School admissions in the US are almost never based on merit alone. If all these elite schools never saw the name or face or skin color of their applicants, their student bodies would look way different than they are now.
Correspondingly, you see 33% asian in UCs, and 43% asian at Caltech.
They aren't actually race-blind, and funnily enough they're happy to admit that in official documents. The recent study on "should we stop accepting SAT scores from applicants" specifically noted that, although black and hispanic applicants have much lower SAT scores than other applicants, the effect of ignoring SAT scores on black and hispanic admissions would be negative. Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus! If and only if you belong to a certain race.
Do you mean they take race into account when admitting an individual?
>Ultra-low SAT scores are a plus!
Do you have direct evidence of this? Just because black and hispanic applicants have lower SAT scores on average and they're harmed overall by ignoring SAT scores doesn't mean having a low SAT score is a plus. Black and hispanic applicants might have a much different distribution of SAT scores than other applicants.
>If and only if you belong to a certain race.
How does that work, are the admissions people factoring in race?
The distribution satisfying the following constraints:
- low SAT scores are bad for your application
- the average black SAT score is very low
- absence of SAT scores would result in a net loss in black admissions
looks like most blacks scoring above average (so that their applications are hurt by the loss of the score) and a few blacks scoring deeply negative numbers (to get the average down). You can't actually get a negative score on the SAT.
In reality, black and hispanic scores are roughly normally distributed, just like white scores, but substantially lower.
It does seem to show that black and hispanic students seem to have a lower admission standard for SAT scores. But I can come up with a couple hypotheses for why we might see this data even if the admission ignores race:
1) The admission might largely ignore SATs already. If that's the case, and if black and hispanic applicants have lower SATs, then it it would be expected that black and hispanic accepted students would also have lower SATs because nothing is really filtering out low SAT scores, they're just passed through unfiltered.
2) The admission might have a lower SAT standard for students from low income families. Black and hispanic students might be on average lower income, and thus on average be aided by the income-based standard policy, even though students' race is actually not taken into account.
[1] https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/11/19...
You may respond that a lot of these benefits are about wealth, not race. However the two are connected. Black Americans on average have a tenth of the wealth of a white family.
Underrepresented minorities are as a whole not as optimized for the system. Some of that is that cottage industry of essay writers etc, SAT prep courses, etc... but some of it is objectively not being as prepared. Now some of this is also due to growing up in worse environments for academic performance but this is a real difference in performance.
I have interviewed Stanford students. There is a step difference between the Asian/white students and the underrepresented minority students in their performance. The underrepresented minorities were still smart but the Asian/white students behaved like they were a year or two ahead in school.
And the median?
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/fiscal-fact/median-value-wea...
1.5x is a huge difference in income. Imagine a 50% raise.
I do think it makes sense that the wealth difference stems from blacks having so little time to build wealth. The income also is a big factor for sure, but it’s hard to see it causing the 10x gap by itself. OTOH generational wealth is lost really quickly.
On the other hand, there are multiple instances I can remember interacting with people of other ethnicities in uni and thinking "wow, I can't _ever_ see myself thinking that way" - and I think I'm better off for it. IMO, diversity of culture and thought is real.
If you extrapolate a pure meritocratic approach - the demographics of admissions will likely continue to skew white/asian into perpetuity. Fair? I suppose so. But is it good for society? That is harder to answer.
If this is the case -- which I believe it is not -- then you are arguing that a meritocratic approach (normalized for factors that affect access to education) would skew toward white and Asian people. I recognize that you're speculating, but I don't believe there to exist a top-tier university that has actually put such a filter into practice for its admissions process, so there's insufficient data to verify your claim.
In response to your speculation, I speculate what you would find is that, normalizing for economic and social factors, race makes little difference....If a pure merit-based approach actually skewed the playing field toward whites and Asians, it would already have been put into place long ago. The whole problem with racism is that it damages the ability for people to be judged on their merits.
That said, from personal experience, I would still contend that _cultural_ diversity is valuable to uphold. I don't think diversity of thought stems solely from socioeconomic background.
Why not provide racially neutral class-based / disadvantage-based affirmative action instead? You get points if your parent(s) are poor. You get points if you have a single parent. You get points if you or your parent(s) have been on welfare. You get points if your parent(s) are in or have been to prison. You get points if you went to a high school with a low average academic achievement. You get points if your parent(s) have a history of homelessness or drug addiction or serious mental illness. You get points if you reside in a low income area.
That would produce a diverse student body without any direct consideration of race.
I have no problem with the idea that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get some special consideration. But compare two individuals: (a) a person from an under-represented racial/ethnic minority who comes from a privileged background (e.g. parents who are university professors, politicians, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc) (b) a person from the ethnic/racial majority (or a minority which is not considered to be "under-represented") who grew up in extreme poverty, suffering from child abuse and neglect, parental drug addiction and criminality, homelessness, etc. How is a system fair if (a) gets given a preference but there isn't one for (b)? That's why I think affirmative action should be based on individualised assessment of social disadvantage, not group membership.
2. We can argue all day over which categorization should have the most weight. There will always be people on the fringes of the applications that feel like they were shafted
At the end of the day, these universities are trying to give disadvantaged individuals. They may not be perfect, but it is hard to come up with a perfect system to do this.
Like a would-be 30% population of Asian students?
In the current system, you're essentially punished if you're Asian, but what is "Asian," really?
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans often immigrate to America with advanced degrees, wealth, etc. and they pass those advantages on to their kids, hence the high standardized tests scores / GPAs, but immigrants from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines often come here with nothing in search of a better life, and their children are tossed into the same "Asian" bucket, and punished.
Maybe you could have one "non-white" checkbox that would award you a few points to partially offset any historical exclusion of nonwhite people in the university, which is important if they still have legacy admissions. Hispanic people might not have the option of getting extra points for having a father that went to Yale, who himself had a father that went to Yale, if Hispanic people were outright excluded in the past.
I think we'll eventually move to something close to what you're describing. You could get some points if your parents are poor, or didn't attend college themselves, or don't speak English, but categorizing people into one of a few crudely drawn racial categories has got to end.
The Asian bucket was better performing even before the latest wave of immigration. However, supposedly that declines with each generation such that by the 3rd generation, there isn’t much of a difference. Perhaps regression to mean?
The buckets are defined by the US federal government [1], and then get used by educational institutions and employers as checkboxes on forms whose answers are used to compute diversity statistics. And the US federal government's "Asian" bucket is defined as "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam". So that definition does explicitly include Thais and Filipinos
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
You think, if Yale publishes these statistics on their website, that Yale’s admissions officers aren’t thinking about them during the admissions process?
Harvard
Tap on SAT by Ethnicity
Look at Pacific Islander vs Asian. That is as close as I have found so far.
Prior to 1997, the US government had a single bucket, "Asian or Pacific Islander". Since 1997, they've been split into two separate buckets (although it took some time for the bureaucracy to fully adopt the new grouping – the 2000 census still used the old classification, but the 2010 census adopted the new one.)
[1] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
Affirmative action as practiced by top schools is completely consistent with the white power structure, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering these institutions are part of that power structure.
The data says otherwise. You'll have a HUGE amount of Asians and Asian-Americans. Not whites.
The UC system has a sizable Asian population as a result (and my personal experience), but also admits a diverse student body every year.
Part of understanding this is race, location of growing up, schools, and parent's wealth.
For example, high schools nationwide are constantly ranked and compared. If you have an identifier that simply says "rural tier 3 high school," it's unclear what the race of the applicant is.
A parent's income can be shown based on decile of Americans, without revealing the race of the applicant.
Geography can be given in a way that is nonspecific enough to prevent educated guesses about the applicant's heritage.
I contend that race doesn't tell you much more about how hard a person had to work, if you already have all of the preceding factors evaluated.
You made a mistake already. These decisions are not purely merit based. Meritocracy isn't real. It never was.
What you are seeing is looking at race on purpose. Because racism is a real thing. There are studies that even if you remove the names and photos of people from their resumes, white people will prefer to accept other white people. They intuitively know, because their resumes will look "familiar". You have to go out of your way to solve the problem, you can't just be colorblind.
Not when you have 30,000 applicants all with near perfect SAT scores. No one said that you have to ignore merits in order to promote diversity. It's not like white people are magically special and smarter than everyone else. There are plenty of candidates to choose from without giving up on quality.
I just follow the data. The data says that people unconsciously prefer people who are similar to themselves.
I mostly couldn't care less how Yale decides to do their admission process. Most people in the world can't afford to go to Yale, even if they had the aptitude. This cries to me like the whining of the privileged that the aren't used to not getting what they want.