Harvard, Princeton Targeted in Asian Discrimination Probe
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1. For elite colleges, specific SAT scores are irrelevant. Essentially, once a certain cut-off is reached, say 2250, it doesn't matter how high you go. In fact, I'm sure admissions officers get a kick out of rejecting the 2400 - I'd rather have a 2380 than a 2400 any day. The variance in SAT scores over a certain cutoff is simply not a good enough indicator for what the colleges are looking for.
2. In my experience, Asian families tend to place a disproportionate emphasis on test scores and grades. This leads to higher than average SAT scores for Asian students, sometimes at the cost of other parts of the application package.
Taken together, I believe these two ideas contribute to a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon discussed in the article.
This is not to say that admissions are not racially biased - I would not be at all surprised if they are.
Other things people have done in life factor into future success. Working a part time job, for instance, something many 4.0/2400 people didn't do, relating well to others, volunteering, government service, art, sports, etc all have value as well, and can all be a much better determiniate of success than "did he test well".
I went to a school, a good school, that was predominantly asian in my department. If admissions are racial for no other reason than to diversify the student body, this is a reasonable approach on its own - though I'm sure there are plenty of other more old-fashioned legitimately fashioned arguments.
So you had good grades but didn't get in because you are asian? Tough shit - a lot goes into creating a desirable incoming class than grades and standardized test scores.
I'll refrain from opining on what the government will do, solely out of respects for the HN politics rule.
[Edit: One may think I am being unfair. Here, try reading Harvard's amici brief. http://www.vpcomm.umich.edu/admissions/legal/gra_amicus-ussc... ]
I'm going to be a little racist towards my own race here, and tell you what I've observed recently.
Most Chinese Females... 1. Play piano and/or violin 2. Take pictures of food 3. Probably applying to sciences
Most Chinese Males... 1. Plays a racket sport - probably badminton (myself included) 2. Only works out upper body 3. Probably applying to engineering
I never scored perfect SAT marks, and yet I still got my acceptances just fine, because I did so many things most Asians don't do. If the people doing these assessments actually spent time at elite campuses, they would understand better.
Filing a complaint for not being admitted with a 2400 SAT score is ridiculous. I wouldn't want that kind of person in my class, that's for sure.
The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.
So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.
It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?
The use of a poll tax people have to pay in order to vote isn't racist per se, but in the segregationist south, poll taxes were used as a mechanism to suppress black votes because they knew (disproportionately poor) black people would have a harder time paying it, and this use was racist.
People involved in college admissions (as you said you are in another comment) love to say things like this. If I based my understanding of the world solely on statements by college admission officers at, say, Duke, I would guess that thousands upon thousands of high school students each year get literally perfect scores (cumulative score of 2400 across three sections of the test) each year. In fact, only a few hundred do, not even enough to fill the entering class at Harvard each year.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/SAT-Percen...
Literally "perfect" scores are still quite rare. Caltech is just about the only college small enough to enroll only perfect scorers on the SAT (but not all perfect scorers apply to Caltech). As a consequence of this, all United States colleges without exception, by the pigeonhole principle, admit students with less-than-perfect SAT scores.
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
Your point is well taken that college admission offices look for student characteristics other than test scores. They always have, and they always will. But if a college is found to practice racial discrimination, it is violating the law, period. If a college claims, in response to a Department of Education inquiry, that it is looking for some other student characteristic that just happens to disfavor students from [insert race or ethnicity category here], it had better be able to identify that characteristic with specificity and not simply ASSUME that students of one category or another have more "sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc." than other students.
No legacies. I think there would be FAR fewer trust-funders.
And MIT's 'Chocolate City'...pretty much gone.
I suspect they would be very Asian places with a smattering of Jewish students. I think I can see why they would give ... say ... a Colorado snow boarder a few extra points. I think there is something that he brings to an Ivy campus...though I can't quantify it.
The issue is "how do you determine merit".
As a class, the students who applied who happened to be asian are probably lacking in other areas as well if this BIG of a bias is being seen. Perhaps there aren't enough participation in volunteering/jobs/sports. Perhaps there isn't a good relationship in the alumni interviews, who knows. There may STILL be a racial bias on top of that, however I'm guessing not 200 points worth of pure racial bias.
These factors may be part of the consideration when accounting for lower quantitative admissions requirements for black and hispanic applicants, and those from lower income brackets in general.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124278685697537839.html
Also, bringing up income when defending racial preferences is disingenuous. If colleges wanted to discriminate by income, they would.
Fun fact: income is not the cause of racial gaps in educational performance. It plays a role, but the gap exists even holding income constant.
http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pathwaysconference/presentati...
The material point is the same though, I really can see where the hypothetical snowboarder might have something to offer the Ivy community even if there are others more qualified academically. But again...I can't attach a number of points to that. I don't know what that number would be.
To the issue...I do think there should be more taken into account than just academics. I just can't think of a way to take those things into account AND be fair.
Sometimes fairness is less important than not missing out.
College is a place where students learn far more things than can be learned in classes or even books.
In terms of teaching students to live in the real world, the value of racial and economic diversity in the student population of a college is often underrated.
EDIT: Given both downvotes and upvotes, I guess what I have said is controversial. For the record I am south-asian myself .
Then why are colleges fighting for the right to discriminate on race alone (I've seen nothing suggesting that they're looking for economic diversity)?
The claim is that a multiracial student body enriches the educational experience, and there's truth to that. But having representatives of many races actually does little. Having a wife of a different race, I think I'm qualified to claim that racial differences make up the smallest of differences between people. Far more important, in real life as well as outlook on the world, are factors such as religion, urban/rural living, size of family, and more.
I don't see schools concerned about the portion of the student population of Buddhists relative to Catholics, or that there are enough kids who grew up on farms. So long as they are pursuing only racial diversity, I think that their claims about the value of diversity are a sham.
As others have pointed out, although admissions is need-blind (it is not relevant whether you're rich or poor), I'm sure that socio-economic factors are also evident from where the student went to school, recommendation letters, information about parents and their professions/education (which are often asked on applications), and so on. So, while race may be the most obvious "discrimination" point, this is really, in my experience, not the case. And given these multifactored assessments, it is enormously difficult to "prove" that schools are discriminating based on race: it is NOT the case that the school gives everyone a number, and then increases or decreases that number based on your race, wealth, etc.: compare Gratz v. Bollinger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger) (point allocation system where underrepresented minorities received more "points" on their application illegal) with Grutter v. Bolilnger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger) (less-rigid race-based affirmative action permissible).
I also don't buy the idea that college is a way to teach people how to live in the real world, given that going to college is an alternative to working in the real world. That just sounds like the sort of thing college administrators would say in order to defend the status quo.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/12/why_caltec...
> A combined SAT score of 1470 (the 99th percentile by national standards) placed an entering Caltech freshman at only the 25th percentile among his fellow students. (At Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, the 25th percentile is reached by a score of only 1380)
> Only 4 percent of the U.S. population, Asians made up a whopping 40 percent of the incoming freshmen class in 2008, a slightly larger proportion than the 39 percent figure for whites.
For example, are there proportionally more Google employees from Caltech or more startups in YCombinator with Caltech graduates?
I'd bet P[At Google | Caltech degree] is greater than P[At Google | Princeton degree], but it's mostly explained by P[interested in CS | Caltech degree] >> P[interested in CS | Princeton Degree].
Since they are all based in California now, I would think yes. But since Larry and Sergey Bin are both from Stanford, I'd expect a disproportionate number of Stanford grads at Google.
In any case, one way universities market themselves is by looking at the average income of their alumni. Since Harvard grads often end up on Wall Street, I would not be surprised if Harvard comes up on top.
But you could argue that's just the financial industry connection. What if you restrict your search on science and engineering majors? Well then we already know MIT and Caltech are better.
Maybe financial industry salaries would change these rankings if they considered averages rather than medians, but a reasonable number of Caltech grads end up on Wall Street as well.
In terms of other measures of success, Caltech might lag behind some other schools. As a current CS undergrad, I only know of a handful of startups run by Caltech grads. As I said, this is changing, but it goes to show the impact of choice of metrics.
There’s nothing wrong with Caltech’s admission criteria (engineers and scientists are lovely people! I am one!), but it’s pretty stupid to boil down human ambition and accomplishment to the results of the SAT test.
That said, race-blind admissions policies are not current law nor necessarily even the optimal policy. For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass. In as much as college effects class mobility (which is probably small), race-aware policies allow for this.
Why not? As long as the racial underclass remains an underclass due solely to non-discriminatory processes, what's the problem?
A related question: suppose we don't divide humans into subgroups by race, but instead divide them by some other factor. (E.g., height, good looks, intellect, whatever.) Would it be wrong if one of those subdivisions were a "persistent underclass" due solely to a meritocratic process?
Are you asserting that we don't?
Cut it to the chase. The ruling class of tomorrow is the current class of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. (And maybe Wharton). The end. The current class wants a ruling class that looks like their idea of utopia. This means a very Kosher group of whites, a hefty dose of divide-and-conquer "diversity", and a minimum of technocrats. Obviously, Asians are left out of that utopia.
They aren't going to spell that out in words, but their actions are clear as damnation.
At Stuyvesant High School here in NYC admissions is 100% test base, meaning the only criteria for acceptance is your test score. Here's a quote about their acceptance policy (from an article called "Paper Tigers" in NY Mag last year):
"Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school."
Not sure if this article ever made Hacker News, but it's worth reading if you have a chance. It's long-winded, but being Asian-American myself there's a sort of poetic-truth to it:
The problem is, in the drive to get perfect grades and test scores, the drive for knowledge and life skills is lost somewhere along the way. And in the end, many asian students simply never get the skills needed to actually create things or execute at a job that doesn't have very rigid guidelines.
I think the larger picture issue is optimizing for grades and tests does not optimize for achieving in the real world. And elite colleges in the US have acknowleged that, and brought in the use of subjective factors. And while that may be an imperfect system, it is less imperfect than choosing solely on scores and grades.
1. Academic Mismatch - Those who benefited from AA often can't keep up. They often fall behind or transfer to an easier major.
2. Cascading Academic Mismatch - This mismatch is replicated everywhere because the top academic tier recruits the top 'racial balancing' students from the tier below it.
3. Academic Mismatch Semiotics - This mismatch encourages judging people by their race on campus. It breeds racial conflict(no matter how low level it may be) and reduces solidarity between peoples on campus.
Racial balancing and academic standards are at odds with each other. Schools that value racial diversity should set their academic standards appropriately.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...
The FAQ links to the relevant federal regulations defining the categories, and to guides to admission professionals on how to apply the categories, and to admissions statistics from a variety of colleges. Some colleges admit a substantial percentage of students who decline to self-report race or ethnicity, as is the right of every United States college applicant. Harvard, for example, has 12 percent of its currently enrolled undergraduates reported to the federal government as "race/ethnicity unknown"
http://members.ucan-network.org/harvard
(even though Harvard personally interviews essentially all of its undergraduate applicants) and another 10 percent of its enrolled undergraduates are international students, for whom race and ethnicity are not reported as a matter of federal regulation.
It will be interesting to see how this latest case turns out. As the submitted article notes, "While the Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate federal financial aid to colleges, it almost always negotiates agreements with schools on steps required for compliance, rather than taking enforcement action, the Education Department spokesman said."
Isn't the fact that Asians need to score a couple hundred points higher on SAT score just to get admitted enough evidence that there is bias?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but at Berkeley where Race is not considered in admissions, Asians comprise like 50% of the student body. I'm pretty sure you'd see similar numbers at all the elite universities if race wasn't an issue.
Schools like Harvard and Princeton look both for well-rounded students ("future leaders" they call them), as well as diversity in their student body. This means they won't accept, for example, 100 top violin players in the same class, no matter how impressive their individual applications are. Instead, they want a complete and balanced orchestra, for example.
So if, hypothetically, Asians tended to disproportionately cluster in the same extracurricular activities, or have less extracurricular activities, then there would be a very valid non-race-based explanation for the SAT gap.
You have no way of knowing how true that is.
Distribution of talents (as you mention) among the applicants, and luck (a larger factor every year that the US population grows but the firstyear class doesn't) are the main factors.
I agree that SAT scores shouldn't be the only factor, I disagree though if you are saying race can and should be factor. Where it's legal and appropriate to discriminate on say what instrument you play it is illegal (and most would agree immoral) to discriminate on race. Proving racial discrimination may be tricky in this case though.
It is actually not illegal to discriminate based on race in educational admissions -- you just need to meet certain criteria (serve a "compelling interest" and not use quotas) to be able to do so.
This is relevant taken in light of the reputed homogeneity among asian applicants.
The remedy is nothing you haven't heard before, either. Stand out. Take up falconry instead of piano. There aren't many falconers.
You're begging the question of whether or not Asian students are well-rounded. You just assume that, for the most part, they are not, and that it makes perfect sense to throw most of them out because they're all the same.
Go up a couple of posts, and the question was whether a gap in average test scores is sufficient to determine that there is bias. If there are other non-quantitative criteria such as being "well-rounded", then the answer is no -- we can't make any sort of statement about bias from test scores alone.
Whether the subset of Asian students that applies to a particular school is more or less rounded and displays a more or less diverse array of talents than the subset of students of another ethnicity that applies to that school is an empirical question that I don't think any of us should hazard any guesses on without seeing some actual data. If there is data available on the topic, I would love to be able to review it.
And as for Berkeley's 50% student body, 1/3 of all Asian-Americans live in California (they make up 13% of the Californian population), so a much-higher population at a California school is hardly a surprise.
I think it's likely there is some anti-AA biasing in the admissions process. The alternate explanation, that higher scores on tests are more than cancelled out by lower merit in other all other categories on average, seems really unlikely.
The real question is how much of a problem you think that is. This probably depends on your personal system of ethics or morality. Or, more likely, under which of the two alternatives (pure academic merit, or some form of race-based admissions) you personally stand to benefit.
You kindly asked for a correction, so I will provide one.
http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/search/CollegeDetail.j...
The current figures for first-year students at University of California: Berkeley, based on student self-reports according to the federal category definitions, are
1% American Indian or Alaska Native
40% Asian
3% Black or African American
10% Hispanic/Latino
28% White
11% Non-Resident Alien
The total is less than 100 percent both because of rounding and because some students exercise their right under federal regulations not to self-report race or ethnicity. People of "Hispanic" ethnicity can be of any race, but are reported as part of the Hispanic ethnicity category and not otherwise counted twice.
I'm pretty sure you'd see similar numbers at all the elite universities if race wasn't an issue.
I'm pretty sure one would not see Berkeley's numbers at all other elite universities (we don't see such numbers at those universities now), in large part because California in general, and the Bay Area in particular, has a much higher percentage of Asian residents than most parts of the United States. In-state subsidized tuition entices a lot of Californians to apply to Berkeley.
I am sure if you looked at race-based stats on who played sports in high school (as opposed to test scores like in the article), you would see that Asians are way behind in that particular metric.
And while some may not think sports matter, colleges do. And it appears that there is good reason for this, as sports teach leadership, teamwork, how to perform under pressure, etc.
I would hope this lawsuit is thrown out, as this country really should not be encouraging "tiger mom" behavior as the right thing to do. Instead, if you want your son to get into Harvard, stop making him study 15 hours a day and get him into extracurricular activities.
I really wish college sports were segregated by academics and were not just glorified development leagues for the professionals. Most of these college athletes have absolutely no business representing their schools. I didn't go to Stanford(I went to the UofI), but they are one of my favorite teams because at least I know those athletes belong in a college.
"If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college, according to “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,” a 2009 book co-written by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade."
I guess my point is that it is impossible for me to say if there is real prejudice in Ivy admissions, or if their processes are just nearly unfathomable to the outsider.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_divers...
It is so arcane and bizarre. If you want to major in CS or mathematics or engineering, who cares if you do ice skating or can play the tuba? And if you're a tuba player who wants to major in music, what can be possibly be more important than your musical skills?
Entrance examinations are like the democracy. They suck but they suck far less than the existing alternatives.
Of course, a lot of the top universities in the world are American; but I think that's despite the admission system, not thanks to it.
The other issue is programs. If you're a school with 1000 open seats and 100 of that is music, you're going to have to drop some very science-smart students to make room for music-smart students.
Good colleges look at how rounded a person is, standardised tests don't always capture the high achievers.
The gap is nowhere near that large for Wisconsin-Madison or Duke which are rather selective institutions. I bet you're only going to get those kind of gaps at the Ivies and even then I'm very skeptical.
It's clearly a racket, this whole Ivy/Stanford system where grads from such schools receive the benefit of the doubt when it comes to employment.
By the way, I am such a tiger parent, and it's almost ridiculously pathetic to game this system to a certain degree. Let's see, he is currently enjoying: 1. Summer computer camps 2. Singing/piano lessons + rock band camp in the summer 3. Leadership/Scout programs 4. Private school education with very small teacher/student ratios 5. Competing on the swim team 6. Starting a recycling program at his school as his "entrepreneurial project" and writing a journal about his experiences
Most importantly, the above is very fun for him because he's allowed to enjoy the moment after periods of incredibly hard work. And he just turned 8. The only time he watches "TV" is Netflix on the iPad in the car while we shuttle him between activities. This is the new normal, and what I'm doing is what all the other Tiger parents are doing to create the "balanced" individual.
Yes, he goes to birthday parties, yes he has sleepovers, and yes he has lots of friends. But because he's having "fun", we are not pushing him 24/7 to be the "best" in all these activities, but to simply do his best, as best as an 8 year old is expected to do. Nevertheless, I feel bad for the kids that do not have such supportive parents with the resources to help their children in this way. My son does not deserve success any more than the next child, he's simply blessed that he was not born in the 'hood.
I don't know exactly how it works for UCLA, but for Berkeley the admissions percentage for the EECS program is much smaller than the general admissions percentage. So, even ignoring differences in the application pools, getting into the EECS program is going to be much more difficult than getting into most other programs. And if you don't get into the program you applied to, you don't get in at all.
So perhaps the different students applied to different colleges at UCLA? I know that from my high school, some fairly smart people didn't get in to Berkeley Engineering while some who weren't particularly gifted got into, say, the College of Natural Resources. This was just a reflection of the different admissions policies than any discrimination.
You have, in fact, provided no proof that family income isn't ordered that way as a result of SAT scores.
Assuming a college wants to admit a student with high "intelligence" or intellectual potential, which cannot be measured directly.
If high income causes high SAT, and high intelligence also causes high SAT, then (low income, high SAT) may well indicate much higher intellectual potential than (high income, high SAT)
If high income and SAT are both caused by high intelligence, then there is less (intelligence-related) reason to prefer (high income, low SAT) or (low income, high SAT).
Precisely my point. By my reading it appears that the only empirical evidence for race-based discrimination (an extraordinarily grave accusation) is something that could just as easily be explained by factors other than racism.
But this is no defense of those elite institutions, mind you. I'd even go so far as to make an exception and tax the staggering returns on their endowments.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/harvard-endowment-rises-t...
I'd be interested in a break up of admission statistics, SAT scores, race and family income for the Ivies. because I'm not entirely convinced that just because SAT scores follow family income in the general population, the trends are exactly the same among admitted students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...
“The only way to answer these questions is to force these schools to open their data sets,” he said. “College admissions should be transparent.”
If this every happens, heads will roll. Alas, Hell will freeze over first.
The un-stated assumption in this case is that Asians, are for the most part, not well-rounded (and only focus on test scores), and hence, any reasonable admissions process that favors well-roundedness will result in an understandable (obviously!) bias against Asians.