I hope the conversation does not stop as it has been very interesting!
Well, I apologize if I have helped to drag the thread off topic. I do think that a general understanding of intelligence/IQ differences among the races would help inform the discussion of affirmative action preferences generally.
For instance, in earlier posts on this thread (posts 36 and following, e.g.), many posters accepted patently absurd presentations of SAT scores that showed very small differences among “elite college” admittees by race. Of course, the data were flawed and I would argue deliberately misleading (not by the posters necessarily, but by the data sources themselves). Some basic understanding of the literature on intelligence and what it says and doesn’t say about applicants would go a long way towards focusing the affirmative action debate and avoiding obvious dead ends.
To get back to the topic, intelligence research shows that preferences at “elite” schools will need to be extremely large in order to approximate any roughly proportionate representation of racial groups that have even moderately significant differences in mean intelligence. That is because elite schools pick from the “right tail” of the intelligence distributions, and that is where differences become greatest. Think of it this way: the average difference in height for men versus women in the US is only about five inches, and at some intermediate height (say, 5’6-1/2") there are roughly the same number of men as women. But at 5’10" there are 30 times more men than women. At 6’0" there are 2000 men for every woman. That’s just the way it is.
@SatchelSF As always thank you for truly informing a discussion. Sadly: this is information and facts that no one wants to hear much less consider to inform virtually codified racial preferences in education. Everyone is equal end of story. I think its 10s and 1000s of years of the environment influencing survival. Didnt Guns, Germs and Steel touch on this a bit?
@Center - Diamond did touch on some of these themes in Guns, Germs and Steel, for sure. It is an interesting book, as I recall, with its main theme being that accidents of geography, disease and “culture” led to positive feedback loops that increased differences among cultures and societies. In effect, the hegemony of European thought and influence in the modern period, as in earlier periods with respect to Muslim or East Asian societies, reflects the legacy of prior feedback loops. Disruptions to those cycles of hegemony occur because of largely exogenous events (such as disease, overextension of military empire that could not have been foreseen, “fortuitous” technological discoveries, etc. - echoing the title of the book).
Fine, so far as it goes. However, Diamond wrote this twenty years ago, before the human genome was fully sequenced and before much research on genetic selection pressures, which are strong, recent and widespread. The orthodoxy promulgated by academics a few decades ago that human evolution effectively stopped 40,000 or 50,000 years ago (epitomized by Gould, Kamin and the rest of the “Harvard School”) has been effectively disproved by recent research and so we never hear about that anymore. In my opinion, the better, modern view, is that environment does affect all aspects of human beings - in particular intelligence - but that any influences become reflected in the genes (more properly, through how they are expressed at various stages of life). In essence, human beings become genetically selected for particular cultures, a process that can happen relatively quickly (as in Ashkenazi Jews over maybe 700-800 years, at most), but unfortunately that is not going to happen within a single lifetime. The feedback loop thus becomes genetically “coded,” and culture becomes “hardwired.” If one subscribes to that view, one can easily see how modern society is a very tricky construct, as people and cultures that have evolved largely separately for more than 50,000 years (and perhaps much longer) are now expected to conform to one (largely Western and very recent, at that) model. Given that modern transportation and communication systems ensure this mixing of cultures, my personal belief is that recognition and acceptance of group differences will allow a more harmonious society, as well as a renewed focus on individuals - especially individual education.
@tonaviscestquoi or maybe the Asian families that “don’t work as hard/are unlucky and unintelligent/don’t get to access higher education at home” do not immigrate here to the US which selects immigrants with advanced (usually eng/tech) degrees.
African immigrants are super high achievers also - those immigrant families also have a strong work ethic and are highly educated before coming here too.
Groups that bring expectations about higher education form home and do not try to understand the American system are going to be at a disadvantage. If a Chinese family expects US university admissions to work like Chinese ones, they will be disappointed. Same for people of any country.
Part of what many dislike about US selective U admissions is part of what makes those schools so desirable to many.
Not all Asians are successful. The Asians you see in the US are not remotely representative of their country of origin.
The successful ones you see here are typically first or second generation. They or their parents had to have the work ethic, likely higher intelligence, and confidence that made them decide it was worth leaving their friends and family in search of a better life.
I suspect that the Asians who have been here for many generations (e.g. those who came over in the 1800s) are not much more successful and intelligent than the typical American.
There is a designated thread for policy discussions on this topic.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1843141-race-in-college-applications-faq-discussion-12.html
But no one seems to notice, since they are small in number compared to the existing African American population that is mostly descended from involuntary immigrants (i.e. slaves) and has had its educational attainment suppressed for many generations.
Also, people do not seem to notice educational achievement among European immigrants and their first-generation-in-the-US kids, because they are small in number compared to the existing European American population.
Hawaii is the state with the highest (by far) percentage Asian American population, but its schools and universities are nowhere close to being seen as elite generally.
Unlike in many other states, much of the Asian immigration to Hawaii was not in the form of PhD students and highly skilled workers who tend to have high educational attainment.
“African immigrants are super high achievers also - those immigrant families also have a strong work ethic and are highly educated before coming here too.”
Immigrants from Africa as a group have higher welfare dependency (48%) than any major group other than those from the Caribbean (51%) and from Mexico and Central America (73%), based on the most recent Census SIPP data. See, e.g. here: https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households
These rates are quite substantially higher than native (non-immigrant) Americans, which are approximately 40% for native blacks and 13% for native whites. Also, even households headed by college educated immigrants have more than double the welfare utilization rates than households headed by college educated natives (26% vs. 13%).
With regard specifically to the children of black immigrants, Alison Rauh formerly at U. of Chicago (and now making $$ in Silicon Valley in data science) used CPS data from 2001-2013 to document alarming rates of “idleness convergence” between immigrant and native black population, but she doesn’t distinguish between Caribbean and African immigrants specifically: http://home.uchicago.edu/~arauh/Rauh2014a.pdf. The paper is well worth reading as well for its documentation of other socially undesirable characteristics of second generation black immigrants (crime, rates of incarceration, low educational attainment, etc.).
Also, it is always worthwhile to understand that “college-educated” signifies entirely different things when one is comparing, say, China with Nigeria. The meme that African immigrants are super high achieving as a group is comforting, and no doubt there are some, but as always the devil is in the details. We should be guided by data and not by hopes.
Guided by data to do what?
“Guided by data to do what?”
As a first step, we should understand the data in order to have an informed discussion as a society on what immigration policies we should adopt. Understanding has to be the basis of any intelligent conversation and a necessary prerequisite for political action in a representative democracy. Personally, I do not believe that the United States benefits much from African immigration; in fact, I believe it is a net negative as currently instituted. Again, this is a personal opinion, but I believe a merit-based system is more appropriate for all immigrants.
But whatever you believe, surely you can agree that data rather than dreams should be what is informing our choices, no?
Newsflash: This thread isn’t about immigration policy.
It’s about college admissions and the role race plays (or should/should not play) in that.
@OHMomof2 Actually, immigration policy and college admissions have a lot in common–its about whether you want a merit based system.
@jzducol I agree that the merit-based admissions system is totally on-topic. American colleges don’t define merit the same way from one college to another, of course, so there’s lots of room for discussion on that.
The fact remains, this is not an immigration thread.
The major immigration-restrictionist groups like FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA were started by John Tanton or his allies on the issue. Tanton wrote in 1993 that “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” Not exactly advocating for merit-based immigration, unless “merit” is defined as “being from Europe”.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/2017/03/15/mich-man-led-immigration-fight-nearly-forgotten/99193990/
@ucbalumnus you are putting words in my mouth…By “merit based system” I mean it would be similar to a Canadian system, where it is point based without considering the country of origin.
I’m always happy to bring the conversation back to college admissions and race based preference. It’s just that the same posters who are now saying we are off topic are the ones who brought immigration into the discussion (e.g., posts 1370 and 1374 above).
On topic, I recently came across a fascinating exchange of letters from 1969 between the then Dean of the Yale Law School and a prominent alumnus (California appellate judge) that was remarkably prescient on what watering down the standards in order to accept less qualified applicants on the basis of race would lead to: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/58e/1a4/ae3/58e1a4ae36717528770103.pdf.
I would urge anyone seriously interested in the topic of affirmative action to read that exchange closely. The crib notes are here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/05/12/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/
Last, see what Justice Thomas has said about the value of his Yale Law School degree in light of the preference system under which he was admitted, an exaggeration for sure, but informative nonetheless: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102100567_pf.html
I didn’t bring immigration into the discussion, you might want to read the post I responding to, @SatchelSF . #1370 was an attempt to steer it back on course.
Yup, Yale Law is a dump now, no one wants to go there. Black Yale Law grads never get good jobs. Very “prescient”.
Satchel’s point was that there is a large difference in qualifications(LSAT and GPA) between regular admits and URM’s. Surely you have noticed that the large law firms have very few URM partners. These firms are largely run by left of center attorneys but very few URM’s remain. The facts firmly support Satchel.
URM’s aren’t regular admits? @SAY