Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits: Lawsuit
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Every admission system is unfair in some way but tests are a yardstick everyone understands and can optimize for. In India they publicly post the list of admitted students and their marks. Richer students may benefit from higher-quality test coaching but a) that happens today anyway and b) the Internet will ensure rapid dissemination of test-prep strategies for cheap or free
The other downside is it might give you a more, for lack of a better word, boring student body at the higher levels. Fewer non-academic interests and achievements because every bit of spare time in high school was spent on studying.
I thought the American system sounded better when I was a high-schooler in India with not good but not great marks ("surely they'd recognize my specialness despite my lower scores, even if these hidebound colleges in India won't!") but it does leave more room for implicit bias.
With a single-gate protocol gate-deception investments have diminishing returns, which could (I'm not an expert) put participants on a more level playing field.
Harvard hired an analysis of their admissions: 196 page analysis of the admissions process. It seems like they rank 4 things: Academics/ extracurricular/ personality / athletics.
You can see some comparison rankings on page 36 of Harvard's report -
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file...
From https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/diverse-education
I didn't go to harvard, but I work there.
But extracurricular activities and personality seem like things that are fundamentally incomparable. What's better, 3 years at a local soup kitchen or 2 summers in a developing nation teaching arts and crafts? Cello or acting? Public speaking skills or organizational ability? Ambitious go-getter or diplomatic consensus-builder? For all I know Harvard has a rubric for judging what's better or worse but at some level they all seem like subjective judgments prone to some sort of bias. My mental model of the implementation details of this system is most likely flawed but I don't see how you can get around this problem. Happy to learn more though.
Intentionally provocative question: is "least unfair" the right goal to solve for in college admissions?
If a change to an admissions system makes it less "single-input->single-output" from the perspective of an applicant, but produces a positive effect elsewhere, what is the right standard to decide whether it was a good or bad change?
My hypothesis is, if there's no benefit to doing expensive extracurricular activities, hiring a personal essay coach or college counselors, getting recommendation letters, and all the other ceremony, elite colleges might become more accessible to students of limited means. There's only so much of an advantage that expensive test coaching can give you, right?
You only need a fancy resume if you apply to the T20 schools, some of which are more selective if you’re from out of state.
That doesn't sounds like an average student to me. You were entering college as a junior, effectively.
Thanks for the info, though.
Plus I didn't have research, ISEF awards, USAMO/USACO medals, and everything else that's expected at elite institutions.
- It’s more than just a Boolean to get into the right school. Your score dictates what major you’ll study for the next 3-4 years. This idea single-handedly ruins it for most students as they try and game the system because they want to study what they’re interested in. On the flip side you’re training students in majors that they personally may have no interest in
- The Indian system adds “quotas” for minorities but these percentages are fixed and don’t fluctuate over time. To make it worse they very publicly lower the bar for admissions since there’s two different scores that can now get you into the same university. This again leads a lot of students to try and game the system and forces the general populace to think of the system as unfair.
- There is no age barrier and combined with the above reasons, you’ll see a lot of students take the entrance exams many years in a row after graduating high school to land the right school and major. A lot that don’t succeed settle for a major/school or worse - commit suicide.
I think there’s a midpoint somewhere between the West’s opaque approach to college admissions and the East’s transparent yet rigid approach.
Do you have more info available on that? That sounds really bizarre to me.
Generally you can't change your major without changing your college and starting over (or at least from year 2) so it's almost never done. I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone explained the Russian system and it sounds similar to what we have in India:
"Majors/minors. It's such a big deal in a lot of fiction, for example. But even though I read about it a lot of times, I still don't quite get it, along with class selection. In Russia, you choose a specialization when you enroll (e.g. Applied Math), and from the day one to the end, all students in your group will attend the same classes and take the same tests and exams. American system seems like a computer game's research tree to me - "you must unlock A, B and C before studying D", and somehow, it's your burden to keep track of what classes you attended and got grades in. WTF. Here, you just get a ready-made complete curriculum, no need to do anything but study. If you feel you chose a wrong specialization in the beginning, you might change it, and then things become a bit complicated, but it only happens rarely, and usually only right after the first semester." [1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8qrh78/nonameric...
L&SCS admitted you to the university and department, but you didn't get officially into the major until after 2 years of taking prerequisites. Admission to the CS major was very competitive, and yet if you didn't get high enough grades to beat the curve, you didn't get into the major and had 2 years of CS prereqs. Choosing another major at that point required either studying in uni for longer or graduating in a "normal" time while studying something from a very limited set of options.
EECS had a much more competitive acceptance curve. If you were accepted into the department, your position in the major was secured. If you didn't get into the department, you also didn't get into Berkeley.
My closest friends applied to L&S CS, while I applied to EECS. I didn't get into Berkeley, while my friends didn't make it through the meat grinder prerequisite years.
Looking back, I'm happy with my own decision to try to study what I wanted without compromise. It was definitely a blow to my ego at the time, but when I heard about how overcrowded the L&S classrooms were, I honestly think I got a better education experience at a smaller, less prestigious UC. my friends routinely told me about massive overcrowded lecture halls. If they got to class late, all seats might be taken and they had to go home and watch the lecture online. Oh and none of my Berkeley friends made it through the prerequisite grinder, either.
I don't know how the system is now, but if my nephews or nieces were considering that path, I'd look into it and make sure they were informed of how the experience was as a student. In my opinion, it was less about learning and more about proving yourself all the way through. The quality of education still seems objectively lower to me, looking back.
Arts, commerce, and science (non-engineering and technical) students (all of which sort of map to a liberal arts education in the US, albeit with different specializations) are admitted solely on the basis of high school final marks. Since a high school education is already pretty broad, wouldn't performance there be predictive of performance in a liberal arts institution? Obviously this is more of a problem in the US because you don't have common high-school final exams at a state or national level so it's hard to compare an A from High School Foo and an A- from High School Bar.
You would probably have been lumped in and compared to the other Asian high-performers and would not have even gotten an interview.
Like teenagers everywhere else I rationalized my laziness and underachievement by saying to myself "Oh but I have other hobbies, and I write well, and I'm not like those swotty scholars with their noses in schoolbooks all the time. An enlightened education system like America's with their personal essays would take all those other intangibles into account and therefore value me just as much!".
Now that I'm older I'm starting to see the dark side of an admissions system with squishier, more malleable standards. I think it's possible that the current system, even with all its evils, is the most corruption- and bias-proof system possible in India. The only way to "hack" it is by outright fraud or other crimes - fake documents, leaking exam papers or otherwise tampering with the examination process. Otherwise everyone has to write the same exams, and study whatever their marks earn them (let's leave the additional complication of reservations out of this for now).
Russian here, this is not entirely correct. Instead of race you have region and when that region is 80-90%+ single ethnicity then a region division serves as "race-by-proxy".
You can also get a certain region overrepresented (with regards to it's total population) and by extension certain ethnicity as well.
You're saying that students from certain regions in Russia do better on tests and are therefore overrepresented in colleges?
I can't imagine the feeling of working so hard through elementary school, middle school, and high school to get into an Ivy League school, only for an admissions panel to declare me "low in personality" or too introverted.
Harvard's admission criteria seem heavily based on outdated stereotypes of what makes an individual successful. I question if Ivy League schools are choosing the best applicants and by extension, how much prestige Ivy League degrees really deserve.
Also America: "these immigrants' children are too skilled and educated, and it's upsetting our racial quotas. We have to discriminate against them."
America - you can work here, but don't dare dream that your children will be treated equally if you're from Asia. Of course, if you're from Europe your children will be lumped into the white demographic. If you're from Africa, your children may even benefit from affirmative action meant for the descendants of American slaves. Yay racial profiling!
And yet, hundreds still get in.
I went to a public school, not elite in the least, but I also worked hard throughout my K12 education like the folks you mention - and I’ll be honest, this continual focus on the tiny percentage of folks that didn’t get into Harvard but got into institutions of equivalent pedigree (one of the plaintiffs in an earlier NYT article goes to Duke) while my classmates have to struggle with a lack of opportunity and poor perceptions as a result of a lack of pedigree, even if they are hard working and talented. To me, it feels like a slap in the face. Am I wrong in thinking this?
There are few people I know whose parents would have treated them according "the most performant of you will get the best of our resources. Ready, set go.", instead of say, trying to help each child grow as much as they need.
As a hazy summary - the prestigious institutions try to have a mix of different types of people - rich people bring resources, well connected families bring influence & contacts, people with high test scores bring hard work and intelligence, achievers in arts/sports/activities bring hard work and desire to win, alumni children bring culture, loyalty and resources. Its no coincidence that there are different routes in for these different types of people.
Its the unique mix that makes places like Harvard great. There are other schools that choose people with highest test scores - that is a different approach. Harvard has no obligation to do this. Given the track record of alumni to achieve, the Harvard approach seems to work much better if you consider routes to powerful & high achieving jobs to be the main outcome.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...
“We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President
Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored
by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions
officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual
recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who
get in.
Faust's top tip for raising a Harvard man or woman: “Make your children
interesting!”
For parents and students alike, that’s both good news and bad news. The bad
news is that of course it’s much easier to say that than to actually make it
happen, though Faust recommended encouraging children to follow their
passions as a way to develop an interesting personality. It’s much easier to
complete a checklist, however daunting, than to actually be interesting.[1]
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-to...
Harvard doesn't need anybody's money, but they sure aren't going to use endowment money to make things free. They want your money, regardless of whether or not they need it, whether it's a huge status-signaling donation or a drop in the ocean semester's worth of tuition. They absolutely are trying to optimize how to get that money, now and in the future.
I also think you underestimate how much big scions of generational wealth compete for status symbols like Harvard degrees. Once things become decoupled from money, that type of status signaling only increases in importance, lending legitimacy to the children of foreign rulers and diplomats, acting as a currency to normalize political relations with western countries or between corporations with vastly different political party affiliations.
Harvard sells status, and absolutely is looking at how to monetize that. If offering a pittance of tuition relief to underrepresented groups helps maintain their entrenched brand status, they'll do it because of the long term effect on their ability to monetize reputation, not in spite of.
It also reminds me of how Harvard absolutely hounds graduates for donations, despite utterly not needing them by comparison to what Harvard Management Corporation does. Mike Reiss (Simpsons writer and Harvard alum) skewered this in [0], saying among other things,
> "Harvard is like a bum who starts bugging you for spare change on the bus. And then follows you around for the rest of your life. Oh, and that bum already has $40 billion in the bank."
[0]: < https://features.thecrimson.com/2014/fm-comedy-issue/article... >
I thought Harvard did make it essentially free to attend if your parents have a middle class income.
20% of undergrads going tuition-free is just part of Harvard’s marketing budget. It’s not philanthropy, just the cost of doing business if your business is elite status signaling.
The statistics clearly show this.
You do have to admire the intense racial resentment at work here. There's no evidence at all that these Asian Americans aren't boring cookie-cutter kids when compared to the broader pool of applicants. The headline literally reads 'Harvard admissions have a broader perspective than Alumni interviewers' ... duh. But this non-story is enough to summon up all sorts of wild accusations and intense paranoia that somehow, somewhere the blacks are being given an unfair advantage.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/09/new-research-...
Among elite Universities that initially do a holistic review of applicants to narrow down the applicant pool, URM status is viewed as the most important factor for an applicant by 42% of the universities, equal to the number of schools that view "exceptional talent" as the most important factor. Being a URM is basically equivalent to being an "exceptionally talented" non-URM in the eyes of many elite colleges' admissions boards.
Look up average SAT scores of different ethnic groups admitted to elite colleges as well. The disparity is glaring.
Now, we can argue that giving URM's a leg up in admissions is justified. I'm willing to have that discussion. But let's be realistic about the facts here.
Yes, everybody appeals to SAT scores. SAT scores are easily gamed. That's why more and more colleges are deprioritizing or abandoning them completely.
What American colleges are increasingly uninterested in are excellent test-takers. Nobody is persuaded that students who are able to grind out excellent numbers (usually with the help of an army of private tutors) will actually add anything new to the university. This "anti-number bias" as I've heard it called is just that -- an anti-number bias. There's absolutely no evidence that minorities are gaining some extraordinary advantage from this process.
> But let's be realistic about the facts here.
There are no "facts" here. This story and your link introduce nothing new. You're making a circular argument: "Going by the SAT scores which colleges are discounting more and more the best test takers are being discounted more and more." Duh.
Test scores are just used as a proxy for overall application quality. If you are a URM, it's much easier to get into elite colleges.
[1] Sackett et al. 2008
[2] Frey & Detterman 2003
That's the problem IQ tests can be gamed as well. There's ample research showing you can study to improve your score on IQ tests.
“Psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability.[9][56] A high reliability implies that – although test-takers may have varying scores when taking the same test on differing occasions, and although they may have varying scores when taking different IQ tests at the same age – the scores generally agree with one another and across time.”
“Clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes.[22][57][58] In a survey of 661 randomly sampled psychologists and educational researchers, published in 1988, Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman reported a general consensus supporting the validity of IQ testing. "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy."”
IQ tests are generally accurate across a large population because very few people are practicing them, not because practice doesn't improve scores.
If you provided widespread incentive for people to practice IQ tests like colleges do for the SAT, they would cease to be an accurate measure of intelligence.
Ah yes, a classic case of proving the negative. What about extracurriculars? What’s your criterion?
There’s no evidence at all that other races “aren't boring cookie-cutter kids”, as you put it. Yet the fact that Asian Americans perform better academically implies you are claiming otherwise:
“Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria.”
So enlighten us.
Situation for them is pretty much as it was with Toyota in its first decade in US, and them being greatly puzzled why Americans were so bent on buying Buicks over "twice as cheap, and twice as better" Corollas, and had total nil appetite for the supreme Corona.
To authors of comments in line of "being a minority is actually a boon, statistics wise" I can say this: on the other side of "social invisibility" lies life of being "trophy" talent/socialite acquaintance/romantic partner, and, the most dreaded one, the life of diversity hire.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/business/global/in-china-...
In its admissions process, Harvard scores applicants in five categories — “academic,” “extracurricular,” “athletic,” “personal” and “overall.” They are ranked from 1 to 6, with 1 being the best.
Harvard does not claim to be a purely academic meritocracy.
Has anyone tried to control for this?
(I'm fully aware of studies that show that being athletic leads to sharper mind and better neuronal circuitry. But moderate physical activity is sufficient to have that effect. Being the best at football requires a lot of practice beyond just staying fit. Yes there are those who are really good at doing both. But that's an exception I'd surmise.)
In fact the Asian numbers at Berkeley are probably inflated due to Asian students being discriminated against elsewhere (like Harvard) and going to Berkeley instead, so if all the universities stopped discriminating, the numbers would average out to lower than Berkeley's current demographic.
There are so many times where I have heard indirect comments that so and so got in only because he is the right minority. I see there is a lot resent among those who say they would have made it if it wasn't for AA.
Trump is direct result of this resentment, and it will only get worse if we don't address this issue.
Admissions is high-stakes for everyone, including Harvard. Having some opaque, non-mechanical criteria lets them pick and choose without giving as much of a lever to lawyers.
Cynically - it gives them cover to manage to "other goals" and chalking it up to a subjective measure that can't be proved/disproved
It's pretty common for someone with good intentions to institute a policy for deciding what they thought was previously disorganized and substandard. Instead, all they've done is create a way for powerful people to hide their choices behind the "objective" policy. The trick is that the folks in power control the inputs, even if they don't control the algorithm. As a management consultant, the client boss didn't tell me what to say, but they decided who I could talk to. Note the current trend in machine learning.
Imagine if Harvard had fed its past admissions into an artificial neural network! Maybe they could have hid behind that back box.
While you and I are more tribally identified with Asian Americans, America's upper crust considers them a threat. An elite university is a gateway into the upper crust, so it makes tribal sense for them to limit their access on grounds that to everyone else looks blatantly racist but doesn't really feel that way to them.
If I had to wager a guess, I imagine that the upper crust justifies this morally by saying that without Harvard and other elite schools, no Asians would get to climb that ladder. And also to note that not even the paragons of democracy, the Greeks, were immune to tribal identification and social stratification and racist policies to enforce them. Sparta was especially egregious in this regard.
From Harvard's perspective, in order to maintain their prestigious reputation, they have to cater to the tribal whims of the upper class, even if they don't want to. Otherwise Harvard, well, wouldn't be Harvard anymore, the prestige will move on to other universities that are willing to play ball. Remember, it's not us that determines Harvard's prestige status, it's the elites. Expect Harvard to dream up an endless array of subjective metrics that pay lip service to inclusivity while in practice serving exclusive goals.
I believe that if we succeed in forcing an inclusivity agenda onto the Ivy League, then it'll just cause the elites to make even more ultra-exclusive educational institutions and send their kids there, revoking not just Harvard's, but the whole Ivy Leagues' cool card. While this will democratize Harvard, it will ultimately increase stratification and inequality.
Tragedy of the commons writ large.
The Ivy League is a resource shared by both the commons and the elites. The belief stated at the end of my comment, that collective action taken to make Harvard more inclusive will inevitably strip it and all the other Ivy League schools of its vitality, will spoil that resource, forcing the elites to stop sending their kids there and snuffing the Ivy League's social ladder aspect out of existence.
That's a classic case of a tragedy of the commons. It's both a tragedy, in that nobody wanted that outcome, and it's driven by the collective action of the commons.
I thought you had some interesting economic point to make about these kinds of situations. So instead let me make one of my own. Economics isn't physics, it's broadly applicable to any kind of situation you think to apply it to. Any time you have a situation where you'd want to say, "this is why we can't have nice things," you're looking at a tragedy of the commons.
Doing well in tech entrepreneurship needs brilliance more than great personality and political connections (they should be above a level but you don’t need a very high level of them).
Politics is still the surest route to power but billionaires are also powerful and have longer influence. If next generation moguls are educated elsewhere, the colleges with more merit based criteria should emerge as more elite.
These candidates who don’t get into Harvard but were contenders are not hurting for overall choice.
A university's entire goal is to empower anyone to succeed. That's the whole reason they exist. If Harvard's reputation as a gateway to elite society is lost, society doesn't gain another one elsewhere. It's just lost. People that could succeed without college will still succeed. It's all those people that couldn't have succeeded without college, that went to college and gained the benefit of having an education there, that will lose that opportunity.
Imagine a world in which Harvard is only slightly better than Georgia State. That's what's at stake here.
huh? what? what scientific reason do you have for believing such a thing?
Elite universities are often accusing the broader society of racism, when in fact they are some of the most blatant perpetrators of racial discrimination.
Second, I and my maternal ancestors haven't been part of a "horde" since Padishah Babur shacked up in the 16th century.
I would have assumed it was to create some diversity in their acceptance pool.
"They [the plaintiffs] compare Harvard’s treatment of Asian-Americans with its well-documented campaign to reduce the growing number of Jews being admitted to Harvard in the 1920s."
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/the-chosen-g...
That's not to say that schools should discriminate against Asians, they shouldn't, but people also shouldn't hold up tests and GPA as some sort of beacon of fairness and meritocracy.
Those scores are being talked about because of all the criteria they are the measurable ones, so you can use them as a baseline. Asian Americans do extracurricular activities just like everyone else does.
Not something I said or implied. I was purely talking about the responses to the NYC admissions thing on Facebook, the NYC subreddit, etc.
> Those scores are being talked about because of all the criteria they are the measurable ones
They're not measurable, they just have numbers attached to them. You can attach numbers to a personality test just as easily.
>You can attach numbers to a personality test just as easily.
Please, do propose this novel test. Shouldn't take you too long..
For instance https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/players/jeremy-lin-1.ht...
College grades and graduation rates don't matter either though. Given that society has limited resources, we should be trying to give the best educations to those most likely to do stuff that contributes positively to society, not those who are most likely to spend their four years maximizing their GPA and those most likely to graduate.
I think the basic things to look for are people who have some combination of:
- Basic awareness of what's going on locally, nationally, and around the world, and the problems that society faces.
- Technical skills (e.g. math, science, the active literacies, etc.)
- Interpersonal skills, leadership ability, grit, resourcefulness, and other positive personality traits.
- Passion of certain hobbies, interests, problems, etc.
- Track record of success in one or more areas.
- Culture literacy
In other words, leaving aside the issue of whether or not they're using these criteria as a way to discriminate, what Harvard is ostensibly looking for today.
> How do you define "positively to society"?
That's really up to the school faculty. Each person's definition is going to be different, and you can't really impose something on people from on high.
[1] Sackett et al. 2008
[2] Frey & Detterman 2003
You need to correct for the fact that it's used in college admissions though, otherwise this isn't telling you anything.
E.g. if tree identification were used as the basis for college admissions, within a couple years you'd find that the people who did the best in college were the ones who were the best at identifying trees.
My point was that the fact that it's used in admissions changes the correlation with g-factor and GPA. If you want to argue that SAT correlates with these things, then you should only be using SAT scores from countries where the SAT isn't used in college admissions.
Hispanic and Black populations in USA are consistently painting themselves as victims. As a result there are many Hispanic and Black organisations focused activism and their membership counts as "personality development" at Harvard.
Asian students on other hand are busy getting successful instead of painting themselves as victims.
How an Indian student faked to be African American and get admission https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwMzZtU5H7I&t=4s
"Asian students on other hand are busy getting successful"
What does that mean? How do I get successful? It's a thing I can just will into existence? When you so profoundly reduce success to something a person can just "get" you're painting a picture of a level playing field on which everyone plays. There's loads, and loads, and loads.....and loads more of studies, books, theory, film, music, poetry that all very clearly articulate systemic inequalities that make it difficult for a person to just simply "get successful". There are good conversations on HN about this very point. If you truly feel Hispanic and Black populations are painting themselves as victims in a way that doesn't reflect their reality I urge you to spend time talking to people from these groups. Get to know them, ask them their stories, learn about their families, have meals with them and understand them. Read about Hispanic and Black civil rights movements and struggles and see what of your beliefs come out on the other side.
It's important to not confuse accusations made by the student body of a university with accusations made by the administration.
Asian student community is remarkably focused on real results instead of pointless activism and social justice wars. Partly the reason they are high achievers in real life where as most kids who "do well on personality traits" turn out to be losers.
Asian Americans are the least likely group in the US to be promoted to management. https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely...
Asians are dominating US colleges they will dominate US executives by 2040.
Of course some of them might go back to India and China.
I feel that in 100 years we will look back on quotes like this and shake our heads at institutions like Harvard actually defending "race conscious admissions".
Reward people that do well and hold them up as examples for other people to follow.
Racial discrimination must end.
FTFY
Also, I think that quote speaks more to what Edward Blum is trying to do. Blum wants to challenge "race-conscious admissions" at the level of the Supreme Court. But Harvard will probably try to prove that being "race-conscious" is only a small part of their admissions process, and not a make or break aspect of a candidate's application.
And what does that mean? Using GPA or standardized test scores as the _only_ criteria? If I have 10 people in the 99th percentile of test scores but I only have 5 seats, do I _really_ think the upper 5 who beat the lower 5 by a handful of points are the "best" fit, or are there other factors that might influence my decision?
To me, these is like taking NFL players only based on their raw sprint and lift stats...yah, it's important...but it's in no way a firm indicator of "best".
That's the point. We don't have to restrict ourselves to test scores and GPA.
Just don't be racist.