I recall Harvard rated Asians as being boring people as part of their justification for putting a foot on the scale for blacks instead...but maybe they are kinda right. I would suspect that although increased Asian share will keep the reputation of elite schools high, they might not be as attractive socially to other groups or international students looking for a more "American" experience. It will be interesting to see what happens if some schools become too Asian dominated and where non-Asians with options gravitate to.
> It will be interesting to see what happens if some schools become too Asian dominated and where non-Asians with options gravitate to
If you notice, the top black athletes don't go to HBCU's and the top female students don't go to the Seven Sisters. Following the same pattern, if a school gets to be dominated by Asians, the top Asians will no longer go there. They want to be around white people.
> If you notice, the top black athletes don't go to HBCU's and the top female students don't go to the Seven Sisters. Following the same pattern, if a school gets to be dominated by Asians, the top Asians will no longer go there. They want to be around white people.
There's an obvious flaw in your analogy. Can you spot it?
> "although increased Asian share will keep the reputation of elite schools high, they might not be as attractive socially to other groups or international students looking for a more 'American' experience."
Besides the Yogi Berra quote, Steve was also fond of saying that, in regards to primary and secondary schools, America is running out of white kids with which to run liberal America's great desegregation project.
But now it turns out not only has America run out of malleable working-class white kids to do school desegregation with, it has also run out of ambitious bourgeois white kids to give college education that traditional American patina with.
Seriously. I do think a sort of white enclavism is going to become fairly apparent in the coming decades, which naturally will be a target of the federal government to break up. To the extent this happens in relatively affordable areas I wonder if it will end up increasing the white birth rate so that in a couple of generations whites have clawed back lost population share as a lot of blacks and Latinos remain concentrated in high cost cities and suburbs that damper down the birth rate.
"White enclavism" aka "white flight" is already happening and has been for a while. And yes, the Feds already target it for extermination under the "domestic extremism" rubric among others.
Regarding birth rates, which is a game of relative rather than absolute numbers, so far whites are losing while blacks and Hispanics keep winning.
I meant in a more organized way, as opposed to the fuzzy "I'm moving for the better schools" justification that a lot of left of center whites utilize to justify their actions without consciously admitting what they are doing.
I've been immersed in many environments that were saturated with officially intelligent people. It turns out that curiosity is somewhat correlated with intelligence, but only somewhat. I have met plenty of people who could grind out straight As at a top school, and have no interest in anything intellectual and/interesting once the school day is over.
If you are a curious person, who likes to discuss things, ideas, what the heck was going on in that movie you just watched, you know how difficult it is, as an adult out of school, to find anyone you want to talk to.
And you do want to find and talk to such people! That's what brings most of us here. Of course web discussions are a poor substitute for speaking face to face.
WRT what kind of student a top university wants, it's easy to simplify it to "they want the smartest kids, obviously" and then conclude that test scores and high school grades are all you need. I think there is room for a place like that, but I doubt it would ever be considered "a top school"
Good observations. My kids are fortunate to go to a school where the average household income is extremely high, so you have lots of parents in business, medicine, and law. They organize grade level annual parent parties so people can get to know each other every year on top of the other typical school fundraiser events and frankly a ton of these people are incredibly boring. Most have such pedestrian interests that I basically have to bug out of these events after a polite hour or so because I don't want to talk about college sports or golf outings (sorry Steve) the entire night. That's not to say we haven't developed friendships with a few, but given the intellectual capital present it's remarkable how few are truly dynamic people.
In such situations I like to think that some of the others are like me, but they learned after the first few times to just keep their mouths shut, or talk about one of the acceptable topics. I went to an informal reunion of several classes from my college fraternity and the conversations were wide ranging and frankly wonderful. Everyone there was starved for it in their regular lives.
I'm curious how current Asian students treat the lower-performing students. Do they ignore them, show or hide their contempt, or are they even in the same orbits?
I doubt this will ever happen. The reason colleges put their thumbs on the scale for legacies and varsity athletes is that they tend to do well in life and they tend to be generous with their alma maters. Even if Asians ever get to be 60 percent of a student body, I sincerely doubt that they will ever represent 60 percent of alumni donations; it's not in their nature.
Women's colleges have the same problem with alumnae donations. My mom's male cousin, brought up in an all-female household, spent decades chatting up rich old ladies for an Ivy that they couldn't have attended.
There are already examples of what happens when highly selective academic institutions become majority Asian. From Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to Stuyvesant in NYC to Monta Vista High School in Cupertino. The first thing one sees is that the white students will begin to leave or avoid the place.
MIT and Johns Hopkins would draw the very best black applicants in the country, so it may be that they are not practicing affirmative action at all, notwithstanding that their percentages are a bit higher than what would be expected.
Fewer than 100 black kids a year in the entire country get better than a 1500 on the SAT. For practical purposes, literally every black kid at an elite university is there for non-academic reasons, whether it be straight aff action or athletics or whatever.
MIT is rough if you don't have that 1500 but Harvard has less rigorous majors available. Do you need a 140 IQ to write for the Lampoon and join a writers room in Hollywood?
Yes, of course, and that’s exactly what happens. [Insert special group here] student is admitted promising to study a hard discipline but pretty quickly realizes he or she can’t hack it and switches to a soft humanity. I attended a HYPS not that long ago and by the end of my sophomore year my math-heavy major was… entirely White and Asian.
But the point is that even if a student can skate by in an unfailable major, the sub-1500 applicants didn’t have the academic credentials to be there in the first place. There were literally thousands of better-qualified applicants for that slot.
But the question is, better qualified by what standard? We may assume that schools are selecting for the smartest students, but as outsiders we don't know what function they are trying to maximize. I don't mean the obvious affirmative action thing. Harvard has been admitting by other criteria than just test scores for a long time. I don't know what they were selecting for but I have to admit they have been successful with their brand. I also have to admit I would have done a worse job
that’s a fair point, clearly there are other criteria than simply “highest test score”
Harvard recently had to open the kimono on their admissions criteria b/c of discovery in the lawsuit and as it turns out the biggest “boost” factor was just… race. Presumably the other elite schools are similar. But there were lesser boost factors at play too
The evidence in the SFFA V Harvard and SFFA V UNC-Chapel Hill showed that whites benefitted more for the admission advantage than black students due. Think about all of the Olympic and non-revenue sports that are overwhelmingly white. Even the bowling, golf, and baseball teams at the HBCUs are a significant number of whites on the team.
The Harvard case discovery revealed that without explicitly race-based affirmative action, the Harvard student body would be less than 1% black. You can read the documents yourself, they’re in the public record.
You can bet they were practicing AA in 2010 when it was 5.8% black. The diversity demand is decades old.
At some point, could they have foreseen the approaching end of legal racial discrimination and jacked up their black %, so they could then appear to bend the knee and drop it significantly now? I believe one of the SC cases was in process for 9 years.
> JHU: But for the first time in many years, the percentage of students from **underrepresented groups** dropped significantly.
"Underrepresented groups" is one of those terms that has taken on a meaning of its own and can't be taken literally. At most colleges, blacks are overrepresented vis-a-vis their percentage of the population.
Not true. High School students in the U.S. are 15% black and very few universities have 15% or more black students except for HCBU. As an example, the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa is 11% black for undergraduates in a state that is 25% black and where 32% of public high school students are black.
Now look at the triple digit IQ college population, which may be what he was driving at. Sports and Diversity uber alles have likely pushed % black higher than the local pop. in areas with fewer blacks, like the West--and Cambridge.
Steve needs to remember that undergraduate admissions at all universities do not work the same. I believe that if one is admitted to Harvard, one can major in what wants to major in. However, Johns Hopkins firewalls off many of its majors that have separate admissions criteria. Thus, one might get admitted to Johns Hopkins but not get admitted to the College of Engineering. Or one might get admitted to the College of Engineering but not get admitted to the biomedical engineering program.
Also, Johns Hopkins is more of a place to go to graduate/professional school rather than undergraduate.
Yup. I remember being surprised that Hopkins had undergrad back when I was applying to school. I applied. It looked pretty good, like a hidden gem. Some Universities are just better at publicity than others. When I was a kid Hopkins was shorthand for top medical school. These days I think people kind of forget about it. Stanford was a poor man's Harvard for west coast types but these days I think most would prefer it.
If one is going to the New School or Thomas Jefferson University, one has to explain the specifics on places to everyone from relatives to acquittances. At least most people have heard of Johns Hopkins even if they drop the "s" from Johns.
Remember, there are around 6k undergraduates at Johns Hopkins compared to around 15k graduate/professional students. High school seniors in the U.S. are around 45% white. So the number for whites is not bad. In addition, Johns Hopkins is around 20% international students who do not count as Asian-American for Ed Dept compliance or statistics.
OK, fine. But what happens when Asians get to be 60% of the faculty, and 60% of the administrators, and 60% of the alumni contributors are Asian?
I just have this weird feeling that our Asian friends are not going to be your common or garden DEI fanatics.
I recall Harvard rated Asians as being boring people as part of their justification for putting a foot on the scale for blacks instead...but maybe they are kinda right. I would suspect that although increased Asian share will keep the reputation of elite schools high, they might not be as attractive socially to other groups or international students looking for a more "American" experience. It will be interesting to see what happens if some schools become too Asian dominated and where non-Asians with options gravitate to.
As Yogi Berra said, "That used to be my favorite restaurant, but it got so popular that nobody goes there anymore."
> It will be interesting to see what happens if some schools become too Asian dominated and where non-Asians with options gravitate to
If you notice, the top black athletes don't go to HBCU's and the top female students don't go to the Seven Sisters. Following the same pattern, if a school gets to be dominated by Asians, the top Asians will no longer go there. They want to be around white people.
> If you notice, the top black athletes don't go to HBCU's and the top female students don't go to the Seven Sisters. Following the same pattern, if a school gets to be dominated by Asians, the top Asians will no longer go there. They want to be around white people.
There's an obvious flaw in your analogy. Can you spot it?
> "although increased Asian share will keep the reputation of elite schools high, they might not be as attractive socially to other groups or international students looking for a more 'American' experience."
Besides the Yogi Berra quote, Steve was also fond of saying that, in regards to primary and secondary schools, America is running out of white kids with which to run liberal America's great desegregation project.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-nyt-reports-that-schools-are-more-segregated/#p_1_1:62-74
https://www.unz.com/isteve/science-discovers-white-families-with-children-drawn-to-less-diverse-neighborhoods-schools/#p_1_15:5-17
https://www.unz.com/isteve/dallas-like-america-is-running-out-of-white-kids-to-solve-its-problems/
But now it turns out not only has America run out of malleable working-class white kids to do school desegregation with, it has also run out of ambitious bourgeois white kids to give college education that traditional American patina with.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v53/herringbonekid/collegian1919.jpg
The faucets are running dry at both ends at once.
America, it was nice while it lasted.
Heckuva job, Libs!
Seriously. I do think a sort of white enclavism is going to become fairly apparent in the coming decades, which naturally will be a target of the federal government to break up. To the extent this happens in relatively affordable areas I wonder if it will end up increasing the white birth rate so that in a couple of generations whites have clawed back lost population share as a lot of blacks and Latinos remain concentrated in high cost cities and suburbs that damper down the birth rate.
"White enclavism" aka "white flight" is already happening and has been for a while. And yes, the Feds already target it for extermination under the "domestic extremism" rubric among others.
Regarding birth rates, which is a game of relative rather than absolute numbers, so far whites are losing while blacks and Hispanics keep winning.
I meant in a more organized way, as opposed to the fuzzy "I'm moving for the better schools" justification that a lot of left of center whites utilize to justify their actions without consciously admitting what they are doing.
Yes, I wonder about that too, but I suspect that the more organized the white enclavism, the more organized the Federal crackdown will be.
C.f. Ruby Ridge, etc.
I've been immersed in many environments that were saturated with officially intelligent people. It turns out that curiosity is somewhat correlated with intelligence, but only somewhat. I have met plenty of people who could grind out straight As at a top school, and have no interest in anything intellectual and/interesting once the school day is over.
If you are a curious person, who likes to discuss things, ideas, what the heck was going on in that movie you just watched, you know how difficult it is, as an adult out of school, to find anyone you want to talk to.
And you do want to find and talk to such people! That's what brings most of us here. Of course web discussions are a poor substitute for speaking face to face.
WRT what kind of student a top university wants, it's easy to simplify it to "they want the smartest kids, obviously" and then conclude that test scores and high school grades are all you need. I think there is room for a place like that, but I doubt it would ever be considered "a top school"
Good observations. My kids are fortunate to go to a school where the average household income is extremely high, so you have lots of parents in business, medicine, and law. They organize grade level annual parent parties so people can get to know each other every year on top of the other typical school fundraiser events and frankly a ton of these people are incredibly boring. Most have such pedestrian interests that I basically have to bug out of these events after a polite hour or so because I don't want to talk about college sports or golf outings (sorry Steve) the entire night. That's not to say we haven't developed friendships with a few, but given the intellectual capital present it's remarkable how few are truly dynamic people.
In such situations I like to think that some of the others are like me, but they learned after the first few times to just keep their mouths shut, or talk about one of the acceptable topics. I went to an informal reunion of several classes from my college fraternity and the conversations were wide ranging and frankly wonderful. Everyone there was starved for it in their regular lives.
I'm curious how current Asian students treat the lower-performing students. Do they ignore them, show or hide their contempt, or are they even in the same orbits?
> 60% of the alumni contributors are Asian
I doubt this will ever happen. The reason colleges put their thumbs on the scale for legacies and varsity athletes is that they tend to do well in life and they tend to be generous with their alma maters. Even if Asians ever get to be 60 percent of a student body, I sincerely doubt that they will ever represent 60 percent of alumni donations; it's not in their nature.
Women's colleges have the same problem with alumnae donations. My mom's male cousin, brought up in an all-female household, spent decades chatting up rich old ladies for an Ivy that they couldn't have attended.
I have this vague impression that Indians are pretty generous toward educational institutions, but less so Chinese.
There are already examples of what happens when highly selective academic institutions become majority Asian. From Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to Stuyvesant in NYC to Monta Vista High School in Cupertino. The first thing one sees is that the white students will begin to leave or avoid the place.
MIT and Johns Hopkins would draw the very best black applicants in the country, so it may be that they are not practicing affirmative action at all, notwithstanding that their percentages are a bit higher than what would be expected.
Fewer than 100 black kids a year in the entire country get better than a 1500 on the SAT. For practical purposes, literally every black kid at an elite university is there for non-academic reasons, whether it be straight aff action or athletics or whatever.
MIT is rough if you don't have that 1500 but Harvard has less rigorous majors available. Do you need a 140 IQ to write for the Lampoon and join a writers room in Hollywood?
Yes, of course, and that’s exactly what happens. [Insert special group here] student is admitted promising to study a hard discipline but pretty quickly realizes he or she can’t hack it and switches to a soft humanity. I attended a HYPS not that long ago and by the end of my sophomore year my math-heavy major was… entirely White and Asian.
But the point is that even if a student can skate by in an unfailable major, the sub-1500 applicants didn’t have the academic credentials to be there in the first place. There were literally thousands of better-qualified applicants for that slot.
But the question is, better qualified by what standard? We may assume that schools are selecting for the smartest students, but as outsiders we don't know what function they are trying to maximize. I don't mean the obvious affirmative action thing. Harvard has been admitting by other criteria than just test scores for a long time. I don't know what they were selecting for but I have to admit they have been successful with their brand. I also have to admit I would have done a worse job
that’s a fair point, clearly there are other criteria than simply “highest test score”
Harvard recently had to open the kimono on their admissions criteria b/c of discovery in the lawsuit and as it turns out the biggest “boost” factor was just… race. Presumably the other elite schools are similar. But there were lesser boost factors at play too
The evidence in the SFFA V Harvard and SFFA V UNC-Chapel Hill showed that whites benefitted more for the admission advantage than black students due. Think about all of the Olympic and non-revenue sports that are overwhelmingly white. Even the bowling, golf, and baseball teams at the HBCUs are a significant number of whites on the team.
No, that’s completely, absurdly false.
The Harvard case discovery revealed that without explicitly race-based affirmative action, the Harvard student body would be less than 1% black. You can read the documents yourself, they’re in the public record.
You can bet they were practicing AA in 2010 when it was 5.8% black. The diversity demand is decades old.
At some point, could they have foreseen the approaching end of legal racial discrimination and jacked up their black %, so they could then appear to bend the knee and drop it significantly now? I believe one of the SC cases was in process for 9 years.
Whenever I hear Johns Hopkins, I always think of Hannibal Lecter.
What does more Asian students mean? Probably depends. How many are CCP members?
They're in the 15% International for sure.
It would be nice if they separated Asian into nationalities.
“Asian” is an extremely broad category. I was thinking Chinese but it must include Indians too. And those are just the big ones.
We have a fair number of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Koreans that came here long before the dot Indians, plus the 19th cent Chinese.
> JHU: But for the first time in many years, the percentage of students from **underrepresented groups** dropped significantly.
"Underrepresented groups" is one of those terms that has taken on a meaning of its own and can't be taken literally. At most colleges, blacks are overrepresented vis-a-vis their percentage of the population.
Not true. High School students in the U.S. are 15% black and very few universities have 15% or more black students except for HCBU. As an example, the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa is 11% black for undergraduates in a state that is 25% black and where 32% of public high school students are black.
Now look at the triple digit IQ college population, which may be what he was driving at. Sports and Diversity uber alles have likely pushed % black higher than the local pop. in areas with fewer blacks, like the West--and Cambridge.
Steve needs to remember that undergraduate admissions at all universities do not work the same. I believe that if one is admitted to Harvard, one can major in what wants to major in. However, Johns Hopkins firewalls off many of its majors that have separate admissions criteria. Thus, one might get admitted to Johns Hopkins but not get admitted to the College of Engineering. Or one might get admitted to the College of Engineering but not get admitted to the biomedical engineering program.
Also, Johns Hopkins is more of a place to go to graduate/professional school rather than undergraduate.
Yup. I remember being surprised that Hopkins had undergrad back when I was applying to school. I applied. It looked pretty good, like a hidden gem. Some Universities are just better at publicity than others. When I was a kid Hopkins was shorthand for top medical school. These days I think people kind of forget about it. Stanford was a poor man's Harvard for west coast types but these days I think most would prefer it.
It is not as bad as the New School in NYC or Thomas Jefferson University in Philly, or Rush University in Chicago.
what isn't as bad as those, Hopkins? I didn't mean to imply I thought it was at that level.
If one is going to the New School or Thomas Jefferson University, one has to explain the specifics on places to everyone from relatives to acquittances. At least most people have heard of Johns Hopkins even if they drop the "s" from Johns.
Maybe Harvard gobbles up all the top blacks and the rest make do with the nearly exhausted pool?
Harvard and the other Ivies.
The low number of whites is astonishing.
Further
-What is the percentage of the Evil Patriarchy= White Males?
-Harvard is blatantly violating the Supreme Court. Will Biden's Dept of Ed try to enforce? Harvard should be on the road to a Consent Decree
Remember, there are around 6k undergraduates at Johns Hopkins compared to around 15k graduate/professional students. High school seniors in the U.S. are around 45% white. So the number for whites is not bad. In addition, Johns Hopkins is around 20% international students who do not count as Asian-American for Ed Dept compliance or statistics.
I agree. Whites seem to be the big losers. Probably especially white men.
Why go where you're openly not wanted?
Im okay with having a new Asian ruling class. Anything is better than being ruled by Jews.
Well having institutions with genuinely different approaches is a good thing.