The magnet school where I went to high school has median SAT scores comparable to one of the mid-level Ivies. They got rid of affirmative action. It is now 70% Asian. And that's without accepting any foreign or out of state students. Asians didn't take seats from other minorities, because there weren't all that many to begin with. They took seats from white kids.

CalTech, which is race blind, has 40% Asians, more than the number of whites. That's the end result schools like Harvard are trying to avoid.

Why? That is the worst kind of discrimination in my book. How is it my fault that I was born smart, worked hard to capitalize on my innate abities and then competed on a standardized test to perform better than folks who just happened to pop out of a different vagina or uterus? Nice way to fuck me for no fault of mine.

For those saying not getting into Harvard or MIT is no big deal, are either in the sour grapes camp or have never had to face opportunity costs arising from picking a non-exclusive-low-visibility-(but-great)-school.

I don't know what la-la-land they live in, but that Veritas stamp will open doors that no amount of effort, intelligence or other factors ever can.

As an Asian myself, perhaps the question that needs to be asked is if there is enough diversity in our upbringing to be well-rounded candidates for admissions to "elite" schools?

Where this gets politically complicated is by the concurrent policies in favor of non-Asian minorities, but at least there the policies are quite explicit about their justifications (correcting historical disadvantage).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus...

Let's face it, the harvard admissions process is secretive they aren't giving all candidates a thorough review, they aren't looking deeply into 150,000 applications in a three month period. They can't. So they dump and dump based on subjective and biased methods being careful to honor first and foremost those requirements like affirmative action. And then they probably get the quota and then start onto the smaller piles. In other words all the activities an Asian might be on, they can and will be overlooked because somebody else has a righter color at the right time when the stack of applications are being sorted by whatever computer or individual at that step.

So to question, "maybe I need a better holistic upbringing?" Bullshit. in this case it's highly likely many many many of these asians had a remarkable upbringing that would satisfy anyone but they got dumped for somebody so the color factor was satisfied.

There have been numerous studies showing that whites favor meritocratic admission criteria, but reverse their position when shown the high percentage of Asian admits (e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/670664?uid=2&uid=4&sid...). Indeed the data also shows that white admissions are barely affected in comparison to Asians (e.g. see the MCAT admissions data linked elsewhere in this thread).

It seems to me that the shroud of "diversity" is being used to preserve the existing white power structure in elite universities, especially with the prevalence of legacy admits.

Anyone who has designed a system knows that you can tweak variables to get your desired result and then tautologically justify your decisions post-hoc.

That's only true if SAT score are a good predictor of "success" - however you define that. That's obviously not true for elite institutions since their candidates' SAT score are all bunched up at the top and within the MOE of each other. It's low-resolution. If you want test-based admissions, you'll have to design a test that shows significant differences among the elite schools' applicant pool.

On the hand, just having an "Asian attenuator" is, objectively, racist. The schools that do that will probably claim they just deemphasize applicants who don't have outside activities, which has led to formulaic portfolios of the "right" outside activities among high school students now, because "grades are not enough." Ugh. That's worse than just accepting the top SAT scores.

How can you tell which highly selective universities really have a sophisticated selection process and which are just running ethnic groups through different sized apertures? Elite schools that have legacy preferences have an especially hard job defending their policies.

"White applicants would benefit very little by removing racial and ethnic preferences; the white acceptance rate would increase by roughly 0.5 percentage points."

Back to the real world though - what a shitty thing to do to someone - to care so little about them as an individual, but to only give them a place because they meet this week's PC hiring criteria. For shame all of those who promote or continue with positive discrimination.

  > Discrimination is a bad thing that should be rooted out and
  > stopped. The most insidious is of course the very PC "positive
  > or affirmative discrimiation" - where a group of people decide
  > discrimination is now ok, just because.

Next, your use of the word "insidious." This means something that appears innocuous but is actually a creeping evil. There is nothing "innocuous" about affirmative action. It's not banal. Nobody thinks it makes no difference.

Insidious is something like claiming to strengthen democracy by eliminating voter fraud, but actually attempting to suppress the votes of African-Americans. THAT is insidious.

Openly favouring applications of one group while openly claiming that you believe this will right a systemic wrong is not insidious. You may feel it is wrong-headeded, but there is no deceit involved.

Finally, you may not intend it this way, but your phrasing is misleading. It makes it seem as if affirmative action, by being "the most insidious discrimination," is somehow more dangerous and damaging than the everyday discrimination minorities face every day in North America and have for more than a century.

Affirmative action may be misguided, but under no circumstances is it the same level of threat to our stated principles of equality as the existing systemic and cultural discrimination minorities face. To use words so carelessly as to equate the two is irresponsible argumentation.

Ethiopians and Papuans are both "black", Japanese and Indian people are both "asian", Spaniards and Bosnians are both "white", and nobody can agree on what the hell "hispanic" means.

None of these people have anything in common, culturally, genetically, linguistically, you need a bogus concept like 'race' to do that.

It's fine for universities to use a form of affirmative action to correct society, they're called grants.

This instance is very much a first world problem (I couldn't get into harvard because I'm asian, but that white or black person did even though they scored lower.) but it's one we have proof of and it's very much worth fixing to set an example everywhere.

You read harvard's reply or reasoning that what they do is ok. Actually depending how you interpret it it could be a complaint by harvard. They said are following STATE Law. Maybe, if we interpret what they said another way, we learn they don't like doing things that way and really shouldn't be held accountable for any so called legal discrimination because they are following the law. Maybe harvard wants us to blame the law and not them. Maybe harvard would like to bring on more asians or more whites but can't even though they perform better and do more research.

Any attempt for harvard or any other school to bring up the holistic student argument is ridiculous. Because Asian students very much participate in extracurricular activities here and in asian countries, objectively so. You won't see a lot on the football or basketball team. You will see a lot of them in other things sports and clubs of all kinds.

Also what do you mean to affirmative action will "correct" society? In what interpretation is a society "corrected" if as you said races are a fiction in your mind? If there's no race, then there's no racism, it's just a bunch of people interacting with a bunch of other people of various colors and any "trends" are meaningless.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say it's a fiction but then wish that any places you go was would be more "correct" if it were more color diverse, (tossing out all concept of people's personal choice or their capabilities.)

Races do exist because groups of people evolved based on their environments and their ancestors ability to procreate. We may not know exactly why because people move and separate and that long span of time has no written record really. But we do know people look different, their languages are different behaviors however "anecdotally" are often different. Their prevalence of various conditions, disease and health are different. Artifacts were different too. Their capabilities on tests across the world are clearly different.

And if various experiments weren't shunned we'd likely understand more about race. They acquired various levels of intelligence and physique due to conditions. The problem is a lot of these things that make people different aren't studied enough. Because universities fear their reputation because even true scientific findings can and have been hidden due to political implications. Thankfully learning about the brain and understanding people are sciences that won't be stopped. So we'll probably learn more over time about race. We most certainly won't be able to find ways to boost equality in humans or find how or where they best flourish if we can't study and be able to honestly interpret the differences in humans.

This is why it's so dangerous, no one takes it seriously.

or by, say, observing the life of Barack Obama.

The stated mission of Harvard college is to "educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society"

In neither case is their any value is filling up the school with people with highest test scores. The primary use of the test scores is to select from the cream from a broad cross section of society, because the entirety of society is whom the graduates of are expected to lead (serve or exploit). A secondary use is to extort larger sums of money from the elite whose children score exceptionally low.

Working class whites complain that lower scoring african americans get jobs as police or firemen over higher scoring whites. They ignore that purpose of the tests is simply to weed out people who can't do the job.

Scholastic test scores serve a similar purpose. Harvard has an exceptionally high graduation rate. There is no reason to believe that Harvard is admitting students who can't benefit from what is offered. Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

> Even if it was, the children of tiger moms pursuing meaningless vanity metrics have no standing to complain about it.

Perfectly stated.

A better solution would be to stop negative discrimination in the first place, but sometimes that's too hard. When you pile hacks on hacks, you end up with crazy edge cases.

A person is an incredibly complex array of both discriminatory and nondiscriminatory features. A tall, poor African American with a really great support network might actually face less discrimination than a fat, middle-class European American who has that one goofy ear. It's just impossible try and rectify this after the fact. Stopping negative discrimination in the first place is not just a better solution, it's the only solution.

People of colour & women who are perfectly competent at their jobs fall under more suspicion, have to prove themselves more, and are assumed to be less competent than white men doing the same work. There are so many studies affirming this.

It's pretty ugly behaviour to hold onto the idea that a single PoC might be an incompetent "diversity token" rather than just ... someone doing their job.

Are Asians not POC?

I've got news for you: People don't hold white males in high regard because they're white males, they do so because they're privileged.

I've never met a "SJW" that actually knows what it's like to be poor, it's all well-off, college educated, mostly white people. Some social justice warriors even go so far as to split people up into groups (PoC?) while at the same time espousing ideas of "equality".

I think most poor people who make their way to the top don't actually get any help, so they end up forming conservative view points, whereas the rich white people just can't understand why poor people don't just stop being poor. It must be because they're black! Congratulations you're a racist.

>Spreading that fictional "parody situation" is fuel for real discrimination.

No it's not. You're basically saying that by not taking race into account at all you're fueling racism. Institutionalized discrimination fuels racism. Why do you refuse to accept that people who are against affirmative discrimination may in fact be for RACE BLINDNESS and not just letting people be racist?

Why can't being blind to race completely be an option? Why does everything that doesn't go your way have to be racism? It sounds more to me like you're just trying to control the narrative to push some political agenda.

Why should childless adults pay taxes that go toward a school system that educates children, despite the fact that they don't have children?

Whatever your answer to that is, it is probably closely related to the answer to the question you posed. My own interpretation is that the whole point of paying taxes and building services is to cover the larger society's needs, not simply my own needs.

1) Tax money spent on sending kids to college helps everyone, even the non-parents, since more educated people = better world. Affirmative action doesn't help Asians in any conceivable way. Does it even help society at large? No one arguing for it shows reliable data that it creates significant community benefit.

2) You can always have a child in the future if you choose to. You can't become non-Asian if you were born Asian.

When it comes to companies, diversity is far better than having whatever the equivalent of "everyone looks the same and has the same SAT scores" so presumably it'd probably work to Harvard's benefit as well to encourage diversity whether mandated by law or not.

There's been plenty of studies pointing to the positives of diversity. In order to foster an environment which will be diverse you're probably going to have to skip over some of the kids from the populations that are large and generally well off even if they have better SAT scores.

I personally, have no problem with this. The kid who just missed getting into Harvard because of their race is probably going to an awesome school and statistically is more likely to come from a pretty good place in the world. They'll be fine.

The other kids who do get in though, get to go to a school that is better precisely because of the advantages diversity offers.

Here's some reading:

http://images.forbes.com/forbesinsights/StudyPDFs/Innovation...

Or they kill themselves because their life goal is over or become bitter and hateful of others. Really hard to tell when you shatter someones dreams arbitrarily.

I feel so sad for anyone that has such a futile outlook in life. Life is literally what you make it, not what some gatekeepers make of it for you.

Sadly, a stint working with social services has taught me some folks, who are normal about everything else, have one event that they have strived for that will break them if they miss it. Its actually easier if it was your doing, but not when its your ancestry or other factor you had no control over.

Have you considered getting the Blackberry Passport which features a physical keyboard which is also touch sensitive for swiping. I find the Passport quite interesting and it can also run Android apps.

On that point, it's very hard for me to see how Asian-Americans have a societal advantage that needs redressing in the USA.

As I see it, Asian-Americans are being punished - not to admit more Afrian-Americans - but to keep European-American admissions higher.

If we say that African-Americans are benefiting from positive discrimination, we must be consistent and say that European-Americans are benefiting from positive discrimination.

I would expand your use of 'etc':

Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans === Harvard Accused of Favoritism Towards European-Americans