I want a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much. In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today.
Other people seem to want the same thing, but they advocate a world view that specifically considers ethnicity, and sex, and other body attributes. I feel certain it's well-intentioned, but it's racism, sexism, etc.
Further, that worldview encourages codifying racism and sexism, and making them part of our workplaces. It has become normal for universities to tweak points on admissions applications, and for big companies to publish pie charts about their progress toward diversity. But this is just more racism and sexism. If you have to add an ethnicity column to your employee database and periodically release ethnicity pie charts to show how unracist you are, I hope it is obvious that something is very wrong.
We shouldn't try to use old bad ideas to increase justice. Justice will increase naturally when we discard old bad ideas.
Every day, we're putting down bricks, building the world of the future. Let's put down the kind of bricks that suit the world we actually want.
In that future world, body attributes would matter much less than they do today. So I advocate paying as little attention to them as possible today.
You realize that your first sentence does not imply your second sentence is a good policy automatically, right? It might, but there is no automatic relationship there.
I think that your goal of a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much is admirable. However, in an imperfect world - especially one in which some people explicitly disavow that goal - it is worth considering what a policy like yours will actually achieve. What that video linked above to find out.
The language in this article is positively Orwellian.
Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions
Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination.
Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media."
But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students."
Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened.
Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.
Incidentally: the Harvard Jewish quota was described externally as their plan to increase "geographic diversity" (there's that word again -- doing a lot of work for a full century) in the applicant pool and to combat anti-Semitism. I love this, just like I love that Yale's present racial discrimination plan is administered by the Office for Equal Opportunity.
Tulane's got the most geographic diversity in the country. It's 45% Jewish. Someone ought to mass email their admissions material to these institutional equity offices with a smiley face.
Just to be contrarian here is an answer that I stole from somebody:
thaumasiotes says:
Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today.
Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.<<
So I guess is OK if Hardvard does not become homogeneous all in the name of diversity. I'll swallow it.
Edit: Yes, I know it is legal. I cannot comment about peoples motives since I don't know them.
This is done in the name of diversity because it's officially legal that way. Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity.
Compare what happened to my roommate's dad: a sensitivity training guy came to give a lecture at his company, and was easily prodded into saying that workplace diversity increased along with the share of women. 40% women is more diverse than 30% women (sure). 70% women is more diverse than 60% women (hmmm). In the college context, "diverse" is more likely to be a code word for "black" than for "female", but the semantic drift is just as real; it's quite possible to describe a class as, oh, "40% diverse".
Did the person (being quoted from three steps away, I'll note) actually say that "70% women is more diverse than 60% women" or are you just assuming that's what was meant because the person agreed with the general statement that more women would improve diversity? In most workplaces that is true.
As the story was told to me, the question was specifically probed of passing 50% women, which is obviously the tipping point at which additional women make you less "diverse" in the dictionary sense. I provided the particular numbers 70% and 60% so my comment would read better, since I can't recall the exact wording as it was told to me. Very true that I can't personally attest to this. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's more likely that my roommate's dad (an engineer at Raytheon, if it helps you one way or the other) made it up to have something to complain about to his family, or whether he noticed something ridiculous, tested it, and complained to his family.
> the question was specifically probed of passing 50% women
Over what organizational unit? It makes a crucial difference: diversity within a team (more generally: a gerrymeandered division of the company) can fall at the same time as the total diversity across the encompassing company rises.
> You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's more likely that my roommate's dad made it up... or whether he noticed something ridiculous
3rd possibility: something seemed ridiculous because he didn't understand it.
Reminds me of a kerfluffle that happened a couple months back, mentioned on Volokh:
All the newspaper headlines were proclaiming that the startup world was getting less diverse, and people were very upset at the racism of the tech community. But as it turned out, white representation in the tech sector had actually decreased. The only reason that the numbers said it was becoming less diverse was that Asian people weren't being classed as a non-white minority.
This is actually going to be a big change going forward. Asian, Indian, South American, middle eastern, etc will be totally assimilated into white culture. Just like Italians and Irish were, despite initial discrimination.
Take a step back and put this identity politics madness into context. Basically you get penalized for working hard and following the rules. Imagine you're a working-class White or Asian family, not eligible for state aid, and your child is trying their best to get into college. How would you feel if you also found out:
> "Apply only for California state aid through the California Dream Act of 2011.
Several state financial aid programs and many private scholarships are open
to AB 540 students. Other undocumented students are encouraged to apply
as there are often campus based aid and private scholarships available to
them.
There are two types of grants available as Cal Grants: the entitlement grants and
the competitive grants... Under entitlement grants, eligible student are guaranteed a Cal Grant A if they
have at least a 3.0 grade point average... Cal Grant A and B Competitive Awards are available for students who do not
qualify for the entitlement grants. The competitive grants are not guaranteed. Each year 22,500 competitive grants are awarded.
"
I don't understand this comment: why would a working-class white or Asian-American family not be eligible for state aid? I assume it would be because their income is too high or the kid's GPA is too low. Wouldn't those same regulations apply to the Dream Act kids too? If you're rich and undocumented you still don't get aid, and if you're undocumented with a crappy GPA you don't get anything either.
So do you feel that poor US citizens are actually getting a worse deal? How?
(I can see the argument that people who go back to, say, Mexico, and wait for a legal family visa to come to the US, are getting a raw deal. That's certainly true: as of January 2015 the US govt has finally gotten around to dealing with people who submitted their paperwork in 1994. http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy... )
Yes, I'm hearing a lot of this kind of chatter in the asian american community. In the Korean and Chinese communities(where I live anyways), a lot of people are paying very very close attention to this. A lot of anger is rising, and it crosses age groups in their community. At my old college(ivy league, so big school), there was a large undercurrent of racial tension. A lot of students, even 2nd generations asian americans, mostly hung out with groups drawn along racial lines. I honestly fear these attempts to curb racism/discrimination are increasing it significantly.
The one that "turns away good developers", since you put it that way.
Because good developers aren't all going to look like me, but people's hiring practices tend to make them hire people that look like them under the phony guise of "these are the good people".
(And what makes you think they're turning away good developers for diversity quota reasons, and getting crap instead?)
I don't think the two are comparable. At work your goal is to grow and make money as a company. At elite schools they aim to educate their students to better their futures. Colleges are attempting to shape people not make a billion dollars. And I love that here on HN, where from working in the tech industry I can only assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place?
Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity.
Has any company actually figured a way to implement the first choice? Hiring is highly subjective. We don't have any foolproof way of figuring out who the best developers are (it's not a well-defined question) and no one has yet come up with a practical way to avoid unconscious bias.
The closest thing I've heard is asking someone to remove identifying information from resumes before screening them. (Blinding the screener.) That should at least help you get a diverse set of candidates coming in. I would think positively of a company that does that.
But the interviews themselves will still be biased and the only question is whether you realize this or you're fooling yourself.
Here's the thing: it doesn't actually matter how many blacks, gays or women you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same few CS programmes, then you have not achieved diversity in any meaningful way. The point of diversity in a business sense, is a strategy to avoid getting caught in an echo chamber. Any organization that is forcing it with quotas, has missed the point.
Although I sense that none of the following is likely to pacify the general grating sentiment of the arguments here, I will venture anyway:
“We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,”
Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an
audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the
Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That
means admissions officers rely on intangibles like
interesting essays or particularly unusual
recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent
of applicants who get in.
Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman:
“Make your children interesting!”
For parents and students alike, that’s both good news
and bad news. The bad news is that of course it’s much
easier to say that than to actually make it happen,
though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow
their passions as a way to develop an interesting
personality. It’s much easier to complete a checklist,
however daunting, than to actually be interesting.
But the good news is that when colleges use this set
of criteria, kids can focus on shaping their teenage
years in a way that isn’t just about trying to build
up resume line after resume line, and instead focus on
a more holistic sense of self. That seems like a far
more sensible way to move through high school than
spreading oneself too thin trying to get a slew of
positions one can’t really ever concentrate on. That
encourages a dilettantish approach to learning and
society that is just the opposite of what the liberal
arts have traditionally tried to encourage.[1]
I mention this not because it captures the whole truth of the way one gets into Harvard. But because it is almost alluring an argument that anyone - whether a Harvard, a YC, a Hackerspace / co-living community, the approval process at a highly prized co-op building in New York, a dating app ( The League [2] ) - could use ( and do use ) "to winnow out the chaff", so to speak.
Is it fair that a co-op uses some strange criteria to let a bigwig, say a political donation bundler, with connections, have the penthouse and not you ? No.
Would you dare fight the co-op and take them to court to prove you are just as "interesting" as the bundler?
Are you likely to win? Are you not likely to appease the co-op board through some other means because you know it is the socially-acceptable way to do so and suing them is just going to make you a social outcast and expunged from the social diaries of the well-heeled?
Is it fair that a group of people self-select themselves to be part of a dating club, so as to not being put through the grief of having to date a person who doesn't - from all social cues and signalling - doesn't belong? [2]
Is it wrong? Yes. Is it illegal? No.
Their lawyer is sure to say that no one is stopping you from building your own app and inviting people only you approve of. After all it is a private app.
I could give examples of even more explicit discrimination in daily life that go unchallenged.
One cannot cherry-pick an issue when it suits them and choose to shift it to the back-burner when it doesn't.
Discrimination is rampant, persistent and has become acceptable in all manner of ways - both latent and in plain sight.
It is too important an issue to be fought in piece-meal, from one aggrieved party to another.
We ought to have a much bigger, much more encompassing and thorough discussion of what it means to be discriminated - whether the person is non-Jewish white, Jewish, Asian, Black, Hispanic or the rest.
Harvard in particular is about building leaders. If you want great front-line employees it would seem there are other hundreds of other schools that can do that.
When it comes to having great leaders, race matters. I wish it didn't, but its naïve to think otherwise. That said, simply awarding points for race (if that's what is actually done -- or if they have just regressed it to show the differential) seems inefficient.
You want people with great upside to make a positive change in the world. Being around some of the highest SAT/GPA people in the world for my life has shown that most end up having good, but mundane careers. And what I find surprising is that I probably could have predicted which of my cohort, colleagues, and associates would go on to have outsized impacts -- and it was rarely (or more like never) a product of their SAT score.
Sports is one of the better professions where performance trumps almost everything. If you talk to NFL scouts you'll find that they look numbers, but they realize that the numbers come with very strong context. Incredible passing numbers in the SEC are different than from a DIII school. They want to know if you've peaked in college, or if you have upside in the NFL.
The NFL also does something similar to college -- they have later rounds in the draft, because they have a large enough roster to take some risks (and practice squads). These later rounds are where they often take riskier players. This is where Seattle takes a slower cornerback named Richard Sherman or a shorter QB named Russell Wilson. Based on the tape, neither of these players should be in the NFL, much less excelling. But the upside potential was huge on them -- so Seattle picked them.
I'm sure Harvard could have found someone with better numbers than Barack Obama, but the upside on him was huge.
Given the ridiculous importance our society puts on race, I'm not against using race a metric. I'm just not sure we're efficient about it.
My take from the article was that they just broke out the average entry SAT score of each race. Which concluded Asians needed 50 points more than whites to get into Harvard while Blacks needed 200 points less.
But as said elsewhere, Harvard isn't looking at SATs solely - they are looking for "interesting" or future leadership potential.
I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance about this. I went to a selective admission high school where due to anti-AA reforms the Asian population has grown from about 30% to 66% in just 15 years: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/demographics-s....
Most people perceive the change negatively. Some objectively good qualities have been diminished: collegiality has been replaced by cut-throat competitiveness. External perceptions of prestige have gone down even as SAT scores have gone up, partly due to racism but also partly due to back-channel whispering about increased cheating.
That being said, I acknowledge that many of the same reasons I don't like the shift were and still are used to keep Jews out of elite schools. And I agree that on the whole it's wrong. At the same time, I also recognize that this is a problem of assimilation. People want to preserve aspects of their culture they believe to be virtuous. But our institutions have limited capacity to assimilate and inculcate new groups with our values.
I think discrimination against Asians in higher Ed should end. I'm a little wary of what road that will lead us down.
I too went to a selective admission high school that was mostly asian, in Australia, which never had AA to get rid of in the first place. We ate a lot of vietnamese food, learnt how to to say Nguyen properly, played Big 2, laughed at FOB Asian parent's pressure and a had a good time. By the second generation people are assimilated but still have their own culture and we were united far more often than divided.
I'm curious what your evidence is that "universities have formal policies" discriminating against Asian Americans. Because you realize, I hope, that the study being cited only made inferences about "bonus points" on the assumption that SAT score is the only worthwhile factor to be considered in admissions decisions. There is no evidence that I see that Asian Americans are being discriminated against by policy due to their race.
Quoting from their most-recent-of-several amici briefs on the matter:
Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia
University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College,
Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins
University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University,
Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale
University submit this brief as amici curiae in support
of respondents. [[Amici have long used admissions policies
similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved
in Regents of University of California v. Bakke]],
438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan
Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger,
539 U.S. 306 (2003). [[Amici accordingly have substantial
experience with admissions policies that consider
all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience,
including in some circumstances the applicant’s
racial or ethnic background.]]
They go on:
[[Amici accordingly urge the Court]] to interpret
the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to
continue to [[allow educational institutions to structure
admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity]]
as single factors within a highly individualized,
holistic review process.
I have taken the liberty of using [[double brackets] to direct your attention to the really salient bits.
There's the whose-who of American universities saying, in pretty clear language, to the Supreme Court, that they would find it very inconvenient if the Supreme Court were to illegalize their racial discrimination programs.
Are you still unconvinced that American universities operate racial discrimination programs?
If your objection is the more narrow "I agree that American universities often operate racial discrimination programs, but disagree that those racial discrimination programs disfavor Asians", I'd be more than happy to find you citations of of which groups particular formal racial discrimination policies discriminate in favor of. This will, inevitably, fail to find Asians on that list. If you disagree with me on this prediction, please name three representative universities and I'll happily do the legwork on finding their written statement of which races are favored by their formal racial discrimination programs.
"Orwellian" has become one of HN's least useful snarl words that now communicates nothing aside from "I disagree with this point of view and consequently the way it is framed."
If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.
You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable?
Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation?
It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.
"To discriminate" means to draw distinctions and act upon them. Establishing a maximum quota of Jewish or Asian students at a university is, factually, discrimination. It may be morally justifiable discrimination, but it is discrimination.
If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education?
If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.
That's not a useful definition of discrimination, as it would also mean that students with low test scores are being discriminated against. In fact, the only way to not discriminate would be to simply admit everyone.
Well, if you begin from the premise that "discrimination" is first and foremost something bad, and only has any semantic content as a secondary affair, your comment might make sense. But usually you take words as you find them. Students with low test scores are being discriminated against, and everyone thinks that's fine. That's not racial discrimination, though -- a distinction which is specifically called out in the comment you respond to.
The alternative to admitting everyone, if you're determined not to discriminate along any dimension, is to admit by lottery. This will produce results which are biased in various ways, but not because of any distinctions you drew.
Hey that's not a bad idea. What if admissions were simply taken out of the hands of universities and conducted as a lottery by some independent third party. Then the purpose of universities is to simply educate those who come through their doors rather than engage in the business of trying to advance their position in college rankings through the admissions process.
Students with low test scores are discriminated against. That's what the word means. It has a negative connotation because usually people use it to describe discrimination based upon things that are usually unjust to discriminate based on, like sex and race.
Isn't it in Harvard's self-interest, and the interest of its students, to have a diverse (racially and in many other ways) student body that prepares students for a diverse world?
The point is that they are investing in the growth of their endowment by seeking to maximize future donations from successful alums. With that goal it is straightforward to select exclusively from the two groups most likely to meet it.
Harvard's interest lies in keeping itself as the power center of America: produce the future wealthy and powerful, eduate the kids of the current powerful and wealthy. If the current powerful and wealthy has diversity, it is good for them: that is, they would recruit a kid of Chinese billionaire, instead of the kid of City Wok in South park.
Are people who do not attend multicult schools really at a disadvantage in life? Who says Harvard and other elite schools have any interest in "diversity" in "many other ways" than racially? Do their admissions policies include quotas for different religions, political ideologies, professional interests, extracurricular interests, etc.? No, their interest in "diversity" ends at skin color.
A cynic might say that, since Harvard is part of the predominantly-WASP establishment it's in their self-interest to keep their student body predominantly WASPy, with a diverse smattering of minorities. If Harvard turned around one day and based admissions solely on academic merit, they would end up churning out lots of well-educated Asians and Jews, and let's face it, it's not like white people are going to let Asians and Jews run the country so Harvard loses its status as the academy of the nation's leadership.
>If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty.
This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?
I would say the disparity in IQ scores is another symptom of the same problem rather than a fundamental cause. I don't think black people are fundamentally stupider than Chinese people, for instance.
>If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.
That is not logical at all.
How can it be discrimination when 2 racial groups are admitted in opposite class-to-population ratios?
Blacks at 6% < 13%
AND
Asians at 29% > 5.3%?
The AND conjunction is key. It would be clear discrimination if both groups' percentages were less than the representative population.
And by the way, if such a hypothetical black person didn't know: the Asians are already an "undesirable" applicant group. It's somewhat of an open secret in admissions that "we don't want anymore Asians."[1] That the maligned group still gets 29% in the uphill battle against that condescension is astounding.
Also, I'm not sure where the logic of blacks as 13% of population should or would translate to ~13% of Harvard student body. Let's look at each layer of qualifications for an elite school:
Of the students that achieve SAT scores of ~2200+, are 13% of them black?
Ok, let's pretend Harvard removes SAT scores from consideration and only looks at GPA. Out of all the valedictorians at high schools, are 13% of them black?
Ok, let's eliminate SAT and GPA. Just evaluate students on course workload. Of the students that took AP (Advanced Placement) classes such as AP Calculus, AP English, etc, are 13% of those enrolled black?
How is it Harvard's problem of discrimination if their student body doesn't happen to have ~13% blacks? The only way to do that would be to relax the tough academic standards until it's meaningless. No SAT, GPA, or course transcripts.
I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years. The 6% blacks at an elite school may be low but hopefully, the vast majority of those 6% actually belong there by genuine academic qualifications.
Posted this elsewhere in the thread but I'll say something similar again: I love that here on HN, where from working in the industry I can sensibly assume the posters are mostly white and Asian, no one questions whether the metrics are of any quality. Is SAT really a good measure of your talents as a human being? Are high school grades? Two things that vary based on your education before the moment of the test and the grades. The grades themselves being subjective evaluations from thousands of people with different standards. If the quotas were swapped and whites and Asians were getting the "bonus", how quickly would the arguments shift to the idea that the metrics aren't any good in the first place? You probably took the SAT, do you honestly think its' a great talent indicator or a mediocre one? How many courses are out there that promise to improve your score and how much money do they cost? Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one. Is that a great metric to decide people's futures. Who has access to SAT prep courses? Wealthy people (and people who know the system well and budget to game it).
Grades? You want to talk about grades? If the culture is overall discriminatory, how can we trust subjective evaluations from that culture?
Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity. If the system is gameable why should we take its metrics seriously? And if we can't take the metrics seriously we shouldn't be upset about ignoring the metrics and making subjective choices.
I worked in standardized testing for ten years for SAT's competitor and am very familiar with the SAT as well, and phenomenal effort was made detect and correct for racial, gender and cultural bias. I cranked out crates of statistical analysis using SAS analyzing every demographic breakdown looking for statistical anomalies in answers so they could be excluded from scoring (and mainly preventing pretest items from ever being scored items in the first place.) If blacks (or whites, or women, or Eskimos) performed statistically significantly worse on a question, then it was thrown out of scoring.
> Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one.
Yeah, they have a financial interest in promoting their snakeoil. They teach you how to not be a fuckup before you take the test (get good sleep, don't go drinking) and a few general facts about the test to minimize wasting time, they don't teach you how to "beat" the SAT/ACT, that hasn't been a thing since the 80's.
I didn't say cultural bias was an issue, you're twisting my words. And the people I know who vouch for the effectiveness of test prep classes don't even teach them anymore, they taught them mostly as a summer jobs or jobs out of college before they found more of a career path job. They have no reason to vouch for the effectiveness of the classes, they are speaking about personal experience.
And you honestly don't think the classes help at all? Seeing sample questions, taking sample tests, and learning strategies to handle questions you don't know. You might as well say structured practice doesn't help. And sure you could say "why don't the kids from less affluent families practice just as much?" but if your parent doesn't know how the game is played the sixteen year old kid still isn't as prepared as the kid who has affluent parents. And the scores aren't going to reflect ability as much as they reflect whether you come from a household that prepares you for standardized tests.
The demographic information collected for the test is a proxy for culture, since we really don't have any idea. We just detected if individual test items were gotten wrong substantially more often for any individual demographic categories. In the end it really doesn't matter why people got it wrong, just that statistically it's a strong sign it's a bad question.
Yes, the tests help. But they just help you reach your maximum potential. You're not hacking the test, you're hacking yourself. You can get basic prep courses for not much money. Yes some people cannot afford that, but that is a problem with secondary education that test prep even exists. There is no way you can make a test that doesn't discriminate against people that don't get enough sleep or show up hung over or the person didn't figure out the basics of taking standardized tests through primary and secondary education.
I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years.
As a black person who was accepted to (and graduated from) MIT, and had SAT scores less than my peers (but excellent grades and extracurriculars) allow me to respond: I feel fine.
If you had "excellent grades" (GPA), you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about. Your MIT peers had excellent grades and so did you. You got admitted without some artificial lowering of standards to mirror a 13%-black-ratio of the population at large. I'm sure some Caucasian MIT students had lower SAT scores than you as well. As a whole, all the students at MIT had legitimate academic chops to get admitted. MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the University of North Carolina academic scandal.
you're not the example of watered down academic standards for admittance that I was talking about
At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the North Carolina academic scandal.
Interesting fact: MIT coaches do have input into the admissions process.
The NC scandal was not about reducing admission standards in the name of discrimination, it was about stacking athletic teams. That's a whole different (and real) topic than this thread, especially since your post referred to Harvard.
>At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
Understood. However, you're addressing something I didn't say. I wasn't accusing elite universities of dumbing down existing standards. I was talking about about how the universities would hypothetically have to lower the academic thresholds to fulfill someone's idea that 13% of Ivy Leagues should be black to mirror the 13% in the general population.
>, it was about stacking athletic teams.
Right. But, what's the reason-behind-the-reason that it gets framed as "stacking athletes" so that it looks like it has nothing to do with academics?
In reality, it's the academics (or fiction of it) that made it a scandal in the first place.
Let's remember that it's a football scholarship. It's supposed to be scholars who go to school and happen to use football participation to pay for tuition. For many reasons (societal, circuses & bread, etc), it has mutated into athletes who need to fake the academic process to play for the school. Since society has not embraced an alternative structure for 19-year olds to play televised minor-league football outside of college institutions, that's how academics got twisted to fit a non-educational agenda. Football isn't getting in the way of school; it's school that is getting in the way of football.
As for making the black percentages at ivy leagues match the population at large, I'm not exactly sure what the other posters who dismiss SAT + GPA + AP course transcripts are proposing. If elite schools are academic institutions (instead of unpaid football teams), and SAT+GPA+AP classes are cultural discrimination, what do they propose the schools look at? The color of the skin? If football doesn't have much to do with academic qualifications, the amount of pigment in the skin doesn't either.
You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?
A local news station recently did a piece on a former basketball player brought in on scholarship to the local big U who was functionally illiterate. He seems to have had enough resolve to turn himself around but it baffles me how someone like that could be expected to be a "scholar athlete" when they are incapable of college level scholarship. It also speaks to the failure of secondary education that high schools will issue diplomas to unprepared students solely to keep their graduation rates up.
You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?
I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT. I know of students with worse grades than me that were admitted to MIT. MIT considers many factors. Based on my experience there, that is a good thing, YMMV.
I don't know what "stacking athletic teams" means, but the NC football scandal that I'm familiar with involved the school providing fake classes for their football players, to maintain the illusion that they were "student-athletes" instead of just "athletes".
Your response was on point, concise and well made. I was going to craft a many paragraph response but yours summed up the essence of mine in far fewer sentences. Well done.
If said Asian did it in an attempt specifically to bolster his/her admissions chances, I'll feel the same way I would feel if that applicant reported a fraudulent extracurricular activity on their application.
Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable?
Straightforward: "Do American universities routinely intentionally discriminate against Asian applicants as a consequence of formal policies designed to ensure that happens?" Binary question with a single, verifiable answer.
The objective, verifiably true answer to that question happens to be "Yes." You can be in favor of it, if you like, but disagreeing that it is actually policy beggars the imagination.
Straightforward: Do you think the SAT and high school GPA are excellent metrics (note that I'm not asking are they decent metrics that measure something, I'm asking do you believe they are excellent metrics)? It seems to me that the SAT is a gameable system and that some groups (people who are wealthy, people inclined to spend money on education) are more likely to spend money on the types of things that help them game the system (SAT courses that guarantee certain score improvements because they teach the student how to game the system). If one group has less money they are less able to game the system. Or if you are from a less affluent family that doesn't even realize there are New England, SV, NYC & LA parents paying for multi-thousand dollar SAT prep courses that your child is competing with.
And high school grades are subjective evaluations, often from mediocre teachers, that are likely to themselves be subject to bias because the subjective evaluators have many of the same biases as the culture at large.
I agree that SAT/GPA are gameable. Can you find an alternative that is not gameable, but which is better than the blacbox of HYP admission machine? If you can't, what is there to argue, except to favor the blackbox policies of HYP.
Do American universities routinely discriminate against African Americans and Latinos as a consequence of reliance on standardized tests and curricula on which they are known to receive lower scores?
Adjustment for the bias in these measures might correct for discrimination, not create it.
The purpose of admissions testing for almost any organization (businesses for prospective employees, military for recruits, schools for students, basketball teams for players) is to find those who are most likely to succeed at what they will have to do if admitted.
The only question is whether these measures are good or bad at predicting who is likely to succeed. In the university case, that means do well in classes and graduate. If they are bad predictors, they need to be replaced with good predictors. If they are good predictors, the problem for groups who are "known to receive lower scores" is not the measurement.
The fact that Massachusetts routinely receives lower temperature scores than Florida is not evidence that thermometers are bad.
You just completely missed the entire thrust of my argument, which is not whether something meets patio11's criteria of discrimination, but the very question of what constitutes discrimination, and how your point of view and cognitive biases lead you to your own criteria, and not anything "objective" or "logical" or "scientific."
Your response to my point - "It's a question of values" - was to simply re-state your value.
If you grew up black in a black community, black piato11's straightforward definition would probably be: "Do American universities engage in recruiting and admissions practices that ensure that black students are significantly underrepresented among the student body?" This is also a binary question with a single, verifiable answer. At may elite U.S. universities, the answer is a resounding "yes," whether or not the "yes" is intentional.
You are operating at a level where not only do you believe the question itself has already been decided, but it doesn't seem to even have occurred to you that the question itself was ever in question, and that anyone might have a different view at all.
When I was in 12, I volunteered to help feed the poor at a soup kitchen. When I was in high school, there was a mandatory volunteer requirement of 40 hours just to graduate. Volunteering isn't disgusting, it's valuable experience. It's no different than putting volunteer experience on a resume to get a job. Volunteers are in short demand; it'd be much more disgusting to deny help just because their intents aren't purely altruistic. Heaven forbid you help someone and help yourself at the same time.
Through four years and working for around thirty different families, I only met one that were just clearly in need of help. And they were a couple suffering from undiagnosed developmental disabilities. (The local social services took the opportunity of our construction project to gain access to the house and get them properly into the system.) Almost everyone else we worked for were just shiftless leechers prone to outbursts of violence.
It made me realize that most "humanitarian" outfits serving "the poor" are doing a great disservice to the elimination of human suffering. Subsidizing "the poor" just creates more poor people. If we really wanted to reduce human suffering, we would leave "the poor" to die off and subsidize the family formation and procreation of successful people.
It's quite patronising to be assisted by someone who doesn't really care for you, but is just using you to get into college, something that you might never experience.
“I don't want to be racist or anything,” Lawrence said. “Everyone works hard and struggles. But there's this feeling that it's going to be harder for us.”
No, it's going to be harder for someone who's parents can't afford tutoring academies named "Little Harvard", tennis lessons, violin lessons or 4 hours of extracurriculars a day.
This sounds like someone who has been given every advantage in life complaining about not being given more advantages. Maybe more of them should do volunteer programs in poor communities so they can think about how difficult it would be for those kids to get into Harvard. After seeing what a life of poverty is like, having your SAT score adjusted down by a couple of points will seem like quite a bargain.
According to you, it's even more racist then. Because, what about the asian students that come from poverty? Why is the adjustment (still can't believe they do this) based on ethnicity and not on the parents income or bank account?
This occurs in Brazil with racial quotas at university. The only problem is that most Brazilians have some African blood (some say one drop is enough to claim they are black). It'd make more sense, as you mentioned, if it were based on income.
In Fanshen, its is noted in pre-PRC China, poor peasants in the countryside could not afford livestock, so peasants used their own shit as fertilizer. Sometimes peasants would even steal one another's shit.
That is poverty. Taiwanese families who are getting press because they want their kid to get into Harvard by taking the place of the poor black kid whose family was in the US before 1808 are not poor.
Classic racism. Say that the target group (Jews, Asians, whatever) is wealthier/smarter/more powerful than average, then use that to penalise all members of the group.
I'm amazed the American left falls for this stuff.
That doesn't mean all non-Asians don't "value education and hard work". However, I think those are good attributes that an educational institution should be emphasizing.
Exactly. The slave trade ended in 1808. Most black families have been in the US since before then. They have been here before most white families got here. They were here certainly before the Asians moved here. The East Asians I talk to in all walks of life are rarely born from poor farmers in western/central China. They are usually from what would be considered the upper middle class in Asia.
Despite blacks having built this country, the foundation of the USA is that they be a nation enslaved within the nation. The constitution itself has their worth marked as 3/5ths a person. Look at the man choked to death in New York City accused of selling loose cigarettes. After which they couldn't even find any cigarettes on even. The grand jury lets the officer off. The Murdoch outlets, the Post and Fox News whip up a frenzied atmosphere telling blacks they must submit themselves and immediately follow police instructions at all times, or face death. This is not seen as a threat. I could say that the two black men killed by police meant that the lives of two policemen should be taken by the community in New York - which did happen. Despite the courts, despite the corporate media - two dead blacks meant two dead policemen. An eye was gouged out was met with an eye gouged out, and I could say this was just. Of course, that would be seen as a threat. People yelling on Fox News and in the Post, with the corpse still fresh that blacks must prostrate themselves before police or face death is not seen as a threat. Despite it all, rough justice did happen with the funerals of the two police officers.
Ycombinator was created by two criminals. Criminals in a sense that could not be considered rhetorical or hyperbolic. Both born to the white upper middle class, with connections to the US establishment. Went to the Ivy League schools mentioned here. Morris criminally crashed about 10% of the Internet. Investigations showed strong evidence Graham had foreknowledge of this happening, perhaps even aided it. What was their punishment? Graham nothing. Morris did not do a day in jail. His father was an upper middle class WASP, with, as the song says "high office relations in the government". While this was happening, the MoD hackers, referred to privately by a corporate security executive as "spics, niggers and white trash from New York" do see jail time - three see the inside of a jail. The judge points to ONE computer which crashed as why they need to as the judge put it, be made an example of. Of course, the reality is that whatever access they may have had to that computer, along with dozens of other people who had access, none of the three crashed the Learning Link computer. No judge wanted to make an example of Morris or Graham, computer geniuses made a mistake or whatever is how the US media and press played it out. If I recall correctly, the MoD headlines in the New York Times even mentioned the MoD were working class in the headlines.
It's an obvious historical case, massive destruction followed by Ivy League reward and founding a capital fund worth tens of billions, versus one crashed computer (which the accused did not crash) followed by working class men looking for work with criminal records. Different outcomes ordained at birth, before birth.
All hot air in a sense. Justice for me is working class justice, the justice of those of us who work, which is so alien to the liberal democracy and hegemony which springs from the current relations of production of capitalism, that it might as well be a different word. It comes only with the dialectic forward movement of history along with advancement of the means of production and subsequent relations of production - all of which we can see here, recently with the rise of mobile and the cloud. We see it with the coming rise, maybe, of VR/AR and Oculus, AI and Google self-driving cars, and so forth. The world has seen massive shifts in the forces of production and subsequent relations of production in ...
Is it true that non-jewish whites are more underrepresented than even hispanics or african americans, while at the same time needing higher scores to be accepted?
Technically the answer is yes, unless there is a "compelling governmental interest". The supreme court once ruled that selecting college students so as to increase the diversity of viewpoints in a class satisfied this test, which is basically how diversity got to be the buzzword that it is today.
Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.
True, federal racial discrimination laws seem to have been put in place after 1942.
I suppose what I find most interesting about this situation is that the census still requires you to identify your race and the race of those in your household.
In light of the census's record of abuse of such racial data, I asked my roommate not to identify my race when the census agent came to our house years ago . However, the census agent returned a couple more times, threatening my roommate with legal retaliation if he didn't comply with divulging my race. Despite the threats, the agent eventually stopped showing up, and the promised threats never materialized.
Title VI, a federal law, prohibits discrimination by race in, most prominently for the present discussion, any federally funded university, which is substantially all of them due to how America does research budgets and federal student aid. Many universities are government institutions, and in the United States government cannot generally discriminate on the basis of race due to the Equal Protection clause of the US Constitution (in the 14th Amendment) and/or the Due Process clause (5th Amendment). Both are generally pretty toothy.
However, a contentious series of Supreme Court cases (Bakke, Gratz, Grutter) have held that universities are allowed to racially discriminate if they do so with the intention of achieving compelling educational interests and as long as their institutionalized racial discrimination is not a crass point system but rather a "holistic" evaluation of applicants which uses race as "one part of" the decisionmaking process.
Racial discrimination is pervasive at US selective universities, public and private. It is described as a minor, marginal policy, but all players understand that abandoning the formal racial discrimination policies would cause instantaneous hits to enrollment of favored racial minorities of roughly 50% or more, as has indeed happened when particular formal racial discrimination policies were found illegal. For example, the Gratz decision illegalized a points system used by the University of Michigan, where 100 points were required for admission and being a member of a favored racial group was worth 20 points. (For comparison: the best essay they received in a year was worth 3 points and winning a gold medal in the Olympics was worth 5. )
Some states have explicitly "No-we-really-mean-it-this-time" illegalized racial discrimination in public education, a policy which commands a supermajority of support with American voters. California is a prominent example. The universities threatened massive resistance. (That phrasing would be understood by educated Americans to be a grave insult. It is a callback to a particular phrase used by a Southern politician refusing to comply with federal laws prohibiting discrimination against racial minorities.) Enrollment by favored minority groups declined by roughly half. Over the same period, Asian enrollment (as a percentage) increased markedly and white enrollment was roughly constant or declining.
It is described as a minor, marginal policy, but all players understand that abandoning the formal racial discrimination policies would cause instantaneous hits to enrollment of favored racial minorities of roughly 50% or more, as has indeed happened when particular formal racial discrimination policies were found illegal.
It's marginal for the majority population. Not for the minority group. Its like handicapped parking. If you were to remove them, your parking situation only sees a marginal improvement, but for the handicap it's probably a big deal.
The minority population. The small percentage of Blacks in college doesn't impact greatly the percentage of Asians at Ivy League schools. It's a red herring.
This is why I use the word "margalised group" instead of "minority". Black people in apartheid South Africa made up up the majority of the population, but were very definetly margalised.
Of course people shouldn't be rejected by their race.
But according to the article, "all" asians have the same profile. If this is true, I can understand why some of the similar profiles are rejected in the name of diversity.
Once an SAT score is sufficiently high, it makes sense to look at other things. I can see why a college would want 50/50 gender, and a wide spread of social backgrounds.
If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.
> If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.
This doesn't bear any resemblance to current admissions policies. Discrepancies between races in average SAT score at a given college are in the hundreds of points, not the low tens.
Yes but no one takes the writing portion as a real measure of anything concerning scholastic ability and its the most coach-able part of the test and even back when I was taking it a 200 point difference was taken to be no guarantee of differing levels of academic ability.
The difference has been hundreds of points since long before the merging of the writing test into the SAT. And yes, a 200 point difference is, and always has been, a large difference. I think the standard deviation is generally in the ballpark of 120 points.
SD for verbal is 115, math is 120. This must have been what I was thinking of. SD for overall (V+M) score is 218. The overall SD is much more relevant here, but let's note that a difference of one standard deviation is still a very large difference.
The article and the person you are replying to are specifically talking about disadvantages faced by Asian Americans, and they have an SAT penalty of 50 points, according to the article and the paper it references: http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/files/webAdmission%20Pre...
Without making a judgment one way or the other on the core issue - given that this paper is looking at "highly selective private research universities" with average SAT scores of over 1300, a 50 point difference is not very big and probably within each individual student's margin of error. When you are in that scoring range, each incorrect answer has a magnified score penalty to maintain the normal distribution.
1. Asians suffer a penalty of 50 points relative to whites. We can equally say, using the numbers from rjdagost's comment, that whites themselves suffer a penalty of 230 points.
2. The entire concept of the normally curved scores is that one 50-point difference is just as significant as any other 50-point difference. That's why we use standard deviations to compare things. It is true that scores at the very high end are more volatile, since most of the test's "space" is devoted to distinguishing between people in the middle of the range, but 1300 does not seem to be at a level where that worry would make sense; the data I have to hand is a score report from 2000 saying "on average, a person with a math score of 710 loses 2 points on a second testing", which is pretty reliable. And regardless, while an individual student might easily lose 30 points by retesting, group averages don't move so easily.
> "on average, a person with a math score of 710 loses 2 points on a second testing", which is pretty reliable
On thinking about this further, I've grossly misused the word "reliable". What that quoted bit says is precisely that while an individual's score may vary from test to retest (and is thus not necessarily reliable), the average score of a group is highly stable.
Racial discrimination, neatly quantified: "Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission."
Note that no school actually penalizes Asian Americans by 50 points or gives 230 points to black applications. This study appears to assume that one's SAT score is the only factor that should be used in college admission and that race is the only explanatory factor for the disparity between admission and scores.
But admissions policies that granted extra "points" based on growing up in a poorly performing school district or the economic status of the parents would also likely generate this sort of distribution.
I find penalizing scores of Asian Americans to be exactly as racist as improving scores of African Americans and other ethnicities. If we, as a society, believe that all people from all ethnicities are equal, why do we do this? I could understand if we boosted scores of people coming from poor families, but changing scores based only on ethnicity? How is that not racist?
All people from all ethnicities are equal in the sense that they deserve an equal oppertunity to succeed. However, that has not happened. Certain ethnic groups (black people) have been systematically disadvantaged. They continue to be under-represented in higher education and over-represented in the prison system. Affirmative action does a good job at getting black people into college, which generally helps a person later in life when they want to get a good job.
It's not black people who are disadvantaged - but people coming from poor, ghetto communities who are. The fact that they are black is secondary. Like I've said, I would be completely ok with them being given extra points due to coming from a very poor/criminal families. No problem here. But a simple system "black? extra points. Asian? negative points" is nothing but racist. Is a black person from a rich family getting extra points? If yes, why? Is an Asian person from a poor family still getting negative points? If yes, again - why? It literally doesn't make any sense.
You're now shifting the conversation from the broad admissions policy to specific admission merits of individuals. The policy of promoting the admission of black students as a whole has been successful. It's not racism when a minority/disadvantaged group is given a leg up on a group that already has an advantage. The effect is so minimal that it really isn't worth discussing.
How has it been successful? Some people got admitted to university on the basis of their skin color, while some other people got rejected based on their skin color. How is this a success?
Skin color is not the only factor of admissions, so your reduction of the situation to being one is not appropriate. It is a success in that people who might have previously been unable to attend college are admitted to college, and given scholarships for needy/minority students. We need not worry about the fate of middle class white people like me.
Asians from poor neighborhoods still are because they're Asian. And if they are male, then they are even more discriminated against than Asian women who are both "female" and "Asian".
Basically Asian in general regardless if you're from overseas or from NY, you're getting shafted. And if you're male... good luck, you better have a 5.0 GPA and be the captain of the football team to get in any where.
If you think all ethnicities are equal, a quota system makes perfect sense. If all ethnicities are equal, the differences in admissions must be the result of error, bias, or discrimination.
Asians/whites are just forcing their kids to prep better for SAT. The SAT may be biased. Grades in high school are biased.
Admissions criteria are actually biased (don't even have to play devils adovate here). Vice President (one of 55!) of the junior Sailing Club looks better than guy who picks teams at the local basketball hoop. Playing Violin looks better than freestyle rapper.
" If all ethnicities are equal, the differences in admissions must be the result of error, bias, or discrimination."
No, if all ethnicities are equal, then having 100% of Asians or 100% of black or white people doesn't mean anything. If black people are just as good as white people(and they are!) then we shouldn't care about the split being 50/50 - any split is good enough, because the color of your skin literally doesn't matter.
>>Asians/whites are just forcing their kids to prep better for SAT.
and this sort of generalization is racist all by itself.
What the original poster is saying though is that if they are all equal, then differences must be either though some bias or just random chance. With consistent disparity it is more likely to be bias. So to counter this a quota system makes sense.
Of course we know both that a quota system won't fly and skin color matters a lot in virtually everything we do. We're at a great lose-lose scenario.
This is an issue of some interest. For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting. When we look at the CalTech statistics, racial biases are not apparent (admittedly, we have to do this in a very rough way because universities will generally fight tooth and nail to prevent researchers from looking into the effect of race on admissions). And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered", which is the least significance a variable can have before being "not considered".
If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, based on massive discrepancies between the records of admitted freshmen of different races, why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement that race is considered, based on a lack of such discrepancies?
For example, the UC system in California is currently prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions. But we know they're doing it anyway by looking at the statistics of the students they keep admitting.
Do "we know they're doing it anyway"? When Prop 209 passed, minority enrollment dropped. And there are any number of factors that the system may consider that are not race, but may be correlated with race. In any event, the numbers I can find show black and latino admissions combined are less than expected based on CA and national numbers.
And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered"
I was responding to a poster that said "CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all" - CalTech itself disagrees. I was not commenting on the extend or magnitude of that consideration.
If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered,
I'm not sure I accept this premise.
why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement
Occam's razor. In any event, we know that CalTech does target minorities via outreach programs [0] so it would not be out of character for them to consider race. And anecdotally (I'm black), I was heavily recruited by CalTech despite my showing no interested in attending and having below (CalTech) average SAT scores (and above average grades/school rank/extra curricular)
The University of California is prohibited by law from discriminating by race in admissions, but they've found other ways to increase minority representation that don't violate the law. Perhaps the most significant example is the "Eligibility in the Local Context" program. If a student is in the top 9% of their high school class, their application gets a bump. It doesn't involve race on the face of things, but it has increased minority enrollment in practice.
All right, I think I agree with you on many points. Let me try to summarize my view here:
1. We can only see the effect of race on admission at a very coarse resolution, because universities try their hardest to obscure it.
2. Even at this coarse resolution, it's easy to see that at most US universities, race has a massive effect. We see this by noting that when you break down admitted freshmen by race, they show very large group differences on all the characteristics that the universities will admit they're looking for.
3. Although minority enrollment in the UC system dropped after Prop 209, we still see these large differences. As they are our only way of inferring any effect of race, we conclude that race still has large effects, despite the fact that this is now illegal. Ward Connerly will tell you any number of stories (well, write stories down that you can read) about other UC regents specifically plotting to subvert prop 209 and get minorities in by whatever pretexts they can think of.
4. We fail to observe significant differences among the racial groups at CalTech.
5. You are almost certainly correct to estimate that, since CalTech says it considers race, we should believe that it does consider race.
6. But I, personally, while admitting that in the sense of point (5) CalTech does consider race, still think that it's usefully correct to go around telling people "CalTech, unlike other US schools, doesn't discriminate by race". This is because when we use our own metric, which is what we have to do for other schools, we can't detect any discrimination on the part of CalTech. When we compare it to other schools, it seems reasonable to measure them all the same way.
Put another way, in the wise words of Cecil Adams, what we cannot reliably measure we are entitled to ignore. CalTech has information that we don't, but until it makes a difference that we can see, there's not much of a reason for us to pay attention. Comparing our view of UCLA with CalTech's view of itself is terrible statistics.
We can only see the effect of race on admission at a very coarse resolution, because universities try their hardest to obscure it
I agree, that we can only see the effects at a coarse resolution, but disagree that universities try to "obscure" that effect. I think the reason for the coarse resolution is that there isn't a simple formula for each individual student. Admissions officials look at each application and weigh factors depending on each student's particular circumstances. This would be consistent with another post in this topic about so many Asian applications being similar (assuming the post was true) which would make it harder to tease out unique factors (I'm speculating here).
they show very large group differences on all the characteristics that the universities will admit they're looking for.
I don't agree with this at all, especially looking at all U.S. universities in aggregate. There are a lot of universities that look for different aspects rather than pure academics, and look to serve different audiences (HBCU's being the obvious example). Can you give an example of a college or university that claims to
look for a particular set of characteristics but has a student body that conflict with those characteristics?
Although minority enrollment in the UC system dropped after Prop 209, we still see these large differences.
California has a population that is (as of 2011) 40% white, 7% black, 14% Asian and 38% Latino. [0]
The U.C. System (undergrad) is currently 30% white, 4% black, 34% Asian and 18% Latino. [1]
Are the "large differences" you're referencing referring to the overrepresentation of Asians and underrepresentation of everyone else?
> [I] disagree that universities try to "obscure" that effect [of race on undergrad admission]
You can't be serious. Universities selectively deny access to their admissions data based on the politics of the researchers asking for it. They've been known to agree to allow access and then welsh after hearing the proposed topic of the paper. They're acting with overt malice, here.
I think people who complain about discrimination against Asian students in places such as Harvard should ask themselves, why do people want to go to Harvard? It sure as hell isn't because that is the only place you can get an excellent education.
While Harvard is obviously great as an academic institution, people want to go to Harvard for the prestige. Do you think that prestige would be there if they were to allow the place to essentially become an academic ghetto for any given ethic group (Asian, Jewish or any future group)?
Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores.
Complaining about not being accepted to a place like Harvard even though you scored a perfect SAT or some other test taking metric shows a misunderstanding of what these highly prestigious institutions are about.
We know what top universities would look like if they selected purely for academics. They would look like CalTech.
> Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur .... You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores.
CalTech has more nobel prizes per capita than any of the Ivies. Dunno if CalTech loses out on Macarthur (maybe) or Pulizer (probably), but if so it's because CalTech is a technical university. There's no reason you couldn't have an all-academically selected university focusing on the humanities.
> or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up.
This is obviously not the reason that Harvard has racial preferences.
Yes, we can agree that it is reasonable for Harvard and other high-prestige universities to select for things besides academics (ambition, social savvy, sports, extracurriculars). But the complaint being leveled is that they shouldn't pick explicitly on race.
I think you're making my point, only people hanging out on HN and other similar circles know what CalTech is...Go out there and ask random people about CalTech... :) CalTech is a first-rate academic institution but it's prestige is limited to those who actually know what it is about.
My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so.
Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.
> CalTech is a first-rate academic institution but it's prestige is limited to those who actually know what it is about...
> Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.
I understand that, which is why I didn't claim that CalTech had the same prestige as Harvard. I was rebutting your claim that Harvard had racial policies in order to get academic awards in order to get prestige.
> My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so.
Again, this is clearly not why Harvard has these policies, so bringing it up is a distraction. I agree that racial policies affect Harvard's prestige, and I agree that Harvard is driven largely by the pursuit of prestige, but I disagree that prominent racial alumni is a causal link, as you suggested.
We know what top universities would look like if they selected purely for academics. They would look like CalTech.
Again, this isn't true. Caltech considers race, legacies (this is recent), work experience and volunteer experience (although they hold less weight than academics). See section C7 of CalTech's CDS filings: http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
You're splitting hairs. First, as you say, this is recent, so it doesn't affect my points. Second, CalTech clearly makes race a much smaller factor than the Ivies, and in fact many folks who support giving racial preferences consider CalTech's stated admission policies to be mere lip service. CalTech's class is just 1% black.
Only the legacy consideration is recent, everything else (including racial consideration) has been happening for at least 20 years. But I was responding to the quote that Caltech selects "purely" for academics. They don't, they look at a number of factors.
CalTech's stated admission policies to be mere lip service
As I noted in another response to this thread, as a black high-schooler I was highly recruited by CalTech despite showing no interest in attending. They also have an outreach program. It's more than lip service. They put in less emphasize than other institutions, but it's not zero.
> Only the legacy consideration is recent, everything else (including racial consideration) has been happening for at least 20 years. But I was responding to the quote that Caltech selects "purely" for academics. They don't, they look at a number of factors.
Fair enough. Thanks for the correction. However, I still don't think their official statements are very meaningful unless backed up by actual results.
>> CalTech's stated admission policies to be mere lip service
> They also have an outreach program.
Oh sure, but these aren't admissions policies. Sorry, I'm not trying to start a fight on semantics, but I do think (especially in the context of this article) that having outreach programs is importantly different than changing the admissions procedure.
Nonsense - this is a classic example of a strawman. Your post directly implies that the only two ways to do college admissions is 1) take race into account (as it does today), or 2) look at only test scores. Holistic admissions can be race-blind, you know?
Don't know what to say other than feeling upset. The losers are more on the middle-class of poor Asians and the Whites obviously. Due to the increasingly large number of the black and the Hispanic voters, these situation will not change, if not getting worse.
Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out.
I'm fine with helping the economically disadvantaged students, but manipulating the admission by skin color or race?
Top universities just like NBA, only the best players shall attend, skin color shall not be the reason you can stay there. Not to mention there are so many other public/private universities to choose for everyone.
From what I've read most of the black and Hispanic students are not dropping out due to course work, but an inability to pay for it. Furthermore, taking out more loans is often not the best idea since many of the students do not make the connections in those schools to get the best paying jobs and usually end up with similar jobs as their peers that went to less prestigious and cheaper schools.
"Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out."
Yes, there's been a fair amount of research on this. Essentially, once you get beyond the very very top, I'm not sure what beyond Harvard and MIT (and of course CalTech), there just isn't a large enough pool of qualified candidates. So at each "level" a large fraction of these students admitted and accepting belong in a school one or two levels down, where they could thrive.
Some people may find this surprising, but you shouldn't.
It's simply how the world works. It's repugnant but life is not fair.
Racial discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also legacy admission and athletes grade fixing. It's also not uncommon for rich parents to hire a professional ghostwriter for the admission essay. College admission as a whole is extremely subjective even if they try to pretend it isn't. After that there's the rampant grade inflation. We can go on and on.
Make no mistakes though, these aren't just inefficiency that happens by oversight. Someone __always__ benefit. They certainly don't feel sorry for you. They may use fancy euphemism to justify their decisions, but we're all adults here. Nobody really believes that bullshit.
College is a business and the only thing you can do is take your money somewhere else.
Until society is ruled by some AI, we'll always have these kinds of problem.
Some things I would recommend if people really want to give away their money and support these evil institutions,
1. Change your name, first and last
2. Check a different box when they ask for your race (or any other bullshit like religion, etc.)
Changing your name has _massive_ implications besides college applications. Humans love to judge especially when they have nothing at stake. If you don't believe me, just apply to a few jobs with different names.
I'm married into a first generation Asian family and this is a constant topic of conversation on that side, especially now that their kids are getting ready for college.
The problem ultimately stems from a huge wave of mostly Korean and Chinese immigrants (but by extension other East Asian and Pacific Island nations get penalized as well), who grew up in poor countries (or when their countries were poor), suddenly finding themselves with enough money to immigrate to the U.S. and "escape". They put down roots, work their tails off and start having families.
They don't want their kids to have to struggle like they did (and they want to ensure they set themselves up well in retirement), but they have incredibly unsophisticated views of what 'success' means in America (often as a result of working so much they never really had a chance to integrate well into their adopted country).
However, they understand passing tests, having deep cultural histories around test taking to get ahead in life. So they look for the most prestigious work you can test into.
And bam, at the intersection of hard work, prestige signaling and test taking you get a fairly limited set of occupations, which these parents instinctively laser beam their kids at.
Good schools want extracurriculars? No problem! Let's use the prestige button on that, prestigious schools must want the most prestigious extracurriculars, and those are obviously piano and violin (and sometimes opera). Let's toss in some prestige sports as well, and now these kids and splitting time studying endlessly for tests to become a doctor or lawyer, practicing piano/violin and playing tennis/golf/figure skating.
Repeat until the parents think they're maximizing the fitting function for university acceptance and you end up with entire social networks and minor industries around SAT test taking, piano and violin teachers and tennis/golf/figure skating coaches.
And you know what? For a very long time this worked. Asian Americans have been extraordinarily and consistently "successful", far over-represented in university admissions and in select professions.
But there was no secret, it was literally hard screaming, crying, kicking work. There's no cheating. While their other raced peers studied for an hour every night before turning on the XBox. They studied till midnight, every night, and then spent all day Saturday at private school, then studied till midnight again, then spent most of the day on Sundays doing prestige extracurriculars. Their parents were often poor, working crap triple-D jobs, or triple shifts at convenience stores. They lived frugally and invested every single drop of blood in their kids. Even if they were often wrong headed about how they did it, it worked and anybody can do it.
But on the university side, as parents start to find the optimal mix to acceptance, application packets start to look not just virtually identical, but absolutely identical.
Imagine you're tasked with figuring out which 10 of 1000 applications all with the last names Kim, Chin, Hu, Lee, Park, Wang or Choi should be accepted:
- All have 4.0 GPAs
- All have AP degrees from High School
- All have extracurriculars that are selected from the set of {violin, piano, opera, tennis, golf}
- All went to the best High Schools in their respective areas
- All submit essays with some story about their parent's difficult immigration, usually involving stories of poverty and unbelievable work hours in menial jobs. Maybe with some kind of "escape from the communists" or "swimming to safety across Hong Kong Harbor" or something. I know 3 Chinese Americans who's parents have almost identical "swimming escape from China and lived in Kowloon Walled City for 3 years before making it to America" stories.
- All have perfect or near perfect SAT scores
What the universities are of course realizing is that it becomes a random sample at this point. There...
Interesting I know that one of the reason well off mainland Chinese parents are opting to send their kids to Public Schools in the UK to get out of the death march style of cramming facts education.
Not surprising, if you're already succesful you want your children to be happy, and you don't have this burning need to live through your children or make sure they get to do everything you missed out on at any cost.
That's interesting, I wonder how the emergent Chinese middle class is informing this.
It's really such a difficult and complicated topic. But I think the action/reaction dynamic is largely explainable and understandable.
The people who I really don't get are the ones that know better, the Amy Chua's of the world. Who have the education, the sophistication and the cultural integration to escape it, yet simply repeat the cycle of abuse, mindlessly.
While the "death march" approach has largely worked to get immediately (within a generation) into "prestige" and well paying occupations. There's also a huge number of burned out kids with absolutely shattered parental relationships.
There's several reddits dedicated to basically being support groups for deeply depressed, deeply damaged kids who grew up in this kind of grind.
Here's a thought experiment. You are a college admission counselor. You have room to accept 50 people.
You get 500 Asian American applicants with 4.0 GPAs, 1500 SATs, and IB degrees.
You get 500 White applicants with the name numbers.
You get 1 Black applicant with the same numbers.
Do you throw all 1001 applicants in a lottery and pick 50. Or are you more likely to accept the one Black applicant outright. Put the remaining 1000 in the lottery and pick 49?
Well right, that's the heart of the matter isn't it? "Diversity" in a pure form means that the people accepted should be accepted in proportional numbers to their racial percentages in the general population. If you agree with this or not isn't terribly important, it's the goal that's been set.
Ideally there'd be some set of criteria that would allow this naturally happen. Some mix of SAT score, GPA, etc. that when summed up would give you x% white, y% black, z% hispanic and so on.
But there isn't. Some ethnic groups, for whatever set of complex reasons you would like to use, under represent on these measurable criteria. But basically it boils down to this, there aren't enough Black and Hispanic students, scoring at high enough levels, AND applying to these schools, to supply a proportional representation in the student body (about 13% and 17% respectively).
"Diversity" programs operate under the assumption that there's some kind of systemic cultural, social or environmental pressure on these groups that keeps them underrepresented. What those are, seem to be complex, and for whatever reason don't appear to impact White, Asian (and a couple other identifiable groups) in the same way. Poverty, racism, culture, whatever, seem to be chronic issues for underrepresented groups while proportionally or overrepresented groups seem to either be immune to these problems or able to work through them.
The idea is that, if you get enough of these underrepresented minority applicants into prestigious schools, get them good educations, start getting them well integrated into upper socio-economic echelons, it'll have a "viral" like effect on other people in their same cultural ethnic group and eventually (over generations) they'll naturally start to represent at the "right" ratios.
On the flip side, there's well documented reasons why some ethnic groups (notably Asians, but other so called "model minorities" seem to show the same patterns) seem to excel and over-represent. It seems to mostly come from a high cultural value for education, combined with constant social and parental pressure to get educated and into prestigious jobs combined with an intense work ethic. It seems to be a repeated pattern that crosses all racial, genetic, socio-economic, geographic and other boundaries. Work hard, work towards a high goal and focus on that goal, and you'll make it out of being poor and make it into being reasonably rich.
So in your example, a pure "diversity" sample would overrepresent the White students to ensure the acceptances are as close to the natural population diversity as possible. The black student would get in, and for the remaining 49 seats, about 38 would got to White applicants, and 11 would go to Asian applicants.
The problem is obvious, setting "diversity goals" to arbitrarily say that proportional attendance is an appropriate goal is entirely arbitrary. Why is that virtuous? Because it seems fair? Why is race or ethnicity used and why not gender or economic quintile or hair color or height? Why is the concept or proportionality the right model? What's wrong with a student body that's 50% Asian?
Shouldn't hard work get rewarded instead of genetics?
Shouldn't hard work get rewarded instead of genetics?
But even in the model you suggest, you're not rewarding "hard work", you're rewarding test scores. Not the same thing. As my old professor would say, "Don't tell me you studied hard. I don't care how hard you studied."
In many regards, all these metrics are arbitrary. I wonder if there is a utilitarian perspective on college admission metrics.
Yeah, you are absolutely correct. But nobody ever seems to have come up with a better way to sort out regular snowflakes from special ones, especially in a scalable way.
Perhaps the next incarnations of how Asian parents will try to gain an edge is to hire "cultural consultants" for their kids. Their jobs would be to carve out a path to signal being different to college admissions.
The study at the core of this article appears to make the assumption that SAT scores are the only factor that ought to be considered when making college admissions decisions. But I don't think that's right. Certainly the mission of these universities is not solely to educate the best test-takers in the world.
And unless I missed it there's also no evidence that the schools studied actually do use race in their admissions decisions. There are a variety of other factors that could be considered which would end up skewing the admissions results on the basis of race. Should colleges not be allowed to give extra consideration to students from poorly performing schools simply because doing so might have the effect of giving "bonus points" to African American or Hispanic applicants?
MLK said this in his famouse speech "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." [0]
This is so sad with what many colleges/states are pushing for now. I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, which the children were born into, but not discrimination based on skin color, which the children were born with.
One's SAT score is not a measure of the content of one's character. In any case, the study being quoted here did not give any evidence that race was even being used as a factor in admissions decisions.
If you favor giving bonus points based on one's economic status, then that will correlate to the same sort of results this study revealed, with black and hispanic populations being over-represented versus an admissions policy based purely on standardized test scores.
MLK also said: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, [..] but not discrimination based on skin color
The problem is that research has shown that institutional discrimination is not just based on economics, but also on race (for example, Prager's research showing that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job callback than a black applicant without a criminal record). Ignoring race isn't the answer. As for what is the answer, that's a much harder problem which is why we're still wrestling with it.
I'm one of those Asian-Americans that applied to only "elite" schools due to constant parental pressure and did "enough" to get accepted to most. Although all this happened a decade ago, the challenges these days seem mostly the same, if not trite, in the sense that Asians seem to typically over-value institutionalized education and focus on a narrow set of activities for whatever cultural reason ... leading to racial bias from colleges and conventional life choices from Asians.
For me though, I just enjoyed trying a bunch of different stuff out and was fortunate enough to excel at a variety of things that I guess these colleges weren't expecting from an Asian. These interests include(d) linguistics, journalism, public speaking, student government, graphics + layouts + grids, game design, acrobatics, and somehow even ended up as an Eagle Scout (shrug) ... on top of hyper-accelerated math, science and tech stuff expected I guess of Asian students. Didn't sleep much though.
Also, after attending one day of Harvard's Campus Preview Weekend, my gut said "uh ... no," and went to MIT instead. Very happy about that choice in hindsight, purely based on the people I met and the meritocracy instilled in the students; I doubt I use even 25% of course material in the stuff I work on these days. The most important lesson that I did learn at the end of the day is that general society is led to believe that people should/can master only one or two tasks, a possible relic from industrialism. Instead, people should aim to become polymathic, which becomes exponentially easier by learning across diverse interests and realizing that there are many common threads across seemingly different fields -- a personal and particular implementation of "learning how to learn."
* As a side note, San Gabriel Valley? Never been so can't really guess, but I would bet that Cupertino schools were much tougher. Thankfully, we had a certain neighborhood fruit company that inspired some of us to become pirates instead of joining the navy, and to experiment with Learning Some Divinity (eventually).
> "But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity."
As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
> "But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity."
As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
This is not surprising, most asians already know this - I encountered this during admissions when I applied to undergrad for the class of 2006. I was one of the most stellar candidates from the NY tristate area (NYC area) with some of the best test scores & a diverse set of extracurriculars, and a history of excellence in regional/national math competitions & advanced coursework (Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra in 10th grade), but my being Korean definitely hurt (combined with my having wrote a bad essay, which helped give a reason to say no/waitlisted in a year where many colleges lost millions of dollars from the Enron scandal).
In the end, it didn't matter as much since I always had strong confidence in my ability to adapt and to look ahead, and my path turned out to be beneficial in many different ways. Obstacles such as this are difficult to overcome though, and it helped home in that I need to be that much sharper in order to succeed.
> Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points
Compared to what? White applicants, statistically? Why are white people the "default" which everyone else is measured against, do white people not have a race/ethnicity?
There is no 'objective' measure of what SAT score "should" get you into a university. Most universities use things other than SAT scores to decide admissions (things in addition to affirmative action/diversity, I mean, too). Some universities may rely/weight SAT scores more than others. There is no SAT score that is "supposed to" guarantee you admission, "before accounting for race". It doesn't work that way. If you think it would be more "fair" to rely exclusively on SAT scores, you can make an argument for that, but a test is not in fact some objective measure of 'reality', it's just one test.
The idea that it's just a fact that "Asian Americans are penalized by 50 points"-- it's an under-specified statement, and it doesn't actually mean much.
I think this is an example of the assumptions/biases in the language of this article and those quoted in it, in general.
I was part of a program that changed to graduate admissions based solely on subject GRE score. The first such resulting class was 88% Chinese, 4% Taiwanese, and 8% white American. Did they do that well as a class in graduate studies or in academia? No. Some were great, some were terrible, just like every other year. The years where admission was done based on prior math research instead resulted in a more interesting group of students, although again some were great, some were terrible.
It's well-known that in subject GREs Chinese students score very well compared to American students of any racial or ethnic background. (As a Chinese friend asked, "Why don't you Americans just study for it, like we do?") However, subject GRE scores are not that predictive of success in a graduate program. Research skills, writing ability, grit, and the simple capacity to get stuff done are not well-predicted by multiple choice exams. It is useful to know that students who do well on, for instance, the math subject GRE can do triple integrals quickly. That's about it.
So, since subject GREs don't predict graduate success, and SATs are not that well-correlated with college success either [1], admissions committees use other factors to evaluate students. In fact, a number of schools do not require any standardized test [2]. These other factors range widely and include high school grades, which are most predictive of college success, volunteer work, interestingness, etc. And they do include race and geographic origin. Small colleges in the Midwest are currently targeting California, Texas, and Florida for recruitment because of their huge numbers of graduating seniors, and the coastal schools let in some token Midwesterners to provide some leavening to their provincial views of flyover country.
There is discrimination against Asian Americans in admissions in the US. It's not written into policy explicitly: it's just like discrimination against women and blacks today, taking the form of discussion of "fit" or subjective evaluation of how interesting someone's work is. It should stop, and the comparison to the "Jewish quotas" is apt. At the same time, test-based admissions are ludicrous, and evaluation of extracurricular activities and accomplishments given the student's environment are necessary. I had friends at Caltech who went to high schools that didn't offer calculus: smart people come from all sorts of backgrounds.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadOther people seem to want the same thing, but they advocate a world view that specifically considers ethnicity, and sex, and other body attributes. I feel certain it's well-intentioned, but it's racism, sexism, etc.
Further, that worldview encourages codifying racism and sexism, and making them part of our workplaces. It has become normal for universities to tweak points on admissions applications, and for big companies to publish pie charts about their progress toward diversity. But this is just more racism and sexism. If you have to add an ethnicity column to your employee database and periodically release ethnicity pie charts to show how unracist you are, I hope it is obvious that something is very wrong.
We shouldn't try to use old bad ideas to increase justice. Justice will increase naturally when we discard old bad ideas.
Every day, we're putting down bricks, building the world of the future. Let's put down the kind of bricks that suit the world we actually want.
You realize that your first sentence does not imply your second sentence is a good policy automatically, right? It might, but there is no automatic relationship there.
If you are prepared to have an open mind on this, I'd strongly encourage you to watch https://www.gv.com/lib/unconscious-bias-at-work.
I think that your goal of a world where ethnicity, sex, and other body attributes do not matter very much is admirable. However, in an imperfect world - especially one in which some people explicitly disavow that goal - it is worth considering what a policy like yours will actually achieve. What that video linked above to find out.
Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions
Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination.
Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media."
But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students."
Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened.
Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.
So I guess is OK if Hardvard does not become homogeneous all in the name of diversity. I'll swallow it.
Edit: Yes, I know it is legal. I cannot comment about peoples motives since I don't know them.
Compare what happened to my roommate's dad: a sensitivity training guy came to give a lecture at his company, and was easily prodded into saying that workplace diversity increased along with the share of women. 40% women is more diverse than 30% women (sure). 70% women is more diverse than 60% women (hmmm). In the college context, "diverse" is more likely to be a code word for "black" than for "female", but the semantic drift is just as real; it's quite possible to describe a class as, oh, "40% diverse".
I don't follow.
In particular,
> Nobody's doing it because they believe in diversity.
strikes me as incorrect. They made a much more convincing case than you did.
Over what organizational unit? It makes a crucial difference: diversity within a team (more generally: a gerrymeandered division of the company) can fall at the same time as the total diversity across the encompassing company rises.
> You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's more likely that my roommate's dad made it up... or whether he noticed something ridiculous
3rd possibility: something seemed ridiculous because he didn't understand it.
All the newspaper headlines were proclaiming that the startup world was getting less diverse, and people were very upset at the racism of the tech community. But as it turned out, white representation in the tech sector had actually decreased. The only reason that the numbers said it was becoming less diverse was that Asian people weren't being classed as a non-white minority.
> "Apply only for California state aid through the California Dream Act of 2011. Several state financial aid programs and many private scholarships are open to AB 540 students. Other undocumented students are encouraged to apply as there are often campus based aid and private scholarships available to them.
There are two types of grants available as Cal Grants: the entitlement grants and the competitive grants... Under entitlement grants, eligible student are guaranteed a Cal Grant A if they have at least a 3.0 grade point average... Cal Grant A and B Competitive Awards are available for students who do not qualify for the entitlement grants. The competitive grants are not guaranteed. Each year 22,500 competitive grants are awarded. "
[1] LATimes comment via http://web.csulb.edu/president/government-community/ab540/pd...
So do you feel that poor US citizens are actually getting a worse deal? How?
(I can see the argument that people who go back to, say, Mexico, and wait for a legal family visa to come to the US, are getting a raw deal. That's certainly true: as of January 2015 the US govt has finally gotten around to dealing with people who submitted their paperwork in 1994. http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy... )
The one which hires the best developers they can find without any regard to race or gender?
Or the one that turns away good developers because they have diversity quotas in hiring?
Because good developers aren't all going to look like me, but people's hiring practices tend to make them hire people that look like them under the phony guise of "these are the good people".
(And what makes you think they're turning away good developers for diversity quota reasons, and getting crap instead?)
Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity.
The closest thing I've heard is asking someone to remove identifying information from resumes before screening them. (Blinding the screener.) That should at least help you get a diverse set of candidates coming in. I would think positively of a company that does that.
But the interviews themselves will still be biased and the only question is whether you realize this or you're fooling yourself.
Is it fair that a co-op uses some strange criteria to let a bigwig, say a political donation bundler, with connections, have the penthouse and not you ? No.
Would you dare fight the co-op and take them to court to prove you are just as "interesting" as the bundler?
Are you likely to win? Are you not likely to appease the co-op board through some other means because you know it is the socially-acceptable way to do so and suing them is just going to make you a social outcast and expunged from the social diaries of the well-heeled?
Is it fair that a group of people self-select themselves to be part of a dating club, so as to not being put through the grief of having to date a person who doesn't - from all social cues and signalling - doesn't belong? [2]
Is it wrong? Yes. Is it illegal? No.
Their lawyer is sure to say that no one is stopping you from building your own app and inviting people only you approve of. After all it is a private app.
I could give examples of even more explicit discrimination in daily life that go unchallenged.
One cannot cherry-pick an issue when it suits them and choose to shift it to the back-burner when it doesn't.
Discrimination is rampant, persistent and has become acceptable in all manner of ways - both latent and in plain sight.
It is too important an issue to be fought in piece-meal, from one aggrieved party to another.
We ought to have a much bigger, much more encompassing and thorough discussion of what it means to be discriminated - whether the person is non-Jewish white, Jewish, Asian, Black, Hispanic or the rest.
[1] How to Get Into Harvard
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to-...
[2] The League
http://www.theleagueapp.co/
edit: formatting
Harvard in particular is about building leaders. If you want great front-line employees it would seem there are other hundreds of other schools that can do that.
When it comes to having great leaders, race matters. I wish it didn't, but its naïve to think otherwise. That said, simply awarding points for race (if that's what is actually done -- or if they have just regressed it to show the differential) seems inefficient.
You want people with great upside to make a positive change in the world. Being around some of the highest SAT/GPA people in the world for my life has shown that most end up having good, but mundane careers. And what I find surprising is that I probably could have predicted which of my cohort, colleagues, and associates would go on to have outsized impacts -- and it was rarely (or more like never) a product of their SAT score.
Sports is one of the better professions where performance trumps almost everything. If you talk to NFL scouts you'll find that they look numbers, but they realize that the numbers come with very strong context. Incredible passing numbers in the SEC are different than from a DIII school. They want to know if you've peaked in college, or if you have upside in the NFL.
The NFL also does something similar to college -- they have later rounds in the draft, because they have a large enough roster to take some risks (and practice squads). These later rounds are where they often take riskier players. This is where Seattle takes a slower cornerback named Richard Sherman or a shorter QB named Russell Wilson. Based on the tape, neither of these players should be in the NFL, much less excelling. But the upside potential was huge on them -- so Seattle picked them.
I'm sure Harvard could have found someone with better numbers than Barack Obama, but the upside on him was huge.
Given the ridiculous importance our society puts on race, I'm not against using race a metric. I'm just not sure we're efficient about it.
But as said elsewhere, Harvard isn't looking at SATs solely - they are looking for "interesting" or future leadership potential.
Most people perceive the change negatively. Some objectively good qualities have been diminished: collegiality has been replaced by cut-throat competitiveness. External perceptions of prestige have gone down even as SAT scores have gone up, partly due to racism but also partly due to back-channel whispering about increased cheating.
That being said, I acknowledge that many of the same reasons I don't like the shift were and still are used to keep Jews out of elite schools. And I agree that on the whole it's wrong. At the same time, I also recognize that this is a problem of assimilation. People want to preserve aspects of their culture they believe to be virtuous. But our institutions have limited capacity to assimilate and inculcate new groups with our values.
I think discrimination against Asians in higher Ed should end. I'm a little wary of what road that will lead us down.
Quoting from their most-recent-of-several amici briefs on the matter:
Brown University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University submit this brief as amici curiae in support of respondents. [[Amici have long used admissions policies similar to the Harvard Plan that Justice Powell approved in Regents of University of California v. Bakke]], 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and the University of Michigan Law School plan this Court upheld in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). [[Amici accordingly have substantial experience with admissions policies that consider all aspects of an applicant’s background and experience, including in some circumstances the applicant’s racial or ethnic background.]]
They go on:
[[Amici accordingly urge the Court]] to interpret the Constitution, consistent with Bakke and Grutter, to continue to [[allow educational institutions to structure admissions programs that take account of race and ethnicity]] as single factors within a highly individualized, holistic review process.
I have taken the liberty of using [[double brackets] to direct your attention to the really salient bits.
There's the whose-who of American universities saying, in pretty clear language, to the Supreme Court, that they would find it very inconvenient if the Supreme Court were to illegalize their racial discrimination programs.
Are you still unconvinced that American universities operate racial discrimination programs?
If your objection is the more narrow "I agree that American universities often operate racial discrimination programs, but disagree that those racial discrimination programs disfavor Asians", I'd be more than happy to find you citations of of which groups particular formal racial discrimination policies discriminate in favor of. This will, inevitably, fail to find Asians on that list. If you disagree with me on this prediction, please name three representative universities and I'll happily do the legwork on finding their written statement of which races are favored by their formal racial discrimination programs.
If you were black, you might see it as "Orwellian" when someone claims an admissions policy is non-discriminatory when it results in a class that is 6% black and 29% Asian among U.S. students (this is CMU), while blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and Asians make up 5.3%.
You are trying to cloak your subjective opinion in the veneer of science and objectivity with nonsense about "verifiable and falsifiable," but it doesn't work. In your example - "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media" - what would be a falsifiable and verifiable statement? "Republicans ARE treated poorly by the media?" How is that or any statement like it falsifiable or verifiable?
Likewise, in what way are questions of racial fairness verifiable or falsifiable? If one policy is "race blind" and results in some minorities being seriously under-represented, is it fair because of its "race blindness" or unfair because of its outcome? If another policy takes race into consideration, is it unfair because it takes race into consideration in admissions or fair because its outcome results in a proportional representation?
It's a question of values, not a question of science. Depending on your point of view you are going to see it very differently from someone else.
If the freshman class at Harvard University ends up being 30% Asian and 10% Jewish, maybe it's because people in East Asian and Jewish cultures value education more than people in other cultures. In that case, why isn't it fair for an educational institution to cater to individuals who have been raised to value education?
If some minorities (and let's not dance around the issue; we mean black people) are underrepresented at these institutions, that is a wake up call. It means that the public school system in our country has, in aggregate, failed black children and that decades of racial injustice have forced black people into self-perpetuating cycles of generational poverty. It doesn't mean that Harvard is being racially discriminatory.
The alternative to admitting everyone, if you're determined not to discriminate along any dimension, is to admit by lottery. This will produce results which are biased in various ways, but not because of any distinctions you drew.
This is only true if it is reasonable to expect similar performance and outcomes between different population groups. Is it? Why should we expect blacks to perform as well academically as Ashkenazim and east asians, two population groups with notably high average IQ?
That is not logical at all.
How can it be discrimination when 2 racial groups are admitted in opposite class-to-population ratios?
Blacks at 6% < 13% AND Asians at 29% > 5.3%?
The AND conjunction is key. It would be clear discrimination if both groups' percentages were less than the representative population.
And by the way, if such a hypothetical black person didn't know: the Asians are already an "undesirable" applicant group. It's somewhat of an open secret in admissions that "we don't want anymore Asians."[1] That the maligned group still gets 29% in the uphill battle against that condescension is astounding.
Also, I'm not sure where the logic of blacks as 13% of population should or would translate to ~13% of Harvard student body. Let's look at each layer of qualifications for an elite school:
Of the students that achieve SAT scores of ~2200+, are 13% of them black?
Ok, let's pretend Harvard removes SAT scores from consideration and only looks at GPA. Out of all the valedictorians at high schools, are 13% of them black?
Ok, let's eliminate SAT and GPA. Just evaluate students on course workload. Of the students that took AP (Advanced Placement) classes such as AP Calculus, AP English, etc, are 13% of those enrolled black?
How is it Harvard's problem of discrimination if their student body doesn't happen to have ~13% blacks? The only way to do that would be to relax the tough academic standards until it's meaningless. No SAT, GPA, or course transcripts.
I can't see how a black person with any dignity would feel pride about being "accepted" into Harvard with less qualifications than his peers of the last 100 years. The 6% blacks at an elite school may be low but hopefully, the vast majority of those 6% actually belong there by genuine academic qualifications.
[1]http://cornellsun.com/blog/2011/11/14/no-asians-need-apply/
Grades? You want to talk about grades? If the culture is overall discriminatory, how can we trust subjective evaluations from that culture?
Not to mention if you approach the admissions officers at Ivies, particularly at Harvard, Princeton & Yale, they say that they easily could fill 3 freshman classes or more with the applicants they receive. That even most of the rejected applicants could succeed academically at their schools. So yes, I think it's okay to select for diversity. If the system is gameable why should we take its metrics seriously? And if we can't take the metrics seriously we shouldn't be upset about ignoring the metrics and making subjective choices.
> Ask an SAT tutor and they'll tell you it's easy to take someone from a decent score to a good one.
Yeah, they have a financial interest in promoting their snakeoil. They teach you how to not be a fuckup before you take the test (get good sleep, don't go drinking) and a few general facts about the test to minimize wasting time, they don't teach you how to "beat" the SAT/ACT, that hasn't been a thing since the 80's.
And you honestly don't think the classes help at all? Seeing sample questions, taking sample tests, and learning strategies to handle questions you don't know. You might as well say structured practice doesn't help. And sure you could say "why don't the kids from less affluent families practice just as much?" but if your parent doesn't know how the game is played the sixteen year old kid still isn't as prepared as the kid who has affluent parents. And the scores aren't going to reflect ability as much as they reflect whether you come from a household that prepares you for standardized tests.
Yes, the tests help. But they just help you reach your maximum potential. You're not hacking the test, you're hacking yourself. You can get basic prep courses for not much money. Yes some people cannot afford that, but that is a problem with secondary education that test prep even exists. There is no way you can make a test that doesn't discriminate against people that don't get enough sleep or show up hung over or the person didn't figure out the basics of taking standardized tests through primary and secondary education.
As a black person who was accepted to (and graduated from) MIT, and had SAT scores less than my peers (but excellent grades and extracurriculars) allow me to respond: I feel fine.
At tend to give as much credence to those "example[s] of watered down academic standards" at elite universities as I do to welfare queens driving Cadillacs.
MIT doesn't have football scholarships like the North Carolina academic scandal.
Interesting fact: MIT coaches do have input into the admissions process.
The NC scandal was not about reducing admission standards in the name of discrimination, it was about stacking athletic teams. That's a whole different (and real) topic than this thread, especially since your post referred to Harvard.
Understood. However, you're addressing something I didn't say. I wasn't accusing elite universities of dumbing down existing standards. I was talking about about how the universities would hypothetically have to lower the academic thresholds to fulfill someone's idea that 13% of Ivy Leagues should be black to mirror the 13% in the general population.
>, it was about stacking athletic teams.
Right. But, what's the reason-behind-the-reason that it gets framed as "stacking athletes" so that it looks like it has nothing to do with academics?
In reality, it's the academics (or fiction of it) that made it a scandal in the first place.
Let's remember that it's a football scholarship. It's supposed to be scholars who go to school and happen to use football participation to pay for tuition. For many reasons (societal, circuses & bread, etc), it has mutated into athletes who need to fake the academic process to play for the school. Since society has not embraced an alternative structure for 19-year olds to play televised minor-league football outside of college institutions, that's how academics got twisted to fit a non-educational agenda. Football isn't getting in the way of school; it's school that is getting in the way of football.
As for making the black percentages at ivy leagues match the population at large, I'm not exactly sure what the other posters who dismiss SAT + GPA + AP course transcripts are proposing. If elite schools are academic institutions (instead of unpaid football teams), and SAT+GPA+AP classes are cultural discrimination, what do they propose the schools look at? The color of the skin? If football doesn't have much to do with academic qualifications, the amount of pigment in the skin doesn't either.
You're black -- and you got into MIT. You had the academic qualifications. Is there something you're debating that I missed or are we agreeing?
I know of students with better grades and SAT results that were not admitted to MIT. I know of students with worse grades than me that were admitted to MIT. MIT considers many factors. Based on my experience there, that is a good thing, YMMV.
Were they Black, Asian or White?
> I know of students with worse grades than me
Were they Black, Asian or White?
Asian and white.
Were they Black, Asian or White?
All of the above.
Isn't race self-reported anyway?
What exactly qualifies you as an African-american that people who you or I qualify as Asian - can not legally claim?
Straightforward: "Do American universities routinely intentionally discriminate against Asian applicants as a consequence of formal policies designed to ensure that happens?" Binary question with a single, verifiable answer.
The objective, verifiably true answer to that question happens to be "Yes." You can be in favor of it, if you like, but disagreeing that it is actually policy beggars the imagination.
And high school grades are subjective evaluations, often from mediocre teachers, that are likely to themselves be subject to bias because the subjective evaluators have many of the same biases as the culture at large.
Do American universities routinely discriminate against African Americans and Latinos as a consequence of reliance on standardized tests and curricula on which they are known to receive lower scores?
Adjustment for the bias in these measures might correct for discrimination, not create it.
The only question is whether these measures are good or bad at predicting who is likely to succeed. In the university case, that means do well in classes and graduate. If they are bad predictors, they need to be replaced with good predictors. If they are good predictors, the problem for groups who are "known to receive lower scores" is not the measurement.
The fact that Massachusetts routinely receives lower temperature scores than Florida is not evidence that thermometers are bad.
A college's promise is to prepare students for life, and at present that means life in a diverse world.
Success beyond academia may be predicted well by SATs and high school grades in some fields, but certainly not all.
Your response to my point - "It's a question of values" - was to simply re-state your value.
If you grew up black in a black community, black piato11's straightforward definition would probably be: "Do American universities engage in recruiting and admissions practices that ensure that black students are significantly underrepresented among the student body?" This is also a binary question with a single, verifiable answer. At may elite U.S. universities, the answer is a resounding "yes," whether or not the "yes" is intentional.
You are operating at a level where not only do you believe the question itself has already been decided, but it doesn't seem to even have occurred to you that the question itself was ever in question, and that anyone might have a different view at all.
Volunteer has to be free from pressure.
But we have a society that try to push "moral"values instead of freedom and pursuit of your OWN happiness (obeying laws).
It made me realize that most "humanitarian" outfits serving "the poor" are doing a great disservice to the elimination of human suffering. Subsidizing "the poor" just creates more poor people. If we really wanted to reduce human suffering, we would leave "the poor" to die off and subsidize the family formation and procreation of successful people.
No, it's going to be harder for someone who's parents can't afford tutoring academies named "Little Harvard", tennis lessons, violin lessons or 4 hours of extracurriculars a day.
This sounds like someone who has been given every advantage in life complaining about not being given more advantages. Maybe more of them should do volunteer programs in poor communities so they can think about how difficult it would be for those kids to get into Harvard. After seeing what a life of poverty is like, having your SAT score adjusted down by a couple of points will seem like quite a bargain.
In Fanshen, its is noted in pre-PRC China, poor peasants in the countryside could not afford livestock, so peasants used their own shit as fertilizer. Sometimes peasants would even steal one another's shit.
That is poverty. Taiwanese families who are getting press because they want their kid to get into Harvard by taking the place of the poor black kid whose family was in the US before 1808 are not poor.
I'm amazed the American left falls for this stuff.
Despite blacks having built this country, the foundation of the USA is that they be a nation enslaved within the nation. The constitution itself has their worth marked as 3/5ths a person. Look at the man choked to death in New York City accused of selling loose cigarettes. After which they couldn't even find any cigarettes on even. The grand jury lets the officer off. The Murdoch outlets, the Post and Fox News whip up a frenzied atmosphere telling blacks they must submit themselves and immediately follow police instructions at all times, or face death. This is not seen as a threat. I could say that the two black men killed by police meant that the lives of two policemen should be taken by the community in New York - which did happen. Despite the courts, despite the corporate media - two dead blacks meant two dead policemen. An eye was gouged out was met with an eye gouged out, and I could say this was just. Of course, that would be seen as a threat. People yelling on Fox News and in the Post, with the corpse still fresh that blacks must prostrate themselves before police or face death is not seen as a threat. Despite it all, rough justice did happen with the funerals of the two police officers.
Ycombinator was created by two criminals. Criminals in a sense that could not be considered rhetorical or hyperbolic. Both born to the white upper middle class, with connections to the US establishment. Went to the Ivy League schools mentioned here. Morris criminally crashed about 10% of the Internet. Investigations showed strong evidence Graham had foreknowledge of this happening, perhaps even aided it. What was their punishment? Graham nothing. Morris did not do a day in jail. His father was an upper middle class WASP, with, as the song says "high office relations in the government". While this was happening, the MoD hackers, referred to privately by a corporate security executive as "spics, niggers and white trash from New York" do see jail time - three see the inside of a jail. The judge points to ONE computer which crashed as why they need to as the judge put it, be made an example of. Of course, the reality is that whatever access they may have had to that computer, along with dozens of other people who had access, none of the three crashed the Learning Link computer. No judge wanted to make an example of Morris or Graham, computer geniuses made a mistake or whatever is how the US media and press played it out. If I recall correctly, the MoD headlines in the New York Times even mentioned the MoD were working class in the headlines.
It's an obvious historical case, massive destruction followed by Ivy League reward and founding a capital fund worth tens of billions, versus one crashed computer (which the accused did not crash) followed by working class men looking for work with criminal records. Different outcomes ordained at birth, before birth.
All hot air in a sense. Justice for me is working class justice, the justice of those of us who work, which is so alien to the liberal democracy and hegemony which springs from the current relations of production of capitalism, that it might as well be a different word. It comes only with the dialectic forward movement of history along with advancement of the means of production and subsequent relations of production - all of which we can see here, recently with the rise of mobile and the cloud. We see it with the coming rise, maybe, of VR/AR and Oculus, AI and Google self-driving cars, and so forth. The world has seen massive shifts in the forces of production and subsequent relations of production in ...
Note that the rationale goes like so: "increased diversity among the students leads to higher-quality education, and therefore this diversity may be sought through the otherwise forbidden means of racial preferences". Where the goal is to benefit certain groups because you like those groups, the same process is notionally illegal. You have to say you're doing it to help everybody.
In 1942, the federal government used racial data gathered by the census[0][1] and rounded up over 100,000 Japanese into concentration camps.
[0]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-c...
[1]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census...
I suppose what I find most interesting about this situation is that the census still requires you to identify your race and the race of those in your household.
In light of the census's record of abuse of such racial data, I asked my roommate not to identify my race when the census agent came to our house years ago . However, the census agent returned a couple more times, threatening my roommate with legal retaliation if he didn't comply with divulging my race. Despite the threats, the agent eventually stopped showing up, and the promised threats never materialized.
However, a contentious series of Supreme Court cases (Bakke, Gratz, Grutter) have held that universities are allowed to racially discriminate if they do so with the intention of achieving compelling educational interests and as long as their institutionalized racial discrimination is not a crass point system but rather a "holistic" evaluation of applicants which uses race as "one part of" the decisionmaking process.
Racial discrimination is pervasive at US selective universities, public and private. It is described as a minor, marginal policy, but all players understand that abandoning the formal racial discrimination policies would cause instantaneous hits to enrollment of favored racial minorities of roughly 50% or more, as has indeed happened when particular formal racial discrimination policies were found illegal. For example, the Gratz decision illegalized a points system used by the University of Michigan, where 100 points were required for admission and being a member of a favored racial group was worth 20 points. (For comparison: the best essay they received in a year was worth 3 points and winning a gold medal in the Olympics was worth 5. )
Some states have explicitly "No-we-really-mean-it-this-time" illegalized racial discrimination in public education, a policy which commands a supermajority of support with American voters. California is a prominent example. The universities threatened massive resistance. (That phrasing would be understood by educated Americans to be a grave insult. It is a callback to a particular phrase used by a Southern politician refusing to comply with federal laws prohibiting discrimination against racial minorities.) Enrollment by favored minority groups declined by roughly half. Over the same period, Asian enrollment (as a percentage) increased markedly and white enrollment was roughly constant or declining.
It's marginal for the majority population. Not for the minority group. Its like handicapped parking. If you were to remove them, your parking situation only sees a marginal improvement, but for the handicap it's probably a big deal.
But according to the article, "all" asians have the same profile. If this is true, I can understand why some of the similar profiles are rejected in the name of diversity.
Once an SAT score is sufficiently high, it makes sense to look at other things. I can see why a college would want 50/50 gender, and a wide spread of social backgrounds.
If I was teaching a class and I had to choose between 2 students for the last seat, I might choose the one with the (insignificantly) lower score if that student seemed more fun to be around.
This doesn't bear any resemblance to current admissions policies. Discrepancies between races in average SAT score at a given college are in the hundreds of points, not the low tens.
SD for verbal is 115, math is 120. This must have been what I was thinking of. SD for overall (V+M) score is 218. The overall SD is much more relevant here, but let's note that a difference of one standard deviation is still a very large difference.
Without making a judgment one way or the other on the core issue - given that this paper is looking at "highly selective private research universities" with average SAT scores of over 1300, a 50 point difference is not very big and probably within each individual student's margin of error. When you are in that scoring range, each incorrect answer has a magnified score penalty to maintain the normal distribution.
1. Asians suffer a penalty of 50 points relative to whites. We can equally say, using the numbers from rjdagost's comment, that whites themselves suffer a penalty of 230 points.
2. The entire concept of the normally curved scores is that one 50-point difference is just as significant as any other 50-point difference. That's why we use standard deviations to compare things. It is true that scores at the very high end are more volatile, since most of the test's "space" is devoted to distinguishing between people in the middle of the range, but 1300 does not seem to be at a level where that worry would make sense; the data I have to hand is a score report from 2000 saying "on average, a person with a math score of 710 loses 2 points on a second testing", which is pretty reliable. And regardless, while an individual student might easily lose 30 points by retesting, group averages don't move so easily.
On thinking about this further, I've grossly misused the word "reliable". What that quoted bit says is precisely that while an individual's score may vary from test to retest (and is thus not necessarily reliable), the average score of a group is highly stable.
But admissions policies that granted extra "points" based on growing up in a poorly performing school district or the economic status of the parents would also likely generate this sort of distribution.
All people from all ethnicities are equal in the sense that they deserve an equal oppertunity to succeed. However, that has not happened. Certain ethnic groups (black people) have been systematically disadvantaged. They continue to be under-represented in higher education and over-represented in the prison system. Affirmative action does a good job at getting black people into college, which generally helps a person later in life when they want to get a good job.
Basically Asian in general regardless if you're from overseas or from NY, you're getting shafted. And if you're male... good luck, you better have a 5.0 GPA and be the captain of the football team to get in any where.
If you think all ethnicities are equal, a quota system makes perfect sense. If all ethnicities are equal, the differences in admissions must be the result of error, bias, or discrimination.
Asians/whites are just forcing their kids to prep better for SAT. The SAT may be biased. Grades in high school are biased.
Admissions criteria are actually biased (don't even have to play devils adovate here). Vice President (one of 55!) of the junior Sailing Club looks better than guy who picks teams at the local basketball hoop. Playing Violin looks better than freestyle rapper.
No, if all ethnicities are equal, then having 100% of Asians or 100% of black or white people doesn't mean anything. If black people are just as good as white people(and they are!) then we shouldn't care about the split being 50/50 - any split is good enough, because the color of your skin literally doesn't matter.
>>Asians/whites are just forcing their kids to prep better for SAT.
and this sort of generalization is racist all by itself.
Of course we know both that a quota system won't fly and skin color matters a lot in virtually everything we do. We're at a great lose-lose scenario.
[0] http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered, based on massive discrepancies between the records of admitted freshmen of different races, why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement that race is considered, based on a lack of such discrepancies?
Do "we know they're doing it anyway"? When Prop 209 passed, minority enrollment dropped. And there are any number of factors that the system may consider that are not race, but may be correlated with race. In any event, the numbers I can find show black and latino admissions combined are less than expected based on CA and national numbers.
And the source you cite doesn't actually specify any amount of bias by race - it says that race is "considered"
I was responding to a poster that said "CalTech doesn't discriminate by race at all" - CalTech itself disagrees. I was not commenting on the extend or magnitude of that consideration.
If we think that other universities are lying when they say race is not considered,
I'm not sure I accept this premise.
why shouldn't we discount CalTech's statement
Occam's razor. In any event, we know that CalTech does target minorities via outreach programs [0] so it would not be out of character for them to consider race. And anecdotally (I'm black), I was heavily recruited by CalTech despite my showing no interested in attending and having below (CalTech) average SAT scores (and above average grades/school rank/extra curricular)
[0] http://diversitycenter.caltech.edu/resources/rfus
1. We can only see the effect of race on admission at a very coarse resolution, because universities try their hardest to obscure it.
2. Even at this coarse resolution, it's easy to see that at most US universities, race has a massive effect. We see this by noting that when you break down admitted freshmen by race, they show very large group differences on all the characteristics that the universities will admit they're looking for.
3. Although minority enrollment in the UC system dropped after Prop 209, we still see these large differences. As they are our only way of inferring any effect of race, we conclude that race still has large effects, despite the fact that this is now illegal. Ward Connerly will tell you any number of stories (well, write stories down that you can read) about other UC regents specifically plotting to subvert prop 209 and get minorities in by whatever pretexts they can think of.
4. We fail to observe significant differences among the racial groups at CalTech.
5. You are almost certainly correct to estimate that, since CalTech says it considers race, we should believe that it does consider race.
6. But I, personally, while admitting that in the sense of point (5) CalTech does consider race, still think that it's usefully correct to go around telling people "CalTech, unlike other US schools, doesn't discriminate by race". This is because when we use our own metric, which is what we have to do for other schools, we can't detect any discrimination on the part of CalTech. When we compare it to other schools, it seems reasonable to measure them all the same way.
Put another way, in the wise words of Cecil Adams, what we cannot reliably measure we are entitled to ignore. CalTech has information that we don't, but until it makes a difference that we can see, there's not much of a reason for us to pay attention. Comparing our view of UCLA with CalTech's view of itself is terrible statistics.
I agree, that we can only see the effects at a coarse resolution, but disagree that universities try to "obscure" that effect. I think the reason for the coarse resolution is that there isn't a simple formula for each individual student. Admissions officials look at each application and weigh factors depending on each student's particular circumstances. This would be consistent with another post in this topic about so many Asian applications being similar (assuming the post was true) which would make it harder to tease out unique factors (I'm speculating here).
they show very large group differences on all the characteristics that the universities will admit they're looking for.
I don't agree with this at all, especially looking at all U.S. universities in aggregate. There are a lot of universities that look for different aspects rather than pure academics, and look to serve different audiences (HBCU's being the obvious example). Can you give an example of a college or university that claims to look for a particular set of characteristics but has a student body that conflict with those characteristics?
Although minority enrollment in the UC system dropped after Prop 209, we still see these large differences.
California has a population that is (as of 2011) 40% white, 7% black, 14% Asian and 38% Latino. [0]
The U.C. System (undergrad) is currently 30% white, 4% black, 34% Asian and 18% Latino. [1]
Are the "large differences" you're referencing referring to the overrepresentation of Asians and underrepresentation of everyone else?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#Raci...
[1] http://www.cpec.ca.gov/StudentData/StudentSnapshot.ASP?DataR...
We fail to observe significant differences among the racial groups at CalTech.
CalTech (undergrad enrollment) is 2% black, 30% white, 42% black and 10% Latino.[2] That's a lot closer to the UC system than to CA's population.
[2] http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/198-cds2014_final.pdf table B2
You can't be serious. Universities selectively deny access to their admissions data based on the politics of the researchers asking for it. They've been known to agree to allow access and then welsh after hearing the proposed topic of the paper. They're acting with overt malice, here.
While Harvard is obviously great as an academic institution, people want to go to Harvard for the prestige. Do you think that prestige would be there if they were to allow the place to essentially become an academic ghetto for any given ethic group (Asian, Jewish or any future group)?
Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up. You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores.
Complaining about not being accepted to a place like Harvard even though you scored a perfect SAT or some other test taking metric shows a misunderstanding of what these highly prestigious institutions are about.
> Every time a Harvard affiliated person wins the Nobel prize, Pulitzer, Macarthur .... You don't get that by robotically picking students based on only test scores.
CalTech has more nobel prizes per capita than any of the Ivies. Dunno if CalTech loses out on Macarthur (maybe) or Pulizer (probably), but if so it's because CalTech is a technical university. There's no reason you couldn't have an all-academically selected university focusing on the humanities.
> or becomes the first black president the prestige equity of every Harvard graduate goes up.
This is obviously not the reason that Harvard has racial preferences.
Yes, we can agree that it is reasonable for Harvard and other high-prestige universities to select for things besides academics (ambition, social savvy, sports, extracurriculars). But the complaint being leveled is that they shouldn't pick explicitly on race.
My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so.
Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.
> Again, my point is that the preoccupation people have with Schools like Harvard isn't about academics but prestige.
I understand that, which is why I didn't claim that CalTech had the same prestige as Harvard. I was rebutting your claim that Harvard had racial policies in order to get academic awards in order to get prestige.
> My reference to the "first black president" has less to do with race or racial preference but rather for the sort of social change it represents. When you take the entire social history of the United States, a first black president is a monumental change and the institutions (academic or otherwise) that can claim any part of the credit for that, are falling over themselves to do so.
Again, this is clearly not why Harvard has these policies, so bringing it up is a distraction. I agree that racial policies affect Harvard's prestige, and I agree that Harvard is driven largely by the pursuit of prestige, but I disagree that prominent racial alumni is a causal link, as you suggested.
Again, this isn't true. Caltech considers race, legacies (this is recent), work experience and volunteer experience (although they hold less weight than academics). See section C7 of CalTech's CDS filings: http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds
CalTech's stated admission policies to be mere lip service
As I noted in another response to this thread, as a black high-schooler I was highly recruited by CalTech despite showing no interest in attending. They also have an outreach program. It's more than lip service. They put in less emphasize than other institutions, but it's not zero.
Fair enough. Thanks for the correction. However, I still don't think their official statements are very meaningful unless backed up by actual results.
>> CalTech's stated admission policies to be mere lip service
> They also have an outreach program.
Oh sure, but these aren't admissions policies. Sorry, I'm not trying to start a fight on semantics, but I do think (especially in the context of this article) that having outreach programs is importantly different than changing the admissions procedure.
Instant bonus points + narrowing discrimination as a side benefit.
Then I read somewhere that for diversity reasons after those students(the black and the Hispanic) are admitted to the top universities, they actually don't have a nice experience at all, most of them simply can't catch up and some of them drop out.
I'm fine with helping the economically disadvantaged students, but manipulating the admission by skin color or race?
Top universities just like NBA, only the best players shall attend, skin color shall not be the reason you can stay there. Not to mention there are so many other public/private universities to choose for everyone.
Yes, there's been a fair amount of research on this. Essentially, once you get beyond the very very top, I'm not sure what beyond Harvard and MIT (and of course CalTech), there just isn't a large enough pool of qualified candidates. So at each "level" a large fraction of these students admitted and accepting belong in a school one or two levels down, where they could thrive.
Racial discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also legacy admission and athletes grade fixing. It's also not uncommon for rich parents to hire a professional ghostwriter for the admission essay. College admission as a whole is extremely subjective even if they try to pretend it isn't. After that there's the rampant grade inflation. We can go on and on.
Make no mistakes though, these aren't just inefficiency that happens by oversight. Someone __always__ benefit. They certainly don't feel sorry for you. They may use fancy euphemism to justify their decisions, but we're all adults here. Nobody really believes that bullshit.
College is a business and the only thing you can do is take your money somewhere else. Until society is ruled by some AI, we'll always have these kinds of problem.
Some things I would recommend if people really want to give away their money and support these evil institutions, 1. Change your name, first and last 2. Check a different box when they ask for your race (or any other bullshit like religion, etc.)
Changing your name has _massive_ implications besides college applications. Humans love to judge especially when they have nothing at stake. If you don't believe me, just apply to a few jobs with different names.
The problem ultimately stems from a huge wave of mostly Korean and Chinese immigrants (but by extension other East Asian and Pacific Island nations get penalized as well), who grew up in poor countries (or when their countries were poor), suddenly finding themselves with enough money to immigrate to the U.S. and "escape". They put down roots, work their tails off and start having families.
They don't want their kids to have to struggle like they did (and they want to ensure they set themselves up well in retirement), but they have incredibly unsophisticated views of what 'success' means in America (often as a result of working so much they never really had a chance to integrate well into their adopted country).
However, they understand passing tests, having deep cultural histories around test taking to get ahead in life. So they look for the most prestigious work you can test into.
And bam, at the intersection of hard work, prestige signaling and test taking you get a fairly limited set of occupations, which these parents instinctively laser beam their kids at.
Good schools want extracurriculars? No problem! Let's use the prestige button on that, prestigious schools must want the most prestigious extracurriculars, and those are obviously piano and violin (and sometimes opera). Let's toss in some prestige sports as well, and now these kids and splitting time studying endlessly for tests to become a doctor or lawyer, practicing piano/violin and playing tennis/golf/figure skating.
Repeat until the parents think they're maximizing the fitting function for university acceptance and you end up with entire social networks and minor industries around SAT test taking, piano and violin teachers and tennis/golf/figure skating coaches.
And you know what? For a very long time this worked. Asian Americans have been extraordinarily and consistently "successful", far over-represented in university admissions and in select professions.
But there was no secret, it was literally hard screaming, crying, kicking work. There's no cheating. While their other raced peers studied for an hour every night before turning on the XBox. They studied till midnight, every night, and then spent all day Saturday at private school, then studied till midnight again, then spent most of the day on Sundays doing prestige extracurriculars. Their parents were often poor, working crap triple-D jobs, or triple shifts at convenience stores. They lived frugally and invested every single drop of blood in their kids. Even if they were often wrong headed about how they did it, it worked and anybody can do it.
But on the university side, as parents start to find the optimal mix to acceptance, application packets start to look not just virtually identical, but absolutely identical.
Imagine you're tasked with figuring out which 10 of 1000 applications all with the last names Kim, Chin, Hu, Lee, Park, Wang or Choi should be accepted:
- All have 4.0 GPAs
- All have AP degrees from High School
- All have extracurriculars that are selected from the set of {violin, piano, opera, tennis, golf}
- All went to the best High Schools in their respective areas
- All submit essays with some story about their parent's difficult immigration, usually involving stories of poverty and unbelievable work hours in menial jobs. Maybe with some kind of "escape from the communists" or "swimming to safety across Hong Kong Harbor" or something. I know 3 Chinese Americans who's parents have almost identical "swimming escape from China and lived in Kowloon Walled City for 3 years before making it to America" stories.
- All have perfect or near perfect SAT scores
What the universities are of course realizing is that it becomes a random sample at this point. There...
It's really such a difficult and complicated topic. But I think the action/reaction dynamic is largely explainable and understandable.
The people who I really don't get are the ones that know better, the Amy Chua's of the world. Who have the education, the sophistication and the cultural integration to escape it, yet simply repeat the cycle of abuse, mindlessly.
While the "death march" approach has largely worked to get immediately (within a generation) into "prestige" and well paying occupations. There's also a huge number of burned out kids with absolutely shattered parental relationships.
There's several reddits dedicated to basically being support groups for deeply depressed, deeply damaged kids who grew up in this kind of grind.
You get 500 Asian American applicants with 4.0 GPAs, 1500 SATs, and IB degrees.
You get 500 White applicants with the name numbers.
You get 1 Black applicant with the same numbers.
Do you throw all 1001 applicants in a lottery and pick 50. Or are you more likely to accept the one Black applicant outright. Put the remaining 1000 in the lottery and pick 49?
Ideally there'd be some set of criteria that would allow this naturally happen. Some mix of SAT score, GPA, etc. that when summed up would give you x% white, y% black, z% hispanic and so on.
But there isn't. Some ethnic groups, for whatever set of complex reasons you would like to use, under represent on these measurable criteria. But basically it boils down to this, there aren't enough Black and Hispanic students, scoring at high enough levels, AND applying to these schools, to supply a proportional representation in the student body (about 13% and 17% respectively).
"Diversity" programs operate under the assumption that there's some kind of systemic cultural, social or environmental pressure on these groups that keeps them underrepresented. What those are, seem to be complex, and for whatever reason don't appear to impact White, Asian (and a couple other identifiable groups) in the same way. Poverty, racism, culture, whatever, seem to be chronic issues for underrepresented groups while proportionally or overrepresented groups seem to either be immune to these problems or able to work through them.
The idea is that, if you get enough of these underrepresented minority applicants into prestigious schools, get them good educations, start getting them well integrated into upper socio-economic echelons, it'll have a "viral" like effect on other people in their same cultural ethnic group and eventually (over generations) they'll naturally start to represent at the "right" ratios.
On the flip side, there's well documented reasons why some ethnic groups (notably Asians, but other so called "model minorities" seem to show the same patterns) seem to excel and over-represent. It seems to mostly come from a high cultural value for education, combined with constant social and parental pressure to get educated and into prestigious jobs combined with an intense work ethic. It seems to be a repeated pattern that crosses all racial, genetic, socio-economic, geographic and other boundaries. Work hard, work towards a high goal and focus on that goal, and you'll make it out of being poor and make it into being reasonably rich.
So in your example, a pure "diversity" sample would overrepresent the White students to ensure the acceptances are as close to the natural population diversity as possible. The black student would get in, and for the remaining 49 seats, about 38 would got to White applicants, and 11 would go to Asian applicants.
The problem is obvious, setting "diversity goals" to arbitrarily say that proportional attendance is an appropriate goal is entirely arbitrary. Why is that virtuous? Because it seems fair? Why is race or ethnicity used and why not gender or economic quintile or hair color or height? Why is the concept or proportionality the right model? What's wrong with a student body that's 50% Asian?
Shouldn't hard work get rewarded instead of genetics?
And that's the billion dollar question.
But even in the model you suggest, you're not rewarding "hard work", you're rewarding test scores. Not the same thing. As my old professor would say, "Don't tell me you studied hard. I don't care how hard you studied."
In many regards, all these metrics are arbitrary. I wonder if there is a utilitarian perspective on college admission metrics.
And unless I missed it there's also no evidence that the schools studied actually do use race in their admissions decisions. There are a variety of other factors that could be considered which would end up skewing the admissions results on the basis of race. Should colleges not be allowed to give extra consideration to students from poorly performing schools simply because doing so might have the effect of giving "bonus points" to African American or Hispanic applicants?
This is so sad with what many colleges/states are pushing for now. I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, which the children were born into, but not discrimination based on skin color, which the children were born with.
[0] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/martinluth115056....
If you favor giving bonus points based on one's economic status, then that will correlate to the same sort of results this study revealed, with black and hispanic populations being over-represented versus an admissions policy based purely on standardized test scores.
MLK also said: "Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic."
I am all for college admission policy to help out low incoming group, based on his/her economy status, [..] but not discrimination based on skin color
The problem is that research has shown that institutional discrimination is not just based on economics, but also on race (for example, Prager's research showing that a white job applicant with a criminal record is more likely to get a job callback than a black applicant without a criminal record). Ignoring race isn't the answer. As for what is the answer, that's a much harder problem which is why we're still wrestling with it.
For me though, I just enjoyed trying a bunch of different stuff out and was fortunate enough to excel at a variety of things that I guess these colleges weren't expecting from an Asian. These interests include(d) linguistics, journalism, public speaking, student government, graphics + layouts + grids, game design, acrobatics, and somehow even ended up as an Eagle Scout (shrug) ... on top of hyper-accelerated math, science and tech stuff expected I guess of Asian students. Didn't sleep much though.
Also, after attending one day of Harvard's Campus Preview Weekend, my gut said "uh ... no," and went to MIT instead. Very happy about that choice in hindsight, purely based on the people I met and the meritocracy instilled in the students; I doubt I use even 25% of course material in the stuff I work on these days. The most important lesson that I did learn at the end of the day is that general society is led to believe that people should/can master only one or two tasks, a possible relic from industrialism. Instead, people should aim to become polymathic, which becomes exponentially easier by learning across diverse interests and realizing that there are many common threads across seemingly different fields -- a personal and particular implementation of "learning how to learn."
* As a side note, San Gabriel Valley? Never been so can't really guess, but I would bet that Cupertino schools were much tougher. Thankfully, we had a certain neighborhood fruit company that inspired some of us to become pirates instead of joining the navy, and to experiment with Learning Some Divinity (eventually).
As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
As an asian american myself this is offensive. Why would I want to IMPROVE my ethnicity? Furthermore I personally believe a 'holistic' application review process is fair, if diversity in the workplace is valued shouldn't diversity in universities be similarly valued? Yes I know this undoubtedly hurt Asian American applicants but they will no doubt adapt and this community is the furthest from believing that a 2400 on the SAT or 5.0 GPA is indicative of success
In the end, it didn't matter as much since I always had strong confidence in my ability to adapt and to look ahead, and my path turned out to be beneficial in many different ways. Obstacles such as this are difficult to overcome though, and it helped home in that I need to be that much sharper in order to succeed.
Compared to what? White applicants, statistically? Why are white people the "default" which everyone else is measured against, do white people not have a race/ethnicity?
There is no 'objective' measure of what SAT score "should" get you into a university. Most universities use things other than SAT scores to decide admissions (things in addition to affirmative action/diversity, I mean, too). Some universities may rely/weight SAT scores more than others. There is no SAT score that is "supposed to" guarantee you admission, "before accounting for race". It doesn't work that way. If you think it would be more "fair" to rely exclusively on SAT scores, you can make an argument for that, but a test is not in fact some objective measure of 'reality', it's just one test.
The idea that it's just a fact that "Asian Americans are penalized by 50 points"-- it's an under-specified statement, and it doesn't actually mean much.
I think this is an example of the assumptions/biases in the language of this article and those quoted in it, in general.
It's well-known that in subject GREs Chinese students score very well compared to American students of any racial or ethnic background. (As a Chinese friend asked, "Why don't you Americans just study for it, like we do?") However, subject GRE scores are not that predictive of success in a graduate program. Research skills, writing ability, grit, and the simple capacity to get stuff done are not well-predicted by multiple choice exams. It is useful to know that students who do well on, for instance, the math subject GRE can do triple integrals quickly. That's about it.
So, since subject GREs don't predict graduate success, and SATs are not that well-correlated with college success either [1], admissions committees use other factors to evaluate students. In fact, a number of schools do not require any standardized test [2]. These other factors range widely and include high school grades, which are most predictive of college success, volunteer work, interestingness, etc. And they do include race and geographic origin. Small colleges in the Midwest are currently targeting California, Texas, and Florida for recruitment because of their huge numbers of graduating seniors, and the coastal schools let in some token Midwesterners to provide some leavening to their provincial views of flyover country.
There is discrimination against Asian Americans in admissions in the US. It's not written into policy explicitly: it's just like discrimination against women and blacks today, taking the form of discussion of "fit" or subjective evaluation of how interesting someone's work is. It should stop, and the comparison to the "Jewish quotas" is apt. At the same time, test-based admissions are ludicrous, and evaluation of extracurricular activities and accomplishments given the student's environment are necessary. I had friends at Caltech who went to high schools that didn't offer calculus: smart people come from all sorts of backgrounds.
[1] https://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Validity...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/19/study-finds-l...
Affirmative action means the college admissions process is racist against asians and whites.
End of story.