Sorry, didn’t mean to lead this towards becoming a political discussion, which is not allowed by CC. I just used the last election to reflect how disaffected some people are.
I agree with you that AA should be primarily SES based, which as you said will help many blacks, but also other groups. After that, if we still need a feather on the scale for blacks as well, I wouldn’t object.
There is a “feather on the scale” for low income and first gen students at many selective colleges, and there are also programs specifically for them, like Questbridge, and many outside and college-specific scholarships for low income kids. Of any color.
No, I’m not saying all URMs get the same bump. I am saying quotas or having applicants only compete against other applicants in their own racial bucket would be illegal. Are you claiming Yale is engaged in illegal admissions practices?
@roethlisburger Here’s what I said and you actually copied it into your reply:
I’m not sure exactly how it works in Yale admissions (and all of those other great schools), but you may have only been competing with other URM’s or perhaps only other blacks.
I said I wasn’t sure and I definitely was NOT saying Yale is engaging in illegal practices by any stretch of the imagination.
However, if you are NOT saying that URM’s get the same bump, which you say in post 606, then you are saying you agree they may be looked at differently. I think we are saying the same thing. I said nothing about quotas. And I think it’s entirely possible that black applicants are looked at differently than hispanics, depending on how that school is attempting to diversify their class, with completely good intentions. But we will never know and I’m sure it varies by school.
There’s a difference between blacks and Hispanics, getting different bumps, but still being evaluated within and competing against the entire applicant pool and blacks only competing against other blacks, which would imply some type of racial quota system. If you don’t have quotas, then the percentage of the class which is URM can’t be pre-determined. The only way for that to happen is if you allow URMs to compete against not just other URMs, or their own subset of URMs, but ORMs and whites.
This is illegal in certain states like California and Florida, but what would force a school like Yale to not place kids in racial buckets?
The 14th amendment applies to all states. Under the Civil Rights Act, private colleges which accept federal money, have to follow the same rules as public colleges. There’s a legal difference between giving URMs a boost and a system of hard quotas(X% black, Y% Hispanic).
While there are no hard quotas, selective (non-stem) colleges practice soft quotas, definitely for Asians.
…and the assertions without evidence - indeed in the dace of evidence to the contrary - continue.
Well, not sure what @theloniusmonk saying isn’t backed by some “soft” evidence…one cannot argue that it is now harder for Asians to get in to some schools than their non-Asian peers with similar stats…generally speaking. So if you agree this is the case, then you would also be agreeing that the admissions offices are trying to balance their classes and therefore might stop at a certain point admitting Asians because that would bring them over a certain level that they were comfortable with. So it may not be a hard number (like only 500 Asians per year), but they are definitely limiting their Asian admits, for reasons that have been fully exhausted already on this thread I think. So there may not be evidence that could be proven without a shadow of a doubt in a court of law , it’s pretty hard to ignore the fact that there must be some kind of tipping point. I agree with @theloniusmonk.
If you take a study that examined only SAT scores, years ago, as evidence of limits in a set of schools’ self-described holistic process that most definitely emphasize they do NOT consider only SAT scores then, yeah, sure.
But why would you do that?
Guess what? It’s harder for Asian students with high stats to get into some schools than some Asian students with low stats. We saw specific examples of this in the Princeton report. Who is to blame there?
The evidence is the study by Ron Unz that Fareed Zarkaria referred to in his Time article a few years ago and his statements while discussing it on CNN, the CNN show is where I first heard about this officially, if you will. There were some talk about it among Asians, esp out here in silicon valley, but Fareed captured it well, that there is a soft quota and Ivies want to keep the Asian population at a certain percentage. Now he says the data is not without flaws and points out a couple of them.
My issue is not with colleges doing it as they can build a class as they see fit, it’s that Asians and whites should know this going in and adapt their college search strategy accordingly.
@theloniusmonk Let’s not make the mistake of calling Ron Unz’ article a study. He wrote an article.
Here it is. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
He presents “evidence” like this gem where he notes the perception of some Asians:
…then go to footnote 17, which says:
…then when you chase that rabbit down, you see that the Pew article he cites says most Asians don’t think their race affects college admissions.
And the entire paragraph in Unz’s article is about perception. Not reality.
Then he pulls out the Espenshade study we’ve discussed ad nauseum, in which we return to SAT scores, where elite colleges make very clear that those scores are but one small piece of the admissions puzzle.
PS: You know what’s really my favorite part of that article? Where he cites a post on College Confidential as evidence in footnote 28 
…and for the record, it might well be true that Asian students are being discriminated against. But I will continue to ask for evidence when people ask us all to assume it here, like it’s common, accepted knowledge.
@theloniusmonk I think you hit the nail on the head. As it relates to college admissions, if you are a high achieving Asian you need to have an idea of at least the speculation that you may be held to a higher standard and if you have your heart set on an elite Ivy-esque school, I would suggest you apply to a lot of them in order to increase your chances. Competition is severe.
Or perhaps look at schools where Asian students are sought after because there aren’t many applying. Most LACs, for example, even the tippy top ones. Or universities in the midwest or south.
the evidence is not going to be there, because then you will have a college admitting to doing something illegal, or finding that a college does, and that won’t happen as they’re going to cover their tracks. You have to understand a comment like the one in Princeton case, “typical pre-med” and know it’s white or Asian since only 10-15% of med school grads are URM. Your point on LACs is a good one, but elite schools in the midwest or south like say Vanderbilt still have a soft quota or URM preference.
I actually think Asians in STEM should apply to less ivies and stanford and more to mit, caltech, berkeley, michigan, where the soft quota doesn’t exist.
Agree with you. I am all for diversity if diversity is demanded in all areas of academic, athletic, entertainment and professional areas. I personally don’t care if my kid is surrounded for 4 years by all whites, all blacks or all other ethnic groups because my kid can get the diversity experience in other areas of his life, and he knows that this is not the norm in the rest of society. Heck, let’s say my kid joins a hockey team and all his teammates are whites, I am not going to call for diversity and espouse selection of non-white players on the team, as long as the team selection is based on the merit. Same thing with track and field or NBA. I guess you could argue that education is different etc., but I can also argue that 4 years of college experience is temporary and workplace diversity is more important.
@OHMomof2 Yes, there are schools like that. If top schools were like that, I would not mind sending my kid there. So be it. Heck, in my college major, there were only several Asian students in a group of several hundreds, and I didn’t care.
@uofmichigan I have no problem with URMs using URM status to increase their chances of getting into their colleges of choice, even if I disagree with the colleges using this admission system. It’s like tax loop holes; those taking advantage of legal tax loop holes should not be blamed as if they are doing something wrong. Heck, if there was a top 10 school that treats Asians as a URM, I would be the first one to tell my kid to apply there.