‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions | Hacker News Reader

‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

nytimes.com

139 pointsmlthoughts2018252 comments

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in.

We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental problem was solved, many of these others would melt away on their own.

I always thought that historically, the elite schools were for the children of the elite; the idea behind letting "scholarship students" in is that if the children of the elite are going to run the world (and they always have in the past) it's really in everyone's best interest if we set them up so that they build relationships with some people who are competent and will have to work.

I think the fact that there does seem to be some grumblings about 'legacy admissions' is progress.

> the idea behind letting "scholarship students" in is that if the children of the elite are going to run the world (and they always have in the past) it's really in everyone's best interest if we set them up so that they build relationships with some people who are competent

This has always been the reason I'm not as eager as lots of people to smash universities and elitist admissions. The children of the rich and powerful took the reins without trouble before widespread university attendance, and they'll probably keep doing so after it declines.

In this narrative, the breakthrough of the last ~70 years is running a whole bunch of highly-qualified non-elites through what are effectively elite finishing schools, introducing them to the existing elite and in many cases giving them the shared experiences and cultural habits to enter the halls of power. It's not a great system, it leaves people trying to hide their lack of a Vineyard summer home from their classmates, but it's far better than a lot of older systems like "anyone who has to work for their money can't be an elite" or "if you don't learn Latin you can't go to college".

I certainly think this is a major flaw in the grand hopes for MOOCs; the aspirational Ivy League and top 20 experiences are the part of college they're least capable of replacing.

> I always thought that historically, the elite schools were for the children of the elite;

Parents of means sent their children to College so they'd have a leg up on the under-class. The Screwing Of The Average Man [0] pointed this out to me. It additionally pointed out that college was subsidized for returning WWII soldiers so they'd have something to do that didn't involve fighting, via the GI Bill [1]. This had the effect of causing college costs to spiral out of control.

My dad's parents both went to college before WWII. My grandfather's mother had played Prohibition well (legally), and sent all four of her children to college. My grandmother was an only child, and her parents had the means to pay for college for her.

My mom's father was relatively old by the time he was released from the army, and didn't take advantage of the GI bill. My grandmother said he really should have - that they probably would have greatly benefited financially from it.

Education is an industry whose purpose is mostly to keep people out of the workforce for as long as possible. Some people get a lot out of their degree programs, but mostly school is just a distraction.

I wonder if there's a way to gracefully reform K-12 & post-secondary education so that it better serves the needs of the students.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=-PJ0DLVOIXcC [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

> historically, the elite schools were for the children of the elite

Based on what I read several years ago, social mobility in the U.S. used to be significantly higher, such as in the 1980s, and I know the U.S. used to define itself on social mobility - the Land of Opportunity and of Liberty, where a person is free to do and accomplish what they can through merit and hard work. I'll add that the U.S. long has been run by children of the working and middle class, such as Clinton, Obama, and LBJ, as well as elites (Trump, Bush, Bush, Kennedy, etc.). (I'm not cherry-picking; I just don't remember the economic backgrounds of Reagan, Carter, Nixon, etc.).

Of course it still was very imperfect, but my point is that we shouldn't think that the way things are is the way they've always been.

> We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit.

Or were sold a merit based social contract and it has always been an ineffective set of rules that has no bearing on the way goods and resources are apportioned.

Your cognitive dissonance comes from how you expect goods and resources to be apportioned. How you expect people should "earn" access, when the elites/oligarchs/connected rarely earn anything. They merely maintain access.

Your point sure makes me angry, but I see the logic to it.

Positions based on merit may be the aberration!

Z-list probably isn't illegal (despite it being pretty disheartening).

Of course it isn't illegal. Folks with money and power create the rules, and obviously one of the first rules you'd make is that those with money and power can use that money and power to get what they want. But just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right or it should be.

And you could potentially make a case that it's illegal, even though it's flimsy and you'd probably would lose. Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit. That's false advertising, and potentially even fraud. I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree. Again, they'd almost certainly lose, but my point is that there are existing legal hooks into this bad behavior.

> Harvard makes all sorts of claims that they pick the best and the brightest based on merit.

they didn't lie - they do pick the best and brightest. But they don't claim that's the _only_ people they pick.

> I could see a Harvard grad suing the school for admitting Z-List students because it waters down the prestige of their degree.

In my experience the social access of the Z-list is the primary draw of an “ivy-league” education.

> We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit.

Nah, because such an admissions policy impacts reputation. All else being equal, you probably wouldn't hire a civil engineer with a BS from Harvard over one from MIT.

If you're buying your way into Harvard, you aren't taking a spot from someone else. You're essentially paying for a new spot to be created.

This assumes that the space at Harvard is currently constricted by the budget rather than other factors.

That doesn't appear to be a good assumption given Harvard's current budget situation.

And really begs the question, given Harvard's current budget situations, why haven't their practices created significantly more spots.

It’s because the people pushing the lawsuit don’t care about the issues, rather they just want to divide 2 minority groups and pit them against one another.

I don't think so, rather I think everyone involved tacitly accepts that a ton of money and power is sufficient to buy your way into pretty much anything, even (especially?) top universities that enjoy cultivating money and power. There's a clear quid pro quo though.

It's less clear what the quid pro quo is for racial discrimination against Asians, so people are less okay with it.

>We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit.

The argument cuts both ways. The reason there is this lawsuit is because many came to accept that merit provides access and opportunity. Both views are extremes.

It's a private university. Why shouldn't you be able to buy your way in?

Given the sheer amount of taxpayer dollars they absorb via tax breaks etc they should be subject to oversight. Harvard costs taxpayers billions of dollars, perhaps with good ROI given their stature but at a huge cost.

Well, the problem is that they serve as a credential issuing authority, but they also provide what is essentially a credential laundering service for the people who can pay.

I do not know specifically about Harvard, but generally when you receive a lot of federal money, you have to comply by certain rules. I don't know if there are existing rules that govern this, but if not, I'm sure plenty are trying to create those rules.

For quality of education and quality of reputation.

This sort of thing reminds me of the process to select and promote generals. With veritable mountains of qualified candidates, the selection process has to invariably use political methods in order to produce a desired outcome.

These processes were completely political until the ancient Greeks, who experimented with things like randomness to grant power to lower-class citizens. Some of my favorite videos on YouTube describe these political methods.

Randomness seems to have fallen out of favor ever since, I think it might have died with the Romans.

But imagine Harvard actually making public policy that they're just going to randomly select the the top applicants. They still won't be able to shape the demographics the way they want. Ensuring that they get to define the concept of a diverse student body is so important for them that they're fighting tooth and nail to preserve it.

I stated the last time this came up that this was an existential issue for Harvard and the whole concept of the Ivy League. But now I see it as a public policy and individual rights issue. Should Harvard have the right to shape their student body demographically? And if not, what does that make Harvard? What distinguishes the Ivy League from other universities? Obviously Harvard is of the opinion that this is a bet-the-company moment for them.

The concept you refer to is called "Sortition"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Thanks for that! I didn't even consider juries.

Interestingly enough, randomness may be poised to make a comeback in decision-making as more decisions get made by algorithms. Many proposed "fair" learning algorithms require randomness, and IIRC the American legal attitude to fairness-through-randomness is not well-specified.

My intuitive grasp of the issue is that the game eventually resolves down to virtual randomness as candidacy features become indistinguishable.

The military phrase at hand is 'damning with faint praise'. One word in one performance report can put you out to pasture. Literally everybody knows this so anything even the slightest bit off glares at you like a giant grinning rictus on a 40 foot movie screen. "who did he piss off to get 'excellent' instead of 'superlative'?"

In an environment where literally everyone involved is so sensitive to noticeable features, transparency becomes opaqueness and all decisions are based on the whims of the oligarchy. When all the whims are satisfied, that's where the process becomes indistinguishable from random. There's no criteria left with which to make a decision, let's just pay lip service to merit while just picking names out of a hat to keep them all honest.

Everywhere else where this dynamic manifests, selection processes are not even half as public as those of the top educational facilities in the world's most powerful country.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if, after demographic shaping wishes are satisfied, Harvard's selection criteria for the remaining candidates can't be meaningfully distinguished from random.

You are talking about a fairly elite team here. Tossing in a few average/random people via sortition would only be a humiliating waste of time. Could you imagine a few random people in an NFL game?

Well, they call up Minor League players to Major League games all the time, the farm system is a fascinating window into that kind of world if you should ever want to dive into it.

But now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, the gap between inner circle will and the number of candidates has a better solution than mere randomness. Corruption. Decisions on who gets accepted get farmed out to subordinates and allies.

The stats on how they scored asians were pretty incredible.

Asian personalities were only 2 or better at the top decile (top 10%), african-americans scored 2 or better 8 deciles in (top 80%, only the worst 20% didn't score 2 or better).

Personalities were scored on: likability, helpfulness, courage, kindness, positive personality, people like to be around them, the person is widely respected.

Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly.

This was a key scoring measure because it was the one area Asians got crushed in (and was very subjective). They actually used I think a similar subjective scoring tool in the past to keep out other groups.

Interesting article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...

"Race differences aren't real unless they're the ones that lead to the a priori outcomes we prescribe".

> Harvard insists this was unbiased, but it's pretty incredible that Asians score so low on these measures and African-Americans so highly.

Considering asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority group in the US, it does seem odd. Also considering harvard alumni interviewers generally rated asian personalities just as high as everyone else's, I wonder why there is such a divergence from american culture at large/alumni and admissions' officers?

I wonder if there are transcripts or video recordings of interviews and a methodology these admissions officers used.

It would be great if harvard released all data ( minus identifying info ) and we could look through the dataset.

> asians are considered "model minorities" and the best "assimilated" minority

By who? What data is there? A stereotype is not evidence; repetition doesn't make it more likely. Nor can we infer from a stereotype - or even real data about assimilation - something about the personalities of individuals.

When people complain about diversity in Silicon Valley, Asians don't count.

Right, because there isn't much racial discrimination against Asians (though perhaps among founders and CEOs), and not against white people and males either. There is against women and other minorities, so that would seem to be the place to focus our efforts.

There isn't much discrimination against women or other minorities either.

There is overwhelming and widely accepted evidence that there is discrimination and women and minorities.

> By who?

"whom". By us? By our culture? By the media?

> What data is there? A stereotype is not evidence;

Education attainment? Income? Interracial Marriage? Sure a stereotype isn't evidence. But my point is that both the nation at large "stereotypically" and alumni ( after interviewing asians ) both rated asian personalities at the same level or better than other races. Given that evidence, why did admissions officers rate asians a couple of standard deviations below other races?

> something about the personalities of individuals.

But we aren't inferring personalities of individuals. We are inferring personalities of racial groups.

> We are inferring personalities of racial groups.

Personalities are characteristics of individuals. Racial groups don't have a scientific basis regardless, and "Asia" covers a vast world from India to Korea to Indonesia to Kazakhstan to Pakistan to Tibet to Cambodia to Japan ... it's absurd to suggest you can say anything about all these individuals that doesn't apply to all humanity. My own family members have very different personalities.

> By us? By our culture? By the media?

> the nation at large "stereotypically" ... rated asian personalities at the same level or better than other races

Not in my experience and I sure don't. Is there any basis for this? And see my comment above.

Any bias against Asian people has nothing to do with African-American people. Let's leave the racial competition off HN.

Hey man, race is the topic of this conversation. No disrespect but if there is a place to have this slightly sensitive discussion politely on HN, it's in threads like this.

Hey man - I have no problem talking about race. But the whole premise of what I was responding to is bullshit: humans shouldn't be discriminated against due to their 'race'; it's not a competition, it about protecting people's rights and giving them opportunity, regardless of their supposed 'race'.

They just repurposed a system that was designed in the 1930s to keep Jews out, to keeping Asians out. The smoking gun is how the admissions committee's ratings for “personality” differ so much from alumni volunteer interviewers.

Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.

What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps?

In the case of Jews, they can hardly be called unambitious given the number of writers and scientists they produced.

In the case of Asians, ambitious engineering, scientific and business persons do not seem to be short supply.

> What makes you think that? Stereotyping perhaps?

Look at the quasi racist stuff this guy wrote. He obviously doesn't like asians for some reason.

"Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably."

The guy claims to have been an admissions officer at an ivy league school. Doesn't seem likely.

I've had an admissions officer at MIT scream at me--handing out leaflets at a protest--that MIT "doesn't admit people like me any more." I think he meant to communicate that they were aiming at more complacent people who would participate on the rails--as admissions officers of his era imagined Millenials to be. "Whoops"

He's out of admissions and lecturing physics at U Kentucky now, which seems a fair result. But anyway, these groups hire bozos to do the low-tier work. The heads of admissions are usually fantastic, but the clerks are lower quality than average because of supply issues.

Just remember that the heads of admissions are the ones coming up with these policies (in tandem with other university leaders) and personally reviewing all the applicants in the end to make sure they're carried out.

I think he might have fit in at Dartmouth?

Fighting stereotypical prejudice with...a stereotype? Dartmouth is around the mean in Asian-American student body according to https://blog.collegevine.com/the-demographics-of-the-ivy-lea... .

"Not Asian" was not the stereotype invoked above.

17% < 19.6%, as if it matters.

Lots of downvotes. To clarify my point: The elite schools only want to admit so many future doctor/lawyer/engineers. Today, the way they limit those numbers hits asian applicants disproportionately hard. 80 years ago, jewish applicants were hit disproportionately hard. There was racism mixed in then as there is now, but having read a bit about those policies and experienced the current ones, I think the main thrust was the same: managing the large number of applicants looking for a ticket to the upper middle class.

You were downvoted probably because you could have stated it more tactfully. The real problem is that many Asian applicants tend to look similar on paper. There is a real problem among Asian families for hyper-optimizing on gaming the admissions system and overly trying to superficially hit all of the checkboxes for admissions (max out AP classes, start SAT test prep in middle school, play a musical instrument, etc.), instead of trying to raise well-rounded children with their own idiosyncratic interests and unique character.

If you have an admissions system that tries to select for uniqueness in addition to aptitude, it's going to naturally disfavor cookie-cutter applicants that do not attempt to differentiate or stand out from the crowd.

Uniqueness and well-roundedness are traits of privilege. The activities typically used to signal "uniqueness" for college admissions like philanthropy and political activism have roots in privilege. If you're not from a rich, well-connected white family, the best chance for success is through the typical tryhard, academic STEM path. You can't afford to be unique. You don't have cronyism or money to fall back on.

This does not hold up at all to scrutiny, because Harvard accepts many students that do not come from privileged backgrounds. In fact, their lack of privilege and the challenges they overcame are seen as very "unique" and favorable by the admissions committees.

Look up the income statistics. There are very few low income students at Harvard and similar "holistic" universities. It's a school for rich people.

MIT cares more about scores and STEM and MIT actually has around the lowest family income and lowest percent of rich people in the Ivy League tier.

If you want to limit the number of doctor/lawyer/engineers, why not filter the applicants based on what they intend to study rather than filtering based on race based on the idea that race is somehow correlated with field of study?

...Jews and Asians have no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle?

Is aiming for a middle class lifestyle ambitionless? Modern America is showing that it takes concentrates effort to maintain a middle class or it dissolves away

You forgot also needing enormous luck

From an earlier thread:

I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies.

The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist.

Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply.

You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.

What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?

So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.

This cohort of students happens to be disproportionately asian. No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.

Extracurriculars have been moved away from in the UK because you're basically discriminating on class. I went to a uni much like the one you describe, Imperial College London. It has it's problems but I wouldn't have traded all the engineers and scientists for lit students. Pretty sure we produce our share of investment bankers. A uni discriminating on extracurriculars and perceived sociability is insane. We're supposed to be building a meritocracy not constructing weird model societies based on your own preconceptions of what that would look like.

Keep in mind that top 5 US schools are taking a much smaller percentage of a much larger population. They simply can't differentiate on academic performance alone. They generally admit somewhere around 5% of their applicants. Keeping in mind that those applicants are self-selecting, to some degree, thanks to the previously known admit rates and high application fees -- they have to use something else. A professor of mine at Stanford told me that Stanford starts by disqualifying all students that they believe won't make it at Stanford. This leaves them with about 60% of the applications. They then take the academic prodigies out. You know, researched mouse cancer at 14. That's about 1%. Stanford's admit rate was 4.something% last year. Getting that other 3% is a pain for US institutions.

In France, the most sought after enginnering schools use an entrance exam. No need to check for old academic performances as everyone is tested on the same things.

They usually also have alternate admittance system but that's for 2% or 3% of students.

In France, Polytechnique is probably the most sought after. There's an oral exam to get in, and guess what ? Only 25% of student from Paris are eliminated, versus 40% of kids from la province.

7% of girls are eliminated in the Computer Science branch (MP-Info), versus 27% of boys.

More info, in french: https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2014/11/25/l-ecole-pol...

And besides, the real filtering is actually done after the Baccalauréat: not everyone gets to be admitted to the big Parisian Lycées (Henry-IV, Louis-Le-Grand, etc.).

By 'academic performance' he is almost certainly including their ACT and SAT test scores, which serve essentially as standardized university entrance exams in the US. The problem is for schools like Harvard or Stanford, almost all the applicants have near-perfect scores, so they're not a good differentiator - people with lower scores will not apply, since they know they will not be accepted.

I guess thats a problem with the SAT. I saw a couple of questions and a lot of them are very easy for college entrance exams. I think university entrances should be a bit on the tough end (China's standardized tests and JEE from India come to mind). Of course schools could look at a lot more but if so many people get perfect scores then that clearly is a problem with the tests themselves.

0.06% of ACT takers scored perfectly in 2013. A smaller percentage get a perfect score on the SAT. I don't think the problem is the test is too easy.

The problem is there are 400 million people in the USA, and the 1-2% of entering freshmen across the country having high scores mostly apply to the same few schools.

The challenge of SAT is not in the difficulty of the questions. The challenge is that there are 40 questions and you have 1.25 minutes to do each one.

When i was at uni they described the intention as:

    40% for book learning (memorisation)
    30% for variations on things you've seen before
    30% for applying concepts in new ways, requiring "deeper" understanding

From that perspective, if I want good students I don't care if you can answer a standard question quickly and accurately, I care whether you can reason something about a harder question given time to think.

I see. That is tight. But that simply tests thinking under time pressure. Fewer problems with higher difficulty level may help here (like the Olympiads or Putnam but both being extreme examples). But the challenge would then be to come up with large number of such problems.

The French system he’s talking about is more a contest than an exam. They are intentionally too hard/long for anybody to score perfectly. This way it’s possible to differentiate between two excellent students. Not saying it’s perfect, but at least it’s sort of fair.

Don't the families who are well off spend a lot of money on test prep? The bright students who don't have the time or money for that are at a disadvantage. There's also the unlucky ones who have something happen and can't do their best on the exam. High-stakes testing has its own problems.

If you want to see how putting the entire admissions process on a single entrance exam will play out, look no further than the dystopian cram schools of China and India.

Unless we want to train a generation of rote-memorizers and elite test takers, this is not a direction that should be pursued.

Those admissions processes are actually seen as very fair processes in those countries. IIRC, there is very high economic diversity in the top colleges in China and India which can't be said about the Ivy League schools.

Those admissions processes are actually well-known for producing excellent students of rote memorization and standardized tests. They are not well-known for producing well-rounded students that are capable of thinking outside of the box.

In particular, these written part of the entrance exam usually cover multiple schools, which allow students to pass two or three written examination, whose result will examined by multiple schools.

Just do a random lottery, assign points for objective achievements, whether academic or extracurricular. Pick some low (say 5%) percentage of admissions subject to discretion.

The legacy/z-list stuff demonstrates that the curation/engineering of the student body aspect of the process is bullshit. Kids who are marginally qualified and have rich parents seem to be able to make it.

Introducing a lottery system would eliminate the injustice and resentment where some admission officer is applying a "cool filter" to determine whether chinese/korean/indian people are worthy, or creating the assumption that other minorities were somehow unworthy of their opportunity.

I'm just an idiot who went to a SUNY school. In the 90s, if you met an SAT threshold and were a B-ish student you were in. We used to joke that we were the 13th grade of Massapequa high school -- there was no curation of the social skills of the student body. That said, we had a fine social life, and in rigorous subjects the dopiest idiots were filtered out. Computer Science 201 was a lecture hall with 800 students, and about 40-50% of the population was culled each year. About 40-50 students graduated. It was no Harvard, but we seemed to muddle though.

Just do a unbiased lottery draw for the rest, that's about as fair you can do until you go down the really dystopian full facebook micro surveillance.

"What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?"

Sorry but what makes you think students with stellar grades have no social life? My memory of my four years at an "elite" NYC high school is that the students with the best grades (I was not even close) were just as social as the rest of us and participated in plenty of after school clubs and whatnot (more than I did).

"Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?"

Ironically that is a career path with a reputation for attracting anti-social psycopaths (but maybe this is a myth -- after all, Harvard admissions committees are there to find the applicants who proved their pro-social personalities by participating in exactly the sort of extracurriculars Harvard is looking for).

"No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale."

The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."

Investment banking is a highly social business. Everyone lies and there is a lot of manipulation, but social skills help you navigate that world.

> The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."

So regardless of intent, it's conclusively, unequivocally "racist" if the outcome of a selection process doesn't fall perfectly within a normal distribution?

You might want to reconsider your distaste for the robotics club. Take a look at the CEOs of the 10 most valuable companies now vs 10/20/30 years ago (Hint: Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella...) Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard Business School ten times, by the way.

Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

You might also give Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates a reason to actually stay at Harvard (I’m taking aim at the slim technical curriculum and easy As)

Philip Greenspun on “Lean In”:

> Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David...takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

They teach Humanities courses at Caltech too. And Harvard teaches Physics. Mixing critiques of grade inflation and the Humanities weakens both.

Whats wrong with one or two activities? I did design build fly in college, and it took up every single moment of time I wasn't studying or working.

The kids winning the "at large" bids have 6-12 extracurriculars and standout in many of them OR they have 1-2 and are distinguished in them at the state or national level. So if you had a project that ate up all your time like that, we'd look to see if you'd won any sort of national or state recognition for it. If not then it wasn't going to help the cause.

When hiring, I’d eagerly interview the design-build-fly candidate, and immediately reject candidates with 6-12 extracurriculars. You want problem-solvers with strong interests, follow-through, and real teamwork. Not superficial resume padders.

How does a kid realistically do 6-12 extracurriculars, school, sleeping, and eating in a 24 hour day?

If the admissions departments are just looking for higher numbers every year without even considering if they are plausible, that sounds like they are just asking for resume padding or fraud

resume padding then?

Why would someone apply to a school ten times??

We don't discriminate against asian people, just their problematic culture.

Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.

This is just classism dressed up as racism. People who don't want to enter the upper middle class and have strong extracurriculars are just the already upper middle class/upper class. The professions like law/medicine are what the lower classes shoot for, trying to be a journalist or a political player is the domain of the higher classes.

"These people work too hard for too low aspirations, we need more people who work less hard but have higher aspirations"

Those people are the rich and powerful.

ivy league educations are obviously a very scarce good. is it really so wrong to want to limit the amount of unambitious professionals they matriculate?

i was a smart enough kid that i probably could have done well academically at an ivy league school, but the whole time i was in college i knew i had no loftier goals than just getting a nice job as a software engineer and enjoying my time after work. there are hundreds of good state schools that do a great job preparing you for this kind of life if you put in the work. a spot at a school like MIT would honestly have been wasted on me, even though i was likely "smart enough" to be there.

I don't think that's always the case but the important distinction is classism is legal, racism isn't.

I description is very precise, but the tone implies a value judgement - is it intentional?

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that history will judge this line of argument poorly.

On what basis?

The Ivy League schools understand that admission is a ticket to a comfy-but-historically-and-culturally-insignificant middle-class life. Their goal is to guard against applicants seeeking that and to look for those who will go further.

It's not unlike VCs who guard against investing in founders who will take the first acquisition offer they see so they can score a few million and live comfortably. That outcome does nothing for them.

You're making an argument of rational self interest, which doesn't at all speak to morality.

Imagine a company that maintains a culture of grooming executives through the ranks. After reviewing their data, they find that more women than men leave to start families. Are they then justified to hire only men, or more subtly divert resources to only groom male junior employees?

OK, so an Ivy League school wants to continue with policies with racist outcomes because it's better for the school. It's probably going to stay legal for quite some time, so they'll be free to continue. But they shouldn't receive a dime of government money, and will deserve the scorn they'll be viewed with in history.

Asian students make up a much greater percentage of Harvard College students than the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population, that doesn't sound like a racist outcome.

What's most frustrating is this case is a stalking horse for white racists who want to eliminate race as a consideration to keep higher education predominantly white and therefore economically advantaged.

> they find that more women than men leave to start families

They're definitely justified in filtering out people (men and women) who are more likely to leave to start familier, and prefer those who won't.

This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.

> This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.

There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives; they are almost victims of circumstance with no agency of their own.

Markets and financial incentives are useful tools, but very imperfect. To keep society functioning and to do good and do well, we all must sacrifice some financial benefits. What is the financial incentive for soldiers, as a simple example, or for nurses who serve in Ebola zones? For Albert Einstein? 'The market made me do it' is not a defense; there are financial incentives for murder too; we must make our own decisions and we are responsible for the consequences.

From another perspective, it's ironic that capitalists, traditionally more conservative, take on this structuralist argument, usually abhorred by the right. If we say the system makes minorities and women poor, they say it's nonsense. If we say the system makes capitalists do evil, well what else could they do?

> There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives

No that's just your interpretation.

> there are financial incentives for murder too

Indeed, whici is why the society introduced significant non-financial (and financial) disincentives for murder to counteract them.

Tsk tsk, of course we should restrict those who seek upper middle class lives in law and medicine, when clearly we should instead be selecting for upper-upper middle class livelihoods in I-banking and, once in a blue moon, management consulting!

I think you missed some sarcasm there. Are you sure you were in admissions at Harvard?

Funny how you substituted culture for the word application in the OP. Is it your belief that college applications are the sum total of Asian culture?

Clearly 'reitzensteinm is baiting this "IvyAdmisions" [sic] character. No one who had a job at Harvard for more than a month would tolerate that statement, but "IA" agrees heartily. He's going to claim that he was in admissions at a different Ivy, but no matter how people might look down on Penn or Cornell, they wouldn't have this joker around either. This account has existed for 42 days, and is trolling this entire thread.

We don’t discriminate against black people, just their problematic culture.

Still doesn’t sound great. If you use race as a feature, you’ll give and deny opportunities based on race.

So out of curiosity, what would be some optimal sets of characteristics for being admitted to top Ivies?

Are they largely looking for people with ‘change-the-world’, ‘make-a-big-impact’ potentials and great academic records (with the former being the more important criterion)? Or something else?

I expect these criteria can be described in words and it is not only learned through apprenticeship as supposedly there are tens or hundreds of officers doing the filtering.

Generally they want a mix of people like that; people skilled in sports, music, various arts; and some people TRULY gifted intellectually (actually doing research or showing strong promise to). They also need to admit enough rich kids to satisfy the annual giving org and make sure enough poor kids and black and latino kids get in to meet liberal/progressive racial goals.

Interesting and thank you for the reply. So they aim to admit people truly outstanding at something or with the potential to do so and strong evidence to back that up.

I guess they might miss out on some exceptional generalists who tend to shine a bit later in life.

Of course. No process is perfect and there are more exceptional people than there are spaces for them at Harvard or at all the Ivies.

>You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men. When they analysed the numbers, they found that it was because women generally applied to very departments with low admission rates, and men generally applied to departments with high admission rates.

There is a bit of self selection in the outcome here.

> Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men.

That's the Simpson's Paradox [0]. In Simpson's Paradox, you observe a trend in sub-groups but this trend disappears when these sub-groups are combined. I'm not sure of how this is the same. Could you explain how this is the same?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...

I intentionally did not mention Simpson's Paradox as it would be distracting. The fact that the Berkeley case is a good example of the paradox is mostly a cool artifact. My point would be as valid if in every department the admission rate was roughly equal. In terms of the actual lawsuit, the issue was that there was no bias - or rather, the bias was in the preferences of women/men, not in the admissions process. Men opted for departments where admission was easier.

I'm not claiming Simpson's Paradox here. I'm commenting on the observations IvyAdmissions made (which was also my observation when I was in school). If what he says is true, the bias doesn't appear to be entirely from the admissions committee, but from the fact that Asian Americans are targeting a few professions (e.g. medical school) in a much higher proportion than other races.

Although I did not go to an Ivy league, I did go to a top school, and I saw pretty much the same thing. I hung out a lot with the Asian students, of which there were many. The Asian undergrads with top grades (South or East) were very reliably predictable: They either aimed for medical school, an MBA, or law school. The motives were all similar: These were high paying jobs. Almost none of them showed any passion for any of these fields. None of them wanted to become a lawyer to fight for worthy causes - they all wanted to go work at a law firm to get high pay. The pressure from their parents to go into one of these was strong - so much so that some of them did exhibit a passion for something, but they abandoned that passion and went into one of these career paths for grad school due to parental pressure. There were exceptions, but they stood out.

If this is reflective of the reality, it's understandable why Harvard is not admitting many of them.

This was quite a few years ago, and anecdotally I do see differences in the latest batch of Asian students - they are much less prone to the pressures of "must go be a high paying doctor/lawyer/businessperson". I do see a lot more creativity, variety and entrepreneurship, so things probably have changed.

Of course, all the usual caveats of relying on anecdotes apply here.

how do you explain the fact that admissions officers rated asian students lower on "personality" than alumni interviewers?

from here:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination...

Alumni Interview programs exist mainly to create a sense of continued involvement with the alma mater post-graduation so alumni will donate more. Their interview reports were rarely material to a decision.

A main reason for this is that alumni, like newly minted admission officers, have no clue how preposterously competitive the process is and how many monstrously academically qualified applicants there are. So they write rave reviews of smart kids who really aren't all that special in the context of the applicant pool.

Don't admission officers actually come from worse educational backgrounds than alumni? I think many AO never reach educational or career heights that would help them appreciate the accomplishments of applicants while alumni do.

Umm they are out to discriminate against Asian people.

More seriously if your aim is to limit the number of people applying for premed then limit the number of pre-med slots and let the applicants know.

If demand is greater than supply then just put everyone over the acceptable score into a pool and draw out at random. Why resort to outright racism to solve a problem of supply and demand?

I think you can answer that by asking yourself another question: who at Harvard understands supply and demand?

A lottery is such an obvious solution that we can only conclude that the people who developed the Harvard admission process are irredeemable racists.

A lottery among the academically qualified students would produce a class with many fewer African American, Native American and Latino students which would be politically untenable. Those cohorts score much worse than caucasians and asians on standardized tests.

The data is pretty shocking and closely guarded by the testing people who believe they'd be asked to shut down altogether if it got out.

This would only happen if you set the threshold too high. If Harvard wants to be an institution with lots of AA, NA and LA students then just set the threshold at a level where these groups can enter the lottery.

A lottery at any threshold will create a student body biased away from blacks/natives/latinos, since the entire bell curve of their SAT results is to the left of whites/south Asians/east Asians. (Unless the top students stop applying, which is an unacceptable outcome for any elite school.)

[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

A lottery appears to be a reasonable solution but it has a problem. The admissions system has two objectives - selecting students according to criteria that Harvard deems important and second, giving the public perception of selecting quality students. If it was publicly known that getting was a lottery, then the perception of quality takes a hit.

I mean, if we really have this many "perfect on paper and equivalent" students applying, toss out everyone who was less than perfect and then run the lottery on the cream of the crop.

Imagine if the lottery produced only White and Asian males being accepted. The meltdown and tears that a even a less than 0.01% event would cause prevents the lottery concept. I personally agree that a lottery is a valid suggestion but I don't think it would ever happen, at least completely random without "supervision"

How could a lottery produce such an outcome with tens of thousand of people in the pool and thousands being chosen? Set a threshold to get into the lottery (say a SAT score of 1200) and then choose at random.

Such an approach will likely encourage diversity as people who think they don't have a chance under the current system will apply.

In Harvard wanted to stay a top school, they wouldn’t set the lottery threshold to 1200, they’d set it to 1500, with minimum 4.0 GPA. They’d still have a huge pool of applicants, but it would likely end up with a class around half Asian, which is what they are explicitly trying to avoid.

If Harvard can be a top school despite accepting people with scores of 1200 (which it currently does) then why can't it come down to this level for everyone and run a lottery?

I'm not disagreeing with you. But someone in Admissions (who is heavily incentivized to not use a lottery) is going to vehemently argue the opposite

May I ask, what was the racial breakdown of the admissions officers? Were there any asians?

> play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably),

Let's take your low end of 600 students. Let's say you are a former musician and could judge their ability after listening to a mere 1 minute of music. Plus perhaps 30 seconds to reflect upon what you heard and make some notes.

That alone is 15 hours of your work week as an admissions officer, or 3% of your total time for the review period if you figure a full 3 months of reviews for applications. That's assuming you didn't listen to musical excerpts from the thousands of other musician students you ostensibly reviewed to fill in the slots for the rest of the Freshman class.

Did you do that as an admissions officer?

Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest the OP do differently with this comment.

> Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

Compare with:

Of course you don't spend 3% of the process critically reading essays. You look to see what writing groups they were in as a kid, what essay contests they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list writing as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the English department at the university you're applying to, let them read your entrance essay, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

The difference is that we presume the OP did take the time to critically read those essays. Imagine if OP had written, "I didn't see much in the way of extra-curricular writing activities, so I can assumed those 600 essays were boring." It's not a serious statement.

Presumably there is a web portal for retrieving the essays, reading them in the browser, making comments, etc. Presumably that web portal exists because admissions can assume with impunity that admissions officers are literate and can critically read and rate an essay according to some predetermined rubric.

We don't have that same kind of API for musical excerpts because we don't have the same rate of musical literacy we have for reading literacy. That's unfortunate because an admissions officer could tell a lot about the applicant's propensity for risk taking, sense of humor, and a lot of other important characteristics that are difficult to convey in test scores and essay form.

That's not really a fair comparison. The equivalent would be someone listing writing as an extracurricular activity and then you look and see what novels they've published, what anthologies their poetry has appeared in, whether they've written essays or journalism that got published in the New Yorker or a similar, high quality publication.

Again, I'm not sure what you're suggesting the OP do differently. It's not feasible for admissions directors to be experts in every area they're evaluating candidates on, so they have to outsource some of that to people who have already evaluated the candidates on those dimensions.

Regardless of what you think the fair comparison is, it wouldn't be serious to claim that the writing is unremarkable without... reading the writing.

Same goes for playing an instrument. You have to listen to the applicant to know whether their playing is remarkable or not.

To be as clear as possible: OP should have reserved judgment on the musical prowess of the applicants instead of claiming all 600-1000 applicants were unremarkable players without having listened to them.

tldr; "I didn't see any musical accolades listed in their packets" != "unremarkable players."

I don't believe you have to listen to a student musician to judge them. You can see on their application what they've achieved. Are they third chair in some youth philharmonic? That's not remarkable. If they were remarkable, they would have remarkable achievements on their application.

> The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist.

Then why do college admissions factor in race at all?

> Their grades and scores are STELLAR!

But the complaint is that their grades and scores aren't stellar. That lower grades and scores are being chosen over higher grades and scores based apparently on race.

> What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?

Once again, the complaint is that people with equal or better extracurricular activities and better grades are being passed over based on race.

> No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.

But we know this isn't true. We know that college admins have discriminated before.

Your argument is just a rehash of the anti-semitic discrimination against jews decades ago.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/18/harvard-ad...

It's pretty much boilerplate word for word copy of previous racist admission policies.

College admissions aren't about sat scores anymore. I graduated from high school this year, and know 2 people going to Harvard. It doesn't matter if you get perfect sat scores, it matters about what you do outside of school, and whether you spend all your time studying or actually doing something that will contribute to society. Numbers just aren't enough to admit students by, since if they admitted everyone with perfect scores, they would have way too many students.

I graduated from highschool 20+ years ago (1997, holy smokes!) and it was the same deal then. There were about 25 of us in my graduating class that ran the table with perfect SATs, 5s on all our APs, perfect GPA, etc and we all applied to pretty much all the Ivies. It was arbitrary who got in where, no rhyme or reason as far as we could tell then. Sounds like it hasn't changed much.

Except for if you read the article you would see that it's not arbitrary, but based on racial discrimination.

That has not been proven at all.

Apparently it also matters where your parents went to school, what your father or mother does for a living, and what color your skin is.

Race is a big factor.

It's a factor, but not a big one, and will usually make you have a bigger chance at getting in, but rarely will it decrease your chances. Harvard accepted ~17% Asian people, while the people who are suing them say it should be closer to 40%, like the UC system, which is race blind. They dont consider that more asians live in California, and thus more apply to the UCs. Yes, being black, Hispanic, or native American can often give you a boost in the admissions process, but I think it's a good thing, colleges are trying to correct how tough it was historically for certain ethnic groups. I would say that college admissions are for the most part pretty fair. Of course theres a couple kids who get in because of donors, connections, etc., but these are very small minorities.

Hm I think your argument of considering historic context isn’t that great. When Asians first started coming to the US, lots of them were railroad workers treated like slaves, even now days Asians face a lot of racial discrimination (ever seen how they portrait an asian man on TV?). America is the land of opportunities, people should work for what they get. Handout will only make people look bad in the long term (how do minorities feel knowing that they might have been less qualified when getting in?)

Admissions at elite private colleges were never just about SAT scores. Harvard for example tries to admit students with the potential to become leaders in their chosen fields. Naturally that evaluation is quite subjective.

I think without numbers the way students get selected would be the same way ball players got selected before Billy Beane and Oakland As. The problem is with the metric not the method.

Regardless of race, giving preferential treatment to relatives of donors seems like pure cronyism. If a small town government does things like that, we roll our eyes and lament backwards rural towns.

If anything, it would make race a "we better not talk about this" smokescreen of anger and eggshell stepping to act as a moat around the real discussion.

Why is SAT so ridiculously easy that thousands have perfect score?

It was "recentered" in 1995. The right side of the distribution was essentially truncated. A 1600 on the pre-1995 SAT was quite an accomplishment (I don't have data at my fingertips, but in most years, fewer than 10 students achieved a perfect score of 1600 and only a few dozen scored 1550+). By contrast, several hundred students a year scored 1600 on the recentered test.

The scoring system has been changed several times since 1995 and I have no idea how the current system compares to the pre-1995 system or the recentered test given for some years afterward.

Many, including myself, suspect that one of the motivations for the recentering was to give colleges cover for their admissions decisions. It is pretty hard to turn down students who get 1600s when only 7 or 8 students a year do so. It is easier to "shape" a class without provoking criticism when a large percentage of students score 1500+.

It's hard bordering on impossible to make a single test that measures most of the college-bound high school graduate population and can also make non-arbitrary distinctions among top-1% students.

Lopping off the top of the distribution looks to me like a recognition that pre-recentering scores in the top 100 points or so were essentially measuring the luck of top-performing students on which questions they drew and how well their educated guesses landed.

Why not administer a second test to distinguish between the SAT's high scorers? Students who knew they were very strong beforehand could just take the hard test to begin with.

They have these, they're the SAT subject tests.

It's a metric you can actively improve on by studying. Ala, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

It's not. A perfect score puts you in the top 0.0348% (2014 test). That about 1 in 2900.

It only seems like a lot because millions take the test.

There's a lot of kids taking it, and it needs to be able to differentiate kids in a country with very wide ranging abilities. If you made it harder there'd probably be a whole load of people bunched up at the bottom.

Okay serious question, which has the larger negative societal impact - making it harder to differentiate between the top tenth of a percent of college applicants, or making it harder to differentiate between the bottom ten percent of college applicants?

I only got a 1500/1600 or 2240/2400. Sad to say I’m probably in the lowest quartile of the HN readerbase.

Guess maybe it’s my IQ holding me back...

I think the part of the issue that bothers me most is how much of a double standard there is between what counts as racism against African Americans and rasism against Asian Americans. Objectively, if you have two identical applications to Harvard except one is labeled black and the other is labeled Asian, the black one has a higher chance of success.

They do the same thing with fake job applications with white names and black names. When whites get called back at higher rates that rasism. Yet when it's Harvard doing it to Asians, that's okay.

This just rubs me the wrong way.

Edit: this post has 30+ votes at 4 hours old and went from the front page to not the top 3 in less than 30 minutes. Looks like mods nuked it.

So, I don't think this is about any of the racial groups, but more so about the fact that diversity advocates have latched onto a narrative of underrepresentation of minorities as the issue, which is basically asking for equality in outcomes (i.e. demographically proportionate representation), and Asian Americans (largely due to skilled immigration) do not fit this framing.

Except for Asian Americans this is a narrative that works well for minorities, and also lets them push for affirmative action that may be necessary to correct past injustices.

Mods didn't. Users flagged it.

Thank you for the info.

As a non-white who doesn’t fit into any of the pre-defined buckets, race-specific programmes have always bothered me too. I never play the race card to gain advantage but hypothetically if I’m as generally discriminated against as a member of group X but there’s a quota for X that I’m not eligible for then I’ve been double-discriminated against.

I've never thought about it that way, but as a mixed-race white/asian, I wonder if including that information rather than just letting them assume "white" from my name actually hurt me rather than helped me when I applied to (and did not get accepted to) the ivy league 20 years ago.

'Yet another was “bright & busy” but it was “a bit difficult to see what would hold him in during a lop.”'

'admissions officers then fine-tune the final class using a form that lists five pieces of information about the applicant; they give an example of a form that has spaces for the applicant’s name, LIN (lineage), ETH (ethnicity), ATH (athlete), and HFAI (financial aid).'

It's undeniably racism.

I wonder what the outcome would be if one or two Ivies stick their necks out and institute race blind, legacy blind admissions.

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions. As far as I can tell, it hasn't put any pressure on the Ivy's to change. Incidentally, Caltech's latest class is roughly 50% Asian and about 30% white.

There may be some geographic bias there because California’s Asian population is much higher than the US as a whole.

I would be interested to see if there is any bias toward state of residence for a school as widely known and respected as CalTech.

Of course there is. Harvard has a disproportionate number of students from New England, and more specifically Massachusetts, as well. Plenty of smart kids don't want to be too far from home or travel a long way to an unfamiliar environment.

As for CalTech's rep, I'm just one person on the East Coast and wasn't a Tech-type student but I forget it exists all the time. If someone asked me to name a West Coast school to compare to MIT, "Stanford" would be all I could think of.

See CalTech for an example of an elite school that has race-blind admissions

This is not true. See http://finance.caltech.edu/Resources/cds (pick any year), Section C7.

Do you know how much is black? If it's less than 8% (or whetever the US average is), then it's literally "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

That part sounds like a literal race quota.

I guess Harvard's defense is that they do most of the "work" at the subjective personality score stage where races are conveniently ranked in the same order as their desirability for "diversity".

It’s worth reminding everyone that Harvard is the reason there’s any discrimination in the admissions process. Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone.

But Harvard wanted to covertly discriminate against Jewish applicants. The reason why you have to write essays about your extracurricular activities, for example, is because a Jewish applicant back then typically wouldn’t have any.

It’s also when legacy admissions began for the same reason.

Why the hell are we still allowing this? It should be grades and test scores only.

Hell no. Optimizing solely for grades and test scores will get you rote-memorizing robots with zero personal skills and minimal potential.

A completely merit-based, objective admissions system simply does not exist.

You are making a reasonable, but baseless claim. You are saying that 4.0 GPA students with 1600 SAT scores have zero personal skills, are robots, and have minimal potential. We know though, that SAT is a one of the best available predictors of outcome.

I am saying that grades and SATs are just two factors in predicting potential. Saying that we should only use those two factors when we have a wealth of other factors to complement them is sheer naivety.

Lumping test scores and grades together seems to obscure that one was intended to fix issues with the other.

I think that a purpose of the SAT was to combat the undesirable effects of judging people solely on grades. It's meant to be a measure of aptitude, exactly because your grades can reflect how good your school was, how much you memorized, your economic/social class, grade inflation, and so on.

People who do well on the SAT (or at least who did on the old SAT back in the early 90s and before) did not necessarily study at all for it.

> Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone.

That seems unlikely, to put it mildly. Nepotism is not a recent innovation.

Did you read my post? Legacy admission was started at Harvard as a means of ethnic discrimination. Before then, a large percentage of students at Harvard were Jewish because they ignored the social convention that only the elites applied to Harvard. When students are judged only on academic merit, nepotism is not an issue.

Of course I read your post. I don't believe "judged only on academic merit" was ever how Harvard operated, and the IMO naive statement Students used to get accepted on academic merit alone was what I initially objected to. I'm not disagreeing with the point that that they might have engaged in some targetted anti-Semitic discrimination.

The article says that there are only 1600 spots at Harvard, and of the applicants "3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, 2,700 had perfect SAT verbal scores, and more than 8,000 had straight A’s" (doesn't say how many had all three).

Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias. The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this) or expand the university and accept more students and make the school larger.

It boggles my mind why they don't expand the school. The US population and GDP increase, the demand for education and exemplary leaders in society increase, Harvard's endowment and prestige increase, yet their class size remains the same. I'd say they have an obligation to increase class size.

>Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias.

I think you are missing the point OP is making. The top 80% of blacks score well on the subjective stuff. Only the top 10% of Asians score that well. With that, there are a few possibilities.

1) Blacks are more interesting than Asians.

2) Personality is uncorrelated with test scores.

3) Harvard is purposely scoring to change the racial split of the class.

Of those, I think 3 is most likely. I am open to discussion but I think Harvard is to smart to be doing it on accident and the racial split is to politically acceptable to be by chance.

I wish you were right, because if the issue was just a few racist admissions officers, then the solution would be simple: fire them and get non-racist ones, problem solved. However, there is a fourth, more likely explanation:

4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students.

From the article, it seems that Harvard focuses on establishing student diversity that roughly tracks the US population, bringing in big money donors, bringing in legacy students, and finding leaders that have traits similar to other successful leaders in the past.

None of these values have the intent to reduce Asian admission, but that is their undeniable effect.

It means that Asian students don't face a single racist admissions officer, they face a facially race-neutral system that has a discriminatory effect. To fix it, you can't just fire a few people, you need to make much larger changes. My original point was that the only fair and effective solution would need to require a larger class size.

>4) Harvard's scoring is unintentionally hurting Asian students.

It's Harvard we are taking about, not a community college. Someone in admissions knew it was happening and let it keep happening. If you are willing to say unintentional means knew it was happening and didn't care to stop it, sure it was unintentional. The issue I have with that is if the same thing was happening but you replaced Asian with African, people would be up in arms. Such a double standard offends my sense of equality.

I am not arguing with you that it's wrong, I am saying the solution isn't as easy as you describe. This isn't a tumor you can cut out, it's a veiny cancer that is hard to see and widespread. I'd bet there were a number of individuals that knew about it, felt it was wrong, and maybe some did do something about it. Firing them would probably make the system worse, not better.

It's quite easy for a bunch of non-racist individuals to create a well-intentioned system that has a racist effect. It happens in many institutional systems, this year's Pulitzer prize went to a guy who showed that D.C.'s well intentioned and black-run criminal justice system discriminated against black people in their own city.

When you have systemic problems like this, you can't just swap out some individuals, you need to fix the system. My original point is that increasing Harvard's class size will be a necessary component. It may also require a change of leadership (e.g., president or dean of admissions), but this is not a personnel problem, it 's a structural one.

We all think the claim that just policies result in just consequences, is logically true. Empirically, as this case demonstrates, that is not true.

It seems unlikely to be unintentional. Since Harvard is grading personality on a USA-centric scale, it would most likely accentuate the traits of the current USA leaders and executives who are overwhelmingly white. We would expect the white children to inherit, genetically and environmentally, these traits from their leader and executive parents and score the highest by a good margin and all other minorities to score low.

The results contradict the expectations. Conveniently, it is black > Hispanic > white > Asian which is exactly the diversity hierarchy

If their only aim was to favor "the traits of the current USA leaders and executives", then that would indeed to a preference of white males, but they have other goals as well, and when taken together, do fall in line with expectations.

What "other goals" and "expectations"?

It conveniently falls in line with racial diversity goals but it is unclear what other goals it accomplishes. The reasonable assumption is that any soft skill goals or measures will have a high preference for white males. It is very suspect that this isn't true.

> If you were president of one of the top universities, the way you would instantly get all the students, all the alumni, and all the faculty to hunt you down and fire you would be to propose doubling the enrollment over the next 20 years. But why can't Harvard double or triple its enrollment? It’s like a Studio 54 nightclub where you have a velvet rope with a very small number of people on the inside and very, very large line of people on the outside.

The difference is that Harvard's goal is to create the next generation of leaders, not to increase the appearance of scarcity and exclusiveness for profit, as a nightclub seeks to do.

It seems that Harvard does have a strong vested interest in maintaining the (appearance of) exclusiveness.

Even setting aside the concern of “where would they live?”, the average Harvard grad probably doesn’t want to see Harvard undergrad triple in class size.

> Obviously hard objective criteria are not be enough to get into Harvard, and they need to dip into subjectivity which is rife with bias.

Why do they need to dip into subjectivity? Why not just set admission standards and then run a lottery on everyone who meets those standards?

Using randomness to evaluate students is an admission that it's impossible to evaluate them with any objective or subjective criteria. While it would be fair, it's a dereliction of responsibility on the part of admissions officers.

But from all we know about recruitment and bias we know that it is impossible to fairly evaluate candidates.

Random selection would be closer to meritocracy than anything that involves humans evaluating other humans.

Random would just favor the biggest demographic

Get rid of the admissions officers.

The only fair solutions are to make the SATs harder (Havard can't control this)

They can't change the SAT, but they could create a New Harder SAT and give it just to their applicants.

I don't get why they don't use lotteries. Have a grade cutoff, then choose at random. You should get unbiased results. The remaining bias is grade bias which would reflect poor schools and their corellation with ethnicity. Which will give a clearer startegy for intervention.

This is the solution. It also solves the problem that all your candidates are cluster so tightly together by grade score that it is impossible to separate them by any ranking process. Just set the threshold to enter the lottery and go from there.

When will people understand that “We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.” is a good thing. This always gets me a negative reaction, people want college admissions to be straight top scorers, job prospects to be picked as the people with the top qualifications. I don't get it and it doesn't benefit anyone.

It's because the language and approach with respect to Asians (and specifically Chinese, Korean, Japanese backgrounds) echoes the explicitly racist efforts of top universities, especially Harvard, in the early 20th Century against Jews. Holistic applications in the Ivy League were created solely to keep the Jewish population to a manageable level.

This for people who relatively recently experienced severe racist treatment by the government, currently experience racist treatment in pop culture (Lauryn Hill's racist treatment of Koreans in Doo Wop for example, or Spike Lee's movies), and see local governments creating intentionally racist policies (Philadelphia's attempt to ban security glass in liquor stores).

I think the plaintiffs don’t misunderstand this claim, they just think it’s cover for “we don’t want that many Asians” in this case.

That's the same argument these colleges used to keep Jews out in the 30's. Now they're saying Asians have bad personalities so they shouldn't be admitted. This sounds ethical to you?

In practice your statement reduces to holding up a color wheel and making sure the special colors are given a benefit in the selections process and unfavored colors receive a disadvantage in the process.

Most people understand this. The lawyer bringing the suit has chosen to do so in order to help abolish affirmative action.

You don’t have son of a police officer.

Well that's an obnoxious qualification to help one into a selective school. In future I won't be as concerned with mundane corruption like the free coffee and donuts in any quick-trip they feel like shaking down...

This is terrible to read about from a European perspective.

- It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives. If 50 or 60 rich kids a year out of a pool of what? A few hundred people rich enough to be z-listed? Maybe not even that. Versus the busload of ordinary kids who need to slip through the eye of the needle.

- Athletes I guess are a special American thing where universities are involved. Maybe not Harvard, but some of the others will let people attend for free. Which isn't even then terribly fair, because they make a lot of money off those kids, possibly a lot more per person than a comparable athlete would get in the free market. That's if their sport is one of the popular ones.

- You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

At the end of this, I still don't quite understand how you communicate all this stuff in your admissions form. Do they have a drop-down for ethnicity? If they did, I would game it, knowing that they seem to like Vietnamese people more than Chinese. And where do you say "my name is Smith, but please check the donation register for ...". I've got a hard luck story as well, is that what the essay is for?

Coming from a European perspective as well, I do understand the idea behind Harvard's admission process.

They want to mold a group of people that are coming from the money, brain, physical and societal elite. It is not a school, it is an elite network generating institution.

The academic aspect is their legitimacy generating element. If you take this viewpoint, everything they do makes sense.

>You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

None of the folks that I think exemplify the American dream that I know personally went to Harvard or even an elite school.

> It seems getting into America's most prestigious institution on merit is incredibly unlikely, compared to if you happened to have rich relatives.

It's mostly prestigious for business. Not saying it's right, but business is almost entirely who you know. The allure of Harvard is networking and name recognition. For tech, you can make amazing contacts at CMU, CalTech, MIT, etc and there systems are at least partially more of a meritocracy.

>Athletes I guess are a special American thing where universities are involved.

While it might be a raw deal for basketball or football where there is a ton of revenue, this is amazing for athletes of less popular sports like swimming, track and field, softball, etc. Also, athletics give people an outlet. It's at least partially why people walk on with no scholarship.

> You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

Granted this was a few years back, but parents were 1st gen from an Eastern European country. It helped me in the admissions process at a top tech school.

>Do they have a drop-down for ethnicity?

Yes, but pretty vague (e.g; White, Pacific Islander, Asian, etc). I wrote about my parents in my admission essay. I honestly think it helped me get into the school I wanted to go to. I'm not disagreeing the system is shitty, but where you go to school isn't as important as building your network in the US. The school on my resume may have gotten me some first interviews but the people I met at jobs have gotten me every other one. I'm not a super social person, so I never liked playing this game, but people liking you is far more important than what you actually know or where you went to school most of the time.

> - You can't work your way out of poverty over two generations. If anything is the American Dream (arguably there's more people outside of America who have one of these, but I digress), it's being able to see your kids succeed. But they want 1st gen immigrants according to the article.

I’m not following or think I disagree. Plenty of people (me and my siblings included) have gone from poverty to upper middle class in two generations. My grandfathers were literally a coal miner and a steel mill worker in rural Western PA. My parents were the first generation to attend college. My siblings and most of my cousins have achieved solid middle class or better in general.

> from a European perspective

Go to Wikipedia and read about the 1960s in the US - Freedom Riders (whites and blacks sitting next to one another on a bus) almost being beaten to death, buses burned, riots on school integration, dogs and firehoses turned on black children, people registering black voters murdered, 4 little girls murdered at a black church by the Klan, civil rights workers and leaders beaten and jailed and murdered and on and on.

Look to the USA currently - before US football games are played the team must stand and salute the USA and the controversies around that, the Black Lives Matter movement and the politician and media hatred of the concept of black lives mattering - which means police killing blacks for no reason. Or the rage against tearing down Confederate statues with inscriptions praising white supremacy like the one in New Orleans. The anti-blacks murdered someone who wanted the Confederate statue in Charlottesville taken down last year - in fact hundreds of Nazis and Klansmen and other far right groups marched there, and the state government and judiciary has blocked the city government from tearing down the statue. Dylan Roof hated blacks and walked into a church murdering blacks.

And on and on. The former African nation enslaved in the US is still an oppressed nation in the US, along with Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians and such.

Africans being represented at Harvard at a level proportional to their population in the US is an anomaly in the existing oppression of Africans on the US, and all this hubbub is an attempt to correct that.

>Harvard says it also considers “tips,” or admissions advantages, for some applicants. The plaintiffs say the college gives tips to five groups: racial and ethnic minorities; legacies, or the children of Harvard or Radcliffe alumni; relatives of a Harvard donor; the children of staff or faculty members; and recruited athletes.

I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors.

To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring. If asians are underrepresented among donors and legacies it would explain the discrepancy pretty well.

>To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring.

I am going to make some assumptions and I apologise if they are wrong. I am going to assume that you think racism is wrong. I think that includes structural rasism. That is, policies, procedures, and practices by institutions that systematically disadvantage on race over another. From you above comment, it seems like you believe other racial minorities get an excplicit tip as a matter of policy. It also seems like you believe whites get an implicit tip due to the due to the process of how legacies work.

Yet, you seemed to stop a step short of calling this structural rasism against Asian Americans. Is there something I am missing for why you didn't take that last step?

This is a delicate issue so I'm afraid your fantastic post won't receive a response from anyone who didn't agree with you 100%.

I felt I should chime in. Why that last step is a little different for some of us.

Truthfully, I don't know. 'Structural Racism' feels different that regular direct explicit racism. I don't feel as confident making blanket statements about it at least.

I can certainly think of structurally racist scenarios that feel totally and completely wrong. Casting in movies and entertainment for instance.

But other times it's less clear. At the very least there's a point where a desire to be charitable and give someone the benefit of the doubt starts to fade into the picture.

I don't wish to speak to the exact matter at hand. I'm catching up on the story still.

>Yet, you seemed to stop a step short of calling this structural racism against Asian Americans. Is there something I am missing for why you didn't take that last step?

If we remove legacy admissions, does the Harvard admission system become racist against white people? I don't think so. Harvard is trying to counter-balance a (semi) racially stratified society.

Imagine a caste society. Higher caste children are provided with much more material support and are going to be more equipped to get high scores on standardized tests and participate in extracurricular activities (and the right ones). Would a school that looked only at test scores and extracurriculars be race-blind? No, it would just be an indirect observer of race, in this way we have 'laundered' race.

In a racist structure there is no way to be blind to race, you either perpetuate it or you work against it.

>In a racist structure there is no way to be blind to race, you either perpetuate it or you work against it.

You could be trying to say one thing while I hear something different. Do you think it is okay to elevate underrepresented minorities despite a lack of objectively measurable merit?

>Do you think it is okay to elevate underrepresented minorities despite a lack of objectively measurable merit?

In the sense that you mean it - yes. But I would say that there is no such thing as 'objectively measurable merit' and that frequently the type of merit we measure when admitting applicants to the Ivy League isn't really merit at all but instead laundered privilege (whether on race or class or anything else). Some intelligent black girl who goes to a school that performs in the bottom third and takes the hardest classes available to her and has to work a job after school has basically no chance to make it to Harvard or Stanford or Cornell. Some intelligent Asian girl who goes to a private school and takes the hardest classes available and plays tennis and is on the debate team still has a decent chance. Who is more meritorious? We aren't really measuring merit at all, we're measuring likelihood to pass into the upper echelons of society.

And then to the extent that there are lots of white and Asian kids who have grown up in circumstances which allow them to signal in a way that the black girl above can't, I really don't have a problem with Harvard stepping in and fixing that.

I think we are disagreeing about what it means to be meritorious. Both people should have equal work ethic. I would say that the person who has been to private school, taken hard classes, is physically fit, and a practiced debater has a higher chance to succeed at Harvard and afterward due to having better cognitive skills.

>And then to the extent that there are lots of white and Asian kids who have grown up in circumstances which allow them to signal in a way that the black girl above can't, I really don't have a problem with Harvard stepping in and fixing that.

I would say that Asian culture has done a better job, on average, of preparing its children with good study habits, work ethic, and cognitive skills than Black culture has. Thus it bothers me that Harvard who are less well prepared because of their skin color.

>Both people should have equal work ethic. I would say that the person who has been to private school, taken hard classes, is physically fit, and a practiced debater has a higher chance to succeed at Harvard and afterward due to having better cognitive skills.

The whole point of my example was to pose two people of equal intelligence with equal work ethic. I'll admit the Asian girl has a higher chance to succeed at Harvard but I don't believe that's due to her merit, it's due to being placed in a more challenging environment, something that is completely out of her control.

>I would say that Asian culture has done a better job, on average, of preparing its children with good study habits, work ethic, and cognitive skills than Black culture has.

1. Culture doesn't just emerge spontaneously, it's a response to environment. Asians and blacks have very different historical circumstances thus different cultures.

2. It's completely unfair to hold an 18 year old accountable to the 'culture of their race' (if there is such a thing). The 18 year old black girl didn't choose to be born into her culture any more than the 18 year old Asian girl chose to be born into hers. The black girl didn't choose to live in a poor area or have poor parents or go to a bad school just like the Asian girl didn't choose to live in a good area or have middle/upper-class parents or go to a good school. These things are irrelevant to merit and yet they all count for one girl and against the other. That's not really a merit-based system.

>The whole point of my example was to pose two people of equal intelligence with equal work ethic. I'll admit the Asian girl has a higher chance to succeed at Harvard but I don't believe that's due to her merit, it's due to being placed in a more challenging environment, something that is completely out of her control.

I agree that being placed in an environment that could be more challenging was out of her control. But, her choice to work hard, and do well in those things was her choice. In life she got dealt a straight flush but she played it well. Much like accusing someone of being admitted because a diversity initiative is an insult to their hard work and ability, accusing someone of their success being solely because of their privilege is an insult to their hard work and ability.

> 1. Culture doesn't just emerge spontaneously, it's a response to environment. Asians and blacks have very different historical circumstances thus different cultures.

Yes, they do have different historical circumstances. Remember, Asian Americans have not been treated great on the West Coast. They have still been able to do very well. Look at Jewish culture. They have been mistreated for over a thousand years and are still able to have good results. Were blacks mistreated and oppressed? Absolutely they were! That doesn't change the fact that 91% of Asian/Pacific Islanders graduate high school and only 76% of Blacks do [0]. If we don't focus the cause of that difference, there are always going to be more Asians with perfect SAT scores than Blacks with the same apply to Harvard.

>2. It's completely unfair to hold an 18 year old accountable to the 'culture of their race' (if there is such a thing).

I completely agree but you were advocating for Harvard to try and correct for that difference which I do not think they should do because it requires treating someone different because of their race.

>These things are irrelevant to merit and yet they all count for one girl and against the other. That's not really a merit-based system.

Example 1: Person A goes to Harvard and pulls a 4.0. Person B goes to community college and gets a 4.0. Both get business degrees. It is almost guaranteed that person A learned more. Thus as an employer if you only have one job and want to decide on personal ability, person A gets the job.

Example 2: Person A goes to an elite private high school and gets a 4.0. Person B goes to a very poorly ranked public high school and gets a 4.0. It is almost guaranteed that person A learned more. Thus as an college administrator if you only have one acceptance letter to send and want to decide on personal ability, person A gets the letter.

In my understanding, both example are a merit-based system. In example 2, person B had the deck stacked against them from the start. When we measure personal ability person A has a greater ability and thus more merit. Yet, I feel like you will disagree about this being merit-based.

Would you be willing to explain why you think the quality of school is irrelevant to merit? It would really help my understanding if you were able to put a working definition to your concept of merit.

[0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp

>But, her choice to work hard, and do well in those things was her choice. In life she got dealt a straight flush but she played it well.

Yes but the other girl gets dealt a shit hand and still plays it well. The two girls are equally meritorious yet only one will get admitted.

>If we don't focus the cause of that difference

... I am focusing on the cause of that difference. I think the opposite here, that it is you who is failing to consider the cause of that difference.

>I completely agree but you were advocating for Harvard to try and correct for that difference which I do not think they should do because it requires treating someone different because of their race.

Yes, Harvard should correct for that difference because it is unfair to hold someone accountable for a culture they did not choose.

>Example 2: Person A goes to an elite private high school and gets a 4.0. Person B goes to a very poorly ranked public high school and gets a 4.0. It is almost guaranteed that person A learned more. Thus as an college administrator if you only have one acceptance letter to send and want to decide on personal ability, person A gets the letter.

>In my understanding, both example are a merit-based system. In example 2, person B had the deck stacked against them from the start. When we measure personal ability person A has a greater ability and thus more merit. Yet, I feel like you will disagree about this being merit-based.

>Would you be willing to explain why you think the quality of school is irrelevant to merit? It would really help my understanding if you were able to put a working definition to your concept of merit.

To me merit is something that comes from within, not from without. So take a feudal example. It's best to have a king who understands the duties of being a king. Most people in a kingdom will grow up with no real understanding of what is it to be a king. The king's firstborn son however, grows up in an entirely different culture. He will be cultivated from birth and given every advantage in order to turn him into the best king possible. Does that make bloodline aristocracy a merit-based system? After all, at the time of the king's death it is obvious that his son has received the best preparation.

Now, I think if you're a normal person something about that will bother you, it doesn't quite seem like merit. It seems like inherited privilege which has been converted into knowledge, but that knowledge isn't itself merit. I feel the same way about our current system. It is based on inherited privilege which takes place in the realm of knowledge and test scores but it doesn't really strike me as being 'merit.'

You have a very interesting world view.

>The two girls are equally meritorious yet only one will get admitted.

>To me merit is something that comes from within, not from without.

>but that knowledge isn't itself merit.

I don't get your definition of merit. The crown prince might be given every advantage be that doesn't mean when the king dies the crown prince is best qualified to rule. History is full of examples. Thus because the crown prince will become king regardless of his current ability when the king dies it is not a meritocracy.

In the book Player of Games the Azad society plays a game called Azad. A person's rank in society is determined by how well they play the game in the "annual" tournament. People who are able to be better trained on the game perform better and thus have a higher rank in society. From how you have spoken, I think you would count this training as privilege and not something that increased merit.

If we had a similar test that accurately predicted future success and job applications were decided by this test, would that be meritocratic? Would that change if parents were able to send there kinds of a special $10k/yr school that significantly increased their children's results on the test? Either way, what is your reasoning?

>The crown prince might be given every advantage be that doesn't mean when the king dies the crown prince is best qualified to rule. History is full of examples. Thus because the crown prince will become king regardless of his current ability when the king dies it is not a meritocracy.

Yes, there are exceptions. But for most of history the crown prince, is in fact the best person to rule. All of those instances are meritocratic? We'll admit the occasional error but would you at least say that bloodline aristocracy is often meritocratic by your definition?

>From how you have spoken, I think you would count this training as privilege and not something that increased merit.

Correct. If in Azad society my parent's wealth or the high school I attended had a significant bearing on my skill at the game then I would say that is not a meritocratic system.

>If we had a similar test that accurately predicted future success and job applications were decided by this test, would that be meritocratic?

If it was able to remove environmental and structural effects then yes, that would be meritocratic.

>Would that change if parents were able to send there kinds of a special $10k/yr school that significantly increased their children's results on the test?

Absolutely it would change. It's no longer a measure of merit, now it's a measure of merit AND your parents' wealth AND your parents' willingness to spend on your development. We can't separate out those factors so the test is now useless as a measure of merit.

>All of those instances are meritocratic? We'll admit the occasional error but would you at least say that bloodline aristocracy is often meritocratic by your definition?

I would say that it often has the same outcome as a meritocratic system. Suppose if every US election, after deciding the winner, they rolled a 20-sided dice and on a 1, elected the loser instead. This would be democratic most of the time but it would not be a democratic system. Similarly since a bloodline aristocracy uses bloodline as the deciding factor not merit, it is not meritocratic.

>Absolutely it would change. It's no longer a measure of merit, now it's a measure of merit AND your parents' wealth AND your parents' willingness to spend on your development. We can't separate out those factors so the test is now useless as a measure of merit.

I feel like what you are saying is that merit is independent of the training and experiences you receive. I define merit as the ability to perform the given task well. With that definition, you have to include training and experience because they have effects on ability to perform. So if you exclude training and experiences, what do you mean by merit?

>I would say that it often has the same outcome as a meritocratic system.

Doesn't that seem even a little bit condemnatory of your conception of merit? Your meritocracy is frequently indistinguishable from aristocracy. That once in a while they differ isn't a great credit, it's damning with faint praise.

>I feel like what you are saying is that merit is independent of the training and experiences you receive. I define merit as the ability to perform the given task well. With that definition, you have to include training and experience because they have effects on ability to perform. So if you exclude training and experiences, what do you mean by merit?

Then why call it a meritocracy? Call it a knowledgocracy or something of that sort. Again, I find merit to be something that comes from within not from without. The asian girl's advantage over the black girl is entirely from without so it shouldn't be considered - they should have an equal chance to be admitted.

>Your meritocracy is frequently indistinguishable from aristocracy.

I think there is a big leap from saying the crown Prince is most qualified to take the thrown and saying a meritocracy is frequently indistinguishable from aristocracy. I think Prince Charles is probably most qualified to take the thrown but I don't want the British government to go back to mostly inherited positions.

>Then why call it a meritocracy?

Google defines a meritocracy as "government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability." So since it is deciding on ability which is dependent on training and experience it is still a meritocracy.

>I find merit to be something that comes from within not from without.

But what is that thing within? It seems like you have ruled out experience and skills because both of those can be bought by wealthy parents. Even hard work is something that can be taught. It seems like you mean something closer to potiential (future ability) than merit (current ability). Also, what do you look for as evidence of merit?

Structural racism for African Americans is longstanding issues of disproportionate policing, a massive wealth gap as a result of block busting and red lining, and the educational disadvantages that come with it.

If the only thing Asians have against them is having to go to Cornell or a state school instead of Harvard I think those complaining should rethink their priorities.

Asian people have been discriminated against and oppressed plenty throughout (recent) history, just because the Asians in the US are doing well doesn't mean there is no discrimination - we're just seeing that minorities who come here through skilled immigration pathways tend to be more successful, but don't worry, we're cracking down on that now and you'll see the reversion to the mean occuring in Asian kids soon enough.

> To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring.

Those are equivalent things. Whether you frame it as boosting the scores of every other group, or cutting the scores of Asians, the net effect is the same, and should be considered the same activity.

This was part of the study, and even controlling for legacy and athletes, Asians still underrepresented.

Harvard absolutely INSISTS it doesn't discriminate against Asians though - their president came out with a pretty strong statement about correcting the record.

I think you can say that. It just depends on how the numbers turns out, but then we also have to agree on what the right "diversity numbers" are.

>I just don't think you can, at the same time, claim to be for diversity in admissions and allow legacy admissions and preferential treatment for donors.

Why can't they do that. Of course they can do that, most Universities in the US do that.

>To the asian issue I wonder if it isn't even a negative treatment, just that other racial minorities get a tip and many whites make it through legacy and donoring.

No, they are specifically discriminated against, read the linked article.

I recognize that in a literal sense you can claim to support diversity and also have legacy admissions. What GP meant is that you shouldn't, because it makes the claim a lie. Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume all legacy admissions are white males, and that the diversity they claim to promote is racial and gender diversity.

> Legacy admissions promote exactly the opposite of diversity

That's only true if the number of white males that would be admitted in a fully diverse class is not large enough to accommodate all the legacy admissions. I suspect that this is not the case, and so legacy admissions are essentially orthogonal to diversity considerations.

Dropping the assumptions stated in the first paragraph, the above argument remains correct as long as each category considered for diversity analysis has more admissions than the number of legacy admissions in that category.

I am not sure where you're even going with this. It's like you're trying to have a different argument about privilege. Harvard-educated people don't have more male children.

Making sure that Harvard students keep coming from the same families is, quite directly, the opposite of diversity. You don't have to count white males to see that Harvard keeps being shaped by the same group of people.

This is classism, in particular. Of course class is correlated with race, but even if it weren't, this would be fucked up.

Usually when organizations have diversity programs and goals, it is racial or pseudo-racial diversity they are talking about, or gender diversity, or both of those.

To achieve such goals, for every 1000 students a school should have about 127 black students, 178 Hispanic students, 613 white non-Hispanic students, 48 Asians, and 34 others.

About 290 of every 1000 Harvard students are legacy admissions. Legacy admissions are overwhelmingly white.

My point was that Harvard can admit those 290 legacy students without affecting its racial diversity easily, because fully diverse Harvard would have 613 non-Hispanic white students per 1000 students. They could arrange that every legacy admission who would not have made it but for being legacy displaces another non-Hispanic white student, so had no affect on racial diversity.

I would not be at all surprised if among the white applicants Harvard has enough from each income level that they could even make it so each legacy admission that would not have made it if not legacy is displacing a non-legacy who is white and in the same income range.

Additionally, if a school admits an increasingly diverse mix over time, this should should impact the legacy admissions to become more diverse over time.

The legacy admissions will create a dampening effect on diversity, averaging it out with whatever it was 30 years ago.

Part of what we should be asking is why Harvard is even relevant?

That these Ivy League schools have such an outsized influence in politics and American culture should be something that should be examined and debated.

Would love to see a concerted movement to arrange a boycott of Harvard by Asian students - having a graduating class without any Asian students would send a very a strong symbolic message.

It won't happen. Imagine there are 3800 Asians, with perfect SAT, validictorians, excellence, etc. You can make 95% people boycott, the other Asian applicants will apply even if they sign to the pledge.

It is better for professors of Asian descent to leave, and not join, Harvard. That will send a better message.

If they received substantially fewer Asian applicants they would probably adjust the thresholds to keep the balance how they want it. It would be nearly impossible for a boycott to be so effective they could not get a "Harvard-balanced" class, whatever that means.

This lawsuit already sends a pretty strong symbolic message, though (in addition to whatever practical effect it might have.)

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