# Harvard and Princeton Targeted in U.S. Asian-American Discrimination Probe **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 3, 2012, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/harvard-and-princeton-targeted-in-u-s-asian-american-discrimination-probe/611636 "2012-02-03T06:06:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 116
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2012, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/harvard-and-princeton-targeted-in-u-s-asian-american-discrimination-probe/611636/116 "2012-02-06T22:31:24Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > This is greatly overstated. See this [link](http://www.ucop.edu/sas/publish/aa_final2.pdf). On page 19, you can see a graph of the under-represented minority percentages over time. Applications went down .6%, admissions went down 2%. By 2002, four years later, application were up 2.4% from the '98 levels, and admission were up 2.5%. Also note that applications were falling BEFORE the changes went into affect for a variety of reasons. To quote the paper: > > Hardly a significant drop. Accordin to your link, at Berkeley and UCLA the drops were large and persistent over the time frame. While UC schools could not discriminate on the basis of race, they could discriminate along other vectors such as income, coming from a family with few or no college grads, coming from a school that doesn’t have a history of sending a lot of kids to 4 year colleges the percentage of California minorities going on to 4 year colleges has diminished. trhe admission rate at Berkeley went from 26% to 11% and with the implementation of these other vectors, the rate has climbed to over 16% and holding steady. > [@brickbacon](#): > > Can you explain to me why you think editorials from the Weekly Standard, and a Brown university newspaper are more informative and telling than the detailed paper from the UC office of the President? Besides, you are focused on two UCs where trends of White and under-represented minority enrollment had been going down for years partly due to the real, or perceived notion that the school was for Asians. Your links seem to say much the same thing. > [@](#): > > There is areason UCLA is know as the University of Caucasuians Lost among Asians. That said, there was a reduction of under-represented minorities at those two schools, but there are many reasons this was the case. You know there are more white kids at UCLA than Asian kids, right? > [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > Yes, it’s going to be, mathematically speaking, less likely for a particular race to get in (frequencies considered, variables controlled for) if there is a priority on bringing in other races on board. But this does not mean they are held to higher standards or discriminated against. Your use of words here is inaccurate, and that’s what people are arguing against, here. Wait. What?!?! First of all you’r not stating it bluntly. Lets use the words we mean and not some mealymouthed vague references to “a particular race” and “other races”. So the distinction you are making is that this isn’t discrimination against Asians this is discrimination in favor of whites, which just HAPPENS to result in fewer Asians being accepted but this doesn’t mean that its tougher for Asians to get in. Are the higher average scores and the disparity in acceptance rates between white students and asian students with teh same scores, just an unrelated coincidence. > [@](#): > > But if you want to try to figure out a system of fairness, you’re going to have a tough time arguing it. The current system is basically set up so the cream of the crop from a number of diverse groups have a chance of admission. Otherwise, you’re going to be catering to the affluent and coached only, further widening the socioeconomic gaps. So because we cannot achieve perfect we shouldn’t try for better? Take the UC system. They are race blind but they do select for students who come from high schools that do not send a lot of kids to 4 year colleges, they select for low income, they select for first in family to attend college and they end up with similar underrepresented minority populations in the system as a whole even if more of that population is not at UCLA and UC Berkeley. > [@](#): > > “Lower down the food chain the differences can be meaningful.” > > Not really. Like I said, even if you don’t hit the Ivies, it’s not going to really matter much. Most of my friends from Ivies who landed big jobs after graduation came from affluent families to begin with. The biggest indicators for your future success are going to be things like the type of family you come from and who you know. Top schools will open doors for you, but it’s not like the doors opened at Ivies are really all that superior. Plenty of top firms recruit from more than just Ivies, and even if you don’t hit a top firm, you’ll still get a pretty good job for yourself. > > I have over 1500 friends on Facebook, most of whom went to top 30’s. Most of them are doing just fine for themselves. Its not Ivy League per se. I include all top schools and if you don’t think that there is a difference between the opportunities available to someone who graduates from a top school and someone who doesn’t then you are cracked. > [@even\_sven](#): > > Given that the general national drop out rate among white college students is around 40%, I think I’ll need to save the smelling salts for another day. I think its closer to 21% but who gives a shit, the graduation rate in the UC system for underrepresented minorities started to approach the average graduation rate (note the UC system system admits the top 1/8th of california high school graduaates and the top 4% of any particular school, they are allocated to the different campuses on teh applciation process, so the applicant pool is not exactly random to begin with). > [@](#): > > What is shocking is those numbers. UC Berkeley is an enormous campus, with around 25,000 undergraduates. Are there really only 600 Latino students in California’s 13.7 million strong Latino population who can complete a UC Berkeley undergraduate degree without failing due to academic reasons? > > Really? > > That number is obscene, and an embarrassment to California. i couldn’t tell you where we are failing, but somewhere we are failing a lot of people. Is that really the critieria? Let in any applicants of a particular race that successfully graduate? If acceptance is not a direct metric function of scores and grades (as everyone here including you seem to believe), why would the graduation rate be? Their admission to and graduation from other schools like UC Davis seems to be pretty good. And I believe pepople have been making the argument that it doesn’t really matter what school you go to because they are all pretty much the same, they can graduate from Davis and they’ll do OK. Or do these concerns only apply to underrepresented minorities? > [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > Based _solely_ on your SAT score? If so, I’ll want evidence. Sorry its been almost 30 years, I didn’t go to Rice and I didn’t keep the letter. > [@](#): > > I’m a Rice alum and have known the folks in the admissions office for a long time. While scores are certainly a part of admissions, Rice has always prided itself on consideration of things other than scores. It’s why the notorious “fill this box” part of the application is still there. Now that I think about it the letter probably didn’t include the offer of a free plane ride but when I called them, they offered to fly me out (a couple of colleges offered to fly me to their campus but I didn’t really want to visit Texas) and when I asked more about it they said that it was my SATs. Now they may have been reluctant to tell me it was my race or my family income or geography (although I don’t know why they would have trouble getting applicants from NYC) but thats what they told me. I got sebveral letters offering admission and a free ride (a lot of kids I went to school with got these letters) without ever having sent in an application (and remember this was back in the day when every school had its own unique application) and Rice was one of them. Maybe you should ask them how they operated back then. I never applied so I don’t know what the “box” is but they might have made me fill out an application if I decided to pursue it. > [@](#): > > It sounds like you’re putting your own interpretation on correspondence from the school. > > Your description of a “pre-acceptance” letter and “offers to fly you out” also sound suspect. There’s “Owl Weekend” which is a weekend in April when students can spend a weekend on campus (including 1 day of classes) with student hosts in the colleges before deciding on what school to attend. Students come for the weekend at their own expense. > > This does not sound like the Rice of the 80s at all. The Rice board was (and still is) tight-fisted and the admissions office operates on a small budget. There’s no way they approved the expenses to fly students out for visits. Athletics does so but out of their own budget. Well like I said it was almost 30 years ago so I might be misremembering but I am pretty sure they offered me a full ride without my ever having even seen an application and I’m pretty sure they offered to fly me out if I was serious about attending, I certainly couldn’t have afforded to fly out on my own. > [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > No school does it based on SAT alone, lol. > > A friend of mine was invited to check out Emory and had airfare paid for, if I recall. They’ll invite students with strong academic credentials to come check the place out if their aim is to improve yield, but it’s not like they spend gobs of money on it or do it by SAT alone. Does Rice really need more Asians? Or poor children of immigrants? Or kids from NYC? My GPA was just average but I had a pretty good SAT scores. The only other thing i can think of is that I was a national merit scholar but I think that was just from getting good PSAT scores, there might have been a one page application or something to actually get the scholarship money. But I wasn’t Westinghouse or anything like that. > [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > Anyways my point is you seem way too fixated on SAT scores and act like high scores imply the student is better or something (otherwise I don’t know why you keep harping on it so much). > > SAT’s _are coachable_. My 2400 SAT1 / 2400 SAT2 used to be something like 2120 / 2190 cold before I decided to study for them. > > SAT’s are also _poor measures of what a student can contribute to the school_. That’s why they look at things like essays and activities and recs and awards. > > All the SAT is meant to do is provide a statistical baseline for academic correlation, which gets verified/confirmed via the academic transcript. It’s meant to gauge whether or not a student could handle the work at the college/uni. Of course they are coachable FOR YOU. Take a 1800 test score student and try to coach them to 2400. There is a limit to the coachability. They are the only objective measures that we have and when the admission rates diverge considerably from what you would expect based on the only objective measures you can get your hands on, it raises questions. When the disparity is so great between similarly credentialed kids of different races, you can’t help but suspect that maybe race has soemthing to do with it. When teh state of California school system admissions process goes race blind and the Asian population increases significantly as a result that tends to confirm your suspicion. Noone seems to be able to identify anything objective (like recs essays activites and awards) that would explain the skew. The ony thing we have is a cite to an article that concludes that Asian kids engage in more individual rather than group or team activities and they tend to hang out with other Asians. Hardly the sort of thing that you would expect to lead to such large disparities. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/harvard-and-princeton-targeted-in-u-s-asian-american-discrimination-probe/611636)._