It means that almost no blacks are able to get past the Google tech job screening exams.
Without AA, this will not change. There is such a disproportionate ability by self-identified race group that blacks are effectively shut out. Other tech companies with similar screening test evaluations have similar disproportionate representation.
For companies that do not require the rigid kinds of screening exams for tech applicants, the race-based mix may look more diverse.
For the life of me, I cannot find in your Princeton paper what the actual average scores are for matriculants, by race group. Or, at least, accepted students. Can you help me?
It looks like what the authors did is mention applicant scores, then look at various other factors, then performed various handwaving modeling and analysis, and then spit out some sort of model-generated “SAT advantage” (which, in the case of asians, is a disadvantage to blacks is 280 points on the SAT).
This is what feels to asians in the complaint at hand, bullshit.
The first step ought to be easy, and transparent: Can schools please publish the quantifiable data (SATs, e.g.) that they have on applicants, by race group?
If not, why not? If the schools want to defend an idea that the average black applicant has such overwhelming “other” merit characteristics that they should be accepted with an average SAT deficit of 280 points to blacks, no problem. Defend it. Explain what that is.
But do not pretend you are not racially profiling and setting informal quotas if, in fact, you are.
The factual basis of the claim for race-based discrimination is very straightforward:
Asians have remarkably higher scores than whites and blacks who were accepted instead, and institutions are very opaque about what kind of “merit” other than race non-asians have that permit them to be admitted in front of asians.
It is absolutely true that asians, as a group, are over-represented. But if, as a group, they are also much higher quality applicants, than only race-based quotas will yield race-based diversity. Since race-based quotas are frowned upon, asians are claiming race-based discrimination. Hello.
There is only one reasonable solution to this. We as a society need to admit that race-based groups have average differences in skillsets; that we want diversity; and that we are going to maintain–transparently–race-alone preferential admissions and job hiring.
You have this very odd idea that we calculate fairness based on how closely matriculated groups mirror their percent of total population. This is ridiculous and completely confused thinking. If a given group is vastly superior to all other groups, then a “fair” process will end up with that group being vastly overrepresented.
By your logic, NBA owners could informally cap black representation in the NBA at about 25% and then argue that their process must be fair because blacks are proportionately double in the NBA as in the general population. By your logic, any blacks complaining they were discriminated against could get a dismissive big grin and a patronizing pat on the head for suggesting the NBA owners wanted to keep the NBA all white…
So do you believe that there are biological and/or cultural factors behind this “disproportionate” ability?
For the zillionth time on this board (and including my first post in this thread), yes.
But I’m not sure the “why” for the gap makes a difference, as long as we all accept that, until it changes, we need race-alone AA if we want to have a society in which all race-based groups have at least some reasonable representation.
If I’m wrong about the nature/nurture argument, and we are unable to unlock the (currently secret) cultural/societal reasons race-based groups differ so much for outcome, then we can address those, and slowly back out of race-alone preferences.
To date that has not happened. In the US, where the data is most rigorously tabulated, wealth and opportunity do not eliminate a stubbornly persistent, fairly broad race gap for the skillset of academic performance. Asians are at the top of the standardized test tier to such an extent that asians in the lowest decile of socioeconomic status outscore blacks in the highest SES decile. If we can’t fix the gap by eliminating SES differences of cohorts (and the same holds true if you control for parental education), there just aren’t many variables left to play with.
We’ve discussed genetics ad nauseum elsewhere, and it just distracts a thread.
This thread is about race-based admission bias against asians, keeping them underrepresented against the proportion of asians with admissions profiles that should garner them a spot were they a different race.
That perception is absolutely accurate. An asian with high scores, low SES background and equivalent “other” soft criteria is at a considerable disadvantage to other self-identified race groups with the same profile. He is competing against an asian-only peer group.
But that is how it must be if we want diversity by race in schools–and ultimately, the workplace. Time to accept it, and move on.
For people from third world countries, yes, it is. Not for everyone though. The university ranking scales I’ve seen have always had a lot of obvious flaws either from their methodology or their potential bias. Really, who believes a ranking system that gives all the best credits to their own institutions?
Well, for one, one of the most respected rankings tables is British.
The real measure here is international student migration. Where are students on the move moving too?
It’s getting more diverse, for sure. But it’s still primarily US universities. Other countries have good schools, but nobody offers the sheer quantity and range of high-quality schools that are found in the US.
Perhaps then it would have been more correct for you to say that “the U.S. is still, overall, the most desirable academic destination in the world for international students.”
Actually I have to partly agree with CP here. Partly because I believe that aiming at factors other than race will likely achieve the same ends to a satisfactory level.
Again several separate yet interrelated conversations going on here that are getting conflated and distracting from each other.
Is there a de facto quota limiting Asian students at Harvard to max out near 20%? Given a class already selected with x number of students with certain qualifications, strengths, weaknesses, obvious field of study interests, sorts of life experiences, so on, would the Asian student with virtually the same strengths, weaknesses, other interests, life experiences, etc., need higher GPAs, and higher SAT scores on all subtests than any other non-legacy student?
And whatever you believe the answer to question one is, are there acceptable reasons, excluding race per se, for an elite university to choose, out of the large pool of qualified candidates, students with different sets of strengths, weaknesses, interests, planned fields of study, and life experiences inclusive of SES, even if that means that some with higher than the mean GPAs and/or SATs might not make the team? Note: it is highly likely that certain of those non-racial aspects will correlate with racial factors to some degree and result in certain racial groups being represented more or less than a pure GPA + SAT metric would predict.
Likewise independent of your other answers, are there benefits to all students to experience a class that consists of those who look different than they do?
Are there benefits to society to minimizing classism in opportunity?
Are there benefits to society to aiming for diversity in schools and the workplace, whatever you personally believe the causes of the lack of diversity might be?
Confusing these questions with each other makes for conversations that go cross purposes.
My answers:
I have seen no convincing evidence of a de facto quota.
I believe there are very good reasons for a small liberal arts college to select for a team that has a variety of different strengths and talents and sorts of life experiences and field of study interests even if selecting for those choses some with below the class mean for GPA and SAT.
I believe there is benefit to experiencing a diversity of faces as your colleagues but am still … uncomfortable … with a process that explicitly selects on those grounds.
Yes I think that institutional aspects that propagate classism are against American society’s best interests.
Yes, I believe that society benefits from achieving some diversity in the work force.
It will be fun to see any data from elite institutions actually get pried out.
There is one–and only one–reason admissions data by race is so closely held: it is absolutely crystal clear in terms of showing a pure, race-based bias.
If it were the case that applicant pools can be more or less equalized for admission without using race, the data would be hustled out and paraded about.
What data there is, is overwhelming that a huge number of asians with much higher admissions criteria than others who are accepted, are being turned down. Those criteria include standardized scores, grades, rigorous coursework, extracurricular activities, recommendations, and so on. And even when adjusted for socioeconomic opportunity, the high tier asians are still turned away because a school already has enough asians.
If that is not a defacto standard, what is?
If you were to look at black matriculants (the other end of the spectrum, with whites falling somewhere in between), what you would find is that the scores are abysmally lower, the soft criteria are no higher, the socioeconomic status for accepted blacks with similar scores to accepted asians are much much higher, and the acceptance rate (not to mention financial assistance offers) is incredibly higher for blacks.
There is absolutely nothing other than a self-identified race driving this effort to get a diversity of face colors. The pool of high-tier asians is so huge, and the pool of black applicants qualified to make it through an elite university is so miniscule, that only race drives the selection process at the top end.
Elite universities will–and do–take black applicants from any SES tier if they are reasonably well qualified. They will–and do–turn away asians who are vastly more qualified. Life experiences and other such soft items do not mean a thing; it is the case that most black matriculants are from high-SES backgrounds, and many are wealthy foreigners. The selection criteria over an asian is “black” and not some other measure of diversity.
There are too many asians at elite universities already, and there is not room for any more. If that is not a defactor standard, what is?
No asians below the class mean for GPA and SAT are admitted; almost all black students admitted have GPAs and SATs below the class mean. If that is not a defacto standard, what is?
Everyone inside the admissions process knows this, and this is the reason that data is so closely guarded. But if you just look at raw scores for SAT, which are published, and take the time to have private conversations with insiders willing to open up, I think you will see you have blinders on.
We have to have race-alone AA for admission to elite universities, and we do. We have to continue that into the workplace, and we do.
I don’t think we do ourselves any favors pretending there is no convincing evidence of it, and universities fight tooth and nail to prevent the data from being pried out of them.
Missed putting in a Harvard Crimson article link talking about the number of black matriculants (41% of black students) at Ivies who are foreign-born and/or wealthy.
*The study also cites a higher rate of parental education in children of immigrants, which some scholars say reflects unfair admissions preferences for individuals with privileged backgrounds.
“Even with the expansion of financial aid, the number of students at selective universities are from privilege,” said Lani Guinier ’71, the Boskey professor of law at Harvard.
Such disparities, she added, reflect a tendency for universities to seek to bolster public image through the diversity of their applicant pool.
“Diversity statistics tend to camouflage or justify that preference,” she said. *
West African immigrants tend to be the most successful group in academia, even outpacing Asians.
This just goes to show that notions of “inherent” or genetic racial intelligence are garbage. But the fact that representation from the “wrong kind” of black people is not good enough for Guinier (who is not just a random Harvard professor but, in fact, one of the leaders of the pro-AA/quota movement for the last 30 years) just goes to show that “diversity” is a smokescreen that no one really believes in. Someone who is black AND an immigrant is even more horizon-expanding to the average white American than someone who’s just one, but Guinier, and the people defending the Asian quota in this thread, aren’t really interested in “diversity,” just racial preferences defended disingenuously.
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Asians, as a group, are inherently better test takers or their culture inherently makes them better at school. This is not an unreasonable hypothesis. It’s become abundantly clear that in certain sports and in certain situations, blacks are on average better athletes. Competing on a test is really just another sort of “sport” : it’s an artificial task, with artificial rules, and certain actions are worth more points than others.
Well, if you go to a school like Harvard…or any “elite” college with a history as long as theirs…and go walk around the lobby area, you find a long line of paintings of dead white guys. Look at some of their records, and you’ll find the elite institution was only possible because of the money and lifelong efforts of a crapton of white people. I know this sounds racist, and perhaps it is true that during the time periods in question the other races were being oppressed and not able to contribute…but the simple fact is, a crapton of white people donated vast sums and gave lifetimes of effort to make these elite institutions what they are.
So, hypothetically, if Asians really are more meritous of going to Harvard, and you accept purely on merit…you’ve created a school crammed with elite Asians. Where were those Asians in the 1940s? 1960s? 1980s? 1920s? 1900s?
They were not at Harvard, for the most part. Either as students, faculty, or donors.
So, I dunno. These quotas are racist. They are quotas. But Harvard isn’t some public access museum that anyone is allowed to visit. It’s an edifice built on top of a vast mountain of money, most of it supplied by wealthy white people. Shouldn’t it seek to serve the needs of the people who gave it the billions of dollars that make it what it is?
Note : my family isn’t a group of those donors, I never had a chance of getting in to Harvard, and I’ve got no skin in this game. I’m just observing from a distance.
Also, if you, as a foreigner, try to get into the elite institutions of other countries, you’re not going anywhere, either.
If you look more closely you’ll probably that the last names of said “white people” will change depending on the time period from not just the Lodges and Cabots but also to the Shapiros and Kennedys. While until fairly recently the Ivy Leagues were strongly white, the actual sort of white people changed greatly to include not just WASPs but also Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia etc.
Well depends, earlier on they were excluded not just by racial discrimination but by the fact there were far fewer Asians in the United States. However Asians in the Ivies go a long way-future Korean President Syngman Rhee studied under Woodrow Wilson before World War I for example. By the 1960s and '80s you definitely had a non-trivial number of Asians at the Ivies.
What were the “needs” of the donors and “which” donors are you talking about? I’m not sure if the Congregationalist and Presbyterian founders of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ever envisioned hordes of Papist, Hebrew, Infidel, Sodomite, and Harlot whites forming significant portions of their student body. But I suspect, most will agree that returning to such standards would be absurd. And as more Asians go to Ivies and advance to positions in American society, there are going to be more Asians on the lists of donors and names of buildings.
Pretty sure there are plenty of Americans at McGill or Sorbonne.
If people were arguing, “We should let impoverished blacks and Hispanics in over wealthy Asians,” I could agree. But I don’t think the argument is being presented in that way. A certain poster here seems to be arguing for reducing Asian enrollment, period - regardless of socioeconomic status - and increasing black and Hispanic enrollment, period - regardless of socioeconomic status.
I am wondering where you got this idea.
ACT readiness benchmarks for Science and Math show about 5 or 6 times as many asians meet standards compared with blacks when interest is measured.
In 2006, about 8x as many Engineering PhDs were awarded to asians as blackswhen you adjust for proportion each group represents in the population (similar disparities for almost all the STEM fields). I have addressed medicine above.
My whole post was about first-generation immigrants from West Africa, not “blacks” in general.
I think Haberdash means applicants like this one.
And more generally factoids like this:
And discussions such as this one:
And this
There’s some irony here, isn’t there? Kwasi Enan’s scores make him such an extraordinary outlier as a black applicant that he gets an entire breathless article in Forbes about how he “won the race to the Ivy Leagues.”
Were he asian, his academic qualifications (2250 on the SAT) and his “other,” which the writer describes as “excellence in music and athletics” without further detail, would not distinguish him at all from his asian peers applying to Harvard, and he would be at risk of not even being accepted.
If he were asian, he’d be just another dime a dozen asian applicant in that stratosphere. This is exactly why asians feel discriminated against. An asian with these qualifications would not get his own Forbes article (and, if I recall, many other articles), and would not get a straight pass, full-ride into an educational institution of his choice. This is because there is a defacto quota for all race groups, and so there is a completely separate standard for asians set by the asian pool. That standard is extraordinarily higher than the standard for blacks and it is also higher than the standard for whites.
There is a second irony about which subset of black applicants have relatively high success rates. Race-based AA is (and needs to be) cosmetic, and not corrective. That is, we are not correcting for blacks with an underprivileged, enslaved ancestry. We are looking for asian/white/black faces, even if a given black individual comes from a highly privileged, foreign background (and, of course, regardless of how “black” or “asian” or “white” someone is genetically). At this point it is more important for society to have representation by diversity of color, and if the pool needs to be expanded worldwide to get enough blacks, that’s what we should do.
It does not need to be expanded in the same way to asians, because there are plenty of high-performing domestic asians, but I suspect our domestic asians and whites also compete against the world for Harvard’s quota. Every academic institution wants the best candidates within a given race group that it can find.
I’m not sure what point you are making by comparing the success of immigrant populations…the specifics around each population render those data very manipulatable.
In general, black matriculants at elite universities have very low scores compared to other race peers, and something like 40% of black matriculants at elite universities are immigrants. There are not enough domestic black applicants able to compete with the pool created by the rest of the world…
I used to think diversity for diversity’s sake was well meaning but mostly pointless as far as actual producting results. But it seems like more diverse groups are literally more innovative and efficient than homogenous groups. I very rarely see this mentioned by liberals or other supporters of diversity. Most diversity rhetoric is about social harmony or economic justice or long standing historical oppression, which is nice, but it’s not clear why a company or school should care about any of that stuff.
Amusingly, some of the offered reasons for why more diverse groups perform better is because of tribalistic competition. People literally try harder to impress or convince people they consider “other,” and get lazy if they think everyone is like them. If there ever really is a color/gender blind world will this advantage disappear?
So the argument for discriminating against Asians is to recognize they may be more qualified than other races, but a group of mostly Asians would be worse than a more diverse group. I’m not sure if saying that out loud is particularly PC, but that would be the logic. You could replace “Asian” with any sub-category, though.