> They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

Is that a claim that their schools are worse at educating students than schools in Africa?

Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries with a population of 1.2 billion people, so it makes perfect sense that such a huge geographic area like that would have many excellent schools compared to the areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US.

The two areas aren't remotely comparable, unless you were thinking of something else?

Given that the US black population does better on the PISA tests than the only black majority country that participated, Trinidad and Tobago, it seems unlikely there are better educational systems. A quick check does not find a single country in SSA with college graduation rates above ten percent[1]. Given that over 90% of the US black population are descended from slaves who’ve been in the US since the 1800s the disproportion is suspicious.

[1]http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/global_education...

https://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/02/ssa.html?m=1

So 1 billion in subsaharan africa vs 42 million african americans - still on totally different scales.

Subsaharan Africa has plenty of educational institutions of sufficient quality to prepare motivated (and likely more well off) students for admission vs relatively small number of seats at Harvard.

That doesn't in any way contradict with the possibility that general education systems in subsaharan africa aren't great.

Foreign undergrads at elite US universities are likely themselves to be privileged in their countries of origin, not the least because the ability to understand English and pass tests administered in English is a huge filter for privilege in many developing countries.

I have not, yet comments here assert that it is.

It makes me question the legitimacy of their data sources.

It is intentionally difficult to find and requires legwork since I believe it is intentionally obfuscated.

Also international students are counted separately from the race/ethnicity categories. This is due to how the government classifies and collects information about race and ethnicity (see IPEDS definitions below).

https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-de...

I used to work at Harvard as an institutional research analyst. I actually submitted the final reports (institutional demographics and other stats) to US Department of Education. If anyone is curious, a large portion of the aggregate demographic statistics is open and available to the public: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think these should be able to add up to more than 100. E.g., someone who is both Hispanic and Black.

The average age of people who identify as two races is markedly lower than other groups though they're a relatively small group, so not sure how that works out. But there's roughly as many people who identify as both white and native American as just native American. If Harvard only lets them choose one, which I guess they must if it adds up to 100%, then that could have a big impact on those numbers depending on how people react to that.

Harvard doesn't consider all US born students. They have an academic floor. Most of the US population does not meet the academic floor. Low achieving students are effectively not in the applicant pool even if they apply.

A more accurate representation of the applicant pool would be the USA demographics that meet the 10th percentile SAT score at Harvard. However, even with this more accurate pool, the accepted population would differ because different races have different average scores within this pool. The races with lower averages would be expected to be underrepresented in the accepted pool compared to the applicant pool.

See page 45. Asians have a much higher bar and lower probability of getting in after balancing for same academic level. Seems like discrimination to me.

And how does harvard assert the "race" of someone in the first place?

This is all extremely confusing.

I find that the black community (including myself) will quickly point to the reason of Affirmative Action, and what it is trying to accomplish. I find it fair if a historically marginalized group require over-representation to "break" it's cycle. Yet I find something troubling.

I'm concerned that many of the flagship arguments that are still often brought forth by this community have propositions that continue to look less and less stable.

There is a perpetual cycle that the average African-American faces, often said starting from slavery. It has frequently been said that starting with proper education, will this cycle begin to unravel. Though there's been significant attempts to equalize opportunity of education for decades, yet there's been virtually no improvement in the racial performance gap (Black-White).

The main reason I commonly see for this gap is socioeconomic status and parental education. College Board prompts every testing student for their family income status, race, gender, etc. I'd love CB to dump every categorical statistic they've collected, but they do provide a summary every year. Every year they're able to give basic statistics on performance of the different groups based upon the groups stated above.

What I find really interesting was for 2 separate years (2003, 2008) College Board made public test performance by race x income. College Board had also released 'Reaching the Top: A Report of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement The book' (1999). The book generally stated that black students whose parents were college-educated scored lower than white students whose parents did not graduate high-school. Both datasets show that black students from high socioeconomic families were scoring comparatively to white students from low socioeconomic families.

I see this as deeply troubling. Though there is an large list of variables that are not publicly accounted for, it would make more sense for discussion to be shifted towards the discovery of the cause of the gap.

I fear that Affirmative Action is inherently unjustified and examples like similar to OP's post will continue to hurt the opportunities of the talented.

(2008) [JBHE] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/why...

(2005) [JBHE] http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

[Teachers College Record] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...

Extra bit, attempt to model 1995, caution on the rhetoric but quality article: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm

Tables start at page 40.

How strange - are these people allowed to benefit from affirmative action?

In particular with respect to Harvard and Boston I'd think Catholicism might deserve a mention if we're going to bring religion into this.

In the end I think religious diversity is important but it doesn't belong in the same conversation. You can choose your religion and also turn it on/off at different phases of your life. You also can't see religion from the outside (with some exceptions for example a Sikh turban).

That's not true for race.

The Supreme Court has ruled that in fact Jewish people are a race...at least for purposes of Civil Rights/anti-discrimination laws.

In the Anglosphere, Jews have pretty much always been considered "white". For example, both the Confederacy and Apartheid South Africa, two regimes obsessed with racial classification, never even considered that Jews might not be white.

The conception of Jews as a separate race, has historically been an Eastern European idea. Even in 1930s Germany, the Nazi party's base of popularity was always firmly rooted in the most Eastern federal regions.

I don't remember where (help me, please!) but I read an account by a medieval European monk visiting monasteries and Christian communities in Africa. He described their religious practices, traditions, culture architecture and food in great detail, but mentioned their (certainly much darker) skin tones only in passing.

"Race" (boiled down to skin melanin contents) as a distinguishing point between groups of people is not a permanent fixture in human history. It is especially overwhelmed by religion, language and culture/tribal nationality in terms of its use as a dividing point between "us" and "them".

It doesn't really make sense to talk about the expulsions in the 1500s as being motivated by race, given that there was no meaningful difference in race between the Jewish and Christian populations in the area, and they had widely intermingled.

While I have read plenty of accounts of riots and expulsions that either explicitly or implicitly state their reasons as being motivated by fears of new Christians still Secretly practicing Judaism, I haven't seen a single account naming race or some ethnic distinction as the cause.

Second, Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews to England, nearly 500 years ago. The Dutch readmitted Jews over 500 years ago. The Swedes 300 years ago. Over 200 years ago Napoleon's Western European armies emancipated Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe's absolute monarchies.

In contrast, Jews were never granted equal legal status in Russia until 1917. Pogroms were regular occurrences in Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania until the 1920s. The Romanian Iron Guard persecuted Jews with such brutality, that even the Nazis told them to dial it back. Contrast with Denmark, where the local populace refused to let the SS deport even a single Danish Jew.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity of Jewish history would tell you that while anti-semitism in the modern period isn't unheard of in Western Europe, its orders of magnitude worse in Eastern Europe.

Not true about South Africa:

"Shortly after the Union of South Africa received dominion status in 1910, the new Boer rulers proposed to re-classify the Jews as "coloured" because they originally came from the Middle East, and hence were not really European. The Jews of South Africa fought tooth and nail to retain their privileged status as "Whites""

https://www.quora.com/Were-Jews-during-South-African-aparthe...

Right around the same time the Oppenheimers were becoming the wealthiest and one of the most powerful families in South Africa. Despite being ethnically Jewish, I've never once heard of them facing any discrimination from the apartheid regime or the broader SA public.

You basically have to strip every complicating element of your true identity safe for the absolutely benign forms (ie "Kiss me, I am Irish" tea shirts).

If you pay attention at least in American you can observe intriguing examples of this tension with white identity playing out. For instance being LGBTQ and white presents a problem for many. In fact there are examples now of white gay men who claim to hate "identity politics", what they really hate is that LGBTQ identity jeopardizes their "white" identity and they recognize this, so it is easy to pretend there are no other "blemishes" to their "white" identity....It is a fascinating phenomenon if you pay close attention :)

Speaking for myself, mmm.....no.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/magazine/gay-conservative...

"To ensure that we did not overlook religiously unengaged Jews, we asked students for their religion and whether they considered themselves Jewish aside from religion; then, we asked about their parents’ religious identities. Students who considered themselves Jewish in any way were counted in our estimates." -- https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat...

"Jewishness in the United States is considered an ethnic identity as well as a religious one." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religion

I genuinely am not trying to break out the praeteritio, and say I'm not calling it a 'positive' stereotype, but at a certain level you can't have such a cultural focus on education, and then be gobsmacked when it has statistical significance in things like school admissions.

Like, if I told you that Utah had the lowest per capita alcohol consumption in the US, it's not liable to blow anyone's mind.

Heck, one of the reasons Harvard came up with its holistic admissions process in the first place was targeted at Jewish kids applying. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/9/19/admissions-laws...

Also just a lazy google, I'd hazard to guess you're right about catholic representation being higher than expected. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/09...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

"An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry or on similarities such as common language or dialect, history, society, culture or nation. Ethnicity is often used synonymously with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism, and is separate from but related to the concept of races."

From Wikipedia. You're right that I didn't list every factor.

Judaism as an identity class has a lot more to it than mere religious affiliation.

I have to suspect that if the representation were 0.5x, rather than 5x, then its consideration would strike you as more natural.

Practically for much of this history in this part of the world, "Jewish" has been used interchangeably with Ashkenazi. Jewish is not an ethnicity, but Ashkenazi is, and most of the Jewish people at a place like Harvard (or applied-but-denied) have been Ashkenazi. Note this paragraph is descriptive, not normative: this conflating of Jewish and Ashkenazi is a way by which other Jews (many of which face even more racial discrimination) get erased from discourse.

This is, to put it mildly, an opinion rather than an established fact. Ethnicity is a social construct, and many Jewish societies do construct an ethnicity that crosses the intra-Jewish Ashkenazi/Sephardi/Persian/etc. lines.

The biggest example of this is of course Israel, but you also see this in other mixed-background Jewish communities like e.g. Los Angeles or France, where a single umbrella Jewish ethnic identity is overlaid on top of those more specific ones.

There is a belief that many of the "Jewish" ethnic groups form one nation (Zionism tends to hold this) and I suppose there are people who extend that to a broader definition of "ethnicity."

To continue the example of Zionist ideology, even secular Zionists consider converts to be Jews, and many consider converts to non-Jewish religions to have exited the tribe. Non-Jewish immigrants and their descendants who speak Hebrew as a native language may or may not be considered members depending on the person.

Say what? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism#United_States

If people don't think that breaking "whites" down into Jewish/Non-Jewish and nothing else is strange then I don't think we can discuss this topic rationally.

I would bet that your average Ashkenazi Jew (it is worth noting there are multiple different Jewish ethnic groups) has more genetic commonality with an average person of Ukrainian descent than that Ukrainian person has with someone of Irish descent. So why are the Ukrainian and Irish person both white while the Jewish person isn't?

And also let's point out that there is no distinction for any other group of Middle Eastern people. They instead have to choose between being Asian, African, or European.

My maternal grandparents were born in Gaza City, and Syria respectively. Grandmother was expelled Gaza in 1929, and the Syrian grandfather was expelled from Syria in 1927. Both families had been there for many generations, if not since Temple times.

When I'm in the United States, even though I am very dark, I am never considered a "Person of Color" solely because of my religion. Other people from the same places _are_ "Persons of Color" if their religion differs.

I'm darker than Ms. Tlaib if you want to get your colorimiters out.

It's 12:54 AM in Tel Aviv now, where I am. (I spend about half my time here and half in Silicon Valley).

However in the United States it's still Rosh Hashanah. I think it's a little unfair to have a discussion about Jews and affirmative action in the United States at a time when observant Jews will not be on-line.

Shanah Tovah.

Neither did the Nazis, btw.