This chart (where is it from Tiggerdad?) makes it clear that Asian American percentage at Harvard is not static at all but has grown basically every year. It’s grown by a LOT - especially given how few get into Harvard, period (4.59%?) and how few Asians are in the large hook pools of legacies and recruited athletes.
Has any other racial group grown by 10% of the class in 20 years? 13% to 23% is a LOT. Especially for a group that is such a small % of the population as a whole.
But there’s no way to know, from this, if this regular growth over a few decades had anything to do with the 1990 case. US demographics? Immigration patterns? Financial aid initiatives? Marketing and outreach on the part of H?
Correlation and causation and all that.
I’d really like to see that link/data please. I haven’t seen it yet and didn’t realize the overall rating scores and admit races for those by race had been made public.
Changes in Asian American percentage of class is not meaningful without also considering changes in the application pool. For example, when expressed as below, it looks like the Asian acceptance rate always seems to stay slightly below the White acceptance rate. Instead of lawsuit repercussions, it appears that the main reason the Asian percentage in class increased rapidly during the 80s and early 90s was because the number of Asian applicants increased at a faster rate than occurred in other races.
Class of 1983: 784 Asians applied, Asians applicants have 2% lower acceptance rate than White applicants, Asians are 5% of class
Class of 1992: 2,263 Asians applied, Asians applicants have 3% lower acceptance rate than White applicants, Asians are 14% of class
Class of 2002: ~4k Asians applied, Asians applicants have 3% lower acceptance rate than White applicants, Asians are 19% of class
Class of 2012: ~6k Asians applied, Asians applicants have 3% lower acceptance rate than White applicants, Asians are 19% of class
Class of 2019 (last year of lawsuit info): ~8k Asians applied, Asians applicants have 2% lower acceptance rate than White applicants, Asians are 19% of class
13% was from the late 1980s – more than 30 years ago. There was an increase in the 1980s. However, the past 20 years has had much smaller changes. A comparison with the freshman class 20 years ago is below, according to IPEDS. Using IPEDS federal definitions, Asians make up a similar percentage of the freshman class in 2017 than in 1998, perhaps slightly lower (variable unknown and two or more races make exact percentage an estimate). Instead the group that had the largest relative increase during this period was international, which doubled from 6% to 12%.
20 Years Ago
White – 44%
Asian – 19%
Black – 9%
Hispanic – 8%
International – 6%
Unknown – 15%
Last Year
White – 43%
Asian – 17%
Black – 7%
Hispanic – 11%
International – 12%
Two or More Races – 6%
Unknown – 3%
This entire topic is a lot more complicated than people are making it seem.
To me, it is clear that Harvard did intentionally discriminate on the basis of race, whixh is a
protected category and so, explicitly illegal.
Non-legacies and non-athletes in the other hand, are not protected categories, and so Harvard is free to consider those things in admissions, especially since universities derive other benefits, some
financial, from their athletic programs, and although I have not seen the evidence, the idea behind legacy admission is to increase donations to the university. So these candidates offer financial benefit over other candidates, so the benefit to the university is much more clear than the supposed benefit of diversity of skin tone.
I feel bad for the Asian kid who does
what they’re told, nosey-grindstone, for years - and then goes to a just-OK- LAC. It seems
unfair to be limited because you are the “wrong” kind of diversity.
The flip side of that is that Asians are so over represented in proportion to their presence on the general population that at some point, it DOES become a self-fulfilling prophecy. My math kid decided not to apply to UCLA and Berkeley because he was interested in sports statistical analysis, and looking at the composition of those programs, didn’t see a lot of friend potential.
My daughter got into Cornell, and although she would have gone if we could have afforded it, personally I was rather surprised by the majority-Asian appearance of the student population everywhere on campus. Our town
is about 25% Asian, and it was MUCH more Asian than our town.
And the statistics did NOT reflect that…I have to think they are hiding an Asian percentage in international. The official White percentage was about 40%, which seemed accurate. I just think there is a tipping point where students or parents start to rule
out schools because of the percentages, which is why racial balancing, although “unfair”, sort of seems necessary. She was admitted to RPI with a generous merit award, but never seriously
considered it because of the skewed male/female
ratio.
To me, the bigger problem is not schools tinkering with demographics, it is their non-profit status, and the failure
to apply foundation rules
to endowments. If these schools were required to spend 5% of assets each year on direct educational programs, it would perhaps bring tuitions back down to attainable numbers for a
lot of people who are currently shut out due to fiscal reality.
@picktails
Thank you for the linked article. It is a part of American history that we all need to know when discussing about race and poverty today.
“During the 1930s, black Southerners lived in such degraded conditions that poor white people could afford to hire them as housekeepers. New Deal policies could have dramatically improved their lot. Instead, they widened the racial gap while millions of white families cemented their place in an exploding middle class. By 1984, when most of the G.I. Bill mortgages had matured, the median white household had a net worth of more than $39,000. The median black household was worth slightly less than $3,400 — a gaping chasm attributable primarily to the absence of black homeownership”.
@picktails great article and thanks for sharing. I saved the link because that is a great article to have in my back pocket.
I am white (and I think so is the author of that article?) and I completely agree with the theme of that article. I know too many white people that have this “we’ve worked hard for what we have” and therefore are, generally speaking, anti-civil rights oriented because they feel the playing field is level enough. But no one wants to spend the time reading articles like the one you posted about some of the realities of our not so distant past that has brought us to where we are today.
I especially agree that the Asian plaintiffs are being used as pawns and that this is really deep down not even about the Asians being discriminated against in Harvard admissions…some people see AA exactly as what the article suggests they see it as…that slackers that don’t deserve it are getting a boost.
I have a lot more to say but it would end up taking us way off topic. But in a nutshell, it seems to me that this whole Harvard case has the momentum it has because of a deep underlying feeling of threat that some (definitely not all, but enough) whites feel from the program and sad as this may sound, civil rights in general. There is so much hypocrisy out there, as the article points out, but this is not the forum for the debate.
If it becomes illegal for race to be a determining factor in college admissions, my concern is the wrong people will benefit and people that most need the “tip” will be hurt.
The rate of poverty among blacks is much higher than that of whites, butnin absolute terms, there are more whites living in poverty.
Just because some whites benefitted from the New Deal and entered the middle class, it doesn’t follow that ALL whites feel obligated to compensate for benefits they did not receive either. My Dad and Mom were both poor, and in the 70s and 80s I would guess we had a negative net worth. My husbands parents came from refugee camps in europe with the clothes on their backs, in the early 50s. So don’t expect us to feel we owe anyone anything.
@Gudmom those are good points and I have a similar background. But I don’t think it’s that anyone “owes” anything to anyone else. If anything, it’s the wrong people that think they are owed or entitled. As in any situation, there are many people that are the exceptions to the rule. And many European immigrants (all four of my grandparents) from the early-mid 20th century experienced their own prejudices, I get that. But there are some unique issues with the African American community, in my opinion as the article that was posted suggests, and I personally worry about the implications to that particular community of getting rid of AA/race in college admissions. I realize not everyone shares that opinion. Probably not the right forum for that debate.
I don’t begrudge at all anyone taking advantage of the tilting of the playing field to their advantage. Just don’t delude yourself into thinking that it is ever going to be more “fair”. It will just be unfair, in a different way.
I agree that whenever we change the rules, there will be winners and losers and it will never be completely “fair”. But things could be more or less fair, depending on how we amend/change/add laws. And I can’t help but fear a wave of white entitlement, but maybe that is just a function of the times we are currently living in. And I know that doesn’t reflect that values of many people, especially people on this thread. But it is a fear of mine.
The reason that I push against AA as an African American is that it is hard for me to see how it has really helped African Americans as a people (My theory is that as it continues, it will help more and more higher SES URMs over time as they have the resources/better schools to have increased standardized test scores). My family has felt the impact of slavery and Jim Crow (generations of family sharecropped from Mississippi farm lands after slavery ended), and one thing that I have noticed is 2 different methods to dealing with that historically bad treatment. Part of my family has a belief that due to these past horrors, we are owed a debt, and that they blame any and all problems on institutional racism and look for ways to exploit every system (Social Security, Food Stamps, handicap placards, etc.) because we are “owed”. Another part of my family decided to try and compete and AA did help my father’s generation attend PWIs and get out of poverty. (but I didn’t live with my father so I lived another generation in poverty). But it really wasn’t AA that did it, but a mind state that pulled that portion of my family out of poverty. My wife’s family has been out of poverty for 4 generations (even during Jim Crow in Alabama thanks to a long term belief in education which they got through HBCUs). The world is not fair, and it has been especially unfair to African Americans since this country’s founding, but African Americans will overcome whatever elite institution’s admissions policies become, AA is 50 years in and it has barely made a dent in African Americans status in America. It is time to try something else and looking at SES is just a better idea (especially from a legal standpoint). We (African Americans) should really want 4.0 UW GPAs, 1550 SAT/ 35 ACT scores too, not a lower statistical standard to get into elite schools (even though stats/EC should be viewed through the context of an applicants situation regardless of race). My kids have had every advantage that my household’s low end upper middle class income could give them. Why should their race give them another advantage over a white or Asian kid whose family household income is $20,000 a year?
What exactly do you mean by “didn’t see a lot of friend potential”?
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=cornell&id=190415#enrolmt says 19% Asian. Appearance-wise, there are also possibly some of the 11% international, 8% unknown, and 5% multiracial, but even if every single student in these categories were Asian, that would still only add up to 43%, not a majority.
While I can understand your perspectives and what direction we need to go, I don’t think pushing against AA is a way to get there. After all, AA and SES are neither exclusive nor competing. So what if URMs get in through the elite gate with 25th percentile scores when such empowerment places them in an excellent position for their children to achieve 4.0 UW GPAs, 1550 SAT/ 35 ACT scores.
Let me rephrase this a bit and see if it makes any less sense:
So what if poor white students get in through the elite gate with 25th percentile scores when such empowerment places them in an excellent position for their children to achieve 4.0 UW GPAs, 1550 SAT/ 35 ACT scores.
@TiggerDad I have no problem with a URM getting in at the 25th percentile, but today it is under the guise of AA. I just believe in taking race out of the process. I think that Holistic Admissions is okay as long as race is removed as a preference. My question for those who believe that AA should continue: How long should AA exist?
Every time I read through this thread, I find my own beliefs shifting. I started out very supportive of AA despite the fact that it would only disadvantage my kids. But, I have come to see some of the problems. It is absolutely true that URMs who are accepted into elite universities are stigmatized as not having truly “earned” it. I hear it in the conversations of kids from our high school. “X got into Princeton, but he’s Black so that explains it.” It seems to foster more antagonism and racial separation. I’m honestly not sure if it does more harm then good for racism overall. On the other hand, one of the benefits of going to college is being surrounded by people of different cultures and different races. I honestly think students benefit from being exposed to diversity. Maybe AA is needed to make sure that keeps happening.