The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, focusing on whether Harvard’s consideration of race in admissions intentionally discriminates against Asian Americans, is expected this month. A big part of our research has been to identify anti-Asian discrimination, so we understand how charges that Asian Americans are held to a higher standard in college admissions might feel like another instance of anti-Asian bias. But we just don’t see an Asian American penalty in college admissions.
Potent myths about admissions circulate within and outside Asian American communities: “Asian Americans have to score higher than other students to get in” and “Asian Americans shouldn’t check the Asian box on applications.” These myths are often endorsed by college admissions advisors and accepted by parents and students, though not a single Asian American student has testified that they faced discrimination in the high profile Harvard case.
I think it is pretty obvious that Affirmative Action works against Asians. A 2005 Princeton study showed that without AA, Asian students in elite colleges would have an admissions rate of 23.4%, up from the current 17.6%. Asians would gain the most from a race-blind admissions system. Seems to me that a race-based system that has a disproportionate negative impact on Asians fits the definition of being racially discriminatory. A look at the data and arguments about Asian-Americans and admissions at elite colleges
That nicely illustrates the fundamental flaw of AA. Asians are not considered a disadvantaged group despite the fact that the Hmong and Burmese Asians clearly should be.
I don’t think that is a fair description. The SAT is an objective measure of preparation for college. Its utility is demonstrated by a consistent positive correlation between SAT scores and college GPA. Given the desire of admissions committees to bring in students who can be successful in college, the SAT seems like a useful tool.
To devalue the SAT because it is not producing the desired racial distribution seems suspiciously like killing the messenger of bad news. It’s like responding to the observation that diabetes occurs more frequently in blacks than whites by eliminating testing for diabetes. Perhaps society would be better served by trying to raise SAT scores among the disadvantaged than “gaming” the admissions system with subjective criteria like “personality” to get a desired outcome.
I’m not claiming to be harmed by AA in any serious way, but the same thing applied in my case: my parents immigrated to the US from Iran and I’m a first-generation American. Technically I’m “White”, but I had no clue how the college system works here or any of that stuff.
Why should someone like me get penalized (relatively speaking)? Just because I fall in some arbitrary bucket based on skin color/ethnic origins? It’s a blatant violation of civil rights and everybody knows it.
I disagree with your points on the SAT. Colleges do not want all non-legacy students to be high score SAT for the student population. SAT scores do not evaluate the leadership, social, psychological and other qualities of students. That is why top colleges are dropping SAT scores as a requirement.
That study is 20 years old. I do not think it is applicable today. We have lots of new Asians (Philippine, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Arabic, Afghani, Iranian, Pakistani and Indonesian students in America. Many of these new emigrants would benefit from AA.
Did that factor in whether Indian students would get more visas? Because without those visas it is not true. No other Asian group currently would lead US universities up to those percentages. I get Princeton blah blah blah. I am watching the Supremes blah blah blah as well these days. Nice to have big names and then not live up to any of it.
So you brought in the Princeton study. Did it discuss visas for Indian students? Or was the study fact blind?
If the study was not discussing visas then the study was utterly and completely worthless. You can not educate students who wont show up in class at all or for that matter on campus at all or for that matter in the US at all. Some how the percentage mentioned does not count.
The claim was Asian student score 140 points higher than AA students and/or legacy students to get into Ivy league schools. That does not mean there are enough elite Indian students to make the percentage true. That means there are more Asian students from other groups that simply want in. Never mind all Asian students scoring 140 points more. Simply put that is not the claim and that is not happening. The extrapolation is fallacious.
The western republicans are made up of bureaucracies.
In a phrase “institutional imperatives”.
The alternative would be a horrifying dictatorship that would not educate on any level any of us in real terms.
Just my two cents no one was ever penalized by a black man getting ahead. I really do not like that implication from several here.
People at a young age are told they need to earn a place in college. African Americans also earn their places in colleges and universities. Our society immediately denies them. That is our history and that is our present day actions. As an immigrant join the crowd. It has been immigrant wave after immigrant wave putting themselves first. Every excuse to do so will be applied.
It’s quite clear that AA benefits some groups (black and hispanic students) while hurting other ones (whites and asians). College admissions are essentially a zero-sum game. because the number of acceptances is relatively fixed. So if one person benefits, then someone else must lose out.
I am NOT suggesting the SAT should be the only criterium for college admissions. I am saying that the correlation with college grades makes the SAT a useful measurement. So why devalue it? One of the original intents of adopting the SAT was that it provided an objective measure of knowledge that would counter stereotypes admissions committees might have about certain groups. The prevailing notion then was that objective criteria would be fairer than subjective ones. Ironic that we are now moving in the opposite direction to achieve the same purpose.
I am not sure what you are arguing here. Today, Asians are not considered under-represented in colleges. At top schools that do not use AA, Asians tend to be a disproportionately large group. For example, UCLA is 35% Asian. Univ of Texas (Austin) is 21%. The benefits of race-based AA goes to Black, Hispanic, and indigenous people groups, not to Asians.
Here are the racial categories in the Common Application used by most colleges. All the “new Asians” you list would have to check either Asian or White (includes Middle East). How does that help them with race-based AA? They would be helped by a hardship-based AA, but not a race-based one.
Of course enrollment could be expanded, but the fact is that really isn’t. College degrees are social badges (for the most part). The more people you hand them out to, the less valuable they are. Exclusivity and prestige account for most of the value.
There is some minor growth in enrollment (maybe 1-3% per year), but exact figures are hard to find. But if the value of college was actually education, then why wouldn’t the top universities expand their enrollment substantially? The lack of expansion isn’t due to natural size constraints (a handful of schools enroll tens of thousands of students). The more likely cause is exclusivity.
Jay Kang has a column directly addressing this point. Basically, he argues that colleges could have adopted an affirmative action program that actually helped increase the opportunities available to historically disadvantaged/prejudiced against minorities…and didn’t. Instead, they adopted a system that just made sure that they captured the lion’s share of whatever minority students happened to be in the student pool already, which (mostly) were folks that were from the same socio-economic classes that they were already drawing from:
It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson —shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used.
In theory, affirmative action could be a valuable instrument in mitigating the persisting trauma of past racism. In practice, it primarily functions just to make sure that the classes of elite colleges aren’t “too Asian and too White” to be attractive to the prospective students and faculty that want their institutions to look diverse. While there is some collateral benefit to society at large from that latter type of program, to be sure, it is much much smaller than the benefit that would come from a real effort at affirmative action. And the SCOTUS, in part, relied on that assessment in reaching their decision - that irrespective of whether there exists some program of affirmative action in some context that provides a great enough benefit to justify differentiating based on race, the specific programs as practiced at schools like Harvard and UNC was not that.
iirc, one of the parties to the suite was acting on behalf of Asians. Thing is, Asians are fooling themselves if they think they will not be targeted next. We hear it from “thought leaders” that go out of their way to blame covid on China. We hear it in the fear mongering about Tic Tok and Huawei. Read up on Shiny immigration policy of over a century ago, and the total ban on Asians from anywhere other than US possessions. Forty years ago, it was Japanese who were targeted.
Metro Detroit had it’s notorious anti-Asian incident in the early 80s, when a couple white, unemployed, auto-workers, thinking a Chinese man was Japanese, beat him to death.
Having been on admission committees and associated at different levels with Ivy league and flagship state schools I can say with great confidence that a black or Hispanic kid with straight A’s and high SATs would be accepted most anywhere. Most every college wants that kid who can succeed despite all the challenges of poverty and prejudice. There simply aren’t that many.
So to do what your link suggests and take in a representative number of the poor “descendants of slaves” means accepting a lot of kids into college programs that (through no fault of their own) they aren’t prepared for. The result is either poor college GPA or semesters of remedial classes that stigmatize and put you years behind your peers.
Imagine the smart but poorly educated ghetto kid thrown into the intro chem class where half the kids completed AP Chem in high school. He struggles in the class and so switches his major from preMed to something less challenging . This scenario may explain why during the past 30 years of Affirmative Action, Black students quit STEM majors at much higher rates than white students:
An unintended consequence of race-based Affirmative Action is to place a lot of disadvantaged kids in situations where they are likely to fail. There is a very real possibility that race-based affirmative action resulted in fewer Black physicians, engineers, and scientists than would have been produced by a race-neutral system
That is why I am for AA. The African Americans are always sent to lose out. As far as getting into the Ivy League you can be tossed aside to lose out before you are born.
African Americans are then blamed for losing out.
The people who have gotten placements because of AA were Harvard material if accepted by Harvard. The people were not less than. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of people that are Ivy League material that do not get accepted into the Ivy League every year.
The unstated goal of getting rid of AA is to take as many African Americans that are Harvard material out of the running as possible.
The irony for Asian groups their scores on average are not so good. Indian scores on average are that good. You need more visas for Indian students to increase “Asian” acceptance rates at this point. Mostly not entirely. There are students in other Asian countries that are high level as well.
The Indian student acceptance rate into the Ivy League has been soaring. With more Indian Americans those families are sending a lot of students to top US schools.
I wish people who want this as their home would not lock out African Americans to make a buck. I get it is desperate to make a buck in most places on earth. Just blocking out African Americans is very low behavior.
Posting stuff that is untrue or unsubstantiated doesn’t really help.
Fundamentally, affirmative action is a racially biased college admissions system. It promotes some races over others. Accusing those who are against a racially biased college admissions system is ironic at best.
While the intentions of AA are good, in practice it actually promotes more racism. By placing Black students in colleges they aren’t prepared for, it promotes poor academic performance by Blacks. This perpetuates negative stereotypes about racial differences in intelligence. By forcing colleges to find reasons to not accept so many Asians, it perpetuates negative stereotypes about Asian personality traits and leadership ability.
We’ve had AA for 30 years. It hasn’t worked for the most part. Time to move on to a different strategy.
Really? You are fabricating things entirely. Racism is all over this. Your make believe world is not at all reality based. We just had someone admit this is a zero sum game.
Leaving aside whether it “has worked” in the past, it’s really hard to make it work now. As Capsian Kang notes, “a program that was designed for a racially binary America never got meaningfully updated for today’s multiracial democracy.”
In 1970, about 95% of the country identified as either Black or non-Hispanic White. By 2020, that’s down to 70%. We went from about 10 million people identifying as Hispanic or Asian to 82 million people over that time frame.
That vastly complicates the calculus of affirmative action, and makes it harder to cast as a reparative program to compensate for past governmental prejudice in the form of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
I think this is likely very true, but it is ironic that many of those who would maintain AA believe we live in a “multi-racial democracy” while many of those who want AA eliminated still believe through their words and actions in a racially binary America, if not the ‘one drop’ rule.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Even the most incorrigible racist knows that Hispanic and Asian people exist. And of course many of the people who wanted AA eliminated are far from racist.
For the last two decades or so, the U.S.’ Hispanic population has been larger than the Black population. I don’t know if we’ve reached the point where more AA beneficiaries in elite college admissions are Hispanic rather than Black - but if not, we’re probably close.
