The point though is that at top US schools, the SAT isn’t everything. Holistic admissions would take into account your school and how it didn’t offer a slew of AP classes. “Qualifications” are taken into context to try to see how you WOULD perform had you had access to resources, which is what they’re doing: When they admit a student to their campus, they admit someone they think would be able to take advantage of resources and contribute something/grow/etc.
The problem is that such extrapolations involve a lot of subjectivity, and some people think admissions officers are using that as an excuse to hide discriminatory practices (which is why people get all up in arms when people like Jian Li can have perfect SAT’s and grades and still get rejected from most of the Ivies).
However, the answer is that the SAT is being weakened over time and colleges are trying to get away from it. It doesn’t tell you anything about how that student is as a person. It’s just a number, and that number is highly contaminated by things like parental wealth.
So I mean, these colleges are trying. It’s not some conspiracy to discriminate against any one particular race. They just want to admit a huge, diverse, intelligent class with a huge pool of skills and aspirations. Some people will still find this unfair, though, even though I think it’s a step in the right direction.
You are right, and I wasn’t asserting otherwise. But remember the brick wall you were up against in that Asian discrimination thread? People still believe that SAT = absolute qualification, and that attempts to circumvent such a numerical rubric is a sly way of bringing in the dregs of society. It doesn’t matter that SAT scores are often used as the initial screen (i.e., no one scoring under a certain percentile will be evaluated). If the admissions criteria can’t be boiled down to hard metrics, the argument goes, then you risk letting in a slough of “unqualified” people. And we just can’t have that.
The woman filing this suit seems to rest her argument on the fact that her high school was more competitive than a predominately minority high school. It was unfair she was held up to a higher bar than your average black or Latino kid, she claims. But I think there should be an outcry over the fact that your average black or Latino kid attends schools that aren’t as academically challenging or stimulating as the one attended by your average white kid. That’s the messed-up thing, not the fact that this young woman wasn’t able to get into the top 10% of her class.
I agree that there is unfairness in the top 10% cut-off rule for the reasons brought out by the plaintiff. But without doing something like this, an institution only serves to perpetuate unfairness generation after generation, without fixing the problem. Publicly-funded institutions should not be reserved for the citizens of the state that were lucky enough to attend the best school systems. They should serve as many of their citizens as possible…or at least the “best” ones from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances.
To add to your point, if you were an admissions director, who would you find a more worthy student and who’s SAT scores would look more impressive.
The daughter of two lawyers who grew up in Scarsdale with a 1270 SAT, or the daughter of a Mississippi farmer who grew up in a house where the only books were a Bible and a TV Guide who scored a 1240.
Yep. That’s ultimately the point: The bar is set higher if you had a head start. I know plenty of kids from rich prep schools in NYC, and while many of them are bright, they had a lot of help.
Again, in NYC for example, it’s very easy to get around in minutes and attend all sorts of extracurricular activities (it’s harder for kids in rural areas who need to drive everywhere or require parents to drive them). It’s easier to do well in school when your parents are well-off, stable, and college-educated – where they prioritize education and make it a point to put you into good schools and help when you have trouble. Having better teachers who are all literate in college admissions is a plus – they know how to write rec letters correctly, too. It’s much better than having an underqualified teacher who is handling a class that’s too large to give any one person individual attention – such teachers may be completely ignorant of college admissions and have no idea how to help you best. If you’re poor, you can’t hire tutors like rich kids can, and it largely becomes a function of how well you can self-study and figure out all the tricks yourself. It’s also much harder to achieve notable/nationwide-respected internships/positions when you aren’t well-connected.
So I do have a problem with “objective” admissions because its tipped heavily in favor of those with resources and opportunities, which does nothing to solve socioeconomic gaps.
Yes, opening up seats for underrepresented minorities means fewer seats for other races. Opening up seats for bright-but-poor students means fewer seats for rich kids. And honestly, I am completely okay with that. Plenty of rich kids who wind up in non-Ivies still get help from their parents and are able to land good jobs after graduation anyways, so I mean, cry me a river, here. Coming from a wealthy family gives you an advantage few people seem to understand or care to admit because people don’t like the feeling that they didn’t do it all on their own.
Besides, it is better for society as a whole to be better-educated instead of simply catering to those with wealth. I think some people just like being on top. It’s like how you can earn $60,000 a year when everyone else is earning $50,000 and feel great, but if you work as an ibanker and your $100,000+ bonus is $30,000 lower than everyone else’s? Well that’s just unacceptable/my life is ruined! We live like rich kings relative to the common people hundreds of years ago. Even if society were better off on average, I think some people would still hate it because they weren’t the best. It’s very American Psycho.
Fair comment. Thanks. (The Oriental = rug people generally blindly parrot the catchphrase without being able to defend it. Drives me crazy but I wouldn’t lump you in that group)
College is not always the government. How many AA programs are legislatively required as opposed to being internal programs? And how is it helping anyone to attack a minority flawed social program without having a strong alternative to take its place?
Maybe. But what if I’m burdened by even the merest awareness of context or sense of perspective? What if I’m not mired by myopia? What then?
Again, sense of perspective. A bunch of guys break into a house steal the food. They give their kids the food. The kid who lives at the house goes to school hungry. The teacher gives her a sandwich to make her feel better so she can focus on the lesson. Another student who already got lunch complains that it’s unfair that the girl was given the sandwich. If we care about fairness and equality we should treat her no differently. Should we have the mindset of the whining kid or the compassionate teacher?
I like this post because it gets to what we want to see without bringing race into the equation. Would it not be an absurd injustice if the one child was a black child of two black lawyers in Scarsdale and the other child was a white child of a Mississippi farmer and therefore the privileged child who scored 30 points higher got an additional bump because of his/her race?
But that aside, and assuming traditional racial roles and the fact that we are determining “who’s SAT scores would look more impressive” then now, always, and forever, the score that was 30 points higher is more impressive. I don’t care what the background was that led the test takers to that point. Test Taker #1 wins by 30 points.
I grew up in West Virginia, so the Mississippi thing hits pretty close to home. I don’t want a 30 point preference because people assume I’m an idiot since I’m from Mississippi (West Virginia). I want to be respected just like anyone else from anywhere else in the country. Don’t pat me on the head and give me a participation award because I was able to overcome my inbreeding and actually find the test taking center.
IMO, that type of quiet and silent bigotry is very prevalent in today’s society (whereas the hostile and open bigotry is largely eliminated) and is the very thing that needs to be done away with.
That’s not a good analogy. A better one, is this; Two students, one black, one white go to school. They are both hungry. The teacher gives one to the black student because of the history of slavery and racism. The teacher doesn’t give one to the white student because of wrongs his or her ancestors may have done, and because it’s assumed that the white student must be doing OK because he or she is white.
This is demonstrably untrue. The people who throughout most of the US history who were members of the elite were male WASPs. These are the types of people who defined the qualifications for entrance in elite colleges. For most of history the people who were admitted were male WASPs from elite prep schools. Then came the introduction of the SATs and AP tests. Now getting a high score on these tests is more important than going to the right prep school. The introduction of these objective tests benefitted Jews, Asians and women to the detriment of male WASPs. The whole reason the diversity rationale was made up was that Asian students were doing too well and university adminstrators are afraid their schools will lose prestige if the student body has too many Asian students and not enough black students.
If you have a story about how 200 years of slavery have disproportionately benefitted Asians who parents have emigrated to this country in the last 40 years, it would be interesting to hear.
This is just blind speculation on your part. The explicit reasons given by admissions officers is fairly backed up by the evidence: You get a pretty powerful class when you admit a diverse mix of traits and personalities. Otherwise you end up with too much homogeneity. You get all sorts of awesome ideas and growth, and it shows – when you consider how many new research frontiers and projects come rolling out of top schools on a daily basis and how much we learn from our peers. I can assure you it’s not all coming from rich prep kids, heh.
The idea is to not have too many of ANY given type of student, but rather a decent representation of all walks of life. There’s no evidence to suggest any particular race is being discriminated against.
Affirmative Action sounds nice in practice, but if we are going to eliminate discrimination on the basis of race, then let’s do it.
So 40 years ago there was the civil rights legislation that was supposed to remove racial discrimination between different races. However, instead of reverse discrimination, the civil rights legislation was based on the principle of equality.
That is, both blacks and whites are allowed in my restaurant, NOT that I need to keep a tally of how many blacks and how many whites are in my restaurant, and now entice more blacks (or whites) off the street with a coupon to make my numbers look better.
Reverse discrimination is discrimination, if a particular race is doing better or worse than another the answer is not always just 'racism ’
There is lots of evidence that certain races are discriminated against. Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford did a study using the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), which was gathered from eight highly competitive public and private colleges and universities, they found that to have the same chance of admission an Asian student had to have an SAT score 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a hispanic student, and 450 points higher than a black student. This was using the old 1600 point scale. The same study found that there was no advantage for those from low income families, or whose parents did not attend college. If the real reason for diversity is that people are concerned about getting a powerful class and succesful alumni, that would mean that our society is so anti asian and pro black that asian genius has just as much chance of success as a moderately intelligent black person.
The real rationale for Affirmative Action is not something speculation. An admissions officer for Amherst admitted to this inthe New York Times
Perhaps that would fly in a private institution, but if we applied that standard to every public institution, we would have affirmative action in everything from public workplaces to jails, since the homogeneity would be creepy otherwise.
What would you say if your local police force decided that the force was too white and they needed to hire an Asian officer, since the homogeneity was creeping out some of the top commanders. The force also claimed that they needed a perspective on “Asian criminal culture”, or whatever that means, as justification.
It sounds nice in practice but it is still discriminatory.
curioushat, law enforcement is an excellent example of how something like AA can be useful. There are two areas that I am generally comfortable with race and gender being used as criteria: law enforcement and lower education.
You may not think an all-white police force in a community comprised of all non-whites is a big deal. But reality would disagree with you.
This study was debated ad nauseum in another thread.
It has some severe flaws:
The author of the study acknowledges that his findings do not prove discrimination.
The author acknowledges that his model is oversimplified and leaves out a huge array of factors that are usually involved in admissions decisions.
Asians outperform whites on the SAT, but SAT scores stop mattering past a certain point.
In other words, simply looking at SAT scores held constant and seeing how admissions rates change = fallacious logic. You assume a quantitative change in SAT leads to a direct increase in admissions acceptance rates, when this isn’t the case. Asians do get higher SAT scores, but those higher SAT scores don’t matter as much. Once you start clocking past 2100-2250 or so, your scores are good enough to get your foot in the door. 2400’s get rejected all the time because their application is weak elsewhere. Scores are only part of the picture. The other conflicting factor is that students who tend to have stellar apps all-around also tend to have higher scores (i.e. those two areas of the application are correlated. It’s tough to find someone with stellar EC’s, awards, grades, recs, essays, etc, but a low SAT score).
Also, being a first generation college student is a massive boost in terms of admissions chances and officers make it a point to take it into account via holistic admissions.
