<p>fabrizio, I’m glad you are so sure that no one was exercising racial preferences in Sowell’s favor in the late 1950s at Harvard. I’m not. And when Sowell entered the job market in the late '60s, there’s no chance of it.</p>
<p>But you’re right. Many URM colleagues of mine over the years have soured on affirmative action because they feel it undermines their accomplishments. It’s a serious issue. White liberals tend to be much more enthusiastic about affirmative action than Black or Hispanic advanced-degree holders. On the other hand, most of the people I’m thinking of have somehow managed to accept many positions for which their ethnicity was a significant hook. And at some levels, it’s not just a question of how many people get the goodies. How many Asian Supreme Court Justices have there been?</p>
<p>(Formal affirmative action came very late to academia and to elite jobs. It began in the late '40s, with the predecessors to EO 10925, as a way to get Blacks into union apprenticeships and jobs, and just as importantly to ensure they remained in those jobs in a recession despite lack of seniority. Merit and qualifications barely entered into things – the main qualification for new hires was generally being related to existing union members.)</p>
<p>EDIT: Executive order 10925 and its predecessors and successors, most importantly EO 11246, had nothing to do with affirmative action in academia or government positions. It dealt with government contractors, mainly defense contractors. It would be the height of naivete to suggest, however, that people weren’t thinking along the same lines in all different corners of society at the height of the civil rights movement.</p>
<p>You asked me why I am not clamoring for change in the case of employers. I am not because I do not have legal protection there.</p>
<p>Would I be OK if racial discrimination was absolutely legal? No, as that is obnoxious, as no one can change their race.</p>
<p>Am I OK that elitist discrimination is legal? Absolutely, as anyone can try hard, harder, and hardest to qualify for the elites (if not held back on racist grounds). I am a meritocrat. I also believe that 99% of merit is hard work. I can assure you this, give me any kid, from anywhere, and over 18 years I can get his/her application up to a point where Ivies will have a hard time turning it down - unless there is a racist bias that comes in.</p>
<p>I don’t need names. Just say what it was - like selling home baked cookies or holding the Youth DNC. You can repeat 250 times that it was just GREAT! That means nothing unless you explain what kind of work it was. </p>
<p>I have a strong suspicion that many if not most White kids - and some African American kids - get away with doing very routine stuff that is the social norm - like holding a charity event at the local church. That’s not leadership. </p>
<p>I got the point about Eagle Scouts. I can understand what the work is there. But often I hear people claiming simple things to be as great as collecting gun shells in the middle of Stalingrad to be turned into bullets later. </p>
<p>Which is not to say that the Eagle Scout is a big deal.</p>
<p>But that’s the whole point. Sometimes, there are extremely hard working, smart, meritorious people who are not at Harvard. Lots of times, they are better than people at Harvard. But if you simply make the assumption that person X is a Harvard grad, so they must be more hardworking, smarter and better trained than person Y, who is a Georgia Tech grad, is just as offensive as assuming that a person X, who is part of a specific ethnic group, must be some sort of uninteresting conformist grind.</p>
<p>As much as you want to make people confront their racism, you have to also confront your elitism.</p>
<p>You’re wrong. To get more specific, I would have to locate and name her efforts, which would in fact “out” her. I don’t care how much you demand it; it’s not going to happen.</p>
<p>Not “very routine stuff.” Not “doing charity event at the local church.” And not scouting. Routine stuff does not get noticed to this degree. This is just one of your innumerable straw men to discredit others out of your deep prejudices about what is and is not valuable (or what “should” and “should not” be valuable) to elite institutions of higher education in the United States of America.</p>
<p>If a student takes significant initiative to actually apply an academic interest by engaging human effort (labor), and over a consistent period of time, then that shows a level of commitment that rises above the ordinary and validates the interest itself. And that is particularly true if sacrifice is involved.</p>
<p>Please don’t lecture me about leadership. Again, since I interview for this, I know precisely what some institutions of higher learning look for when they say “leadership,” and it’s not school clubs.</p>
<p>I am not making such assumption. I am merely using the Elites as a filter. After all, the whole world can have meritorious people, but I can’t go after hunting all of them down. I can only look at whoever applied, and everyone can apply. Then, I can only use an objective criteria - just as the Elites should and do scale the grades by the school.</p>
<p>LOL. Since I actually do the leading after the kids graduate from school, I know how little leadership skills they have. Which is fine. That’s what they learn at work through apprenticeship. I just need raw intelligence and hard work.</p>
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<p>OK, so if a STEM major spends nights at the local college laboratory for years to perform experiments for a professor, does that work?</p>
<p>But what you can’t do is say that the elites aren’t admitting on the basis of merit, and then say it’s acceptable to recruit only at the elites or use the fact that a candidate graduated from an elite as a filter because that’s where the meritorious people are.</p>
<p>And you also can’t say that the advantage of going to elite is networking for job purposes, and then say that there is no active recruiting network; the company looks at only who applies.</p>
<p>Why cure the symptom? Cure the cause instead. The employers are using the best objective measures available to them. It is HYPSM who are screwing up the objective measures.</p>
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<p>The network value comes not in the first job. It comes much later.</p>
<p>What I really found funny about this whole exchange with Epiphany is that she couldn’t define at all what leadership means in real terms. She kept saying what it isn’t, and what it needs to be, but not what it is with an actual example. It’s scary that someone like this is giving out leadership scholarships at Princeton.</p>
<p>You know, if I really thought that the elites weren’t accepting the most meritorious candidates, and specifically, that they were biased against Asians and if I were a Wall Street businessman and had the power to hire and recruit people, the best message I could send the elites to change their practices would be to hire fewer graduates from the elites and hire more graduates of those hard working talented kids at other well regarded programs.</p>
<p>Because once word gets out that there is no longer an exclusive pipeline from the Ivy League to Wall Street, then you better believe that the Ivy League would change its practices.</p>
<p>After all, there’s nothing illegal about hiring well qualified applicants from state schools with top 10 programs. </p>
<p>There are many ways to change society. It’s funny how you think Wall Street hiring practices are untouchable. </p>
<p>So, do you agree with the statement that the elites don’t accept the most meritorious candidates?</p>
<p>Do you agree with the statement that certain companies should hire mainly from the elites because this is where the most meritorious people are?</p>
<p>Because you can’t hold both these statements at the same time.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Agree</p></li>
<li><p>Agree</p></li>
<li><p>Why not? If HYPSM has 50% kids with merit and 50% without, employers can simply choose from the 50% to fill their ranks.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Will they miss out on some other meritorious candidates? Absolutely! Which is a shame, as the elites didn’t take those candidates and instead went for BS biases. But does it hurt the employers? Not really, as they are filling their ranks anyway. Does it hurt the Elites? Not really, because this 50% will keep giving donations. The kid that misses out is the one kept out of the Elites. But he can always go to a lesser school as he will just get as good an education, a PhD, and change the world just as much. That’s the party line anyway.</p>
<p>What gave you the impression that Wall Street is trying to change society? It is trying to make money, just like the Elites.</p>
<p>People change society. You can’t be the one who has the power to initiate a change, and then complain that no change has been intiated, because that’s not our basic mission, and we are doing nothing illegal by keeping the status quo.</p>
<h1>4397 is wrong in important ways. As HYP was forced to reject qualified candidates, and as the number of significant investment banks has radically shrunk, the remaining banks have vastly expanded their recruiting efforts beyond HYP. Do you really think any of them recruited at Duke, Michigan, or Chicago 30 years ago? Northwestern? Brown? (Or Stanford, for that matter, at least at the undergraduate level. Not to mention Wharton undergraduates.)</h1>
<p>This stuff changes all the time. The kid in my daughter’s high school class who had the most stellar STEM performance in college went to Penn, not Harvard. (And the STEM valedictorian in her high school class who did go to Harvard chucked science for finance.) As HYP can no longer admit substantially all equivalently talented applicants, and they have gone to other institutions, a whole bunch of other universities have been increasing their prestige, absolutely and relatively to HYP.</p>
<p>I am actually a believer in HYP superiority, but it is superiority on average, by low single-digit percentages, and any number of individual kids will get better educations at non-HYP institutions due to individual factors. HYP graduates have a range of outcomes, no matter how you measure them, and so do graduates of Berkeley, Chicago, Amherst, etc. One can tell practically nothing about the prospects of an individual kid by knowing where he or she went to college across a pretty broad range of institutions. Furthermore, there’s no way we could possibly isolate the effect of the college itself vs. the effect of the fact that HYP essentially gets to cherry-pick, or attempt it. Their admission staffs aren’t perfect, but on average they probably get more kids who are guaranteed to succeed regardless of the education they receive than Duke does. When a HYP-able kid goes to Duke, however, I don’t think there’s any basis for concluding that he or she will be worse off four, or ten, or twenty years later.</p>
<p>Having URM’s doesn’t just benefit them. Their point of view is valuable to all that don’t share the same experiences. Yah IP, I know you think there is a LSED Asian out there with a lot of merit that can provide the same insight but I’m not buying it.</p>