See earlier posts on how affirmative action hurts Asian-Americans (Asians have to score 50 points higher, on average, on the SAT than whites to gain admission to the same elite universities), and how the silicon valley counterpart to this NYC magnet school story is told in a less politically correct way by the WSJ.
Via GNXP:
The New York Times headline is: Minority Students Decline in Top New York Schools. The graphic? Here:
Is something off with this graphic in relation to the headline, or what? Ah, click the link in the story, and you see this:
6 comments:
I think the guy preparing the article for the web didn't have space, so just cropped it. The printed newspaper article only showed the full graph.
You may be right -- I only saw the Web version.
But think about the focus of the article. A lot of those Asian kids are children of recent immigrants. Undoubtedly, there are many whose parents work in restaurants or other modest occupations, and who don't speak English at home. Isn't it amazing that they're getting into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science?
Once you add other "soft" factors into the admissions process you'll just get subtle discrimination against Asians the way you do at the Ivies today and at UC back in the 80's. Asian kids will need to outperform everybody else just to get a spot.
It's worth remembering that the modern Ivy-league type admissions policies first arose in the 1920's as a means of keeping those genteel institutions from becoming overly jewish.
One of the things I admired about Caltech admissions is that they didn't care whether I was on the soccer team or ran for student body president or travelled to Europe my junior year. Even MIT seemed overly interested in that BS.
Of course, the charts you present clearly show that Asian-Americans are *not* a minority group, at least at New York's elite high schools in the most recent school year.... It's white students who are in the minority, and their numbers are declining too, as the graphic shows. :-)
I'm curious as to your source for your statement in the comments about the socioeconomic status of the Asians in the elite NY public schools. Are there really a lot of children of poor recent immigrants among these students? I'm sure there are some, but I would be surprised if the children of more well-off and second-or-higher-generation immigrants were not overrepresented.
Alex,
I don't know specifically about NYC schools. I have friends who went to Lowell in SF (also a magnet school, requiring admission by exam, and where Asian parents had to sue to overturn a quota system in favor of a rigorous testing system), and yes there were a lot of first generation Asians there of modest means.
Steve
What I don't get in why Asians increasingly vote Democrat, when clearly the policies are stabbing them in the back.
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