>> and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976894
Excerpt: "tiny fraction" of low-income black American teenagers who attend private schools "produces about half of low-income black students at Ivy League colleges."
Anecdotally, looking at who attended Ivies where I grew up, this seems to be true.
I think they worry that Black students from actually Black, and often poor, school districts will not jive well with so many silver spoon swallowers. They want people more accustomed to bougie New England & NYC culture.
My guess is that this “tiny fraction of low income black American teenagers” are mostly, if not entirely, recruited athletes doing a 13th year to fix grades, SAT scores, and (maybe) study skills.
While folks (of any race) from low income areas can theoretically succeed at elite schools via their own initiative, the education at these low income schools does little or nothing to prepare them for an elite education. This is a very significant handicap that many people underestimate the importance of.
That said, in the US, many people (Asians included) can go to shitty schools and still succeed. Their success is despite the formal education they got at a low SES school, not because of it.
Generally when you see elite school success from students from low-SES areas, it is due to substantial intervention at home and/or extracurricular education/tutoring.
You ask why it is a handicap. If they could get quality education during school hours, their extracurricular hours could be used for deeper study or more interesting endeavors (e.g., research projects).
What do you think explains the difference?
> which I've heard is actually very easy once you get in
Very dependent on what classes you take.
The Asians, at least the ones who come to the US, being a far more elite group in terms of genes for academic success.
I call it as I see it, and I'm generally not wrong.
Because it makes their racial stats sound good to affirmative action advocates without actually requiring the effort of educating somebody who is underprivileged? I don't think the reason is a mystery at all.
The mission of Harvard, Princeton, or any university is not to remediate the poor education some kid received in K-12.
I went from my shitty ass physics class to taking one of the hardest freshman physics classes in the country. It is manageable, they are just afraid of cultural inhomogeneity.
There were at least 10 Black kids at my school who could have succeeded at Harvard.
The really bad inner city school systems usually: a. don't have sizable Asian communities
b. Not many Asian students from those schools are accepted either.
Anecdotally, in 4 years at my inner city school district, which had a small, poor Asian population (mostly Vietnamese), only one Asian kid got into an ivy league, and her dad was a professor at a top-tier university.
Calling it a dogwhistle is just trolling. The real racism is from people judging based on race instead of ability.
But I judging how the things are going I am sure this is going to get fixed soon. The colleges will ask you to do a DNA test to determine the purity of your black heritage and a proof of slave ancestors. Hooray, intersectionality.
I suspect it was exacerbated by what social circles you were traveling in.