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Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

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Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#41

Post by albntomat0 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30
albntomat0 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the article said. The key point is that Asian applications scored well in "whole person" metrics when evaluated face to face, from teachers, high school counselors, and alumni interviews, but much worse when graded by Harvard admissions officers, on supposedly similar categories. All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated, as they are all trying to measure the same things.

> All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated I wouldn't go so far. If your measures always correlate, why have separate measures? The point is when one measure disagrees with the others, it should say something meaningful. In this case, the disagreement appears to say "this student is Asian."

My understanding of it is that they are multiple samples of the same underlying distribution (the applicant's subjective characteristics). Multiple references who know/have interacted with the applicant attest to his/her personality strengths & weaknesses, and the average of all of them should result in an accurate measure of the person. If one of your "sensors" consistently measures lower than the grouping of the others, then you look into why that one is giving faulty readings, if it does so over a large sample size.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#42

Post by acomjean »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18
gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societall…

Harvard is the position of Ranking and admitting students. They have a fair number of very high scoring academic performers so they use some other metics. They use 4 criteria: Academic, extracurricular, personal, and athletic.

Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file...

Also for that report:

"These data show that even if Harvard wanted to admit every student with elite academic credentials, it could not. Harvard admits roughly 1,800 domestic students each year, yet thousands of applicants have impeccable academic qualifications.9

For example, based on the statistics in Exhibit 2, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect GPA, it would need to reject at least 6,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants. Similarly, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect Math SAT score, it would need to reject nearly 2,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants."

( I didn't go the Harvard, but I do work there)

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#43

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

Thought experiment: if you made all admission decisions by lottery, by randomly admitting a previously decided, fixed number of n applicants out of all valid applications received, and the resulting cohort of admitted individuals was later found to significantly differ in demographic composition from both the local and nationwide composition of population, would that be discriminatory? If not, would it at least be problematic? What if it differed significantly from the demographic composition of the pool of all valid applications received?

This case is very unfortunate, because it literally pits racial categories against one another, and claims that Asian-Americans are being unfairly disadvantaged by affirmative action applied to Hispanic and Black applicants, whose likelihood of successful admittance is proportionally much higher, in part due to their race. What's unusual is Asian-Americans apply to Harvard at much higher rates that they occur in the population, which complicates the math, and encourages some reflection about the roles of affirmative action, e.g. whether it intends to counterbalance a pipeline shortfall, or improve absolute outcomes among groups whose society-wide outcomes have lagged behind, or to right past wrongs. These are questions worth asking among ourselves when we see that in some cases, and when faced with the allocation of a limited number of a resource (a chance for a Harvard education) to a large group of people.

It's hard to avoid thinking that this may be an edge case of affirmative action that was purpose-selected by this group to force the courts to consider a larger issue.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#44

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

Edit - Could I ask why I was downvoted? I'd like to know where I went wrong here.

Forgive the question, but that is a general statement to a specific case, and I am having trouble seeing the clear path between your statement and the article. Can you elaborate?

Are you taking the position that any and all attempts to shape admissions into universities based on race are misguided and regressive? The specific case here being discriminatory or not seems to be more related and less vague, you've generalised the article into a statement that is kind of hard to elaborate on.

Regardless of whether racial quotas (hard or soft) are a good thing or not, I would certainly think it is an important data point, and at the very least demonstrates a weakness in society that merits attention.

If one race is by far receiving admission over all others, then I do think there should be moved being made to ask why, and how to fix the problem.

The specifics of this particular incidence seem more pertinent to this article rather than a statement on racial quotas as a whole.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#45

Post by fraudsyndrome »

eganist wrote: post #29
ronyeh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very easy. Admissions should be race blind and name blind. Everything else, including socioeconomic background, can be included in the admissions packet.

Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included. The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially…

They do but it goes deeper as people tend to stereotype Asians as being privileged as if they are a monolithic group, yet you have those (mainly from South East Asia) coming from low socio-economic backgrounds being lumped in as privileged.

People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#47

Post by [deleted] »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18
gourial wrote: post #4

By enforcing racial quotas, Harvard and other institutions are actively cementing race as an important factor in our society, as if it's something we should care about. As such, they are not helping society to become post-racial - as must be our goal - but instead are forcing a racialized view of the world down our collective throats. While well intentioned, racial quotas are a regressive policy and history will look…

It seems like there are two conflicting goals: - don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc). - ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societall…

[deleted]

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#48

Post by bryant »

ekianjo wrote: post #36
eganist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socioeconomic background is blocked out for need-blind schools, of which there are a ton, Harvard included. The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially…

> The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space o…

> Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.

(circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...

(Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed...

(Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i...

The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting.

And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration.

If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure.

TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#49

Post by fraudsyndrome »

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #43

Thought experiment: if you made all admission decisions by lottery, by randomly admitting a previously decided, fixed number of n applicants out of all valid applications received, and the resulting cohort of admitted individuals was later found to significantly differ in demographic composition from both the local and nationwide composition of population, would that be discriminatory? If not, would it at least be pr…

Not American but wasn't the goal of affirmative action to give access to opportunities from the majority (white-Americans) to the minorities?

I'll try and dig it up when I can but I do remember reading that as a result, Asian Americans got shafted the most (they are still a minority) while white women benefited the most from affirmative action.

People genuinely believe the model minority myth of Asians/Asian Americans and think that this is okay for them.

Re: Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans

#50

Post by axaxs »

Why is race even a factor? Our society is moving backwards in regard to unification. If we stop using race or nationality as a factor for anything, we can get more fair results - as long as the selection process is thought out enough to not explicitly favor races over one another based on irrelevant factors. It seems like more than ever people are identifying themselves by race, and diversity is celebrated so granularly anymore than it creates 'us vs them' situations. I just don't understand the thought process. I want to work with the most qualified candidates and not celebrate or even think about their race, sexual status, heritage, etc.
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