Date: August 3rd, 2017 1:22 AM Author: Federal private investor
By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.
But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.
It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.
“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.
Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.
The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.
The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.
“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.
His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.
The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.
In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.
The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. Harvard has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a Harvard education.
Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”
Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.
For the Harvard case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.
The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”
The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.
In contrast, it says, in the same year, Asian-Americans made up 34.8 percent of the student body at the University of California, Los Angeles, 32.4 percent at Berkeley and 42.5 percent at Caltech. It attributes the higher numbers in the state university system to the fact that California banned racial preferences by popular referendum in 1996, though California also has a large number of Asian-Americans.
The data, experts say, suggests that if Harvard were forbidden to use race as a factor in admissions, the Asian-American admissions rate would rise, and the percentage of white, black and Hispanic students would fall.
Harvard argued that Mr. Blum’s group lacked standing to sue, but the court rejected the motion in June, based on signed declarations from several Asian-American applicants to Harvard who were rejected and who are members of the organization.
A year ago, the Supreme Court upheld a University of Texas admissions plan that allows race and ethnicity to be considered as one of many factors in admission. But some legal experts noted that Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in his dissent, said the Texas plan discriminated against Asian-Americans, and they saw that as a future theme to be pursued by opponents of affirmative action.
Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, echoed that view on Wednesday.
“The idea of discriminating against Asians in order to make room for other minorities doesn’t seem right as a matter of principle,” Mr. Dershowitz said.
Mr. Dershowitz said that investigating discrimination against whites, however, raised a different set of questions.
“Generically, whites have not been the subject of historic discrimination,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “When you start getting into subgroups of whites, then the question becomes a more subtle one.”
The Harvard lawsuit likens attitudes toward Asian-Americans to attitudes toward Jews at Harvard, beginning around 1920, when Jews were a high-achieving minority. In 1918, Jews reached 20 percent of the Harvard freshman class, and the university soon proposed a quota to lower the number of Jewish students.
That history, Mr. Dershowitz said, made affirmative action opponents wary of admissions policies that resulted in a college population reflecting a group’s share of the general population.
Some Asian-American students believe Harvard’s system has enriched their educational experience. Emily Choi, who will be a junior with a history and literature concentration at Harvard this fall, said the university had been her dream school since she visited in seventh grade.
She graduated from Ardsley High School in Westchester County, N.Y., as editor of the newspaper, president of the Latin Club and vice president of the student council with a 4.0 G.P.A. and 35 out of 36 on the ACT.
She was not aware of concerns about discrimination against Asian-Americans until she arrived on campus and heard about the lawsuit, she said, and she was glad of the diversity she found at Harvard.
“I firmly believe in affirmative action,” Ms. Choi said. “The diversity at Harvard has been key to my learning, and I think that if there weren’t so many people of different backgrounds, I wouldn’t be forced to think about things in new ways.”
Mr. Jia, who is not a party to the lawsuit against Harvard, graduated in 2016 from Millburn High School in New Jersey.
He applied to 14 colleges, including Duke, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Rutgers, New York University, Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania. His SAT score was 2340 out of 2400, his G.P.A. was 4.42 and he took 11 Advanced Placement courses.
In addition to playing tennis, participating in the debate team and playing violin in the state orchestra, he did advocacy for an Asian-American student group.
“All I know is that my student profile and all the extracurriculars I was involved in, and the grades I achieved were, I think, sufficient to get into a couple of the schools I applied to,” he said.
The experience has left Mr. Jia questioning the admissions process. “I felt that the whole concept of meritocracy — which America likes to say it exercises all the time — I felt that principle was defeated a little in my mind,” he said.
But, he added, he is coming to terms with the results. “I didn’t want to blame everything on one reason.”
Date: August 3rd, 2017 1:34 AM Author: dark curious pistol church
let's trade: azn quota goes up 10%, but we reduce the 10% of internationals (who 15 years ago were mostly chill euros or the odd rich middle eastern family but now almost entirely chinks, koreans, HKers, and the odd turd) to 0.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 1:51 AM Author: amber hell son of senegal
i wish they would start showing a backbone instead of letting themselves get treated like shit.
that NYT article about the trump DOJ talked about how these lawsuits to stop "reverse discrimination" would help whites and hurt "minorities."
um, asians are minorities. and they get fucked over the most, because they are minorities who get treated like shit in furtherance of other minorities.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:56 PM Author: obsidian haunted graveyard
If Asians effectively get a deduction, and blacks and Hispanics get a boost, then it's perfectly sensible -- and true -- to say that the cost of affirmative action primarily lands on Asians.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:55 PM Author: obsidian haunted graveyard
Those wouldn't have been notably strong hooks for top schools even 20 years ago. They're not bad, but they're not stellar.
But it's also not the case that everyone who gets admitted to a top undergrad has stellar soft factors. Absent anti-Asian bias, the guy probably should have been admitted to at least one school ranked above Duke.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 1:54 AM Author: Opaque odious ladyboy
article insinuates that 50 percent of harvard is white, but we all know half of that is jews. so harvard is actually only a quarter white these days, and whoever founded the university, i assume his name was harvard or whatever, is likely rolling in his grave by now.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:01 AM Author: Hairless azure plaza gay wizard
more than half, easily, and of you're just a regular Joe in the student body you will encounter barely any non-jewish whites cuz they are largely athletes and legacies
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:13 AM Author: Hairless azure plaza gay wizard
I can think of only like five max confirmed non-jewish whites from undergrad who weren't athletes or legacies (most of those I knew were also Jewish actually). A *few* others could be but I'm also amazed at the number of stealth jews I encountered
As always, nothing against them, I had an amazing time in undergrad and most of my friends there were Jewish, but when you realize their overrepresentation at these levels it's absolutely mind-blowing
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:15 AM Author: Federal private investor
There were about 4 million adherents of Judaism in the U.S. as of 2001, approximately 1.4% of the US population. According to the Jewish Agency, for the year 2007 Israel is home to 5.4 million Jews (40.9% of the world's Jewish population), while the United States contained 5.3 million (40.2%).
its no secret that in terms of pure intelligence whitey cannot compete with us.
so when you have an unfair system in which softs are used as an excuse to ding asians, you will end up with asian quotas. ivies are the most notorious for this shit. seriously LOL@ any asian who applies to those shit schools.
now, get rid of the softs of the whitey-j00 conspiracy - and asians pwn everywhere they go. see: UCs, TJ, etc. all asians.
now go to a TRULY meritocratic admissions system and you will have zero whites. in korea uni admissions is purely meritocratic and there are literally zero whites in the top unis.
and dont give me the bullshit of "BUT THERES NO WHITES IN KOREA!" there are plenty. and they have not risen despite being in our country for 50 years. theres a reason why foreigners pack their bags and leave korea once they have kids - they know their kids cannot compete with superstudy koreans who would pwn the fuck out of them on the k-SATs
of course, whitey knows this all too well and is clinging onto softs to keep us out. the real question is can they have their cake and eat it too?
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:36 AM Author: mind-boggling mildly autistic internal respiration
Fleeing South Korea (physicians opting to work on US farms).
Well-educated; middle-class, even physicians, are flying S. Korea to work on a US farm in order to gain residential status; they have given up on their country.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:34 AM Author: Sooty School Cafeteria Foreskin
But he's right -- whites cant compete at gunning with Asians or Jews for that matter. Do away with quotas and these schools will be 98% Asian and 2% Jew. Maybe one lucky white goy a year will get in.
1 - put their kids through middle school, send them to int. high school, leave korea
2 - leave korea after getting married and shit out kids in the the third world
youre right in saying there are very few white kids who make it all the way through our system, but that just goes to show you how incapable they are vis a vis superstudy korean kids who crush them on the k-SATs
they simply. cannot. compete. and thats the cold nigga truth.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 5:45 AM Author: navy legend
i have a better way of "breaking it down" - there are virtually no white kids in the korean school system. their numbers round to zero. this is like discussing fijians in the US school system. we could probably figure out everything relevant by interviewing both of them.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 7:22 AM Author: garnet blood rage sound barrier
So what's your excuse for attending a mediocre college, choosing an unrigorous course of study, having an undistinguished academic record in said course of study, and ultimately ending up a low-income mediocrity in life?
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:29 AM Author: charismatic buff house
In some respects this is a good example of why multi-cultural societies fail.
Yes, the Asians who come here excel and do very well, and I personally would not reject qualified Asian applicants in favor of non-qualified applicants.
But the Asian study culture is a bit like the Bulgarian weightlifting team in that it prioritizes work loads that ends up hurting many kids (mentally, emotionally and socially). And those "soft" development factors are important in business and other professional settings.
So then you have a situation where the white kids are forced to study in an insane, obsessive amount or else be left out, while the Asian kids who do study that much never quite develop socially and don't quite fit in with western culture, both at schools and in the workplace.
It ends up being a system that's not really good for either group.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:44 AM Author: Federal private investor
Eventually won't it be more of an issue for the school? I assume the socialized white kids that end up at lower ranked schools will still go on to be successful.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:52 AM Author: charismatic buff house
no, because the issue just gets pushed forward
post-college you will have a situation where superstudy asians have HYP degrees, whereas chill (but still smart) whites have degrees from Michigan, UVA, UCLA, Lehigh, Bucknell, etc. wouldn't the Asians still complain if they weren't as successful based on their degrees as compared to whites with softer factors? and frankly, HYP with all superstudy asians will only exacerbate their lack of social and western skills.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:35 AM Author: flirting aromatic business firm
I can't even imagine the disappointment these Asian robots must feel when they get summarily rejected by every top school and have to settle for Penn or Tulane while mediocre blacks get Harvard.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:20 AM Author: charismatic buff house
Lol that was literally the first thing I thought when I read the article. Yes he had a resume that was competitive at HYP, but Duke is that very next tier, and his resume fits in very well there. It's not like he's going to Lehigh or Wisconsin.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:41 AM Author: dun public bath digit ratio
Right - HYPS is a reach for anyone except for IMO winners, etc, and this guy got into a school in the very next tier but is just mad that he didn't get into MOAR in that same tier (I guess just so he could brag about it). You can only go to one school.
Also the article doesn't say whether he got into Cornell or Brown or Dartmouth. It's possible he did.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:49 AM Author: dun public bath digit ratio
The only clearly better schools mentioned are HYP. This guy is obviously smart but his extracurriculars are pretty common ones. It's possible they had enough tennis players and debaters. I generally agree that AA should be reduced and Asians get unfairly punished as a group, but it's hard to make a case that this guy got screwed at all. The article also isn't clear about whether or not he got into the 3 other Ivies (Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell).
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:58 AM Author: charismatic buff house
Yeah. We don't know the group of schools that rejected him.
I think we also have to consider the fact that college admissions isn't like running the 100m dash, where 9.92 seconds is always better than 9.98 seconds.
He lists his resume as the following: "His SAT score was 2340 out of 2400, his G.P.A. was 4.42 and he took 11 Advanced Placement courses. In addition to playing tennis, participating in the debate team and playing violin in the state orchestra, he did advocacy for an Asian-American student group."
If he's getting dinged at a school like Princeton in favor of a kid who with 2300, 4.29, state qualifier in wrestling and editor of the paper, idk it's hard to say one resume is meaningfully better than the other.
He 100% got rejected from all other ivies. No asian person wants to go to duke and Columbia is still considered prestigious. Cornell and penn shit but still better than duke in an Asian's mind. Dartmouth was the least desirable ivy for asians and they struggled to get enough asians to fill the quota (I suspect that's why I got in), but I imagine that's changed given how competitive admissions are now.
Clueless people don't get that the aristocratic south is old and prestigious and not just tobacco juice hicks, and that there's tons of good jobs and gentrified dining in the research triangle
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:58 PM Author: charismatic buff house
I personally don't think so, but I think part of the problem is that AA-beneficiaries aren't really going from Duke to Harvard. More like UConn to Harvard.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 8:57 AM Author: copper indian lodge
“I firmly believe in affirmative action,” Ms. Choi said. “The diversity at Harvard has been key to my learning, and I think that if there weren’t so many people of different backgrounds, I wouldn’t be forced to think about things in new ways. I also might have to socialize with Asian males instead of Handsome."
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:20 AM Author: bearded poppy box office
“Generically, whites have not been the subject of historic discrimination,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “When you start getting into subgroups of whites, then the question becomes a more subtle one.”
translation: it is OK to discriminate against non-Jewish whites
Date: August 3rd, 2017 9:31 AM Author: slate macaca stag film
“Generically, whites have not been the subject of historic discrimination,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “When you start getting into subgroups of whites, then the question becomes a more subtle one.”
Date: August 3rd, 2017 2:48 PM Author: obsidian haunted graveyard
"The data, experts say, suggests that if Harvard were forbidden to use race as a factor in admissions, the Asian-American admissions rate would rise, and the percentage of white, black and Hispanic students would fall."
Are they referring to a particular study?
IIRC, there was something that came out a couple years ago that said the effect on whites at top schools was pretty small.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:08 PM Author: soul-stirring double fault
15% of the class being african american is completely indefensible. Assuming Harvard UG is made up of 130+ IQs, black representation in that group should be something like ~1/17 their representation in the general population. Harvard should be less than 1% black.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 3:10 PM Author: Cheese-eating Filthpig
We have no idea what the % of HUG applicants are, broken down by race. That is far more important than their share of the general U.S. population. My educated guess is that only like 5-10% of HUG applicants are black while 25-30% are Asian.
And yes, 15% black is indefensible given that they are held to significantly lower standards.
Date: August 3rd, 2017 5:10 PM Author: boyish maize garrison
"I firmly believe in affirmative action,” Ms. Choi said. “The diversity at Harvard has been key to my learning, and I think that if there weren’t so many people of different backgrounds, I wouldn’t be forced to think about things in new ways.”