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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

#221

Post by hackinthebochs »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #218
hackinthebochs wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. There is no way to quantify leadership potential and so they have to come up with various heuristics. One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Those who are outliers of those groups are likely to have leadership potential: whatever drove them to succeed where others failed in s…

> One heuristic is being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster. That is, group people by various factors such as race, income, region, etc. Then, pray tell, which lack of "being an outlier in some socially/politically relevant cluster" is common to Asian applicants, year after year? I'm sure we would all be fascinated to hear the specific areas in which Asian applicants are failing to match these h…

Your responses seem to indicate you don't understand the points I'm making (or you're just very invested in the narrative you're pushing). It's hard to see what I can say that won't invite a further response such as this.

But to put a very fine point on it, Asians with stellar scores, similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar extra curriculars lack diversity in backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars by definition. There's nothing deeper to be noted about this. Whether Asians that apply to Harvard actually have similar backgrounds, interests and extra curriculars is certainly up for debate. But it is plausible.

The issue is that the distribution of leadership potential in the applicant pool is not equivalent to the distribution of top GPA and test scores (past a certain threshold). So when you use your GPA/SAT metric to analyze something that doesn't follow the same distribution, you will conclude there is bias. But it is your metric that is wrong. If your argument is that they necessarily should use your GPA/SAT metric, then you have to argue for this directly. It is not self evident.

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

#223

Post by uhohnotgood »

DrJaws wrote: post #196

On 2016 Abigail Fisher sued the university of texas for the same reason, the supreme court stood with the university. Can anyone tell me why not here and what's the difference?

Well, to be clear, the Supreme Court has not ruled on this case yet. The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, responsible for the enforcement of the law.

As for what the difference is, I'm no expert on law, and can't confidently provide an answer.

To me, the difference seems to be that while white students may be slightly discriminated against through affirmative action, asian students face much larger hurdles.

The Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action have not decided anything as clear cut as "affirmative action is completely allowed", nor "affirmative action is not allowed". From my understanding, explicit quotas are not allowed, but if a school can reasonably argue that their use of affirmative action serves its "education goal", then it's allowable.

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

#224

Post by InfiniteBeing »

tptacek wrote: post #215
InfiniteBeing wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

White is still very synthesized as European Americans generally have mixed ancestral origins. I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases. Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.

People such as myself and everyone who's written a scholarly article or magazine essays about when and how Asians have/will become "white"? Because, like I said, this isn't my idea.

I never claimed it was your idea. It's just people who think like this want to claim that every successful non-white group of people are white to continue viewing reality through a faulty prism.

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

#225

Post by DrJaws »

uhohnotgood wrote: post #223
DrJaws wrote: post #196

On 2016 Abigail Fisher sued the university of texas for the same reason, the supreme court stood with the university. Can anyone tell me why not here and what's the difference?

Well, to be clear, the Supreme Court has not ruled on this case yet. The Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, responsible for the enforcement of the law. As for what the difference is, I'm no expert on law, and can't confidently provide an answer. To me, the difference seems to be that while white students may be slightly discriminated against through affirmative action, asian students face much lar…

thanks

It's pretty weird everything, on my country nothing outside "this is your score, this is your admission" would be allowed.

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

#226

Post by sbierwagen »

Alex3917 wrote: post #121
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…

> Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy. It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.

These are crime rates, independent of total population. 1.009% of US Asians were arrested for any crime in 2016. 2.782% of US whites were arrested the same year: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Less than half the arrest rate.

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

#227

Post by tptacek »

InfiniteBeing wrote: post #224
tptacek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People such as myself and everyone who's written a scholarly article or magazine essays about when and how Asians have/will become "white"? Because, like I said, this isn't my idea.

I never claimed it was your idea. It's just people who think like this want to claim that every successful non-white group of people are white to continue viewing reality through a faulty prism.

That depends on what you think the definition of "white" is. The one you prefer --- "of various European origin" --- is not the only one, and is in fact ahistorical: several European ethnicities were not "white" until relatively recently.

I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.

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

#228

Post by jessaustin »

zacharytelschow wrote: post #173
jessaustin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please familiarize yourself with basic facts about crime and punishment in USA. After that, pay attention to how those basic facts affect the communities on which they are imposed.

The basic facts are black people commit more violent crime and have a correspondingly high rate of incarceration. They have a higher prevalence of single parent homes, a contributing factor to academic under achievement (and future crime). Blacks commit abortion at such an alarming rate, in some major US cities there are more black abortions than live births. Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redist…

Screaming? Who is screaming? Blacks are a small minority; they do not commit "more" crimes of any sort than whites commit. Yet 90% of the victims of Chicago PD violence are black. [0] In other locations like Ferguson MO, poor blacks are a captive gold mine for predatory police, prosecutors, jailers, and municipalities. [1] You cannot possibly not have heard anything about this. Even if you were right (you're not) about the verdicts reached by such a self-evidently flawed system, how could you trust those verdicts?

As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow.

There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduc...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...

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