<p>Gratz v. Bollinger. They said that assigning points automatically to minorities is unconstitutional because it prevents individual assessment to each candidate. This can be extended to admissions in general, because point systems would generally not allow individual assessment. So the UCs probably do not have a point system because it would be struck down by the Supreme Court on precedent. I have not heard anything that said that they have a point system; their own website says that they are holistic. Your spreadsheet doesn’t have the UC logo anywhere, so I am not that inclined to believe it.</p>
<p>But that’s beside the point. The point is that Asians would be accepted in droves at Ivy League institutions without affirmative action despite supposedly better admissions standards there. That is not debatable. Therefore, Asians are better candidates. This entails several things: Asians are good at school (duh) but that they are also good passionate people. So your charge that Asians are soulless drones is false. Please stay on topic this time.</p>
<p>I don’t “toss” the ad hominem and ■■■■■ card around. </p>
<p>Your ad hominem attacks on just this page:</p>
<p>-“Kerkolus, after a few years of college that might help you understand the facts a whole lot better, you might be forced to conclude that the admissions policies are far from being a model for other schools.” Obvious ad hominem attack is obvious.</p>
<p>-“It is not up to me to correct your misinterpretations” Not even trying to refute; just saying that I’m not credible</p>
<p>-“This is not WOW, or whatever the 1997 generation of Charlies now plays!” I’m not sure what WOW is but I’m guessing this is supposed to attack my age</p>
<ul>
<li>“I’ve been here long enough to understand how a forum like this works.”
Attacking my experience on a message board…however relevant that actually is… (see: not relevant)</li>
</ul>
<p>Did I throw it around? Not really, considering it is pretty accurate. Now to the next step: are you a ■■■■■?</p>
<p>Also, I notice you posted the year I listed as my birth year on my account. So you’ve been researching my profile? Come on, man. I understand we disagree but no need to creep.</p>
<p>Affirmative Action is, I believe, directed mainly at URMs, no? So do you mean without AA Asians would replace the black,Hispanic and native students or they would replace the white students? Or both?</p>
<p>Well, OHMomof2 both obviously. It’s a well-known fact that Asians are discriminated against in admissions so if the limits on Asian admission were to go away, both URMs and whites would naturally have their numbers go down.</p>
<p>What my point in that quote was that Xiggi’s insistence that Asians are test-taking drones is false. Asians are well-rounded, passionate people—the kind that would be accepted at Ivy League colleges. The fact that they would be accepted in such high numbers without AA validates that point. At the Ivy level, without passion and well-roundedness, it is impossible to get admitted, after all (without hooks).</p>
<p>My logic in a flow chart (kind of):
Assumptions:
Without Affirmative Action, Asians would be around 40% at Ivy Leagues, similar to UC-Berkeley, a comparable school
At this top level, it is impossible to gain admission as a passionless, bad person</p>
<p>Therefore:
Asians are actually the exact people that colleges are looking for and are not “resume builders” or whatever else people call them.</p>
<p>Pretty simple logic and it’s astounding how Xiggi continues to reject it. It’s OK to try to justify AA to help minorities or other ways that are logically viable. But it is not OK to just attack most Asians on an ill-informed stereotype on an entire race. Would it be OK if some guy here were to call most black people thieves? Of course not; it is blatantly false and offensive. The sheer absurdity of Xiggi’s argument is why I suspect he may be a ■■■■■.</p>
<p>Both my parents are from India (Now in Canada), but my grandma/grandpa from my Dad’s side came from Pakistan during the split of India into Pakistan and India. Even my last name turns up an Irani/Pakistani origin. Therefore, is it possible to pick white/Middle Eastern on the application? If i get into trouble for it, could i claim that i associate with Middle Eastern culture as my ancestors were forced to leave the Middle East? </p>
<p>I don’t think you can assume the same result is likely at the Ivies. “Class-crafting” at the Ivies and NESCAC colleges is distinct from race-based AA. If for example a college commits to crafting a class drawn from all regions of the country, from rural as well as urban and suburban areas, it disadvantages racial groups that are not well represented in all those places. This has nothing to do with Asians being “test-taking robots”. Many well-rounded, high-stats applicants are rejected simply because they don’t contribute as well as other applicants to the desired class balance. Whites are everywhere in America (geographically and otherwise); Asians aren’t (not to the same degree anyway). </p>
<p>With or without race-based AA, Stanford won’t craft a freshman class that looks like Berkeley’s freshman class. Stanford wants to be a truly national university that draws students from diverse locations and perspectives. Personally, I don’t think the class-crafting approach is necessarily the best way to achieve diversity of interests and outlooks. That, however, is the system we do have at many “elite” schools.</p>
<p>Utter nonsense. The idea that Asians gained relative to whites from banning of AA (proving prior discrimination, as the narrative goes) is a factoid repeated ad nauseam as a “meme” in internet, newspapers, and some books, and by now is an important part of Asian-American identity politics. </p>
<p>Repetition does not make the meme true, and long experience on the internet shows that few of the repeaters make any effort to check facts. It is partly a self-selection, because checking would tend to remove those that are honest from the repeater category, but I do not know of cases where people who had previously repeated the meme and acknowledged the error when shown the facts, then became repeaters of their corrected understanding. Staying silent allows others do the work of spreading a meme the (corrected) repeaters know to be wrong, or seriously suspect.</p>
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<p>There is no large scale before-after comparison that shows such a thing. The finer-grained statistical studies, such as regression analyses (discussed here every year or two) support the alternative theory, that Nothing Happened from prop 209 at UC Berkeley as far as white vs Asian discrimination effects are concerned. Of course some changes happened for other reasons over the years, such as a rising Asian/white ratio in the California public high schools every year, and UC admissions reflect those trends, but “Asian enrollment increased due to secular trends independent of affirmative action bans” does not make for politically useful memes or headlines about discrimination. </p>
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<p>Statistical studies of UC data qualitatively supported the stereotype that being Asian is a negative factor for characteristics such as extracurriculars and others that you might consider proxies for “passion”, and both UC and non-UC data find Asian underperformance in college grades relative to academic credentials at time of admission. If I remember it correctly, the absolute grades, measured by GPA or class rank, were also lower for Asians than whites in most or all of the grade studies.</p>
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<p>In average levels of the main admission characteristics, Asians tend to score higher and are therefore admitted at higher rates. However, the discrimination issue and some of the questions that you are raising related to stereotypes, are about admission (and post-admission outcomes such as grades, extracurricular etc) controlling for credentials. In that respect I don’t know of any study or data that disconfirms any of the major stereotypes except the ones about uniform academic superiority of Asians, as a group, relative to whites.</p>
<p>Oh siserune is back. Which facts would you like to talk about, sis? Outdated working paper versions that you selectively misquote to push your pet points? If so, I still have a 2011 copy of Antonovics and Backes that you brought up two years ago. I’m happy to discuss table 3 with you again.</p>
<p>On another note, I’m quite pleased that the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in favor of Michigan in the Schuette case.</p>
<p>@siserune Well, lost in all that rhetoric and pretentious diction is the fact that your whole post does not contain one piece of evidence contradicting me. What I said wasn’t utter nonsense. It is fact, and I interpreted it.</p>
<p>That’s a New York Times article. On page two, the article cites a study showing that University of Michigan, pre-ban in 2005, admitted Asians at a 54% clip while Blacks and Hispanics were trending around the 70% mark, despite Asians having higher credentials. Later in page two, they cite another source, a study by Chung and Espenshade, Princeton professors (I think?) showing that if Affirmative Action were to be banned, then Asians would take 4/5 of the spots given to URMs. </p>
<p>Check out the Asian applicant graph. It’s stayed fairly constant 1992-now, despite the huge increase in the Asian population at Berkeley. Sure debunks your idea of a “rising Asian/White ratio” causing the huge spike. It’s hovered around 21% for a while now.</p>
<p>Here’s the freshman enrollee graph. It spiked from around maybe 15% (only the graph goes back to pre-AA times, and it’s separated by gender so it’s a little difficult to see) to the 43% you see today, in the table shown at the bottom of the page.</p>
<p>You cite ephemeral sources that I can’t seem to see or touch. Who has more credibility, you, a poster on the internet that makes up sources, or the New York Times plus the Berkeley data archives? Try harder.</p>
<p>@fabrizio I am also happy with the ruling, but I wish the Court could have just done what is going to happen anyway: ban Affirmative Action definitively. It would be easy: just cite the Equal Protection clause and people are going to have a hard time arguing with them anyways. All they’re doing is prolonging the inevitable. Many more states are on their way to ban it in their schools and eventually nationally it will be banned. In the future, even private schools like the Ivies finally be coerced into stopping this policy or risk forgoing federal funding.</p>
<p>What the graph is actually showing is that there was a large jump in Asian admits at around 1996/1997, the aftermath of the ban. Then, curiously, perhaps due to minority outreach programs and other proxies for affirmative action, the Asian enrollment number dropped. Nevertheless, it still largely shows what I have been trying to point out: Affirmative Action has a negative affect on the admissions of Asians.</p>
<p>I didn’t know that being a good writer makes you qualified as a Supreme Court justice. Constitution? Who cares? I mean, her biography and dissent were both good reads!</p>
<p>Schuette was a joke from day one: it’s a violation of the 14th Amendment to ban racial preferences? Really? IMO Scalia eviscerated Sotomayor’s dissent in his concurrence. Racial preferences are only justified to the extent that they benefit all students in the form of “diversity.” It would seem natural that removing racial preferences would thus hurt all students to the extent that doing so hurts racial “diversity.” Yet, that was not BAMN (and Sotomayor’s) position: removing racial preferences hurts “underrepresented” minorities and only “underrepresented” minorities by depriving them of participation in the democratic process. <em>Cough</em> BS <em>Cough</em></p>
<p>The interpretation was utter nonsense, i.e., that Prop 209 is responsible for a change of between 3 and 5 to the ratio of white to Asian enrollment at UC Berkeley. There was no such before and after effect from 1997 to 1998 (the first year 209 took effect), as you probably know, or could have figured out. The whole world would have heard about a jump that extreme, and people in the admissions office would have been dismissed or prosecuted. What actually was seen is minor changes, some of which favored and some disfavored Asians compared to whites. For example:</p>
<p>The issue was Asian vs white admission patterns at UC Berkeley. Clearly if affirmative action is removed, its beneficiaries (black, Hispanic, etc) give up admission places to its non-beneficiaries (including Asians). Nothing in what you quoted compares Asians to whites, nor is it about California.</p>
<p>That study of U Michigan did compare Asians and whites, with what initially seemed like “discrimination” effects being wiped out by using ACT rather than SAT as the academic measure (Michigan is an ACT state), and other data in the report going against the idea of higher admission standards for Asians, except as a result of out-of-state residency. For example, admitted Asians were several times likelier to be on academic probation than whites, had lower university GPAs after admission, were more often in the Honors program and Engineering school (which have much higher admission standards), and have a very small representation among in-state applicants who get preference as residents of the Upper Peninsula. In any case, your comments and my criticism were about the UC Berkeley Asian Discrimination meme. If you want to discuss Michigan I suggest posting a thread in the UM board where people more familiar with their admissions can comment.</p>
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<p>My past postings with the word “Espenshade” might help you understand some of the issues with conflating the E & C Asian coefficient with an Asian race effect. UC Berkeley was not part of Espenshade’s data, so the question, once again, is what sources would support a big jump (or any change) from before Prop 209 to after. </p>
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<p>It never “spiked” in 1997-98. UC Statfinder is no longer online, but they have enough other admission data online that you could correct yourself fairly quickly using a web search.</p>