Somewhat clickbait. They overview the different criteria but don't go into how each factor contributes to the overall score and thus the admission process so you don't really learn much how the overall admission process is decided.
> They overview the different criteria but don't go into how each factor contributes to the overall score
Applicants are graded 1 - 6, so an applicant getting 'tipped' doesn't necessarily bump their score. The way I've seen it work elsewhere is just that applicants who are flagged get their entire applications reviewed, so that way someone actually reads the essays instead of just tossing it after spending 30 seconds looking at the grades and SATs.
Also each department is going to have its own quota, so that way the orchestra gets 10 people and the rowing team gets 10 people and the development office gets 10 people and so on. So you're really only competing with other applicants within your bucket, unless you're not in a bucket in which case it's really just lottery odds at that point.
The 1-6 grading I haven't read before this article but since there is no information on how that contributes to the overall application outside of 1 (strong admit) and 6 (strong deny), it doesn't really tell us much.
Also, they never mentioned "quotas", just that they try to "looks at factors like parental occupation, which Mr. Fitzsimmons said offer clues about financial hardship, and intended major, to avoid having too many students with the same educational interests".
There isn't a quota in the sense that there is a permanent fixed number, it's all just politics. So you've got situations like someone who donated $100 million to the school had the kid they wrote a recommendation for rejected last year, and now they're pissed so the development office wants to make sure whoever they recommend this year gets in. But then the rowing coach is considering going to another school where they're promised 12 recruits instead of 8, so now you have the AD and the head of development both lobbying the head of admissions to get more slots for their department. And exactly how many each actually gets each year is going to depend partly on how the admissions process is structured, but also on the facts of the situation, who owes who favors, where different people are in their careers and how much they've been contributing to the overall mission and prestige of the university, etc. As well as what the admitted class looks like so far, which can be vastly different a few days or even hours apart.
The "secret" (at least for me back in 1972 ;-) was to be in a far-flung location (San Diego for me) where there's slim pickin's. ;-)
Seriously, I'm sure the decision process has quantitative elements, but it's got to still be 70% intuition. And the "legacy" applicants most definitely get a big bump.
I think you're coming at this from the wrong perspective. The fact that someone is grappling with their sexual identity isn't by itself a qualification.
On the other hand, if in the essays or interviews you get the feeling that this candidate has matured beyond his/her peers as a result of it, or if this candidate demonstrates resilience dealing with growing up this way in an extremely conservative culture, then you'd probably consider betting on this person's upward trajectory. The context is important, and I don't think the NYT article captures it.
At that point why specifically call out sexuality? Why not just say “candidates whom have matured behind their peers because of difficult life experiences”?
Because that was specifically what the student was dealing with. If the student was dealing with the stress of a laid-off parent, or a serious disease, or a sibling with a drug problem, I wouldn't be surprised if those details were mentioned, and not just vague language about "difficult life experiences."
So in addition to having solid academic credentials, the ideal student would be from a rural place, a star athlete, potential humanities major (Philosophy, History, English), have parents with working-class jobs (chef, homemaker, construction worker), interesting or familial extracurriculars (film making, baby sitting), maybe an immigrant, maybe a racial minority, maybe not straight, but most importantly has great interview skills and personal recommendations emphasizing how outgoing, clever or mature you are.
Or your parents are super rich and can donate money for a new building or donate their entire art collection.
> Harvard has testified that race, when considered in admissions, can only help, not hurt, a student’s chances of getting in.
So if your race matches their preference they improve your odds of admittance. Since the number of admissions is fixed this reduces the odds of those who have a race that doesn’t match their preference.
IANAL but it sounds like Harvard just admitted that they were guilty.
> IANAL but it sounds like Harvard just admitted that they were guilty.
I don't like what they seem to be doing, but Harvard is a private university - they should be able to recruit who they want to based on their own criteria. Of course, it's not a binary thing: universities in the US receive lots of subsidies from local states, so there is a certain expectation of fairness.
Maybe the right thing to do would be to completely cut subsidies if they decide to have a non-public selection process.
"I don't like what they seem to be doing, but Harvard is a private university - they should be able to recruit who they want to based on their own criteria"
How is this argument different than supporting a private restaurant not serving e.g. Chinese people since they "are a private company that should be able to serve whom they want based on their own criteria?"
It's not. And as a person of color, I'll tell you that laws preventing discrimination offered me and my family zero protections (specifically with respect to restaurants) in the post CRA-III era.
I would assume that is Title III of the Civil Rights Act which covers the obligation of the Attorney General to instigate civil suites to enforce the CRA on behalf of complainants who do not have the means to pursue a civil suite on their own.
Sorry for the ambiguity. It's the third civil rights act (1964) after 57 and 60. I and II dominantly were about racism in voting, but III has substantial portions that were about regulating private behavior in addition to those segments about the state sponsored racism.
How is what Harvard is doing supported by that example? They are giving preferential treatment to certain groups or ethnicities, not actively discriminating against any certain group. If you went to a restaurant and someone that was in line after you got seated before simply because of their ethnicity, that's not the same as not being served at all right?
Although I'd support this, cutting subsidies is going to be incredibly painful. A lot of University income is tied up as overhead on top of research grants.
Except that this was specifically what private universities (and private everything else’s) were required by law to stop doing 50 year ago, when their preferred race was white. There’s a LONG precedent against private institutions discriminating based on race in the United States - it just hasn’t been enforced evenly.
I hate to be this guy, but...how is this different from affirmative action? I'm not saying it's wrong, but affirmative action is discriminating based on race. Surely it hasn't been illegal this whole time?
>I don't like what they seem to be doing, but Harvard is a private university - they should be able to recruit who they want to based on their own criteria.
So your position is that they are free to racially discriminate against candidates because they are a private university?
> can only help, not hurt, a student’s chances of getting in.
Ok, can someone explain to me if this distinction even matters effectively? If every group is getting a bonus and one group is not doesn't that effectively mean that one group is being penalized?
I presume they're trying to have it be affirmative-action-like, but your comment did make me think of it in an interesting way: You can't say "race always helps" or "race only helps" because everybody has a race. There are no Person for which Person.Race is null. (Can you tell I'm on a break from writing code tonight?)
> There are no Person for which Person.Race is null.
Are there not? There are surely Person for which multiple rows with distinct Race exist. It's... complicated.
And yes: if you buy that "race" matters, for good or ill, it's not possible to have a completely just policy that is race-blind, it just isn't. If Harvard wants a campus whose diversity of background (and that obviously includes much more than just race) matches the world around it, which seems like a laudable goal to me, then there are going to have to be race-based decisions made.
Are they the right ones? Not to everyone, no. The best ones? Surely not. But let's not get too caught up in our schadenfreude here.
Be honest: the Preferred Admissions Policy of all the folks who are shouting the loudest here would result in a campus filled with middle+ class whites (with a detectable minority of east asians). We've tried that model. It sucked.
You can call me racist all you want but I do think that'd suck and meeting people from different and similar backgrounds to me has been a tremendous boon to me in my life.
Getting out of your bubble is important, being challenged by others beliefs is important, and learning to have empathy for others situations is important.
And universities should strive to be places where those things happen.
Complaining about any kind of race composition does seem oddly racist to me, even when the poster is trying to reduce racism. I wouldn't go to a university in Africa and say "wow it sucks that there's so many black people here, you need some white people for diversity. Maybe we should tweak the admissions system".
You're missing the point. Let's say you go to your hypothetical "university in Africa", and that your nation had, I dunno, a significant(25%, say) Uzbek minority. Yet the student body was 98% native africans. You seriously wouldn't consider that a problem? You wouldn't ask why the Uzbeks weren't being educated at the same rate as the rest of the population? You'd consider it "oddly racist" to even ask if maybe this was wrong?
That's where we were, in just our parents generation. Harvard used to be 98%+ white as recently as the 1970's. Of of that generation, there were almost no non-white elite graduates entering the top flight law firms and investment banks and academic tenure tracks. I mean, sure, hispanic kids could "go to college". But because of "merit" they couldn't go to Harvard.
So Harvard fixed it. Harvard is now reasonably well-integrated. But the techniques they used to fix it are coarse and hard to apply in a uniformly fair way. So everyone bitches about it, and they tweak it endlessly. But bitching about the algorithm isn't a refutation of the problem.
So tell me again how that's "oddly racist" to think this is a problem.
> tell me again how that's "oddly racist" to think this is a problem.
They are discriminating due to race, which is literally the definition of racism. You may be able to rationalize it, and you may think the pros of such calculated racist behavior outweigh the cons, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still racism.
Your examples all fall flat. You've completely sidestepped the issue of discrimination against Asians, instead saying that Harvard "fixed" its racism by instituting more racism.
You would model that as a many-to-many relationship, with a People table, and a Races table, and a cross-referencing People_Races table that only has PersonID and RaceID columns.
Anywhoo, I'm not sure what the grounds would be for feeling schadenfreude here. "Ha ha, Harvard makes race-based decisions that are not-the-right-ones to everyone, and are surely-not-the-best... THE BLIND FOOLS!" A little esoteric for me.
I'm old OK - I grew up after the leftie ideals that started their ascendancy in the 60s had already kind of arrived in the mainstream. (But before they were set on fire by the likes of Reagan and then sold out by the unholy Clinton-era alliance between erstwhile liberals and 1-percenters.) I was taught, and internalized, values of racial equality, the ennoblement of all peoples, equality for all, one big group called humanity, etc. That picture of Earth taken from the moon by the Apollo astronauts - one world. All of us.
What makes me sad is that what people call fighting "for justice" nowadays seems to mean betraying and abandoning all that. Instead of seeing one big group with no subgroups, and treating everyone equally, some people seem to want to go back to looking out only for their own little subgroup and its interests, against all the others (or against one in particular). Who does that remind you of? Reminds me of the KKK. It was practically their mission statement - "let's look out for our particular subgroup." (white people) So you might say "No no no, we're different because unlike theirs, our cause is just." Are we so sure? The KKK thought they were just. It's in fact the very thing that enabled them to commit horrible acts against human beings. Justness of the cause is ALWAYS how you rationalize injustice.
Seems to me division and hate still lead to exactly where division and hate have always led.
Not that this has much to do with Harvard admissions but I thought I'd get it off my chest.
> Since the number of admissions is fixed this reduces the odds of those who have a race that doesn’t match their preference.
Sounds like a classic example of double effect[1] to me: Harvard intends a good end (alleviating historical injustices), applies a means that is not in-itself objectionable (AA), and does not intend the bad end (that some otherwise-qualified students have a reduced chance of getting in).
That's a moral argument and not a legal one, but my intuition is that the intent of their admissions program and its necessary connection to the means (AA) will play a central role in their defense. Fisher II v. UT[2] was decided on similar grounds.
Seems like Harvard is trying to add confusion to the issue. There's a strong possibility that asian applicants are penalized relative to white students, which has nothing to do with affirmative action.
If it was up to me, for university admissions there would be a public clear and objective scoring system, based for example only on grades and then use a lottery system weighted inversely by income. No more essays and subjective values, silly extracurriculars or race involved (it's already somehow accounted for in the income).
That's why it's not up to you and Harvard has a $40B endowment ;)
But more seriously, grades do not correlate across schools in the slightest. The rigor of a public school in rural Kansas vs. a private school in NY could be wildly different. AP scores and SATs correlate well (same test for everyone that takes it), but normal grades do not
And good grades are already a prerequisite for admission, you generally need to averaging an A- average GPA to be competitive. schools want to see that you can balance a ton of things on your plate well (or your parents can afford to send you to classes/camps) rather than just optimize for a 5.0 GPA
AP scores might, but class rank is a far better correlator than SAT scores [1].
Although I couldn't find any research on it for overall collegiate performance, the only research i could find in a short Google Scholar search found slight correlations between SAT performance and freshman year performance (but not overall).
> The rigor of a public school in rural Kansas vs. a private school in NY could be wildly different. AP scores and SATs correlate well (same test for everyone that takes it), but normal grades do not.
That assumes students in rural Kansas have the same AP & SAT preparation as students in the elite NY private schools. The income disaparity between the two schools is probably quite noticable with one having more access to elite college prep than the other. By focusing purely on SAT scores and ignoring economic advantages you are discriminating against those from poor places without access to college prep. It's easy to be blind to that when you fall into the "elite NY private school" camp and have no idea how bad educational resources are in rural Kansas. It is a process of the elite admitting the elite and excluding the poor. You can tout how "fair" SAT scores are and how they equalize talent while conveniently ignoring you are just using it as a filter to keep out poor folks. The elite private NY school may send dozens of kids to HYP every year. The rural Kansas school may never send anyone to elite college in its entire existence. And it would be questionable if that rural Kansas school never had at least one student that would have excelled at an ivy (if given the same opportunities as students in the elite NY private school). Take the kids from the elite NY private school, strip them of their high parential income, put them into the rural Kansas school and take the kids in the rural Kansas school and put them into the elite NY private school with high parential income. Now see how many from each get admitted where.There are students at Harvard that have parential income of over $500,000. It wouldn't be unusual to find not one kid with the same parential income in the rural Kansas school.
Yea I agree, my point wasn't that the preparation is fair, but that it's easier (not necessarily "better") to compare 2 candidates based on the same nationwide test rather than a GPA from different schools with 4 years of different classes
It's not a value judgement and the SATs are far from perfect, but just another piece in the puzzle
And yea life isn't fair at the end of the day, nurture and nature are both super important for determining future achievement
I agree it is easier to compare two candidates on a standardized metric, but my point is these kids get different levels of preparation for that metric. It isn't a suprise those with more resources to prep tend to do better overall than those that lack resources. It doesn't mean the kid from Kansas that scored lower is dumber than the kid from NY that scored higher, if the Kansas kid didn't have elite prep and the NY kid did. Luckily the internet is flattening those disadvantages to a degree, and the Kansis kid could likely go to a library and study online after school but there is no denying that poor Kansas kid has a lot more to overcome than the elite rich NY kid to get to the same point in life.
Not sure you want that, because then you end up with something like the Iowa system. (Basically, everyone is admitted, because every school optimizes for getting the required score. It's nigh impossible to graduate high school in Iowa WITHOUT the required 245 points for the Iowa schools.)
Giving an explicit formula for scoring, along with a required score, has historically been the same as letting everyone in, because schools, over time, will always "teach to the test" so to speak.
Similarly in Wisconsin, and possibly any state with a flagship public university. Even if the point system isn't known, everybody gets into one of the Wisconsin system colleges. But everybody doesn't go to those colleges.
First, the number of positions is limited, though I don't know how the limit is set or if it actually fills up.
Second, the top kids at the top high schools in the state go to the Ivy's, or other selective private colleges, even if they could get into UW. This leaves positions open at UW for a wider variety of students.
There is also a third tier system, consisting of community colleges that feed into the university system or provide shorter term job training.
Disclaimer: One kid is at the flagship college, the other is in high school.
I went to UW. The Madison campus. And the limit is never technically hit. (Though if you want to live on campus, obviously, it's first come, first served. So you may end up having to live off campus if you dilly-dally.)
Score = (score from exam at the school you want to go to * 2 + GPA + high school Math grade) / 4
That’s for engineering school. Every school has a different formula and holds its own exams. But the formula is public.
Sort all candidates, draw a line. When some of the selected people chose different schools, draw another line after a month.
We didn’t have an equivalent of SAT. But it can easily be plugged in a formula like this. There’s no studying to the test, since every school has a different test.
That's not how Iowa works. You get the 245 points, you get in. Full stop. It's law.
It's a system that can't be "gamed". (And, coincidentally, doesn't need to be gamed.) The idea was that it would take all the race, and the extra-curriculars, and the subjective stuff out of the system. And it did. But it also gave everyone admittance. Which is fine. Maybe everyone should get into college? I don't know?
My point is, when you have a set target, it's pretty much guaranteed that after a few years nearly everyone will be hitting that target. It's the nature of the beast.
That kills diversity because you only admit people who game the system. It also harms Harvard, because the value of their education comes from experiencing a very diverse crowd.
What’s stopping you from making a groundbreaking company of your own and becoming an employer yourself? Employers can hire who they want and if Harvard’s selection of candidates does not meet their standards, you can be sure that employers are going to stop hiring from Harvard.
This is a good counterpoint, but they could probably survive without it. I don’t agree with discrimination and don’t think it’s right, but I do feel like Harvard should do what it wants if it didn’t take a single dollar of public funds.
A really great admissions primer - Sierra Burgess is a loser. You really have to stand out. Be bigger than life, grades and sat are not enough. Be a positive force but mature and mindful. If you can be super smart and this at 18, the world is your oyster.
To those who have a problem with Harvard's alleged discrimination. Do you think female-only schools should exist? In addition, would you agree with an admission policy that only uses SAT and AP scores? Grades inherently are subjective and can unfairly be given on the basis of race on the K-12 level, so that's helpful.
Harvard should just model China and make the SAT the only criterion. If there are too many people with a perfect school, use randomization accordingly. Of course, the typical Harvard admit won't like this since it'll mean their private school boost won't mean anything, nor will the fact that they come from a feeder school.
ACT should already be like that. I looked at the last one they sold, and, at least for math, you can easily game your way up to a 22ish on it. Which, granted, isn't needed for higher levels, but that's above what some states set as their benchmark, so...
I'm sure the other sections are the same, though I didn't look at those. But, really, any math exam with multiple choice answers can be gamed, at least to an extent. And then people will start teaching how to game it (especially if funding comes from them, which some does in the state I teach in)
Except that SATs measure something real (intelligence), so unless outright cheating and bribery are taking place, it will continue to be a good measure.
Citation needed. The huge amount of time and resources spent preparing for the SATs imply that it is not a direct measure of intelligence.
Is a someone who scored a 2300 after years of test prep necessarily more intelligent than someone who couldn't afford test prep or didn't have access to it and still scored a 2000?
"When researchers have estimated the effect of commercial test preparation programs on the SAT while taking the above factors into account, the effect of commercial test preparation has appeared relatively small"
In my experience, SATs measure nothing - only how well you can take the SAT, after taking a prep course my score went up like 200 points. One of my friends got a perfect score on the ACT after doing alright on the SAT. Some colleges are no longer taking it into account because everyone knows how BS it is.
EDIT: and to make it worse the college board charges exorbitant prices for everything involved in the process - it’s ridiculous
There’s an entire academic field designed around making reliable tests with valid results for psychological measurements, called psychometrics. IQ tests and we swear it’s not an IQ test like SATs, the GRE, GMAT, LSAT are all designed to be as close to ungameable as possible and it works. Practice effects exist, you can get better by doing more of them but they’re also limited. Usain Bolt is never going to run 100m in 5s and I’m never going to run a sub 10s 100m no matter how hard I practice. Likewise SATs are not going to stop predicting success in college or in life because they measure g, the general factor of intelligence.
The root of this is the Harvard Jew Crisis of the early 1900s, which redesigned the admissions process away from merit. This is the basis of the modern practice at the Ivy Leagues. It was not done secretly, publicized by the university's President in speeches, and had little backlash.
It is in fact a result of Asian Americans having many similarities to Jews that they are being discriminated against, but they were not the original target. It will be interesting to see if they were ever explicitly targeted, but so far it appears to be collateral damage as times changed but the process's foundation has not.
As NovaX describes, “holistic” admissions had very ugly roots. It was specifically instituted as a way to limit Jewish admissions.
Oddly enough, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell justified the policy as a way to avoid antisemitism, reasoning that too many admitted Jews could provoke antisemitic sentiment. This was the same President Lowell who tried but failed to impose segregation on students. (“We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we do not owe it to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”) [1]
Still, as Judge Burroughs has pointed out, the ugly origins aren’t necessarily relevant to the current impact. [2] It will be interesting to see how well Harvard’s “diverse student body” argument holds up to scrutiny.
I thought the ACLU had a rather interesting take on this issue: "Make no mistake: A lawsuit against Harvard that's purported to represent the interests of Asian-Americans would, if successful, primarily benefit white students. #DefendDiversity"
https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1051626960537808898
The question is not who the lawsuit will benefit, though. The question is what the law says right now, and whether Harvard is trying to concoct a scheme that violates that law in practice while pretending to be compliant.
Whether the law is a good idea or a bad idea as written is another question, and is up to the legislature to debate that and amend the law as needed. But courts shouldn't be in the business of rewriting laws because they had some consequences that their authors didn't intend (although in this case I suspect that the original authors actually did very much intend for this sort of thing to be illegal also, since the laws were written back in the era where being color-blind was not considered bad).
The ACLU has been corrupted by money. They have become a mirror of Democratic party talking points.
They used to defend Nazis to make a point of dedication to free speech. Now they openly abandon due process if the accused is a white guy (Kavanaugh) and have recently decided to never protect a Nazi, saying some speech shouldn't be protected. Very sad to see.
Quite aside from the question of whether or not its okay to discriminate as long as it is principally whites who are harmed, I find this statement from the ACLU to be bizarre. I think it is fairly obviously wrong.
Moreover, the plaintiffs commissioned a study on the effect color blind admissions would have on the racial distribution of Harvard's undergraduate population. It should be taken with a grain of salt, as should the materials offered by the defense, and I suspect it overestimates the effect a bit, but it conforms fairly closely with anecdotal evidence I've seen and so sounds much more plausible to me than the ACLU's take.
It claims the share of black students would shrink from ~15% to ~0.9% and the share of hispanic students from ~15% to ~3%. Meanwhile, the share of white students would shrink slightly from ~37% to ~35%. The proportion of Asian students would roughly double, from ~25% to ~50%.
Again, the specific numbers might be a bit off, but it generally agrees with a lot of anecdotal evidence I've seen --- being black or Hispanic gives one a large advantage, being white is close to neutral, and being Asian is a large disadvantage.
If the primary goal is to be selected into Harvard, your finding is correct. Is it wrong to optimize for several metrics? What if the goal was to create opportunities that would exist for decades, for generations?
There was a time that the ACLU would defend the right of Nazi's to march down a Jewish neighboorhood. Not because they thought that particular lawsuit would help anyone other than the Nazi's; but because they recognized the importance of establishing a legal precedent so it would be there when the "good guys" were under attack[0]. Under this old philosophy, even if the aim of the lawsuit were specifically to help whites, it should still be supported.
By supporting Harvard in this case, you are weakening the legal precedent against racism, and strengthening the legal precedent for it.
Once this precedent is established, it can be used to argue for racism against Jews (it already bears an eerie resemblance to earlier anti-semetic attempts), or gays, or liberals, or redheads.
Sure, this one case won't overturn all our legal protections overnight. But those legal protections did not spring into existence overnight. They grew up through a long sequence of court cases [1] that gradually established our rights. Those cases can be overturned in the same way, and this case is 1 step on that ladder.
[0] The ACLU also recognized the practical importance of sympathetic cases, and so would often make a strategic choice to pursue the most favorable ones, but that is a separate discussion.
[1] And legislation, and shifts in public opinion. But we are talking about a court case, so I am focusing on that aspect of the history.
The answer to this is so simple: rather than trying to optimize algorithms for admission, we need to decrease the demand for admissions to these schools.
1. Increase the supply. More seats. More schools. More teachers. More locations.
2. Decrease the demand. Better alternatives. Vocational schools. On the job training. Not using degree a job criteria.
As a teacher, I agree with all the things you say in number 2. Full-heartedly. But can't really bring myself to agree with Number 1. Quality will just keep going down, and I know several schools that stay afloat right now only because of BS online programs (half supported by the state)... 2 really needs to be the answer, not 1.
The point of exclusive clubs like top schools is to be exclusive. If they’re not exclusive, then they don’t confer the benefits of distinction. That’s all elite universities are, for the most part. You can learn whatever you want from books; going to a top school doesn’t bestow greater knowledge on you.
On the one hand, harvard and the left repeatedly say we should live in a colorblind society. Race is not important and it isn't even real. It is a social construct of no importance to who the person is. They tell us only raicsts are obsessed with race and only racists see color.
On the other hand, harvard and the left are obsessed with race. So is harvard and the left racist? Aren't they supposed to be colorblind and not focused on a person's immutable characteristic? By giving certain racial group an unfair advantage, aren't they condescendingnly assuming these racials groups are inferior. Doesn't that make them patronizing racists?
If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?
From where I stand, harvard's admissions policy seems like blatant condescending and patronizing racism.
On the one hand, harvard and the left repeatedly say we should live in a colorblind society. Race is not important and it isn't even real. It is a social construct of no importance to who the person is. They tell us only raicsts are obsessed with race and only racists see color.
That's a MASSIVE straw man. Harvard won't argue that, and nobody who studies race and equality issues will argue that.
I'm assuming that you are looking for actual discourse on the topic. The issue of color-blindness vs. race consciousness is pretty well-trodden territory in the context of studying racism. If you google those words, you'll find plenty of literature about it. I just tried it and there are several good discussions of the topic in the first couple pages.
The short version is that colorblindness doesn't address the "rich get richer" effect, so if you want to close the gap, you're going to have to look at ways to create catch-up mechanisms.
If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?
You're assuming that the default behavior is fair. That's fundamentally not true. If you're looking for the actual argument made by Harvard and "the left," then this is it: the default is unfair, and the goal is to make it fair.
Wealth in the US correlates strongly along racial lines. The rich getting richer widens wealth disparities between races and communities, which in turn widens the gap in political voice, both because of money and education.
Racism exists. But there are many black and brown ethnic groups that do better than whites in the US[0]. In fact, the highest earning ethnic group in the US are brown! And immigrants from The Caribbean (who are predominantly indistinguishable from black Americans) tend to earn more income than American born whites. So while race may be an issue, the hypothesis that it is the predominant issue doesn’t seem to line up with the data.
This isn't a data issue, it's a problem where you're trying to bend the data to your point. Just because Indians earn more on average doesn't mean Black people don't face clear racism problems.
As an analogy, just because most people didn't get their data stolen in the latest Facebook breach doesn't mean Facebook doesn't have a security problem.
The main problem is that the catch up mechanisms don’t have a termination condition. At what point do these go away? What if for whatever reason, these mechanisms don’t actually improve anything. Do we keep adding more mechanisms?
Well, affirmative action did technically have a built in catch-up mechanism.
But really, do you think all laws need termination mechanisms, and do you only vote for laws that do? Or if you think that some laws must exist that solve permanent problems, then, well, racism has never not been a problem, it has just taken different forms over time.
Alternately, we can trust the democratic system to do the course correcting.
Yes, they say we should live in a colorblind society. But because we don't, applicants' paths to Harvard are very different, often because of systemic differences in opportunities, resources, enforcement, etc that differ strongly between races.
Thus, the theory is that the way to get to that colorblind society is by accounting for those differences and to afford greater opportunities to historically disadvantaged groups.
Does it still include a photograph? When I was a kid, my parents avoided such private schools and similar institutions because of the dog-whistle of anti-Semitism and other genetic pedigree bias it likely signals.
one thing that always puzzles me about this topic is that even though everyone knows Harvard's admissions process is unfair/phony/rigged many people still want desperately to be accepted there in order to send the right signal
so what signal could possibly be getting sent if we already know the game is unfair/phony/rigged?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." -- Martin Luther King Jr.
Pretty sure this is at expense of poor whites, who are under represented under such admission criteria. Since
"whites at the bottom 10% of family income distribution, do about as well as blacks at the top 10% of family income on SAT scores".
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadApplicants are graded 1 - 6, so an applicant getting 'tipped' doesn't necessarily bump their score. The way I've seen it work elsewhere is just that applicants who are flagged get their entire applications reviewed, so that way someone actually reads the essays instead of just tossing it after spending 30 seconds looking at the grades and SATs.
Also each department is going to have its own quota, so that way the orchestra gets 10 people and the rowing team gets 10 people and the development office gets 10 people and so on. So you're really only competing with other applicants within your bucket, unless you're not in a bucket in which case it's really just lottery odds at that point.
Also, they never mentioned "quotas", just that they try to "looks at factors like parental occupation, which Mr. Fitzsimmons said offer clues about financial hardship, and intended major, to avoid having too many students with the same educational interests".
There isn't a quota in the sense that there is a permanent fixed number, it's all just politics. So you've got situations like someone who donated $100 million to the school had the kid they wrote a recommendation for rejected last year, and now they're pissed so the development office wants to make sure whoever they recommend this year gets in. But then the rowing coach is considering going to another school where they're promised 12 recruits instead of 8, so now you have the AD and the head of development both lobbying the head of admissions to get more slots for their department. And exactly how many each actually gets each year is going to depend partly on how the admissions process is structured, but also on the facts of the situation, who owes who favors, where different people are in their careers and how much they've been contributing to the overall mission and prestige of the university, etc. As well as what the admitted class looks like so far, which can be vastly different a few days or even hours apart.
Seriously, I'm sure the decision process has quantitative elements, but it's got to still be 70% intuition. And the "legacy" applicants most definitely get a big bump.
On the other hand, if in the essays or interviews you get the feeling that this candidate has matured beyond his/her peers as a result of it, or if this candidate demonstrates resilience dealing with growing up this way in an extremely conservative culture, then you'd probably consider betting on this person's upward trajectory. The context is important, and I don't think the NYT article captures it.
Or your parents are super rich and can donate money for a new building or donate their entire art collection.
So if your race matches their preference they improve your odds of admittance. Since the number of admissions is fixed this reduces the odds of those who have a race that doesn’t match their preference.
IANAL but it sounds like Harvard just admitted that they were guilty.
I don't like what they seem to be doing, but Harvard is a private university - they should be able to recruit who they want to based on their own criteria. Of course, it's not a binary thing: universities in the US receive lots of subsidies from local states, so there is a certain expectation of fairness.
Maybe the right thing to do would be to completely cut subsidies if they decide to have a non-public selection process.
How is this argument different than supporting a private restaurant not serving e.g. Chinese people since they "are a private company that should be able to serve whom they want based on their own criteria?"
You'll have to try and catch the next flight. We have one departing next year.
So your position is that they are free to racially discriminate against candidates because they are a private university?
1. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/1/22/federal-funding...
However, that is not what the law says.
Ok, can someone explain to me if this distinction even matters effectively? If every group is getting a bonus and one group is not doesn't that effectively mean that one group is being penalized?
Distinct from $race_b-2 and $race_a+2, as this only hurts the subset of $race_b applicants lacking [c,d,..n]
Are there not? There are surely Person for which multiple rows with distinct Race exist. It's... complicated.
And yes: if you buy that "race" matters, for good or ill, it's not possible to have a completely just policy that is race-blind, it just isn't. If Harvard wants a campus whose diversity of background (and that obviously includes much more than just race) matches the world around it, which seems like a laudable goal to me, then there are going to have to be race-based decisions made.
Are they the right ones? Not to everyone, no. The best ones? Surely not. But let's not get too caught up in our schadenfreude here.
Be honest: the Preferred Admissions Policy of all the folks who are shouting the loudest here would result in a campus filled with middle+ class whites (with a detectable minority of east asians). We've tried that model. It sucked.
Does that suck? If so IMO you're racist
Getting out of your bubble is important, being challenged by others beliefs is important, and learning to have empathy for others situations is important.
And universities should strive to be places where those things happen.
That's where we were, in just our parents generation. Harvard used to be 98%+ white as recently as the 1970's. Of of that generation, there were almost no non-white elite graduates entering the top flight law firms and investment banks and academic tenure tracks. I mean, sure, hispanic kids could "go to college". But because of "merit" they couldn't go to Harvard.
So Harvard fixed it. Harvard is now reasonably well-integrated. But the techniques they used to fix it are coarse and hard to apply in a uniformly fair way. So everyone bitches about it, and they tweak it endlessly. But bitching about the algorithm isn't a refutation of the problem.
So tell me again how that's "oddly racist" to think this is a problem.
They are discriminating due to race, which is literally the definition of racism. You may be able to rationalize it, and you may think the pros of such calculated racist behavior outweigh the cons, but that doesn't change the fact that it is still racism.
Anywhoo, I'm not sure what the grounds would be for feeling schadenfreude here. "Ha ha, Harvard makes race-based decisions that are not-the-right-ones to everyone, and are surely-not-the-best... THE BLIND FOOLS!" A little esoteric for me.
I'm old OK - I grew up after the leftie ideals that started their ascendancy in the 60s had already kind of arrived in the mainstream. (But before they were set on fire by the likes of Reagan and then sold out by the unholy Clinton-era alliance between erstwhile liberals and 1-percenters.) I was taught, and internalized, values of racial equality, the ennoblement of all peoples, equality for all, one big group called humanity, etc. That picture of Earth taken from the moon by the Apollo astronauts - one world. All of us.
What makes me sad is that what people call fighting "for justice" nowadays seems to mean betraying and abandoning all that. Instead of seeing one big group with no subgroups, and treating everyone equally, some people seem to want to go back to looking out only for their own little subgroup and its interests, against all the others (or against one in particular). Who does that remind you of? Reminds me of the KKK. It was practically their mission statement - "let's look out for our particular subgroup." (white people) So you might say "No no no, we're different because unlike theirs, our cause is just." Are we so sure? The KKK thought they were just. It's in fact the very thing that enabled them to commit horrible acts against human beings. Justness of the cause is ALWAYS how you rationalize injustice.
Seems to me division and hate still lead to exactly where division and hate have always led.
Not that this has much to do with Harvard admissions but I thought I'd get it off my chest.
Sounds like a classic example of double effect[1] to me: Harvard intends a good end (alleviating historical injustices), applies a means that is not in-itself objectionable (AA), and does not intend the bad end (that some otherwise-qualified students have a reduced chance of getting in).
That's a moral argument and not a legal one, but my intuition is that the intent of their admissions program and its necessary connection to the means (AA) will play a central role in their defense. Fisher II v. UT[2] was decided on similar grounds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
But more seriously, grades do not correlate across schools in the slightest. The rigor of a public school in rural Kansas vs. a private school in NY could be wildly different. AP scores and SATs correlate well (same test for everyone that takes it), but normal grades do not
And good grades are already a prerequisite for admission, you generally need to averaging an A- average GPA to be competitive. schools want to see that you can balance a ton of things on your plate well (or your parents can afford to send you to classes/camps) rather than just optimize for a 5.0 GPA
Although I couldn't find any research on it for overall collegiate performance, the only research i could find in a short Google Scholar search found slight correlations between SAT performance and freshman year performance (but not overall).
[1] http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~norman/SAT.pdf
That assumes students in rural Kansas have the same AP & SAT preparation as students in the elite NY private schools. The income disaparity between the two schools is probably quite noticable with one having more access to elite college prep than the other. By focusing purely on SAT scores and ignoring economic advantages you are discriminating against those from poor places without access to college prep. It's easy to be blind to that when you fall into the "elite NY private school" camp and have no idea how bad educational resources are in rural Kansas. It is a process of the elite admitting the elite and excluding the poor. You can tout how "fair" SAT scores are and how they equalize talent while conveniently ignoring you are just using it as a filter to keep out poor folks. The elite private NY school may send dozens of kids to HYP every year. The rural Kansas school may never send anyone to elite college in its entire existence. And it would be questionable if that rural Kansas school never had at least one student that would have excelled at an ivy (if given the same opportunities as students in the elite NY private school). Take the kids from the elite NY private school, strip them of their high parential income, put them into the rural Kansas school and take the kids in the rural Kansas school and put them into the elite NY private school with high parential income. Now see how many from each get admitted where.There are students at Harvard that have parential income of over $500,000. It wouldn't be unusual to find not one kid with the same parential income in the rural Kansas school.
It's not a value judgement and the SATs are far from perfect, but just another piece in the puzzle
And yea life isn't fair at the end of the day, nurture and nature are both super important for determining future achievement
Giving an explicit formula for scoring, along with a required score, has historically been the same as letting everyone in, because schools, over time, will always "teach to the test" so to speak.
First, the number of positions is limited, though I don't know how the limit is set or if it actually fills up.
Second, the top kids at the top high schools in the state go to the Ivy's, or other selective private colleges, even if they could get into UW. This leaves positions open at UW for a wider variety of students.
There is also a third tier system, consisting of community colleges that feed into the university system or provide shorter term job training.
Disclaimer: One kid is at the flagship college, the other is in high school.
Score = (score from exam at the school you want to go to * 2 + GPA + high school Math grade) / 4
That’s for engineering school. Every school has a different formula and holds its own exams. But the formula is public.
Sort all candidates, draw a line. When some of the selected people chose different schools, draw another line after a month.
We didn’t have an equivalent of SAT. But it can easily be plugged in a formula like this. There’s no studying to the test, since every school has a different test.
It's a system that can't be "gamed". (And, coincidentally, doesn't need to be gamed.) The idea was that it would take all the race, and the extra-curriculars, and the subjective stuff out of the system. And it did. But it also gave everyone admittance. Which is fine. Maybe everyone should get into college? I don't know?
My point is, when you have a set target, it's pretty much guaranteed that after a few years nearly everyone will be hitting that target. It's the nature of the beast.
The whole thing strikes me as presumptuous and entitled.
Your ability to break into the highest levels of many fields depends on that Harvard degree vs a public or 2nd tier private school.
It’s not like they aren’t already considering a lot of factors besides some kind of test metric.
Harvard should just model China and make the SAT the only criterion. If there are too many people with a perfect school, use randomization accordingly. Of course, the typical Harvard admit won't like this since it'll mean their private school boost won't mean anything, nor will the fact that they come from a feeder school.
SATs will quickly become one of the poorest indicators for success.
I'm sure the other sections are the same, though I didn't look at those. But, really, any math exam with multiple choice answers can be gamed, at least to an extent. And then people will start teaching how to game it (especially if funding comes from them, which some does in the state I teach in)
Is a someone who scored a 2300 after years of test prep necessarily more intelligent than someone who couldn't afford test prep or didn't have access to it and still scored a 2000?
"When researchers have estimated the effect of commercial test preparation programs on the SAT while taking the above factors into account, the effect of commercial test preparation has appeared relatively small"
EDIT: and to make it worse the college board charges exorbitant prices for everything involved in the process - it’s ridiculous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
Oddly enough, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell justified the policy as a way to avoid antisemitism, reasoning that too many admitted Jews could provoke antisemitic sentiment. This was the same President Lowell who tried but failed to impose segregation on students. (“We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we do not owe it to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”) [1]
Still, as Judge Burroughs has pointed out, the ugly origins aren’t necessarily relevant to the current impact. [2] It will be interesting to see how well Harvard’s “diverse student body” argument holds up to scrutiny.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Lawrence_Lowell
[2]: https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/09/harva...
Whether the law is a good idea or a bad idea as written is another question, and is up to the legislature to debate that and amend the law as needed. But courts shouldn't be in the business of rewriting laws because they had some consequences that their authors didn't intend (although in this case I suspect that the original authors actually did very much intend for this sort of thing to be illegal also, since the laws were written back in the era where being color-blind was not considered bad).
They used to defend Nazis to make a point of dedication to free speech. Now they openly abandon due process if the accused is a white guy (Kavanaugh) and have recently decided to never protect a Nazi, saying some speech shouldn't be protected. Very sad to see.
Moreover, the plaintiffs commissioned a study on the effect color blind admissions would have on the racial distribution of Harvard's undergraduate population. It should be taken with a grain of salt, as should the materials offered by the defense, and I suspect it overestimates the effect a bit, but it conforms fairly closely with anecdotal evidence I've seen and so sounds much more plausible to me than the ACLU's take.
It claims the share of black students would shrink from ~15% to ~0.9% and the share of hispanic students from ~15% to ~3%. Meanwhile, the share of white students would shrink slightly from ~37% to ~35%. The proportion of Asian students would roughly double, from ~25% to ~50%.
Again, the specific numbers might be a bit off, but it generally agrees with a lot of anecdotal evidence I've seen --- being black or Hispanic gives one a large advantage, being white is close to neutral, and being Asian is a large disadvantage.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/03/19/594993620...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
There was a time that the ACLU would defend the right of Nazi's to march down a Jewish neighboorhood. Not because they thought that particular lawsuit would help anyone other than the Nazi's; but because they recognized the importance of establishing a legal precedent so it would be there when the "good guys" were under attack[0]. Under this old philosophy, even if the aim of the lawsuit were specifically to help whites, it should still be supported.
By supporting Harvard in this case, you are weakening the legal precedent against racism, and strengthening the legal precedent for it.
Once this precedent is established, it can be used to argue for racism against Jews (it already bears an eerie resemblance to earlier anti-semetic attempts), or gays, or liberals, or redheads.
Sure, this one case won't overturn all our legal protections overnight. But those legal protections did not spring into existence overnight. They grew up through a long sequence of court cases [1] that gradually established our rights. Those cases can be overturned in the same way, and this case is 1 step on that ladder.
[0] The ACLU also recognized the practical importance of sympathetic cases, and so would often make a strategic choice to pursue the most favorable ones, but that is a separate discussion.
[1] And legislation, and shifts in public opinion. But we are talking about a court case, so I am focusing on that aspect of the history.
1. Increase the supply. More seats. More schools. More teachers. More locations.
2. Decrease the demand. Better alternatives. Vocational schools. On the job training. Not using degree a job criteria.
On the other hand, harvard and the left are obsessed with race. So is harvard and the left racist? Aren't they supposed to be colorblind and not focused on a person's immutable characteristic? By giving certain racial group an unfair advantage, aren't they condescendingnly assuming these racials groups are inferior. Doesn't that make them patronizing racists?
If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?
From where I stand, harvard's admissions policy seems like blatant condescending and patronizing racism.
That's a MASSIVE straw man. Harvard won't argue that, and nobody who studies race and equality issues will argue that.
I'm assuming that you are looking for actual discourse on the topic. The issue of color-blindness vs. race consciousness is pretty well-trodden territory in the context of studying racism. If you google those words, you'll find plenty of literature about it. I just tried it and there are several good discussions of the topic in the first couple pages.
The short version is that colorblindness doesn't address the "rich get richer" effect, so if you want to close the gap, you're going to have to look at ways to create catch-up mechanisms.
If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?
You're assuming that the default behavior is fair. That's fundamentally not true. If you're looking for the actual argument made by Harvard and "the left," then this is it: the default is unfair, and the goal is to make it fair.
There's a reason the EEOC needed to exist.
Case in point, do you think this can be fixed by fixing wealth disparities? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/2...
Racism exists. But there are many black and brown ethnic groups that do better than whites in the US[0]. In fact, the highest earning ethnic group in the US are brown! And immigrants from The Caribbean (who are predominantly indistinguishable from black Americans) tend to earn more income than American born whites. So while race may be an issue, the hypothesis that it is the predominant issue doesn’t seem to line up with the data.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
As an analogy, just because most people didn't get their data stolen in the latest Facebook breach doesn't mean Facebook doesn't have a security problem.
But really, do you think all laws need termination mechanisms, and do you only vote for laws that do? Or if you think that some laws must exist that solve permanent problems, then, well, racism has never not been a problem, it has just taken different forms over time.
Alternately, we can trust the democratic system to do the course correcting.
Thus, the theory is that the way to get to that colorblind society is by accounting for those differences and to afford greater opportunities to historically disadvantaged groups.
so what signal could possibly be getting sent if we already know the game is unfair/phony/rigged?
I'm curious if those who attended public universities in California felt that their education was less "holistic" in any way due to Prop 209.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_209
This video purports to break down the stats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtXjAaxpI2I