<p>I believe the key word there was hundreds. Out of hundreds of colleges (including many top LACs), there aren’t 6-8 that are good fits? I find that hard to believe.</p>
<p>Imagine if Mississippi, which is heavy in African-Americans but has a shortage in Asians, adopted measures such as Proposition 209. Would that me telling little Asian children they can’t go to college as Drosselmeier so dramatically stated was true for blacks in California? Don’t really take this seriusly, I’m only asking you to analyze your own logic.</p>
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</p>
<p>Few deny that Jian Li is exploiting the system. What we’re talking about here is the broader issue at hand.</p>
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</p>
<p>In college admissions, everybody competes against everybody. Therefore it is unfair. As for the second part, even if a college accepts 10% of members of every race, Asiand wouldn’t have an advantage. There’s no real logic to this.</p>
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</p>
<p>Yes, it should, if they are the most highly qualified. It is ok to look for intraracial uniqueness (to give only intraracial examples, Asians in jazz band vs. average classically trained Asians, African Americans in hockey vs. African Americans in basketball, Hispanics fluent in Polish vs. Hispanics fluent in Spanish) to prove “un-averageness” but it stops at that.</p>
<p>Just so you people know, I’m tired of the redundancy on both sides of this argument, so until something new and fresh about this topic (Asians in Princeton stage a munity and take over the campus! NAACP sues state of Michigan! etc.) I’m leaving.</p>
<p>Pro,</p>
<p>My reference to “the Supremes” meant the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the ULTIMATE source for this issue. (Sorry for the confusion - it is a humorous reference carried over from law school)</p>
<p>Pro,</p>
<p>The problem I see with your analysis is that it ignores the big picture. IsleBoy posted a good article that encapsulates many of convolutions of AA over the years.</p>
<p>You need to start from the premise that the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken: Racial diversity is a “compelling interest” for universities. (“ci” is a legal term - it essentially means the Court recognizes it as a VERY IMPORTANT component of university environments).</p>
<p>Therefore, no matter what formula adcoms use to admit students, if college campuses end up all one race, or exclusive of some races, eventually their admission procedures will be struck down as discriminatory against the excluded races. It may not happen this year or in ten years, but I would (almost) stake my house on it eventually happening. I think universities are doing their best to stave off that lawsuit.</p>
<p>That’s why I say Jian Li may end up disappointed in the outcome of his suit, if it goes all the way to the Supremes. It is certainly possible for them to find that racial diversity is much more important than some “score” attributed to applicants. And it could mean that Asians lose out on more spots than they have now. That is conjecture on my part, but something that should be considered.</p>
<p>
Its not like anyone already owns a spot at the schools that they must “sacrifice” because of Affirmative Action. So this claim that “Asians are made to sacrifice their places” is just false. The schools want a certain shape to their classes, and they are employing criteria that keep academic standards high while also creating the sorts of classes they want to see. AA is a tool that schools use to shape their classes. It is a tool much like judgments of ECs and personality. Saying that without AA Asians would gain more spots in the schools is like saying if we get rid of judgments of personality, we’d get more quiet or loud people at the schools. Maybe such a thing would happen, but it surely does not mean the quiet or loud people had a right to the spots in the first place. It only means that if the selection criteria were changed, the population would change. Well, duh. The schools may not be interested in having a class of mostly quiet or mostly loud students.</p>
<p>
Of course we already know the system is effective. The issue that concerns me is just what it is effective for. I think the American college system is the best in the whole world. It seems that every single state of the American Union has at least one school that rivals or bests the finest schools in Asia. This circumstance didn’t come about because of the Chinese or any other Asian system. And it hasn’t come about because of an influx of Asians. American students at one time spent a lot more time experimenting and haggling with ideas, and a lot less time with TV and other conformist behavior. To this day the American schools value this intellectual independence (though they seem to value it less now than in past years). I think they should remain free to value it, rather than be confined to a system that is more rigid. Yes, Question Ocean is very effective, and many of our secondary schools are adopting it because it is effective. But, as I think schools like Berkeley are finding out, it is effective only for producing well paid copyists and factory workers.</p>
<p>A few years ago, the government of Singapore summoned Mitch Resnick to help crack a problem. Although thousands of schoolchildren in that country were designing and building robots using the Lego Mindstorm kits Resnick helped invent, Singapore businesses complained that when these same students hit the workplace, they lacked creativity and initiative. Resnick discovered, in conversations with teachers, that robot building was an after-school activity, and classroom time was devoted to math and science drills.
<a href=“http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/372/[/url]”>http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/372/</a></p>
<p>*China’s lack of innovation is pervasive in business to the point that it impacts nearly all Western companies that do business in or with China. I am constantly hearing complaints of China’s lack of innovation from Westerners doing business in China. Though these complaints rarely include the word “innovation,” I am told the following:
- Companies in China are not capable of doing anything beyond exactly what we tell them to do.
- We are not getting any help from our Chinese manufacturers in blending our production techniques with their factory. We have to do all of this ourselves.
- We partnered with this company because they had substantial experience selling similar products within China. And yet, they have not made even one suggestion (good or bad) as to how we can make our product better suited for the Chinese market. We ended up having to learn about the market entirely on our own and we suggested the changes.
- My Chinese employees are unwilling to do anything beyond what I specifically tell them to do. I feel like they do not even try to fill in the blanks in the instructions I give them.<br>
<a href=“China Law Blog - Harris Sliwoski LLP”>China Law Blog - Harris Sliwoski LLP;
<p>* International managers who are waiting for Chinese staffers to suddenly become independent and creative are simply deluding themselves. It is far morel likely that Chinese schools will become MORE conservative and conformist, not less. Business schools can’t teach 30-year-olds to be creative, and Chinese public schools don’t want to encourage 10 years olds to ‘think outside the box’. Chinese public schools ARE the box, and that’s not going to change any time soon.</p>
<p>The challenge for western managers is to figure out ways to use the talents and abilities that their Chinese staff possess or can be taught effectively. Waiting and wishing for Chinese graduates to suddenly change their personalities and abilities is a sure-fire recipe for failure.*
<a href=“http://www.diligencechina.com/blog/?p=130[/url]”>http://www.diligencechina.com/blog/?p=130</a></p>
<p>Such articles are legion, and this is obviously not the fault of the kids. It is clear to me the problem is with the system in which those kids are raised. It is creating kids who are good at passing tests and who, like you, can do thousands of problems in drill after drill, but who cannot create from scratch even if their lives depended on it.</p>
<p>We ought not reward such a system here in America, as we now increasingly do. I think admissions officers ought to have the flexibility to choose a kid if that kid is qualified, even though that kid may not score quite as well as another kid on a test. The kid with the lower score may be able to better communicate creativity, though such communication may not be easily quantifiable. This sort of flexibility is what has made America’s schools the greatest on earth, even despite its being used against other groups. Once it was adjusted to include other groups, the quality of the schools never suffered. Indeed, they are still the best on the planet. The flexibility to use race in these judgments only adds power to the selections. When a black guy is found to be gifted in math and literature, even though he comes from a race that has historically been denied education by law, and even though he comes from a race that still suffers as a result of that mistreatment, the meaning of his gift is profound.</p>
<p>What is going on? First Tufts, now Princeton.</p>
<p>
America has never enslaved and denied education to any of these other groups so that such things as Affirmative Action are needed for them. That is the real unfairness here. Asians are doing fine when it comes to their numbers in the schools. Blacks are not. And this is not only due to the results of history, but also because of unfairness that is still being dumped on them today.</p>
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Perhaps you would had Asians developed here in an environment wherein they were enslaved and denied education by American law.</p>
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But you obviously don’t prefer Asia, and that is really the point here.</p>
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Very well then, I take it back.</p>
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Well you don’t have to take my word for it. But if you are a person of consciousness, you might wish to attempt to understand the experiences of others, which experiences can best be communicated by those who have them. That is a large part of what education is about. If an educational institution lops off such a large and significant voice as blacks in America, it simply cripples itself as an American institution of education.</p>
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Which is why I personally wish to maintain a significant presence of Asian-Americans in our schools. </p>
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LOL. Well, no. But they are quite few in the nation period, which will influence their representation in the schools. I strongly suspect that should a qualified Kazakh-American apply to the schools, he will tend to get special attention compared to Chinese-Americans because he needs the attention. The same might apply to South-east Asians.</p>
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There is no contradiction and there is no double standard. America has no obligation to either the Hispanic or the Indian. But because of diversity, I wish to include them both. American does have obligations to blacks and Native-Americans, and because of this I think it has a duty to include them both.</p>
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So much for the constant use of the E & C study.</p>
<p>
I agree with this. I am not really sure if AA caused it. It seems to have influenced or perhaps even caused it, but I do not know. My concern is, that we should know before we just end it. If it has done such stupendous good, then it may be too soon to just end it.</p>
<p>
FAR more than being a gangster, especially when it is associated with academic excellence and fine neighborhoods, and when gangsterism is associated with thuggishness, as in Weird Al’s video. A black kid seeing that video basically receives the message that calculus, nice neighborhoods, computers, intelligence, are all white things, while being a thug is not—it is a black thing. It leaves the kid little room to explore other pursuits. I am not saying that this one video is debilitating. I am saying this video is an example of literally thousands of influences that perpetuate, not just ridicule, but perpetuate black stereotypes, and that no one complains about. So I don’t see a double standard here with this Prince article. The article just failed to do what the students were attempting. It crossed the line of propriety. But calling them racists is just an overreaction in my view.</p>
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I certainly would think so. I would think that the HBCU’s would be thrilled to see an increase in white and Asian applications. I heard of where one was offering near full rides to certain whites.</p>
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It has been done. Indeed, before HBCUs were created, all colleges were for whites only. That is why the HBCUs were created in the first place.</p>
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Agreed. You will get no denial from me on this point. I have already said here, many times, that HBCU’s in this modern day, lose something special when too many of its students come from a single experience. I think they even understand this, and are trying to greater diversify their student bodies.</p>
<p>
No. The applicant pool is already skewed against blacks because of history. In other words, we now have a situation where a thousand qualified applicants apply for a hundred spots. Eight hundred of them are white, a hundred fifty are Asian, forty are everything else, and only ten are black. They are all qualified. Now which of all these groups have had the greatest downward pressure against it? It makes no sense to just throw away the nine blacks as if they are not in the group that has taken the brunt of America’s evil. Race still matters. It ought not matter, but it does. So, keeping this in mind, you might pay a little more attention to those ten blacks, to see if some of them have what it takes add meaningfully to the overall class. Their being black does not give them an auto admission status, or anything like it. It simply helps ensure black students who are as qualified as the whites and Asians, don’t get swamped by the white and Asian numbers due to the effects of racism and history.</p>
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haha. It is hard to use this to analyze my logic, when it is such an utter abortion of my logic. Had those Asians been roundly enslaved and oppressed by law, and had they ALSO encountered routine and brutal racism such that the harder they tried, the less they achieved their dreams, then when Mississippi passed its Prop 209, which cut Asians out of the colleges by the thousands, then Asian kids would very likely get the message of hopelessness very clearly. They would get this message because it is what they have always gotten there in Mississippi.</p>
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Bye. Have a nice one.</p>
<p>I have similar feelings as proletariat2 does in the sense that I do not feel “isolated and unsupported” when I am the only Asian in a group. It’s been like that in the majority of my classes for the past seven years.</p>
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<p>I don’t agree with this view. I used to live in the Midwest. Between grades two and five, I met roughly five Black students (i.e. we were in the same class). I don’t remember any racial animosity. They seemed to be neither isolated or unsupported. We all interacted with each other. We all treated each other the way we wanted to be treated. There was a lot of goofing around, of course, but race was never brought up with malicious intent. Ever.</p>
<p>Drosselmeier,</p>
<p>I definitely don’t agree that a qualified Kazakh-American needs preferential treatment. The student is good, no contest. Hence, he doesn’t need special treatment.</p>
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<p>I agree with Ward Connerly. The problem is the low number of qualified Black candidates. The solution is not preferential treatment. The solution is better academic preparation. Finding implementations of this solution is much harder than designating group preferences, I acknowledge. But, it’s the only way to actually help disadvantaged Americans.</p>
<p>Drosselmeier, I just can’t help but think the following: since you didn’t want to be discriminated against based on your race in the past, why are you so supportive of being discriminated for now?</p>
<p>“The problem is the low number of qualified Black candidates. The solution is not preferential treatment. The solution is better academic preparation.”</p>
<p>Thank you! This would work so well. I live in NYC and Giuliani really did wonders for the place. One of the things he did was to implement Workfare programs so poor people could get jobs instead of collecting a handout Welfare check every month. The program was a success, and many people, particularly minorities, had stable jobs that they earned livings in. Instead of collecting money and living in a never-ending spiral of poverty, Giuliani advocated self-help and earning your $. Guess what? NYC flourished under him and his systems. It used to be a real decrepit place with sky-high crime rates and high poverty levels. Both crime and poverty fell under Giuliani and now NYC is considered the safest big city in the US. </p>
<p>Imagine what things would be like without AA, which is pretty much the “Welfare check” of college admissions? We should instead focus on boosting academic performance amongst the poorer communities, which have a disproportionate number of minorities. There should be more programs that advocate hard work and earning college acceptances than programs like AA where college standards are lowered for URMs.</p>
<p>“There should be more programs that advocate hard work and earning college acceptances than programs like AA where college standards are lowered for URMs.” </p>
<p>Programs that advocate hard work for URM’s & earning college acceptances = Affirmative Action.</p>
<p>“Programs that advocate hard work for URM’s & earning college acceptances = Affirmative Action.”</p>
<p>WRONG!!! AA advocates NOT working hard to get accepted because it lowers the standards for URMs. It’s like telling one row of a class that they only have to do 5 math problems while the rest of the class has 10. How is that advocating hard work?</p>
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</p>
<p>If that definition was used, then I’d have no problems.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that is not how affirmative action works now. It’s racial preferences.</p>
<p>Here’s yet more fuel:</p>
<p>Study Says Skin Tone Affects Earnings
Jan 26, 7:21 PM (ET)
By Travis Loller</p>
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</p>
<hr>
<p>Color-blind, indeed. Does that mean there is inequity pre-college? Maybe. Does it affect primary and secondary school opportunities? Maybe. Does it affect household income? Maybe. Does it affect social interactions? Maybe.
Does it exert a socio-economic and/or a socio-political force on those discriminated against pre-college? Maybe.</p>
<p>So, why would you ignore that there is discrimination (and it’s root causes)that makes people unequal when considering an application holistically at private colleges?</p>
<p>Rather than attempt to modify the behavior of the majority against color identity, what makes one think that color-neutral policies would protect against positive (rather than normative) inequity?</p>
<p>Hepstar, it is naive to assert that colleges are “lowering their standards” for URMs. What proof do you have?</p>
<p>If colleges are lowering their standards for anyone, it’s for the athletes. Take the SAT scores at Duke as an example. </p>
<p>768 male non-athletes: 1438
42 male athletes: 1172
786 female non-athletes: 1403
37 female athletes: 1258</p>
<p>Baseball team: 1206
Football team: 1063
Basketball team: 997
Nationwide average: 1026</p>
<p>These are significant numbers of people in the freshman class. More people than some colleges have Hispanics or Native Americans, in fact.</p>
<p>Post #374 is utterly false. Not a single selective admissions committee (and we’re talking about Elites here, as in “Princeton,” in the title of the thread) has any interest in accepting weak, unqualified, underqualified students, or students who do “half the work” (5 problems instead of 10). Where do get this fantasy? It’s really not even worth arguing about.</p>
<p>You want proof, here you go:</p>
<p>Admissions statistics for Princeton University, % admitted by race in 1997:</p>
<p>White: 23.8%
Black: 33.7%
Hispainc: 26.8%
Asian: 17.6%</p>
<p>A higher percentage of blacks and hispanics are accepted sinec they aren’t subjected to the same standards as whites and Asians. Futhermore, without AA, the acceptance rate for black applicants would fall from 33.7% to 12.2%, meaning that almost 2/3 of the black-admits at Princeton in 1997 were admitted due to AA. Hispanics would go from 26.8% to 12.9% without AA. Is that enough “proof” for you?</p>
<p>source:
<a href=“http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/tje/espenshadessqptii.pdf[/url]”>http://opr.princeton.edu/faculty/tje/espenshadessqptii.pdf</a></p>
<p>That IS the definition, fabrizio. I’ve told you repeatedly. Admissions officers have stated it publicly, and on CC. You just don’t want to believe it. There is a “preference” for some balance, and wide inclusion, only within that group of hard-working students of all colors & nationalities who have earned their acceptances. The rare exception to this are generally white students with mega-bucks whose parents have contributed significant dollars to that U. while not achieving academically. Legacies (also overwhelmingly white, still) are not heavily advantaged at Ivies, although they get a significant bump at the top LAC’s. (Affirmative Action for Mostly Whites.) Even athletes are now (at Elites) competitive in terms of their academic records, & definitely capable of doing the work. (Regardless of the race of the athlete.) This is a change from many years ago.</p>
<p>Some of you need to get a lot more current.</p>