Comment by brigandish

5 days ago

> then they turn around and defund universities

Harvard was one of the universities "screw[ing] over poor, hard-working Asian students", so I'm not sure the criticism holds, especially when the government's letter is asking for merit based admissions reform.

Are there other universities that weren't discriminating against Asians that the government has or has moved to defund?

And exactly how were they "screw[ing] over poor, hard-working Asian students

  • From [1]:

    > Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

    What came out of the documents in that court case was used as research by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and was published[2], so we can see very well how they were screwing over poor, hard-working Asian students.

    > Data on admissions—particularly at elite universities—is tightly guarded, making it challenging to identify both the students who benefit from racial preferences and the importance of race in admissions decisions… The data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC lawsuits are important because they make it possible to look behind the admissions veil to see how racial preferences operate.

    It wasn't just Harvard, the University of North Carolina was included. The poor part is handled right there in the abstract:

    > Both universities provide larger racial preferences to URMs [under-represented minorities] from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

    Echoed later on:

    > Those who benefit the most from racial preferences (at least in terms of advantages in admissions) are those who come from higher socioeconomic status homes.

    Asians weren't and probably still aren't benefitting from this, as:

    > Looking first at the applicant columns, African Americans are most likely to be labeled disadvantaged followed by Hispanics, Asian Americans, and whites.

    So not only do these "diversity" policies hurt Asians, they don't even help black Americans from lower socioeconomic classes, which seems to me to make all of it racist, including against black Americans - the ones most purported to be helped by this - and even against disadvantaged whites, who lose a whopping 25% of their chance to be admitted:

    > a white, male, disadvantaged applicant with a 5% chance of admissions would only see his admissions probability rise to 32.1% if he were instead treated as an African American applicant

    But the easiest misdeed to see is that done against Asians, hence the lawsuit.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

    [2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w29964