Getting into MIT according to my sister in admissions, MIT takes from a widening circle first from the Cambridge area, then Boston, then Greater Boston, followed by Mass, followed by New England, then the Northeast, then the US and finally foreign students.
Right away there are fewer than 100% of the seats as US because of foreign students.
If a top Asian student is in San Fran his odds of getting into MIT drop. His odds of getting into Cal Tech go up. That does not mean there is a quota system. In fact no one is claiming there is a quota system. The rampant talk in at least the NYC Chinese speaking community is there is a quota system against them. Note we are not talking educated people. We are talking under educated immigrants. We are not talking locking out their children.
The assumption that anyone came here and worked harder from nothing to get ahead and is now being denied is interesting. It is totally wrong. Not the work part but the assumption you can look at any American and decide they have not worked so you should go to the top of the line.
I have seen someone with a third grade education decide no one else works.
Separately any student can fall through the cracks. Top student of a friend of my sisters, the mother from China, applied to ten elite schools and was not accepted. Just bad luck that all ten did not take her. Nothing wrong with the schools admission policies or her grades etcâŚjust none said yes.
University and College admissions are hopelessly mired in pretenses about equity while being hopelessly mired in struggles over status and power. Affirmative Action is simply part of that hopeless mire that has more to do with institutional inertia than racism or other isms.
The dominant bias, stunningly, is towards people born in January or February and early March. Why? Because athletic scholarships are so important and because high school athletics are biased by the very significant physical advantages (hey testostorone is a very fast acting drug) of students older by a few months within any given grade level!
As a Harvard grad with Stanford siblings I am deeply and uncomfortably familiar with how elite higher education, outside of STEM subjects, is hopelessly biased towards elevating rich or at least richly descended idiots and mediocrites. However, the dominant force in admissions is statistical ignorance and incompetence in the deeply entrenched college admissions rackets.
If you need more evidence check out the hideously scandalous and ugly history of US News and World Reports corrupt and scamming ranking system.
This is a superb column on the subject by a highly qualified author:
I am passionate about transforming educational opportunities for all, but especially for the multi-generational imporverished (and I am deep in that here in Mexico) and for the descendants of chattel slavery. I am convinced that there is only one sure path to do that without falling into gamification and solicted fraud:
IMPROVE infant through high school education for all. COPY FINLAND or be damned.
The truth of the matter there are not enough slots in the top 300 universities in the US. Particularly not enough in the top 200 universities where many more people belong than get in.
It is ignorance to say my dad worked hard but so and soâs dad and mom did not.
Little anecdotal storyâŚworking in a Chinese restaurant 30 years ago on the register. The mom used to wait on an African American woman, mother of four boys, she was very poor. The Chinese couple were working themselves to death. The talk when the customer left each time was devasting. Particularly the Chinese male owner was aging faster than he should. One day I called the mom on her talking out of line. I let her know the customerâs husband had just died young leaving her with four boys, she was working three jobs. The look on mom/ownerâs face. She went out of her way to give food to the customer. She felt very guilty as she should have. She also finally saw the humanity. She was worried about losing her own husband.
People are people when do we acknowledge that. If you come to America you come to our history. You come to our culture. You do not have to love it. I am not one of those but at least understand our humanity. Do not exclude us just because you think we are faulty. You in all likelihood have your own faults.
From Pew Research, we find that 62% of blacks and 65% of hispanics say that race should not be considered in admissions.
As the debate over college admissions policies reignites, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most Americans (73%) say colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Just 7% say race should be a major factor in college admissions, while 19% say it should be a minor factor.
So the solution is to punish smart Asian kids ⌠who didnât perpetrate slavery, and whose ancestors didnât perpetrate slavery. And who also happen to suffer from racism to boot!
What do you call punishing a type of person due to their race again? What do you call treating someone differently due to their race?
Actually, the news wires are reporting the court provided a carve out, for the military academies. So West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force academy can have AA policies, but not Whatsa Matta U.
The Asian kids are not being denied by the numbers. There is not 100% US seats in the Ivy league when you factor in foreign students. The legacy students do the most to force out most people. So there is not 50% available seats in the Ivy League but the Asian US kids have 27.9% of Harvard seats. The good Harvard prof who said otherwise was testing to see if you were awake.
That very bright people are arguing for the Asian kids without reviewing the stats well is unfortunate.
We all come to this nation. Most of us after Slavery. We live by a lot of laws. We do not live by laws or history elsewhere.
That Chinese restaurant, the daughter and younger son felt very put upon by their parents. The kids worked when their peers did not for years before their peers got a job at age 16. The public would have screamed but the community was small and saw what was going on. The kids came in after school and after being at home waiting for a person to pick them up and worked 3.5 hours per day. The kids went home at 8 pm. The kids had the lightest jobs in the restaurant. The son did far less than that. The daughter felt she carried the entire load. I would talk to the father and he would smile and just shake his head. He thought the cross she was bearing was cute but not hers.
When any immigrant family has kids working in the small family business the kids are spared a lot of the work. The idea that âour family came from nothing and did xyzâŚâ is not so accurate in that the parents are not applying to Harvard the son or daughter is applying.
Many young people have angst. Some get over it. Some do not. It is not the work, the friends, the parentsâŚit is simply your life.
We minorities face bigotry in the US. In the pecking order of bigotry no one faces what African Americans and many women face. It is a bit of a disgrace to either equate other bigotry as equal or to deny a responsibility in American society to equal rights and especially economic access.
Does that mean someone who is not protected wont get into Harvard? We will never know. So many people apply that in reality the ratio of people getting in is not that high.
No one has a seat at Harvard with their name on it. That includes most African Americans who apply. Oddly the need to fix to a degree the wrongs have possibly a lot of African Americans also applying and possibly feeling a bit cheated when denied.
Life goes on for everyone who does not get into Harvard. The same guys suing will be suing their next door neighbors next. Seems some people live to be in court.
Protect each other and we all do better. In reality you are never denied when you protect each other.
One way to think about the different perspectives on this issue is to recognize that you can frame the case on different levels of generality:
Is it constitutional to take into account race in order to achieve some legitimate state goal?
Is it constitutional to do that through college admissions generally?
Is it constitutional to do that through the specific way that colleges actually do it?
Note that you can have different answers to these different questions. Itâs entirely possible to answer âyesâ to the first two questions and ânoâ to the last one. You can answer âyesâ to the first question and ânoâ to the second two.
I think the majority opinion is that last one - yes, no, no. The Court doesnât say that race can never be taken into account to achieve an important goal (it actually expressly doesnât reach military academies, for example). But it does say that college admissions arenât an acceptable venue for doing that, and that the specific procedures being challenged arenât an acceptable way of doing that.
Itâs also pretty clear that Roberts - and probably the rest of the conservative justices - simply donât believe universities when they claim that these programs are intended to address systemic racism and its effects on their students, or even to provide the benefits of a diverse classroom. If they did (reasons the majority) the programs would look quite different than they do - and look beyond the broad categories of âAsianâ or âHispanicâ or âBlackâ to make sure that they were actually reaching the populations they would need to reach to have actual diversity:
â[T]he use of these opaque racial categories undermines, instead of promotes, respondentsâ goals. By focusing on underrepresentation, respondents would apparently prefer a class with 15% of students from Mexico over a class with 10% of students from several Latin American countries, simply because the former contains more Hispanic students than the latter. Yet â[i]t is hard to understand how a plan that could allow these results can be viewed as being concerned with achieving enrollment that is âbroadly diverse.'â
Diversity is a fig leaf word being batted around in legal and critical ways.
The goal is especially economic access for African Americans.
If we went solely by percentage of the US population Asian American kids would be less than 3% or is it slight more now than Harvard admissions.
Just throwing grades and SATs out there and saying give me is not that simple. You gots already at 27.9% of Harvard enrollment. But what do you gots? Who knows. Most Asians do not want to be simply lumped together.
The question is are Asian students not getting economic access because of AA? Yes to a smaller degree. Are Asians students not getting access because of legacy students? Yes to a larger degree but legally there is no case to bring. It is not aimed at Asian students. Unless dad built a wing on a building in Cambridge. Then again that is legacy the Asian student is in probably in that case.
Bottom line there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of students in the US that do not get into the top 100 schools after rightfully applying for admissions in a given year. Going after African Americans is wrong even if the case is AA because AA means there was merit to be enrolled in the first place. AA does not guarantee students who obviously can not do the work admissions.
Bigotry twists that. Which is why most African Americans are very sensitive about AA.
Coming in part from a minority group we detest feeding the stereo types.
Thing is, without a target to meet, it is too easy to say âwell, the best qualified applicants happen to all be whiteâ, especially a university that weighs things other than course work. They can positively weigh the things that are done by middle and upper class white kids, not the things like working one or two part time jobs, like a kid from a less well-heeled family might do through High School.
Before the Gerald Ford museum in Grand Rapids was renovated, there was material on display about his time at U of M. The admissions officerâs notes said things like âgood lookingâ, and âfamily background none too goodâ. (for those who donât know, Jerry mother divorced his biological father, moved to GR, married Gerald Ford, and her son changed his name to Gerald R Ford Jr) Granted, that was some 90 years ago, but such criteria could be used to downgrade applicants because they were born out of wedlock, or parents were divorced, or a relative did time in jail. Lots of ways minority students, especially those that donât have a lot of money, could be excluded, without a quota to meet.
But the fact of discrimination has been shouted down with wails of white victim-hood, and demagoguery about âwokeâ.
The article is very outdated. The Asian enrollment at Harvard is 27.9% now.
snippet from the article
âwhich would be in line with long-standing perceptions of Asians as indistinguishable from one another.â
The author is using this in her thesis instead of disabusing the readers. After 2000 Chinese immigrants were more often uneducated. Prior our colleges and post grad programs were taking people who had a visa that were Ph.D material. The visa system was the quota. Of course factor in second generation immigrants are not as successful often as their parents.
Now the real lack of disabusing her audience. Indian students are considered Asians. The Indian diaspora has major advantages. Out of a population that size the talent pool is huge. The tech trade between India and the US allows for more visas for India. India has important well done schools left by the English that create very high quality students speaking English. Indian students know more than one language which was also the Jewish advantage.
If Indian students test highly and get in that means Asian SAT scores are high. But if other Asian groups apply with lesser scores and do not get inâŚwell she is implying a false claim. Which she indeed is doing.
Yes dumb bigoted things are said. They are anecdotal.
Again her assumption that the quota system is hidden and out to get Asians. That is not true. There is a lot of pressure in the Chinese speaking NYC China town to buy into that. I know this first hand.
The AA for African Americans demands the enrolling student achieve enough or more to be placed in the school nothing less. The author knows this and did not defend it. She broached the topic of racism against blacks being wrong and then decided it might cost her quarter in this to care.
The US is the US. We have a history we acquire when we get here. We have taxes we pay when we get here. We do not figure out why Asians pay more in taxes. Or less in taxes. Or anybody elseâs individual taxes.
There is a common theme here. We worked hard here as xyz group so we deserve more. If that is based on SAT scores hate to say this it was not her Asian group this time. The black community no matter what is not given credit for hard work. This is just one more time to take that hard work, hold it down and not pay it properly. Just keep down one more generation of African Americans another immigrant group wants the promised land first.
Interesting tidbit offered in the discussion on the news tonight. The (L&Ses) in Lansing outlawed AA in Michigan colleges in 2006. Since then African-Americans, as a percentage of enrollment at the University of Michigan, has fallen from 7% to 4%. Of those who still make the cut at U of M, I canât help but wonder what percentage are there on an athletic scholarship, rather than there to get an education?
It appears that there are still some true unabashed white supremacists out there. What a horrible statement âNo Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based systemâ!!!
That very nicely summarizes what I think is the central flaw of affirmative action with regard to race. There is no clear definition of race, certainly no biological or genetic one. The intent of affirmative action was not to give a college admissions advantage to the children of Tiger Woods or the Obamas who as Barack said, âhad a good dealâ. Yet that seems to make up a larger fraction of those who benefitted from AA if you believe Henry Gates, Most Black Students at Harvard Are From High-Income Families</A>.
So the reality is, particularly in the more prestigious schools, that much of the benefits of AA are going to students who havenât suffered the negative legacies of the Civil War and Jim Crow segregation. To be honest, I donât believe that target demographic is going to be seriously impacted by this AA Supreme Court ruling. Admissions people are always impressed by students who are the first in their family to go to college or who have overcome poverty, prejudice, or racial bias to achieve academic success. Thatâs not going to change.
Ending AA will likely reduce the probability of black kids from wealthy parents getting into good colleges but have no effect on the admissions of poor black kids.
I think it was a convenience to lump the Harvard case in with Chapel Hill.
The Ivy League schools are not necessarily known for championship football and basketball teams, but, rather, for being expen$ive, so, anyone, regardless of race, needs to have deep pockets, or stellar qualifications, to get in. The last time Harvard won a national football championship was 1920. Last time Yale won a national football championship was 1909. Similarly, the service academies, were exempted from the ruling, because their students are required to actually learn something, not just play football for four years, then get themselves drafted by the NFL.
The ruling was clearly aimed at the large, state universities, where the vast majority of middle class kids go, including the majority of African American students, because, between student loans, a part time job, and parental help, they can pay the bills.
âŚor an athletic scholarship. U of M football team, 2009, three years after AA was outlawed in Michigan. I count 56 African American players, out of 120. University administration or the board of trustees can said âof course the university has a diverse student body, just look at the football teamâ Of course, most of these kids are there to be groomed for the NFL, not to learn anything.
I wish they would ignore race and gender and all that and just look at a personâs neighborhood, high school, parentâs income, number of parents, etc., to see whether that student has had to overcome difficulties that might degrade their âqualificationsâ unfairly.
And my three grandsons have a Hispanic surname, for whatever thatâs worth.
