[humanrebar]

> If you go to those five schools, the percentage of minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. Let's say it's 3% and 10%.

I am also miffed at that kind of elitism and parochialism.

That being said, both of those numbers are very low for general enrollment at top universities. MIT is a little over half male and about a third white. Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?), 3% and 10% are extremely lowball estimates. Or are we talking only about students with software-related majors? Does anyone have stats that describe the demographic breakdown for computer science majors?

Source: http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/diversity.html

[tzs]

Asians are essentially the 21st century's Jews as far as universities go. The universities want some, because they bring up the academic stats, but they don't want too many of them so they tweak their admissions processes to not let too many in. They just can't be as honest about it as they could with Jews in, say, the 1930s when they actually had explicit public quotas.

From 1990 to the present, the number of Asian college students nearly doubled, but if you look at most of the top universities, Asian percentages have been pretty much flat, with the exception of MIT and Caltech. At Caltech, Asians are now the biggest group, at 47%. Whites are only 33%. Next comes Hispanic/Latino at 11%, multi-race (not Hispanic/Latino) at 7%, and Black at 2%. MIT incoming class of 2018 is around 30% Asian (50% White, 14% Hispanic/Latino, 11% Black) [1]. (45% women at MIT, 40% at Caltech).

Caltech's distribution is probably closest to an accurate representation of the demographics of top STEM students coming out of high school, because Caltech does not take into account race or gender when making admission decisions. There's still some distortion, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, Caltech does actively seek out strong minority and female STEM students and try hard to persuade them to apply, and they have run projects that have provided summer science programs for high school students in minority districts to give them a boost. Once someone applies, however, race and gender are not considered for the admission decision. In 2010, according to numbers I saw, this resulted in 106 Black applicants (out of 4859 total applicants). 19 were accepted (out of 610 total acceptances). Only 6 of those decided to attend.

Second, the Asian numbers at Caltech are probably boosted a bit by the de facto Asian quotas at the Ivy League schools, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other top schools (other than MIT). There are probably several Asians at Caltech who would have picked one of those other schools if they hadn't been shut out because of their race. MIT might get a boost from this factor, too.

There's probably also a bit of an Asian boost at Caltech because of location. There is a noticeable skew in Caltech's student body toward people who come from the West side of the country, which is also where Asians are more concentrated.

[1] http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile

[potatolicious]

> "Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?)"

We are, and we have our own problems with race and tech (see: representation of Asians overall vs. representation of Asians in leadership positions), but the Asian-American experience is fundamentally different from the Black- or Hispanic-American experience.

We are also frequently used as bludgeons against other races. As if the disparity between Asian enrollment in schools and Black enrollment comes simply down to working hard enough. It's important to note that some of this "Asians as bludgeons against other races" comes from Asian individuals.

Asians in America do not fit into a simplistic race narrative. We are not "as good as" whites, but neither do we have many of the same problems that face Blacks and Hispanics.

There was an article I read about the nature of being Asian in tech, and one quote stuck out to me: "we have a problem, and we are a problem, at the same time".

The presence of Asians should not be mistaken as the lack of a race and diversity problem.

[theorique]

We are not "as good as" whites

Well, in some key ways (at least for tech) Asians are better - e.g. a +0.5 SD average IQ boost really helps for the cognitive and analytical challenges that are commonly encountered in the tech/programming worlds.

[santaclaus]

> Even if you don't count Asians (I guess they're not minorities?)

Not according to the NSF, strangely enough -- people of Asian decent are not classified as an underrepresented group within STEM fields. Pick another US .gov agency and it might be different.

[seanflyon]

It's worth noting that "minority" and "underrepresented group" mean different things. I think you are right to talk about underrepresented groups instead of minorities because under-representation is at the heart of the issue.