https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/us/harvard-affirmative-action-trial-asian-americans.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37033530)

Things are off to a booming start.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37033924)

I have a feeling it won't be for long

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37034568)

interesting story behind all the cambodians who own donut shops in the US, too, but basically one cambodian came over and hit it big and started using it as a way of getting refugees out and getting them jobsin the US - he'd train them and then have them start a franchise, and it expanded from there

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37034742)

very mindfuck

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37034734)

???

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37033681)

huh?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37033701)

the logic out of Harvard defenders has been "if we can't discriminate against Asians, then AA is dead." it's NPC-speak. and it's the underlying logic of his heart-warming anecdote.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37035083)

https://i.imgur.com/Kwi7tKn.gif

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37033706)

odd case

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37034752)

here is how to make harvard great again: discriminate AGAINST asians. stop AA for blacks and hispanics.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37040678)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37040909)

====

URISPRUDENCE

A Better Way to Diversify Harvard

The university favors the rich and overuses racial preferences in admissions. Here’s how the school should approach diversity instead.

By RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG

JUNE 22, 20183:56 PM

A street and brick building on Harvard’s campus.

Harvard.

Thinkstock

At a time when the president seeks to exacerbate racial and class cleavages on a regular basis, providing educational settings where students of different racial, ethnic, economic, and religious groups can come together to learn is paramount. But there are fair and unfair ways to achieve that diversity in higher education, and which path universities take matters. Choosing the wrong way is one factor in making the election of demagogues who feed on resentment more, not less, likely.

Four years ago, in my personal capacity, I signed on as an expert witness in a lawsuit challenging Harvard University’s use of racial preferences in its admissions process. Another expert in the case documented the considerable anti-Asian bias at Harvard, which has already garnered widespread media attention. My task, on the other hand, has been to explain how using alternatives—such as socio-economic preferences—could create a diverse student body without relying on racial preferences. (Court papers were just made public.) Socio-economic preferences can open the doors to impressive young students—including underrepresented minorities and first-generation students—who have overcome considerable obstacles in life and are now largely shut out of selective colleges. In addition, the Supreme Court has long held that if workable strategies can create the educational benefits of diversity, they should be employed, as there are costs—such as reinforcing negative stereotypes—to classifying individuals by race.

What I’ve found is that Harvard starts with a system heavily biased toward the wealthy, then adds in racial preferences to compensate. To begin with, the university preferences students in the know, heaping advantage on already privileged and disproportionately white groups. It admits those who are on a “Dean’s Interest” list and other preferred candidates through a backdoor channel known as the Z-list, in which just 2 percent in recent years were black and 1.2 percent economically disadvantaged. It gives a leg up to those who apply through the early—rather than the regular—admissions process, even though Harvard acknowledged in 2006 that such a policy “operates at cross purposes with our goal of finding and admitting the most talented students from across the economic spectrum.” (Harvard reinstated early admissions in 2011.) Harvard also preferences the children of faculty and alumni. According to Harvard’s own internal analysis, being a legacy boosts a candidate’s chances of admission by 40 percentage points, compared to a 9 percentage-point increase for low-income students.

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Harvard’s preference for legacy students shuts the door to others trying to gain a foothold. For the classes of 2007 to 2016, Harvard had more legacy students than it did first-generation college students. Although 68 percent of American adults 25 and older lack a four-year college degree, an average of only 10 percent of Harvard students in the classes of 2007 to 2016 were first-generation college students. If black students, who represent 15 percent of the newest Harvard class, were as underrepresented in the Harvard population as first-generation college students have been over the years, they would account for just 2.25 percent of the student body.

Other leading colleges try to foster racial and socio-economic diversity by recruiting from the nation’s brightest community college students. Amherst College, for example, enrolls between 12 and 15 community college transfers annually. If Harvard, with a much larger student body, adopted a similarly scaled program, it would admit 44 to 55 community college transfer students annually. In fact, over a six-year period, Harvard admitted only two such students.

The results of this process are highly predictable. According to a 2017 study by Stanford University’s Raj Chetty, in recent years, Harvard has had as many students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution as the bottom 60 percent. More come from the top 10 percent by income than the bottom 90 percent. Twenty-three times as many come from the top income quintile as the bottom quintile.

Because Harvard’s system is so heavily biased against nonwealthy students, who are disproportionately black and Hispanic, Harvard puts itself in the unnecessary position of having to employ significant racial preferences in order to achieve its diversity goals. According to Harvard’s own analysis, for example, the size of the preference provided solely to blacks is more than twice the preference provided to students of any race from families making less than $60,000 a year. Even here, though, Harvard tilts its racial preferences toward the well-off: 71 percent of underrepresented minorities admitted to Harvard are socio-economically advantaged, even though less than 32 percent of blacks and Hispanics nationally would qualify as advantaged by Harvard’s system.

There is a much better way to create diversity. Instead of adding racial preferences to counteract the effects of an admission process titled toward the rich, Harvard could create a system that meaningfully recognizes that students of many different backgrounds overcome tremendous hurdles in building their high school academic, extracurricular, and athletic records. Because race and income are deeply intertwined in American society, black and Hispanic students will still disproportionately benefit from such a program. In 2016, black median family income was 57.8 percent of white median family income, and Hispanic income was 62.9 percent of white income. The disparities in neighborhood opportunities are even greater: While 6 percent of white youth live in neighborhoods with more than 20 percent poverty rates, 66 percent of black youth live in such neighborhoods. As Sean Reardon of Stanford University has found, although the black/white achievement gap used to be twice as large as the rich/poor achievement gap, today the reverse is true: The economic achievement gap is twice as large as the racial gap.

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How would this approach work at Harvard? Because my colleagues and I had access to data from more than 160,000 students who applied for admission over six cycles, we could employ Harvard’s holistic system of rating students by academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal criteria to carefully model the results of socio-economic affirmative action programs. In one of the simulations, we turned off the effects of Harvard’s preferences for race, legacy status, early admission, faculty children, and economic disadvantage. In its place, we instituted a larger socio-economic preference that is about half the magnitude of Harvard’s existing preference for athletes. In this simulation the overall share of underrepresented minorities increased from 28 percent to 30 percent. The share of first-generation students increased from 7 percent to 25 percent. Academic preparation of the admitted students in the simulation remained superb, with the average SAT in the class declining just 1 percentage point (from the 99th percentile to the 98th) and high school GPA remaining exactly the same.

More diversity can be achieved with less divisiveness. Racial preference policies likely help explain why 60 percent of white working-class Americans say that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks.” Socio-economic preferences in college admissions, by contrast, would benefit working-class whites alongside working-class black, Latino, and Asian students. In an era of racial strife and antagonism, class-based affirmative action could reduce racial division while opening up gated communities in higher education to promising students from all walks of life.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37081562)

====

Editorials

Keeping Diversities in Balance

By The Crimson Editorial Board

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board.

3 days ago

With anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions’s lawsuit against Harvard underway, court documents demonstrated last week that Harvard, in order to attract a more geographically diverse student body, sends interest letters to students from rural “sparse country” with PSAT scores lower than the usual threshold to receive such letters. However, Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons testified that this threshold is not lowered for Asian Americans. While we affirm the importance of geographical diversity in Harvard’s admissions, we would be remiss not to underscore the interrelatedness between geography, racial, and socioeconomic diversity.

Harvard is going through a difficult time defending affirmative action as an important practice that creates a diverse environment on Harvard’s campus. The admissions process is by no means perfect, and one issue lies in the aforementioned way in which Harvard recruits rural students to apply to the College.

In that vein, the College must change its practices with respect to recruitment of students from “sparse country.” Part of its mission is to encourage intellectual transformation by having students live in a diverse environment with people from various backgrounds and with different identities, and diversity is multifaceted. Therefore, if Harvard wants to create a truly diverse college community, it must not sacrifice some forms of diversity for others. In this case, Harvard has sacrificed racial and socioeconomic diversity for geographic diversity. Indeed, the Admissions Office’s use of lower standards when sending interest letters to white students from rural states unfairly benefitted those students at the expense of rural students from minority races and lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Though we uphold our standing behind the Admissions Office in its support of affirmative action, its diversity search leaves much room for improvement. To maintain its integrity, the Admissions Office must stop attempting to cram many different backgrounds and ideas into a very small number of boxes to tick, as it belittles the entire process as well as the students that work hard to be competitive applicants.

We would like to see Harvard continue its efforts to make the campus a truly inclusive space. In order to do so, the College should actively address such problems and make the admissions process more equitable. As a result, the Admissions Office should change its approach to this particular diversity search, however well-intentioned it may be. Harvard should critically analyze its scouting processes to minimize bias and ensure the comprehensive evaluation of every prospective student. In sum, the Admissions Office should not use one form of diversity to belittle another. Students deserve better than that.

This staff editorial is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/25/editorial-keeping-diversity-in-balance/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4107827&forum_id=2#37106880)