other European nations.</p>
<p>A recent article from the NY Times shows that there is not a material difference between enrollment percentages of white, black & hispanics in college:</p>
<p><a href=“Hispanics’ College Enrollment Surges, Report Finds - The New York Times”>Hispanics’ College Enrollment Surges, Report Finds - The New York Times;
<p>Is it time for colleges to forget about their URM preferences and quotas and let everyone be considered on the merits? Or should the URM preferences be changes to more of a socioeconmic one?</p>
<p>I don’t know why you think that. 6 percentage points isn’t a huge difference, but it’s not trivial. (And those numbers include two year community college programs; I suspect the numbers would not look nearly so good for only four year programs.)</p>
<p>There has been some interesting research on interventions to overcome “stereotype threat.” </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-67-2-130.pdf[/url]”>Internal Server Error;
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<p>I don’t want to insult Philippines(I meet some people from Philippines and they are really cool! I know in Tagalog the word for ghost it is inherited from Spanish), but Syria was the last French colony, but they are not WHITE and you can see them on TV, killing each other like any other terrorists. Mali was a French colony and they are muslims and speak French but they are not White. If a country was colonized it doesn’t say to much information about the race.</p>
<p>However Philippines are more white than Middle Eastern are.</p>
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<p>I’m not an expert on Levantine demographics, but if you take a look at photos of Bashar al-Assad, you’d be hard pressed to say that he isn’t white. </p>
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<p>That’s true. But regarding my Hispanic example, Hispanic is not a racial classification. One can be of any racial classification and also be Hispanic. There are white, Amerindian, black, and Asian Hispanics.</p>
<p>One of the problems with granting preferences to Hispanics is that it assumes that all Hispanics are Amerindians (i.e. “visible” minorities). In fact, several South American countries (e.g. Argentina and Uruguay) are majority white.</p>
<p>but Syria is in the Middle Eastern, so concluding to USA federal laws, Syria is a white country with White people. Pakistan is a white country, but the photos from Google says the Pakistan people’s skin is more close to Indians’ skin. Also ideologies from these countries are so big. What is the ideology of Dutch people(work, learn, study) and the ideology of Syrian people(only war , ak-47, suicide bomb, Allah akhbar). Middle East is so different with Europe. Even Bulgaria which is very very close with Turkey. Turkey is from Middle East.</p>
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<p>I’m not going to get into a discussion about Middle Eastern politics and culture. Suffice it to say that your comments illustrate how arbitrary racial classifications are.</p>
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<p>This is a misunderstanding. By the federal definitions, people from Pakistan are “Asian.” Oddly, there are ethnic groups that span both sides of the common border between Pakistan and Iran. People from Iran are called “white,” but people from Pakistan are called “Asian.” Read, read, and reread the FAQ posts at the beginning of this growing thread. All the links you need to the official definitions can be found in those posts. The Census Bureau itself says the definitions are political, not scientific, and we should take the government’s word for that.</p>
<p>Is diversity about skin color, or culture? </p>
<p>Maybe we need to stop looking at race as a statistic or quota, and evaluate holistically–how it’s affected the applicant. If it hasn’t affected the life of the applicant in some way that makes him special, that makes him a valuable contributor to “diversity”, then colleges are only admitting a token minority, not creating true diversity, but merely a showcase of skin colors.</p>
<p>Nobody can make it through 18 years without being affected by race, though. A middle class suburban white kid and a middle class suburban black kid probably don’t have all that many cultural differences, but their lives are quite a bit different.</p>
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<p>This is either a ■■■■■ or a deeply ignorant poster with a seriously misguided (if not nonexistent) world view.</p>
<p>Personally, I think they have to do away with AA. There’s no need for reparations anymore and all it does now is bastardize the legitimacy and objectivity of the admissions process. There’s no reason why a black or native american student should have any advantage over a white student, and for those who say “we need diversity”, there’s nothing particularly GOOD about diversity. And it’s not worth denying better students admission to preserve this precious diversity. One may also wonder why Jews, who are among the smallest minorities in the world and have endured more discrimination than any other race (including in America, where a holistic admissions system was adopted specifically to reduce the number of Jews in Ivy League colleges), are not included in preferential college admissions.</p>
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Are you taking US History this year?</p>