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What I'm trying to say in my own muddled fashion is that .... yeah sometimes we're not invited to the party and yes it might be nice to go...but there always seems to be another party. Maybe not quite as grand but still fun.
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<p>Oldman, sounds like you are a good candidate for the CC Chuck E. Cheese party for those of us [numbering two, so far] who apparently aren't going to be admitted to a more prestigious party. [See the Hijack thread in the Parents Cafe for more details]. LOL</p>
<p>Pyewacket, Brandeis actually has a fair number of Asian students, including some of Indian origin, as well as Chinese-origin and others. Israeli students (undergrad) are outnumbered by far by those from Turkey. A couple of years ago the school started a freshman diversity-leadership program (it's called "Mosaic").</p>
<p>mini - just for the record I am sure your numbers on Prestige University and who attends are accurate. Yours chance of getting in and being able to pay for it are pretty slim if your old man is a car salesman or a shop foreman unless you can throw a mean block or got a 95 mph fastball and can get one of those atheletic scholarships that Prestige U and the other league members don't give wink wink. On the other hand if pop is a corporate lawyer or mom hits the crack pipe you are almost home free if you can get some grades or standardized test scores. Admitedly that is a little easier in the big house in the burbs than it is with mommy trying to sell you for another rock.</p>
<p>But in the end who cares? oldman has the right attitude. As Groucho said, "I'd NEVER join a club that would have me as a member!"</p>
<p>As for social mobility I think the economist has it wrong. Look at our presidents. Sure the Bushs and Kennedys and Roosevelts were born into wealthy families but Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton were middle class at best and Carter was maybe a 10%.</p>
<p>The latest Brandeis on-line paper had mention that there may be a move to add courses to the East Asian Studies program, including teaching Korean, becaue there are a fair number of Korean students on campus (or so it's said).</p>
<p>I'm not a parent, but I stumbled upon this thread because it was linked from another forum.</p>
<p>"I also think that Asian acceptances are under-reported as the percentage of applicants refusing to self-identify racially or ethnically has now become a significant part of the applicant pool."</p>
<p>When I was applying to Yale, I considered not checking a race/ethnicity box because I was afraid of invisible quotas working against me. But then I looked about 3 lines higher and saw my last name. And then I looked below and saw that the disclosing the location of my birth was mandatory. I didn't need to tell Yale directly that I was a first generation Asian American through some type of race box. My application screamed it.</p>
<p>I did end up getting in (to my surprise, really) and attending, and I'm currently a sohpomore. I must admit that I haven't been satisfied with the diversity of the college. Despite affirmative action, I don't see and interact with many African American students. Most of my black friends are either international students from Africa or early generation African Americans who immigrated themselves or whose parents immigrated. And thinking about this topic, I can't identify one African American friend at Yale who went to an American public school. I don't think that racial and ethnic diversity is something that I should be expected to actively search for on campus; it shouldn't be that elusive. So at least in the context of Yale, I haven't personally experienced the diversity that affirmative action is meant to garner. Given all of this hype about the policy, I really hope that I'm in the minority (of a minority...) on this one.</p>
<p>"Wow mini, you sure do hate prestigious schools."</p>
<p>Oh, NO! Not at all! I went to three of them! (Williams, Oxford, and the University of Chicago.) I think my "truth in advertising" statement for their websites is true, and is deduced from the very data THEY provide - I didn't make any of it up! And I got a GREAT education at all three. I sent one foster kid to one of them (Princeton), and my d. to another (Smith).</p>
<p>What I do think is that providing truth in advertising would help middle class families understand what's going on a lot better, so they wouldn't put their eggs in the prestige basket. All it does is tell the truth - a truth the colleges themselves put out, but in other forms. Secondarily to that, I think ALL students, especially the majority 5%ers, would benefit greatly - educationally speaking -- from greater economic diversity at the prestige colleges. I think by not doing so, they are handicapping the education of future elites, and we ALL pay for that handicap at a later date.</p>
<p>Truth-telling would make these places even better, and make the burden of middle-class parents lighter. The Presidents of Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Amherst, and Smith publicly agree with me. How could you object to that?</p>
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When I was applying to Yale, I considered not checking a race/ethnicity box because I was afraid of invisible quotas working against me.
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<p>Had you not checked the voluntary box, you would not be counted in Yale's "Asian-American" percentages. You would be counted in the "Undefined/Unknown/Other" category -- a category that has been steadily increasing. </p>
<p>For example, the "Unknown Race" category at Swarthmore has increased from 5% of the total enrollment in 2000 to 12.6% of the total enrollment in 2004. That's a pretty remarkable increase in a short period of time. That trend indicates an increasing grassroots rejection of race-based admissions in a way that is much more direct than Supreme Court affirmative action decisions. If that number continues to increase at such a high rate, "diversity" stats published by colleges will become meaningless.</p>
<p>I see no benefit to Asian-American or Caucasian applicants voluntarily checking the race box. Sure, the colleges can figure it out. But, why assist them in their "percentage" game approach to affirmative action when there is no corresponding benefit in acceptance odds?</p>
<p>(Just a little side note - the "mixed race" category now included in the 2000 Census was the result of a political decision made by the first Bush Administration in 1990-1991. As we all know from our history, African-Americans were always viewed as Black if either 1) they were even 1/16 or 1/64th of African ancestry (looking back far enough, we all are, of course, but that's another matter), or 2) "look Black". (There is a long history of AAs trying to "pass", and for very good reason.) The new categories were promulgated a) Because it could make the AA population look smaller than it would actually have appeared otherwise, reducing their political clout; b) Because fewer in the long-run would be able to make use of race-based affirmative action; c) racial and class disparities in health and income would be harder to correlate with each other, and hence require governmental intervention. And the theory was that AAs would like it in that it would allow them one small avenue, in theory, to escape discrimination. (But it doesn't work if condition #2 holds.)</p>
<p>There were a lot of interest groups arguing for a "mixed race" category in the 2000 census. Yes, that did have to be debated almost a decade in advance, because that is how far in advance that census questions are proposed and approved, but I doubt that had a lot to do with the particular president who was in office in the very early 1990s. </p>
<p>I don't see that the common application or other college application forms that ask about ethnicity have quite matched up their categories with the census categories.</p>
<p>On the other hand, one could argue that a "Mixed" category is simply reflective of an increasing reality."</p>
<p>Hardly. African-Americans have virtually all been mixed race for more than 200 years.</p>
<p>Tokenadult - I work in public health, and was part of the dialogue. The particular President WAS a part of the decisionmaking in 1990-91. They knew precisely what they were doing. (Anyone who thinks the CDC is not a politicized agency should look at the recent history of Surgeon General appointments.)</p>
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Hardly. African-Americans have virtually all been mixed race for more than 200 years.
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<p>OK. Reflective of reality, period.</p>
<p>I do think there is a tremendous amount of racial mixing in the United States these days -- across all racial lines (black and white, black and asian, white and Asian, hispanic and white, hispanic and black, and so on and so forth). Whether it is increasing over historical levels is something I would leave to the sociologists, although my hunch is that it probaby is increasing. </p>
<p>Or at least becoming more visible and accepted. I don't think that "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" would be quite as controversial as it was when it was released nearly 40 years ago. </p>
<p>I think this is a very good thing for the United States. It makes it much more difficult to segregate along racial lines when those lines are blurred.</p>
<p>It's good in theory. The reality is something else. I have in front of me two articles from the the 2005 edition of Health Affairs, Volume 24 No. 2, on the increasing Black-White Mortality Gap 1960-2000. The good thing about knowing such things (gap in infant mortality increased, gap for African-American men increased) is that it allows for the targeting of minority initiatives to improve health. Now, obviously, some (though not by any means all) of the gap is explained by class disparities (the title of the second article.) But policymakers are willing to focus on minority disparities, not class-based ones, and for obvious reasons. And so the insight of the first Bush Administration (some very bright people) was that if they could take the clout out of the African-American political community, they wouldn't likely have to do anything else at all.</p>
<p>They were right, too. Everything else is window dressing.</p>
<p>But enough of this diversion. Now back to regularly scheduled programming, where I'm supposed to hate prestigious colleges, and where second-year students report they haven't even met a single African-American student who attended an American public school. (Maybe they were "mixed race"?) (And, so I am not misunderstood again, I love them a lot, which is why I think we should pay attention to what their own Presidents are saying these days.)</p>
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And so the insight of the first Bush Administration (some very bright people) was that if they could take the clout out of the African-American political community,
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<p>Well, if that was their thinking, I guess it hasn't worked out very well.</p>
<p>I count 38 African-American members of the House of Representatives and 2 African-American members out of the 15 cabinet posts -- one slightly below and one slightly above the national population statistics. </p>
<p>There is under-representation in the Senate and Governor seats, although I'm not sure that's indicative of reduced political clout of the Af-Am communities as much as it is state-wide population distributions.</p>
<p>I do think that the Democratic Party and the black political base have wasted their political power with ineffective leadership and political strategies, something that shows no indications of changing anytime soon.</p>
<p>A friend of mine went down to give blood a couple of years back - well a decade or so back. He was of course asked the usual screening questions about aids and hepatitus and travel outside the country but was surprised when asked his race. Thinking it was obvious he replied, "Human."</p>
<p>That apparently was the wrong answer. He by the way is one of the millions of Americans who have mixed race offspring. Most of those kids don't really want to reject any part of their heritage which I think more than any political machinations explains the constituency pushing for the mixed race option on the census form. But of course I could be wrong.</p>
<p>When I give blood, which is quite regularly, I am never asked about my race. It's my understanding of the CDC risk categories for blood-borne diseases that they don't include race. See the Red</a> Cross eligibility guidelines for some of the issues I'm asked about every time I give blood. (They always ask all the questions again and again and again, and it is interesting to see what new exclusion questions are added to the protocol over the years, as I have been a blood donor since 1980.) </p>
<p>I too, thought the idea of "multiracial" or whatever the term was on the census (I was living overseas in 2000, and thus didn't fill out a census form) simply fit my family better. But these days, whenever possible, I simply don't fill out any category. I too note with approval that more and more college applicants are declining to designate an ethnic affiliation. It's a long story about why I think that way, but it goes back to a schoolteacher of mine who was a freedom rider in the 1950s and 1960s and is still a very public civil rights activist.</p>