Harvard and Princeton Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe

[FixMyIgnorance]

I mean, of course there is going to be some amount of discrimination, but it’s not what you think.

For instance, I am a first-generation college student, so my admission chances were greater. Why? It’s much easier for you to get ahead when you’re the child of a college grad (esp a legacy of an Ivy grad). In other words, for a particular application of particular quality, it’s much easier to achieve those stats as a rich kid of a Harvard grad than a poor kid from a shitty public high school with alcoholic parents.

Is that discrimination against the advantaged? Sure, but you could also view it as prioritizing the disadvantaged. If you admitted students by merit alone, Ivies would be primarily Asian and Jewish. You’ll notice those representations are already quite sizable as-is.

But moreover to the point that’ll likely get me flamed: Too many applications are the same. There are countless high-scoring, violin/piano-playing, class-president Asian valedictorians applying to these top schools. Are they are fantastic students? Absolutely. But there just aren’t enough spots, and they don’t want to admit too many of the same type of student.

You could take the admitted students for Harvard, set them aside, and re-fill your class again with students from the rejected pile who are just as qualified. At a certain point, schools want diversity… things you can’t replace or find easily.

It is a form of discrimination, but at the same time, it’s tough. Have you ever tried mock admissions? No matter who you decide to admit/reject, you always feel like crap in the end because of who you wind up rejecting for really no reason at all other than some pedantic difference or pure randomness alone.

Ivy admissions aren’t fair, but that’s life. You have to really make yourself stand out if you want a decent shot. I’m a 2400 SAT/2400 SAT2 student myself, but I had all sorts of quirks and nuances to my profile that made it easier to pop out. But perfect-score rejections at top schools aren’t uncommon. You should feel lucky to get in – not discriminated because you’re kept out. It’s just a ridiculously selective and cramped process.

I should also note that scores are allocated into categories. In other words, a student with 760’s on everything shows up before the committee with the same scaled score compared to someone who got 800’s on everything.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Marley23

What are you talking about? Based on some quick internet searching, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton are more like 40 percent white.

I think you might be treating all hispanic students and all foreign students as non-white.

[madmonk28]

I’m just glad we have a robust and empowered federal government that will investigate the matter and if need be, pursue further options in ensuring that all Americans have a fair shot at success. It’s a good thing that we have a Deparment of Education and that they have an Office for Civil Rights, it is stories like this one that show that the system works.

[Farmer_Jane]

If this is affirmative-action related (and it may very well be), this wiki link w/study may be of interest. In previous threads on AA, it’s usually brought up that Asian Americans come out at a negative when rated against other races. (Someone will say that white males suffer because of affirmative action, but in likelihood its probably Asian students, etc…)

A 2005 study by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung compared the effects of affirmative action on racial and special groups at three highly selective private research universities. The data from the study represent admissions disadvantage and advantage in terms of SAT points (on the old 1600-point scale):

Blacks: +230
Hispanics: +185
Asians: –50
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160[34]

In 2009, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford, in their book ‘No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal’, examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans. These results were after controlling for grades, scores, family background (legacy status) and athletic status (whether or not the student was a recruited athlete).[35]

It pretty much says what the OP’s link does: that being an Asian-American apparently means the bar is set higher for you. That’s wrong on so many levels, especially if you are an Asian-American with below perfect test scores and wanting to get into Ivy League universities.

[Marley23]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I think you might be treating all hispanic students and all foreign students as non-white.

It’s true that international students are broken into a separate category. As far as cites go, here’s Stanford’s data from 2005-06. It includes 40 percent “other,” including white and non-Hispanic white, 7 percent international, and 5 percent “declined to state.” Harvard was about 43 percent non-Hispanic white in 2009. So I don’t think it’s true that these schools allow tons of white students and only crack down on letting in too many Asians, but maybe you can cite those claims.

Meanwhile these kinds of admissions cases are always presented in a simplistic way and they often turn out to be more complicated. We have no idea if race was an issue here. Not all of the kids who got 2390 on their SATs wound up at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or MIT.

[Farmer_Jane]

Also, the idea that schools want “more diversity” is just silly. There is plenty of diversity in Asian-American students, and lumping them all in the same category is just ignorant. Chinese is not Cambodian or Japanese. Singapore is not the UAE, and so forth and so on.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I’m pretty sure you have in fact looked at the demographic breakdown of acceptance by race and test scores. Do you really think that Asians in today’s day and age are at THAT much of a disadvantage in extra curricular activities and interpersonal skills?

I’m not talking about Asians generally. I’m talking about the one mentioned in the OP. I had the highest LSAT score of any student admitted to my 1L law school class. I also had the lowest undergraduate GPA, and I’m one of about 20% admitted to my program who don’t already have graduate degrees. I also happen to be Asian (of Indian descent, rather than Southeast Asian) and identified as such on my application. It’s a historically black school, incidentally. I don’t know whether race helped or hurt my application; there’s only one other Asian in my program and she’s an international student, and there were only 10 students total in 2010 who self-identified as Asian according to ABA figures.

I happen to think that Asians are the primary victims (though obviously not the most numerous in absolute terms) of race-based admissions criteria generally… and I’m fine with that.

[FixMyIgnorance]

Actually, they do want diversity.

But it’s not like any one particular group is vastly over-represented or under-represented or something. If I were to show you 100 applications from various races and asked you to guess which was which, I dare say you’d have a pretty tough time doing it.

Note: It’s not JUST racial diversity. It’s diversity along any metric you choose (although obviously the academic base must be strong).

[brickbacon]

@CitizenPained

It pretty much says what the OP’s link does: that being an Asian-American apparently means the bar is set higher for you. That’s wrong on so many levels, especially if you are an Asian-American with below perfect test scores and wanting to get into Ivy League universities.

Why is it wrong in your estimation? Why should a university be color blind when the world isn’t? Why should a university feel compelled to accept the students with the best scores and grades?

[Bill_Door]

@CitizenPained

(snip)It pretty much says what the OP’s link does: that being an Asian-American apparently means the bar is set higher for you. That’s wrong on so many levels, especially if you are an Asian-American with below perfect test scores and wanting to get into Ivy League universities.

Why is it wrong? There’s no claim to an objective standard here. The admissions office at Harvard is about as objective as the guy holding the velvet rope at a popular nightclub. He lets in who he needs to make the club demographics match the profile they’ve decided makes them the most money. Just out of curiosity, how do you think Harvard benefits by having a 2400 SAT student attend versus an 1850 one?

[John_Mace]

@madmonk28

I’m just glad we have a robust and empowered federal government that will investigate the matter and if need be, pursue further options in ensuring that all Americans have a fair shot at success. It’s a good thing that we have a Deparment of Education and that they have an Office for Civil Rights, it is stories like this one that show that the system works.

You think this is going to be pursued through the Dept of Education? Or are you joking?

[Kimmy_Gibbler]

@John_Mace

You think this is going to be pursued through the Dept of Education? Or are you joking?

From the article, a link to which is the very first thing in this thread:

The U.S. Education Department is probing complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminate against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating a complaint it received in August that Harvard rejected an Asian- American candidate for the current freshman class based on race or national origin, a department spokesman said.

(Incidentally, the above is also the very first sentences of the article, the link to which is the very first thing in the very first post of this thread. Let’s get on the trolley, OK?)

[Ibn_Warraq]

@Marley23

What are you talking about? Based on some quick internet searching, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton are more like 40 percent white.

Is that entering freshmen or the graduating class?

I ask because at many elite schools one of the disturbing trends of the 90s, which I believe may still continue is that African-American and Latino students drop out or transfer to other schools at vastly higher rates than their white or Asian counterparts.

That’s why such schools often only give the breakdown of the entering class, not of those graduating.

[Terr]

@Ibn_Warraq

Is that entering freshmen or the graduating class?

I ask because at many elite schools one of the disturbing trends of the 90s, which I believe may still continue is that African-American and Latino students drop out or transfer to other schools at vastly higher rates than their white or Asian counterparts.

That’s why such schools often only give the breakdown of the entering class, not of those graduating.

I think in the interests of having a diverse student population, those schools should establish much lower grading requirements for African-American and Latino students too.

[Marley23]

@Ibn_Warraq

Is that entering freshmen or the graduating class?

Entering freshmen. I didn’t specifically look for either type of stat, but it does look like the enrollment stats are easier to find.

Anyway I’m sure those ivory-tower limosine liberals are doing something terribly wrong, and if the thread lasts long enough and we try enough theories, we’ll figure out what it is.

[Frylock]

@John_Mace

You think this is going to be pursued through the Dept of Education? Or are you joking?

Isn’t that what the OP’s link says?

[even_sven]

I currently research college admissions.

Universities are really, genuinely dedicated to “diversity” for reasons that go way beyond politically correct posturing. Indeed, they tie themselves up in knots trying to think of the best ways to recruit a diverse class when their hands are often tied. For example, they know that SATs are biased and coachable, and they are desperate to get away from them. But the college ranking system is so entrenched that they can’t get away. The same with early admissions- universities hate them in theory, because they are really bad for students relying on financial aid. But you can’t be the only university that doesn’t have early admissions without losing something.

Universities really are interested in providing a public service and building an educated nation, and they really would prefer to serve the nation broadly rather than simply perpetuating elites. One way to educate people is to bring them together in a lively intellectual atmosphere full of various points of view and life experiences. When universities put together a class, they are basically putting together a club of really interesting people who are going to spend the next four years together sharing ideas.

If you were putting together a club of really interesting people, would you want to stock it with exclusively high-SAT Asian? Of course not. You’d want some, for sure, but you’d also want to pull from as many places as you can. Universities have really low investment in the people they don’t admit- in other words, they do not see themselves as the ones in charge of rewarding working hard in high school. Their obligation is to put together a group of people that will best serve those that they do admit. And part of that is diversity.

Obviously not every Asian person is the same. But universities are thinking broadly. A class of 20 Asians with perfect SAT scores is going to be, on the whole, more homogenous than the sorts of diverse classes they are building. Remember, admissions officers at highly selective schools are working with a huge pool of candidates who are ALL spectacular. They get to pick and choose and know that all of them are likely to succeed. So the minor differences in credentials are not really important to them. What they are thinking about is “What will this person bring into a classroom,” and raw smarts tells you very little about that.

[Omg_a_Black_Conservative]

@erislover

Omg, I’m sure we could wax poetic about the merits and demerits of affirmative action some time, but in this case, it wouldn’t address my post, which specifically mentioned automatic admission based on test scores alone, the implication being that colleges intentionally do not judge by such things absent other qualities, and that denial of a prospective student who happened to score well wouldn’t amount to racism. It’s not obvious how affirmative action fits into that tale.

Oh well. I misread what you said then. My mistake.

@brickbacon

The problem with this logic is that “the best of the best” doesn’t really have an objective meaning.

Yes, it does. It means those with the highest GPA’s and test scores.

There are few individuals that have all the same schools, teachers, classes, etc., so there is rarely a direct comparison that can be made.

And? Colleges have admission requirements which don’t depend on any of those factors.

More importantly, college admission isn’t some reward for being really good at high school. They care about more than just grades or test scores because most universities don’t exist just to teach undergraduates. They lose money on nearly every one of them while they are in school, which is why they see it more as an investment in a person rather than as a duty to educate the “smartest” kids in the country.

So in essence, what you’re telling me is that if you work really, really, really hard in high school to be accepted to that, for example Ivy League university, yet you are rejected solely because you’re Asian, that you’re okay with that? Because, essentially, this is what you’re saying to me. And before you disagree, yes, Asians do get rejected because of their race and if race was not a consideration in college admissions you would see an increase in the number of Asians at the expense of mostly Blacks and Hispanics.

Critics of affirmative action in American higher education often overlook the fact that elite universities give added weight in the admissions process to many different types of student characteristics. In this article, we use micro-simulation analysis to investigate the effect on the profile of admitted students of eliminating preferences for one or more categories of students. Data for the 1997 entering class indicate that eliminating affirmative action would reduce acceptance rates for African-American and Hispanic applicants by as much as one-half to two-thirds and have an equivalent impact on the proportion of underrepresented minority students in the admitted class. White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points. Asian applicants would gain the most. They would occupy four out of every five seats created by accepting fewer African-American and Hispanic students. The acceptance rate for Asian applicants would rise by one-third from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. We also show that, even though athlete and legacy applicants are disproportionately white and despite the fact that athlete and alumni children admission bonuses are substantial, preferences for athletes and legacies do little to displace minority applicants, largely because athletes and legacies make up a small share of all
applicants to highly selective universities.

Link

@Kimmy_Gibbler

If only there were some way of testing this provocative thesis! If only we could create a laboratory of college admissions to see whether this theory would be borne out!

Why, as it happens, we do have such a laboratory! It is called “the world we live in”! It happens to be a fact that no private college is compelled to practice affirmative action, which seems to me to mean that colleges are free to admit whomever they consider the “best-of-the-best.” Now, you might define this differently than they do, in which case, you’ll just have to go and create your own Omg A Conservative Ivy League Institution (… a/k/a Dartmouth).

I don’t know if those schools have specific affirmative actions rule or guidelines, but I wouldn’t deny that Asians are being denied entry solely for being Asian, as this isn’t the first time Asians have been denied entry to top-tier schools based on their race. It was true in the 1980’s, the 1990’s and the 2000’s, and I would bet it’s still true. In fact, the emerging trend is for Asians to not disclose their race when applying to college, as they’re more likely to be accepted than if they do not.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

Answer to the OP:

Probably to avoid a glut of Asians and I absolutely opposed such policies both for philosophical reasons and for reasons of self-interest.

[dropzone]

Harvard and Princeton have not been important for decades.

Oh, we’re not taking football? Then why are we talking about them?

You kids really need to get your priorities straight.