Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford favor race-based admissions. But their study showed that at competitive public universities, the racial bias AGAINST Asian applicants relative to whites was as strong as the bias in favor of black students.
Espenshade found an Asian American had to score MUCH higher than a white student on the ACT to have equal chance of admission.
But, as an advocate of race-based admissions, he denied this proved a racial bias against Asians because Asians might be inferior on “soft variables”.
Separately, Espenshade and Chung studied 124,374 applicants under current “race conscious” admissions compared to a “race neutral system” and found white enrollment would be unchanged but Asian American enrollment would be MUCH higher in a race-neutral system.
The data made public in litigation revealed that Harvard’s admissions system had no net negative affect on white applicants relative to a strictly GPA and SAT system, and that it was specifically Asian American applicants that Harvard systematically gave low “personality” scores.
At Yale, we just discovered from data revealed by the Department of Justice that
the top 10% of Yale applicants by GPA and SAT were:
62% Asian
33% White
while the 7.1% of Yale applicants actually admitted were
27% Asian
38% White
When interviewers point out that race-based admissions to increase “under-represented” racial categories at the University of California would mean “more white students, but the number of Asian American students would be reduced by over 50%”, #YesOn16 lawmakers just shrug.
When the California state legislature passed the constitutional amendment now on the ballot as Prop 16, over and over lawmakers in favor of legalizing racial discrimination said this was appropriate because “race matters!”
They said “we all know in our hearts that race matters”
But they know if #Prop16 passes that it will not be THEIR kids who will be racially discriminated against when they apply to college.
It will be the only racial group that the UC calls “over-represented” — Asian Americans.
Yes, race-based policies would likely discriminate against Californians classified as white when applying for state jobs or competing for state contracts.
But most rich white guys aren’t looking for a state government job or contract, while their kids are applying to college.
A postscript, since the above 2020 thread is getting renewed attention:
Equality won a landslide victory over racial discrimination in California on Nov 3, 2020. #Prop16 was defeated.
We now hope for a decision from the Supreme Court upholding equality under law nation wide.
I’m finally starting an analysis of the data on 2023 University of California admissions by source high school released last month, beginning where I left off last year with data on all public high schools in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
All California public high school students take the same English and Math tests (the “CAASPP” tests) to determine whether they are meeting the state’s standards and given a grade of 1-4 with 4 defined as “exceeds standards”
Statewide, 20% and 16% of students “exceed standards”.
I entered the number of students offered admission to each UC campus at each high school, and compared that to the number of students at the high school who exceed standards.
Then I plotted the number of UC offers per student who exceeds standards as a function of race.
Huge racial disparities in changes to acceptance rates at most of the 6 University of California campuses that are ranked among the top 50 national universities.
But the explanation has to be one that doesn’t apply to UCLA or Davis.
Given the University of California’s plummeting acceptance rates from high schools with many top scoring students, and increasing acceptance rates from schools with few such students, the average student rejected by UC is likely more qualified than the average student admitted.
We can test this assumption at the extreme if we assume that the University is being completely merit-based on standardized measures of academic preparation (AP, CAASPP) *within* each high school.
A fun project for today while daughter studies for APs in our hotel room…
So… if selection is purely test-based within each school, then I’m wrong and there is a higher rate of top scoring students among admitted than rejected overall.
But if selection within schools does not correlate with test scores, then I’m right.
In 2020, the number of offers UCSD extended per graduating senior at LA/OC public schools (regardless of how many applied) was positively correlated to the number of top scores that students at the school earned on their AP tests.
In 2022, that correlation was obliterated.
This uses AP scores for the last year that they were made available.
In addition to making dramatic changes in admissions policies and forbidding submission of SAT/ACT in 2020, California also started hiding all AP data for its public high schools.
In 2020, the number of offers UCSD extended per graduating senior at LA/OC public schools (regardless of how many applied) was positively correlated to the % of students at the school who exceeded state Math and English standards.
More fun with UC admissions data from OC public schools:
The more students exceeded English and Math standards, and the higher their average AP test score, the lower their UC Berkeley 2022 acceptance rate at their school.