How do you know that they don’t take any of that into account? There is information in the essay, and also imparted in the interview.
And here in California, whites are a minority in the University of California system.
I cited their web page
The main focus of interviews is to explore your academic potential, motivation and suitability for your chosen course. Questions are designed to assess your:
problem-solving abilities
assimilation of new ideas and information
intellectual flexibility and analytical reasoning
It’s important for you to remember that interviewers won’t be trying to ‘catch you out’, but will be challenging you to think for yourself and show how you can apply your existing knowledge and skills laterally to unfamiliar problems.
Interviews help selectors to gauge how you would respond to the teaching methods used at Cambridge. Interviews are similar in many ways to supervisions.
… and
Are extra-curricular activities taken into account?
While achievements in particular extra-curricular activities may be impressive, getting an offer of a place isn’t influenced by them. However, interviewers often ask about other interests or experience that you mention in your application where they’re of relevance to the course that you intend to study.
Can you show me where the “compelling life story” comes in? Let’s say you want to study chemistry at Cambridge. How exactly will the story about overcoming being fat, gay and Mexican going to help you?
Because I have been an admissions officer for a graduate program, I know the games that can be played on both sides of the table.
“show how you can apply your existing knowledge and skills laterally to unfamiliar problems” can be used to show how overcoming the one challenge (being a fat, gay Mexican) means that when I hit a lab exercise with what seems to be an insurmountable problem, I won’t quit. I will experiment until I defeat it.
Interestingly enough, one of the problems we see with grad students in STEM is that they have spent too much of their life avoiding any sign of failure - which keeps them from being great researchers and experimenters in the graduate program. Those who do NOT fail, tend to fail out of the PhD program.
If Cambridge truly did not care about a personal statement, they would not ask for one. If they wanted to keep it all out of the discussion, they would not have an interview. That adds a significant, difficult to measure, human element to the review process for admissions.
Now - if you can show me that Cambridge only uses the scores, or that the interview counts for naught, or that the personal statement is not read, etc. - I welcome the information.
Most universities are extremely circumspect in their evaluation criteria. Individual admissions officers are even tighter. You can find the admissions files of hundreds of admitted candidates, and thousands of rejected ones, with my signature. What you will NOT find is any notes in the files from me aside from a few checkmarks. I only had to be subpoenaed once before I developed a system of nothing of note that could be easily interpreted (the subpoena was for a divorce case).
(emphasis mine)
Can you give me a cite for this “have to” claim you keep making? Where does it say that? What I read in that article is that Asians as a group score higher on SATs than other groups. We already knew that. So I would expect the subset of Asians as a group who are admitted to have higher scores than other groups. I don’t know what you would expect, or why you would expect some mathematical oddity to occur.
Which is one reason they got nowhere in the 1980s complaint, and will likely get nowhere with this one.
Let’s say you have a problem while studying chemistry at Cambridge. And you have to overcome it. 
“The” Asians, as in the ones specifically suing to overturn the racial quotas. So no, not racist, just a descriptive statement of their legal maneuvers.
Cite?
That’s a biased question. Instead ask at what point in time there was AA in favor of non-whites. The answer is: When such quotas were created, reducing the dominance of whites in these schools and creating a diverse student body
I have no problems with Harvard maintaining a diverse student body by limiting enrollment based on race. Ideally, given Harvard’s demographics, I would like them to reduce the Asian enrollment and accept more blacks and latinos to more closely match the population demographics
Like I said, at one point, whites held all the enrollment in the top schools. AA was created in part to lessen that inequality and it has worked. It still continues to work by creating a diverse student body. Please don’t pretend it has never happened, its silly and ignorant.
I asked about *Asians *benefiting from AA. Not other races. Asians.
You’re arguing for policies which artificially give less qualified whites places over Asians. Have you forgotten?
Harvard already gives a massive boost to black students. Right now, the average score needed to get into Harvard as a black applicant is the same as that required to get into the University of Nebraska as a white applicant. Sure, they could lower the standard even further. But the ACTUAL TOPIC of the lawsuit and this thread is the penalty applied to Asians to let in more whites.
The topic of this thread is Harvard preserving a “diverse student body” by excluding Asians in favor of whites. Their affirmative action program for blacks is both substantial (again, it’s easier to get into Harvard if you’re black than get into Michigan or Virginia if you’re white) and not being questioned here.
Are you so in love with the concept of affirmative action for blacks that you feel compelled to defend anything labeled “affirmative action” by someone, or do you actually think that it would be harmful for Harvard to become “too Asian?”
How can that possibly be? If I use only objective factors in admissions, then there is one set of racial characteristics of a class.
I then apply a new type of review that focuses on race, for the sole purpose of adjusting the racial makeup of the class, and then it does in fact alter the racial makeup of the class. Because of my new type of review that focuses on race I have now, as was my intention, kept some out of the class and admitted others with the determinate factor being race.
It has a racially discriminatory purpose and outcome and its stated goal is to discriminate based upon race, but you claim that it isn’t “necessarily” racial discrimination? You might say it is good and necessary racial discrimination, but I don’t know how you can say it isn’t racial discrimination.
I thought it was just about discriminating against Asians - nothing in the OP seemed to say that it was whites who were winning. When the University of California changed their rules via Prop 209 - Asians came out with higher representation, whites stayed fairly level, and it was Hispanics and African Americans who seemed to come out at a loss.
This is not an Asian vs. White fight.
I think you may be thinking of “discrimination” only in a negative/against sense. It’s not necessarily. Promoting people *because *of their race is also a form of discrimination - you might call it positive discrimination.
It’s an “Asian plaintiffs vs. the specific whites who benefit from the policy” thing. If the only thing Harvard changes is removing the Asian quota/penalty, then more Asians will get in, and the people displaced will be less qualified white applicants.
But in a zero sum game like college admissions, when you promote someone because of their race, you necessarily demote another person because of his race.
Well, exactly. But because it’s more indirect, people don’t care or mind as much.
Saying, “Let’s increase enrollment of Race A!” sounds much better than, “Let’s reduce enrollment of Races B, C, D, and E.”
Ok, I’d really like to see a cite which shows that it’s as easy for a black applicant to get into Harvard as a white applicant to get into the University of Nebraska.
I find that ridiculous and hard to believe.
The closest I can think of too anything remotely like that was a report from a whistle-blower at Cornell from the early 90s showing the average SAT scores of African-American students admitted to Cornell was 1070 while the average SAT score of white students admitted was 1270 but that was over 20 years ago and was Cornell not Harvard.
I don’t know about the average SAT scores of African Americans admitted to Harvard - Harvard does not publish this data.
But here is an interesting tidbit:
If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation’s most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test.
Nationwide, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT.
In a race-neutral competition for the approximately 50,000 places for first-year students at the nation’s 25 top-ranked universities, high-scoring blacks would be buried by a huge mountain of high-scoring non-black students. Today, under prevailing affirmative action admissions policies, there are about 3,000 black first-year students matriculating at these 25 high-ranking universities, about 6 percent of all first-year students at these institutions. But if these schools operated under a strict race-neutral admissions policy where SAT scores were the most important qualifying yardstick, these universities could fill their freshman classes almost exclusively with students who score at the very top of the SAT scoring scale. As shown previously, black students make up at best between 1 and 2 percent of these high-scoring groups.
It is taken as an obvious given by this article that the competition for those places is not race-neutral. As anyone who looked at that data would be forced to admit.
Given that they get higher SAT scores than any other group and manage to get in to elite universities out of all proportion to their population, and they do this all by themselves, just exactly what sort of affirmative action benefits do you think they should be given?
That wasn’t the question. He was asking how past affirmative action benefited Asians.
According to this article, Fillipinos, Cambodians, Pacific Islanders are among the Asian Americans who benefit from policies that take ethnicity into account.
And I can attest to this personally. I received funding in graduate school through NIH targeted at minorities (particularly those from communities with health disparities). One of my lab-mates received funding through this program too. He was Fillipino.
I was in a program in undergrad designed to help minority students matriculate (it was run out of the Office of Minority Education and Development). There were Asian students in this program, albeit very few.
I know what he’s asking. And I answered it by pointing out how ridiculous the question is. AA hasn’t benefited rich white guys, either.