@ChangeTheGame - “Do you think that is impossible? Because I believe we can have a diverse community of students without having a racial preference.”
Your belief or personal preference isn’t going to change the fact that, yes, it’s impossible to diversify the campus population without the race conscious admissions. Getting rid of AA is only going to hurt the diversification efforts.
This is only true if you ignore race neutral alternatives, such as eliminating legacy preferences, eliminating preferences for large donors, eliminating boosts to children of faculty, create caps on the number of students from the private feeder schools, and giving a larger boost to students with low family income. It also presupposes diversity can be defined in strictly racial terms.
Regardless of where you stand on the Blum/SFFA - Harvard lawsuit, and regardless of whether or not the result is the one you prefer, what Harvard subsequently does in its admission process will be what it wants to do, not necessarily what you would prefer it to do. I.e. prepare to be disappointed, regardless of the result.
Also, do not expect popular perception regarding “fairness” or lack thereof in Harvard admission and related perceptions of students’ racial/ethnic groups to change, regardless of the result.
“This is only true if you ignore race neutral alternatives, such as eliminating legacy preferences, eliminating preferences for large donors, eliminating boosts to children of faculty, create caps on the number of students from the private feeder schools, and giving a larger boost to students with low family income.”
Add in eliminate athletic preferences as well. Many of the Ivy sports that give preference to recruited athletes are sports that heavily draw from high SES and white demographics. Rowing, sailing, lacrosse, golf are just a few examples of sports where the majority of recruited athletes are well off white kids. One article mentioned that there is a college that recruits for polo players, but I have to suspect that was hyperbole.
Those hoping that Harvard will eliminate legacy or athletic preferences will almost certainly be disappointed.
Note that Harvard created targeted campaigns for any and all Hispanic and black students to decrease their the acceptance rates. The large percentage of the growth for black and Hispanic applicants have been people who objectively have no chance — they score under a 3 on the objective measure, academic index.
Quoting myself:
Meanwhile, Asian candidates have been increasing in quality after Asia came out of 3rd world poverty and as Americans colleges have a higher percentage of Chinese nationals year over year.
And people feared the crash of the South economy when slavery was banned.
This is a big point of discussion in the lawsuit, with many pages or analyses on both sides. I think Harvard’s expert is effective in making the point that Harvard wouldn’t have the same degree of URM representation without AA, and if they did implement a race neutral alternative that focuses on increasing the portion of low SES admits, then there would be financial issues with far fewer full pay students.
He found the racial percentages would change as follows with different admission models proposed by the Plantiff (only domestic applicants listed, using Harvard’s racial definitions). In all cases, the percentage of Black students decreases significantly without AA. I think that’s accurate that the Black percentage is expected to decrease substantially without AA, and that may be considered an acceptable consequence. What may require greater changes is creating a new financial model for tuition. The current financial model is able to have ~$0 parental costs for families making less than approximately the US median income because they have such a large portion of wealthy families who are capable of and willing to pay a $70k+ sticker price. If you dramatically reduce the full pay group and dramatically increase the $0 parental cost group, then this system becomes impractical.
No Hooks, Bigger Boost for Low SES
Hispanic: 13% → 11%
Black: 14% → 7%
Income “Disadvantaged”: 18% → 48%
No Hooks, Bigger Boost for Low SES, Double Number of Low SES Applicants with Low SES Targeted Recruiting
Hispanic: 13% → 14%
Black: 14% → 8%
Income “Disadvantaged”: 18% → 70%
No Hooks, Bigger Boost for Low SES, Well distribute Admits Across All Neighborhood Clusters
Hispanic: 13% → 14%
Black: 14% → 10%
Income “Disadvantaged”: 18% → 59%
No Hooks, Bigger Boost for Low SES, Double Number of Low SES Applicants with Increased Recruiting, Distribute Admits Across All Neighborhood Clusters
Hispanic: 13% → 15%
Black: 14% → 11%
Income "Disadvantaged: 18% → 76%
Is it just me, or did the tone of that seem really condescending to @ChangeTheGame ? “Naive”…the subject is “complex”, but “cogently laid out”…and if your attention span is too short, then just read the one page? I mean, the guy has his own experience and opinion, with the very subject you speak of academically,…but here’s an article.
@ucbalumnus in regard to my comment about my son not applying to California schools for math, he grew up in a school with a lot of Asian kids, and was never on a team with any one of them. The kid loves sports, playing sports, talking about sports, wants to do sports statistics, both as a hobby now and perhaps as a profession. He had asian friends when he was in the lower grades, but by middle school there was little common ground. The Asian kids did not play team sports without an individual component, ie, golf yes, soccer no, tennis yes, basketball no. Maybe that was parental insistence rather than preference, but in any case he felt he would be lonely in a department where no one shared his interests. He imagined no one would care about the football team, or basketball. Maybe he was wrong, but he could only go to ONE school, and he was already applying to 10. Sorry if you think it was racist. It wasn’t. It was about the same as the reason my daughter didn’t really consider RPI. Too many boys, not enough girls. That is what I meant about a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. Too many of one thing makes other people who aren’t that thing feel like maybe they aren’t as interested. Which is the whole reason for trying to increase “representation” in the first place - to make people feel less alone. But that is why RPI still has a “ratio problem”. They can admit girls - but they can’t MAKE them come. And lots of girls won’t come because of the ratio problem.
Perhaps that is how inaccurate (and sometimes much more vicious) stereotypes form, when people apply what they see from a small not-necessarily-representative subset of a visibly-identifiable group to all members of the group. To the extent that it causes people to want to self-segregate, or fear situations where they are not part of the majority group (as @Hanna once mentioned about white students not wanting to attend colleges where they are not the majority), that can lead to continued inaccurate stereotyping, as more people have less contact with those from other visibly-identifiable groups, so that any potentially-unrepresentative contact may be inaccurately seen as representative.
From Harvard’s point of view, that is presumably to make itself marketable to as many potential students as possible; it does not want to project the image where students of any racial/ethnic group will feel alone or unwelcomed. This could be an impossible task, since the sum of the percentage thresholds for those of each racial/ethnic group to feel comfortable may add up to substantially greater than possible, even with multiracial/ethnic people counted in each. Harvard apparently has to lean hard on legacy and athlete admissions to keep non-Hispanic/Latino white enrollment close to a majority (the threshold that @Hanna mentioned to keep the school attractive to white students), but then having enough of the rest of the students be black and Hispanic/Latino may leave not enough for Asian students to the point of attracting the Blum/SFFA lawsuit.
In addition, Harvard presumably wants to be marketable to big money donors and the most elitist high paying employers (Wall Street and consulting), so that may affect how it shapes its student body (in both race/ethnicity and SES background) for marketability.
@Gudmom I am used to changes in tone on “complex” subject matters but I don’t believe it is racial, but because we disagree and I see it more often with the political differences around the US.
I have a lot of “skin” in the game when it comes to AA with a child going through elite college admissions process next year along with mentoring and tutoring African American youth who basically shoot for a lower standard because they know they have AA to help them. It would be easy for me to be another rubber-stamp agreeing with racial preferences in admissions, but I see what happens at the lowest levels. My kids even see the hypocrisy and my daughter just wasn’t interested. No one from my neighborhood of my youth is going to an Ivy and can barely get 1-2 students can get into my state flagship because AA doesn’t help those URMs that need it the most (because it is too late by that point), but it could be the deciding factor of admission for my son. The numbers that @Data10 provided are significant drops from current numbers and would no doubt sting, but AA being never ending is not an option from own point of view (The courts may or may not kill AA this go around, but they be the ones to eventually kill it).
Seems like the theme of this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/black-struggle-technology-jobs/573859/
SFFA has their first victory. Harvard changed their admissions guidelines.
Previously, Harvard gave zero instructions on race, the implication being that race can be used for everything. They would give presentations to admissions officers stressing the high number of Asians that excel academically and the low number of African Americans that excel academically. Then they would stress the use of “context” when evaluating candidates, wink wink nudge nudge.
This year, they’ve given instructions explicitly limiting the use of race:
They’ve also added more academic “personal traits” used for personal ratings:
I think they created the campaigns to get more of those applicants and you’re reading the sinister (and very far out) motive into that. Harvard sends marketing materials to all kinds of applicants with little chance of getting in (of course even very qualified applicants have little chance of getting in…)
Sorry, but if you think my son was “inaccurately applying a stereotype to a not-representative subset” or somehow wrong in applying his experience ina school that was 30% Asian, and “projecting” what he would experience
in a school which has overall Asian enrollment of 40%, then applying another “perhaps not representative” stereotype to assume that the MATH departments would be even more racially skewed. Unless you have some information that points to UCLA and berkely as having very diverse math departments in which many people are engaged in sports analysis, he wasn’t wrong.
The potentially non-representative stereotype is that there are no Asian people who are interested in the sports that he is interested in (either participatory or spectator).
@OHMomof2 brings up a good point. It seems that SOME of the people “not on Harvard’s side” (for lack of a better way of classifying them) are reading “sinister motives” into their actions and I think that is totally uncalled for. Their admissions staff has a very difficult, and pretty impossible, task each year in making decisions that are going to be scrutinized to death, in an attempt to keep things as fair as possible, given all that they have to balance. It’s a no win situation for them. No matter what they do, they will be attacked. I feel like all of this energy could be applied more positively elsewhere.
It isn’t that there are NO Asians who like football and basketball, but I would venture to guess that they aren’t OVER represented among fans of those sports, and if you really want to suggest there is significant participation but Asians
in those sports, you would just be wrong. The kid did not choose the best school he could get into. He didn’t apply to any Ivys or the NE LACs, because he wanted a big sports school.
The one he chose ultimately
is majority minority, but has a huge and active sports culture.
Asians don’t happen to be one of
the bigger demographics. So what.
Your son’s example suggests that colleges do have reason to care about the racial/ethnic makeup of their students in terms of marketability. In his particular case, a high Asian population makes the college less marketable to him. Of course, that can extend to other racial/ethnic groups, both historically and currently.
But, obviously, trying to manipulate the racial/ethnic makeup of the students could lead to lawsuits.