Groups heavy with recent (in generational terms) immigrants from overseas are filtered by the immigration system that prefers skilled workers and graduate students. Hence, regardless of ethnicity and national origin, they have been selected for educational attainment, and the valuation of and drive for education gets passed to their American kids.
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ucbalumnus, I am aware of that selection process. That is one reason I referred to the descendants of Chinese coolie laborers who came to the US in the mid 1800s. Of course, one could compare native born minorities who are successful to those who are not. What differentiates them?
The flip side of the coin are white subgroups (think Scotch/Irish in Appalachia) who engage in similar limiting behaviors (dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, etc.) to many poor urban minorities, with the same unhappy results.
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Looking a little closer, is it the descendants of less educated immigrants from the 1800s who are educational high achievers, versus the descendants of more recent highly educated immigrants (engineers, computer scientists, physicians, etc.)?
The state of Hawaii has a very large Asian American population, but much of it is descended from less educated immigrants from the 1800s*. If educational achievement follows race and ethnicity, Hawaii would be educationally elite compared to the rest of the US. But it is not.
*Similar to recent immigration from Mexico; only about 6% of Mexican immigrants have a bachelor’s degree, far lower than the overall population in either the US or Mexico.
But what happens when the merits for a demographic are all the same? Why is there a whole industry of college coaches that advise applicants on how to look less Asian?
TJ high school in Virginia is going through the same thing as the Harvard case. Years of racist attitudes toward black and Hispanic students necessitated a shift in the admission policies to bring in much-needed diversity. When this reduced the 73-percent Asian enrollment of the school, it prompted another frivolous lawsuit.
“Yes, if this is the type of classroom one strives for over diverse intellectual enrichment, I would agree with you.”
Sure, but how would you build a class with diverse intellectual enrichment, do you think Harvard and Stanford are doing that? Most of the students at those colleges have above 1500 and 35 or 36 and a lot of 5s on the APs. Do you want more 1300s and 1400s or 27s and 28s? That’s probably not going to happen, especially in STEM classes, where it will all be 1550 or higher.
ucb, While immigrants from the West Indies and Nigeria often are coming to the US for the educational opportunities, and may already have degrees, immigrants from Mexico are generally poor, less educated, and seeking any kind of employment they can to feed their families.
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Honest question. Why can’t you build a class with diverse intellectual interests solely with high scoring students?
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Outlander, What you describe - let’s call it affirmative action stigma - is one of the deleterious effects of preferential treatment based on race. I liken it to a business owner’s nephew getting hired; no matter how well they perform, some will always wonder if they were only hired because of nepotism.
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And that suggests that the real difference in educational achievement of the American kids is not the more visible aspects of race, ethnicity, or national origin, but in the parental educational attainment.
No one should be surprised if the US selects highly educated Nigerians, Indians, Chinese, or Russians to immigrate that their kids do well in school.
Similarly, no one should be surprised that African Americans descended from lineages who were subject to educational suppression for generations (and even now) are on average behind in educational attainment compared to other Americans, or the kids of highly educated immigrants.
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The more analogous situation in college would be students who got admitted with legacy or donor relation preference. However, legacy or donor relation is less outwardly visible, so such students may be less subject to a similar stigma and can therefore more easily let others believe that their admission was fully earned by themselves, rather than being built on an admission preference that is about as unpopular as that based on race or ethnicity.
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I thought this was easily the best contribution in the entire thread. The “only grades and test scores and nothing else” crowd seldom start the diatribe with complaints that high-end prep school kids below the top 10% with good but not tippy top test scores find their way into elite schools with regularity. “Context!” they say. These schools are rigorous and the low end of the top 20% would be Top 5% at a public high school! So here we are supposed to review the context of the applicant’s accomplishments. I’ve heard this one a lot.
And I think you’re hinting here at another problem I’ve encountered on this difficult topic: the exaggeration of the benefit of these horrible admissions practices. You would think that all a person has to do is say, “I had a hard life and I’m Hispanic,” and a cornucopia of academic opportunity magically appears. The first rule of rhetoric is to make your opponent look and sound like a clown.
The other thing I’ll add will unfortunately will be controversial. There are legions of academic automatons out there. That is a fact and it represents one of my top challenges in work life. More than I care to recall, I have wrestled with academically accomplished people who lack emotional IQ, good judgement or intellectual flexibility/creativity. Some have been very difficult teammates. Universities are trying to produce successful people. There is a very good reason why they want seasoned admissions people who can do a 360 review of a candidate. Yes, academic preparation is paramount. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t end there.
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The other thing about this particular type of “affirmative action” is that, whether we like it or not, people generally assume that children of very wealthy legacy families are likely capable and “belong there anyway”; and those same people also default to the notion that a black or hispanic student is either there with help or they represent the exception to the rule. Yes, people assume if your family is financially successful and had family attend elite universities in the past that the apple won’t fall far from the tree.
Nobody likes to admit this, but I believe with every fiber of my being that it’s true. I’ll never forget one of my HS best friends, whose family was well known (in our town) as staunch liberal Democrats, said to me upon my acceptance to Georgetown LS (not where I attended), “Oh, they must love you.” He and his entire cohort were Notre Dame people and, at the time, Georgetown was viewed as the more elite school at least from an admissions standpoint. The implication, of course, was that Georgetown “loved me” because of my ethnicity. That was the first assumption. I would have had to tell him that I had a high GPA and aced the LSAT with a perfect score. If I had been someone else, he would have assumed the academic accomplishments first and last. And this is coming from a liberal. True story.
So is it any wonder that even in this thread there is an assumption that the Ivy League is crawling with academically underqualified people of color?
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On a separate note, the CNN headline last night, ‘I’m just tired of being terrorized like my grandparents were’: More than a dozen HBCUs got bomb threats on the 1st day of Black History Month. I don’t think any young person of color wants to be dealing with this and would gladly trade places with the white subgroups (Scotch/Irish in Appalachia - taking the references from a prior post). To say that this life experience shouldn’t be considered in admissions just seems grossly close-minded. URMs don’t get a choice to have these experiences.
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“But racism is a thing of the past. We really need to stop talking about it so much.”
Heard a lot of that over the last 5 years. And I live in the PNW, which isn’t going red any time soon.
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A similar pattern has developed with Cuban American immigrants. While not as commonly thought of as one of the “model minority” groups the way Asians are, a similar immigration pattern emerged. Who do you think got out before Castro’s regime took over?
They may have lost their physical wealth, but they brought a lot of intellectual wealth with them. Many had to go to school again to obtain American credentials, but they did it. The first and largest wave of Cuban immigrants represented the elite from Cuban society. The second wave (Mariel boat lift of 1980) was more blue collar.
Those first Cubans not only assimilated well, they took over Miami from the ground up, politically and economically. People talk about white flight in Detroit … that was nothing compared to the demographic shift that happened in my home town.
So it’s no surprise that Cuban kids don’t enjoy AA status at many elite schools because they often over-represent as a percentage. In my time, this was true at Georgetown, Michigan and Virginia to name a few. The UC system (before the legislation) focused AA on Chicano and Puerto Rican students.
All to say, this has happened before and there is a reason why and it jibes with what @ucbalumnus is saying about Asian immigration patterns relative to others.
ucb, You are right - that might be a better analogy. Which brings me to my earlier point about mismatching students and schools harms both. Studies have shown that legacies and donor’s kids who are admitted to schools for which they were not qualified drop out at much higher rates and have lower GPAs than students who were academic matches for their schools.
ucb, Yet some blacks in the US whose ancestors were subject to slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination (both flagrant and subtle), excel, while others do not. Likewise, some whites excel, while others flounder. What are the determinant factors?
I would love to see a regression analysis with a proxy for educational attainment, say years of education as the dependent variable and the following independent variables: 1. race, 2. number of parents in household growing up, 3. educational attainment of parent(s), and 4. parents’ per-capita income. If anyone is familiar with research that addresses this, please forward a reference to me.
Note that “liberal” and “conservative” may not necessarily apply to all areas of opinion. For example, someone can be “liberal” on economic matters (e.g. pro union labor and social programs and the like) but “conservative” on matters of race and ethnicity. Or the other way around.
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cquin, I agree with you about “academic automatons”. I’ve met people with Ivy League degrees who didn’t have the common sense of a housecat.
Outlander is right about the many tips that have nothing to do with race. An east coast school may want more kids from the great plains. A school may need a trumpet player for their marching band. Another college may want more veterans on campus. A school may turn down a qualified student because the last three students it accepted from their high school didn’t matriculate. Mom’s a legacy. The list goes on…
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Whether some blacks excel or not, the disparate wealth gap and everything that comes with the effects of discrimination and violence inflicted upon the AA slave reverberates beyond measure. Just as slavery has existed for centuries, it is undeniable that these effects are pervasive today especially in wealth, the primary driver to access in societal mobility. No other race in America has been subjected to what the American slave has been subjected to and for as long. Additionally, the mindset of an immigrant is vastly different than of a descendant of an American slave, choosing to come to America vs forced into slavery. It takes imagination to put oneself in the shoes of a class that has experienced this much inequity and violence. I, myself, as a high-schooler, back in the day, thought that it seemed unfair that the AA student was accepted to the Ivy League over someone with higher stats. It was because I was clueless about Black history as the injustices were never really taught as I lived in a Southern state. I never really thought about the true societal impacts of slavery as it did not seem relevant to me or my community. It wasn’t even until recently that I learned that Blacks who served in the military were denied the GI Bill to buy homes or to get their 4-year college degrees, something that my family benefitted from. The reason why AAs weren’t educated certainly wasn’t because they didn’t value education - it just was never an option that even existed. And for most of the AAs that I have met that have been successful, they are very moderate in their views. If anything, I am appalled that in their presence, they tolerate the discrimination inflicted upon them as they are so used to it. I am lucky that I have never had to even think about the things they have to block out of their American existence. No one, if given the choice, chooses to have the AA legacy of violence and inequity. In the article below, the average black family in 2016’s wealth was $17K. The average white family’s wealth is $171K. Two races that came to this country at roughly the same time - one subjected to opportunity in abundance, the other to violence and slavery. In numbers alone, even centuries later, can you see what is the root for the disparity? I have a hard time believing it is because families didn’t value education. This is the reason race should be considered in admissions.
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