

What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu - tokenadult
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/what-harvard-owes-its-top-asian-american-applicants-stephen-hsu.html

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
jaems33
Re: Leadership Qualities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
reader5000
Hsu seems to maintain a blog on IQ supremacy generally and specifically the iq
supremacy of asians. Why is this guy getting mainstream attention?

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

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

------
yosho
Another post and discussion on this topic today.

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

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

~~~
jsnk
Problem is much more complicated than that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
bilbo0s
That's because ... frankly ... neither the black or the white guy belong
there. Who cares about the differences between them.

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

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

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

------
learc83
How many times does the average Asian student take the SAT versus the average
white/black/Hispanic student?

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

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

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

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

------
lrhot9
Same guy: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jZENi1ed8>

------
ThaddeusQuay2
"Surely this is exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther King wanted when he
asked us to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of
their character."

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

Related: [http://biggovernment.com/cjohnson/2012/02/01/did-top-
liberal...](http://biggovernment.com/cjohnson/2012/02/01/did-top-liberal-arts-
college-falsify-sat-data-to-legitimize-racial-preferences) (Did Top Liberal
Arts College Falsify SAT Data to Legitimize Racial Preferences?)(2012-FEB-01)

------
chegra84
It's not the universities that are racial bias because Asians are
overrepresented at Ivy League school.

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

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

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

