I don’t care about what you think as long as one more person becomes sensitive to the racism being perpetrated against asians
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Not sure that indiscriminately labeling posters and others as racists will help in that regard, but here’s hoping that it will be viewed as is deserved.
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Why do people always say that Asian-Americans are being duped?
It’s insulting - they have just as much agency as any racial group and they understand that affirmative action isn’t going to benefit them personally but is wrong on principle.
I oppose affirmative action and I’m well aware that it’s not going to boost individual chances much for my kids but it’s about the principles, not about opportunistic benefit.
If we’re all equal in the eyes of the law, we should all have an equal shot at an elite school when comparing two identical candidates.
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I’ve got to say, it seems satirical that you’re complaining that another user is calling affirmative action proponents racist when that’s what the pro-affirmative-action side has been calling people who oppose affirmative action for years now.
Ed Blum has been called a ‘white supremacist’ so many times by Harvard students who testified and activists (Sally Chen), and Harvard officials themselves. Even the lawyer Mr Bill Lee of WilmerHale who was employed by Harvard in the district case called SFFA an organization that wants to keep Hispanics/African-Americans out of university - he compared it to the segregation movement of the 1960s in interview he did a few years ago.
People who oppose affirmative action are routinely labelled as racist, white supremacist, and people who want to go back to the 1960s.
With all due respect, the word racist and white supremacist has been thrown around so much by people who are pro-affirmative-action that it begins to lose meaning.
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Hold on there.
There is no need for claims about the grades or scores. That is existing data. It is easy to then group by various criteria, such as race, or state, or income level, or sex, and measure the average score and spread by various groups. The result is not making a claim. That again is data.
The reasons for differences between groups is again not necessarily racism. It could be racism, but it can also be differences in parental education, income, emphasis on education, or expectations (parents have a big role). It could be the quality of the school system. Most likely it is a combination of several factors.
For example, children of Nigerians that immigrate to the USA do quite well. Why are they outperforming not only Blacks born in the USA, but also whites born in the USA? Again, it is due to parental level of education (most of these parents are college educated), and the expectations they have of their children.
Finally, when it comes to college admissions, these children of Nigerian immigrants do extremely well in terms of college admissions, as do Black children from the West Indies. They might even make up a majority of Black students at elite colleges. So much for the colleges using affirmative action to right the wrongs of those who suffered in the USA. It is much easier to make it “look right” by admitting the highly accomplished children of immigrants.
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Harvard has more than 17% of the students in D1 sports. Most recruited, some “soft recruited”. They, in average, have more than 100 less points in SAT compared to non-athletes. Are they admissible? Maybe, by very stretched standards. Not sure how many 1300 students get into Harvard without a sport or legacy/donor/celebrity. Not URM’s.
In fact, URM’s ARE admissible as they are. All the black kids I know that got into Ivies are top of their class, have perfect GPA’s and test scores, amazing EC’s. Did race play a role? I don’t know, the same as if a white kid got in, they have all very similar stats. But maybe they valued more having funded a non-profit who saves teenage girls (actively, not in paper) than someone who has a business sells their clothes on the internet. Maybe they need certain ethnicities or even from certain states (is it discrimination if instead of another kid from MA or NY they take that one kid from AK or ND or AR that finally applied?). Five Types of Students that Get into Harvard | Admissions Blog
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That Veritas article has quite a few inconsistencies. The cited Atlantic article says 10% of Harvard students are recruited athletes, so how is it possible that recruited athletes are 20% of admitted athletes, as veritas states? That math doesn’t work.
Recruited athlete means the student had coach support thru admissions…whether full or soft support, they were recruited (but had different probability of admissions). Walk-ons are by definition not recruited…no coach support at all in the admission process.
We can debate all day whether H or a school should recruit athletes, but the reality is that most US colleges see intercollegiate sports as quite important to their educational mission. So, these student-athletes per se belong at Harvard because they were admitted.
Thousands of student-athletes vie for recruited athlete slots at H each year, the competition and recruiting process is intense. People see the high acceptance rates of recruited athletes but they don’t realize the big cuts that happened prior to the student-athlete submitting an app. As these student-athletes go thru the coach selection and admissions pre-read process is when the real winnowing happens, where the rejection rate (whether by coach or admission) is over 90% at a school like Harvard.
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But not on this thread.
As the recent posts have been dominated by a handful of users, I have put the thread on slow mode temporarily. My hope is this will allow other users to join the conversation and prompt the more exuberant users to be strategic in postings.
Interesting idea. Not sure I agree with it, I’m still thinking about it. Where I live, there are 2 different populations of Asian refugees who receive special consideration in college admissions, at least to the colleges around here. AOs here understand that these refugees (and their kids and grandkids etc) are disadvantaged due to being historically persecuted minorities in their countries of origin. Due to their long history of persecution, they were very poor, and at least 1 of these groups didn’t have a written language. Their kids do poorly academically, and so when they do better than average academically AOs understand this is an accomplishment.
Yes. Perhaps this is a good time for some to learn about structural and systemic racism.
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Let’s dismantle the structure and system, not build on them.
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Because the entire premise of this lawsuit, orchestrated by an old white guy, is that Asian American students rejected by Harvard would have been admitted if race wasn’t a criteria.
From the website set up to dupe Asian Americans into believing that they would have been admitted were it not for these policies:
It doesn’t get more explicit than that, does it?
Also, as I indicated, it is not just Asian Americans who have been duped. Many white Americans have been duped in to believing the same thing. It is the same ginned up racial resentment, only Blum was unsuccessful when he tried the same thing with White Americans, so he is giving it a shot with Asian Americans.
But some, not all, of the people who oppose affirmative action are racist and support racist agendas. Blum is allied with and receives a substantial portion of his funding from the same dark money sources who fund racist organizations such as V-Dare and Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance. Whether or not you consider Blum a racist, I think that it is undeniable that racists are rooting for him to succeed, and hoping that his success will squeeze URMs out of higher education. Like it or not, these are his (and your) allies in this battle.
That said, this doesn’t mean you are a racist. But then I haven’t called you a racist. I, however, have been labeled a racist for daring to disagree with Blum.
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Apparently I was too subtle.
Move on from discussing athletic recruiting or any rehash of the Harvard lawsuit that does not specifically refer to Affirmative Action.
While we’re at it, any variation of “If [insert any person/institution here] thinks X, they must be racist” will also be deleted.
I’ll further remind members of the forum rules: “Our forum is expected to be a friendly and welcoming place, and one in which members can post without their motives, intelligence, or other personal characteristics being questioned by others."
Examples of phrases to avoid (and this list is not exhaustive):
Let me explain it to you in words you can understand
You clearly don’t understand
That shows how little you know
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines
The conversation tends to work better when one does not attempt to put words in another user’s mouth.
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I’ll just put this as gently as possible – no rage or rancor or too-heavy bias:
- We need a little more understanding as a people
- We also need a little more accountability/responsibility as a people
Those two things, working in tandem, would go far in helping us: it means we’d be making fewer excuses ourselves, while understanding and forgiving others’ faults/failures.
How does this relate to the use of SES and racial hooks in admissions?
Those blessed with access to better K-12 education, tutors, test prep, ECs (etc.), four cracks at the ACT/SAT to notch their best possible score… would understand the advantage, and accept a fellow matriculant who is also at their elite college, who scored 200 points lower on the SAT because he had to work a part-time job while in high school and had far less time for test prep/ECs/homework. Or, understand how that person was accepted to a school, while he was not.
And, the kid who does have it harder – less money, poorer school, etc. – still perseveres, does the best he can, and works his tail off to achieve the most he can.
Perseverance and understanding – a different kind of golden rule.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a school wanting to select a diverse class – diverse in many ways. There is logic behind this: one way to help prepare kids for the world is to make the college as diverse as the world is. Or the state, county, etc. – mirror the society they will be entering. Being subjected to people who are different than you will help you understand and relate to others. And there is no end to the good that will do in future endeavors.
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Past racist policies, laws, and actions, which have not been remedied, can continue to affect the success of generation after generation. Refusal to acknowledge that these effects are still affecting the success of the kids and grandkids of families who suffered from direct discrimination is a form of discrimination as well.
If somebody steals all of another person’s money, that theft will affect the children of the person who was robbed, even though the children did not personally experience the robbery. When a community is purposefully kept in poverty for generations, simply lifting the previous restrictions will not magically remove them from poverty. This is especially true if the poor community has also missed a huge temporary opportunity for education and employment which was provided to other communities.
My point is, really, that, in my opinion, because past discrimination still effects generation of descendants, refusing to remedy this, and ignoring it altogether can be considered part of that past discrimination.
The factors that you mention, like quality of school systems, poverty, and emphasis on education, can be traced back to that fairly recent history of discrimination. Poverty, because of past policies and loss of opportunity, school systems because of the messed up system in the usa which has communities being required to fund their own school system, and emphasis on education, because, for 10 generations, education was generally not a ticket out of poverty, partly because there was no education to be had, and partly because discrimination meant that the benefits of an education were minor, compared to the investment. Add to that the fact that the education itself supported the discriminatory ideology.
It is really recent - redlining was only banned at the end of the 1970s. That didn’t stop it, BTW. Only a week ago, City National Bank of California paid a good amount of money to resolve allegations of redlining between 2017 and 2020.
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I agree with this. Which is why I have repeatedly called for adjusting admission criteria based upon family income and wealth. These have tremendous impacts on the opportunities that a child has while growing up.
This also has the advantage that we are not using a coarse tool like race and assuming that everyone with a particular race has the same experience. Does an inner-city Black child have limited opportunities compared to a child from a wealthy white family? Absolutely. But the same is true of a White coal miner’s child in Kentucky. But only one of those gets a huge advantage in admissions. Even worse, a Black doctor’s child has it easier in admissions compared to the coal miner’s child.
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I think that we are mostly (or entirely) in agreement, but are coming at this from somewhat different directions (which I think is a good thing, BTW).
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The challenges faced by URMs go well beyond family income and wealth. In many situations they are directly tied to race. A black kid of any SES faces a much different reality than a white kid from any SES. Asian kids, Middle Eastern kids, LatinX kids, etc. also face a much different reality than do white kids. Unfortunately, that is the way the world is. Why should Harvard be forced to ignore reality in making their admission decisions?
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@Data10 has shown that for Harvard, being identified as Black is a bigger admissions advantage than anything except recruited athlete. And further has identified that there is no additional benefit to being identified as both Black and low-income.
So while the inner-city Black kid in my previous example did get a huge admission bump relative to the coal-miner’s child, they would still have to directly compete against the child of a wealthy Black doctor who had access to superior schools, tutors, test prep, and could afford desirable ECs.
And as I mentioned earlier, a surprisingly large percentage of them are first or second generation immigrants from places like Nigeria or the West Indies. A good primer on this issue can be found here: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/affirmative-action-helps-black-immigrants-but-not-black-americans/
The result of all this is that Black students at Harvard look very little like the historically oppressed Black community in the USA.
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Should affirmative action be considered a “failed” policy in terms of remedying past harms? Neutral? Positive? Are past disparities in outcomes narrowing? Has it been in place long enough to collect good data? I read a little bit on the topic when we were voting in California on this issue but my recollection was that I didn’t find any definitive papers/data. If anyone can point me in any direction, please do.