The researchers' results seem to be in agreement with what happened at Berkeley after UC was forced to drop affirmative action - the main effect was a drop in the numbers of black and hispanic students, a big increase in the number of Asians and little effect on the white population.
Why wouldn't white and Asian-American applicants benefit equally if admission were purely by merit? It sounds suspiciously like the quota system imposed on Jews early in the 20th century. Previous research by these authors showed that being Asian was statistically equivalent to a penalty of 50 points on SAT score. (Probably due to preference awarded to "legacies", who are predominantly white.)
Disregarding race in college admissions would cause sharp drops in the number of black and Hispanic students at elite institutions, according to a new study by two researchers at Princeton University. The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students.
If affirmative action were eliminated, the acceptance rates for black applicants would fall to 12.2 percent from 33.7 percent, while the acceptance rates for Hispanic applicants would drop to 12.9 percent from 26.8 percent, according to the study. Asian-American students would fill nearly 80 percent of the spaces not taken by black and Hispanic students, the researchers found, while the acceptance rate for white students would increase by less than 1 percent.
The researchers who conducted the study -- Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology, and Chang Y. Chung, a statistical programmer at Princeton's Office of Population Research -- looked at the race, sex, SAT scores, and legacy status, among other characteristics, of more than 124,000 applicants to elite colleges.
14 comments:
Has there been any study on what the effect of removing legacies would do?
I suspect one of the reasons Asians would benefit the most from removal of preferences is that they are underrepresented among two of the preference categories at elite schools: legacies and athletes. The legacy category benefits white applicants, and the athlete category probably benefits whites and blacks more than Asians.
From the paper (via www.gnxp.com):
African-American applicants receive the equivalent of 230 extra SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), and being Hispanic is worth an additional 185 SAT points. Other things equal, recruited athletes gain an admission bonus worth 200 points, while the preference for legacy candidates is worth 160 points. Asian-American applicants face a loss equivalent to 50 SAT points.
Well, legacies do serve an important purpose at elite universities: namely, filling out the bottom of the bell curve. If you didn't have legacies at Harvard, you'd always have some high school valedictorian graduating the bottom of their class, and that can't be good for their self esteem.
High school valedictorians flunking out? That's what happens at Caltech :-)
Actually, the justification for legacy admits is to grow the endowment. I can't really criticize the need for that, in today's environment.
You are right that lumping all Asian ethnicities together is very crude. The spread in, e.g., SAT scores for this artificial Asian category is, I think, larger than for the other categories - there is evidence of a bimodal distribution with both under- and over-performing components.
Steve's post on inhomogeneity of 'asian' populations in US is interesting - and there's no good reason that hunter-gatherer- small-farmers like the Hmong would have been rewarded historically for the same skills as benefited people in civil-service examination based China.
Thinking about removing preferences, though, is unnerving - whether you buy heritability or cultural explanations, every school district lugubriates about 'the gap' in test scores and makes a press release about its plan to close it every year, and the gap keeps appearing again next year. Whatever you think the origin of the gap is, it seems to be very durable after people start kindergarten.
Edison said invention is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration - I think Edison was a very smart man, and had no control whatsoever of how smart he was. He also worked very hard, had control over that, and so that was what he noticed, that's why he said that. Folks who work really hard can 'punch above their weight' consistently. But I think you don't get an Edison out of someone who doesn't have a certain amount of horsepower to start with. So what do you do? Maybe you decide you have to have a certain fraction of your (doctors, police sergeants, teachers) look like the populations they serve, and put your thumb on the scale for admissions, etc., but you try not to do that for, say, water-treatment-plant engineers or physicists.
I really don't like group rights ideas, but I think you just don't have that many people - for whatever reason, early childhood education faulty or genetics or what - who can compete their way in to some of the positions you may want them in, if the playing field is kept level.
Here are some numbers for the back of your envelope: USA population 296 million. .82 white, .04 Asian, .01 Jewish, .13 black. let's say a seventieth of the population is avail to start a career, or get admitted to school, every year. that would be 3.5 million white, 170,000 Asian, 43,000 Jewish, 550,000 black. Now, the per cent of a normally distributed set of observations which exceeds standard deviations is: +1, 16%. +1.3, 11%, +1.6, 5%, +2, 2+, +2.3, 1%. Let's say a law school wants to admit only students with IQs over 120: what is its potential target population by group? Whites, normally distributed around 100, 120 is +1.3, 11% of 3.5 million is 380000. Asians, normally distributed around 105, 120 is +1, 16% of 170000 is 28000. Jewish, 7000. Blacks, normally distributed around 85, 120 is + 2.3, 1% of 550,000 is 5500. So, barring some kind of thumb on the scale, that's your level-playing-field result. And it doesn't add up to social peace.
I'd be a lot happier to put a thumb on the scale for people whose parents are uneducated or poor (that will do nice things for some Hmong and some whites from the hollows of Appalachia as well as blacks from urban ghettoes) than to make race the major criterion and send benefits heavily to favored-minority kids whose parents were themselves relatively fortunate, college- educated even though minority.
Steve's post on inhomogeneity of 'asian' populations in US is interesting - and there's no good reason that hunter-gatherer- small-farmers like the Hmong would have been rewarded historically for the same skills as benefited people in civil-service examination based China.
Thinking about removing preferences, though, is unnerving - whether you buy heritability or cultural explanations, every school district lugubriates about 'the gap' in test scores and makes a press release about its plan to close it every year, and the gap keeps appearing again next year. Whatever you think the origin of the gap is, it seems to be very durable after people start kindergarten.
Edison said invention is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration - I think Edison was a very smart man, and had no control whatsoever of how smart he was. He also worked very hard, had control over that, and so that was what he noticed, that's why he said that. Folks who work really hard can 'punch above their weight' consistently. But I think you don't get an Edison out of someone who doesn't have a certain amount of horsepower to start with. So what do you do? Maybe you decide you have to have a certain fraction of your (doctors, police sergeants, teachers) look like the populations they serve, and put your thumb on the scale for admissions, etc., but you try not to do that for, say, water-treatment-plant engineers or physicists.
I really don't like group rights ideas, but I think you just don't have that many people - for whatever reason, early childhood education faulty or genetics or what - who can compete their way in to some of the positions you may want them in, if the playing field is kept level.
Here are some numbers for the back of your envelope: USA population 296 million. .82 white, .04 Asian, .01 Jewish, .13 black. let's say a seventieth of the population is avail to start a career, or get admitted to school, every year. that would be 3.5 million white, 170,000 Asian, 43,000 Jewish, 550,000 black. Now, the per cent of a normally distributed set of observations which exceeds standard deviations is: +1, 16%. +1.3, 11%, +1.6, 5%, +2, 2+, +2.3, 1%. Let's say a law school wants to admit only students with IQs over 120: what is its potential target population by group? Whites, normally distributed around 100, 120 is +1.3, 11% of 3.5 million is 380000. Asians, normally distributed around 105, 120 is +1, 16% of 170000 is 28000. Jewish, 7000. Blacks, normally distributed around 85, 120 is + 2.3, 1% of 550,000 is 5500. So, barring some kind of thumb on the scale, that's your level-playing-field result. And it doesn't add up to social peace.
I'd be a lot happier to put a thumb on the scale for people whose parents are uneducated or poor (that will do nice things for some Hmong and some whites from the hollows of Appalachia as well as blacks from urban ghettoes) than to make race the major criterion and send benefits heavily to favored-minority kids whose parents were themselves relatively fortunate, college- educated even though minority.
Dave S.,
Nice analysis. Now run it for 130, which is typical for PhDs in physics, math or CS (actually, for elite programs, perhaps 140-150+ is the threshold).
Larry Summers got into a lot of trouble by thinking out loud about this re: male vs female variances in apititude distribution.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/02/summers-lynching.html
BTW, I would be all for affirmitive action based on SES (Social-Economic Status), but that isn't what is happening now...
If I am not being overtly stereotypical I think the primary reason that "Asian-Americans" (meaning mostly of East Asian descent) do so well in academics (primarily math and science) is due to the following broad reasons:
1. they study like hell!... as a group much more so than other communities (except perhaps Jews); it's the only way they can gain socio-economically as a minority community (who, perhaps, do not feel fully integrated (as-yet) within the predominantly Eurocentric host country [USA]);
2. they [Asian-American students] generally feel external pressures (e.g. family and societal) to succeed in 'career-oriented' activities;
3. most Asian-Americans I have encountered are rather 'studious' and 'hard-working' but rarely profoundly thoughtful in humanistic terms - i.e. their interests go into fields like engineering, science, medicine, etc. but rarely into philosophy, art history, literature, etc. [again, I do not mean to seem disrespectful, but this is due to years of actual encounters]
Perhaps if more (European-)Americans had more person-to-person interaction with Asian-Americans they would conclude that there isn't anything profoundly magical about this community: it's just that they are under more-than-average pressure to succeed.
As for blacks, they face other (and possibly even greater) challenges; for them a sense of pervasive alienation tends to counter their desire to work hard in a social context where they were once treated as nothing more than bonded slave-laborers...
Hispanics just want to have it their way no-matter the consequence; most of them identify themselves as 'white' Americans, and hence they don't feel such external pressures to succeed to 'prove themselves'.
To end, I have met many 'white' Americans who are exceptionally talented (in math and science), and many 'Asian-Americans' who are exceptionally un-talented (in English literature). So the debate may require some rethink.
Kudos to Anonymous: It would be very interesting to see what effect removing legacies would have on higher education, especially at elite schools.
Being the product of an Asian American parent and a European American parent perhaps gives me more of an "inside" look at this whole race preference issue. I have cousins who are half Arab African American and half European American. They don't identify as African American because they choose to emphasize the Arab aspect of their ethnic/cultural identity. Arabs enslaved Africans and were the oppressor, not the oppressed. However, these relatives do not let that stop them from taking advantage of their African ethnicity to obtain massive scholarships from top universities. Plus, their parents are both college educated and one parent even has a Ph.D. One of these kids got into an Ivy League institution with a 1200 SAT. If this kid had been of Asian ancestry instead, the admissions committee would probably have just laughed and tossed the application in the reject pile. The point of all of this is that in some cases the slots reserved for those poor downtrodden African Americans are going to highly privileged students who aren't even really Black and couldn't get in otherwise. We need to use a different approach.
This is what happens when whites rules the world....it all goes down...
yes, and i have met many whites who suck at english. stop with the stereotype that asians are only smart because they work hard and study like crazy (24/7). asians are smart because of a variety of reasons.
oh yeah. and think about it, if other races work just as hard as asians, then would they be equal to, greater than, or below that of asians? and i know many asians who are talented in art, and literature, and history, but especially art and literature. but seems like some people don't like there works b/c of racist feelings
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