The perception may have been around for a while, but the causes for the perception may have changed.
As for legacy admissions, I’m not sure if there is any effective way to ban this. It should certainly be discouraged, but how exactly would one draw up the rules for foiling it?
I’m LOL’ing.
If a school had that many black students, it would not be known as diverse. It would be known as a predominately black school and all the “good” white people would be running away from it.
You might be interested in this figure: Asian enrollment in elite institutions is between 20-30%
If Asian enrollment was, say, 30% across the board, there would still be plenty of Asians getting rejected. Especially since there are so many applying every year.
So you’re ready to get rid of AA based on an assumption that even you aren’t confident about?
Speaking of perceptions - I often hear from liberals that they do not consider Bush Jr’s Yale and Harvard degrees worth much because his admission to both schools was a legacy admission.
I am ready to get rid of racial discrimination in college admissions because it is racial discrimination. That assumption is a side issue.
It is admirable that you want to get rid of racial discrimination. But do you have an alternative to AA that helps to offset the effects of historical and current discrimination?
Or are those things just not important to your “fair world” ideal?
Yes. Don’t racially discriminate.
We tried it your way. For fifty years we racially discriminated in order to “offset the effects” of racial discrimination. And yet the “effects” are still there, strong as ever, as liberals keep reminding us.
So let’s try it my way. No racial discrimination. Then let’s see fifty years hence if those “effects” are “offset” much better.
You do know that you have to name the place you worked for, and that likely a letter from a supervisor is part of your file. Doubt it will say “Generic Tenant Organizing Group” and by your standard it should then be disallowed. Silly.
Let me try to break this down.
In the most elite institutions there are a certain number of spots that go to those with lesser test scores and GPAs based on legacy status. Historically and currently most of those spots are wealthy and White but with generational shifts more legacies may be wealthy and minority as well. The argument, which I had repeated, is that this represents a play for endowment money. Not currently racist in intent even if it structurally perpetuates minimally classism and to some degree racially structured outcomes. Let’s hold off on further discussion of legacy for a minute to pursue the implications of a certain number of students, generally White, getting in not because they are White but in pursuit of endowments by way of legacy admissions. Maybe a quarter of the spots.
You now have a smaller pool, we are guessing 3/4ths, of everyone else. White non-legacy candidates, Middle class Asian students, Blacks of all social strata, so on. Eliminate those whose test scores and GPAs don’t place them in the very top strata. Give spots to those with some way out of the normal personal accomplishment be it having already been nationally recognized for research on how computers multi-task, being a nationally ranked skier, other athletic achievements, national recognition for original cancer research while in High School, or overcoming major adversity on the path to academic excellence. That will be a mix of ethnicities, certainly some Asian and some Black, some Hispanic and some White. They won’t all be Asian and there is no a priori reason to believe that there will be an over-representation of Asians in the group. Some of those might not have the very top SAT in the class and might have even had one B along the way but it is reasonably clear that they are more likely to enhance the institution both in the short and the long term than the average high SATer.
Slightly smaller pool yet now remains; let’s rough it as two thirds.
Of that group the Admissions Committee wants a diverse range of interests. You are a liberal arts school … you want at least half the class to be expressing interest (and having demonstrated their “passion” for it in past coursework and extracurriculars) in non-STEM/econ fields, things like the classics, philosophy, literature, anthropology, history, art, english, linguistics, psychology, so on. Some of those will be high achieving Asian-Americans but culturally not as many. Non-zero but smallish. The cultural push is more to hard science and math, not comparative literature. Let’s be generous and call it 5% of the very top of that group is of Asian heritage. Now of the half of the remaining two thirds, that is one third of the total class, that is primarily STEM and econ focused … to get over 20% of the total you need to argue that the vast majority of the best of the best of High School students interested in STEM and econ are of this less than 6% of the U.S. population. Not so sure that is true.
It seems not to be a quota so much as a structural result combined of legacy as an affirmative action class and the cultural biases within Asian American culture to be concentrated in similar paths and thus competing with each other and a group of similarly amazingly qualified Whites, Blacks and Hispanics for a smaller portion of the seats.
Now the legacy system is fair game to criticize. It does seem that its original intent was to discriminate against immigrants, at the time mostly Jewish ones.
I don’t blame the institutions for responding to what they perceive as doing that which funds them … although apparently it actually does not work so well. But I wouldn’t mind if it was prohibited as illegal … and it may yet be.
Harvard has had a relatively low percentage of humanities majors (they call it “concentrations,” it’s just an affectation) for some time. It is not a “liberal arts school.”
http://harvardmagazine.com/375th/concentrations-chart
One of the issues that Ivy League schools are currently confronting is the end of confidence in the humanities. The age of the prestigious English degree guaranteeing a job outside of academia is coming to a close. Best-of-the-best students who can write their own ticket are declining Harvard and Yale for Stanford and MIT because the hard science programs are not as strong.
Just for clarification, by “40% black or Hispanic,” I mean 40% comprising the total of black and Hispanic students combined. I don’t mean all 40% black or all 40% Hispanic.
They aren’t “as strong as ever.” You conservative types are always reminding us how much improvement we’ve seen over the past 50s. Why, we’ve got a colored man in the White House!
We can say that racial discrimination is still problematic while recognizing that the situation has clearly improved for black Americans. I don’t know how much of this improvement is due to AA. But your assessment that this policy has been a failure is not born out by evidence.
We can actually isolate how much of it is due to affirmative action at prestigious universities fairly easily. Because affirmative action affects things like university admissions and blue-collar hiring. It doesn’t make the actual program of study any easier, and it doesn’t get you a job in a professional field.
The growth in the number of black doctors, lawyers, economics professors, and CEOs can’t be attributable to affirmative action since affirmative action has never been used in moving people through medical school or in handing out law partnerships.
What does any of that show to an undergrad or grad school admissions officer about how likely you are to succeed in the program? I’m sure that a fat, gay Mexican kid in an all white school has some interesting stories to tell. I’m also sure that we can feel sorrow and admiration for what he had to go through. But how does any of that show that he will be a good doctor or lawyer?
And even if it somehow did, why should he get admitted over another student with higher GPAs and test scores because of it? My kid doesn’t get admitted because he wasn’t fat, gay, or Mexican even though the objective indicators show that he will perform better in school?
A larger point is that my kid never owned slaves or participated in Jim Crow laws. He will probably be more tolerant of different lifestyles than me, e.g. will probably support same sex marriage at a greater rate than my generation. He is blameless for the past. To deny him admissions in favor of a less qualified minority applicant will, in a perverse sense, reignite racial hatreds and passions. The kid is left with the very true belief that he was only denied because he wasn’t a minority who had a good story to tell.
That sort of stuff will stoke the racial fires that we all agree should die in the dustbin of history.
I’d be curious to see how black professionals compare against their white counterparts in terms of their high school credentials. If black professionals, on average, had less-than-stellar high school credentials (fewer advanced classes, less impressive SAT scores), one could argue that AA faciliated their advancement, allowing them to offet the disadvantages of their birth and cultural background. If black professionals, on average, had marks that were similar to their white peers, then one could argue that AA is just a waste of time. If you’ve got all the merit criteria checked off, you’ll make it. If you don’t, you’ll flunk out. No special boost is necessary.
Hmmm…what do you know? There’s been research done on this exact subject. I guess social science is actually good for something!
Your link shows that sciences and humanities are as they always have been, mostly neck and neck, and that the biggest group by far, nearly half the class, is social sciences - which includes Anthropology, Sociology, African American Studies, Psychology, Economics, Poli Sci, Government, History … sounds like a liberal arts school to me. Pretty similar to Yale and likely most other liberal arts colleges, and not majority hard science and math.
Disparities in health among ethnic minorities
Racial disparities in criminal justice
Being a good doctor or lawyer is not predicated on someone being fat and Mexican. But perhaps one way to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in medicine and criminal justice is to increase the representation of practitioners from stigmatized racial and ethnic groups. Perhaps some of the disparities are the direct result of low representation.
I’m imagining a group of first-year medical students learning about how culture can play a role in medicine. It does not benefit those students if everyone in that room comes from the same culture–including the instructor.
So, the imposition of “geographic diversity” quotas for the purpose of limiting the number of Jews entering Harvard did not constitute imposing “Jewish quotas”.
Ok, leaving aside the fact that such a claim is jaw-droppingly stupid, for your sake, I hope you have never once claimed that the use of poll taxes or literacy tests in Jim Crow states was racist since they were not in fact explicitly racist but, in theory at least, applied to both whites and blacks regardless of the intent behind them.
Yeah, no kidding. A colored man who is an Ivy League graduate, married to a colored woman who is also an Ivy League graduate. Almost exactly 45 years before Obama was elected president of the United States, George Wallace was standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent two black students from entering its hallowed halls. The Civil Rights Act was still in the future, and the Negro Motorist Green Book was still being published, advising such motorists where they could safely stay on cross-country road trips without being killed. Yes, I do believe there have been some changes in the past 50 years, even if conservatives don’t quite see them.
monstro while you and I have not seen perfectly eye to eye on this subject in the past, today’s NYThas an article that makes some of the same points you have made before and make today. I’ll just quote the concluding paragraph -
Being fat gay and Mexican does not make the kid a better student; it was how he wrote about it and the insights he demonstrated discussing being “other” with humor that Manda Jo was impressed by, and that she thought would not have been demonstrated so well if his discussing how he is/was “other” was a verboten topic. It may be that as a result he will be better skilled at appreciating others otherness. In any case his past experience of otherness is a key part of who he is, what motivates him, and his demonstrated ability to integrate that into his persona with humor and insight is a plus.
Here’s the simple reality that often gets missed: communication skills (be it involving different cultures or not) are skills and skills are not well taught in a lecture format. They require either being naturally talented or practice and coaching or more often both … just like throwing a football or playing a musical instrument. Being in an environment that is all “us” and getting lectures about how to talk to “them” … even if given by a “them” … is no substitute for actual experiences on the level of equals.