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The model minority is losing patience

economist.com

71–80 of 188 posts

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#71
post #16

A really good point noted in this article, and ignored in the comments, is that of the 'bamboo ceiling.' Yes, there are lots of Asians in tech. But they are generally programmers and rarely in managerial positions.

Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country? Surely most managers in China are Chinese. I would not expect to see a completely even ethnic distribution in high positions in any country.

> Maybe because you are considering asians in a foreign country?

> Surely most managers in China are Chinese

oh look, another confused racist who thinks only white people can be real americans.

i hadn't seen one of you in a few years, i thought you had all died of old age by now.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#72

“There’s something in the upbringing that makes Asians shy," At my first internship, people were commenting on how timid I seemed. I was used to obeying my parents and teachers without question; all I did was try to keep my head down and work harder. This sort of upbringing makes for great workers but bad leaders. I hope to come out of my shell more during the rest of college and my formative years.

As an asian, I think shyness is also genetic. My parents were pretty lax in terms of discipline. So lax, that I ended up going to a community college after high school and transferring to ucla after i got my act together. This didn't stop me from being shy. Shyness is just a heightened fear response that's triggered during social situations. I think for asians the threshold for this trigger just lower when compared t…

I think this is a cop-out.

I've met tonnes of asians who are great at social settings. Just like I've met tonnes who aren't. Just like I've met tonnes of (black|white|hispanic|etcs) ...

I have noticed that asians engineers in particular, in a corporate setting, tend towards "work hard + wait for reward" strategy. Maybe it's the intersection of what draws us to engineering and upbringing that results in this?

But yeah, to say it's genetic is silly :)

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#73

I think the Australian system is fairer, where university entrance is determined almost solely by the results of our SAT equivalent and our final year of high school in a largely automated matter. Universities don't even know the race of applicants (although they do know if the applicant is a member of the underrepresented Aboriginal minority).

That would only be fairer if everyone has the same level of access to education up to that point. I don't know anything about the Australian school systems, but I know for sure that is not the case in the U.S.

this can be corrected for to some extent by weighting exam scores based on school/region/socioeconomic status. that would be fairer and more transparent than the current system used by elite universities in america.

the ability to develop an "interesting" application is of course strongly influenced by family background and finances...

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the horse's mouth: “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who get in. Faust's top t…

in other words, use unclear and vague criteria to judge admissions that just happen to massively disadvantage asian americans. it's strange that Faust is not condemned for her absurd and racist suggestion that asian american applicants are on average much less "interesting" people.

"All these Asian applicants look the same..."

Seems to be her meta-message.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#75
>Thanks to such pressures and hard work, many Asian-Americans do end up in top universities—but not as many as their high-school performance would seem to merit. Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians’ soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were (see chart).

The picture painted by this article of the difficulties (or lack thereof) faced by whites in securing admission to elite private universities like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia is in stark contrast to the one painted by Ron Unz three years ago in his thorough analysis of university admissions policies.

While Unz did indeed find ample evidence of quotas restricting the admission of Asians, he also found evidence of what appears to be affirmative action favoring Jews:

>Most of the other Ivy League schools appear to follow a fairly similar trajectory. Between 1980 and 2011, the official figures indicate that non-Jewish white enrollment dropped by 63 percent at Yale, 44 percent at Princeton, 52 percent at Dartmouth, 69 percent at Columbia, 62 percent at Cornell, 66 percent at Penn, and 64 percent at Brown. If we confine our attention to the last decade or so, the relative proportion of college-age non-Jewish whites enrolled at Yale has dropped 23 percent since 2000, with drops of 28 percent at Princeton, 18 percent at Dartmouth, 19 percent at Columbia and Penn, 24 percent at Cornell, and 23 percent at Brown. For most of these universities, non-white groups have followed a mixed pattern, mostly increasing but with some substantial drops. I have only located yearly Jewish enrollment percentages back to 2006, but during the six years since then, there is a uniform pattern of often substantial rises: increases of roughly 25 percent at Yale, 45 percent at Columbia, 10 percent at Cornell, 15 percent at Brown, and no declines anywhere.

Read the rest here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...

Despite Unz's piece being nearly three years old, the issue of Jewish over-representation at these elite private universities has gone completely undiscussed in the wider media, even in the context of Asian quotas, and outlets like the Economist continue to point the finger at whites and whites alone.

Similar dishonesty is manifest in the discussions of technology's supposed lack of diversity, where it turns out that whites are actually generally underrepresented at major tech companies relative to their proportion of the general population and minorities (non-whites) are therefore by definition collectively overrepresented, despite the continuous rhetoric to the contrary.

For example, at LinkedIn, whites make up only 53% of employees, meaning that minorities are in fact overrepresented, largely due to Asians making up a full 38% of its employees despite being only 4% of the general population: http://blog.linkedin.com/2014/06/12/linkedins-workforce-dive...

Yahoo! is borderline majority-minority, yet it too supposedly lacks diversity: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/06/17/yahoo-lack-of-...

Asians apparently only count as diverse and minorities sometimes, when acknowledging them as such won't refute a particular anti-white narrative the media is intent on spreading.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title may refer asians as a minority. However, while asians definitely aren't a minority in the context of the world, they still are a minority in the context of the united states and Europe. All of that, however, is completely irrelevant of the issue. What is the issue? Vanity? No. The issue is racism. When a race delivers quantitative metrics that beats other races out of the water, what does it mean? When blac…

I think that's a bit literal. No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are different. They should be 'treated' equally is the thing we are taught. We all have our unique genetic advantages and disadvantages, but there shouldn't be social disadvantage based on genetics. It is good we are taught this, because it requires social change. Also to answer your points directly, they do not at…

> No one thinks all races are equal in a genetic sense, it is obvious they are different.

I don't find that at all obvious.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in other words, use unclear and vague criteria to judge admissions that just happen to massively disadvantage asian americans. it's strange that Faust is not condemned for her absurd and racist suggestion that asian american applicants are on average much less "interesting" people.

"All these Asian applicants look the same..." Seems to be her meta-message.

"All these Asians look the same..."

Another win for casual racism.

College admissions could really do with some sort of objective criteria. Because yeah, obviously human foibles always creep in.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#78
post #57
post #16

A really good point noted in this article, and ignored in the comments, is that of the 'bamboo ceiling.' Yes, there are lots of Asians in tech. But they are generally programmers and rarely in managerial positions.

As a white in tech, I sometimes sense that I'm being discriminated against by Asian / Asian-American hiring managers. For instance, I've never been offered a position by an Asian, whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non-Asian. What kind of concerns me is that so many of the big tech companies have disproportionately more Asians, and many Asians cultures are known to be as racist or more racist. Unlike Amer…

> I've never been offered a position by an Asian

so... this feels like discrimination, which is understandable.

> whereas I'm rarely not offered a position by a non-Asian.

... but does this feel like preferential treatment? because that's the logic you are presenting here.

"when i don't get hired, it's because of discrimination. when i do get hired, it's because i'm a good hire, not because someone else was discriminated against to hire me."

this is why these discussions are meaningless. there's no way of knowing why you did or didn't get hired. yet another reason to run your own company.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the horse's mouth: “We could fill our class twice over with valedictorians,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival, sponsored by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, on Monday. That means admissions officers rely on intangibles like interesting essays or particularly unusual recommendations to decide who comprises the 5.9 percent of applicants who get in. Faust's top t…

in other words, use unclear and vague criteria to judge admissions that just happen to massively disadvantage asian americans. it's strange that Faust is not condemned for her absurd and racist suggestion that asian american applicants are on average much less "interesting" people.

That's a rather pithy way to interpret what was said. Here's an alternate interpretation: be different from all the other applicants. If you have the same grades, the same extracurriculars, and the same things to talk about in an essay, you're not going to be different from everyone else and thus won't get in. And that's the nature of being different - you can't quantify it until you see it.

Having gone to a high-percentage Asian high school, I can tell you that traditional Asian parents mostly push their kids to do a limited set of things (high academic scores, orchestra, etc.), which can easily lead to a homogeneous pool of applicants.

Faust is saying that if you want your kid to get into Harvard, you should instead encourage them to do things that set them apart from the thousands of other smart kids applying. Build an airplane, climb a famous mountain, invent something, be a sailor, race sled dogs, etc. Those are the things that make an applicant stand out.

Re: The model minority is losing patience

#80
One reason that Asians outperform other racial groups in the United States is overlooked in the article: the difficulty of immigration. Most whites and blacks are born within the US, and Hispanics are either born or move into the US by simply crossing a land border. For Asians to come to the US, they have to cross the Pacific Ocean. In order to do that, they have to be either rich (at least middle class), highly educated, or extremely adventurous and self motivating. The Pacific Ocean filters out many would-be Asian Americans that would have lowered the average of the "modelness" of the group.
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