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‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

nytimes.com

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Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#211

Post by lovich »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #108
fmajid wrote: post #94

They just repurposed a system that was designed in the 1930s to keep Jews out, to keeping Asians out. The smoking gun is how the admissions committee's ratings for “personality” differ so much from alumni volunteer interviewers.

Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.

Is aiming for a middle class lifestyle ambitionless? Modern America is showing that it takes concentrates effort to maintain a middle class or it dissolves away

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#212

Post by totalZero »

betterunix2 wrote: post #128
IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

"What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?" Sorry but what makes you think students with stellar grades have no social life? My memory of my four years at an "elite" NYC high school is that the students with the best grades (I was not even close) were just as social as the rest of us and participated in plenty of after school clubs and whatnot (more than…

Investment banking is a highly social business. Everyone lies and there is a lot of manipulation, but social skills help you navigate that world.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#213

Post by totalZero »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #171
IvyAdmisions wrote: post #68

From an earlier thread: I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies. The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply. You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect tes…

i wanted to upvote your comment until i noticed that you spelled your handle "IvyAdmisions" instead of "IvyAdmissions." you're clearly a very talented individual with relevant experience, but i feel your ideas are best expressed on one of the lesser comment boards, perhaps a Yahoo forum or some place on Google+. thank you for your interest in posting a comment here. best wishes for your future.

Lol. Who cares about the spelling? A rose by any other name still has experience and something thoughtful to share.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#214

Post by IvyAdmisions »

danieltillett wrote: post #90
bigcostooge wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can answer that by asking yourself another question: who at Harvard understands supply and demand?

A lottery is such an obvious solution that we can only conclude that the people who developed the Harvard admission process are irredeemable racists.

A lottery among the academically qualified students would produce a class with many fewer African American, Native American and Latino students which would be politically untenable. Those cohorts score much worse than caucasians and asians on standardized tests.

The data is pretty shocking and closely guarded by the testing people who believe they'd be asked to shut down altogether if it got out.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#215

Post by lovich »

IvyAdmisions wrote: post #107
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats wrong with one or two activities? I did design build fly in college, and it took up every single moment of time I wasn't studying or working.

The kids winning the "at large" bids have 6-12 extracurriculars and standout in many of them OR they have 1-2 and are distinguished in them at the state or national level. So if you had a project that ate up all your time like that, we'd look to see if you'd won any sort of national or state recognition for it. If not then it wasn't going to help the cause.

How does a kid realistically do 6-12 extracurriculars, school, sleeping, and eating in a 24 hour day?

If the admissions departments are just looking for higher numbers every year without even considering if they are plausible, that sounds like they are just asking for resume padding or fraud

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#216

Post by taormina »

nindalf wrote: post #134
danieltillett wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lottery is such an obvious solution that we can only conclude that the people who developed the Harvard admission process are irredeemable racists.

A lottery appears to be a reasonable solution but it has a problem. The admissions system has two objectives - selecting students according to criteria that Harvard deems important and second, giving the public perception of selecting quality students. If it was publicly known that getting was a lottery, then the perception of quality takes a hit.

I mean, if we really have this many "perfect on paper and equivalent" students applying, toss out everyone who was less than perfect and then run the lottery on the cream of the crop.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#217

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

totalZero wrote: post #213
HillaryBriss wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wanted to upvote your comment until i noticed that you spelled your handle "IvyAdmisions" instead of "IvyAdmissions." you're clearly a very talented individual with relevant experience, but i feel your ideas are best expressed on one of the lesser comment boards, perhaps a Yahoo forum or some place on Google+. thank you for your interest in posting a comment here. best wishes for your future.

Lol. Who cares about the spelling? A rose by any other name still has experience and something thoughtful to share.

You don’t find it suspicious that a supposed Ivy League admissions officer doesn’t know how to spell “admissions”?

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#218

Post by tomp »

forapurpose wrote: post #205
tomp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they find that more women than men leave to start families They're definitely justified in filtering out people (men and women) who are more likely to leave to start familier, and prefer those who won't. This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.

> This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such. There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives; they are almost victims of circumstance with no agency of their own. Ma…

> There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives

No that's just your interpretation.

> there are financial incentives for murder too

Indeed, whici is why the society introduced significant non-financial (and financial) disincentives for murder to counteract them.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#219

Post by pitt1980 »

Aunche wrote: post #179
speedplane wrote: post #23

I understand the outrage of racial discrimination in this case, but I'm saddened over the lack of outrage over Harvard's self-described "Z-List" students who get into the school solely based on their family's money and power. No one is suing Harvard over the fact that you can buy your way in. We've come to accept that money and legacy power provides access and opportunity regardless of merit. If that more fundamental…

If you're buying your way into Harvard, you aren't taking a spot from someone else. You're essentially paying for a new spot to be created.

This assumes that the space at Harvard is currently constricted by the budget rather than other factors.

That doesn't appear to be a good assumption given Harvard's current budget situation.

And really begs the question, given Harvard's current budget situations, why haven't their practices created significantly more spots.

Re: ‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions

#220

Post by gaius »

cowpewter wrote: post #146
gaius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-white who doesn’t fit into any of the pre-defined buckets, race-specific programmes have always bothered me too. I never play the race card to gain advantage but hypothetically if I’m as generally discriminated against as a member of group X but there’s a quota for X that I’m not eligible for then I’ve been double-discriminated against.

I've never thought about it that way, but as a mixed-race white/asian, I wonder if including that information rather than just letting them assume "white" from my name actually hurt me rather than helped me when I applied to (and did not get accepted to) the ivy league 20 years ago.

Oops I seem to have strayed off the narrative - can always tell when the West Coast comes online, regular as clockwork
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