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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

That's not actually true. The majority of Harvard's class is white. Statistically, if they are biased against Asians, that seat is going to a white person, not a black or Hispanic person.

The magnet school where I went to high school has median SAT scores comparable to one of the mid-level Ivies. They got rid of affirmative action. It is now 70% Asian. And that's without accepting any foreign or out of state students. Asians didn't take seats from other minorities, because there weren't all that many to begin with. They took seats from white kids.

CalTech, which is race blind, has 40% Asians, more than the number of whites. That's the end result schools like Harvard are trying to avoid.

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That's the end result schools like Harvard are trying to avoid.

Why? That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book. How is it my fault that I was born smart, worked hard to capitalize on my innate abities and then competed on a standardized test to perform better than folks who just happened to pop out of a different vagina or uterus? Nice way to fuck me for no fault of mine.

For those saying not getting into Harvard or MIT is no big deal, are either in the sour grapes camp or have never had to face opportunity costs arising from picking a non-exclusive-low-visibility-(but-great)-school.

I don't know what la-la-land they live in, but that Veritas stamp will open doors that no amount of effort, intelligence or other factors ever can.

To the question of why, Harvard believes that standardized tests are simply one of many factors that should be taken into account when deciding on who to admit. In building a student class, they value diversity not of race but of backgrounds and experiences. Perhaps that correlates closely with race since much of our country's socio-economic divisions also fall along racial lines in many places.

As an Asian myself, perhaps the question that needs to be asked is if there is enough diversity in our upbringing to be well-rounded candidates for admissions to "elite" schools?

Historically, concerns about "diversity of backgrounds", "well-rounded" candidates, and the even more nebulous "character" were code for the fear by the majority's elite of an overrepresented minority gaining entrance into that elite. In the time when these policies were first promulgated the target was Jews [1], but the strategies and motives seem not to have changed: the presence of enormous academic success among an immigrant minority group without high economic status is resented as somehow a "gaming" of the system that needs to be corrected by introducing subjective factors into the system.

Where this gets politically complicated is by the concurrent policies in favor of non-Asian minorities, but at least there the policies are quite explicit about their justifications (correcting historical disadvantage).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...

As an asian yourself don't belittle your upbringing by assuming you need to be 'improved' by special programs to make you a better all around fit. You're better off being proud of your race or family line and whatever demonstrated intelligence level and then pursue your career interests which (hopefully for us will also align with bettering the world).

Let's face it, the harvard admissions process is secretive they aren't giving all candidates a thorough review, they aren't looking deeply into 150,000 applications in a three month period. They can't. So they dump and dump based on subjective and biased methods being careful to honor first and foremost those requirements like affirmative action. And then they probably get the quota and then start onto the smaller piles. In other words all the activities an Asian might be on, they can and will be overlooked because somebody else has a righter color at the right time when the stack of applications are being sorted by whatever computer or individual at that step.

So to question, "maybe I need a better holistic upbringing?" Bullshit. in this case it's highly likely many many many of these asians had a remarkable upbringing that would satisfy anyone but they got dumped for somebody so the color factor was satisfied.

The less measurable your admissions criteria, the more subconscious bias seeps into your decision making process. You can not extricate the perverse stereotypes that exist in society when making a decision whether a candidate is "diverse" or "well-rounded".

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.

> That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book.

That's only true if SAT score are a good predictor of "success" - however you define that. That's obviously not true for elite institutions since their candidates' SAT score are all bunched up at the top and within the MOE of each other. It's low-resolution. If you want test-based admissions, you'll have to design a test that shows significant differences among the elite schools' applicant pool.

On the hand, just having an "Asian attenuator" is, objectively, racist. The schools that do that will probably claim they just deemphasize applicants who don't have outside activities, which has led to formulaic portfolios of the "right" outside activities among high school students now, because "grades are not enough." Ugh. That's worse than just accepting the top SAT scores.

How can you tell which highly selective universities really have a sophisticated selection process and which are just running ethnic groups through different sized apertures? Elite schools that have legacy preferences have an especially hard job defending their policies.

Whites are actually unaffected by affirmative action. The transfer is from Asians to blacks/Hispanics. Here's some hard data: http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Opportunity%20Cost%20of%...

"White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points."

That's from one study, and it's 10 years ago. Not dispositive in the slightest.

No, because that asian student would replace the white would just mean the white would replace the black or latino. the lower end falls off not the middle if you go by the academically qualified here.

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