Harvard's discrimination against Asian Americans

A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers. In 2008, over half of all applicants to Harvard with exceptionally high SAT scores were Asian, yet they made up only 17 percent of the entering class (now 20 percent). Asians are the fastest-growing racial group in America, but their proportion of Harvard undergraduates has been flat for two decades.

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The most common defense of the status quo is that many Asian-American applicants do well on tests but lack intangible qualities like originality or leadership. As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, said that they were “slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.”

Even leaving aside the disturbing parallel with how Jews were characterized, there is little evidence that this is true. A new study of over 100,000 applicants to the University of California, Los Angeles, found no significant correlation between race and extracurricular achievements.

The truth is not that Asians have fewer distinguishing qualities than whites; it’s that — because of a longstanding depiction of Asians as featureless or even interchangeable — they are more likely to be perceived as lacking in individuality. (As one Harvard admissions officer noted on the file of an Asian-American applicant, “He’s quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor.”)

That's Yascha Mounk, a Harvard professor, in a NYTimes op-ed. There is a particular sting in this discrimination coming from Harvard since, as any Asian American first generation kid like myself will tell you, Harvard remains, for our parents, Earth's academic holy grail.

Given how hard it is to distinguish one extremely qualified applicant from the next (regardless of what admissions committees might claim), it would be more fair to set some bar for qualifying to get into Harvard and then put all those who pass the bar into a lottery for admission.

Miscellany

1. Fewer Harvard MBA's took jobs in finance this year than last. That might be a good sign for the stock market according to one theory.
2. Don't like the idea of the Miami Heat's Big Three taking pay cuts to lure in Carmelo Anthony to form a Big Four super team? Perhaps the solution is a radical one: remove the ceiling on individual player salaries. There is no small measure of poetic justice that the a team in which its top three stars took a discounted salary to allow their owner to sign other strong players (the Spurs) just defeated a team in which the top three stars took the maximum salary possible, leaving the rest of their roster very undermanned (the Heat).
3. We're living in an art market boom. I'm saving up for my first Jeff Koons'. I may have to settle for stealing a kleenex after he blows his nose in it.
4. The wonderful economic test beds that are multiplayer video games. “A multiplayer game environment is a dream come true for an economist. Because here you have an economy where you don't need statistics. And elaborate statistics is what you use when you don't know everything, you're not omniscient, and you need to use something in order to gain feeling as to what is happening to prices, what is happening to quantities, what's happening to investments, and so on and so forth. But in a video game world, all the data are there. It's like being God, who has access to everything and to what every member of the social economy is doing.”