<p>Haha, Barrons, for someone who is ever so prompt in asking others to back up opinions with facts and data, you may want to check a few numbers on the changes in student body at Cal and UCLA for the past twenty years?</p>
<p>“Yale records show that entering Asian American freshmen averaged a 1493 SAT score in 1999-2000, 1496 in 2000-2001, and 1482 in 2001-2. For the same three years, the average for white freshmen was about 40 points lower. Black and Hispanic freshmen lagged another 100-125 points below whites.”</p>
<p>Those are entering admitted freshmen. What about the applicant pools? Do the Asians have the highest SAT’s at the applicant-pool level? </p>
<p>If at the applicant pool level, Asians averaged 1500, whites 1450 and blacks / Hispanics 1350, then it wouldn’t surprise me if at the admitted-freshmen level the distribution was the same. That wouldn’t prove discrimination. If at the applicant pool level, all groups averaged 1400, but then you had the above distribution at admission, that might suggest discrimination.</p>
<p>
Well, they don’t limit Asians. They don’t include race in their admissions criteria. They do use ancillary factors like first-gen, low-income, and other factors in addition to GPA/SAT scores but there are plenty of Asians who fall into those categories already. You can’t be serious if think think the numbers for Asians at UCLA/UCB are ‘stark’ since these campuses have huge percentages of Asians so I must have misunderstood your post.</p>
<p>Stickershock, if all you know about Asians are anecdotally occurring in your small town, then I can tell you it is not the case here in the Bay Area and you seem to have a very myopic view of Asian American students. Every high school sports teams here are at least 10% Asian, including contact sports. My friend’s Asian daughter wrestled in Palo Alto High. Another friend’s half Asian daughter is on the Women’s Olympic Wrestling team heading to Beijing this summer. Several Asian girls now are on our Olympic Soccer team including one with Brandi Chastain’s team.</p>
<p>obviously you have never been to any California campuses.</p>
<p>Cbreeze, your experience may be very different than mine. But my observation is not just relevant to my town (pop.27,000.) It’s fairly universal around here, which is a pretty typical densely populated suburban area ten miles from Manhattan.</p>
<p>Anecdotally only, cbreeze, I’m in a typical suburban area of a major city, and the Asian students are overly represented in the math and science achievement areas. I know of several of my son’s friends who are Asian who are required by their parents to study for X hours a day and do NOTHING not school-related until the weekend, and have been banned from TV / videogames unless they achieve straight A averages. I know of several others at the summer program my children attended, who wanted to attend writing or humanities programs but were made by the parents to take physics, chemistry or computer engineering. Anecdotes only, of course.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl:
</p>
<p>I don’t understand this argument. Can you explain your logic?</p>
<p>In our county there are two magnets, one math-science, and the other IB. My son is in the IB magnet, and the vast majority of the Asian kids in the IB magnet are math-science oriented. In the other magnet, of course, all the kids are math-science oriented. Of course, this is anecdotal too, but this is a DC suburb.</p>
<p>What I mean is:
The fact that admitted-freshmen Asian students had a higher SAT than the admitted-freshmen whites and the admitted-freshmen Afr Ams does not, in itself, prove discrimination (as in, “they make Asian students jump a higher hurdle”).</p>
<p>What were the ingoing SAT’s of each of the applicant pools? </p>
<p>If the Asians who APPLIED had a higher average SAT than the whites who applied (etc), then even with no discrimination … even if the college just took the top 10% from each racial pool … admitted-freshmen Asians would have a higher average score. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if Asians, whites and AA’s applicants all had the same average score of 1400, and you found that the Asians who were accepted had 1500, the whites 1400 and the AA’s 1300, then there would indeed be potential evidence of discrimination, because they made the Asians jump a higher hurdle - that is, they “skimmed the cream of the top” of their applicant pools differently.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, even if those differences were established beyond all reasonable doubt, it would still mean … very little. That is why studies such Espenchade’s and Chung’s add very little if anything to the debate about college admissions. In addition of using questionable projections instead of objective data, focusing solely on the SAT does not shed much light on a process that relies on holistic reviews.</p>
<p>All such efforts are meant to (re)introduce the same concepts of meritocracy based on BASIC standardized tests that have been rejected repeatedly. Admissions to our best schools will never mimic the admission systems of Korea or India. It is not coincidental that the most vocal critics come from the same corners that benefitted tremendously from preferential treatment in the past.</p>
<p>You, I and everyone else knows that “holistic review” was just a smokescreen for maintaining some affirmative action at the UC after the state made the old fashioned kind illegal. I am not even saying it’s wrong but the negative impact on one group to boost another cannot be denied either.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, I’ll deny it. If you have any credible evidence that this happened, please present it.</p>
<p>I’m in favor of affirmative action, as well as affirmative action in the guise of holistic admissions, but how can you deny that its use has a negative impact on people who don’t benefit from it? You really can’t, unless you just claim that it isn’t happening.
To give a less charged example, if a school maintains gender balance by accepting boys who are, on average, less qualified than the girls who applied, that obviously has a negative impact on girls, even if it still might be a good idea.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There have been plenty of litigated cases on this issue. The cases don’t go forward without someone making a threshold claim of harm from the policies of colleges that have been litigated.</p>
<p>token,</p>
<p>I was referring directly to the UCs, as specified by barrons. Other than Bakke, I am not aware of any other litigated cases on this issue. Are you? If so, what was the outcome?</p>
<p>Even lawful and reasonable discrimination hurts somebody.</p>
<p>As simple as ABC
A. Look at the numbers
B. Look at the numbers
C. Look at the numbers</p>
<p>Yes, you are correct. The numbers show that when the race, sex and ethnicity of UC applicants were not considered, the number of Asians admitted to UC schools went up and the number of URMs admitted went down. But is it discriminatory to NOT look at an applicant’s scores and accomplishments in the context of his/her race, gender and ethnicity? Perhaps, because when you eliminate those factors, URM admission rates go down. Now who is getting hurt?</p>
<p>Yes- Eurocentric all right, the fabric of the US culture is based on European customs, foods and religion. Asians are all lumped together in most references- as them. No one is talking about relative percentages of Indians, Koreans, Chinese…yet people of Jewish ancestry with European roots get special notice (for understandable reasons, history was not kind and the nonchristian culture). Of course California has a lot of Asian college students- demographics. Most of this country is too heavily skewed, relative to the world population, to Europeans- courtesy of past colonization and immigration practices. I come from a white world, demographics of the Midwest, and could easily have remained oblivious to nonEuropean cultures. Anyone remember the dumb Polack jokes of the '60s? Another example of us and them. I see people of the majority posting who never felt being different because of some of their heritage. Like Kermit said, it is hard being green.</p>