SFFA doesn't like the Asian American %

[Anonymous]

I’m so interested in why they think it’s a good year to sue. They won a landmark Supreme Court case and only have 1 class of data to make any conclusions. All of the colleges conducted without racial information, and I guess if they could get records of extracurriculars and find the words “black” somewhere in all the black student profiles.

I also wonder if they’re going to address that they’re essentially suing a college for having more socioeconomic diversity…

[Anonymous]

Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

But…colleges don’t keep this information. They assign scores to these essays and move on. Much in the same way Harvard’s case was decided by the deltas in points compared to interview scores. What organization keeps 1000s of essays just lying around?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

But…colleges don’t keep this information. They assign scores to these essays and move on. Much in the same way Harvard’s case was decided by the deltas in points compared to interview scores. What organization keeps 1000s of essays just lying around?

The Common App is a massive database holding everything. Everything submitted by the student. Everything shared by the College Board. Every letter written by teachers, etc. That is where SFFA will have to go to get it all. Nothing ever gets deleted from the internet. So if there is something sensitive in an applicants essays or in a letter-of-recommendation it will be exposed during discovery.

https://www.commonapp.org/counselors-and-recommenders/recommender-guide

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

But…colleges don’t keep this information. They assign scores to these essays and move on. Much in the same way Harvard’s case was decided by the deltas in points compared to interview scores. What organization keeps 1000s of essays just lying around?

The Common App is a massive database holding everything. Everything submitted by the student. Everything shared by the College Board. Every letter written by teachers, etc. That is where SFFA will have to go to get it all. Nothing ever gets deleted from the internet. So if there is something sensitive in an applicants essays or in a letter-of-recommendation it will be exposed during discovery.

https://www.commonapp.org/counselors-and-recommenders/recommender-guide

Seems like a security concern. I don’t think anyone should be applying to a system that up and forfeits their info to a bunch of randoms obsessed with race.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

That would be a welcomed lawsuit. Aside from its historically racist and cultural bias ( yeah...unserious posters will get cute and bring up "math" not being biased. Math problems that blacks scored well on vs whites have been thrown out in the past),
standardized testing in the U.S. is a multi billion dollar industry that should not have an outsized role in college admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

That would be a welcomed lawsuit. Aside from its historically racist and cultural bias ( yeah...unserious posters will get cute and bring up "math" not being biased. Math problems that blacks scored well on vs whites have been thrown out in the past),
standardized testing in the U.S. is a multi billion dollar industry that should not have an outsized role in college admissions.

Why doesn’t the federal government just make an exam and encourage state universities to adopt it for additional federal dollars? No reason a private company should be providing essentially a national exam.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

That would be a welcomed lawsuit. Aside from its historically racist and cultural bias ( yeah...unserious posters will get cute and bring up "math" not being biased. Math problems that blacks scored well on vs whites have been thrown out in the past),
standardized testing in the U.S. is a multi billion dollar industry that should not have an outsized role in college admissions.

Why doesn’t the federal government just make an exam and encourage state universities to adopt it for additional federal dollars? No reason a private company should be providing essentially a national exam.

Because that's a political minefield that isn't remotely worth it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

That would be a welcomed lawsuit. Aside from its historically racist and cultural bias ( yeah...unserious posters will get cute and bring up "math" not being biased. Math problems that blacks scored well on vs whites have been thrown out in the past),
standardized testing in the U.S. is a multi billion dollar industry that should not have an outsized role in college admissions.

Why doesn’t the federal government just make an exam and encourage state universities to adopt it for additional federal dollars? No reason a private company should be providing essentially a national exam.

Because that's a political minefield that isn't remotely worth it

Oh no the politics of asking students pre calculus questions and pretty neutral reading passages. The horror!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Has this been mentioned yet? The total undergrad enrollment numbers for many of these colleges are so small that without an explicit or de facto quota system (AA functions as a de facto quota system even if actual quotas are explicitly not allowed) you are apt to see large and random fluctuations in demographics from year to year if race (or proxies for race) are truly not allowed to be considered. Simply because the classes are so small. You are talking about total class sizes of 1-2k and hundreds of thousands of applicants, a huge percentage of whom are academically qualified to attend. A truly race-blind admission process would result in random percentages because in any given year you could have a qualified class admitted of Amy one race category. You could absolutely have a class that was 70% black or 80% AAPI depending on what non-race factors the admissions committee focused on. And every admitted student would still have the high grades and test scores that are always minimally required.

Anyway I'm curious what would happen if they truly dropped diversity-of-class as a value and this happened. I think everyone would freak out. Sure, some members of the AAPI community would be enthusiastic about a class at Princeton or Yale that was over 50% AAPI. But would they be equally happy if the next year it was just 5% AAPI and 70% white? No.

People think they want true merit but I actually think the reality of eliminating diversity as a core value in admissions would freak everyone out and they'd hate it.

You missed the part about baseline numbers of applicants. There will be much larger numbers of some groups and much smaller numbers of others. So wild fluctuations are much less likely.

When you have a huge number of qualified applicants and a very small number of spots it's very easy to create heavily skewed classes. Due to the small size of the admitted class you are likely to have a certain amount of variation and you could accidentally wind up with a class that is not at all representative of the demographic mix of applicants. Also when schools look for other qualities in students any of these can wind up being an accidental proxy for race depending on demographic trends. A school could decide to emphasize demonstrated commitment to the arts or foreign language or athletics or charitable activity in their admitted class and if there is not counterbalance of diversity this could result in highly skewed classes (for both race and gender btw). Yes people will then seek to game those preferences but what if they change.

Because such a tiny percent of applicants receive spots and because a surprisingly high percent of applicants have the test scores and grades that will minimally qualify them for entry it is very easy to wind up with a class that is very unrepresentative of the population (either as a whole or of applicants) by accident.

Larger schools don't have this same risk because of mean reversion. Penn and Cornell both have much larger undergraduate classes and this makes it less likely they will wind up with a very skewed or non-diverse class even without emphasizing diversity. Though they could also see large swings in percentages. State universities that are many multiples the size of private colleges have even less risk especially if applicant classes are proportionally smaller.

But if you are Yale or Dartmouth and you get 300k applicants and of those 90k are minimally qualified and you need to select 1k to admit it is incredibly easy to wind up with a class that bears no resemblance to a normal demographic break down unless you introduce diversity in some way to the process (whether that's explicitly considering race as in AA or looking at proxies like geography or parents HHI or high school or whatever).

I just think that if you truly eliminated diversity as a value the people arguing about this might not like it as much as they think they would if some years the numbers cut against their demographics. There is obviously this assumption that if you don't use race or race-proxies that suddenly this will greatly favor AAPI candidates. But I feel confident this is not absolutely true at these tiny elite colleges. It is likely true at larger state universities (and the UC systems experience bears this out). But Yale is not UC Berkeley.

What the harvard litigation taught us was that the applicants are not equally qualified.
Harvard doesn't get hundreds of thousands of applications, they get like 50k. Most of them are woefully underqualified. Just people shooting in the dark because they were test optional.
If Harvard takes the most qualified candidates, they end up with students that mirror the SAT score distribution because SAT scores correlate with pretty much everything else they measure except skin color.

Almost no top college would agree with your comment that the majority of applicants are unqualified. They’d say the opposite, and the reason admissions standards have risen so much is because the profile of students is sharply increasing. Many students who don’t “qualify” for admission solely don’t qualify SAT/ACT wise, because test optional has increased the average sat for these institutions by 100 points.

Most people are much more critical of applicants than the AOs themselves. They just know the reality that there’s 40ishk very qualified applicants and they need a class of 2000.

The elite colleges are the arbiters of "qualified." The graduation rates are high as well. There are many good candidates,
but limited spots. Aggrieved people get mad when rejected. They need to find someone to blame, and as you can see in today's news, a group with dark skin pigmentation is usually the target.

It's not their skin color that disqualifies them, it's the test scores.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

Well usually the schools have already done most of that during their own review process. You can sample the review process and see if its honest but the school's own records will provide most of what they are looking for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

But…colleges don’t keep this information. They assign scores to these essays and move on. Much in the same way Harvard’s case was decided by the deltas in points compared to interview scores. What organization keeps 1000s of essays just lying around?

It's in electronic format. They keep it around for at least the 4 years the kid is at the school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

Well usually the schools have already done most of that during their own review process. You can sample the review process and see if its honest but the school's own records will provide most of what they are looking for.

No sampling!! If this is going to be done it must be done exhaustively. Otherwise the excuses will never stop.

Open up EVERYTHING. The data is there. The Common App has it all. One stop shop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Someone may sue saying research shows standardize test are bias. That would be interesting.

Since their inception almost a century ago, the tests have been instruments of racism and a biased system. Decades of research demonstrate that Black, Latin(o/a/x), and Native students, as well as students from some Asian groups, experience bias from standardized tests administered from early childhood through college.

https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing#:~:text=Since%20their%20inception%20almost%20a,from%20early%20childhood%20through%20college.

That would be a welcomed lawsuit. Aside from its historically racist and cultural bias ( yeah...unserious posters will get cute and bring up "math" not being biased. Math problems that blacks scored well on vs whites have been thrown out in the past),
standardized testing in the U.S. is a multi billion dollar industry that should not have an outsized role in college admissions.

Why doesn’t the federal government just make an exam and encourage state universities to adopt it for additional federal dollars? No reason a private company should be providing essentially a national exam.

Because the exam the federal government would devise would be a heavily g-loaded test like the ASVAB and colleges have already rejected more g-loaded tests in favor of the mushy thing we have today.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:SFFA wants the stats of all non-Asians admitted to these colleges this year? Is that the short answer?

The asian students too. All the stats for all the students. You can't really do an analysis with partial data.

With each identified by race. Also need their personal statements, mental health records, etc. Everything.

I agree about the essays, but why would the admissions committee have mental health records?

So long as they get the essays they can evaluate and compare discussions of family struggles, financial, immigration issues, medications, therapy, suicide attempts, gender dismorphia, divorces, lottery winnings, business failures, rational and irrational fears, car accidents... everything. Plus all the letters of recommendation from teachers. They will have to be identified by name and race as well. Everything

Well usually the schools have already done most of that during their own review process. You can sample the review process and see if its honest but the school's own records will provide most of what they are looking for.

No sampling!! If this is going to be done it must be done exhaustively. Otherwise the excuses will never stop.

Open up EVERYTHING. The data is there. The Common App has it all. One stop shop.

You don't get it. It's never going to stop anyway.
Affirmative action was around for 50 years.
You can expect at least 5 years of litigation to burn away the remnants of the racism that calcified in these institutions.