Richard Hanania & Rob Henderson: The Rise of Wokeness and the Influence of Civil Rights Law — Manifold #39

 

Richard Hanania, Rob Henderson, and I were scheduled for a June 2023 panel as part of the University of Austin (UATX) Forbidden Courses series. I missed the panel due to travel issues, but we gathered on this podcast to recreate the fun! 

Topics: 

0:00 Introduction 

1:20 The University of Austin and forbidden courses 

17:37 Will woke campus culture change anytime soon? 

29:57 Common people vs elites on affirmative action 

35:42 Why it’s uncomfortable to disagree about affirmative action 

41:22 Fraud and misrepresentation in higher ed 

44:20 The adversity carveout in the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling 

50:10 Standardized testing and elite university admissions 

1:06:18 Divergent views among racial and ethnic groups on affirmative action; radicalized Asian American males 

1:10:00 Differences between East and South Asians in the West 

1:23:03 Class-based preferences and standardized tests 

1:31:57 Rob Henderson’s next move 

Audio version with transcript.

LINKS 

Richard Hanania’s new book: 

The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics 

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-origins-of-woke-richard-hanania?variant=41004650528802 

Richard Hanania’s newsletter: 

https://www.richardhanania.com/ 

The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology: 

https://www.cspicenter.com/ 

Rob Henderson’s newsletter: https://www.robkhenderson.com/ 

Rob Henderson’s new book: 

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Troubled/Rob-Henderson/9781982168537 

UATX: https://www.uaustin.org/forbidden-courses

Richard Sander (UCLA Law) on the Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling — Manifold #38

 

Richard Sander is Jesse Dukeminier Professor at UCLA Law School. AB Harvard, JD, PhD (Economics) Northwestern. 

Steve and Richard discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling in Students For Fair Admissions vs Harvard and UNC. 

Sander has studied the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. He coined the term "Mismatch" to describe negative consequences resulting from large admissions preferences. 

0:00 Introduction 

1:09 Richard Sander’s initial reaction to the Supreme Court ruling 

4:03 How data influenced the court’s decision 

7:58 Overview of the court’s ruling 

11:27 Carve outs in the court’s ruling 

16:59 The litigation landscape 

21:25 Workarounds to race-blind admissions and the UC system 

32:22 Remedies: What will happen with Harvard and UNC now? 

38:02 The landscape of college admissions 

44:47 Effects of the Supreme Court ruling beyond higher education 

LINKS 

SCOTUS decision on Affirmative Action:

 

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/supreme-court-decision-on-race-based-admissions/0a725aaabb459074/full.pdf 

Richard Sander on SCOTUS Oral Arguments: Affirmative Action and Discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard and UNC, Manifold #23

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/richard-sander-on-scotus-oral-arguments-affirmative-action-and-discrimination-against-asian-americans-at-harvard-and-unc 

Richard Sander: Affirmative Action, Mismatch Theory, and Academic Freedom, Manifold #6 

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/richard-sander-affirmative-action-mismatch-theory-academic-freedom-6

Anna Krylov: The Politicization of Science in Academia — Manifold #25

 

Anna I. Krylov (Russian: Анна Игоревна Крылова) is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC), working in the field of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. Krylov is an outspoken advocate of freedom of speech and academic freedom. She is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a member of its academic leadership committee. 

Her paper, The Peril of Politicizing Science, launched a national conversation among scientists and the general public on the growing influence of political ideology in STEM. It has received over 80,000 views and, according to Altmetric, was the all-time highest-ranked article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. 

Steve and Anna discuss: 

0:00 Anna Krylov’s background, upbringing in USSR 

7:03 Ideological control and censorship for the greater good? 

14:59 How ideology underpins DEI work in academic institutions 

30:40 Captured institutions 

37:05 How much is UC Berkeley spending on DEI, and where the money is going 

41:46 Krylov thinks it can get worse 

52:09 An idea for defeating preference falsification at universities 

Transcript

Resources: 

Professor Krylov academic page: 

https://dornsife.usc.edu/chemistry/krylov/ 

Wiki page: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Krylov 

The Peril of Politicizing Science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2021 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475

Richard Sander on SCOTUS Oral Arguments: Affirmative Action and Discrimination against Asian Americans at Harvard and UNC (Manifold #23)

 

Richard Sander is Jesse Dukeminier Professor at UCLA Law School. AB Harvard, JD, PhD (Economics) Northwestern. 

Sander has studied the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. He coined the term "Mismatch" to describe the negative consequences resulting from large admissions preferences. 

Rick and Steve discuss recent oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard College and Students For Fair Admissions vs the University of North Carolina. 

0:00 Rick’s experience at the Supreme Court 

4:11 Rick’s impression of the oral arguments 

16:24 Analyzing the court’s questions 

29:09 The negative impact on Asian American students 

34:41 Shifting sentiment on affirmative action 

40:04 Three potential outcomes for Harvard and UNC cases 

44:00 Possible reasons for conservatives to be optimistic 

50:31 Final thoughts on experiencing oral arguments in person 

52:12 Mismatch theory 

56:31 The future of higher education 

Resources 

Background on the Harvard case: 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/01/supreme-court-to-take-up-harvard-unc.html 

Transcripts: 

https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2022/20-1199_6537.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2022/21-707_m64n.pdf

Previous interview with Richard (Manifold #6)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pda6efrHgc

See the Crimson for some photos of the parties involved

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/1/scotus-hearing-recap/

SAT score distributions in Michigan

The state of Michigan required all public HS seniors to take the SAT last year (~91k out of ~107k total seniors in the state). This generated an unusually representative score sample. Full report. 

I'm aware of this stuff because my kids attend a public HS here.

To the uninformed, the results are shocking in a number of ways. Look specifically at the top band with scores in the 1400-1600 range. These are kids who have a chance at elite university admission, based on academic merit. For calibration, the University of Michigan median SAT score is above 1400, and at top Ivies it is around 1500.

Some remarks:

1. In the top band there are many more males than females.

2. The Asian kids are hitting the ceiling on this test.

3. There are very few students from under-represented groups who score in the top band. 

4. By looking at the math score distribution (see full report) one can estimate how many students in each group are well-prepared enough to complete a rigorous STEM major -- e.g., pass calculus-based physics.

Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, ...) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.

This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.

This table was produced by German professor Gunnar Heinsohn, who analyzes geopolitics and human capital.

Note, I will censor racist comments.

Harvard Veritas: interview with a recent graduate (anonymous) — Manifold Episode #18

 

The guest for this episode is a recent graduate of Harvard College, now pursuing a STEM PhD at another elite university. We have withheld his identity so that he can speak candidly. 

Steve and his guest discuss: 

0:00 Anonymous student’s academic background and admission to Harvard 

21:37 Intellectual curiosity at Harvard 

29:36 Academic rigor at Harvard and the difference between classes in STEM and the humanities 

46:47 Access to tenured professors at Harvard 

50:08 The benefits of the Harvard connection and wider pool of opportunities 

58:46 Competing with off-scale students 

1:00:48 Ideological climate on campus, wokeism, and controversial public speakers 

1:23:11 Dating at Harvard 

1:26:52 Z-scores and other metrics to add to the admissions process 

Transcript 

Harvard Admissions and Meritocracy: 

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/11/defining-merit.html 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-best-for-harvard.html 

Harvard Affirmative Action Lawsuit: 

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/01/supreme-court-to-take-up-harvard-unc.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/09/former-yale-law-dean-on-harvard-anti.html https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional_21.html

From first link above, The Chosen by J. Karabel.

Typology used for all applicants, at least as late as 1988: 

1. S First-rate scholar in Harvard departmental terms. 

2. D Candidate's primary strength is his academic strength, but it doesn't look strong enough to quality as an S (above). 

3. A All-Amercan‚ healthy, uncomplicated athletic strengths and style, perhaps some extracurricular participation, but not combined with top academic credentials. 

4. W Mr. School‚ significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation plus excellent academic record. 

5. X Cross-country style‚ steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would. Gets results largely through stamina and consistent effort. 

6. P PBH [Phillips Brooks House] style: in activities and personal concerns. 

7. C Creative in music, art, writing. 

8. B Boondocker‚ unsophisticated rural background. 

9. T Taconic, culturally depressed background, low income. 

10. K Krunch‚ main strength is athletic, prospective varsity athlete. [ Sometimes also "H Horse" :-) ] 

11. L Lineage‚ candidate probably couldn't be admitted without the extra plus of being a Harvard son, a faculty son, or a local boy with ties to the university community. 

12. O Other‚ use when none of the above are applicable.

Manifold Podcast #6: Richard Sander on Affirmative Action, Mismatch Theory, and Academic Freedom

 

Richard Sander is Jesse Dukeminier Professor at UCLA Law School. 

AB Harvard, JD, PhD (Economics) Northwestern. 

Sander has studied the structure and effects of law school admissions policies. He coined the term "Mismatch" to describe negative consequences resulting from large admissions preferences. 

Topics discussed: 

1. Early life: educational background and experience with race and politics in America. 

2. Mismatch Theory: basic observation and empirical evidence; Law schools and Colleges; Duke and UC data; data access issues. 

3. CA Prop 209 and Prop 16. 

4. SCOTUS and Harvard / UNC admissions case 

5. Intellectual climate on campus, freedom of speech 

Resources: 

Faculty web page, includes links to publications: 

https://law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/richard-h-sander 

A Conversation on the Nature, Effects, and Future of Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions (with Peter Arcidiacono, Thomas Espenshade, and Stacy Hawkins), University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 683 (2015) 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2625668  

About Prop. 16 and Prop. 209, University of Chicago Law Review Online (2020) 

https://lawreviewblog.uchicago.edu/2020/10/30/aa-sander/ 

Panel at Stanford Intellectual Diversity Conference, April 8, 2016, Stanford Law School 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RZbz-lHwVM 

ManifoldOne podcast (transcript).

Supreme Court To Take Up Harvard, UNC Affirmative Action Case

By coincidence, I was just in contact over the weekend with several of the people involved in the effort to end discrimination against Asian Americans in elite college admissions. 

This has been a long road, but perhaps victory is near. 

Supreme Court To Take Up Harvard, UNC Affirmative Action Case (Harvard Crimson)

... SFFA founder Edward J. Blum, who has spearheaded more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action and voting rights laws around the U.S., heralded the court’s move. “Harvard and the University of North Carolina have racially gerrymandered their freshman classes in order to achieve prescribed racial quotas,” he wrote in a statement. “Every college applicant should be judged as a unique individual, not as some representative of a racial or ethnic group.”

See previous posts: 

Former Yale Law Dean on Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case: The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard... Quotas and a climate of dishonesty 

... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore. 

There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves. 

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation 

Harvard Office of Institutional Research models: explicit racial penalty required to reproduce actual admit rates for Asian-Americans

 

Harvard Discrimination Lawsuit: Judge Burroughs on Racial Balancing and "Unhooked" Applicants 

Harvard Office of Institutional Research on Discrimination Against Asian-American Applicants 

20 years @15 percent: does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans?

The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li 

An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy (Kenny Xu)

Kenny Xu is a brave young man. His new book An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy expertly documents a number of unpleasant facts about American society that most major media outlets, education leaders, and social justice advocates have been obfuscating or outright suppressing for decades.

1. Asian Americans (not foreign students from Asia, but individuals of Asian heritage who are US citizens or permanent residents) have been discriminated against in admission to elite institutions of higher education for over 30 years. 

To put it bluntly, Asian Americans must, on average, outperform all other groups in order to have an equal chance of admission to universities like Harvard or Yale. If one were to replace Asian Americans with Jews in the previous sentence, it would describe the situation in the early 20th century. Looking back, we are rightfully ashamed and outraged at the conduct of elite universities during this period. Future Americans, and observers all over the world, will eventually have the same reaction to how Asian Americans are treated today by these same institutions.

2. Asian American success, e.g., as measured using metrics such as income, wealth, or education, is problematic for simplistic narratives that emphasize race and "white supremacy" over a more realistic and multifaceted analysis of American society.

3. Efforts to guarantee equal outcomes, as opposed to equal opportunities, are anti-meritocratic and corrosive to social cohesion, undermine basic notions of fairness, and handicap the United States in scientific and technological competition with other nations.

The Table of Contents, reproduced below, gives an idea of the important topics covered. Xu had an insider's view of the Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard trial, now awaiting appeal to the Supreme Court. He also describes the successful effort by a grass roots coalition of Asian Americans to defeat CA Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the public sector (including college admissions) which were prohibited by Proposition 209 in 1996.

Over the years I have had many conversations on this topic with well-meaning (but often poorly informed) parents of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I cannot help but ask these people

Are you OK with discrimination against your child? What did they do to deserve it? 

Are you going to let virtue-signaling administrators at the university devalue the hard work and hard-won accomplishments of your son or daughter? Are you going to do anything about it?

and I cannot help but think

If you won't do anything about it, then f*ck you. Your kids deserve better parents.

Kenny calls it a Fight for Meritocracy. That's what it is -- a fight. Don't forget that Meritocracy is just a fancy word for fairness. It's a fight for your kid, and all kids, to be treated fairly.

I highly recommend the book. These issues are of special concern to Asian Americans, but should be of interest to anyone who wants to know what is really happening in American education today.

Related posts: discrimination against Asian Americans at elite US universities, on meritocracy, and UC faculty report on the use of SAT in admissions.

University of California to end use of SAT and ACT

University of California Will End Use of SAT and ACT in Admissions (NYT)

This decision by the UC Regents (most of whom are political appointees) is counter to the recommendation of the faculty task force recently assigned to study standardized testing in admissions. It is obvious to anyone who looks at the graphs below that SAT/ACT have significant validity (technical term used in psychometrics) in predicting college performance for all ethnic groups.

See Report of the University of California Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force for more.

... SAT and HSGPA are stronger predictors than family income or race. Within each of the family income or ethnicity categories there is substantial variation in SAT and HSGPA, with corresponding differences in student success. See bottom figure and combined model R^2 in second figure below; R^2 varies very little across family income and ethnic categories. ...

Test Preparation and SAT scores: "...combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points. Similarly, extensive meta-analyses conducted by Betsy Jane Becker in 1990 and by Nan Laird in 1983 found that the typical effect of commercial preparatory courses on the SAT was in the range of 9-25 points on the verbal section, and 15-25 points on the math section."

Report of the University of California Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force

The figures below are from the recently completed Report of the University of California Academic Council Standardized Testing Task Force. Note the large sample sizes.

Some remarks:

1. SAT and High School GPA (HSGPA) are both useful (and somewhat independent) predictors of college success. In terms of variance accounted for, we have the inequality:

SAT + HSGPA  >  SAT  >  HSGPA

There are some small deviations from this pattern, but it seems to hold overall. I believe that GPA has a relatively larger loading on conscientiousness (work ethic) than cognitive ability, with SAT the other way around. By combining the two we get more information than from either alone.

2. SAT and HSGPA are stronger predictors than family income or race. Within each of the family income or ethnicity categories there is substantial variation in SAT and HSGPA, with corresponding differences in student success. See bottom figure and combined model R^2 in second figure below; R^2 varies very little across family income and ethnic categories.

There is not much new here. In graduate admissions the undergraduate GPA and the GRE general + subject tests play a role similar to HSGPA and SAT. See GRE and SAT Validity.

See Correlation and Variance to understand better what the R^2 numbers above mean. R^2 ~ 0.26 means the correlation between predictor and outcome variable (e.g., freshman GPA) is R ~ 0.5 or so.

Test Preparation and SAT scores: "...combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points. Similarly, extensive meta-analyses conducted by Betsy Jane Becker in 1990 and by Nan Laird in 1983 found that the typical effect of commercial preparatory courses on the SAT was in the range of 9-25 points on the verbal section, and 15-25 points on the math section."

Harvard Discrimination Lawsuit: Judge Burroughs on Racial Balancing and "Unhooked" Applicants

As has been widely reported (WSJ):

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs found that Harvard’s practices were “not perfect” and could use improvements, including implicit bias training for admissions officers, but said “the Court will not dismantle a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster, solely because it could do better.”

I anticipate that this case will end up before the Supreme Court.

While I have not read the entire decision (PDF), I was curious to see how two important arguments made by the plaintiffs (Students For Fair Admissions, SFFA) were addressed. You can evaluate Burroughs' logic and use of evidence for yourself. In the excerpts below I first quote from the SFFA filing, and then from the decision.

Issue #1: Racial Balancing:

SFFA: ... Harvard is engaging in racial balancing. Over an extended period, Harvard’s admission and enrollment figures for each racial category have shown almost no change. Each year, Harvard admits and enrolls essentially the same percentage of African Americans, Hispanics, whites, and Asian Americans even though the application rates and qualifications for each racial group have undergone significant changes over time. This is not the coincidental byproduct of an admissions system that treats each applicant as an individual; indeed, the statistical evidence shows that Harvard modulates its racial admissions preference whenever there is an unanticipated change in the yield rate of a particular racial group in the prior year. Harvard’s remarkably stable admissions and enrollment figures over time are the deliberate result of systemwide intentional racial discrimination designed to achieve a predetermined racial balance of its student body.

This is a relevant figure from the Economist. It shows the increase in Asian representation at Caltech (mostly race-neutral admissions), tracking the overall population of college age Asian Americans, versus the suspicious Ivy league convergence at 15-20% of each class.

From page 80 of the decision:

Although Harvard tracks and considers various indicators of diversity in the admissions process, including race, the racial composition of Harvard’s admitted classes has varied in a manner inconsistent with the imposition of a racial quota or racial balancing. See [Oct. 31 Tr. 119:10–121:10; DX711]. As Figures 1 and 2 show, there has been considerable year-to-year variation in the portion of Harvard’s class that identifies as Asian American since at least 1980.   [ italics mine ]

Figure 1 seems merely to show that admittance by race tends to fluctuate by 5-10% from year to year. No attempt at analysis of correlations across years -- i.e., to detect racial balancing.

Figure 2 seems to show that Asian American applicants are a smaller fraction of the class relative to their share of the applicant pool, whereas, e.g., this ratio is reversed for African Americans. Racial balancing would be found only in detailed comparisons of these ratios across several years, adjusting for strength of application, etc.

Rather than giving a serious analysis of racial balancing (is it actually happening?), Burroughs seems to explicitly support the practice in her comments on racial diversity:

p.30 To summarize the use of race in the admissions process, Harvard does not have a quota for students from any racial group, but it tracks how each class is shaping up relative to previous years with an eye towards achieving a level of racial diversity that will provide its students with the richest possible experience. It monitors the racial distribution of admitted students in part to ensure that it is admitting a racially diverse class that will not be overenrolled based on historic matriculation rates which vary by racial group. [ Isn't this just a definition of racial balancing? ]

Quota Bad, Soft-Quota Good! Is this now the law of the land in the United States of America? SCOTUS here we come...


Issue #2: Is discrimination against Asian Americans especially obvious when one considers "unhooked" applicants separately?

SFFA: ... The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

The judge seems to have ignored or rejected the claim that discrimination within the pool of unhooked applicants (95% of the total!) is worth considering on its own. This seems to be an entirely legal (as opposed to statistical) question that may be tested in the appeal. (ALDC = Athletes, Legacies, Deans interest list (donors), and Children of Harvard faculty.)

p.52 Although ALDCs represent only a small portion of applicants and are admitted or rejected through the same admissions process that applies to other applicants, they account for approximately 30% of Harvard’s admitted class. [Oct. 30 Tr. 153:6–154:8, DX706; DD10 at 38, 40]. For reasons discussed more fully infra at Section V.F, the Court agrees with Professor Card that including ALDCs in the statistics and econometric models leads to more probative evidence of the alleged discrimination or lack thereof.

See also Former Yale Law Dean on Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case: The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard... Quotas and a climate of dishonesty and comments therein.

Former Yale Law Dean on Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case: The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard... Quotas and a climate of dishonesty

The excerpt below is from a recent interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Anthony Kronman was Dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004 (Yale JD and PhD in Philosophy). These are elite establishment credentials. Yet the observations he makes rather matter of factly below are not to be found in the national media coverage nor in the public remarks of university administrators.

The focus of the Chronicle interview is Kronman's recent book The Assault on American Excellence, which does not, as far as I know, address Asian American university admissions. In case you are wondering, Kronman is an anti-Trump lifelong democrat.

Chronicle: What are your thoughts about the Harvard anti-Asian discrimination case?

... The facts are just so embarrassing to Harvard that with some modest adjustment in its admissions practices it might be able to absorb a judgment against it and get on with life more or less as usual. The vagueness of the category on which Harvard was relying to make sure that it kept its Asian undergraduates at the level that it wished, the so-called personality score, is such a floppy nothing of an empty basket — that’s not gonna do anymore.

There is something profoundly disturbing about Harvard using these flaccid categories to achieve something like a quota. The court papers show how the system was invented to keep the number of Jews down in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It’s all pretty bad, and part of the badness is that colleges have been both compelled and allowed to do what they’re doing under the rubric of "diversity," which conceals from view the actual operation of the whole system, and what they are in fact aiming to achieve. It’s substituting one vocabulary for another in a way that creates a climate of dishonesty. What goes on in the admissions office is increasingly mysterious, and what happens once students are admitted — that is something to which little attention is paid by educators themselves.

[ Italics mine ]

Kronman is presumably aware that other Ivy schools like Yale are little different from Harvard when it comes to undergraduate admissions.

See also

Harvard Admissions on Trial

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation

Harvard Office of Institutional Research on Discrimination Against Asian-American Applicants

"When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants ..."

Glenn Loury and Laurence Kotlikoff on the Harvard Trial (video)

Glenn Loury is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Brown University. Laurence J. Kotlikoff is a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Video should start at @49:06 Glenn: Affirmative Action undermines black students’ dignity.

@95:27

Kotlikoff: I think it's pretty obvious that at least based on the facts so far that Harvard probably did downgrade the personalities of the Asians in order to achieve ...

Glenn: [Interrupting] Well that's the ball game -- they discriminated. Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Yesterday David Card (Harvard's statistical expert in the Asian American discrimination trial) began his testimony. At least as reported in the Chronicle, he has yet to dispute Arcidiacono's (plaintiff expert) finding that among "unhooked" applicants (95% of applicants: not in the subset of legacies, recruited athletes, and major donor kids), Asian Americans are discriminated against relative to all others, including whites. I discuss this in detail here and here.

Card has questioned the legal relevance of Arcidiacono's finding (he does not want to consider unhooked applicants separately), but that is for the judge and lawyers to wrangle over (see excerpt below). As a statistical fact I have yet to see any claim from Harvard or Card that the result is incorrect.

Perhaps today's cross examination of Card will focus on this important question, which the media is largely ignoring.


From the SFFA brief:

"The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

[ Card and Arcidiacono have exchanged criticisms of the other's analysis already, so Card's lack of response on this specific point is worthy of attention. ]

UPDATE: The reporting below confirms what I wrote above. Card and Harvard maintain that looking specifically at unhooked applicants is irrelevant to the case, and do not dispute the statistical facts uncovered by SFFA regarding that group (95% of all applicants!). SFFA maintain (see case law cited above) that anti-Asian American discrimination in this category is itself a violation of law. Will any journalists report this part of the case, prominently discussed in the SFFA brief?

Chronicle: Card’s main objection to Arcidiacono’s model is that it omits recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a special list that includes children of donors. Excluding all those applicants, who are accepted at a relatively high rate, Card suggested, had skewed his counterpart’s results.

[ THIS EXCLUSION DID NOT "SKEW" THE RESULTS -- THE POINT IS THAT THIS ANALYSIS IS OF INTEREST IN AND OF ITSELF. SURELY THIS POINT WILL NOT BE LOST ON THE JUDGE. ]

Harvard Admissions on Trial: Enter the Statisticians

Let's see if any other media outlets cover this very essential part of the trial -- the cross examination of each side's statistical experts. As far as I understand, the plaintiff's claim that "unhooked" Asian American applicants are discriminated against by Harvard relative to applicants of other ethnicities (including white applicants) is NOT DISPUTED by Harvard, nor by their statistical expert David Card (economist at Berkeley).

Chronicle: ...A main difference between the two economists’ analyses is which types of applicants they included. Arcidiacono excluded recruited athletes, the children of alumni, the children of Harvard faculty and staff members, and students on a “Dean’s List” made up partly of children of donors. Those applicants — about 7,000 out of the roughly 150,000 students in the six-year data set — are admitted at a much higher rate than the rest of the pool, which Arcidiacono said made them difficult to compare with the other applicants.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court, had some questions about the decision to omit that group. She wondered how many Asian-American applicants in those excluded categories are admitted. As it turned out, they are admitted at higher rates than the white applicants.

“It looks to me like what you’re arguing is you have an admissions office that’s discriminating against Asians, but they only do it in certain places,” she said. Arcidiacono agreed.

Unhooked applicants make up 95% of all applicants, but only 2/3 of admits. Recruited athletes, legacies, rich donor kids, etc. are all admitted at much higher rates than ordinary kids -- while only 5% of the applicant pool they are 1/3 of the entering class!

There has never been any claim that Asian Americans who are, e.g., nationally ranked athletes or children of billionaires are discriminated against. Eoin Hu, a Chinese American, was the star running back at Harvard when I was there! Jeremy Lin may have been denied D1 scholarships by Stanford and Berkeley despite being first-team All-State and Northern California Division II Player of the Year, but Harvard Basketball was very happy to have him.

Special status is a much stronger effect than Asian ethnicity, so including hooked applicants only dilutes the statistical effect found by Arcidiacono. Card insisted on lumping together hooked and unhooked applicants in his analysis and has not (to my knowledge) rebutted Arcidiacono's analysis. Reportedly, 86 percent of recruited athletes were admitted, 33.6 percent of legacy students were admitted, 42.2 percent of applicants on the Dean or Director’s List (major donor kids) were admitted, and 46.7 percent of children of faculty or staff were admitted. Compare this to an admit rate of ~5 percent for unhooked applicants. It is clear that these are different categories of applicants that should not be conflated.

If your kid is an unhooked applicant, you can infer much more about his or her prospects from Arcidiacono's analysis than from Card's. The former covers 95% of the pool and is not subject to large idiosyncratic and distortionary effects from the special 5% that are advantaged for reasons having nothing to do with academic merit or even personality and leadership factors.

From the SFFA brief (still uncontested?):

Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

The question of how unhooked applicants are treated has been discussed in college admissions circles for some time. From 2006:

Inside Higher Ed covers a panel called “Too Asian?” at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Particularly telling are the comments of a former Stanford admissions officer about an internal study which found evidence of higher admission rates for white applicants over Asians of similar academic and leadership qualifications (all applicants in the study were "unhooked" - meaning not in any favored categories such as legacies or athletes). 

Harvard Admissions on Trial

Now that the Harvard Asian American discrimination trial has started, let me share some previous correspondence with NYTimes reporters who are covering the proceedings.

... it's far too easy for the press to just report it as "Harvard's statistician disagrees with plaintiff's statistician" when in fact there are specific and important claims (e.g., regarding unhooked applicants) that are unanswered by Harvard.

Claim: when unhooked applicants are considered, Asians are discriminated against relative to all other groups.

Unhooked applicants are 95% of the total pool, but only ~2/3 of those admitted (see below). [ Unhooked = ordinary applicant = non-legacy, non-recruited athlete, etc. ]

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-office-of-institutional.html

From the SFFA brief:

"The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

[ Card and Arcidiacono have exchanged criticisms of the other's analysis already, so Card's lack of response on this specific point is worthy of attention. ]

Will Harvard contest the claim that within the set of unhooked applicants, Asian Americans are discriminated against? As far as I know they have not.

The question about how unhooked applicants are treated has been discussed in college admissions circles for some time. See this from 2006:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2006/11/ugly-truth.html

Inside Higher Ed covers a panel called “Too Asian?” at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Particularly telling are the comments of a former Stanford admissions officer about an internal study which found evidence of higher admission rates for white applicants over Asians of similar academic and leadership qualifications (all applicants in the study were "unhooked" - meaning not in any favored categories such as legacies or athletes). 

[ So it is strange for Card / Harvard to claim that this specific question is not worth investigating! ]

Thanks to the lawsuit the results of a Harvard internal study in 2013 have been revealed, which concluded, like the Stanford study, that there was indeed discrimination against Asian American applicants. This will undoubtedly be discussed at trial.




The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li.

Jian Li: "I have a message to every single Asian-American student in the country who is applying to college: your civil rights are being violated and you must speak up in defense of them. If you've suffered discrimination you have the option to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. Let your voice be heard .. not only through formal means but also by simply letting it be known in your schools and your communities, in the press and on social media, that university discrimination is pervasive and that this does not sit well with you. Together we will fight to ensure that universities can no longer treat us as second-class citizens."

Jordan Peterson: Identity Politics, IQ, Harvard and Asian admissions

First ~9min: Trump, the US Left and Right, Identity Politics

@10min: IQ

@24min: Harvard and Asian admissions. "The Asians are the wildcard..."

@37min: Nazism, Communism; UK Leftist: "I don't love Obama. I'm literally a communist, you idiot."

Coincidentally (or perhaps not) I know the room they are sitting in very well. I'll be there later today ;-)

Harvard Office of Institutional Research on Discrimination Against Asian-American Applicants

Harvard's Office of Institutional Research (OIR) produced a series of internal reports on discrimination against Asian-American applicants, beginning in 2013. I believe this was in response to Ron Unz's late 2012 article The Myth of American Meritocracy. These reports were shared with, among others, William Fitzsimmons (Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid) and Rakesh Khurana (Dean of Harvard College). Faced with an internal investigation showing systemic discrimination against Asian-American applicants, Harvard killed the study and quietly buried the reports. The Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) supporting memo for Summary Judgment contains excerpts from depositions of these and other Harvard leaders concerning the internal reports. (Starting p.15 -- SAD!)

The second report included the figure below. Differences are in SDs, Asian = Asian-American (International applicants are distinct category), and Legacy and Recruited Athlete candidates have been excluded for this calculation.

As discussed in the previous post: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are given the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants ...

From the SFFA (Students For Fair Admissions) supporting memo for summary judgement:

OIR found that Asian-American admit rates were lower than white admit rates every year over a ten-year period even though, as the first of these two charts shows, white applicants materially outperformed Asian-American applicants only in the personal rating. Indeed, OIR found that the white applicants were admitted at a higher rate than their Asian-American counterparts at every level of academic-index level. But it is even worse than that. As the second chart shows, being Asian American actually decreases the chances of admissions. Like Professor Arcidiacono, OIR found that preferences for African American and Hispanic applicants could not explain the disproportionately negative effect Harvard’s admission system has on Asian Americans.

On David Card's obfuscatory analysis: the claim is that within the pool of "unhooked" applicants (excluding recruited athletes, legacies, children of major donors, etc.), Asian-Americans are discriminated against. Card's analysis obscures this point.

The task here is to determine whether “similarly situated” applicants have been treated differently on the basis of race; “apples should be compared to apples.” SBT Holdings, LLC v. Town of Westminster, 547 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir. 2008). Because certain applicants are in a special category, it is important to analyze the effect of race without them included. Excluding them allows for the effect of race to be tested on the bulk of the applicant pool (more than 95% of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted students) that do not fall into one of these categories, i.e., the similarly situated applicants. For special-category applicants, race either does not play a meaningful role in their chances of admission or the discrimination is offset by the “significant advantage” they receive. Either way, they are not apples.

Professor Card’s inclusion of these applicants reflects his position that “there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant.” But he is not a lawyer and he is wrong. It is illegal to discriminate against any Asian-American applicant or subset of applicants on the basis of race. Professor Card cannot escape that reality by trying to dilute the dataset. The claim here is not that Harvard, for example, “penalizes recruited athletes who are Asian-American because of their race.” The claim “is that the effects of Harvard’s use of race occur outside these special categories.” Professor Arcidiacono thus correctly excluded special-category applicants to isolate and highlight Harvard’s discrimination against Asian Americans. Professor Card, by contrast, includes “special recruiting categories in his models” to “obscure the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for those not fortunate enough to belong to one of these groups.” At bottom, SFFA’s claim is that Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants who are not legacies or recruited athletes. Professor Card has shown that he is unwilling and unable to contest that claim.

This is an email from an alumni interviewer:

[M]y feelings towards Harvard have been slowly changing over the years. I’ve been interviewing for the college for almost 10 years now, and in those ten years, none of the Asian American students I’ve interviewed has been accepted (or even wait-listed). I’m 0 for about 20. This is the case despite the fact that their resumes are unbelievable and often superior to those of the non-Asian students I’ve interviewed who are admitted. I’ve also attended interviewer meetings where Asian candidates are summarily dismissed as “typical” or “not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing” while white or other minority candidates with similar resumes are lauded.

From p.18 of the SFFA memo:

Mark Hansen, the (now former) OIR employee, remembers far more. He remembers working with others in OIR on the project. He remembers gathering data, conducting the regression analysis, collaborating with colleagues, coordinating with the Admissions Office, and discussing the results of OIR’s investigation with Fitzsimmons and others on multiple occasions.  Hansen expressed no concerns with the quality and thoroughness of OIR’s statistical work. Moreover, he has a clear understanding of the implications of OIR’s findings. Hansen testified that the reports show that Asian Americans “are disadvantaged in the admissions process at Harvard.” And when asked: “Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process?” Hansen responded: “I don’t.”

A very sad tweet:

Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) June 15, 2018

Harvard discrimination lawsuit: data show penalization of Asian-Americans on subjective personality evaluation

Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have released a large set of documents related to the case, including statistical analysis of records of more than 160,000 applicants who applied for admission over six cycles from 2000 to 2015.

Documents here and here. NYTimes coverage.

The following point does not require any sophisticated modeling (with inherent assumptions) or statistical expertise to understand.

Harvard admissions evaluators -- staffers who are likely under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities each year -- rate Asian-American applicants far lower on subjective personality traits than do alumni interviewers who actually meet the applicants. The easiest way to limit the number of A-A admits each year would be to penalize them on the most subjective aspects of the evaluation...

As stated further below: When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian-Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants...

SFFA Memorandum: Professor Arcidiacono found that Harvard’s admissions system discriminates against Asian-American applicants in at least three respects. First, he found discrimination in the personal rating. Asian-American applicants are significantly stronger than all other racial groups in academic performance. They also perform very well in non-academic categories and have higher extracurricular scores than any other racial group. Asian-American applicants (unsurprisingly, therefore) receive higher overall scores from alumni interviewers than all other racial groups. And they receive strong scores from teachers and guidance counselors—scores that are nearly identical to white applicants (and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants). In sum, Professor Arcidiacono found that “Asian-American applicants as a whole are stronger on many objective measures than any other racial/ethnic group including test scores, academic achievement, and extracurricular activities.”

Yet Harvard’s admissions officials assign Asian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on the personal rating—a “subjective” assessment of such traits as whether the student has a “positive personality” and “others like to be around him or her,” has “character traits” such as “likability ... helpfulness, courage, [and] kindness,” is an “attractive person to be with,” is “widely respected,” is a “good person,” and has good “human qualities.” Importantly, Harvard tracks two different personal ratings: one assigned by the Admissions Office and another by alumni interviewers. When it comes to the score assigned by the Admissions Office, Asian-American applicants are assigned the lowest scores of any racial group. ... By contrast, alumni interviewers (who actually meet the applicants) rate Asian Americans, on average, at the top with respect to personal ratings—comparable to white applicants and higher than African-American and Hispanic applicants.

From the Crimson:

The report found that Asian American applicants performed significantly better in rankings of test scores, academics, and overall scores from alumni interviews. Of 10 characteristics, white students performed significantly better in only one—rankings of personal qualities, which are assigned by the Admissions Office. [italics added]

See also Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions. (Source of figure at top; the peak in A-A representation at Harvard, in the early 1990s, coincides with external pressure from an earlier DOJ investigation of the university for discrimination.)

A very sad tweet:

Here's an exchange in the Harvard lawsuit in which a a teacher at Stuyvesant started to cry when she was shown data that showed her Asian students were *half* as likely to be admitted to Harvard as her white students in 2014 pic.twitter.com/EfjBeBFgfy

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc) June 15, 2018

For the statistically sophisticated, see Duke Professor Arcidiacono's rebuttal to David Card's analysis for Harvard. If these entirely factual and easily verified characterizations of Card's modeling (see below) are correct, the work is laughable.

Professor Card’s models are distorted by his inclusion of applicants for whom there is no reason to believe race plays any role.

As my opening report noted, there are several categories of applicants to whom Harvard extends preferences for reasons other than race: recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, those who are on the Dean’s List or Director’s List [i.e., Big Donors], legacies, and those who apply for early admission.1 Because of the significant advantage that each of these categories confers on applicants, my report analyzed the effect of race on an applicant pool without these special categories of applicants (the baseline dataset), which allowed me to test for the effect of race on the bulk of the applicant pool that did not fall into one of these categories.2

Professor Card, however, includes all of these applicants in his model, taking the remarkable position that there is no penalty against Asian-American applicants unless Harvard imposes a penalty on every Asian-American applicant. But this is an untenable position. I do not assert that Harvard uses race to penalize Asian-American applicants who are recruited athletes, children of donors (or others identified on the Dean’s List), legacies, or other preferred categories. By including these special recruiting categories in his models, Professor Card obscures the extent to which race is affecting admissions decisions for all other applicants.

Professor Card further exacerbates this problem by including in his calculations the large majority of applicants whose characteristics guarantee rejection regardless of their race. Harvard admits a tiny fraction of applicants – only five or six percent in recent years. This means that a huge proportion of applicants have no realistic chance of admission. If an applicant has no chance of admission, regardless of his race, then Harvard obviously does not “discriminate” based on race in rejecting that applicant. Professor Card uses this obvious fact to assert that Harvard does not consider race at all in most of its admissions decisions. Further, he constructs his models in ways that give great weight to these applicants, again watering down the effect of race in Harvard’s decisions where it clearly does matter. (To put it in simple terms, it is akin to reducing the value of a fraction by substantially increasing the size of its denominator.)


Professor Card removes interaction terms, which has the effect of understating the penalty Harvard imposes on Asian-American applicants.

As Professor Card notes, his model differs from mine in that he removes the interaction terms. An interaction term allows the effects of a particular factor to vary with another distinct factor. In the context of racial discrimination, interaction terms are especially helpful (and often necessary) in revealing where certain factors operate differently for subgroups within a particular racial or ethnic group. For example, if a law firm singled out African-American women for discriminatory treatment but treated African-American males and other women fairly, a regression model would probably not pick up the discrimination unless it included an interaction between African-American and female.

Professor Card rightly recognizes that interaction terms should be included in a model when there is evidence that racial preferences operate differently for particular groups of applicants; yet he nonetheless removes interaction terms for variables that satisfy this condition. The most egregious instance of this is Professor Card’s decision not to interact race with disadvantaged status—even though the data clearly indicate that Harvard treats disadvantaged students differently by race.

...

Professor Card’s report changes none of my conclusions; to the contrary, given how easy it is to alter the results of his models and that my own models report the same results even incorporating a number of his controls, my opinions in this case have only been strengthened: Harvard penalizes Asian-American applicants; Harvard imposes heavy racial preferences in favor of Hispanic and African-American applicants; and Harvard has been manipulating its admission of single-race African-American applicants to ensure their admission rate approximates or exceeds the overall admission rate. Professor Card has demonstrated that it is possible to mask the true effects of race in Harvard’s admission process by changing the scope of the analysis in incorrect ways and choosing inappropriate combinations of control variables. But Professor Card cannot reach these results by applying accepted statistical methods and treating the data fairly.

Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions

An updated analysis of discrimination against Asian-American applicants at elite universities. Figures below are from the paper. See also The Content of their Character: Ed Blum and Jian Li.

Too Many Asian Americans: Affirmative Discrimination in Elite College Admissions

Althea Nagai, Ph.D.

Asian Americans are “overrepresented” in certain elite schools relative to their numbers in the U.S. population. In pursuit of racial and ethnic diversity, these schools will admit some Asian American applicants but not as many as their academic qualifications would justify. As a case study, I examine three private universities and Asian American enrollment in those universities over time.

No “Ceiling” on Asian Americans at Caltech But One at MIT and Harvard.

Some basic facts: Caltech has race-blind admissions. The fraction of Asian-Americans enrolled there tends to track the growth in the overall applicant pool in recent decades. Harvard does use race as a factor, and is being sued for discrimination against Asian-Americans. The peak in A-A representation at Harvard, in the early 1990s, coincides with external pressure from an earlier DOJ investigation of the university for discrimination (dramatic race-based adjustments, revealing the craven subjectivity of holistic admissions!). Despite the much stronger and larger pool of applicants today (second figure below), A-A representation at Harvard has never recovered to those 1990s levels.