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.