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Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

nytimes.com

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Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#141

Post by Symmetry »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #50

A lot of commenters here are demonstrating that they do not understand the difference between racism and racial discrimination. Racsim is the systematic oppression of people. It's carried out in instutions, culture, and processes: individual people do not perform racsim. (Individuals can discriminate.) Racism depends on country / region. In the US, racism exits against black and brown people. It is a system set up fo…

There's a tendency in many fields to take a piece of jargon specific to that field and insist that non-members of that field also use it the same way. Forming jargon is healthy in a field but trying to enforce it outside the field isn't. A biologist who tries to correct you when you talk about an octopus having tentacles is wrong to do so. And a critical race theorist correcting you when you say that James Strom Thurmond was racist is equally wrong.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#142

Post by univalent »

jessaustin wrote: post #135
univalent wrote: post #128

I think the problem lies with SATs/GREs/GMATs. The tests (especially SAT, GRE) are ludicrously simple. I'm your run of the mill IIT-an and placed 98th and 99th percentile without breaking a sweat in the GRE when it came time for grad school. I think I maxed 2 of the 3 sections and was 98th percentile in both. What's the point of a test like that? Thousands of people max/get to the highest percentile and it becomes us…

The SAT, which is the more relevant test for this discussion, was intentionally made easier years ago, so that it would be better suited to measuring the vast majority of USA college applicants. That made it less suited to Harvard's needs, but not as much as one might think. Plenty of Harvard students had less than the maximum SAT scores. Some might prefer that admission be based solely on test scores, but that is no…

So maybe have 2 tests. A second one that is harder and spreads students out more. I was just questioning the value of a test that 'normalizes' student scores having no distribution at the top end.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#143

Post by Jyaif »

"Harvard does not discriminate against applicants from any group, and will continue to vigorously defend the legal right of every college and university to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions"

translation: "We don't discriminate, but we discriminate."

How can somebody write something that stupid?

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#144

Post by thaumasiotes »

cma wrote: post #35
samangan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all the ivy leagues have in person interviews... Also are people supposed to fake their names?

Is Elizabeth Warren a traditional indigenous name?

No, but then again neither is "Sitting Bull".

English wasn't common in pre-Columbian America.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#145

Post by jim-jim-jim »

40acres wrote: post #7

This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion. We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools. We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school…

I was a high school teacher for half a decade (not exactly veteran status, I know) and I've kind of soured on the very concept of education. Both affirmative action and the general push for increased funding suffer from the same fundamental flaw of "fostering opportunity." Even if every last student in the US were educated to the point of genius, at the end of the day they'd still be let loose in an economy where wealth is derived from ownership, not brainpower. Devoting so many resources towards ensuring everybody is as intelligent as Bill Gates is a fool's errand when only a sliver of a sliver can ever be Bill Gates.

The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#146

Post by seatdrummer »

40acres wrote: post #119
themgt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article/issue is about non-white applicants (Asian Americans) who are being discriminated against in the admissions process. And not just at Harvard but other elite schools, med schools, etc. It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test sc…

Solid point, I really feel for Asian kids and parents who are being discriminated against. The reason why these discussions usually end up in a discussion of black v. white is because (in my opinion) that "struggle" affects every aspect of American life, whether or not you are aware of it or have any influence. Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape pol…

Many proponents of AA may admit that things are near fair now, but they used to be much worse. so AA this is just reparations for the past injustice. If that is the case then fixing underlying issues would have less of an effect than we would expect.

It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.

A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.

Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]

0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#147

Post by Aunche »

nostrademons wrote: post #47
40acres wrote: post #7

This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion. We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools. We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school…

"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?" Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enri…

That's how the school district I grew up in ended up with a large population of high expectation Chinese parents. Parents with young kids move there because they hear that some Chinese students from that school district got accepted to Ivy League schools. The children of these high expectation parents inevitably also disproportionately get accepted into top tier universities, which further perpetuates the cycle.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#148

Post by thaumasiotes »

creaghpatr wrote: post #42
aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about not discriminating at all ?

Personally, I'd love to see Harvard set aside 75% of their spots for a lottery of students who meet an insanely high threshold (98% percentile in the SAT, for example, or some other objective measurement), and then use the other 25% for athletes, legacies, diversity, etc. That way you may not get in, but you know you won't get cut because you got assigned an arbitrary 'personality' score if you scored high enough; en…

> I'd love to see Harvard set aside 75% of their spots for a lottery of students who meet an insanely high threshold (98% percentile in the SAT, for example

Insanely high threshold? That's... a very low bar. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-... (no idea how good this source is) shows roughly 4 million births a year. A 98th percentile cutoff would admit 80,000 kids per year to Harvard. By contrast, according to https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics (hopefully a strong source), the class of 2021 admitted 2037 people of which 1687 enrolled.

You would hope that 100% of Harvard admits would have 98th percentile (or, really, better) scores, but they don't.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#149

Post by nostrademons »

2bitencryption wrote: post #99
nostrademons wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?" Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enri…

Anecdote time: The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class. As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school s…

I was looking more for studies than anecdotes, like the one mirajshah posted.

My anecdote is that I went to a charter school that served 23 different communities across basically half the state of Massachusetts. Median family income from these communities ranged from $54K (Leominster) to $202K (Lincoln). And there were very noticeable differences in both behavior and academic achievement between students from the Fitchburg/Leominster/Ayer region (poorer and more blue-collar) vs. wealthy Boston exurbs like Lincoln, Carlisle, or Bolton. Almost everyone at the school was white, so this wasn't much of a conflating factor (aside from some Asians & blacks adopted into wealthy white families, and half-Chinese like me who also were in relatively well-off and well-educated families).

Granted, it's a charter school, and my class was the first year they were legal in Massachusetts. This tends to exacerbate differences because you don't go to an experimental charter school unless you're unhappy with your existing school, and top reasons for being unhappy include falling behind classmates or being so far ahead that you're bored. But interestingly, a large number of those who struggled from poor districts went back to their home district, perhaps because they struggled even more when going to a school with a wide mix of backgrounds. This despite my school having a radically individualistic instruction method (every student had a personalized learning plan) and an enviable 1:12 teacher:student ratio.

Re: Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

#150

Post by thaumasiotes »

creaghpatr wrote: post #5

Notably, the comments section of the article is overwhelmingly in favor of schools not discriminating based on the color of the applicant's skin.

> the color of the applicant's skin

I feel like a lot of people use this phrase to emphasize... something... without thinking about it.

Asian skin color isn't all that different from white skin color, particularly among the Asians that schools are trying to keep out.

Can you tell the difference between an Asian and a white by looking? Easily, but skin color is certainly not where you'd look first, or fifth, or tenth.

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