The Insulting And Unfair Practice Of Affirmative Action
As it's oh, so euphemistically put in the LA Times subhead, Asian Americans are "learning to deal with diversity" in the "changing landscape of college admissions."
In common language, they're getting fucked -- hard -- by affirmative action.
Frank Shyong reports on a college admissions information session led by a woman named Anna Lee at an Arcadia tutoring center:
Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic -- one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.
"Let's talk about Asians," she says.
Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term "bonus" to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a "bonus" of 230 points, Lee says.
"Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points."
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points -- in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
"Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes," Lee says.
How awful and unfair -- and unfair and insulting to black students who have legitimately earned their way into a place in college, only to be assumed to have been given the special "black person bonus."
Personally, I'm for a more Martin Luther King approach to admissions -- judging somebody by apparent the content of their character, their past performance in school, and their likelihood of making it in college.
Sadly, many who are admitted to schools when it's unwarranted by their tests scores or past performance tend to be left with huge student loans to pay back -- and no diploma -- after they crash and burn in an environment they were never ready to be in.
And this sort of thing, folks, is why standardized testing exists. No, it's not perfect. But if it were left totally up to the discretion of the schools, admissions-officer-preference stuff would be universal (instead of merely widespread), and more important, there would be no means of either measuring it or challenging it.
Cousin Dave at February 24, 2015 8:19 AM
At least in med school, Asians were not considered in any minority for admission purposes. However, once they were admitted the school loved to take credit for all their 'minority' Asian students. I wonder if the same kind of logic is being used today...
Doc Jensen at February 24, 2015 12:47 PM
Is this the blueprint for government employee hiring practices?
Because it would explain a *lot*.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 24, 2015 2:41 PM
Today in Silicon Valley I attended a meeting with ten people, two were male, the rest female, with a couple of minority female managers (paid at nearly double my rate).
Fortunately Hillary Clinton came to town to announce that there aren't enough of "them" (meaning too many of "us") and this is, apparently, some sort of hate crime, as in, white men in tech hate women and that's why there aren't lots of women billionaires.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/healthcare/la-pn-hillary-clinton-speech-silicon-valley-20150224-story.html
Yes, I'll be voting Independent again in 2016.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 24, 2015 4:23 PM
Gog_Magog: "Is this the blueprint for government employee hiring practices?"
Assuming that isn't a rhetorical question, I'll answer your question with a yes.
Yes, it is; from local government contracts to the top departments in the US Federal Government; including state department - there shouldn't be any wonder as to why so much of government doesn't work or doesn't have a clue on how to deal with the world.
charles at February 24, 2015 6:04 PM
I agree with Amy on how admissions ought to work -- and I suspect a lawsuit may be one, or even the only, way to get there.
It's well established that a lender who makes a loan on which he's pretty sure the borrower will wind up defaulting is committing fraud by making the loan. This same principle ought to apply to institutions of higher education whenever they admit a student who, statistically, has next to no chance of graduating.
This should be a golden opportunity for the right lawyer.
jdgalt at February 24, 2015 6:43 PM
Which institute had this I have forgotten but there was minority Asian and non-minority Asian. If you are from China, Korea or Japan you non-minority status Asian. If you were from Laos or Thailand among others you were minority status Asian.
The Former Banker at February 24, 2015 7:31 PM
"From local government contracts to the top departments in the US Federal Government; including state department - there shouldn't be any wonder as to why so much of government doesn't work or doesn't have a clue on how to deal with the world."
A lot of people don't realize that the federal civil service exam of legend and lore was eliminated some years ago. In its day, it at least somewhat helped to keep the hiring process above board. Its elimination went a long way towards turning civil service hiring into the secretive, you-have-to-know-somebody process that it is today.
Cousin Dave at February 25, 2015 9:37 AM
Part of the problem with that is lenders are not able to use past academic records, test scores, choice of degree, choice of college, or any other indicator of probable success in assessing the risk of lending to a particular applicant.
If a lender were able to tell an applicant, "son, you don't have the grades for me to lend you $250,000 to go to Harvard," perhaps the student would be diverted to an institution at which he could succeed.
While that decision should be on the Admissions Office and not the lender, someone has to apply reality to these situations.
From Kevin Williamson at National Review Online: "This is classic leftist misdirection. The students in question took out loans and used their credit to purchase a defective product, no different from putting a bucket of magic beans on a MasterCard. They made poor decisions with other people’s money, which is not entirely surprising: Access to other people’s money is an invitation to making poor decisions."
While Williamson is talking about 15 students refusing to pay back their student loans because the for-profit "school" they attended went out of business, the aphorism, "access to other people’s money is an invitation to making poor decisions" still applies.
It's a poor decision for a mediocre student to attend Harvard. It's a poor decision for Harvard to accept him. It's a poor decision for him to choose a major with poor post-academic job prospects. The only people in this scenario with any incentive at this stage to stop this string of poor decisions is the student loan lender - and they're forbidden from applying any rational criteria to risk assessment.
Once the lender has made the loan, the lender will sell it as soon as possible to a third-party agency like Sallie Mae. Then, the loan enters a pea soup of guarantee agencies, servicers, and regulators, the outcome of which is that the former student (graduated or not, employed or not) is now responsible for paying the loan back with interest. And if he can't, the government will pay for it. But that's okay, 'cause it's other people's money, right?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414357/student-loan-default-not-moral-good-kevin-d-williamson
PS - I spent 5 years working for a student loan servicing company and could tell you horrible-but-true stories about for-profit schools, government record-keeping, incompetence, and outright fraud. Welcome to government programs in action.
Conan the Grammarian at February 25, 2015 1:39 PM
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