All you’ve displayed is that they’re effectively told to identify themselves as “Asians” not that they choose to identify as “Asians”.
Also, I didn’t get my “dander” up. That implies outrage, when what it really inspired was laughter.
Since Harvard is private I thought they could do what they want, kinda like how Chinese restaurants don’t bother hiring Caucasians, at least not most.
Universities must comply with federal anti-discrimination statutes as a condition of accepting federal funding. Only a small number (less than 10) of the most extreme right-wing Christian colleges (plus Grove City College, which is more moderately Christian but heavily tied to libertarianism) reject all federal funding for both research projects and student financial aid, and may thus continue to explicitly discriminate (in the case of GC, they claim to reject certain parts of Title IX but otherwise have a nondiscrimination policy).
No, Chinese restaurants are not exempt from anti-discrimination laws.
Most such laws don’t apply if you have fewer than 15 employees, however.
I hope you learned a little about what self-identified race categories are available after you stopped laughing…for Hmongs, the only accurate one is “asian,” since these are generally based on an idea of continent of origin for a source population with which you identify.
You are incorrect that they are “told” to identify as asians. This is literally self-identification, as I tried to explain earlier. Any individual is free to choose any box he wants.
If you take a little time and do some reading, you won’t end up hopping into a thread with a comment that shows nothing other than a lack of understanding.
I’m not sure what you mean by “first cut,” but the way the system works is this:
Asians are scored against all groups. Since asians are the top scoring group, their main competition for admission is other asians.
Blacks are scored against blacks. They are not considered against asians, because if they were, almost no blacks would get admitted to elite institutions. There wouldn’t be any blacks who didn’t have an asian outscoring them.
As the JBHE article I cited mentions, the TOTAL number of blacks scoring above 750 on the SAT is about 250 for math; 375 for verbal. There are not enough high-scoring blacks to go around; whites score at those levels at about 10 times the rate that blacks do, and asians score higher than whites.
So for any given SAT score, you have to divide the admissions FIRST by color if you want to keep proportionate representation. If, instead, you just took the top X percent and then started looking at color, almost no blacks would be in the top X percent.
Another way to understand it would be to point out that a huge number of asians are rejected whose scores are substantially higher than blacks who are accepted. The reverse is not the case. This is the sense in which race is considered first. It’s enough–all by itself–to get a black candidate offered admission in front of an asian one.
Now you could argue that the “other” category for blacks is so extraordinarily better than “other” for asians that this is the way they get into the top X percent given a closer look. I think that’s nonsense, but you are free to think it, I guess.
If Harvard is forced to cough up its data, it will be interesting to see the exact numbers associated with each accepted race pool.
Just to give you another data point to chew on for a highly selective educational institution (med school):
If you are black/hispanic/native american and you have MCAT scores 24-26 with a GPA of 3.8-4, you have about a 78% chance of being offered admission.
If you are asian with the same score ranges, your chance of being offered admission is about 26%.
Each race group is conisdered as a race group first, and not against another race group. If this were not so, almost no blacks would be admitted because all the spots would be taken by asians and whites.
You have to do race groups first so that you don’t get too many asians and you don’t get too few blacks. When the asian quota is full, it’s full, in order to leave room for the black quota.
And again you make shit up and use irrelevant data. The subject is Harvard, not med schools across the country.
If the cutoff for consideration to Harvard was 750 on each section more than half the class would not be admitted - average for the class is “742 in the math section, 745 on writing, and 742 on critical reading.” Yes Harvard could have a class full of people with 750 or above on all sections. They do not want that; they want a class most of who are in the top few (or even several) percent that includes some star team athletes and those who will play club sports, humanities and social science majors, lower SES as well as the predominance of upper, and so on.
Overall Asians at Harvard do score higher on the SAT, by a fairly insignificant 78 points than the average, and Blacks a bit less, 70 less than average. The lowest income bracket also is about 70ish points lower than the average. Surprisingly legacies tend to score higher. "[R]ecruited athletes reported an average SAT composite score more than 187 points lower than the average of scores reported by non-recruits."
Yes, the group that gets the biggest thumb on the scale, by far, are the recruited athletes … and stereotype or not I’d bet you dollars to donuts that there are relatively few Asians compared to Blacks and lower income students in that group. The one student with a 1732 SAT and a 3.40 who brings down the average of whatever group (s)he is in? Accepted you think because (s)he is Black (if (s)he is) or because of being a team athletics superstar? Not a legacy because that one score would have brought its mean down more unless the other legacy were all SAT superstars anyway.
What percent of Asian students applying to Harvard are competing to fill the quota for star team athletes? As team sport club athletes? For the quota of humanity and social science majors? And how many are competing for the third of the spots that are STEM focused without team athletics as part of their “qualifications” and with the same orchestra/music/math awards package? Your SAT-only metric is only relevant if Asians are equally distributed on those metrics as well … do you have data to suggest they are? Do you even think that such is remotely likely to be the case? My suspicion is that SAT by major shows a significant differential with obvious to be humanities and social science majors likely being given a generous thumb on the scale as well. Do you have data to show that each of those quotas is populated by identical SAT profiles?
Please only respond if you bring actual relevant data and not if all you bring is more either immaterial or made up shit.
Surely you are not naive enough to think that this complaint is about Harvard, but that everywhere else is different? That’s a great strategy–separate every single iteration out so that it’s impossible to find resources to fight them all if you are asian–but it is also a deliberate pretense that any preference at Harvard is an exception to a broad pattern. C’mon.
It’s not clear to me which “shit” you think I am making up.
The data you cite are from a self-reported survey, covering 70% of the Harvard class. This is not a trustworthy way to find out what real scores are. It is naive to think otherwise, and naive to think the lowest tier of scorers are going to self-report their marginal scores.
There is nothing special about Harvard in terms of elite schools competing for highly qualified applicants. Like the others, Harvard can–and does–screen by race to maintain a cosmetic diversity by race. Like the others, it deliberately hides the real data because it does not want the process to be exposed to external scrutiny.
WRT standardized scores, the rate at which asians make high scores on the SAT (see the JBHE cite) is about 10X the rate at which blacks score highly. For every black scoring above 700 on the SAT, there are over ten asians (adjusted by population proportion).
If you back out students admitted for exceptional “other” (legacy; athletic; genuine separation b/c of some truly outstanding accomplishment) and look at the main pile of applications, ordering them by academic merit without separating them by self-identified race, you will fill almost all your slots before you get to applications from black students.
Every school faces this, and Harvard is no exception.
You may choose to live in a world where all these students are exceptional in general, and therefore it’s no big deal about “slight” differences. If you are an asian student already in that stratosphere, the “slight” differences that prevented you from receiving an offer of admission are unfair b/c they are driven by race, and race alone.
If we had a hundred yard dash, and preferentially gave the second and third place prizes to a white and an asian for color balance on the argument that they were in the top tier of runners and their separation from blacks who finished ahead of them was trivial, would you consider that there was no real race-based discrimination?
There is race-based discrimination–even at Harvard–and it is for a good cause. It is, nevertheless, race-based discrimination that does affect asians. Harvard will fight very hard to prevent transparency to the real data. In the meantime, you can content yourself with the notion that all these students are about the same academically.
There is not a shred of evidence for that, and when they go on to apply for law school or med school or take job-screening exams, the differences will persist and be just as profound. This is true at Harvard–the example at hand–but it is equally true across all higher education.
I doubt that the asians complaining here think this sort of race-based discrimination happens only at Harvard. :dubious: It simply happens to be the index case for trying to get some transparency.
IOW, the SAT self-reported gap is about 150 on the SAT:
“Asian respondents reported the highest average SAT score of 2305, while black and Hispanic or Latino students reported the two lowest averages, at 2157 and 2201, respectively.”
It will be interesting to see the real data, should it be pried out, instead of self-reported data.
Without considering race first, slots would be filled by higher scoring asians. I think the complaint is not that black students admitted to Harvard are marginal students. It’s that black students admitted to Harvard are admitted in front of asians because the first consideration is division into race-based quota pools.
The rejected asian whose score is 150 points above an accepted black student does not see the difference as trivial. They see it as rejection based on race discrimination.
And this is clearly an untrue statement other than under the condition of the only two criteria being considered are SAT and race or the condition that race and other factors apparently considered more important to the Harvard admission team than the +/- 70 around their mean are equally distributed among the racial groups applying.
If the group “Asian students” is not very diverse in those factors then they would be (theoretically) “discriminated against” by virtue of choosing a class based on looking for diversity alone, with no consideration of race at all.
Filling by best SAT score alone, or by SAT plus GPA, would not achieve the goal of having the team sports athletes they want, the legacy students they want, the non-STEM students they want, the diverse extracurricular interests they want.
So play out the math assuming that Asian students with SATs and GPAs high enough to earn consideration for Harvard admission are overwhelmingly not people who are the football and basketball stars, not very often of legacy status, and overwhelmingly of demonstrating interest in the hard sciences plus econ … science and the econ concentrations in the social science department consist of maybe a third of the spots. Legacy students tend to have high SATs and some fraction of those spots will be won by them. Some will be won by those with team sports excellence even if their SATs are in the lower quartile for the Harvard class. We are now down to maybe 25% of the class spots left? Those are the spots the Asian student group is competing for under that set of conditions, and if those conditions do apply then they are winning an overwhelming number of them.
Are you responding to me? I’m unaware that I made such an argument. Please let me know if you are specifically responding to me, thanks.
Quit playing games. You’re clearly saying that anyone who disagrees with you has a “bigoted agenda.” It would be a nifty trick if your audience was as dumb as you think they are, and couldn’t read up and see that what you think is “bigoted” is “supporting letting a racial minority keep what they have earned instead of giving it to undeserving white people.”
Not specifically disagrees with me. You could think that Street Fighter isn’t the best fighting game franchise ever and I wouldn’t think you’re a bigot, just ignorant.
What you should have picked up was that I think people are bigoted when they are against AA. Typically, they have issues with race they can’t reconcile. I happen to agree with AA. That there are people who are bigoted while also being wrong is a happy coincidence 
The keyword here is “usually”. I can’t help that those who are against AA are usually the same types that normal people would consider racist. But you want to accuse me of saying “anyone” is racist if they disagree with me. Hardly the case! Just most of them. Based on reality
Besides, I didn’t say you were bigoted. I said those people were. You can prove me wrong by leaving race out of your discussion on who deserves things more than others 
Is it a fact that non-white races were less represented in schools before AA? Yes. Is it a fact that AA somewhat equalizes minority enrollment by preferring one race (minority of enrollment) over another (who are in the majority)? Yes. And is it true that people who get in that otherwise would not have are still qualified? I think so but I suppose you can argue that point. But is it better to have such people get in over ones who would otherwise be overly represented? Definitely, its a moral issue and an issue of how society treats minorities, so I want those people in much much more and I think society benefits a lot more than if we simply said this guy or that guy gets in because of a few extra points on a test. The minority life experience cannot be quantified by a standardized test. There’s no way to test for that right now that we know of, so give them a a few more points on the SAT
By the way, I suppose you still were mistaken. You weren’t responding to ME. You were responding to a fictional me who you thought made such an argument. Happy to have corrected that for you!
The “minority” in this case being rich, white Harvard applicants, who are given an artificial leg up against first-generation immigrants from dirt-poor Asian countries.
I keep pointing this out, you keep pretending we’re having a discussion about affirmative action for blacks.
No, you keep pointing it out and I ignore it because its irrelevant, but I’ll address it right now.
“Minority” in this case refers to less represented racial minorities. I’m sure they’re mostly all rich people who don’t need a helping hand compared to the rest of society. But we’re not talking about the rest of society, we’re talking specifically about Harvard applicants.
I’ll just say it this way so there’s no mistaking what I mean: when a bunch of rich kids apply to Harvard, we should ensure, using AA, that the less racially represented rich kids get a boost in their score so that they can leap frog other rich kids, who historically were white, now they’re mostly Asian, so that Harvard can have a diverse freshmen class. Is that clear enough for you? Can you see why I didn’t specifically mention helping black people? Because AA doesn’t say “We need more blacks!”
And yes, those spoiled, rich, know-it-all kids applying to Harvard do need help, especially if historically they can’t get into Harvard despite being spoiled, rich, know-it-alls
Does that mean that students of Irish, Cambodian, Polish and German descent should have AA give them a leg up?
Similarly, do you believe that Southern Baptists should be given a leg up over Jews.
If not, please explain why you think they shouldn’t and why that would not be hypocritical.
Your assumptions are incorrect, and your understanding of the admissions process is wrong, both at Harvard and elsewhere.
About 11% of Harvard admissions are recruited athletes, and you are correct that SAT scores are more or less waived for that–at least, the standard is remarkably relaxed with athletes self-reporting scores of a couple hundred points below average.
Perhaps 30% of students are “legacy,” although the definition is quite broad and can include simply an applicant whose sibling went to Harvard. Their scores are not known to be lower than average.
Let us say (for reasons we can leave undiscussed) that asians are, as a group, lousy at sports. For an asian to gain a spot within the other 90% he is not going to compete in an open market. He is going to compete for the available asian-designated quota of spots, and when those are gone, they are gone. Spots reserved for whites and blacks in the interest of cosmetic balance are not available to those asian candidates, even if their scores are higher, their other is higher, and anything else is higher.
There is not a shred of data showing that asians are outcompeted in “other.” Not direct data; not indirect data.
So their discrimination complaint is that many, many students with lower academic credentials are accepted in the name of cosmetic racial balance.
This is absolutely true, but it is the inevitable result of the law of averages by race for academic performance, and it is absolutely necessary in order to maintain a cosmetically race-balanced class.
According to this article, legacy students at Harvard do indeed have (or had a decade ago) very slightly lower SAT scores than the average. But the interesting part of that isn’t the two-point numerical difference: