Harvard Faces New Scrutiny Over Alleged Bias Against Asian-American Applicants

This issue is significant at many universities, such as UC Irvine.  If applicants were selected on the basis of merit, in a process that did not reveal something about cultural origins or “diversity”, even through names, it is highly likely that there would be huge increases in the percentage of Asian students in the class.  This is a logical consequence of preferential admissions processes trying to microengineer social “equality” in order to meet the political correctness expected by the academic community.

Dear rogue_academic: You are giving a standard response like so many others in higher education in the West. It is an easy way (also a lazy way perhaps) of discussing an important issue such as this. To succeed academically, one needs multiple learning styles. It is not one or the other. More importantly, things have changed in the last decade. Please explain to me: if the Asian ways of learning is so BAD, how do you account for the current economic turmoil in the West  while it is the opposite in Asia?

The long-standing sticking point in this issue (less so at private universities than at publics) is the presumption that “Qualification for admission” is a simple calculation of GPA and test scores.  In fact, any researcher worth her salt knows that the standardized tests predict almost nothing of importance, other than explaining some variance in first-year grades.

As long as we allow plaintiffs to cling to this feeble definition of merit, we’ll have many more of these issues to grapple with in the future.

I don’t think you are trying to raise stereotyping to a new level, but your analysis borders on racism. Actually, I take that back, it is clearly racist even if you don’t intend to push that agenda. Are you trying to tell me that you have data that shows Asian-Americans lack “high levels of creativity.” How do admissions officers know this? How do you know that? And, on average, every white kid you run into has this special creativity gene? Every Asian-American kid has a tiger mom? Really? Lumping the huge variety of different nationalities and ethicities into the one label “Asian-American” is insulting and meaningless as a tool to categorize cognitive ability and creativity. Is your argument based on the experience of one woman? You are really reaching, aren’t you? Plus, are you talking about the US or Asia? Apparently you see no cultural differences between actual Asians and Asian Americans, just like there are no differences between Italian-Americans and actual Italians. Lord. What do you know of “Asian ways of learning” anyway?  Sorry, you don’t get to take Japan out of the mix to prove your point, the Japanese are East Asian and so you just disproved your own argument. Good job. Finally, you are clearly ignorant of many, many technological advancements that came out of Asia. Let’s see, the Chinese were practicing metallurgy and casting bronze thousands of years ago, they invented gunpwder, currency, moveable type for priniting, gigantic ocean vessels that travelled to Africa and beyond before any Europeans and the list keeps going. I would educate yourself a bit more before you decide white is right

You could demolish my arguments and call me a racist while feeling good and noble by following the prescribed thinking of the moment as much as you like, but if you want to understand what admissions people are up to you might consider cutting back on indignation. People in admissions are not always researchers on cognitive abilities and racial studies. Many of them are teachers and researchers in their own fields who have plenty of opportunities to compare test scores at admissions with subsequent performance in classes. They often rely on their own experiences. If you accepted quite a few graduate students with almost perfect GRE subject scores who could not ask a meaningful question during a class discussion because they do not understand a thing, or those with top 5% TOEFL scores who could not tell the difference between past tense and present tense, you are not going to ignore your experience on the basis that applicants’ ancestors invented gunpowder or practiced metallurgy thousands of years ago. If you say they are racists, go after them, straighten them up, scold them right and sit back and enjoy the outcome.

Two candidates for admission:

Candidate 1: speaks two languages, plays a musical instrument, diverse courses, GPA of 3.65432

Candidate 2: speaks two languages, plays a musical instrument, diverse courses, GPA of 3.65433

Is this what we are coming to?

I have never understood the arguments about preferential admission since they all seem based on ranking students who are fundamentally of equal rank.

In my opinion, once the GPA is above a certain cutoff, say, 3.5 or so, we must realize the students are of equal ranking.  And short of any other substantial criteria, the school should have the right to socially engineer its student body.  The admissions should be based on a racial criteria that matches society, a desire to bring more African Americans into the fold, a desire for more women in engineering or men in nursing and education.  Nothing wrong with that at all.

I don’t feel good and noble, I feel annoyed. I am interested to learn more of this research you speak of. There is data available from admissions (what schools?) that tracks SAT/GRE scores and then compares those scores to how students actually perform in classes? And not only that, the research compares results by race?  On a longitudinal basis? That is a very expensive enterprise for a higher education system in turmoil and I would like a reference to establish that is true. You say there are “plenty of opportunities” for this research so it must exist or are you saying it could exist but you don’t know? Personally, at the graduate level, I do not believe any such research is being done. For what purpose? You need to end your hypotheticals (IF you accepted students….and IF they could not ask a meaningful question), what use are they. Anyway, IF pigs could fly then I will reconsider your arguments. I did demolish your argument so no conditional verbs needed. Race is a socially-derived category not a natural or biological one, so any efforts to show race as a causal agent are doomed to failure in this regard. Do universities also take care to separate scores by ethnicity (chinese v Thai v indonesian, etc.)? Do you include South Asia (India, pakistan, etc) as Asian or are they not “Asian” enough to have a tiger mom? Believe me, students in the top 5% of TOEFL scores likely understand English grammar better than you. Anyway, I don’t understand your last sentence, who am I supposed to go after and why? Who is “they?”  You are the only one who needs to straighten up. Have you ever been to Asia? I lived in Japan for 5 years and traveled widely in East, and South East Asia. Yes, there are cultural, national and historical differences in educational systems, they reflect the values, norms and beliefs of the people who live there. That doesn’t mean you can separate them into creative versus non-creative societies. You haven’t even defined or operationalized what creativitry means or how it is measured so I would just recommend you sit back and think of a new topic to explore.

1. Admitting one student over another on the basis of some (the charitable term:) intangible or (the antiseptic term:) affirmative action, or, (the uncharitable term:) racial preference is usually not a matter of choosing on the basis of a hundred-thousandth difference in GPA.

2. A 3.5GPA from a one-room schoolhouse or a high school in an upper-middle class suburb full of grade-grubbers and parents with hair-triggers for lawsuits, is not the same as a 3.5GPA from a different kind of school. There are schools that permit grades of “A+” with a point value of a little more than four, and there are schools that indicate “weighted” GPAs, with some courses counting more than other.

3. Students in the applicant pool are usually not of “fundamentally equal rank.” Some are pretty far above the median, and applying to that particular school as a “safety school”; others are saying to themselves, “Oh, what the hell, go for it,” and overreaching.

4. If students in the applicant pool, on the other hand, are of “fundamentally equal rank,” then the only fair way to choose among them would be by chance, i.e., a lottery. The school’s “desire to bring more…” whomevers into whatevers is too subjective. It could want to bring more children of rich people in, with the endowment down the line in mind; it could want to bring more white kids into nursing, so it doesn’t look so much like an occupation for minorities; it could want fewer Asians so as not to scare off white kids from STEM fields; it could want more hockey players from Canada to beef up its small-division championship chances; it could want more kids from Korea and Qatar who require no financial aid, and so on. In short, we can’t assume a school’s subjective “desire for…” is noble.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the worst enemy proponents of affirmative action could have is the Asian-American community. A minority with its own history of being discriminated against, it succeeds in college admissions at a rate better than whites without needing any AA. So when proponents of AA maintain that the rate of white admissions needs to be curtailed in favor of blacks, they also have to favor cutting back on the admission of Asian-Americans, a minority.

“That huge pool of exceptionally talented* Asian Americans is a bulwark protecting the continuation of race-conscious admission policies…”

That pool is anything but. “Race-conscious admission policies” discriminate against this pool of minority students more than it does white students, and most AA proponents don’t like this being spotlighted.

*By the way, what does “exceptionally talented Asian Americans” mean? That Asian-American students are inherently more talented (“exceptionally” does mean more talented than other people, doesn’t it?), more talented by dint of circumstance, or do they work harder?   

Mbelvadi, in whose mouth butter does not apparently melt, can say with a straight–albeit patronizing–face, “I am not saying all who oppose Aff Action are racist, just some.” And this almost immediately after saying, “…if the racists ever really did win what they seem to be fighting in the courts for – true absolute color-blindness in admissions.” Color-blindness (i.e., no racial preferences) is the core of being opposed to AA, so mbelvadi must think that pretty nearly all–not just that euphemistic “some”–opponents of AA are racists.