How is this different from the secret Asian admission quota Harvard and the other elite US universities have?
Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
61–70 of 135 posts
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#62I think the US unofficial quotas against Asians are somewhat similar to the Soviet ones against Jews, though not so spitefully motivated. Essentially, it boils down to "We don't want our own kids to have to compete on even terms with these hard-working, incredibly studious outsiders."
Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but: 40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1] 23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2] 26% of MIT students are.[3] In other words…
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Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#63I think the US unofficial quotas against Asians are somewhat similar to the Soviet ones against Jews, though not so spitefully motivated. Essentially, it boils down to "We don't want our own kids to have to compete on even terms with these hard-working, incredibly studious outsiders."
Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but: 40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1] 23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2] 26% of MIT students are.[3] In other words…
Under ethnicity-agnostic admissions standards, those percentages may be even higher.
Note that Stanford's and MIT's percentatges are notable lower than UC's. Why?
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#64What's interesting is that according to several narratives from those close to the central committee under Stalin, anti-semitic policies in the Soviet Union started from geo-political maneuvering rather than any inherent personal sense of racism. Sudoplatov, an NKVD agent who worked for Beria, wrote in his memoirs that the original Soviet post-war plans were actually to establish a Jewish republic in the Crimea , wit…
The Crimea was one idea, so was a semi-autonomous state out near Birobidzhan.
The problem with saying that it was paranoia that some people in the Jewish community were trying to undermine the Russian government, is that, especially after the fall of the USSR, right wing Jews have openly boasted about how they HAD been working to undermine the Russian government, and were using the Jewish community in the USSR to do so. The documentary record of this is extensive in not only Hebrew but English. On the one hand, they brag about how they subverted and undermined the government - then on the other hand, they talk about how crazy and paranoid the USSR was for thinking there were plots against them from the Jewish community.
Many Jewish people bragging about how they helped bring down the USSR kind of undermines these arguments about how the idea that some members of the Jewish community were working to subvert the government is crazy. Because nowadays, they openly admit it.
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#65I think the US unofficial quotas against Asians are somewhat similar to the Soviet ones against Jews, though not so spitefully motivated. Essentially, it boils down to "We don't want our own kids to have to compete on even terms with these hard-working, incredibly studious outsiders."
Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but: 40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1] 23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2] 26% of MIT students are.[3] In other words…
Asians may be over-represented relative to their proportion in the population at large, but the question you should be asking is "are Asian applicants over- or under-represented among applicants with certain grades and test scores?"
This is a widely studied and easily Google-able topic. Private schools discriminate against Asian Americans is through the combination of Affirmative Action (favors non-Asian students), athletics (favors non-Asian students - completely bizarre to non-Americans) and legacy admissions (favors non-Asian students).
I attended a famous public high school where Asian girls (officially) had to meet a much higher grades+scores standard than others. Many lawsuits, so I'm not sure whether this is still in place.
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#66Posted last time[1] one of these stories came around, comment applicable here: As a preamble there most definitely existed anti-semitism in Soviet Union. I am a Russian living in the US with Jewish family in Russia. This is a throw away account. With that said, stories of anti-semitism told by Russian Jews in US should not be taken at face value. These folks are subject to a very strong selection bias. Most of them c…
As a counter point, I came to the United States in 1996 -- my dad and brother had H1-B visas and my mother and I had H4 visas. These are all non-immigrant issues, much less non-refugee. We have since obtained green cards and naturalized. My grandparents resisted coming to the United States until few years ago (when my grandmother passed away and we had to bring my grandfather over so that our family could take care of him) and warned me against talking to any "refugees" when I would come to the US.
I'll mention my grandparents perspective as it's not well known in the US but describes many Russian Jews accurately: essentially, they were culturally Jewish, but strongly secular. While they supported Israel the country (as they saw it as more civilized than its neighbors), they rejected the Hebrew language (preferring Yiddish) and the concept of Zionism (they rejected it as a form of nationalism, which they opposed having witnessed it Ukraine and Baltics).
Yet our own family's stories of anti-Semitism are very similar to those the "refugee" families we later befriended (contrary to my grandparents' advice) told us. It turned all out of them were just as secular (you can have our salo when you pry it from our cold dead hands...) as us, so it can't be ascribed to general anti-religious discrimination that happened during the Soviet times.
Keep in mind that today Jewish population in Russia is minuscule and -- due to greater openness and multi-way competition (between Israel, United States, Western Europe, etc...) for intelligentsia -- anti-Semitism in academia has gone down a great deal. I don't think that you can use the experiences of your Jewish family in today's Russia (which is effectively a different country even when compared against Russia of 1996) to come to any conclusions about anti-Semitism during the Soviet days.
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#67I think the US unofficial quotas against Asians are somewhat similar to the Soviet ones against Jews, though not so spitefully motivated. Essentially, it boils down to "We don't want our own kids to have to compete on even terms with these hard-working, incredibly studious outsiders."
Can you explain about these "unofficial quotas against Asians"? I'm genuinely curious if this actually exists. Note that less than 5% of Americans are Asian, but: 40% of UC students are asian (and it's higher at Cal, UCLA and UCSD (i.e. the better schools)).[1] 23% of Stanford students are asian (probably higher since that excludes "international" and "decline to state").[2] 26% of MIT students are.[3] In other words…
Yes, indeed, those schools don't seem to have a quota.
However, this study appears to show a quota in place (starting around 2003) at the Ivy League schools.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#68I read down to the first picture then got a TLDR sense. I did a find for "Jew" and lo and behold, this was the "surprise" climax of this melodrama. For one thing, before World War II, there was a Jewish quota in US Ivy League schools. Why focus close to home in 1940 USA though when you can hear a yarn from 1970 Uzbekistan, about as physically far from the majority of HN readers as possible? Secondly, before World War…
> Jews in the USSR would go to a top flight school in the USSR, get their diploma, then immediately go to Israel or the West and get paid a high salary.
Complete and utter anti-Semitic horse shit: my dad was prohibited from as much as leaving the Soviet Union to attend a scientific conference until 1989. Even so, he still did not want to leave the USSR or the post-USSR state until it was clear (after Soviet Union's collapse) that economic opportunities for our family were much better in the US (we finally moved in 1996).
Believe it or not, leaving everything behind and immigrating to a country with a completely different economic and political system, a different language, and often a need to work in a completely different industry is hard and often the last resort. My dad researched mathematics at a university in USSR, but that was simply not an option for him in US -- he ended working as a grossly underpaid engineering manager in a startup; yet he was lucky -- friend's dad had a Ph.D. in Economics, but ended up doing menial labour and later started a moving company. Going from masters/Ph.D. and "intelligentsia" to menial or clerical labour was the rule for immigrants, not the exception.
> Where could Jews get free education in the US? I'd like to get a free education at a top school in the US.
Except that while university education in USSR was cheap, it was not actually completely free: you could receive a stipend to help (if you qualify), but it was not guaranteed.
All Ivy Leagues provide need-based scholarships. Top-tier public universities can be extremely cheap (e.g., UT Austin) and many offer full-ride scholarships. Getting a STEM degree free of charge is very well possible in the United States.
Not to the mention, the idea that if a state pays for someone's education they subsequently own them is quite repugnant.
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, how big a problem is antisemitism in Russia, in your opinion?
I don't know. My well-off Jewish relatives in Russia don't report discrimination, but that I believe is a factor of their position or demeanor and not absence of antisemitism. Since you asked "how big", I would say greater than zero but less than discrimination against certain other groups. These other groups include Chechens, other people from the Caucuses, people from the *stans, and gays. People in these groups ar…
>Additionally 50% of the population are subjected to sexism to a significant degree.
Agreed. Between the military draft and pandemic levels of deaths of young Russian males it's hard to think otherwise.
Re: Soviet College Admission — My Dad's Story (1970)
#70Such quotas were also in USA. Isaac Asimov originally applied to medical university, but was not accepted for being jew. Hi started writing sci-fi instead.
>Such quotas were also in USA. Are you sure about that past tense? http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-...
US system is broken anyway. Even asking for racial origin on application form should be illegal. Here in Europe it is banned since Hitler.