are colleges racist?

fabrizio · June 19, 2011, 3:15pm

No one should ever be told that he is “act[ing] white.” To get beyond that, we need to STOP viewing people as members of groups and start viewing people as INDIVIDUALS.

But your anecdotes appear to confirm that a not insignificant number of the "URM"s at Duke (at least) came from high schools that did not have what epiphany termed an “affinity group.” Why is that? You are a well-to-do professional, therefore I am under the impression that you have the power of school choice. Was it not possible to find a school that was academically excellent and offered “affinity group[s]”?

Yes, I am in favor of socioeconomic preferences. And I would heartily join Pizzagirl, epiphany, and others in using the dreaded “sense of entitlement” phrase on anyone who complained that a poor kid took “his” spot.

epiphany · June 19, 2011, 3:24pm

Who’s “we”? Because one doesn’t necessarily have control of how others, even within our own ‘groups,’ view us. Clearly true among Asian-American groups as well. There can be tension between those who behave as supposedly culturally ‘authentic’ and those who have earned an epithet for making an effort to blend in with a non-Asian dominant culture. Clearly true, believe it or not, among whites who have recently – or ever – fallen from a position of high net economic worth to much lower. There is a fair amount of rejection and condemnation awaiting them, among their peer group. White upper-middle-class folks are ‘bound,’ if you will, with a set of expectations. So why “shouldn’t” other groups also find themselves with such individual-vs-class(group) struggles? Maybe it “shouldn’t” happen, but it does.

College admissions committees are not in the business of dealing with shoulds and shouldn’ts when they review applications; they are in the business of dealing with what is, and in some cases, striving to make a difference for such an impoverished, minority, or impoverished+minority student. Such different opportunities may eventually change the dynamics of the ‘shouldn’ts’ into ‘no longer necessary.’ But we’re not there yet, and colleges are very aware of that.

Shrinkrap · June 19, 2011, 3:30pm

“You are a well-to-do professional, therefore I am under the impression that you have the power of school choice. Was it not possible to find a school that was academically excellent and offered “affinity group[s]”?”

You have asked me this before, and the short answer is no. Using what I have learned on college confidential, there are no “academically excellent” schools within 45 miles of where I live. I don’t know if there are some 50 or 60 miles away, but they would involve at least one bridge, and maybe giving up a huge part of my income to drive my kids around.Income now (with college loans to pay now), or Fab’s schools with socioeconomic diversity in 15 years? I did not look. I did not even know what academically excellent WAS until I came to CC, through a google search. I could not believe that kids took SAT classes, or took them more than once.

So there are four schools in my city;

two publics; zipcode x goes here, zip code y goes there; one marginally better than the other; both offer about 8 AP’s;

one charter (which used to be for the kids who couldn’t cut it elsewhere, but is now for kids that want a small school, can handle a waitlist and the rules, and don’t need varsity sports, AP’s etc)

one “christian”; the one I picked when my D was 4 and son was 1. I was just out of the military, and I picked my kids school because they offered early kindergarten. Period. I had no idea this choice would have ramifications down the road.

That’s why young adults without kids get a pass. Having kids really changes your perspective.

When my husband started talking about saving for college ( What??? Parents pay for their kids to go to college? And other parents talked about sending there kid’s to public schools for more AP classes so they could go to a UC, and my kids said no…those are not my values…I felt stuck. I ended up at CC, and I was blown away.

“Yes, I am in favor of socioeconomic preferences.”

Here’s the thing; I suspect once you start tweaking at the level you describe, you are going to end up with a disproportionate amount of kids YOU think deserving, without the money to spend on what they “deserve”. Not being in this business, I don’t know for sure, but that’s how it is with other things, like “spectrum” diagnosis in mental health.

sewhappy · June 19, 2011, 3:42pm

It bothers me that race is seen as the Harry Potter sorting hat, determining whether a group is diverse or not. All those white men on the board of the corporation that someone disparaged a bit back on this thread – what makes you so very certain there is no diversity among them? That is just a stunningly huge assumption. You don’t know their background or lives. Some worked their ways thru state U, some are Ivy bred, some have no degree and are wildly successful entrepreneurs. Some may have had abusive alcoholic parents. Some may be second generation here on this soil. Some may come from generations of entrenched poverty and some may be the offspring of school teachers in the Midwest. It’s like looking at a droplet of water from any pond – inside swims a multitude of life.

Using race to achieve “diversity” is ludicrous. I really believe this. I disagree with my wonderful daughter . . .

epiphany · June 19, 2011, 3:50pm

I don’t think colleges are deluding themselves that grand societal changes are happening because of their admissions decisions. Their own attempts at diversity are minuscule, and they recognize that. It’s just for those campuses, and effects on society will mostly be of the non-grand variety. But it is a vast difference from what those institutions looked like in 1965. And in the economics of college admissions, the idea of a more homogeneous look on campus will immediately affect the candidates available to them, who will gravitate to the alternate elites who do include race as a factor in admissions. (Because as I stated, the majority of students seeking such campuses do themselves favor racial diversity as well.)

soomoo · June 19, 2011, 3:57pm

Sewhappy

I bring up the boardroom example because I am very familiar (via my husband) with it. So yes, while it is true there may be diversity of all those things you mentioned, some boards are looking for more than this. I was not disparaging the old white guys. These old white guys are the ones saying we need more than us. We need someone with a different background (race or ethnicity) to help us with this problem or these customers. A poor white guy who made it big probably has a very different perspective than a poor black guy who did the same.

If a good chunk of your customers are inner city blacks or hispanics for example, why wouldn’t you want someone on your board who can help you with this customer base.

No, not all boards are this progressive…just the successful ones. :)

Sorry if this is a bit off topic.

fabrizio · June 19, 2011, 4:03pm

My apologies for asking you to repeat. Thank you for your long(er) answer.

You mean the schools wouldn’t have the money to implement the socioeconomic preference policy described by Dalton Conley?

epiphany · June 19, 2011, 4:12pm

soomoo, I had this experience myself working on a Board for a non-profit. (It was an educational enterprise but not a college environment per se.) We actively sought more members from a wider population sampling, to draw other ethnic groups besides the heavily whites+Asians we had. This can affect various kinds of funding for a non-profit (demonstrated efforts to admit minority members).

fireandrain · June 19, 2011, 5:04pm

Repeating Roberts back at me doesn’t answer my question about whether you think a room with no blacks in it can be considered diverse.

To answer your question to me “why couldn’t it be” – I’ll answer it this way.

Let’s create a theoretical college class on, let’s say, “American Higher Education.” The students come from urban and rural settings, some are rich and some are poor. But there isn’t a single Asian in the room.

The professor walks in and writes on the board, “Are colleges racist?” He turns to the class and says, “Discuss.”

My bet is that the discussion would not follow the same course that we have in more than 1500 comments. I seriously doubt the Asian point of view, which is argued so passionately here on this thread and elsewhere on CC, would be presented. Without the Asian perspective, the discussion would be lacking something and the students wouldn’t learn something. Fabrizio, in this situation your own arguments would never get in the door. The students would walk out not knowing your point of view. And that’s the power of diversity in an educational setting.

There has been reams of research done on the value of diversity in the classroom, including racial diversity. I’m not going to spend time finding all that research and quoting it back at you.

I don’t understand why we would accept other facets of diversity – gender, socio-economic, geographic – and leave out the color of one’s skin. We might strive for an ideal society where one’s skin color doesn’t matter, but that society doesn’t exist today. And frankly, I don’t think that would be an ideal society. White society tried its best to eliminate all the culture and traditions of Native Americans, and that was a disaster. The color of your skin doesn’t make you better or worse, but ignoring that differences exist seems ridiculous to me.

Professor101 · June 19, 2011, 5:26pm

If this is aimed at me, please stop the misrepresentation.

I never called Stanford racist. I called it a discriminator. I am sure that a person of your caliber knows full well the difference between a discriminator and a racist.

Canuckguy · June 19, 2011, 7:08pm

I am very impressed with your daughter. Most adults never figure this out, let alone a student.

My position may not be well-supported on CC, but it is consistent with the work of Karabels The Chosen. Here is a quote from book reviews:

*Karabel, whose role in redesigning Berkeley’s admissions policy in the late '80s in order to pass constitutional muster is described in The Big Test, and who remains one of the most thoughtful advocates of affirmative action, candidly concedes that the Big Three ramped up the admission of black students almost overnight owing not to some midnight conversion but to terror at the rising tide of black anger and violenceowing, that is, to racial blackmail. *

For Asians, I suspect a different type of fear that I call the The Good Mother Syndrome is at work:

[The</a> Ivy Delusion - Magazine - The Atlantic](<a href=“http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/the-ivy-delusion/8397/]The”>The Ivy Delusion - The Atlantic)

Yes, my experience applying to university is exactly that of Malcolm Gladwell. We grew up in the same province a decade or so apart.

BTW, just for fun I told my friends yesterday that the difference between Canadas leadership and Chinas leadership is very simple; Canada uses a numerically-driven system while the Chinese uses a holistic review system to pick their leaders. I swear I could hear a pin drop. They obviously have never been on CC.

Bay · June 19, 2011, 7:37pm

I don’t understand the relevance of discussing socio-economic “preferences” to this topic. The elite colleges already claim that their student bodies are comprised of the entire socio-economic spectrum, they provide 100% FA to the needy, there are programs like Questbridge in place, and there is nothing at all preventing elites right now from admitting as many poor applicants as they like, and accepting any qualifications to make it so.

So what is it you are proposing that would be new? Are you saying that if the elites dropped using race as a factor and just admitted more poor kids, the racial diversity would be the same? Why would the elites take their arguments in favor of using race all the way to the US Supreme Ct if it were that simple?

Shrinkrap · June 19, 2011, 7:46pm

"You mean the schools wouldn’t have the money to implement the socioeconomic preference policy described by Dalton Conley? "

I don’t really know, and I’m glad I’m not in charge. I’ve got my hands full doing my little part.

sewhappy · June 19, 2011, 7:53pm

^ That Flanagan piece in The Atlantic is extremely perceptive.

bovertine · June 19, 2011, 8:36pm

Since I assume Professor Karabel understands the conclusions of his own work, and since he still supports race based diversity programs am I to assume you also support programs which take racial diversity into account, provided they are designed to avoid quotas, and take all factors into account including ethnic underrepresentation (which is basically what the Karabel plan was)?

<a href=“http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/committees/aepe/implementation-karabel-report-freshman-admissions-berkeley-1990-1993[/url]”>http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/committees/aepe/implementation-karabel-report-freshman-admissions-berkeley-1990-1993</a>

^^^
I think he carves out some spaces for people who score high on this scale.
I think that’s a reasonable plan.

epiphany · June 19, 2011, 8:58pm

I could barely disagree more. I.m.o., the only thing Flanagan got right was the Embarrassment of Riches part. Otherwise she was way off. For example, this part:

First of all, her mythical “they.” She invented a little pet term “The Good Mother.” I’ve never met such a caricature as she describes, not IRL. It sounds like something out of a corny or maudlin movie. So either I’m sheltered or Flanagan is an attention-getter and considers herself clever. And who’s “angry”? Not any mother, “Good” or not, that I know.

Then there’s this gem:

Is she on drugs? Because it sounds like a flat-out hallucination. And I’ve got news for her. I’m not Asian, my children chose to achieve on their own (as did many other children of other CC’ers, including, I’m sure, a number of Asian children), they were not threatened by any adults if they didn’t perform, and their admissions results were terrific. (Similarly for these other CC’ers.)

No “suspicions”
No “perceived threat”
Not “cheesed-off”

And I’m really, really glad that I don’t know this author.

I’ve made this public twice before, I think on CC: The reason I don’t like Amy Chua has nothing to do with the inaccurate guesses by the author above. I simply don’t like Chua as a person, as she came across with Charlie Rose – whether that was or was not an accurate depiction of her, in her own words. I had no opinion of her whatsoever before I saw her on CR. I found all of her rationales unconvincing – not relative to college admissions, but relative to her supposed level of happiness and that of her children, simply because her personal style is so – for want of a better word – “manic.” Maybe it’s television cameras that do that for some interview subjects and do not show them, unfortunately, in a positive light; maybe it’s the “thrill” of being published in The Atlantic that does it for its contributors as well. :rolleyes:

As to this part, again this author gets it wrong:

It “suggests” no such thing, lady. And if that was your ‘theme’ when you were a “college counselor at a prep school,” you did your families a disservice ever to imply or believe that. How unprofessional of you.

woeishe · June 19, 2011, 9:02pm

I think Amy Chua is a pretty cool person, albeit very extreme in her parenting methods.

pacheight · June 19, 2011, 9:18pm

“the Asian threat, as perceived by cheesed-off white professional-class parents, is in fact higher than their worst suspicions”

I don’t know about the higher part but white parents talk about this openly everywhere in affluent suburbs where their kids are not getting accepted to schools they themselves were accepted to years earlier. They blame asians. It’s racist and it’s very common.

I don’t know if admissions is racist but a lot of white professional class parents are towards Asians. In fact it’s so common I’ve heard asians say it followed by I’m a “white asian” so I can’t get in either…meaning I don’t study all the time and I hang with the white kids and therefore I’m more social therefore my grades are not as high

it’s all racist, and it’s certainly wide spread in California.

fabrizio · June 19, 2011, 9:30pm

What is the Asian point of view on racial preferences? I am not sure whether it exists at all, especially since Jerry KANG and Frank WU are both ardent advocates of affirmative action for "URM"s. That you refer to the Asian point of view reflects a fundamental difference between us. I see people as individuals; you see people as members of groups.

If you asked Ward Connerly to sit down and have lunch, I bet you would find it odd that a quarter-black man has the Asian point of view when it comes to racial preferences. There is no the Asian point of view/perspective. I’m pretty confident that if you had POLITICAL diversity in the classroom, my arguments would be aired, and you don’t need to consider racial classification to have political diversity.

When it comes to racial preferences at elite universities, I think there’s astonishingly little diversity of thought. [url=<a href=“http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sica/reading.htm]Harvard[/url”>http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sica/reading.htm]Harvard[/url</a>], for example, has a “Summer Institute on College Admissions.” If you examine the reading list, it will be very clear that when it comes to racial preferences, there is only one acceptable way of viewing it if you attend the program. It’s ironic that they have NO diversity of thought there even though the term will probably be used hundreds (thousands?) of times throughout the week.

fabrizio · June 19, 2011, 9:37pm

If the “reams of research” are as rigorous as some of the studies mentioned in [Rothman</a>, Lipset, and Nevitte](<a href=“http://www.planethan.com/drupal/racial]Rothman”>http://www.planethan.com/drupal/racial), count me unimpressed:

…it suggests that the question is worded in a way that taps into what social scientists call a “valence issue,” an issue on which almost everyone agrees. In this sense, diversity is like free speech–almost everyone approves of it in the abstract, but its application in concrete situations can produce great controversy. In sum, the social science surveys that support the benefits alleged for diversity in college enrollment cannot preclude the possibility that favorable responses are products of a kind of indoctrination in the meaning of certain terms and concepts, rather than a valid reflection of real world effects. In this case, the argument that diversity is beneficial becomes circular–students are taught that diversity is valuable, asked whether diversity is valuable, and then their positive replies are seen as proof of diversity’s value.

And it’ll never exist so long as you insist that it matters.

are colleges racist?

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