Harvard admits 2000 students out of close to 40 thousand. No one is entitled to be there. We are talking about numbers so incredibly small that I wonder why it pays for anyone to bother litigating this. I fear that it is more about wanting to keep URM’s out rather than about wanting to raise the enrollment of any other group.
As a parent, do you really believe your child will have a meaningfully better chance of gaining acceptance to Harvard if 200 new spots open up? What does the math say?
@studyingbad
lols… I’m sure that is exactly how Harvard feels about it too.
nice touch pulling out the Asian card and professing how shameful it is:)
That is a really intriguing statistic. I had assumed that being low income gave no additional bump over being black, but if, as you say, it is actually a detriment, thats a very different story.
Can you tell whether the academic stats are similar between the low income black applicants and the rest of the pool of black applicants? Could stats alone explain this discrepancy or does it suggest that something else is going on?
While I was born in the US, I understand that originally, the US was meant to be for Western Europeans only, as stated by the Founding Fathers. Ironically, the Founding Fathers believed that Western European unity via race and religion was what will make the country great, not diversity.
I understand that I shouldn’t have been born in this country and my being here spits on the graves of this country’s founders. I would hope that Asians and other minorities understand this and act grateful instead of entitled, but they don’t. This lawsuit just proves it.
While history provides some insight as to what was intended at the time, the composition and ideology of the US constantly evolves. Affirmative action programs IMO pit people against each other which is one of their hugely negative unintended consequences. Good intentions, bad results.
But it’s all worth discussing as a country and as a citizenship so we are all aware of the practice and have some consensus on whether it still fits the country’s needs and priorities.
I will repeat - you were born in the US. You are part of “us” the Americans and should be part of the discussion, benefits and responsibilities as all other Americans.
@gallentjill One basic reason to litigate this is that the Supreme Court has nixed quota systems. If this amounts to a quota system by another name, it is illegal.
In a general sense, I actually agree with you that when you’re dealing with such tiny differences among such top students, there’s a point at which bean-counting scores becomes quibbling; so what if one student has a 1580 and the other has a 1530? Past a certain point of achievement, the students are all so strong that any number of non-academic factors might as well be a tie-breaker.
But there’s compelling evidence in these reports that a lot more than that is going on. Creating a special, amorphous ranking category of “personal” characteristics on which Asian applicants score inexplicably poorly and URMs do disproportionately well is highly suspect in itself. And an SAT disparity of 140 points on a 1600 scale between African American and Asian admits isn’t quibbling. It is an indication of completely different standards for two minority groups.
No one is entitled to admission to Harvard. But I’m not sure why that wouldn’t apply just as well to a middle-class African American with a 1380 as it would to an Asian-American with a 1580. A student with a 1380 and equivalent achievements in other categories should be able to get into a very fine college on their own merits. It doesn’t have to be Harvard.
I wish people are analyzing all those IVY-trained Wall Street bankers as carefully as they did the Harvard data, to see whether their race/test scores/intelligence correlate well with how successfully they “socialized their risk and privatized their wealth” in 2008, and judging their ability to keep themselves completely out of jail for any malfeasance, I would say their “race/intelligence” must have paid off.
I think the lawsuit is without merit EVEN IF Harvard is holding Asians to a higher standard. So what? Holistic admissions is a euphemism for not merit based. If you can have lower standards for some you can have higher standards for others. And that means any “others.” Holistic means consideration of the many parts–specifically beyond objective quantifiable parts. I think this lawsuit will only make people more inclined to view asians (insofar as academics) negatively as prep machines and stat driven without interest in the academic communities or a genuine love for education and learning and simply as a means to an end. This is an interesting older article.
I gotta agree with this.
While social intelligence does give someone an advantage and an easy route to management, it’s not really good for the country as a whole. People with great social skills in powerful positions are great at transferring wealth around and pretending to be important, but they don’t actually produce new wealth.
Now, Harvard is a place for the wealthy to kiss butt and make connections. They don’t generate any wealth, which is why they prefer social skills.
No, unfortunately I cannot find any way to get to the answer to that question (perhaps some one else out there can - time to crowdsource the data mining!).
My suspicion is that the academic statistics are so low for the pool of black applicants as a whole, that Harvard is more interested in whether the applicant would fit in at all at Harvard than trying to make too many fine distinctions. There are certainly some low income black students in the admit pool, but my guess is that income plays very little differentiating role in that group because as everyone knows intelligence is distributed in any group more democratically than income, and standardized testing is not measuring income anyway. At the margins, Harvard is probably more interested in taking a student from Choate than a lower income black student who happens to do even a little better on her SATs. There are, of course, other interpretations available, but they need to account for the data we have.
Harvard divides its applicants into ten deciles by academic index, which is basically some composite of (i) SAT or ACT and other scores, (ii) GPA, and (iii) rigor (presumably). I am not sure Harvard has released the exact mix of those components, but perhaps someone out there has seen it?
Here is my presentation of the data:
Top 5 deciles of academic index (aggregated) as share of applicant group
White – 52.5%
Black – 10.3%
Hispanic – 21.0%
Asian – 67.52%
Top 2 deciles of academic index (aggregated) as share of applicant group
White – 17.6%%
Black – 2.1%
Hispanic – 5.1%
Asian – 34.13%
As fully 90% of the black applicant pool is in the lower half of the academic index (38% in the lowest decile 1), I suspect that many low income black students are just completely uncompetitive and unable to handle the academics at Harvard. However, there have been strong affirmative action programs for decades at many selective high schools (including prominently at elite boarding schools) and so there is a relatively stronger pool there from which Harvard and others no doubt draw disproportionately. It is not quite the story that is peddled of course, namely that its competitive black applicants are likely to have enjoyed substantial privilege, but it is what is observed at HYP anecdotally.
I think except for a few private univs like Caltech, majority of the elite private institutions are no different for Asian-Americans than Harvard when it comes to admissions/admit rate.
Even in CA, where the Asian population is over 11%…
Stanford (23%)
https://diversityandaccess.stanford.edu/diversity/diversity-facts
Harvey Mudd (17.5% … same as for Hispanics… and a Tech school to boot)
https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-statistics/institutional-statistics-students/student-enrollment-raceethnicity/
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
As I said would happen, I am temporarily closing this thread to review and clean.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21601068/#Comment_21601068
It will reopen when it reopens; nobody should create a version 13.0 in the interim.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Reopening thread. Let’s follow the rules of the forum, please.
In my post #2004 above, I posted some information about applicants labeled “Standard Strong” by Harvard adcoms, and also noted some limitations concerning the small sample size, particularly for black applicants (there were only 3 of them in the sample). On a different thread, there was some implication that these were “cherry picked” by the plaintiffs in order to highlight the disparities by race in admissions evaluations.
I think it is helpful to see how these figures emerged from the litigation:
From p.140 here: http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-1-Arcidiacono-Expert-Report.pdf
In many of the recent comments on this and other threads touching on the Harvard Asian discrimination case, I sense a lack of understanding that, while lawyers will naturally spin facts and analyses to the benefit of their clients, they are limited by the actual data provided and are subject to real consequences (both for themselves and more importantly for their clients) for intentionally misrepresenting evidence. Experts will also need to swear to their bona fides in their written work and testimony.
@SatchelSF is it possible that the Asians that were labeled “Standard Strong” were indeed “Standard Strong” (and therefore not highly rated enough to be admitted) but only when compared with other Asians? Was Harvard obligated to execute the assignment of the “Standard Strong” rating in exactly the same way to everyone, regardless of racial group? Was there any kind of loop hole for them with this?
That’s not what I wrote. I said something to the effect of, taking the average score of 3 students is not a statistically significant sample size, especially with a cherry-picked sample. The plantiffs use that exact phrase to describe the sample :
The link SachelSF provided above gives more detail about the selection procedure:for the summary sheets:
The 3 applicants used in the score average certainly don’t sound like they were selected randomly. Rather than focusing on those 3 applicants who we have no reason to believe were admitted, it seems more relevant to focus on the scores of students that Harvard actually admits. The lawsuit provides a much larger sample of 100k+ applicants and thousands of admits. Among these admits, the differences in scores between Black and White admits is listed below. Standard deviations are compared to the overall applicant pool of 100k+ students.
White Admits
SAT CR: +0.72 SDs (0.43)
SAT Math: +0.55 SDs (0.52)
HS GPA: +0.50 SDs (0.52)
Mean SAT Score in 2017: ~745 per section
Mean 5.90 AP classes with average AP score of 4.73
Black Admits
SAT CR: +0.41 SDs (0.56)
SAT Math: +0.11 SDs (0.68)
HS GPA: +0.33 SDs (0.73)
Mean SAT Score in 2017: ~720 per section
Mean 5.08 AP classes with average AP score of 4.50
To my untrained eye, the difference in mean SAT scores between white and black admits doesn’t seem earth shattering. 720 vs. 745. This would not lead me to believe that unqualified students were being accepted.
In an earlier post, someone had cited the numbers 1400 and 1480 (so, 700 vs. 740 per section), which is slightly more striking, but the more egregious number was the 1540 for Asians.
The Economist weighs in:
The article is not flattering to Harvard: Here is a particularly damaging section: