Even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago, according to a New York Times analysis.
The share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980. Black students are just 6 percent of freshmen but 15 percent of college-age Americans, as the chart below shows.
“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.”
Asian Americans are right now in the 2nd or 3rd generation, so while you might be right, we’ll have to wait a another generation or two to verify. Most of the Asians I meet here in silicon valley are first gen, they came directly on the H1B boom and their kids are the ones applying and honestly, they’re doing better than their parents wrt university admissions. Many Asians here did not go to the top colleges I’m finding out, their kids are though! There are some Asians whose parents came in the 60s to study and so their kids are 3rd gen.
“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.”
That is purely 100% the impact of US News Rankings of engineering and computer science programs. UIUC is in top ten of all the rankings and a lot of Asians from California go there for that reason. I suspect quite a few Asians are at Purdue and WashU Stl for the same reason. Now these are excellent schools but they’re helped by the rankings since people enroll there without visiting based on the ranking.
I don’t know if readers have noticed big flaws in NYTimes data. For example: in NYTimes Harvard college in 2015: White 47%, Asian 24%, Hisp 13% and AA 8% but on Harvard’s own website about 2021 freshman class: White 49%, Asian 22%, Hisp 12% and AA 15%. Even though there are only two years difference in data I find the change too big to be believable. It’s sad nowadays even a reputable news outlet like NYTimes has to resort to manipulating the data to fit its narrative.
As much as folks like to crap on the NYT to fit their own agenda, here’s Harvard’s CDS, and thus self-reported data from 2014-15. Doesn’t look like manipulation at work, more like using the info available.
https://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2014-15.pdf
Any other “big flaws” that need debunking, @jzducol?
Anybody with elementary statistical knowledge can see the big flaw. The difference in AA percentage for example can well be due to the additional category of multi-race starting in 2010. Harvard’s own website keeps the methodology the same as 35 years ago for the racial statistics while that of CDS data set has changed over the last 35 years. With CDS data comparing racial breakdown of 2015 vs 1980 would be like comparing apples and oranges because how they categorize race has significantly changed. NYTimes surely knows this. But to make the headline more dramatic and reach their preset conclusions it made no mention of any of this in the article.
@ucbalumnus Yeah so? You have reasonable explanations for the racial gap. However, this does not justify ANY discrimination or reverse-discrimination in college applications. Everyone should play by the same standards no matter their race, and AA is counterintuitive to that.
@IBXavier2017 Yeah so? If you care about underrepresentation of minorities, then encourage them to become educated instead of bailing them out and giving them preferential treatment while discriminating against Whites and Asians.
The headline was really not that dramatic and the article was pretty neutral in tone. The interactive section of NYT tends to be that way. Sometimes a mistake is just that - a mistake not a vast conspiracy on the part of the writers.
One way to accommodate for the change in classifications and how they impact the percentage of minority students is by looking at the year schools added multi-racial as a category with the prior year without the multi-racial category. The cutoff years are 2009 or 2010 depending on the school. Since they seem to be the most race conscious schools and the ones that many parents obsess over, here are the results for the Ivy League schools for black students.
Percent of students identifying as black:
OldNew
ClassificationClassification
Brown9%6%
Columbia15%12%
Cornell9%6%
Dartmouth10%8%
Harvard12%7%
Princeton9%8%
Penn11%8%
Yale_12%___8%
As you can see, with the exception of Princeton, the percent of students identifying as blacks fell dramatically in the year that the multi-racial category was added. If you do the same type of analysis for Hispanic or white students, there seems to be little change in those years, while the percent of Asian kids tended to decline although not nearly to the extent that the percent of black kids. This suggests that a great many kids who claim to be multi-racial in the current system would have claimed to be black under the old system. Looking at the data, creating the multi-racial category reduced the number of students identifying as black between 20 to 40 percent.
Please see above.
The multiracial people presumably includes those identifying as black and some other race, so it is not a case of no longer identifying as black, but being able to add identification of some other race in addition to black (same goes for other categories that apparently shrank when reporting of multiracial as a category started).
If students identify as non-Hispanic multi-racial, they are no longer identified as black, Asian or white on the CDS forms.
That is a distinction between how the category is reported on CDS or whatever, versus how the student self-identifies.
A student may self-identify as (for example) black + Asian, but will be reported by the college as multiracial, along with other students who self-identify as (for example) Asian + white, white + black, etc…
@ucbalumnus - That is my point. Before the multi-racial category, students had to pick one category, so the kid who who had a mix say black and white parents had to pick to be in the black or white category. Under the new system, kids who pick to be in the multi-racial category don’t get counted as either black or white; they are in the new multi-racial category. See the totals for Columbia for the years the change happened (2009 vs 2010)
20092010
White4343
Asian2019
Hispanic2019
Black1512
Multi-Racial06
Total_98_99
It is pretty obvious that a number of kids who would have identified as black in 2009 but were of mixed-race parentage took advantage of the multi-racial category in 2010.
The New York Times leads off the story with:
There are two main problems with this opening statement.
1 - As @jzducol pointed out, the racial categories have changed between today and 1980. If a substantial number of students who would have claimed to be black in the older system now claim to be multi-racial, any comparison of statistics that does not take this into account is highly flawed and very misleading.
2 - The Times does not mention what source they used for the 15 percent of college age Americans as being black. However, if this source does not include the option of being multi-racial, you cannot compare it directly with college acceptance data that includes the multi-racial option. It is an apples to orange comparison.
The students do not pick a multiracial category. They now can pick more than one of the usual categories (e.g. someone picks both black and white in your example) rather than be forced to pick just one; then the college reports them as multiracial.
Some US census reports are more clear about this. They report “X alone” and “X alone or in combination” (where X is one of the usual categories) to give more clarity about how many of X identify as just X versus X and some other category.
@noplayallwork wrote “Really, you’re picking at a specific word I used, “displacement” in place of an actual argument?”
No, you just did that, all by yourself.
@noplayallwork wrote “And the “definitions” of Asians having a higher academic performance statistically, it’s common knowledge with the racial gap in academic performance: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/hsts_2009/race_gpa.aspx?tab_id=tab2&subtab_id=Tab_1”
First of all those are statistical averages of large groups, accepted students to elite schools, INCLUDING URMs have much higher stats than any of those averages (vast majority within a standard deviation or so). Second it is common knowledge that stats such as GPA and test scores only tell part of the story, that is why elite schools look at many other variables before making a decision. Third even though they are nothing more than a crude proxy of potential performance they can be gamed. For example: a not too bright kid devours textbooks 80 hours a week just to get an A+ while another slacks and gets an A. That first kid starts doing practice SATs at age 6 and goes nonstop until 17 while a second one just shows up to the test and gets the same high score. Say the first one’s stats are slightly above the second (within one or two standard deviations) but the second one whips a fantastic essay (while the first does a decent one after many, many hours and weeks of prep, proof reads, etc…). Add to that, that the first one might be bored out of his mind in high school and despices the ridiculous game of treating academics as if it was a rat race. The second rises to the intelectual stratosphere after HS while the first one, well not. Which is academically superior?
So sorry, you are using bad logic to defend your point. A system that can be gamed (one based exclusively on GPA and test scores that is) is not reliable on it’s own. A kid that plays it and masters it as if it was a game of LOL shows no academic superiority and it is in the best interest of elite schools to keep an eye out for that.
It seems that BOTH types of students have something to offer the university community and society as a whole.The diligent, responsible, consistent types as well as the innately brilliant.
Universities seem to have a relatively fixed pattern as to their desired ratios.
If they are private, I don’t see a problem with it whatsoever.
^Except they are not “private” in a legal sense because they take federal dollars. If they are like private country clubs, sure, they can have whatever “desired ratios” they want.
@notigering “… starts doing practice SATs at age 6 and goes nonstop until 17…ridiculous game of treating academics as if it was a rat race” I assume you are referring to some Asian American students in question here, please provide some evidence and data to support this instead of using racial profiling and stereotyping.
If both types of students have perceived value to the school, what does this have to do with “federal dollars?”
^with all due respect if you dont know the connection then you have not understood what is at issue in affirmative action debate and litigation.