SCOTUS outlaws race as college admissions factor

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

It's not just one example though. Most of the black kids at elite schools are either this profile (parents perhaps beneficiaries of AA in the 70's and 80's and doing well now) or children of African/Caribbean immigrants (a whole different debate). Yes there are also first gen or "adversity" students but they are a small part of the demo on these campuses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

10 bucks says these kids turned down Ivy offers to attend HCBUs. They are the children of well-to-do professionals. While they may be "legacy," they likely had stats that were 90th+ percentile for their HCBU.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

There also are not as many Asians in the legacy, faculty, and recruited athletes admission preference pools. Those combined have more effect on Asian admissions than does Affirmative Action.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

I made no such assertions. I was going on an extended hypothetical offered by the person I was responding to. the bottom line is, there are hundreds of thousands of "top" students qualified to be at these elite schools, where there are only thousands of seats available. So many more qualified kids will be rejected. Crying to the supreme court about it doesn't open up more seats, doesn't raise the admission rate, etc. the bottom line is that there are kids who are going to be upset about being rejected. The idea that Asian applicants are somehow more worthy of any of these seats when their percentages relative to the overall population were oversampled makes the case less compelling. So congratulations, rather than being 21% of the make up of these schools, you should expect that it will fall to closer to 10% or less and in total, it will now be much harder for minorities to gain acceptance to these schools.

Hoisted by your own petard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

I made no such assertions. I was going on an extended hypothetical offered by the person I was responding to. the bottom line is, there are hundreds of thousands of "top" students qualified to be at these elite schools, where there are only thousands of seats available. So many more qualified kids will be rejected. Crying to the supreme court about it doesn't open up more seats, doesn't raise the admission rate, etc. the bottom line is that there are kids who are going to be upset about being rejected. The idea that Asian applicants are somehow more worthy of any of these seats when their percentages relative to the overall population were oversampled makes the case less compelling. So congratulations, rather than being 21% of the make up of these schools, you should expect that it will fall to closer to 10% or less and in total, it will now be much harder for minorities to gain acceptance to these schools.

Hoisted by your own petard.

This isn't how merit based admissions work. They don't look at racial percentages in the overall population and then compare same-race applicants against each other to fill up a quotation for each race. They compare all applicants against each other and select the best. Asian students are the highest performers. Therefore, in a meritocratic system that considers academic performance to be the dominant factor, Asians would see drastically higher admissions. It's odd that your not understanding that the entire point of the case was to end race based admissions-- not to reinforce it. That's the entire point, to make admissions colorblind.

[Anonymous]

It's odd that you don't understand that places like the Ivies *say* they are a meritocracy, but are really mostly a legacy environment with a few "meritocracy" students thrown in for good measure.

Asian students, or poor / middle class white students, or black students could be the highest performers in admissions but most of them will not get in, no matter what their race.

It's almost like many Asians don't understand the rich people culture in the United States.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

I made no such assertions. I was going on an extended hypothetical offered by the person I was responding to. the bottom line is, there are hundreds of thousands of "top" students qualified to be at these elite schools, where there are only thousands of seats available. So many more qualified kids will be rejected. Crying to the supreme court about it doesn't open up more seats, doesn't raise the admission rate, etc. the bottom line is that there are kids who are going to be upset about being rejected. The idea that Asian applicants are somehow more worthy of any of these seats when their percentages relative to the overall population were oversampled makes the case less compelling. So congratulations, rather than being 21% of the make up of these schools, you should expect that it will fall to closer to 10% or less and in total, it will now be much harder for minorities to gain acceptance to these schools.

Hoisted by your own petard.

This isn't how merit based admissions work. They don't look at racial percentages in the overall population and then compare same-race applicants against each other to fill up a quotation for each race. They compare all applicants against each other and select the best. Asian students are the highest performers. Therefore, in a meritocratic system that considers academic performance to be the dominant factor, Asians would see drastically higher admissions. It's odd that your not understanding that the entire point of the case was to end race based admissions-- not to reinforce it. That's the entire point, to make admissions colorblind.

Academic performance is the dominant factor? You need to go to some of these elite campuses before you spout nonsense like that. Academic performance is not enough. You perform up to a standard over the first hurdle and then you have to bring the thing...elite athletic performance, big bucks, science research prizes, freakish ability in math or art or dance or saxophone...

[Anonymous]

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Facts matter. The right has "won" again on this thanks to a corrupt court and the Federalist Society that has perfected gaming the system.

Is it your belief that no Asian Americans feel aggrieved by the recent admissions practices at elite colleges and universities?

These schools have single digit admit rates. No one is entitled to gain acceptance. The fact is, the Asian population makes up X percent of the US population. Asian students make up X+++ at these elite schools. They are already oversampled. Do you think the student bodies should just be all Asian students?

You didn't answer my question.

To answer yours, no.

By your logic, African-Americas are also "oversampled" in the Harvard student body. Weird.

Yes, I believe there are Asian-Americans who feel aggrieved. There are also whites, blacks, women, gays, lesbians and others who feel aggrieved too. Tons of kids who worked their tails off and were certainly qualified to be considered for schools like Harvard. But a manufactured lawsuit that complains about a fictional "less deserving black student" over the more deserving Asian student is ridiculous.

So a black son of a biglaw partner from from McClean is more deserving than an Asian daughter of poor, recent immigrants with better stats?

These policies were on a path toward creating a class within a class wherein privileged black kids had their places essentially secured at these elite schools by dint of their privilege with numbers that were incomparable to their similarly (though not exactly the same) privileged peers. Similarly enough, these educated professional class types were also the chief beneficiaries reaping the largess flowing from BLM and DEI initiatives while leaving everybody in the hood still poor and downtrodden and settling in their wealthy enclaves with other elites.

These institutions wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Wanted to keep "acceptable" diversity figures, while keeping a sufficient quotient of full-pay students and keeping minority retention/attrition rates from looking like a complete mockery AND pretending that they are doing the lord's work by throwing a kid from the trenches a scholarship every now and then. They should just own that they are instruments for the perpetuation of generational privilege and keep the song and dance.

Surely these games are not the answer.

You all keep citing this one example. My response, I don't know, I am not in the admissions office and not responsible for the composition of a class of incoming students. What I do know, having two kids very recently gone through the college admissions process, is that the schools weigh many factors into each applicant - can they do the work, what in their background makes them a unique applicant, what will they study? What does our school need in terms of students who will contribute to the school community, be it as a writer for a student newspaper, an actor, a musician, an athlete, whatever. So I don't know anything beyond what you have posted that is bolded. Assuming both students scored well enough (your scenario says the Asian student has better stats) - maybe the Asian student wants to go into engineering and the stats for that are not the same as the African-American applicant, who in addition to stats that are good enough for the school, also plans to major in English, has won writing awards, and also plans to continue their acting career in the school's theater department? Whereas the Asian student comes from a less advantaged background, has good stats, never worked a job, didn't do much otherwise in terms of extracurriculars etc.

See the dilemma these schools face? Provide more context for both students AND the school, and then we can play the game. In fact, this is an exercise my kids school does with the parents of juniors early in junior year, so parents can understand what the Admissions officers are up against with these applications.

As others have noted in the college thread over the last several years, with grade inflation, the watering down of the SAT etc, the fact is, there are tens of thousands of "good" students with "strong stats" and tons of awesome extracurriculars and volunteer service. All of that is good enough to get tossed into a viable admissions pool, so you go from the 50,000 applications down to 12,000 applications for the same 2,000 spots. From there it is a whole host of non-academic considerations.

And still, there are more Asians relative to the general population and fewer blacks relative to the general population.

Now, post SCOTUS decision, I am willing to bet that neither of the applicants you note, will gain admission to these schools. Oh well.

You have to remember the Asian applicants to Harvard excelled in all categories. They had greats scores, great extracurriculars, great everything. By assuming the Asian applicants had poor extracurriculars, you're perpetuating the stereotype that Asians are just test taking machines.

The one area where Asian applicants failed as a group was in the personality rating, where somehow the Asian applicants had the lowest personality ratings across every decile. The evidence is damning unless you believe Asians uniformly have the worst personalities. What's worse, the Asian applicants ranked high in the personal interviews too, but somehow systematically ended up with the worst personality scores.

I don't know if Affirmative Action as a whole needed to be removed, but Harvard needed to be rebuked. I don't know how anyone can defend what Harvard did, and it's kind of telling that the left basically condones Harvard's casual racism. Hardly anyone on the left admits to the discrimination. Yes, Asian are overrepresented at Harvard. You can be overrepresented and still be discriminated against.

I made no such assertions. I was going on an extended hypothetical offered by the person I was responding to. the bottom line is, there are hundreds of thousands of "top" students qualified to be at these elite schools, where there are only thousands of seats available. So many more qualified kids will be rejected. Crying to the supreme court about it doesn't open up more seats, doesn't raise the admission rate, etc. the bottom line is that there are kids who are going to be upset about being rejected. The idea that Asian applicants are somehow more worthy of any of these seats when their percentages relative to the overall population were oversampled makes the case less compelling. So congratulations, rather than being 21% of the make up of these schools, you should expect that it will fall to closer to 10% or less and in total, it will now be much harder for minorities to gain acceptance to these schools.

Hoisted by your own petard.

This isn't how merit based admissions work. They don't look at racial percentages in the overall population and then compare same-race applicants against each other to fill up a quotation for each race. They compare all applicants against each other and select the best. Asian students are the highest performers. Therefore, in a meritocratic system that considers academic performance to be the dominant factor, Asians would see drastically higher admissions. It's odd that your not understanding that the entire point of the case was to end race based admissions-- not to reinforce it. That's the entire point, to make admissions colorblind.

Who said any of these schools were based on merit alone? If you want that, go to a school in a country where admission is predicated on the results of a national test. That isn't how things are done in the US, and the schools are very specific in stating that they based their decisions on a holistic approach which weaves in a variety of factors.

[Anonymous]

Is there anything particularly special about Harvard without the "legacy" special sauce? Would the prestige, brilliant professors, mega donors, smart students etc. all still be drawn to Harvard without "legacy"?

The majority of the value proposition of Harvard to which people are drawn is grounded in centuries of "legacy", which becomes a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle when more talented people want to associate with the brand to reap their own benefits and then become a part of the brand themselves.

If you strip "legacy" from the Harvard value proposition (which is pretty much impossible to do), then you can probably get way better bang for your buck elsewhere. The ugly truth is that proximity to "legacy" is a lot of what you're paying for at Harvard.

If you remove all of the underserving rich, political or celebrity kids, princes, trust fund kids and the attendant donations, brand cache, visibility etc. that come with them and replace it with a strictly meritocratic system, would people still be clamoring for Harvard in the same way 50 years from now, when those people have decamped to another exclusive institution?

To be sure, a lot of legacies independently qualify on meritocratic grounds, but a bunch of others get their sh*t together way later in life and can go on to great success and prominence by banking on their relationships and connections that they would've had with or without Harvard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The vast majority of the public is against affirmative racism. The citizens finally catch a break

Haha, so 5 or 10 more Asian kids get into Harvard. Hallelujah, the Republic is saved!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is there anything particularly special about Harvard without the "legacy" special sauce? Would the prestige, brilliant professors, mega donors, smart students etc. all still be drawn to Harvard without "legacy"?

The majority of the value proposition of Harvard to which people are drawn is grounded in centuries of "legacy", which becomes a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle when more talented people want to associate with the brand to reap their own benefits and then become a part of the brand themselves.

If you strip "legacy" from the Harvard value proposition (which is pretty much impossible to do), then you can probably get way better bang for your buck elsewhere. The ugly truth is that proximity to "legacy" is a lot of what you're paying for at Harvard.

If you remove all of the underserving rich, political or celebrity kids, princes, trust fund kids and the attendant donations, brand cache, visibility etc. that come with them and replace it with a strictly meritocratic system, would people still be clamoring for Harvard in the same way 50 years from now, when those people have decamped to another exclusive institution?

To be sure, a lot of legacies independently qualify on meritocratic grounds, but a bunch of others get their sh*t together way later in life and can go on to great success and prominence by banking on their relationships and connections that they would've had with or without Harvard.

Huh? The legacy admits at these places are seen as that. It's not exactly a particularly desired distinction as it clouds the impression as to why the student got admittance...kinda like athletic recruits.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is there anything particularly special about Harvard without the "legacy" special sauce? Would the prestige, brilliant professors, mega donors, smart students etc. all still be drawn to Harvard without "legacy"?

The majority of the value proposition of Harvard to which people are drawn is grounded in centuries of "legacy", which becomes a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle when more talented people want to associate with the brand to reap their own benefits and then become a part of the brand themselves.

If you strip "legacy" from the Harvard value proposition (which is pretty much impossible to do), then you can probably get way better bang for your buck elsewhere. The ugly truth is that proximity to "legacy" is a lot of what you're paying for at Harvard.

If you remove all of the underserving rich, political or celebrity kids, princes, trust fund kids and the attendant donations, brand cache, visibility etc. that come with them and replace it with a strictly meritocratic system, would people still be clamoring for Harvard in the same way 50 years from now, when those people have decamped to another exclusive institution?

To be sure, a lot of legacies independently qualify on meritocratic grounds, but a bunch of others get their sh*t together way later in life and can go on to great success and prominence by banking on their relationships and connections that they would've had with or without Harvard.

The quality of education at the "elite" schools isn't that dramatically better than a lot of other schools. What sets them apart is the access they provide to people with money and power - both in terms of the student bodies and their family and the types of businesses, etc. who are recruiting at those schools.

[Anonymous]

"In the case of university admissions over the past decade, Asians serve as this sort of mask for white privilege," Chang says. "A mask that white privilege can wear in order to hide itself." A mask, he says, with the veneer of very real experiences of racism by Asian Americans.

"Is anti-Asian racism real? Yeah, absolutely," says OiYan Poon, a professor at Colorado State University who studies race-based admissions. "I have experienced it firsthand."

But according to her research, affirmative action is not the source of that racism.

"I've been pouring over the data for years," she says — including the admissions data of Harvard before the court in one of the case that just ended affirmative action. "There is no evidence that there's a practice of anti-Asian discrimination."

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/02/1183981097/affirmative-action-asian-americans-poc

Asians are useful idiots for white conservatives.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The vast majority of the public is against affirmative racism. The citizens finally catch a break

Haha, so 5 or 10 more Asian kids get into Harvard. Hallelujah, the Republic is saved!

Pretty much.

The vast majority of the US public will see absolutely no change, lol.