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Trust me - the posters in that thread have seen and answered questions way more illogical and unnecessary than yours (not that yours is particulary illogical/unnecessary in the first place).</p>
<p>fab, I know you think that I either represent all college admissions committees or that I invented AA. Neither is true. So I can’t answer your question about benchmarks, except in this way:</p>
<p>Yes, the term UR began as a reflection of overall population percentages, but clearly it has taken on other interpretations since its inception. No matter what State one lives in, undoubtedly one has run into hiring policies – in gov’t, in education – that specify the term UR groups. I acknowledge that there does not seem to be a uniform standard of what those numbers are. In my State, it generally has meant “historically under-represented.” Did I say I necessarily approve of such a label, or that I always approve of such a concept in itself – particularly without regard to the qualification of the individuals? No, I never said that nor implied that. </p>
<p>So I’ll say it again: AA has its positive and negative aspects & impacts. Certainly a lot of negativity is attached to the perception of what it is and how it is applied. For example, in my region there tends to be a knee-jerk assumption of its priority with regard to vast areas of hiring, and with perfunctory review of the candidate’s skills & appropriateness for the job. Just because a member of a group was indeed historically underrepresented at one time does not, i.m.o., make that person necessarily the best choice for the job, today, merely by association with that group. (You’ll get no argument from me there.) But more to the point, when it comes to hiring (as opposed to college admissions), we have long since past the point in many regions of the country (certainly my own), where a true preference for a previously UR group has any meaning, when that group is no longer a minority at all, let alone a URM. * Sometimes they are not even a minority in the local population, and further, often they are anything but a minority in the job classification, job locale, company, or agency.</p>
<p>*(previous to September 2009)</p>
<p>For me, the difference with college admissions is that there is a genuine attempt to filter for qualification first, and representation second. In addition – unlike in many areas of the country in general – one would be hard-pressed to claim that Hispanics, for example, are adequately represented at Elite U’s without special consideration (yes, a bump). It is not as if there are a lot of feeder schools near Harvard and Princeton which send a lot of Hispanics, competitively, to those institutions. To date, they would still be under-represented vs. the representation of different identities at H and P, at the very least. </p>
<p>I doubt very much that H, Y, or P would ever get to the point that various employment sectors have reached, where the term UR has no relationship to a fixed number or a present number. College admissions are way more fluid, and the institutions are a lot more interested in examining and re-examining balance, rather than maintaining some fixed definition. Admissions officers on CC and elsewhere have been adamant that there are no fixed quantitative goals, since the fact of qualification is ultimately more important than percentages of populations. I anticipate that they will remain open and fluid in the definition of URM, and should it become no longer a “U” on any particular campus, we will see adjustments in practices, policies, and percentages. (And, i.m.o., it would certainly be called for.)</p>
<p>You also very much misunderstand my position and my philosophy. “If I were in charge,” as you say, I would not necessarily have the exact same policies. I might do a lot more bridge-buildling and recruiting in earlier stages of education, grooming such capable candidates for excellence at an elite U through supplemental enrichment programs. But one thing I would keep is the aspect of balance overall in its many elements, certainly not with restricted emphasis to race, ethnicity. Balance in academic majors and academic backgrounds, for that matter, is really important to the vitality of a college campus. I would not be admitting a class which consisted of 80% engineering majors, even if every one of those candidates had a 2400, a 5.0 W, and had won Olympic gold medals.</p>
<p>I have a fair amount of experience in K-12 private & public educational institutions. I’ve seen what happens when there is extreme socioeconomic homogeneity in the student body, and further when that SES status is accompanied by homogeneity in race/ethnicity. Not pretty. When such student bodies also end up aligning along a narrow ridge of preferred academic majors, it makes for a very undynamic mix, and one that others are not attracted to join.</p>
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<p>They are human. The bottom line is, like every other group, every school has a quota for Asians. No one’s race will be ignored by schools that consider race.</p>
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True; I am skeptical myself of this. But at worst, the OP will be treated like an Asian applicant if he leaves the ethnicity box unmarked. Besides, nothing ventured, nothing gained.</p>
<p>Nothing to be gained here.</p>
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<p>If you read that thread you will find that it’s an unsourced claim from someone with a track record of posting personal speculation as authoritative, known, factual information. </p>
<p>Of course, claims that there are Asian quotas, extra readings of Asian files to weed out applicants, or other adverse structural differences between the processing of Asian and white applications, are also speculations routinely passed off as fact in these boards.</p>
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<p>So it’s just an amazing coincidence that each schools comes up with just about the same percentage of Asians (and whites, blacks, hispanics and Native Americans) each year?</p>
<p>The Heritage Foundation addresses it here:</p>
<p>[College</a> Admission Quotas Against Asian-Americans: Why Is the Civil Rights Community Silent?](<a href=“http://www.heritage.org/research/politicalphilosophy/hl216.cfm]College”>http://www.heritage.org/research/politicalphilosophy/hl216.cfm)</p>
<p>The proportion of Asians does vary widely both within and between schools. There are undoubtedly quotas or “targets” for internationals, for URM, and for athletes. Gender balance is also imposed. Given that and all the additional (nonracial) constraints, how much room do you think actually exists for extreme fluctuation in the white vs Asian composition of the class? How large do you think the fluctuation has to be in order to not signal discrimination? </p>
<p>The Heritage Foundation information is from 1989. Stanford, among other places, reformed their internal procedures since then. Harvard had a Federal investigation that found discimination, and appears to have changed its practices. Other schools had large increases in the number of Asians. Here’s a discussion with a link detailing some of the changes at Harvard:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/758695-bit-reach-asian-graduating-2010-a-3.html#post1063095931[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/758695-bit-reach-asian-graduating-2010-a-3.html#post1063095931</a></p>
<p>See ‘The Price Of Admission’ by Golden, which goes into great detail about Asian admissions at elite colleges. The book is about 2 years old and is based on the author’s Pulitzer winning work. He even quotes admissions officers commenting on their perception of the typical Asian applicant. He claims that Asians need 50 SAT points higher than white candidates to be on a level playing field.</p>
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<p>This is not true at all. If you mark “I do not wish to answer” it means you do not wish to answer. It could mean any number of things - too many things for adcoms to care about. It could just mean you don’t care what race you are. It’s like when a cop asks if he can search your car and you say no - that is NOT probable cause that you are guilty, it means you don’t want the cop searching your car because you know you don’t have to let him.</p>
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<p>You have altered my position. All I said was that standards of proof change, depending on whether the posters agree with each other. </p>
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<p>This tactic is a variation of the above. I first came across it as St. Anselm’s ontological argument, which involves the subtle adjustment of the meaning of “existence”. These and other tactics (I mentioned a few others in a previous post) are used under the umbrella of “catch me if you can” strategy. The intent is to dodge, to obscure, to create a “semantic hell” to grind the opposition into submission.</p>
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<p>I suspect it is an attempt to drive a wedge between blacks. The fact that they have not altered the system tells me that it is probably not unintentional.</p>
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<pre><code> “Maintaining power is my aim;
Divide and conquer is my game”.
</code></pre>
<p>The big problem with the “party line” I see here is that it fails to explain the giant pink elephant in the room: the changing status of Jewish applicants over the years. It also fails the “simple elegance” test needed for a good sound theory.</p>
<p>My hypothesis, on the other hand, explains that without a hitch. Furthermore, I do not need to adjust my theory every time new data or evidence shows up ( At numerous times, I described the arguments seen here as torturous or convoluted). Most powerful reason of all, I can use it to explain national and international politics as well. What not to like?</p>
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<p>He claims a lot of things. Siserune, OTOH, is warning against suppositions and correlations (via authors with axes to grind, via cc posters with snippets of information vs. an entire field of data). “Needing” fifty points higher would be operative in a test-determined system, which U.S. colleges are not. Having fifty points higher is another matter entirely. Further, no discrimination can be ascertained without also having access to all the **offers of admission<a href=“vs.%20yield”>/b</a>, as well as the files of those offered admission.</p>
<p>I´d like to point out AA won´t be an issue in CA.</p>
<p>…Uh. Obviously. </p>
<p>[Affirmative</a> action in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Affirmative action in the United States - Wikipedia”>Affirmative action in the United States - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>@Yurtle: Ah… no. That proposition only banned affirmative action by the state. That includes the UCs, but not Stanford or any other private college.</p>
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<p>After which you mastered the art of manipulating both premises and statistics.</p>
<p>What your posts, plural, demonstrate – in additiion to feeling very pleased with yourself & superior to other participants here – is that (1) you know very little about U.S. college admissions – how they operate, what drives them, how they have and have not operated in the past; (2) you have particularly little knowledge about AA in 2009 (as opposed to, say 1970); (3) you have stereotyped views of U.S. black students; others would use a more common derogatory term to describe that stereotyping.</p>
<p>You also seem to believe that AA has a huge impact on student body composition at Elite U.S. colleges (it doesn’t). For my own part, I’ll say it again that AA represents neither an ideal vision nor an ideal result. It is controversial; it is awkward; it does not necessarily produce social assimilation on those campuses. It does, however, provide a critical measure of opportunity for those benefiting from it. Those who believe in more aggressive provisions for opportunity than a Darwinian vision tend to support it as a better option than what the Ivy League looked like in, say, 1964.</p>
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<p>That’s a poor analogy because when you’re pulled over by a cop, it doesn’t matter what he thinks is probable cause but rather what is probable cause according to standard practice, because the cop knows that otherwise any evidence obtained will be worthless later on. Contrarily, in the admissions process, what the admissions officer thinks is very important because college admission is a subjective process.</p>
<p>On paper, a college will obviously never admit to guessing races but in practice it can be very different.</p>
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<p>In that case, both “underrepresented” and “overrepresented” are absolutely meaningless terms. Worse, their usage indirectly proves that quotas are in play, as logically, there must be a “correct” level of representation, at the complete discretion of whoever is in charge.</p>
<p>Re #335</p>
<p>No, I don’t think you “represent all college admissions committees.” I do think, however, that you have very strong opinions on the issue and that you have a tendency to brand as wrong anyone who doesn’t share your exact viewpoint, even academics who are strong advocates of racial preferences like Drs. Massey and Espenshade.</p>
<p>And, no, I don’t think you “invented AA.” While President Kennedy was first to use the phrase affirmative action, the dubious distinction of inventor belongs to the Right Honourable Arthur Fletcher.</p>
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<p>What are these other interpretations, and which do you subscribe to? That you’re not a member of any college admissions committee is irrelevant. You frequently use the term and its antonym, “overrepresented,” without specifying what the basis of comparison is (ie. the benchmark).</p>
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<p>In my opinion, epiphany’s posts demonstrate the very obfuscation that Canuckguy and I are trying to point out and criticize.</p>
<p>Early on, epiphany said, “It’s in my imagination if I think that changes/reversals in ‘race’ policies will result in extremely different-looking campuses.” Consistent with this, epiphany recognized that there is only a “tiny positive impact…on keeping AA vs. not keeping AA.”</p>
<p>Yet, epiphany subsequently suggested that if race were not considered, then elite universities would suffer from “severe unbalance in racial/ethnic representation.”</p>
<p>When pressed to reconcile these contradictory statements, she created a distinction between “URM” representation and white / “ORM” representation. Apparently,</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Ending racial preferences barely impacts “URM” representation, “which is indeed tiny overall.” Consequently, “AA does not have a huge impact on student body composition at Elite U.S. colleges” and Canuckguy and I are wrong.</p></li>
<li><p>Ending racial preferences significantly impacts white / “ORM” representation, leading to “severe unbalance in racial/ethnic representation.”</p></li>
</ol>
<p>However, Canuckguy and I are still wrong because epiphany can just invoke argument one whenever she wants to claim that AA doesn’t have a huge impact on student body composition and its abolition won’t lead to “severe unbalance.”</p>
<p>Talk about heads I win, tails you lose!</p>
<p>“that you have very strong opinions on the issue and that you have a tendency to brand as wrong anyone who doesn’t share your exact viewpoint”</p>
<p>:) 
Is this satire? I love it!</p>