What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu | Hacker News Reader

What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

bloomberg.com

41 pointstokenadult35 comments

I've read too many stereotypical comments today on this topic that I'm just going to unload my thoughts.

If you want to argue that racial diversity is important for your 'elite' universities, that's fine. I can't argue with that since it's really a matter of opinion.

However, if you argue that Asians as a group do not have leadership qualities, diverse extracurriculars, or do anything besides study, you're really just promoting more stereotypical views towards Asians.

I'm Asian, I want to an Ivy League. I played football and basketball in high school. I also took Piano, scored a 1500+/1600 on SATs, and I love snowboarding, riding my motorcycle, and skeet shooting. So I don't believe I fall into any single category.

Yes there are many Asians who study a tremendous amount who love badminton, there are also plenty who enjoy football, snowboarding, and other, more strenuous activities. I'm also sure plenty of you here would be categorically "Asian" purely based off your interests and habits. By saying that colleges refute Asians due to their strong focus on academics is really missing the issue. We're not all the same despite what the Tiger Moms out there would suggest. And I strongly do support a blind college admissions process where race, sex, religion, income, etc wasn't a factor.

Re: Leadership Qualities

It strikes me as odd that so many high level tech execs/founders in SV aren't Asian, if only because so many engineers I've met are.

I just assumed that with the % who get into great American schools (especially in CA), there'd be more Asian entrepreneurs/business leaders.

Then again, I could be overestimating the number of Asian's seeing as how it's less than 10% of the U.S. demographic.

Asian demographic is 4.7% of U.S. population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

This could be due to a perceived lack of leadership qualities as much as a real one.

I mean, that's a self-reinforcing situation.

There was an article here a few months ago by an Asian engineer about this topic. His theory was that Asian culture doesn't encourage one to be talkative when interacting with superiors--the Asian in the meeting is more likely to stay quiet and thus is overlooked by his superiors.

It all comes down to whether or not schools should manage the racial make-up of their students. The administrations of the schools obviously want them to do so. The Obama administration has made it clear that they want the schools to do so. I'm not sure how there can even be an investigation.

Trying to discuss the merits of any race is completely missing the point. The only question that matters is, "Should schools be able to enforce diversity in their selection process?"

Could it be that they are being screened out based on "intended major"? Attending Berkeley for my BA, where 20-30% of the school was Asian or Asian American, it seemed like a huge percentage of the Asian students were solely set on STEM and Bioscience majors. Maybe admissions realize that if they want to keep the Humanities, Arts and Social science depts around they need to admit fewer Asians.

I believe there is a similar story used in statistics courses (based on a true story) of a possible case of gender discrimination. The university (or universities) basically appeared to be discriminating against females (maybe lower overall acceptance or higher scores). Further analysis shoed that females were applying to more competitive majors. I wouldn't be too surprised if something similar was going on here.

This exact situation has happened before, at Berkeley no less. See 'Berkeley gender bias case' in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox

The author is failing to take into account the distribution of the applicants themselves. Discrimination can be interpreted many ways. In this scenario I prefer to word it as 'if you are in this class, you will have less of a chance to be accepted.' Thanks to Bayes' rule, we know that we can't ignore a priori probabilities - they are the only way to get a true probability without 'confidence intervals' and other junk. Classiscists avoid Bayes because the a priori distributions are often inconvenient or uncomputable. By measuring scores we can get a rough estimate of these probabilities and work with them. Thus, simply being born in a certain class dramatically alters your SAT scores without you performing a single action.

It's an unfortunate reality that race and gender based inequalities exist and affect real people. Attempting to build a 'meritocracy' without considering all factors creates a cycle that only exacerbates this effect. Chances are you think this way already and don't even know it: who in your opinion works 'harder:' the poor immigrant who builds a business, or a trust fund child who builds a business of equal size? Both are equal on your 'meritocratic' measure but chances are you'd have a strong preference to choose one over the other to run your own business. This isn't some kind of charity, it's recognizing that this person applies a much larger multiplier to what they are given than other people. Therefore, giving them a 'proper' base to work on would have an even greater effect.

Whenever someone underplays the systematic racial bias top universities have against Asian students, imagine the reverse scenario.

If the table turns and suddenly some other racial groups, be it aboriginals, blacks, hispanics etc, are targeted with the same racial bias, would these people still doubt that there is racial bias citing reasons like this?

I tend to agree. Given the number of Asians applying to these universities, you have to wonder how non Jewish whites, blacks, and Latinos are gaining admission to these schools at all? There HAS to be something going on to give them a leg up.

For your situation to exist, those groups would have to have dramatically higher SAT scores and a societal status to have the leisure of many extracurriculars.

Which is the exact fucking thing we're trying to achieve.

I'm not trying to say that there isn't discrimination going on, just that a more reliable indicator would be comparing the ratios inside top universities versus the real world. I don't have those numbers, but trying to play games with test scores can too easily be done incorrectly.

The admission process to Harvard sounds very much like a scene out of Gulliver's travels.

-- The ceremony is performed in his majesty's great chamber of state, where the candidates are to undergo a trial of dexterity, very different from the former, and such as 1 have not observed the least resemblance of in any other country of the new or old world. The emperor holds a stick in his hands, both ends parallel to the horizon, while the candidates advancing, one by one, sometimes leap over the stick, sometimes creep under it, backward and forward, several times, according as the stick is advanced or depressed. Sometimes the emperor holds one end of the stick, and his first minister the other; sometimes the minister has it entirely to himself. Whoever performs his part with most agility, and holds out the longest in leaping and" creeping, is rewarded with the blue-coloured silk; the red is given to the next, and the green to the third, which they all wear girt twice round about the middle; and you see few great persons about this court who arc not adorned with one of these girdles.

Here's what I think should be done: split the application into two parts after the university receives it; one part being the one with person information such as name, race, location etc. and the other being the one with the actual application, such as marks, extra circular activities etc. The admissions officers receive the second, to ensure a unbiased decision. Both will have a common unique tracking id, to link them back to each other after the decision is made. This is the system used for marking the PATs (provincial achievement tests) in Alberta, as they are marked by the teacher of the the student and another teacher in the province, to ensure there is no bias.

Slight problem: admissions for prestigious schools aren't based on sheets of paper. For most of them, admission decisions are based on interviews, where the admission officer is inherently able to determine sex, race, etc.

The author, Steven Hsu, is a physics professor at the university of Oregon. He has a rather informative blog [1] about physics, and lately genetics. In particular he has recently been doing a lot of work with BGI, currently the largest human genome sequencing company in the world.

[1] http://infoproc.blogspot.com

Hsu seems to maintain a blog on IQ supremacy generally and specifically the iq supremacy of asians. Why is this guy getting mainstream attention?

I mean jesus he broke down the grade distribution of one of his undergraduate classes by race just to demonstrate the superiority of recent Chinese immigrants, lest anybody suspect they are slackers for not getting into a top Chinese university (and having to go to the University of Oregon instead, lol): http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/12/human-capital-globaliza...

I'm sure the undergrads paying money to take that class appreciate being guinea pigs in their professor's racial supremacy experiments.

What university admissions choose to do is the university's own choice, particularly if the university is private, like all the Ivy Leagues are. If they want to accept lower quality applicants in the name of diversity, that is their choice. The highly talented students they reject can go elsewhere and raise the quality of the universities that do accept them. The brand of the undergraduate school is overrated anyway.

Problem is much more complicated than that.

1. Universities receive large amount of public funding. 2. Are you willing to let all private institutions, companies, individuals decide for themselves and have their own policy on serving what kind of people they want to deal with?

1. But they are privately owned so their primary obligation should be to act in a way that they believe benefits the university and complies with the law.

2. My answer to your question is yes, but specifically in the case of Universities, doubly so. The value of the University is highly dependent on the quality of the students.

nah...even many public schools are allowed to balance themselves for diversity. If there is evidence that schools are being racist (the ugly side of the term), this is one thing. But I haven't seen evidence of this. They seem to be trying to provide diversity for all the right reasons. This is complex. Companies, and stuff that happens outside of school should be held to a different standard. Edit: big companies sometimes have open policies of trying to hire for disabilities. Even if it means an equally qualified person gets skipped so the blind guy gets the job.

Another post and discussion on this topic today.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3543946

There is one huge factor this article is overlooking: Do Asian-American students take more SAT training than other students. In China and Taiwan there are strong traditions of after school "school" where student basically go to another school to train for tests like the SAT or to study their regular class work in order to get ahead.

If it is true that Asian-Americans take this kind of SAT training more often than others then their SAT scores may be higher then the level of the rest of their application. In other words they might be getting A+ SATs but the rest of their applications may only be B+s. The SAT is not the only factor.

Are you willing to let stores discriminate against young black men because they have disproportionately higher chance of committing crime?

Grouping all Asians under one category makes the same mistake of the grouping all young black men together. In the midst of all this debate, the smallest and the weakest minority who are unfairly discriminated against are individuals.

I think it's interesting that the article is about the difference between the Asian avg. (1457) and the white avg. (1416), a difference of 41 points, and no one addresses the difference between the white student avg. and the black student avg (1275), a difference of 141 points.

That's because ... frankly ... neither the black or the white guy belong there. Who cares about the differences between them.

The more information I find on this issue...the more I find myself agreeing with the Asians. Asians play basketball and football, and involve themselves in social projects. If you have differences like that between Asians and everyone else...it's legitimate to ask why are ... say ... non Jewish whites, or blacks, or hispanics getting into elite Universities at all?

So we complain when schools only use SAT scores for admissions, but we also complain when schools admissions don't exactly follow SAT scores. Ok...

BTW, I am in favor of lottery admissions above some SAT cutoff (a fairly low one).

How many times does the average Asian student take the SAT versus the average white/black/Hispanic student?

I honestly have no idea, but until we know that, statistics like "Asian students need to score 200 more points than white students" are meaningless.

This is entirely hypothetical: An Asian student takes the SAT 4 times and makes a 1500, A black student takes it once and makes a 1300--If the black student is accepted, on paper it looks like racial discrimination.

Personal anecdote. I took the SAT once, in 10th grade, and scored 1360/1600. If I had taken it again my senior year I probably would have scored much higher, but I got accepted everywhere I applied, and I had the highest score in my class, so why bother. Most of the other high achievers in my class took the SAT at least 3 times.

I believe multiple SAT attempts are reported to the applicant's schools.

Same guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8

"Surely this is exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther King wanted when he asked us to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Putting aside the ridiculousness of that statement, given that it came from a black guy who had sex with White girls just because he saw them as trophies, the real reason an asian is likely to be rejected from Harvard is exactly due to their character. In general, asians don't donate. Harvard has to care about such secondary issues, which don't make it into the news. If Hsu really cared to know the truth, he would analyze the racial makeup of the graduates who donate to Harvard. I don't have those numbers, but my best guess is that Whites rank as the highest financial contributors, and that they do so, by far.

Related: http://biggovernment.com/cjohnson/2012/02/01/did-top-liberal... (Did Top Liberal Arts College Falsify SAT Data to Legitimize Racial Preferences?)(2012-FEB-01)

It's not the universities that are racial bias because Asians are overrepresented at Ivy League school.

The real question should be why is the SAT so racially bias?

> The real question should be why is the SAT so racially bias?

How is it racially biased? How are you defining an unbiased test?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com