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<p>Well excuse me for expecting excellence from ALL applicants regardless of their racial classification! :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>We’ll just have to see what SCOTUS says about that, won’t we? Thank you Sixth Circuit for your idiocy.</p>
<p>eastcoascrazy - I have noticed similar results like your high school locally where one or two kids with the similar accomplishments as others in top 10 to 15 kids in the school, end up getting admitted to every school and rest get scr@#$ed for the lack of a better word. If the kid happens to be an URM or first gen, they get into every school and the rest of the top kids get wiped out of Ivies.</p>
<p>This is a result of undersupply that Hunt keeps talking about comes into picture. There are a bunch of highly achieving URMs out there but they are in such short supply that when they apply, every school admits them and then overlooks everyone else in that public school.</p>
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If all this is so, what on earth are you complaining about? Semantics? It’s weird–you seem to be agreeing with those who argue that the URMs might not be getting in because of AA anyway.</p>
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I think that it may look like that, but it may be that the others may not be as highly achieving in the context of white and Asian students as the URM kid is in context of other URMs. This effect is certainly annoying, even if you think it’s justified.</p>
<p>fabrizio wrote:
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<p>No, in your inimitable fashion, Fabrizio, you are jumping to conclusions.</p>
<p>No one is dismissing their abilities, merely their odds of standing out amidst the wave of poor whites who – surprisingly – still outnumber poor blacks in this country and presumably wouild also score above 600 on the CR.</p>
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<p>So, you would accept the same number of Asian STEM majors as you would for the WASP LA majors?</p>
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<p>If you would be happier with **unequal treatment of races<a href=“for%20whatever%20historical%20reason”>/b</a> instead of racism, that works for me. At least you have the guts to admit it. Most others on this thread don’t.</p>
<p>A couple of disjointed thoughts about this:</p>
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<li><p>The notion that “Asians” reject AA is puzzling to me, because when I look at Asia I see both extensive use of formal AA, much more so than here, to address the same sorts of historical social issues that underlie AA here (India, Malaysia, Australia), and situations where there is de facto and sometimes de jure racial chauvinism and discrimination against ethnic minorities leading to instability and occasional violence – the sort of social systems that are morally obnoxious to me at least, and that do not commend themselves as models. </p></li>
<li><p>Something that people forget to some extent is that discrimination against blacks, Hispanics, and indigenous Americans is central to American history – we fought wars about that stuff. Discrimination against Asians – Chinese at least, and Jews, who were considered “Orientals” – was hardly unknown, but it simply didn’t have the same kind of centrality to the American narrative or the same scale, and it also didn’t seem to hold those communities back for multiple generations. To say the least. There isn’t any set of contemporary, neutral criteria that supports using affirmative action to help people of African descent but not, say, Khmers, Ainu, or Dalits – it’s all historical and (everyone, supporters and detractors alike, hopes) ephemeral. (This is the same point Hunt was also making above while I was writing.)</p></li>
<li><p>The Asian population in the U.S. has exploded during our lifetimes, and the demand for elite education (and the assimilation it implies) from that population has increased so dramatically that “explosion” is inadequate as a metaphor. I don’t know what percentage of my class at Yale was ethnically Asian, but it was far below 10%, probably less than 5%, almost entirely Han Chinese (I can’t remember a single ethnic South Asian, or more than a couple ethnic Koreans), and smaller than the percentage of African Americans. In one generation, that has changed enormously – we are essentially debating whether the “natural” Asian component should be 15% or something like 50%. It’s not written in stone now, either; I expect things will be different in 10, 20, 30 years. That’s the process of change – it doesn’t happen instantly.</p></li>
<li><p>I wish people would acknowledge that things aren’t as black and white (so to speak) as they are sometimes presented. In my son’s class, the one kid who got into Harvard and Stanford was a Japanese-American STEM major whose class rank and test scores were both slightly lower than my son’s. Harvard and Stanford did not take my son, and also rejected a kid with better grades than either, a Puerto Rican STEM-type first-generation student-athlete who was certainly the top Hispanic student in that cohort for the entire region. (Not to worry, he got plenty good opportunities.) Yale took a tennis- and violin-playing pre-med Thai girl. No one grumbled about either choice – rather, we were impressed that the admissions committees seemed to be able to pick the kids their peers respected most over the ones with somewhat better numbers or more obvious hooks. Lots of ethnic Asian kids get into HYPS – despite what is probably some residual discrimination. And there is a great deal of competition for whatever affirmative-action URM slots are available. The URM kids who are picked are absolutely among the many applicants who deserve admission, and not all deserving URM kids get admitted. (Of course, that’s not to say that, as between otherwise-equal Asian and URM applicants, the URM applicant doesn’t have a meaningfully higher chance of admission. He does. But he still has to worry.)</p></li>
<li><p>We are lucky to live in a society where the 1,000 miracle Asian STEM majors who don’t get into Yale have perfectly good educational alternatives to help them save the world. Really, so little turns on whether they get into Yale that it’s ludicrous to debate it for hundreds of pages. But one thing that can – and likely will – alleviate the pressure, is for ethnic Asian families to adopt the same strategies WASP or Jewish families use. That includes taking advantage of the different educational model represented by LACs. Many LACs, including universally respected ones, would LOVE to have more ethnic Asians, especially STEM majors. Their model IS different from Harvard’s, but it has been proven to work extremely well over time (in the sense of producing top-quality MDs and PhDs, for example). There would be less grief in the Asian-student world about Ivy admissions if more Asian students saw SWAP (and many others) as a good option.</p></li>
<li><p>No one believes that discrimination against Asian students is justified. No one. If there is an effective quota on Asian students anywhere, it is indefensible, and it will not survive, because no one will stand up to support it.</p></li>
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<p>Hunt - All I know is if the count of highly achieving URM or first gen exceeds 2 in a reasonably good public school, the count of anyone else getting into an Ivy tends to be much closer to zero (top 2% of class, above 2300 SAT scores, almost perfect SAT IIs, 230+ on PSAT in a school of 700-800, similar ECs), unless the number of Ivies the URM/first gen apply to does nt cover all of them. In a private school, they ensure the kids don’t always overstep on each other during applications but in a public school, there is no such control. I believe this breeds some of the discontent that we see on CC.</p>
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<p>I disagree. It is very much there. This thread is one proof, but comments from AdComs about textureless violin-playing math grinds in the context of discussing Asian applicants are proof positive.</p>
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Huh? I’d let the school decide what mix of majors/diversity/musicians/jocks etc works for them. Their mission is not to save the world, crystal ball or no crystal ball.</p>
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That’s it, exactly. Of course, if colleges were forced to stop using race as a factor, they could just use “cultural diversity” or something like that–so being in the gospel choir or the African dance troupe might be a tip–just as it’s possible that being a Kumon tutor might be a negative today.</p>
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<p>I never thought I’d be the one telling someone to buck up and quit playing the race card…</p>
<p>Interesting.</p>
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D’oh! Groundhog Day!</p>
<p>Hunt, How do you think academic performance can be improved among lower income URMs?</p>
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<p>OK, so far, we have established two things. The mission of the schools is not to support the growth of the students (it is to ensure a steady flow of funds for faculty). The mission is also not to change the world for a better place (it is to have an optimal mix of races and interests, optimal as defined by the schools).</p>
<p>Sounds more and more like a fund raising social event and not an academic institution. Some people really have a low opinion of the elite American institutions of learning.</p>
<p>indianparent wrote:
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<p>You made a typically idiotic analogy at post #4233, involving a hypothetical person with Asperger’s ability to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars”. Presumably, this was not in a vacuum; you admit it had to do with “leadership skills”. I, in turn, stated that Harvard doesn’t care whether an individual student (with or without Asperger’s) ever earns a fortune upon graduation. </p>
<p>Sorghum was honest enough to come right out and disagree with me. You, OTOH, chose – for whatever reason – to create another strawman, involving donors – to which I responded with a question. You don’t have to answer it. It’s a free country.</p>
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<p>Typically idiotic analogy? Calm down John.</p>
<p>I actually gave that example to show that leadership ability has nothing to do with success.</p>
<p>^^and success has nothing to do with making “hundreds of millions of dollars”. Are you sure that you are a philosopher?</p>
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<p>I am not a philosopher.</p>
<p>Lima claimed that to compete and succeed in the global marketplace one needs leadership skills. That’s the post I responded to. What do you think he meant when he mentioned success?</p>