[purephase]

You keep throwing "plausible deniability" around, thinking that is what is happening here.

You're assuming that the decision is someone selecting a candidate solely based on their race, when it is far far more nuanced than that. For Ivy's, the pool of candidates is so unbelievably large to available spots, that they look at hundreds of different data points when evaluating candidates, and they weight certain ones higher/lower depending on the criteria set by the faculty and institutional goals.

If the goal of the institution is to have a student body that is more representative of the overall population, this isn't "plausible deniability" it is the institution attempting to prepare their students for the real world.

Prior to affirmative action (and it's not perfect by any means) these institutions were overrun with white men, and our society has still not course corrected from the overwhelming benefit that afforded that specific class of people.

I fail to see how taking two students, one from an afluent area who happens to be white, and one from a less affluent area, with fewer advantages, but the latter scored at or near the former candidate and has nearly the same extra-curriculars, volunteer experience etc. is such a bad thing. Your "plausible deniability" is really just a lazy way of saying that you would prefer purely "objective" bias when it comes to evaluating students, but the world is not purely objective, and I think we're better served with a bit more subjective consideration when we're allocating scarce resources that have traditionally benefitted (significantly) one class/race over another.

[belorn]

In an other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33446363) we see how simply changing race on the application from Asian to Black/Hispanic increases a person chances of getting from 4-8% to 60+%. If there is hundreds of different minor data points, but then a single major data point called race that dominate all the other minor data point, then it doesn't matter that there is hundreds of minor data points.

How strong a bias is is relevant in case of discrimination. If race changes a person chances by over 12 times then that is a very major bias.

[cuteboy19]

Let us say for a moment that Misogyny University wanted to discriminate on the basis of sex. However, it quickly found out that openly doing so is illegal. But they still hated women and wanted none of them.

So, instead of saying that women automatically get rejected, they say that there are many factors that they consider and that sex is only one of them. However, of course when you look at the statistics the admission rate for women is very very low compared to men. But the university insists "one of many factors!"

Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University? Clearly, "one of many factors" can't absolve them of sexism. But presumably they think they can get away with it so long as the decision is opaque enough.

I think you are giving Harvard the benefit of the doubt. But I don't think they deserve it. If you look at their history, they have used the exact same tactics. In fact they invented holistic admission for the sole reason of discriminating against Jews.

[csa]

> Now what exactly is the difference between what Harvard is doing and Misogyny University?

Harvard admitted 27% or so Asians in this years class.

They aren’t turning away any “strong admit” Asian applicants.

The real decisions among the marginal candidates are who gets accepted and who gets waitlisted (iirc, that number is over 1000 at Harvard).

Underrepresented groups get a slight edge in this area. Race is one possible criterion for underrepresentation, so is geography, so is economic status, so is expressed major, etc.

Comparing the current relatively low level of consideration given to race to the explicitly exclusionary policy 100 years ago is quite a stretch, imho.

[cuteboy19]

https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/

There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!

It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA. We should always consider admission rates for a particular student.

And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from? This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?

[csa]

Many good points.

> There is a huge difference between the Admission rates for Asians Vs African Americans. In fact the admission rate for Asians is lower than Whites!

You seem to assume that the applicant pool is equally strong across races, especially with reference to the parts of the application outside of test scores and grades. I humbly suggest that this is not true.

> It does not matter that the current percentage is 27% when Harvard itself admitted that it would be 40% if not for AA.

I would like to see that exact quote. Iirc, that was the stat if they went by grades and test scores, which they never have and most likely never will.

> And finally I do not understand where this degree of faith in Harvard is coming from?

I have worked in an advisory capacity at several elite schools on the admissions process.

I’ve seen how the sausage is made. Most people get it incredibly wrong.

> This is the institution that systematically gave Asian significantly lower "personality scores" without even meeting them. Even while their own alumni rated Asians similar to their peers. Is this not an explicitly exclusionary policy?

Maybe.

The real question is if they also rated non-Asian people with similar profiles low on the personality score.

Let me tell you, there are an absurd number of applicants to elite schools that are basically doppelgängers. Strong grades, strong SAT scores, similar essays to thousands of other applicants, no outstanding hook, “standard strong” recommendations, etc. There is nothing that makes these applicants stand out to the reviewer. They may be super pleasant to be around and highly articulate, but so what? So are truckloads of other applicants.

I haven’t seen the comparable numbers for Asians versus other races, but there are no shortage of boring white applicants and boring applicants from every race that would warrant a lower personality score (however that is described).

Additionally, there are a number of reasons that one group or race might have lower average personality scores than another group that don’t involve racism. As a simple made up example, the ratio of “hail Mary” applications to strong applications might impact this. Note that I have no idea what race/group sends a higher percentage of Hail Mary apps than another, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few.

I can tell you one group that definitely exists. Kids of upper middle class parents in the northeast corridor who are pushing their kids to an elite school when their kid absolutely doesn’t care. The vast majority of these applicants probably have low personality ratings because they aren’t really trying that hard to stand out. Is that exclusionary? I dunno… seems reasonable to me.