Justice Department Finds Yale Illegally Discriminates Against Asians and Whites in Undergraduate Admissions in Violation of Federal Civil-Rights Laws
Some commentators point out that DOJ is sort of using asians as cover for white students.
It seems to me there is a really simple solution this this. Stop discriminating against asians.
The simple solution is simply do not discriminate. But that isn’t politically palatable.
This is not really a new issue, more like one that has been problematic for at least a century. It’s already a problem as soon as the admissions department “knows” that an applicant is Asian, or female, or Jewish, or whatever. With the volume of applications, it should be theoretically possible to keep things anonymous, but that’s easy to say as I am not involved with undergraduate admissions and it seems rather Byzantine. There is an infamous tradition at Ivy League schools of attempting to curate the incoming class so as to keep the customers happy, and that has never turned out well.
You already have a username here of Damuri_Ajashi which contains your posting history. Now you have 2, which isn’t allowed. This one would be considered a sock. You might contact a mod as per https://boards.straightdope.com/t/name-changes-and-fixes/915847/18.
To add to this, it goes beyond “illegally discriminating” against this or that group. There are plenty of allegations, if not actual practices, of kids getting mysteriously admitted because they came from the right family (they call this “legacy preferences”), or were related to a big, fat donor, or something along those lines.
Legacy admissions are not “mysterious”, they’re done openly. Preference is given to the children of former students and that is no secret at all. Both the younger Bush and Obama were legacy admissions to their respective universities, as they went to the same ones their fathers did. However, it should be noted that Obama as a student of African descent being a legacy admission is very much an exception to the usual rule.
Being a legacy doesn’t guarantee admission to a prestigious university, but it very much helps.
I’m not going to assume anything that this administration finds that plays into white persecution talking points is true without some sort of verification.
If true, I would like to see this without Asians being lumped in. Or without white people lumped in with Asians. Why did they pair them together? It does seem suspicious.
I also wonder how well they’re controlling for other factors. Socioeconomic status, home location, or other factors could be used to try and have a diverse class.
You don’t make your bed with white supremacists and have me take what you say about anti-white racism without a huge grain of salt.
I tried to figure this out for 2 days and I could never log onto my original account. I’m not trying to deceive anyone.
Still this account is technically a sock. The other account contains all your history. If you contact @engineer_comp_geek at EngineerCompGeek@gmail.com he can fix you up.
Personally I will reserve judgement until I know more details, which may never be revealed to me due to the secretive nature of university admissions.
According to the letter, “[b]ecause Yale admits that it uses race in admissions, Yale bears the burden of showing that it satisfies strict scrutiny.” They have to prove, to the DOJ (or to a court, should it come to that) that their admissions process is narrowly tailored to satisfy the compelling interest of student diversity in higher education. This much I fully agree with.
I think the DOJ’s complaint about Yale’s goal of diversity being too vague is probably unfounded, or rather an impossible ask given that explicit guidelines such as quotas are patently unconstitutional.
The DOJ argues that Yale is using race as one of the “predominant criteria” in their admissions process. The argument is weak, and I’ll let you read it for yourself:
"Yale’s use of race cannot satisfy the narrow tailoring requirement because Yale “unduly burden[s] individuals who are not members of the favored racial and ethnic groups.” Grutter, 539 U.S. at 341 (citation omitted).
For example, data produced by Yale show that Asian American applicants have a much lower chance of admission than do members of Yale’s preferred racial groups, even when those Asian Americans have much higher academic qualifications and comparable ratings by Yale’s admissions officers. Every year from 2000 to 2017, Yale offered admission to Asian Americanapplicants to Yale College at rates below their proportion of the applicant pool. During this same 18-year period, Yale offered admission to White applicants at rates below their proportion of the applicant pool in a majority of years. And, every year during the same 18-year period, Yale admitted applicants to Yale College from Yale’s preferred racial groups at rates higher than their representation in the applicant pool.
Additionally, Yale’s data and other information show that Yale is racially balancing its admitted class, with the major racial groups remaining remarkably stable for approximately the last decade."
Yes, hmm, is this somehow objectionable or unexpected? If applicants from racial groups are accepted out of proportion among the applicant pool, and if race is a factor in the admissions process, it does not follow that race is the predominant criteria in the admissions process. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, or rearranged, this argument affirms the consequent. As pointed out by others in this very thread, legacy admissions probably contribute significantly to the continued and stable distribution of students among the different races. It is not clear to me whether this is accounted for when the admissions officers make their “comparable” ratings; if race is accounted for after the initial round of ratings, it seems likely to me that mom and dad’s contributions would be, too.
The DOJ also asks Yale to do more detailed studies on possible race-neutral alternatives, with specific focus on how they might pertain to Yale as opposed to other universities. This seems reasonable to me, although I have no way of knowing what studies Yale has already undertaken to judge for myself whether they are relevant enough.
Perhaps the strongest argument is that Yale’s reliance of race is multiplied because it is a factor in multiple stages of the process. But without knowing the specifics, I cannot pass judgement on that allegation.
The burden of laying out the admissions process remains with Yale. And it is not necessarily my right as a layman to see that.
~Max
The fact that I won’t likely get direct information is kinda my point. I was including perhaps the results of a court case, or possibly some more independent investigation–perhaps one by a DOJ after Trump is gone, for example. Or, you know, if Yale actually comes out and says there’s a problem and tries to fix it.
And, yeah, I may not ever know at all, as you say, but then my judgement will be forever reserved or suspended. That’s fine with me.
In other words, I think we’re basically saying the same thing.
If rather than race, Yale used demographic information as to what neighborhoods or schools an applicant went to, and weighted them in such a way to give extra consideration to someone who has managed to work their way out of poverty or failing schools, would that be acceptable, even if it did tend to be biased against Whites and Asians?
One reason why they might be lumping asians in with whites is because everyone (other than asians) do it in this context.
There is a conflation of whites and asians in these sort of issues because some people want to justify their bias against asians so they just import the arguments they would use to use bias against whites and try to apply them to asians. Except it usually becomes pretty clear that whites and asians are not rhetorically interchangeable at which point the accusations of racism seem to take over (at least on other sites.).
So in short, I think some liberals conflate asians and whites because it makes it easier to justify their bias against asians and some conservatives conflate whites and asians because it makes it easier to justify their bias against everyone else.
YMMV
I’m working on the account name issue. I’m hoping they will be able to merge the accounts or something.
Huh. I don’t actually disagree with you much–as long as we keep it to “some liberals.” That said, since this is Trump’s administration, I’d expect it to be the conservative one.
That said, you are right that they aren’t interchangeable.
Anyways, I like to keep track when I find common ground with people I have ideological disagreements with. It can be helpful in the future so we call can work together on issues of importance.
tldr: I don’t think selecting for poverty is going to get you the desired result.
There is a pretty vigorous debate surrounding a group of 8 magnet schools in NYC. By state law (Hecht Calandra Act “HCA”:), admission to these schools must be based on a single test. Depending on who you ask, this law was originally passed in 1971 to prevent NYC from implementing affirmative action in the admissions process or it was used to preserve the merit based admissions standards of the school from subjectivity and local politics. The HCA provided an avenue for admitting kids based on other objective criteria through something called the “discovery Program”.
The most selective school among: (Stuyvesant High School) is about 1% black, 3% hispanic and 75% asian. The Discovery program tried using income as a factor but then it turned out that asians had among the highest rates of poverty in NYC, so you ended up replacing some wealthier asians with poorer asians. Then they tried limiting the discovery program to schools that did not have large asian populations and you ended up with a lot of asian kids from black and hispanic neighborhoods displacing kids from predominantly asian neighborhoods.
There has been a lot of hand wringing over the fact that blacks and hispanics used to comprise 15% of the school and now only comprise 4% of the school. Many actually attribute this to some mysterious form of racism. I think everyone is looking at this the wrong way. The black and hispanic population hasn’t decreased, the asian population has increased.
When blacks and hispanics were 15% of NYC, asians were 15% and whites were 70%. Now blacks and hispanics are 4% and whites are under 20%. The proportion of blacks/hispanics to whites has not really changed much. What has changed is the proportion of asians to everyone else.
More asians are sitting in formally white seats than formally black/hispanic seats. Racism might explain the black/white disparity (or at least some of it) but it is hard to argue that racism is causing the black/asian disparity in NYC magnet schools.
What ideological disagreements? I’m pretty sure that the lion’s share of any disagreements we have are due to my ignorance, your ignorance or a combination of both.
What if my desired result is to help people out of poverty?
I don’t know about college admissions, but when it comes to employment and housing there’s something called disparate impact. If you have a rule that adversely affects a group within a protected class (such as race), even if that rule appears neutral, it can be a form of discrimination.
Please substantiate these numbers. My cursory search on the Census Bureau's website tells me that 42.7% of the New York City population identifies their race as white alone, 24.3% as black/African American alone, and 13.9% as Asian alone. 29.1% identified as Histpanic or Latino, with the footnote that Hispanics may be of any race.
~Max
U.S. Census Bureau. (2020, August 16). QuickFacts: New York City, New York. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/newyorkcitynewyork