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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Right. It could also suggest that something else is at work that favors white applicants and thus that it’s not so simple to assume that things would play out as the simple math suggests.  It’s odd to think that for the first 7000 applicants you get one result but for this group you get a wildly different result.  If Asians have a lower score for everything else it should manifest itself consistently throughout the process I think. I just don’t understand the disparity, which is why I think the simple subtraction methodology must be off somehow. That seems the simpler explanation than anything else.

I suppose the most obvious answer is that an unspoken cap exists on Asian admissions so even if you got rid of these preferences the ultimate beneficiaries would be white kids. [/quote]

If you remove all preferences, Asians would be the primary beneficiaries with whites behind them.  The Asian admit rate increases more than 2 absolute points from 6.5% to 8.6%.  The white admit rate increases 1 absolute point from 6.9% to 7.9%.  Asians have both a relative and absolute advantage in this case.  Of course both groups gain at the expense of African Americans and Hispanics.

There may be an unspoken cap on Asian admissions as there was for Jews and other ethnic groups at certain times in the past.  Evidence for such a cap prompted the lawsuit in the first place.[/quote]

How did you arrive at those numbers?[/quote]

My mistake, those numbers are actually if you move from ONLY racial preference (no athletes or legacies) to no preferences at all.  If you remove ALL preferences, then the benefit to Asians is amplified and the benefit to white students almost entirely disappears:

Applicants: 62,586 white and 41,258 asian

Model (all preferences remain) admits and admit rate: 4,802 white (7.7%) and 2,358 asian (5.7%)

No-preferences admits and admit rate: 4,947 white (7.9%) and 3,564 asian (8.6%)

If you remove all preferences, the chance an Asian applicant is admitted to Harvard increases more than 50%.  The chance a white applicant is admitted increases 2.5%.  The chance an African American or Hispanic applicant is admitted presumably falls dramatically.

I cross-checked this with a few other data points and they all seemed to line up.  For instance, Harvard's freshman class is about 43% white while the US under 18 population is about 50% white, so whites are not demographically over-represented.  While some posters seemed to want to make this about the over-representation of white students, the data doesn't support that conclusion in any way.  When Harvard shows a preference for well-connected white applicants, it appears to be at the expense of less well-connected white applicants, not minority applicants.

This does therefore appear to be a story about Asian admission capped to open up seats for other minorities.  It will be fascinating to watch how SCOTUS - a court without any Asian American member, I will point out - handles this one.[/quote]

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