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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Is there a reason to compare the demographics to those of the US, when many Harvard students aren’t US citizens?

I have a feeling the stats make a bit more sense if you just assume Harvard is country-of-origin blind, and so compare Harvard admissions to the racial make-up of the entire global population (perhaps weighted by how much of each country’s population declares intent to attend a university.)

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Sure: it's still a school in the US.

Many employees of US companies are not US citizens, but that doesn't stop people from evaluating Google or FB or whoever that way.

For there to be a representation disparity you need a baseline. You could choose a different population as your baseline, but usually when talking about racial disparities in American institutions they use the American population

The "Asian American" stat presumably doesn't include international students (just like "African American" wouldn't include someone from Africa)

Oh, it might well do that. It's a somewhat common American tic to use "African American" to mean "black" even when talking about people who are definitely not American.

Only 12% of Harvard students are international: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

" if you just assume anyone from anywhere in the world has an equal chance of getting into Harvard" is just not true really. It's fundamentally an American school. 20% foreign students.

The better numbers (assuming that's not what these are already) would be the statistics for Harvard students who are from the US, because the international numbers are obviously going to be confounded by the demographics of the non-uniform source countries. Nobody's going to be enlightened by the revelation that substantially all of the admissions from Asia are Asian.

Asian Americans are Americans. It makes perfect to compare Asian American admits to Asian Americans in the American population

I think I remember reading that 10% of Harvard College students are international

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