[BeetleB]

>You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.

Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men. When they analysed the numbers, they found that it was because women generally applied to very departments with low admission rates, and men generally applied to departments with high admission rates.

There is a bit of self selection in the outcome here.

[denzil_correa]

> Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men.

That's the Simpson's Paradox [0]. In Simpson's Paradox, you observe a trend in sub-groups but this trend disappears when these sub-groups are combined. I'm not sure of how this is the same. Could you explain how this is the same?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...

[BeetleB]

I intentionally did not mention Simpson's Paradox as it would be distracting. The fact that the Berkeley case is a good example of the paradox is mostly a cool artifact. My point would be as valid if in every department the admission rate was roughly equal. In terms of the actual lawsuit, the issue was that there was no bias - or rather, the bias was in the preferences of women/men, not in the admissions process. Men opted for departments where admission was easier.

I'm not claiming Simpson's Paradox here. I'm commenting on the observations IvyAdmissions made (which was also my observation when I was in school). If what he says is true, the bias doesn't appear to be entirely from the admissions committee, but from the fact that Asian Americans are targeting a few professions (e.g. medical school) in a much higher proportion than other races.

Although I did not go to an Ivy league, I did go to a top school, and I saw pretty much the same thing. I hung out a lot with the Asian students, of which there were many. The Asian undergrads with top grades (South or East) were very reliably predictable: They either aimed for medical school, an MBA, or law school. The motives were all similar: These were high paying jobs. Almost none of them showed any passion for any of these fields. None of them wanted to become a lawyer to fight for worthy causes - they all wanted to go work at a law firm to get high pay. The pressure from their parents to go into one of these was strong - so much so that some of them did exhibit a passion for something, but they abandoned that passion and went into one of these career paths for grad school due to parental pressure. There were exceptions, but they stood out.

If this is reflective of the reality, it's understandable why Harvard is not admitting many of them.

This was quite a few years ago, and anecdotally I do see differences in the latest batch of Asian students - they are much less prone to the pressures of "must go be a high paying doctor/lawyer/businessperson". I do see a lot more creativity, variety and entrepreneurship, so things probably have changed.

Of course, all the usual caveats of relying on anecdotes apply here.