"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion

[Weasel8488]

<p>Since such programs only accept students of certain races, their admissions processes are by definition racially discriminatory. I believe that if such programs are made available to minorities, they should also be available to poor whites and Asians. That way there is no racial discrimination in the aggregate. If that’s the case, then the programs don’t bother me. Another point in favor of these programs is that those who are already interested in science are not harmed by being unable to take part (since they don’t need any more motivation than they already have). That seems to be a key difference between programs like this and college admissions AA.</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>

There are studies out there which say Asians are at a disadvantage relative to whites.

That’s mostly because there are fewer Asian legacies and athletes.

</p>

<p>Not necessarily. In his rebuttal to Espenshade and Chung’s 2005 paper, Kidder stated that “At some elite colleges and universities, Asian Pacific American (APA) applicants have a lesser chance of being admitted than equally qualified White applicants” (emphasis added). Legacy and athlete preferences can’t explain all of it or even most of it.</p>

<p>

But that’s not the point. The point is that many people on here would try to argue that it is easier for an Asian to get into an elite school if he or she hides the fact he or she is Asian.

</p>

<p>Given the existence of negative action, it is certainly possible “that it is easier for an Asian to get into an elite school if he or she hides the fact he or she is Asian.”</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>

Consider that is is necessary for even the most selective schools to have lower SAT averages for some groups because there simply aren’t enough scoring extremely highly to admit at the same standard while maintaining a racial composition that won’t have people up in arms about the Ivory Tower.

</p>

<p>I really like Justice Scalia’s counter to this. The following is a transcript from an exchange between Justice Scalia and Mr. John Payton in Gratz:</p>

<p>

SCALIA: Because your standards are so high, you say that there are very few of those who can meet your standards. So why don’t you lower your standards, actually, I mean if this is indeed a significant compelling State interest, why don’t you lower your standards?</p>

<p>PAYTON: We do have sufficient numbers in our applicant pool to achieve the critical mass that we’re achieving. We’re not taking – you’re right we’re not –</p>

<p>SCALIA: By taking race into account, you can you can do it. But –</p>

<p>PAYTON: But we’re not taking students that aren’t qualified, you are correct about that, Justice Scalia.</p>

<p>SCALIA: But just lower your qualification standards, if – if this value of – of having everybody in a mix with people of other races is so significant to you, just lower your qualifications.
PAYTON: It is that significant to us. But I think that –</p>

<p>SCALIA: You don’t have to be the great college you are, you can be a lessor college if that value is important enough to you.

</p>

[Weasel8488]

<p>The problem is that there are only so many spots available in a freshman class. If you lower your standards across the board, you’ll admit more students, and you’ll over-enroll as a result. This of course assumes that qualification is binary. If it’s continuous, then the phrase “lower your standards” is meaningless; the only thing you can change is how much importance you assign to each factor being evaluated.</p>

[madville]

<p>

EDIT: tokenadult has provided extensive data demonstrating that “race unknown” applicants are admitted in healthy numbers at top colleges across the country.

</p>

<p>In a gesture to state the obvious, apparently so are ORM’s (aka over represented minorities) who state their ethnicity! Their numbers are apparently “healthy” too! lol</p>

[madville]

<p>

I think schools should stop using race as a proxy for socio-economic class, give more consideration to disadvantaged kids regardless of their race, gender, geography, etc., but still allow things like race, gender, geography, etc. to be used to promote diversity.

</p>

<p>Not to hijack, but he’s downplaying race in admissions to placate the middle class whites he needs to become elected. More socio economic and not use race as a proxy but still use race to promote diversity? What double talk!</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>

The problem is that there are only so many spots available in a freshman class. If you lower your standards across the board, you’ll admit more students, and you’ll over-enroll as a result. This of course assumes that qualification is binary. If it’s continuous, then the phrase “lower your standards” is meaningless; the only thing you can change is how much importance you assign to each factor being evaluated.

</p>

<p>Your first sentence is absolutely true. Going back to negative action, it is the reason why I do not know how removing negative action can increase Asian enrollment without decreasing non-Asian enrollment. Some users here think that Kidder “disproved” Espenshade and Chung’s now (in)famous findings that being black was worth the equivalent of 240 extra SAT points and being Asian is worth a 50 point deduction. In actuality, Kidder didn’t dispute any of that. Rather, Kidder argued that E&C conflated negative action with affirmative action. He stated that you can remove negative action, which helps Asians, but keep affirmative action, which helps the “underrepresented.” As interesting as that is, the only way I can see it working is if fewer whites are admitted. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Nevertheless, I welcome any responses to the question, “How can you increase Asian enrollment without decreasing non-Asian enrollment?”</p>

<p>Regarding your second sentence, note that Justice Scalia said, “You don’t have to be the great college you are, you can be a lessor college if that value is important enough to you.” I see there being an equilibrium effect. If Michigan were to impose a lower albeit uniform standard, the immediate effects on Michigan’s prestige would be minimal. Thus, I agree that they would admit more students and possibly strain the campus’s resources. Gradually, however, Michigan would lose its status as a flagship university due to the lowered standard. Students interested in attending an elite university would apply to Michigan mainly for safety reasons. As the school gets larger and larger and worse and worse, the number of applications will start decreasing and finally reach a new equilibrium.</p>

<p>I’m not sure whether Justice Scalia was defining standards and qualification in an “either/or” (i.e. binary) sense. Certainly, Mr. Payton was not as he said that Michigan was admitting qualified students who just so happened to have lower GPAs and SAT scores than their white and Asian peers. I see no reason why believing that qualification is a continuum is at odd’s with Justice Scalia’s reasoning. Assume a standard that is set relatively low and two qualified students Abdul and Baker. Why can’t Abdul be more qualified than Baker? They both meet the standard, but Abdul is still the superior candidate of the two.</p>

[madville]

<p>

For better or worse, AA is all about helping people who have been dealt a bad deck, so it seems odd for you to use that analogy.

</p>

<p>Correction, AA is about helping people and creating opportunities for those who are competing in a game with a STACKED DECK. Socio-economic considerations are for those dealing with a “bad deck.”</p>

<p>In your analogy it could be reasoned that being a minority is part of having a “bad hand.” It is an inherent position that I don’t wan’t to give your analogy credence to.</p>

[Weasel8488]

<p>Earlier I said the following:</p>

<p>

If it’s continuous, then the phrase “lower your standards” is meaningless

</p>

<p>Perhaps I should have said irrelevant instead of meaningless. What I meant was that colleges will accept approximately the number of students needed to fill their freshman class (accounting for yield). Presumably those accepted will be those who are most qualified. So if the number of applicants who meet the minimum standards is greater than the number of applicants the college can accept, the standard becomes irrelevant. I’ll concede that the standard could make a difference if a college was willing to under-enroll, but it seems unlikely that a college would want to do this. Does that make sense?</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

so is it safe to leave the “race” part on commonapp blank?heard ppl saying that its better for ppl to leave it blank than to fill in a race that might get looked down on?

</p>

<p>The answer to this frequently asked question (it was asked in other forms in the last few pages) makes up the first few posts in this FAQ thread. </p>

<p>You have and everyone has the legal right to leave the form blank ([post</a> #1](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810810-post1.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810810-post1.html)). </p>

<p>The recent national trend has been for an increasing number of college applicants to decline to self-identify any ethnic group ([post</a> #3](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810876-post3.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810876-post3.html)). </p>

<p>Many colleges admit many students each year for whom they do not know of any ethnic affiliation ([post</a> #4](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810896-post4.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1060810896-post4.html)). </p>

<p>You don’t need to worry about this. If you choose not to self-report any race or ethnicity, for whatever reason you have, the college won’t hold that against you, because for all the college knows you are just a student who is very aware of your legal rights and chooses to exercise those rights.</p>

[Tyler09]

<p>While the Justice’s claim made sense following her line of logic, because their is no such thing as becoming a “lesser” school by lowering nonexistent “standards” it makes no sense. The stats of a student body are more determined by the students that apply then what the school wants. And since top students will apply to Harvard even if they stop caring as much about their SAT averages the entire notion of becoming a “lesser” school is, as Weasel said, irrelevant. </p>

<p>Also, part of the goal is to educate more minorities at the elite college level, so the Justice’s suggestion is counter-productive.</p>

[Newjack88]

<p>

Not to hijack, but he’s downplaying race in admissions to placate the middle class whites he needs to become elected. More socio economic and not use race as a proxy but still use race to promote diversity? What double talk!

</p>

<p>How is that double talk?</p>

<p>Socio-economic affirmative action decreases racial/ethnic and geographic diversity, so steps would have to be taken to counter that side-effect.</p>

[Kicharo]

<p>"How is that double talk?</p>

<p>Socio-economic affirmative action decreases racial/ethnic and geographic diversity, so steps would have to be taken to counter that side-effect."</p>

<p>I don’t understand how you can’t see that this is double talk… This would be essentially the same system as today.</p>

[Newjack88]

<p>

I don’t understand how you can’t see that this is double talk… This would be essentially the same system as today.

</p>

<p>How is it the same policy? We don’t give preferential treatment for socio-economic class we only consider it.</p>

[Kicharo]

<p>Ok, you’re right. It would the current policy plus socio-economic affirmative action.</p>

[Weasel8488]

<p>There was an interesting article in the Times today on census self-identification trends.</p>

<p>

Deep inside a data dump by the Census Bureau last week was a startling racial projection: By midcentury, the United States will be home to 80 million more white people.</p>

<p>Never mind, for a moment, that the bureau also predicts that Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American-Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will constitute a majority of the population by 2042. The number of people who say they are white is projected to rise by about two million every year.</p>

<p>At that rate, even while the Hispanic and Asian populations expand enormously, the proportion of Americans who identify themselves as white will barely shrink, from a little more than 79 percent, to 74 percent.</p>

<p>It’s not some new math metric that’s responsible. It’s the way the government defines race: most people who describe their origin or heritage as Hispanic or Latino also identify themselves as white.</p>

<p>“The process of assimilation is such that our views of the degree of difference of newer non-white groups changes rapidly,” Professor Glazer said. “So the Jews and Italians, considered very foreign at the time of immigration by Henry Adams and others, were much less foreign by the 30s, hardly foreign at all by the 60s — they were then as white as other whites (for a time, called ‘white ethnics’).”</p>

<p>Race and ethnicity, says Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University, are really about culture, not biology. Categories contrived by bureaucrats and politically correct committees can be confusing and skew the results. “Even the notion of Hispanics ranges in people of European origin in Chile to those of native-America origin in the lowlands of Mexico,” Professor Cohen said.

</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17roberts.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17roberts.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&oref=slogin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[Newjack88]

<p>

Ok, you’re right. It would the current policy plus socio-economic affirmative action.

</p>

<p>Not quite, since race/ethnicity would be only considered not given preferential treatment.</p>

[Kicharo]

<p>“Not quite, since race/ethnicity would be only considered not given preferential treatment.”</p>

<p>I misunderstood your initial posts then. </p>

<p>I would certainly rather have socio-economic affirmative action plus racial “consideration” than what we have now.</p>

<p>Although, ideally, I would like admissions to be race blind.</p>

[Weasel8488]

<p>If you consider race, aren’t you giving some races preferential treatment? Sorry to split hairs, but I’m not sure I understand the difference.</p>

[collegealum314]

<p>“I would certainly rather have socio-economic affirmative action plus racial “consideration” than what we have now.”</p>

<p>There is already an admissions boost for being socioeconomically underprivileged.</p>