As in most of life, it is not legal rulings but social pressure that nudges society. The elites are squealing, but the broad consensus of society is moving towards a complete removal of race preferences. In the end, that consensus will be what drives the future anyway.
We don’t have federal laws that prohibit all forms of discrimination in the broadest sense. We have federal laws that ban discrimination on the basis of race/ethnicity, religion, sex, disability, national origin, genetic information, and age. Everything else is fair game.
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Just for the record, everyone (well, perhaps besides recruited athletes) has a miniscule chance at admission to an >>Ivy+.
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P(admission | black, decent academics) is very, very high.
From what I’ve seen self-reported on this website, almost every African American with 2250+ (on old scale) or 1530+ (on new scale) SAT and decent GPA/APs has gotten into at least one Ivy league tier school (usually 2 or 3), implying that African Americans who “only” have the academics have an insanely high admission chance. For apples to apples comparison, the African American with the “Asian” profile has a very high rate of admissions ( like 70%) in at least one ivy league tier school while the Asian American with the same “Asian” profile has a tiny chance.
Someone said that there are so many qualified applicants that it doesn’t matter. This is true for the entire applicant pool (when including Asians + whites). This is not true for the African American pool. There are not enough talented African Americans to even fill the implicit quotas at the top schools.
- African Americans flunk out of hard majors and take easy majors
- African American graduation rates are at least 10% lower than others despite taking easier majors
- On the old math SAT, only 2,000 African Americans scored above 700, 1,000 above 750 per year (overall, ~100,000 students score > 700, ~50,000 students score >750)
Notice that only Harvard publishes average SAT scores segmented by race. They can because they are skimming the very top of the African American applicant pool. Even then, there is a large SAT score gap. SAT scores are cutoff at the high end of the academic scale, so even if schools severely racially discriminate and have a hard quota, the average SAT score by race should be similar if there are indeed enough talent available. The score gap would only appear if there are not enough talented applicants from that particular group in the pool to fill the quota.
If Harvard has a hard time filling its African American quota, just imagine how much harder it is at lower tier ivy league schools and how big the academics/score gap is. Lower tier ivy league schools have a numerous, high talent pool of non-African Americans because it’s much deeper but only scraps left from the African American pool.
About gender:
Woman get neutral or positive treatment in every competitive, prestigious, well-paying major/field. There are “diversity” internships at top firms in consulting, IB, tech, etc. and the well-paying, competitive companies specifically recruit from women’s groups and events. Men only get positive treatment in non-competitive majors and fields.
I would argue that getting an edge in competitive majors is a huge privilege compared to getting an edge in non-competitive majors. A competitive person can get to the top of a non-competitive major without much help but needs help to get to the top of a competitive field. It doesn’t matter much either way for a non-competitive person.
On gender:
Woman get neutral or positive treatment in every competitive, prestigious, well-paying major/field. There are “diversity” internships at top firms in consulting, IB, tech, etc. and the well-paying, competitive companies specifically recruit from women’s groups and events. Men only get positive treatment in non-competitive majors and fields.
I would argue that getting an edge in competitive majors is a huge privilege compared to getting an edge in non-competitive majors. A competitive person can get to the top of a non-competitive major without much help but needs help to get to the top of a competitive field. It doesn’t matter much either way for a non-competitive person.
Consideration of race or any other attribute in admissions or the workplace automatically taints the outcome. It doesnt matter if the goal is noble in intent. I have worked in places where there was a push to hire woman in management so they ended up with a bunch of unqualified women, I worked somewhere where -under pressure–we had to hire more black employees so we went on a hiring binge with that as a goal. Preferences of any attribute that that are non producing-i.e have no value–damages social fabric. Being a good programmer or researcher or tight-end is a skill that can produce results. Being a color or gender or rich or poor produces little --that didnt already exist.
I agree that it will be a few years at the earliest before anything changes because the SCOTUS will most likely make a narrow decision with the Harvard lawsuit, but that should be enough to get the ball rolling. I also believe that both political parties will start to push this issue to the back burner as the 2020 election approaches (It seems to always come down to the economy and any dirt gathered on the candidates as we approach election season). After looking at the data of admitted students at Harvard, the scores were much closer than expected, so a more wide ranging decision would probably come from a lawsuit with a college that has a much larger statistical spread (that should be easy to find). I would guess 5 years to remove preferences due to race if I were a betting man. At that point, schools may try to come up with a new “holistic approach” to blunt the impact, so don’t be surprised if that is the next war front.
@UndeservingURM I know about those diversity internships you are talking about and they are not just for women, but for men as well that aren’t “diverse”. I think Asians might be included in diversity, but not sure.
Regardless, despite the existence of these diversity internships, the upper levels at the banks are still mostly white men. Pretty sure the boards are still mostly white men. Not even saying this is due to discrimination (but maybe it is and I’m sure there are people that think it is). But I do think at the end of the day, for whatever reason, the white men are still dominating a lot of the prestigious, high earning positions out there. And it does seem like many companies, to their credit in my opinion, are trying to bring more diversity to upper management.
@Center I’m not sure I agree with your last point, that “Being a color or gender or rich or poor produces little…”. I think if you can get beyond the superficial differences, students/employees from these varied backgrounds offer diversity of thought and varying perspectives which I think OVERALL society does respect and value.
@UndeservingURM I have some questions/comments about your points raised. 1st is your point that African Americans flunk out of hard majors and take easy majors. I have never actually seen the data from Elite colleges and universities, but I have seen this topic brought up before, so any data you have seen on this particular topic would be great. Point number 2 is false when looking at Ivy League schools data as they have all fluctuated between 1-8 percentage points on the graduation rate from all of the data I have ever seen on the topic. I will attach a link I saved a few years back on that subject, and you can find more online pretty easily. Your 3rd point is spot on from the data I have seen on the subject. I will note that even among that group of high scorers, a significant percentage choose non “elite” level schools. My African American daughter had a 1470 SAT (680 EBRW and 790 M) and with a retake would have gone above a 1500 superscore and she did not apply to any top 25 schools. There are a few members of her HBCU scholarship cohort with high standardized test scores who spurned Ivy League acceptances. Part of her own reluctantance to look at those schools dealt with the stereotypes she would deal with as a student of color.
I also don’t think there is too much evidence of African Americans “flunking out” or of massive disparities in graduation rates, at least at the elites (though there are some disparities). But there is some evidence of African Americans switching out of tougher STEM subjects, especially males if I recall correctly, from the Arcidiacono paper regarding Duke.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
This losing of black students to STEM majors is a big issue to my mind if it is widespread (and I suspect it is). You usually only get one chance to go into science, and if you get discouraged in college, it is not going to happen. @ChangeTheGame correctly points out that HYP skim the very best of the black students available, and so any disparities in admitted students are relatively small (the Harvard data support this observation).
But because of the large preferences, as implied by @UndeservingURM, the most elite skim a very large percentage of the available top URM students, a much larger percentage of course than with respect to whites and Asians. Therefore, as you go even one rung down in selectivity, even within the Ivy League and equivalent, then you are going to see much wider disparities. That might be contributing to the loss of smart URM, particularly African American, in STEM fields even at Duke. I do think Harvard and a few others are doing a disservice to the entire ecosystem by taking too high a percentage of the very best URM. Far from breaking down stereotypes, the results are likely to reinforce them as lower prestige schools feel the need to reach down lower into their own applicant pools in order to satisfy their perceived need to meet diversity goals. The average SAT score differences, for instance, given in the Arcidiacono paper for Duke are quite a lot larger than at Harvard.
I can see why some smart black students would choose to opt out of this dynamic. I can’t remember exactly where in the Harvard documents I saw this, but yield on African American admits is the lowest for all races/ethnicities/categories. If I recall correctly, it is around 58-60%. No doubt some are opting for better offers elsewhere (scholarships, or perceived opportunities to shine).
@SatchelSF Thank you for that data from Duke. I think I have seen that particular data set and had more issue with the flunking out characteristic than the change of majors. I have seen hundreds of my wife’s African American students go to college that my wife keeps up with as a high school teacher and while I see some eating alive by the rigor and lack of time management skills, the issues I see pop up the most are a struggle to sometimes find a place on a PWI campus (much less issue on most elite campuses however) and a lack of funds (a larger than expected percentage even getting denied parent plus loans in Black community). The Ivy League Schools have less African American turnover than any HBCU and almost all PWIs. That is because they have the best African American students and because the money part of the equation is solved with generous financial aid packages. Flunking out and running out of money are two totally different events in my mind but are always lumped together in every data set that I have ever seen. I have also seen the data where the African American yield was the lowest among the racial groups at Harvard and I have a theory on that. The African American diaspora is large and has many different groups that feed into it. Top 25 schools are viewed differently within these groups. I believe I read somewhere that 2/3’s of all African Americans on Harvard’s campus had ancestors within 2 generations of the Caribbean Islands, and particular set of African countries led by Nigeria. These immigrants and children of immigrants have been superstars within the African American community and reach for the elite schools with vigor. African Americans with a longer history within the US tend to be more distrustful due to a long “historical memory” of past horrors, so we tend to stick to institutions (HBCUs) that were there for black people when we had no choice or stay close to home (Even if a full need school could make the costs a non-factor). Every future generation will make some strides, but it may take awhile for African Americans to chose elite school opportunities in similar numbers to other groups.
@ChangeTheGame You are probably referring to a wide publicized article in NYT some years ago about black student composition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more-blacks-but-which-ones.html
It might still be true today. Interestingly, at Harvard, among black, Hispanic, unhooked white and Asian admits roughly two third by my observation are immigrants who came as a child or are children of immigrants. Harvard’s president Larry Bacow whose mother was a Holocaust survivor fits that profile too. With Harvard’s admission case in the spotlight an often less talked about aspect of this racial balancing act is that it is done to a great extent among the country’s newcomers with very little attachment to historical context of affirmative action. The irony is that the groups probably have more in common with each other in culture and experience than with families who have been here for many generations. I don’t know if it is a peculiar situation at Harvard or it is also true at many other top colleges.
jz this is exactly why AA should and will be ruled illegal. Something like almost half of the back students admitted to Harvard are not Americans and have absolutely nothing to due with the history of America. Why should foreigners get preference to our elite schools over Americans? But they do this precisely because their are not enough American URM’s with very tippy top scores. My son’s roommate at college came from an African country and had a 35 ACT. The parents were important people in the country and the kid had attended top notch private prep schools outside his native country. This is not at all atypical.
Many immigrants to the US are selected by the immigration system as PhD students or skilled workers. Not a surprise that their American kids end up doing well in school. You can argue nature versus nurture, but these kids tend to get both in their favor.
@collegemomjam
They are usually explicitly stated as “under represented minority” internships which usually excludes Asians. The boards and leadership being mostly white men doesn’t matter much for the average high achiever/Ivy leaguer. The average high achiever is only looking to make $200k-$500k as a decent cog in the system. Not many people have high aspirations to become a director/VP.
@ChangeTheGame
I take back the 10% graduation rate gap comment. The median appears to be ~5% for the Ivy league tier schools (and a little higher for the schools ranked just under the Ivy League). This isn’t a red flag like a 10% gap would be but the 5% gap combined with a higher percentage of them taking easier non-STEM majors is still very suspicious.
Note that the graduation rate doesn’t cover GPA differences within the same major either. There is a racial GPA disparity across all college graduates [1] and African Americans are more likely to graduate with majors that are easier to achieve high GPAs in. It’s unclear whether there is a GPA gap at the top endcolleges. With the only information being the aggregate GPA disparity and omission of the data by universities (because universities omit data that makes them look bad and equality = good, disparity = bad), I slightly lean towards a racial GPA disparity within majors existing at the top colleges.
On a side note, the graduation rate gaps at UCLA and UC Berkeley are ridiculous. Local context at the top end of the UCs is clearly a failure. I would think that one look at those gaps would lead anyone to conclude that the UC admissions process is broken from mismatch.
The problem for the top UCs in achieving African American diversity is that many talented African Americans go to the elite private or magnet schools. I’ll give credit to the universities that argued that banning affirmative action would force universities to accept lower quality students. It is playing out in the UC system. Disallowing the use of race stops universities from separating the rich URM applicants from the other applicants. The only other ways to meet the racial quota would be to overweight local context or create and use additional signals for race like Questbridge. If the supreme court rules against affirmative action, the rigor that universities will be required to use to prove that the proxies for race aren’t actually being used as proxies for race will be much higher.
@jzducol
Those immigrant statistics makes the reparations argument obsolete. Many of the winners and the losers of affirmative action have not been in the country for very long.
@ucbalumnus
Immigrant children from some countries tend to do better even after normalizing for income and education of parents.
@UndeservingURM thanks for the note back. I was told by someone at one of the big 8 banks that Asians count in the diversity internships that begin for sophomores. So maybe it varies by bank but I"m not sure Asians are over represented in banking.
I’m also not sure I agree with your last point that not many people have high aspirations to become director/VP. I would think there are many people of all colors that want the opportunity to advance. I’m not saying that discrimination is the reason that women/non-whites do not advance, but to say they don’t really want to doesn’t sit right with me. My daughters are both pursuing financial careers and they want to go as far as they can. They may change their minds as the circumstances of their lives change, who knows. But they certainly want the opportunity.
I welcome your well-thought out posts on this board.
You recently used the same JBHE link that I did a few months ago, showing the graduation rates by race. And the graduation rates for students at the elite colleges are high for all races. But I have argued previously (in post 1503) that there is more information in comparing the “failure to graduate” percentages to show the difference between them. Quoting from post 1503:
What is the evidence for this claim?
^ With respect to East Asian immigrants, we can see some of this by looking at the NYC specialized schools (figures taken from greatschools.org):
Stuyvesant High School - ~75% Asian, 45% low income (eligible for free or reduced price lunch)
Bronx High School of Science - ~73% Asian, 47% low income
Brooklyn Tech - ~61% Asian, 66% low income
Clearly, low income (and presumably low educational attainment of the parents) are not significant barriers for Asian immigrants in NYC.
With regard to children of African-heritage immigrants (primarily Africa and West Indies), the evidence is mixed. Although we often hear of the higher earnings of black immigrants, it is not true; they earn less on average than native whites but more than native blacks.
Alison Rauh did some interesting work here, but unfortunately she left academia for Silicon Valley after earning her Ph.D in economics from Chicago in 2014.
She found that the children of black immigrants display a binary outcome, largely conditioned on the educational attainment of the parents (contrast with the NYC specialized high school information). To the extent that the black immigrant parents are educated, the children continue to do well, narrowing income and other gaps with native whites. However, the second generation of non-college educated parents show convergence towards native black Americans on rates of “idleness”:
http://home.uchicago.edu/~arauh/Rauh2013a.pdf
There is a lot of interesting information in that paper, including some discussion of the possible effects of discrimination (proxied by patterns of racial segregation, which I’m not sure is very robust). She also had another paper also worth reading on similar questions: http://home.uchicago.edu/~arauh/Rauh2013b.pdf
Free or reduced price lunch goes up to 1.85 times the federal poverty line, which may be a higher income limit than many assume: https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/fr-050818
Also, those competitive-admission or test-in schools in New York have a lower percentage of FRPL students than New York (city) overall at 71.5%: http://www.nyskwic.org/get_data/indicator_profile.cfm?subIndicatorID=52 . So their student populations are less poor than that of New York (city) overall. In addition, some immigrants with high educational attainment may have “undermatched” on income due to credential mismatch, English language ability, or discrimination against their ethnicity.
Note that about 50% of Chinese and 70% of Indian immigrants have bachelor’s degrees (or higher), which is much higher than the US non-immigrant population, or the populations of China and India.
@hebegebe Your analysis of the data is sound and African Americans are finishing elite institutions at lower rates in comparison to other ethnicities. The data has hopefully shifted closer today, but it is another sign that race based policies have issues. I would be curious to see the 4 and 6 year graduation rates between races at elite state schools that have removed race as a factor (UCs and the University of Michigan) which I will look up tonight if no one posts the data. I saw that @UndeservingURM mentioned a big spread at the UCLA and UC Berkeley and that may be something that shows up in the numbers regardless (I hope not).