SAT scores are not a sufficient indicator for bias in college admissions. There are two factors at work here:
1. For elite colleges, specific SAT scores are irrelevant. Essentially, once a certain cut-off is reached, say 2250, it doesn't matter how high you go. In fact, I'm sure admissions officers get a kick out of rejecting the 2400 - I'd rather have a 2380 than a 2400 any day. The variance in SAT scores over a certain cutoff is simply not a good enough indicator for what the colleges are looking for.
2. In my experience, Asian families tend to place a disproportionate emphasis on test scores and grades. This leads to higher than average SAT scores for Asian students, sometimes at the cost of other parts of the application package.
Taken together, I believe these two ideas contribute to a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon discussed in the article.
This is not to say that admissions are not racially biased - I would not be at all surprised if they are.
This is exactly right. I completely detest knee-jerk reactions and blanket statements that crop up instead of some good old fashioned critical thinking.
I went to a school, a good school, that was predominantly asian in my department. If admissions are racial for no other reason than to diversify the student body, this is a reasonable approach on its own - though I'm sure there are plenty of other more old-fashioned legitimately fashioned arguments.
So you had good grades but didn't get in because you are asian? Tough shit - a lot goes into creating a desirable incoming class than grades and standardized test scores.
Agreed. I'm sure they'll look racially biased, I think they probably are racially biased, but saying "LOOK AT THE NUMBERS AND GRADES" as the only indicator of who a college should let in is ludicrous.
Other things people have done in life factor into future success. Working a part time job, for instance, something many 4.0/2400 people didn't do, relating well to others, volunteering, government service, art, sports, etc all have value as well, and can all be a much better determiniate of success than "did he test well".
We will now see the same racial discrimination departments which filed court briefs saying that race-neutral admissions policies would make them into Asian enclaves suddenly pretend to be shocked, shocked that anyone would suggest they were anything but valiant upholders of equal opportunity.
I'll refrain from opining on what the government will do, solely out of respects for the HN politics rule.
One of my favorite education quotes, supposedly from Larry Summers, comes from when he was asked about why it was that 60% of white students were jewish. Supposedly he responded that while there was no surefire way of getting into Harvard, it certainly helps to have every advantage one can get.
Have we considered, that maybe the reason Asians need higher entrance scores, is because they end to have the same qualifications?
I'm going to be a little racist towards my own race here, and tell you what I've observed recently.
Most Chinese Females...
1. Play piano and/or violin
2. Take pictures of food
3. Probably applying to sciences
Most Chinese Males...
1. Plays a racket sport - probably badminton (myself included)
2. Only works out upper body
3. Probably applying to engineering
I never scored perfect SAT marks, and yet I still got my acceptances just fine, because I did so many things most Asians don't do. If the people doing these assessments actually spent time at elite campuses, they would understand better.
Filing a complaint for not being admitted with a 2400 SAT score is ridiculous. I wouldn't want that kind of person in my class, that's for sure.
If that were true then the admissions forms should not be asking about race. However, college admissions are explicitly race biased and use this information on incoming applications to alter the distribution of the student body from the distribution that would result in a race-blind admissions process.
I believe this is absolutely true. I've heard from a real admissions officer at an elite school that too many asian applicants just look exactly the same on paper. Schools are looking for diversity, not just ethnically, but in interests and talents as well.
SAT scores above a certain threshold can become a negative signal, if they aren't paralleled by equally exceptional performance elsewhere. It suggests a certain misallocation of effort. "Why did this person spend all his time on the tests?"
I did pretty well on the SAT and as far as I'm concerned studying for it is a giant waste of time. Go out and learn something. Don't prep for a single test.
Where you live where you observe all of this? I can see how these generalizations hold truth, but on the other hand, I think it would be a shame to see the typical AA stereotype of test-taking, soulless machine, piano/violin prodigy being reenforced.
The thing is, admissions to elite universities is almost never about test scores. Immigrant parents from countries like China and India are used to test scores mattering a lot. In those countries, your absolute score on the National Exam determines not only your placement into a university, but also what fields are available to you for study.
The SAT is nothing like that. If you walk into Harvard or Princeton, you'll find that most of the kids got above 2300 on the SAT, and a ton had perfect scores. If you tried using the SAT to distinguish between members of the student body at either place, you would have little success. The admissions committee has the same problem, so, kids are not selected based on SATs. You get in because you're good, or at least, you show a lot of promise, not because you can study for a test.
So yeah, maybe asians have higher test scores as a cohort, but maybe they also have less other things that are equally important -- sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc. These things count just as much in admissions decisions.
It's possibly to argue that selecting for these things is inherently racist, but I mean, what isn't? The SAT itself privileges a white collar suburban education. Who's to say it's more valuable to be able to memorize vocab, or do arithmetic than to run or paint?
People involved in college admissions (as you said you are in another comment) love to say things like this. If I based my understanding of the world solely on statements by college admission officers at, say, Duke, I would guess that thousands upon thousands of high school students each year get literally perfect scores (cumulative score of 2400 across three sections of the test) each year. In fact, only a few hundred do, not even enough to fill the entering class at Harvard each year.
Literally "perfect" scores are still quite rare. Caltech is just about the only college small enough to enroll only perfect scorers on the SAT (but not all perfect scorers apply to Caltech). As a consequence of this, all United States colleges without exception, by the pigeonhole principle, admit students with less-than-perfect SAT scores.
Your point is well taken that college admission offices look for student characteristics other than test scores. They always have, and they always will. But if a college is found to practice racial discrimination, it is violating the law, period. If a college claims, in response to a Department of Education inquiry, that it is looking for some other student characteristic that just happens to disfavor students from [insert race or ethnicity category here], it had better be able to identify that characteristic with specificity and not simply ASSUME that students of one category or another have more "sports, focus, passion, alumni connections, etc." than other students.
I would say just because one culture is more inclined to sports and social activities doesn't mean it is racist to use these things as a discriminating factors. I don't think it's possible to argue that a selection criteria is racist unless the color of your skin is the sole discriminator.
On the other hand, it bears mentioning that you can be racist in your choice of selection criteria, if you choose criteria based on their ability to produce a certain racial outcome.
The use of a poll tax people have to pay in order to vote isn't racist per se, but in the segregationist south, poll taxes were used as a mechanism to suppress black votes because they knew (disproportionately poor) black people would have a harder time paying it, and this use was racist.
Wow... I wonder what the Ivies would look like if admissions were 100% merit.
No legacies. I think there would be FAR fewer trust-funders.
And MIT's 'Chocolate City'...pretty much gone.
I suspect they would be very Asian places with a smattering of Jewish students. I think I can see why they would give ... say ... a Colorado snow boarder a few extra points. I think there is something that he brings to an Ivy campus...though I can't quantify it.
> A combined SAT score of 1470 (the 99th percentile by national standards) placed an entering Caltech freshman at only the 25th percentile among his fellow students. (At Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, the 25th percentile is reached by a score of only 1380)
> Only 4 percent of the U.S. population, Asians made up a whopping 40 percent of the incoming freshmen class in 2008, a slightly larger proportion than the 39 percent figure for whites.
Caltech explicitly looks for the top science/math/engineering students. These tend to be students with heavy focus on academics, and in particular these students universally score very very well on the math section of tests like the SAT. Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, look for students who excel in a much wider range of skills. Many of my most brilliant classmates at Harvard came in with abysmal SAT math scores. A brilliant actor, painter, entrepreneur, historian, debater, or even naturalist who can’t hack it in a calculus or physics course is never going to get into or survive Caltech, but might be entirely successful at Harvard or Princeton.
There’s nothing wrong with Caltech’s admission criteria (engineers and scientists are lovely people! I am one!), but it’s pretty stupid to boil down human ambition and accomplishment to the results of the SAT test.
Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, look for students who...
Cut it to the chase. The ruling class of tomorrow is the current class of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. (And maybe Wharton). The end. The current class wants a ruling class that looks like their idea of utopia. This means a very Kosher group of whites, a hefty dose of divide-and-conquer "diversity", and a minimum of technocrats. Obviously, Asians are left out of that utopia.
They aren't going to spell that out in words, but their actions are clear as damnation.
This is really the gist of these suits. If it were the case that by law colleges could only consider SAT score, then there is strong evidence for anti-Asian and anti-white discrimination. But since not all schools are Caltech, nor want to be, these suits are without merit. It is entirely possible that a legitimately race-blind admissions process would produce lots of 2600SAT asian kids not getting into the elite unis.
That said, race-blind admissions policies are not current law nor necessarily even the optimal policy. For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass. In as much as college effects class mobility (which is probably small), race-aware policies allow for this.
For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass.
Why not? As long as the racial underclass remains an underclass due solely to non-discriminatory processes, what's the problem?
A related question: suppose we don't divide humans into subgroups by race, but instead divide them by some other factor. (E.g., height, good looks, intellect, whatever.) Would it be wrong if one of those subdivisions were a "persistent underclass" due solely to a meritocratic process?
I'd bet P[At Google | Caltech degree] is greater than P[At Google | Princeton degree], but it's mostly explained by P[interested in CS | Caltech degree] >> P[interested in CS | Princeton Degree].
While this is definitely changing, Caltech graduates have tended to be heavily focused on academia in the past, and in that particular regard, the data definitely show success later on in life. The percentage of Caltech undergrads who earn PhD's is well above everyone else: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/?govDel=USNS...
In terms of other measures of success, Caltech might lag behind some other schools. As a current CS undergrad, I only know of a handful of startups run by Caltech grads. As I said, this is changing, but it goes to show the impact of choice of metrics.
from the article:
"The fact that 17 of its student alumni and 14 of its faculty have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, and six of its alumni have won the prestigious Turing Award in computer science, surely says something about the institution and what it stands for. Despite its small size, Caltech was chosen by NASA to be the center for its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in the past was a major venue for visiting scholars of the rank of Heisenberg, Einstein, Lorentz, and Bohr. In more recent times its undergraduate alumni have gone on to be founders or co-founders of such leading-edge American companies as Intel, TRW, Compaq, and Exploratorium."
For example, are there proportionally more Google employees from Caltech or more startups in YCombinator with Caltech graduates?
Since they are all based in California now, I would think yes. But since Larry and Sergey Bin are both from Stanford, I'd expect a disproportionate number of Stanford grads at Google.
In any case, one way universities market themselves is by looking at the average income of their alumni. Since Harvard grads often end up on Wall Street, I would not be surprised if Harvard comes up on top.
But you could argue that's just the financial industry connection. What if you restrict your search on science and engineering majors? Well then we already know MIT and Caltech are better.
Maybe financial industry salaries would change these rankings if they considered averages rather than medians, but a reasonable number of Caltech grads end up on Wall Street as well.
Here's a parallel situation at the high school level.
At Stuyvesant High School here in NYC admissions is 100% test base, meaning the only criteria for acceptance is your test score. Here's a quote about their acceptance policy (from an article called "Paper Tigers" in NY Mag last year):
"Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage “diversity” or any nebulous concept of “well-roundedness” or “character.” Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school."
Not sure if this article ever made Hacker News, but it's worth reading if you have a chance. It's long-winded, but being Asian-American myself there's a sort of poetic-truth to it:
That's a great article. The same situation has developed here in San Francisco, where the magnet public high school that admits based solely on test scores is Asian by a large majority.
The problem is, in the drive to get perfect grades and test scores, the drive for knowledge and life skills is lost somewhere along the way. And in the end, many asian students simply never get the skills needed to actually create things or execute at a job that doesn't have very rigid guidelines.
I think the larger picture issue is optimizing for grades and tests does not optimize for achieving in the real world. And elite colleges in the US have acknowleged that, and brought in the use of subjective factors. And while that may be an imperfect system, it is less imperfect than choosing solely on scores and grades.
Plus, standardized test scores have a significant income bias. Affluent kids get SAT prep and can take the SAT multiple times if they're unsatisfied in their scores. And I don't have any data, but my guess is that there's a negative correlation between how many hours per week that you are employed while attending high school and your GPA.
These factors may be part of the consideration when accounting for lower quantitative admissions requirements for black and hispanic applicants, and those from lower income brackets in general.
Merit can include a consideration of race. One factor of merit is being an outlier of your group. There are many ways to analyze a given population that reveals different clusters. Being an outlier of this cluster is a factor in merit. The question is, is race a relevant dimension to consider? At face value, the answer is no. But in the US at least, race is a proxy to many other factors that are extremely hard to quantify. These hard to quantify factors are relevant in determining who "deserves" a spot at your prestigious school. Thus a consideration of race within specific contexts can be relevant, college admissions being one of them.
That isn't at all what I was saying, but the idea that two IDENTICAL students with nothing other than one being white and the other being asian would require 200 more SAT score points to get in is inaccurate.
As a class, the students who applied who happened to be asian are probably lacking in other areas as well if this BIG of a bias is being seen. Perhaps there aren't enough participation in volunteering/jobs/sports. Perhaps there isn't a good relationship in the alumni interviews, who knows. There may STILL be a racial bias on top of that, however I'm guessing not 200 points worth of pure racial bias.
Extracurriculars are another dog-whistle for that sort of thing. A heuristic like "Deduct 150 SAT points for violin or piano" would be pretty predictive.
While this is true, I don't see why this can used as justification to keep name and ethnicity showing. There will always be ways to guess an applicant's ethnicity but since it (supposedly) has no bearing on admissions, why keep it in the application?
Not once it becomes known - I imagine Amy Chua types would stop forcing their kids to learn it, and applicants would stop mentioning it on applications (unless they are applying to Juilliard).
You're correct. Precision is important. It would have been more accurate to say "...100% academic merit..."
The material point is the same though, I really can see where the hypothetical snowboarder might have something to offer the Ivy community even if there are others more qualified academically. But again...I can't attach a number of points to that. I don't know what that number would be.
To the issue...I do think there should be more taken into account than just academics. I just can't think of a way to take those things into account AND be fair.
College is a place where students learn far more things than can be learned in classes or even books.
In terms of teaching students to live in the real world, the value of racial and economic diversity in the student population of a college is often underrated.
EDIT: Given both downvotes and upvotes, I guess what I have said is controversial. For the record I am south-asian myself .
the value of racial and economic diversity in the student population of a college is often underrated.
Then why are colleges fighting for the right to discriminate on race alone (I've seen nothing suggesting that they're looking for economic diversity)?
The claim is that a multiracial student body enriches the educational experience, and there's truth to that. But having representatives of many races actually does little. Having a wife of a different race, I think I'm qualified to claim that racial differences make up the smallest of differences between people. Far more important, in real life as well as outlook on the world, are factors such as religion, urban/rural living, size of family, and more.
I don't see schools concerned about the portion of the student population of Buddhists relative to Catholics, or that there are enough kids who grew up on farms. So long as they are pursuing only racial diversity, I think that their claims about the value of diversity are a sham.
That's not quite true. From personal experience at two different Ivy Leagues schools, I can say that these schools and probably top schools in general are completely obsessive about fulfilling certain stated or unstated "requirements" for students. Yale, for example, where I went for undergrad, prides itself in having students from all 50 states--I can pretty confidently say that, if you're from a state with a smaller population, or simply a smaller number of people who are interested in attending a school far away, your chances of admission are substantially higher (think Montana versus New York).
As others have pointed out, although admissions is need-blind (it is not relevant whether you're rich or poor), I'm sure that socio-economic factors are also evident from where the student went to school, recommendation letters, information about parents and their professions/education (which are often asked on applications), and so on. So, while race may be the most obvious "discrimination" point, this is really, in my experience, not the case. And given these multifactored assessments, it is enormously difficult to "prove" that schools are discriminating based on race: it is NOT the case that the school gives everyone a number, and then increases or decreases that number based on your race, wealth, etc.: compare Gratz v. Bollinger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger) (point allocation system where underrepresented minorities received more "points" on their application illegal) with Grutter v. Bolilnger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger) (less-rigid race-based affirmative action permissible).
Elite colleges are far more diverse than elite employers. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey are dominated by whites and Asians, especially outside of entry-level jobs.
I also don't buy the idea that college is a way to teach people how to live in the real world, given that going to college is an alternative to working in the real world. That just sounds like the sort of thing college administrators would say in order to defend the status quo.
Assuming that is true, where do non-white non-asian (= black/hispanic?) students of elite colleges go, if they're not going to elite employers? Do they fail to graduate? Do they go into the public sector? Do they start more businesses? Do they go to non-elite employers?
And there's also the question of how meritorious high marks in classes and nominal positions of leadership in common high school organizations are. If everyone can do it, it's not exceptional.
1. Academic Mismatch - Those who benefited from AA often can't keep up. They often fall behind or transfer to an easier major.
2. Cascading Academic Mismatch - This mismatch is replicated everywhere because the top academic tier recruits the top 'racial balancing' students from the tier below it.
3. Academic Mismatch Semiotics - This mismatch encourages judging people by their race on campus. It breeds racial conflict(no matter how low level it may be) and reduces solidarity between peoples on campus.
Racial balancing and academic standards are at odds with each other. Schools that value racial diversity should set their academic standards appropriately.
The FAQ links to the relevant federal regulations defining the categories, and to guides to admission professionals on how to apply the categories, and to admissions statistics from a variety of colleges. Some colleges admit a substantial percentage of students who decline to self-report race or ethnicity, as is the right of every United States college applicant. Harvard, for example, has 12 percent of its currently enrolled undergraduates reported to the federal government as "race/ethnicity unknown"
(even though Harvard personally interviews essentially all of its undergraduate applicants) and another 10 percent of its enrolled undergraduates are international students, for whom race and ethnicity are not reported as a matter of federal regulation.
It will be interesting to see how this latest case turns out. As the submitted article notes, "While the Office for Civil Rights has the power to terminate federal financial aid to colleges, it almost always negotiates agreements with schools on steps required for compliance, rather than taking enforcement action, the Education Department spokesman said."
Isn't it pretty easy to determine if there is racial bias in admissions?
Isn't the fact that Asians need to score a couple hundred points higher on SAT score just to get admitted enough evidence that there is bias?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but at Berkeley where Race is not considered in admissions, Asians comprise like 50% of the student body. I'm pretty sure you'd see similar numbers at all the elite universities if race wasn't an issue.
No, because SAT scores don't determine admissions. A schoolmate of mine with straight A's who scored a perfect 1600 SAT was rejected from Harvard, because he had essentially zero extracurriculars.
Schools like Harvard and Princeton look both for well-rounded students ("future leaders" they call them), as well as diversity in their student body. This means they won't accept, for example, 100 top violin players in the same class, no matter how impressive their individual applications are. Instead, they want a complete and balanced orchestra, for example.
So if, hypothetically, Asians tended to disproportionately cluster in the same extracurricular activities, or have less extracurricular activities, then there would be a very valid non-race-based explanation for the SAT gap.
> 100 top violin players in the same class, no matter how impressive their individual applications are. Instead, they want a complete and balanced orchestra, for example.
I agree that SAT scores shouldn't be the only factor, I disagree though if you are saying race can and should be factor. Where it's legal and appropriate to discriminate on say what instrument you play it is illegal (and most would agree immoral) to discriminate on race. Proving racial discrimination may be tricky in this case though.
it is illegal (and most would agree immoral) to discriminate on race
It is actually not illegal to discriminate based on race in educational admissions -- you just need to meet certain criteria (serve a "compelling interest" and not use quotas) to be able to do so.
The violins are not a metaphor for race. He is saying that if every asian applicant plays violin as an extracurricular, and the university only wants five accomplished violinists (because they also need some cellists and flutists et al), then being a violinist effectively stacks you up against all the other violinists vying for a spot.
This is relevant taken in light of the reputed homogeneity among asian applicants.
The remedy is nothing you haven't heard before, either. Stand out. Take up falconry instead of piano. There aren't many falconers.
> because he had essentially zero extracurriculars.
You have no way of knowing how true that is.
Distribution of talents (as you mention) among the applicants, and luck (a larger factor every year that the US population grows but the firstyear class doesn't) are the main factors.
You're begging the question of whether or not Asian students are well-rounded. You just assume that, for the most part, they are not, and that it makes perfect sense to throw most of them out because they're all the same.
I don't think anyone's assuming anything of the kind -- or if they are, they're both wrong and offensive.
Go up a couple of posts, and the question was whether a gap in average test scores is sufficient to determine that there is bias. If there are other non-quantitative criteria such as being "well-rounded", then the answer is no -- we can't make any sort of statement about bias from test scores alone.
Whether the subset of Asian students that applies to a particular school is more or less rounded and displays a more or less diverse array of talents than the subset of students of another ethnicity that applies to that school is an empirical question that I don't think any of us should hazard any guesses on without seeing some actual data. If there is data available on the topic, I would love to be able to review it.
The current figures for first-year students at University of California: Berkeley, based on student self-reports according to the federal category definitions, are
1% American Indian or Alaska Native
40% Asian
3% Black or African American
10% Hispanic/Latino
28% White
11% Non-Resident Alien
The total is less than 100 percent both because of rounding and because some students exercise their right under federal regulations not to self-report race or ethnicity. People of "Hispanic" ethnicity can be of any race, but are reported as part of the Hispanic ethnicity category and not otherwise counted twice.
I'm pretty sure you'd see similar numbers at all the elite universities if race wasn't an issue.
I'm pretty sure one would not see Berkeley's numbers at all other elite universities (we don't see such numbers at those universities now), in large part because California in general, and the Bay Area in particular, has a much higher percentage of Asian residents than most parts of the United States. In-state subsidized tuition entices a lot of Californians to apply to Berkeley.
Only if SAT scores were the only factor in admissions, and it's not.
And as for Berkeley's 50% student body, 1/3 of all Asian-Americans live in California (they make up 13% of the Californian population), so a much-higher population at a California school is hardly a surprise.
Assuming there isn't some form of self-selection going on. Asian students may be favouring Berkeley and comprise a relatively larger proportion of the applicant pool there when compared to Harvard/Princeton. In other words, your conclusion assumes that relative make-up of the applicant pool is the same everywhere and it very well may not be.
Asians comprise a larger percentage of the applicant pool of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT. It is true that many Asian Americans from California apply to Berkeley, but that doesn't take into consideration the rest of them, hoards from China, Japan, and South Korea.
It's definitely evidence of bias with a naive prior (i.e. you assume that in other ways a higher SAT-scoring student is as good as a lower SAT-scoring student). Not proof of bias, but evidence -- in that you'd probably think bias was more likely than if Asian students who got rejected had the same average scores.
I think it's likely there is some anti-AA biasing in the admissions process. The alternate explanation, that higher scores on tests are more than cancelled out by lower merit in other all other categories on average, seems really unlikely.
The real question is how much of a problem you think that is. This probably depends on your personal system of ethics or morality. Or, more likely, under which of the two alternatives (pure academic merit, or some form of race-based admissions) you personally stand to benefit.
Are the essays that some universities require there to offer a layer of plausible deniability ("sure your marks were excellent but your essay somehow didn't get us very excited").
That's not really needed, when the universities proudly proclaim their commitment to diversity and a well-"balanced" class, which of course requires uneven application of objective measures to different subpopulations.
This article fails to mention that college admission is not based solely on test scores. Many Asians are almost solely test-driven and tend to ignore the other aspects of a "well-rounded" eduction.
I am sure if you looked at race-based stats on who played sports in high school (as opposed to test scores like in the article), you would see that Asians are way behind in that particular metric.
And while some may not think sports matter, colleges do. And it appears that there is good reason for this, as sports teach leadership, teamwork, how to perform under pressure, etc.
I would hope this lawsuit is thrown out, as this country really should not be encouraging "tiger mom" behavior as the right thing to do. Instead, if you want your son to get into Harvard, stop making him study 15 hours a day and get him into extracurricular activities.
Why shouldn't there be affirmative action for Asians in sports? Why are jock parents better than tiger moms?
I really wish college sports were segregated by academics and were not just glorified development leagues for the professionals. Most of these college athletes have absolutely no business representing their schools. I didn't go to Stanford(I went to the UofI), but they are one of my favorite teams because at least I know those athletes belong in a college.
"If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college, according to “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,” a 2009 book co-written by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade."
I would be interested to see their definition of "all other credentials equal". My assumption is that it is some very simplistic compilation of grades and test scores, because the article barely mentions any factors other than these. Also, many of the things that drive college admission are not easy to objectively compare - is a great cellist equal to an 3 sport letterman who was also on student council? How does a rich kid whose parents send him to math camp compare to a kid who had to work full time during the summer? And so on.
You're only being punished if somehow you can claim you deserved a spot at any particular school. This is what this discussion is about, how one determines "merit".
Long ago, the valedictorian of my high school class (white, female), did not get into Brown, Harvard, MIT or Cornell, despite a stellar academic record and near-perfect SAT scores. She wound up going to a state school. Another white female in my class got into three of those places, despite being below the top 10%. Ivy admissions are entirely mysterious to me.
The number of people with good academic records and top SAT scores outnumber the total seats available at top schools. They also take into account extra-circulars, leadership experience, and other activities. This prevents people from just studying for tests and thinking they have an automatic admission. Personally, I'm glad they do or I imagine it would be a very dull environment if there was nothing but people with their head in the books all the time.
It's not that, it's that those with perfect scores appear to be wasting their talent on test taking. They'd prefer students who studied hard enough to get into the 95% percentile, and then devoted the remainder of their efforts elsewhere. If you can do both, fine, but don't sacrifice everything for a few more points on the SAT.
I hear there are extracurriculars involved, like a decade of aspirational music training, leadership in high school sports, and civic engagement. I suppose someone else can weigh in with clues.
Of course. But how does National Merit Scholar compare vs. 4-H club president, or 6 years of piano vs. 4 years of community theater musicals, or civilian parents vs. military parents, or 3 years of Japanese vs. 3 years of fine art instruction? A series of state academic decathlon medals vs. a prominent role in the state model legislature?. I knew both of these women very well, and they both have had fine lives so far, but I couldn't figure out what made one so much more desirable than the other. On paper, they look almost equivalent, except one had better grades. Maybe she was just a better interviewer.
I guess my point is that it is impossible for me to say if there is real prejudice in Ivy admissions, or if their processes are just nearly unfathomable to the outsider.
4-H Club president hurts your chances of admission, just like being involved in JROTC or anything else that has the faintest whiff of social conservatism.
But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call "career-oriented activities" was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student's chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. "Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission."
Helicopter parents everywhere I'm sure have taken this tip and shared it virally. Expect a sudden drop in participation over the next 10 years as a result! But on the flip side, expect creations of extracurricular civic groups that are "college approved".
Whenever I read articles about the American university admission system, and the ensuing discussions about them, I feel like Gulliver visiting a weird country.
It is so arcane and bizarre. If you want to major in CS or mathematics or engineering, who cares if you do ice skating or can play the tuba? And if you're a tuba player who wants to major in music, what can be possibly be more important than your musical skills?
Entrance examinations are like the democracy. They suck but they suck far less than the existing alternatives.
Of course, a lot of the top universities in the world are American; but I think that's despite the admission system, not thanks to it.
Because there is much more demand than supply in the US for a college education. Going merit based is not that simple. If you have 1000 open seats at your school, 50,000 students apply and 1500 of them all have perfect SAT scores, how do you choose who gets in if it's entirely merit based. What makes this perfect SAT score different from that equally perfect SAT score? If everyone looks the same on paper, you need something extra to stand out. That's where extra-curricular activities come in.
The other issue is programs. If you're a school with 1000 open seats and 100 of that is music, you're going to have to drop some very science-smart students to make room for music-smart students.
Keep in mind that truly sophisticated and informed "helicopter" parents know that tests are not enough - they've done their research, they themselves have been through the system. As a matter of fact, the truly informed helicopter parents are engineering failure into their child as well in order make him stronger. Many are reading how Native Americans create emotional strength in their children; others research and study the biographies of great leaders, investigating what separates these leaders from those that failed.
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"If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college, according to “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal,” a 2009 book co-written by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade. """"
The gap is nowhere near that large for Wisconsin-Madison or Duke which are rather selective institutions. I bet you're only going to get those kind of gaps at the Ivies and even then I'm very skeptical.
We should explore why some people deserve to enter Harvard/Stanford/etc. and why some don't? Part of the reason Harvard graduates are successful have little to do with merit and everything to do with being a "Harvard Grad", so it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways. In other words, if we pulled 3 super-hard working freshman from random state schools, and put them through Harvard, and follow them 10 years later, would it surprise anybody that they would end up being successful? If so, what does it matter that their SATs sucked in the first place? Do they not deserve a shot at success as the next person? So they scored "only" in the top 20%, because they were hard working dual athletes with a part time job helping out their single parent and no AP classes, so what? Why should they not have the same shot at the Harvard lottery ticket as the kid who's fortunate enough to be born to a "tiger" Asian mother or well connected blue blood parents?
It's clearly a racket, this whole Ivy/Stanford system where grads from such schools receive the benefit of the doubt when it comes to employment.
By the way, I am such a tiger parent, and it's almost ridiculously pathetic to game this system to a certain degree. Let's see, he is currently enjoying:
1. Summer computer camps
2. Singing/piano lessons + rock band camp in the summer
3. Leadership/Scout programs
4. Private school education with very small teacher/student ratios
5. Competing on the swim team
6. Starting a recycling program at his school as his "entrepreneurial project" and writing a journal about his experiences
Most importantly, the above is very fun for him because he's allowed to enjoy the moment after periods of incredibly hard work. And he just turned 8. The only time he watches "TV" is Netflix on the iPad in the car while we shuttle him between activities. This is the new normal, and what I'm doing is what all the other Tiger parents are doing to create the "balanced" individual.
Yes, he goes to birthday parties, yes he has sleepovers, and yes he has lots of friends. But because he's having "fun", we are not pushing him 24/7 to be the "best" in all these activities, but to simply do his best, as best as an 8 year old is expected to do. Nevertheless, I feel bad for the kids that do not have such supportive parents with the resources to help their children in this way. My son does not deserve success any more than the next child, he's simply blessed that he was not born in the 'hood.
This has been happening for at least 15 years. When I was in high school mid 1990's we had several Asian students with over a 4.2 GPA that were not accepted to local universities such as UCLA. There was not a specific rejection reason related to race, however several students with a GPA around 3.6 who were not Asian were accepted to UCLA.
One thing to keep in mind is that large schools like UCLA tend to have different admissions policies for different colleges. So somebody interested in engineering would have a harder time getting into UCLA than somebody interested in anything else.
I don't know exactly how it works for UCLA, but for Berkeley the admissions percentage for the EECS program is much smaller than the general admissions percentage. So, even ignoring differences in the application pools, getting into the EECS program is going to be much more difficult than getting into most other programs. And if you don't get into the program you applied to, you don't get in at all.
So perhaps the different students applied to different colleges at UCLA? I know that from my high school, some fairly smart people didn't get in to Berkeley Engineering while some who weren't particularly gifted got into, say, the College of Natural Resources. This was just a reflection of the different admissions policies than any discrimination.
I don't get it. Family income is a very strong (if not the best) predictor of SAT score. In this case, if you order each race by median income you get the exact same order as mean SAT score, Asian-American families with the highest median income and SAT, African-American families with the lowest.
That could be verified by looking at first-generation SAT takers, eg immigrant families or perhaps historical data from when SAT wasn't so common in the US. It seems extremely intuitive to me that families with higher income raise children that have higher SAT scores though.
Precisely my point. By my reading it appears that the only empirical evidence for race-based discrimination (an extraordinarily grave accusation) is something that could just as easily be explained by factors other than racism.
But this is no defense of those elite institutions, mind you. I'd even go so far as to make an exception and tax the staggering returns on their endowments.
Causation is measure of the extent to which they contain different information.
Assuming a college wants to admit a student with high "intelligence" or intellectual potential, which cannot be measured directly.
If high income causes high SAT, and high intelligence also causes high SAT, then (low income, high SAT) may well indicate much higher intellectual potential than (high income, high SAT)
If high income and SAT are both caused by high intelligence, then there is less (intelligence-related) reason to prefer (high income, low SAT) or (low income, high SAT).
Are you suggesting that affirmative action should be based on family income, then? Seems like a good idea to me, but I might be missing something.
I'd be interested in a break up of admission statistics, SAT scores, race and family income for the Ivies. because I'm not entirely convinced that just because SAT scores follow family income in the general population, the trends are exactly the same among admitted students.
Yes, to an extent. I think the focus on what the ivies do or don't do distorts our view (the majority of US undergraduates attend community colleges, for example) of what truly is broken in higher ed. I've commented before on it here:
It's not fair to take affirmative action solely on family income, as the cost of living varies vastly across the US. $100K in Manhattan is nothing, but can translate to an extremely comfortable lifestyle in rural Texas.
What I found most lacking among my own relatively diverse class (relatively diverse for an engineering school, anyway) was actually people from areas with low cost of living, aka "poor areas". For example, the school boasted that the incoming class represented 49 of the 50 states; the one missing was West Virginia. And in general people from places like West Texas or other non-major-metropolitan areas were underrepresented. Also true among minorities; there were a few black students from Los Angeles and Atlanta, but none from Mississippi.
Not solely on family income (but I'd suggest that if 100K is nothing in Manhattan one might be better served by looking a bit farther afield, Brooklyn perhaps...), but as it currently stands low income students receive no advantage at many elite institutions.
People are pointing out the fact that Asians may not be getting in because they are focused too much on their studies and do not spend enough time in extra-circulars. If that's the issue, why not remove the race category on the form? That way, it is completely merit-based. I don't the admissions officer needs to see the race of the applicant to determine if he/she is interesting and has diverse extracurricular activities. The name could still hint at the race, but it should be much fairer than currently.
I'd like to see some numbers related more to where people applying/going to prestigious schools are actually from, and application density for a given area.
Controversial topics like these usually have a core "assumption" that the discussions and arguments always circle around.
The un-stated assumption in this case is that Asians, are for the most part, not well-rounded (and only focus on test scores), and hence, any reasonable admissions process that favors well-roundedness will result in an understandable (obviously!) bias against Asians.
1. For elite colleges, specific SAT scores are irrelevant. Essentially, once a certain cut-off is reached, say 2250, it doesn't matter how high you go. In fact, I'm sure admissions officers get a kick out of rejecting the 2400 - I'd rather have a 2380 than a 2400 any day. The variance in SAT scores over a certain cutoff is simply not a good enough indicator for what the colleges are looking for.
2. In my experience, Asian families tend to place a disproportionate emphasis on test scores and grades. This leads to higher than average SAT scores for Asian students, sometimes at the cost of other parts of the application package.
Taken together, I believe these two ideas contribute to a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon discussed in the article.
This is not to say that admissions are not racially biased - I would not be at all surprised if they are.