It’s also used to determine first-gen status.
@UndeservingURM I agree AA might have had been a part of her admission…but possibly less than it may have helped a legacy or an athlete or donor’s kid? I gave the example because we were discussing the implications of “poor” kids living in affluent towns/strong school systems, wondering if that could help or hurt the “poor” kid.
So had we just relied on SES info in this situation, she still would have gotten the bump if SES replaced AA.
They also may have wanted her, AA or not, for her personal experiences, traveling back to South America every summer and helping teach English to poor children at her family’s churches and communities. I think those experiences could definitely enrich the campus community at NYU, don’t you? Or even just for her experiences being the daughter of immigrants, another hot topic these days. Maybe NYU is looking for students that have different perspectives that everyone can benefit from, both inside and out of the classroom.
So isn’t it possible then that it’s not just “AA” here and that NYU was just trying to look good on paper? This girl brought something to the campus that other “non hooked” or ORM’s might not have been able to and I don’t in anyway begrudge NYU for accepting her over someone with higher stats.
Either way, I think she deserved to be there, IMO. I know many posters may disagree with this, but I think there is some altruism in the concept of AA. It’s not just a program to take spots away from kids that “deserve” it more.
Though a college that wants to know first generation to college status but does not consider legacy can just ask if the parents have attended college or university and what degree (if any) they earned.
@collegemomjam
The way NYU conducts and determines its admissions decisions is entirely different from Harvard’s.
Entirely different institutions, with different qualities and priorities valued.
“Has anyone considered what eliminating race from consideration would look like, how it would actually work in practice?”
Eliminating race from consideration does not mean you change anything about your application, it just means that you can’t discriminate based on race or use race as a factor. That shouldn’t be hard for adcoms, esp Harvard to figure out what to do. They can still use context, opportunities available to determine a class. What they cannot do is admit someone simply because they’re a particular race, which is good. If Harvard was able to adjust after quotas were deemed illegal, they can adjust to this.
“Often a kid’s race/ethnicity is woven through the app, way beyond any checkbox. Removing any consideration could mean seriously limiting the ability of kids to fully present who they are, what they have achieved and in what context.”
Again, you can definitely evaluate what someone achieved in their context, the UCs do and while their black enrollment is 3-4%, their Hispanic is 15% for UCB and 20% for UCLA.
This is a good thing?
Sure, eliminating discrimination, bigotry, stereotyping, racism, are all good things. If Harvard is found to institutionally discriminate against Asians, they have a lot of splaining to do (if I may borrow from I Love Lucy).
“They also may have wanted her, AA or not, for her personal experiences, traveling back to South America every summer and helping teach English to poor children at her family’s churches and communities.”
Many Asians (and whites) do this too, and it’s usually interpreted by adcoms as wealth and privilege, that’s why many GCs and advisors warn not to write about the trip to South America where you’re going to save the world.
“I think those experiences could definitely enrich the campus community at NYU, don’t you? Or even just for her experiences being the daughter of immigrants,”
Ok, but the Asians are also sons and daughters of immigrants, some are wealthy sure but most are middle class and poor.
“Maybe NYU is looking for students that have different perspectives that everyone can benefit from, both inside and out of the classroom.”
Different perspectives are important, agree but does that outweigh discrimination? Not sure, that’s not an easy one to figure out, a complex issue.
That doesn’t close the case at all. The real question is does Harvard have de facto quotas for blacks?
.
That’s difficult to evaluate. For example, unhooked Asian and unhooked White applicants have a very similar admit rate. However, it’s not a simple “case closed” because the applicants themselves are different. Asian applicants average higher test scores than White applicants, so some might expect unhooked Asian applicant should have a higher admit rate. If you compare students with similar test scores, unhooked White applicants with that score average a significantly higher admit rate than unhooked Asian applicants with the same score. That’s also not a simple “case closed” because there are numerous important components in the application besides just test scores. If you attempt to compare applicants who are similar across these dozens of other relevant factors besides test scores including individual component rankings through regression analysis, then Harvard’s expert says there is no signfiicant difference in regression coefficient between Asian and White; while the Plantiff’s expert says there is a small difference (model 6). The different conclusions relate to minor differences in their respective models, such as whether they should control for parents’ occupation. Parents’ occupation has some degree of correlation with race, so the racial regression coefficients change depending on whether this is a control or not. One of the experts included this control. The other did not.
If you exclude the personal rating, then there is a more significant difference in admit rate, high enough that it would be significant in both experts’ models. This makes it important to ask whether the personal rating has unfair bias against Asian applicants. This is also not simple to evaluate because the personal rating criteria is vague, and some of the key components used to assign the personal rating are not available to evaluate in the lawsuit, such as essays. It would be suspicious if Asian applicants averaged less desirable essays than White applicants, but without seeing the actual essays or clearly defining what the essay evaluation criteria is, unfair bias in essay evaluation is difficult to confirm.
@theloniusmonk but did the Asian’s travel to/emigrate from South America? Maybe they wanted that perspective?
Just like they like to diversify the states people come from, can’t see how wanting to diversify the countries people come from is any different. Certainly there are more differences in kids from Ecuador vs. China than kids from Iowa vs. New Jersey??? Think about it.
Also, I’m sure they could tell her traveling back to Ecuador had nothing to do with wealth and privilege! It wasn’t a program, she went back and stayed with family!!! A little different than the programs you are talking about. Her essays genuinely elaborated on these experiences.
@epiphany I’m sure you are right that NYU and Harvard conduct their admissions differently. My point was more about the generic use of race/AA and that it’s not only the box checking, that these students have a lot more to offer than diversifying their class on paper.
This thread is about more than just the Harvard case.
Call it discrimination or not, but I don’t see a problem with NYU wanting the kind of diversity that my NYU girl had to offer. And, for the record, she’s doing great. Good grades, very happy. It was a great fit.
First point: Race is not used “generically” by higher education across the board. I’m not complaining about a derail of a Harvard discussion but I’m correcting about a misperception that priorities, so-called “quotas” (in NYU’s case, possibly a need to meet minimums of that, rather than supposed concern about "maximums), and “what a college looks for in diversity” or in what a student can contribute is similar. H and NYU are especially different from each other, more different than H and Yale or H and Princeton, even those two are also different.
Second point: While there are some common factors among colleges in evaluating “what a student has to offer,” there are also many differences (again). NYU is looking for something different in “specialness” (lame word, but you get the point) than what H is looking for, including and excluding the factor of race and national origin.
I don’t think they ever “admitted someone simply because they’re a particular race”. It was part of the package, part of the story, part of the applicant’s experience, combined with stats and everything else H looks at.
I agree.
I don’t think this lawsuit asserts that at all, does it?
If the case gets to SCOTUS, it won’t matter what arguments were asserted in district court.
There will be an entirely different case @roethlisburger ? I’m no lawyer but I thought when a case appealed to the supreme court that particular case was all that was considered. I’ve seen nothing in this case alleging a minimum quota for black students, only a max quota for Asian students.
It’s still the same case. You still have the same parties to the case, alleging they were illegally denied admissions. It’s the same case, but the justices can reach judgments based on legal rationales not argued in the district court. If the case ever makes it to SCOTUS, it will be decided on the big issues, how do the Justices view the Civil Rights Act, and not fact bound issues of dualing multivariable regressions or notes an adcom scribbled on a few apps.
New article from NPR on the case: Main highlights for me include the differences in the personal ratings by race of higher academically rated students (data looks significantly against Asian American candidates and for African American candidates) and Harvard’s expert finding no significant bias based on being Asian American. The plaintiffs removed some subsets of the student body (legacy, athletes, and children of faculty) while Harvard’s expert’s review was over the entire student body. I am not sure what “no significant bias” means from the Harvard’s expert and I also don’t understand why parts of the student body would be removed by the plaintiffs, but it feels like this case could go either way in district court.
Because it looks like a better case with the white preferences removed.
I think we all know letters “inviting to apply” are mean-nothing marketing stuff, but this is really bad:
H’s point that
…suggests H gets plenty of rural Asian applicants anyway and thus doesn’t need to market to them. IDK if that’s true, but it’s still bad. It’s a marketing letter. Why any difference from white to Asian?
LOL I think everyone on CC already knew this. Maybe not to what extent with recruited athletes. But common knowledge here ever since I arrived some 8 years ago.
@OHMomof2 All races can be any and all of those different subsets so excluding them seems to be cherry-picking. Harvard’s recruiting tactics definitely look bad and would have had less scrutiny if they had different regional scores but not different scores based on race within the same region.
Legacies, recruited athletes, z-list and donors skew whiter than the general pool.
Agree, it is cherry picking. It’s almost like Blum wants to get rid of affirmative action for everyone except white people…which his history would indicate is exactly what he us trying to do.