Reply to Here's how much legacy/athlete preferences matter at Harvard

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Here's how much legacy/athlete preferences matter at Harvard"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I don't get is this:

Let's say that we did your math and removed both athletes and legacies.  The breakdown by your method, I believe, would be 4295 whites and 2669 Asians.  That's roughly 1.6 whites getting in for every Asian.  This is based solely on whatever standards are left, presumably 'merit'.

so why, when you remove race, does the ratio suddenly shift to .72 white students for every Asian?   It doesn't make sense that the ratios are so far off.  If anything, according to your logic, more whites applying should mean that more whites are admitted in both groups.  If more Asians are admitted in the second group because they are more qualified, then what explains the first group?  I'm not saying the ratios need to be the same, but does it make intuitive sense that they are so far off?

Imagine you were able to line up every applicant to Harvard from 1-40000 in order of merit (which is what people who want to blow the system up think will magically happen).  If that was the case, your analysis suggests that the front of the line be predominantly white but this one section of the line (spots 7000-8000) would be predominantly Asian. These are the students who are replacing the 'less qualified' AA and Hispanics who are now not getting in?  does that make ssense to you, especially when the raw numbers of Asian to white applicants is so low?
[/quote]

Removing athlete and legacy preference, but keeping racial preference, total admits by race: 4,295 whites and 2,669 asians.

This is a white to asian admit ratio of 1.6 as you said.

Removing all preferences, total admits by race: 4,947 whites and 3,564 asians.

This lowers the ratio from 1.6 to 1.4.  I'm not sure where the .72 number comes from.[/quote]

The overall ratio in the end is lower because the incremental change of 900 Asians and 600 whites changes the ratio. That’s the .72 ratio. Why is this subset so different from the existing ratio. Wouldn’t you expect that this group would be divided in the same ratio?  [/quote]

Ah I see what you mean now.  Yes you'd expect the ratio to remain the same if the racial preference were applied equally and formulaically to each group.  This may show that Asians are even more harmed by racial preferences than the initial data would suggest.  The data set the feeds into the "no preferences" model is probably imperfect, i.e. is it just based on GPA and test scores?  Of course Harvard looks at other factors (quality of high school, ECs, essays, recommendations) in addition to grades and test scores.  The move from 1.6 to 1.4 could reflect that as a racial cohort Asians have higher GPAs and test scores but a lower score for "everything else".  One must note that ranking a group of folks lower in these subjective areas can be fertile ground for institutional bias to fester and I believe the lawsuit notes this.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics