Let’s use some numbers (population ones are approximate but in the ballpark):
Asian Americans make 5.5 percent of the total American population. Asian Americans made 22.2% of Harvard's admitted class of 2021.
Non-Hispanic white Americans make 6.2% of the total American population, Non Hispanic white Americans made 49.1% of Harvard's admitted class of 2021.
Hispanic or latino Americans make 17.3% of the total American population. Hispanic or latino Americans made 11.6% of Harvard's admitted class of 2021.
African Americans make 13% of the total American population. African Americans made 14.6% of Harvard's admitted class of 2021.
Native Americans and pacific islanders make 2.5% of the total american population. Native Americans and pacific islanders made 2.4% of Harvard's admitted class of 2021.
@noplayallwork, if I combine the above numbers with your logic only Latinos and Non-Hispanic white Americans are being displaced. Latinos by 50% and white Americans by 25%. Also, using your logic, the only group that happens to be displacing them is Asian Americans and they are doing so by being 400% over-represented.
People with an agenda are using Asian Americans as pawns to try and force colleges to kick out URMs. You can be sure that if they happen to accomplish that “cleansing” Asian Americans are next in line. All I am saying is be careful of what you wish for.
Those stats are true, however you are actually deluded if you think they mean anything.
Asians do make up a large chunk of Harvard and other colleges for their population size, however it would be higher if there was no discrimination against them in the college admissions process. Despite Asians statistically having a higher performance than other races, they have a lower chance to get in. The amount of Asians who actually applied to that class may be around say 30-40%.
I am sure you mean that non-Hispanic Whites are 62%, not 6.2% of Americans.
Hispanics may be "underrepresented", but that's because they don't perform as well on average/statistically speaking. On the individual level, Hispanics and Latinos have a higher chance of getting in.
And your last statement is a bare assumption. People don’t want to just “kick out URMs,” those people simply want a fair admissions system based on merit that holds no regard to race what so ever.
Please don’t tell me you’re this deluded about affirmative action…
“The amount of Asians who actually applied to that class may be around say 30-40%.”
Are there any stats on this? The percent of people applying to top schools who are Asian is definitely higher than their national percentage of ~5.5%, but jumping from 5.5 to 30-40 seems like a big stretch.
You were the one that wrote “The difference is that affirmative action is structured racial discrimination that displaces whites and asians” and that is obviously not true. Asians are clearly displacing other groups, if that wasn’t the case Asians wouldn’t be over-represented by 400% What you are saying is that you want Asians to displace other groups even more in the ivy league because you seem to believe that “Asians statistically hav(e) a higher performance than other races” and that the system is not based on " merit".
You called me “deluded” twice yet you somehow come up with these definitions of Asians having a “higher performance than other races” and also more “merit”. Can you please explain how you came up with those definitions? or is that what you see when you look at yourself in the mirror?
I think Fareed Zarkaria’s Time article on this summarizes it well, it’s a little dated (2014), he made similar points when he was a guest on a CNN show (where I first saw the info).
"Even so, institutions that are highly selective but rely on more objective measures for admission have found that their Asian-American populations have risen much more sharply over the past two decades. Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, are now about 40% Asian. New York City’s Stuyvesant High School admits about 1,000 students out of the 30,000 who take a math and reading test (and thus is twice as selective as Harvard). It is now 72% Asian American. The U.S. math and science olympiad winners are more than 70% Asian American. In this context, for the U.S.'s top colleges and universities to be at 20% is, at the least, worth some reflection.
Test scores are only one measure of a student’s achievement, and other qualities must be taken into account. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the arguments for such subjective criteria are precisely those that were made in the 1930s to justify quotas for Jews. In fact, in his book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, scholar Jerome Karabel exhaustively documented how nonobjective admissions criteria such as interviews and extracurriculars were put in place by Ivy League schools in large measure to keep Jewish admissions from rising."
Now I agree with the above but does that mean the selective colleges are discriminating based on race, not sure. That’s a serious charge and would imply some level of racism, i.e. this applicant is not good for this college solely because of his or her race. Does it happen, of course, but is it systemic and broad-based, probably not.
I’d just note that there are some other factors to take into account here.
Caltech is a STEM school encompassing fields especially pursued by the children of Asian immigrants whose parents’ immigration to the US was often itself based on being advanced STEM grads. Also it’s in CA.
It is also likely that the children of these advanced STEM folks pursue, and excel in, competitions in that field.
Re: Berkeley, CA has a high Asian population relative to the rest of the country (and so does NYC).
This is not to say that the Jewish thing isn’t real, it certainly was. I am convinced that the mostly white, mostly upper class keep their places in elite schools with legacy and sports preferences. Just read an entire book on that actually and at most elite colleges those preferences take FAR more places than any AA program.
But it’s a complex issue and hard to say “this means that because ____”.
Agree with @OhMomof2. Jewish discrimination (and worse) was obviously real and elite schools came up with a rigged holistic application process to be used in bad faith just to limit and reduce their numbers. It was plain old white supremacy at its best. All ivies but especially the big three (HYP) +possibly D? and all seven sister colleges were essentially WASP institutions (WASP supremacy is possibly a better term…). But that is the opposite of what AA is trying to accomplish.
BTW an article about this issue with lots of numbers was published just a few hours ago today:
@theloniusmonk thank you for sharing that. Really interesting stuff there.
Just looking at Asian %ages…
There are relatively few Asians at the selective LACs, which seems to agree with the fact that they include them in diversity programs and fly-ins but most selective universities do not. Wellesley is an exception and I wonder if that is because of its reputation with Chinese families?
Or the difference between Emory and Georgetown (or Notre Dame!) in Asian students. Presumably because most Catholics are white and Hispanic?
Asian students are most represented in the states where there are a lot - Hawaii has the most even though they do practice affirmative action, as an obvious example. UIUC has a lot also - 23%, and that’s another AA state, but just a few hours away in Bloomington (also an AA state), only 5%. I wonder why. Lots in Maryland, few in Maine or Wyoming but also few in Delaware - I’m thinking in all these cases the Asian population is making a difference since instate schools get mostly instate students. U Washington has 30%. That’s near California levels, and they have AA.
It would be really interesting to look at % of Asian students at flagships in states with and without AA but with similar Asian student populations.
@notigering So in regards to your other post, I suppose it’s anti-semitic and racist to limit the numbers of Jewish admissions and discriminate against them? However, it’s completely fair to discriminate against Asian applicants with AA?
And in regards to Blacks/Hispanics still being underrepresented despite AA, that doesn’t simply mean they should be given the easy way out of things. They are underrepresented due to statistically being less qualified. There’s lots of explanations for this, however simply making things extremely easy for them with policies such as Affirmative Action will solve nothing other than endorse racism in college admissions.
Remember, everybody being treated fairly and playing by the same standards is racist so we should bail out URMs with AA and discriminate against Whites, and Asians more so!
Of course, that is the result of immigration selection. With a large percentage of Asian Americans being immigrants or first generation descendants of immigrants who came in on PhD student or skilled worker visas, the transmission of high educational attainment to subsequent generations in a superficially racially visible manner is not a surprise Note that this is true for white and black immigrants as well, but they and their descendants “blend in” to the much larger existing white and black populations in the US, so the immigration effect are not superficially racially visible for them. Recent Latino immigration has been mostly of lower educational attainment people, so the opposite effect becomes superficially ethnically visible with respect to Latino people.
The fact that educational attainment or lack thereof tends to be transmitted across generations is another issue altogether, even though it is actually the basis for much of apparent racial differences in educational attainment.
Besides the educational attainment there is also a cultural component. If you look at the achievement gap between 4th or 5th generation Asian Americans and the general population there is virtually no difference. You almost never hear about an Intel/Olympic Math/Phy/CS/Chem winner who is a descendant of Gold Rush era Asian American despite the fact that more than two third of the winners are of Asian descent. So, its definitely not all about genetics; it has a strong cultural component. The same pattern holds true for Jewish and other immigrant groups. The further away from the immigrant root the less accomplished they seem, with the first generation (born in US) being the strongest performers.
The fact that two third of US Nobel prize winners and two third of fortune 500 founders came from 0-1st generation immigrant groups tells you that not only their place at elite colleges is well deserved but also should be encouraged if the society wants to achieve the greater fairness and wealth. Today, with more than half of tech startups involve founders of Asian American descent the stereotype in college admission of Asian American kids lacking of leadership, creativity and simply being test robots is just racial prejudice like many before it.
The Gold Rush era immigrants may also have been very different in educational attainment (or equivalent) compared to more recent immigrants.
Note that many of the immigrant origin countries in Asia have lower bachelor’s degree attainment than the US. Asian immigrants and their descendants are not a representative sample of their origin countries.
Just another example of some media’s hidden agenda by presenting one side of the story without the other. Why not look at the same time the credentials of accepted students of different racial groups too, is the gap closing or enlarging. Or even better, looking at the rejected students’ profiles.
If all of the elite American institutions makeup has to reflect the demographics then there are more egregious examples to show, from sports/entertainment to politics/law…
NYTimes seems to go further away from its founding root—presenting all the facts without being partisan.
Asians tend to favor colleges with strong STEM reputations (perceived or real). Therefore, within Ivies, Brown and Dartmouth have a lower percentage of Asians. Similarly, the relative lack of interest in LACs, other than HMC (Wellesley and to an extent Amherst may be outliers). Publics like UIUC and UT Austin are again targeted though none of the corresponding states have an outsized Asian population. None of this is a surprise.
