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Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

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Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#111

Post by patio11 »

BlackJack wrote: post #25

Full disclaimer: I'm a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions office. I'm also friends with the girl photographed, but that's irrelevant :) This is roughly how admissions works at Yale: 1. An officer reviews your application for 20-25 minutes. 1a. Some kids are clear rejects. 1500/2400 SAT and a 2.7 GPA, with no activities usually does the trick…

Yale has an explicit, declared policy to discriminate by race in admissions and hiring decisions. Sorry, it felt at least a little relevant towards the question of whether Yale racially discriminates.

You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#112

Post by mikeknoop »

patio11 wrote: post #111
BlackJack wrote: post #25

Full disclaimer: I'm a sophomore at Yale, my adviser last year was an admissions officer, and a friend of mine works in the admissions office. I'm also friends with the girl photographed, but that's irrelevant :) This is roughly how admissions works at Yale: 1. An officer reviews your application for 20-25 minutes. 1a. Some kids are clear rejects. 1500/2400 SAT and a 2.7 GPA, with no activities usually does the trick…

Yale has an explicit, declared policy to discriminate by race in admissions and hiring decisions. Sorry, it felt at least a little relevant towards the question of whether Yale racially discriminates. You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.

Don't most admissions discriminate? For example, http://yale.lawschoolnumbers.com/stats/1011/

Play around with the year/school. Clicking on data points shows self-reported profile information. It's pretty clear there is a shifted standard in many cases.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#113

Post by fatjokes »

gujk wrote: post #79
localhost3000 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'best student' != 'best score/gpa'

Thank you. It is insane how many people think college admissions is the official scoreboard oof high school, and not something to do with choosing students who are well matched to the college.

It's not insane. It's simply objective. How do you define "best match"? The gut feeling of the admissions officer? You need an objective measure.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#114

Post by greiskul »

TheCowboy wrote: post #87

I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter. This entire thread just sounds like privileged or talented people(nothing wrong with being either) fighting over admittance to elite universities. After all, people qualified to get into Yale, and this is a large number of applicants, will still get into a very good university. Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much…

Because their brand CAN be diminished if they start accepting more students. More students need more professors, and it might be hard fighting over who gets to hire the best professors. It might also change the student community. I go to a university that is considered prestigious in my country, and what I like the most about it is how it's so easy to find incredibly smart people on the campus, with which you can have great intellectual discussions. If there were more people, it could be harder to find who these great people are. It's a Brazilian public university, which means it's free, and while recently it was created a quota for black and public school students, the majority of students is accepted in a completely color, name, cultural blind manner.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#115

Post by Duff »

_pius wrote: post #80
tokenadult wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that 0% of MIT admissions is non-academic admits (legacy, recruited athletes, development, under-represented minorities). Is that incorrect? You are thinking of Caltech. MIT, by contrast, very vigorously practices affirmative action by race and ethnicity. (MIT filed "friend of the court" briefs in the last Supreme Court cases about affirmative action in college admission.) http://mitadmissions.org…

You're correct that MIT practices affirmative action, but incorrect that this means they have "non-academic" admits.

"Non-academic" status wouldn't work there anyway. The smartest person I ever met went there, and was in mortal fear of flunking out a few times.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#116

Post by tokenadult »

neutronicus wrote: post #86
jpdoctor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me: I believe in Feyman's day, Jews were fighting a similar problem to Asians now. I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a calibration point. Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota

I remember reading an article in ... I believe it was the New Republic ... that said that the "holistic admissions process" of today, with the essays, activities, etc. supplanted the earlier more test-scores / grades-centric approach at the Ivy League precisely in an attempt to admit fewer Jews.

I remember reading an article . . . that said that the "holistic admissions process" of today, with the essays, activities, etc. supplanted the earlier . . . approach at the Ivy League precisely in an attempt to admit fewer Jews.

The much-cited article on the subject is by Malcolm Gladwell, and was first published in the New Yorker.

http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_10_10_a_admissions.html

The article is a review of a book by Jerome Karable, which gives many details of the history of admission policies at selective United States universities.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#117

Post by ryanwaggoner »

steve-howard wrote: post #110
tokenadult wrote: post #38

"Race/ethnicity unknown" is the fastest-growing category reported for enrolled students in United States colleges and universities, with more than 1 million students so reported to the federal government in the most recent year. http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Programs_and_S... The federal regulations on the subject http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/10190... require all colleges to…

> She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. I doubt there are many young people today who have that kind of dedication. I wish I did.

People rise to the occasion. There isn't much need for that kind of dedication domestically today. As for abroad, most of the thousands killed in various military adventures over the last decade were pretty young. Whether you agree or disagree with the greater view of those adventures, many of those young people gave their lives for what they viewed as something worth dying for.

Disclaimer: I served in the US Navy and have many friends and family members who served or are serving in various branches.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#118

Post by Duff »

reinhardt wrote: post #37
jpdoctor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages. Thank god, I hope it means the world is a different place. First, I'm guessing you're about 30 yo. (Sorry if I'm way off.) When I applied to colleges in late 1981, there were still some dumbass amounts of discrimination for being black. Affirmative action occurred in the 60s/70s to try and rectify some of that. It was a giv…

The more common downside is that some qualified guys are passed up in favor of others that are just "promising" but have the right skin color.

I don't buy that.

Its easy to point out the EAP kid who can't hack it in college. But I've never heard of anyone bemoaning the "qualified" upper-middle class fratboy who flunks out of school in a drunken haze.

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#119

Post by Duff »

nivertech wrote: post #104
dennisgorelik wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. So Bill Nguyen proved that it's possible to self-identify yourself under different race. University Admission Committee may not mind such "self race re-branding" practice too, because university ratios of admitted minorities would be improving as well.

The article talking about high school, not college. Anyway I find, that Americans a little bit confused about things like race, ethnicity and nationality. Asking to fill nationality in official documents is legitimate. Asking for ethnicity is borderline. Asking to fill a race is barbaric.

Have you ever dealt with an academic bureaucracy? Barbarism is a good description!

Re: Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

#120

Post by forensic »

narkee wrote: post #19
BlackJack wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is simply wrong. US Population: White - 72.4 % Black or African American - 12.6 Asian - 4.8 Some other race - 6.2 Source: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf Princeton class profile: African America - 7.4 Asian - 18.6 Hispanic - 7.1 etc. Source: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admi... Asians are "overrepresented minorities", or ORM's, by admission standards because, i…

I understand they're overrepresented. What I meant was why is that a problem? According to the article, that degree of over-representation (relative to population) is below what it would be, given a completely blind admissions process. So why not have 25% asian population? What's the problem? On the other hand, why isn't anyone saying there is a problem with ORM in football?

Basically social power and wealth is distributed in a top-down way based on which school you went to. "grades" don't actually mean anything they're just a social fiction created to justify why some people have greater shares of power/wealth/freedom than others.

Asian families, the pragmatic authoritarians they are, are very good at hacking this system of social sorting. The elite colleges know this. Elite colleges are n the business of creating and maintaining high status in the eyes of society. The highest status people are often not the best education-hackers. Therefore, the elite colleges don't sort solely or even primarily on the basis of grades. They want people who are going to rise to powerful, prominent, high status positions and they accurately recognize that hordes of Asian authoritarian parents are just hacking the system for their family's wealth.

They use racial profiling because it makes sense given their goals. Anyone who tells you it isn't racism is suffering from some kind of American myth of a post racial world.

Caltech is color blind because their goals are different. Caltech is for scientists and so they don't care what race you are. Yale is for leaders and good leaders usually don't get that way by being obedient violinists.

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