Reply to NYT article: Young, Gifted, and Not Getting Into Harvard

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[quote=Anonymous]I was merely curious so I went to the Harvard admissions page for the Class of 2020 and compared to US census information for 2015. Stats below are % of Harvard students compared to national %.

African American: 13.7% versus 13.3%

Asian American: 22.1% versus 5.6%

Hispanic or Latino: 12.6% versus 17.6%

Native American or Pacific Islander: 2.6% versus 1.4% (combine NA and PIslanders in the census).

*Harvard did not state what % was white, but let's assume it's the remainder: 49%, versus 77.1%

Source: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

Judging from the above it seems that Harvard has done an excellent (and most likely deliberate) job of keeping the AA population comparable to the national average. The under-representation of whites at Harvard is probably due to Asian Americans.

Note: the following article from JPost states that Harvard's undergraduate is 25% Jewish, compared to 2.2% of the American population.

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-college-and-other-facts-about-Jews-at-American-colleges-437701

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/us/poll-shows-major-shift-in-identity-of-us-jews.html

Jews are for all practical purposes white with the exception of a tiny handful (I am Jewish FYI), so it doesn't take much to realize that no more than 25% of Harvard's students are from white American backgrounds of Christian heritage, which means that this group is substantially underrepresented. And likely by a higher margin given that Harvard admissions link states 11.4% of the students are international, meaning it's likely white Americans of Christian heritage are around 15% of Harvard student body. The most overrepresented demographics at Harvard are Jews, followed by Asians. The most underrepresented are basically the WASPs.

Just putting this out. It's interesting. Provides fuel for everyone who's posted on this thread.

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