I was flying all week in the Cirrus SR20 with a European customer of our flight school, so I’m behind on the news. How is the trial in the race discrimination case against Harvard University going? Has anything new been discovered? (That Harvard prefers non-Asian students is not new!)
“Harvard’s gatekeeper reveals SAT cutoff scores based on race” (New York Post):
dean of admissions William Fitzsimmons … said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.
Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.
I find this confusing. Why would Harvard have to send out recruitment letters to Asian men who score 1380? Wouldn’t those guys already know about the existence of Harvard and the possibility of admission? Maybe it makes sense to recruit students with SAT scores of 1100. As this is below the bottom of the range for Michigan State, for example, those students might not realize that they could get into Harvard.
Related:
- “Official MIT opinion on Korean-Americans” (from 2007): The MIT Dean of Admissions, Marilee Jones, said, never having met the guy, “It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Koreans kids… yet another textureless math grind.” (higher-ups in the MIT Administration were okay with this, apparently, though Jones did run into some difficulty due to issues with her resume (Wikipedia))
- “Former Dean Resurfaces, Leaving Scandal Behind” (nytimes, 2009): “After a move to New York, and a divorce from Steven R. Bussolari, of M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory, she has re-emerged with a new consulting business, offering her services both to admissions offices and to parents.” (the Massachusetts family law system at the time provided for the potential of lifetime alimony regardless of the length of the marriage, so Jones might not have ever needed to work again)
Why are Asian women more desirable than Asian men?
The 1380 SAT number as some sort of criteria for Harvard admission for Asians is certainly misleading — the right number is probably more like 1580. At Stuyvesant HS in NYC, more than 3/4 Asian, the median SAT is around 1470 and I bet a trivial number were admitted to Harvard this Fall. NYC’s Mayor is concerned about the high median SAT score at Stuy so he is trying to change the Stuy admission criteria from IQ (standardized testing) to including students from any NYC high school who graduate in the top 7% of his or her class (at the expense of about 1,000 high IQ candidates) — the inconvenient problem with that criteria is that according to today’s WSJ it would admit lots of student who are rated “not proficient” in math and English. Also interesting is that about 40% of the Stuy graduating class ends up at one of the NY State universities, probably a reflection of race discrimination against poor Asians in all of the top universities.
Yellow Fever: I wonder if Harvard’s assigning a threshold value of 1350 to Asian “women” and 1380 to Asian “men” betrays cisgender-normative prejudice. Unless they take the position that gender is not fluid, how do they know that the person who scored 1350 on the SATs continues to identify as a woman when he/she/they matriculates?
Jack: That’s also a good point. If they won’t admit an Asian man without a 1580 on the SATs, why do they waste postage sending our recruitment advertisements to an Asian man who scores 1380?
One theory is having a low acceptance rate look prestigious. If you want rejection rates to be roughly equal across groups – use SAT cutoffs to define an # in each group, and a historical data to predict a response rate. Use a computer to sort by SAT when it comes time to decide admittance.