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Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

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Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#51

Post by fraudsyndrome »

codedokode wrote: post #37

> Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits as ... “attractive person to be with,” is “widely respected,”... Why is such an evaluation is even necessary? What is its purpose? To give higher scores to one's relatives and friends? And how do you measure the wideness of respect? Well, if it is completely…

I reckon it's to purposely give them a "reason" not to accept Asian Americans.

People like to believe we live in a meritocracy and Asian Americans as a group did better than other races - so they put in "well-roundedness" which ends up being super subjective but a reason for them to deny others based on other factors not relating to scores.

The respect part is a cop-out as it plays on peoples bias. This is where social stereotypes of groups as a whole tend to work it's magic. Asian Americans are seen as "not able to lead", "worker bees" etc. Even though there is no objective measure for that, just peoples bias and this leads them to apply certain characteristics to groups (based on names/photos) no matter what their application looks like.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#52

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

acomjean wrote: post #42
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societall…

Harvard is the position of Ranking and admitting students. They have a fair number of very high scoring academic performers so they use some other metics. They use 4 criteria: Academic, extracurricular, personal, and athletic. Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file..…

Suppose the application was fully race-blind, and Harvard could rank all applicants on the four criteria you listed (academic, extracurricular, personal, athletic), and derive an overall score for each applicant.

I would claim that this score would strongly suffer from racial bias. A cohort admitted based on this score would look like a cohort where certain racial groups historically disadvantaged would appear to have been directly disadvantaged by the admissions choices, despite the process being fully race-blind.

And the same for religious affiliation, gender, able-bodiedness, and various other designations.

So while nobody consciously evaluating admission criteria would have ever considered e.g. race, it nonetheless would have been a major determining factor in the decisions.

The question is if society does not want that outcome, then what steps is the university allowed to take to fix it? It seems explicitly considering e.g. race ahead of time, to ensure an acceptable cohort demographic distribution, is not OK. So then what else?

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#53

Post by rayiner »

gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

Race blindness isn’t the end goal, the goal is racial equality. Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Because we must assume black people are intrinsically just as capable as white people, the goal must be to drive that disparity to zero.

With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable.

History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”

EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#54

Post by skookumchuck »

ekianjo wrote: post #33
gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

> As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial It did always use to be like that. In the 70s and 80s there was a focus back on individuals regardless of their race, gender or origin. This trend to put quotas goes with the wave of political correctness that started pretty much in the early 90s.

Affirmative Action started much earlier than that.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#55

Post by alienallys »

seibelj wrote: post #14

An anecdote about the evolving value of higher education: I received a resume recently for a junior software engineer role. Under the 'Education' section was a paragraph that listed a prestigious university and entrance year, but under it stated something like, "I was accepted to this university, but rather than attend and go over $100,000 in debt, I taught myself computer science and coding for 3 years with online t…

This might be possible for probably computer science education, if you want to be a lawyer, banker, architect college education is MUST

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#56

Post by gizmo686 »

fraudsyndrome wrote: post #49
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #43

Thought experiment: if you made all admission decisions by lottery, by randomly admitting a previously decided, fixed number of n applicants out of all valid applications received, and the resulting cohort of admitted individuals was later found to significantly differ in demographic composition from both the local and nationwide composition of population, would that be discriminatory? If not, would it at least be pr…

Not American but wasn't the goal of affirmative action to give access to opportunities from the majority (white-Americans) to the minorities? I'll try and dig it up when I can but I do remember reading that as a result, Asian Americans got shafted the most (they are still a minority) while white women benefited the most from affirmative action. People genuinely believe the model minority myth of Asians/Asian American…

>Not American but wasn't the goal of affirmative action to give access to opportunities from the majority (white-Americans) to the minorities?

Officially speaking, no, as that would be blatantly unconstitutional if done by the government (including public universities), or illegal if done by private organizations.

The official justification was that having a diverse student body provided a benefit to the entire student body; so an underrepresented student actually provided more value than an otherwise equal over represented student.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#57

Post by eganist »

fraudsyndrome wrote: post #45
eganist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included. The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially…

They do but it goes deeper as people tend to stereotype Asians as being privileged as if they are a monolithic group, yet you have those (mainly from South East Asia) coming from low socio-economic backgrounds being lumped in as privileged. People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.

You're entirely right. The anti-Asian bias would probably (as suggested by the article) also impact populations with the same socioeconomic detriments, examples of whom can be seen among Vietnam War refugees and subsequent South-East Asian asylum-seekers/immigrants more generally, as you suggested.

So by penalizing the whole band of Asian races to even out admission, a whole bunch of materially disadvantaged Asian populations end up less favored than their African counterparts.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#58

Post by PakG1 »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #44
gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

Edit - Could I ask why I was downvoted? I'd like to know where I went wrong here. Forgive the question, but that is a general statement to a specific case, and I am having trouble seeing the clear path between your statement and the article. Can you elaborate? Are you taking the position that any and all attempts to shape admissions into universities based on race are misguided and regressive? The specific case here…

I read an academic paper yesterday that read exactly like you. It's crazy hard to parse the words without my eyes glazing over. I fear universities try to teach students to sound clever and intellectual, not clear and comprehensible. I just had to vent because I have to slog through a large number of academic papers over the next few weeks and if they're all like this, I might weep from agony.

Besides that, parsing your logic, I think you completely missed parent's point.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#59

Post by snomad »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18
gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societall…

> there is endemic and generational discrimination and privilege issues that can mean even if you truly did not want to make decisions based on race, religion, nationality, etc., you inadvertently did just by using proxies for societal scale discrimination or disadvantage in those categories.

Agreed. However, it seems to rest on confusing race for class. How about we just focus on class and get all the benefits (pick up the poorest; policy that attempts to correct those suffering generational discrimination) without the negatives that come with race based policy.

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