"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion

Applying to College
201

<p>token,</p>

<p>Thank you for the articles, which predict what this country will look like over the next 50 years, using self-reported race information collected by census. </p>

<p>I have a question for you: If Americans decline to identify their race in college admissions (and the census for that matter), how do you propose that we monitor or ensure that all of our citizens are getting an equal chance in this country? Do you think that ignorance about our racial makeup is preferable and beneficial? This is where I have trouble following your reasoning on this subject. Thank you.</p>

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<p>sorry for my typo in post 200, paragraph 2: ‘one race,’ not ‘once race’</p>

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<p>First, you still haven’t answered my question regarding Kidder’s statement that Asians are held to higher standard compared to equally qualified whites.</p>

<p>Second, are you implying that I support the discriminatory policies that the Ivies devised in the 1920s to control Jewish enrollment? Those policies were shameful and embarrassing though not necessarily racist since Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Ashkenazi Jews are both “whites.” To put it mildly, it is intellectually dishonest for you to insinuate that I think there was nothing wrong with those practices.</p>

<p>Third, I find your final paragraph to be highly amusing because of how you misunderstood Reider’s words. The effect is comically ironic.</p>

<p>Reider [url= <a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/10/asian]said[/url”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/10/asian]said[/url</a>] that the question, “Too Asian?” is shameful, embarrassing, and racist. In other words, you can never have too many of any racial group and to suggest otherwise is shameful, embarrassing, and racist.</p>

<p>You, however, said “…[elites] continue to consider it shameful, embarrassing, & racist to have too many whites.” By using Reider’s words without understanding his point, you completely twisted his words. Like “Too Asian?” the question “Too White?” is shameful, embarrassing, and racist. Asking the question is itself already shameful, embarrassing, and racist. You, on the other hand, went one step further: you answered it, and you answered in the affirmative.</p>

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<p>epiphany,</p>

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<p>I’m still interested in knowing what you think about Kidder’s statement.</p>

<p>I do not see how “Asians score well” was E&C’s sole conclusion. This is the second time you’ve made this assertion. [url= <a href=“http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/Tje/EspenshadeSSQPtII.pdf]Here’s[/url”>http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/Tje/EspenshadeSSQPtII.pdf]Here’s[/url</a>] a link to their paper. Please tell me where it says that their only conclusion was “Asians score well.”</p>

<p>The following paragraph was part of E&C’s conclusion section:</p>

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205

<p>I know you’ll never stop making selective conclusions about the E&C study. Plenty of other people have pointed out flaws in the study, similar to what I also have said. The “researchers’” [cough, cough] premises are faulty, & demonstrate how little they understand about what is considered “qualified” on simple academic measures alone, excluding anything about origins. Their very premises are based on their own (false) assumption about the admissions process itself. The missing data further compromises their conclusions.</p>

<p>I’m not going to keep repeating myself about why & how the E&C study shows results (enrolled students), not “requirements,” not “standards.” Figure it out. There’s a history of my posts & others’ similar posts on CC alone. For example, it does not explain why some “top” Asian scorers were admitted but identically top Caucasian scorers were rejected! E&C had zero info about the highly qualified rejected set. Therefore, their “conclusions” are without merit, being highly unscientific. Design is essential to conclusion.</p>

<p>I was referring to your own statement, not Reider’s. You yourself believe that there should be no limit on Asian enrollment. You’ve said that many times.</p>

206

<p>“Asians are held to higher standard compared to equally qualified whites.”</p>

<p>If they’re equally qualified, they’re not being held to a higher standard.</p>

207

<p>epiphany,</p>

<p>Plenty of other people? If by “other people” you mean bona fide researchers, then I find that to be misleading because I know of only one published paper that critiques Espenshade and Chung (Kidder). If you know of other critiques, however, please tell me. If by “other people” you mean biased citizens, then you are absolutely correct. Plenty of doubting Thomases have been displeased at Espenshade and Chung’s peer reviewed and published research.</p>

<p>For the n-th time, what are your thoughts on Kidder’s statement regarding the existence of negative action?</p>

<p>And, let’s be fair, epiphany. If you’re making a claim, then the burden of proof is on you. I don’t have to “figure [anything] out.” You twice asserted that Espenshade and Chung only found that Asians score well. You made the claim, you prove it. You can say anything you like about the quality of Espenshade and Chung’s research, but know this: it’s over three years old, it was peer reviewed, and there has only been one published critique. All your accusations of their research being of zero worth can’t change those facts.</p>

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<p>Thank you for correctly understanding one of my positions. Yes, I believe there should be no limit on Asian enrollment. I’m curious, the way you phrased that sentence suggests that you believe there should be one. Isn’t that a quota, epiphany?</p>

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<p>OK, please, please tell me you’re joking. This is even more comical than your claim a few pages back that if all racial groups were equally qualified on average, there would still be “civil claims” alleging racial discrimination </p>

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<p>If a college has a notion of what it means to be qualified, that notion may as well be applied to people of all ethnicities, including to people who don’t self-report an ethnicity. (For these purposes, it matters not at all how a college defines “qualified,” whether that refers to overcoming family poverty, getting good grades in school, starring in athletics, community service, something else, or any combination of all these factors.) If applicants are equally qualified, but the base rate of admission for applicants at that level of qualification in ethnic group A is much lower than the base rate of admission for comparable applicants in ethnic group B, any observer supportive of a society without invidious ethnic prejudice could in good conscience report this situation to law enforcement authorities and ask for an investigation. </p>

<p>This, simply put, is what “equal protection of the laws” means under the fourteenth amendment, and why Bakke won his case.</p>

210

<p>…except that post 209 is also completely flawed. It assumes, as does fabrizio, that qualification is a metric, a data point, a number. It is not. Not in this country. If a person or group chooses, or succeeds effortlessly, to perform to a higher standard than expected (it is never <em>expected</em> that one obtain a 2400 score to become qualified or “more” qualified for admission), that is not the province of the University, or any admitting institution. It is the province, the ownership, of the applicant. The Elites have said repeatedly that qualification (full qualification) is a range, not a scale. That range applies to all applicants, whatever their origins.</p>

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<p>No, I have nothing to prove, fabrizio. It’s been proven in other papers & in other pieces both on & off CC. You’re arguing backwards from their ‘conclusions.’ The study is flawed, severely. The ‘conclusions’ are false. They are based on suppositions of ‘progressive’ qualification not held by Princeton University.</p>

212

<p>"Yes, I believe there should be no limit on Asian enrollment. "</p>

<p>Naturally you do. </p>

<p>And therefore, unless you’re a racist, you believe there should be no limit on Caucasian enrollment. There is only one way to accomplish your desires: to triple the size of the University. </p>

<p>…In your dreams. It is just not going to happen.</p>

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<p>Self-identification by the categories now used will only monitor activities of organizations according to those categories, which are both too granular and not granular enough. Right now there is but one way to monitor equal chances for Jewish people, for instance: Jewish people litigating whenever they feel, on the basis of anecdotes, that they are not getting an equal chance. If discovery of a college’s admission files during litigation reveals systematic bias (as it did in the Bakke case, and did again in later cases), then the chances can become more equal, irrespective of whether or not the ethnic group that didn’t have an equal chance is part of the federally defined categories. There was never, ever federal reporting of an “Irish” ethnic category, but Irish-Americans learned how to use the legal system and their own achievements to gain more equal chances in American society. </p>

<p>I hope you are aware that to use the federally reported statistics to check for unequal chances would require information about the college-readiness of different groups of applicants at each particular college and results of admission decisions reported as stratified by college-readiness for the different groups. But today there aren’t any colleges publishing such data in a publicly available manner. (Researchers who have investigated this issue at various colleges have usually had to promise anonymity to the colleges.) </p>

<p>Right now, the aggregate statistics published by colleges show the percentage of various self-identified groups (including the group “race/ethnicity unknown”), which allows interested applicants to calculate, from class size and percentage, about how many students they might encounter who belong to one or another self-designated group, but it tells us exactly NOTHING about equality of chances. ALL applicants of all ethnic groups have an equal chance to enroll at an open-admission college, and there are hundreds of those in the United States. Anyone who hasn’t cured cancer as a high school student might doubt his or her chances at the very most selective of colleges, but today there are no data–certainly none published by the federal government–that show college-by-college whether or not there are equal chances by ethnicity at those colleges. I am agnostic on that issue, because I just don’t have data on that issue. Maybe college X is giving all ethnic groups an equal chance, but I don’t have data to prove that. If EVERYONE self-identified an ethnic group when applying for college, we still wouldn’t know if colleges are giving an equal chance by ethnicity. </p>

<p>(I might add that if I observe that a college has, say, 10 percent of students who are “Asian,” I don’t even know if it has no Indo-Americans at all and lots of Chinese-American students, or the other way around. A Hmong student from St. Paul, Minnesota looking for students with shared experience would be better off telephoning a distant cousin from Orange County, California and asking her where to find Hmong fellow students, rather than reading the college statistics that count “Asian” students, who might include no Hmong students at all. Similarly, a black student looking for fellow students with similar life experiences really has no way of knowing from current statistics how many Afro-Caribbean students, as contrasted with antebellum-ancestry African-American or black-white biracial students, a college has. Even with all the federal reporting, students pretty much have to deal with a lot of uncertainty and say, “I’ll simply have to be adaptable and learn to get along with lots of new kinds of people at college,” because federal categories don’t show students much detail about “their” ethnic group.)</p>

214

<p>I would like to see more specific response to the points mentioned in the article </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/10/asian[/url]”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/10/asian&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>cited above in this thread.</p>

215

<p>epiphany,</p>

<p>Do you believe that Jews in the 1920s faced a higher standard than equally qualified Anglo-Saxon Protestants? You should because it’s fact that Jews were discriminated against in decades past. Thus, your statement, “If they’re equally qualified, they’re not being held to a higher standard” isn’t correct.</p>

<p>You say that “…qualification (full qualification) is a range, not a scale.” How is a range not a metric? In any case, under a range system, it is possible for two candidates to be equally qualified. Negative action is when Asians who are equally qualified as whites face a higher standard. Jerry Kang, Frank Wu, and William Kidder, all academics who support affirmative action, state that this exists and is a solvable problem.</p>

<p>When [Wu</a> and Kidder](<a href=“http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6480.shtml]Wu”>http://www.diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_6480.shtml) argue that Espenshade and Chung’s research is flawed, you’re happy because it means you can say E&C’s paper is worthless. However, when they explain that the reason why it is flawed is because E&C blurred the distinction between affirmative and negative action, your ears turn deaf because to you, negative action is a myth. How intellectually honest.</p>

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<p>Papers? Name them. I can think of only one: Kidder. Again, you’re making the affirmative claim that there is more than one published academic paper that critiques Espenshade and Chung. Therefore, the burden of proof is on you, not me.</p>

<p>As tokenadult posted, the Office of Civil Rights didn’t strike down Li’s complaint as frivolous. Li cited Espenshade and Chung’s research as a big part of his complaint, so if it’s so severely flawed, then two things must be true. First, the professors who peer reviewed the paper and approved it for publication are idiots. Second, the people at OCR who approved the legitimacy of Li’s complaint are idiots.</p>

<p>Hmm, both of those could be true, but I think the more likely explanation is that you are in massive denial about the validity of E&C’s research and the existence of negative action.</p>

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<p>Of course I do.</p>

<p>As for you, based on what you’ve written, it seems that you support a limit on Asian enrollment. That is, you support a quota on Asian enrollment. I’m sorry, but that’s an indefensible position. And, don’t even try to argue that a limit isn’t the same thing as a quota; they’re synonyms.</p>

<p>I also believe that there should be no limit on white enrollment. You are correct to note that I would be somewhat racist if I believed that a limit was acceptable. On the flipside, unless you want to be somewhat racist, you would also have to admit that there should be no limit on white enrollment.</p>

<p>You’ve got one thing right – I believe there should be no limits on each racial group’s enrollment – but you got the last thing semi-wrong. The way to accomplish my desire is to support race-blind admissions. I am interested in removing negative action for Asians, but as I mentioned a few pages back to madville, I don’t see how you can increase Asian enrollment without reducing non-Asian enrollment, assuming a fixed incoming class size.</p>

218

<p>My position is that we have got to get the government out of the business of encouraging private entities to be MORE race-conscious. Race consciousness is a win for the segregationists, and a denial of [human</a> individuality](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060826476-post61.html]human”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060826476-post61.html). I don’t think about my fellow human beings according to “race” typologies. I’m always startled when I read some news article about what percent of Americans had a meal with a person of a different “race” in the last week, for instance, because I think for a split second, “Did I?” until I remember that ALL the meals I eat at home are with people of different “races” by the current federal categories. People are people. Some people happen to be my immediate relatives by marriage or by birth, but everyone I know is part of the human family. </p>

<p>It’s still an open question what might happen if all colleges explicitly decline to consider “race” in the admission process (which perhaps some do already). Various human individuals decide for themselves how eagerly they want to pursue higher education. If it becomes harder to get into college based on ethnic categories, people who belong to one category or another still have open the response of being more academically ready for college and more experienced in contributing to a residential community. Besides the hundreds of open-admission colleges, colleges are always going to choose applicants on SOME basis, and high school students just have to discern what that basis is, and work to get ready. I hazard no prediction what percentage of what “race” would be found at what college ten, twenty, or fifty years after a hypothesized general policy of most colleges credibly claiming that they don’t regard race in admission, because I have no idea how millions of individuals might respond to such a new system of incentives. But I rather suspect that there are enough smart, responsible, and diligent people in all ethnic groups that if family socioeconomic status is well attended to by colleges </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf[/url]”>http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>[BW</a> Online | July 7, 2003 | Needed: Affirmative Action for the Poor](<a href=“http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_mz007.htm]BW”>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_mz007.htm) </p>

<p>then there will be a great variety of students of various ethnic heritages at all the most highly desired colleges in the United States, all without any government tracking by Procrustean categories.</p>

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<p>When I first started discussing this issue in late 2006, I was surprised to find that calls for race-blind policies were frequently met with accusations of racism. In my mind, that made no sense. How can person A be racist if he’s advocating the end of making judgments based on race? By definition, he cannot be racist.</p>

<p>Segregationists vociferously supported race consciousness. It’s great that they don’t exist anymore but sad that their *raison d’</p>

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<p>^not that i think advocates of race blind policies are racists, but by definition they could be pegged as so. </p>

<p>In advocating against affirmative action it could be construed they are arguing in defense of a racist system of education in general. </p>

<p>And to say segregationists supported race consciousness is an intentional oversimplification. I could just as easily say the KKK fought for the preservation of American family values.</p>