Is there any evidence that other minorities were “over-represented” at schools like Harvard? I think we can safely rule out blacks. Were their “too many” Irish or Italian students being accepted?
I agree that there were not explicit quotas, but there were polices put in place to reduce the number of Jews. However, I’m not aware of any other minority groups that were the target of those policies, but I’m open to being educated on that subject if I’m misinformed.
Because if you want ethnicity-neutral admissions, it has to be censored.
Catering to the existing power base sounds extremely illiberal and could justify almost any kind of discrimination. And I think you are right that the sort of schools discussed in this thread do that.
This is not to imply that any group of non-whites is part of the power base.
If admissions offices only gave preference to the real power base (children of contributors and influential employees), it would look quite bad to the US public. Read this carefully:
Perhaps the worst thing about Affirmative Action is that it draws attention away from what you correctly term “catering to the existing power base.”
As I’ve written before, I am torn on this issue. While pure-merit based admissions, focused on high school grades and, to a lesser extent, test scores, would be better than what we have now, taking away AA while continuing all the explicit and implicit advantages given affluent applicants would be worse.
I do not think you understand the point of college admissions essays. How well a kid writes is a function, but it’s a secondary one. How compelling of a personal story a kid has to tell is also a function, but also a secondary one. The primary function is to see how insightful, self-aware, reflective a person is. They are looking for the kid who makes the most of opportunities and who is least side-tracked by challenges. This is generally a kid who has a high degree of self-understanding, of perspective. Denying people the chance to use the things that shape that perspective undermines the function of the whole thing.
It also, frankly, heavily advantages those whose perspective is that of the default, the white upper middle class Christian kid. They don’t have to explain or defend their point of view to give their story context, because if they just leave it all unsaid, everyone will fill in the blanks in the predictable way. It’s the non-standard kid who has to twist into pretzels to avoid mentioning that the party was a quinceanera or whatever.
If you are going to insist on race blind interviews, essay, and rec letters, you might as well just reduce applications to numbers. And I think what you lose when you do that is worse than whatever ills the current system has.
And of course, if the kid is not allowed to write about his ethnicity, then his insightfulness, self-awareness and reflectivity suffer horribly. Right?
What you lose is racial discrimination. You may not consider that an “ill”. I do.
Terr,
And the point being that ethnicity is sometimes pertinent to the stories that shaped individuals lives in very critical ways.
It might be how the first love of music began with singing gospel in church (a racial identifier) and how curiosity about gospel then sparked a love of history as the student investigated the stories associated with its origin and oral history within his/her own family. Or how GrandPaPa’s cooking traditional Mexican foods was an inspiration for studying the science of food. Good stories need details and details identify.
In any case I dispute the premise that ethnicity-neutral requires ethnicity-blind.
And if you want ethnicity-neutral admissions, you cannot have such stories.
If you don’t have ethnicity removed from applications, you have absolutely no assurance that the admissions are ethnicity-neutral. People reviewing the applications are human. Which means possibly biased. Making the ethnicity not available to the reviewer’s consideration removes that possible bias.
He ( and she, and other he, and all of them) have to tell a story about something. They have to show what they’ve reflected on. How can you talk about what you’ve come to understand about yourself without talking about yourself, or how others perceive/react to you?
If you’re an upper middle class white kid, you kind of can, because the reader will fill in the blanks with their own assumptions. If you are less typical, you can’t. The story falls to pieces, doesn’t make sense, sounds fake.
As it is now, I don’t consider it an ill so terrible that it’s worth restructuring the system into one that would effectively highly favor the children of the upper-middle class who know the system very, very well. I mean, we already have that system, preventing atypical kids to talk about what makes them atypical would just make it worse.
See:
http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/African_Americans.shtml
And:
While Princeton may have been the worst of the high-prestige Northern universities, my impression is that before Affirmation Action (or maybe just a couple years earlier), black applicants were generally held to a much higher standard than wasps.
Understood. I consider racial discrimination an ill so terrible that it has to be taken out behind the shed and shot. Repeatedly. I have been on the receiving end of such discrimination. You probably haven’t.
So I guess we won’t agree.
That’s not evidence that the policies put in place to limit the number of Jews were also used to limit the number of blacks. There was not a “too many blacks” at Princeton problem-- blacks were explicitly not allowed to enroll in the first place.
For one of my college essays, I wrote about the impact my AP history teacher–an effeminate black gay guy–had on me as both an “enemy” and a role model. I’m sure my white classmates were affected by Mr. B too. But was their experience the same as mine? I don’t think so. Most of the other teachers we had were from their cultural milieu. Mr. B was only one of a few that hailed from mine.
There are a million different things a kid can write about to set themselves apart, that also play up “identity”. Racial minorities don’t have a monopoly on “special identity” stories. I’m guessing the kids who are diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders (disproportionately diagnosed among whites) write a ton about this experience. Take “identity” off the table and there isn’t much to write about except for “that one time at band camp” kind of stuff. Boring.
I think it is more likely that the requirement tests how good the applicant (and his or her family) is at gaining help from others to produce a wise-beyond-ones-years essay. If you want to keep out of your university students with enough integrity (or, looked at from another perspective, stubbornness) to write the essay independently, it is then of value.
If you reduce it to just one number, as in the traditional Chinese examination system, I think that does have teach-to-the-test evils. But if you base it on lots of different numbers, I don’t see why that is so bad.
There must be some top world universities which base everything on numbers. Does anyone here know some examples? I’d be interested to read any articles on how it works for them.
I think the question we should be asking ourselves is this:
If a school’s admission policies result in Asians being over-represented* in the student body, is that a problem that needs to be corrected?
For our purposes here, let’s define “over-represented” as being 50% more than the general population. If a state has 15% Asians, a student body with > 22.5% Asians would qualify. If we’re talking about private universities, like Harvard, it’s probably better to use national averages.
Personally, I don’t see that as a problem unless there is evidence that the school is discriminating against non-Asians.
Cambridge - not pure numbers, but
Admissions decisions at the University of Cambridge are based solely on academic criteria - your ability and your potential. Along with all the other information you provide, interviews help Admissions Tutors to assess your application.
what the interview is: http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/applying/interviews/what-do-interviews-involve
The main focus of interviews is to explore your academic potential, motivation and suitability for your chosen course. Questions are designed to assess your:
problem-solving abilities
assimilation of new ideas and information
intellectual flexibility and analytical reasoning
It’s important for you to remember that interviewers won’t be trying to ‘catch you out’, but will be challenging you to think for yourself and show how you can apply your existing knowledge and skills laterally to unfamiliar problems.
Interviews help selectors to gauge how you would respond to the teaching methods used at Cambridge. Interviews are similar in many ways to supervisions.
Note: no mention of “compelling life stories” at all.
This is true. Well-to-do kids can afford to hire coaches who can help craft glowing essays. A kid without this resource is at a disadvantage. So is the kid who is strong in mathematics but weak in communication skills.
I didn’t have to write an essay to get into Georgia Tech. It’s possible that’s not the case anymore, though. And that may not be the kind of “top notch” institution you’re talking about. (It’s not a liberal arts school, for one thing).
I don’t think so.
For whatever it’s worth, this is not my experience. Professional help is a help, of course, but you have to have something to work with. What DOES help is having someone help you understand what the essay is supposed to do, and stop you from writing about things they don’t care about. But if a kid doesn’t have much to say, it’s hard for professional help to get the essay past “adequate”.
Because numbers need context. Let’s say you have a kid who has an 1850 on his SAT and a 3.5 and by the end of his junior year has taken a mere two AP exams and earned a 3 on one and a 4 on another.
It really, really matters where that kid goes to school. If you look at essays and interviews and rec letters and school profiles, you might learn that the school average for SATs is like 1250, with only 25% of kids even taking it, and that he’s the first kid to ever pass any AP exam, and he did it in two very different subjects (say, Calc and English). You might see that he has a 3.5 instead of a 4.0 because he works 40 hours a week and that a couple of his teachers are more concerned with homework turned in than in mastery, so there were a couple times he took a B.
A kid like that has incredible ability. This is NOT a case of “yes, he’s not as talented as this other kid with a 2150 and 12 APs, but he didn’t have the opportunity, so give him a break”. This is a diamond in the rough who will explode when given proper support and encouragement. THAT’S what holistic admissions are looking to find–not the kid who we let in out of sympathy, or trying to balance “fairness”, but the truly extraordinary individuals who will be interesting roommates and study group members for the more typical elites, and who can really take advantage of what a top-rate school can offer.
On the other hand, if you have a kid with scores that are sort of middle-of-expected for one of these institutions, but he’s had every type of support and instruction to maintain that success, well, what you see is what you will be getting. It’s hard to see that as being “more meritorious” even if every single number is higher.
Well by that standard Harvard stands unaccused of having any problem with Asian over-representation as they have roughly a 20% Asian student body compared to 6 to 7% national numbers. So closer to 300% more than the general and accused of having too few. Their “too many,” the charge alleges, would be getting any closer to 25% of the class or higher, and the charge is that the admissions committee functions with that as a de facto quota as a pure SAT/GPA metric demonstrates higher scores on average for the Asian admissions than the White ones (who have more who benefit from legacy admissions and we suspect more who fill professed demonstrated interests in Humanities and a variety of Social Sciences).
Maybe raise the bar? Is there any proportion that would be too high? And there I am of mixed mind as I do see the value of having a mix of cultural backgrounds. But of course I apply that equally to the 1%ers. Having 1400% more than the general population may be too much. 
I’m sorry that you took it that way, sincerely. It was said innocently as a sports metaphor to go with with the “curveball” comment and had no intentional facetious meaning. And the “curveball” reference was about the statement “I didn’t accuse you, or for that matter the people who imposed the Jewish quotas as being ‘stupid’” in which the disputed question of quotas has become embedded as a given within a different argument, like an expert pitcher with control over every nuance of his moves. Again, sorry you took it in a way that wasn’t intended.
A general comment: lest anyone think I’m defending the current setup, I’m not. I think it’s deeply, deeply flawed. It’s turned into this horrific kludge of a system that benefits those with access to a set of really arcane knowledge of how it works. It’s a total fucking mess. However, of all the various injustices inherent to it, the fact that it’s harder for middle-class Asians to get into the most elite schools is not the one keeping me up at night. And I really have no idea how to fix any of it.