Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
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Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#2"It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale."
It's odd that affirmative action is basically basing everything on color of your skin and not the content of your character. I was under the impression that it was supposed to prevent this.
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#3I wonder what the basis of their complaint will be considering that race-based preferences in admissions has already been upheld in the US supreme court.
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#4"It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale." It's odd that affirmative action is basically basing everything on color…
The entire point of affirmative action was to provide unearned opportunities based on the color of your skin. With the theory being that over time it would help boost the well being of minorities (at the time mostly African Americans). That by forcing open opportunities, the next generation would do better, and the generation after that would do even better, and so on.
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#5Yeesh. The basis of their complaint seems to be rooted in test score (and possibly grade analysis) but they neglect the increased homogeneity that it represents. Asians may have a tighter distribution of metric based qualities with a mean at the higher end of the spectrum when you cut by race but it's quite possible that there are other deficits that cannot easily be highlighted through a metric based comparison alone.
It's hard to form a full opinion without the type of information you'd only have access to as a member of the admissions comittee.
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#6Have to wonder if it forms a feedback loop:
- Asians are getting higher scores than others, so they're required to get higher scores to be admitted.
- Parents of the next generation know that their children need even higher scores, so they force their children to work continuously harder.
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#7The complaint argues that elite schools “that use race-neutral admissions” have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard.
Interestingly, Ron Unz did a lengthy expose on this issue in 2012, and arrived at similar conclusions: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-...
He found ample evidence of anti-Asian quotas at Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions, and perhaps more controversial, evidence of what appears to be a form of affirmative action in favor of Jews:
In fact, Harvard reported that 45.0 percent of its undergraduates in 2011 were white Americans, but since Jews were 25 percent of the student body, the enrollment of non-Jewish whites might have been as low as 20 percent, though the true figure was probably somewhat higher.51 The Jewish levels for Yale and Columbia were also around 25 percent, while white Gentiles were 22 percent at the former and just 15 percent at the latter. The remainder of the Ivy League followed this same general pattern.
Jews comprise a mere 2% of the population yet a massive 25% of the student body at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. The contrast with Caltech and UC schools with more merit-based admissions processes is quite stark:
But Caltech’s current undergraduates are just 5.5 percent Jewish, and the figure seems to have been around this level for some years; meanwhile, Asian enrollment is 39 percent, or seven times larger. It is intriguing that the school which admits students based on the strictest, most objective academic standards has by a very wide margin the lowest Jewish enrollment for any elite university.
Let us next turn to the five most selective campuses of the University of California system, whose admissions standards shifted substantially toward objective meritocracy following the 1996 passage of Prop. 209. The average Jewish enrollment is just over 8 percent, or roughly one-third that of the 25 percent found at Harvard and most of the Ivy League, whose admissions standards are supposedly far tougher. Meanwhile, some 40 percent of the students on these UC campuses are Asian, a figure almost five times as high. Once again, almost no elite university in the country has a Jewish enrollment as low as the average for these highly selective UC campuses
(Unz himself is Jewish, in case you're wondering.)
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#8reminded - our professors at the University love their Asian students (Russian Universities got a lot foreign Asian(China) students in the recent decade) because, as one professor put it, "they are hard-working and eager to learn, not lazy arrogant bums like you people were back then".
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#9Isn't Harvard allowed to do this as a private institution? What's the education department going to do about it?
Re: Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans
#10Have to wonder if it forms a feedback loop: - Asians are getting higher scores than others, so they're required to get higher scores to be admitted. - Parents of the next generation know that their children need even higher scores, so they force their children to work continuously harder.
I think the problem is that in addition to affirmative action, asians are being compared against other asians rather than against the candidate pool at large (thus effectively having quotas).