Asian-American admissions at Harvard
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...
It would seem at first that Harvard wants to help poor students and race just happens to be a proxy for socioeconomic status, but it turns out that's not what they are doing:
> Harvard’s preferential treatment of African-American and Hispanic applicants is not the result of efforts to achieve socioeconomic diversity. Rather, preferences for African Americans and Hispanics are significantly smaller if the applicant is economically disadvantaged.
It seems they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to appear diverse based on physical features. So if someone takes a picture of the class and publishes it everyone would say "Look how diverse they are". But they also don't want poor students because they want donations to keep streaming in.
In Australia university admissions are based pretty much solely on one number [1] that represents your high school results (unless you didn't go to high school in Australia), plus bonus points if you are disadvantaged (for which race is not relevant unless you are an indigenous Australian or Torres Strait islander).
No interviews, no essays, just high school results plus some data on disadvantage. And handled by a separate organisation, not by the university.
It seems like a pretty good system. Loads of disadvantaged people coming through my university all the time (...I've been here far too long).
Perhaps hard to implement in the US since there is no national high school curriculum and the country is large and diverse making implementing one difficult.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Tertiary_Admission_...
So... race is relevant, then? I mean, that's a pretty big "unless".
[1] No matter how hard the current administration seems intent on trying.
http://theconversation.com/anus-new-entrance-criteria-wont-d...
Amongst Australian academics there is a push to change ATAR allegedly because it reflects socio-economic status (SES) too much.
https://theconversation.com/should-we-scrap-the-atar-what-ar...
Andrew Norton, a researcher on academic policy points out however, that ATAR is a very good predictor for success at University.
https://andrewnorton.net.au/2018/06/14/does-atar-measure-mor...
FWIW having been through the Australian university system and having worked at US universities it seems that the Australian system actually rates pretty well. We don't have researchers of the quality of institutions that pay a huge amount but there is far less grade inflation (really compression) than in US universities because you're graded on a curve in the end. In other words, only 5% or whatever of a subject are expected to get HDs (As in US terms).
Amusing that ANU is changing to keep out Asians the same way the Ivy League did to keep out Jews.
For a NSW student a good ATAR means you can ace a test after 2 years of study, where as Canberra/ACT focuses a lot more on project work and has much more flexibility in subjects.
The difference of experience between Canberra/ACT high school leavers and NSW school leavers is staggering, especially when it comes to project work.
The Canberra secondary school system is incredible, and the rest of Australia could learn a lot from it. Happy to elaborate if anyone is interested.
They don't seem to do that at UNSW except in special circumstances.
It's quite strange coming from the Canberra secondary school system where everything was scaled to a consistent mean and stdev.
I think Canberra's secondary school system (years 11 & 12, 2 years before Uni) is light years ahead of other Australian states. It's great how you can focus on individually driven project work rather than studying state-wide standardized tests.
Though I believe there are also bonus ATAR points for students from regional schools.
How does this work with universities that have different focuses?
From the information at [1] and at your Wikipedia link, my understanding is that the way this number works is as follows.
• There is a large list [2] of standard courses offered by high schools that can count toward your ATAR score. Each course is either 1 or 2 "units". These include courses in English, foreign languages, science, math, history, business, arts, and others.
• This list is divided into two sections. The second, smaller section is courses that are lighter academic rigor and less demanding. The courses in the first section are called Category A course, and those in the second section are Category B courses.
• Your ATAR is calculated from your best 2 units in English, and your best 8 units from the rest, which can include no more than 2 units of Category B courses.
Suppose you have three students, all with the same ATAR number.
Student #1's score came from English, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics.
Student #2's score came from English, Dance, Drama, Music 1, Music 2, and Visual Arts.
Student #3's score came from English, Ancient History, Latin, Greek, and Modern History.
Do the universities these students apply to just see the ATAR number, or do they also see which courses went into its calculation?
If they all applied to whatever Australian school best corresponds to MIT or Caltech, for example, would the school be able to see that student #1 is probably the one they want from these three? If they all applied to Australia's most Julliard-like school, would it be able to see that student #2 is the one they want?
[2] https://www.uac.edu.au/future-applicants/atar/atar-courses
In practice the minimum scores required in specific units are more easily achievable than the ATAR, so the ATAR ends up being the limiting factor most of the time.
Here is an example:
https://www.monash.edu/study/courses/find-a-course/2018/scie...
You can see the scores required in individual units are all 30. 30 is the mean by definition, whereas an ATAR of 95 means you're in the 95th percentile, so obviously if you're in the 95th percentile it's pretty likely you were above the mean in the relevant units.
> Do the universities these students apply to just see the ATAR number, or do they also see which courses went into its calculation?
I've been told by an administrative person in my department that there is in fact no system in place to verify that the students have completed the prerequisite high school courses or their scores. This is surprising to me but there you go.
My memory is unreliable so this might not be quite right but I think I heard from the head a department that they just get ATARs and whether the applicant is from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background. So if that's the case and is true for other universities, then the advertised subject requirements etc mostly have the effect of encouraging students to self-select. Presumably after the fact, the university could ask a failing student to provide their high school transcripts, but basically they're not enforcing it up-front automatically.
But I also get the impression things are just not as competitive as in the US. Most people live in the major cities and just attend the best university that their score allows, out of the universities in their own city. They don't care enough about going to the best school to move cities for it. The differences between the top 8 universities are not great enough for it to be worth moving when there is likely one in your city already.
> Race plays a significant role in admissions decisions. Consider the example of an Asian-American applicant who is male, is not disadvantaged,3 and has other characteristics that result in a 25% chance of admission. Simply changing the race of this applicant to white—and leaving all his other characteristics the same—would increase his chance of admission to 36%. Changing his race to Hispanic (and leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 77%. Changing his race to African American (again, leaving all other characteristics the same) would increase his chance of admission to 95%.
If you are trying to train and prepare a student to lead global teams, set global government policy, guide diverse groups toward a common solution, etc., you will need exposure to a diverse set of ideas and a diverse future network of fellow alumni to debate ideas with during your formative undergraduate years.
Otherwise, might as well save the $0.25 million in tuition and indeed go to UCI instead because otherwise it really is the same lectures, reading material and tests!
That's a pretty big if, people in power like to keep it in their network.
I think that's actually a secret of Silicon Valley. If Apple needs to ask how a UI should be setup to handle the nuances from a certain country, they can go ask a person from that country. It'd be much harder trying to do that in Asia or even Europe.
But that is a flawed premise. Is it even the role of higher education to remedy the cards that have already been dealt, and even if so what evidence is there that it actually does what people say it does?
What kind of absurd "argument" is this? If you're testing for a university in America, the expectation is that not only will the test be in English, but the vast bulk of your university courses. And Asian Americans, despite a large number coming from families of non-English speakers, still do disproportionately well. But if the local language is something you struggle with, that local university isn't for you, unless we're also going to argue that degree awarding requires lower standards.
In which case, just throw university in the dump because it's worthless.
If we're at a point where having a majority language and doing important business in that language is bordering on discrimination, this society is lost.
Or did you just decide you'd rather argue with something I didn't write?
The academic consensus is that there is.
The clearest example is that vocabulary is a large part of most standardized tests and native speakers have larger vocabularies than proficient L2 speakers.
It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.
In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.
>It's almost insulting to think that dialect matters that much considering how much exposure everyone gets to the mainstream dialect.
Whether it's insulting is irrelevant to whether it's true.
>In China they've got a standard dialect and there doesn't appear to be any advantage for those that are from the area north of Beijing where the dialect originates.
I'd be interested to know what your basing this assertion on. Gaokao scores in Beijing are distorted by families who try to move there from other areas to take the test and migration in general.
Combined with with relative lack of reliable data, I'm not sure how you could confidently make this claim.
From the beginning I've not denied that dialect can have an effect, only that I believe it to overwhelmed by a sea of countless other factors that cause someone to succeed or fail at getting into college, and I haven't seen any data that shows that it is the prevailing factor and one that truly matters.
The subtext to my comments is that this a debatable point, and I interjected because others were throwing veiled insults and calls of racism at anyone who tries to discuss this, which is an unfair way to shut conversation down.
Yes it can be and is at an individual level.
If you removed 50 points from every Black student's SAT score just because they were Black, there would still be countless other factors that caused them to succeed for fail at getting into college. Their being Black wouldn't be the largest factor (family income still would be).
But across the entire population, you would see a significant drop in the number of Black students in college.
As to a link: Here's a link and a quote from the abstract of a relevant metastudy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26090843
"The results showed a negative and moderate relationship between dialect use and overall literacy performance (M effect size = -0.33) and for dialect and reading (M effect size = -0.32). For spelling and writing, the relationship was negative and small (M effect size = -0.22). Moderator analyses revealed that socioeconomic status and grade level were not significant predictors for relations among dialect use and literacy skills."
And again, people from families of non-native speakers do well. Generally better than people who only have family who speak the native language and dialect.
That people think it's discrimination is quite clearly silly. :)
>Not being able or willing to put in the effort to learn
This has nothing to do with putting in effort. Across a population, people who grew up speaking a dialect will perform better on a test than people who learned to speak that dialect later.
This isn't a controversial statement.
If your goal is to ensure that speakers of other dialects have equal access to top tier higher education, you will need to account for that somehow.
If you dont care about equal access to speakers of other dialects, then you don't have to do anything.
2. Asian immigrants tend to learn the prestige dialect (the dialect the SAT is written in), so if their children are native English speakers, they tend to learn that dialect natively.
4. Language differences are a factor in performance but obviously not the only factor or the largest factor.
A quick glance at the first graph on this page will tell you that almost all Asian Americans are either first or second generation:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/08/key-facts-ab...
Key stats: Asian American population in 2015 is slightly more than 20 million. In 1960 it is about 1 million and only about 2.5 million in 1980.
> 2. Asian immigrants tend to learn the prestige dialect (the dialect the SAT is written in), so if their children are native English speakers, they tend to learn that dialect natively.
Is it somehow easier for Asian immigrants to learn the prestige dialect than Hispanic immigrants?
However none of that really matters because you ignored my last point.
Other factors such as family income are larger factors that native language.
>Is it somehow easier for Asian immigrants to learn the prestige dialect than Hispanic immigrants?
If it's easier is irrelevant because Asian Americans are more likely to speak the prestige dialect than Hispanics. But to answer your question, yes it is eaiser because Asians have much higher incomes, and they integrate with white communities faster--at least in part because Asian communities are smaller and more spread out.
Tests are written by people who talk a certain way, in a way that is easier to process for people who talk the same way. Different communities use different language, and this is reflected in how quickly different students process the problems on standardized tests. There's also the issue that standardized test scores are higher for students who have the time and encouragement to study for them - things which are scarce in poorer families where the student might have to work or help take care of younger siblings. Years of institutionalized racism (loans not given, redlining, denial of employment opportunities) have economically crippled some ethnic communities.
> for students who have the time and encouragement to study for them
It's not just time and encouragement. SAT/ACT prep is serious industry. $100+/hr tutoring sessions. Owners of good SAT prep businesses can make six or seven figures in a few months.
And good prep courses really do work. Tests, like coding interviews, are a game you can hack with enough time and effort.
The signal is totally washed out; with enough money, you can learn how to take the test well enough.
(None of the research is great, but better than nothing.)
This was with just 20 hours of practice. Many high achieving students practice for 5+ hours per week.
South Korean cram school style 2-3 hours per day is in a completely different league than a standard SAT prep course, but much of the research that shows no result counts them the same.
This is like pointing out that I can make large gains in my 100m sprint time by practicing for half an hour a day for a month and predicting that I can make the Olympic team if I put in a thousand hours practice. Novice gains are real and significant but they peter out pretty quickly.
SATs are different in 2 respects.
1. There is a large incentive to practice.
2. It isn't an IQ test, it only correlates fairly strongly with scores on IQ tests.
SATs are highly knowledge based--most of the math questions can be answered by memorizing algorithms, and the verbal section depends heavily on vocabulary.
>This is like pointing out that I can make large gains in my 100m sprint time by practicing for half an hour a day for a month and predicting that I can make the Olympic team if I put in a thousand hours practice. Novice gains are real and significant but they peter out pretty quickly.
It's unlikely you could become an Olympic sprinter, but with enough practice you could probably move into the top 1% of everyone in your age group because the vast majority aren't going to spend that much time practicing.
The SAT equivalent (for the 2018 test) would be somewhere in the 1500-1550 range.
SATs are more knowledge based than a test designed to be culture fair, like Raven’s Progressive Matrices but they’re not meant to be culture fair either, they’re for testing educated English speaking Americans. The test population are in high school but there’s nothing on the test that you wouldn’t have known by the end of middle school.
As far as algorithms and vocabulary go, most people have limited ability to follow complex algorithms because that requires a lot of working memory, which correlates with... Intelligence!
Even if correlation with IQ somehow proved score durability, a correlation of 0.76 or even .8 is low enough to allow for huge swings away from IQ in a very large percentage of the population.
A big chunk of students practicing and increasing their scores 200-300 points could easily be hiding in that 0.76 correlation.
>As far as algorithms and vocabulary go, most people have limited ability to follow complex algorithms because that requires a lot of working memory, which correlates with... Intelligence!
Most algorithms at that level are designed to be written out step by step explicitly to reduce working memory requirements.
Part of SAT prep is learning algorithms for solving word problems that reduce working memory load by memorizing patterns in the questions and writing down the components in a standardized form.
You said
>As far as algorithms and vocabulary go
And then never mentioned vocabulary.
It has nothing to do with working memory and most definitely can be improved dramatically with practice.
One more thing. The SAT was rewritten in 2016 to be far more content based, so the correlation with IQ will likely fall even further.
Years ago I took the GMAT and scored very highly, 98th percentile, and GMAT-taking is definitely a learnable skill in and of itself. Then again, maybe the test is really a proxy for “willing to do prep work upfront”. Having said that obviously it filters for those who have the opportunity to do so, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say the latter is not it’s deliberate intent.
So have your test writers distributed in a way that matches the general population. Don't just blindly try and force the population of VLSI design engineers or whatever to mimic the city's demographics.
Are there any proven advantages to standardized testing?
My recollection of the GMAT's difficulty was that any high school grad with an A average could easily score higher than the 80 percentile on the test. While I was happy my result gave me the ability to choose which business school I wanted to go to (my marks, while not bad, were also nothing to brag about), I also think the GMAT was a useless selection criterion.
Your thoughtless dismissal of those less intelligent is enraging. Do you think all the people who work harder than you to get worse results are less motivated?
There are tens of thousands of people who would love to get into top graduate programmes, who love the subject they study but who just aren’t as smart as other people and you’re shitting on them as unmotivated?
Conscientiousness and intelligence are negatively correlated.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30661143/Con...
I am joining a CS PhD program in an US university this fall. The GRE, especially the math part, is high school mathematics. If you are not good at math, you can ace it by studying hard for a month.
That is why a low GRE quant score reflects that you haven't really bothered.
People recommended doing your GRE but it wasn't required.
From the part I heard, a big reason given was that you can significantly improve your SAT/ACT scores by taking test prep courses, which reduces the reliability of the test. They believe that can get a better idea of an applicant's academic potential from their grades.
Objective standards can really help people without the connections to succeed otherwise.
I've lived in schools where an A/4.00's average score was 90-100 and I lived in another school where it ranged from 95-100. 3.00 would be from 80-89 at the one school and 90-94 at the other.
From raw GPA data, students who had a 90% average would look great if they graduated from the first school, but just OK if they graduated from the latter school. And I've had friends that went to schools that had max possible GPAs of 5.0.
It's a mess.
Yes. SAT/ACT scores are terrible signals because of Goodhart's law. Professional tutoring in wealthy suburbs starts at $100/hr. Many ambitious students opt for four-figure private prep courses.
SAT/ACT scores may have been good signals 20 years ago. But today, those scores discriminate against poor students and students aren't inculcated into the "elite institution rat race" from a young age.
That discrimination matters to U Chicago because they are interested in admitting brilliant, creative thinkers. Not perfectly groomed drones. If you don't require test scores, then there's a lot less back-and-forth about admitting that one kid who did publishable research as a high schooler but also happened to do only so-so on the associated SAT subject test.
Qualitative evaluations have many problems, but overly quantitative evaluations also have their failure modes. Especially when the candidate knows the quantitative function they're supposed to be optimizing.
I believe "could be perceived" is incorrect; there is a large amount of evidence that it is discriminatory, and that therefore the most deserving students aren't getting opportunities and that the university is shortchanging itself on the quality of its student body.
> one stated goal to make the student body mirror the general population
Who stated that? Also, it's not a bad guide given that talent is distributed relatively equally.
> Is it even the role of higher education to remedy the cards that have already been dealt, and even if so what evidence is there that it actually does what people say it does?
What do you think, and more importantly to fellow users, on what is it based? Shall we stand still until nobody raises another question?
> It seems like ...
Sentences that begin with those words can end in almost any way the author wishes, and in almost all cases we will have learned nothing.
Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.
and then
At the end of the admissions process, the class of applicants is fine-tuned through a so-called “lop list,” which includes race. Almost the entire page in which the plaintiffs describe that fine-tuning has been blacked out. Mr. Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, said Friday that it was “disreputable” of Harvard to complain that information was being taken out of context while at the same time insisting on significant redactions of the evidence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
That last parameter - "attractive to be with" - is aggravating. What is this, a matchmaking institution or something? It's just bizarre that they would have the gall to feature engineer that..
Many people don't realize, but that actually is a core purpose of selective higher education institutions. Biology and physics is the same at a community college versus Princeton, but you don't get the opportunity to meet the kids of diplomats and board members etc.
You also want to sprinkle some natural, hard working geniuses in there and you have a good recipe for a network that can take advantage. Usually for their own monetary gain.
That's where "diversity" arguments lead you. The real argument for bias toward disadvantaged groups is that discrimination in society leads to members of advantaged groups looking better on paper than they really are, and following the results of a biased system blindly would both predictably lead to a lower quality of student and recursively contribute to the original bias.
Separately: minorities face material discrimination at every income and wealth level. I understand that it's tough for some white people to support anything positive that they're left out of, but racial bias in college admissions is meant to be a counterbalance to other, negative things that white people were also left out of, at every income and wealth level.
But Asians were also suppressed by force of US law, and by angry, murderous mobs. If anything, they should be favored instead of pushed out, regardless of their level of achievement.
Thing is, it's just not sustainable. No matter how it is justified in the grand scope of things, for an individual that was rejected over someone on the basis of race (or any other trait they have no control over), it will feel unfair, and rightly so. In aggregate, this creates long-term resentment that is focused on the very traits you're trying to mitigate discrimination over. Eventually, you get pushback - and since the group pushing back is the majority, it can get really nasty (indeed, to some extent, we're already observing it).
Doing very well in tech entrepreneurship needs intelligence more than great personality and political connections (they should be above a level but you don’t need a very high level of them).
Politics is still the most direct route to power but billionaires are also powerful and have longer influence. If next generation moguls are educated elsewhere, the colleges with more merit based criteria can emerge as more elite. By merit, the criteria may include other objectively useful metrics in addition to academics.
Maybe we should make ladders of opportunity wider, and not just focus on HYPSM and Ivies? Just a guess.
Citation needed.
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2018/defending-divers...
There's no good reason to hold education hostage. The goal should be to create as much opportunity as possible.
The shame is that those "49%" of students who are, according to Harvard, fully qualified, are not given access. The whole discussion should be about how to give every qualified person--and in fact, every person: barriers to entry will always be deleterious to competitive results--access to their degree programs.
But that's not how the world works. Harvard sells prestige and privilege, and profits from limiting access to it. So we end up in these ridiculous discussions about who should get access to that prestige and privilege.
Or simply , with time, universities applying those kind of discrimination will fall behind the ones that don't in rankings.
The situation you’re talking about applies almost purely to Asian (south/east) Americans. It’s the complete reverse in regards to black folks, and nonexistent in Hispanic Americans (look up intermarriage statistics).
So blacks and hispanics are not villified at all in your view? being grouped into economic apartheid that is repeatedly paraded on media as thugs, gangbangers and of low intellectual capacity?
For example, it is generally accepted in mainstream american culture that making fun of blacks, as a result of slavery, is very taboo but other minorities tend to get a pass. I've encountered this many times in the so called "liberal and mutlicultural society" powerhouse of the West. You are either Black or White in America I've been told. People in between don't matter.
media emasculates/villifies minority men while fetishizing minority women.
Black men face issues of fetishization and hyper masculine caricatures, while black women are villified and systemically unwanted by other races, intermarrying at lower rates of any other group save Asian men. It is quite literally the opposite of what you’ve stated.
Hispanic men and women don’t have any significant differences in intermarriage, and at that have the highest rates of intermarriage (because >50% are white probably).
I do hope you’ll note the absurdity of preaching Amerikkka while lacking a basic understanding of the racial dynamics within it. It’s reminiscent of JS only devs decrying strong typing, and carries about as much weight!
1. Consider whether you can predict with high accuracy a person's attitude toward a racial discrimination issue, while being blind to that issue's facts, based solely on the political beliefs of the person and on the race of the alleged victim. (You can do the same with politicians and, very sadly, with U.S. Supreme Court justices.) For example, I had no doubt what the parent article's position would be based on the publication's politics and the race of the alleged victims.
2. In the U.S., by far the most prevalent amount of discrimination historically and currently has been against African-Americans. Yet I can't remember the last time such an issue was on the front page. To a degree, that could be for lack of novelty, but that doesn't nearly explain the vast omission.