Over drinks and dessert with some friends we got on the subject of skin color diversity at academic institutions. Universities say that they need to sort applicants by race because having a “diverse” class will lead to a richer educational experience for all.
We started with Stuyvesant high school, to which the only path in is via an impartially graded exam. The school is 78 percent Asian and Asian-American. The principal is named “Jie Zhang” and various other officials and coordinators are Asian as well. “When we get prerecorded phone calls from the school,” one parent said, “they start off in English then repeat the message in Chinese and then repeat it again in Korean.”
The subject of elite American schools filling their dorms with rich American kids of different skin tones came up. “That’s like establishing one’s connection to the underclass by saying ‘some of my best friends are extremely rich black people,'” I pointed out. A half-Haitian-American woman at the table said that even the richest darker-skinned Americans would bring diversity into the classroom due to their experiences of racial prejudice, including “microagression,” at the hands of white Americans. We as white people could never learn how bad this experience was because young black people would never share it with us. Suppose that we accept her account of Americans as everyday racists, how could a group of Americans, mostly with the same family income, constitute true diversity in a global economy? Wouldn’t someone from India, Burma, China, or Japan bring a more dramatically different perspective into the classroom than an American student, whatever his or her skin color happened to be? Isn’t having a 5000-year history of distinct culture more likely to result in a different perspective on the typical humanities class? The woman of partial Haitian heritage disagreed and then pointed out that it wasn’t just a better educational experience that American universities were seeking but rather “remedy” for past injustices to people with different skin colors.
What do readers think? In a world economy where the U.S. is less than 25 percent of GDP, how does it make sense to have a university claiming to be “global” where 90 percent of students are American-born (e.g., Yale)? And if students do actually learn more in the presence of diversity, can we see that in the academic performance of students at some of those schools in Europe where there is a true mixing of languages and cultures?
The Supreme Court has said that affirmative action in universities is only permissible in order to create “diversity” and not as a form of racial reparations. However, what people say they are doing and what they are actually doing are two different things, so in a sense your Haitian friend is right.
“Diversity” is a in practice code word that really means discrimination in favor of blacks (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) and against Asians. There is an enormous spread between the average SAT scores of the major racial groups. In order to get into a top ranked school, the average Asian needs something like 150 points more on his or her SAT than the average white and the average black needs 300 fewer points (on the SAT 1600 scale). http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-12-03/asian-students-college-applications/51620236/1
Others studies peg the #s a little differently but everyone agrees that there is a spread. Without the spread, the enrollment of elite American colleges would resemble that of Stuy. or of Cal Tech – a lot more Asians, a lot fewer blacks and Hispanics. I happen to think that would be fair and appropriate – as MLK said, judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, but this is apparently not acceptable to the liberal orthodoxy that prevails at most American universities.
BTW, Mayor DeBlasio is going to do his best to “fix” Stuy. so that it has fewer Asians (he is going to say it so that it has more blacks but since this is a zero sum game, more black = fewe Asians). It will be interesting to see if he can pull it off.
It will also be interesting to see at what point Asian Americans will no longer stand being discriminated against. Virtually the exact same thing was done to Jews in America and it was only when they had gained considerable political power and connections in the ’60s that universities finally stopped discriminating against Jews.
It has to be kept in mind that most of the Asian parents whose kids are being discriminated against are not themselves American born and often speak very little English and don’t understand American culture, society and government very well. I once attended a meeting of parents of the Johns Hopkins “Study of Exceptional Talent” kids (either math or verbal SAT score over 700 before age 13) in my area and of the parents of Asian kids (the majority even though my area does not have a huge Asian population) every single one of the parents was an immigrant who spoke broken English (just as my parents did).
I just came across this WSJ article that is on point:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-chinese-exclusion-act-1433543969
BTW, although the “official” international enrollment of most top schools is somewhere circa 10%, not a few of the students who are counted as American (mostly Asian-American) are kids whose families (or often just the mother, while the father stays home in Asia to tend to business) have moved to the US so that their kid can get an American HS education and a better shot at getting into a top American U.
I think it’s very reasonable for the California taxpayers to demand that UC, and UC Berkeley in particular preferentially admit California High School students and provide them inexpensive tuition rather than admit all students globally on an equal basis and take in those who can afford the ever skyrocketing tuition.
Among the reasons tuition is skyrocketing is UC knows out of state, and international students can and will pay full fare.
But like churches, UC Berkeley and UC require large subsidies from their communities and place high demands on that community and the state as a whole. Not just land, but infrastructure. Parking, traffic. Purchasing of prime real estate.
I think UC provides enormous income to California and enormous amounts of intellectual power, but I don’t think all that can or should be measured in terms of economics alone.
UC is a state school whose mission at one time was to educate the state’s students. I think it’s fine for them to stick to that mission even in the face of knowing how much more money they could make if they admitted only international students.
(UC is my backyard.)
Diversity is a code word that refers to Black people. Not Chinese, not Indian, not Thai, not even Mexicans. It’s a way of suggesting reparations using carefully disguised language. A student from Thailand is arguably way more diverse than a black American. English isn’t their first language and there culture is non-western. They often come from an upbringing that is poorer than the vast majority of America, including black Americans, but helping poor Thai students isn’t the point. The point is wealth redistribution to black Americans.
Yale is a private corporation, run for the benefit of its trustees and other stakeholders. How would they benefit by admitting more Asian foreigners?
Yale has many objectives that it values higher than being “global”.
George, how does Yale benefit from preferentially admitting blacks, esp. if many of those who receive preferential treatment are people like Obama whose ancestors were not slaves in the Southern US and to whom Yale owes nothing?
George, how does Yale benefit from preferentially admitting blacks, esp. if many of those who receive preferential treatment are people like Obama whose ancestors were not slaves in the Southern US and to whom Yale owes nothing?
The premise that one student who has higher scores on SAT tests than another somehow indicates they are better qualified to benefit from a college education is very simplistic and stupid assumption. At best the SAT should serve as a rough sanity check or cutoff, but it’s not a question of ‘fair’ to admit one student preferentially with a higher score, it’s just stupid. I regard it as some kind of ‘China-fication’ of American higher education. For around 1,300 years, from 605 to 1905, mandarins were selected by merit through the extremely rigorous imperial examination. It seems almost as if the progressive waves of Asian immigrants have brought with them this mentality, latching onto the SAT tests, which the college admissions staff also latched onto as a ‘fair’ but also cheap and robotic way to rate students.
In a way similar to the out of control tuition spiral and other forces which nobody seems to be able to reign in, college admissions are turning into the same nightmare that exists in Asian countries, and probably at the same time destroying the creative and iconoclastic streak that made the US the primary science and engineering force on the planet for so long.
Henry: Don’t blame the Chinese for the SAT obsession! It was colleges themselves that got excited about the SATs. Formerly the screening mechanisms were grade point averages and knowledge tests. See http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/12/17/examined-life for how colleges shifted toward aptitude tests about 100 years ago, long before the latest Asian immigration wave:
(And separately, it makes sense that we have Chinese-style college admissions today. We have Chinese-style population and demand for higher education. When we were kids the U.S. population was about half what it is today. High schools were much more successful at educating young people to the point where they were employable.)
Elite colleges are certain to become more internationally diverse in the future, but not because of fairness or diversity but rather because of money. As the economies of China and India grow, wealthy families will buy their way into top schools. Up until last week, Harvard’s largest gift ever came from Hong Kong (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/09/07/harvard-school-public-health-gets-largest-gift-university-history/YixNC3xkBfMtg3mrSmE6zJ/story.html). I predict the acceptance rates will drop from today’s 5-7% to 2-3% as more applicants come from overseas as class size remains constant. There will still be guilt reducing carve outs for exceptional people of color, but the richest 2% of Americans, who are wildly over-represented today, should be concerned.