How I Think You Should Try to Get into an Elite College, Part 2
I wouldn’t ordinarily get into this, but the LA Times unveiled some dirty laundry, and it needs context:
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
No citation is provided, but I read what I think is probably the referenced study when it came out. I know some people were surprised, but I wasn’t. College-level affirmative action exists for the following purposes
- so that colleges have enough colors on campus to fill out their campus brochure pictures. (Good luck actually finding minorities spontaneously on campus though.)
- so that white liberals can safely ignore the dramatic K-12 disparities that create the need for affirmative action in the first place.
- so that white conservatives can complain about how oppressed white men are without actually having to be oppressed.
Win-win-win!
So, I’m no fan of affirmative action, but I’m even less of a fan of worrying about affirmative action programs if you are a capital-P privileged Asian. Here are my issues with such complaints.
You are ignoring the many legs up you got and focusing on the one, minor disadvantage you have.
Let’s say you’re one of the stereotypical Asians that has to worry about coming off as a stereotypical Asian.
“Everyone is in orchestra and plays piano,” Lee says. “Everyone plays tennis. Everyone wants to be a doctor, and write about immigrating to America. You can’t get in with these cliche applications.”
There is reason you have all those accomplishments and talents. It’s because your parents practically force-fed them down your throat. If they did a good job, it didn’t feel like that was what was happening and you actually began to like it. When I was growing up, it felt like I just naturally loved math. It was only later that I realized that my parents had taught me all the math before I learned it in class, so I when I was actually in class I got to feel smart in class, which I didn’t experience in other subjects like English. Am I naturally good at math and not as good as English? I don’t think that can ever be known.
If you have family who is making music training and tennis lessons and computers available to you, you probably didn’t do much yourself to deserve it. Your parents certainly own more of the story about your family immigrating to America than you do.
It is dishonest to sit in your glass house stocked with glass privileges you were given and cast stones at a 50-point SAT penalty. You didn’t earn your ethnicity, but you didn’t earn your privileges either. Count both your blessings and curses consistently, or quit whining.
This point is especially salient in my mind right now having just adopted a young girl from China. There are other girls in her orphanage who will likely spend their entire lives there. Our daughter has instead been plucked out and will live in a college town a visiting friend once described as “ridiculously picturesque” with two people who are willing and capable of indulging her with whatever learning opportunities she wants to pursue(1).
We don’t plan on using corporal punishment, but she will lose one stuffed panda each time she chooses to complain about the unfairness of being Asian.
You can’t do anything about it.
You’ve probably seen the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
That’s one way to say it. I’d have said:
Only losers obsess about factors they can’t change.
Military strategists seek the high ground. (I assume this is no longer universally true, but roll with it.) If they fail to get the high ground despite their best efforts, do they give up? Do they complain that the battle is unfairly stacked against them? I would guess that that is what some of them do, but those that do are perhaps less likely to survive that those who quickly and completely accept what is true and work from those constraints.
You want to be this latter kind of person. Play the game fully from the position you occupy. Don’t complain about the rules as you do so. Unless you can stop being Asian, accept it as a constraint (or even as a privilege) and plot your next moves. Did I mention only losers obsess about factors they can’t change?
I have an Asian friend who came to the US for political asylum from Cambodia. As near as I can tell, she didn’t get any of the unearned advantages spoken of by the LA Times, but when she applied to college, she was still considered “Asian”. As far as I know, she has spent zero time complaining about this situation. She’s never mentioned it to me, anyway. Instead, she went to a state school, kicked ass at work, and now makes more than $250k per year at the company she started after the prestigious consulting company she was working at decided they didn’t want to make her a partner.
Jeremy Lin. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
50 SAT points isn’t actually that much.
If you didn’t get into Harvard as an Asian, you probably wouldn’t have as a white candidate either. Don’t overestimate your knowledge of who does and doesn’t get in. Own up to your performance. Also, even if you really want that Harvard brand, consider graduate school. I only know one person who went to Harvard for undergraduate studies, but nearly a dozen who went there for graduate school or a postdoc or something else to get that scarlet H on their resumes.
(1) As long as they lead to some kind of engineering.
In 2000 the University of Wisconsin was busted for photoshopping a black student into a crowd picture at a football game that was used as the cover of its application.
They were caught because this particular black student had never attended a football game.Report
I remember that! We all had a good laugh about it on campus, because the administration was so overly focused on appearing racially diverse and they thought one black kid in a sea of caucasian would do it.Report
>>so that colleges have enough colors on campus to fill out their campus brochure pictures
But why do people want to go to colleges with diverse campus brochure pictures. Could it be that a diverse campus makes for a better learning environment?Report
It could be, but I think the more likely explanation is they do it for the same reason any other advertisers feature diversity in their materials.Report
It could be, but I think the more likely explanation is they do it for the same reason any other advertisers feature diversity in their materials.
The suspense is killing me. What’s the reason, Vik?Report
So there are two proposed explanations:
1. Universities set lower SAT standards for certain minorities; accept them over their better-scoring peers; dedicate professor time and money in educating them; grant them diplomas; etc. etc. All in the hopes that when it comes time to take photos for the campus brochure, some of these individuals will walk through the frame and get captured in the marketing; leading to other potential minority applicants seeing photo, thinking “people who look like me!” (as they would after seeing a Wheaties box) and applying; at which point the University again accepts them with lower SAT scores; and the cycle continues. At some point, the increased demand leads to profits.
2. The University prioritizes other aspects of the entrance application and believes that diversity improves the learning environment for all. Better learning environment leads to profits.
And you think (1) is the more likely one?Report
I’m sure someone’s explained the reasons better than I have, but here’s my list:
1. A desire to appeal to a broad range of ethnicities. Having diverse models in ads communicate that the product is not only for ___ but also for you.
Since the practice is so widespread now, I think people might find it weird to see ads with several individuals but no racial minorities. I think that’s part of why Wisconsin may have felt pressure to photoshop in a black student in their brochure.
2. A desire to communicate the brand’s openness.
A lot of Coke’s advertising is about people coming together around the product. It’s a better demonstration of the product’s ability to do this if a black and a white dude are laughing over their bottles of coke than if two white guys are doing the same thing.
3. A desire to set a good example.
Advertising is often aspirational. I think to some extent advertisers are trying to show you diverse sets of people because that’s what they feel the world ought to look like instead of the fairly segregated world we actually live in. Ads at least tell us not to feel weird just because you are interacting with someone of a different race.
This is just off the top of my head. I’ll try searching for what others have written tomorrow.Report
Hmmm. I’m not seeing why you think trizzlor’s account is wrong here. Or how what you said is inconsistent with it. Maybe I’m just not cynical enough. 🙂Report
@trizzlor
Ack. I was being unclear. I was being facetious that administrators support affirmative action because they want the pictures.
I do think it is likely that they do have their own sincere reasons for implementing the policies.
Apologies for the confusion, which was totally my fault.Report
@trizzlor
Evidence shows that diversity — of all types — leads to better learning outcomes.
This is why I get frustrated when the only arguments made in favor of AA or other attempts to diversify institutions are grounded in social justice. It’s not that social justice is wrong, perse, but I think it is a problematic way to frame the argument and also strategically a likely losing approach.Report
Do you have a link or two for that? It’s a very broad statement — whatever specific studies you have in mind to support it are probably more restricted (what age ranges? what types of schools? what social class(es)? what sorts of diversity?) and also probably not able to truly justify “leads to” (more likely just “is correlated with”).Report
Kazzy,
You mean better learning with something like history, not calculus, I’m figuring?Report
@vikram-bath
The fact that one’s parents force-fed extra maths/ piano practice down one’s throat and thus gave one a realised skilled (though not necessarily innate) advantage over others does not make that accomplishment any less one’s own. Or even if it does, it does not do so in a way that is relevant to college admissions. College admissions is not (or should not be) about deserving(tm) your place, but about who can do the most with what they already bring to the table. The fact of the matter is if you bring more to the table, there is more you can do with it all things equal. The fact that my parents pushed me to practice maths may have given me a leg up in highschool maths, but it also therefore made me better able to cope with university maths. Maybe that’s unfair, but it would be just as unfair if an accident of genetics just made me that much more naturally gifted at evaluating mathematical expressions. I deserve neither my genetics nor the extra private tuition my parents send me for. And if such deservingness mattered then test scores would be inherently unfair in any world. Just give out places by lottery.Report
I basically agree. All I’m adding is that people should be aware of the opportunities they have been given and perhaps be thankful for them rather than focusing on the thing that disadvantages them a little.Report
Fair enough.Report
@murali
“College admissions is not (or should not be) about deserving(tm) your place, but about who can do the most with what they already bring to the table.”
Says you.Report
Yeah oughts like this are difficult to argue for. But few other principles which justify a significant portion of current admissions behaviour pass the smell test.Report
>>But few other principles which justify a significant portion of current admissions behaviour pass the smell test.
Let’s set aside the racial angle entirely. There are ~30,000 high-schools in America. Harvard admitted 2,048 students for the Class of 2018. If they wanted to, Harvard could have admitted a class entirely made up of valedictorians. Why do you think they chose not to do this?Report
@trizzlor
There are other very good colleges which valedictorians apply for. I’m assuming that Harvard just cannot capture all the valedictorians because of competition from other equally good universities.
Note, I’m not making an argument against affirmative action or diversity hires per se. I’m saying that the best justification for admissions is forward looking not backward looking. This is compatible as Vikram pointed out below with affirmative action. After all, if all else equal, being of a disadvantaged background indicates that one is likely to put in more effort than others with similar extra curriculars, or if diversity creates a better learning environment, that is a good reason to craft admissions policies which create diversity.Report
I’m assuming that Harvard just cannot capture all the valedictorians because of competition from other equally good universities.
But it doesn’t even try, right? Why think that their decision is results from the pragmatics of a competitive market based on a single and somewhat trivial metric rather than a “forward thinking” view of the type of student who will excel given the opportunities Harvard presents?Report
@murali
Don’t ask me why I know this, but Harvard has something like an 80% yield rate. That is, in head-to-head competition with other elite schools, students tend to select Harvard. So it is entirely plausible that Harvard admissions, if they so chose, could aim to admit classes of pure valedictorians (and still be rejecting a significant number of other valedictorians).
Also, in less quantitative terms, they call it dropping the H-bomb, and ending up with dodges like “I went to school in Boston.” Harvard has a pretty big pull on the American higher ed imagination – I’d say elite schools generally are the focus of a far and away a disproportionate amount of attention when the vast majority of higher ed institutions admit +50% of those who apply. It probably says something about our media culture, the chattering classes, and focus on the struggles of upper middle class lives that we spend so much attention there instead of, say on improving community colleges, or as the original post wryly suggests,on (pre-)K-12 education.Report
@murali : “I’m saying that the best justification for admissions is forward looking not backward looking.”
Yeah, this is what I was getting at. The idea that – if it weren’t for AA or multi-culti liberals – universities would just pick some testable metric and admit students that maximize it is not consistent with what universities actually do (at least at the highest level). What’s much more consistent is that universities aim to select students with a mix of features that indicate “will contribute to learning environment”. It so happens that one subgroup that meets this criteria and averages 50 more SAT points than the majority, and another subgroup averages 230 SAT points less. But the idea that this disparity is an injustice is unsupported unless you conclusively show that that the disparity is confounding the “will contribute” goal. The argument that one group is being “penalized” 50 points is completely backwards, just as it would be if we found that group A had much higher athletic performance than group B and claimed that group A is therefore being penalized for being good athletes.Report
The reasons Harvard does not admit only valedictorians are the following.
1. Valedictorians often lack “character”.
2. Practically speaking, the median valedictorian is still nowhere near as good as the 100th best student at Stuyvesant.
3. Most valedictorians are not pointy. Yes, they are the best in the school subjects among those attending their school, and that says something, but as far as accomplishments go, it is pretty boring compared to Olympic shot put medal winner or even the kid who got the school lunch program shut down.
On #3, I empathize with Harvard. What does the valedictorian have to bring to the classroom? If she has something to say, it’s almost necessarily going to be unrelated to the fact that they were valedictorian. In my classes, the best comments came from thoughtful students who had unique experiences, who were only sometimes among the highest scoring students.Report
Oh, there’s one other thing that doesn’t seem to have made it into the final post.
It does kind of matter to colleges how much help you got in achieving your success. Unless you really are going into the music department, they don’t care about how well you play the piano. They care about what how you play the piano says about you. If you had your parents’ support, it says less than someone who worked a job to play for lessons (if such people exist).
Similarly, our daughter is speaking exclusively Mandarin now and our hope is that she will remain fluent into adulthood. Universities won’t give her as much credit as they would a fluent white kid with non-Mandarin-speaking relatives because that kid probably had to work much harder to achieve his fluency. That makes sense because the thing they are after isn’t actually Mandarin fluency, it’s being the kind of person who goes and does a bunch of extra work to accomplish something.Report
OK that actually makes sense. So even though such stuff matters for extra curriculars only, because of the disadvantage in extra curriculars, the difference has to be made up via SAT scoreReport
An interesting fact related to Mandarin speakers an university applications:
The AP Chinese Language and Culture test is the AP test with by far the highest pass rate, and is primarily taken by native or heritage speakers of Chinese.Report
You can’t do anything about it.
I’m on the pro-affirmative action side of the argument, in fact I think America is a little too complacent on the spectrum of positive discrimination steps that can be taken to ensure equity in a number of important spheres of public life. But I do want to take issue with this particular it-is-what-it-is point. Demonstrably, people have successfully done something about it. iGrutter v. Bollinger was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, it took a Grutter to – from the affirmative action critics perspective – stand up to a practice she found unconstitutional and impermissible (and Bakke had no majority opinion, so kind of more open terrain to work with for the Court). And it isn’t clear how such cases are going to come out, especially with the conservative appointment tilt on the Supreme Court for many years.
In addition to the courts, there’s the whole self-governing democracy bit. What is the democracy if many, many citizens think they can’t do anything about the structure of norms, institutions, and laws that govern their lives? And I can make the point even more forcefully, I mean, if you see what you perceive to be a genuine injustice perpetrated against X group – what’s more, you happen to be a member of X group! – shouldn’t you do something about it?
Put another way, “You can’t do anything about it.” would be a very, very bad slogan for a social movement.Report
Sometimes people do make differences, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to actually try to make a difference in this particular way. Someone who has the wherewithal to accumulate proof that they would have been admitted, file a lawsuit, prevail through appeals, and brand themselves in a particular way that is likely to be difficult to rewrite. My advice would be to dedicate all that energy to something more likely to end up productive for the person individually.
And, yes, I realize the limitations of this strategy. If MLK had asked for my advice first, I’d have totally have told him he was crazy and stay safe. But I really doubt that affirmative action policies are such a policy worth fighting. If they are indeed a bad idea, it’s probably only the 237th worst idea we implement as public policy. Why obsess over it as an individual?Report
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “well behaved women seldom make history” comes to mind.
Why obsess over it as an individual?
There’s that quote that the public gets the democracy it deserves. I’m probably pretty positive on this stuff at the moment having watched the testimony of Justices Kennedy and Breyer before Congress (ostensibly on next fiscal year’s funding for the Court), and their concluding point about the need for civic engagement and the Ephebic Oath, with particular emphasis on the duty to leave Athens better for future generations. Is there room for civic duty with a starting premise as constricting as “You can’t do anything about it.”?
And though this, affirmative action, isn’t my hobby horse, I can see that different people in the subset of interested-in-politics, have different top priorities and cluster around them. So libertarians might go on-and-on about coercion reduction, and identify all sorts of sectors and policies that might make someone coming at it from a different perspective shrug their shoulders. Or feminists might identify all kinds of distinctions, gender roles, and inequities that even people who might be sympathetic won’t necessarily want to put at the top of their priority list. I’d say that kind of diversity/dynamism probably helps the political culture work its way through some of these conflicts. To me, a don’t rock the boat political culture seems near-static, and in rather unhealthy ways for society.Report
Is this true for all Asian applicants? Like Indian is equivalent to Pakistani is equivalent to Hmong is equivalent to Japanese?Report
Yes, this is universal to all who have to check the Asian box. If you’re biracial or otherwise multi-racial, of course, you should select the box of the race that benefits you most for the purpose.Report
What exactly do you mean by that, Jaybird? The specific study that those numbers are from isn’t cited, but I assume it’s an average based on some sample population–so those exact numbers don’t apply to most students by definition.
But as far as “are all Asians treated the same way by admissions offices?” I think the answer pretty much depends on the specifics of the admission procedure.
Take for example, that student who wanted to get into a UC and study engineering. Per proposition 209, the UC system can’t consider race as a factor in admissions–so the barrier faced by students like the one in the article is related to race-blind diversity promoting policies.
So, for example, the UC system guarantees admission at one of their campuses to students in the top 5% of their class. This example student, who presumably goes to one of Arcadia’s excellent public schools, might be kicked out of that 5% based on that one A- she got in AP European History. On the other hand, the Iu Mien refugees who went to my poor, rural high school could have easily been in the top 5% of by getting semi-decent grades in honors classes. But that level of success is harder to achieve when you’re born in a refugee camp than it is when you’re born to a pair of rich doctors who live in San Gabriel Valley.Report
When I went to college back when Noah was still building that boat of his, “Asian” pretty much meant “East Asian”. The Indian kids integrated with the white kids. The East Asian kids, however, sat in the same group of tables in the corner of the cafeteria.Report
The East Asian girls didn’t sit with their white boyfriends?Report
@mike-schilling
That only happens in Singaporean night clubsReport
This conversation just made me realize something: I’m pretty sure all of my Asian classmates were female.Report
My son went to a well-known private high school in San Francisco that had recently switched from boys-only to co-ed. At back-to-school night, the principal explained that, since the school was by design 50% boys and 50% girls., they had had to make the entrance exam cutoff for boys lower than it was for girls. So (and he used these exact words) every boy there was the beneficiary of affirmative action.Report
The affirmative action for boys issue is an interesting one.Report