What a shame that such blatant racial discrimination is being forced on Americans - through the colleges.
Cheating and bribing is bad enough, but this kind of social engineering is not fair and should be illegal.
Excerpts from your article:
Eliminating racial preferences at Harvard (and elsewhere) would have a far greater effect on increasing admission slots for qualified Asians than eliminating legacy admissions, according to Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, the plaintiffs’ expert witness in the recently concluded Harvard racial-preferences trial, which focused on Harvard’s anti-Asian admissions penalty. On average, Asians admitted from 2010 to 2015 at Harvard outperformed admitted blacks on the SAT by 218 points (admitted whites outperformed admitted blacks by 193 points). Test scores and GPA that would give an Asian only a 25 percent chance of admission at Harvard would be a virtual admissions guarantee—95 percent—for a black student.
To be sure, legacy preferences and racial preferences should both be eliminated.
Colleges should adopt a transparent, purely merit-based admissions system based on quantified tests of academic preparedness. Such a system would guarantee that entering freshmen were all equally prepared to compete academically, and would have the additional benefit of putting most college admissions officers out of a job. These self-important bureaucrats view themselves as artistes, using their exquisite insights into character to curate a utopian community of “diverse” individuals. The Harvard racial-preferences trial put such airs on nauseating display. In fact, admissions officers are simply allocating a scarce resource based on their own prejudices and inclinations.
The unquenchable desire of college admissions officers to engineer racial diversity led to a cheating scandal far more consequential than this one. Michael Landry and his wife ran a vaunted college prep school in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, that subjected its students to sadistic physical abuse and emotional humiliation, while inventing their college credentials out of whole cloth. The transcripts that Landry fabricated adopted every trope of the “holistic” admissions process used to override the admissions standards applied to most Asian and white applicants. One such transcript referred to a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student, whose alcoholic father had beaten his mother and him while denying them money for food and shelter. The student had allegedly founded a community-service program to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents.
All this was as much of a fiction as his high school GPA and test scores, as the New York Times reported. Landry students attended no classes, and they were trained to demonstrate complicated math problems on the chalkboard by rote for the benefit of visitors. America’s big-hearted desire to close the persistent racial-achievement gap made the Landry school a magnet for hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions, especially from small donors, as videos of its students getting acceptance letters from Harvard, Wesleyan, and other elite schools went viral. |
