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What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

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Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#11

Post by wickedchicken »

up_and_up wrote: post #6

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.

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

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#12

Post by jsnk »

wickedchicken wrote: post #8

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…

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?

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#13

Post by jsnk »

JDShu wrote: post #10

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.

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?

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#14

Post by jsnk »

jibjaba wrote: post #5

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 oth…

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.

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#16

Post by JDShu »

jsnk wrote: post #13
JDShu wrote: post #10

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.

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?

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.

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#17

Post by dvdhsu »

neilparikh wrote: post #4

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 th…

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.

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#18

Post by jaems33 »

yosho wrote: post #7

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 jus…

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.

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#19

Post by [deleted] »

jaems33 wrote: post #18
yosho wrote: post #7

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 jus…

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.

[deleted]

Re: What Harvard Owes Its Top Asian-American Applicants: Stephen Hsu

#20

Post by ww520 »

jaems33 wrote: post #18
yosho wrote: post #7

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 jus…

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.

Asian demographic is 4.7% of U.S. population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

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