This is roughly how admissions works at Yale:
1. An officer reviews your application for 20-25 minutes. 1a. Some kids are clear rejects. 1500/2400 SAT and a 2.7 GPA, with no activities usually does the trick. The director (or an experienced officer) reviews these. 1b. Some kids are clear admits. These are incredibly rare - something like 20 kids out of 26000 I think? The director also reviews these but they're pretty much auto admits - think multiple gold medalists at IMO, IOI, and IPhO, stuff like that.
2. The officer writes a summary sheet that contains what the officer feels about you, good points, etc, if they like you. If they don't, you get put in the "no" pile. 2b. I believe most of these "no" applicants are reviewed by another officer, but not as deeply. The goal is to find false negatives - most people in the "no" pile stay there.
3. The application goes to a committee of 3-4 officers. They all read your profile and debate about whether or not to let you in. Your admissions officer is supposed to argue in your favor, and the others can argue for you or against you. Usually, most candidates at this point are solid, so the officers argue about possible negatives.
Something like 70% of applicants are qualified to attend Yale, so it usually breaks down to what you'll contribute to the campus community, what kind of a person you are, etc. A lot of admissions officers were former Yalies, so I imagine they even ask "would I hang out with this person?".
4. If you're accepted, you're golden. If you don't make it past committee, you usually don't get in. Some people get waitlisted. They also review several of the "no's" to avoid false negatives, and some people might be brought to committee again. If you're borderline between "admit" and "reject," you will usually be rejected or waitlisted. There's just too many really good applicants.
There is no EXPLICIT comparison of Asians to Asians. Nobody looks at your application and says "Oh, another Asian, let me turn on my asian scale!" What happens, subconsciously, is that the stereotypical asian profile is "high scoring, high gpa, piano/violin, tennis, math/science."
So a lot of qualified asians get rejected because their admission officer can't find enough good arguments for them. Regardless of how qualified you are individually, Yale is trying to build a diverse class, so if you do the same thing as 1000 other candidates, it's very hard to vouch for you. "What do you bring to the campus that this other kid doesn't? , and that's the end of it.
I don't think checking "Asian" or "not Asian" makes a huge difference, because in the end, it's your activities, recommendations, and essays that differentiate you. Once your scores are high enough, nobody is going to say "well Bob and Melinda are both cool, but Bob has a 2310 while Melinda has a 2270, so we should clearly go with Bob." That's just absurd - they always go with the person who will contribute more to Yale.
I hope that dispels some of the myths you see and hear. Correlation does not imply causation. People don't get rejected because they ARE Asian - it's usually the lack of differentiation. Again, I don't represent Yale or anything like that, and this is just what I've heard, but I believe it's fairly accurate, and for most Asians, they'll figure it out by your name, so a box isn't making a huge difference.
Edit: Legacy students (parent(s) went to Yale), recruited athletes, and under-represented minorities have higher admission rates than the overall pool. I don't know why or by how much or anything like that. This exists at almost every elite school.
You can review, but not make copies, of this written policy. It is kept at - I kid you not - the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.
every school clearly remarks similar policies and reviewing the statistics is pretty self-evident. i don't see why everyone is making an issue to explain away the current standards when they're pretty clear.
i'm asian and it doesn't really bother me, since i've experienced similar situations in the "real world" during my career.
i've dealt with the principals and superintendents in nyc and they've made it abundantly clear that they want asians in their schools because "they raise the stats and increase funding." race clearly has an influence on the admission process at multiple levels of education.
the glass ceiling is pretty obvious when i had a "literal" 100% turnover rate within 12 months of every asian in my department at prestigious firm. this includes myself, i left within 12 months.
you simply make it so that your accomplishments are so undeniable that race no longer becomes an issue. however, i do personally feel that race shouldn't be a question that is asked at all or at least no one should answer them. i'd even go so far as to eliminate or redact applicant names to the admissions board as a question of independence.
go one year where no one is aware of an individual's race or name and i think that would be an interesting data set!
i hope that we'll move towards a true meritocracy instead of constantly worrying about race and other irrelevant facts.
Play around with the year/school. Clicking on data points shows self-reported profile information. It's pretty clear there is a shifted standard in many cases.
Note to self: if I get an Asian girl pregnant, the kids get my name.
[1] Take the 450pt gap between blacks and asians on the 1600pt SAT and multiply by 2400/1600.
"For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students have applied for undergraduate admission. Applications have doubled since 1994, and about half of the increase has come since the University implemented a series of financial aid initiatives over the past five years"
Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/01/a-first-for-ha...
That item is an even bigger injustice imho.
But this is quite different to discriminating on grounds of race, as patio11 describes. If it's really true that Asian pupils are discriminated against purely because of a tick box then this is clearly racist even if it's because of the supposed 'hothousing' effect of Asian attitudes towards studying. Is this kind of discrimination not illegal in the US? In Britain and probably most of Europe it is illegal to discriminate on grounds of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation and disability.
I went to Oxbridge (not going to say which) for my first uni and also interviewed at several colleges, as well as many of my friends also going to Oxford or Cambridge.
1. Neither Oxford or Cambridge university have an open policy to discriminate against privately educated students. This is just a public perception due to political pressure. In fact, in the 1960s, 30% of domestic intake was from private schools, it is now holding at roughly 45%.
2. You are largely correct that you need better exam results if you're from a private school compared to maintained schools. But within that large group, you are actually differentiated mainly by your entrance exam (70% of all admissions), application and interview.
3. Oxbridge has no inate preference for diversity. Academic excellence in general matters far more:
i. Your first critical generalisation is that preferences are expressed from a university level. This is not the case. Every college has its own admissions office and select based on their own college preferences which vary significantly from college to college and can be surprisingly strong and consistent across time.
ii. Therefore, your resume matters far less than you think, depending on which college you apply to and even what subject. For example, for the most competitive subjects, the academic bar is extremely high and in the interview they will be looking for additional indications of the nature of this intelligence such as quick or lateral thinking as well as confidence of expression. For the least competitive subjects, the academic requirement is far more flexible and you can get in largely based on how well you fit in with that specific college's ethos or how much they value diversity.
4. Oxbridge DOES effectively discriminate, not on any illegal basis, but on your "class". Almost all Oxbridge students have a background from upper or upper middle/professional classes, even those from state maintained schools. It is rare to find lower middle or working class kids who go to Oxford. This is likely due to the heavy emphasis on education from an early age as well as the Oxbridge staff, culture and traditions all being from the same cut.
Since this tends to cover a large proportion of immigrant groups, this means you will rarely find such pupils at Oxbridge. For example, there was a notorious article that exactly ONE Black-Carribean student had been admitted to Oxford in 2009. Even the British Prime Minister got involved. Oxford vociferously denied this and said there had been 26 "Black" students out of 3,202.
5. As for Europe, I dare not generalise. This is especially the case since many European countries have lower proportion and diversity of immigrants as well as strongly integrationist rather than the multicultural policies of the UK and US. Also, difficulty of access to tertiary education tends to be much lower in Continental Europe because it is heavily subsidised publically. For example, many courses in many German universities are effectively free, even for foreigners. When things are that different, there's little point trying to compare directly on one specific issue.
===
So, Britain does not do "tick box" discrimination even for the most competitive universities. Quite the contrary, at least for Oxbridge, they will take academic quality even if that means sourcing from a monoculture. Only political pressure has stemmed the further reduction in state school access.
In short, you could say that Oxbridge is almost a perfect example of the minimum you could expect without legalised "positive" discrimination in a university system of a multicultural anglo-capitalist society.
Not checking this box shows an aspect of your personality, maybe the differenciator you're looking for.
My guess is that this is true in a narrow sense; it's just that if you check "Black/African American" or "Latino/Hispanic" you dramatically increase your chances of admission. At that point, the admissions officer does have an argument for what you add to the campus: your race. Asian is neutral in their book, but many more Asians are qualified for admission than can possibly be accepted. The result is de facto discrimination against Asians.
The effects are vicious even when the intent is good. But the road to hell, etc., and it helps to consider a case where we can all agree that the intent was evil: the numerus clausus law, which required that university admissions reflect the ethnic composition of the broader community, passed in Hungary under the "White Terror" regime of Admiral Horthy. Its intent was to keep Jews out of academia. Whether the professed goal is to keep out the Jews or to ensure diversity by letting the "right" groups in, the effect is the same.
You can only admit so many violin playing science hopefuls.
Is that incorrect?
You are thinking of Caltech. MIT, by contrast, very vigorously practices affirmative action by race and ethnicity. (MIT filed "friend of the court" briefs in the last Supreme Court cases about affirmative action in college admission.)
http://mitadmissions.org/pages/policies
After edit: A kind reply just denied that MIT has "non-academic admits," and I agree with that denial. Everyone who is admitted to an undergraduate degree program at MIT (but also at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton) is plainly academically above average, generally qualified to be in an honors program in a strong state flagship university. So while everyone in MIT has strong academic credentials, there does seem to be a genuine admission advantage at MIT and several peer institutions correlated with "underrepresented ethnicity." Thanks for focusing in the reply on the language from the earlier post I was quoting. Yes, MIT has no admitted students whose qualifications could be called "nonacademic." But, no, Caltech differs from MIT in being genuinely more purely focused on academic qualifications rather than other student characteristics. (I know the whole family of a black woman who is an undergraduate at Caltech. She and her parents, and her sibling, are smart, period. I'm sure she had other college choices, and for all I know she found Caltech appealing because its admission policies make very clear that EVERYONE who comes in the door must meet a very high academic standard for admission.)
Caltech did this at one time with women (I don't know how they do it now). They would seek out high school women who showed promise in math and science, and encourage them to consider Caltech. Women who were accepted would be given trips for themselves and their parents to come visit the campus where the benefits of Caltech could be pitched.
This flies in the face of the fact that affirmative actions exists and that the racial demographics at any given college are typically consistent year-to-year. Somehow the numbers get hit every single year, yet you claim it's an inherent property of the applicants themselves that naturally results in those numbers appearing every single year. I find that highly suspect.
Not if you know how affirmative action actually works.
They don't reject high-performance black athletes for lower performing, asian athletes. I've never once heard anyone complain that their university's football team had a disproportionate number of non-asian people.
Serious double standard there.
US Population: White - 72.4 % Black or African American - 12.6 Asian - 4.8 Some other race - 6.2
Source: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf
Princeton class profile: African America - 7.4 Asian - 18.6 Hispanic - 7.1 etc.
Source: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admi...
Asians are "overrepresented minorities", or ORM's, by admission standards because, in Princeton anyways, the ratios are nearly 4x the population average.
What I meant was why is that a problem? According to the article, that degree of over-representation (relative to population) is below what it would be, given a completely blind admissions process.
So why not have 25% asian population? What's the problem?
On the other hand, why isn't anyone saying there is a problem with ORM in football?
Thank god, I hope it means the world is a different place.
First, I'm guessing you're about 30 yo. (Sorry if I'm way off.) When I applied to colleges in late 1981, there were still some dumbass amounts of discrimination for being black. Affirmative action occurred in the 60s/70s to try and rectify some of that.
It was a given back then that admissions would overlook somewhat lower SATs if you were otherwise promising, and if you could be identified as being from a disadvantaged background. The downside was that some completely kickass guys I knew felt that they had been admitted because of their skin color.
I assume there's still discrimination out there, but perhaps it's a lot less than 30 years ago.
Do Asians have considerably higher academic performance than most other ethnic groups? Yes, they do.
Do I believe Asian people are inherently more intelligent and capable? No, I do not.
Do I think that colleges should admit students based on academic performance or intelligence and capability? I think intelligence and capability are clearly more important qualities.
The only conclusion I can draw is that academic performance is clearly a bad indicator in some ways, if it so severely favors one racial group. Therefore colleges' unwillingness to judge Asians with the same standards of academic performance is a reasonable policy to me.
How do you plan to measure "intelligence and capability"? By this logic, a brilliant-slacker-underachiever should be the most sought after candidate. Who cares about results, after all, when all that matters is someone's raw intelligence (regardless of whether or not it has been or will be applied to anything at all).
For example I could have easily gone to med school with my grades, which is one of the majors with the higher grade cutoffs, but it is maybe open for the top 10-15%? At this level I don't believe parental involvement matters too much, everyone at age 18-19 is mature enough to know: OK, if I want to study medicine, I should try to get these grades etc...
But if admission is based in the 99,99% area, I don't know if a system based on merit alone is "fair". If I look at areas like competitive sports or piano competitions etc., I would believe at least 2/3 of the contestants at the national stage had "helicopter parents" relentlessly pushing them, often against their own will...
So having a "tiger mom" simply gives you a huge competitive advantage over "normal" kids/families. So if your system is based on ideas like affirmative action, where people from disadvantage backgrounds get a boost, it seems sensible to give people from advantageous backgrounds a detriment.
Even though they are pretty much making racist choices, the public is happy with it.
Look not without, but within, for the enemy is us.
In this case, the assumption is that asian are a homogenous group, and that having a class full of asians in necessarily not diverse. That's in line with the "violin playing automatons" perception of asian students.
Why is it not possible to have diversity of experience without artificially restricting access by race. The assumption that people of a certain race are defined by the same experiences is exactly racism.
Why is asking for ethnicity even legal?
As I understand it, France also has systemic discrimination - grand-children of guest workers from the 1960s have a hard time finding employment, for example, and the official state position is that "there are no ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities." The Human Rights Committee disagrees with that view, and I think it's a bizarre viewpoint.
The French Constitution and Penal Code prohibit the collection of data based on the origin, race or religion, so of course you haven't seen such a form. On the other hand, it's widely believed that the lack of such information makes it hard to determine if there truly is wide-spread discrimination or not. The view of the French government is that there is no discrimination and so there's no need to measure it. While I say that without measurements, you don't know if it exists or not.
we often have "are you a aboriginal or torres strait islander" but that is always clearly marked as optional and only used for measuring progress in improving the absolutely disgusting state of education for indigenous australians.
really i always thought america was better then this... TIL
Jared Diamond concurs: http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/0...
If you believe their arguments, there is no scientific basis for categorizing someone on the basis of race. Appearance is particularly hazardous.
Therefore, why can't Asians mark black on the application? Who is to say they are not black if they self-identify as black? According to PBS, Jared Diamond, and many sociology departments, it is impossible to administer a genetic test that distinguishes African Americans from Asians, so self-identification is the only measure that matters.
So: why would Asians simply self-identify as white? Why not self-identify as black?
If race just a sociocultural construct, well, many Asian Americans certainly are into rap music and cultural markers that are associated with socially constructed category of African American. So why aren't they black?
Phenotypically, I can easily identify a black person vs. an asian person, with nearly 100% accuracy. What I'm seeing are phenotypic differences in hair type, skin colour, facial structure, etc. that are all defined by genetics.
It's ludicrous to think that I can't sort people into groups based on these apparent differences(and I'm talking broad racial categories, not Ukranians vs. Russians or anything). Ignoring that might be PC, but it's definitely not realistic.
Just to be clear, I'm not insinuating anything about intelligence, ability, or whatever. I'm just saying that to deny that there are distinct categories that humans can be classified into is unrealistic. There may be edge cases, but nobody would mistake one of China's 1.6 billion people for an east African.
https://www.23andme.com/ancestry/origins
Nevertheless, if you take for the sake of argument the fallacious concept that "geographic ancestry has no connection to genetics", then there is and should be nothing stopping an Asian American (or a European American for that matter) from self-identifying as an African American. Is a university going to start administering blood tests?
This is a rather hyperbolic statement. You concede edge cases, but the fluidity of phenotype means that it fails to map cleanly onto neatly delineated categories. We can look at the recent book describing the history of 'passing' reviewed here [1] for one of many examples.
>I haven't read much on the subject, but the idea that races can't be separated based on genetics is either false, or due to the fact that we don't have enough sensitivity in the measurement.
Again, I'd caution against letting your intuition be your guide on this topic. A cursory examination of the literature (i.e., 15 minutes on Google Scholar [2]) might lead you to the conclusion that: (1) genotype != phenotype, and (2) while we can reliably sort humans by ancestry using genetic information, there is variation within these clusters because the proportion of any individuals ancestry that arises from different populations also varies.
I think that the upshot is that the science is less useful when applied to a nebulous term like race, which involves a host of cultural, political and historical factors. The way we Americans define race in debates like these is a legacy of our binary 'one-drop rule' concepts of identity, and it isn't at all clear that appeals to science couched in sweeping generalizations have any connection to the biology.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Arsenault-t.h...
[2]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=genomics+race
Are you sure Jared Diamond actually made that statement? It seems weird. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering mentions a study where genetic markers were found to predict self-reported race/ethnic group with a discrepancy of only 0.14%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Human_genetic_diversity:_Lew...
But many people accept his premises.
Surprising that it doesn't happen more often. Or maybe it does...
I was pretty naive, and after thinking it over for a few minutes I decided to ask her for advice. I said to her: "Well, I'm really not sure what to tell you, see, my mother's Jewish, and my father's Ukrainian. Can you write them both? Or am I supposed to choose somehow? What do you think?" I'd actually thought it through a bit more and was ready to continue telling her how my parents were divorced and I was living with my mother so I should probably choose that side... but I decided to wait for her response first.
She looked at me a bit funny (I think now that she was trying to see if I was being ironic. I wasn't). She held a pause. And then she said firmly: "Let's just write you up as a Ukrainian, shall we?"
I'm pretty sure that SAM (a Jewish frat?) was gone by the 80s at MIT, as a calibration point.
Edit: I was a little confused, he was turned away from Columbia for being Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota
I lived there as an undergrad in the 1990s. The most famous alum is probably Lori Berenson, who was held by the Peruvian government for years for (maybe inadvertently) supporting a terrorist organization.
The illusion of merit that graduation from these schools imparts leads to a false sense of mastery amongst those who've been able to scale the pyramid of achievement, a self-deception that has had pretty profound consequences for the country since, oh I don't know, say 2008 or so.
[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-Are/12689...
[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=4JyQus8r9JYC&pg=PA150&#...
[...] all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score.
Attendance at elite schools and the myth of the "meritocratic test score" is just the most recent form of upper class hegemony. It's a fiction created to justify hereditary rule. The far majority of wealth, power, and status is obtained through heredity and nepotism. The "meritocratic test score" myth is there to hide this simple fact.
Maybe the problem is that going to an elite school matters too much for arbitrary social reasons. We've all heard and read about how hiring at places, such as elite financial institutions, will simply discard any application from a person who didn't go to an elite university. No one wants to lose out on opportunity.
Why can't elite universities increase enrollment to increase the number of opportunities? They have the endowments for it. I'm not aware of any Ivy struggling to pay its bills.
If society thinks that people who attend these schools are a better value, then wouldn't it be of benefit to try to expand capacity?
It seems like an artificially created scarcity. Do top schools feel their brand is diminished if they start accepting 2k students vs 1.5k?
Agreed. Allowing elite universities to continue to serve up this shadow-play of a sorting function has led to a perverse credentialism that often fails to reflect the actual performance or qualifications of elite graduates.
And even if I were to concede that admissions to elite schools should matter, this thread's focus on URMs reminds me of the joke that was circulating earlier this fall, punchline: 'Watch out for that URM guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/golden1.htm
When I was an admissions office for a short time, my advice to asian applicants looking to be noticed was to go to clown school, perform as a semi-professional magician, or even excel at sports.
Violin, cello, piano, essays about translating for your immigrant parents, computers, math, science...all that stuff blends together after awhile and makes it hard for an admissions office to remember you when sitting around the table voting on applicants.
For example, if a white kid had the same piano + math achievements as an Asian one did in the same year, would he stand out more?
So a kid with incredible credentials who plays the violin and is awesome at math....who grew up in an igloo is going to get extra attention.
That same kid who went to a math/science academy in NYC has a tough path in front of him.
I mean, I'm sure the school would reject you if they knew you were lying about it, but there really isn't any way for them to tell, is there?
Er... what? So you believe putting the wrong tag on yourself will hurt your evaluation by the admission officers; but you also believe they are wise enough to not just put tags on yourself.
You're saying something here, but I don't know what it is.
Additionally if they have a pic that would it give it away.
I didn't know there was a quota on how many Asian students a college could accept.
And besides, doesn't a college want the best students in their college, regardless of ethnicity?
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/bill-nguyen-startups
University Admission Committee may not mind such "self race re-branding" practice too, because university ratios of admitted minorities would be improving as well.
Why not just hide it from them? I suppose there are certain parts of an application which could give away information that’s meant to be hidden—being president of the Asian-American Student Club would pretty well give away the applicant’s ethnicity.
http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Programs_and_S...
The federal regulations on the subject
http://www.ed.gov/legislation/FedRegister/other/2007-4/10190...
require all colleges to ask, but no students to tell, which of the federally defined race or ethnicity categories
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards
they belong to. A growing number of students decline to answer the questions, which are clearly marked as optional on all college application forms. Harvard
http://members.ucan-network.org/harvard
reports 12 percent of its enrolled undergraduates as "race/ethnicity unknown," and several other selective colleges have higher percentages of students reported as unknown race or ethnicity. Several state university systems, by state law, may not consider student race or ethnicity at all as part of the admission process.
The definitive online FAQ on the issue of race and ethnicity self-identification in college admission in the United States
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/12282...
links out to other relevant laws and official definitions and news stories, and gives links to reported enrollment figures for a wide variety of colleges.
After edit: A comment at the same comment level as this comment appears to be referring to a college's claimed rationale when it says:
I don't understand why they require ethnic proportions to stay close to population averages.
They don't. Indeed, it is strictly illegal to have admission quotas by race, since the Bakke decision decades ago. If you look at the actual enrollment figures, linked to from this comment, you will see that that is not what happens in practice either.
Another comment mentioned an applicant's view that he should not "lie about his race." This view motivates my children NOT marking anything on the forms, because the form questions are optional for applicants, and because my children think it is a lie to describe themselves as belonging to any narrower category than humankind. (From an old-fashioned American point of view, my children could be described as "biracial," but we prefer the term "human" and accept the term "postracial.")
I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.
One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.
It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.
One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. Why can't individual human beings have the right to be treated as one more member of the general human race?
I doubt there are many young people today who have that kind of dedication. I wish I did.
Disclaimer: I served in the US Navy and have many friends and family members who served or are serving in various branches.
I'm very curious to know what could provide a greater return on investment than spending four years at Harvard for free.
I feel supremely sorry for any 16-year-old trying to get into a top ranked school right now. As a fairly stable 26-year-old it made me depressed like nothing before. It's a broken process that's been spoiled rotten by the bottom feeders who will tell a kid "you won't get in unless you pay me five grand to help you." (i couldn't afford it...)
If you want to see some people really freak out over race and admissions, talk to some Indian B-school hopefuls (note: I am not Indian). They are absolutely bucketed and compete against one another.
On the topic of race - It's no unusual occurrence to hear some HYPSM reject at my school (pretty average/ordinary California high school) say "I was rejected because I was Asian/White/Indian/whatever." It really bothers me because these kids never had a shot at those top schools anyway. They were above-average at an ordinary high school. They really had nothing to differentiate them from any other applicant. It was the same "Smart kid with good grades and an SAT score above 2000 who was loosely involved in a club or two."
The mentality is, if you get a 2000+ SAT score, then certainly you are some sort of genius who belongs at Harvard. You participated in two clubs?! Wow! You got A's in a few of your AP classes?! Look out Stanford!
They think there is some formula to admission, where it's just a stats competition. If you have the right stats, then you're in. But their goal numbers are weak, and they detract from what really matters, and that is being amazing and following your passion (see here - http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/esse-quam-videri).
And when they get rejected, their first reaction is to blame the black kid. It bothers me because there were other people of their race accepted, and they were accepted because they proved their worth to that college, just like the black kid did. The sore losers complaining don't see that they offered nothing unique or notable to the college that any one of the other thousands of Regular Genius Kids(TM) didn't. All things considered, and race not considered, it's the amazing and truly notable kids who get accepted. Whether white, black, Asian, or whatever, those amazing individuals proved that they themselves could offer something truly valuable to the college, and they were accepted as a result. There are no average Asians at MIT. There are no average black people at MIT. There are no average anyone at MIT, they're all amazing in some way.
EDIT: Disclaimer, I'm white.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309338
the federal definition of "American Indian or Alaska Native" is "A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment." In other words, if you don't have community attachment to an Indian tribe, or formal legally recognized tribal membership, you are not a Native American or Alaska Native.
The interesting thing is that the cutthroat high school his son is enrolled at - the AP weed-out courses, the hardest ones are the humanities. Courses like Modern European History.
> For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers. They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.
http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/02/18/want-to-get-into-harva...
In any case, there's a suit 'Fisher v University of Texas at Austin' which experts think will be heading to the Supreme Court sometime in 2012, and may have a good chance of bringing education a little closer to the meritocracy it should be: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/sunday-review/college-dive...
Quoting from the anecdote:
All of my known forebears came from Europe, mostly from Southern Germany with a few from England, Ireland, and Scotland. A glance in the mirror, however, indicated that there was Middle Eastern blood in my veins. I have a semitic nose and skin that tans so easily that I am often darker than many people who pass for black. Did I inherit this from a Hebrew, an Arab, a Gypsy or perhaps one of the Turks who periodically pillaged Central Europe? Maybe it was from a Blackfoot Indian that an imaginative aunt thinks was in our family tree. I will probably never know.
As an arrogant young computer scientist, I believed that if there is any decision that you can't figure out how to program, the question is wrong. I couldn't figure out how to program racial classification, so I concluded that there isn't such a thing. I subsequently reviewed some scientific literature that confirmed this belief. "Race" is, at best, a fuzzy concept about typical physical properties of certain populations. At worst, of course, it is used to justify more contemptible behavior than any concept other than religion.
In answer to the race question on the security form, I decided to put "mongrel." This seemed like an appropriate answer to a meaningless question.
If it happens to be the case that race Y dominates admissions (or race Z can't seem to get a leg up), whether that domination be through genetic or cultural factors (or both), it is arguably racist to handicap admissions by appeal to soft factors. But consider:
Let's imagine (e.g.) global warming has destroyed US agriculture so all the gringos in the US have to migrate south to Mexico. The University of Mexico is (say) the premier university of Mexico, the Harvard all the best Mexican students want to attend. Historically, whites outperform latinos on admissions numbers (SAT and GPA). Would it make sense then for the University of Mexico to cease accepting latino-Mexicans (or substantially decrease their admissions rates) in favor of the new white-Mexicans with higher numbers? Would that be the fairest thing to do? Or would the U of M admissions board say things like "yeah whites have good numbers but they all kind of look the same to us. All from the same middle class families, all played tennis and hockey in high school, all want to be business/psych majors and join greek fraternities. We look at other things than just numbers."
I'm not entirely sure it's unfair to handicap asians, or assist blacks, if we've essentially industrialized the production of status-signalling - fixing the recommended amount of prestige and job offers a person should receive for the rest of his life at age 18 - and have to determine some means of doling it out.
I ask this as a graduate of a Christian liberal arts college, which discriminates on the basis of religious beliefs. It's not entirely on topic but I think the "logic" still applies. Or does it?
Also, is it possible to be admitted if one is outside the typical age range of applicants (ie 18-19)?
I just don't know how these things work for you in the US, so I had to ask :)
Here is my suspicion (or what I would like to hear): Asian students are significantly higher-scoring, in both histograms. Such a result would go a long way towards vindicating the college admission process, and suggest that universities don't explicitly judge those who mark "Asian" by a different standard but rather choose to largely discount SAT scores (and by proxy academic performance).
Similar studies were used to discredit claims that engineering and science departments were practicing gender discrimination against women. Does anyone have a reference to a study on race in undergraduate admissions that takes this approach?
Asian [x] - If you're more "white"
White [x] - If you're more "asian"
Both [x] - If you open minded or PC
Neither [x] - If you want me to pick a side
Hapa [x] - If you'll allow me all of the above
Identity depends on where you stand.