If white and Asian students are the majority, they should be selected against based on their proportion of that majority. I believe some are suggesting that Asian students are being unduly discriminated against when compared to white students.
In the Myth of American Meritocracy[1] Ron Unz shows that non-Jewish white students face 5x as much discrimination as Asian students in comparison with their proportion of the general population, and 2x as much when compared with their proportion of national merit scholars.
I don't think it matters to anyone, though, because they're white kids.
Although this article is interesting and worth a read, it is very difficult to verify that your source backs your claim. It is unclear whether the reader is supposed to perform some calculations upon some figures in the source material to arrive at your claims or whether, by exhaustively searching many different paraphrasings of your claims, one could eventually find the same claims made in the source.
Sorry, commenting on the go. non-jewish white % in ivy league is about 30%, in general pop it is about 65% for a ratio of about 0.5x. asian % in ivy league is about 15% and general pop about 5% for a ratio of 3.0x.
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.
how do they statistically account for 'non-jewish white?' - is there a box on the admissions paper asking how many Jewish grandparents you have or something?
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.
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?
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.
Wait, what? I asked about candidates who would be accepted, you're talking about candidates who are accepted.
When the whole question is about discrimination in the admissions process, you can't just assume those two are similar quantities without backing it up.
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.
Yeah exactly, that's the entire point. Asian DO seem to be be treated differently, that's the premise of the entire discussion. How is that surprising? What's so impossible about that possibility?
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.
The unofficial ethic is that minority students must be treated fairly or have a bias in their favor. This is the first time that a minority group is negatively effected by racial preference policies, so it is newsworthy.
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.
This is the first time that a minority group is negatively effected by racial preference policies, so it is newsworthy.
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.
> 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.
If I thought the SAT was a useful metric you might be on to something. I used to be an SAT coach (back when the top score was 1600) and I could typically raise someone scoring between 1000 to 1300 by 200 points in 6 weeks.
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.
In reality it is simply not possible to create such gains on average. SAT score is still a very good predictor of future academic performance.
"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."
The SAT is highly g-loaded, and highly correlated with all other measures of intelligence. 450 points on the SAT is a big deal, very significant, especially when dealing with large populations.
For a large population I'd agree that it is significant, because a large population doesn't prep for the SAT. For Ivy class schools I think it's counter intuitively not that big of a deal if one portion of the population hasn't prepped.
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.
