Hacker News Reader

Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities, this is what the demographics of the Ivy League looked like in 2023:

https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png

View on HN

As a note of caution: these demographic statistics are somewhat misleading because they use the demographics of the US as a whole, but the correct demographic set is to use for 18 year olds (70 year olds generally aren't applying to college)

if you look at the ethnic breakdown of children in the US in 2023 (https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...):

48% non hispanic white

26% hispanic

14% non hispanic black

6% asian

5% mixed

1% native

When you look at these statistics through this lens you see that white relative underrepresentation is slightly reduced, hispanic significantly increased. broadly speaking, when you look at younger ages the country is a little bit less white and a lot more hispanic.

Perhaps we should investigate the systemic discrimination that is causing lower birth-rates in whites. There are whole academic fields for similar disparate outcomes in other groups, so why not treat this case the same way?

The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness.

Unless you're suggesting that Asians are overrepresented because their parents are part of an elite old-boys network that gives them an unfair advantage, I think you're missing the point here. If you want to suppress the number of Asians in school because their numbers at ivies are out of proportion with their numbers in the broader population, it sounds like you want more legacy-style admissions rules, not fewer. Maybe this is what you're suggesting and I just I'm just misunderstanding you.

I'm not suggesting anything, just adding needed context to the discussion. E.g. if you want to suggest that these institutions are rife with systemic white supremacy, be my guest. Just include in your assertions explanations for why there are, per capita, 8x as many Asians, 11x as many Jews, and 1.4x as many Blacks, as there are non-Jewish Whites, in the Ivies, despite Whites' many privileges.

Edit: Self-selection is at best an incomplete explanation. It fails to explain how, when comparing non-Jewish Whites vs Blacks, Whites' 177-point average SAT-score lead results in a 1.4x admission penalty. Meanwhile Asians' 73-point lead over Whites becomes an 8x admission advantage.

Scoring well on the SAT is an advantage for other groups, but somehow a disadvantage for non-Jewish Whites.

Legacies are not well allocated distributions either according to per capita numbers.

Arguments like this lead to universities severely discriminating against jews in the not so distant past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

I haven't made any arguments, I just presented the data.

If you hadn't said "Before wringing our hands too much about antisemitism or anti-Asian prejudice in universities," that might have been true. If you had just said "here is this data", then you would have "just presented the data".

You clearly expressed by that phrasing that you thought that the data in question would at least potentially be a reason to not wring hands about such things, and presented it for that reason.

If implying that data might maybe potentially apply to the conversation is an "argument", then you got me.

You didn't imply it might potentially maybe apply. You definitely, clearly, stated it not only applies but what the "correct" conclusion to come to was.

A policy that would exclude all Jews would potentially affect some 8 million Americans, same as a policy that lowers White participation by 3%. Which would be worse, and why?

I think the GP argument is that you can't argue going all on merit for Jews while demanding that Blacks and Whites are somehow equally represented.

self-selection.

The population that applies to Ivies is completely different from the overall population, and different from the population that gets admitted to Ivies.

If there were no requirements to be admitted to Harvard, any tom dick and harry could send his application - only then you can reasonably conclude that the admitted population should reflect the overall population.

But because there are requirements like SAT GPA etc, there is some filtering happening and population that apply is slightly different.

But the affirmative action zealots require that the admitted population must represent the overall population, despite the fact that incoming applications have completely different distribution IQ/SAT/GPA/race wise.

This leads to discrimination, where White/Asian admits, who are overrepresented among applications with high scores, are clamped at certain threshold and then other races are selected with whatever grades they have

Just to add more context to the provided data. It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.

Also a per capita comparison assumes that the number of qualified applications follows similar distribution, no? I'm not sure if this is reflected in the provided data.

Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective. Even so, two schools skew the data for Black students (75% of Ivies are <1x per capita for Black students) and of course there is no mention of Hispanic students (one of the fastest growing demographics) which is mostly underrepresented on a per capita basis.

And then it doesn't get into international students and if/how they assimilate into a "race". Nor does it reflect stickier topics such as whether Hispanic students culturally assimilate into "White", effectively lessening their numbers under a per capita comparison (it does this for Jewish students).

I appreciate what the data brings to the conversation, but don't believe others' assertions have to take any of it into account considering the number of assumptions one must make to follow a "per capita" AND population SAT = sample SAT comparison.

> It provides mean nationwide SAT score numbers, and the provided comparison assumes that nationwide scores are reflective of Ivy applicant scores.

Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.

> Also, the overall analysis assumes that per capita distribution is fair but that seems subjective.

I must have missed where in those charts a definition of 'fair' is given, and then relied on for further analysis.

> of course there is no mention of Hispanic students

Hispanic students are between Asian and Black on every chart.

> And then it doesn't get into international students

That is correct, international students are entirely excluded, in the sense that all the domestic students in a school are taken to represent 100%. I don't understand how not answering all these additional questions you raise makes the data irrelevant.

> Does it really assume that? Suppose, for the sake of argument, one group had a nationwide average SAT score of 1500, and all other groups had an average SAT of just 500. Barring any bizarre distributions of those scores, we can infer from only the averages, that the 1500-SAT group would have more individuals that satisfy a university's academic criteria, than the 500-SAT groups. It's far from perfect, but does provide a hint.

There’s no need to construct a hypothetical when there is actual data to dissect. For example, in the cited links, the 25th percentile SAT score for Harvard students is ~200 points greater than the highest mean nationwide score. The middle 50% of all students (25th-75th) range is ~100. And on 7 out of 10 students admitted included SAT scores in their application. So one would have to make additional assumptions (I’m not sure what they are) to claim one’s groups scores lead to penalty and another’s leads to advantage. It could be true, but I don’t see it as a fact, hence my original position that other assertions don’t necessarily need to meet some bar.

A lot of the nonsense comes from the bonkers categories. Hispanic origin is sort of like being Jewish from a statistical perspective - it’s a layer, not a state.

We’re also decades after civil rights. People don’t fit in these boxes.

My nephews dad is Irish, mom is black Puerto Rican. Racists would consider him black, his name is Irish, mom is of African and Spanish origin. They don’t speak Spanish at home or really have a deep connection to Hispanic culture. Wtf is he for the college demographic survey?

Likewise for my Filipino friends… are they Asian? Pacific Islander? This particular family speaks English, Tagalog and Spanish at home. Culturally they are very much into traditional Filipino traditions, but their Catholicism practice is close to Spanish style.

> The point of this law is to reward merit and hard work and discourage universities from offering back-doors for wealthy donors and alums. The point of it is to encourage fairness.

The point of donor child admissions, as I understand it, is to bring in additional money. Which could potentially enable more low-income students to attend.

The reason why some universities have ended legacy admissions recently seems to be that they have concluded that it doesn't bring in enough money. But they usually still have donor admissions.

Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates. If for example every single person got exactly the mean score allotted to them by their race, you'd actually expect that the top 5.9% of universities would all be 100% Asian, the next 57.8% of universities would be purely "White (incl. Jewish)", the next 18.7% of universities purely Hispanic and bottom 12.1% purely Black.

By that math, every single slot in an ivy league school "belongs" to an Asian candidate and even a single white person is already over-representation.

(Didn't separate White from Jewish since they don't have mean scores for just Jewish, possibly they should be first according to the estimate in the text below, but that doesn't really matter for the point made)

> Looking at mean SAT grades is close to irrelevant when your (supposed) strategy is to pick Top-N candidates.

Not if the mean SAT score predicts how many students surpass some academic cutoff used by the universities. It's like predicting who will win a best-out-of-3 100m dash, when all you have are the runners' mean 100m times.

I find it baffling how people become incapable of the simplest inferences, and capable of the smallest nitpicks, when they don't like where the data leads.

It's not clear what your point is exactly. It's still possible that Asians, despite being overrepresented, receive some sort of penalty in admissions.

For any penalty Asians receive there are other ethnicities that appear to receive a much harsher one.

Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?

Your skill at crimestop is commendable.

What's the implication here, that asians should just suck it up because others have it worse?

We're stuck with a math problem. If you admit purely based on test scores then black and latino applicants would be significantly underrepresented and non-Jewish white applicants would be slightly underrepresented. If you address these problems by insisting on a full balancing then you're going to have to reduce Asian and Jewish admittance. But increasing black and latino admittance at the expense of non-Jewish white admittance when the latter group was already underrepresented is not only the same kind of quota system but not even satisfying the goal of proportionate representation -- and that's the one that seems to be happening. So what do you want to do?

Addressing the underlying barriers preventing blacks/latinos from getting into elite universities, rather than trying to fix the symptoms by instituting illiberal policies like reverse discrimination.

Then you need people to stop getting mad at universities when admission based on test scores causes those groups to be underrepresented. They're not the ones who can fix the test scores and nothing is going to fix them before the next round of applications.

Arguably, the problem of underrepresentation became already unsustainable during Affirmative Action by the classification of African immigrants as black. Because the latter displace African-Americans who do worse in test scores than Africans.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/may/29/internatio...

break us colleges into tiers based on academic rigor. assuming you met XXXX standardized test score you are automatically sorted into one of the appropriate schools at random on your 18th birthday.

no take backs, safety schools permitted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com