It was a hypothetical scenario, meant to highlight a potential legal issue regarding disparate impact. Too abstract?
epiphany-
I wasn’t suggesting that schools follow some sort of mathematical equation, parsing out spots proportionally. I was simply suggesting that Asian American students might be affected by a relative lack of geographic diversity and as such disadvantaged in admissions in at least one way that has nothing to do with race.
The same dynamic affects white girls from Massachusetts, the demographic under which my D falls. The NMS cutoffs are among the highest, the number of applicants to Ivy League and NESCAC schools among the greatest. What it means is that although girls from MA are disproportionately represented at these schools their qualifications tend to have to be slightly better than, say, a boy from Idaho, because frankly, well qualified girls, and to a lesser extent boys from MA, NY, NJ and CT are a dime a dozen as applicants. There’s even an expression for kids from MA at my son’s NESCAC school-JOB, standing for “just outside Boston”
A white girl from MA is going to have a tough time getting into Bowdoin or Middlebury or Yale. Applying to Grinnell or Pomona or Northwestern is a smarter strategy.
Just saying: imagine the hoops for kids JOTJ or JOS-- Thomas Jefferson or Stuy.
The private elites are not your local public k-12 system obliged to take you, not even your state Governor’s Academy (many of which, btw, like so many magnets, are also out for representation, not simply stats-based factors. Ready to sue them?) And the private elites are not about to triple their spaces to accommodate all.
Hardly. Too irrelevant and absurd. There is no “legal issue” requiring a private educational institution to admit a certain “proportion” of students from any State.
No kidding. They’re not obliged to do anybody’s bidding except to the legitimate mission of the school. This subject has been talked to death for several hundred pages since I joined this forum in 2004. Far too many CC’ers think they have the slightest understanding of exactly what amounts to “rights” (constitutional or not), and even more fail to understand the legal standard for “discrimination.” They throw terms around that they think they understand but their application of the terms makes it obvious they do not.
But yeah, keep wasting your time and spinning your wheels.
@Sue22 I wasn’t responding to you, at least not deliberately! I was responding to reply 398. Sorry about that.
One simple question: Why do college applications ask for your race? Employment applications don’t!
@father91 : Actually many do indeed have a field to indicate that. Nice try though…(many employers also use affirmative action will say it explicitly).
No harm, no foul. I think we’re basically on the same page.
They’re required to for federal reporting purposes. Applicants, on the other hand, are not required to answer the question.
Do you have access to Harvard’s admission data? Where is your proof?
There may indeed be no discrimination, but that remains to be determined after a review of the data.
Looking at the Harvard Common Data Set, last page, it looks like only about 35% of enrollment degrees conferred are in the STEM areas. If a majority of the 40% of asian applicants are looking at STEM, then it looks like a majority of the Asian applicants, who are 40% of the applicant pool, are vying for only 35% of the open spots.
I wonder if the Asian social sciences applicant has a different perspective/outcome? Harvard just isn’t a STEM-my school. They don’t want to be.
http://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2013-14.pdf
@HRSMom
It’s my understanding, from students currently enrolled there, that Harvard is more STEM-friendly lately, anyway. They’re putting their resources into hard sciences at the moment – more so than humanities/social sciences. At least it seems that way.
^interesting…maybe they are responding to the “demand”? I don’t know much about Harvard, so I’m just musing…
Harvard does not admit by major.
But major can be a consideration in a review.
GMT, I know the process at another most competitive.
Harvard has acknowledged their interest in incresding humanities kids. Not going looking for the exact wording, but it’s there.
That’s nice. No one said Harvard does.
from post #410
it looks like only about 35% of enrollment degrees conferred are in the STEM areas. If a majority of the 40% of asian applicants are looking at STEM, then it looks like a majority of the Asian applicants, who are 40% of the applicant pool, are vying for only 35% of the open spots.
Well, this is not such a bad question. The short answer is that “disparate impact” is not enough to show discrimination and to obtain relief an a discrimination case unless there is a specific law that calls for it, as there is in some housing and employment laws. As far as I am aware, plaintiffs in the case we are talking about would not be able to prevail if all they could show was disparate impact.
However, they might prevail if a smoking gun document surfaced that said, “Let’s limit the admissions from California; that will be a good way of keeping out all those Asians from out there.” But I think the possibility of that is extremely remote.
While this is true, Harvard is going to consider likely major, or at least general area, in admissions, because it needs to fill all its majors.
@ TallyMom2017 - “I just think that Asian parents value education in a completely different way than everybody else and see it as their only means to better their offspring. No excuses for those kids …”
Yes, they very much , education is a must have !! No failing there
Thank you Hunt. I was – erroneously it seems – thinking that college admissions might be similar to employment in this regard.