Are Elite Colleges Biased Against Poor Whites?
mindingthecampus.com
mindingthecampus.com
When it comes to receiving the hillbilly quota scholarship, my grandparents happened to be poor and living in the middle of nowhere but also had advanced degrees in mathematics and religion and were employed as schoolteachers.
Btw several powerful establishment figures seem to think of "rednecks" as far more important than the so-called "elite". Sarah Palin and mother politicians use Redneck jokes to endear themselves and identify themselves with their core constituencies. It is hard to imagine someone like Obama or Deval or some other mainstream black politician use n-word jokes for political benefit or to describe themselves.
Good for you, but no one is assuming that.
If you attempt to diversify by socioeconomic status (including race), those that are overrepresented be SES and race will appear to be penalized. This is due to the fact that admission to elite colleges is a zero sum game. There are X number of spots. If you somehow diversify to get Z more members of group A then there will be Z less spots to go around.
Not really rocket science.
To me the two big questions really are: 1) Are race and SES the right things to seek diversity, if anything at all? This is oft debated. 2) Is merit the right measuring stick for admission in general? This is rarely debated.
There's no debating that SAT scores are highly correlated to income. And there's very little evidence that SAT scores are reliable predictors of college success.
The significance of the recent research is that low-income, rural, red-state whites face discrimination relative to high-income, urban, blue-state whites. That is, given two white students of equal merit, the admission is more likely to go to the one born in Manhattan than the one born in Iowa.
The tragic thing is that apparently this is new information to some people, when everyone in the midwest has known this for years. I was valedictorian of my high school, had very high standardized test scores and a dozen extra-curricular activities with leadership roles.... but I didn't even both to apply for any Ivy/prestigious schools because I knew being from a small town in the midwest I had no chance. How's that for institutionalized discrimination (or bias inherent in the system)?
Even though the private colleges have price tags up in the $40k+ range, the average middle-class family will end up paying around $20k, and truly poor people generally pay as much if not less than they would for a state school.
The admission process is a crapshoot, and I don't really see any reason to whine about arbitrary stuff like this. They have to rule some people out, it's mostly random once you get past a certain point, and even if it isn't, I don't think it's particularly harmful. Not everyone can get in.
I have no idea how to compare the disadvantages each has to overcome, let alone quantify one set vs. another. I think the experience of the rural poor in this country is often overlooked compared to the inner city. They are in my experience both utterly pathological societies, I cannot imagine having the sustained discipline to escape either one.
But there is still racism in this country and it overwhelmingly is against minorities.
The only racism I have ever experienced in the US has been from "minorities" (i.e. non-white people), usually directed toward white people.
Also, my experience has been that Asian immigrants often dislike black people.
Right. There's so much racism in the US. Every job I have ever had has had a mix of different races among its employees (not to mention the president of the United States).
I've experienced racism first-hand as someone who is a non-minority. A couple of years ago, I went to a big boy in Atlanta, Georgia. The majority of the staff and patrons were black. It took them 45 minutes to an hour to get my food (people that clearly were there after me got their food much earlier). I also got a lot of stares.
If this was the reverse, Al Sharpton would have been picketing outside to get the waitress fired.
When will it end? I'm wondering when the minorities in this country will end their self-segregation.
What I want in this country is equality (everyone has an equal shot at getting into things like universities IE: no extra points on the SATs/quotas based on race), but I don't think this will ever happen.
It's also funny that Greek organizations are allowed to have entire fraternities based on race (asian, african-american, etc), but if a caucasian frat was founded, it would be considered racist. This isn't equality.
Only problem is, it's asymmetrical. You experienced it at a restaurant. Other likely places for someone like you might be at the laundromat, at school, at a party, at the post office. But it's unlikely at places like, at the bank, at a job interview (for a good job - not McDonalds), driving down the highway, etc. Because even though in America anyone can be racist, the people in positions that matter are more often white.
I really find people who make a judgement based on a datum to be in error most of the time. You are <insert category here> so you have never truly experienced <insert social problem here>.
The typical over-achieving student is going to be in dozens of activities, none of which necessarily correlate with their future career. Agriculture might seem really weird or foreign to you, but for much of America being in FFA/4H/Eagle Scouts/whatever is just as normal as band, chess or sports.
My daughter is an officer in 4H - a horse club. I'm quite familiar with the organization. My point was that for those kids that fit the stereotype that the authors were picking on, high achievers with interests that don't fit the "elite" school stereotype, the admissions folks may have a point. The Harvards of the worlds may not be the best school for those kids. It's not necessarily evidence of bigotry.
I think you are right, an agriculturally inclined student probably would not feel like they fit in at Yale. However, Cornell is also an Ivy, and they have a serious agricultural sciences program.
The article also mentions ROTC. I was once a TA at MIT, and there were many ROTC students at MIT. I believe MIT is now not just considered an elite engineering school, but just an "elite" school like the Ivies. And, I don't think they discriminate against ROTC students.
Furthermore, if they aren't already, the elite American universities of the future are Stanford and NYU, which seem to have much different student preferences than the Ivies or even hardcore engineering schools like MIT and Harvard, even though they are all lumped in together.
It factors in the opportunities a student has and admits students who therefore appear to have less going for them (it uses other metrics, a big one is being project oriented). It has at least in times past actively recruited white working class male students from the Midwest because they were underrepresented.
MIT has a big advantage, for there are no legacies to speak of. Everyone has to pass one year of the calculus (first term is the AP BC curriculum) and one year of calculus based physics. So MIT admits nobody who can't do the work. Legacies will get a "second look" if they don't make the first cut, but that's all. (As it is, the raw odds of admission are 1/3 if MIT thinks you can do the work.) It doesn't take many students from the fancy prep schools (I don't think many apply, MIT never was part of the elite prep school to Ivy/Ivy imitator path). So it simply has a lot more room for working class students.
Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to discriminate against Christians or students who have made achievements in those institutions cited in the study where for the normal elite colleges their chances of admission drop by 60-5%. As you note, MIT has ROTC units (if you get an ROTC scholarship at e.g. Harvard you have to go to MIT for the classes and other activities...).
(BTW, Harvard is not a "hardcore engineering school" ^_^. Although they did try to assimilate MIT in the years before it moved to Cambridge, that even led to a street riot in 1904 or 5. Heck, Harvard is so unhardcore that the last time I checked (end of the '80s) all you had to do WRT math was to prove you could do algebra.)
They don't do biology at Harvard?
4H isn't specific to future farmers. (Heck, Future Farmers of America, aka, FFA, isn't specific to future farmers.)
If you're going to argue that a specific kind of discrimination is rational, shouldn't you actually know what you're talking about?
Also see this excellent article on the same subject: http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=2923
"When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."
I mean, the point is simple math. If you have a certain number of people you are going to admit, and you give bonuses to certain groups, you are equally penalizing others. People shouldn't be permitted to pretend otherwise because that's disingenuous; if you're going to do that, do it forthrightly and honestly. The fact that it's a challenge to forthrightly and honestly say "We want to discriminate against poor white people" sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.
If you believe, as many do, that there are fewer minority applicants because of institutional racism and therefore you decide to weight their applications higher is that biasing you selection process? Or is it cancelling out bias present elsewhere in the system?
Actually, my beef is with Think Tanks in general - I don't care what ideology they ascribe to. I should have made that more clear.
Think tanks exist to produce content that promotes the views of various Washington factions. They are arbiters of neither fact nor truth. They're political campaigns for ideologies, except instead of stump speeches you get blog posts and various "white paper" studies. It's not intellectually wholesome content, and skates a very fine line between propaganda and "informational content."
But it does mean that anything that the publish on race will be feeding into the idea of white victimhood at the hands of minorities. You just have to look at the party registration by race -- obviously that's what they have to publish, whether it's correct or not.
Whatever. It was the Princeton types who said "Excelling in career-oriented activities is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission", that is, having a leadership position or having achieved something significant in e.g. 4h, FFA, JROTC was crippling for your admission chances.
Let me finish by quoted the final bit from the two eeeevil Manhattan Institute scholars (Neili is from Princeton as well and wrote the first of their two articles on this study):
"As Nieli wrote: "The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers... Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant's admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it." If you read the whole book, the prejudice of the elite schools against poor whites seems clear. As a political issue, this is a sure bet to gain ground."
America's ruling class likes to pretend it's a meritocracy but studies like this show it's anything but. And that's indeed going to continue to be a major political issue. Discrimination has ugly consequences.