Asian-Americans rejected by Harvard need to resist the anti-affirmative action narrative

Our community is being fed a story by a white man trying to preserve spaces at colleges for mediocre white students, not stellar Asian-American ones.

There is a story about race-based college admissions that holds particular sway over Asian-American students like I once was — my father wrote away for my Harvard application before I was out of diapers. It’s backed up by some cherry-picked data and a conservative activist group that wants to end all affirmative action, and it goes something like this: Because of colleges’ consideration of diversity, Asian-American students have to be even smarter than the average white student in order to qualify for admission to the most competitive American universities.

But the issue hiding in plain sight is not how the elite admissions system keeps Asians out; it is more about how it is largely rigged to keep white students — who are often staggeringly underqualified — in, by any means necessary.

There’s reason enough to be suspicious of the intentions of the people pushing our community to take on affirmative action: The man behind the pending lawsuit against Harvard University, for instance, is Edward Blum, who, as the Texas Tribune reported, is the strategist behind the Texas affirmative action case and "the man who recruited Abigail Fisher."

There’s reason enough to be suspicious of the intentions of the people pushing our community to take on affirmative action.

Fisher, you may recall, was the complainant in the recent Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action at the University of Texas; the Supreme Court quickly came to the conclusion that Fisher's grades and scores were simply too low for her to have qualified for admission — an unwittingly perfect illustration of how race-based admissions generate controversy, while white mediocrity goes accepted and unchallenged.

While it is right to press Harvard to end any practice of denying admission to otherwise qualified Asian students based on racial quotas — which Harvard denies exists — websites like Harvardnotfair.org feature a lone, pensive Asian person and ask, ominously, “Were You denied admission to Harvard? It may be because you’re the wrong race.”

But before aggrieved students rush to sign up, it is time to take a breath.

Though Harvardnotfair.org (or UNCnotfair.org or Uwnotfair.org) all prominently feature sad-looking Asian-Americans, these are all Blum projects in service of white supremacy and not Asian-American equality. Just click through to the fine print: “HarvardnotFair.org is an undertaking by the Project on Fair Representation (POFR). Founded in 2005, POFR is a program of Project Liberty, Inc., a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Our mission is to support litigation that challenges racial and ethnic classifications and preferences in state and federal courts.”

Harvard Business School students celebrate their graduation on April 08, 2005 in Boston. Brooks Kraft / Corbis Via Getty Images File

Think about that. He seems to be willing to use anything — including Asians — to dismantle affirmative action.

There’s one study most commonly cited in service of the idea of "the Asian penalty" in admissions. Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade ran a demographic study using applicant data from the 1980s to the 1990s and found that Asians needed on average 140 SAT points higher than whites to arrive at the same probabilities of acceptance to highly competitive private colleges.

There are plenty of commonly cited critiques of his study, which even Espenshade admits didn’t take into account many of the non-numerical factors considered in admissions. And a 2015 Justice Department investigation into Princeton’s admissions practices, for instance, found that many students with stellar and even flawless academic records were denied admission because the competitiveness of the applicant pool precluded the admission of every student who qualified on the numbers alone.

But even if admissions processes took numbers more strongly into account, reparative increases of Asian-American admissions would need to come from subtracting the spots from underqualified whites, not from supposed affirmative action candidates — and that is clearly not the purpose of Blum’s suits.

Even if admissions processes took numbers more strongly into account, reparative increases of Asian American admissions would need to come from subtracting the spots from underqualified whites, not from supposed affirmative action candidates.

And even were they the purpose of Blum’s suits, Espenshade’s studies suggests that, at the most competitive colleges, underqualified white candidates can still rely on a host of longstanding admissions processes that favor them (and not any students of color) regardless of SAT scores.

Espenshade, for instance, also found that recruited athletes had a fourfold advantage in admissions with lower mean test scores. To be sure, athletes in the broadest sense are diverse. However, Harvard, for example, actively recruits for swimming, fencing, lacrosse, soccer, squash, water polo, skiing, sailing and crew — sports that highly favor the wealthy and white.

And then there is the admissions loophole that favors the children of alumni and large donors: A legacy applicant to an elite college is more than seven times more likely to gain admission than an ordinary applicant. After generations of admissions policies that favored white people or outright excluded nonwhite people, this would necessarily disproportionately benefit white applicants.

In an interview, Michael Dannenberg, director of Education Reform Now, points out that these policies "don't reward merit. ... In fact, they undermine both and are fundamentally unfair."

When the goal of ending affirmative action is not specifically to better Asian American's change of admission — and it never is — but to dismantle race-based protections for others in favor of white students, we don’t benefit.

And, in California, there is evidence that banning affirmative action doesn’t affect white and Asian-American students in equal measure, despite some cherry-picked statistics to the contrary: Proposition 209 banned affirmative action at the state's schools starting in 1998. Seeming to confirm the idea of Asian-American merit, enrollment of Asians indeed increased at the most competitive California schools, like Berkeley.

However, OiYan Poon, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University, took a deeper dive into the data and found that the rate of increased admissions of Asian-Americans actually declined from 16 percent growth to 6 percent growth; the reported increase in overall enrollment was "likely due to significant demographic shifts in the state and a higher yield rate among admitted Asian-American applicants."

In other words, even as the population of Asian-Americans in California exploded, the increase in the rate of admissions didn’t keep pace. This suggests that when the goal of ending affirmative action is not specifically to better Asian-Americans' chance of admission — and it never is — but to dismantle race-based protections for others in favor of white students, we don’t benefit.

Asian Americans need to resist the fallacies being sold to us.

Asian-Americans need to resist the fallacies being sold to us; I know from personal experience how attractive they are, given that I, too, was disappointed by my rejection from Harvard despite being class valedictorian, captain of a varsity athletic team and having well-above-average SAT scores, among other accomplishments that I’d hoped would make me a shoo-in. I'd heard rumors that it was my SAT scores, compared to other Asian-American students, that kept me out — and maybe, despite Harvard’s current denials in court, it was. Harvard's deployment of possible (illegal) quotas needs to be dealt with, but not via false allies who exploit legitimate grievances to maintain white mediocrity at the expense of qualified blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and, yes, Asian-Americans.

The people claiming they want "colorblind" admissions aren’t likely to welcome mass numbers of Asian-American classmates with open arms.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee teaches fiction at Columbia and has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among others. She was born and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota, the same as Nobel laureate Bob Dylan.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/asian-americans-rejected-harvard-need-resist-anti-affirmative-action-narrative-ncna863496

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808197)

um, why?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808297)

but wtf is "supposed affirmative action candidates." Why do libs demand that we not only submit to massive affirmative action but also deny that it exists? That sounds religious

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808331)

She was point blank told not to apply through the soccer team at Harvard because they only are given slack for a few key applicants and that it would actually be HARDER for her get in as a recruited athlete.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808373)

(check my moniker)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808532)

I have no doubt that being a walk-on level soccer player wouldn't get you any pull.

The non-top tier wrestling guys all have excellent credentials

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808551)

she likely just didn't understand the admissions process, or the school really wasn't at all interested in her as a player.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808572)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35817494)

You would be wrong, and it's clear you didn't attend an elite school.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808390)

Corey Jantzen, JP O'Connor and Steven Keith too.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808637)

what did you play?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808660)

i bet we have some connection somewhere...

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808811)

Author: dha tux

chess

(going to delete this in a few)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808736)

the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.

then you have to hurt whitey. this is about hurting whitey, not merit, not fairness, not equality.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808370)

restate, please

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35818079)

Because they would NEED to.

It says right there -- WOULD NEED TO COME.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35813484)

link?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808338)

harvard will never reduce white population b/c they want to keep that legacy money flowing

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808399)

the Ivies are historically full of legacies - in fact i think princeton used to be 1/3 legacy (maybe as high as 40%) back in the 1990s. It's actually gotten a lot better recently.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808411)

think like a shitlib and you'll come up with a different premise for the article. then it makes sense

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808427)

Ethnicity, 2016[6]

Undergrad Graduate Percentage

Black Non-Hispanic 1,485 619 4.8%

Asian or Pacific Islander 9,917 2,566 29.1%

Hispanic 6,462 1,188 17.3%

American Indian or Alaskan Native 169 79 0.6%

White Non-Hispanic 8,113 4,394 29.1%

Unstated, Unknown, Other 1,068 670 4.0%

Foreign 3,659 3,159 15.2%

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808439)

Nearly a third of Harvard’s incoming Class of 2021 consists of legacy students. That’s right. If you pick out three Harvard undergraduates at random, chances are strong that one will be the progeny of a Harvard alum.

I don't know their stats, but legacy admissions is still rampant among the Ivies. I personally know at least 3 Harvard legacy admits (who didn't even get in EA and their dads made a call after they were rejected and donated some money and got them in).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808489)

if they know your parents have money they will WL you and then have the inevitable talk about what they can do to get you off the waitlist. some shit schools like cornell may also transfer option you where you will essentially be guaranteed transfer admission if you want it.

FYI I understand the going donation rate to get a reasonably bright but not qualified kid into H or Y is in the $700-1M range.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35824238)

less qualified, sure. significantly, like aa admits? no way

it's not like lower ivies, and the step down schools have tards

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808555)

The legacy advantage also comes from simply KNOWING what the admission standards are and tracking a kid towards it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808687)

legacies are often ultra qualified in their own ways, and parents know what adcoms are looking for

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808780)

Hint: it might have something to do with the fact that you’re assuming that some good universities (Cornell) won’t discriminate like better universities (Harvard) in a world where universities can discriminate without federal oversight.

I know you’re gonna say: “but those schools already discriminate!” But the question at hand is whether schools should be able to accept whoever they want, i.e. discriminate in a manner contrary to federal law as it stands: should schools be able to impose actual quotas/deny admissions to a particular race no matter their credentials.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35815639)

yes, colleges should absolutely be allowed to have quotas on which races or any other demographics they want to have. We shouldn't have the fed govt mandate by law that harvard is required to be 98% chinese immigrants just because they all cheat on the SATs and that's the only thing that matters in their bug brains.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35817423)

A degree from a respectable university is necessary for socioeconomic advancement. If we want to be a country where socioeconomic success is based on merit, we need to ensure that universities don’t “accept whoever they want” but rather base their admissions decisions on merit.

A world where admissions decisions are based on merit, HOWEVER DEFINED, is not compatible with a world where universities accept “whoever they want.” (all caps because I don’t trust your reading comp skills not to misinterpret this sentence)

Think about what I’m saying (and as importantly what I’m not saying). You’ll get there.

Edit: LOL at you thinking I’m Asian. My original post was disagreeing with the guy who said “universities should be able to accept whoever they want” as a point IN DEFENSE of AA. How tf does me disagreeing with the premise that universities should be able to accept whoever they want imply my being opposed to an admissions system that takes into account things other than gpa and standardized test scores?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35817676)

I think the vast majority of those who oppose AA would agree with this statement if everyone else, in all spheres of life, were permitted to do the same.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35826646)

Twist: it's not

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35809074)

2. it's probably one of the least expensive or disruptive programs out there to get blacks to stop acting like blacks.

3. there already are too many superstudy chinks at colleges and in general. everyone is sick of them and their chinky bullshit. all colleges, even kind of shitty ones, will look like bug colonies if admissions are reduced to pure numbers.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808816)

but state governments sorting by race and doling out admissions that way? no.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35810416)

Well, how about it libs, if AA is so important why shouldn't we know exactly how big of a boost everybody is getting? You could anonymize and aggregate the data.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808577)

Not just randomly assigning +400 SAT points to URMs, and -150 SAT points to asians, which is probably precisely what happens in the admissions room

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808609)

(guy who has never talked about welfare or how social programs are run with libs)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808624)

I would be perfectly content to make a grand bargain whereby to retain non-profit status or be eligible for student loans or whatever racial discrimination was banned, in addition to legacy admissions. "Soft factors" could be considered, including poverty but not race (the kids of Chris Fucking Rock don't need an AA boost).

If there was a "disparate impact" (heh) and it sure seems that one ethnic group was getting a stealth AA boost either in admissions or AA, then it would be up to the university to prove their admissions practices were actually racially blind.

With the realities on the ground the "poverty" boost would disproportionately benefit latinos and blacks anyway. But it would also give poor white kids a shot and, again, not offer this massive windfall to well-off black kids.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808562)

Asians and Jews will just vote for them because of propaganda like this even though this all works explicitly against them.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808662)

The best thing to be in a crude category based system like this is a member of an over performing subgroup within a mediocre overall group.

Jews get lumped in with country bumpkin whites, and SAT standards for that group are lower, even though Jew SATs are similar to Asians.

Same thing with wealthy groups of South Americans claiming to be Latino.

Or Nigerian engineers getting lumped in with ghetto hood rats.

The worst is being some kind of low IQ group within a high IQ group: Vietnamese gangsters have to compete with violin virtuoso Cindy Changs, White trash and thuggish eyetalians are up against rich Jews and WASPs.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35814391)

but if you take a more cynical view, the systems in place at a school are OVERTLY preferring jews even over and above their good performance statistics, but it goes unnoticed because jews aren't specifically called out.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35824298)

Whites, actually.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35826658)

https://qz.com/1000690/im-a-minority-my-son-is-disabled-its-an-unsettling-time-for-people-like-us-in-trump-country/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808717)

http://heymancenter.org/images/made/images/persons/marie_myung-ok_lee-208x300_200_170_s_c1.jpg

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/05/why_i_give_my_autistic_son_pot_part_4.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808735)

"As a parent of a cognitively disabled half-Asian teen who can be easily mistaken for white"

every.time.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808805)

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gNEKZDDfYRU/WHi69JiP8fI/AAAAAAAAEms/eTMri9JOc4gsEiQ7FTNjLGMO-twE9rQ7QCLcB/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Marie%2BMyung-Ok%2BLee%2Bwith%2Bher%2Bhusband%2Band%2Btheir%2Bson%2Bat%2Bage%2B12.JPG

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35808906)

instead she gets frosty the snowman

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35809032)

I'm sure that's someone's moniker.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3944917&forum_id=2#35813504)