Asian American groups accuse Harvard of racial bias in admissions

Great Debates
521

As with any other group tracked by Federal guidelines for identification of race and ethnicity, self-identified ones.

As a group, asians outscore whites on standardized academic exams. Whites in turn outscore blacks. See a recent SAT composite summary here, in the bottom table:
Asians: 1654
Whites: 1576
Blacks: 1277

At the top tiers of performance, the differences become quite stark, with very very few high-performing blacks on standardized exams.

“Almost No Blacks Among the Top Scorers
on the Scholastic Assessment Test
It is important to explain how the SAT racial scoring gap challenges affirmative action policies at the nation’s highest-ranked colleges and universities. Under the SAT scoring system, most non-minority students hoping to qualify for admission to any of the nation’s 25 highest-ranked universities and 25 highest-ranked liberal arts colleges need to score at least 700 on each portion of the SAT…
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.”

With all groups, the highest scores generally come from reasonably privileged backgrounds, and so socioeconomic status generally trends with academic performance. This means schools cannot simply achieve diversity by taking into account privilege. At every tier of privilege, asians still substantially beat out their equally-privileged peers.

If a school used a pure merit-based system (adjusted for socioeconomic privilege), asians would be even more hugely over-represented than they are now. This is exactly the problem Ivy Leagues are facing. There are plenty of high-scoring asians to fill the classes, and a paucity of high-scoring blacks. Every institution must set de facto “diversity” criteria that have the effect of not accepting asians who would be readily admitted were they blacks with the same set of scores and “other” skills.

522

As an example, Kwasi Enanwas accepted to all 8 Ivy League schools to which he applied, despite SAT scores of only 2250 and a rank of #11 in his class. This would be highly unusual were he asian instead of black.

523

All Asians. Chopstick Asians (and Indians) tend to blow the curve and then the other Asians are stuck with that curve. Schools don’t generally give a shit about the difference between Asians of Taiwanese descent and Asians of Malaysian descent. They just lump them together and apply a higher standard.

524

“Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.”

525

If university admissions are a circus because of a supposed flood of qualified candidates, then the real problem is that there are not enough places. Ameliorating overcrowding and high tuition fees at universities would require massive funding, of course.

526

Its true. If you are Asian and applying to Harvard, your standards are higher then another ethnic group. Maybe Asians who work hard will wake up and realizes the Democratic party isn’t for them with this quota business.

African Americans should be upset too, as some universities accept African born, non-USA citizens over them to hit their own quotas.

Higher education needs a kick in the rear. No only does this happen, conservative students are sometimes intimidated or punished for speaking their views. I hope the Supreme Court takes one of these cases.

http://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discrimination-on-admissions/

527

Only at the best universities. And there are only so many great professors. You can invent more places but you can’t keep the quality of the education at the same level.

528

What do you mean? There are now more seats in college than at any time in our history. The problem is that the seats are not being allocated according to ability but according to melanin content.

529

It isn’t just discrimination in admissions.

Part of the idea of admitting less-qualified blacks is to get students used to being in a diverse environment. So they admit a bunch of less-qualified candidates, and those candidates drop out more, take longer to graduate if they do graduate, tend to take easier, non-STEM majors, get lower GPAs, and generally cluster around the bottom of the class. The rest of the student body is supposed to not notice that, but it is not easy to ignore.

The lesson of diversity is “the top achievers are not likely to be black”. Of course, college also gives training in negotiating the minefields of political correctness, so at least they will have some experience in doing that when they get out into the real world.

Regards,
Shodan

530

In the UC system we have seen blacks achieve pretty good results after they got rid of racial preferences. Sure, they are going to UC Irvine instead of UCLA but they are dropping out less frequently, getting better grades and generally achieving better results.

I think the push to have more of them at places like Berkeley is that some people think that college admissions is correlated directly to IQ and it makes them uncomfortable to see the absence of black faces at the toughest schools. So they want to institute diversity programs that send those UC Irvine students to Berkeley where many of them drown academically and drop out. And, as you say, the UC Berkeley students see that all the kids dropping out for academic reasons are black.

Environment and effort rather than native IQ have a lot to do with academic success but people don’t like THIS answer either because that implies that the black students aren’t trying hard enough or there is something.

So they want to pin this large difference in test scores on racism. A form of racism that cripples blacks and hispanics (although it seems to cripple hispanics less and less every generation) but provides an advantage to Asians.

The problem with Harvard is threefold (IMO).

(I) It is not merely giving URMs a preference which sets aside some spots for URMs, it is actively discriminating against Asians giving the impression that those spots are being borne entirely by Asian applicants.

(II) It is providing preferences not only to the descendants of slaves and american Indians, it is providing preferences to anyone with the same melanin content in their skin. It is doing so on the basis of diversity. This gives the distinct impression that they think there are too many Asians that are fucking up the diversity mix.

(III) The preference is too large. The large difference in standardized test scores is (IMO) hard to justify based on a desire for diversity or countering the effects of modern day racism.

531

Do you favor quotas?

Who sets them (or the level of AA), how are the levels determined?

532

Some do realize it.

533

Well, you could video-record the best professors. And figure out who’s best not by peer reputation but by measurable learning metrics. And train AI agents and bots to predict what the professor would have said to a given query so that students can ask the great professor questions without needing 1:1 time from the professor.

Some of this is what OMSCS is trying to do, though like anything it takes time. Point is, there is know reason why name brand Ivy League education need remain elite…if it’s even measurably better.

534

A brand name degree is more than the course of instruction.

But to be fair, a lot of state schools are doing a great job of creating schools within schools that surpass the Ivy league environment in every way except international name recognition.

535

OTOH, tech schools are screaming for women like Missouri tech at Linn is only 13% female.

536
537

Harvard wins lawsuit at trial level. Appeal inevitable.

538

Appellate court win for harvard.
The petitions for writs of certiori are being drafted.
Cert requires 4 justices to be granted.
It is likely that cert will be granted.

539

It’s a weird case.



Harvard’s statistical defense, as argued by Berkeley econometrician David Card, is essentially:

We don’t discriminate against Asians. We discriminate against the boring children of boring professionals, a disproportionate number of whom happen to be Asians who score spectacularly well on exams. If there were a bunch more boring white kids who were the children of boring professionals, who also did spectacularly well on exams, we’d happily deny them admission as well, in favor of our preferred bundle of rich brats who pay full tuition along with children from more interesting backgrounds than the boring spawn of boring professionals who litter our society with their boring lives.

This is their basic answer to why so many Asian kids receive such terrible “personality” scores, which push down their applications below admission threshold, despite their clear dominance in objectively measured categories.

Nothing personal, right? Their background is run-of-the-mill, that’s all. Nothing special.

“Interesting personality” is defined, here, by being the children of billionaires or alumni, or patenting a cancer cure before you’re 17 years old. Being the child of a doctor or lawyer or engineer doesn’t cut it. There are a lot of professionals in our society whose children have extensive test smarts, a disproportionate number of these happen to be Asian, and thus the children of those professionals have no family or personal distinction that merits Harvard’s attention, the purpose of which is for the scions of the rich to rub elbows with the youthfully interesting. Card’s analysis for Harvard is dressed up in fancier words than that, but I’m not joking about the substance. That is really the thrust of what he is saying.



And I’d guess it’s probably true, too. That seems to be exactly what they’re doing.

They soak the rich brats for full tuition, and in return, the rich brats – who are the real customers of the university, since their parents are the ones who pay for it – get to interact with the world’s best violinist under twenty years old, and the daughter of the prime minister of an important oil-exporting country you’ve only vaguely heard of. There’s a limited number of these spots. You don’t want to fill them all with the children of midwest doctors who got 1600 SATs. You could do that. But you don’t want to do that. Not if you are Harvard.



The result of all this is… something similar to “disparate impact”.

I mean, if we’re talking about percentage of the total population, then Asians make up more than 20% of the Harvard student body, even if they’re less than 6% of the US population.

But among the more limited population of students who are most qualified to study at Harvard based on objective evaluation criteria, it’s clear that Asians are underrepresented. Their “personality” scores are depressed because of their boring origins.



I don’t know what the law is.

But it’s understandable that an argument that goes “We’re not discriminating against Asians! We’re merely discriminating against traits that overwhelmingly correlate with being Asian!” is going to rub people the wrong way.

Even if that argument happens to be true.

Of course, there’s still a possibility that the truth is deliberate discrimination. They could intentionally be choosing against characteristics that overwhelmingly correlate with being Asian as a deliberate policy to discriminate against Asians. And they’re clearly worried that people are going to think that. Maybe the general public will think that. Maybe the courts on appeal will think that. Because Asian matriculation spiked for this incoming class.

It’s a weird case.

540

I suspect SCOTUS will get a similar gist.

I think it’s already too late. The die has been cast. The case will be argued before the supreme court. And by overreaching with the use of race, I think harvard has doomed racially discriminatory practices across the board. I do not see any court ever turning back the clock and returning to permitting racial discrimination. It will require a constitutional amendment and seeing as how you can’t even get affirmative action reinstated in california, I don’t think that will ever happen.

But anything can happen with the supreme court.