Judging from the comments from both sides of the aisle, the alleged cap on Asian admissions seems to be inextricably tied to affirmative action as if Affirmative action only takes away from Asian admissions.
Affirmative Action only takes away from whites at these sort of schools because the Asian population has been pegged at about the same percentage for over 3 decades, almost the entire time that affirmative action has been implemented at these schools.
I see way too many otherwise liberal Asians nodding their heads at what Sessions is doing and they realize that they are just using the alleged anti-asian policies at these schools to try to undermine affirmative action but they are just tired of everyone’s issues but theirs being taken seriously. If the Trump administration manages to eliminate the bias against Asians, the Republicans will have earned some Asian votes. Maybe not Trump but down ticket and whoever comes after Trump.
In a very real sense, college admissions are a zero sum game. Offering more places to Latino and African American students may be a desirable thing to do, but this means that Asian and white students will not get those places. While it could be argued that society as a whole benefits from AA, at least some individual Asian students are harmed by it, in the sense that they are not able to attend the college of their choice.
This statement is a bit difficult to parse, but the fact that the percentage of Asians at Harvard and similar schools has stayed the same is evidence that affirmative action hurts Asians quite a bit.
Since the nineteen-nineties, the share of Asians in Harvard’s freshman class has remained stable, at between sixteen and nineteen per cent, while the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population more than doubled. A 2009 Princeton study showed that Asians had to score a hundred and forty points higher on the S.A.T. than whites to have the same chance of admission to top universities.
As further evidence, there is one top university that has never had affirmative action in admissions: Caltech. The percentage of Asians admitted in some years at Caltech has been over 40%. It’s reasonable to assume that if other top universities didn’t have affirmative action, they’d get a similar figure. So if we see those universities admitting a much smaller number of Asians, it’s reasonable to conclude that affirmative action hurts Asians.
Even further evidence: when California abolished affirmative action in 1996, the percentage of Asians at the top public universities in the state went up.
Be careful concluding anything about CalTech: There are more Asian immigrants on the West Coast than the East, and so even absent any racial admissions criteria, one would expect more Asians at CalTech than at Harvard.
As **zimaane **pointed out, it’s a zero-sum game. More room for white legacy admissions or black and Latino students = fewer seats for Asians. Given the disparity in standardized testing between Asians and many other applicants, getting more applicants of other races into the door means fewer Asians, which also generally means Asians have to score significantly higher on tests than other races in order to get in.
That being said, I am sympathetic to the university-admissions argument that having a student body that is, say, 50% Asian, wouldn’t be ideal, nor would it be ideal to have too fewer people of some other races. But the fact that AA in general hurts Asians in admissions is a pretty sound argument; the cause and effect is clearly linked.
I am STILL waiting–have been for over a decade now when I initially posed this question–to explain to me how AA is NOT simply reverse racism. So…since I believe it is and always has been, I think it harms more than it helps. And this dynamic is not limited to any one ethnic group.
Is it a zero-sum game, though? I don’t see a real reason unis can’t expand to cope with demand. There are logistic hurdles, but nothing insurmountable.
The intent of destroying AA is to allow white college administrators the freedom to discriminate. I can understand how Asians believe that they’re victims of discrimination, but America has never been a color-blind society and probably won’t be anytime soon. One of the justifications for AA was to correct past institutionalized racism, but doing so also protects against future racism. AA is an institutionally-sanctioned way of making sure that institutions respect the value of diversity. Removing that safeguard makes institutions like education more susceptible to institutionalized racism. Removing AA will at first seem like an adverse measure that affects African Americans, Latinos, and Southeast Asian immigrants. But the dynamics of racism can change. The Western United States in particular has been witness to horrific racism against Asians, particularly when they were competing with whites for mining and maritime commerce.
I don’t know about that - my alma mater just expanded class sizes and built new lecture venues. Courses that had ten students when I was in undergrad now have 50. And they did that without dropping from being the best uni in the country.
Because people have (successfully, in some circles) redefined racism so that only white people can be racist. So anything that benefits non-whites over whites (or asians) by their definition can’t be racist, only things that help whites. No, I’m not making a straw man. When confronted with a dictionary, they will reply that dictionaries are racist for not agreeing with them.
(University of Cape Town?)
Existing Unis can only grow so much. After a while, you need to make new ones. Or you need to make satellite campuses.
I am a big fan of expanding University access, as someone who has been a part time Lecturer on and off for nearly 10 years. But quality always goes down. It takes while to get back up. Done properly within 10 years or so. Done poorly, well we are fucked up good.
The Uni I go teach in these days expanded exponentially in 15 years from a small Lib Arts College to a full-fledged University. It has an excellently regarded Sciences Departments, mainly due to the presence of Federally funded research labs. Its Law School is first rate, since its received good financial support from backers. Everything else is, junk.
UCT’s coped by pushing some faculties that were on the main campus (like Commerce) onto new satellite campuses, but then it always had a couple of satellites (Art, Medicine) even in the 80s. It really spreads through a large area.
I think you left out “Go online” as another avenue for expansion.
That’s a perhaps plausible argument for the benefits of race preferences for society as a whole, not that I agree necessarily. However from the POV of Asian applicants who don’t get admitted at prestigious universities when non-Asians with systematically lower objective qualifications do, it’s seems a stretch.
Asians would have to believe that outlawing a system of race preferences in pursuit of ‘diversity’ which clearly discriminates against them, relative to objective qualifications, would result in another system even more biased against them. Nobody knows the future, but in general it’s a stretch to tell people to pipe down about discrimination against them because if the system which produces it were changed to eliminate it, that would just result in more discrimination against them, and besides, the current discrimination against them is driven by good motives.
Personally I think for race preferences to survive, and have any real argument in their favor, they have to be curtailed to apply only to two groups the victims of very longstanding discrimination flowing through the family trees so to speak for many generations on average: the descendants of people held as slaves in the US, and Natives. If it’s ‘icky’ to make people prove their ‘blood quantum’* to belong to one of those two narrow groups, well the whole thing is icky, human existence is. Giving preferences to a highly diverse group of mainly recent** comers like Latinos, but effectively doing the reverse to another diverse group of mainly recent comers like Asians, makes it hard IMO to argue that race preferences are really about remedying past racism rather than just enforcing equal outcome by group. And beneficiaries must also be limited to those from relatively poor families in the current generation. Race preferences for the kids of the black elite strike too many people as rank injustice, with good reason IMO.
However with or without (or with reduced) race preferences for non white/Asians, there will be still tension in any admission system nominally largely based on objective academic qualifications if relatively small but not tiny groups tend to outperform on objective academic qualifications. That applies to some Asian groups, but isn’t necessarily limited to them. Ending the de facto limits on Asians at prestige schools isn’t exactly the same issue as eliminating or curtailing black/Latino race preferences.
*IOW what Native tribes have done to judge eligibility of claimed members for benefits arising from status as a Native tribe.
**again society is messy. Yes there are American Asians and Latinos with very long roots in the country, some of whose family history was seriously affected, sometimes even in recent generations by discrimination (Japanese American internees etc). But by and large it’s not comparable to the descendants of American slaves or Natives, and African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants are almost all recent comers.
I don’t necessarily disagree that it’s discrimination; I think the broader question is, in the absence of anything else, how harmful is it? And without it, what safeguards exist to prevent a backslide into an era when there was much greater latitude to discriminate against anyone? I can’t really make great arguments for AA other than my vague concern that this will somehow end up having unintended consequences, just like AA itself has unintended consequences.
Do whites get affirmative action? I know they have legacy and other advantages I’m talking specifically about policies which give them points in favor on their applications just for being white. I ask because something doesn’t make sense to me. If Asian students outperform white students then they should replace the whites in the part of the student body not allocated on the basis of legacies or affirmative action. If the percentage of asian students remains the same despite their superior qualifications doesn’t that mean they are being discriminated against for the general spots? Why should we assume the percentage of asians would increase if more general spots are created by eliminating AA?