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Comment by jdoliner | Hacker News Reader

These numbers are next to meaningless, Harvard doesn't just accept people from the US, so we should be looking at population percentages of the world. I assume that people who don't fit in any category are shunted into one of them based on skin color. For example a Jamaican is, I assume, counted in the African American bucket, and compared against the African American population, even though they're neither American nor African. And as with all things race it's largely a question of how you draw the lines. Jamaicans are African Americans, white American Jews are separate from whites though. And who could say what bucket the billion people in India are in, Asian American maybe?

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It's a great exaggeration to say the numbers are meaningless. Just shy of 90% of Harvard undergraduates are from the US and its territories: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics

> While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

> They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/top-colleges-take-more...

Other commenters have attributed that disparity to the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education rather than a problem of Harvard admissions.

> the African American community's limited access to quality K-12 education

Is that a claim that their schools are worse at educating students than schools in Africa?

Yes.

Africa is a huge continent of 54 countries with a population of 1.2 billion people, so it makes perfect sense that such a huge geographic area like that would have many excellent schools compared to the areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US.

The two areas aren't remotely comparable, unless you were thinking of something else?

Moreover, the schools that Harvard's African students come from are typically expensive and prestigious private schools, not schools in impoverished areas.

The comparison isn’t all of Africa with areas of concentrated and persistent poverty in the US. It’s sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with the black population of the US.

Given that the US black population does better on the PISA tests than the only black majority country that participated, Trinidad and Tobago, it seems unlikely there are better educational systems. A quick check does not find a single country in SSA with college graduation rates above ten percent[1]. Given that over 90% of the US black population are descended from slaves who’ve been in the US since the 1800s the disproportion is suspicious.

[1]http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/global_education...

https://huebler.blogspot.com/2012/02/ssa.html?m=1

No, we are not interested in the total averages of the SSA nations, which obviously will not compare to America: we are interested in the elite high schools of the SSA nations. We are comparing economically disadvantaged African Americans to the economic elite of SSA.

> It’s sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean with the black population of the US.

So 1 billion in subsaharan africa vs 42 million african americans - still on totally different scales.

Subsaharan Africa has plenty of educational institutions of sufficient quality to prepare motivated (and likely more well off) students for admission vs relatively small number of seats at Harvard.

That doesn't in any way contradict with the possibility that general education systems in subsaharan africa aren't great.

Foreign undergrads at elite US universities are likely themselves to be privileged in their countries of origin, not the least because the ability to understand English and pass tests administered in English is a huge filter for privilege in many developing countries.

This article is over 15 years old, are the statistics it cites still accurate?

Yes. See for example Paul Tough's book "The Years That Matter The Most" which came out a few months ago.

Fyi about 1/10 of Harvard College students are international

That's wild statement, shunted into a category based on skin color? Nobody is shunted anywhere, you are asked on the application what race are you, or if you are biracial, or if you identify as anything else. It's your choice what to put on the application. Everything is determined from your responses. Nobody is "shunted" anywhere.

Have you ever seen an application where Jewish is a racial option?

I have not, yet comments here assert that it is.

It makes me question the legitimacy of their data sources.

A lot of the data I believe is from the Hillel membership / Jewish org membership numbers.

It is intentionally difficult to find and requires legwork since I believe it is intentionally obfuscated.

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