whoa, Jews?

Applying to College
101

<p>I agree with post #46 that “anti-Semite” is thrown around too frequently and often inappropriately.</p>

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Is the Jewish experience being replicated today for Asians?

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<p>In many ways, I say ‘yes.’</p>

<p>Back then, too many Jews was seen as undesirable. They neither were “manly” nor possessed “character.” Nowadays, we don’t use “manly” and “leadership” has replaced “character.” Today, Asians are seen as math grinds who have no passion for what they do and hence, no leadership. It’s ‘anti-Semitic’ to say “too many Jews” but it’s perfectly all right to say “too many Asians.”</p>

<p>It seems that some people truly have no problems with giving college admissions officers a license to discriminate. When a student asks whether it is beneficial to not check the race box if he has an Asian last name, I frequently read a response like, “You’re just trying to game the system. They can see that you’re Asian from your last name.” When I advocated changing one’s last name to avoid discrimination, I met responses like, “That’s over the top. Besides, they always ask if you’ve changed your name, so you can’t win.”</p>

102

<p>I had at least two really good professors in law school who were Jewish people who changed their names for upward social mobility. It seems to me that people of every ethnicity ought to be able to do the same until, I hope, it becomes unnecessary to do that sort of thing.</p>

103

<p>This is for icantfindaname, who wrote:</p>

<p>"If you are suggesting that there is a link between one's religion and one's intelligence I would like to see the science on that one. The concept that genetic differences in races lead to differences in IQ has been completely dimissed (led to a lot of problems like one race being able to own another and it had no basis in fact).There is no meaningfull genetic difference in mankind."</p>

<p>It is entirely politically incorrect to talk about genetic differences among races and most academics are politically correct to a fare-thee-well. But, that does not mean that they may not be there.</p>

<p>I did a search on Jews and IQ (and subject to the caveat that what you find on a web search is not science), here are a few interesting articles:</p>

<p>The first, by Charles Murray, whom I often take with a grain of salt, states that there is general acceptance that the mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, for a test with a mean/median of 100 in the population. I'm not an expert in this, but I believe that the IQ score is an average of Verbal IQ and Performance IQ and that Ashkenazi Jews underperform on performance IQ, which means that the Verbal IQ score is on average 115 or higher.
Jewish</a> Genius</p>

<p>Here's the abstract of an article written by two British academics reporting that the 10 point differential found in the US is also found in Britain.<br>
ScienceDirect</a> - Intelligence : On the high intelligence and cognitive achievements of Jews in Britain</p>

<p>Here's an article(?) from the same British academic reviewing a number of studies: The</a> Intelligence of American Jews</p>

<p>I have no idea exactly what to make of this one, in which an anonymous author works backwards from the extreme overrepresentation of Jews as Nobel Prize winners, Turing Award winners, Fields medalists, Russian chess champions and Putnam math scorers to estimate the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, but it is interesting. This one probably does not qualify as science, but I suspect that the previous two do.
Assessing</a> the Ashkenazic IQ</p>

<p>I suspect that the real question is the cause of these results. Nature or nurture or both. ScienceDirect</a> - Personality and Individual Differences : How to explain high Jewish achievement: The role of intelligence and values
Not clear what the basis of their conclusion is or what their methodology is.</p>

<p>Whether nature or nurture, I doubt that Jews are advantaged in general in elite college admissions. First, they are likely underrepresented in the three categories of students who get a boost in admissions: Athletes, URMs, and legacies. Second, given an attempt to have lots of diversity (according to The Chosen, HYP admissions committees chose to use geographical diversity as a criterion because it disadvantaged Jews), coming from a group that is less than 2% of the US population does not help when Jews make up 10% to 40% of some elite schools undergraduate classes. While selecting for diversity does not mean quotas, it can (though need not) have an effect close to that of quotas. The only advantage that I can think of is that schools do have give some preference to the children of professors, and if the professors are disproportionately Jewish, this would work in the other direction.</p>