The model minority is losing patience

Identity politics is a very dehumanizing philosophy. It tells us that we must be seen through a label we can't change: our race, gender, or orientation.

* Dumping data from an advocacy group into a sidebar chart without doing any critical analysis of the data. The ratios of professionals to managers and executives are meaningless without factoring age cohort ratios into the data.

* Comparing Asian student admission rates between Ivy League universities to two California public universities, making an implicit assumption that they have comparable candidate pools and an explicit assumption that the only real difference in their admissions policies is that California forbids using race in making admissions decisions. Neither of those assumptions is close to being true.

* Implicitly accepting the idea that SAT or ACT scores are the only metric on which students ought to be judged for making admissions decisions. (Okay they mentioned "extracurriculars" and I was amused by the Northwestern person who said recruiters were looking for people who played lacrosse and rowed crew. But all the data mentioned were based on test scores alone.)

About the only sentence in the article I feel I can put any trust in is: "Asian-Americans are a large, diverse group exposed to a range of influences." But that very true statement feels almost out of place in an article that sure frames things as if all Asian-American high schoolers are academic powerhouses who want into the Ivy League at all costs.

Complaining people just overlook them as: "it's a bunch of white males", but Asians (and Indians I think) might be a key for change this situation.

I was surprised by the paragraph before this, when it claimed affirmative action was holding back Asians, when immediately after it listed a whole bunch of less deserving groups that were taking up spaces. At least this line acknowledges it, though I'm not sure fatalistic acceptance of the status quo is much better than ignorance, both seem driven by cognitive dissonance more than logic.

We know there are de facto quotas at a lot of otherwise great schools. (Probably not MIT -- yay!) Hopefully the word 'quota' reminds people of the time when Feynman couldn't get into Columbia because he was Jewish.

At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.

This seems quite naive. We all have been children and something like this seems unlikely to work (at least my personal opinion).

The picture painted by this article of the difficulties (or lack thereof) faced by whites in securing admission to elite private universities like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is in stark contrast to the one painted by Ron Unz three years ago in his thorough analysis of university admissions policies.

While Unz did indeed find ample evidence of quotas restricting the admission of Asians, he also found evidence of what appears to be affirmative action favoring Jews:

>Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere.

Read the rest here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

Despite Unz's piece being nearly three years old, the issue of Jewish over-representation at these elite private universities has gone completely undiscussed in the wider media, even in the context of Asian quotas, and outlets like the Economist continue to point the finger at whites and whites alone.

Similar dishonesty is manifest in the discussions of technology's supposed lack of diversity, where it turns out that whites are actually generally underrepresented at major tech companies relative to their proportion of the general population and minorities (non-whites) are therefore by definition collectively overrepresented, despite the continuous rhetoric to the contrary.

For example, at LinkedIn, whites make up only 53% of employees, meaning that minorities are in fact overrepresented, largely due to Asians making up a full 38% of its employees despite being only 4% of the general population: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...

Yahoo! is borderline majority-minority, yet it too supposedly lacks diversity: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-...

Asians apparently only count as diverse and minorities sometimes, when acknowledging them as such won't refute a particular anti-white narrative the media is intent on spreading.

"Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action."

The Truth, which is hard to swallow for some people, is well summarized in the book "The Bell Curve." Fact is, in a pure meritocracy, some groups of people ("races") would be represented more than others. And its impossible to face this fact in America without getting shouted down.

The other day I was watching a video on YT for the Daily Show after Trevor Noah took the helm. While all what I was just concerned about was the possibility that Trevor not to be up to the job and not to be able to fill Jon's shoes, in other words, he might not be funny, esp. since Jon was exceptional in this regard and superbly funny, unfortunately a great deal of comments on the video were about his skin color and ethnicity and whether he was black, bi-racial, mixed-race, coloured ...etc.

It's really nauseating and disheartening.

Americans need to be de-sensetized about this immediately because their heightened sense of awareness regarding this issue is getting to an extremely ridiculous level.

Back to the subject, America could be considered a relatively meritocratic economy compared to others but in general can't be viewed as such in absolute terms. There's a pecking order in businesses and while they love to blabber about diversity and inclusiveness esp in tech companies, this only applies to the lower ranks and if anyone wants to make his way up, they get to deal with the ugly reality and real strata that make up their organizations or the society as a whole.

"The higher socioeconomic status of Asian parents provided part of the explanation, but only a small part. Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work."

So Asians' higher socioeconomic status only play a small part in their success, but Whites' socioeconomic status is the only explanation for Whites outperforming other races in academia (thus justifying Whites being the target of discrimination via affirmative actions). Boy, don't I love it when liberals try to make up some double-think to reconcile their crooked ideology.

It is entirely possible that he did not demonstrate, through these other avenues, the desired qualities of a student from the schools he was rejected by. Getting into such schools isn't simply a matter of racking up points by following some formula and quite a few kids do not seem to realize this.

When a school has a flood of equally polished test scores and fantastic accomplishments it can result in other criteria playing the deciding role. Perhaps he didn't meet these other criteria? They are not discussed in the article so no way to know. I personally suspect this, much more than mere ethnicity, as I know they matter greatly in the application process at such schools.