There is plenty of innuendo in this thread, but very little in the way of facts demonstrating that Harvard admissions was actively discriminating against Asian American applicants. Thus the lower court’s finding (affirmed by the appellate court) that there was no discrimination.
(That’s not to say Harvard will prevail in the case. Given the current makeup of the Court, I expect Harvard will lose. The fact that they took the case at all is strong indication that some of the Justices see it as an opportunity to get rid of any consideration of race in college admissions, despite the facts and long established precedent.)
I think a more accurate statement would be that Harvard discriminates toward certain preference groups. The major preference groups are ALDC (Athletes, Legacy, Development (big donors), and Children of Faculty) plus URM. There are secondary ones including first generation, low income, and geographic diversity. Another consideration is that Harvard wants students that fill its academic departments. A moderately strong student who truly loves classics might get the nod over yet another strong student that wants to study Econ.
Each preference group gets a different admission bump relative to the completely unhooked candidate, and each tilts towards a certain demographic. Legacy and development skews white and wealthy. Children of faculty likely do so as well, but not as much. Recruited athlete skews white and somewhat wealthy for certain sports (lacrosse for example), and less so for football and basketball. URM targets students of specific races, but also skews towards first gen and lower income.
The net result is that candidates that don’t fit into a preference group face the toughest admission odds. I suspect that an unhooked white applicant and unhooked Asian applicant face similar low odds of admission. But in terms of a lawsuit, it is far more appealing to allege discrimination against Asian-American applicants than against white applicants.
I suspect the same, and more so if these applicants happen to be from an overrepresented, high performing school/area where there also happen to be a lot of ALDC students. But as you agreed above with regard to NMSF, disparate impact because of race-neutral factors is not necessarily racial discrimination.
ALL students in the US receive free lunch this year through COVID funds. This has caused a lot of families to not even fill out the forms to qualify and that’s causing a lot of issues for schools to qualify for other benefits the school could get because of a high percentage of free/reduced cost lunches.
The accuracy of free-lunch numbers was dubious well before Covid and universal free lunch programs, whether it was from indifference to completing the forms, fraud, people underreporting or not reporting income due to fears of the IRS or immigration issues, and so on. NY is moving to an index that measures the number of students in a school who actually receive government assistance, plus Census-tract-level measures of poverty. Children from the highest-poverty neighborhoods in the city are not often found in the top high schools.
Wow - Just yesterday I saw that question on a summer app - must have documented free lunch program info - for financial aid. I think I will mention this to a GC at our local low SES HS. thanks for that thought.
School districts are/were required to audit a small percentage of those getting free and reduced lunch. Oftentimes, the amount of fraud discovered from the sample audit was well above 50%. The programs are not required to test further, instead they are banned from testing further. If the samples selected to test for eligibility were random (and I think the program requires them to be) then it is likely that a majority of the FRL recipients are not eligible.
Our state is looking for a way to continue the free lunch for all program next year. They have provided free breakfasts for all for years.
I love it. I’m working at a charter Pre-k thru 5 school and every kid picks up a breakfast bag each morning, usually with a juice, milk, piece of fruit, and a muffin or cereal. Lunch is delivered to their rooms (they eat in their classroom). No problem with kids forgetting their lunch, of being hungry.
It’s great.
They will probably have to fill out a FRL form for next year just to get the federal funds for the program.
In our school district the free lunch for all has done nothing but make the food available inedible. Day after day students post images of their lunches and it is shameful.
Marketing to URM may reflect the lower yield of acceptance by these groups. I am not sure what the exact percentage is but I believe Asians then Caucasians had one of the highest enrollment yields, with AA/Hispanic and Native Americans the lowest. Based on these lower yields, it would make sense to reach out to a greater number of applicants. Additionally, PSAT scores are not SAT scores. I know of many students who did no prep going into their PSATs and studied and improved their scores by 200+ points after prep.
Better qualified candidates from other groups - This is very subjective; a diversity in personal experience is incredibly valuable to a community. I hear about his at my child’s elite private school all the time - many teachers have commented about how unique students are absolutely essential to leading discussions in the classroom and cannot be replaced (often wishing there were more of them)
Yes, if only people would tenaciously prioritize not being steered by bankers and realtors to less-valuable properties and grittily develop the habit of not having their home’s value under-appraised by hundreds of thousands of dollars strictly because of their race, you are so right
The samples are not random. The programs require samples targeting applications that have a higher probability of leading to an inaccurate result, and provides guidelines (such as sampling those which claim income levels come in just below the cut off.) So the results are heavily weighted, not random. Also, a high percentage of qualifications in most states are now done through reference to other more rigorous programs, thus further decreasing the odds of fraudulent abuses.
Strawberry, Students are evaluated throughout their academic careers. Some of the evaluations are very subjective (art, poetry) and others are not (math, sciences, standardized tests like SAT & ACT, etc.). What I am talking about in my post is not “diversity of experience”, but applying different standards to students based on their race.
Lowering standards to benefit some subgroups hurt those groups, better qualified candidates from other groups, the institutions, and society at large.
Better qualified candidates applies to both subjective and “apparent” objective metrics. At my child’s elite private school, most students easily obtain 1560+ after 10th grade as they have been schooled in great schools for sometime. My student studied for 2 weeks without tutoring and was able to achieve this metric easily (almost too easily - a testament to access to great schooling). In my opinion, the test disproportionally disadvantages those who come from underperforming schools and those who do not have access to private tutoring. Tutor a LI URM with 10K for 3 months, some are tutored @ $500 an hr for even longer (which is what most students at my child’s school do, coupled with years of great schooling and pay to play summer programs) and let’s see those scores. The marketing to URM recognizes this in conjunction with lower enrollment yields. Frankly, in my personal opinion, I would welcome a diverse voice any day over the myriad of perfect test scores and homogenous viewpoints. I’ve listened in during COVID online in classrooms and the homogenous nature of discussions can be utterly mind-numbing. Yes, if this is the type of classroom one strives for over diverse intellectual enrichment, I would agree with you.
This is always such a hard topic. On the one hand, it makes me angry that anyone would look at my African American child at Stanford and think she is only there because of some notion that she got in due to race. She had a 4.0 and 35 ACT. I like to think that it was important to whoever read her application that she had a job from the time she was 14, that she had been a competitive athlete in an out of school sport that trained 20 plus hours a week from age 7 to 14 that many kids are homeschooled for yet she went to public school with all As the entire time, that she took the most rigorous courses available to her, that she was student council president, that she had done university level research at a major research hospital, that she had funny and interesting essays and she is a terrific writer, she is a female in engineering, etc., etc. But I also recognize that she probably got a small tip from being African American. And that is what is at issue here in my opinion—who, out of all the qualified applicants, is getting a “tip”? And let’s be clear, there are a lot of tips that have nothing to do with race but have a lot to do with wealth and historical access to Ivy League schools. But in the long run, with the exception of a small number of athletes and deans interest candidates, I don’t think that anyone is getting accepted to HYPSM that is not highly qualified academically. Over a certain threshold, no one “deserves it more”. I do not think that one student deserves it more simply because they got a 1600 on the SAT and a 4.0 rather than a student who got a 1550 and a 3.9.
Harvard can fill 10 times its incoming class each year with highly academically qualified applicants. So what gives a “tip” to get someone more of a look? I just read a different thread about a full pay family worrying that their child with great but not highest level academics would not get in to her reaches (none of which were HYPSM). The advice there from frequent posters on CC was “reach out to XX school to make sure they know that you are full pay and won’t be asking for any aid—that may give her a tip over an equally qualified candidate that is not full pay” and “oh, she runs track…YY school has D3 track…if her times are within range reach out to the coach and let him know she will try to walk on if admitted—that may give her a “tip” over a student with equal academics”, etc. etc. So that is ok, but giving Black and Hispanic applicants a small “tip” in the interest of having a diverse class is not ok? I disagree. Applicants have no control over whether they are born into a full pay family, if they are born with inherent athletic ability, or if they are born black. Each of those comes with its own experiences that make each of those applicants bring something different to the table. I don’t want my kid going to a school that is full of only purple giraffe tuba players. I personally agree that universities should have the ability to fill their classes with students that bring a wide variety of talents and experiences and backgrounds to the table, including considerations of race as a part of the entire package. Because we are not talking about filling a quota with affirmative action. You don’t get in to HARVARD just because you are Black and you don’t get into Harvard below a certain academic threshold. What we are talking about in elite admissions is what things give applicants who all fall in a certain academic qualification range a “tip”. Because I don’t see it as “quota filling” discrimination. Rather, I see private school university admissions as trying to admit a well rounded cohort.
I read most if not all of the pleadings, rulings and expert studies from both sides from the Harvard case. Before anyone on this thread talks about unqualified or undeserving students being ADMITTED to elite universities, I think you should read all of that first.
First, I want to make it clear that I consider your child highly qualified, and students like her get admitted all the time without an affirmative action hook.
But I take issue with the assertion that everyone at HYPSM is highly qualified. Having attended an elite college myself for graduate school, and having two children at elite colleges for undergrad, disabused me of the notion that every student is more elite than the strong students at a state flagship. Some of those at HYPSM certainly are superstars, and many are very competent. But some left me, and my children wondering “how in the world did this person get in?”
Perhaps the admissions department knows that this person has extraordinary talents beyond academics. Or perhaps they just took a bet on someone and they got it wrong. No decision process will be right every time. But once into Harvard or Yale, it is very difficult not to graduate. I recognize that MIT and Princeton are harder, as are most programs at Stanford.
Yonkers, I was not able to see the attached article without a subscription to the NYT. Assuming that the article does present accurate empirical evidence that there is discrimination in the NY housing market (the Grey Lady’s reputation for objective journalism has really declined since her glory days), no one has claimed that there is no racism anymore. My point is that culture - personal decisions, values, priorities, etc. - drive outcomes far more than race, or any discrimination, past or present. Nigerians in the US are among the best educated and most successful economically in the US, beating whites and rivaling “model minority” Asians. Immigrants from the West Indies, whose ancestors suffered slavery and discrimination, also out perform whites socioeconomically. The descendants of Chinese immigrants who where targeted by the Anti-Coolie Act (1862), the Naturalization Act (1870), the Page Act (1875) the Exclusion Act (1882), The Immigration Act of 1917, etc. also are better educated and earn more than whites. What do they have in common? They have strong families, they greatly value education, and they show initiative.