When affirmative action is letting more people from some group in than they normally would, then isn't it kind of obvious that other groups will take the hit?
It's not some magical force... when A + B is to be constant (total capacity), then increasing B decreases A.
If that is the case, then why do Asians underperformed compared to Whites? If affirmative action is meant to help underrepresented groups, shouldn't the overrepresented group be the one "taking the hit"?
That's like saying children of age 6 are overrepresented in kindergarten, because there is a higher proportion of kids of age 6 in kindergarten than in the total population!
The "natural" (equally-represented) proportion isn't that in the total population, it's the proportion in the population of interest, which in this case is the set of qualified applicants.
The meaning of words does depend on context of course. Regardless, rest assured that when you hear someone say "overrepresented" and they are talking about higher education, they are using the definition I gave you above.
If white and Asian students are the majority, they should be selected against based on their proportion of that majority. I believe some are suggesting that Asian students are being unduly discriminated against when compared to white students.
What's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race?
If it's > 1, then obviously Asians will take a bigger hit, since they're the majority, that's the whole point of my comment.
If it's <= 1 though then yes, the situation is very interesting indeed.
Wait, what? I asked about candidates who would be accepted, you're talking about candidates who are accepted.
When the whole question is about discrimination in the admissions process, you can't just assume those two are similar quantities without backing it up.
IF there were more qualified Asian applicants than qualified White applicants (ratio > 1) _and_ admissions was not racially biased, THEN there should be more Asians than Whites in the student body.
We know that there are more Whites than Asians in the student body of these colleges, so look at the contrapositive:
IF there are more Whites than Asians in the student body, THEN there more qualified White applicants (ratio <= 1) _or_ admissions was racially biased.
Look carefully at the logic statement I wrote - it means that one of two things must be true:
1. There exists racial bias specifically against Asians in admissions.
2. Qualified White applicants outnumber qualified Asian applicants.
If you concede (1), then your point that Asians get treated more harshly because they're majority is moot. If you concede (2), then, as you said, your argument doesn't work since "ratio < 1".
I don't know how to make this more clear than by using propositional logic.
Yeah exactly, that's the entire point. Asian DO seem to be be treated differently, that's the premise of the entire discussion. How is that surprising? What's so impossible about that possibility?
That's neither a sentence of mine, nor a logical impossibility. It's a perfectly valid, logically sound scenario, but for some reason you think it's a logically impossible scenario.
Just because you think it's false doesn't make it logically impossible! And here I was arguing with propositional logic as if I'd claimed 2+2=5.
Your original premise was that the article was unsurprising since _someone_ (Asians and Whites) must bear the downside of pro-minority AA:
> Well, if minorities are being positively affected, then majorities (in this case, Asians + whites) must be negatively affected.
> How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
Then, asdfologist clearly points out that the interesting part is that Asians, a "minority", get affected worse than Whites (a majority):
> You don't get it - the parent's point is that your argument doesn't explain why Asians take a much bigger hit than whites.
You then claim that this could because Asians are actually the majority of qualified candidates (the whole ratio > or <= 1 thing), which I admit was an unconventional but valid challenge of assumptions:
> What's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race?
So then I point out the logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions, so I guess we actually do agree that there probably exists some racial bias against Asians vis-a-vis Whites in elite college admissions. Cheers?
> But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions
> logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
"But"?
What I'm not understanding is, when did I ever claim or imply that that is not true? When did I ever claim Asians are treated the same as whites? There was no inconsistency in my logic as far as I can see, I think you just made too many assumptions.
In the Myth of American Meritocracy[1] Ron Unz shows that non-Jewish white students face 5x as much discrimination as Asian students in comparison with their proportion of the general population, and 2x as much when compared with their proportion of national merit scholars.
I don't think it matters to anyone, though, because they're white kids.
Although this article is interesting and worth a read, it is very difficult to verify that your source backs your claim. It is unclear whether the reader is supposed to perform some calculations upon some figures in the source material to arrive at your claims or whether, by exhaustively searching many different paraphrasings of your claims, one could eventually find the same claims made in the source.
Sorry, commenting on the go. non-jewish white % in ivy league is about 30%, in general pop it is about 65% for a ratio of about 0.5x. asian % in ivy league is about 15% and general pop about 5% for a ratio of 3.0x.
Asian ivy league pop % / merit scholar % given by Unz is about 70%. Same for non-jewish whites is about 35%
Asians are getting the short end of the stick, but non-jewish white kids are getting it worse.
how do they statistically account for 'non-jewish white?' - is there a box on the admissions paper asking how many Jewish grandparents you have or something?
I mean, I've seen forms asking for my race, but I've never seen one asking if I considered myself Jewish. (and it seems, well, pretty slippery, as nearly all the people I know who identify as Jewish also identify as "White (non hispanic)" - And I've seen several studies saying that without cultural context, even experts can't tell Jewish faces from non-Jewsh faces from similar parts of the world.)
Seems to me like there are a lot of people who could identify one way or the other, who will answer the question differently, depending on how they think you want the question answered.
The unofficial ethic is that minority students must be treated fairly or have a bias in their favor. This is the first time that a minority group is negatively effected by racial preference policies, so it is newsworthy.
This unusual event happens because Asians are an outperforming minority. Most minorities suffer from the "cultural bias" of the education system and do worse than whites. But Asians just seem to kick ass regardless.
Affirmative action was designed to come at the expense of majority students only. Now that minority students are negatively affected, we have to rethink the justice of it.
This is the first time that a minority group is negatively effected by racial preference policies, so it is newsworthy.
You must not be in the US. The history of the US has been policies against minorities. It's only been since the early 60s has there been policies that favored minorities. And even then it has pretty much been relegated to schools (and most just undergrad college) -- it's never been very effective in the workplace. And affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.
> affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.
According to the article, being black is like getting 450 extra points on your SAT compared to an Asian student. I don't think AA is as dead as you think it is.
If I thought the SAT was a useful metric you might be on to something. I used to be an SAT coach (back when the top score was 1600) and I could typically raise someone scoring between 1000 to 1300 by 200 points in 6 weeks.
IMO it's just not a useful test, and I suspect the Harvard admin committee knows so as well.
That said, it can be used as something to see how much work people are willing to do. In which case I think the delta over their HS peers is more useful than anything else. A 1500 at Andover would be a lot less impressive than a 1300 at Crenshaw.
The SAT is highly g-loaded, and highly correlated with all other measures of intelligence. 450 points on the SAT is a big deal, very significant, especially when dealing with large populations.
For a large population I'd agree that it is significant, because a large population doesn't prep for the SAT. For Ivy class schools I think it's counter intuitively not that big of a deal if one portion of the population hasn't prepped.
Furthermore the data isn't really believable (remember the article used pretty much made up data). Data from actual schools disputes that. For example:
"Harvard's Asian Americans in the Class of 1995 have average SAT scores of 1450, Blacks averaged scores of 1290, whites scored 1400 and Hispanics averaged 1310, the report states. "
"Asian-American students who enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2001 and 2002 scored 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks, according to a 2011 study co-authored by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono."
"Asian-Americans admitted to the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus in 2008 had a median math and reading SAT score of 1370 out of 1600, compared to 1340 for whites, 1250 for Hispanics, and 1190 for blacks, according to a 2011 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity"
And I suspect if you control for recommendations, geographic, and socio-economic diversity the gaps would shrink, not grow.
In reality it is simply not possible to create such gains on average. SAT score is still a very good predictor of future academic performance.
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
Just as latino students are "favored" over whites with better scores, and (at the top of the SAT range in the graph) black students are "favored" over latinos.
You can't win here. Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students. Identifiable ethnicities have different median qualifications. So someone has to lose in that tradeoff.
The point upthread was simply that usually when you see this argument made it's a complaint that whites are being "penalized". This time it's asians. But despite being a novel spin, it's still the same story.
"Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students."
They could try looking for actual diversity, then, instead of just an aesthetically pleasing mixture of superficial skin colors. Accepting 100 multiracial kids who all attended the same boarding schools is going to be way less diverse than a selection of 100 kids from different levels of income. Actually, I believe income quite dominates race in terms of predicting academic success these days--the interracial achievement gap looks quite small by comparison. (As well it should, in a country currently headed by a black president.)
That does nothing. You just swap out "my" arbitrary definition of "diversity" for your equally arbitrary one. Any definition that doesn't have a 1:1 frequency map with "objective stuff we otherwise use for admissions qualification" is subject to the same thing. And of course those objective measure are themselves subject to debate and (gasp) subjectivity.
There's no winning here. Don't fool yourself into thinking you know the right way to do education selection, and stop sneering at all the people who want different things than you do.
Yes, a white kid from a $500,000/year household clearly has SO much more in common with a white kid from a $20,000 a year household than he does with his black classmate who also lives in a $500,000/year household.
Race based discrimination supporters love to pretend that race is everything when it means less now than it has in the entirety of US history. You can throw yourself in with the "gravity is a social construct" people if you want, but at least there's hard data to back up my beliefs, instead of just collectivist guilt that punishes truly disadvantaged people for the crime of being born with the wrong skin color for that particular decade.
When I got to Penn my freshman year I very quickly came to the very unscientific conclusion that the admissions office probably could have filled the entire freshman class with very smart Asian students who had better grades and test scores than me. I am black and was never a stellar student in high school but I had great test scores. I often felt that if I had been Asian or white I may not have been admitted.
How does that impact your view on the position or carrier you have obtained? Is it all part of the game? Just curious how affirmative action is viewed in your eyes, as someone who believes they benefitted from it.
To be honest, I have never put much thought into it. There were so many kids at Penn who were legacies, athletes, or from very wealthy families that I never felt like I may not have "deserved" to be there. There may have been affirmative action for minority students but there were similar types of things for many white and Jewish students as well. A lot of kids go to college every year based on something other than merit or race and so it never really bothered me that my race may have helped me get in. Does that make sense?
It's pretty clear the point is not that discrimination against Asians is a secret. The point the author is making is that this kind of discrimination is wrong.
I get so tired of seeing this sloppy thinking. Discrimination isn't bad. Its an essential part of clear judgement. Prejudicial discrimination is bad because its piss-poor discrimination. Of course universities are discriminating against a wide variety of people; they can't accept everyone. The question is whether its prejudicial, as in they've pre-judged these people because of a group they belong to before they've looked at them as an individual.
I think you misunderstood my post. Your question is exactly the problem I addressed. Universities HAVE to discriminate; they cannot accept every applicant. The question is how are they doing it, is it a good way, and is there a better way.
You discriminate every time you purchase one product over another, take one job over another, live in one area over another, befriend one person over another, etc. We all do. The key to doing it well is clear, analytical judgement about such decisions. Personally, I haven't seen much of that in University admissions at any school.
I am ok with private businesses or individuals going about their own business with whatever racist, homophobic, sexist policies. I don't care. I simply won't visit them or pay for their service. I read my fair share of Rothbard, Friedman and Block. Discrimination in the sense of making choice so long as the choice doesn't violate the rights of other is ok, even if it is morally despicable.
This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.
He's differentiating between prejudice and discrimination in his post. Universities discriminate against stupid people all the time, that's how their admissions work. What's not a good metric to discriminate upon, is race, because it doesn't offer insight into how successful the student may or may not be. Those sorts of qualities (race, gender) are not things to discriminate upon because doing so would be prejudice; which by definition is not an effective method of discrimination.
Assuming you are just responding to the title (because I don't see any evidence otherwise), what about "Asian" is not "a group they belong to before [...] an individual"?
If its true for that reason, yes. Universities are coy with straight answers. Some speculate its because the Asians are culturally too uniform, same focus on GPA, piano, etc. and the schools are looking for more diversity than that. The test of that would be an Asian who didn't fit the profile getting in with a lower test score.
Others suggest its because of how many legacy students the upper tier accept. Whatever the reason, SAT scores are not the only factor in admission because SAT is not the sole arbiter of a good University student, or at least that's what the University leadership say.
Personally, I think its well-meaning racism, and, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But my thinking it ain't facts, ain't statistics. Only the facts, carefully analyzed matter in the end.
This is a strange distinction. It sounds like you're defining "discrimination" as "judgment" or even just "making a decision", whereas you're defining "prejudice" in a way that most people would consider a synonym for "discrimination".
I'm also not sure what that has to do with this article (which doesn't hang on any particular definition).
You are making an invalid assumption. Prejudicial discrimination is bad iff you have total knowledge of all variables. Admissions panels have very little information that in many cases is weakly correlated with the outcomes they are interested in.
What you are calling prejudicial in that case they call experience. They correlate past statistical data on how the variables they do have access to predict the outcomes they want.
If that a satisfying situation? No way. Is including your experience better than just using the data you have for a current set of candidates? Hell yes. On average, hell yes. Some students will get screwed but on average IF you are smart, not a bigot, rational, have good past data, etc, your results WILL be better. Of course, most people aren't all of those things.
But what can you do other than make your best try at an optimal outcome? If they went just on raw present data, quality of students admitted to Stanford/MIT would probably go down and 99% of students would be asian. Does that seem better?
s/sloppy thinking/nuanced yet practical problem solving/g
> “Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind.”
Yes, because using quotas would be illegal.
But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.
Wasn't the whole point of the UC v. Bakke case to say that quotas are illegal, but race is still a legitimate factor to consider in admission? This sentence means nothing.
That's not true. They couldn't, for example, demand editorial constraints on the Harvard Crimson. Private organizations don't give up their rights, including their right to free association, just by accepting government dollars.
By "force them to do X" he meant the government can refuse to fund them if they didn't do X (which forces them to abide by the government's rules if they are accepting its funds), not that the government can legally mandate them to do X unconditionally.
Conditions placed on the recipients of government expenditures are not unrestrained by Constitutional limitations. Witness the Supreme Court throwing out some of the strings attached to ACA's Medicaid expansion.
You are going on tangent after tangent as if to prove something. No one said that "unrestrained by Constitutional limitations" are ok.
Suppose you have the right to exclude Blacks or Asians from your college (freedom of speech, associations or whatever)
Once you take even a penny of federal dollars, directly or indirectly, you may have to agree not to discriminate. So YOU give up that right voluntarily. No one forces you to take the government's money.
No, but the government could attach strings to the money. Now, freedom of speech is well understood and well protected, so it would probably be difficult for the government to gag the Crimson this way, but it's not hard to see how certain "equal opportunity" or "diversity" requirements for admissions could find its way in.
You picked one narrow thing that no one even suggested. No one even hinted that the government would tell the Crimson not to criticize, say, Obama but that's the route you went.
Now more on topic, the being able to discriminate as a private uni one:
Q: Why doesn’t Hillsdale accept any federal or state taxpayer subsidies? A: In 1975, the federal government said that Hillsdale had to sign a form stating that we did not discriminate on the basis of sex. Hillsdale College had never discriminated on any basis, and had never accepted federal taxpayer subsidies of any sort, so the College felt no obligation to comply, fearing that doing so would open the door to additional federal mandates and control. Our trustees pledged two things: first, that the College would continue its long-standing policy of non-discrimination, and second, that it would not accept any encroachments on its independence. The case went to court, and Hillsdale College won a partial victory, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals did rule that Hillsdale College was an “indirect recipient” of federal funding because of participation in federal grant and loan programs. In 1984, Grove City College in Pennsylvania fought and lost a similar legal battle. The case then went to the Supreme Court, and in Grove City v. Bell, it was determined that if even one student received a federal grant or loan, it made that institution a direct recipient of federal funds. To avoid the hassles of government control, Hillsdale College announced its decision to end participation in all federal financial aid programs in 1985. In 2007, Hillsdale announced that it would no longer accept State of Michigan taxpayer subsidies earmarked for student financial aid, thereby making the College completely independent of taxpayer support.
Basically once you take their money you agree to their strings.
Hang on, I am going to ignore the topic at hand and spend the next 4-5 weeks to discuss every possible constitutional /anti-constitutional scenario just to please you.
I'm not the one who insisted taking a "penny" meant "the government can force them to do almost anything."
This is an absurd principle, and you've offered little but snark to defend it.
You take advantage of government largess every time you drive on a Federal highway. That doesn't mean the government can make your travel on that highway contingent upon giving up completely unrelated rights.
As far as I know, the only federal mandates they have to accept are the ones in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. These basically just forbid discrimination based on race or sex.
I don't think this has ever been challenged in court, so technically I guess we don't know.
But "In the 30 years since this ruling, public and private universities have crafted affirmative action programs consistent with Bakke's requirements" [1], so I assume it probably would be, otherwise they wouldn't go through the trouble.
There is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that only applies to employment. It doesn't apply to something like students. Most universities are covered by Title VI, which applies to students at institutions that receive federal funding, but theoretically, they could avoid all federal funding, including federal grants and loans for their students, and then they would be allowed to discriminate based on race.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race to programs receiving government money.
Even were a given university to forgo all government money, it would lose it's tax exempt status if it discriminated on the basis of race (see Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983)).
>But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.
You don't understand it because it doesn't translate into equal treatment. "Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races. It's a de facto quota system that would never survive a court challenge if you rearranged the races a bit.
>"Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races.
The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit. These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs. If you are a part of a group that all has perfect GPA/SATs, then that simply isn't enough anymore. Cluster analysis is a valid technique to identify outliers.
> The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit.
So let me get this straight: GPA + test scores don't show merit, but race does?
> These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs.
So let's accept less qualified people just because they're doing better than even the lesser-qualfied people of the same race, even though there are perfect candidates we could be choosing instead?
I think you (like many Americans) are completely misunderstanding the point of affirmative action.
It has nothing to do with "encouraging diversity" or anything like that. It's trying to right a historical wrong, discrimination against certain groups based on race. "Diversity" is just a nice word to use to appeal to emotion so they just use that, but it's irrelevant to the purpose of affirmative action.
Race is a proxy for all sorts of cultural differences, hardships, experiences, etc. Being an outlier of your group with similar cultural disadvantages is an indication of leadership. I read an article recently about the origin of extracurriculars in the college admissions process. Basically they turned from defining the system on a GPA/SAT basis to one that tried to predict future leaders. The college that lead in this change, Harvard, is now the most prestigious university in the world. It was precisely because they stopped defining "merit" based on just test scores that it is what it is today.
The point is, it has been a long time since merit was GPA/SAT scores for top-tier college admissions. The criteria changes frequently as kids pattern their lives after what they assume the current criteria is. If you are one of a million (Asian) kids with perfect GPA and SAT scores, well, you're likely not going to get in. You are not owed a spot in any sense.
> If you are one of a million (Asian) kids with perfect GPA and SAT scores, well, you're likely not going to get in. You are not owed a spot in any sense.
You're owed exactly as much of a spot as anyone with the same qualifications as you, which is exactly equal to that of a Black or White kid with the same qualifications.
You're still defining "qualifications" and GPA and SAT scores. This is a bias on your part that is no longer appropriate at the elite universities. These schools are not selecting for the smartest or the most studious. They are selecting future leaders. GPA and SAT scores are not in and of themselves good correlations to what they are looking for. You really need to accept this, or at least formulate an argument as to why this is inherently unfair. But your assumption is plainly wrong.
You can define qualification to be leadership skills or whatever else you want, I'm not claiming they're just looking for good test scores.
I'm just saying that race isn't a qualification.
But race combined with other factors can be a predictor of leadership skills, which is the only thing that really matters. Talk of qualifications and merit are muddying the issue. The question is about probability that this person will obtain significant power in the future, and thus increase the brand of the university they came from. Race is a legitimate factor in such a discussion. It's up to those who don't like it to prove that its inherently wrong to consider race in their calculation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the fact that colleges always say they're looking for "diversity" is a blunt admission that they're their reason for looking at race is "diversity" (a.k.a. affirmative action), not to determine leadership skill.
Even if that's a goal, it doesn't seem to be the main one. Frankly, I've never heard a college admissions official say they look at race to determine leadership skills, even if they really do do that.
If they do that, then it's fine for them to do so, but that just doesn't seem to be the issue here. And to the best of my knowledge, it didn't seem to be the issue in the Bakke case either, which nevertheless got the Supreme Court's nod toward promoting "diversity".
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but the fact that colleges always say they're looking for "diversity" is a blunt admission that they're their reason for looking at race is "diversity" (a.k.a. affirmative action), not to determine leadership skill.
It can certainly be read this way, but it's not obvious that this is so. Diversity creates an atmosphere that will most likely mirror the world in which these future leaders will be required to navigate. That in itself is enough of a justification for diversity, assuming their goal is to educate future leaders. Also, there is the fact that leaders of ethnic groups tend to be of that ethnic group, so maximizing some proportion of diversity is increasing that schools chance of educating a future leader.
Er, you changed the subject from determining which future leaders are accepted into college to educating future leaders after they've been accepted.
That's a whole another discussion which I wasn't intending to get into. All I will say is that the status quo seems to point toward the use of race as a way to fulfill affirmative action requirements, not as a means for determining aptitude.
"Educating future leaders" and "determining who are future leaders so that we can be the ones to educate them" are expressing the same exact sentiment. To be fair, I understand how it can be read in the way you implied.
>> The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit.
>So let me get this straight: GPA + test scores don't show merit, but race does?
I think he's implying that cultural differences could be coming into play that skew the curve while looking like racial discrimination. Just like Academic scores differ between races, I'm sure Athletic honors differ between races as well, as well as Club honors, and Arts (band/choir/etc) Honors, and so on.
If you want to argue that Academic merit is all students should be judged on when colleges are considering applications, that is a separate argument, but GP is probably just saying that GPA + test scores doesn't singlehandedly define "merit" to a college because things like community service and athletics and student council and... and... and... all altogether factor into the cumultive merit of any given applicant in addition to GPA and whatnot.
If this kind of practise were done against Blacks, Aboriginals, LGBT or women instead of Asians, would you still say it was ok? Instead of universities, if it were some restaurants in your neighborhood practicing policy akin to this, would you still say it was ok?
I never said it was okay (or for that matter, not okay) against Asians to begin with. I was just stating the facts behind the Bakke case, not attempting to take a stance.
Is there any functional difference between a system that considers race and a system of racial quotas? As far as I can tell, the difference is that one of them will have a very slight random deviation from the other.
It is simple to construct a non-quota admissions system from a desired set of quotas (though one would probably do well not to write down the desired set of quotas). Each year one could adjust the bonus/penalty assigned to each race to target admissions levels at the hidden quotas. Conversely, given a set of per-race bonuses and penalties and admissions data for a particular year, one could calculate what (non-quota) admissions level was most targeted by the set of bonuses and penalties.
Edit: It is perhaps even more troublesome to hear "There is no formula for admission. We look at the academics, leadership, activities and references about the applicant's character." If a school explicitly states that it is not looking for anything in particular in its candidates, it would be very difficult for any investigation to find that it is turning away qualified candidates on the basis of race.
“Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind.”
....but we do value diversity :)
and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.
It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.
I guess the idea that we should stop with race based discrimination altogether is too novel yet. So long as this is the case, the cycle will continue to repeat.
Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying something to the effect of "Back in the '60s people thought I was a radical because I said we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color. Today people think I'm a radical because... I say we shouldn't discriminate based on skin color."
The topic of Affirmative Action, or race- conscious admissions in general has nothing to do with entitlement. Conflating the two is the sloppy thinking I'm referring to.
>It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.
Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms (generalization, but I'm just making a point). This is just more sloppy thinking from you folks.
The topic of Affirmative Action, or race- conscious admissions in general has nothing to do with entitlement. Conflating the two is the sloppy thinking I'm referring to.
History and current situation makes the comparison very weak. If 30% of application at Harvard were from black students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores, people wouldn't mind a bit of "racism," or Harvard letting in a few other races with lesser scores.
They're not directly using quotas, but they get the same result by putting less emphasis on test scores and grades.
There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.
For anybody interested in running their own numbers, there is a wealth of demographic data on college admissions available called IPEDS from the National Center for Education Statistics.
TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - for example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).
The full TL;DR of that article is that Jews are "the new WASPs" (e.g. are over-represented relative to recent performance on measures like STEM competitions) and both Asians and non-Jewish whites are "the new Jews."
The author suggests that top Asian students are being discriminated against (implicitly or explicitly), and it's unclear whether top non-Jewish white students are being discriminated against, or whether they apply in much smaller numbers to the Ivies.
Which part of the article says that Jews are over-represented? It says that blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics) are over-represented, but all it says about Jews is that they were under-represented and that this effect starting fading in the 50s.
I assume you're referring to the Priceonomics blog post, while the comment you replied to was talking about Ron Unz's article in The American Conservative.
In the article from The American Conservative, the claim that Jews are over-represented is rather hard to miss.
Did you read the analysis? I mean, the length of his critique should already tip you off, since Unz's article takes at least 2-3 hours to read. Gelman only criticizes Unz's assertion that Jews are overrepresented.
Gelman says in that critique that he agrees there is an underrepresentation of Asians.
That's not actually Gelman's analysis. He's just relaying some criticisms that were sent to him by Janet Mertz. Ron Unz responds to this, corrects some of his own errors, and shows his claims still hold. Then Gelman (proxying for Mertz) and Unz go back and forth way too many times, using way too many words and almost no data.
The current educational system utilizes SAT scores with a variety of other sources for determining acceptance. While there are other factors such as athleticism, social endeavors etc. SAT score is still often viewed as one of the key determining factors. It is of no doubt that Asians that apply to these top universities as a whole have higher SAT scores. However it does not say of their other qualities, those were perhaps the reasons why there was a lower acceptance rate for them.
In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better.
One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true.
Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.
You did mention it in the last paragraph, but let's reiterate that. In the end, it is plain racism against Asians, solely for being Asian. People can continue to shroud this fact with more comforting language such as "diversity" that's politically salient, but end result for Asians is all the same, plain old racism.
No one is saying that SAT is the sole standard of admission. But does anyone really believe that Asians as a group collectively are so horrible in admission standard (with exception of SAT score) that huge disparity in number of Asian applicants and Asian admissions are justified?
Asians are not underrepresented relative to population-wide demographics, so it is only "obviously" discrimination if you assume that more Asians are qualified than students of other races. Otherwise, it is possible that these studies are failing to take into account some dynamic.
To play devil's advocate, for example: Asians may be more likely than other groups to apply to these schools. It may be that Asians with high SAT scores but weaker applications in other areas are more likely to apply to highly selective schools than comparable students of other races, which would lead to lower admission rates.
The numbers here wink suggestively, but they present a far from airtight case.
<<Asians are not underrepresented relative to population-wide demographics, so it is only "obviously" discrimination if you assume that more Asians are qualified than students of other races.>>
I am not assuming that Asians are more qualified than students of other races. Purely from the statistics provided by the blog, I find it hard to believe that Asians are doing so poorly in other admission standards that having several hundred extra SAT score doesn't put them in equal footing.
Aren't you the one who is assuming that Asians are obviously failing in admission standards other than SAT compared to other races?
I've always wondered what happened if you lied, particularly if you had an ambiguous or misleading name.
(If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)
I was made uncomfortable enough honestly reporting my racial background I can't imagine kids actually doing that. I am of mixed race, had a culturally non-White upbringing, but look as White as Wonderbread. College was a very weird experience, because I felt like I was either unfairly infringing on the challenges of the students who were obviously minorities at my school, or I had to ditch most of my upbringing and pretend to be as White as I look.
Maybe they do, but this whole discussion is missing the point that going to an "elite" university is not an essential step in having a successful life and career. I quoted a bunch of this data in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to search for right now, but the gist is, you have approximately as good a chance of becoming CEO of an S&P 500 company if you go to the University of Wisconsin as if you go to Harvard. So even if your goals are at the extreme upper end of the spectrum, you aren't necessarily hurt by not going to an Ivy League school. A well known, well regarded State university puts you on pretty good footing as well.
None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.
Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
I think you confuse the odds of a given exec being from Harvard vs. OSU with the odds that a Harvard student becomes an exec vs. that an OSU grad becomes an exec.
All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.
In retrospect, you may be right, when factoring in the different size of the student populations. But nonetheless, I stand by the point that going to a good State school is a perfectly sufficient step to have a good - even amazing - career. Keep in mind that there are only, well, 500, S&P 500 CEOs. But a pretty damn successful and amazing career might be being the CEO of a multi-million dollar textile manufacturer in South Carolina, that nobody on HN has ever heard of.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
This is independent of school -- if someone like Steve Jobs didn't go to college for very long, he'd be fine (oh wait, he was).
I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.
There's that payscale list of best ROI per college which mostly confirms this, but there are some colleges in the top 20 I wouldn't have thought of (Duke, Babson, Harvey Mudd).
I don't know... their data either has to lag calendar time substantially, or be heavily based on inference or other statistical techniques that might not reflect reality. It may be accurate as a snapshot of a "point in time" but I'd be reluctant to judge any trends based on that, right now.
Means or even medians are probably not terribly useful (Stanford and Harvard should be crushing the stats just based on Google/Facebook/etc.). A school which has a lot of people who go into public service or other low compensation positions would also be unfairly penalized.
"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".
On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.
But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.
Yeah, I saw that :( And I think Olin may have changed their policy a few years ago (I'm not sure); seems to have tuition now, and a half scholarship for everyone.
I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
But also see the comment above. I am probably somewhat misinterpreting the data in the strict sense, in what I said above. About as many S&P 500 CEOs come from UW as from Harvard, but you have to consider student body size, so it's not quite the same thing. But I don't think this invalidates the general gist of what I'm saying, which is that you can go to a good State school and still expect to have a fine career.
Obviously the school you attend doesn't determine your future, but it matters. Harvard is better than UW and any other state school. You could share whatever stats you want, but Harvard is better, and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Obviously the school you attend doesn't determine your future, but it matters. Harvard is better than UW and any other state school. You could share whatever stats you want, but Harvard is better
Maybe it is, but quantify that. And compare the best care outcomes from attending Harvard with people's actual ambitions. For most people, I still contend that going to Harvard (or not) is fairly irrelevant.
and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Again, just to be clear, I am not trying to support racism or any sort of discrimination. I think admissions should be strictly race-blind, gender-blind, ethnicity-blind, religion-blind, etc. I'm just pointing out that if you get excluded from your $IVY_OF_CHOICE for whatever reason, you aren't consigned to the scrap heap of life. It's not the end of the world, and it's probably not even a big deal for most people. Now if you absolutely, 110% have your heart set on getting elected President someday, then I guess all bets are off.
"Harvard is better than UW and any other state school."
Well, I can't let that statement go by without challenging it. At the PhD level, I just don't agree that Harvard is better than UC Berkeley overall. It's pretty close, but I think UCB has slightly greater breadth and depth at the PhD level.
Like I said in an earlier comment, there is a type of very high achieving undergraduate who looks at and engages with a university more the way a grad student would. There are plenty of reasons someone like this might choose UCB or UMich over an ivy league school.
There is a small subset of undergraduate students that go to public universities who are hidden high achievers with a very strong interest in an area of study. In this sense, they evaluate a college the way a potential PhD student would look at graduate programs - they are more concerned about the department ranking and research activity. If this were the case, a student might very well prefer UW, Berkeley, or UMich over Harvard, especially in a field like CS.
From this angle, it shouldn't be too surprising that this sort of student student would be as likely to come from UW as from Harvard. There's no real point in averaging in a huge student body drawn largely from a single state vs a small undergraduate student body with no in-state percentage requirements, because these students are unlike the other students at either institution. While it's harder to "get in" to harvard as an undergraduate, let's face it - the vast majority of students at either institution are probably not among the very brightest of the very brightest. Those statistical oddities are a small sliver, and I actually suspect that they can be difficult to detect through test scores and GPAs earned from age 15-17. These students often just don't give enough of a crap, or they may be far too focused on their intellectual interests to put enough time into the GPA game.
If UW has a strong CS department, it makes just as much sense that these odd outliers would come from there as an ivy.
Let's go the extreme upper end: POTUS. Out of the last 10 presidents, 6 have attended Ivy League Schools (or 4 of the last 4 if you will). Sounds like pretty good odds to me.
I agree that where you went to school shouldn't matter for your career outcomes, but fact of the matter is that it simply does. There are plenty of people who hire ivyleague only
Let's go the extreme upper end: POTUS. Out of the last 10 presidents, 6 have attended Ivy League Schools (or 4 of the last 4 if you will). Sounds like pretty good odds to me.
Sounds irrelevant to me. Most people don't have "becoming President" as their goal. For the handful who do, then OK, sell your soul to try and get into an Ivy. But I would posit that this is an irrelevant point to most normal people. :-)
Exactly. That's basically my point... even at the extreme upper end of the ambition range, you can succeed without necessarily attending an Ivy League or "elite" university. Now, stop and look at the ambitions of the more average people, who maybe want to run a local Subway franchise in their hometown, or maybe be a VP of Engineering or VP of Marketing somewhere, or who would be satisfied being CEO of some obscure tool & die manufacturing plant in the Rust Belt, or who want to own a chain of Ford dealerships in their area. All of those things still count as "success" in most books, and I don't think any of them necessitate having gone to an Ivy League school.
Nö One says anything about it being necessary, but if you think that going to one of the "elite" universities doesn't help you tremendously with your chances of being higher up on your career ladder, then this is really not worth discussing.
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success ...
but if you think that going to one of the "elite" universities doesn't help you tremendously with your chances of being higher up on your career ladder
Depends on how exactly you define "elite", "tremendously" and "career ladder".
Anyway, I'm not arguing that they don't help, I'm arguing that the extent of the difference they make is very possibly overstated, especially for people whose aspirations don't include "being President of the USA" or "being CEO of an S&P 500 company".
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success
Not sure if that was meant to be sarcasm or mean to be taken literally, but I actually believe that very strongly. There are lots of variables that affect what happens to a person in life, of which "what university you attend" or "did you attend university at all" are just two.
Personally, I believe determination, ambition, perseverance, work ethic, attitude, etc., matter more than either of those factors.
I mean i agree that there are many factors at work, but im not sure whether i could comfortably say for example that "what university you attend" is a worse factor (correlation wise) than work ethic/determination. Though I guess that is party because you can't really measure those other factors you mentioned.
If you do the math, you'll see that an elite school's degree really will help you get into those midrange jobs. It opens doors, so if you have the ambition, it'll give you more opportunities.
Me, I'm kind of a bum, but thanks to my UC Berkeley degree, I barely have to make an effort to land a middle class job. Granted, I am a computer geek, so that's easy.
> Ouch. That hurts. First in the list of "2nd class" ;)
Given the context of what I'm arguing, I don't think you should feel too bad about that! Heck, I don't even mention my school in these discussions (UNC - Wilmington). Then again, I didn't bother graduating anyway.
Clearly discrimination against Asians was one of the unforeseen consequences of affirmative action. What's particularly sad is it doesn't even help the people it was supposed to. For example:
"Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were 'modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an increase in black and Hispanic degrees.'"
The comparison between Caltech and the Ivies is a bit unfair. Caltech is in California, which has more Asians, and people tend to attend schools near home. Adding in Stanford would be illustrative.
This turns out to explain most of the "overrepresentation" of jewish students as well: there are lots of highly-ranked universities around NYC and Boston.
Yup, I'd like to see Stanford as well. I'd also like to see what the breakdown for asians that are US citizens versus foreign nationals or immigrants.
The other problem is that this article automatically assumes that private schools are "elite", and public schools aren't.
That's true for certain fields-law and finance, for example, are dominated by the ivy league schools. STEM, on the other hand, is a much more even distribution. Many of the engineering programs at most of the Big 10 state schools are considered to be some of the best educations you can get, and the UC system is full of very good programs. UIUC's CS program is considered one of the best in the nation, as are Purdue's ME and aeronautical engineering programs.
As far as public schools go, the article only excludes the UCs because they can't consider race. In fact, it uses Berkeley as a peer for the elite private schools. There's no other public school that has a reputation across all disciplines similar to the elite private schools, so I don't think the article made any real oversight. There are many programs within public schools that are considered peers, though.
Stanford's undergraduate student body is 23% Asian, which is just above the Ivies.
Stanford is 41% from California. Caltech is 32% from California. Thus, it looks like the California factor has little if anything to do with the Caltech vs. the Ivies Asian data.
I can't speak to whether admissions officers are, consciously or not, discriminating against Asians.
What I can contribute, however, are my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences with Asian households, and my own personal experience with the college application process. I am not Asian.
Probably because of my own interest in sciences and mathematics, many of my friends in high school were Asian. They tended to excel in schoolwork, in no small part because they were under huge amounts of pressure from their parents. I'm not saying that all Asian families "force" their children to study ad-nauseum, but the "high expectations Asian father" Internet meme is at least somewhat based in truth, stereotyped or not.
Because of this pressure (and supportive culture of success), Asians tend do incredibly well in school, as well as on standardized tests... but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students "well-rounded," which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value.
My personal college application process involved SAT scores that were very good, and a GPA that was solid but somewhat average. However, I had done several sports in high school, done a considerable amount of community service, had three technical jobs (two as a developer, one as a security analyst), and released open source software--all while passing my classes. I was passionate about computer science, and I believe that that helped me gain admission to very good universities.
I'm not trying to "blame the victim" with this comment--it may very well be that admissions officers harbor prejudices against Asians--but I also think it's worth noting that when you're talking about the top-tier of our education system--the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world--great grades aren't enough to gain admission.
I'm willing to believe that this is what US universities are aiming for (i.e., "well-roundedness", passion vs. nurture, etc.) However, believing than an Asian kid did well on his scores / science competitions simply because a lot of Asian kids are pressured at home is called prejudice and extremely unfair to the kid in question. One (Asian) acquaintance of mine had great passion to be a computer scientist and pursued it against the wishes of his parents... who wanted him to be a doctor.
Explaining away someone's personal success because of their race is a particularly nasty thing to do to someone. Unfortunately, I see it happen all the time.
No, it's stereotyping, which is not quite the same. He's saying that parental pressure is a major factor in why a lot of Asian kids do well on their tests (hence the, yes, stereotypical "Asian father" meme); not that every Asian kid who does well does so only because of parental pressure (which would be prejudice).
The article discussed this extensively: these well-rounded-ness requirements are arbitrary, having been introduced in the 20's with the sole purpose of keeping out jewish students. While it may very well be true that the average asian applicant plays less sports than the average white applicant, it doesn't have any relevance to the applicant's aptitude for computer science.
I agree with you completely; however, if Harvard (for example) wants to find the next "leaders in business, innovation and politics," they are likely seeking people who've shown drive in their chosen fields.
For example, when I look to hire developers who are recent or soon-to-be college graduates, I may glance briefly at their GPA. While I care that they didn't flunk their classes (and aptitude in their language of choice is certainly important), I check to see what projects they did on the side. What open source software did they release or contribute to? Did they launch mobile or webapps while studying? Are they conversant in current events around their field of choice?
To me, passion is more important than grades or even degrees--in business. My question, which I believe is the same one posed in the article, is whether it is appropriate for schools to evaluate on that metric, too.
You're severely overestimating the ability of Harvard admissions officers to evaluate those traits based on college applications. You can at least narrow the scope to a single professional area in which the candidate must excel to do the job well. Do you think an average Harvard admissions officer can evaluate open-source projects? Or similar types of accomplishments in other specialized areas? They are looking in a vacuum and they hardly have the expertise to evaluate how passionate someone must be to have accomplished some line item in their application. They also have virtually no ability to question the applicant on anything.
This entire "holistic evaluation" thing, at this point is pretty much gamed out and the savviest parents and students know what the admissions officers are looking for, which means it plays out very much like the tests and the grades - people who really, really want to get into the top schools and will put in the effort are the ones who get in.
My hiring process is very similar to yours. Every one of 6 devs in my office has a history of side projects if out of college, failed startups if older, etc. I don't know if I would apply the same standard to a high-schooler though.
To give a specific example, I've always thought that community involvement is one of those developmental stages that happen later in life. Bill Gates is a great example: obviously a "leader in business, innovation and politics", who went from active, principled disdain towards all charity when he was younger to the world's biggest philanthropist today. Whenever I see community involvement coming from a high schooler, I always "blame" parents, college admission coaches, church, etc.
Similarly, serious commitment to more than one sport makes me think "ambitious parents" and "affluent" rather than "drive". I just don't buy that a high-schooler, all by him/herself, has the wherewithal to manage multiple athletic training programs. I did serious ballet before I went to college, and let's face it, while I did all the sweating, my mother gets more than half the credit.
I agree with your comments here, particularly bits about detecting drive in someone that young. I may have taken my personal experiences (I did say my original comment would be anecdotal!) and applied them too broadly to the difficult and complex issue at hand.
What this boils down to, to me, is the inability for admissions boards to release their exact criteria for admitting a prospective student. If, say, MIT released the exact formula for their perfect student, then people would immediately game the system (more so than they do already).
As some other users pointed out, and as you alluded to here, how can we tell the difference between 'drive' and 'trying to appear well-rounded'? How can we tell if a high schooler wanted to do those five-hundred hours of community service, or if they were coerced into doing so by a parent or school?
I personally believe that there is more to a successful academic (and professional) career than grades, so my initial dispute was the use of standardized test scores and GPA to indicate discrimination when it may have simply been another variable skewing the results.
It would be a very interesting case study for a university to release their full (objective) admissions criteria, however--while, sure, it would result in applicants trying to game the system, would it end up resulting in a more cohesive student base? What would the main factors be? How do you weigh passions vs., as you stated, ambitious parents?
I don't have any of the answers to the questions I posed in this comment (nor in my earlier ones), but it's an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
> how can we tell the difference between 'drive' and 'trying to appear well-rounded'? How can we tell if a high schooler wanted to do those five-hundred hours of community service, or if they were coerced into doing so by a parent or school?
that's a good question - and this same question needs to be asked by a prospective employer during hiring interviews. In other words, you have to try and understand the applicant, and see if they really want it, or is only wanting it for extrinsic reasons (which i deem to be a bad reason for wanting to study).
I'm going to generalise a little bit from your statement about sports: it is dangerous to disregard the body (Sports) and focus mostly on the mind (Where things that would allow someone to excel in CS are). You don't need to be a sports star. Even just someone who exercises casually or plays sports socially.
Someone's physicality (Let's move on from just thinking about sports only) can/does have relevance to someone's aptitude for CS, or, their ability to do well.
"Exercising casually" is not the sort of "well-roundedness" that colleges select for. They look for "team captain", which, by the way, is far more common when your (expensive, private) school has 100 students instead of 1200 like a common public school.
"Someone's physicality (Let's move on from just thinking about sports only) can/does have relevance to someone's aptitude for CS, or, their ability to do well."
"but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students 'well-rounded,' which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value."
"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past." Look at the kinds of things colleges value: community service, sports, etc. These are the things that used to in years past set people of good breeding apart from the regular people who were too busy keeping a roof over their head.
100% agreed. People take "well rounded" to mean "better person." In most cases, what it actually means is a person who has never known what it's like to feel hunger.
>"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past."
No it isn't. "Well rounded" is in fact code for any activity that has completely subjective merit which admissions offices can use to create quotas without officially having quotas.
Trying to experience a bit of everything isn't a WASP thing, it's bona fide Humanism. As Montaigne put it : « I like better a well rounded head than a well filled one ».
Western Universities are (or should be) the heirs of this tradition.
What I've noticed is that the kids who have to be "forced" to study ad-nauseum usually aren't the top performers. They're around the middle, but their families desperately want them to be the top.
The top students are much more self motivated. They tend to be more or less equivalent to their supposedly more-well-rounded white counterparts.
I agree. As a high-school student, I notice that the top few percent of the class is comprised primarily of individuals who either 1) are innately intelligent (to the extent that innate ability exists at all. Obviously, there are many confounding factors in most of the criteria used to determine intelligence, and in many cases people misinterpret privilege with actual tallent. The people who are "innately smart" are those that can perform well with minimum effort, for whatever reason) or 2) work hard but are intrinsically motivated.
Few people manage to get ahead solely through being compelled to work hard. It's very difficult to force someone to sacrifice four years of their life to attain a goal that they themselves are ambivalent about.
The Stanford & Harvard's of the world have a very real interest in ensuring that their demographics are preserved. "Well rounded" is a cop out, and your anecdote is a false dichotomy.
The high achieving students you're describing aren't not participating in extra curricular activities. That just sounds bizarre. Anyone who's intensely focused on getting into a top school also has their application filled with extra curricular engagements.
We should just take race off the applications, like we did on loan applications decades ago. If you want an affirmative action proxy, we can just use high school data, and zip code information, and questions like "did your parents attend college?"
Asian-Americans lack the numbers and the political clout as African- and Hispanic-Americans. Asians do not have a Sharpton. It's also tough to sympathize with a bunch of kids protesting how they weren't let into Harvard / Princeton / etc. It's unfair, and it sucks for them. Jews got around it after Asians came around and took their place. Who can Asians wait for?
Jews 'got around it' due to sustained media and political pressure in the 1950s - we didn't wait for anybody. Nor did Asians take our place - quotas against Jews in elite universities were largely lifted before the widespread adoption of affirmative action, which is when Asians' problems began.
If you want to do something about it, don't wait for some other minority group to come along and be the goat, organize. There's a lot more Asians than Jews in this country - you should be able to build an organization at least as effective as the Anti-Defamation League. And for god's sake, at least stop voting for politicians who support affirmative action. If you vote for politicians who discriminate against you, those politicians are going to quite reasonably conclude that you don't really care about being discriminated against.
I think it will first take realizing that they don't deserve to be discriminated against. A lot of my asian friends are just like, oh well, nothing to be done about it. It's an attitude I find quite perplexing. Even the ones that do care about it do so only mildly--nowhere near the level of outrage that is mustered by a hispanic or black person when they (increasingly more rarely, today) encounter a similar problem.
While it is a very easy "excuse" to hide behind, I believe in holistic admissions qualifications. I think charts of SAT score x race x admissions are as good of a metric of assessing a potential student as college GPA are of assessing a potential employee. To some degree there's a baseline expectation for the practical purposes of filtering (with lots of outliers for various reasons), but at the end of the day it doesn't say much about how intelligent or capable someone really is. Intelligence and capability can't be reduced to a test-taking skill.
I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.
Asian-born student life sounds like it involves a lot of after school classes, and group cramming sessions. Maybe this leaves less time for community service and class representative. If Asians do less of this they'd not be chosen compared to all the other 'equally' 'perfect' applicants.
The question I think is how we are weighting extra-curriculars. How does piano compare to... say.. windsurfing? I'd put both about on the same level as far as merit goes (one taxes the mind and dexterity, the other taxes the body and dexterity, both are fairly out of reach for the underprivileged).
If the "holistic admission" thing is being used to disqualify Asian candidates I would expect that two students with equal grades would be disadvantaged if they played piano rather than windsurfed.
From my anecdotal experience, I find this very plausible. (I'm a white guy who had extraordinarily poor grades in highschool yet was accepted to the school of my choice. My Asian peers almost universally far outclassed me in academic skill (proper student discipline in general); if you told me that I was accepted because I was on the swim team instead of another student with better grades who played the piano (both forms of self-improvement, not community service), I would not be surprised. Very disappointed, but not surprised.)
What about diversity of extra-curriculars? I don't know how it breaks down, but maybe they felt they had enough Asians (or anybody) who play the piano. Maybe you got in because they didn't have that many people who swam as an extra-curricular.
As far as I am concerned, a sport is a sport. I primarily swam, but I did some track as well, and did and continue to do casual weightlifting. They work different muscle groups but they are all fundamentally the same (all have very low leadership/teamwork opportunities, all require a decent amount of drive and dedication, etc. These are all fundamentally "selfish" sports; most participants will spend most of their time competing against themselves). The other class of sports, the "team sports", are fundamentally different of course but also essentially all the same.
So do universities honestly think they have too many classical musicians, but not enough casual athletes? I don't think so. That seems incredibly implausible. I don't think they are thinking anything at all along the lines of "we better introduce some athletic viewpoints into our student body, lest all the musicians dominate discussion."
I think they are arbitrarily classifying hobbies as "well rounded" or "square" to allow themselves to shape their student body demographics to their liking.
The problem is now you're stereotyping. It's like as if I said something patently untrue like "Black student life is just playing basketball" [and that's too "black" and not well-rounded] or something like that.
EDIT: Agreed with jlgreco, added [] to what I said earlier.
As I understand it, the assertion is that admissions people are, in order to unfairly disqualify Asian applicants under the guise of "holistic application", negatively weighting stereotypical Asian extracurriculars.
If we are saying "Black student life is just playing basketball", then that is clearly an unfair stereotype. If however college admissions start disqualifying anyone who has ever played basketball, then I think it would be prudent to ask if perhaps the admissions people are attempting to disadvantage black applicants (particularly so if the "has played basketball" metric is accompanied by a series of other metrics that have a relationship to stereotypes).
It's an interesting counter-point. The allegation is that admissions committees are looking at intangible factors in order to discriminate against Asians. But it's possible that they're forced to consider these factors because so many students have "maxed out" the traditional metrics.
But the question remains, are admissions committees negatively weighting stereotypically Asian activities (e.g. violin) to reduce their enrollment? Anecdotal evidence is insufficient.
Participating in "red state" leadership activities in high school among white students such as ROTC or 4-H have been shown to reduce admissions rates in Ivy league by about 50%[1], all else being equal. More important than being smart is to be the right race (non-Asian, non-white). And most important of all is to be an urban liberal.
>Participating in "red state" leadership activities among white students such as ROTC have been shown to reduce admissions rates in Ivy league by about 50%.
ROTC was only allowed on campus recently:
"Yale, Harvard and Columbia all signed agreements this year [2011] to bring back ROTC"
Uh, LOTS of folks in the admitted class at Harvard Business School each year is military officers.
Ivy League admissions for both undergrad and graduate programs is NOT what most people think it to be. There are MANY factors they consider and it's not all about grades/test scores/sports.
Are you seriously going to 1) extrapolate graduate admissions to undergrad admissions, and 2) go against hard data with an anecdote?
For #1, grad schools are looking for extremely different things than undergrad. In fact, the plurality, if not majority, of grad admits at top schools are internationals. As another example, most PhD programs care about your research almost to the exclusion of all other factors. Extracurriculars? Don't matter very much.
Business school programs most heavily weight your work experience (followed by test scores, essays, and extracurriculars), which is why a lot of military officers get in, because of their impressive leadership-related work experience.
My point was to answer the comment that red-state extracurriculars serve as a black mark in the Ivy League. I think it's clear that they don't.
And data is not what you're basing your argument on. It's an interpretation of some data that might be flawed in collection methodology, reporting errors, false conclusions from over fitting and other common errors that occur in studies.
For the record, I served in the military, and earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and know of many others who did the same. Painting the Ivies as somehow anti-military kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Many state schools have geographic quotas also, which then heavily biases towards kids from rural areas (red states, or red parts of blue states). Being "urban liberal" is actually not that useful, since so many other applicants are "urban liberal." The only advantage to being "urban liberal" are better schools and more opportunities for academic enrichment, but as we all know, applicants in such a category are a dime a dozen these days.
I have no idea if the Ivy's aim for geographic diversity; since they are not taxpayer funded, they probably don't have that mandate.
In a recent article, Ross Douthat claims that America’s elite private colleges and universities are discriminating against white, rural, working-class applicants, especially those from “Red” states, and he cites work that Alexandria Radford and I did on college admissions to support his argument. Douthat seizes on one relatively minor finding in the entire book to push an interpretation that goes far beyond the bounds of the actual evidence.
We find that applicants who demonstrate a strong commitment to career-oriented extracurricular activities while in high school have a slightly lower chance of being admitted to a top school. This outcome affects only students who have won awards or assumed leadership positions in these activities, not those known for their extensive involvement. These extracurriculars might include 4-H clubs or Future Famers of America, as Douthat mentions, but they could also include junior ROTC, co-op work programs, and many other types of career-oriented endeavors. Participating in these activities does not necessarily mean that applicants come from rural backgrounds. The weak negative association with admission chances could just as well suggest that these students are somewhat ambivalent about their academic futures.
... students who apply from “Red” states appear to have an advantage in the process. Compared to otherwise similar applicants from California, those from Utah are 45 times as likely to be admitted to one of our elite colleges or universities. The advantage for applicants from West Virginia or Montana is 25 times greater, and nearly 10 times greater for students from Alabama. Because top private schools seek geographic diversity, and students from America’s vast middle are less likely to apply, it stands to reason that their admission chances are higher. On the other hand, coming from such “Blue” states as Virginia or Colorado lowers the odds of admission.
If the problem is simply that too many students are getting 1600s on the SATs (and similar criteria), it surely should not challenge the collective minds of the elite 1% of US universities to devise a more difficult test that has more room on the top end. As a matter of fact, as I recall, I took a number of such tests in high school.
This isn't the problem. In fact SAT scores were "re-centered" in 1995 to boost scores.
One problem is that too many people think the SAT is some amazing indicator of applicant quality. In fact it has biases. In fact it can be coached and responds to test prep and experience.
Another problem is that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees when you feel you're being discriminated against. There is a great society wide wrong that affirmative action is meant to partially redress. Some Asians having to go to Columbia instead of Yale is not an equal wrong to kicking in the doors to provide opportunity.
Finally, diversity does matter. I learned a hell of a lot from the hispanic and black students I lived with. And they certainly would not have been there without affirmative action. The same thing in classes (although there's less certainty on whether they were beneficiaries of AA).
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
(2) Many forms of "coaching" are lumped together here. In fact some may only add 30 pts or less while others add over 100.
(3) Controlling for self-selection is self-defeating here since poor black/hispanic/native american kids don't have the same opportunity to self select into say private schools with test prep programs.
(4) Taking post PSAT gains ignores coaching received prior to this.
(5) This only measures indirect coaching. The effects of a superior school itself could be large.
The effect "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
Some forms of coaching "add over 100". Do you have data to support this?
Poor black/hispanic kids don't have test prep programs in school. So they are unable to get privately provided test prep or have no incentive to do so, and therefore receive a smaller amount of test prep than other racial groups. Do you have any data to support this?
The effects of a superior school "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
You also say that you learned a lot from black and hispanic pupils. Would you have learned less from white pupils?
Do you really contest that private schools have better outcomes on the SAT? Or that poor kids have less test prep? Maybe you should do some basic googling on the subject before you start tossing around strident conclusions.
Having a worthwhile discussion requires a basic standard of reasonableness. Some of the perfectly reasonable claims I made could have also benefited from citations, sure. OTOH you've given me at least 5 data points that say you've just decided to be a pedantic troll about this topic. Good luck with that.
Everything you say rings true to me. However, the notion of "well rounded and compassionate because that's what it takes" makes me feel a little queasy.
Wouldn't an easier solution be to re-balance the SAT? Or to follow the french/british model, and add competitive exams for admission to the most prestigious universities.
your argument hardly talks to the bias laid out in this article. The problem is not that a white student with perfect SAT's will gain an admission, but that the same student with a lower score can gain admission while an asian with perfect scores cannot. Essays are important , but they are a tool to hide behind.
if the existing tests are not good markers of excellence, why dont harvard and stanford have their own entrance examinations? it is a common practice in universities around the world.
When I was an Asian student (I'm still Asian), my strategy was to apply to good-but-not-elite schools, and spent my time trying to load up diversity scholarships and merit-based scholarships.
I got a full-ride to a great non-elite school; there are plenty of schools like the one I went to that would love to have more non-white students, and are even giving away money for it. I'd much rather go to a good school for free than to go to an elite one and be in debt.
I would be interested to see how prevalent this is at top institutions around the world. I can be fairly confident that my program does not do this as my class is very far from diverse. (the large majority of students being asian males)
I have heard of a little bit of black magic that is involved in the acceptance process but in order to accept people who are more likely to succeed in the program. But race definitely does not come into play.
The sad part is there will always be discrimination, all attempts to counter discrimination are in themselves discrimination.
Until students/people are judged purely off their merits there will ALWAYS be discrimination.
The truly sad part is it is openly acceptable to discriminate against whole groups of people purely based on statistics of whole groups. If this isn't the definition of stereotyping i don't know what is. Just because one's motivations are sound doesn't mean we should unanimously assume so are there actions.
Judge people for who they are, not where they are from.
I suppose that depends on what the goal of a school is. If the goal is to teach(which i think everyone can agree is there purpose?), then cultural discrimination, or any discrimination has no place in it education process. In school students are judged by their grades, so should they be in the selection process. Any deviation from this IS discrimination, again assuming the goal is to teach.
you can stop discrimination when there are enough position so that everyone gets to have the same quality education, anywhere (and no one has to miss out).
Alright, what's up with this weird article shuffling on HN lately? This was in the top position on the home page. I refresh the page, can't find it anymore, spend a few minutes checking my browser history, and suddenly it's at the bottom of the home page. This happens a lot lately, and it's confusing me. Could we at least get a moderator note when the article is moved or a different color to let users know it has been moved?
EDIT: Holy cow, now it's on the 2nd page. What the heck? (And I bet I'm never going to get an explanation either.)
Well... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't.
But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted.
It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people.
Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics"
I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.
At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts.
It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail.
edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too.
(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
I suspect Caltech beats Yale hands down in I direct comparison of the student body's intelegence. But, if you want to go into politics Yale is a far better choice. Rich may be well educated, but it's got little to do with raw intelegence.
My point wasn't really the amount of smart people that exist at either schools. It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.
Although I agree with you that the further you get in a field, the more likely a prestigious school will be better. But I would credit that to having a more direct relationship with professors. When you are actually helping a professor with their research, the quality of the research matters more than when you are simply being lecture by that same professor.
>It is more so that existence of smart people does not equal a more challenging or more educational experience.
Huh. I don't have any hard data, but I always thought the opposite. I mean, I didn't go to school, but I put a lot of effort into being around people who are better (at things I want to be good at) than I am, and I attribute much of my success to surrounding myself with people who are better than I am.
I mean, I agree about the second bit... my understanding is that undergrad at a prestigious school offers little contact with the (usually very good) professors (thus, my assertion that it's all about the quality of the other students.) - thus, grad school there, where you get more contact with the (very good) professors would be even better.
Perhaps I am unqualified to say, because I didn't go to school. On the other hand, I managed to learn enough without school to get a job that often requires a degree, so maybe I am qualified?
In my experience (Brown undergrad), literally every undergrad I know who wanted to do research with a professor has gotten to. And usually they had plans on working with specific people by their freshman or sophomore year. And this is in fields as varied as Sociology, CS, Chemistry and Comparative Literature. Though, this may not be a function of going to a prestigious school, so much as a school that has 2000 grad students and 6000 undergrads, so professors are forced to interact and teach undergrads.
I don't think that is the case in many engineering fields at least. A greater presence of smart people sets the bar that much higher for grades/tests/projects.
Most engineering courses are based on a curve. If the rest of the class is brilliant, it's significantly harder to compete and get a good grade.
Which means that exams need to be much more difficult. When I was a grad student Teaching Assistant at Harvard we had a newly hired professor who'd spent the last decade at Cal Berkley. He decided to give the same midterm exam he'd given many times before at Berkeley. When we TA's saw the exam we politely told him he needed to change it or the whole class would ace it. "Nonsense!" he said, "Harvard students aren't that much smarter than Berkeley students." We had to write and administer a second midterm because everyone scored 98, 99, or 100 on his Berkeley test.
This is the problem with anecdotes: your experience seriously does not mirror my experiences with top colleges and UC Berkeley. I took several math classes at Stanford and had to repeat them at UC Berkeley, and they were significantly easier (coursework and testing) than the equivalents at UC Berkeley, even considering the fact that when I took the classes at Berkeley I had already covered the basic foundation of the material at Stanford.
If this was an exam for a freshman/sophomore course, I might believe it since lower-div classes at Berkeley have an exceptionally wide audience with non-uniform levels of prior mathematical experience. However, if this was an upper-div course, I highly doubt your anecdotal experience holds true in general. Source: majored in math at Berkeley, went to MIT for grad school.
Depends where you draw the line. Compared to a public state school, the Ivy League course cover far more material faster in more depth, because the students are better prepared harder workers and can handle it.
Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years.
The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.
certainly, but those top notch academics are more relevant for graduate research than undergrad courses. with the swarm of ivy graduates going to work on wall st, I doubt the advanced botany course with a medalist in the field is as relevant as the name of the school.
I did go to an Ivy League school, and I didn't go for the top-notch academics, even though I was at the top of my class in my department.
And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.
I went to Penn, my sister went to Yale, and our mother went to Columbia and we all had very different experiences from what you describe here. None of us went for the "old-boys network" nor have we really seen that there is that much of one. Yes, there are a lot of monied alumni but I really dont believe that is what many of the students who want to go to top schools are thinking about.
We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.
"I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go."
That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.
No I dont think that's what it is. I wanted to go to Wharton because it is the most rigorous undergraduate finance program in the country. And that is why it has a good reputation.
As someone who works with someone who got an undergrad degree from Wharton, I seriously do not believe you. But I'll assume you are telling the truth - even if so, it certainly does not apply to 90% of Wharton's student body. By my co-worker's own admission, finance is all about prestige, and the primary reason he went to Wharton is because of the name and how it gets you into IB jobs, not because of its rigor. In fact, he didn't want to go to a rigorous school but liked Penn because it was more of a party school than other Ivies.
I'd like to add that there are about a dozen other concentrations at Wharton that are not related to finance. Most people at Wharton dont concentrate in finance partly because there are a lot of very douchey people, like your coworker, who do in an attempt to get rich or something. Most people at Wharton are there for the rigor. Your coworker went to Wharton for the wrong reasons and thinks everyone else did too.
It's about recruitment. Every IBank and top tier consulting firm recruits heavily from the Wharton graduating class. That's what you're paying for.
You're also getting the opportunity (not guarantee) to get a top tier education - but that can be gotten anywhere. Study for the CFA tests if you really want to know finance. Go to Wharton if you want to get a job.
Was going to jibe about "high paying" job, but that's not really it. It's just any competitive placement benefits from active recruitment.
I do hope that is sarcasm. MIT has the reputation of giving a world class, rigorous, education. People who attend MIT attend it because they know they will have the opportunity to receive that education.
Any school that is capable of giving an education of similar quality has a similar reputation. Claiming that the point of an education from a school like MIT is the "old-boys-network" is in essence confusing the effect with the cause.
Yes, in the sense that an EE degree from MIT is a heuristic of sorts. It's got some differing qualities, but at the end of the day that heuristic will make a difference for two otherwise comparable job applicants, say.
Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now offers coaching and mentoring to students and would-be entrepreneurs. But because he's deluged with requests, he tends to give preference to students from his alma mater, Stanford's engineering school.
"I don't feel a Stanford student is better than another one," he said. But "since there are so many, I use that as a filter."
I think we need to separate out the term "old boys" from "network." One of the most valuable things you get from going to a top school, whether MIT, Ivy League, or otherwise - is exposure to a network. They're not necessarily the "old boys" you guys are picturing, with money and power and political connections, but the folks who are starting companies, doing the most cutting-edge research... if you go to a school like MIT, you're surrounded by people like this - and you'll be able to reach out to these people for the rest of your life. And this can be very useful... when you're looking for a cofounder, or a guest speaker in a specific field to talk to a group of students, or you want someone to pass on your resume at company X, for example. If you go to a lower tier school, no matter how smart and motivated you are, it will be much harder to forge the same kind of network.
There's a study that concluded that Ivy League schools don't really add value (in terms of lifetime earnings) to non-black, non-latino, non-poor students.
So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.
My experience makes me think otherwise. I didn't attend an elite university, but visited friends that did. I saw a disproportionate number of gifted and extremely hard working people. More so than at my college, which itself was highly ranked.
it doesn't matter what you saw there. the point of TFA is there are many equally (if not more) hardworking candidates that don't find their ways to these schools because of existing prejudices and non-transparent admission policies.
>So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.
I worked on the web side of a non elite but good universities student recruitment department. I would hear stories all the time of Asian parents coming in and handling their whole child's enrollment process. Many of the administrators found it kind of funny/horrifying/sad all at the same time.
Asians are fairly poorly represented compared to their raw "paper intellegence" in the business, cultural and politics of the United States. The following statements will include many generalizations, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that most Asians are studious, but rather shy, passive. Asians tend to generally not be viewed as "strong" personalities or leaders, but "born followers" that know how to get the job down quickly. It doesn't help that China always copies everything.
As much as stereotypes are deceiving and ill for our society, I tend to think they hold a small, but ruthless grain of truth in them. and i am Asian.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadWhen affirmative action is letting more people from some group in than they normally would, then isn't it kind of obvious that other groups will take the hit?
It's not some magical force... when A + B is to be constant (total capacity), then increasing B decreases A.
The "natural" (equally-represented) proportion isn't that in the total population, it's the proportion in the population of interest, which in this case is the set of qualified applicants.
How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
"Asian applicants have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with comparable test scores."
If it's > 1, then obviously Asians will take a bigger hit, since they're the majority, that's the whole point of my comment.
If it's <= 1 though then yes, the situation is very interesting indeed.
It doesn't strike me as highly unlikely. Asians tend to have much higher education levels than Whites: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0229.p...
IF there were more qualified Asian applicants than qualified White applicants (ratio > 1) _and_ admissions was not racially biased, THEN there should be more Asians than Whites in the student body.
We know that there are more Whites than Asians in the student body of these colleges, so look at the contrapositive:
IF there are more Whites than Asians in the student body, THEN there more qualified White applicants (ratio <= 1) _or_ admissions was racially biased.
Look carefully at the logic statement I wrote - it means that one of two things must be true:
1. There exists racial bias specifically against Asians in admissions. 2. Qualified White applicants outnumber qualified Asian applicants.
If you concede (1), then your point that Asians get treated more harshly because they're majority is moot. If you concede (2), then, as you said, your argument doesn't work since "ratio < 1".
I don't know how to make this more clear than by using propositional logic.
Maybe it's just because I'm running low on sleep, but consider this scenario:
1. Qualified Asian applicants outnumber qualified White applicants.
2. A higher percentage of qualified White applicants are admitted than that of qualified Asian applicants.
3. There are more Whites than Asians in the admitted student body.
Can you tell me which sentence of mine this scenario runs counter to, or which logical impossibility you think it results in?
That's neither a sentence of mine, nor a logical impossibility. It's a perfectly valid, logically sound scenario, but for some reason you think it's a logically impossible scenario.
Just because you think it's false doesn't make it logically impossible! And here I was arguing with propositional logic as if I'd claimed 2+2=5.
Your original premise was that the article was unsurprising since _someone_ (Asians and Whites) must bear the downside of pro-minority AA:
> Well, if minorities are being positively affected, then majorities (in this case, Asians + whites) must be negatively affected. > How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
Then, asdfologist clearly points out that the interesting part is that Asians, a "minority", get affected worse than Whites (a majority):
> You don't get it - the parent's point is that your argument doesn't explain why Asians take a much bigger hit than whites.
You then claim that this could because Asians are actually the majority of qualified candidates (the whole ratio > or <= 1 thing), which I admit was an unconventional but valid challenge of assumptions:
> What's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race?
So then I point out the logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions, so I guess we actually do agree that there probably exists some racial bias against Asians vis-a-vis Whites in elite college admissions. Cheers?
> But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions
> logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
"But"?
What I'm not understanding is, when did I ever claim or imply that that is not true? When did I ever claim Asians are treated the same as whites? There was no inconsistency in my logic as far as I can see, I think you just made too many assumptions.
> Cheers?
Sure
I don't think it matters to anyone, though, because they're white kids.
[1]http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
Asian ivy league pop % / merit scholar % given by Unz is about 70%. Same for non-jewish whites is about 35%
Asians are getting the short end of the stick, but non-jewish white kids are getting it worse.
I mean, I've seen forms asking for my race, but I've never seen one asking if I considered myself Jewish. (and it seems, well, pretty slippery, as nearly all the people I know who identify as Jewish also identify as "White (non hispanic)" - And I've seen several studies saying that without cultural context, even experts can't tell Jewish faces from non-Jewsh faces from similar parts of the world.)
Seems to me like there are a lot of people who could identify one way or the other, who will answer the question differently, depending on how they think you want the question answered.
This unusual event happens because Asians are an outperforming minority. Most minorities suffer from the "cultural bias" of the education system and do worse than whites. But Asians just seem to kick ass regardless.
Affirmative action was designed to come at the expense of majority students only. Now that minority students are negatively affected, we have to rethink the justice of it.
You must not be in the US. The history of the US has been policies against minorities. It's only been since the early 60s has there been policies that favored minorities. And even then it has pretty much been relegated to schools (and most just undergrad college) -- it's never been very effective in the workplace. And affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.
According to the article, being black is like getting 450 extra points on your SAT compared to an Asian student. I don't think AA is as dead as you think it is.
IMO it's just not a useful test, and I suspect the Harvard admin committee knows so as well.
That said, it can be used as something to see how much work people are willing to do. In which case I think the delta over their HS peers is more useful than anything else. A 1500 at Andover would be a lot less impressive than a 1300 at Crenshaw.
Furthermore the data isn't really believable (remember the article used pretty much made up data). Data from actual schools disputes that. For example:
"Harvard's Asian Americans in the Class of 1995 have average SAT scores of 1450, Blacks averaged scores of 1290, whites scored 1400 and Hispanics averaged 1310, the report states. "
"Asian-American students who enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2001 and 2002 scored 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks, according to a 2011 study co-authored by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono."
"Asian-Americans admitted to the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus in 2008 had a median math and reading SAT score of 1370 out of 1600, compared to 1340 for whites, 1250 for Hispanics, and 1190 for blacks, according to a 2011 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity"
And I suspect if you control for recommendations, geographic, and socio-economic diversity the gaps would shrink, not grow.
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...
You can't win here. Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students. Identifiable ethnicities have different median qualifications. So someone has to lose in that tradeoff.
The point upthread was simply that usually when you see this argument made it's a complaint that whites are being "penalized". This time it's asians. But despite being a novel spin, it's still the same story.
They could try looking for actual diversity, then, instead of just an aesthetically pleasing mixture of superficial skin colors. Accepting 100 multiracial kids who all attended the same boarding schools is going to be way less diverse than a selection of 100 kids from different levels of income. Actually, I believe income quite dominates race in terms of predicting academic success these days--the interracial achievement gap looks quite small by comparison. (As well it should, in a country currently headed by a black president.)
There's no winning here. Don't fool yourself into thinking you know the right way to do education selection, and stop sneering at all the people who want different things than you do.
Race based discrimination supporters love to pretend that race is everything when it means less now than it has in the entirety of US history. You can throw yourself in with the "gravity is a social construct" people if you want, but at least there's hard data to back up my beliefs, instead of just collectivist guilt that punishes truly disadvantaged people for the crime of being born with the wrong skin color for that particular decade.
Go away.
You discriminate every time you purchase one product over another, take one job over another, live in one area over another, befriend one person over another, etc. We all do. The key to doing it well is clear, analytical judgement about such decisions. Personally, I haven't seen much of that in University admissions at any school.
This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.
Others suggest its because of how many legacy students the upper tier accept. Whatever the reason, SAT scores are not the only factor in admission because SAT is not the sole arbiter of a good University student, or at least that's what the University leadership say.
Personally, I think its well-meaning racism, and, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But my thinking it ain't facts, ain't statistics. Only the facts, carefully analyzed matter in the end.
Exactly. This is why basketball teams are missing out by their pig-headed refusal to send talent scouts to evaluate Rwanda's Pygmies.
This is exactly the behavior that you condemn, unless I've missed something.
I'm also not sure what that has to do with this article (which doesn't hang on any particular definition).
What you are calling prejudicial in that case they call experience. They correlate past statistical data on how the variables they do have access to predict the outcomes they want.
If that a satisfying situation? No way. Is including your experience better than just using the data you have for a current set of candidates? Hell yes. On average, hell yes. Some students will get screwed but on average IF you are smart, not a bigot, rational, have good past data, etc, your results WILL be better. Of course, most people aren't all of those things.
But what can you do other than make your best try at an optimal outcome? If they went just on raw present data, quality of students admitted to Stanford/MIT would probably go down and 99% of students would be asian. Does that seem better?
s/sloppy thinking/nuanced yet practical problem solving/g
Yes, because using quotas would be illegal.
But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.
Wasn't the whole point of the UC v. Bakke case to say that quotas are illegal, but race is still a legitimate factor to consider in admission? This sentence means nothing.
By "force them to do X" he meant the government can refuse to fund them if they didn't do X (which forces them to abide by the government's rules if they are accepting its funds), not that the government can legally mandate them to do X unconditionally.
Suppose you have the right to exclude Blacks or Asians from your college (freedom of speech, associations or whatever)
Once you take even a penny of federal dollars, directly or indirectly, you may have to agree not to discriminate. So YOU give up that right voluntarily. No one forces you to take the government's money.
Those government dollars most certainly can be conditioned on associating with certain people (military recruiters, in that case).
Now more on topic, the being able to discriminate as a private uni one:
http://www.hillsdale.edu/admissions/faq/faq_list.asp?iSectio...
Q: Why doesn’t Hillsdale accept any federal or state taxpayer subsidies? A: In 1975, the federal government said that Hillsdale had to sign a form stating that we did not discriminate on the basis of sex. Hillsdale College had never discriminated on any basis, and had never accepted federal taxpayer subsidies of any sort, so the College felt no obligation to comply, fearing that doing so would open the door to additional federal mandates and control. Our trustees pledged two things: first, that the College would continue its long-standing policy of non-discrimination, and second, that it would not accept any encroachments on its independence. The case went to court, and Hillsdale College won a partial victory, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals did rule that Hillsdale College was an “indirect recipient” of federal funding because of participation in federal grant and loan programs. In 1984, Grove City College in Pennsylvania fought and lost a similar legal battle. The case then went to the Supreme Court, and in Grove City v. Bell, it was determined that if even one student received a federal grant or loan, it made that institution a direct recipient of federal funds. To avoid the hassles of government control, Hillsdale College announced its decision to end participation in all federal financial aid programs in 1985. In 2007, Hillsdale announced that it would no longer accept State of Michigan taxpayer subsidies earmarked for student financial aid, thereby making the College completely independent of taxpayer support.
Basically once you take their money you agree to their strings.
sorry for the sarcasm but he keeps going
This is an absurd principle, and you've offered little but snark to defend it.
You take advantage of government largess every time you drive on a Federal highway. That doesn't mean the government can make your travel on that highway contingent upon giving up completely unrelated rights.
But "In the 30 years since this ruling, public and private universities have crafted affirmative action programs consistent with Bakke's requirements" [1], so I assume it probably would be, otherwise they wouldn't go through the trouble.
1. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_regents...
Even were a given university to forgo all government money, it would lose it's tax exempt status if it discriminated on the basis of race (see Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983)).
So as a practical matter -- yes.
You don't understand it because it doesn't translate into equal treatment. "Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races. It's a de facto quota system that would never survive a court challenge if you rearranged the races a bit.
The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit. These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs. If you are a part of a group that all has perfect GPA/SATs, then that simply isn't enough anymore. Cluster analysis is a valid technique to identify outliers.
So let me get this straight: GPA + test scores don't show merit, but race does?
> These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs.
So let's accept less qualified people just because they're doing better than even the lesser-qualfied people of the same race, even though there are perfect candidates we could be choosing instead?
I think you (like many Americans) are completely misunderstanding the point of affirmative action.
It has nothing to do with "encouraging diversity" or anything like that. It's trying to right a historical wrong, discrimination against certain groups based on race. "Diversity" is just a nice word to use to appeal to emotion so they just use that, but it's irrelevant to the purpose of affirmative action.
The point is, it has been a long time since merit was GPA/SAT scores for top-tier college admissions. The criteria changes frequently as kids pattern their lives after what they assume the current criteria is. If you are one of a million (Asian) kids with perfect GPA and SAT scores, well, you're likely not going to get in. You are not owed a spot in any sense.
You're owed exactly as much of a spot as anyone with the same qualifications as you, which is exactly equal to that of a Black or White kid with the same qualifications.
Even if that's a goal, it doesn't seem to be the main one. Frankly, I've never heard a college admissions official say they look at race to determine leadership skills, even if they really do do that.
If they do that, then it's fine for them to do so, but that just doesn't seem to be the issue here. And to the best of my knowledge, it didn't seem to be the issue in the Bakke case either, which nevertheless got the Supreme Court's nod toward promoting "diversity".
It can certainly be read this way, but it's not obvious that this is so. Diversity creates an atmosphere that will most likely mirror the world in which these future leaders will be required to navigate. That in itself is enough of a justification for diversity, assuming their goal is to educate future leaders. Also, there is the fact that leaders of ethnic groups tend to be of that ethnic group, so maximizing some proportion of diversity is increasing that schools chance of educating a future leader.
Er, you changed the subject from determining which future leaders are accepted into college to educating future leaders after they've been accepted.
That's a whole another discussion which I wasn't intending to get into. All I will say is that the status quo seems to point toward the use of race as a way to fulfill affirmative action requirements, not as a means for determining aptitude.
I think he's implying that cultural differences could be coming into play that skew the curve while looking like racial discrimination. Just like Academic scores differ between races, I'm sure Athletic honors differ between races as well, as well as Club honors, and Arts (band/choir/etc) Honors, and so on.
If you want to argue that Academic merit is all students should be judged on when colleges are considering applications, that is a separate argument, but GP is probably just saying that GPA + test scores doesn't singlehandedly define "merit" to a college because things like community service and athletics and student council and... and... and... all altogether factor into the cumultive merit of any given applicant in addition to GPA and whatnot.
It's been almost sixty years since discrimination based on race (or sex) was legal. It's time to let affirmative action die.
It is simple to construct a non-quota admissions system from a desired set of quotas (though one would probably do well not to write down the desired set of quotas). Each year one could adjust the bonus/penalty assigned to each race to target admissions levels at the hidden quotas. Conversely, given a set of per-race bonuses and penalties and admissions data for a particular year, one could calculate what (non-quota) admissions level was most targeted by the set of bonuses and penalties.
Edit: It is perhaps even more troublesome to hear "There is no formula for admission. We look at the academics, leadership, activities and references about the applicant's character." If a school explicitly states that it is not looking for anything in particular in its candidates, it would be very difficult for any investigation to find that it is turning away qualified candidates on the basis of race.
....but we do value diversity :)
and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.
Uh huh. Substitute "Blacks" for "Asians" and somehow suddenly it's no longer okay.
I guess the idea that we should stop with race based discrimination altogether is too novel yet. So long as this is the case, the cycle will continue to repeat.
>It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.
Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms (generalization, but I'm just making a point). This is just more sloppy thinking from you folks.
That's just a rationalization.
There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.
http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx
TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - for example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).
The author suggests that top Asian students are being discriminated against (implicitly or explicitly), and it's unclear whether top non-Jewish white students are being discriminated against, or whether they apply in much smaller numbers to the Ivies.
In the article from The American Conservative, the claim that Jews are over-represented is rather hard to miss.
Gelman says in that critique that he agrees there is an underrepresentation of Asians.
That's not actually Gelman's analysis. He's just relaying some criticisms that were sent to him by Janet Mertz. Ron Unz responds to this, corrects some of his own errors, and shows his claims still hold. Then Gelman (proxying for Mertz) and Unz go back and forth way too many times, using way too many words and almost no data.
Eventually Gelman gives up, so Unz moves on to reviewing Mertz's old work. Let's just leave it here: http://www.ronunz.org/2013/03/16/meritocracy-dangerous-cance...
In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better.
One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true.
Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.
No one is saying that SAT is the sole standard of admission. But does anyone really believe that Asians as a group collectively are so horrible in admission standard (with exception of SAT score) that huge disparity in number of Asian applicants and Asian admissions are justified?
To play devil's advocate, for example: Asians may be more likely than other groups to apply to these schools. It may be that Asians with high SAT scores but weaker applications in other areas are more likely to apply to highly selective schools than comparable students of other races, which would lead to lower admission rates.
The numbers here wink suggestively, but they present a far from airtight case.
I am not assuming that Asians are more qualified than students of other races. Purely from the statistics provided by the blog, I find it hard to believe that Asians are doing so poorly in other admission standards that having several hundred extra SAT score doesn't put them in equal footing.
Aren't you the one who is assuming that Asians are obviously failing in admission standards other than SAT compared to other races?
(If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)
None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.
Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.
http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value
"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".
On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.
But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.
It's complex.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/nyregion/cooper-union-t...
I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
I would love to see that data, if you could make the effort. Because I have no faith that this statement is true.
But also see the comment above. I am probably somewhat misinterpreting the data in the strict sense, in what I said above. About as many S&P 500 CEOs come from UW as from Harvard, but you have to consider student body size, so it's not quite the same thing. But I don't think this invalidates the general gist of what I'm saying, which is that you can go to a good State school and still expect to have a fine career.
Maybe it is, but quantify that. And compare the best care outcomes from attending Harvard with people's actual ambitions. For most people, I still contend that going to Harvard (or not) is fairly irrelevant.
and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Again, just to be clear, I am not trying to support racism or any sort of discrimination. I think admissions should be strictly race-blind, gender-blind, ethnicity-blind, religion-blind, etc. I'm just pointing out that if you get excluded from your $IVY_OF_CHOICE for whatever reason, you aren't consigned to the scrap heap of life. It's not the end of the world, and it's probably not even a big deal for most people. Now if you absolutely, 110% have your heart set on getting elected President someday, then I guess all bets are off.
Well, I can't let that statement go by without challenging it. At the PhD level, I just don't agree that Harvard is better than UC Berkeley overall. It's pretty close, but I think UCB has slightly greater breadth and depth at the PhD level.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/09/28/nrc-rankings/
Like I said in an earlier comment, there is a type of very high achieving undergraduate who looks at and engages with a university more the way a grad student would. There are plenty of reasons someone like this might choose UCB or UMich over an ivy league school.
From this angle, it shouldn't be too surprising that this sort of student student would be as likely to come from UW as from Harvard. There's no real point in averaging in a huge student body drawn largely from a single state vs a small undergraduate student body with no in-state percentage requirements, because these students are unlike the other students at either institution. While it's harder to "get in" to harvard as an undergraduate, let's face it - the vast majority of students at either institution are probably not among the very brightest of the very brightest. Those statistical oddities are a small sliver, and I actually suspect that they can be difficult to detect through test scores and GPAs earned from age 15-17. These students often just don't give enough of a crap, or they may be far too focused on their intellectual interests to put enough time into the GPA game.
If UW has a strong CS department, it makes just as much sense that these odd outliers would come from there as an ivy.
I agree that where you went to school shouldn't matter for your career outcomes, but fact of the matter is that it simply does. There are plenty of people who hire ivyleague only
Sounds irrelevant to me. Most people don't have "becoming President" as their goal. For the handful who do, then OK, sell your soul to try and get into an Ivy. But I would posit that this is an irrelevant point to most normal people. :-)
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success ...
Depends on how exactly you define "elite", "tremendously" and "career ladder".
Anyway, I'm not arguing that they don't help, I'm arguing that the extent of the difference they make is very possibly overstated, especially for people whose aspirations don't include "being President of the USA" or "being CEO of an S&P 500 company".
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success
Not sure if that was meant to be sarcasm or mean to be taken literally, but I actually believe that very strongly. There are lots of variables that affect what happens to a person in life, of which "what university you attend" or "did you attend university at all" are just two. Personally, I believe determination, ambition, perseverance, work ethic, attitude, etc., matter more than either of those factors.
Me, I'm kind of a bum, but thanks to my UC Berkeley degree, I barely have to make an effort to land a middle class job. Granted, I am a computer geek, so that's easy.
Ouch. That hurts. First in the list of "2nd class" ;)
Anyway, you make a good point. Colleges would like you to think ranking matters more than it really does. Didn't Tim Cook go to Auburn?
Given the context of what I'm arguing, I don't think you should feel too bad about that! Heck, I don't even mention my school in these discussions (UNC - Wilmington). Then again, I didn't bother graduating anyway.
http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race-ebook/dp/B00BAH...
Clearly discrimination against Asians was one of the unforeseen consequences of affirmative action. What's particularly sad is it doesn't even help the people it was supposed to. For example:
"Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were 'modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an increase in black and Hispanic degrees.'"
The other problem is that this article automatically assumes that private schools are "elite", and public schools aren't.
That's true for certain fields-law and finance, for example, are dominated by the ivy league schools. STEM, on the other hand, is a much more even distribution. Many of the engineering programs at most of the Big 10 state schools are considered to be some of the best educations you can get, and the UC system is full of very good programs. UIUC's CS program is considered one of the best in the nation, as are Purdue's ME and aeronautical engineering programs.
Stanford is 41% from California. Caltech is 32% from California. Thus, it looks like the California factor has little if anything to do with the Caltech vs. the Ivies Asian data.
What I can contribute, however, are my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences with Asian households, and my own personal experience with the college application process. I am not Asian.
Probably because of my own interest in sciences and mathematics, many of my friends in high school were Asian. They tended to excel in schoolwork, in no small part because they were under huge amounts of pressure from their parents. I'm not saying that all Asian families "force" their children to study ad-nauseum, but the "high expectations Asian father" Internet meme is at least somewhat based in truth, stereotyped or not.
Because of this pressure (and supportive culture of success), Asians tend do incredibly well in school, as well as on standardized tests... but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students "well-rounded," which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value.
My personal college application process involved SAT scores that were very good, and a GPA that was solid but somewhat average. However, I had done several sports in high school, done a considerable amount of community service, had three technical jobs (two as a developer, one as a security analyst), and released open source software--all while passing my classes. I was passionate about computer science, and I believe that that helped me gain admission to very good universities.
I'm not trying to "blame the victim" with this comment--it may very well be that admissions officers harbor prejudices against Asians--but I also think it's worth noting that when you're talking about the top-tier of our education system--the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world--great grades aren't enough to gain admission.
For example, when I look to hire developers who are recent or soon-to-be college graduates, I may glance briefly at their GPA. While I care that they didn't flunk their classes (and aptitude in their language of choice is certainly important), I check to see what projects they did on the side. What open source software did they release or contribute to? Did they launch mobile or webapps while studying? Are they conversant in current events around their field of choice?
To me, passion is more important than grades or even degrees--in business. My question, which I believe is the same one posed in the article, is whether it is appropriate for schools to evaluate on that metric, too.
This entire "holistic evaluation" thing, at this point is pretty much gamed out and the savviest parents and students know what the admissions officers are looking for, which means it plays out very much like the tests and the grades - people who really, really want to get into the top schools and will put in the effort are the ones who get in.
To give a specific example, I've always thought that community involvement is one of those developmental stages that happen later in life. Bill Gates is a great example: obviously a "leader in business, innovation and politics", who went from active, principled disdain towards all charity when he was younger to the world's biggest philanthropist today. Whenever I see community involvement coming from a high schooler, I always "blame" parents, college admission coaches, church, etc.
Similarly, serious commitment to more than one sport makes me think "ambitious parents" and "affluent" rather than "drive". I just don't buy that a high-schooler, all by him/herself, has the wherewithal to manage multiple athletic training programs. I did serious ballet before I went to college, and let's face it, while I did all the sweating, my mother gets more than half the credit.
What this boils down to, to me, is the inability for admissions boards to release their exact criteria for admitting a prospective student. If, say, MIT released the exact formula for their perfect student, then people would immediately game the system (more so than they do already).
As some other users pointed out, and as you alluded to here, how can we tell the difference between 'drive' and 'trying to appear well-rounded'? How can we tell if a high schooler wanted to do those five-hundred hours of community service, or if they were coerced into doing so by a parent or school?
I personally believe that there is more to a successful academic (and professional) career than grades, so my initial dispute was the use of standardized test scores and GPA to indicate discrimination when it may have simply been another variable skewing the results.
It would be a very interesting case study for a university to release their full (objective) admissions criteria, however--while, sure, it would result in applicants trying to game the system, would it end up resulting in a more cohesive student base? What would the main factors be? How do you weigh passions vs., as you stated, ambitious parents?
I don't have any of the answers to the questions I posed in this comment (nor in my earlier ones), but it's an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
that's a good question - and this same question needs to be asked by a prospective employer during hiring interviews. In other words, you have to try and understand the applicant, and see if they really want it, or is only wanting it for extrinsic reasons (which i deem to be a bad reason for wanting to study).
You play sports to get laid, not because your parents make you.
Someone's physicality (Let's move on from just thinking about sports only) can/does have relevance to someone's aptitude for CS, or, their ability to do well.
citation needed.
"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past." Look at the kinds of things colleges value: community service, sports, etc. These are the things that used to in years past set people of good breeding apart from the regular people who were too busy keeping a roof over their head.
No it isn't. "Well rounded" is in fact code for any activity that has completely subjective merit which admissions offices can use to create quotas without officially having quotas.
What I've noticed is that the kids who have to be "forced" to study ad-nauseum usually aren't the top performers. They're around the middle, but their families desperately want them to be the top.
The top students are much more self motivated. They tend to be more or less equivalent to their supposedly more-well-rounded white counterparts.
Few people manage to get ahead solely through being compelled to work hard. It's very difficult to force someone to sacrifice four years of their life to attain a goal that they themselves are ambivalent about.
The high achieving students you're describing aren't not participating in extra curricular activities. That just sounds bizarre. Anyone who's intensely focused on getting into a top school also has their application filled with extra curricular engagements.
We should just take race off the applications, like we did on loan applications decades ago. If you want an affirmative action proxy, we can just use high school data, and zip code information, and questions like "did your parents attend college?"
Asian-Americans lack the numbers and the political clout as African- and Hispanic-Americans. Asians do not have a Sharpton. It's also tough to sympathize with a bunch of kids protesting how they weren't let into Harvard / Princeton / etc. It's unfair, and it sucks for them. Jews got around it after Asians came around and took their place. Who can Asians wait for?
If you want to do something about it, don't wait for some other minority group to come along and be the goat, organize. There's a lot more Asians than Jews in this country - you should be able to build an organization at least as effective as the Anti-Defamation League. And for god's sake, at least stop voting for politicians who support affirmative action. If you vote for politicians who discriminate against you, those politicians are going to quite reasonably conclude that you don't really care about being discriminated against.
I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.
If the "holistic admission" thing is being used to disqualify Asian candidates I would expect that two students with equal grades would be disadvantaged if they played piano rather than windsurfed.
From my anecdotal experience, I find this very plausible. (I'm a white guy who had extraordinarily poor grades in highschool yet was accepted to the school of my choice. My Asian peers almost universally far outclassed me in academic skill (proper student discipline in general); if you told me that I was accepted because I was on the swim team instead of another student with better grades who played the piano (both forms of self-improvement, not community service), I would not be surprised. Very disappointed, but not surprised.)
So do universities honestly think they have too many classical musicians, but not enough casual athletes? I don't think so. That seems incredibly implausible. I don't think they are thinking anything at all along the lines of "we better introduce some athletic viewpoints into our student body, lest all the musicians dominate discussion."
I think they are arbitrarily classifying hobbies as "well rounded" or "square" to allow themselves to shape their student body demographics to their liking.
EDIT: Agreed with jlgreco, added [] to what I said earlier.
If we are saying "Black student life is just playing basketball", then that is clearly an unfair stereotype. If however college admissions start disqualifying anyone who has ever played basketball, then I think it would be prudent to ask if perhaps the admissions people are attempting to disadvantage black applicants (particularly so if the "has played basketball" metric is accompanied by a series of other metrics that have a relationship to stereotypes).
But the question remains, are admissions committees negatively weighting stereotypically Asian activities (e.g. violin) to reduce their enrollment? Anecdotal evidence is insufficient.
[1]Espenshade (2009) pp. 92-93.
ROTC was only allowed on campus recently:
"Yale, Harvard and Columbia all signed agreements this year [2011] to bring back ROTC"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/23/rotc-ivy-league_n_1...
It's tough to do ROTC when you have to go to another campus every week.
Ivy League admissions for both undergrad and graduate programs is NOT what most people think it to be. There are MANY factors they consider and it's not all about grades/test scores/sports.
For #1, grad schools are looking for extremely different things than undergrad. In fact, the plurality, if not majority, of grad admits at top schools are internationals. As another example, most PhD programs care about your research almost to the exclusion of all other factors. Extracurriculars? Don't matter very much.
Business school programs most heavily weight your work experience (followed by test scores, essays, and extracurriculars), which is why a lot of military officers get in, because of their impressive leadership-related work experience.
And data is not what you're basing your argument on. It's an interpretation of some data that might be flawed in collection methodology, reporting errors, false conclusions from over fitting and other common errors that occur in studies.
For the record, I served in the military, and earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and know of many others who did the same. Painting the Ivies as somehow anti-military kinda rubs me the wrong way.
I have no idea if the Ivy's aim for geographic diversity; since they are not taxpayer funded, they probably don't have that mandate.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/the-white-anxiet...
In a recent article, Ross Douthat claims that America’s elite private colleges and universities are discriminating against white, rural, working-class applicants, especially those from “Red” states, and he cites work that Alexandria Radford and I did on college admissions to support his argument. Douthat seizes on one relatively minor finding in the entire book to push an interpretation that goes far beyond the bounds of the actual evidence.
We find that applicants who demonstrate a strong commitment to career-oriented extracurricular activities while in high school have a slightly lower chance of being admitted to a top school. This outcome affects only students who have won awards or assumed leadership positions in these activities, not those known for their extensive involvement. These extracurriculars might include 4-H clubs or Future Famers of America, as Douthat mentions, but they could also include junior ROTC, co-op work programs, and many other types of career-oriented endeavors. Participating in these activities does not necessarily mean that applicants come from rural backgrounds. The weak negative association with admission chances could just as well suggest that these students are somewhat ambivalent about their academic futures.
... students who apply from “Red” states appear to have an advantage in the process. Compared to otherwise similar applicants from California, those from Utah are 45 times as likely to be admitted to one of our elite colleges or universities. The advantage for applicants from West Virginia or Montana is 25 times greater, and nearly 10 times greater for students from Alabama. Because top private schools seek geographic diversity, and students from America’s vast middle are less likely to apply, it stands to reason that their admission chances are higher. On the other hand, coming from such “Blue” states as Virginia or Colorado lowers the odds of admission.
One problem is that too many people think the SAT is some amazing indicator of applicant quality. In fact it has biases. In fact it can be coached and responds to test prep and experience.
Another problem is that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees when you feel you're being discriminated against. There is a great society wide wrong that affirmative action is meant to partially redress. Some Asians having to go to Columbia instead of Yale is not an equal wrong to kicking in the doors to provide opportunity.
Finally, diversity does matter. I learned a hell of a lot from the hispanic and black students I lived with. And they certainly would not have been there without affirmative action. The same thing in classes (although there's less certainty on whether they were beneficiaries of AA).
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
(1) This is not a universal conclusion.
(2) Many forms of "coaching" are lumped together here. In fact some may only add 30 pts or less while others add over 100.
(3) Controlling for self-selection is self-defeating here since poor black/hispanic/native american kids don't have the same opportunity to self select into say private schools with test prep programs.
(4) Taking post PSAT gains ignores coaching received prior to this.
(5) This only measures indirect coaching. The effects of a superior school itself could be large.
Some forms of coaching "add over 100". Do you have data to support this?
Poor black/hispanic kids don't have test prep programs in school. So they are unable to get privately provided test prep or have no incentive to do so, and therefore receive a smaller amount of test prep than other racial groups. Do you have any data to support this?
The effects of a superior school "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
You also say that you learned a lot from black and hispanic pupils. Would you have learned less from white pupils?
Having a worthwhile discussion requires a basic standard of reasonableness. Some of the perfectly reasonable claims I made could have also benefited from citations, sure. OTOH you've given me at least 5 data points that say you've just decided to be a pedantic troll about this topic. Good luck with that.
I got a full-ride to a great non-elite school; there are plenty of schools like the one I went to that would love to have more non-white students, and are even giving away money for it. I'd much rather go to a good school for free than to go to an elite one and be in debt.
I have heard of a little bit of black magic that is involved in the acceptance process but in order to accept people who are more likely to succeed in the program. But race definitely does not come into play.
Until students/people are judged purely off their merits there will ALWAYS be discrimination.
The truly sad part is it is openly acceptable to discriminate against whole groups of people purely based on statistics of whole groups. If this isn't the definition of stereotyping i don't know what is. Just because one's motivations are sound doesn't mean we should unanimously assume so are there actions.
Judge people for who they are, not where they are from.
EDIT: Holy cow, now it's on the 2nd page. What the heck? (And I bet I'm never going to get an explanation either.)
But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted.
It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people.
Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
That's extremely funny if intentional, even funnier if not :)
Although I agree with you that the further you get in a field, the more likely a prestigious school will be better. But I would credit that to having a more direct relationship with professors. When you are actually helping a professor with their research, the quality of the research matters more than when you are simply being lecture by that same professor.
Huh. I don't have any hard data, but I always thought the opposite. I mean, I didn't go to school, but I put a lot of effort into being around people who are better (at things I want to be good at) than I am, and I attribute much of my success to surrounding myself with people who are better than I am.
I mean, I agree about the second bit... my understanding is that undergrad at a prestigious school offers little contact with the (usually very good) professors (thus, my assertion that it's all about the quality of the other students.) - thus, grad school there, where you get more contact with the (very good) professors would be even better.
Perhaps I am unqualified to say, because I didn't go to school. On the other hand, I managed to learn enough without school to get a job that often requires a degree, so maybe I am qualified?
Most engineering courses are based on a curve. If the rest of the class is brilliant, it's significantly harder to compete and get a good grade.
Berkeley is a top school, and I don't think you'll find much of any evidence to the contrary.
Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years.
The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.
And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.
We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.
"I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go."
That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.
Business is just as prestige driven as finance (management consulting, Fortune 500, etc.).
You're also getting the opportunity (not guarantee) to get a top tier education - but that can be gotten anywhere. Study for the CFA tests if you really want to know finance. Go to Wharton if you want to get a job.
Was going to jibe about "high paying" job, but that's not really it. It's just any competitive placement benefits from active recruitment.
Any school that is capable of giving an education of similar quality has a similar reputation. Claiming that the point of an education from a school like MIT is the "old-boys-network" is in essence confusing the effect with the cause.
Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now offers coaching and mentoring to students and would-be entrepreneurs. But because he's deluged with requests, he tends to give preference to students from his alma mater, Stanford's engineering school.
"I don't feel a Stanford student is better than another one," he said. But "since there are so many, I use that as a filter."
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49465579
Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...
Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one.
In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.
The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.
If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.
As much as stereotypes are deceiving and ill for our society, I tend to think they hold a small, but ruthless grain of truth in them. and i am Asian.