SAT scores are highly correlated with income and your hopeful notion that low-income black kids with high SAT scores are represented within the ranks of Harvard-level scores is incorrect. In fact, even at the highest black SES level (income over $100K/yr) , the average black SAT score is still actually below the average white SAT score for families with incomes under $10K/year. And whites score lower than asians.
Sure; if there is an outlier black student with genuinely high SAT scores (not just high for the black SES group) she’d get in almost automatically. But this just doesn’t happen. What happens instead is that black kids with high-enough scores are taken, and those are from high SES black cohorts–not from disadvantaged ones, where the average scores are abysmal.
We’ll see if Harvard coughs up the data. They are sure going to fight doing so, because it will not look good for the argument that they do not use race-alone weighting. The only way to get the best black students is to use race alone weighting, and take high-scoring black students from the high SES tier in which they are found. Even then, their scores are substantially lower than asians taken from all tiers.
So in other words - no cite, just another claim of what you imagine might be true but is stated as if it is established fact. Okay. Just checking.
Nice to see consistency here.
I actually thought this one wouldn’t be just another pulled out of your ass because it does seem likely that higher SES Blacks will have higher odds of high achievement and admission than lower SES Blacks just as higher and lower SES Whites do. But no …
Anyway, the thesis of the NPR bit I linked to boils down to sample size: There are many times more graduating High School Seniors who are not in the top SES 1% than who are. Goodness, there are many more of them in the lowest SES 20% than in the top 1%. I know, shocking, right? The fraction of extremely high GPA/SAT/achievement kids coming out of each of those many lower SES schools is however quite low … maybe one student like that every few years. Spread out as it may be it still comes to, as claimed by the article NPR links to (full version, pdf), “a vast pool of highly talented, low-income students.” If they applied to a Harvard they would qualify (“almost automatically”) and would get a free ride … but no one is advising them to apply. And the admission committees only finds the keys that are under the lamp post.
From that analysis - the vast majority of high achieving lower SES students do not apply to any selective colleges while almost all higher SES high achievers do.
And helping you out here … Blacks are still under-represented in the ranks of the low income high achievers. 15.4% are under-represented minorities and specifically 5.7% non-Hispanic Black. The authors agree that recruiting to increase the presence of under-represented minorities will not attain the goal of income diversity. It also documents that most of low SES high achievers, including the 5.7% of them that are Black, do not apply to the selective schools that are appropriate for their achievement level, and are thus invisible to the admission committees.
LOL at your fantasy world where the ranks of the socioeconomically disadvantaged blacks is just loaded with highly talented gems of students.
The real world is not quite so fairly tale. Scores correlate with SES status. That means the highest SES tiers have the highest scores. And even at the highest socioeconomic tiers, there are so few blacks with high standardized scores the JBEH opined that, without race-specific admission policies, almost no blacks would qualify for admission to medicine and law schools. What’s your notion here, DSeid–they got into Harvard with great scores but then crapped out on their MCATs?
In looking at Race-sensitive admissions policies, the JBHE said this:
*“Many of the black students at America’s most selective institutions are from upper-middle-class African-American families. Very rarely are they the children of low-income blacks whose economic station in life is still influenced by slavery and a century of racial segregation. Another large group of black students at America’s most selective colleges and universities today are foreign born or have parents who recently emigrated from Caribbean nations or Africa.”
*
And here’s why: there are almost no low SES black students with high standardized test scores, despite glowing vague descriptions of these wonderfully talented, potentially able students who are somehow robbed of a Harvard education b/c they never apply. Elite educations for truly outstanding blacks applicants are essentially free; that’s how competitively elite universities compete for the handful of blacks students with outstanding scores. And when they find them, they snap them up even if they are not disadvantaged, and even if they are foreign born. The goal is a cosmetically mixed group, by race. Not by SES status.
In Texas, U Texas and Fisher was all about the problem U Texas has. They can get cosmetic diversity by using a 10% rule, but in order to get good black students they need to extend a race-only criterion to privileged black kids because those are the ones with the good scores. The situation at elite universities is no different.
In 2005, fewer than 1600 out of 46,000 total black students did better than 1300 on the SAT (and 1300 would not get many asians past the Harvard doors ). That pool of 1,600 is eagerly sought after by every school in the country. Since SES correlates with SAT scores in every race category, what’s your notion here…that out of the 1600 most of them were underprivileged, and those that were applied to Harvard? That I’m pulling this idea out of my ass that most black students who matriculate at Harvard are not underpriviliged?
Well; they’re not. Go ahead and live in your fantasy world. You can bet Harvard will fight tooth and nail not to expose the obvious truth: They use race-alone de facto quotas, are not able to extend admissions to large numbers of underprivileged blacks b/c there are not enough who would be able to survive at that educational level, and therefore they accept privileged black students to fill their cosmetic quota.
This is what gives rise to the perception on the part of asians that they are discriminated against; they must compete on academic merit against other asians within that defacto quota.
Sheesh. "In recent years it appears that the vast majority of black students at Harvard came from upper-middle-class to affluent families. Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, has stated his belief that very few of Harvard’s black students are the descendants of American slaves and that most black students at Harvard were from middle-class or affluent black families. A 2006 study by researchers at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania found that more than one quarter of the native-born black students at 28 selective colleges and universities came from families with annual incomes over $100,000. "
One more freebie, DSeid:
*
“Call it the Ivy League’s dirty little secret: While America’s most elite colleges do in fact make it a point to promote ethnic diversity on their campuses, a lot of them do so by admitting hugely disproportionate numbers of wealthy immigrants and their children rather than black students with deep roots—and troubled histories—in the United States.”*
Had a chance to read your link, and got a chuckle, DSeid. They define high-achieving students as follows:
*" “High-achieving” refers to a student who scores at or above the 90th percentile on the ACT comprehensive or the SAT I (math and verbal) and who has a high school grade point average of A- or above."
*
For an asian student, making the 90th percentile on the ACT/SAT would mean there is absolutely no point whatsoever in bothering to apply to an Ivy League school. If you are asian, that is not “high-achieving.”
Again, this idea there is a vast pool of high-achieving lower SES black students somehow missing out on the chance of a (free) Ivy League education is just pure fantasy. They’re not that stupid.
The problem is the lack of high-achieving black students at any SES level; what few there are, are found in the higher SES tiers, since SES correlates so strongly with better standardized test scores. Harvard alone consumes 200 black students from the total pool of genuinely high SAT scores.
Let’s look at med school as a proxy for Harvard, b/c med school data is published while Harvard hides theirs, but the situation is analagous: a very competitive admissions process looking at the top tiers of students.
From the JBHE, again: “If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.”
This is equally true at Harvard, and the asian-black gap is higher yet. When high-scoring black applicants are found, they are clustered in the higher SES tiers and are offered acceptance to maintain a cosmetic balance regardless of their SES tier and regardless of their enslavement ancestry. This is why most Harvard blacks end up not being from the vast pool of low SES blacks, and why so many of them are foreign born…certainly SES would be considered an “other” factor in promoting a black student into the accepted pool because of the overall paucity of high-achieving black students. It would not be much of a reason to promote an asian student b/c there are so many high-achieving asians across the SES tiers that there is no need to use SES as a factor to get a low-achieving student in.
The pool that does not bother to apply to the Ivies is the pool of asians with anything less than stellar standardized scores. And their judgment about the futility of that is correct.
And yet CP the point of the article is that most of them, and others of higher income levels, still do*. High income high achieving students apply to reach schools; low income high achieving students (Black White Asian Hispanic … all) do not often apply to even minimally selective schools, let alone reach schools. Nearly half are only applying to community college level schools.
As to your uncited claim (which I still suspect is true, as it is for Whites, that “most” and the “on average” in Harvard of all groups are from upper SES) … still unsupported. No, a cite stating “many” is explicitly not stating “most” or what is “average.” It supports that a majority of the Black students there are of the pooled together groups of middle income, high income, and foreign born or have parents who recently emigrated from Caribbean nations or Africa of all income levels, leaving a minority of them that they classify as “whose economic station in life is still influenced by slavery and a century of racial segregation.”
Maybe it makes a bit more sense to look at a more recent year? Indeed American Blacks as group score poorer on the SAT than the broad group of Americans taking the test but still 1 out of a hundred scored over 2100 (700 or over on each component) in 2013 … which again is about average for the 2019 Harvard class per that college data cite already linked to.
Yes that group is highly sought after, including by Harvard … but again the lower income portion of those high achievers are generally not applying there.
*And they are correct to do so, depending on what else (team athletics, etc.) they bring to the table. The average score for those high achieving groups is 94 to 96%ile which comes to 690 to 720 on critical reading, 700 to 720 on math, and 680 to 700 on writing. All at about the average scores for admission to Harvard: 694; 711; and 698 respectively. (Again, right or wrong, Harvard and other top selective schools do not define the best applicant as being the highest possible SAT score.)
Good idea. Let’s focus back on the topic of discrimination against asians using your data…I will let you figure out on your own why nearly all the black students admitted to Harvard do NOT come from poverty-stricken backgrounds.
I think we are reading your cite differently, so maybe you can help me out.
Here’s what I think it says:
There are roughly the same number of asians as blacks who are in the database.
Note there is a soft point between 0 and 1%, so it’s hard to say if there really are 1% of students scoring above an X level when 1% is listed.
For Critical Reading:
Blacks: 1% over 700. 2% over 650.
Asians: 9% over 700. 17% over 650.
For Maths:
Blacks: 1% over 700. 2% over 650.
Asians: 25% over 700. 40% over 650.
For Writing:
Blacks: 1% over 700. 2% over 650.
Asians: 11% over 700. 20% over 650.
IOW, scholastically outstanding asians outnumber scholastically outstanding blacks roughly 10:1. In the stratospheric scoring levels, that ratio is much higher. Since the proportion of applicants is roughly the same, one would expect about 10X as many asians as blacks to be accepted, all else being equal.
So either asians are discriminated against by the use of a defacto quota, or blacks are so superior in the “other” category that they overcome a huge deficit in the quantifiable academics category.
What the asian complaint is saying is that asians are discriminated against. It’s not that no acceptable blacks can be found, or that they can’t make it through the educational process, or even that they are lousy students. It’s that, if the playing field were equalized, about 10 times as many asians as blacks would be admitted instead of only 2 times as many.
That would be unacceptable to Harvard and other elite schools, for the reason of cosmetic diversity by race that I explained earlier.
This article about Dartmouth might prove a helpful perspective on the practical problem Harvard has in allocating and filling race groupings for matriculation.
Okay, we can move on, having documented that there is in fact a vast pool of Blacks, including some who are low income, who are within or above the middle range for Harvard on SAT.
Yes, the there is a larger mass of Asians who are in that range or above. And larger mass of Whites yet, larger than Asians.
Absolute numbers;
White above 700: CR 50K; M 50K; W 41.7K
Asian above 700: CR 17.7K; M 49K; W 21.6K
Enough in each group to fill many many Harvard classes but goodness, three times as Whites in the over 700 critical reading section … a key skill for a liberal arts program. Almost twice as many Whites over 700 for writing and even more Whites over 700 in math. Math is nice but Harvard is not a technical school; they want to see over 700s in CR and W too. And once the limited math-centric student spots are full they more so want to see high CR and W scores.
About 20% of the 2019 class is Asian American and 37% of the class is White American. Given the score distribution above alone that ratio seems to be about what one would predict.
So yes, more Whites are getting in but in absolute numbers more White applicants are qualified by all three SAT metrics. Per that Dartblog cite absolute numbers Asians are a bit under 60% of the Whites number over 2100. They are roughly that percent of Whites matriculating.
12% of the class is African American; 13% Latino, 2% Native American or Hawaiian; 11% international. I do not doubt that of the many many thousands who apply who meet Harvard’s range of qualified (which seems to include averaging over 650 on each sub test and high GPA, along with possessing other characteristics that set them apart from the crowd, again especially team athletics accomplishments) Harvard would choose the one who is part of a (at Harvard) under-represented minority and/or from of a lower SES status over another of their majority populations (White and Asian).
Now the case for discrimination at Dartmouth may be a bit higher - more than three times as many White students than Asian Americans while only twice as many Whites scored over 2100 on the SAT … but then again we do not know the distribution of those scores … 800 math 650 both others may not be as preferred as 700 on all three, or even 750 on each of CR and W and 650 on math, at a liberal arts school. So even there I do not presume guilt. It would not be discrimination to prefer a higher score on CR and W than on M at a liberal arts school.
Yes, Dartmouth would have a hard time getting 4.8% of the highest scoring minority students to say yes to them. Harvard likely not.
I think you are implying that the pool of matriculated black students Harvard gets is approximately the same academic level as the pool of matriculated asians. (Again, gonna leave out whites so we can focus on the data about how much cosmetic race manipulations goes on.)
This is patently incorrect. It seems like your notion is that if a student is very very good, then you can’t say he was preferentially admitted just because someone even better failed to be offered admission. Say what?
First, Harvard is not some kind of special case where their black applicant pool is so remarkably stellar that Harvard has plenty of blacks who so outshine the huge asian pool that Harvard can get to 10% blacks without race-alone consideration. Harvard can get good-enough black students–esp for non-STEM–but if you looked at that asian+black aggregate pool of good-enough applicants, asians outrepresent blacks roughly 10:1, and at the top tier of that good-enough pool, it is almost exclusively asian (note the asian/black difference in your SAT data between “99%” and “99+%” when looking at the percent of students scoring below the very highest levels).
At Harvard, as with every other university from elites on down, only a race-specific “discrimination” will enable broad participation in higher education by black students. (This will be true in the job world as well, for jobs which require any quantified screening exam. The rank-order of results, by self-identified race, is pretty much the same across every scenario.) In the worst school in Chicago, the average asian score will be higher than blacks, by a wide margin. In the best schools of the nation, the average blacks score will be lower than asians by a wide margin.
But just out of curiosity, if it were the case that Harvard is the exception to the rule, and everywhere else asians are actually discriminated against, are you all good with that?
You think wrong. I am not implying anything. I am clearly stating something different.
The pool of students who have the academic chops to succeed at Harvard is vast, well over 100,000 graduates each year who have what it takes to succeed there. Harvard is looking to create a team of 1600. Now of course not all of those who could succeed there apply (and as documented already, the lower SES students who could succeed there - of all ethnic and racial identifications - tend not to) but of the over 35,000 graduates who do apply most likely could be successful at Harvard if accepted.
So how to choose your team?
Right or wrong the method chosen is not highest total SAT or highest GPA “wins.” They are looking to create a mix. First off plenty of those with lots of family money and/or influence and some legacies. Team athletic stars they like too. A good split between those who did better on math and those who excel at writing and reading skills, between those who are likely to fill up the STEM concentrations (a minority there) and those who will fill the humanity and social science ones. They want to pick a diverse set of extracurricular interest and non-academic accomplishments and love a good life story. They want some different sorts of cultural perspectives (and same SES can still have different cultural perspectives even those getting a few of lower income origins in there would be desirable). Some who are the first in their families to go to college.
And again, of those 35,000 applying, most of who have good enough academic chops to be successful there, they can create that team, they can pick the roughly 5% of them that creates that mix. It will not be the top 5% SAT scores of all who apply. Someone with a higher grade point, multiple AP classes and a higher SAT (math higher than reading and writing subsections) and who won music and science competitions may not be chosen because they already have a third of the class that fits that description … better the next one in be someone with a still good enough total SAT that is higher on the non-math sections and who is a poet and/or who plays team sports.
Is that process color blind? I don’t know. I’d doubt it. I suspect it is true that of that huge pool of capable students that being a member of an under-represented (there) minority is a big plus, more than having a perfect SAT is. Whites don’t get that plus and neither do Asian-Americans. (No na-gonna leave out Whites.)
Is that discriminating against Whites and Asians? Such is argued and I can see the logic of spinning it that way even if I do not. It is not however a quota, de facto or otherwise. It is not advocating accepting someone without the academic chops for the institution. If it was then the roughly 27% of the class that are African American/Hispanic/Native American or Pacific Islander would be flunking or dropping out in large numbers. They are not.
Am I okay with a college aiming for choosing a class consisting of students all of who are capable of success at the institution aiming to have a diverse team across multiple dimensions of diversity (interests, likely concentrations, music v sports, cultural heritage, etc.)? Yes, even if you label that as discrimination against a few of the highest SAT scoring Whites and Asians. I see that as being in the college’s best interest, in the best interest of all who attend the college of all groups, and of society’s.
The process is not color blind. It cannot be, because the best qualified asian applicants would crowd out the best qualified black (and white) applicants, resulting in the kind of disproportionate representation we see at CalTech (2% black; 47% asian).
It cannot be balanced by looking at family income or opportunity privilege, because at every tier, asians overwhelmingly outperform blacks.
It cannot be balanced by “other” because you only need so many athletes (and not that many black ones in the Ivy lame-o sports, anyway ).
It cannot be balanced by “life experiences” because the best available blacks are from the highest cultural and class tiers.
There is one–and only one–way to get your mix if you don’t want to end up with mostly asians. Self-identified race must be grouping, and each grouping must have its own standard. That is the only way to get a matriculating class which looks cosmetically balanced. If you do not separate out races and create the double (quintuple, really) standard for each race, your class will be overwhelmed with asians who are academic stars but who also cover all of the other “other” criteria very nicely.
The same is true in the post-graduate world; the same is true in the working world. Quantified qualifying exam processes are the reason the tech work forces at Google/Apple/Facebook/Yahoo…etc have such lopsided cosmetic asian:black diversity numbers (about 30:1 for Google tech, e.g.).
You can control for some of this disparity by using “other,” but eventually, for pursuits using quantified screens, you cannot get a “mix” without using race alone. The numbers catch up to you.
And that’s why asians feel discriminated against. For the same “other,” they have vastly superior scores, even at Harvard. The defacto quota means they get rejected when they would have gotten accepted with exactly the same application were they self-identified as “black.”
It will be interesting to see if anyone can pry the real numbers out of Harvard. I suspect the disparity is so profound that Harvard will hide them as long as they can. The two areas in which there is likely to be pushback should the data be made public is the disparity around to whom financial aid is offered, and the disparity for admission scores. I predict this will be in the 300+ range for the SAT; I will be interested to see the disparity over offer of financial add for level X of SES status, asians v blacks. That is likely as sensitive an area as is a scoring double standard.
Blacks were discriminated against. They are the ones who have had opportunity truncated due to discrimination. If you want to help out Appalachian whites and the children of Chinese immigrants in Chinese ghettoes, I might support that too but the harm was inflicted along racial lines and it is not irrational to fashion a remedy along those same lines.
I know plenty of people that lived through Jim Crow. Heck, the last former slave died during my lifetime. We are not talking about ancient history here. We are only a generation or two removed from Jim Crow and segregation. We are only a few more generations removed from slavery.
In what way does past human atrocity obviate the need to remedy the effects of those past atrocities?
I don’t think the Asians care so much that blacks are being sheltered from having to compete with Asian students as they are that white students are being sheltered from having to compete with Asian students.
Well, I think their slavery ended a few thousand years ago, well before the founding of America. It has been a while since Jewish women were forced to lay with their masters and have their children sold to strangers but they were never subject to this treatment because of American laws and exercise of police powers. Jews are subject to some discrimination in America today but I think it is hard to compare the discrimination they deal with today to the discrimination that blacks deal with on an ongoing basis.
And many white matriculants are there because they did not have to compete with Asian applicants on a level playing field. The average white matriculant is from a significantly above average SES background.
• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.
I thought the Asian complaint had at least as much to do with the over abundance of white acceptances compared to Asian acceptances. The result would be equally as unacceptable to Harvard if not moreso.
It may not be, or it may. My doubt is not proof. And your argument is specious. As you have documented the pattern is for Asian Americans to excel most in math, be that a stereotype or not. Almost as many Asian Americans over 700 on the SAT in math than Whites, but only 1/3 as many on Critical Reading. That bodes well for a Tech school and for careers at Google/Apple etc. … but has less to do with selection at a liberal arts college that may (or may not) prefer higher CR and W scores for a majority of their class. Or for careers that are not STEM focused.
Agreed.
Another uncited claim that I suspect is also made up. Do you have data to support a claim that Asian American, White American, and Black American applicants and matriculants all have a similar “other” interests?
Moreover all of the same tiers do not share the same culture. Middle class Blacks are simply not members of the same exact cultural group as are middle class Asian Americans. Heck within “middle class White” you have an abundance of different cultural groups.
Turns out though you are right about the small number of Black athletes there: “the percentage of black athletes at Harvard not only hovers around a fourth of the national average, but is actually lower than the percentage of African-Americans in the wider student body.”
And no matter how many times you repeat it, it is still untrue. Even a process that is not color blind (which it may or may not be) would not require separate standards. It merely requires a college to not weight SAT scores over that which demonstrates the level of academic skill needed to succeed there very highly and more heavily weight the value of diversity of cultural backgrounds and skill sets.
). That pool of 1,600 is eagerly sought after by every school in the country. Since SES correlates with SAT scores in every race category, what’s your notion here…that out of the 1600 most of them were underprivileged, and those that were applied to Harvard? That I’m pulling this idea out of my ass that most black students who matriculate at Harvard are not underpriviliged?