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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   33473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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New Harvard class of 2028 Demographic data just dropped

Predictably, the Supreme Court decision hasn't changed anything. Whites are not even represented in the demographic statistics, they are an implied residual.

Harvard's data indicates that at least 68% of the class of 2028 is non-White. That leaves 32% of the class as categorized as "White", but the best data we have suggests that Jewish population of Harvard is about 10%, so Gentile Whites, who make up over 60% of the country and founded this country and these institutions, have probably about 20% representation in the Harvard class of 2028, certainly being by far the least represented group by population.

I happened to read this early this morning before listening to this EconTalk at the gym, and I made a new connection. They talk about a variety of situations, vaccines, liver transplants, extreme scenarios on rowboats in the ocean, minimum wages, etc., but the one that really connected here had to do with price controls.

They talked about two examples, one with an explicit gov't price control and one with a paradoxical-seeming private price control. On the former, they mentioned Chinese price controls on rice. The price of rice goes up, people freak out, and so the gov't slaps a price ceiling on rice. Of course, Econ Happens, farmers don't grow as much rice as they would have with higher prices, shortages happen, and then the gov't "has to" figure out how to ration the rice. So, they introduce coupons to ration it. Of course, that means that now the coupons are the new currency that buys rice, and who is the gatekeeper that gets to seek rent and use their power over the currency to their own benefit? Well, the local gov't officials who distribute the coupons, of course. His brother-in-law, great guy, like that guy, he gets coupons. You? He doesn't like your face, you get no coupons, you get no rice. Suddenly, he has the power of distribution and can use it to build his status, favor people who will favor him, and he can screw anyone else for basically zero reason at all; it costs him nothing if he doesn't give you a coupon because he doesn't like your face.

The second example is the question of why tickets to the Rose Bowl are so cheap. Lots of people want those tickets at their face value, way more people than there are tickets. Rather than just let the price rise to be market-clearing, they decide that they "have to" hold some back to make sure that vague Bad Things don't happen, and then they get the status of being in control of distribution. They can give something that is extremely highly valued to their buddies, acting like it's really a little thing, really of little value (the face value), but getting widely outsized personal benefits from gatekeeping/rent seeking.

Now, universities. Lots of universities are actually priced at least in the right ballpark of how much value it provides to the customers. Maybe not really on parity, but they're at least in the same universe. And they do want to make money, so they have great incentives to lobby the government to help them price discriminate as much as they possibly can, so they can wring out every dollar of value possible from every customer.

But Harvard? They're not a regular university in this sort of regular situation. The perceived value by the customer is huge, and they are, like the owners of the Rose Bowl, unwilling to let prices determine distribution, unwilling to let the price rise to the market-clearing price, so they've self-imposed a price cap. What does this mean for their incentives? They now want to gatekeep/rent seek and use their distributional power to self-aggrandize. To give goodies to their buddies, to people who will compete on some other margin, who will support them politically or whatever else. Do they find themselves in that situation and then choose to discriminate against you because they don't like your face and in favor of someone else to self-aggrandize just due to the incentives that have now arisen, or do they choose to self-impose a price cap in part to create that distributional power that individuals in the organization can harvest? I don't know, but it's clear that since they have chosen to self-impose a price cap, these perverse incentives inevitably arise.

Could they adopt an objective measure to be the distributive rule? Sure; basically any measure would interrupt these incentives. Some folks say they could just use test scores as their distributive rule, and sure, that would remove them as the gatekeeper and turn the College Board into the gatekeeper. They could also just let a price system handle the distribution problem, letting the price rise to be market-clearing, and that would completely offload the gatekeeper to the larger market system (then, perhaps rather than competing on some other random margin, customers would just compete by trying to make more money, contributing back into the wealth of the nation). Most objective distribution rules have political problems, so it just happens to be so darn convenient for them that they "have to" personally accrue all of the benefits of being the personal distributional gatekeepers.

The second example is the question of why tickets to the Rose Bowl are so cheap. Lots of people want those tickets at their face value, way more people than there are tickets. Rather than just let the price rise to be market-clearing, they decide that they "have to" hold some back to make sure that vague Bad Things don't happen, and then they get the status of being in control of distribution. They can give something that is extremely highly valued to their buddies, acting like it's really a little thing, really of little value (the face value), but getting widely outsized personal benefits from gatekeeping/rent seeking.

There is a simpler explanation --it's fundamentally a tax harvesting operation. In particular, the tax deduction of a donation must be reduced by the FMV of anything received in exchange for that donation, so the scam goes like

  • Donate $1000 to the University
  • Receive ticket with a face value of $50, claim a $950 deduction on taxes for ~$400 or so
  • University pockets $1000, buyer gets a $1000 ticket for $600, win win

In fact, there is a well-known football university that almost went through with a plan to take 5% of tickets and auction them off, with the proceeds in excess of face value going to some charitable cause. A storm erupted, you see, because an auction for the ticket gives the IRS a very clear starting point for fair market value. Suffice it to say, tickets will never be auctioned off.

Do they find themselves in that situation and then choose to discriminate against you because they don't like your face

I read a good article that I can't find now about this. Around a century ago when schools like Harvard switched over to holistic admissions processes in order to discriminate against Jews, there was one admissions interview report that simply said something like "ears too big". So yes, from the beginning if they don't like your face then you don't need to attend.

in order to discriminate against Jews

What? Is there a source for this. This is the Motte, so I'm not dismissing what you're saying out of hand, I just hand't heard this before.

In 1922, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, noticed a precipitous rise in the number of Jews accepted to the university and proposed accepting a quota of only 15% Jewish students.

But instead implemented admissions changes that allowed them to arbitrarily deny Jews without explanation or official quotas.

Starting on page 5 here.

Or on Harvard’s website.

the committee suggested improved procedures to “accomplish a proper selection of individuals among the available candidates for admission to Harvard College” (Report). Put simply, qualitative factors like personality and background, rather than test scores, would now carry more weight—a democratizing “sifting” process. For the first time, students who had scored poorly, but who had less-tangible strengths to offer the Harvard Community, had a leg up in admissions. Sidestepping Lowell’s brazen condemnation of particular ethnic groups, his committee had ostensibly crafted a policy of inclusion. Despite this meritocratic rhetoric, however, personal correspondence among members of the Harvard community suggests that a primary goal of the changing policies was in fact to curb the admission of minority students, especially Jews.

And many other articles on Google. I read a good one years ago, but can't find it now. These other articles make the same claim that the switch from entrance exam to holistic admissions was a scheme to restrict the number of Jews accepted to Harvard. It took a few years, but they achieved <15% Jewish student body without implementing the proposed quota. With an arbitrary entrance policy they didn't need quotas.

Thanks! Amazing that they though it was enough of a "threat" that they created a gameable system to cover their tracks.

Jewish population of Harvard is about 10%

Given that 2/3rds of non-orthodox jews (i.e. the rich and successful ones living in big liberal coastal cities likely to send their kids to harvard instead of a yeshiva) marry gentiles, that 10% is mostly yankee anyway.

Harvard at least seems to think that the Supreme Court decision changed things. Looking at the admissions data for some other schools, it seems that the results are all over the place, most likely because each tried to achieve their desired racial mix via novel methods and haven't worked out all the kinks yet.

In any case, I thought the whole point of getting rid of affirmative action was so that we would stop caring about things like "[race] makes up [percentage] of the population and so deserves [percentage] of the seats." If you just wanted the racial spoils system inverted in favor of white people, then a lawsuit on behalf of Asians whose goal was admissions purely by test score was probably never going to achieve your goals.

Really we'd all be better off if there were a clearer distinction between admissions at technical schools like MIT and Caltech, which would do fine on a purely meritocratic exam system, and places like Harvard and Yale, which if they had any balls would say "We are private institutions and will admit whomever we damn well please, because our job is to groom the future rulers of this country, not churn out a bunch of programmers and engineers who will never hold the reigns of power." I thought perhaps the disruption of the pandemic would allow for reforms of that magnitude, but sadly the higher education system seems content to stumble along with kludges and half-measures until its bubble inevitably bursts.

The supreme court ruling made their job harder, but there's plenty of ways to get around AA directly. They just have a harder time sorting and categorizing student essays and using plausible deniability. They have to go by application address and correlated by essay instead of a box the applicant clicks.

I hear the new meta is moving your kid to a bottom-tier high school for senior year, since a lot of colleges have committed to taking the top x% of grads from such schools.

Not sure if going to Angela Davis high school is more torturous than being forced to play the vuzuzela for ten years because your preschool's college advisor said it makes you a shoo-in for Harvard orchestra recruiting.

I hear the new meta is moving your kid to a bottom-tier high school for senior year, since a lot of colleges have committed to taking the top x% of grads from such schools.

This is apparently common in the UK where Oxford and Cambridge discriminate against applicants from private schools in favor of those educated at public (‘state’) schools. Wealthy parents send their kid for one year of education at a ‘sixth form college’ (a kind of high school for only the last two years of schooling) before their exams, then they apply as a ‘state school’ student (since you don’t list your whole educational history on your application) despite 12 years of private school.

This is a bit of a myth actually. There are two main areas where "positive discrimination" comes into the admissions process. Probably most importantly, the extensive outreach and support provided to target backgrounds and demographics, schemes such as UNIQ and reserved open days/state specific mentoring mean that smart state school kids can often get their hand held throughout the admissions process. This might also include admissions test help and mock interviews, provided by current students or that way inclined profs. In practice this tends to benefit the middle class state school kids more than those right at the bottom of the pack, ignoring base rate intelligence. And you probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of this unless you did at least 2 years of state sixth form, and then they'd still likely check your prior history. On top of the long standing class based programs there are increasingly racially oriented schemes.

The other obvious way the scales have been tipped is by dropping standards. Classics admissions, for example, no longer require prior knowledge of Latin/Greek, although I think there are only a few of these places available where they fast track you up after you've arrived. If you lower the bar, then more people get over the bar, and so you can start to do a bit of selection for people who may be "diamonds in the rough".

In terms of direct discrimination in applications, officially this very much doesn't happen, or at least that was the case 10 years ago. Occasionally there was some extra leeway afforded over grades (getting AAB for example), but having seen behind the curtain a bit the only point where the thumb can actually get on the scale is the interviews/GCSEs, as future grades and entrance exam are scored identically for all.

As interviews are semi-subjective (although scored by multiple tutors), ideologically inclined tutors could happily penalise a posh Eton boy and help out the nervous inner city kid, but this would vary substantially. But the interviews make up at most 25% of the scoring process (tends to be a semi filtering and then 50% admissions test, 50% other stuff depending on subject). So in theory sending your kid to the good state sixth form probably shouldn't have that much of an impact unless you want to try and take advantage of the tutoring/open day opportunities. But if you go to a good enough private school then this shouldn't outweigh the benefits.

Having said all that, there are some particular sixth form colleges which seem to do exceptionally well (Hills Road, Peter Symonds) either through an extremely middle class catchment area, or extremely selective admissions (Harris Academy). The top 10 schools for admissions in 2024 are split 5/5 for state/private, and of those 10 there's a 37% admission for the private sector and 29% for the state. So it doesn't look like things have substantially changed in the last 5 years.

I am still waiting for this to get common enough that we get a TV shows about the reverse Fresh Prince, where a promising young rich kid is sent to live with his ghetto (or hillbilly) auntie for a chance to get into a better college.

I imagine the plot would be sort of a twist on the oft-forgotten Jamie Kennedy vehicle Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Taiwanese immigrant tiger mom sends her striver son to live in Compton in order to up his street cred. Unfortunately, her perceptions of America being thirty years out of date and skewed by pop culture, she doesn’t realize that Compton was gentrified by Latino immigrants more than a decade ago and isn’t even a particularly unsafe area anymore. However, her son desperately needs to maintain appearances so his mother doesn’t realize her money (she’s paying his rent, which is no longer dirt-cheap in Compton) is being wasted. So, he hires some of his black actor friends to pretend to be hardcore gangsters every time his mom comes to check on him.

However, when a real gang confrontation does break out (instigated by a very real and very scary Latino gang) he and his fake gangster buddies have to put their money where their mouths are, with the protagonist displaying surprising aplomb and bravado. This is witnessed by a Harvard admissions officer, who offers full-ride scholarships to him and to his “gang”. (None of whom, mirroring real life, are actual poor urban blacks, but who will happily count toward Harvard’s black quota)

Great premise. Not too different from current asian meta of 'personality hacking' instead of achievement grinding. Asians are unpopular so use a Nigerian immigrant pretending to be ghetto in order to get the best success at hollywood scripts.

this is very good.

This sounds hilarious, but also raises a genuine question. Why aren't the tiger moms already doing this? It seems like a lot of striving asian families are still doing things the old-fashioned way, sending their kids off for piano and violin classes. They seem smart enough to realize that the system is rigged against them (hence the lawsuit), but not smart enough to work the system and send their kids to the ghetto.

My guess would be that they fear the damage done by a ghetto school would outweigh the benefits.

well, you could find some other way to work the system. Start a "service club" where you do volunteer work in the ghetto, rather than practicing violin. Something like that. The volunteer work could be anything, it doesn't even have to be real.

Asian Americans (Indian and sinics) end up crowding the meta. Relatively safe New Jersey shitholes got rapidly gentrified and flooded with Asians to pull test scores up too fast. Its like a tragedy of the commons, too many smart hardworking kids in a shithole make them stand out less.

I'm reminded of that joke on reddit of the guy who lets off a few shots every now and then to keep property prices low. The actual meta for Asians should be to loudly complain that their kids sre getting bullied and becoming stupider at some low achieving district in order to dissuade overachievers from crowding out their kid. If the current meta favors 'best in class', then cripple the class at the outset.

More comments

I'd watch that show.

Harvard at least seems to think that the Supreme Court decision changed things.

Obviously they are going to say that so they don't outright admit their admissions process is illegal.

In any case, I thought the whole point of getting rid of affirmative action was so that we would stop caring about things like "[race] makes up [percentage] of the population and so deserves [percentage] of the seats." If you just wanted the racial spoils system inverted in favor of white people, then a lawsuit on behalf of Asians whose goal was admissions purely by test score was probably never going to achieve your goals.

Yeah, and I said as much. You aren't allowed to complain about discrimination towards White students, or claim that these institutions should be partial towards White students. You are only allowed to complain about Asians being discriminated against or support them being partial to non-Whites. I knew the ruling wouldn't change much in practice.

I wonder what the actual Jewish representation is. Even back in 2014 I remember Jewish friends deciding to omit “Jewish” on their competitive applications, a practice which was apparently common knowledge disseminated via Jewish summer camp social networks. Is there really not a public list of Harvard graduates that we can examine? If the only gauge of Jewish enrollment is Halal Org or Chabad Org then they are undercounting the large number of non-practicing Jewish Americans.

Even back in 2014 I remember Jewish friends deciding to omit “Jewish” on their competitive applications, a practice which was apparently common knowledge disseminated via Jewish summer camp social networks.

Funny that some people here claim that being Jewish clearly provides a nepotistic admissions advantage over being gentile white and others claim that Jews are deliberately hiding their identity for admissions. I doubt either is true, admissions officers are disproportionately Jewish, but Unz’ insinuation that this led them to admit large numbers of statistically underqualified Jewish applicants was relatively unlikely. Your friends were likely just worried about not seeming like a basic candidate, and some rich Jewish kid writing about what he learned on birthright is not going to impress anyone in Harvard admissions.

Funny that some people here claim that being Jewish clearly provides a nepotistic admissions advantage over being gentile white and others claim that Jews are deliberately hiding their identity for admissions.

'Funny that some people claim x while others claim y?'

There must be something about this argument that is highly effective because you see it virtually everywhere

'Funny that some people claim immigrants are stealing jobs while others claim they're getting taxpayer benefits'

Ad nauseum

It's all enough for me to say "voting was very obviously a mistake." Not women voting, not freedmen voting, not unpropertied men voting - the franchise itself was a mistake.

This argument should have been over after the invention of language because it's not even an argument: People can reach similar conclusions for different, even seemingly opposite reasons. And, more than one thing can be true at the same time.

As an aside because your original thing was so absurd, the only Jewish person in public life that didn't gentile-up their name was Neil Diamond - and that's because they'd already changed it in the old country!!

As an aside because your original thing was so absurd, the only Jewish person in public life that didn't gentile-up their name was Neil Diamond - and that's because they'd already changed it in the old country!!

Sure, that was almost all at a time when (a) antisemitism was much higher than it is today and (b) Germanophobia was also much higher than it is, and many European Jews have and had German or at least German-sounding last names. Gentile German immigrants also changed their names in many cases at this time.

Today no Jew is changing their name from Goldberg to Williams or whatever in the US (at least not outside of marriage)!

On voting, I couldn’t agree more.

Just...don't

(This is a what that fat guy from Superbad said in reference to changing his last name, quote not originated from but cited by article below)

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/would-jonah-hill-have-saved-kanye-west-if-his-name-was-still-feldstein-q93xvxc5

Actors changing their names is extremely common and is far from a specifically Jewish phenomenon in the past or present. If anything the Hill comment was about the journalist clearly trying to bait him.

Jews being discriminated against less than the average white applicant because they, like, wrote an essay about their Grandma in the Holocaust or something would constitute a nepotistic advantage. The fact that the admissions officers are disproportionately Jewish would obviously lend credence to this.

It's impossible to know because they haven't tracked the data with the same urgency they have tracked the data they have pointed to in order to disenfranchise Whites from their own institutions.

Jews being discriminated against less than the average white applicant because they, like, wrote an essay about their Grandma in the Holocaust or something would constitute a nepotistic advantage.

Yes, Unz implies this. But (a) the zenith of Jewish achievement in the Ivy League and other elite colleges spanned the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, well before regular discussion of the Holocaust was a mainstream topic even in Jewish communities, and (b) I think it’s very unlikely that large numbers of the best-qualified Jewish applicants are writing college application essays about generational trauma from the Holocaust. I don’t deny that it happens, but I tutored mostly Jews for elite college admissions while I was at college and I never saw it a single time, and in fact would usually advise people to leave out stuff like (summer) camps and Jewish volunteering activities, not because of possible antisemitism but because they’re just boring upper middle class kid activities from the suburbs.

That's interesting, how did it happen that you tutored mostly Jews for elite college admissions? It sounds like you participated in an ethnocentric apparatus you have denied exists. Do the admissions and administration at these institutions have similar sympathies and identification that directed you towards coaching mostly Jews on acquiring admission? It's difficult to determine without the data that they refuse to collect and publish.

There has traditionally been an ethnocentric equivalent for Whites vis-a-vis legacy admissions but that has increasingly been branded as racist and cast out. My alma matter has publicly disavowed legacy consideration as an instrument of white supremacy.

In the absence of data, it's impossible to point to the zenith of Jewish influence over the Ivy League from the perspective of admissions to the student body. But even more so over the administration of the Ivy League which is more relevant in determining the responsibility for the staggering under-representation of White students in those colleges. Recently when this came under discussion, I pointed out that of 8 of the Ivy Leagues, 5 have Jewish presidents, and only 1 had a White president. But now, only a few months later, the only 3 non-Jewish presidents of those Ivies have all resigned under pressure by the Jewish lobby for anti-Israeli protests on student campuses.

Liz Mcgill, the only White Ivy president, resigned in August, followed by Claudine Gay (black) who resigned as president of Harvard and replaced with a Jew (Alan Garber), and very recently Nemat Shafik resigned as president from Columbia. So last time we discussed this, I mentioned that there were only 3 non-Jewish Ivy presidents, but since then all 3 non-Jewish presidents have been forced to resign due to fallout from campus protests over Israel while none of the 5 Jewish Ivy presidents have resigned.

A reasonable person could identify this as the Zenith of Jewish influence over the Ivy League, with almost-entirely Jewish control over the Ivy League, the forced resignation of every single non-Jewish Ivy president in the span of a few months, and harsh crackdowns on campus protests over Israel. Obviously the Zenith in administrative control is going to lag behind the peak admissions.

In 1922, the president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, Lawrence Lowell, in favor of creating quotas for the admission of Jews, wrote:

The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.

I will allow you to dispute the causality, but what can't be denied is that, at the apparent peak of Jewish influence over the Ivy League since admissions have been loosened since the 1920s, White Gentiles have been driven away from these institutions by administrations with a large amount of racial animus towards White people.

That's interesting, how did it happen that you tutored mostly Jews for elite college admissions?

I spent three months working for a moderately well known college admissions tutoring company in NYC run by an Asian guy. The Asian parents typically preferred Harvard and Princeton grads, so I was left with the rest, who were most Jewish and a few other NYC white ethnics.

But please, tell me how this is covert ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism can manifest in subtle ways, like your ability to relate more to an application because its closer to your own experience or identity... But it's not even subtle. Jews are overrepresented by at least 500% their population proportion (probably more, I seriously doubt Hillel is counting all ethnic Jews despite your counterargument), White Gentiles are underrepresented by 60%. It's always tricky having an intuition for the far tail ends of distribution, It could easily be determined with data collection and crosstabs, but they don't want to do it.

Even if you consider the present state relative to what you believe to have been peak Jewish enrollment, the decline in the representation of White Gentiles is much more significant than the decline in the representation of Jews. And, I don't think there has been nearly as large as a decline as you are suggesting in Jewish enrollment.

Basically, the prospect that these Jewish-dominated college administrations are discriminating against White Gentiles is 100%. The prospect they are discriminating against Jews with the same weight they are discriminating against White Gentiles is extremely unlikely to me. Maybe they still discriminate against Jewish applicants, but that discrimination is less. It's also possible the numbers of ethnic Jews are being undercounted and there is no discrimination relative to their academic merit. The only thing that is absolutely certain is that they hate White Gentiles and are driving them away from these institutions consciously.

It wasn't necessary to my point, but I think it's certainly higher than 10%. Hillel's methodology seems intentionally opaque. They do have countervailing forces: showing a high Jewish population strengthens their legitimacy and mandate as an institution representing the student body. But they also have an incentive to undercount if they think that definitions which are too inclusive would make the evaporation of the White Gentile populations at these schools too on-the-nose.

IIRC Ron Unz concluded that Hillel changed their definition more recently to only include Religious Jews instead of all ethnic Jews (and non-religious ethnic Jews have grown as a % of all Jews in recent years). In practice, we don't have good data around this exactly because they don't want it to be known.

It’s more that Unz’ myth of American meritocracy used an extremely flawed method of calculating the actual percentage of Jewish students at elite colleges, so he subsequently became highly defensive. Everyone knows there has been an extreme fall in the number of Jewish students at HYPS over the past thirty years, my own estimate of the real percentage is around 8%, a substantial proportion of whom are themselves half+ gentile (a group that often identifies as at least somewhat Jewish). Columbia is obviously still much higher due to being in NYC, other Ivies vary.

Hillel organizations are far more incentivized to overcount because that literally gets them more funding than to undercount because of some vague fear that the far right might point out overrepresentation (something only extremely online Jews keyed into DR spaces would even be concerned about; the chief warrior in the crusade against affirmative action is himself Jewish).

There isn’t good data in large part because most Americans would consider it strange for a college to ask all incoming students whether they had any recent Jewish ancestors. Nevertheless, given the zenith of Jewish elite college enrollment was around 35% (in most of the most elite colleges; there were outliers) and given the extreme fall reported in and around even secularish Jewish publications and in the wider community, I think 8-10% is a fair estimate for those with a genuine Jewish identity of some kind.

Of course, given assimilation rates of 70%+ among secular American Jews, the population of gentile Americans of Jewish descent will likely continue to rise dramatically.

“They can’t keep getting away with it”

Yes they can.

As many people here (myself included) said last year, the only way to force meritocracy would be to mandate that eg. every college that receives any state funding must admit solely based on SAT results or whatever.

Otherwise Harvard will continue to admit whoever it wants, and as long as they aren’t as obvious about it as they were before, they’ll be fine.

One wrinkle is actually that Harvard released projections as part of the AA court case that suggested that the number of black students would drop significantly if the court overruled AA; I guess maybe it’s possible that Blum / SFFA could sue on that basis, but I don’t know if that’s actually a viable case.

Is Harvard getting state funding beyond grants?

Blocking federal student loans for students (let's limit it to not-yet-admitted students to avoid tearjerking stories) would probably be hugely detrimental to the academic rankings of any institution, even Harvard.

Doesn’t this leave them open to a lawsuit by a white applicant who gets denied despite stellar credentials?

If the lower courts' treatment of 2A cases after Bruen are any indication, I imagine any AA cases will work around SCOTUS in any way possible (and even openly defy them).

No, because as long as Harvard doesn’t explicitly say that one group is less personable or whatever, its completely legal for them to decide admissions 100% on nebulous extracurriculars that might include fighting for racial justice or based on having grown up in a neighborhood with a high rate of single motherhood or whatever. There’s no requirement for admissions to be based on grades at all.

Core problem of competency. AA has been banned over and over with minimal impact. As long as Harvard is full of smart people who want to discriminate and will suffer no personal consequences for doing so, they will discriminate.

I mean, wasn't the whole Supreme Court ruling about the fact that it doesn't matter what percentage of the population a group makes up, all students have to get in on merit. The Supreme Court didn't say that Harvard should get more white people because they're the majority, the Supreme Court said that Harvard should stop discriminating against Asians in spite of their high academic achievement. Given well-documented racial differences in intelligence and grades, we shouldn't expect a purely meritocratic Harvard to be representative of the makeup of the country.

That said, it doesn't look like Harvard has pivoted to meritocracy just yet. It looks like the school changed their measures (no doubt deliberately) but this article does suggest the AA share has reduced from 18% to 14%, while the white/other share has increased from 29% to 32%. Asian enrolment hasn't changed and the proportion of students who refuse to share demographic identity has doubled from 4% to 8%, therefore the new figures are only based on those students who did give their ethnicity. I would assume the non-sharing group is mostly white or Asian which might explain why the Asian share doesn't seem to have increased.

The entire concept of merit-based admissions is bullshit on multiple levels. On one level, because there is such an enormous pool of applicants with stellar academic credentials you are invariably going to need to rely on other criteria, and the criteria you choose is equivalent to choosing a demographic pool. This doesn't apply as much to Black/Latino applicants, as their academic credentials surely fall woefully short of the application pool of Asians and Jews/Whites.

But among the latter groups, how would you possibly select a subpopulation in a way that isn't subjective, and by extension subject to the cultural and political sensibilities of the admissions committee? That admissions committee which, in the future, is going to be composed of the people who are selected based on the criteria of Racial Spoils?

How about- for every person in the world who speaks English, when they are 18, they receive an invitation to a proctored IQ test. The top N are admitted. Wouldn't that be the most meritocratic? If the future Harvard class is 100% Chinese would you be satisfied because that's the most meritocratic outcome?

Why should this not sit well for you? Because these Institutions are feeders into the political, economic, and cultural institutions that rule over us. If you succeed in making Harvard 100% Chinese, you don't get to pat yourself on the back for accomplishing meritocracy, you are accountable for the political and cultural impact for handing over these institutions to Chinese people.

I don't want my children to compete against the entire world to attend the Institutions I had access to. I want those institutions to be partial to them. Why are Europeans the only people in the world that have to open their institutions, the ones they founded, to global competition?

It's time for people, especially Rationalists with an IQ fixation, to accept that admissions to elite institutions can and should never be based on merit alone, it should be based on the type of world you want to build. It should be noted that opening up college admissions- more meritocracy, did not erase ethnic spoils in the college admissions process it just led to those institutions being tipped against the White people who founded them.

The only Meritocracy that matters is on a Civilizational level, and it's not Europeans demanding access to Civilization and institutions founded by Asians or Jews. A pool of billions of Indians and Chinese competing against my child for access to an institution founded in my home state by Europeans, using a roundabout and fancy IQ test, to the extent that's "meritocratic" is the extent to which meritocracy is a false idol.

For posterity should be the goal, and it was the goal of the Founders of all these institutions which are being handed away. Meritocracy wasn't the impetus and it shouldn't be.

Because these Institutions are feeders into the political, economic, and cultural institutions that rule over us.

I think that this is the real problem.

It is not that Harvard is ten times as efficient at teaching, so if I randomly send one student to Harvard and another to a decent state school, the Harvard alumni will totally destroy the other one on merit.

Or at least, it is not only that. Swimming in money and being able to attract the very best people as tutors will likely help education quality some.

But mainly, I think it is a mixture of two things. First, the pure signaling value. 'That student did something which is very difficult to do and vaguely related with merit, namely getting into an elite school, so we should update towards them being competent'.

The other thing is that you can form connections to other people with high signaling value who have already achieved or will likely achieve positions of power.

I want to contrast this a bit with the system we have in Germany. Here, the choice of university matters a lot less. For example, if you look at the currently serving SCOTUS Justices, you will notice that eight out of nine of them went to either Harvard or Yale. Compare this to the number of universities where the judges of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht studied law. For sixteen judges, I counted some eleven different places of study -- there is remarkably little clustering. Study at Kiel or Konstanz, it will not open or close any doors for you.

and it's not Europeans demanding access to Civilization and institutions founded by Asians or Jews.

Really? Have you heard of this little thing called "Christianity"?

Not something he’s a fan of, though.

@The_Nybbler also

Misses the point so hard as to nearly suggest you're doing so on purpose. The assertion is so perfectly subverted from the truth that it's almost enjoyable to encounter such chutzpah.

There was not a single missionary to a single country that brought along thousands of his closest friends and demanded the existing institutions provide for them.

They by and large sailed from shockingly modern countries to people who had fundamentally not changed since the pre-historic era because they were still in it before the arrival of the Europeans!

Christian missionaries have, if anything, a reputation for trying to save souls by otherwise withholding necessary aid to the natives

There was not a single missionary to a single country that brought along thousands of his closest friends and demanded the existing institutions provide for them.

Umm, this was exactly how parts of the new world were converted.

Plus we aren't 'demanding access' to Christianity - Christianity is not an exclusive club, and enthusiastically welcomes believers of every possible race or culture without distinction. The whole question of 'access' to it is silly.

This may be one of the reasons why people like SS don't like Christianity. If you're focused on race and racial identity politics, the resolutely non-racial and universal Christianity can't help but seem an obstacle.

On one level, because there is such an enormous pool of applicants with stellar academic credentials you are invariably going to need to rely on other criteria, and the criteria you choose is equivalent to choosing a demographic pool.

Easy peasy, a lottery system that picks X students out all applicants with test scores/GPAs higher than Y threshold.

Ok, so you end up with an entirely Indian/Chinese student body in the Ivy League.

That does beg the question: if they have the most merit why are they the ones seeking access to our institutions and not the other way around?

Ok, so you end up with an entirely Indian/Chinese student body in the Ivy League.

No, there will still be whites (and blacks and hispanics) over the threshold for the lottery too, just fewer per capita. That said, I would wholeheartedly support severely restricting the amount of student visas we hand out to prioritize American students (and similar solutions).

But why do you support restricting Visas if you care so much about meritocracy? The reason you wouldn't just give every slot to the top N of the world with no visa restrictions shows that it's not all about "meritocracy." There are other, important considerations.

None of the Ivies / other elite colleges have obscene numbers of international students; the great majority of eg. Asian admits are US citizens.

Because they prioritized, and therefore optimized for, getting into those institutions more than others (arguably too much, because Goodhart's law will always have its due).

proportion of students who refuse to share demographic identity has doubled from 4% to 8%

My guess is these are black students who share their ethnicity through their personal statements.

Why would they be incentivised to refuse to share their identity though? It's not as if Harvard has now decided that it has too many and will start penalising them like it did to Asians before.

On the other hand, Asian and white students who know that Harvard wants to penalise them (because it has strenuously defended doing so in the highest court in the land) may still suspect that it will try, even if it does so while tiptoeing within the law. John Smith or Emily Lee could plausibly be African American, even if they're not, so why reveal their hand to an institution they know wants to treat them unfairly?

Aren’t these surveys from data collected after admission? I presume practically every non white or Asian student shares their ethnicity in their personal statement.

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