I cannot wait for the legal discovery process commences. It’s going to be a bloodbath, because Harvard has discriminated against Asians far more subtly and systematically than they did with Jews.
Though I'd disagree with the whole if it, if they went 'strictly SAT' or something, and suppose 50% of every class was Asian-American, whereupon Asian-Americans only make up 5% of the overall population of the US thereby meaning a 10x overrepresentation ... well - that's a problem by any social measure.
So it's far more complicated than simply 'they don't like some people and don't want them there'.
The "I don't see colors" part of me is cringing at what this implies. Aren't Asian-Americans supposed to be more than their race?
a problem by any social measure.
Elite universities should admit the best students. Science / truth is and should be epistocratic, rather than democratic, fair or equal.
If other ethnies cannot educate their children up to Asian standards, then that's a failure of the other ethnies. Punishing Asians for consistently raising better children is victim blaming. All the more, so since it's very easy to raise successful children: study hard & consistently, value education and do lots of maths.
We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them.
What you are talking about makes sense for something like the IIT in India - and take a look at the huge number of students who run from that environment to a liberal arts education in the US.
To shed more light on your position - by extension we can ask why someone has to study electives and waste so much time on it.
Merit is measured on the subjects that are part of their degree.
The US college education is faced with a definitional crisis - they are tooled for a different era, when a college education wasn’t something every citizen was expected to get.
The US college education is faced
with a definitional crisis
huge number of students who run from [IITs] to
a liberal arts education in the US.
It's part of one's maturation to work out what one wants to do in life. More important is that IITs consistently produce excellent graduates, eg. Sundar Pichai, Sachin Bansal, or the undergraduates who developed the AKS primality test. (Note I'm not saying that IITs are ideal, indeed they can do much better.) Universities (or at least elite universities) should be judged primarily by the quality of their top graduates (for they have a disproportionate impact), and not by their failures.
First, it doesn't have to be, and was never necessarily meant to be, second, it depends on how you define your 'epistemological' criteria.
To my point: 'just using SAT scores' would be basically a very bad way to select students.
For example, some US States high schools may focus intensely on 'SAT prep'. Others may have a policy of not prepping at all. Some candidates speak English as their second language and are at a big disadvantage.
"We should celebrate the Asian focus of intellectual excellence rather than punish them."
This is 'intellectual excellence' on some level, but I view the 'race to perfect SAT' as competitive, not intellectual.
We can all work 12 hours a day from the age of four, but is that what we want? In South Korea, they literally had to ban doing homework after 10 pm, because it was a social malaise. This is a cultural attribute, on the whole, it's certainly better than kids 'not doing homework', but my experience with South Korean students at Grad School has informed me that I don't think that this is really what we want, nor is it actually very productive. (Too clarify about my South Korean compatriots - it's they who were complaining that during their summer internships at home, they would be paid meagre wages, literally a couple thousand dollars a month - after a lifetime of intensely competitive academic endeavour)
There are a number of factors at play and I think 'representation' is one of them, on some level.
Also, I'm the last person to be pushing intersectional arguments, I'm generally wary of it all, and totally opposed to 'proportional representation' and that kind of stuff. I'm saying - it's a factor, that's all.
Most of my extended family is Chinese-born. This cohort (educated, upper middle class and above) definitely raises better test-takers. They are statistically much less likely to divorce and much less likely to be on public assistance. I value these traits enormously myself.
It is not clear to me they are better children. Personal anecdata shows that many of these kids were raised with such obsessive concern with getting into Ivy League colleges that they are not complete adults, and often don't know what to do with their lives when they graduate.
First, I’m going to remove the “Asian” aspect of your comment, because I don’t think the phenomenon you are speaking of is uniquely Asian.
Let me frame it slightly differently.
One group, let’s call them TestPreppers, are excellent at acing tests. Yes, these types of students are common is East Asia (e.g., due to the cram school culture), but they can be found other places as well (e.g., upper middle class communities in the US NE corridor regardless of race).
The second group, let’s call them ThinkersDoers, are really good at identifying interesting problems and doing constructive work on that problem. These folks tend to be smart, creative, and hard working. They exist is all races (including, but not limited to, Asians).
In an academic setting or some professions that have domain specific hard problems to work on, the TestPreppers are largely terrible to work with. Lots of hand holding. Lots of training. Outcomes are predictable but uninspiring. They are great grinders. That said, they will almost never contribute anything positive to your work group other than a willingness to do grunt work that others don’t want to do. Note that the doing the grunt work is valued, but finding grinders is not hard. The VAR (value above replacement — a sports stats term) is basically zero.
The ThinkersDoers, however, will provide unique insights about the problem space and will advance the team in unique and valuable ways. Their VAR is very high — these folks are so difficult to find at any level. These folks are incredibly fun to work with, and you are very sad when they leave the team.
I really wish that we, regardless of race, would encourage the development more ThinkersDoers rather than focus on the relatively mundane TestPreppers. Raising a TestPrepper (to the exclusion of anything else) just seems like a wasted opportunity to develop a ThinkerDoer who has the opportunity to move the needle much more substantially in any endeavor they choose to persue.
It is? Why? And is it Harvard's to fix to the detriment of Asian-Americans?
At Cal Tech Asians are roughly 50% of students. Cal Tech does not consider race in admissions. Those students rightfully earned there places base on merit and objective criteria.
To make the suggestion that they should be systematically denied those positions because of there race and percentage of population is regressive. Who gets to decide what percentage of what race is a good percentage?
Harvard is desperately trying to cover there criteria because it more then likely runs contrary to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and they are going to louse this law suite if it goes to trial.
Lets see the exact formula that Harvard is using for race vs percentage of the population so we can apply the same formula to all races they admit. Lets compare European, Jewish, Asian student percentages based on the same formula.
I think that administration at Harvard is scared to death of that type of scrutiny but that is exactly what they are going to get. And it could seriously stigmatize the school for decades. And set some significant legal presented so Schools can not use these sort of behind closed doors racist regressive policies any more.
By this definition, that "problem by any social measure" already exists. The Jewish (undergrad) population at Harvard is 25% [0] whereas the U.S. Jewish population is approximately 2%. Given this already-existing 10x overrepresentation, would a significant increase in the percentage of Asian-American students vs the domestic population be a social problem? Maybe yes maybe no, it's a complex question.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
We should not just pretend an equality exists where it does not. East Asians on average are smarter than whites, by about half a standard deviation or more. This explains the disparate outcomes. If you don’t like it subsidize embryo selection. Any ethnic differences can be vastly overwhelmed by iterated embryo selection in the near future.
Don’t put roadblocks in the way of us using what little intelligence we have in the pre-embryo-selection world efficiency.
"Holistic admissions criteria emerged at Ivy League schools in the early 20th century and were almost immediately twisted for virulently anti-semitic purposes. Until the 1920s, students took an admissions test and those that did well on the test were admitted to the colleges “almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria.” This resulted in lots of Jewish men on the campus of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
An alumni visiting the Harvard campus around this time was shocked by the scene: 'Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater.'
It’s around this time that Ivy League schools switched from a strictly quantitative system of test scores to a more subjective, holistic approach."
https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-...
Going on a tangent, imo this blog post as one of the starting points of the current spate of lawsuits. The impact and reach of YC companies is huge.
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
> Yale University’s undergrad student body is 27 percent Jewish (1,500 Jewish undergrads out of 5,477 total). Percentage-wise, it narrowly beats out its Ivy League rival Harvard University, which is 25 percent Jewish (1,675 out of 6,694 undergrads). But Cornell University and Columbia University both have more Jews in total — 3,000 and 1,800, respectively.
https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-uni...
No it is not. East Asians on average are higher quality students than gentile whites in every measure of intelligence and grit we have. Denying them entry because such ethnic differences make you uncomfortable is not just.
I don't think people here understand Harvard University. The funny thing is, this level of misunderstanding is so naive and naively self-righteous that it might actually destroy the cesspool. So, good.
"The court documents, filed in federal court in Boston, also showed that Harvard conducted an internal investigation into its admissions policies in 2013 and found a bias against Asian-American applicants. But Harvard never made the findings public or acted on them."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...