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Race as a consideration in College Admissions

Bethboilerfan

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Sep 14, 2012
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Honest question - what is your opinion on "race" as a consideration in college admissions? Couple of facts: 1. Asian Americans are very prominent members and leaders of Students for Fair Admissions. [SFFA filed suit against Harvard that is currently being heard in the Supreme Court]. as they believe that more Asians Americans will be admitted to elite universities. [This may not be true as Asians are already admitted at a rate much higher than percentage of population. For example, Asians are about 6% of the population in U.S.A. but 44% of the college population of University of California at Berkeley] 2. If admitted on credentials only, SFFA believes that many more Asians would be admitted and many fewer of other races (white, black, et al) 3. Purdue’s main campus enrolls about 8% of Asian applicants and about 3% of black Americans.
I know that affirmative action has helped women and minorities so that makes me skeptical of overturning Grutter v Bolingbrook and University of California v Bakke.
 
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Honest question - what is your opinion on "race" as a consideration in college admissions? Couple of facts: 1. Asian Americans are very prominent members and leaders of Students for Fair Admissions. [SFFA filed suit against Harvard that is currently being heard in the Supreme Court]. as they believe that more Asians Americans will be admitted to elite universities. [This may not be true as Asians are already admitted at a rate much higher than percentage of population. For example, Asians are about 6% of the population in U.S.A. but 44% of the college population of University of California at Berkeley] 2. If admitted on credentials only, SFFA believes that many more Asians would be admitted and many fewer of other races (white, black, et al) 3. Purdue’s main campus enrolls about 8% of Asian applicants and about 3% of black Americans.
I know that affirmative action has helped women and minorities so that makes me skeptical of overturning Grutter v Bolingbrook and University of California v Bakke.
In everything under the sun, having the expectations of an equal outcome is a fairy tale. You could get me the best golf clubs and lessons and I wouldn’t be Tiger Woods. You could get me the best basketball shoes and I wouldn’t be Jordan. Expecting things as a ratio of any demographic parsing on outcome has no sound basis in anything other than a political push. It is garbage as an end all , but “potentially” valuable if any proven reasons would be practiced. Asians should be a higher rate than their population because the high school academics show they belong at a higher rate. Also, those ratios might include students from other countries and not just here in the USA.

Investigate the “harder” majors in college and see the ratios there. Using a percentage of the population and suggesting that there is bias because the outcomes don’t match the percentages is a product of reality rather than bias. Few situations are as equal as siblings in a family sharing some DNA and environment and yet we know that children are different in the same families quite often.
 
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Interesting article. Thanks for posting this article.
Many years ago when I was involved in educational topics UCLA was considering dropping the SAT/ACT because they were not getting in enough minorities. There is NOT enough time to "properly" discuss that or many educational topic areas with the depth that is needed.
You have no idea the answers I've provided to people over the years...sometimes in a single email and quite frankly I think that area is very important, very interesting, but requires more energy that I'm willing to spend because very few people actually research much on educational topics. 30 years ago I would have written a lot more than I will today... ;)
 
What does skin color have to do with intelligence and academic ability?
If skin color is something other than white, then it has nothing to do with intelligence and academic ability. Typically, you see hispanic and black scores much lower than Asian and and so the range of scores are much different for skins of color. There are cultural difference between those three brown skins in that Asians many times value education here in the states...moreso than many whites as well.

These difference are found in many scores over the last several decades and so the question is whether someone believes that the aptitudes are the reason for the gaps...or whether it has more to do with cultural approaches to education...but the differences are real and so which one of the two reasons are accurate...not on the whole, but on the average...

Thomas Sowell has some interesting insight on education of blacks in general years ago and how well they used to do.
 
If skin color is something other than white, then it has nothing to do with intelligence and academic ability. Typically, you see hispanic and black scores much lower than Asian and and so the range of scores are much different for skins of color. There are cultural difference between those three brown skins in that Asians many times value education here in the states...moreso than many whites as well.

These difference are found in many scores over the last several decades and so the question is whether someone believes that the aptitudes are the reason for the gaps...or whether it has more to do with cultural approaches to education...but the differences are real and so which one of the two reasons are accurate...not on the whole, but on the average...

Thomas Sowell has some interesting insight on education of blacks in general years ago and how well they used to do.
I would agree. Additionally, you'll see Indian-Americans as having very high academic achievement. You'll also see that black immigrants from Africa often do well academically.
 
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I would agree. Additionally, you'll see Indian-Americans as having very high academic achievement. You'll also see that black immigrants from Africa often do well academically.
Yes I personally believe that it is a cultural thing on the average. I tend to want to believe that aptitude is somewhat normalized across all humans. However, I also think there is a generic factor as well at play that "may distort the normal curve a smidgen"...in that if two academically "bright" people have a child that the child most generally has an aptitude higher than average and vice versa. This is an area where variables of importance is confounded inside other variables that can't be seperated as of today...such as work ethic and such that are correlated to wealth, but as I said...I'm not going to go into much detail in typing. ;)

Thomas Sowell has discussed the blacks fleeing from the south to the north and taking the culture with them...I believe in this book a bit more coverage.
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Diane Ravitch covered "IQ" testing when it began in this "tome of intellectual heft" (words by a cyber friend Richard Munro) in this book.

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I was able to locate some of her words on IQ testing without going into the above book and retyping her thoughts-

I have been writing about standardized tests for more than 20 years. My 2000 book, “Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform,” included a history of I.Q. testing, which evolved into the standardized tests used in schools and into the Scholastic Aptitude Test, known now simply as the SAT. The psychologists who designed these tests in the early 20th century believed, incorrectly, that you inherited “intelligence” from your family and nothing you might do would change it. The chief virtue of these tests was that they were “standardized,” meaning that everyone took the same ones. The I.Q. test was applied to the screening of recruits for World War I, used to separate the men of high intellect — officer material — and from those of low intellect, who were sent to the front lines.
When the psychologists reviewed the test results, they concluded that white males of northern European origin had the highest I.Q., while non-English-speaking people and Black people had the lowest I.Q. They neglected the fact that northern Black people had higher I.Q. scores than Appalachian White people on the Army’s mental tests. Based on these tests, the psychologists believed, incorrectly, that race and I.Q. were bound together.

 
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