Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability
Describing a form of legal discrimination (in this case, affirmative action) as "racial discrimination" is not an argument. Or even an invitation to discussion.
There are major problems with policies like affirmative action. But smirking and saying "But... but you said racial discrimination is BAD! But then you DO THE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. So YOU BAD!" is so tiresome.
Implying that if it was the only factor then it would not be ok. So theirs is not a principled defense of affirmative action but rather based entirely on plausible deniability
You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals.
If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world.
Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people.
I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.
So, instead of saying that women automatically get rejected, they say that there are many factors that they consider and that sex is only one of them. However, of course when you look at the statistics the admission rate for women is very very low compared to men. But the university insists "one of many factors!"
Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University? Clearly, "one of many factors" can't absolve them of sexism. But presumably they think they can get away with it so long as the decision is opaque enough.
I think you are giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think they deserve it. If you look at their history, they have used the exact same tactics. In fact they invented holistic admission for the sole reason of discriminating against Jews.
Harvard admitted 27% or so Asians in this years class.
They aren’t turning away any “strong admit” Asian applicants.
The real decisions among the marginal candidates are who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted (iirc, that number is over 1000 at Harvard).
Underrepresented groups get a slight edge in this area. Race is one possible criterion for underrepresentation, so is geography, so is economic status, so is expressed major, etc.
Comparing the current relatively low level of consideration given to race to the explicitly exclusionary policy 100 years ago is quite a stretch, imho.
There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA. We should always consider admission rates for a particular student.
And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from? This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
> There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!
You seem to assume that the applicant pool is equally strong across races, especially with reference to the parts of the application outside of test scores and grades. I humbly suggest that this is not true.
> It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA.
I would like to see that exact quote. Iirc, that was the stat if they went by grades and test scores, which they never have and most likely never will.
> And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from?
I have worked in an advisory capacity at several elite schools on the admissions process.
I’ve seen how the sausage is made. Most people get it incredibly wrong.
> This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?
Maybe.
The real question is if they also rated non-Asian people with similar profiles low on the personality score.
Let me tell you, there are an absurd number of applicants to elite schools that are basically doppelgängers. Strong grades, strong SAT scores, similar essays to thousands of other applicants, no outstanding hook, “standard strong” recommendations, etc. There is nothing that makes these applicants stand out to the reviewer. They may be super pleasant to be around and highly articulate, but so what? So are truckloads of other applicants.
I haven’t seen the comparable numbers for Asians versus other races, but there are no shortage of boring white applicants and boring applicants from every race that would warrant a lower personality score (however that is described).
Additionally, there are a number of reasons that one group or race might have lower average personality scores than another group that don’t involve racism. As a simple made up example, the ratio of “hail Mary” applications to strong applications might impact this. Note that I have no idea what race/group sends a higher percentage of Hail Mary apps than another, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few.
I can tell you one group that definitely exists. Kids of upper middle class parents in the northeast corridor who are pushing their kids to an elite school when their kid absolutely doesn’t care. The vast majority of these applicants probably have low personality ratings because they aren’t really trying that hard to stand out. Is that exclusionary? I dunno… seems reasonable to me.
How strong a bias is is relevant in case of discrimination. If race changes a person chances by over 12 times then that is a very major bias.
To me, your second sentence seems more like word games than calling it racial discrimination is.
Sure, I can somewhat rationalize it as not being intended to be racist. In the end AA still results in treating people different based on race. Which, to me, fits the textbook definition of racism.
I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies.
I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
That is highly unlikely. As a comparison, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Northern Virginia that has often been ranked the best high school in the US, had a student body that was 73% Asian in the last year that they had completely race-blind admissions (largely based on scores on an entrance exam and grades) despite Asians making up 20% of students in the entire county.
In 2021 they switched to a policy that gave automatic admission to the top X% of students in their respective schools with the goal of increasing black and Latino enrollment. Asian enrollment fell from 73% to 54%, black enrollment went from 1% to 7%, Hispanic enrollment from 3% to 11%, and white enrollment from 18% to 22%: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
Point being, Harvard currently has a freshman class that is < 50% white, so going to a completely race-blind policy would take that down considerably.
If the data in this thread is correct: LatinX, Native American, and Black students averaged lower scores than whites on those same GPA/Tests. Those 49 Asian students would have displaced, therefore, more of those groups than whites. How many more? It's not clear--as few as 1 each for those groups (but those scores would have been outlier-bad) but likely, more black students than any other category (again just based on the numbers presented here).
Will there be more Asians than whites in the Harvard freshman class if Harvard goes race-blind? I appreciate why that question is very important to Asian applicants, but I am more concerned about the further-marginalizing of the other groups.
Grades and test scores are not the primary determination for admissions at elite schools. They say as much on their admissions web sites.
I have no idea why some people continue to believe and repeat that grades and tests scores are the key to elite school admissions. It’s much more than that.
Once the applicant has crossed a reasonably high threshold, all of the other stuff is what makes the difference between admit and reject.
Some folks may not like that elite school admissions are more than grades and test scores, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Check out this article:
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
#3, the hook, is what a lot of folks who complain about elite school admissions completely ignore.
Good recommendations are also important, and these are often not cultivated (and usually they need to be, either organically or structurally).
The applicants who feel like they were “victimized” based on their race were more likely victimized by their parents or guidance counselors for focusing their efforts on the wrong things during high school.
Everyone believes this. The people who disagree with you disagree on the reason. They think it’s mostly racism. You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores.
I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough.
https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...
> You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.
Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers.
If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process.
One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those).
Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.
I don't think my point was clear, Harvard, or most other elite institutions, has never implied to some meritocratic institution where acceptance is based solely on test scores. If that were true, there are ~22,000 applicants with perfect scores; Harvard wouldn't struggle having an incoming class of perfect SAT students.
If Harvard is forced to be "race blind", I highly doubt they would just switch to a completely objective ranking; there's no reason for them to, again, they have never been a meritocratic institution. They will find other subjective hairs to split, such as making interviews count higher or further combing through essays. Given the history of the institution (and some of the more notable graduates it produces), it's not even a given that the school becoming race blind would necessarily benefit asians.