<p>
</p>
<p>What type of systemic changes?</p>
<p>Some people (not necessarily you) seem to want to take the easy way out and use racial quotas in university admissions.</p>
<p>Fabrizio:
</p>
<p>FWIW, I knew you’d say that. :/</p>
<p>UCB, answering your question about systemic changes in K-16 would add hundreds of pages to this thread. </p>
<p>This is simply too complex to answer, but the short version of the answer would be based on changing how K-12 is funded, breaking up the monopoly of public education, overhauling the school boards to eradicate the controls of unions, abolishing all CBAs throughout the nation, limiting administrative expenses, raising teachers’ salaries to compensate for a 12 months activity, prohibiting teacher unions to use dues for political purposes, and last not least, introducing TRUE school choices as opposed to the cynical proposals of charters. This does not address issues of a curriculum that should be revamped from the bottom-up with much higher resources dedicated to the bottom quartiles and a lot less to the top 10 percent, a reassignment of the best teachers to the most at risk students. and a drastic reduction in boondoggles such as the AP program that have created those utterly abject schools within a school. </p>
<p>In other words, a good start! </p>
<p>I am against quotas.</p>
<p>I think CC needs to have AA policy to support slow-to-read and slow-to-write people like me. A hourly or daily quota of posts is needed for each poster per thread.</p>
<p>Also, I have problem figuring out who are the authors of the quotes in the responses. Maybe adding the post number next to the quote will help.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In practice, it seems that some schools / teachers took the easy way out and let the lowest quartile of students hold the class back; the middle and top quartile students get bored and do not learn that much (I remember that this did occur in some non-honors elective courses in high school; in other non-honors courses, teachers who tried to push for higher achievement tended to see the lowest quartile students change to other courses). Then the schools tried to maintain interest for the top quartile with honors/AP/IB courses and the like. Not exactly an optimal situation, especially since the middle quartiles not in the honors/AP/IB courses is still being held back by teaching to the lowest quartile, and the current proliferation of low value AP courses and tests may be giving the college bound students an inaccurate idea of what “college level” work is like.</p>
<p>Bringing the lowest quartile students up to a reasonable standard is probably one of the harder problems that teachers face.</p>
<p>But it’s in the earliest years; first, second, third grade, that kids start to think of themselves as “good at” things, or “bad at” things. Thinking you are good at things, like being a student, or fighting, whether because of your environment, or your ability, or both, can change things exponentially, way before the “IB” years.</p>
<p>So many “tipping points.” (Big Gladwell fan…“Gladwell’s family tree includes ancestors of West Indian, Igbo, Irish, English, and Scottish heritage. One of his European ancestors, an Irishman named William Ford, arrived in Jamaica in the late 18th century and with his concubine, an Igbo slave named Hannah Burton, he had a son named John Ford, whose descendants included a long line of privileged mixed-race Jamaicans, the Fords”)</p>
<p><a href=“I.P.”>QUOTE</a>What I don’t understand is your insistence that if the racial preference goes Elite U.'s will cease to exist as we know them. Would love to know why you think that.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>I didn’t say that. I was responding in my previous post several hours ago to another poster who suggested (perhaps flippantly) that the Elites could just admit everyone who “tests well.” Except, of course, that they won’t, because “testing well” (as you may agree, IP – I’m not sure about that), is not the only criterion of academic merit. Objective and subjective manifestations and evaluations of merit are also considered. But as the twice-cited Atlantic article has pointed out, the spoils go, among the unhooked, (40-60% of the incoming class) to the ‘deeply smart.’ URM’s are among the hooked. In some cases they will indeed be additionally among the deeply smart, but not always, just as there are some white donors and white athletes, and Asian celebrities (hmmm), among the possibly not-deeply-smart but hooked, and therefore of value to the U.</p>
<p>I took exception to any notion that, among the unhooked, the Elites will admit everyone well qualified on objective measures (gpa, awards, test scores) since there are far more of those (4-5 classes more, according to their administrations) than a private U can handle. Size is what would cause them to cease to exist as we know them, but additionally not having wealthy donor families nor athletic recruits (say, if the U were to abandon the hooked admits to allow in more of the well- and even highly qualified. At least you have just conceded that hooked categories are OK, except for any URM’s who happen not to be as deeply smart as the unhooked admits, which by the way is too small a cohort to make a difference in admission results for all those qualified but rejected (whites and Asians).</p>
<p>And you said in another post that racial diversity doesn’t do much for you personally. The problem is (again, from a business standpoint), it does not only a lot for the majority of applicants, the absence of sufficient diversity turns away applicants, often. We have discussed this on this thread & on other threads. Perhaps you didn’t read the earlier part of the discussion on this. In any case, many highly qualified students (including some Asian students) avoid UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UCLA, and Irvine because, compared to out-of-state privates, there is not a breadth of racial/national categories represented, to the degree that appeals to many white and many Asian students – of the very caliber sought by H, Y, P, and these peers.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What is “sufficient diversity” in this context? I.e. what percentage of each racial or ethnic group is sufficient for a majority of applicants to not be bothered? How much does it matter based on the applicants’ racial or ethnic group (since it appears that at least some applicants are mostly concerned about their own group on campus)? For example, some previous posts hinted at the possibility that many white students would be bothered being a member of a minority group (instead of the majority group) on campus.</p>
<p>I would not be surprised if you asked any number of people, you would get a lot of different answers from “don’t care” to “would prefer if my own ethnic group were between X% and Y% of the campus” (for varying values of X and Y) to specifying wanting a specified level of presence of each other ethnic group, etc… But is there any likely “consensus” that college admissions people are “marketing” to?</p>
<p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>I have to defer to Epiphany on this one. I would personally be super happy if American kids of all races treated all other Americans kids from all races exactly the same. I have raised my kid to think that way, to think purely in terms of merit rather than skin color.</p>
<p>^ I thought that’s what I was doing, but they still described them; I remember “pink”, and “orange” (???)</p>
<p>For a senior year retreat, we found an old assignment my son wrote (kgn?), saying even though we weren’t the some color (???)) I was his mother.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s basically the issue of many Asians. Every single other type of hook is legal. One can achieve them in a generation or two, and Asians will. But race is something one cannot change. The only hope there is massive cross racial marriages and kids. Which is also happening, which I applaud, but it has been slow. At the end of the day, I want those with the most merit get the highest preference - merit measured in any way as the academic institution chooses, except for skin color.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I disagree. The UC experiment proves otherwise.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then we have failed to raise our kids properly. They should be race neutral. They should see the person and not the skin color. Call me a dreamer …</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I agree. This is where parents and other role models come in. Schools cannot change this.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Unless the parents are interested in bringing their lower-quartile student up to meet the standards of the upper quartile, teachers are helpless.</p>
<p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>I have not studied Stanford in details, so can’t answer your question. However, I did a rough exercise. For the others in HYPSM, the share of Asian students is roughly 3-5x that of the share of Asians in the local population. The same is true for UCB, geographically close to Stanford, and of similar caliber. For Stanford, it is 2-3x. This doesn’t directly prove anything, but still makes me wonder.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why do you assume that any elite institution has quantified that? Or that applicants express it as a quantity? They express it as insufficient diversity; that’s how they express it. Nowhere is this more true than students who come from already very diverse states such as CA and NY. Again, as I mentioned much earlier on the thread, these colleges have done surveys, etc. on this and discovered that there are too many very, very qualified, intelligent applicants who also want a varied (many races, nationalities, ethnicities) on a campus vs. the same caliber of applicant who is neutral on the subject. The 1-3% figure for black students at some of the U.C.'s just doesn’t cut it for them. One of my students at one UC has told me recently that she barely ever sees a single black student anywhere on campus. It’s very much a contrast to the diverse community in which she has grown up and the quite diverse private schools she attended before college.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a brilliant question that I have seen asked a few times so far and never answered.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But she is still at the UC, isn’t she?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am having trouble reconciling the above 3 points. If you know that adopting race neutral policies will indeed drop the share of URMs, why do you also say that you don’t know what the impact of race neutral policies would be, and why do you say that Asians are not kept out because of race?</p>
<p>"This is a brilliant question that I have seen asked a few times so far and never answered. "</p>
<p>I think I’ve answered. </p>
<p>Not sure I’m a “supporter of racial preferences”, but neither I, nor anyone I know, says any school is " not okay" for URM’s. Everybody I know is just working on getting more kids to graduate high school.</p>
<p>At a recent graduation ceremony honoring black graduates in our county, I don’t think even one of them went to a UC, let alone a “top school”. </p>
<p>My son is going to LMU (7 percent!), and he has better than average SAT’s there. Racists that we re,we are happily paying full price for that environment.</p>
<p>Also, Cal called my D several times, trying to figure out why she declined admission. Her dad still donates to the alumni find though!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But then what is “insufficient diversity”?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What about the percentage of white versus Asian students? For example, is <50% white students “insufficient diversity”? Actually, this is likely much more significant with respect to the Asian students’ suspicions about being quota-limited. A few more black students is going to make a smaller impact than trying to ensure that white students remain the majority, if that is the goal.</p>