What Statistics Can't Tell Us in the Fight Over Affirmative Action at Harvard

University applications should not contain any data such as race, name, gender, or place of origin that would allow the university to discriminate for or against the applicant based on their genetics.

We've decided as a nation to outlaw discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin. We should fucking act like it. If the Asian kid down the street who spent five hours a night studying gets into Harvard and I don't, that's the way it should be.

I will pass by all of the obvious things that could be said to arrive at the following hot take: whether or not Harvard is using them as cover to discriminate, "holistic qualities" do actually exist. There is definitely an aspect to human value that goes beyond lists of achievements, I have known some terrible people that were extremely accomplished and some great people that had coasted through highschool mostly paling around. In fact, the best people I have known consistently focus on the aspects of life that aren't measurable: to pick one random example, the quality of their relationship with their parents. Someone who sacrifices all of those things could ruin themselves in the pursuit of greatness, and we don't want to make that a necessary precondition for admission to a good school. The fact that objective "facts of record" are harder to abuse than just about anything else should not trick us in to eliminating everything but numbers from our society out of fear of abuse.

It's all a joke. Legacy students make up 30%[0] of the Harvard student body. The best way to get into Harvard will always be money, everybody else is just fighting over the scraps.

Edit: This number is incorrect. Legacy student acceptance rate is 30%, 5 times the alternative. The number of legacy students PRESENT at Harvard is closer to 15%

It will be wholly unsurprising to me when fifty years from now we will talk about the overt discrimination against Asian people in America. I’d expect to read “Despite being highly educated, Asian Americans only held X positions of note...”, “A pervasive culture of emasculation and fetishization of Asian Americans was hidden by the fact that many of them were highly paid”, “Explicit discrimination against Asian Americans on the grounds that subtle factors revealed they were unfit for college admission was hidden under a notion of ‘holistic’ admission”.

Boy! The sociologists of the future are going to have a field day. I can’t wait. After all, back then college authorities said “most Jews are socially untrained” and “the social characteristics of the Jews are peculiar”, and they did use precisely the same language about outside interests. We’re going to look like complete morons for having bought this bullshit story college authorities are selling.

Anyway, I leave you with an excerpt from Harvard President Lowell’s remarkable letter from the 1920s extolling the virtues of quotas limiting Jewish enrollment

> The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews. If their number should become 40 per cent of the student body, the race feeling would become intense. When on the other hand, the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also. . . . If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among the students, and as these students passed out into the world, eliminating it in the community.

Family connections as a form of merit, interesting!

> non-academic factors, including athletics, character, and family connections

Rural and elite students, but NOT children of engineers?

>Harvard’s open preference for... strong athletes and the children of alumni, faculty, and donors... Harvard may, for example, favor students from rural communities and disfavor the children of engineers.

> The personal ratings look different depending on who awards them: alumni interviewers or Harvard’s internal admissions staff. On average, alumni give white and Asian American applicants similar ratings, but Harvard staff give whites substantially better reviews than they give Asian Americans. For the alumni-assigned ratings, 50 percent of Asian American applicants and 51 percent of whites were rated as having “very strong” or “outstanding” personal traits. But for personal ratings awarded by Harvard’s internal admissions staff, only 18 percent of Asian Americans were in the top group, compared to 23 percent of whites. White applicants received these top ratings about 30 percent more often than Asian Americans.

What would the response be either in mainstream media or social media or from proponents of Affirmative Action policies, if African-American or Hispanic applicants or other demographic groups (e.g. women) were given measurably lower scores on personality traits Harvard rates like 'likability' or 'integrity' or 'helpfulness'?

> Qualitative grounding of statistical findings is important to avoid misleading conclusions; it is not enough to control for a factor in a statistical analysis without clarifying its role in admissions goals and educational objectives.

This is a crucial point. Contextually framing an analysis, and it's results, is one of the most important parts of a project. In this case, it also forces the question - what does it mean for an admissions process to be biased?

Somehow in the late 20th century we became so focused on nurture that we've totally and irrationally come to disregard nature. This fallacious tabla rasa thinking justifies the modern conflation between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, and leads to penalization of those who are better able to achieve, ostensibly in the name of equality, and so called progress.

But the true outcome of failing to consider half of the achievement equation is a regression toward incompetence, as we effectively hold back those who can in a vain attempt to bring up those who cannot. All of society then suffers in the name of a false, unattainable equality.

What’s it going to look like if they ruled in favor of Jewish students as a harmed class back in the day and then against Asians this time around? Should Asians all get their skin bleached to not be abused in the elite college admissions process? Should we get Anglo names, avoid Asian extracurriculars and other indications of Asianness, and mark ourselves as White?

> Certain private universities, most notably Harvard, introduced policies which effectively placed a quota on the number of Jews admitted to the university. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."[15] As a result, Oshinsky added, "Jonas Salk and hundreds like him" enrolled in New York University instead.[16] Physicist and Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was turned away from Columbia College in the 1930s and went to MIT instead. See also Numerus clausus in the United States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

Trigger warning: as an Asian, I don’t care about helping Black and Latino people if it means hurting me, and especially when society has already chosen not to exert equivalent unfair treatment on another race (and the optics are especially not great when said race can be lumped in as ‘White’).