<p>What if I said (just as an example) that the reason Asian kids do worse in elite emissions than their stats would suggest is that they tend to speak in broken English in their interviews, turning off the white interviewers? That would be offensive, correct?</p>
<p>If I did a survey of interviewers and showed that this was *their *impression, would my observation be offensive then?</p>
<p>This is how I’ve felt when I pointed out (and provided data) suggesting that admissions results for Asian kids might at least partly be explained by some cultural and demographic factors, like major choice and state of residence. If, in fact, it’s true that Asians choose STEM majors more than whites do, that’s not *my *fault.</p>
<p>xiggi, could you please respond to my question about your comment that Affirmative Action in admissions is still desperately needed. I haven’t read all of this thread so if you did explain this could you point me to the post that explains this.</p>
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to public colleges, but not private ones.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. 2000d, applies to public and private colleges that receive federal funds, and prohibits the same racial classifications that would violate the Equal Protection Clause. See Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244, 275-276 (2003); Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 287 (1978).</p>
<p>People are often surprised to learn that adcoms do not consist of faculty members. You don’t need a Ph.D to become one and if “The Gatekeepers” is any indication, they come from all kinds of different backgrounds.</p>
<p>Apparently quite a few; all the 800’s on Math SAT’s and the like don’t make up for the fact that it seems quite difficult for some to mentally move from a system of some-universities-guarantee-success-and-everyone-else-does-menial-work to the type of system in the US where the sky is pretty much the limit for anyone who is a hard worker. The only people who seem to think that the elite schools are the only route to power are people who don’t have the creativity to imagine otherwise. Good grief, look at the power elites in any major city as an example - they aren’t uniformly elite grads at all. Go to ANY well-to-do suburb of any major city and the majority of the people living in million-dollar homes went to state universities or something similar. Go drive along A-1-A in Palm Beach; those people didn’t get there because they were super-good-on-the-Chemistry-AP.</p>
<p>ROFL! The quoted article talked about securing employment at white-shoe law firms, investment banks, and consultancies. What does that have to do with “power”? The business people who have the POWER are the ones who are creating wealth, not the ones hiring lawyers to handle the mechanics. I suppose investment banks as a whole have “power” over the economy, but any one banker? He or she may be incredibly well-paid and that’s wonderful, but high income =/= “power.” As for consultancies? (And I’m a consultant) Again, they may be well-paying jobs, but that’s not “power.” The whole notion is ridiculous.</p>
<p>“Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the “new Jews”, held to higher standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in the game) and frequently stigmatised for their “characters” (Harvard evaluators persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on “personal qualities”). When the University of California, Berkeley briefly considered introducing means-based affirmative action, it rejected the idea on the ground that “using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids”.”</p>
<p>To that end, it probably is very important for adcoms to have a diversity of backgrounds among them – so that the person who tends to be biased towards hard-luck backgrounds gets balanced out by the person who came from a prep school background and values the rigor … the person who tends to be biased towards band / orchestra / musical talent gets balanced out by the person who is real mathy-sciencey … the person who may have a visceral reaction to the kid who lists hunting as a hobby will be balanced by the person who thinks that’s interesting and wants to hear more. This is really just common sense. So much of this is common sense, it’s amusing to hear how it’s not “quantifiable enough.” Well, duh. The 2400 may be important for candidate #1, but not candidate #2. Each candidate needs his / her own story, and there are a lot of potential scripts.</p>
<p>No, no, no. Haven’t you read the thread at all? Epiphany and one other poster (I think either Hunt or Bay, not sure which) articulated it very nicely in the last few days. They have higher SAT’s scores because that’s part of what they offer – not that they “needed” to or would be ignored for not having those scores, or that adcoms explicitly say “Asians are undesirable enough that I only want them if they score x+50.”</p>
<p>What should the “proper” response of adcoms be to math olympiad winners? Fall-on-the-ground worship at their exaltedness? (And before you say anything, I was a math major myself, though wouldn’t be caught dead doing math olympiads.)</p>
<p>PG, First those were not my words. Those were the quotes from the article.
Second. I read this thread everyday. I just don’t buy epiphany’s explaination.
Also, no Adcom would be dumb enough to explicitly say “Asians are undesirable enough that I only want them if they score x+50.” . They don’t need to.</p>
<p>I thought eveyone had left the building. Sometimes, I wonder whether we all have a full-time job :).</p>
<p>
We need AA for the harmony of the society and don’t want to leave some groups permanently behind. On this issue, discussion is futile. If you ask Whites and Asians, majority of them will be against AA, and on the other hand if you ask the URMs, most will supprt it. I believe Xiggi is from one of the UR groups. The difficulty of the admission officiers’ job is to find the middle ground to keep everyone happy so that no upheaval will occur.</p>
<p>That “Poison Ivy” article is really crazy. Can it be that the book it (supposedly) is describing says such ridiculous things? For example:
This may be true, if and only if you include the hook for URMs–but that doesn’t fit the thesis, so it isn’t mentioned. And considering that at the elites many kids are receiving financial aid–I think a majority at Harvard–this idea that all the spots are reserved for the rich and famous is just silly. Sure, they go out of their way to recruit celebrities–that’s good business. But the number of those people (as well as the number of true developmental admits) is tiny.</p>
<p>I have to shake my head at the idea that the elites are primarily trying to protect and admit the power elites–that has become less true every year for many decades, and it’s really much less true than ever before. The article notes that Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants. That’s a lot, and I’m sure they get preference–but that means that a lot of the members of the power elite are not getting their kids into Harvard. Also, remember that admitting 40% of legacy applicants doesn’t mean that 40% of Harvard freshmen are legacies–it’s a lot less than that.</p>
<p>And honestly, if all that stuff were true, Harvard wouldn’t have 15% Asians in the first place. It would have maybe 5%.</p>
<p>Well, not to mention, the vast majority of the power elite aren’t particularly interested in getting their kids into Harvard in the first place (unless the kid really wants Harvard - which many of them don’t). If you really are the power elite, you don’t HAVE to “make” sure your kid get Ivy credentials. It doesn’t matter where your kid goes if you have true personal power and privilege; you don’t need to prove anything to anybody, and if your kid wants to go to the U of Colorado at Boulder and ski, well, then, that’s what you have him do.</p>
<p>Hunt and PG.
I don’t agree that because Asians count 15% of Ivy admits necessarily mean adcom do not think them undesirable. We all know by now Jews in the 30’s weren’t considered desirable by Ivies and they were limited to 15%ish admission rates.</p>
<p>You cannot compare the open and blatant anti-Semitism of the time towards Jews to the situation of Asian-Americans today. It reveals a complete lack of knowledge of American history.</p>
<p>BTW, since African Americans and Hispanics are far less than 15% at any elite school, does that “prove” that adomcs there must REALLY find AA and Hisp undesirables?</p>