Where do they say white in their lawsuit? They complain of an anti-Asian quota, and they are probably right.
The lawsuit talks about Asian scores vs those of all other applicants - that means Whites, Blacks and Latinos (and a couple of Native Americans while we are at it). It is Asian vs ALL OTHERS lawsuit. YOU seem to want to make this just Asian vs. White - why do you keep ignoring the other groups that ALSO get into Harvard with lower scores?
That was the original purpose. But these prestige schools also class-craft their African-American applicant pool. As a result:
Then why didn’t you respond to Yog.
Yog was the one who claimed that Asian-Americans benefitted in the past.
For the record, some Asian-American groups have. I don’t think they still do, but for a time Filipino-Americans did benefit from AA IIRC.
As a rule though Asian-Americans have not.
Yes, and it is good that that happened. Unless you think it is better if more Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans get accepted and fail.
Well depends on your definition of Affirmative Action. If you count legacy admits or the like, rather than purely racial ones the story becomes more complex.
Bit of a cuck, I should say. Although I don’t see why him being Asian has to do with anything, anymore than black conservatives like Thomas Sowell who think the black population would greatly prosper if only all social welfare spending was eliminated.
And race is not a “merit” in any sense of the word.
To quote from the article itself:
This is very much a true statement, however needless to say its hardly support for race-based affirmative action where a black or Hispanic from a “privileged” socioeconomic background has more of an advantage compared to a white or Asian from a less “privileged” socioeconomic background. To those on the left, it should be clear that socioeconomic diversity is of far greater importance than racial diversity.
Again I absolutely agree. Yet it is these dog-whistle culture issues like race-based affirmative action that have divided the working and middle classes of this Republic on racial, cultural, and confessional lines, destroying the New Deal coalition.
So what? It isn’t exactly strange since the majority of this country’s population and in particular of those negatively affected by race-based affirmative action are white while the Asian population has grown greatly in the past few decades, with certain lags in active participation in civic life.
And if the points put forth earlier in the thread-that the rates of blacks and Hispanics who actually graduated held steady-then the development was a happy one.
The belief that a student with an overall SAT of 2300 is of “better quality” than a student whose SAT was 2100 is I think part of the disconnect. Since the basketball analogy has been made it is like saying the 6f 10i player is better quality than the 6f 7i one. An elite liberal arts college is building a team as much as any professional basketball organization is and they want students with different sorts of strengths and talents, few of which are captured with one or two metrics and most of which do not have very good number correlates available. Indeed they want athletes and will recruit excellent students who are athletically gifted whose average SAT is 173 points below that of their non-recruited classmates. They want some who are verbally gifted. So on.
Interestingly and surprisingly enough the 1%ers scored well on the SATs. Not sure how that would break down when you get into the real big money group though … for Harvard $500K annual income is chump change for those folk.
Cambridge is NOT an elite liberal arts college. Oh they are elite, but they are not a liberal arts college. Students are applying to a particular course of study from word go. They apply to law or medicine or architecture or english or mathematics or history or veterinary medicine or … you get the point. And they do not aim for the broad education that a liberal arts college aims for with all sorts taking all sorts of course work.
No it’s like saying a basketball player who can sink 10% more baskets is a better player. Note the lack of holistic crap involving height.
Except that SAT and ACT scores might not matter either:
I posted this thread many years ago. The gist is that my kids (at the time non existent, and currently sitting next to me on the couch) are American Indian by my wife. My wife grew up very poor, benefited from affirmative action, and she is very much a success story, but my wife and I are now safely upper middle class. I was pondering whether I should allow my kids to benefit from affirmative action policies.
When the rubber hit the road, I checked the box and they have already benefited from it. Not sure whether it is right or not, but that’s what we did. But my kids are not the ones that are supposed to benefit from affirmative action. The policy needs to change somehow.
I don’t blame you. It’s your kids. If gaming the system gets them ahead, you game the system. But there shouldn’t be a system to be gamed that way.
At most it is saying that a someone who can sink 10% more free throws (a very specific standardized shot) is the better overall player and that the best team is made up by choosing those who shoot free throws the best - without knowing anything about how each player sets up plays for teammates, his ball handling skills, his rebounding skills, his getting into position to disrupt the flow of the other teams’ offenses, his ability to block shots, to draw fouls, and a host of other attributes that constitute a whole player, let alone how his skills mesh with the rest of the teams. A team of the best centers, for example, is not necessarily the best team overall.
Now mind you I am not saying that the SAT is a worthless metric; it is not and even at the very top levels, 99 to 99.9%ile (and the majority of those who attend Harvard are in that range or very close to it) it probably discriminates a within particular set of important skills. A hypothetical Asian student at 99.9%ile is better at that particular skill than someone at 99.0%. But it does not measure a host of other skills that a true liberal arts college is desirous of in at least some sizable portions of the team.
I am also not of the belief that things like tenacity in the face of failure, a willingness to fail as part of learning, creativity, the drive to seek out challenges, a broad intellectual curiosity, verbal acumen, the ability to function well as part of a team, and a host of other skills and talents, cannot be quantified … but the metrics to do so are not well developed or accepted at this time. Hence those attributes, highly desired by American elite liberal arts colleges in addition to having high SAT scores and top level GPAs, are left to other means of assessments. Flawed as they may be they are the best assessment tools for those attributes we’ve got.
Good luck with that. Things I have seen just this year:
That all said - if we want to help, Socio-Economic Scale is the way to go instead of race. That way the rich don’t ALWAYS win.
Unless you know what quality the schools in the study are, those results don’t mean much. Yes, in a dinky college the incoming SAT/ACT score may not influence the graduation rate much.
Okay a specific one - Bates has found no significant outcomes difference in a 20 year study. Bates is, if you do not know it, a highly rated small liberal arts college in Maine, rated generally a bit above Wash U.
Do you have some hard data about test scores by self-identified race for admissions? Most top tier private universities hold this information very close to their chest, and self-reported survey data is notoriously unreliable.
For Med School, which is also competitive, the score differentials are quite remarkable.
In a recent year, 24% of blacks with MCAT scores of 21-23 were accepted; of asians with the same score range, 4% were accepted.
And from here:
*"For admission to the very highest ranked, brand-name schools such as Princeton or MIT, applicants need scores of 750 to be considered for admission. Yet, as we shall see, only a minute percentage of black test takers score at these levels. Thus, if high-ranking colleges and universities were to abandon their policies of race-sensitive admissions, they will be choosing their first-year students from an applicant pool in which there will be practically no blacks.
Let’s be more specific about the SAT racial gap among high-scoring applicants. In 2005, 153,132 African Americans took the SAT test. They made up 10.4 percent of all SAT test takers. But only 1,132 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 1,205 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, more than 100,000 students of all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and 78,025 students scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category of all SAT test takers, blacks made up only 1.1 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the math test and only 1.5 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the verbal SAT."*
I looked at your cite. It compares outcomes for “submitters” vs “non-submitters”. It does not mention what the SAT/ACT scores are for “submitters” vs “non-submitters”.
In the previous paper cited in this thread, it was mentioned that when the SAT/ACT scores were known for non-submitters, they were statistically not different from submitters’ scores. If so, then the “no significant outcomes difference” finding is pretty obvious, and trivial.
Now, if you could show me that for Bates college, people with SAT scores that were 200-300 points lower, on the average, had similar graduation rates, that would be something. Or get a graph that correlates SAT scores with graduation rates for Bates. If it is flat that would be a significant finding.
The study is more than Bates college, non-submitters means that the people were not required to submit an SAT score.
More findings:
Yes, and THAT study showed that there was no significant difference in SAT/ACT scores between submitters and non-submitters in the study. So why would you expect different results at Bates between submitters and non-submitters?
See figure 25 here: http://www.nacacnet.org/research/research-data/nacac-research/Documents/DefiningPromise.pdf
NO - it showed minimal difference between two groups of students:
Those show submitted an SAT score for admission
Those who did NOT submit an SAT score for admission.
Of those two groups, college GPA and graduation rate was very close.
Does that help?
We can go further, and ask Google what THEY think of college GPA and test scores. They are worthless.
So relying on a score such as SAT to determine admissions is not putting the right emphasis on the right criteria. At the end of my admissions cycle, I effectively removed the GMAT from admissions criteria for an MBA program. I found a NEGATIVE correlation between GMAT score and business school MBA in my analysis. Instead I used positions held (job titles), career advancement, WHO submitted the letter of recommendation (as in - what level of person), and facility with numbers (not geometry or algebra - finance and accounting).
Yes, because the non-submitters’ SAT scores (yes, even though they didn’t submit them, the study had access to them) were not significantly different from the submitters’ scores. Did you look at the link I gave you? You know, it helps to actually read the study you’re citing.