I realize that professional sports and higher education aren’t the best analogy, but IMHO, the notion that there is such a thing as an “overrepresented minority” is problematic. You don’t see the NBA or NFL saying that there needs to be a cap on the number of African-American players (the NBA and NFL are overwhelmingly African-American, despite the fact that African-Americans are a minority in the United States.) Why? Because those African-American players rose to the NBA and NFL through their own individual merits.
Ah. So your declaration that they were actually imposing quotas is speculation, while you declared it to be fact.
Carry on.
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The name can be removed from the application together with gender and ethnicity.
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those interviews can be done by telephone. Of course, then you get into accents.
Come on, Professor Guy. We weren’t cheating, we were… working as a team! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
But this actually is how elite university admissions works. The famous example is that when the tuba player in the marching band graduates, the admissions team is going to have to find you another tuba player. There is no shortage, at all, of resources on elite admissions processes. I can recommend you a dozen books on the subject.
Admissions are not thinking about “what will this student benefit from our school?” They are asking how they will benefit from you-- and there are a lot of niches to fill. A student who just sits in class getting good grades is basically worthless to a university. They need people who can make things happen, who will bring something new to the community, and who will bring interesting insight and discussion into their classes. Classes aren’t just sitting there while the professor talks. Students learn from and are inspired by each other.
They want to make sure the class has enough journalists to keep the school paper going. They have spots to fill on obscure sports teams. They need to make sure the math major has enough extraverts that class discussion won’t be impossible. They want someone who can organize a good alternative spring break. They want entrepreneurs who can make them as famous as Facebook did. They want to make sure the school dances are fun. They need leaders, connectors, techies, quants, activists, writer, politicians, and the whole range of ways that people can be successful.
Above all, they want people with compelling vision and a compelling story, who will continue to do compelling things (ideally while still students) that will bring attention and prestige to the unviersity. A class of 400 mid-level managers at Intel is a failure. They want inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, writers, politicians, TED talkers, and teachers.
And they put a lot of thought- an enormous amount of resources- into putting together a group of people who can get there together.
And NONE of those things are related to race/ethnicity or gender. Which is the point. So - as I said, have your “holistic process” to find or select for those qualities. But remove everything gender- or race/ethnicity-related from it.
The argument I hear is “if we did that, the majority of students would be Asians”. And my response is - so what? Are Asians less likely to be “leaders, connectors, techies, quants, activists, writer, politicians, and the whole range of ways that people can be successful”?
nm
Those things all sound nice; but really they just want money first and foremost. Ultimately, they are businesses - these lovely things are just some of the intermediary steps that lead down the road to large alumni donations.
ETA: I don’t know what my comment has to do with Asians now that I think about it.
Are you suggesting that high admission rates of Asians would prevent these things from happening? This is essentially the “Asians are good test-takers but are dull in other facets of life” stereotype.
Not everyone. Some are the child of owners of major sports teams or other such attributes. And let’s face it, he brings value to the other students. Who will he hire when he takes over the franchise to manage the finances and the marketing? Friends he made at Harvard. Where will he donate a building to later on? Harvard. Some are chosen with slightly lower test scores because they are “legacies” - children of alum, especially alum with money who may donate generously. Altogether about 14% of the class comes from families of the wealthiest 1% of the country.
One 2017 student got in with a 3.0 GPA and below their average SAT of 2237, one a 3.55 and 1900 on the SAT. Which affirmative class do they belong to? Poverty or wealth? I don’t know but if I had to guess I’d guess wealth.
What Harvard is looking for are the students who will most help Harvard over time (which includes helping other 86% of Harvard students, with stellar records and interesting and diverse life stories, become richer and/or more renown, and in turn help Harvard as well).
And I don’t blame them.
They make no pretense at being a complete meritocracy and someone who “should have” gotten into Harvard if only there was not already 25% of the class already upper middle class Asian with similar extracurriculars and life stories will not, in today’s world, lack for other excellent choices of college education.
I am not in favor of quotas but I am also not so sure that the goal of having the 86% that are not 1%ers consist of a variety of life experiences (which will to some degree overlap with superficial factors like race) is not a reasonable one for a school who can pick and choose whoever they want to have. They want a rural kid or two, they want a couple out of urban poor environments, they want to hear about a different set of achievements than the usual mix.
Why?
If it were up to me, I’d support strict racial quotas, like they have in India.
I think you should. In my generation, we all had it drummed into our heads that the US is a meritocracy, education is sacrosanct etc. Why does education have to be a place where things other than ability are necessary? If somehow the “elite” institutions confined elite more to what it should be confined to in education - that is to perform, learn, etc. do you really think that would be a bad thing for society? Would somehow the rich kids not be able to give themselves advantages in life without meeting at university?
Not following that principle kind of sucks - education should be something separate from social privilege. But really, I think this is all a tempest in a teapot - its not as if a few less than worthy individuals really prevent others from succeeds. Eventually the cream rises to the top - undergraduate is just the starting point.
And on the other hand, having lots of money going to elite institutions that can further advance technology and science is a good thing - even at the cost of allowing a certain amount of unfairness in the system.
But it’s still not fair:mad:
Given that most of the applicants are still minors, this is, if true, borderline child abuse. A school should help students be the best they can be, not exploit them for its own benefit.
Here is a much better alternative:
These friggin’ compelling visions were often concocted by admissions consultants. The self-serving school you describe should lose its accreditation.
IMHO, a university has two basic missions: Education, and advancement of knowledge. Prestige should come from a high graduation rate and making scientific discoveries, not from being known for (I can’t believe you mentioned this) fun school dances.
Even if I bought this, you have zero evidence that admissions officers can tell this by reading possibly ghost-written essays and looking for the upper-middle-class pattern of heart-tugging extra-curriculars.
What if a university looks at the racial composition of its student body and says, “We need more white people,” and admits more white students just because they’re white?
But the truth is that stuff like “fun dances” makes a school attractive to students who have money. Money that is used to hire top-rate professors and all the other educational fixtures of a university.
“Fun dances” also keeps the brainiacs from jumping off a bridge during final’s week.
As long as universities continued to fashion themselves as self-contained mini-societies, they’re going to be interested in creating balanced populations–however they want to define that. Which means that someone who looks deserving on paper is always going to be rejected.
I don’t think the rejection burden should fall on Asians or any other group, though.
This holistic review shit was simply a fantasy that existed in the mind of Justice O’Connor in 2003. It has no real difference from a racial quota. Assuming the composition of the Supreme Court remains the same when they take on the next case, it will go into the dustbin of history, as it should.
The practices being described here aren’t new, and they aren’t unique to Harvard. They go back to at least 1905, when Harvard adopted a principally merit-based approach to admission based on College Entrance Examination Board tests, and can be traced to at least some becoming alarmed, at that time, by the disproportionately large number of Jews being admitted.
But while those particular concerns had racial overtones, even then the idea of racial quotas was rejected in favor of what has since come to be called the “holistic” approach, which really goes back to the early 20s when Harvard, Princeton, and other Ivy Leagues started assessing candidates in terms of everything from extracurricular activities to athleticism, physical appearance, and (perhaps most importantly) family background, especially valuing success and belonging to the exclusive club of Ivy League alumni.
The rationale is that while most schools are concerned with admitting students who will do well in school, Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues are most concerned with admitting students who will do well in life. Wilbur Bender, Harvard Dean of Admissions during the 1950s, pointedly asked, “should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?”. This, in turn, creates a self-reinforcing system where Ivy League grads tend to be more successful than others because they’ve been pre-selected for exactly those criteria, and because they go through life with the imprimatur of having been thus selected, benefiting both themselves and the legacy of the schools that bestowed it.
It seems to me that whether one is opposed to this or not seems to depend on whether one believes in pure academic meritocracy and general egalitarianism or whether one believes that schools have a right to foster – and perhaps are even fulfilling an important societal function by fostering – a kind of elite superclass. The biggest argument against it, I suppose, is that many of these alleged virtues arise from a wealthy upbringing and, in essence, can be bought in many ways for the children of the wealthy while the less fortunate are denied, even if they meet the “holistic” standards as well as the academic ones.
So while they’ve really been quite open about their criteria, and have assiduously avoided quota systems, accusations like these naturally arise as a result of those policies – Asian groups launched similar complaints against Harvard back in the 80s, to no avail and with no consequences AFAIK.
There’s a good article in The New Yorker about this from ten years ago, by Canadian author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell, with lots of fascinating insights into the Ive League admissions culture, from which much of the historical information above was summarized.
There is racism in the Ferguson police department because its effects are observed by anyone paying attention, whether the police department comes out and says “we are racists” or not. There was anti-Semitism at Harvard in 1930 because its effects were observed by anyone paying attention, whether Harvard came out and said “we have a Jewish quota” or not. There is an Asian quota at Harvard in 2015 because its effects are observed by anyone paying attention, whether Harvard comes out and says “we have an Asian quota” or not.
Burying your head in the sand only makes you look like a spin doctor. Everyone else is acknowledging the plainly apparent fact that Asians are given an artificial disadvantage in the Harvard admissions process and either criticizing or defending reality.
Asians who go to Harvard in 2015 and Jews who went to Harvard in the 1930s tend to do very well in life, financially (I assume that’s what we’re talking about.) It’s more that the people who have already done well, the old-money whites, may not wish to donate to the school right now if they don’t get what they want, which is an artificial leg up for their kids in the process or, more starkly, a white supremacist culture on the campus.
This is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of affirmative action for blacks and Hispanics, and may illuminate an important difference in the issue for private v. public colleges.
I asked for evidence. You provided evidence. I did not challenge or even dismiss your evidence. Attacking my person because I did not roll over and claim “Oh, that must be a fact” does nothing to persuade me that you are correct.