The real question is why is balance only of paramount importance for admissions? Why not faculty ideology or engineers at Apple or racial composition of pro sports leagues? The other key point is that most of the recipients of race based AA are not poor and in fact are frequently more privileged than other students not eligible for AA. Would someone like to explain why the children of powerful people of color should receive favor over poor white and asian kids.
Hi @SAY , your question is similar to the one makemesmart asks and I re-iterate my recommendation of that book for expression of the answers.
I have read The Shape of the River, and was struck by one fact: the authors steadfastly refused to make the data available for independent exploration by researchers.
There have been a number of useful critiques of the book. An easily accessible essay is Nieli’s “The Changing Shape of the River”: https://www.nas.org/images/documents/report_the_changing_shape_of_the_river.pdf
A more academic, and devastating critique imo, was given by the Thernstroms soon after the book appeared. Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to full text after a brief review, but it is easily obtained through ResearchGate and other services for free (upon registration or request):
Thernstrom, S & Thernstrom, A. (1999). “Reflections on the Shape of the River.” UCLA Law Review. University of California, Los Angeles. School of Law. 46. 1583-1631.
Few people realize the genesis of the “diversity” justification for affirmative action. It only appeared after affirmative action had been firmly established at elite colleges for well over a decade, based upon language in Powell’s separate *Bakke/i opinion, which is well worth reading, not least for the reason that SCOTUS found that ethnic quotas did not advance “diversity” (UC lost in Bakke):
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/438/265
There has been almost no real research on the benefits of diversity, a point made by Nieli, largely because (imo) the proferred explanation has merely been a pretext: the elite universities championing “diversity” do not in fact care about true diversity nor do they believe that - at least as practiced - it advances the mission of the university.
One exception to the lack of substantive research was the 2003 article by Rothman, Lipset and Nevitte (https://academic.oup.com/ijpor/article-abstract/15/1/8/676150), discussed by Nieli linked above at pp. 25-30.
If diversity truly matters than it should be applied consistently in all endeavors. So who supports diversity for airline pilots rather than hiring the most qualified pilots? Should the military stop grading every single carrier landing because the exact right racial mix of pilots must be maintained? So where does one go with this standard?
@Postmodern
Thank you for your response. I just need to clarify that I don’t agree that what I stated in post 2300 above is similar in its meaning to that of @SAY expressed in his/her posts.
I think diversity has its values and colleges should try to have a good representation of diverse background of students. But I don’t believe AA is the best way of achieving that nor the most effective way.
Diversity is a lot more than skin color alone. And I think the existence of AA actually might have hindered better ways to be developed/experimented that could help disadvantaged students to get better education when they were a lot younger and when a lot more of them could benefit.
AA is not a correct term politically or factually. Asians have participated little in the “wrongs of 400 years.” Majority of benefit goes upper SES URM and URM with low SES get little benefit from it. It is now Holistic Admission with Racial Diversity. Perhaps we should start calling it HARD or something.
Heather MacDonald had a nice piece out over the weekend, previewing her now newly released *The Diversity Delusion * and recounting how The University of California immediately began trying to evade the will of the people, who in the late 1990s voted to eliminate race based preferences in public education:
I do think the Harvard litigation is going to result in some substantial changes to the affirmative action landscape, but honestly it might be that standards for all students are even further eroded and the admissions process made even less predictable.
The contents of the above link have has been discussed many times on this thread.
After Prop. 209’s passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, “went through a depression figuring out what to do,” says Robert Laird, Berkeley’s pro-preferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system’s despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of “underrepresented minorities,” especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley’s liberal-arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,” recounted that “they admitted people who could barely read.”
The other thing the UC’s did was dramatically tilt the transfer system in favor of students in CC so that students with very low SAT still can get degrees.
Re: Caltech
Contrary to apparent belief here, Caltech does list both alumni relation and racial/ethnic status as “considered”:
http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/479-cds2017.pdf
https://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=706
However, the extent to which they consider such things may be less than other super-selective private schools.
UC transfer intake has been tilted toward transfers from CCs since 1960, before there was anything called “affirmative action”.
While Caltech may consider the listed hooks, the process appears to be fundamentally different from HYPSM… For example, while Caltech may consider race, only 1% of Caltech’s undergraduate student body is Black. A few years ago, they only had 2 Black students in the freshman class. It’s quite a different process from HYPSM. While Caltech may consider athletics in admission decisions, Caktech’s basketball team had a 26-year losing streak in their Div III conference; and other teams have had losing steaks lasting over a decade. Again it’s a very different process from HYPSM… While a rep from Caltech may check the boxes on the CDS, there are numerous reliable sources that contradict. For example, the paper at https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1296&context=mlr states, “Examples of universities that do not utilize legacy preferences include the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).” MIT’s website makes a similar comments about Caltech not giving legacy preference.
@SAY I don’t dispute your notion that more upper-SES URM tend to make up a higher percentage of URMs at some of the nations top colleges and universities. But one piece of data that I would love to compare would be the family wealth of entire student bodies by race (I have the sneaking suspicion that URMs would still easily be at the bottom of that income distribution) and would also like to see how long that “wealth” has followed those student’s families. One generation of relative wealth (upper middle class) would not be the same as wealth passing down from generation to generation. I would also like to understand and “define” wealth as there can be a wide gulf of access based on income/cost of living in different parts of the country. Most on this thread tend to agree that SES would be a fairer attribute to take into consideration than race (I am one of them), but there will always be someone on the wrong side of college admissions decisions, which will make those “losers” want to change the system, and the “winners” wanting to keep the status quo.
Regarding the average racial/ethnic distribution of accumulated wealth and “privilege” (broadly defined to include attributes like SES as well as “knowing the right people”), the Harvard data are very instructive. To my mind, “holistic” admissions is largely a smokescreen to camouflage elite preferences and the desire to maintain a privileged status quo, neither of which has much relevance for the vast majority of people of any race or ethnicity.
I would think a few attributes are well-correlated with accumulated wealth and broad privilege, including “first generation” (negative correlation); “legacy” (strong positive at Harvard); Dean/Director list (strong positive, as this tag includes both extremely wealthy donors as well as presumably politically and socioeconomically “connected” people); and Harvard’s own tag of “disadvantaged.”*
Here are the data by race/ethnicity for the admitted classes 2014-2019 at Harvard. These are taken from Table B.2.3 in Arcidiacono’s initial report (the initial report is better here than the revised rebuttal report because it includes athletes and therefore is a more comprehensive view of the actual admitted classes).
It should also be noted that the actual enrolled classes will be slightly higher on legacies and Dean/Director list students, as their yields will approach 100%, implying that the yields for other groups therefore will be below the average yield of ~80%.
First generation
White – 3.6%
Black – 7.6%
Hispanic – 17.7%
Asian – 8.5%
Harvard Legacy
White – 21.5%
Black – 4.8%
Hispanic – 7.0%
Asian – 6.6%
Dean/Director List
White – 14.0%
Black – 2.1%
Hispanic – 4.6%
Asian – 5.4%
Disadvantaged*
White – 8.9%
Black – 26.1%
Hispanic – 33.1%
Asian – 19.2%
- It is not totally clear what "disadvantaged" means. In the Harvard OIR documents, it appears that the tag might be a simple flag for less than $60,000 in family income. Arcidiacono (plaintiff's expert) gives a qualitative description: "Disadvantaged is a label assigned by the reader of the file. According the 2018 reader guidelines, the applicant is supposed to be labeled disadvantaged if the reader believes the applicant is from a very modest economic background." Defendant's expert simply notes the tag and offers no description.
Note that Caltech says it has only ~24,000 living alumni (http://www.caltech.edu/content/caltech-glance)–significantly fewer that other elites. That appears to include graduate student alumni. Undergrad alumni would be less than half that.
And, I’ve seen quotes from major alumni donors who admit that while Caltech was a great school for them, it would not be a good fit for their children or grandchildren. People who have attended Caltech (especially in the old days) no doubt understand that it is a good fit only for a small segment of the population.
The number of legacy applicants each year is probably very small.
Regarding URMs (and female applicants), while that status is likely used as a tie-breaker, Caltech admissions is careful not to admit students who can’t (or don’t want to) handle the workload. That gives them less room to weight demographic factors heavily.
Who cares about family wealth? Why is that the business of admissions? It just isn’t the mission of colleges to make a futile attempt to make things equal. The colleges should stick to educating the young men and women and ignore race entirely. That is the law and it should be enforced. As usual the solution has turned out to be worse than the problem in 2018. Discriminating to ameliorate past discrimination is hardly a worthwhile principle. Bedsides what is the point of helping/punishing students for sins committed by mostly dead people that have nothing to do with them. For goodness sakes the Ivies and others discriminate against American Asians to admit foreign black students. That is hardly something to be proud of.
The Harvard Statement of Material Facts states:
“When reviewing applications, admissions officers flag applicants who appear to be socioeconomically disadvantaged or eligible for aid under the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative”
The current HFAI threshold is ~$80k. I believe it was ~$60k at the start of the lawsuit data. There is not a more quantitative description of the “disadvantaged” flag because it is determined by a holistic/subjective review. Being need blind, admission officers don’t know what an applicant’s income is, so instead they make educated guesses about whether the applicant is SES disadvantaged based on combinations of things like parents’ occupation and background, fee waiver, and high school attended. Unlike AO’s during the admission process, the Harvard OIR has access to income reported on FA and was able to use applicants’ incomes directly in the analysis. Based on the Harvard OIR analysis, it appears that the admit rate boost for low SES was primarily associated with incomes below $80k. However, the degree of admit rate increase also suggests a good portion of applicants below this income threshold were not flagged as “disadvantaged.”
A theoretical college attempting to find the most meritous students using the existing measures of merit (e.g. HS courses/grades and various test scores for frosh, college courses/grades for transfers, etc.) would still consider whether pre-existing advantage or disadvantage from family wealth and other factors affects the applicants’ level of achievement. Two students with similar achievement in the usual measures of merit may not actually be the same in terms of actual ability and motivation if one had to climb over various barriers against achievement while the other had parents who could ensure that all doors are open for him/her.
Another way of thinking about this is, why do parents with money spend so much more to live in a good public K-12 school zone or pay private K-12 school tuition, rather than just live in an ok public K-12 school zone and send their kids to those public K-12 schools. After all, if environment including K-12 school does not matter, as some here would argue, why should parents spend the extra money?
One of my friends said that only after they moved in, they realized that the cut throat competition of the high ranked public high school was too much for their kids.
She would rather go back to working to pay private tuition than guarding local railway for school volunteering.
[Edit] Misread the quote as “public K-12 school zone AND pay private K-12.”
Wealth and SES generally are only relevant in my opinion in trying to gauge the potential of the student going forward. All other things being equal, a student who has had significant achievement despite modest resources should achieve even greater success once the resources of a major university are made available. This is a societal good, an efficient matching of human capital with available resources. In that matching, intelligence and motivation should be the primary considerations, and taking account of SES opportunities (broadly considered) should help inform the process of identifying the most promising applicants.
Of course, this is not the process we actually have. Holistic criteria are simply used to camouflage status quo privilege – could be race preference for the virtue signaling benefits enjoyed by the elites, legacy privilege or just the plain old reliable pay to play cashola of a wealthy donor. I don’t have any philosophical objection to most of this, but as I have often noted I think the elite eggheads at Harvard should have to comply with the same difficult laws on race discrimination as the rest of society.
"Discriminating to ameliorate past discrimination is hardly a worthwhile principle. "
But what if all choices discriminate against someone? Which one is fairest then? Isn’t a method that ensures balance reflecting population the one that discriminates the least?