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by ZeroGravitas 1776 days ago
I didnt downvote, but these stats seem to pop up a lot and often are being used to illustrate that "white people are discriminated against". The key flaw if thats the intention is that students are usually of a certain age, and Americans are more diverse than they used to be since the laws against marrying across races and immigrating when non-white got repealed.

Probably also likely a second generation immigrant effect and there's a lot if people in Asia.

1 comments

Looking at only the college age 20-24 year age group [1], the numbers change as follows:

           Ivy League  US     Ratio
  Jewish*  17.2%        2.1%  8.21
  Asian    19.6%        7.1%  2.75
  White    33.1%       51.6%  0.64
  Hispanic 11.4%       19.4%  0.59
  Black**   7.8%       16.5%  0.47
The relative placement of the bottom 3 groups changes, but their individual representation ratios remain approximately the same. Any conclusions about discrimination that you could draw from the first set of numbers, you can draw from this one - the differences are negligible.

As for there being many people in Asia, that is irrelevant - I excluded international students when calculating Ivy League demographics, so only the US population is relevant.

*I assumed the same age structure for non-Jewish and Jewish whites.

**The census data table gives the total Black population as 47 million for 2017, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... gives only 40 million, despite citing census.gov as its source. I don't know where the disparity comes from, and that's the only place I've seen such a high estimate of the US Black population.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2010-... 2019 estimate