are colleges racist?

Pizzagirl · June 16, 2011, 10:49pm

“The acceptance rate the year Jian Li applied was 10.19%. Asians made up 14.41% of the freshman class, though it is not known what the proportion of applicants and admits was”

You are not understanding math. The relevant number is what percent of the app pool Asians were, not what the overall admit rate is.

If (hypothetically, number pulled from air) Asians were 7% of the app pool but 14% of the admitted pool, then they are overrepresented REGARDLESS of whether the overall admit rate at a college is 5%, 10%, 15% or 30%.

I submit that all the fondness for AP Calculus on CC might be better directed towards AP Stats. Signed, (white) math major

fabrizio · June 16, 2011, 10:57pm

Run a CTRL+F on this page, and you’ll see that I never said Li “should have” gotten into Princeton because he got into Yale. The first time the phrase shows up is in YOUR post. Furthermore, you confirmed my recollection that you were one of the “some…parents” I referred to.

What did I say? I said “…some of the parents here interpreted Rapeleye’s comments to mean that Li was not qualified to attend Princeton, even though those same parents are the first ones to say that being rejected doesn’t mean you weren’t qualified!”

Li was certainly qualified to attend Princeton. To argue otherwise requires arguing that Yale is not a peer institute to Princeton. That Li was qualified does not mean he had to have been or “should have” been accepted to Princeton. I WAS NOT arguing that. I was highlighting how mistaken it was for some parents to argue that Li wasn’t qualified on the basis of Rapeleye’s defensive comments as well as expressing my disagreement with Hunt.

I would prefer it if you said things like this to me instead of deceiving me with “I believe you” only to use it as part of a trap. Thank you for telling me to my face that you think I’m lying. (Not sarcasm.)

Li’s acceptance to Yale does says nothing about whether Princeton “should have” admitted him. Again, that wasn’t my point. His acceptance does say that he was qualified to attend Princeton. Again, just in case you don’t understand my point–which is very possible given that your biases are quite different from mine–I am NOT SAYING that Princeton had to accept Li. I am only expressing my disagreement with the parents who argued that Rapeleye’s comments showed that Li wasn’t qualified to attend Princeton. I am pointing out what I think is comical given that these parents are also the first to say that being rejected doesn’t mean you weren’t qualified.

Pizzagirl · June 16, 2011, 10:58pm

“Well, though it’s likely untrue, assume that every Asian accepted matriculated. Why didn’t Cass Cliatt say something like, “Asians made up 12% of the applicants but 14% of the entering class. Jian Li needs to shut up”?”

You didn’t accept that as valid when it was pointed out to you that per an MIT admissions rep, 26% of MIT applicants but 30% of MIT’s accepted pool were Asian. Why would you accept that even if she had said it?

Basically, for someone who is allegedly non racist, this comes down to your belief that Asians are even more qualified than everyone else, yet you have to show it.

You also have ignored and dismissed several reasonable hypotheses-
Asians disproportionately concentrate apps in a few key colleges
Asians disproportionately concentrate in a few majors (STEM) so to that extent they aren’t really competing for all spots but rather a subset
Asians “suffer” because they are geographically concentrated in a few key areas which are overrepresented in college apps

fabrizio · June 16, 2011, 10:58pm

Please reread what you quoted: “…though it is not known what the proportion of applicants and admits was.”

Perhaps I should have been more clear. I accept your criticism though not your rebuke and rephrase: “The acceptance rate the year Jian Li applied was 10.19%. Asians made up 14.41% of the freshman class, though it is not known what the proportion of *Asians in the * applicants and admits was.”

Satisfied?

fabrizio · June 16, 2011, 11:03pm

I am but one individual. Cass Cliatt is not going to refuse to release information because of me. So again, why didn’t Cass Cliatt say something like, “Asians made up 12% of the applicants but 14% of the entering class. Jian Li needs to shut up”? She didn’t because she didn’t want to or because she couldn’t?

While I appreciate that you are saying things to my face instead of deceiving me with “I believe you” traps, my answer to your claim is “No. I do not believe that, but it’s not worth my time trying to convince you that I don’t believe that because you’ll believe what you want to believe anyway, which is that I’m a racist and an Asian supremacist.”

Never you mind that I view people as individuals instead of as members of “groups,” which by definition makes me anti-racist. Never you mind that.

fabrizio · June 16, 2011, 11:13pm

<ol>
<li>I have addressed this to you numerous times already. You simply don’t want to believe the facts. I was even fair to you; I quoted your phrase exactly as you said it, “HYPSM et al.” I pointed out that Asians are pretty much “overrepresented” everywhere: the top three LACs; and numerous research universities past HYPSM throughout the rest of the Top 10, 15, 20, 25 even. </li>
</ol>

You cannot reconcile that FACT with your INSISTENCE that “Asians disproportionately concentrate apps in a few key colleges” (i.e. HYPSM) unless you play loose with the “et al” part. But if you did that, you would be tacitly admitting that one of your long-held beliefs is wrong, so instead of doing that, you choose to act as if you never said “et al.” So for all practical purposes, you believe Asians concentrate apps at HYPSM.

They may indeed apply “disproportionately” (relative to what?) to HYSPM. But that they are “overrepresented” almost everywhere in the Top 20 USNWR research universities by definition implies that they are applying to more schools than just HYPSM. So I didn’t ignore this, Pizzagirl. I dismiss it because it’s at best misleading and at worst, wrong.

<ol>
<li>You want to address (i.e. not ignore or dismiss) this? Fine. How about some DATA supporting this hypothesis? That question is not in any way intended to DENY the validity of your hypothesis. I’m merely asking for support.</li>
<li>Ditto for #2.</li>
</ol>

Edit

You may disagree with how I interpreted the table in the “mismatch” study. You are welcome to do that, though you are not welcome to act as if I never made post #1258. I would accept a reply similar to my post #1258 for points #2 and #3.

Shrinkrap · June 16, 2011, 11:49pm

Alrighty then…

Fab… I am gathering you do not have children. How is this such a mission for you? Whatever it is, I respect it.

There is a bird, or maybe it is one of many similar looking birds, that has batted its head against three windows of my home, for hours every day, for the last several weeks. I figure this bird’s brain must be the size of a pea, but I can’t help but respect this birds determination. As a mother, I am convinced, the bird must feel there are lives, and maybe generations at stake.

Fab, I am NOT saving your brain is the size of a pea. I am saying I respect whatever it is that drives you.

Last week, son told me that in applying for a pre-engineering program, he pulled “the ADD card”. Not the race card, but the “ADD card”. Son does not hae a SAT problem, just a GPA problem.

He has had a " behavior problem" since he could walk. It was a “problem” in the schools he attended, but may have been a strength elsewhere.

Now I am a child psychiatrist, and I’m sure we talked about “ADD”.
So what is interesting about this?

In twenty years of practice, and four on CC, I’ve never seen a URM (or Asian) “pull the ADD card” and never have I seen it explain BEHAVIOR on CC;only grades.

NO Mexican or black family ever thinks of this group of behaviors, this “phenotype” <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype</a>, as an illness, a problem, something better gone. Rather the opposite. Even if it means less academic success.

What does this mean?

Pizzagirl · June 16, 2011, 11:52pm

Uh, the top 20 universities (and might as well throw in the top 10 or 20 LACs while you’re there) ARE “HYPSM et al.” it’s still an incredibly narrow range of schools. There are what, something like 3,000 colleges in this country?

This is empirical. I would guarantee that if you took, say, the top 10% of all Asian students and the top 10% of all white students, and looked where each of them distributed their apps, it would look quite different.

epiphany · June 17, 2011, 12:03am

Amen, brother.

collegealum314 · June 17, 2011, 12:24am

Alleging that Asian discrimination is at work despite their overrepresentation implies to many that they must be superior. Therefore, people have reverse-engineered from the “all races are equal” maxim to reason that there must be no discrimination against Asians.

But there is another possibility.

The so-called “brain drain”, the immigration of professionals and scientists to the U.S. from Asia, meant that the Asian-American population is enriched in high achievers. Therefore, it is indeed “natural” that the Asian-American population should be more successful academically than other racial populations.

sorghum · June 17, 2011, 12:34am

Asians in the US are a very recent and academically highly select immigrant group, on average. I think it is highly likely that offspring of first-generation Chinese immigrants, for example, who came to the US to seek PhD degrees and so on are FAR more intelligent - on average - than most other minority (or majority) ethnic or cultural groups in the US.

Probably the closest competitors in intellectual capability of recent immigrant parents are Africans (not African Americans).

So its nothing to do with racial superiority, just how the populations were formed.

Shrinkrap · June 17, 2011, 2:32am

Ooops!

"NO Mexican or black family

I have seen…

ever independently thinks of this group of hyperactive/impulsive behaviors, this “phenotype” [Phenotype</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype]Phenotype”>Phenotype - Wikipedia), as an illness, a problem, something better gone. Rather the opposite. Even if it means less academic success.

siserune · June 17, 2011, 3:05am

There is certainly an “enriched immigration with assortative mating” variant of the Asian supremacist narrative. It appears more regularly (and more openly, being more PC) than the blanket Asian superiority idea.

Whatever you call it, the question is the same: what happens at the upper tail of the distribution? The prediction of the enriched immigration story, is that when extreme cognitive cutoffs are imposed, such as high scores on the national math olympiad and the Putnam competition, elite science graduate fellowships or academic prizes, or valedictorians at top universities, these categories should be dominated by East Asian immigrants much more so than at lower levels of achievement.

It is a very logical story and not one that can be easily discounted. The problem is that the inference about achievement rates is empirically false everywhere one looks. Nobody has indicated a metric where the predicted increase pattern holds, either.

For example, in the old thread after I first mentioned this, a few CC diehards spent enormous numbers of pixels trying to make the statistical case that US East Asian representation was not dropping at the highest echelons of the national math competition. However, the actual pattern that should have been there under the enriched Asian population theory, would have been one with noticeable increases in the Asian share at each stage. The undisputed absence of any such increase pattern already tells you something, whether or not there are also declines. And one can then look at the research prizes or other metrics to see the same thing.

epiphany · June 17, 2011, 4:00am

Any actual objective evidence in contradistinction to the subjective phrases “I think,” “likely,” and “probably”?

And I wonder about all those first-generation East Asian students of mine who have to go to professional learning centers after school, not because they have ‘tiger mothers’ who are programming them into unnecessary ‘enrichment’ (they don’t), but because they are mediocre students. Not to mention my first-generation East Asian students who seem capable of achieving more (and whose parents are convinced they are), but who are choosing not to excel? Ditto for my students from continental Africa. I have not found them to be more capable, nor more intelligent in testing results than my seemingly very intelligent students from the Middle East.

However, what is common to all of the recent East Asian immigrant parents I encounter, and to many of the South Asian immigrant parents, is exasperation with the virtually instant adoption of the First World recreational culture as a priority of their students. That choice is beginning to have a deep impact (local to me) upon ambition, academic constancy, standardized testing results, and readiness for college level work. My experience is obviously not projectible; it is merely indicative that the myth of the uniformly producing and “more intelligent” Asian student is nowhere near a reality.

I think what might be observed more universally, though, is the drive, persistence, confidence, diligence of immigrants – period. But again, that is their parents; it remains to be seen in the current culture how successfully parental aspirations for their children will be realized. The listed observable traits are admirable, particularly coming from any Third World to First World country. But in themselves they are not indicators of IQ or academic ‘superiority.’

sorghum · June 17, 2011, 5:36am

I think that I am probably allowed to get away with offering a mere opinion.

As you can give anecdotal tales. Of course there are many plainly stupid students in every ethnic or cultural group in every country, the issue is average and the frequency of high-end extremes.

It seems hard to believe that if you rounded up say 100,000 mostly STEM PhDs, of suitable gender ratio, and sent them to another comfortably habitable planet to be left in isolation for centuries, that the average IQ of succeeding generations would regress to 100.

By the way, the “enriched immigration with assortative mating” is a common concept in explaining American superiority; that the energetic and bright left dull old Europe behind to seek a better life.

Hunt · June 17, 2011, 8:57am

Here’s where I get tired, and I remember the other long thread where I went looking for–and found lots of data to show that Asians really do choose STEM fields more than whites, and that they don’t play certain sports, and that they have much less representation in some states, and so forth. Fabrizio tied himself in knots trying to disregard that data, without really providing anything to the contrary. But we learn that his hypothesis is proven by what one admissions officer at one university said about one kid who got into Yale but not Princeton. Can we just talk about URMs instead? At least we have some factual basis for beating up on them.

BlackRose101 · June 17, 2011, 9:06am

<.<

You want to beat up URM’s?

fabrizio · June 17, 2011, 9:18am

Ah, so “a few key colleges” is 40 schools. Good to know! Thank you for voluntarily weakening your own claim.

I don’t know how many colleges there are in our country. 3,000 seems reasonable. If you please, answer me this: how many of those are selective? It’s probably more than forty, I agree, but how many?

You may not have the exact data you need to verify this. Fine. I would accept something that shed more light into this and a post that used that “something,” as I did post #1258.

fabrizio · June 17, 2011, 9:21am

Then, where’s your working paper on SSRN with Espenshade explaining Asian underperformance, siserune? Espenshade himself said it is not known why Asians underperform. So where’s your paper? Didn’t you say that the publishing standards in the social sciences are low?

Yes, NCL and I (and you) “spent enormous numbers of pixels” discussing your “analysis,” how your tables didn’t support your claims, and how the one year that seemingly did was the year that a “low hanging fruit” guy (Alex Zhai) scored 42/42 on the IMO.

And names of the studies and the “Berkeley NMF” data, if you please.

fabrizio · June 17, 2011, 9:24am

Link, please?

Is this supposed to answer the riddle I gave you?

are colleges racist?

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