“Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans” (nytimes) is kind of interesting.
The young student, Austin Jia, who was rejected from Harvard is anti-Affirmative Action. The young student, Emily Choi, who was accepted to Harvard says “I firmly believe in affirmative action.
Here’s an interesting turn of phrase:
A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges
More proof that Rachel Dolezal will be remembered as the most important American of the 21st century.
The same paper carries “Racial Justice Demands Affirmative Action”, from an executive at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Here the Asians who are suing Harvard to end Affirmative Action are characterized as unable to compete with their white overlords:
countless African-American, Native American, Asian and Latino students are still excluded from quality education at all levels. Undoing affirmative action now would reverse the gains we have made and dim the prospects for greater progress.
A commenting schoolteacher disagrees:
The author’s inclusion of Asian students in affirmative action is misplaced here and diminishes her overall thesis. After many years in public education at a diverse, elite public high school, I saw firsthand the struggle of (often economically disadvantaged) Asian students who faced longer odds for admission than their Latino and African American peers. Their SAT scores and GPAs needed to be significantly higher than students of color in order to have a chance at getting into elite schools. How can we claim the arc is moving toward racial justice when one group is treated so differently under admission policies?
Related:
- my review of Academically Adrift, which gives data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment test indicating that Americans in a whole host of majors learn almost nothing during four years in college
I do not think it just against Asians but generically against several for some reason undesirable groups members of which do not necessary have a checkbox in college application to check. I do not think it is GPA or SAT score thing, I have reliably heard of students with Olympiad wins, top GPA, perfect SAT scores, award winning essays, all with 0 tutoring, and tons of true volunteering activities not getting in any of Ivy League schools. I think it is good for the students and their parents because none of the students wanted to go in business or law in the first place.
Affirmative action was used by California public universities until 1996, when, as noted in the NYT article, the voters banned it in the public sector (Proposition 209).
Earlier, in 1987, as a Berkeley undergrad, I spoke with the admissions dean for Boalt law school (since rebranded as “Berkeley Law”), at a campus event where representatives from various law schools made themselves available to talk informally with prospective applicants.
As a Japanese-American, I made a passing remark that assumed I could be considered under Berkeley’s affirmative action program. The dean quickly interrupted: No, he said, Japanese-Americans do not qualify. Startled, I asked: What? Other Asian-Americans qualify, but Japanese-Americans do not? That’s right, he said . . . with a disdainful, contemptuous smirk for good measure. The dean happened to be Chinese-American.
Until then, I had been a staunch liberal supporter of affirmative action for all the usual virtuous reasons, but I admit: my thinking began to evolve after this encounter.
It comes without saying that all students mentioned in post 1 had mostly liberal points of view, except for hard work and such. As far as I know they all are doing OK and keep most of their liberal viewpoint, as far as I know.
If you don’t like private uni admissions policies, start your own university. There are HBCUs, there are Catholic schools, Mormon schools, Jewish schools, etc. So if you don’t like the admissions policies nobody is stopping you from starting your own university. Plus, the Ivy League is not growing its enrollment, so admissions policies will only get more political and restrictive. Schools like BYU are growing because they’re in the business of educating more students, not maximizing their prestige.
bjdubbs,
That’s great but disproportionally many Harvard and other Ivy league graduates end up in leading governmental positions. Sure it is changing with time but Ivy League and especially Harvard are not just private institutions, they are one of several basic American institutions.
bjdubbs: I don’t think that there are truly “private” universities anymore in the U.S., which is why the federal government is able to require schools to implement sexual assault tribunals (see
http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/05/13/missoula-rape-and-the-justice-system-in-a-college-town-a-k-a-majoring-in-partying-and-football/
for example). Any school that takes students who get various forms of taxpayer subsidies comes under the federal bureaucracy’s jurisdiction.
So the person from NAACP made a very small error. Instead of listing all of the significant minority groups, she should have left one out. The comment from the teacher is a bit of an overreaction.
This remarks sounds implausible:
Plus, the Ivy League is not growing its enrollment, so admissions policies will only get more political and restrictive. Schools like BYU are growing because they’re in the business of educating more students, not maximizing their prestige.
The Ivy League universities could increase their undergraduate enrollment quite a bit without suffering any loss of prestige. It’s also hard to believe that the BYU administration doesn’t care about its ranking in US News.
Vince: It is a “very small error” to lose track of who is a victim when you have a full-time job in the American victimhood industry? And, even with the assistance of the New York Times editorial team and any subordinates at your organization, misclassifying more than 4 billion Asians as somehow being helped by present affirmative action policies is a “very small error”?
Actually, reading it again, it appears to me that you and the teacher should agree with the writer. She claims that “countless … Asian … students are still excluded from quality education …” In other words, Asian kids are suffering unfair treatment by education institutions.
The ivies simply repurposed the same techniques used to exclude Jews prior to WWII:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
@Anonymous:
” disproportionally many Harvard and other Ivy league graduates end up in leading governmental positions.”
That probably explains the mess we are in ! According to an Annenberg Foundation study in 1989, only 5% of the randomly chosen Harvard graduates (the current “elite”), managed to explain why there are four seasons (A Private Universe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo ).
It appears, that Harvard accepts mainly aliens from the outer space where a planet orbits their private universe sun with a more pronounced eccentricity. There are other features distinguishing the inhabitants of that planet (e.g. gender is a social construct).
5% of earthlings did manage to squeeze in.
Our history of legal discrimination (to put it euphemistically) with effects which continue to the present day leave us to choose among bad alternatives. I attended deliberately (defacto) segregated schools where resource allocation was skewed to those schools which serviced the white population. Times have changed, but the more things change the more things stay the same.
Ending legal discrimination does enable extraordinary students of any background to attend elite institutions they were previously excluded from. However, most of the student body are not extraordinary but merely very gifted. The performance of these students is more dependent on structural advantages and disadvantages which remain very stratified on race. Affirmative action has negative side effects, but Ignoring all this is not a good option either.
The comments on this article are rich, and really illustrate the casual acceptance of Asian stereotypes among “liberal” NYT readers:
“…Certain cultures have a great work ethic, but a long way to go in creativity, freedom of thought, constructive change through reasoned opposition, and concepts of trust, honor, and face….I only support admissions for those who don’t just do what their tiger parents or communist government tell them to do, whatever race or color they are. ” -Contrary to popular belief, the term “tiger parents” clearly has no racial connotation at all!
“…high numbers do not mean a student is worthy of admission. I interviewed one young lady who had high SAT scores, one of the highest GPAs I had ever seen at the school…The kid lacked passion about anything. At college, she would have been the kid sitting in the dorm/library studying 24×7 and doing a parent approved activity.” – keen, race-blind insight from a college interviewer.
” I can very easily picture an applicant who—regardless of race, GPA, and standardized test scores—lacks any number of skills/talents that a liberal arts college might desire in an otherwise high-achieving individual:warmth, charisma, empathy, kindness?
– because whites,Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians are all equally seen as “warm, charismatic, and kind” in our culture!
“Members of my family experienced the impact of Jewish quotas. The situation then was unlike today. Until Jews applied in large numbers, there was no competitive admissions process at all; Harvard was a rite of passage among the most wealthy and there had been room for all applicants.”
– Jewish quotas = bad. Asian quotas = good
Preferences in admission based on race favor the politically connected minorities at the expense of the rest. How could the US Supreme Court have ever permitted preferences based on race?
KJ: Racist comments about Asians are definitely okay in our otherwise Zero-Tolerance Society (TM). From http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N10/affirmativeaction.html … MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones said, “It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament … yet another textureless math grind.”
White people have texture. Koreans are textureless! (And, of course, nothing gives a person more texture than incompetence at mathematics.)
(Ms. Jones was ultimately forced out of her job, but it was for falsifying her resume, not her blanket characterization of Koreans: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27mit.html )
The comments on this article are rich, and really illustrate the casual acceptance of Asian stereotypes among “liberal” NYT readers
It makes sense for you put the word liberal in quotation marks. Those comments seem awfully nasty and un-liberal. On the other hand, it must have taken some effort to find those among the hundreds of comments. I quickly scrolled through the first 50 and didn’t see any like that. If you want to see some nasty comments about people who are not white or not Christian, go to a conservative website like zerohedge.com.
I should add that the person who wrote “I only support admissions for those who don’t just do what their tiger parents or communist government tell them to do, whatever race or color they are.” could easily be a Republican. That a typical thing that conservatives do on the internet – stating their personal preferences to a bunch of strangers.
Zerohedge isn’t conservative. It’s just weird.
And the liberal and popular website reddit disproves the idea that it’s conservatives who state their personal preferences to a bunch of strangers.
Yes, Harvard had excluded Jews in the past but it was not nearly as harsh as Jews had it elsewhere (except Israel): Harvard capped Jews at 15% percent of its entrance class when my people started to trend towards 30% of the class. In former USSR Harvard limit would be unbelievable promotion of Jews in higher education. I think Harvard still picks what type of Jews it wants. I would guess some unofficial cup on Jews still exist there. But given grade inflation at Harvard I wonder whether it worth to enter for any undergraduate not interested in business or government. Probably there are some great people in liberal arts and sciences, but who would tell who is good and who is not with grade inflation? But it is definitely beneficial to graduate form Harvard if tenured position in academia is a goal, although as things are looking now this could reduce quality of scholars in academia.
The problem with starting your own university is accreditation, isn’t it?
I thought that the unstated goal of all these campus diversity programs is to make the student body of _________ appear demographically representative of _________. If the application process were race-blind, whites, Jews (pretty much whites these days), and some kinds of asian would be overrepresented, while black, latino, and others would be underrepresented. Is that not true? If it is, is any of this surprising?
@Ivan, that is a great set of videos you discovered. Here is a video of MIT graduates who don’t have a clue on how trees grow:
and MIT graduates don’t know how to hook up a battery to a light bulb:
Best comments:
“Light bulbs, electricity and physics are hetero-patriarchal constructs and must be banned.”
“Holy crap it must be easy to get into American universities, these guys are morons”
superMike: It’s possible that race-blind admissions would lead to student bodies with so many Asian-American kids that whites would be under-represented as well. This is a possible explanation for the way that the universities operate, since they’re mostly run by white people.
“This is a possible explanation for the way that the universities operate, since they’re mostly run by white people.”
“White people” are so good at rigging self-selection that in UC Irvine they constitute 23% of the undergrad body while Asians do 61% (as I recall Cal Asian population is about 12%). Perhaps, the real reason is that “whites” are just dumber than “asians”, on average, as simple as that !
GermanL, some Harvard graduates like that became full professors at other colleges.