Oy vey! The Unz article was a pure piece of crap. It looks like it should be on the front page of Breitbart to get the mob riled up. I’m not going to bother to tear it apart. Some of the commentators following the article provided links that do it for me.
And since we are throwing around meaningless analysis and platitudes:
We had two kids get ivy acceptances this year out of almost 400 kids in the senior class. Both were Hispanic girls. Zero Jews or Asians got into to any ivy+ schools. The funny thing is one of the girls is a top notch student the other was OK, but definitely not at the same level of the other top kids in the class. What sucks is there will be people who question how they got into the schools. That’s why race based criteria has to go. Even my Bernie loving, Cornell reject (4.0/35ACT) kid says it should be socio-economic based. He is wise beyond his years.
"We had two kids get ivy acceptances this year out of almost 400 kids in the senior class. Both were Hispanic girls. Zero Jews or Asians got into to any ivy+ schools. "
Unless you know the Hispanic girls very well, how would you know they’re not Jewish? I’m not at all siding with the guy posting about some dark, evil Jewish conspiracy, just pointing out that there are Jewish people of all races. One of my close friends is Jewish Hispanic and she’s constantly amazed by the bizarre things people say around her assuming because she’s Hispanic she’s Catholic (or at least not Jewish.)
My issue with this is that socio-economics alone doesn’t capture cultural differences and I do believe in cultural diversity. Skin color probably doesn’t do it either. But there are differences between latin American culture and WASP culture and NY Jewish culture. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to a school where everyone was just like me and I don’t think thats what my kids are looking for either. I don’t see anyone here railing against geographic diversity and that clearly disadvantages certain groups. Yet, I think we all accept that there are differences between people who grow up in Nebraska and those who group up in a NY suburb. I don’t think my kids want to go to a school filled with people just like them, even though, as kids from a NY suburb, all that geographic diversity is going to work against them in the schools they want.
Low SES is its own catagory and it should stay that way. But it isn’t a proxy for race OR culture. Asian low SES families are very different then Hispanic low SES and black low SES etc. I may be persuaded that schools should stop considering skin color, but I believe they should be able to consider culture in all its different forms.
“I don’t think my kids want to go to a school filled with people just like them,”
But I think many (maybe most) kids do want to attend a school with people like them. That’s why these colleges want to maintain a balanced class wrt race, so URMs can hang out with other URMs. You see this a lot, people of the same race together on campus, and not really trying to diversify, if you will. A lot of parents have mentioned this when looking at whether a college is really diverse or just in name.
From the college’s marketing viewpoint, it wants the undergraduate population to be maximally marketable to all potential students. For many colleges, this means having “enough” of each major race/ethnicity that potential students do not feel that there “are not enough” of people like themselves.
So while a college does not want to use the q-word in public, it probably has preferences for marketing purposes with respect to percentage of each race/ethnicity. Whether it actually acts on these preferences is another story (since some colleges, particularly state schools with legislative requirements, have other constraints that may be more important). Note that colleges that are not high profile private schools or state flagships may not have much of a choice, since they may have to take what they can get in terms of the most academically qualified students out of their applicant pools.
@ucbalumnus is exactly right. My kids don’t want everyone to be just like them and certainly not just like everyone they went to high school with. But they also don’t want to be the ONLY one of their kind either. Its a balance. There needs to be a critical mass. For my kids, I doubt they care about being in the majority, but they want to find “their tribe.”
I don’t exactly know what my kid wants, but I don’t care that much about the race composition; I care about other aspects of the college. I myself got enough exposure and interaction with different races outside the schools so racial diversity was no big deal to me. In short, I would not be opposed if my kid went to a college with zero whites, blacks or Asians. In real life, this is moot issue for me but theoretically, I could care less about racial diversity.
The fact is Asians got and get discriminated in USA just as much as Afro Americans and Hispanics, whether or not a higher percentage of Asian Americans obtain higher education. Just look at how the Hollywood movies portrayed Afro Americans and Asian characters. IMO Afro Americans have made great strides in Hollywood but Asian Americans, not as much.
I admire how Afro Americans achieved the Civil Rights, but personally I identified with Malcolm X rather than MLK. Malcolm X would have been the POTUS had he been born in another generation.
…reveals how Asian Americans are being used and abused, to their own detriment as well as that of African-Americans and Latinos. Real discrimination against Asian Americans is whitewashed, and they are used for strategic purposes to attack other people of color.
Regarding the personal rating, whether the is racial bias and/or AA is not is clear cut as many articles suggest. The personal rating is supposed to evaluate the following:
The vague nature of the evaluation, such as looking for “many other qualities” makes it awkward to confirm whether that criteria is present. The essay is the first component of the application listed in evaluating personal rating, so it is likely a key one. Not considering essays in the lawsuit evaluations further complicates matters.
The lawsuit docs suggest Asian applicants averaged a ~0.13 lower rating than White applicants on the personal rating’s standard 1-4 scale – a relatively small difference, but more than might be expected if just looking at the evaluation of the available material, such as LORs and alumni, with essay unknown. There was significant variation from year-to-year, with Asian applicants averaging a higher rating than White applicants some years, and the reverse other years.
When trying to look at how much race influenced the personal rating after applying controls for the other available sections of the application, experts from both sides found the vast majority variance in ratings was unexplained by a combination of the available application materials, race, and many other characteristics. What strikes me as suspicious, is among the portion of variance that they could explain in personal ratings, race appeared to be a more statistically significant as an influential factor than the other ratings – less likely to be unintentional noise beyond the model. For example, the largest racial regression coefficient for each part of the ratings in Arcidiacono’s expanded model is below after all controls. In short, this is how race appears to influence the rating among applicants with similar stats, majors, gender, ratings in other sections, etc.
Academic: Asian Most Influential: +0.128 (0.031)
ECs: Black Most Influential: -0.283 (0.044)
LOR1: Black Most Influential: -0.103 (0.048)
LOR2: Asian Most Influential: -0.144 (0.028)
Counselor: Hispanic Most Influential: -0.048 ((0.041) Personal: Black Most Influential: +0.691 (0.053)
Alumni Personal: Black Most Influential: +0.204 (0.041)
Alumni Overall: Missing Race Most Influential: +0.167 (0.039)
It’s possible that the apparent increased contribution of race to the personal rating may relate to a greater degree of uncontrolled variables that are correlated with race. For example, Black applicants may be more likely to have have the overcome “family hardship” part of the personal rating criteria than other races in such a way that is not captured by the SES type controls. If true, then this missing “overcame hardship” would be expected to make it appear that Black applicants have an advantage in personal rating beyond the available controls to some degree. It’s hard to say how things like " the applicant’s humor, sensitivity, grit, leadership, integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness and many other qualities" would be correlated with race. So in my opinion, it just looks suspicious – not conclusive, and also not easy to distinguish between unintentional racial biases and AA, as the Vox article touches on.
That link is from 2006, so over a decade old. What should be even worse from your perspective, it’s primarily based on the Espenshade study, which you have literally hundreds of posts criticizing. If you don’t believe the Espenshade study, I don’t know why you would dredge up a 12 year old article based on the Espenshade study.
I think it is important to keep in mind that affirmative action is what allowed this to happen to said Asian-American students in the first place. Any system that disadvantages any students whether they be Asian, white, black, or any other race or ethnicity is racist and oppressive in nature. Having a more qualified student body that represents the standards and atmosphere of that college if more beneficial to the school’s environment than creating diversity for the sake of multiculturalism disregarding the aforementioned. While there are benefits to a diverse campus, affirmative action is an unfair system that takes away from the accomplishments of many while boosting others.
Back in the old days, geographic diversity was put in place by Harvard as another method of keeping down the number of Jewish students. Geographic diversity still has this affect today since such a large percentage of the Jewish population is concentrated in a a very few places. Yet, I don’t see anyone complaining that colleges should stop seeking a geographically diverse campus regardless of its disadvantages for certain students. If we are talking about getting rid of every consideration that might lead the admission of one student over another slightly statistically more accomplished student then all of holistic admissions, including geographic diversity, has to go. Holisitic admissions is not a perfect system. It will certainly disadvantage my daughter, given that we live in a NY suburb, however, I am still strongly in favor of it over the alternatives.
Colleges don’t care about geographic diversity the way you think they do. They still enroll a disproportionate share of their students from the northeast. The joke about moving to North Dakota is more a myth than a reality. Being a New Yorker isn’t a legally protected class under the Civil Rights Act. Being from a particular/race ethnicity is. I don’t know why seemingly intelligent people don’t grasp the distinction. If you want to claim New Yorkers should be their own category for equal protection purposes under the 14th amendment, that’s a creative theory …
It’s plainly obvious that Harvard and all the elite schools are openly and purposefully discriminating against the main Asian groups and that the SCOTUS is going to strike this down. What’s so ugly about this discussion is that the Chinese and Japanese both suffered massive discrimination in the late 19th and 20th century while I defy anyone to show me any significant discrimination against Hispanics. The AA for Hispanics is mostly because they do poorly in school not because of any hardships. The schools are going to lose this case for sure.
Well, at least I seem intelligent! My point is not that living on the Upper East Side should be a protected class, but that it disproportionately disadvantages certain protected groups, especially Jewish students because they live clustered in certain areas. In my post, I stated that that was one of the reasons that Harvard began using geographic diversity in the first place - to limit the number of Jews. It still has that effect today. Nonetheless, I don’t think it should be rolled back.