Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against Asians?
blog.priceonomics.com
blog.priceonomics.com
But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted.
It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people.
Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?
I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.
edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
That's extremely funny if intentional, even funnier if not :)
Although I agree with you that the further you get in a field, the more likely a prestigious school will be better. But I would credit that to having a more direct relationship with professors. When you are actually helping a professor with their research, the quality of the research matters more than when you are simply being lecture by that same professor.
Huh. I don't have any hard data, but I always thought the opposite. I mean, I didn't go to school, but I put a lot of effort into being around people who are better (at things I want to be good at) than I am, and I attribute much of my success to surrounding myself with people who are better than I am.
I mean, I agree about the second bit... my understanding is that undergrad at a prestigious school offers little contact with the (usually very good) professors (thus, my assertion that it's all about the quality of the other students.) - thus, grad school there, where you get more contact with the (very good) professors would be even better.
Perhaps I am unqualified to say, because I didn't go to school. On the other hand, I managed to learn enough without school to get a job that often requires a degree, so maybe I am qualified?
Most engineering courses are based on a curve. If the rest of the class is brilliant, it's significantly harder to compete and get a good grade.
Berkeley is a top school, and I don't think you'll find much of any evidence to the contrary.
Harvard has 4 levels of Multivariable Calculus, for example, whereas most schools have just 1. The 2nd-highest level is basically Real Analysis, except (a) it is more deep/accelerated than the actual Real Analysis class, and (b) it is only taught to first-years.
The highest-level class was designed for students who were expected to learn an undergraduate math degree curriculum "on their own time" and pursue more advanced topics in clads.
And even if your reason was actually the top-notch academics, you still benefit very much from a strong old boys' network of professors and researchers.
We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.
"I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go."
That's what the old-boys-network IS. It's not literally people smoking cigars, it's the preferential treatment you receive for having the brand name on your degree.
Business is just as prestige driven as finance (management consulting, Fortune 500, etc.).
You're also getting the opportunity (not guarantee) to get a top tier education - but that can be gotten anywhere. Study for the CFA tests if you really want to know finance. Go to Wharton if you want to get a job.
Was going to jibe about "high paying" job, but that's not really it. It's just any competitive placement benefits from active recruitment.
Any school that is capable of giving an education of similar quality has a similar reputation. Claiming that the point of an education from a school like MIT is the "old-boys-network" is in essence confusing the effect with the cause.
Konstantin Guericke, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now offers coaching and mentoring to students and would-be entrepreneurs. But because he's deluged with requests, he tends to give preference to students from his alma mater, Stanford's engineering school.
"I don't feel a Stanford student is better than another one," he said. But "since there are so many, I use that as a filter."
Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...
Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159
The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one.
In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.
The dirty little secret is to rank feeder schools vary highly in the admissions process. Few poor people send there kids to 30+k / year private high schools.
If you wanted to design a system such that the families in charge of the country will always be in charge, you probably couldn't do better than the Ivies. You have the rich and powerful mingling with (and marrying) the smartest people in the country. I'm not ready to believe it's all deliberate, but that's how things play out.
IMHO Skin color isn't the only designation.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-...
And who is more African American that someone like Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique and is a naturalized citizen?
Yeah, it's a stupid term.
Race is something that affects people's lives in the real world, beyond boxes on applications. This argument is becoming a little academic.
An anecdote: Egyptian friend studies abroad in the US, gets arrested visiting New York state for very overdue parking tickets he was unaware of (studying elsewhere in the US). They bring him to the station, and the cops attempt to fill in the paperwork, and they admit to my friend they are not sure what to fill in. In the end, they look in their procedure book, and said he is Arab and that is considered a subset of Caucasian in their definition. I was actually surprised by this.
Of course, a substantial number of white Americans would be surprised by discovering they had ancestors from Africa in the recent past. (Most African-Americans, on the other hand, wouldn't be too surprised to find out many of them have European ancestry.)
For sure! But I suspect the most meaningful coarse clusters might end up being some large number of divisions of sub-saharan africa and then everyone else. Definitely not the "White", "Black", "Asian" categories people in the states take for granted. And even ignoring the amazing diversity of Africa (compared with the rest of the world), did the Irish become more genetically white when they became culturally accepted as white? Did Latin Americans of European descent become less genetically white when people further North stopped viewing them that way? Why do some races trump others (i.e., why is Barack Obama considered black)? The boundaries of these categories seem very arbitrary and not derived by any rigorous means at all.
The outcome would no doubt have a lot in common with the ugly and ill-fitting suit made for Gulliver by the tailors of Laputa, who used quadrants, rules, and compasses rather than a simple tape measure.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/04/medical-school-acceptance-r...
Do they implicitly acknowledge that it doesn't take a smart person to become a doctor as long as they get admitted and can get a loan?
In other words, a Hispanic doctor from LA might find a comfortable life in Miami serving the Hispanics there[1], whereas he may be completely uncomfortable serving a largely white, affluent neighborhood in the LA basin.
1. I have no idea if this is true or not; I'm just laying out the hypothetical of my GP.
This entrenches class concentration. You end up with entire geographic regions that are exclusive, and others that are outcast. People who want their kids to be able to be at a certain school value catchment housing higher than others would. As a result, there's a slide of people who care about their kids' education towards certain regions. By consequence, there's a drain of people who are focussed on their kids' education in poorer areas. This pushes parents who would otherwise have been easy-going to join in the same game, which re-enforces the pattern.
There are plenty of crazy people with a burning, status-seeking ambition to have their child go to medschool (regardless of the wishes of the child). They would absolutely move their address to a catchment for easy access to med school. In the list of the crazy things these crazy people do, this would be among the least surprising.
Regarding schools - there's a policy that would kill this and lead to better schools, called vouchers. In this case, parents apply to schools (anywhere) and the schools choose who they take.
But it's very difficult to introduce this when you have a large, highly educated segment of your voting population who are struggling with a huge mortgage that they took on to secure their children access to a certain school catchment. As they see it - they've paid for something, and now the evil government is stealing that from them and leaving their children to compete on an even footing with the children of parents who haven't made the same sacrifices. "Outrageous!"
Teachers unions also come out hard against vouchers, because it makes the sector more competitive, and that leads to bad teachers getting fired, and wage discrepancy, which undermines the union interest of bringing the sector towards collectivised bargaining.
There's social-engineering arguments that say it's better for people use facilities near them to reduce load on transportation or the like. This is petty rubbish, and also often wrong (mass transit gets more efficient and nicer to use with scale, and that leads to less cars), but it gets trotted out in vouchers debate.
Public universities tend to operate on a voucher arrangement at the moment. Their example is a tangible example that vouchers is good policy, and that is very valuable in the campaign to bring good policy to public schools.
No they are against them because the money for vouchers comes out of the public school budget. In poor areas this can be quite devastating. Unlike the Harlem Children's Zone, most school districts don't have a rich, billionaire uncle giving them millions of dollars each school year. Teacher's also recognize that charter schools have one ability they do not, unload disruptive and under-performing students before test time.
> Public universities tend to operate on a voucher arrangement at the moment. Their example is a tangible example that vouchers is good policy, and that is very valuable in the campaign to bring good policy to public schools.
Please explain? I've gone to public universities and don't remember vouchers at any point. You were accepted on merit. Tuition was paid based on merit and need. But, unlike public schools, they were free to kick you out at any point.
No they are against them because the money for vouchers
comes out of the public school budget
Teacher's also recognize that charter schools have one
ability they do not, unload disruptive and
under-performing students before test time.
Please explain? I've gone to public universities and
don't remember vouchers at any point.
From memory, in Swizerland, it's more pronounced. I think students say where they want to go, and the university has to accept them and find a way to make it work. But they get commensurate funding for it. If this is correct, this is quite remarkable. If you live in Switzerland and want to go to the most prestigious university, you just say so and you're there. They're not obliged to give you passing marks once you're there. It takes all the snobbery out of things!
Interesting way to do things. I think as long as standards weren't watered down, it would be a way to make it work. People could fail fair and square, and it would cut down on "I coulda been a contender" sour grapes.
However, in the case of medical education, it's extremely expensive to have everybody who thinks they might want to be a doctor "give it a try". So the college grades and extracurriculars is a way to filter people out who would not likely be successful.
I know of one state in which vouchers were opposed by the teachers' union, even though public schools would still receive full funding for every voucher student they didn't have to educate.
Actually, there are a fair number of social programs around the country that like these students since they tend to generate more revenue (you get paid more for disabled / problem). It happens a lot in social programs (I remember a lecture by a man from Chicago). I can see this working well for a voucher system if properly done.
"money for vouchers comes out of the public school budget"
Technically, it comes from the taxpayers. If the public school was good, then they get to keep the money.
Throw in some homophobia and you can try for bigot of the year.
But here is a real question, one that actually rises to the level of being thought-provoking, just for you:
You have a six-year-old girl who has recently begun to complain of headaches, dizziness, and double-vision. Tests show that she has a tumor in an especially difficult-to-reach part of the brain. If left untreated, she will die, but any attempt to remove the rapidly growing mass has a significant chance of leaving her a vegetable. You must choose between two neurosurgeons, both of whom seemingly have very similar resumes, but one of whom is non-white/non-Asian, the other of whom is white/Asian. Do you choose the former to operate on your little girl, knowing that affirmative action policies may well have greased the skids for him all the way from college to medical school to his residency, or do you pick the latter, for whom no such programs exist?
If you pick the former, then your commitment to egalitarianism is on a par with Abraham's to Yaweh when he bound Jacob to the sacrificial altar.
My youngest daughter was adopted from Korea, but our family heritage is almost entirely Swiss-German ... She's been part of our family since she was 11 months old, and she loves the ethnic German foods we eat (mostly Pennsylvania-Dutch type cooking), but is also fond of many Korean dishes (such as Bulgogi). What should an admissions office consider her ethnicity? A twist on the classic nature versus nurture conversation.
N.B. Decendents of the Jutes, Angels, and Saxons who remained behind when those tribes invaded England are not referred to as Anglo-Saxons.
white nope anglo saxon nope, and not even if she were your biological daughter. protestant ... maybe. is she religious?
Acceptance rate at Harvard is 5.9% for instance. So you get almost 20x applicants than you can accept.
I'm not talking about undergrad.
Except you get an entirely different applicant pool; if the numbers from the article are accurate, the former gives you far fewer Asians and Whites and far more African Americans and Hispanics than the latter.
Unless of course she is in competition with hordes of similar cases of transplanted adoptees.
In seriousness: I think they'd classify her as "Asian". Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I think it's a shame we "need" to classify anyone at all.
AFTER EDIT: If, on the other hand, the statement is factually correct about that school's procedure, some denied applicant has a very good basis for a lawsuit under current federal law.
edit: what I said about public schools is incorrect.
I mean, I could claim that there are "too few" (whatever that means) Estonians in a given medical school and claim minority status.
I was also rejected/waitlisted from every one of my top choices.
To be honest, I'm not really sure now to respond to this article. From the point of view of a student applying to college, these "discriminations" exist pretty universally, and not just to Asians. The notion that race, gender, wealth, etc play a role in college decisions is very widespread among my classmates and peers at other schools. I don't view it as particularly bad, though, even if these colleges will never publicly admit such a thing.
College is not a completely merit based system. I think that we all like to believe that it is, but colleges also have duties outside of admitting the best students. They have to keep their alumni happy, somehow obtain outside funding, keep its population diverse enough (this is ambiguous and controversial, but I think it's a legitimate concern). Most importantly, a college also has the duty to improve society, and that's where a system like Affirmative Action comes into play. It's not perfect, but it does allow for a great deal of social mobility where society would otherwise resemble something like plutocracy. After all these considerations, there's only a fraction of each year's class that they have for purely "merit" based acceptances. And at the level that these elite colleges are at, it's almost impossible to differentiate between candidates. So this small group of accepted students is essentially random (or I like to tell myself).
There was a quote by a Yale admissions officer who lamented that he could've filled 3 identical classes with students on the waitlist.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that one of the benefits of our society, especially in the entrepreneurial community, is that success is ultimately the result of hard work and talent. College is not the end-all and certainly not the determinant of your future.
I ended up going to Cornell (I think my other choices were UPenn and CMU). Anyway, it ended up great. There were tons of things that interested me in school; I got very high grades but didn't concentrate on them. I played in bands and partied. I developed a reputation for being the guy who stayed out all night and still got 100 on all the tests people were cramming for. There is freedom in not trying to compete with others.
Like everyone, I had some rough years after college, but with a decade of hindsight it all turned out great. I also did better on the Asian parent metric of making more money than peers who went to Harvard, etc. I think it was mainly by valuing honest work (i.e. problems people actually have) rather than working on things that are supposed to be hard or prestigious. If you follow the advice of a lot of Asian parents, you'll end up working hard and not smart.
It sounds like you have a great head on your shoulders, and a great outlook on the situation, so good luck to you!
Getting into college is only the starting point; the key is to find a place where you have room to grow and that will challenge you, and where there is an overall good work ethic. Those are the things that will really determine your trajectory later in life.
Alan Kay (who I previously bashed here) has said "perspective is worth 80 IQ points" and that definitely applies to your education.
In addition to the comment you mentioned that Yale could have filled 3 identical classes from their applicant pool, I've heard quotes from Harvard admission officers saying 95% of their applicants would be capable Harvard students.
Another thing that is important to remember is that not only are some of the admission decisions arbitrary but they are differentiations among young people whose lives have been vastly shaped by their family and schooling. Whatever merit is, at the undergraduate level students are already being evaluated on resume and preparedness. This is not at all a competition on equal grounds for students across the country, let alone across the globe as elite US undergraduate admissions are increasingly a global competition.
Echoing your last point, instead of arguing that undergraduate admissions decisions are significant judgments we should be thankful that we live long lives that allow us to do great work outside of a system that at its highest levels does not have the volume or capacity to discover meaningful distinctions between applicants.
so why aren't more position made available for these applicants? Isn't the root cause of the problem one of not enough spaces for the number of applicants? If each applicant paid their own way (either through their own, or borrowed money), how come there isn't enough spaces to satisfy everyone? A more educated society is a better society.
You don't need the prestige of the Ivies to get a great education.
Benefiting who, exactly? Success at what, exactly?
Their reasoning goes that the engineering sections of Ivys often don't attract the very best candidates (Ivy League engineering << MIT, CMU, etc.) in these fields. So by applying in this manner, you end up competing against an "easier" pool of applicants. The major bit adds icing to your application as it makes you appear to be a focused student and allows the school to fulfill career diversity goals. Of course, all of this is just speculation but for the Ivys that rank their engineering schools separately, it is pretty clear that it would be much easier to get into those schools.
So I took this advice and that one school ended up being the only school that didn't reject/waitlist me (none of my waitlists even panned out). Once you get in, just bust your ass freshman year and "transfer" into the general school. Or if you decide to do engineering anyway, change majors (what I ended up doing).
This is just one anecdote and admissions may very well be fair. However, I don't think it is naive for anyone to think otherwise because the perception is shared by many educated people.
Don't worry if you don't make it into your top choice. You can always apply to grad school there. :)
Where did you end up getting accepted to? Did you do things like sports in school, or did you dedicate yourself to academics?
I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.
If the "holistic admission" thing is being used to disqualify Asian candidates I would expect that two students with equal grades would be disadvantaged if they played piano rather than windsurfed.
From my anecdotal experience, I find this very plausible. (I'm a white guy who had extraordinarily poor grades in highschool yet was accepted to the school of my choice. My Asian peers almost universally far outclassed me in academic skill (proper student discipline in general); if you told me that I was accepted because I was on the swim team instead of another student with better grades who played the piano (both forms of self-improvement, not community service), I would not be surprised. Very disappointed, but not surprised.)
So do universities honestly think they have too many classical musicians, but not enough casual athletes? I don't think so. That seems incredibly implausible. I don't think they are thinking anything at all along the lines of "we better introduce some athletic viewpoints into our student body, lest all the musicians dominate discussion."
I think they are arbitrarily classifying hobbies as "well rounded" or "square" to allow themselves to shape their student body demographics to their liking.
EDIT: Agreed with jlgreco, added [] to what I said earlier.
If we are saying "Black student life is just playing basketball", then that is clearly an unfair stereotype. If however college admissions start disqualifying anyone who has ever played basketball, then I think it would be prudent to ask if perhaps the admissions people are attempting to disadvantage black applicants (particularly so if the "has played basketball" metric is accompanied by a series of other metrics that have a relationship to stereotypes).
But the question remains, are admissions committees negatively weighting stereotypically Asian activities (e.g. violin) to reduce their enrollment? Anecdotal evidence is insufficient.
[1]Espenshade (2009) pp. 92-93.
ROTC was only allowed on campus recently:
"Yale, Harvard and Columbia all signed agreements this year [2011] to bring back ROTC"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/23/rotc-ivy-league_n_1...
It's tough to do ROTC when you have to go to another campus every week.
Ivy League admissions for both undergrad and graduate programs is NOT what most people think it to be. There are MANY factors they consider and it's not all about grades/test scores/sports.
For #1, grad schools are looking for extremely different things than undergrad. In fact, the plurality, if not majority, of grad admits at top schools are internationals. As another example, most PhD programs care about your research almost to the exclusion of all other factors. Extracurriculars? Don't matter very much.
Business school programs most heavily weight your work experience (followed by test scores, essays, and extracurriculars), which is why a lot of military officers get in, because of their impressive leadership-related work experience.
And data is not what you're basing your argument on. It's an interpretation of some data that might be flawed in collection methodology, reporting errors, false conclusions from over fitting and other common errors that occur in studies.
For the record, I served in the military, and earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard and know of many others who did the same. Painting the Ivies as somehow anti-military kinda rubs me the wrong way.
I have no idea if the Ivy's aim for geographic diversity; since they are not taxpayer funded, they probably don't have that mandate.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/the-white-anxiet...
In a recent article, Ross Douthat claims that America’s elite private colleges and universities are discriminating against white, rural, working-class applicants, especially those from “Red” states, and he cites work that Alexandria Radford and I did on college admissions to support his argument. Douthat seizes on one relatively minor finding in the entire book to push an interpretation that goes far beyond the bounds of the actual evidence.
We find that applicants who demonstrate a strong commitment to career-oriented extracurricular activities while in high school have a slightly lower chance of being admitted to a top school. This outcome affects only students who have won awards or assumed leadership positions in these activities, not those known for their extensive involvement. These extracurriculars might include 4-H clubs or Future Famers of America, as Douthat mentions, but they could also include junior ROTC, co-op work programs, and many other types of career-oriented endeavors. Participating in these activities does not necessarily mean that applicants come from rural backgrounds. The weak negative association with admission chances could just as well suggest that these students are somewhat ambivalent about their academic futures.
... students who apply from “Red” states appear to have an advantage in the process. Compared to otherwise similar applicants from California, those from Utah are 45 times as likely to be admitted to one of our elite colleges or universities. The advantage for applicants from West Virginia or Montana is 25 times greater, and nearly 10 times greater for students from Alabama. Because top private schools seek geographic diversity, and students from America’s vast middle are less likely to apply, it stands to reason that their admission chances are higher. On the other hand, coming from such “Blue” states as Virginia or Colorado lowers the odds of admission.
One problem is that too many people think the SAT is some amazing indicator of applicant quality. In fact it has biases. In fact it can be coached and responds to test prep and experience.
Another problem is that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees when you feel you're being discriminated against. There is a great society wide wrong that affirmative action is meant to partially redress. Some Asians having to go to Columbia instead of Yale is not an equal wrong to kicking in the doors to provide opportunity.
Finally, diversity does matter. I learned a hell of a lot from the hispanic and black students I lived with. And they certainly would not have been there without affirmative action. The same thing in classes (although there's less certainty on whether they were beneficiaries of AA).
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
(1) This is not a universal conclusion.
(2) Many forms of "coaching" are lumped together here. In fact some may only add 30 pts or less while others add over 100.
(3) Controlling for self-selection is self-defeating here since poor black/hispanic/native american kids don't have the same opportunity to self select into say private schools with test prep programs.
(4) Taking post PSAT gains ignores coaching received prior to this.
(5) This only measures indirect coaching. The effects of a superior school itself could be large.
Some forms of coaching "add over 100". Do you have data to support this?
Poor black/hispanic kids don't have test prep programs in school. So they are unable to get privately provided test prep or have no incentive to do so, and therefore receive a smaller amount of test prep than other racial groups. Do you have any data to support this?
The effects of a superior school "could be large". Do you have any data to support this?
You also say that you learned a lot from black and hispanic pupils. Would you have learned less from white pupils?
Having a worthwhile discussion requires a basic standard of reasonableness. Some of the perfectly reasonable claims I made could have also benefited from citations, sure. OTOH you've given me at least 5 data points that say you've just decided to be a pedantic troll about this topic. Good luck with that.
1) Most colleges admit large numbers of students who are officially reported as "race/ethnicity unknown." (The graphic in the submitted article, showing race/ethnicity questions from a college application, is dishonest by omitting the part on the application that says that whole section is optional, as it must be by federal regulation.)
2) The definition of "race" categories in current United States regulations is arbitrary, acknowledged by the Census Bureau to be unscientific, does not match categories used in any other country, and has changed several times in my lifetime.
3) "Jewish" has never been an officially regarded category in the United States for tracking data on the issue of college admission, but Jews once faced considerable barriers getting into many colleges.
4) The subset of United States high school students who are college-ready by what courses they have completed during high school has a much different "race" composition from the general United States population.
Several of the replies in this interesting thread speculate about details of the practice of colleges in the United States, so I will refer here to the definitive FAQ about "race" in United States college admission,
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/admissions-hindsight-les...
so that those of you who like to look up reliable sources and check facts are able to do that about this contentious issue. The FAQ will have to be revised, of course, after the Supreme Court issues its opinion in a pending case (cited in the FAQ). Full references to the facts listed above can be found in the FAQ.
TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - for example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).
The author suggests that top Asian students are being discriminated against (implicitly or explicitly), and it's unclear whether top non-Jewish white students are being discriminated against, or whether they apply in much smaller numbers to the Ivies.
In the article from The American Conservative, the claim that Jews are over-represented is rather hard to miss.
Gelman says in that critique that he agrees there is an underrepresentation of Asians.
That's not actually Gelman's analysis. He's just relaying some criticisms that were sent to him by Janet Mertz. Ron Unz responds to this, corrects some of his own errors, and shows his claims still hold. Then Gelman (proxying for Mertz) and Unz go back and forth way too many times, using way too many words and almost no data.
Eventually Gelman gives up, so Unz moves on to reviewing Mertz's old work. Let's just leave it here: http://www.ronunz.org/2013/03/16/meritocracy-dangerous-cance...
What I can contribute, however, are my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences with Asian households, and my own personal experience with the college application process. I am not Asian.
Probably because of my own interest in sciences and mathematics, many of my friends in high school were Asian. They tended to excel in schoolwork, in no small part because they were under huge amounts of pressure from their parents. I'm not saying that all Asian families "force" their children to study ad-nauseum, but the "high expectations Asian father" Internet meme is at least somewhat based in truth, stereotyped or not.
Because of this pressure (and supportive culture of success), Asians tend do incredibly well in school, as well as on standardized tests... but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students "well-rounded," which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value.
My personal college application process involved SAT scores that were very good, and a GPA that was solid but somewhat average. However, I had done several sports in high school, done a considerable amount of community service, had three technical jobs (two as a developer, one as a security analyst), and released open source software--all while passing my classes. I was passionate about computer science, and I believe that that helped me gain admission to very good universities.
I'm not trying to "blame the victim" with this comment--it may very well be that admissions officers harbor prejudices against Asians--but I also think it's worth noting that when you're talking about the top-tier of our education system--the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world--great grades aren't enough to gain admission.
For example, when I look to hire developers who are recent or soon-to-be college graduates, I may glance briefly at their GPA. While I care that they didn't flunk their classes (and aptitude in their language of choice is certainly important), I check to see what projects they did on the side. What open source software did they release or contribute to? Did they launch mobile or webapps while studying? Are they conversant in current events around their field of choice?
To me, passion is more important than grades or even degrees--in business. My question, which I believe is the same one posed in the article, is whether it is appropriate for schools to evaluate on that metric, too.
This entire "holistic evaluation" thing, at this point is pretty much gamed out and the savviest parents and students know what the admissions officers are looking for, which means it plays out very much like the tests and the grades - people who really, really want to get into the top schools and will put in the effort are the ones who get in.
To give a specific example, I've always thought that community involvement is one of those developmental stages that happen later in life. Bill Gates is a great example: obviously a "leader in business, innovation and politics", who went from active, principled disdain towards all charity when he was younger to the world's biggest philanthropist today. Whenever I see community involvement coming from a high schooler, I always "blame" parents, college admission coaches, church, etc.
Similarly, serious commitment to more than one sport makes me think "ambitious parents" and "affluent" rather than "drive". I just don't buy that a high-schooler, all by him/herself, has the wherewithal to manage multiple athletic training programs. I did serious ballet before I went to college, and let's face it, while I did all the sweating, my mother gets more than half the credit.
What this boils down to, to me, is the inability for admissions boards to release their exact criteria for admitting a prospective student. If, say, MIT released the exact formula for their perfect student, then people would immediately game the system (more so than they do already).
As some other users pointed out, and as you alluded to here, how can we tell the difference between 'drive' and 'trying to appear well-rounded'? How can we tell if a high schooler wanted to do those five-hundred hours of community service, or if they were coerced into doing so by a parent or school?
I personally believe that there is more to a successful academic (and professional) career than grades, so my initial dispute was the use of standardized test scores and GPA to indicate discrimination when it may have simply been another variable skewing the results.
It would be a very interesting case study for a university to release their full (objective) admissions criteria, however--while, sure, it would result in applicants trying to game the system, would it end up resulting in a more cohesive student base? What would the main factors be? How do you weigh passions vs., as you stated, ambitious parents?
I don't have any of the answers to the questions I posed in this comment (nor in my earlier ones), but it's an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
that's a good question - and this same question needs to be asked by a prospective employer during hiring interviews. In other words, you have to try and understand the applicant, and see if they really want it, or is only wanting it for extrinsic reasons (which i deem to be a bad reason for wanting to study).
You play sports to get laid, not because your parents make you.
Someone's physicality (Let's move on from just thinking about sports only) can/does have relevance to someone's aptitude for CS, or, their ability to do well.
citation needed.
"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past." Look at the kinds of things colleges value: community service, sports, etc. These are the things that used to in years past set people of good breeding apart from the regular people who were too busy keeping a roof over their head.
No it isn't. "Well rounded" is in fact code for any activity that has completely subjective merit which admissions offices can use to create quotas without officially having quotas.
What I've noticed is that the kids who have to be "forced" to study ad-nauseum usually aren't the top performers. They're around the middle, but their families desperately want them to be the top.
The top students are much more self motivated. They tend to be more or less equivalent to their supposedly more-well-rounded white counterparts.
Few people manage to get ahead solely through being compelled to work hard. It's very difficult to force someone to sacrifice four years of their life to attain a goal that they themselves are ambivalent about.
The high achieving students you're describing aren't not participating in extra curricular activities. That just sounds bizarre. Anyone who's intensely focused on getting into a top school also has their application filled with extra curricular engagements.
When affirmative action is letting more people from some group in than they normally would, then isn't it kind of obvious that other groups will take the hit?
It's not some magical force... when A + B is to be constant (total capacity), then increasing B decreases A.
The "natural" (equally-represented) proportion isn't that in the total population, it's the proportion in the population of interest, which in this case is the set of qualified applicants.
How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
"Asian applicants have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with comparable test scores."
If it's > 1, then obviously Asians will take a bigger hit, since they're the majority, that's the whole point of my comment.
If it's <= 1 though then yes, the situation is very interesting indeed.
IF there were more qualified Asian applicants than qualified White applicants (ratio > 1) _and_ admissions was not racially biased, THEN there should be more Asians than Whites in the student body.
We know that there are more Whites than Asians in the student body of these colleges, so look at the contrapositive:
IF there are more Whites than Asians in the student body, THEN there more qualified White applicants (ratio <= 1) _or_ admissions was racially biased.
Look carefully at the logic statement I wrote - it means that one of two things must be true:
1. There exists racial bias specifically against Asians in admissions. 2. Qualified White applicants outnumber qualified Asian applicants.
If you concede (1), then your point that Asians get treated more harshly because they're majority is moot. If you concede (2), then, as you said, your argument doesn't work since "ratio < 1".
I don't know how to make this more clear than by using propositional logic.
Maybe it's just because I'm running low on sleep, but consider this scenario:
1. Qualified Asian applicants outnumber qualified White applicants.
2. A higher percentage of qualified White applicants are admitted than that of qualified Asian applicants.
3. There are more Whites than Asians in the admitted student body.
Can you tell me which sentence of mine this scenario runs counter to, or which logical impossibility you think it results in?
That's neither a sentence of mine, nor a logical impossibility. It's a perfectly valid, logically sound scenario, but for some reason you think it's a logically impossible scenario.
Just because you think it's false doesn't make it logically impossible! And here I was arguing with propositional logic as if I'd claimed 2+2=5.
Your original premise was that the article was unsurprising since _someone_ (Asians and Whites) must bear the downside of pro-minority AA:
> Well, if minorities are being positively affected, then majorities (in this case, Asians + whites) must be negatively affected. > How is that novel? The effect is the same as ever, whoever is part of the majority takes the hit.
Then, asdfologist clearly points out that the interesting part is that Asians, a "minority", get affected worse than Whites (a majority):
> You don't get it - the parent's point is that your argument doesn't explain why Asians take a much bigger hit than whites.
You then claim that this could because Asians are actually the majority of qualified candidates (the whole ratio > or <= 1 thing), which I admit was an unconventional but valid challenge of assumptions:
> What's the Asian to White ratio of qualified college applicants? i.e. are there more Whites or Asians who would be accepted based on factors other than their race?
So then I point out the logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions, so I guess we actually do agree that there probably exists some racial bias against Asians vis-a-vis Whites in elite college admissions. Cheers?
> But now you say that Asians do, in fact, get treated differently than Whites in admissions
> logical issue with your argument there, which I guess you had some trouble understanding.
"But"?
What I'm not understanding is, when did I ever claim or imply that that is not true? When did I ever claim Asians are treated the same as whites? There was no inconsistency in my logic as far as I can see, I think you just made too many assumptions.
> Cheers?
Sure
I don't think it matters to anyone, though, because they're white kids.
[1]http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
Asian ivy league pop % / merit scholar % given by Unz is about 70%. Same for non-jewish whites is about 35%
Asians are getting the short end of the stick, but non-jewish white kids are getting it worse.
I mean, I've seen forms asking for my race, but I've never seen one asking if I considered myself Jewish. (and it seems, well, pretty slippery, as nearly all the people I know who identify as Jewish also identify as "White (non hispanic)" - And I've seen several studies saying that without cultural context, even experts can't tell Jewish faces from non-Jewsh faces from similar parts of the world.)
Seems to me like there are a lot of people who could identify one way or the other, who will answer the question differently, depending on how they think you want the question answered.
This unusual event happens because Asians are an outperforming minority. Most minorities suffer from the "cultural bias" of the education system and do worse than whites. But Asians just seem to kick ass regardless.
Affirmative action was designed to come at the expense of majority students only. Now that minority students are negatively affected, we have to rethink the justice of it.
You must not be in the US. The history of the US has been policies against minorities. It's only been since the early 60s has there been policies that favored minorities. And even then it has pretty much been relegated to schools (and most just undergrad college) -- it's never been very effective in the workplace. And affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.
According to the article, being black is like getting 450 extra points on your SAT compared to an Asian student. I don't think AA is as dead as you think it is.
IMO it's just not a useful test, and I suspect the Harvard admin committee knows so as well.
That said, it can be used as something to see how much work people are willing to do. In which case I think the delta over their HS peers is more useful than anything else. A 1500 at Andover would be a lot less impressive than a 1300 at Crenshaw.
Furthermore the data isn't really believable (remember the article used pretty much made up data). Data from actual schools disputes that. For example:
"Harvard's Asian Americans in the Class of 1995 have average SAT scores of 1450, Blacks averaged scores of 1290, whites scored 1400 and Hispanics averaged 1310, the report states. "
"Asian-American students who enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2001 and 2002 scored 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks, according to a 2011 study co-authored by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono."
"Asian-Americans admitted to the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus in 2008 had a median math and reading SAT score of 1370 out of 1600, compared to 1340 for whites, 1250 for Hispanics, and 1190 for blacks, according to a 2011 study by the Center for Equal Opportunity"
And I suspect if you control for recommendations, geographic, and socio-economic diversity the gaps would shrink, not grow.
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...
You can't win here. Colleges admissions desire a diverse mix of students. Identifiable ethnicities have different median qualifications. So someone has to lose in that tradeoff.
The point upthread was simply that usually when you see this argument made it's a complaint that whites are being "penalized". This time it's asians. But despite being a novel spin, it's still the same story.
They could try looking for actual diversity, then, instead of just an aesthetically pleasing mixture of superficial skin colors. Accepting 100 multiracial kids who all attended the same boarding schools is going to be way less diverse than a selection of 100 kids from different levels of income. Actually, I believe income quite dominates race in terms of predicting academic success these days--the interracial achievement gap looks quite small by comparison. (As well it should, in a country currently headed by a black president.)
There's no winning here. Don't fool yourself into thinking you know the right way to do education selection, and stop sneering at all the people who want different things than you do.
Race based discrimination supporters love to pretend that race is everything when it means less now than it has in the entirety of US history. You can throw yourself in with the "gravity is a social construct" people if you want, but at least there's hard data to back up my beliefs, instead of just collectivist guilt that punishes truly disadvantaged people for the crime of being born with the wrong skin color for that particular decade.
Go away.
It's fairly obvious to me that colleges do discriminate against Asians, and that this reverse racism does need to stop whether it's intentional or not.
Everyone here talks about how Asians are like this or like that... the reality is that Asians are a pretty diverse group of people, and while you do have your nerdy, book worm types, you also have Asians who were captains of their basketball team or who played football or another major sport. Most people who are at the top of their class are extremely gifted in more ways than one and good parenting isn't the only factor that gets them there. I have cousins who have 'tiger-mom' parents but their grades are still suffering. We need to stop generalizing everyone into the same buckets, that's part of the problem.
I'm all for diversity, I would love to see colleges adopt a race blind admission process and focus on all the criteria that they value and see what happens. I almost guarantee that we will see the Asian acceptance rates rise even with the focus on "diversity". Right now, it seems like it's straight forward discrimination at play that is guised as diversity seeking... since by diversity, what they're really saying is that we want less Asians in our top schools.
I realize with regard to affirmative action that race is a poor proxy for socioeconomic status, but it is statistically practical with regard to cultural values. You mentioned "I went to an Ivy League school, I fit the Asian model minority stereotype pretty well." How much did your parents influence your priorities in weighing education?
One of the issues seems to be that colleges are attempting to address institutionalized racism too late in students' lives.
I feel like the english language is being rapidly perverted.
Why not?
> "by diversity, what they're really saying is that we want less Asians in our top schools."
Actually, it means they want fewer whites and Asians.
As you correctly point out, AA typically privileges NAMs at the expense of Whites and Asians.
I had a tougher high school course load, a better GPA, significantly higher SAT I and SAT II scores, and comparable extracirriculars to everyone in my class who got accepted to elite university X.
Thing is, I'm Asian, and they were all more coveted minorities.
The good news is, your university does not determine your future. You do. Once class is out and you're in the real world, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is PRODUCING VALUE.
Admissions officers are not some kind of mind reading wizards who are able to churn through thousands of applications and figure out who are amazing people despite bad test scores and grades and who are frauds despite high test scores and grades, merely based on short descriptions of what they did outside of classes. They are underpaid paper pushers forced to judge people who are likely smarter than they are, with very little information. There are two main reasons for the holistic evaluation. One, to give themselves plausible deniability when they need to tweak the student body to fit institutional purposes. Two, to introduce sufficient randomness into the process to reduce the incentive to game the process.
The truth is that top private schools are in the business of soliciting donations from wealthy donors and selling an image of prestig while avoiding major controversies. Having a heavily Asian-dominated student body doesn't serve any of those goals. They are politically weak, not a threat to organize and are seen as foreign by a large portion of the population.
Yes, because using quotas would be illegal.
But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.
Wasn't the whole point of the UC v. Bakke case to say that quotas are illegal, but race is still a legitimate factor to consider in admission? This sentence means nothing.
By "force them to do X" he meant the government can refuse to fund them if they didn't do X (which forces them to abide by the government's rules if they are accepting its funds), not that the government can legally mandate them to do X unconditionally.
Suppose you have the right to exclude Blacks or Asians from your college (freedom of speech, associations or whatever)
Once you take even a penny of federal dollars, directly or indirectly, you may have to agree not to discriminate. So YOU give up that right voluntarily. No one forces you to take the government's money.
Those government dollars most certainly can be conditioned on associating with certain people (military recruiters, in that case).
Now more on topic, the being able to discriminate as a private uni one:
http://www.hillsdale.edu/admissions/faq/faq_list.asp?iSectio...
Q: Why doesn’t Hillsdale accept any federal or state taxpayer subsidies? A: In 1975, the federal government said that Hillsdale had to sign a form stating that we did not discriminate on the basis of sex. Hillsdale College had never discriminated on any basis, and had never accepted federal taxpayer subsidies of any sort, so the College felt no obligation to comply, fearing that doing so would open the door to additional federal mandates and control. Our trustees pledged two things: first, that the College would continue its long-standing policy of non-discrimination, and second, that it would not accept any encroachments on its independence. The case went to court, and Hillsdale College won a partial victory, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals did rule that Hillsdale College was an “indirect recipient” of federal funding because of participation in federal grant and loan programs. In 1984, Grove City College in Pennsylvania fought and lost a similar legal battle. The case then went to the Supreme Court, and in Grove City v. Bell, it was determined that if even one student received a federal grant or loan, it made that institution a direct recipient of federal funds. To avoid the hassles of government control, Hillsdale College announced its decision to end participation in all federal financial aid programs in 1985. In 2007, Hillsdale announced that it would no longer accept State of Michigan taxpayer subsidies earmarked for student financial aid, thereby making the College completely independent of taxpayer support.
Basically once you take their money you agree to their strings.
sorry for the sarcasm but he keeps going
This is an absurd principle, and you've offered little but snark to defend it.
You take advantage of government largess every time you drive on a Federal highway. That doesn't mean the government can make your travel on that highway contingent upon giving up completely unrelated rights.
But "In the 30 years since this ruling, public and private universities have crafted affirmative action programs consistent with Bakke's requirements" [1], so I assume it probably would be, otherwise they wouldn't go through the trouble.
1. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/rights/landmark_regents...
Even were a given university to forgo all government money, it would lose it's tax exempt status if it discriminated on the basis of race (see Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983)).
So as a practical matter -- yes.
You don't understand it because it doesn't translate into equal treatment. "Diversity" is a legal dodge they use to keep out Asians and whites and accept less qualified people of other races. It's a de facto quota system that would never survive a court challenge if you rearranged the races a bit.
The problem with this reasoning is that it presumes that GPA + test scores is the definition of merit. These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs. If you are a part of a group that all has perfect GPA/SATs, then that simply isn't enough anymore. Cluster analysis is a valid technique to identify outliers.
So let me get this straight: GPA + test scores don't show merit, but race does?
> These schools say this isn't the case. They want the stand-outs.
So let's accept less qualified people just because they're doing better than even the lesser-qualfied people of the same race, even though there are perfect candidates we could be choosing instead?
I think you (like many Americans) are completely misunderstanding the point of affirmative action.
It has nothing to do with "encouraging diversity" or anything like that. It's trying to right a historical wrong, discrimination against certain groups based on race. "Diversity" is just a nice word to use to appeal to emotion so they just use that, but it's irrelevant to the purpose of affirmative action.
The point is, it has been a long time since merit was GPA/SAT scores for top-tier college admissions. The criteria changes frequently as kids pattern their lives after what they assume the current criteria is. If you are one of a million (Asian) kids with perfect GPA and SAT scores, well, you're likely not going to get in. You are not owed a spot in any sense.
You're owed exactly as much of a spot as anyone with the same qualifications as you, which is exactly equal to that of a Black or White kid with the same qualifications.
Even if that's a goal, it doesn't seem to be the main one. Frankly, I've never heard a college admissions official say they look at race to determine leadership skills, even if they really do do that.
If they do that, then it's fine for them to do so, but that just doesn't seem to be the issue here. And to the best of my knowledge, it didn't seem to be the issue in the Bakke case either, which nevertheless got the Supreme Court's nod toward promoting "diversity".
It can certainly be read this way, but it's not obvious that this is so. Diversity creates an atmosphere that will most likely mirror the world in which these future leaders will be required to navigate. That in itself is enough of a justification for diversity, assuming their goal is to educate future leaders. Also, there is the fact that leaders of ethnic groups tend to be of that ethnic group, so maximizing some proportion of diversity is increasing that schools chance of educating a future leader.
Er, you changed the subject from determining which future leaders are accepted into college to educating future leaders after they've been accepted.
That's a whole another discussion which I wasn't intending to get into. All I will say is that the status quo seems to point toward the use of race as a way to fulfill affirmative action requirements, not as a means for determining aptitude.
I think he's implying that cultural differences could be coming into play that skew the curve while looking like racial discrimination. Just like Academic scores differ between races, I'm sure Athletic honors differ between races as well, as well as Club honors, and Arts (band/choir/etc) Honors, and so on.
If you want to argue that Academic merit is all students should be judged on when colleges are considering applications, that is a separate argument, but GP is probably just saying that GPA + test scores doesn't singlehandedly define "merit" to a college because things like community service and athletics and student council and... and... and... all altogether factor into the cumultive merit of any given applicant in addition to GPA and whatnot.
It's been almost sixty years since discrimination based on race (or sex) was legal. It's time to let affirmative action die.
It is simple to construct a non-quota admissions system from a desired set of quotas (though one would probably do well not to write down the desired set of quotas). Each year one could adjust the bonus/penalty assigned to each race to target admissions levels at the hidden quotas. Conversely, given a set of per-race bonuses and penalties and admissions data for a particular year, one could calculate what (non-quota) admissions level was most targeted by the set of bonuses and penalties.
Edit: It is perhaps even more troublesome to hear "There is no formula for admission. We look at the academics, leadership, activities and references about the applicant's character." If a school explicitly states that it is not looking for anything in particular in its candidates, it would be very difficult for any investigation to find that it is turning away qualified candidates on the basis of race.
None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.
Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...
All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.
Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.
I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.
"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".
On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.
But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.
It's complex.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/nyregion/cooper-union-t...
I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.
I would love to see that data, if you could make the effort. Because I have no faith that this statement is true.
But also see the comment above. I am probably somewhat misinterpreting the data in the strict sense, in what I said above. About as many S&P 500 CEOs come from UW as from Harvard, but you have to consider student body size, so it's not quite the same thing. But I don't think this invalidates the general gist of what I'm saying, which is that you can go to a good State school and still expect to have a fine career.
Maybe it is, but quantify that. And compare the best care outcomes from attending Harvard with people's actual ambitions. For most people, I still contend that going to Harvard (or not) is fairly irrelevant.
and using racism (lets call race-based discrimination what it really is) to limit a race's access to a better school is not something that misinterpreting CEO stats will ease.
Again, just to be clear, I am not trying to support racism or any sort of discrimination. I think admissions should be strictly race-blind, gender-blind, ethnicity-blind, religion-blind, etc. I'm just pointing out that if you get excluded from your $IVY_OF_CHOICE for whatever reason, you aren't consigned to the scrap heap of life. It's not the end of the world, and it's probably not even a big deal for most people. Now if you absolutely, 110% have your heart set on getting elected President someday, then I guess all bets are off.
Well, I can't let that statement go by without challenging it. At the PhD level, I just don't agree that Harvard is better than UC Berkeley overall. It's pretty close, but I think UCB has slightly greater breadth and depth at the PhD level.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/09/28/nrc-rankings/
Like I said in an earlier comment, there is a type of very high achieving undergraduate who looks at and engages with a university more the way a grad student would. There are plenty of reasons someone like this might choose UCB or UMich over an ivy league school.
From this angle, it shouldn't be too surprising that this sort of student student would be as likely to come from UW as from Harvard. There's no real point in averaging in a huge student body drawn largely from a single state vs a small undergraduate student body with no in-state percentage requirements, because these students are unlike the other students at either institution. While it's harder to "get in" to harvard as an undergraduate, let's face it - the vast majority of students at either institution are probably not among the very brightest of the very brightest. Those statistical oddities are a small sliver, and I actually suspect that they can be difficult to detect through test scores and GPAs earned from age 15-17. These students often just don't give enough of a crap, or they may be far too focused on their intellectual interests to put enough time into the GPA game.
If UW has a strong CS department, it makes just as much sense that these odd outliers would come from there as an ivy.
I agree that where you went to school shouldn't matter for your career outcomes, but fact of the matter is that it simply does. There are plenty of people who hire ivyleague only
Sounds irrelevant to me. Most people don't have "becoming President" as their goal. For the handful who do, then OK, sell your soul to try and get into an Ivy. But I would posit that this is an irrelevant point to most normal people. :-)
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success ...
Depends on how exactly you define "elite", "tremendously" and "career ladder".
Anyway, I'm not arguing that they don't help, I'm arguing that the extent of the difference they make is very possibly overstated, especially for people whose aspirations don't include "being President of the USA" or "being CEO of an S&P 500 company".
In that light, you don't need anything, not a college degree, not a high school degree, because you will always be able to achieve success
Not sure if that was meant to be sarcasm or mean to be taken literally, but I actually believe that very strongly. There are lots of variables that affect what happens to a person in life, of which "what university you attend" or "did you attend university at all" are just two. Personally, I believe determination, ambition, perseverance, work ethic, attitude, etc., matter more than either of those factors.
Me, I'm kind of a bum, but thanks to my UC Berkeley degree, I barely have to make an effort to land a middle class job. Granted, I am a computer geek, so that's easy.
Ouch. That hurts. First in the list of "2nd class" ;)
Anyway, you make a good point. Colleges would like you to think ranking matters more than it really does. Didn't Tim Cook go to Auburn?
Given the context of what I'm arguing, I don't think you should feel too bad about that! Heck, I don't even mention my school in these discussions (UNC - Wilmington). Then again, I didn't bother graduating anyway.
You discriminate every time you purchase one product over another, take one job over another, live in one area over another, befriend one person over another, etc. We all do. The key to doing it well is clear, analytical judgement about such decisions. Personally, I haven't seen much of that in University admissions at any school.
This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.
Others suggest its because of how many legacy students the upper tier accept. Whatever the reason, SAT scores are not the only factor in admission because SAT is not the sole arbiter of a good University student, or at least that's what the University leadership say.
Personally, I think its well-meaning racism, and, as they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But my thinking it ain't facts, ain't statistics. Only the facts, carefully analyzed matter in the end.
Exactly. This is why basketball teams are missing out by their pig-headed refusal to send talent scouts to evaluate Rwanda's Pygmies.
This is exactly the behavior that you condemn, unless I've missed something.
I'm also not sure what that has to do with this article (which doesn't hang on any particular definition).
What you are calling prejudicial in that case they call experience. They correlate past statistical data on how the variables they do have access to predict the outcomes they want.
If that a satisfying situation? No way. Is including your experience better than just using the data you have for a current set of candidates? Hell yes. On average, hell yes. Some students will get screwed but on average IF you are smart, not a bigot, rational, have good past data, etc, your results WILL be better. Of course, most people aren't all of those things.
But what can you do other than make your best try at an optimal outcome? If they went just on raw present data, quality of students admitted to Stanford/MIT would probably go down and 99% of students would be asian. Does that seem better?
s/sloppy thinking/nuanced yet practical problem solving/g
We should just take race off the applications, like we did on loan applications decades ago. If you want an affirmative action proxy, we can just use high school data, and zip code information, and questions like "did your parents attend college?"
http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race-ebook/dp/B00BAH...
Clearly discrimination against Asians was one of the unforeseen consequences of affirmative action. What's particularly sad is it doesn't even help the people it was supposed to. For example:
"Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were 'modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an increase in black and Hispanic degrees.'"
As much as stereotypes are deceiving and ill for our society, I tend to think they hold a small, but ruthless grain of truth in them. and i am Asian.
There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.
EDIT: Holy cow, now it's on the 2nd page. What the heck? (And I bet I'm never going to get an explanation either.)
(If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)
I got a full-ride to a great non-elite school; there are plenty of schools like the one I went to that would love to have more non-white students, and are even giving away money for it. I'd much rather go to a good school for free than to go to an elite one and be in debt.
This is baffling.
I would also like to add this to the conversation: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admis.... When the criteria to get into elite schools is completely objective, Asians get in disproportionately (what is called overrepresentation) because their families put a higher emphasis on education and doing well on tests. Not every Asian family has a Tiger Mother, but a significant portion of the Asian family places a lot of emphasis on academic achievement. I found the discussion about Jews to be interesting, because Jews in some ways are close to Asians. Jewish culture also places emphasis on scholarly achievement, but to a lesser extent than, for example, Amy Chua. That's why her mother-in-law and husband, who are Jewish, objected sometimes to Chua's overly rigorous methods.
In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better.
One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true.
Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.
No one is saying that SAT is the sole standard of admission. But does anyone really believe that Asians as a group collectively are so horrible in admission standard (with exception of SAT score) that huge disparity in number of Asian applicants and Asian admissions are justified?
To play devil's advocate, for example: Asians may be more likely than other groups to apply to these schools. It may be that Asians with high SAT scores but weaker applications in other areas are more likely to apply to highly selective schools than comparable students of other races, which would lead to lower admission rates.
The numbers here wink suggestively, but they present a far from airtight case.
I am not assuming that Asians are more qualified than students of other races. Purely from the statistics provided by the blog, I find it hard to believe that Asians are doing so poorly in other admission standards that having several hundred extra SAT score doesn't put them in equal footing.
Aren't you the one who is assuming that Asians are obviously failing in admission standards other than SAT compared to other races?
His stance was that they wanted to select the very "best" applicants. Where best in his mind meant most likely to do great research and otherwise be brilliant. gpa and test scores are just one way to assess that.
His experience was that with asians, gpa and test scores were a particularly bad metric for determining brilliance because the culture demanded 4.0 and perfect test scores more than in other cultures.
Discrimination? Racism? I don't think so. Dangerously subjective? Definitely. But I'm not sure he was doing the wrong thing given the observable fact that there was low correlation between gpa/scores and performance. Not sure what is right either.
There is some desired heterogeneity of intellect. Elite Colleges aren't just looking for sharp mathematicians. They want to attract sharp physicists, sharp philosophers, sharp linguists, sharp artists, sharp musicians, sharp poets etc.
Now, in my experience there is a set of areas in which asians excel, but that doesn't comprise 100% of all areas. There are many areas where predominantly white people dominate.
If you weight the distribution of ethnic origin along those lines, I suspect asians will be underrepresented relative to the distribution measured by SAT scores.
The other problem is that this article automatically assumes that private schools are "elite", and public schools aren't.
That's true for certain fields-law and finance, for example, are dominated by the ivy league schools. STEM, on the other hand, is a much more even distribution. Many of the engineering programs at most of the Big 10 state schools are considered to be some of the best educations you can get, and the UC system is full of very good programs. UIUC's CS program is considered one of the best in the nation, as are Purdue's ME and aeronautical engineering programs.
Stanford is 41% from California. Caltech is 32% from California. Thus, it looks like the California factor has little if anything to do with the Caltech vs. the Ivies Asian data.
Until students/people are judged purely off their merits there will ALWAYS be discrimination.
The truly sad part is it is openly acceptable to discriminate against whole groups of people purely based on statistics of whole groups. If this isn't the definition of stereotyping i don't know what is. Just because one's motivations are sound doesn't mean we should unanimously assume so are there actions.
Judge people for who they are, not where they are from.
There's gotta be case law on this...
1. Feels forced to spend the extra time - at diminishing returns - to do well at everything with a grade attached. This comes at the expense of passion-based activities, regarded as 'useless' or invalid as a 'line item for the resume'. (There is wide understanding that you need extracurriculars to look good. As pg says, these are mostly bogus.)
2. The pressure itself is killing your intrinsic motivation, which means the surviving applicants are primarily conformist types.
3. Even if you somehow make it through intact, colleges will assume the stereotype and view your application through those lenses.
Public schools love the international student tuition money these days, it's such a farce, turning "public" education on its head.
Thus you get a lot of droids who are good memorizer/regurgitators but not necessarily all that wise, perceptive, creative, etc.
In my experience, schools discriminate against groups which they see as proxies for this group, such as doctor's kids, nerds, Asians, because having too many of them will mean a miserable "is this on the final?" campus with no commitment to learning.
I have heard of a little bit of black magic that is involved in the acceptance process but in order to accept people who are more likely to succeed in the program. But race definitely does not come into play.
Asian-Americans lack the numbers and the political clout as African- and Hispanic-Americans. Asians do not have a Sharpton. It's also tough to sympathize with a bunch of kids protesting how they weren't let into Harvard / Princeton / etc. It's unfair, and it sucks for them. Jews got around it after Asians came around and took their place. Who can Asians wait for?
If you want to do something about it, don't wait for some other minority group to come along and be the goat, organize. There's a lot more Asians than Jews in this country - you should be able to build an organization at least as effective as the Anti-Defamation League. And for god's sake, at least stop voting for politicians who support affirmative action. If you vote for politicians who discriminate against you, those politicians are going to quite reasonably conclude that you don't really care about being discriminated against.
At risk of sounds discriminator and stereotyping, the number of Chinese and Korean kids applying for college with 4.0 GPAs, perfect SATs with awards for Math and who play either expert level piano or violin is just simply not interesting anymore.
Wow, good for Cal tech though, non race specific admission likewise for the UCs.
I think setting some standard benchmark is necessary, but diversity needs to be guaranteed. (Even if it is as heavy-handed as basing it on race)
It'll happen for middle easterners only once people no longer mind them--of course, then people will think it unfair that they are so oppressed, and whatever the current group-to-be-hated of that decade is will be further discriminated against in favor of correcting for a social pressure that has long since disappeared.
Ask away!
This poses a problem for the sake of consideration of applicants for admission into institutions of higher learning not unlike it does for consideration of peoples for any other purpose.
The immediate problem is of the question of homogeneity.
Although both Asian, are people of Filipino extraction similarly prone to academic excellence as their Chinese counterparts?
Although both Black and hailing from much the same coordinates, do Haitians benefit from a culture that values the merits of higher education as do their Jamaican and other Carib brethren?
Although all White, are the rates of adoption of fields of study uniform among Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans and all other non-Hispanic white Americans?
( The former president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has famously commented on how few numbers of Irish-Americans, as opposed to other whites, are to be found in high-finance. He has made more controversial statements about women in science and mathematics which are less relevant here. )
The more sensitive problem - and one that the universities seek to handle delicately - is the problem of producing a class of pupils that is deft at handling problems of the larger world that are not entirely limited to the narrow confines of their chosen area of study.
Over the course of hundreds of years, universities have come to learn that a purely academically flourishing candidate, otherwise deficient in certain key qualities that make for a ringleader, is less than ideal for those larger missions.
This has led to the emergence of the much vaunted, deservedly so, "well-rounded candidate".
The candidate who sets himself or herself apart in matters of moral earnestness, social conscience and a world view. He who is not just driven by an achievement trophy-besotted vigor that sees education as a means to a higher rung.
I'll leave it to the discursive minds here to explicate on the matter of how various groups including “piano playing, hard working" Asians fare in this regard and if that positively accounts for the disparity in acceptance rates for those groups.
He didn't "make controversial statements about women," he simply asked a question about a fact, which is why men are far and away the (high end) outliers in math and science, and whether there might be something based on nature (vs nurture). For asking this un-PC question, he was basically driven out of the presidency at Harvard.
When you can't even ask questions about reality without getting pilloried, you know things are rotten in academia.
(Summers was a year ahead of me at school, though I didn't know him then.)
If I hadn't been upfront about that portion, I was certain that people would try to scuttle the validity of the comments on Irish-Americans in light of what he said about women.
People love to flog dead horses.
Chinese kids from the country side (of China) have similar problems, we just never see them in the US. Affirmative action in China should focus on getting these kids into good universities, though in practice the reverse occurs (Chinese kids from cities need lower scores on gaokao than kids from the country side).
An equalizing factor, I think, should be whether both parents attended university or not.
There are plenty of Vietnamese with problems, but a whole lot of the refugees were bigshots. My neighbor was some kind of politician, but he made a living as a handyman.
I think theres a lot of value in looking beyond that GPA/SAT. We don't want a lot of identical personalities on a campus nor in the workplace. High GPA/SAT does not necessarily breed the innovation and creativity that makes this country strong (how's China doing on that front?).
Lets make the conversation about that. Thats really what this should be about.
....but we do value diversity :)
and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.
Uh huh. Substitute "Blacks" for "Asians" and somehow suddenly it's no longer okay.
I guess the idea that we should stop with race based discrimination altogether is too novel yet. So long as this is the case, the cycle will continue to repeat.
>It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.
Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms (generalization, but I'm just making a point). This is just more sloppy thinking from you folks.
That's just a rationalization.