# Asian American groups accuse Harvard of racial bias in admissions **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 16, 2015, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183 "2015-05-16T17:34:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 18
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2015, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/341 "2015-05-20T22:33:34Z")
Harvard is not rejecting Asians in favor of blacks and Hispanics, Harvard is rejecting Asians in favor of whites. You were arguing in favor of this a few posts ago, remember? ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2015, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/342 "2015-05-20T22:51:12Z")
> [@YogSosoth](#): > > I’ve answered that, more than once. Are you simply repeating your question because you know your reasoning has no leg to stand on? > > If you’re using that kind of vagueness to argue, why not just say AA does nothing because we can’t be sure if racial increases/decreases are the result of outside factors? YOU want to say AA causes harm to these Asians by limiting their opportunities, and now you want to say AA didn’t help to increase them in the first place? Try to have it both ways and you’ll fail. > > Pick one: AA doesn’t help Asians because it doesn’t affect racial quotas or AA does affect racial quotas and helped Asians get into these schools > > You seem to want to confuse the argument. Are you talking about the early 1900’s before significant minority participation in higher learning or late 1900’s after AA’s been around for a while. But I suspect you know that. I’ll answer your question in its entirety, including the things you’ve left out because of the biased questioning: > > Allowing minorities the opportunities to test for these schools increases racial balance from majority white to plurality white. Yet there are still problems. Without AA, schools would change either too slowly or not at all, and would remain disproportionately white, way past when such things are seen as negatives (ie. decades after it stopped being cool to discriminate in these areas). Therefore, AA was created to further balance out minority enrollment. It admits people due to race because racism hadn’t gone away, because even with less restrictions on minorities, they were still being discriminated against. With AA, the systematic racism of enrollment discrimination could no longer stand because quotas were needed. Therefore, it further reduced racism and is a good thing. > > There is still pervasive racism today against minorities. Therefore, AA is still necessary to lower the dominance of one racial group in schools and increase the diversity for other, less represented minorities. > > By your line of questioning, it seems you want to just come out and say that the reason why there was less minorities in schools was because there was, physically, less minorities in the US, and the lifting of restrictions on immigration meant that the factors that held back Asian enrollment were lifted as well (and therefore they don’t need AA). I assure you that I didn’t ignore it, I just find it irrelevant. > > More than Asians were minorities in the US. AA helps all minorities, not just blacks or Asians. Less Asians in schools due to immigration barriers does not mean there was simply no racism or no discrimination towards minorities. If that was true, there’d been more blacks in schools, but there wasn’t, not proportional to their population at least. > > You can think that immigration restrictions were the main factor, and that might be true, but I’m not debating that. I’m debating whether AA is fair and should continue. I think it is. The controversy has always been that AA artificially lessens the numbers of some races while boosting others that maybe didn’t test so great. I don’t find that a problem at all. If only 1% of Harvard is black and 50% white, I want more blacks to be enrolled and less whites. Right now, there is a large percentage of Asians in Harvard and less so with blacks and latinos. Therefore, Harvard should be rejecting more Asians in favor of blacks and latinos. That it hurts Asians is not a problem for me that needs fixing, it is a feature that should continue Aside from the fact that you’re grossly misrepresenting what I said you seem to be in denial of reality by contrinuing to insist that “Asians” were helped by AA when they never were. You also seem to not understand that when it was put in place AA in college admissions was never about helping anyone but blacks. It was only in the 70s that it was expanded to include Hispanics(who until then were classified as whites). It was never used to help “Asians” as a group because frankly, as as group Asians didn’t need it. Obviously there were some groups of Asians, most noticeably Filipinos who who were helped by it and were given preferential treatment for reasons that wouldn’t have applied to Japanese or say Korean Americans. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/343 "2015-05-21T00:16:57Z")
Re Bates College, their student body is 4 percent black/African American: > **[Bates College](https://www.forbes.com/colleges/bates-college/)** > > Bates College So: Bates College is no proof that increased emphasis on holistic admissions would be good for African Americans, or any other disadvantaged group. Yes, I know that Maine is only 1 percent African-American. Then again, Lewiston Maine is 9 percent African-American, and New England as a whole in 6 percent African-American. My point isn’t to bash Bates. Instead, I’m trying to suggest that reliance on testing isn’t inherently good or bad for the disadvantaged. It all depends what use the college makes of the numbers. If a college is highly familiar with your high school, it will consider your grades as being much more important than your test scores. But what does Bates do with an applicant from a Mississippi high school that hasn’t sent a student to Bates in 40 years? My guess is that, with no test scores, that applicant is at a disadvantage. Test scores are one way to show that the mediocre high school you attended doesn’t define you. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e79b87/32.png) [@The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Joker_and_the_Thief)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/344 "2015-05-21T02:15:34Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > The idea of diminishing returns comes to mind with all admissions criteria, but especially the SAT. I think we can all agree that a student who scores in the 60th percentile on the SAT is less prepared for college than one who scores in the 90th percentile. > > But if we’re comparing a student from the 90th percentile from a 99th percentile, why would we expect the former to be a worse student than the latter? You don’t get extra points for turning in an exam early. You can’t do better than a A+ on an essay. Being able to juggle 19 credits doesn’t make you a more valuable student than one who can only juggle 16 credits at a time. Scoring astronomically high on the SAT does not mean you will be more creative, innovative, or tenacious. > > To use a “holistic” analogy, it’s like saying that a student who founded an African orphanage, holds a patent for a Smart Phone app, and is the concertmaster of her city’s youth orchestra is more qualified than a student who started a pitbull rescue group, published an online cookbook on Appalachian-Asian fusion cuisine, and gives poor rural kids free piano lessons. Obviously both of them are interesting students. If you’ve only got one seat left at your institution, you’d be better off flipping a coin between them rather than pretending you can pick the “better” kid. There’s really two questions here: what SAT/ACT testing measures, and how good of a job it does. Both have fairly straightfoward answers. The first is that standardized tests are essentially just tests of cognitive ability. While the SAT is regularly changed in such a way that it’s measurement of cognitive ability decreases, it still [primarily tests this attribute](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15147489). The SAT doesn’t care about creativity, tenaciousness or inventiveness. It’s strictly concerned with cognitive ability. If you use a small sample size to calibrate your cognitive ability test, you’ll have very few people at the extremes, and you won’t be able to tell if your test is accurately measuring their abilities. But the SAT and ACT lack this problem because they’re given to about 1.5 million students each year. That means the test makers have an enormous dataset to work with, and this means that they can reliably estimate cognitive ability for extremely high-scoring and low-scoring individuals. For example, about 50 people who are four standard deviations from the mean take the SAT and ACT each per year. Now, the tests fail at the absolute extremes because people ‘max out’ the test. But the point is still that the SAT can reliably estimate cognitive ability for nearly everyone. Now what does all this mean? I would argue that even though standardized testing can reliably measure cognitive ability at the extremes, their predictive power decreases for individuals that are at the extremes. In other words, other factors begin to determine life outcomes for individuals who are past a certain threshold of intelligence. Which is just a long-winded way of saying that I agree that standardized tests should not be the sole determinate of college admission. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/345 "2015-05-21T02:42:39Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Re Bates College, their student body is 4 percent black/African American: > > [Bates College](http://www.forbes.com/colleges/bates-college/) > > So: Bates College is no proof that increased emphasis on holistic admissions would be good for African Americans, or any other disadvantaged group. > > Yes, I know that Maine is only 1 percent African-American. Then again, Lewiston Maine is 9 percent African-American, and New England as a whole in 6 percent African-American. My point isn’t to bash Bates. Instead, I’m trying to suggest that reliance on testing isn’t inherently good or bad for the disadvantaged. It all depends what use the college makes of the numbers. > > If a college is highly familiar with your high school, it will consider your grades as being much more important than your test scores. But what does Bates do with an applicant from a Mississippi high school that hasn’t sent a student to Bates in 40 years? My guess is that, with no test scores, that applicant is at a disadvantage. Test scores are one way to show that the mediocre high school you attended doesn’t define you. Indeed Bates ends up with the same rough percentages of Black and two or more races students as most of the other liberal arts colleges in their national grouping do. Most are 4 to 5% Black. The another long term testing optional college of its general reputation, Wake Forest, gets up to 7%. But indeed these small liberal colleges know certain High Schools better than others and are more likely to accept students of the same GPA from a known entity than one that they do not know so well. Blowing away the SAT can counteract that. Agreed that SAT-free does not equal affirmative action. And agreed with **The Joker and the Thief** that the SAT measures (a set of particular sorts of) cognitive abilities, no less and no more, of which having some degree of superiority in will serve a student well but not of which defines all the features that contribute to the make up of a superior student. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/346 "2015-05-21T02:49:50Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > You’re both saying the same thing: a disproportionate number of blacks admitted to Harvard and the other elite schools are from wealthier families. > > But why should this be surprising? Is it not the case that the lower-income demographic on average scores lower on SATs and tends to have lower GPAs and fewer advanced courses and, no doubt, fewer opportunities to achieve the kinds of personal benchmarks that the schools look for? Blacks and Hispanics may get a boost from AA but the admissions process is still highly competitive, including among the minorities themselves. And, in the end, they do have to be successful once they are admitted, not to mention successful once they graduate. Except according to the data blacks in the highest-income brackets do roughly as well as whites in the lowest ones ([http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif](http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif)), so by race-based affirmative action you are literally locking out low-income whites (and presumably Asians) in favour of high-income blacks. > [@](#): > > I’m not saying this isn’t a problem. It is. It just isn’t Harvard’s problem, and it’s not fixable with yet more tweaking of admissions criteria. It’s much more basic than that, and needs to be approached on a much broader basis and much earlier in the educational system. > > Just as in the alleged but non-existent anti-Asian “bias”, why does everything have to be blamed on some nefarious conspiracy of class-warring rich white supremacists? The solution to these inequities isn’t to keep hammering away at admissions criteria to admit more of the unqualified, it’s to help more of the disadvantaged actually become qualified. Or why not both? > [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > 1. For the forseeable future, race preferences will need to continue for both educational institutions and any jobs for which screening examinations are administered for either hiring or promotion. Without a deliberate race-based double standard, the workplace will become as disproportionately represented by race as is the NBA. For the sake of clarification, do you believe that such blatant inequalities via race preference is desirable to avoid “disproportionality”? ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 3:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/347 "2015-05-21T03:49:40Z")
I think this issue partly boils down to individualism vs. community interest. Individualists argue that everyone should be judged on their own individual merits, and say that a student with a 2300 SAT and other achievements should be given a higher likelihood of admission than a student with an 1800 SAT and less achievements. Community-interest proponents argue that it is not in the greater community’s interests for one racial group to be represented out of proportion to its percentage of the general population. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/348 "2015-05-21T03:56:17Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > I think this issue partly boils down to individualism vs. community interest. > Individualists argue that everyone should be judged on their own individual merits, and say that a student with a 2300 SAT and other achievements should be given a higher likelihood of admission than a student with an 1800 SAT and less achievements. > Community-interest proponents argue that it is not in the greater community’s interests for one racial group to be represented out of proportion to its percentage of the general population. I do not think that is the argument made by the “community-interest” side at all. No one is arguing that Asian students being represented out of proportion to the percentage of the general population is a bad thing for the greater community. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/349 "2015-05-21T04:53:33Z")
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > Except according to the data blacks in the highest-income brackets do roughly as well as whites in the lowest ones ([http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif](http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.gif)), so by race-based affirmative action you are literally locking out low-income whites (and presumably Asians) in favour of high-income blacks. What your chart is showing us is that low-income tiers score lower on SATs than high-income tiers, which is exactly what I said, and I also said that they also “…tend to have lower GPAs and fewer advanced courses and, no doubt, fewer opportunities to achieve the kinds of personal benchmarks that the schools look for” and are therefore less likely to be accepted. The fact that blacks as a group also score lower than whites in any given income tier is already widely acknowledged, including by me in an earlier post. This is precisely why affirmative action exists, whether one agrees with it or not. AA is **obviously** discriminatory against the non-preferred groups. The belief is that this is a relatively short-term measure that has compelling societal benefits in correcting a long period of egregious historical injustices. So yes, you’re locking out lower-income whites and, by definition, everybody not in the preferred group. If you want to argue against AA, knock yourself out, but that’s not the discussion here. If you want to argue, as some have done, that race-based AA should be replaced by class (income) based AA, that’s yet a different discussion. Though it makes me chuckle because around here, “Asian” almost invariably means “wealthy”, so I can just imagine how an AA system that artificially favors the admission of poor people would go over with the Asian community! 😃 > [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > Or why not both? For one thing, because tweaking admission standards to “admit more of the unqualified” doesn’t help anyone. For another, because the capacity of the top elite colleges is a fixed quantity and tweaking the numbers doesn’t change that. What I’m suggesting is that we focus on improving the educational system at the pre-college levels so that being poor is not an obstacle to maximizing one’s potential. You’re never going remove the correlation between low income and low achievement because there’s also a causative factor there, but right now there are far too many low-income kids just being locked out of the whole educational process at an early age. It doesn’t help that there are conservative wingnuts running around trying to make even more cuts to public education funding. > [@Haberdash](#): > > No one expects or desires the selection to be “random.” No one said they did. Again, it’s a statistical concept. Without any causative factors influencing the selection, you would expect the demographics of the successful candidates to match that of the general population. If a particular race or income level is under-represented or over-represented, then we know there are causative factors disfavoring or favoring that demographic. Here, it tells us that Asians are being favored. Probably at least in part because they tend to score higher on standardized tests. Perhaps you can tell us just exactly what the proportion of Asians at Harvard _ **should** _ be, since it’s already much greater than that of the general population. Should it be exactly proportionate to their SAT scores? Exactly proportionate to their GPAs? To their IQs? To some other number? Perhaps one can take the view that it shouldn’t be proportionate to any single number, but that it should be a considered mix of objective quantitative metrics and a broad series of subjective valuations, because identifying a person’s potential as well as their fit within an elite community in a very competitive environment is a complex and daunting process. The essence of the most recent complaint launched against Harvard seems at its core much the same as the previous one, namely the position that “I worked hard and I achieved and exceeded every objective requirement for admission, and yet I was still rejected.” Well, guess what, so were about 94% of all the other applicants, white, black, and brown, across all races and income levels. Welcome to the real world. That’s my answer. What’s yours? Should Harvard become obsessed about ensuring a precise percentage of Asians, and, by extension, a precise percentage of every race? What should the percentage be, given that Asians are already over-represented? Should they also, for fear of class warfare, become equally obsessed about ensuring a precise percentage of every income demographic? ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 7:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/350 "2015-05-21T07:54:51Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > What your chart is showing us is that low-income tiers score lower on SATs than high-income tiers, which is exactly what I said, and I also said that they also “…tend to have lower GPAs and fewer advanced courses and, no doubt, fewer opportunities to achieve the kinds of personal benchmarks that the schools look for” and are therefore less likely to be accepted. > > The fact that blacks as a group also score lower than whites in any given income tier is already widely acknowledged, including by me in an earlier post. This is precisely why affirmative action exists, whether one agrees with it or not. AA is **obviously** discriminatory against the non-preferred groups. The belief is that this is a relatively short-term measure that has compelling societal benefits in correcting a long period of egregious historical injustices. You are merely repeating the intuitive suppositions from the chart, but the counterintuitive is again that lower-income whites score the same on SAT as blacks in the highest income bracket. So the point is affirmative action (at least as currently practiced) is benefiting racial tokenism instead of actually disadvantaged people. > [@](#): > > So yes, you’re locking out lower-income whites and, by definition, everybody not in the preferred group. If you want to argue against AA, knock yourself out, but that’s not the discussion here. If you want to argue, as some have done, that race-based AA should be replaced by class (income) based AA, that’s yet a different discussion. Though it makes me chuckle because around here, “Asian” almost invariably means “wealthy”, so I can just imagine how an AA system that artificially favors the admission of poor people would go over with the Asian community! 😃 It seems to me many are arguing against affirmative action here, at least implicitly. And I’m agnostic on class-based AA unlike race-based ones to which I am utterly opposed. > [@](#): > > For one thing, because tweaking admission standards to “admit more of the unqualified” doesn’t help anyone. For another, because the capacity of the top elite colleges is a fixed quantity and tweaking the numbers doesn’t change that. What I’m suggesting is that we focus on improving the educational system at the pre-college levels so that being poor is not an obstacle to maximizing one’s potential. You’re never going remove the correlation between low income and low achievement because there’s also a causative factor there, but right now there are far too many low-income kids just being locked out of the whole educational process at an early age. It doesn’t help that there are conservative wingnuts running around trying to make even more cuts to public education funding. What I mean is getting rid of the blatantly discriminatory standards such as those against Asians via race-based affirmative action. Reducing the causes of poverty and expanding educational opportunities for those with low-incomes should not prevent us from pursuing this policy either. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 8:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/351 "2015-05-21T08:53:15Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I have a bit of an issue with this one point. We know that African-American applicants to the elite colleges have significantly lower SAT scores than the average, and that the preferential treatment is driven by societal mandates that most of us believe are worthwhile. I don’t think there’s any “masquerade” about it, or any claim that these candidates have some abstract meritorious attributes that account for it. And it would be silly, just on the basis of simple math, to claim that this doesn’t disadvantage others, including whites and Asians. Just like preferential treatment of legacy applicants and star athletes impacts the whole applicant pool. Some of it is race-based, lots of it may be unfair, but none of it is the question here. The question is whether there’s overt racism directed against Asians. > > And here the story is entirely different. Asian applicants have marginally higher SATs than the average of the applicant pool (from the study that was linked earlier) and all things considered (from the same study) they are disadvantaged by the equivalent of about 50 SAT points (out of 1600). Much of that is accounted for by the preferential categories just mentioned, which makes everyone else, by definition, also take a hit. Is it such an incredible stretch to imagine that the rest is accounted for by the kinds of soft criteria that the Ivy Leagues use to assess, say, a person’s social abilities or other abstract qualities that correlate with success? > > Remember that Asians are **over-represented** in the elite admissions stats. They just aren’t over-represented quite as much as their SATs alone would indicate. Should they be, when this is just one number among innumerable quantitative and qualitative criteria? The DoE Office of Civil Rights certainly didn’t think so in 1990. Why would it be different today? (Underlining by CP for emphasis) I haven’t got the foggiest idea what racism is, despite having read thousands of posts on the SDMB about it… 😕 What I can say, based on the admissions process at higher educational institutions, is that asians must have much higher qualifications than blacks to be admitted, even if they are in a similar socioeconomic tier. Their self-identified race–and only their race–puts them into a different set of required criteria. (I am leaving whites out of the discussion for simplicity) This is the “racial discrimination” being alleged in the [complaint against Harvard:](http://chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Final%20Aisan%20Complaint%20Harvard%20Document%2020150515.pdf) _“Over the last two decades, Asian-American applicants to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges have increasingly experienced discrimination in the admissions process. Many Asian-American students who have almost perfect SAT scores, top 1% GPAs, plus significant awards or leadership positions in various extracurricular activities have been rejected by Harvard University and other Ivy League Colleges while similarly situated applicants of other races have been admitted. Because of this discrimination, it has become especially difficult for high-performing male Asian-American students to gain admission to Harvard University and other Ivy League colleges.”_ First, the SAT data you cite are nowhere close to the numbers I’ve seen. Would you mind reposting the cite? In the complaint, the authors cite a required average differential of 140 SAT points more than whites, and 450 more than blacks for an asian to be on an equal admissions footing at an elite university. It’s true asians are over-represented, as a group. So are the wealthy; so are the intelligent; so are the motivated; so are the lucky; so are the connected… The question the asians are raising is whether a race-alone criterion is being put into the admissions mix in order to avoid an overly profound over-representation, and whether such a race-alone criterion is legal. The answer to the race-alone question is yes. Just plain old, “yes.” If Harvard is forced to expose its process, this will become obvious; for this reason Harvard and every other institution holds its admissions process very close to their chests. We both agree, I think, that race-based preferences must continue if we are going to have race-based diversity–particularly at elite institutions. Absolutely no other criteria–soft ones or socioeconomic ones–overcome the substantial, persistent, average differences in academic performance among race groups. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 9:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/352 "2015-05-21T09:16:14Z")
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > Originally Posted by Chief Pedant > \*9. For the forseeable future, race preferences will need to continue for both educational institutions and any jobs for which screening examinations are administered for either hiring or promotion. Without a deliberate race-based double standard, the workplace will become as disproportionately represented by race as is the NBA. > \* > > For the sake of clarification, do you believe that such blatant inequalities via race preference is desirable to avoid “disproportionality”? Yes. Having looked at this issue for more than 30 years, yes. Without race-alone criteria in place for education and jobs, most of the ground gained by blacks in the last 30 years will be lost. I do not want to live in a world where a very large, self-identified group does not participate at a reasonable level. For both the educational admissions process and job hiring into jobs with qualification exam screenings, the race-based differences never disappear. This is true regardless of antecedent opportunity or socioeconomic status. Therefore nothing but race-alone double standards for matriculation and jobs will smooth out representation by race. Want to be sobered up? At Google, 1% of the tech force is black. 34% is asian. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/353 "2015-05-21T10:21:17Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Only if you see it from the perspective that AA is racial discrimination. If you see it as making up for (in an imperfect way) some of the discrimination and bias inherent in society today, then it’s quite different. But you have to. Discrimination by race means taking race into account, period. You can try to argue that it’s justified discrimination, but you cannot act like it’s not discrimination. It’s just the definitions of the words involved. Race: distinguished subpopulation by physical traits. Discriminate: to recognize as a distinction and differentiate. The issue here is that, unlike with white people, we are again dealing with a minority. And not some odd minority that has never been discriminated against. We put them in concentration camps during WW2, for goodness’ sake. By all the AA logic out there, they should be getting preferential treatment if anything. Yet they aren’t. They aren’t even equal. They are being discriminated against relative to white people. Or at least, such is being alleged. Maybe it really is other criteria. But that’s something you would need to show. Oh, and finally, we do not in any way want an elite class. Only the rich want that. It’s classism, a form of bigotry. And bigotry is bad. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/354 "2015-05-21T12:55:01Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > First, the SAT data you cite are nowhere close to the numbers I’ve seen. Would you mind reposting the cite? In the complaint, the authors cite a required average differential of 140 SAT points more than whites, and 450 more than blacks for an asian to be on an equal admissions footing at an elite university. No doubt. But [as already pointed out earlier](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18376437&postcount=236), and supported by several reputable articles I’ve seen, the complaint is rife with cherry-picked and misleading numbers and claims. The cite I refer to was posted earlier by **Terr** in an attempt to support the Asian discrimination argument, and specifically the claim that Asians “have to” score some enormous amount higher on SATs than anyone else to be admitted. [This is the link [PDF file].](http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf) Ironically, however, the article makes no such claim – and isn’t even predominantly about that question – and it specifically says there’s no evidence for anti-Asian discrimination (see Footnote 7 on page 1431, which discusses the 1990 DoE Civil Rights Office decision and what can and cannot be inferred from the data presented in the paper). Two other relevant quotes from the paper on which I based my post: Page 1430 Average scores for applicants in each race/ethnic group are as follows: white (1347), African American (1202), Hispanic (1230), Asian (1363), and other races (1322). Conclusions page 1444 Being African American instead of white is worth an average of 230 additional SAT points on a 1600-point scale, but recruited athletes reap an advantage equivalent to 200 SAT points. Other things equal, Hispanic applicants gain the equivalent of 185 points, which is only slightly more than the legacy advantage, which is worth 160 points. Coming from an Asian background, however, is comparable to the loss of 50 SAT points. Let me ask the same question I asked **Haberdash** at the end of [post #349](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18380546&postcount=349): if Asians, who are over-represented relative to their general population, are still claimed to be under-represented, then WTF **is** the “correct” representation? Is the SAT the appropriate magic number? Their GPA? Their IQ? Their shoe size? Is there any single number that is so overwhelmingly significant that it must take precedence over all other factors including a combination of multiple weighted scores and subjective assessments? What about valid considerations of diversity? Where, in short, does merit belong in this equation, and how do you measure it? What is the factual basis of the claim of discrimination – which I’ve never seen substantiated – other than the subjects’ own dissatisfaction with the outcome? > [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > Want to be sobered up? At Google, 1% of the tech force is black. 34% is asian. Which means… what? If we’re going to trade anecdotes, here’s something I’ve noticed in several large multinationals with large information technology departments. There’s no particular racial trend in any department, including IT, but for some reason when it gets down to programming – the patient work of churning out reams of application code – in some of these places there’s a high preponderance of Asians doing that particular task. Forget your 34%, we could be talking 80% of a large workforce. I don’t claim that this is good, bad, or indifferent, and frankly I’m not even sure why this occurs, but I don’t consider it “sobering” or indicative of anything particularly profound. ---
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/355 "2015-05-21T13:03:15Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > Let me ask the same question I asked **Haberdash** at the end of [post #349](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18380546&postcount=349): if Asians, who are over-represented relative to their general population, are still claimed to be under-represented, then WTF **is** the “correct” representation? Is the SAT the appropriate magic number? Their GPA? Their IQ? Their shoe size? Is there any single number that is so overwhelmingly significant that it must take precedence over all other factors including a combination of multiple weighted scores and subjective assessments? The correct representation is whatever is produced by a system that is actually designed to find the most qualified students. What you don’t understand is the notion that individuals deserve fair treatment based on their individual merits, and are not simply blobs in a game of collective racial outcomes. > [@](#): > > What is the factual basis of the claim of discrimination – which I’ve never seen substantiated – other than the subjects’ own dissatisfaction with the outcome? The fact that the “holistic criteria” are adjusted whenever Asians make gains in the class to produce less Asian classes the following year. The fact that people supporting the current policy openly state that their goal is to reduce the chances of Asians in getting in to Harvard in order to keep Harvard white. The fact that at universities which do disclose their affirmative action procedures, a clear numerical penalty for being Asian is part of that procedure, and there is no reason to believe Harvard has some other procedure. The fact that anyone not invested in being a racial quota activist sees what’s happening, sees it the same way, and sees it very easily. You can’t keep hopping back and forth between “there is no Asian quota” and “it’s imperative for the national interest of diversity that we keep the Asian quota and Harvard is a forward-thinking leader by having an Asian quota.” ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/356 "2015-05-21T13:50:08Z")
> [@Haberdash](#): > > The correct representation is whatever is produced by a system that is actually designed to find the most qualified students. That’s not an answer to the question, it’s a meaningless truism. If you can’t rely on a single number like an SAT score as an indisputably reliable measure and predictor of qualification and merit – and of course you certainly cannot – then you have to deal with a complex mix of criteria, including subjective ones. Harvard states that this is precisely what they’re doing. Any claim to the contrary so far has been unsubstantiated opinion, including the list of “facts” you presented, the key one of which I dealt with below. > [@Haberdash](#): > > The fact that people supporting the current policy openly state that their goal is to reduce the chances of Asians in getting in to Harvard in order to keep Harvard white. [47% of the latest year’s admissions to Harvard are visible minorities](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics). Of those, nearly half are Asians, by far the largest ethnicity. Whoever is in charge of keeping Harvard “all white” (or keeping out those pesky Asians) must either be blind or appallingly incompetent! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![robertliguori](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/46a35a/32.png) [@robertliguori](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robertliguori)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/357 "2015-05-21T14:18:43Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > [47% of the latest year’s admissions to Harvard are visible minorities](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics). Of those, nearly half are Asians, by far the largest ethnicity. > > Whoever is in charge of keeping Harvard “all white” (or keeping out those pesky Asians) must either be blind or appallingly incompetent! 😃 Well, whiteness is complicated. Remember that there was a time when it was absurd to suggest that Italians, Jews, Poles, or Irish were white; there’s no reason people can’t decide that the children of highly-educated, highly-integrated Japanese-American and Chinese-American immigrants, are white, and the children of Cambodian-American refugees aren’t. Whiteness is a dumb, arbitrary category, and is not become any less so now that people want to disclaim it than it was 100 years ago when people were trying to claim it. ---
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/358 "2015-05-21T14:23:11Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > That’s not an answer to the question, it’s a meaningless truism. If you can’t rely on a single number like an SAT score as an indisputably reliable measure and predictor of qualification and merit – and of course you certainly cannot – then you have to deal with a complex mix of criteria, including subjective ones. Harvard states that this is precisely what they’re doing. Any claim to the contrary so far has been unsubstantiated opinion, including the list of “facts” you presented, the key one of which I dealt with below. Again, the fact that college admissions are complicated and standardized tests are flawed is not a reason to just throw up your hands and go “guess we just have to keep the Asians out.” It’s exactly the same non-argument as “I don’t think the government should be involved in marriage, therefore it’s okay to ban gays from marrying now.” It’s not anyone’s responsibility to completely solve the admissions question before they have the right to say that _racism is bad_, for fuck’s sake. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/359 "2015-05-21T15:57:10Z")
> [@Haberdash](#): > > Harvard is not rejecting Asians in favor of blacks and Hispanics, Harvard is rejecting Asians in favor of whites. You were arguing in favor of this a few posts ago, remember? The article doesn’t mention any of that, but I suppose I’ll take your word for it. What of it? If the whites are underrepresented by whatever criteria Harvard’s using, then I’m fine with reducing the Asian enrollment > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Aside from the fact that you’re grossly misrepresenting what I said you seem to be in denial of reality by contrinuing to insist that “Asians” were helped by AA when they never were. Cite? I find it difficult to believe that somewhere in the text of AA it says something specific like more blacks need to be enrolled. On the surface, it was designed to target employer actions without regard to their race, creed, or origin. > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > You also seem to not understand that when it was put in place AA in college admissions was never about helping anyone but blacks. It was only in the 70s that it was expanded to include Hispanics(who until then were classified as whites). It was never used to help “Asians” as a group because frankly, as as group Asians didn’t need it. And whether that is true or not is irrelevant. Blacks may have been the ones in need of help the most so if that actually happened like you said, it would be a proper redistribution of enrollment spots. Unlike the Asians in the OP’s article, blacks were being severely underrepresented. Now demographics have changed and Asians find themselves in the top plurality, it makes sense that they would object to artificial reduction of their numbers, but it doesn’t mean them any less selfish or wrong > [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Obviously there were some groups of Asians, most noticeably Filipinos who who were helped by it and were given preferential treatment for reasons that wouldn’t have applied to Japanese or say Korean Americans. And you know what? So what if some groups are not getting full access equivalent to other groups? I’m less sympathetic to a group yelling about equality from the top when those on the bottom need help. ---
**Author:** ![Haberdash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Haberdash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Haberdash)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2015, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183/360 "2015-05-21T17:56:52Z")
> [@YogSosoth](#): > > And you know what? So what if some groups are not getting full access equivalent to other groups? I’m less sympathetic to a group yelling about equality from the top when those on the bottom need help. “Those on the bottom” being rich, white Harvard applicants, who need to be artificially helped against second-generation Asian immigrants, who are okay to discriminate against since they control the banks and the Freemasons anyway, don’t you know. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183.md?page=17) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/asian-american-groups-accuse-harvard-of-racial-bias-in-admissions/720183.md?page=19)