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Comment by alecst | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why this is being downvoted? I feel out of the loop. Is it factually wrong in some way, or just off-topic?

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Probably because people think he is being anti-Semitic by posting the facts about over-representation of Jewish enrollment in top universities.

When you couple that with the fact that the data shows that "white supremacy" at college universities is kind of a myth and that there is another "supremacy" altogether, albeit one we're not really allowed to talk about in "polite society," you can expect a lot of downvotes.

What happens if you talk about it in polite society?

There is something implied by that dataset that we are not allowed to notice or talk about.

The text doesn't say it, but the commenter is suspect because they should know better than to imply the unspeakable.

Why is it unspeakable that Jews/Asians are over-represented in academics?

I didnt downvote, but these stats seem to pop up a lot and often are being used to illustrate that "white people are discriminated against". The key flaw if thats the intention is that students are usually of a certain age, and Americans are more diverse than they used to be since the laws against marrying across races and immigrating when non-white got repealed.

Probably also likely a second generation immigrant effect and there's a lot if people in Asia.

Looking at only the college age 20-24 year age group [1], the numbers change as follows:

           Ivy League  US     Ratio
  Jewish*  17.2%        2.1%  8.21
  Asian    19.6%        7.1%  2.75
  White    33.1%       51.6%  0.64
  Hispanic 11.4%       19.4%  0.59
  Black**   7.8%       16.5%  0.47

The relative placement of the bottom 3 groups changes, but their individual representation ratios remain approximately the same. Any conclusions about discrimination that you could draw from the first set of numbers, you can draw from this one - the differences are negligible.

As for there being many people in Asia, that is irrelevant - I excluded international students when calculating Ivy League demographics, so only the US population is relevant.

*I assumed the same age structure for non-Jewish and Jewish whites.

**The census data table gives the total Black population as 47 million for 2017, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... gives only 40 million, despite citing census.gov as its source. I don't know where the disparity comes from, and that's the only place I've seen such a high estimate of the US Black population.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2010-... 2019 estimate

It is to my knowledge factually correct and on-topic (I upvoted it). That being said, I believe discussion of upvotes/downvotes is against HN guidelines, so we should probably refrain from that here — if you're concerned about abuse you can email hn@ycombinator.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe they don't believe the data? And it's very tedious to check. If that's the case, I suggest to check the data for a few individual universities. Cornell and Princeton are slight outliers, but otherwise individual universities don't deviate much from the average. That should give some credence to the numbers.

$GP is suggesting a high ratio means there isn't any discrimination against a group. For example, asians.

But there is discrimination against asians. So $GP's evidence isn't satisfactory.

That's not what I inferred

That's a take I would never have considered. I'm not really up to speed on discrimination against Asians.

People smarter than me realized the post was a dogwhistle and moved on.

Any advice on how I could present this data without it becoming a dogwhistle? The edit window is over, but I'll gladly make those changes next time.

The presidents of Yale, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Brown are Peter Salovey, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Bacow, Lee C. Bollinger, Christopher Eisgruber, and Christina Paxson. They are all Jewish (don't take my word for it - check their wikipedia pages).

If you contend they are discriminated against despite holding at least 6 of the 8 presidencies, and despite being by far the most over-represented group, I assume you have some fantastically strong supporting evidence.

[deleted]

> They're the only small group being considered. Of course they're gonna be "by far" something. Many other small groups have above-average representation in academics.

Maybe small in the US as a whole, but in the Ivy League they are 17.2% - the 3rd largest ethnicity, almost as large as Hispanics and Blacks combined.

But lets suppose they are being discriminated against. That would require some other group, that makes up a significant % of the Ivy League, to be unfairly privileged (otherwise it would have a negligible effect on the % of Jewish students).

So which group do you think that is? You said Asians are discriminated against, so they're out. Maybe you think there's too many Hispanic or Black students, despite being 11x less likely to be accepted into the Ivy League? Or is it non-Jewish whites, the most under-represented group, that are also the most privileged?

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