<p>OHMom to further address how STEM Majors are relatively more difficult than non-STEM.
At Tufts University, an Engineering major only needs a 3.2 GPA to receive an Honors distinction while an English major requires at least a 3.5 GPA to receive the same distinction.</p>
<p>Handing those “honors” out like candy these days. I remember when we needed a 3.8 for basic honors, a master’s level thesis plus a 3.9 for magna or a doctoral level dissertation plus a 4.0 for summa. </p>
<p>mavant, don’t I know it. I took psychology and other social sciences courses to beef up my GPA to keep my scholarship when I was going to school. Got the extra degrees having realized that it didn’t take much more after completing the elective requirements to get the additional degrees.</p>
<p>Thanks for the additional data, it sure supports the belief that AA might not be that beneficial to those that it was intended to help. </p>
<p>I left the STEM stuff out of my response because, simply, I don’t buy that it’s better or relevant to this discussion. If we were having a discussion about URMs in STEM, or women in STEM, it might be. But this is a lawsuit alleging Harvard is discriminating against Asians in admissions and I responded only to the assertion that Harvard’s URMs form the bottom of Harvard’s classes.</p>
<p>So…</p>
<p>Re: the later Duke chart on pg 3 of the PDF linked by @mavant - interesting. I do notice that the racial groups (and presumably the income and parent education groups since they correlate almost 100%), start out a lot further apart than they finish. They start with a range of 2.85-3.45 and end at 3.25 and 3.65 (I’m eyeballing the chart, the exact numbers may be slightly off). </p>
<p>Hispanic and Asian similarities aside in terms of income, gpa and so on, it is still true that the lowest grades are going to the poorest kids whose parents achieved the lowest education levels. That COULD account for much of the difference, as much as race does? I don’t think we can draw any hard and fast conclusions from it.</p>
<p>Yes, and the authors explain that this is misleading:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>We can draw one pretty strong conclusion from that paper: preparation, not membership in X racial classification, is what matters. Take a look at table 14 on page 25. The first column shows that blacks are more likely than whites to switch from STEM majors to non-STEM majors. However, the second column shows that after controlling for SAT scores, blacks are no more likely to switch from STEM majors to non-STEM majors than whites.</p>
<p>There should always be some major switching; some people find out that X major wasn’t what they thought it would be. But there’s no reason to expect that major switching should systematically vary by racial classification. There is, however, good reason to expect that it may systematically vary by preparation.</p>
<p>OHMom Since the poor at Harvard and other elite schools are proportionally more URM, it affects a lot of URM even if you assert that parent education and SES accounts for much of the difference. My academic mismatch issue doesn’t only affect URM, it affects ALL students who are an academic mismatch. It just affects URM proportionally more.</p>
<p>So, the data is suggesting and what the lawsuit is trying to address is that lower achieving students (URM and Whites) are being admitted over higher achieving Asians based on race.</p>
<p>@voiceofreason I think if the lawsuit proved that lower achieving URMs were being admitted, that would not be an issue - they are graduating and doing well at Harvard, it seems, and part of the reason H considers race (and first gen status and perhaps SES) is to give a leg up (in addition to providing diversity to benefit all students, etc). </p>
<p>In the case of whites, it is more problematic.</p>
<p>@fabrizio, when you type “STEM” I lose interest in the post.</p>
<p>I do wonder why the chart doesn’t show cumulative GPA rather than just semester by semester. If they have the data isn’t just a tiny extra step. </p>
<p>@fabrizio - “giving a leg up” is not the same thing as reparations for the descendants of slaves (though for Caribbean immigrants that is also true). </p>
<p>They might in the sense that they are also living as black people in the US, but not in the sense that I suspect a larger % of them are high-SES than Americans.</p>
<p>But is that any different from the notion of wealthy black kids benefiting from URM status as poor black kids do?</p>
<p>I suspect that too. So while the idea that racial preferences is just “giving a leg up” to people from poor backgrounds may sound great on paper, in reality, high-SES first- and second-generation black Americans disproportionately benefit.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, it isn’t; racial preferences in practice are nothing but a middle-class entitlement.</p>
<p>“No, it isn’t; racial preferences in practice are nothing but a middle-class entitlement.”</p>
<p>Former Harvard president, Derek Bok’s study found this to be likely. He found that “86 percent of Black students at the 28 elite universities they studied were from middle- or upper-status families.” This is why the notion that AA helps low SES URM families is just smoke and mirrors for justifying racial preferences in light of findings that richer URM families were often chosen over poor Asian families.</p>
<p>OHMom Yes URM are graduating at Harvard, no one is disputing that. As to your comment that URM “doing well at Harvard” is debatable. Billions of dollars are spent in an effort to raise the numbers of URM graduating with STEM degrees. URMs are interested and start out trying to obtain STEM degrees, but because of academic mismatch, these URMs that would have flourished at Matched Schools, transfer out to obtain non-STEM degrees in order to as you say “do well” and graduate from Harvard.</p>
<p>Obviously graduating from college is important and an accomplishment, but if one is forced to transfer out of any Major because of academic mismatch, that is not a good thing. Howard University produces more Black PhD’s than all the Ivies combined, as well as Medical Doctors, and STEM grads. How can this be if the best students of Howard would be at the bottom of the likes of Harvard?</p>
<p>It’s not giving a leg up to people from poor backgrounds, it’s giving a leg up to under-represented minorities, in this specific case, black people.</p>
<p>Giving a leg up to low SES kids takes the form of using Questbridge or Posse, meeting full financial need, gving a tip to first-gen kids, etc.</p>
<p>OHMom then eliminating racial discrimination should not be a problem for you if the admission benefit is instead given to low SES kids instead. By doing this, race discrimination is eliminated and ALL students from ALL races who have low SES backgrounds can be “given a leg up.” As you know, Low SES kids tend to be URM but not ALL so the kids that need a helping hand will get them regardless of ethnicity.</p>
<p>My only caveat is giving this benefit to low SES that these kids have the ability to persist.</p>
<p>@OHMomof2
And your socioeconomic reasoning can barely even explain the massive gaps between Asians and other minorities.
Asians have 20% more over 100k than blacks. If you even want to make the ridiculous assumption that people making over a 100k are averaging 4.0s (to try to maximize the explanation of difference), that means Asians making below that are averaging a 2.6 vs a 2.3 for blacks, still outperforming them. Asians outperformed whites despite doing harder stem majors and being significantly lower on socioeconomic spectrums.</p>
<p>I didn’t say I favor race-based or SES-based admission preferences, only clarifying “give a leg up” as I used it in post #1233.</p>
<p>@voiceofreason66 - Harvard is graduating almost everyone it chooses to accept and it seems to be filling all of its departments with majors which is clearly a priority. Harvard’s mission isn’t primarily to educate STEM students. </p>
<p>OHMom you have fallen for the xiggi diversion tactic. Again no one is saying that those URMs that Harvard accepts are not outstanding students in their own right, just that many of the URMs are comparatively have less academic preparation than the vast majority of the Harvard class. This disparity is sufficiently great that many URM graduate but not in their desired major and at the bottom of their class. Harvard’s mission is to educate its students so they can achieve the goals that they set. If it happens that URM get to Harvard with a goal to obtain a STEM degree, they should be able to do that, but clearly the data show that is not happening.</p>
<p>OK, so we’re back to square one: why do they need it, especially since many of the beneficiaries who “get a leg up” are from high SES families? What do these students lack?</p>