This is widely denounced today as the Third Worst Thing in History, after Hitler and the 1924 Immigration Act.

What about the Golfocaust?

One thing about Harvard that should turn some people off: It is now a cliché among strivers and nouveau anybodies. No wonder Asian people just want to go there so bad. They are predictable.

People who don’t know anything about higher education or careers or much of anything just know that Hahvahd is the best place to go to college.

It’s like when Rolls-Royce was “The Best Car in the World” even though it wasn’t and isn’t.

Sure Harvard is great. It just isn’t the only place. What it is now is a self-fulfilling prophesy — because yes, it “creates” elites. The reason you go is not to learn but to join the club of assholes who run our country.

with examples of its positive assessments of applicants of Nepalese, Tibetan, Vietnamese and Indian descent, who were described with words like “deserving,” “fascinating” and “Tug for BG,” an abbreviation for background.

It’s all creepily fetishized, isn’t it?

In 1922, Harvard made some changes to its admissions procedures that had disparate impact on Jewish immigrants. It’s likely that contemporary Harvard, with 2 of its last presidents being Jewish, would prefer to not turn into UC Irvine.

I think it’s more likely they would like to keep Harvard(and Yale, and the state department, and on and on) Jewish. -Jewish as in the dominant, controlling ethnic group. WASPs were stupid enough to “play fair” and give East European Jews access to power. that group said ‘thanks, sucker” and never looked back.

What about it? Just learn the right shibboleths and you’re in.

I’m in the camp that says Harvard (or any other private college) should admit whomever they choose. Admissions is clearly subjective. Life isn’t fair–it won’t ever be fair–and the Board of Trustees and the University management have an institution to run in perpetuity.

Assuming half Harvard’s applicants are qualified to attend, there’s plenty of disappointment to go around–and plenty of other schools that would gladly have them attend. I’ve personally never been over-awed by Harvard graduates–who seem, principally, to be overly impressed with their own smug arrogance. YMMV.

This is similar to how the housemasters at various expensive boarding school in England think. Each house, nevermind school, ends ups as a slightly variable microcosm of this thinking.

For example, at first they hugely welcomed the exotic and very wealthy oligarch’s children from the third world, especially East Asia. The schools began to compete on services and the prices shot up.

Then, the numbers became so large that they detracted from what an English boarding school was supposed to mean. The response was to implement new types of entrance and scholarships that were clearly aimed at genuine British middle class children whom they missed.

It has long been the case that the appeal of expensive British schools was known to be in who your fellow students were and not in the quality of the teaching or facilities (both of which used to be extremely variable.)

In this case, parents greatly appreciated a sample of diversity.

The problem for US colleges, I imagine, is that now there is no answer as to who the typical “you” is, so the intake can no longer be designed with any specific customer profile in mind.

There is no normative default.

2 Buzz Mohawk > It’s like when Rolls-Royce was “The Best Car in the World” even though it wasn’t and isn’t.

i see people on the internet saying that – yeah, Rolex’s are not bad at all, but – a Rolex is more hat than it is cattle.

> Sure Harvard is great. It just isn’t the only place. What it is now is a self-fulfilling prophesy — because yes, it “creates” elites.

Only because dull-witted people believe it. Ok, so let THEM hire Malia Obama.

Or, smart people who ===don’t=== especially believe it, but who have built THEIR OWN brand in playing with Harvard’s brand. Like (say for example) iSteve.

i’m a nice guy who has a rice bowl of my own, so i’m not going to attack iSteve for doing what he’s got to do, to give his wife a new kitchen.

What I will never do, is hire anyone who came out of Harvard. My own little BDS campaign.

It ===does=== take two to tango, Buzz

Harvard invested heavily in statistical modeling of its admission process and its fundraising process, as documented in Klitgaard’s 1985 book Choosing Elites.

Anyone here remember that ’80s lesbian cop show Klitgaard & Kawkblawk ?

Sure Harvard is great. It just isn’t the only place. What it is now is a self-fulfilling prophesy — because yes, it “creates” elites. The reason you go is not to learn but to join the club of assholes who run our country.

No, that would be Yale.

prophesy

That’s a verb. You mean the noun, “prophecy”. Didn’t they teach you that at Tufts?

Three bylines, one contrubuting reporter, and three researchers, and not one of them Asian.I predict an intra-Times rebellion by young Asian reporters sooner or later. You know they are there after the leaked chats about the silly Bari Weiss Mirai Nagasu tweet.

My heretical opinion is that the people running Harvard for the last century have done a pretty good job of self-interested brand management in maintaining the value of the Harvard brand.

And this would be fine if Harvard came out and said as much, “So what? We want balance between the races and ethnicities, not too many of any one race, not pure representation by merit.” But what they say is “We do not discriminate.”

“We do have some very affirmative goals though that I think are important to understand. That when we talk about diversity of backgrounds and experiences, it includes different academic interests. It includes different occupations of parents. It includes socioeconomic differences. It includes different viewpoints on issues.”

Translation: “It includes iteratively searching for factors to consider that will have a disparate impact against Asians, but don’t on their face seem to be race ralated. Recently we added factors that dock applicants whose parents sell doughnuts, work in biology labs, or have pharmacy degrees.”

From a deposition of the dean of adminssions:

“And how would one go about getting on the dean’s interest list?” asked the lawyer, who was prone to calling it the “donor’s interest list,” in an apparent slip of the tongue.

LOL! Apparent slip of the tongue indeed.

Matthew Weiner is moving on from the relatively petty grievance of country club discrimination to the biggest grevience of them all… Tsarist Russia!

Matter Weiner in The Hollywood Reporter:

And I love this idea that these characters believe themselves to be, whether they are or not, descendants of this last autocratic family who are part of one of the great true crime stories of all time. I also love that it’s the chance to talk about nature versus nurture, what they have in common and what is left of a grand heritage.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/matthew-weiners-amazon-series-revealed-russian-royals-mad-men-ties-50m-budget-982167

Of course, on the meta political level, this ties in with the current Russia hysteria and the claims by some that the Trumps are America’s Romanovs.

O/T

Sweden YES unlikely to find employment for the occupying army.

Nordea Bank AB, whose Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull says his industry might only have half its current human workforce a decade from now, is cutting 6,000 of those jobs. Von Koskull says the adjustment is the only way to stay competitive in the future, with automation and robots taking over from people in everything from asset management to answering calls from retail clients.

While many in the finance industry have struggled to digest that message, the latest set of bank results in Sweden suggests that executives in one of the planet’s most technologically advanced corners are drawing inspiration from Nordea.

At SEB AB, CEO Johan Torgeby now says that “whatever can be automated will be automated.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-29/human-bankers-are-losing-to-robots-as-nordea-sets-a-new-standard

There are no truly private colleges.

Most colleges, including Harvard get government grants for useful research and all sorts of things The medical schools all get government grants Every college in the country has a department that does nothing but apply for government grants Tuition is paid by government guaranteed student loans.

Once an organization takes a dime of government money they have to obey all the government affirmative action rules.

Example is the Catholic colleges that had to allow gay activists to form official gay organizations because they take government money.

One of the unfortunate things about how civil rights laws such desperate impact and discrimination laws have impacted the freedom of association is that it discourages whites from simply replicating what they did centuries ago by building new Universities from scratch. What is the point of investing your public tax money if you know your son or daughter will not benefit one iota. Worse, the elites that will graduate will replace you and your family. The thing about Harvard is that they are just not building any more of them.

Slight correction, they didn’t say thanks.

My high school was about one third Jewish. From September of junior year all I heard was “ I’ll be discriminated against applying to college because I’m Jewish” boo hoo boo hoo cry the Whining Weiners.

From about 1900 on, Jews were always way over represented at Harvard.

Schooner is the dead giveaway. Decent people have ketches or yawls.

My heretical opinion is that the people running Harvard for the last century have done a pretty good job of self-interested brand management in maintaining the value of the Harvard brand.

Of course, the problem is that the graduates of Harvard and like institutions who populate the upper echelons of society have spent the last few decades damning as evil anyone else who was “maintaining the value” of something, whether a neighborhood or the whole country, by being similarly selective about who they wanted to admit.

My heretical opinion is that the people running Harvard for the last century have done a pretty good job of self-interested brand management in maintaining the value of the Harvard brand.

Harvard Business School, and its Review and Press, use their branding acumen on themselves first. It’s hardly a surprise to see the rest of the school benefit.

HBS also pioneered the case method of instruction, i.e., other peoples’ trial-and-error. Their earlier, more theoretical approach, evidently bombed.

Interestingly, one of the top names at HBS, Clayton Christensen, is a Mormon. With a Danish name, like the Skousens.

Asians haven’t figured out the sure fire way to get a full scholarship ride to college. It’s the poor poor pitiful me essay. My parents were boat people or coolies who arrived after 2 months locked in a container with 50 other people and a chemical toilet. They worked 100 hrs a week bd saved their pitiful wages as opened a struggling small business. From the age of 8 I worked 4o hours a week in the business.

Athiugh my schools were 80 percent my brand of Asian there were some evil White KKK kids who were mean to me. They chased me and bullied me. My family hates me because I’m transgender I don’t plan on getting a STEM degree. I plan on majoring in grievance studies and then getting a masters in Social Justice Entrepreneurship * so I can fight for truth, justice and the destruction of the evil White race.

I’m applying to Crazy Liberal University because of their welcoming inclusive programs for Asian girls who want to be men and marry black lesbians.

It’s all in the essay.

* Social Justice Entrepreneurship. Don’t laugh guys. They even have PHDs in this. It’s just poverty race war pimp grant hustling parasitism.

Surely allowing more Black American, Indian and Arabian students in Harvard would scare the typical middle class American parents of students applying for these universities, a lot more than allowing more Japanese or Chinese students in Harvard. Japanese and Chinese students (particularly Japanese) would only improve the atmosphere and create a more calm environment in the university.

Other institutions, like the Princeton Review, gladly ride as parasites on the reputation of unaffiliated but similarly-named Ivies. Perhaps trademark violation is the key to reducing the stranglehold that the brands of these hedge-funds-with-universities-attached have on our collective imagination.

(Hey there, non-Ivy alma mater! It’s WJW! Give me some swag and I might donate!)

Anemona Hartocollis

I hope her condition improves.

would prefer to not turn into UC Irvine

The main prob with UC Irvine is less ‘too many Asians’ than ‘too many less-sterling Asians’.

At any rate, the main reason why the Right should not side with Asians is they just become toadies of Jewish Globalists. Whether it’s Zakaria, Chua, or Fukuyama, they might as well be secretaries of George Soros.

“You don’t have first-gen. You don’t have son of a police officer. You don’t have the immigrant story, or the poor immigrant story, that captivates private colleges and universities,”

So, Harvard favors sons of police officers? Really? That’d be surprise white conservative working class applicants with police dads.

And aren’t Jews far removed from Immigrant Story? They seem to get in pretty easy.

People should really look at graduate schools. I think they matter far more, and Jewish enrollment in them is much higher.

Many Harvard undergrads don’t make it to Harvard masters, let alone Harvard Ph.D.
Many come from OTHER schools.

So, I think Harvard uses Undergrad level as a kind of propaganda. It is intentionally made more Diverse. But at the higher levels, the better students who weren’t accepted into Harvard undergrad and attended other schools are accepted into Harvard.

Imagine some Negro kid made it to Harvard Undergrad, while some white kid was rejected and attended Duke. But at master level, the black kid might not be accepted(or may have dropped out by then) while the white kid who attended Duke is accepted into Harvard masters or Ph.D.

So, it seems a bunch of kids attend what are essentially shadow-harvard. They are not accepted into Harvard Undergrad but have a good chance of entering Harvard Graduate if they make the grades at the ‘lesser’ university.

Nepalese? Where the heck did they find one of those? Tibetan?

The “Indian” part is lame, though. There must be 20,000 of those applying to H every year. My guess is they have a hard quota on each ethnicity and do what it takes to hit it.

There’s brand management and then there’s the law. All the stuff that Harvard is doing would be a lot less problematic if there wasn’t a 50+ year effort by the Federal government to outlaw racial discrimination. Maybe in an idea world Harvard would be a private institution and private institutions could do whatever they want, but in this world Harvard depends on massive amounts of Federal $ and is governed by Federal laws.

I was lucky to get into a Public Ivy after dropping out of high school.

Thank you, Mr. Pedant.

Speaking of Yale, I have my own story:

After finishing up at that Public Ivy, I ended up working somewhere near Yale and knowing people associated with the Yale School of Management. They encouraged me to go get an MBA there. I was accepted.

The price then was $85,000, but the opportunity cost was two years of lost income. (Hey look! “Opportunity cost.” There’s an economic term you might even use in business school!). Even though I could have commuted to Yale, the program was M-F daily. The real cost to me would have been between $200,000 and $300,000. Plus, to pay I would have cashed in investments that were making me money too, or taken a loan, which I have never done for school. (I worked my way through college.). I made my own business decision and decided not to go.

We applicants were invited to a meet-and-greet at the Yale Club in Manhattan. The dean then was Jeffrey Garten, husband of the famous TV cook Ina. During the Q&A session all the questions were general except mine. I mentioned what I did and asked if I would learn anything that would help me work better in my specialty at the time, something essential to every big company that has customers.

I will summarize Jeffery’s answer in my own words: “This is Yale. You will take the same kind of classes you would take at any other business school, but this is Yale. You will make connections because this is Yale. Did I mention this is Yale?”

During the handshake time afterward, I was three or four people back when Jeffrey made eye contact with me. He then left before I could meet him. He probably had to get home to enjoy whatever Ina was cooking for him.

He was very, very unimpressive. Certainly not worth two years of my life and $200,000 to $300,000 of my money.

For example, at first they hugely welcomed the exotic and very wealthy oligarch’s children from the third world, especially East Asia. The schools began to compete on services and the prices shot up.

What does it mean to compete on services? What else would they compete on?

Then, the numbers became so large that they detracted from what an English boarding school was supposed to mean.

What was an English boarding school supposed to mean?

For example, at first they hugely welcomed the exotic and very wealthy oligarch’s children from the third world, especially East Asia. The schools began to compete on services and the prices shot up.

Then, the numbers became so large that they detracted from what an English boarding school was supposed to mean. The response was to implement new types of entrance and scholarships that were clearly aimed at genuine British middle class children whom they missed.

In this case, parents greatly appreciated a sample of diversity

So it was the parents pushing for diversity?

It’s likely that contemporary Harvard, with 2 of its last presidents being Jewish, would prefer to not turn into UC Irvine. And, I bet if you got a lot of Asian Harvard students and grads to tell you the truth, they would probably agree that they are glad Harvard isn’t Stuyvesant HS.

Which Stuyvesant? The one from a few decades ago when the majority of students was of the “morally superior” Jewish variety? You know, the institution that produced such world-benefitting graduates as actors, investment bankers, and politicians. Or the other one of a more recent vintage with “mindless math drones” who go on to be engineers and make stuff?

My heretical opinion is that the people running Harvard for the last century have done a pretty good job of self-interested brand management in maintaining the value of the Harvard brand.

Because nothing says brand like being dominated by Jewish political commissars and thought-police officers of indeterminate sexuality.

He was very, very unimpressive.

Well, if you say so.

Certainly not worth two years of my life and $200,000 to $300,000 of my money.

The problem with life is that it’s often hard to run a controlled experiment. That’s a fancy way of saying “You’ll never know.”

Public Ivy

No such thing. The term appears to be a desperate attempt to attain reflected glory by attaching “Ivy” to something that isn’t.*

*In case you don’t understand me, although I did graduate from Ivy League schools, I did not enjoy my experiences and will steer my children away from them (though ultimately they will decide where they will go). But these schools are what they are – a filter through which our society’s elites are selected – no matter what I think of them.

No wonder Asian people just want to go there so bad. They are predictable.

As opposed to the 80% of non-Asians who go to Harvard. They are so boss and unpredictable that they didn’t care at all, but got in and showed up anyway, just to show how rebellious and independent they are. And then afterwards, they are just going become plumbers and gunsmiths, because that’s just how they roll.

Whites (Jews and non-Jews) are so anti-authoritarian that they account for the vast majority of administrators at Harvard. Because that’s what really independent people do. Take that, you predictable conformist Asians! We’ll show you just how against the Establishment we are by rejecting most of you (and “meritocracy”).

What’s holding Asians back is the same thing that’s holding back smart white kids from the Midwest. Both of them tend to come from plain old middle class-income families, and they will need a cut in tuition from Harvard to be able to afford the place. Harvard prefers students who can pay full freight, like a Jewish kid with B grades whose dad works for Goldman Sachs, because that way Harvard doesn’t have to dip into its endowment. Also, Asians have one other big checkmark against them. They are not big donors to their alma mater after they graduate. Schools like Harvard really, really care about that. Old line WASPs used to donate, Jews donate, but Asians, not so much.

It’s all creepily fetishized, isn’t it?

You know what’s funny about the part you quoted?

with examples of its positive assessments of applicants of Nepalese, Tibetan, Vietnamese and Indian descent, who were described with words like “deserving,” “fascinating” and “Tug for BG,” an abbreviation for background.

See if you can play “Which one of these is not like the others?” game with “Nepalese, Tibetan, Vietnamese and Indian descent…”

Here, let me help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income#By_ancestry

1.Indian American : $110,026 (2016)[2]
2.Jewish American : $90,221 (2016)[2]
3.Filipino American : $88,745 (2016)[2]
4.Australian American : $81,452 (2014)[3]
5.Israeli American : $79,736 (2014)[3]

Must be such a struggle to be from a people who have the highest median household income in the United States.

there are no secrets. It is all obvious. The admissions staff at Harvard may be getting worried about stuff. Harvard Sucks is a meme. And, the other Ivies are next and well, over – it’s just a name.

Jeffrey Garten did not impress me, and I was his prospective customer. That’s a little business lesson for you.

The point is, Twink, some of us are rubbed the wrong way by being told that the reason we should pay for something is because of the name.

The whole, narrow emphasis on “Ivy” schools is not good and it’s gotten worse as the country has become more and more mediocre. Those were the earliest and best colleges when our population consisted of colonists along the Eastern Seaboard. A lot has happened since then.

I don’t know who coined the term, “Public Ivy,” — and because I went to one I am not good enough to go find out — but I agree with you the term is meaningless. It’s just that some flagship state universities are better than others, and I think that is what the author of that term meant.

careful Twinkie. If your kids are in the application time don’t make comments (of any kind on any forum for the next 4 years), for Christ’s sake!

Now Twink, did I limit this to Asians or did you? You are right, people in general are predictable when it comes to choosing something because of prestige.

The focus here was on Asians and Harvard.

However, I will argue to the edge of campus that East Asians in America concentrate on social climbing and that this is the reason they work so hard to get their little darlings into Ivy League colleges. I personally believe East Asians are indeed more conformist than round eyed slobs like us.

Jeffrey Garten did not impress me, and I was his prospective customer. That’s a little business lesson for you.

That’s where you were and remain confused. You weren’t his prospective customer. *He* was YOUR prospective customer. And you didn’t close the sale. Don’t let the fact that you might appear to pay him confuse you to the true nature of the hierarchy in the relationship.

The point is, Twink, some of us are rubbed the wrong way by being told that the reason we should pay for something is because of the name.

You only buy generic, right?

but I agree with you the term is meaningless. It’s just that some flagship state universities are better than others

So, the Ivies are no better than state universities, but some state universities are better than other state universities?

This strikes me as “He who drives faster than I do is crazy, but he who drives slower is stupid” type of argument. : )

If you read the legal papers that both sides have put online, the Asian issue that is getting all the current publicity looks like a big nothingburger. A thousand (or several thousand) pages of depositions of Harvard admissions honchos with no indication of any specific procedure that does something worse to Asians than to whites. Statistical analysis by both sides shows only a small Asian effect once basic controls are added, of the kind that ought to show up prior to any discrimination (if any exists) being applied. First- and second- generation East Asian applicants to elite schools have very different behavior from other groups, which leads to a different (joint) distribution of academic+extracurricular+personal traits that is then revealed by the Harvard admission ratings. Harvard’s expert actually wrote, non-anonymously and in 2018, that Asian and white applicants being different (in their distribution of traits observed by the admissions office) is a simpler explanation of the data than discrimination. The Cathedral has, subtly but at long last, pushed back against the PC picture that Asian immigrants are just like everyone else.

The plaintiffs’ black/Hispanic affirmative action data, that MSM is giving the silent treatment, is much harder for Harvard to explain away. There is some evidence that the admission rate for blacks is engineered to never go below the overall domestic admission rate, and unless Harvard can explain that away, that is close enough to a quota that all the talk of diversity and complex multifactor admission will not make it legal under existing rulings. Also the sheer magnitude of the black preference makes it hard to argue that black race per se is only “one of many factors”, it is all-important as the plaintiffs demonstrate.

East Asians in America concentrate on social climbing

High IQ immigrants with low social status try to climb the social ladder through higher education? The temerity of these people. Why can’t they just stay low status like everyone else (except those on top currently), right?

I personally believe East Asians are indeed more conformist than round eyed slobs like us.

Totally. Northern Europeans such as Scandinavians are completely non-conformist and rebellious. After all, “Jante Law” is all about being different and rubbing other people’s noses in your uniqueness and rocking the boat: http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-14/news/mn-278_1_welfare-state

in their distribution of traits observed by the admissions office

“Selectively observed” you mean.

The Cathedral has, subtly but at long last, pushed back against the PC picture that Asian immigrants are just like everyone else.

Right. Unlike past high IQ immigrants whose scions now dominate Harvard (and calumny against whom is now a crime punished by loss of livelihood and social opprobrium), these new high IQ immigrants are totally different and not worthy.

Public Ivy

No such thing. The term appears to be a desperate attempt to attain reflected glory by attaching “Ivy” to something that isn’t.*

Flagship state schools, especially in the big football conferences (thanks to alumni fans), have enormous endowments which move them in the direction of private schools, while the Ivies and other big-name “independent” universities get huge federal and state research grants, and their students are on the same federal loan teat as the public schools, except even more so. (Unless the public U kid is from out of state. Then it’s essentially a private school as far as he’s concerned.)

The difference between “public” and “private” thus becomes quite murky at the top 50 or 100 schools. They’re “public-private partnerships”, the lot of them.

(Also, they’re called “flagships” because much of the state’s local ruling class comes out of them.)

You know what the most significant difference between the two types are? The US Supreme Court ruled that faculty at public colleges could organize, as they were workers, but those at private colleges could not, because they are management.

This is like an optical illusion where, if you turn it one way it makes perfect sense, but turned another, it’s completely mad.

Magic Eye administration.

That’s where you were and remain confused. You weren’t his prospective customer. *He* was YOUR prospective customer. And you didn’t close the sale. Don’t let the fact that you might appear to pay him confuse you to the true nature of the hierarchy in the relationship.

I guess it depends on one’s personality and where one’s brass is located. I own my own business now. It was in my nature to judge Mr. Garten and his school. I was accepted. I didn’t need to close the sale; he did and he failed. I was going to be a paying customer.

You are describing it from the perspective of someone coming on his knees. Not a very manly image.

A college is a business and needs customers. The article we are supposedly commenting on is about Harvard’s brand management.

Having too many Asians is only a problem for minor public schools

a crime punished by loss of livelihood and social opprobrium

To fight this, you have to get yourself a seat on the Opprobriations Committee. Aka Ways-and-Meanspiritedness.

Or the [Stuyvesant] of a more recent vintage with “mindless math drones” who go on to be engineers and make stuff?

Weren’t you a humanities and business guy? You should talk to some recent-vintage engineers and mathematicians. New Stuyvesant hasn’t been producing mathematicians and physicists like it (very famously) used to, and Chinese and Korean kids from Stuyvesant or anywhere else in the US do not tend to become engineers who make stuff. Hint: software, especially in the NYC area where that means finance and media/advertising, is not making stuff. There is some over-representation of Chinese in electrical engineering, so that’s something, but the Asian PhD numbers are not impressive at all, and there is not the Asian overrepresentation that you mistakenly assume exists in make-real-stuff real engineering fields such as mechanical and chemical. Of course there are a lot of imported Asian engineers but that doesn’t say anything about the career paths of recent Stuy grads.

“But Harvard’s worry a century ago was that it would get so popular with Jews that Jews wouldn’t go there anymore.”

Wait, what?

Almost like saying, “Why would any top 1%’ers ever want to live in exclusive Beverly Hills/Bel Air/West Palm Beach/the Hamptons/etc?

That sounds along the lines of, “I wouldn’t want to get into a country club that would have me as a member”.

Today, Harvard (as in the 1920s) remains popular with Jews and other Right Side of the Bell Curve groups. Can it be predicted that there will come a time that the most elitist brand of higher education will have a falling out with the Right Side of the Bell Curve?

Anything’s possible, (if another brand in higher education should suddenly out of nowhere become “THE” top elite brand in all of higher education) but for now, that doesn’t seem likely. After all, it is the US’s first and oldest established university (1636).

High IQ immigrants with low social status try to climb the social ladder through higher education?

Not through higher education in this case, but via seeking the status of a college degree with a good name on it. It is the name they are after, or perhaps they just assume the brand is good.

Yes, that is what we all do; it’s true, so I will agree to leave the East Asian variable out of this. Brands can be a sign of quality, and they are in the case of Harvard. Still, my point originally was that the reason (but not for all of them, it’s true) many students and their parents think “Harvard” then “Yale” then “Princeton” etc. when thinking about what college to go to, is the same reason aspiring people think “Trump” is something that would indicate their own success.

See, it’s branding!

Harvard will never be able to say it accepts the most intelligent students. The fact hat they don’t know that, is well known, by now. However, most State U’s give full ride or good digs for the guys & girls they rejected….yes…men & women who are white.

Race wars are not so effin’ crazy…but Harvard and the Ivies & Co. started it.

You’re picking Scandinavians as your example of European individuality? I’m sure there is a fancy name for that deceptive trick of argumentation, picking a bad example and then using it as if it represents the whole, but I’m too poorly educated to know it. I just know it when I see it.

Stereotypes are based in reality. Our ability to recognize patterns in people is the result of thousands of years of evolution and racial formation. East Asians are less inclined toward individuality than Europeans, but maybe your Scandinavian examples are just as conformist as Japanese. They do seem to be as clean and civilized, but they unfortunately are damn fools when it comes to looking out for the interests of their group, whereas East Asians are a virtual beehive of collective self-interest.

Emphasis on collective.

There is some over-representation of Chinese in electrical engineering, so that’s something,

Actually I’m not even sure that’s true when considering Asian- or Chinese-Americans who attend high school in the United States (which is the population we were talking about in connection with Stuyvesant and Harvard).

I was going to be a paying customer.

Harvard doesn’t need your money. It could finance itself with its own endowment until the end of days.

A college is a business and needs customers.

Harvard doesn’t need customers. Harvard IS the customer.

The difference between “public” and “private” thus becomes quite murky at the top 50 or 100 schools. They’re “public-private partnerships”, the lot of them.

You can say that again. And it’s been like that LONG before Asians showed up.

This is basically correct. A people, practicing group strategy and ethnic nepotism, will always dominate those who don’t. The problem was never that gentiles aren’t collectivist, but rather not collectivist enough compared to the competition. Victories are won on the margins, rarely does it ever require total advantage. A few fingers on the scale here, a few there, and before you know it somehow the organization is majority Jewish.

I think people misunderstand East Asian conformity and mistake this as collectivism. We are very much a go with the flow people that prefer following established norms wherever they exist. This isn’t collectivism though, as the “got mine, f*ck you” attitude is unfortunately extremely common among the Chinese and Koreans. True collectivism, as in “my tribe, f*ck you” is actually rare amidst the people of the Far East because those attitudes are only made possible by multi racial/cultural/religious environs where ingroup endogamy is the norm. That type of environment just doesn’t exist in the Far East or the West (before the imminvasion) but it is extremely common among the peoples of the Middle East and South Asia.

No “selective observing” of the differences is required. The Asian and non-Asian distributions differ substantially, and if Harvard puts relatively more weight on the nonacademic components, which it does, that will lead to fewer Asians being admitted (even if Harvard does not know or suspect that they are Asian). If some of the components are unmeasured or mis-modeled in a statistical study, it can appear as discrimination against Asians even where none exists. Hence the plaintiff can engineer a study indicating discrimination and the defendant can, by using more variables and controls, show the opposite.

Unlike past high IQ immigrants whose scions now dominate Harvard (and calumny against whom is now a crime punished by loss of livelihood and social opprobrium), these new high IQ immigrants are totally different and not worthy.

Why “unlike”? Many of the same differences were also true for Jews back in the day, for the same reasons. We now have internet and statistical analysis and lots of published information, which allow discussion that was not possible back then or in the 80-90’s when the Asian admission issue first came up.

OT: NUZI fan in Indana: Nazi symbols near synagogue in Indiana spark outrage, highlighting lack of a state hate crime law

Because hate crime laws make NUZIs go away.

Sometime before Saturday morning, unknown individual(s) spray-painted a pair of Nazi flags and iron cross graffiti on two walls of a brick shed where trash cans are stored at the property of Congregation Shaarey Tefilla in Carmel, Indiana.

That’s convinving.

After the synagogue notified the police about the defacement, the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis have been working to make sure that “appropriate measures” are taken following the incident.

I hope they called a painter.

The mind-altering symbols have now been decently covered in a tarpaulin.

You’re picking Scandinavians as your example of European individuality?

No, sir. I am – in the Popperian manner – falsifying the notion that “East Asians are indeed more conformist than round eyed slobs.”

Not all East Asians are the same, and not all “round eyed slobs” are the same either. It all depends on which “East Asians” and “round eyed slobs” you are talking about. For example, “round eyed slobs” from the border areas of Scotland and England were notoriously “independent” and querulous historically. So much so that their descendants in Appalachia today are the most crime- and poverty-ridden whites in America today. Meanwhile the Nordics who settled in the upper Midwest turned out to be quiet, hardworking, and economically productive and, yes, very conformist.

Look, I agree that – in general – East Asians are probably more conformist than some populations groups. But it remains to be examined how much of that is based on environment (e.g. colder climate, high population density, degree of isolation, presence or lack of physio-topographic barriers that separate people, etc.) that is shared by certain European populations and not with others. I supposed that would answer why some European populations are FAR more conformist than others and why the same European population is more conformist in one era than in another.

Much of the cult of the rugged individualism that permeates white Americans is not so much European in nature, but a uniquely American phenomenon, which likely argues for some contingent historical factors that are, again, unique to the formation of the American society.

Stereotypes are based in reality.

Nope. SOME stereotypes are based in reality. There are stereotypes that are simply incorrect by all objective measures. That’s because stereotypes are not some sort of magic that accurately captures reality. They could be based on enduring observations, but they could also be based on temporary phenomena that have long ceased to be (but congealed in the minds of the people from the past). To wit: http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/Revolution/yellow.html

The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency — of utter worthlessness.

A stereotype from the days when Koreans were poor, uneducated, and under the boot of the neighboring powers. I suppose the Western equivalent of that would be that of the “dirty, ignorant, immoral, and diseased Irish.” But look at the Irish now – higher GDP per capita than their erstwhile overlords and betters, the United Kingdom.

They do seem to be as clean and civilized, but they unfortunately are damn fools when it comes to looking out for the interests of their group, whereas East Asians are a virtual beehive of collective self-interest.

Er, no. Scandinavians are far more socially cohesive, egalitarian, and communitarian than, say, Koreans are. There is no Scandinavian equivalent to the joke “Two Koreans, three churches.” Contrary to your claims of “East Asian… beehive of collective self-interest,” there is intense intra-East Asian competition and conflict. They are only the mindless, monolithic Borg in YOUR mind.

Weren’t you a humanities and business guy?

I studied and taught military history and then later worked in counter-terrorism. I am not a “business guy” though my wife and I eventually did start a small business and sold it to a large corporation, affording us a comfortable retirement.

the Asian PhD numbers are not impressive at all, and there is not the Asian overrepresentation that you mistakenly assume exists in make-real-stuff real engineering fields such as mechanical and chemical.

1. I don’t know what your definition of “not impressive” means – because “impressive” is usually not an objective quality and is infused more with “what I like” and “what I don’t like” than actual measures of efficacy in real life.

2. Please do provide some data on “not the Asian overrepresentation that [I] mistakenly assume.”

3. Electrical and computer engineering is not about making real stuff?

What Harvard is looking for, in contrast, is somebody who might donate six, seven, or eight figures in 40 years.

Like this guy: https://money.cnn.com/2014/09/08/news/harvard-donation/index.html

With an English name like Gerald (Chan), he is, clearly, is not East Asian. Probably some European tai-pan masquerading as a Chinaman.

And of course, forget China let alone all of East Asia – Hong Kong alone accounts for only 17% of the total worldwide donations to American Universities. So, clearly, those stingy Asians deserve to be underrated as future donors.

No “selective observing” of the differences is required.

You can continue that argument with Jack D: https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyc-schools-the-white-menace-vs-the-asian-ho-hum/#comment-2435643

The primary benefit of the English public school after the introduction of schooling for all was in who your classmates would be. That is what they competed on. Certainly not facilities or food or other services. All of which could be awful.

So it was the parents pushing for diversity?

Naturally a parent would, given a choice for their child to live in a house with 15 other English upper-middle class children or 13 other English upper-middle class children plus a Hong Kong tycoon’s child and a Nigerian leading businessman’s child, plump for the latter.

If you have realistic desires for your child to be an international success in whatever they do then this only makes sense.

Of course, there are swiftly diminishing returns to this. Also, what Hong Kong tycoon wants to send their kid to England to be educated with few English people?

careful Twinkie. If your kids are in the application time don’t make comments (of any kind on any forum for the next 4 years), for Christ’s sake!

I. Do. Not. Care.

My sons are likely headed to the service academies and my daughters to Christian/Great Books curriculum colleges. You know, colleges with rules such as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas_College

Men’s and women’s residence halls are off-limits to members of the opposite sex.

For some minor public school it is a huge problem that they’ve spent huge resources to try to escape.

Nonetheless, the revamping of the scholarship system to re-allow the native middle class entry (the traditional major public school entrant) is pretty obvious.

The NSF has annual data on Doctorates Awarded in different fields. It does not resemble Stuyvesant’s demographics, other than having a very small number of blacks.

I said that software engineering (not electrical engineering) fails to “make real stuff”. It’s the equivalent of law school for people who can do math: a way for relatively bright people to learn how to earn a living, without having to ever get their hands dirty.

The main prob with UC Irvine is less ‘too many Asians’ than ‘too many less-sterling Asians’.

Yes.

At any rate, the main reason why the Right should not side with Asians is they just become toadies of Jewish Globalists. Whether it’s Zakaria, Chua, or Fukuyama, they might as well be secretaries of George Soros.

You are so right. These immigrants – who show up in a new country where they have low status – should immediately start attacking the people in power. Then – and only then – should they be allowed to be junior partners in a white-led Coalition of the Core.

I dunno about Harvard’s brand management in the 21st century. Essentially, they have trashed their reputation as a liberal arts school with affirmative action hires and a gutted curriculum in humanities. Sure, they pump out a lot of social justice trolls, but are they still pumping out future internet billionaires or Supreme Court Justices? Time will tell, I suppose. In terms of academic rigor, Harvard ranks 25 according to Business Insider; MIT Ranks 1 and U Chicago ranks 2. Chicago is now at the top of the Liberal Arts heap and has worked their way up from top 10 to top 3 in the last decade, despite the harsh weather and crap neighborhood. Their secret sauce has been a level of academic integrity unsurpassed by any Ivy League school.

If I am paying, I am the customer — if not the boss.

I was referring to Yale SOM, BTW, not Harvard. Don’t people with Ivy degrees have long attention spans? Yale SOM may not need the money either, but it is not at the top of the list, so it does need to attract good students with promising futures. It is in competition with other B schools. Those same students have other opportunities. This isn’t the best analogy with undergraduate admissions, so let’s drop it.

Ivy League, Inc. thanks you for your service in upholding their brand. You have served your customer well — in the perverse, upside-down relationship you just described.

It’s pretty obvious that Harvard in 2018 tends to view Asian applicants the way it viewed Jewish applicants in 1918: as tending to be smart and hardworking, but in such overabundance that they threaten to inundate the place and detract from the immense glamor of the Harvard brand.

Karabel puts Jewish enrollment at Harvard at 30% seven years later, in 1925. Even if Jews and Asians tend to be “smart and hardworking” that doesn’t mean that any college cannot instead strive to select for leadership qualities and matters of character. Character–that word (like ‘morality’) which has now become an epithet, which should tell you something.

This isn’t collectivism though, as the “got mine, f*ck you” attitude is unfortunately extremely common among the Chinese and Koreans.

Much of what you say rings true. However, things are changing – for better or worse – in East Asia.

For example, this used to not happen in South Korea:

But now, in Seoul, you can leave your stuff (iPad, wallet, etc.) on a coffee shop table and leave for an hour and return and still find your items there. Foreigners – including those from prosperous Western countries – in South Korea often find this quite remarkable and unimaginable in their home countries.

Some people also ran the “a child collapses in public” experiment in South Korea. Interestingly, younger generation people walking by almost uniformly tried to help a strange child in distress whereas the older generation was more likely to walk by (“not my business”). The same result was obtained with another experiment in which an unattended table was left in public with “free gifts” and asking for a small donation in return – again, younger Koreans generally deposited donations, but older ones were more likely to not give any and even grab more than one item!

This kind of high civic-minded culture is less established in China than in South Korea for obvious reasons, but I suspect it is likely that the Chinese will catch up to the Koreans if their standards of living climb near to that of the latter.

It does not resemble Stuyvesant’s demographics, other than having a very small number of blacks.

Link, please.

These immigrants – who show up in a new country where they have low status – should immediately start attacking the people in power

That’s what John Wayne would do.

Also, these are not low-status folks coming to build railroads. They are native upper middle class(or even upper class as in case of Zakaria) coming to suck up to the globo-homo elites to crush the native white folks. Unforgivable.

I already answered that post. Nobody at that thread or in this one has pointed out anything wrong with my (more or less obvious to cognoscenti, once stated) take on the statistical issues in the Harvard Asian lawsuit.

Again, I’m asserting that the Asian issue is a nothingburger on its merits, barring some incriminating evidence that was left out of the summary judgement pleadings. And that if affirmative action for blacks is allowed to be litigated in this case, Harvard will have a harder time defending against some of the allegations on that, such as the black admission rate having to be at least as high as the overall domestic rate of admission.

If I am paying, I am the customer — if not the boss.

That’s true only when the power relationship is equal or nearly so.

Ivy League, Inc. thanks you for your service in upholding their brand. You have served your customer well — in the perverse, upside-down relationship you just described.

You misunderstand me. What I describe is the actual social condition as it exists, not as I or you would have it.

I don’t have a high regard for Harvard, Yale, or any other Ivy, including my almae matres. Again, I will steer my own children away from them. But no matter what you and I might think of them, in the objective sense of hierarchical relationships in America as they exist today, these institutions select you (in the generic sense of that pronoun). You don’t select them.

Saying things like “I am better than they are – I didn’t need them to succeed” might be true in individual cases, but sometimes come off like posturing and a type of virtue signaling as much as those who worship the brands… just like if you try too hard to be a rebel, you are not actually rebellious, but are simply slavish to the other side.

I think there’s a Seinfeld episode hidden in this:

“The Harvard Nazi”

Asian Boy: Please! Please, I beg of you!

Harvard Nazi: No admission for YOU!!!

whereas East Asians are a virtual beehive of collective self-interest.

That doesn’t sound right. If you look at the Chinese market for smartphones, for instance, you’ll see that it is the scene of an intense knock-down, drag-out fight over price, features and market share during which a several big players have already gone out of business, owing billions to creditors. It is this harsh dog-eat-dog competition that poses a long-term threat to American corporations, not the cozy oligopolistic industrial culture of South Korea. In my opinion, Coag, who comments here every so often, has gotten this much right:

The most striking feature of Chinese society may be its homogeneity but the corollary is that in China everyone thinks he can be the emperor and that the emperor is no better/smarter/wiser than him. This idea is inalienable from Chinese society and indeed quasi-sanctified— the founders of the Han and Ming dynasties was a peasant and a street beggar, respectively, who fought their ways to the top. This well-established career of peasant class warrior was played to great advantage by Mao. Its whole 2000-year tradition is a perpetual source of social instability during times of economic crisis or decline.

China is a unified empire instead of a motley collection of independent nations like Europe because every man wants to be emperor. Of the whole enchilada. It’s not that independent nations did not exist in Northeast Asia. The issue is that alliances did not stand long enough for nations to endure. It was always every man for himself. And this definitely goes against the idea that they are conformists. I’d say they’re atomistic, but at the level of the family and close friends. They go along when they have to, because no one wants to die to make somebody else emperor.

Look, I agree that – in general – East Asians are probably more conformist than some populations groups.

Europeans can be conformist too. The real difference is Asians tend to be more SERVILE. One can be corformist and still stand upright, like the Prussians. Japanese, in contrast, bowed before authority.
Asians tend to be servile to power before principle, whereas Nordics tend to adhere/conform to principles(even bad ones as in the present) than to mere power.

It’s actually somewhat ironic that your humor is more accurate than you know. Harvard (and most institutions) does discriminate against “Asian” boys in particular. “Asian” of course is a meaningless catch all phrase that serves to obfuscate. What is actually going on is massive systemic bias against Chinese and Korean men that is lessened by lumping them into a broader “Asian” category and further hidden by the fact that the women are much less discriminated against.

Asians haven’t figured out the sure fire way to get a full scholarship ride to college

This is unlikely, given that Asians have mastered the nuances of the rest of the college admissions process.

Most college admissions decisions are “needs-blind” but pedigree does matter, in that both legacy relationships, as well as the applicant’s parents job titles and places of work, as well as colleges attended, are disclosed.

The financial aid decision is a dual process, and is first filtered through the Federal Student Aid form process, before the individual college financial aid decision is made, through a parallel financial aid application. The amount of financial disclosure is very, very detailed, and fraud is discouraged by having the information go to the federal government first. Fibbing on a federal student aid application is a crime.

What is opaque is whether the financial aid decision makers at the college level look at the admissions application essay and parent information on the admissions application form for further indications of hardship, if any. Having been through the process, I suspect that financial aid is entirely a function of current income and current assets, both the parents’ and the student’s.

Your points are well put and appreciated. However, I am not saying, “I am better than they are — I didn’t need them to succeed.” I am saying, “It was my money and my time — It was my choice what to do with it.”

Aren’t top schools in competition with each other for the best students? (I was by no means one, BTW.)

Funny little anecdote: I sat in on a class then at Yale SOM, accounting I think. The professor was having a hard time making the projection system work. Finally he gave up and said to the class, “You guys are paying $85,000 for this?” According to the CPI, which lowballs inflation, that would be about $150,000 today. He had a point.

Students are increasingly going to have to carefully decide if they are making a good investment, wherever they go to school.

Good post.

OT (an example of the BBC’s “brand management”)

Are you sure you don’t gender-stereotype children?#NoMoreBoysAndGirls pic.twitter.com/iThZ2P6REW

— BBC (@BBC) July 28, 2018

That’s interesting. I’m learning here that “collective” is the wrong term for East Asians. However, how do you explain their group attitude, the way they identify as a group, say Han Chinese or just Chinese, no matter where they are? Don’t they see themselves as a team of sorts, and to hell with everybody else? Isn’t a Chinese person considered to belong to China, no matter where he lives?

There is plenty of originality among members of the European race, but they sure could use some of that Chinese team sense of belonging. If they did, maybe the EU would have actually served Europe and maybe American immigration laws and actions would actually serve American citizens.

All those wanna be emperors seem to serve the collective interests of China pretty well.

Hey, didn’t they say one consequence of the one-child policy was that it would create a nation of little emperors, because of all the only-children?

Trudeauland aka Canada:

Again you are mistaking state nationalism with community tribalism. What the Chinese possess, thanks to the 20th century government educational policies, is a strong nationalist impulse. It is not however a natural impulse that rose organically but rather was the result of explicit government educational policy, thus it does not last a single generation if that, when divorced from its roots. What the Europeans used to possess, in the 19th century was a similar nationalism fostered by new governments centralizing power and thus wanting more control over it’s people. Another Unz commenter whose name I cannot recall at the moment quoted a 19th century Russian liberal Alexander Herzen, in describing the Germans.

“The cruder sort of German boasts of German might, but really means is that the German Emperor is mighty and can crush you, just as he has done to the German people on numerous occassions.”

Europeans no longer have this sense of belonging because European vassal states, living under American hegemony, are not allowed to execute policies promoting such nationalism.

I think people misunderstand East Asian conformity and mistake this as collectivism. We are very much a go with the flow people that prefer following established norms wherever they exist. This isn’t collectivism though, as the “got mine, f*ck you” attitude is unfortunately extremely common among the Chinese and Koreans. True collectivism, as in “my tribe, f*ck you” is actually rare amidst the people of the Far East because those attitudes are only made possible by multi racial/cultural/religious environs where ingroup endogamy is the norm.

Didn’t Chinese civilization emerge from ancient tribes unifying to tame the Yellow River? Flood management/irrigation on that scale is obviously collectivist, and led to hugely productive agriculture which is why there are so many Chinese today. A “got mine, f*ck you” people would have never developed China in the first place. This attitude sounds like a modern aberration from collectivism.

That’s what John Wayne would do.

No, he wouldn’t. Don’t confuse his movie characters with the man in reality.

Also, these are not low-status folks coming to build railroads. They are native upper middle class(or even upper class as in case of Zakaria) coming to suck up to the globo-homo elites to crush the native white folks. Unforgivable.

It doesn’t matter if they are upper middle class in their home countries. East Asians who come to the U.S. generally (especially initially) have relatively low social status in the U.S.

And they are not coming here “to crush the native white folks” given their intermarriage rates with the said “native white folks.”

more or less obvious to cognoscenti, once stated

Of which you are one, of course. Unlike that idiot Steve Hsu who – as you wrote – only knows math that has been taught to physicists.

I’m asserting that the Asian issue is a nothingburger on its merits

Yes you do. You assert a lot.

A comparison to the Ferrari automobile brand might be relevant:

It is well-known that for many many years Ferrari has limited its production in order to maintain the exclusivity of its product. They could build a lot more Ferraris, and those all would be as great as the ones they do build, but then there would be more Ferraris on the road and the brand would be less exclusive.

Furthermore, there are other great sports and GT cars that are manufactured in greater numbers and available at lower prices. Porsches can run with Ferraris, even kick their asses, and they will not break as easily. Okay, maybe they’re not as pretty. The German car, while not cheap, costs far less than the Italian. It is not as exclusive. If you live in the right neighborhood, you will see all kinds of Porsches and pay little attention to them, but you will turn your head when a Ferrari goes by.

Ferrari also has historically wooed famous customers and cultivated its relationships with them. At the same time, the maker is well-known for being snotty and snobby toward first-time buyers who are just people with money. It is like the reversed customer-business relationship attributed here to Ivy League colleges and applicants/students. If you are not “someone” like Malia Obama, you have to come on your knees and earn the privilege of paying six figures for the precious product.

Ferrari’s strategy is somewhat like deBeers and the controlled market for diamonds. The gems are more plentiful than most people know, but the supply available to you is artificially limited, and you have to pay the price. Your woman thinks diamonds are so fantastic because they are expensive: the bigger and better hers is, the more her man had to pay, ergo the more money he has. If his diploma says “Harvard” on it, so much the better.

Your points are well put and appreciated.

Thank you for taking them so well.

However, I am not saying…

I understand. However, I am just cautioning you that being stridently anti-Ivy League can be its own form of rigid thinking and virtue signaling just as much as being infatuated with it.

Aren’t top schools in competition with each other for the best students?

To some extent. But there seems to be some collusion/cartel-like behavior among the top Ivies. Also, let’s not mince words here – not all Ivies are of the same reputational caliber. Very few people choose to attend Dartmouth or Brown (the smallest Ivies) over Harvard and Yale (the largest Ivies) despite the fact that actual teaching quality may be better in the former than in the latter, due to the more undergraduate-oriented structure of the former schools.

Students are increasingly going to have to carefully decide if they are making a good investment, wherever they go to school.

It really depends on what they and the parents are looking for in life, as trite as it may sound.

My desire for my children is that, as is said in the Baltimore Catechism, they would learn to know, love, and serve God in this world. And, by extension, their country, community, and family. I want them to lead lives in which they treasure what is beautiful and true. Of course, I don’t want them to starve or suffer poverty, but such a fate would be preferable to one of material wealth and power cloaking ugliness and falsehood.

I like to characterize the Chinese as balancing two separate impulses. The first is our natural biological urge to follow established precedent and authority. The second, sometimes working in opposition to the first, is our cultural profanity. We really hold nothing sacred beyond filial piety and thus have no schelling points with which to naturally rally to. Our lack of things which we deem holy means that there is little to limit our personal ambition to getting what we want.

“my daughters to Christian/Great Books curriculum colleges”

At that rate, wouldn’t it be simpler, easier, and better to just marry them off at 18? At least a health-subject degree (from a suitably austere university) might be a Mrs. degree that actually does something useful.

I’m learning here that “collective” is the wrong term for East Asians. However, how do you explain their group attitude, the way they identify as a group, say Han Chinese or just Chinese, no matter where they are? Don’t they see themselves as a team of sorts, and to hell with everybody else? Isn’t a Chinese person considered to belong to China, no matter where he lives?

First of all, don’t conflate all East Asians with Chinese. Koreans, Japanese, and even Taiwanese are ethnically and culturally different to varying degrees.

Second, East Asians in the United States have the highest rates of intermarriage, most frequently with whites, so “to hell with everybody else” is hard to sustain.

Much of the in-group dynamic you see is a function of being first or second generation immigrants, which tends to disappear among the American-born. One of the classic markers (or proxies in social science terms) is English monolingualism. East Asians born in America tend to have fairly high levels of English monolingualism unlike, say, Mexicans.

I think there’s a Seinfeld episode hidden in this:

“The Harvard Nazi”

Asian Boy: Please! Please, I beg of you!

Harvard Nazi: No admission for YOU!!!

Ah, but is “the Harvard Nazi” going to be played by a Jew or a fair-haired goyim from the Midwest (or the South)?

First of all, don’t conflate all East Asians with Chinese. Koreans, Japanese, and even Taiwanese are ethnically and culturally different to varying degrees.

I know they are different from each other, Twink.

Second, East Asians in the United States have the highest rates of intermarriage, most frequently with whites, so “to hell with everybody else” is hard to sustain.

Wait a minute, my head just spun around. Did you just put all East Asians in one basket and say they have a behavior in common?

As for “to hell with everybody else,” have you read the news lately or at all in the past many years? Think Chinese industrial spying. The Chinese, that one, very big East Asian group that we should be more concerned about than any other, do seem to be working in a “f*ck you Americans” manner.

Now will you lecture me on how not every Chinese person in the US is a spy?

Geez, when did I get under your skin? Was it when I said the Ivy Leage is becoming the equivalent of a Trump-like aspirational brand, or was it when I misspelled “prophecy”?

Speaking of intermarriage, have you seen Chinatown lately? In any one of it guises in any American city? How come those little islands have remained Chinese for so long? (No, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear about it.)

Hillsdale and a few other colleges don’t take federal money. Very few, though.

There’s nothing wrong with holding people to their words. If you preach meritocracy and equality you have no right to exclude some group from your institution because you don’t like their religion or culture.

I am just cautioning you that being stridently anti-Ivy League can be its own form of rigid thinking and virtue signaling just as much as being infatuated with it.

I am not “stridently anti-Ivy League.” I am anti-aspirational brand-chasing.

Ivy League colleges are good schools, but my position is that many of the people who apply and even go do so because of the names and the prestige they carry, not for the education. This has gotten so sickening lately as more Americans and immigrants more blindly go for the brand.

There are so many articles, even here, about people trying to get into the Ivy League and how their success or failure to do so will determine the rest of their lives. This has gotten worse and worse, this theme has become more and more prevalent, as our country has descended into rich and poor, 1% and everyone else.

Americans are increasingly pursuing things like this not for intrinsic value, but because not to do so gives them fear of flying coach for the rest of their lives. That stinks.

What Harvard is looking for, in contrast, is somebody who might donate six, seven, or eight figures in 40 years.

They don’t even care about people who donate six or seven figures any more. I heard this from an Ivy League Alumni outreach coordinator. They just focus on the 0.01% these days for donations, more bang for the buck and less work. If you can’t give 8 figures, you don’t really have any leverage as a donor.

No, what Harvard is really looking for are influencers. Most alums will not donate huge amounts, but they will be brand ambassadors and decision makers. The Ivies want to a seat at the center of power, and they have done an amazing job covering ALL the bases. Even the Trump administration is full of Harvard and Yale grads. And whom is Trump appointing to the Supreme Court? Another Yale grad. And of course Trump himself is an Ivy Leaguer, and rather proud of that. Reagan was the last President with no Ivy connection and that was rather a long time ago now.

Americans are increasingly pursuing things like this not for intrinsic value, but because not to do so gives them fear of flying coach for the rest of their lives

For most people social status IS an intrinsic value, indeed it is one of the most important ones.

> Sure Harvard is great. … because yes, it “creates” elites.

Harvard’s not so much an education as a place to make connections.

People should really look at graduate schools. I think they matter far more

This is exactly right, a kid who goes to Michigan undergrad and then gets a Wharton MBA has more social status than a kid who goes the reverse route. What is the racial composition of the average Harvard Business School, Law School or Medical School class? That would be interesting.

Last weekend I left my phone and glasses on the sea wall in a coastal Essex town. It was a busy afternoon and the local sailing club was having its annual piss up so there were plenty of drunks cruising around. I realised I’d lost my phone about an hour later some distance away and stopped a woman to ask if I could borrow her phone to call mine. She had clearly lived a hard life, her face was ravaged by booze, but said to me ‘this is an honest town, someone will have it for you’. Sure enough, it had been handed in at an art gallery, they answered, and I went and picked it up.

Essex is quite ethno-statey. Particularly on the coasts. Probably a coincidence.

I read the Times article and wrote the following to a maillist of folks who went to Harvard in the 60s.

Makes me wonder how I got into Harvard GSAS. I aced the GRE which may have been what got me in. simpler times then. I was asked once by my chairman if I would house a black candidate for a day or so while he was visiting Cambridge. How did the chairman know that I had a capacious 4 room apt on King st, a cul de sac off Amory st? I talked up Harvard big time to the guy but to no avail. He told me he was going to blow off the Harvard offer and go to Northwestern in Evanston and stay true to his neighborhood. like I said, simpler times.

For most people social status IS an intrinsic value, indeed it is one of the most important ones.

Yes, but it’s not the highest one. Don’t you think our elite universities should be weeding out the people who only want to be there for the status? Since those admissions departments are deciding who our future leaders will be, shouldn’t they select students who have the highest values?

People who’ve never been to a good school always maintain that they’re just great, big, expensive networking seminars. Hollywood must be promoting this hoary stereotype.

People who’ve attended the better schools know (among other things) that the workload alone would crush most beasts of burden. Sure, you make friends, particularly if you’re the type of student who’s not focused on grades and test scores. But you also learn. A lot.

Just have the good sense to be born into the family of a major politician … President would be ideal … and they won’t even make you fill in the forms or do interviews.

Jungle Asian: IN
Fancy Asian: NOT

Yeah, but they’re pretty quick to take Establishment bucks though!

The flipside of your story is that everyone who did attend Yale thought that spending a quarter million to meet the other attendees who thought likewise was worth it.

IOW, the Jeffrey Garten circle jerk.

Too bad we don’t have a better breakdown on who these so called Asians are. Who are perspiring to get into Harvard. Jungle Asians? Fancy Asians? SubCons? Who would be mostly Hindu but some Muslims. Chinese? Taiwanese? US born Koreans? Mainland Chinese and other Asians who speak perfect English who parachuted into the US at age 13 to attend California schools?

My guess is 70% or more are mainland Chinese or Taiwanese. Born here (the USA, economic free trade zone of their convenience) or not they are mightily aggrieved, and look like they are suing the big H on the Charles on admissions. There are more Chinese and Subcons (Hindu and Muz) than ever where I live. Even lots of full drapery SubCon Muslim women…and some w less drapery just a hair covering scarf.

And yet if you look at, for example, the US News rankings, all of the top 20 schools are private. The highest ranked public U’s – Berkeley and UCLA, don’t kick in until #21.

There is a case to be made that there are now a number of private schools (MIT, Cal Tech, U Chicago, etc.) that are as good or better than many of the Ivies, but the public schools are ALMOST put not quite as good. There is a subtle but real difference in the quality of the students.

A most excellent account and ages ago I saw her (Ina’s) cooking show a few times where he barges in, in the final minutes to chow down. Probably on treif lobster and steamers and corn on the cob. And for a bonus he says a few retarded words.

1978 Civil Rights ad.
Face of sad black student.
Caption: “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.”

2018 Civil Rights ad.
Face of sad Asian student.
Caption: “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Wait-List.”

The flipside of your story is that everyone who did attend Yale thought that spending a quarter million to meet the other attendees who thought likewise was worth it.

Attending the Yale School of Management blesses you with a better circle of co-conspirators to rip off the collective wealth of the USA. Via paper shuffling shenanigans.

Not too shabby! Let the Fancy Asiooons try to tear down the walls of Jericho-Harvard with their horns and trumpets. Get out the popcorn.

When your local fire department glibly dismisses the lack of minority firefighters by reference to “the Black and non Black distributions differ substantially” , they get told by a bunch of Harvard and Yale graduates in black robes that the very fact of disparate impact on different groups is presumptively discriminatory. This, in spite of the fact that the ostensible “hard” evidence of test scores clearly favors the department position and only subjective criteria i.e. a thumb and a few fingers on the scale disfavor the department’s position. Yet , when it comes to the Ivie’s own admission policies , where the hard evidence of test scores clearly favors the Asian plaintiffs, we are told ” Trust us, we are doing the right thing, the Asian and non Asian distributions differ substantially. Would we lie to you?” All of this, mind you, from people who as plain as day are not above fudging admissions criteria to produce their desired outcomes, as witness their NAM admission rates. A “Nothing Burger” indeed

“Ah, but is “the Harvard Nazi” going to be played by a Jew or a fair-haired goyim from the Midwest (or the South)?”

Goyim is plural, Goy is singular

Harvard gets enormous amounts of government grant money for many different things. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Harvard were the largest government grant recipient on a per-student basis. So yeah, they should have to obey the laws that they in fact influenced. This is very similar to New York City residents somehow managing to keep their public schools segregated for all these years and now objecting to a slight bit of integration.

The problem for US colleges, I imagine, is that now there is no answer as to who the typical “you” is, so the intake can no longer be designed with any specific customer profile in mind.

There is no normative default.

My wife and I both got a Harvard AB, as did both of our fathers–and as did pretty much every male in her father’s line going back to the 17th century. My maternal grandfather and most if not all of his many brothers got professional degrees there. By any normal notion of “normative,” our children would be precisely the normative default, no?

But that’s just crazy talk.

I’ve long said that the only way either of our two children will get into Harvard College is if the Admissions Office suddenly comes down with a case of Mad Men-style nostalgia for the Bad Old Days, through which the kids attain token high-WASP status so that Harvard can have them adorn the place like Beefeaters. You know: for the rubes!

Fortunately, unlike my wife I didn’t really like the place–and nowadays we both find it revolting. So I don’t much care.

You are citing U.S. News & World Report‘s rankings as the measure of a university? Are you sure you want to put your eggs in that basket?

Okay, then. Here’s a pointy hat and a stool. And some light reading.

I’ve always gotten this vague sense that the system somehow discriminates against East Asian men. It’s like they’re the least favorite minority.

I don’t know why, but I’d assume it’s related to East Asian men being taciturn, stoic, and business-like. We live in an age that favors verbosity, glibness, and “chutzpah.” These are exactly the opposite of the traits that East Asian men embody, but that’s not necessarily always true of East Asian women.

That’s probably one advantage that South Asians (both male and female) have over East Asians. South Asians have the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/Swarthy (“Men with Gold Chains”) personality type to some extent, which makes them compatible with the Jewish-dominated social order. South Asians also historically lived in a highly Malthusian environment with intense agriculture, which enabled them with some degree of “K-selection” and diligence. So South Asians combine verbosity with a “grind” Tiger Mom culture, which is a pretty good combination for succeeding in today’s America. They’re highly ethnocentric too, which is another trait that favors success in today’s America.

From my experience, the most successful people are those who are diligent when they need to be (especially with respect to academics), but also are adept at bullsh*tting when the need arises. Groups like Jews, South Asians, Persians, Armenians, and Christian Arabs fit this. These groups tend to be clannish too, which makes them able to “network” effectively. On the other hand, groups like East Asians and Slavs don’t fit this, which makes it hard for them to ascend into elite-level positions in Western countries.

Unfortunately, when you allow adept bullsh*tters and networkers to run the country, all sorts of unfortunate things can happen. We see this playing out in America today. While I wouldn’t want to see East Asians run America, I do think that we should promote Americans with East Asian personality traits into leadership positions. “Gold chain” personality traits are not what you want in national leaders.

Somebody compare Chinese to Koreans. In what respects are the two groups similar and different?

It’s too bad your kids aren’t smart enough to get in on merit. I have a number of classmates, including WASPs, whose kids did get into my Ivy Alma Mater. The trick is to actually do well on SATs, have stellar grades and be interesting, not just coast on legacy. The Ivies are trying to weed out some of the decaying old money families, which is probably just as well. Not much point in tying your wagon to Prescotts, Winthrops and Adams when Kushners and Zuckerbergs are running things.

Chicago is now at the top of the Liberal Arts heap and has worked their way up from top 10 to top 3 in the last decade

Chicago is notorious for trying to game the rankings, to the detriment of the education. They do things like admit a large number of students with the condition that they defer a year before starting. They then “re-accept” those students the following year, and it artificially boosts the rate of students who say yes after being admitted. The secret sauce to climbing to number two is actually throwing academic integrity out the window. The irony is that a U of Chicago education really was better than an Ivy education 30 years ago, but probably isn’t today.

The first two years of an Ivy League Med School with which I’m familiar featured 45 credits of classwork each semester for 4 straight semesters. That’s a lot of work. I maintain that it is the amount of material, not the material itself, that is the real load.

Identifying the future wealthy is a sucker’s game. Harvard has probably rejected 4/5 of the world’s billionaires and the other 1/5 dropped out. Harvard’s wealth comes mainly from it’s money managers and Wall Street insider status.

You and Coag are right about the Chinese. Chinese don’t like or trust other Chinese all that much, especially in business. You can see this in Taiwan. Despite years of Japanese rule (much like Korea), and dramatic post-war economic growth much like Japan’s or S. Korea’s, Taiwan has very few large global corporations and has not adopted the chaebol/keiretsu model. As soon as a Taiwanese coroporation reaches a certain scale, it tends to fracture, with managers deciding they can start their own damn company and do a better job running things on their own.

Although Chinese do tend to think of loyalties in concentric circles (me against my brother, my brother and me against my cousin, my village against the neighboring village, etc.) when push comes to shove they have been pretty poor at ethnic nationalism. Chinese spent more time fighting each other than the Japanese in the 1930s and 40s. Again and again over history Chinese have actively aided foreign invaders against other Chinese. Chinese taboos against marriage outside the group seem pretty weak compared to SE Asians, or even Greeks.

The article in the NY Times on admissions to Harvard as usual does not mention the word Jew. Jews at Harvard tripled to 21% of the freshman class in 1922 from about 7% in 1900, but by 1931 that was reduced to 15%. This percentage of jews at Harvard gradually increased to 25% of the class in the mid 1960ies and has remained there. The low of 15% in 1931 which is called a “quota” is in fact a 7-fold over-representation of Jews which today is a 12-fold over-representation. Asians and others cannot expect any justice or genuine meritocracy until this Jewish selection is directly addressed and analyzed.

Well, if this Chicago admissions “strategy” you describe has been working so well for the past decade, then by now wouldn’t the bottom-of-the-barrel Ivy League schools like UPenn, Cornell, and Columbia be imitating it? Everybody games the ratings if they can. Chicago has been committed to a rigorous great-books based core curriculum for much longer than 30 years, and their typical undergrads have better developed thinking skills than typical Ivy grads for the obvious reason that intense academic challenge is required, not optional, as it is at Harvard.

East Asians who come to the U.S. generally (especially initially) have relatively low social status in the U.S. [sic]

Yeah. The programmers and engineers; the physicians and pharmacists. The graduate students (on daddy’s dime, natch…) who never leave, the professors (who cannot even speak Engrish but are given tenure and fat salaries!) teaching them. The oligarchs buying half of California – and all of Vancouver – for cash. Poor, low-status bastards. Pity the lot of ’em.

Do the poor ones who come maybe initially have low status? Sure. Stipulated. So what? Even they get governmentally mandated cash and prizes and privileges over the autochthonous people – the Small Business Administration, the EEOC, the set-asides from DoD,, on and on. Hell, I’ll open a dry cleaner’s tomorrow, as soon as the government lends me the capital on preferred terms because of my epicanthic folds….

Anyway, at least the ones from that part of Asia bathe. Points for that.

(Oh, and I wanted to admire Let Duc d’Quin’s admission most Chinese are at their core amoral son of a bitch. Points for honesty.)

How about this Twinkie. How about Asians stay in Asia. And the ones currently residing in the West can go back to Asia. See how simple that was.

“annual piss up”

Do I want to know what that is?

Don’t you think our elite universities should be weeding out the people who only want to be there for the status? Since those admissions departments are deciding who our future leaders will be, shouldn’t they select students who have the highest values?

Yes, but they’re not our universities.

HY are selecting rulers of a conquered territory, not leaders among a free people.

Limiting supply to maintain exclusivity is a well known strategy in the luxury goods field. Sometimes limited supply is the ONLY thing that can maintain value. The most extreme example being prints by artists. If an artist runs off a lithograph in an edition of 100 or some low number, then the print (which is only a piece of paper and has no intrinsic value at all) has some chance of having value but if he runs off 100,000 then it will never have any value, even though the 1 out of 100 print is exactly the same as the 1 out of 100,000 print.

In most products, the price tag is a negative factor – “I would buy that GMC SUV but it’s awfully expensive.” In luxury goods, the price is a POSITIVE factor – “I would buy that Range Rover BECAUSE it is awfully expensive.” The consumers of these brands WANT you to keep the prices really high and ever increasing so that they can use your product as a status signalling device. When I show up in my new Range Rover (wearing a Rolex, with my Hermes handbag, etc.) people will know that I’m rich and should be envied by them.

For that reason, if you are lucky enough to own such a brand (and smart enough to manage it for the long term – it’s possible to run a luxury brand into the ground – see Cadillac) then it is virtually a license to print money. The price of the product becomes virtually detached from the cost of production. For example, Rolex will sell you a replacement stainless steel bracelet for a Submariner for $1,000. Or the Chinese will sell you a virtually identical bracelet for $10. You can’t really argue that the Rolex bracelet is 100x better – it’s just a hunk of metal. Stainless steel costs $1/lb and the machining is automated. You could make a reasonable argument that it is worth $40 or $50 or even $100 because it is slightly better than the Chinese one (and 40 years ago, when Rolex was just another brand of watch, that’s how much they would have charged you, in inflation adjusted terms), but there’s no way in hell that the bracelet has an intrinsic value (or a production cost) anywhere close to $1,000. But the Rolex one has the magic symbol stamped on it – that’s where 90%+ of the value comes from.

I had not realized before that Hillsdale not taking federal money extended to student financial aid: https://www.hillsdale.edu/admissions-aid/financial-aid/need-based-aid/

Hillsdale College, which does not accept or permit its students to bring federal financial aid to campus, is fully committed to providing its students with competitive financial aid packages, all of which are privately funded.

Oh, bullshit. HY have been selecting from an elite class for the last 300 years. You were just too dumb to notice it because they had the same nominal religion and came from the same nominal ethnic group – maybe you couldn’t tell the difference between them and you, but THEY could sure as hell tell the difference between themselves and you. The fact that the President of Harvard or Yale is named Levin instead of Lowell doesn’t change anything as far as their level of condescension to the unwashed masses.

People should really look at graduate schools. I think they matter far more, and Jewish enrollment in them is much higher.

Agreed. One thing I found interesting is that the racial balance does not seem that much different at Harvard for undergraduates and graduates: https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/edu/166027/harvard-university/enrollment/
Scroll down to “Enrollment By Race/Ethnicity.” The bar charts for all/undergraduate/graduate make it easy to compare.

But looking at Jewish representation at Harvard is even more interesting (as seen in Ron Unz’s article).

Hillel claims 11% Jewish Undergrads and 67% Jewish Graduates: https://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-university
My guess is the former is understated due to the recent controversy about this, but how is the latter even possible given the racial balance seen at the first link?

The Jerusalem Post claims 25% of Harvard Undergrads are Jewish: https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-college-and-other-facts-about-Jews-at-American-colleges-437701

So, it seems a bunch of kids attend what are essentially shadow-harvard. They are not accepted into Harvard Undergrad but have a good chance of entering Harvard Graduate if they make the grades at the ‘lesser’ university.

Perhaps, but based on the numbers above they sure don’t seem to be non-Jewish whites.

You are presenting a quite biased version of the evidence presented so far.

For anyone who wants to dig deeply into this, here are the court filings: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/sffa-files-motion-for-summary-judgment-against-harvard/

Agreed about this though:

The plaintiffs’ black/Hispanic affirmative action data, that MSM is giving the silent treatment, is much harder for Harvard to explain away. There is some evidence that the admission rate for blacks is engineered to never go below the overall domestic admission rate, and unless Harvard can explain that away, that is close enough to a quota that all the talk of diversity and complex multifactor admission will not make it legal under existing rulings. Also the sheer magnitude of the black preference makes it hard to argue that black race per se is only “one of many factors”, it is all-important as the plaintiffs demonstrate.

the Asian issue that is getting all the current publicity looks like a big nothingburger

Nothing to see here folks, move along. These are not the droids you are looking for.

Don’t they see themselves as a team of sorts, and to hell with everybody else?

No. Although its not a religion, its most akin to a religious community in that being Chinese is a set of norms, beliefs, traditions, and so on. As such, it is very vulnerable to “schism” and its how you get intense enmity between factions(such as Epoch Times, which basically exists to attack the CCP). The Chinese have been vastly murderous of their own due to such schisms. There’s ultimately no clear definition on what those common mores must be, and one group can be convinced that they represented a “truer” or “more authentic” faction against the others.

Attacking Chinese as a whole, though, would be akin to attacking Christianity to a Christian; he becomes obligated to defend a significant basis of existence.

Hence the plaintiff can engineer a study indicating discrimination and the defendant can, by using more variables and controls, show the opposite.

That is certainly true, but often one can look closely at the models and make a judgment as to who is closer to reality and who is obfuscating it. I have done that. Have you?

Asian-apologist-whitey-hater who lacks theory of mind — How original!

The numbers don’t point to discrimination against Asians either, chief. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the distributions of intelligence and more importantly proportions of the total population can see who admissions is screwing.

Unrelated, do you have an Anglo first name?

By any normal notion of “normative,” our children would be precisely the normative default, no?

But that’s just crazy talk.

Everyone in China knows what the normative default is for a graduate and post-graduate from their central Communist uni. I lived with one. She was awesome, but I was very young.

Indeed, everyone in most countries knows what the default is. Just in Western Europe and the Anglophone countries is a default prohibited.

I believe the elite is better with a sense of noblesse oblige and organic connection to the wider community. Perhaps America needs to be an experiment in something else but your example is leading the European nations astray.

Even basic b*tch companies get a brand identity but supposedly a country having one is not inclusive enough.

As we have seen from the original post, SATs and grades aren’t enough to accomplish anything on their own. In any case, my children are 11 and 13, so the jury’s still out: hence the future tense.

Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension before baselessly insulting people’s children. With enough work, maybe you’ll even be able to recognize a joke!

45 hours of class time per semester? Not possible. Isn’t the typical undergrad load around 15 hours?

academic gossip seems to generally know what he is talking about, but likes to argue from authority rather than presenting evidence.

Here is what I found. First, it is worth noting that AFAICT this data is only for US citizens and permanent residents.

This report has 2016 bar charts for minorities (but not whites) by broad field on page 5 in panel D: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/static/report/nsf18304-report.pdf
I did not realize just how large a proportion of black doctorates were in education.

Current top level NSF Doctorates page: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/
All of the data tables: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/data.cfm
HTML version of Table 23. U.S. citizen and permanent resident doctorate recipients, by broad field of study, ethnicity, and race: Selected years, 1996–2016 (which I think is best able to address this conversation): https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsf18304/datatables/tab23.htm

As I am sure you are aware, it is necessary to consider the demographics of the underlying populations (both total and “interested in achieving that”) and NYC is different from the US. My guess is academic gossip was mostly referring to the relative proportions of whites (ag, feel free to correct if I misunderstood), and in that I would say he is correct.

What is a “normative default”?

Nobody at that thread or in this one has pointed out anything wrong with my (more or less obvious to cognoscenti, once stated) take on the statistical issues in the Harvard Asian lawsuit.

OK. Let’s have that conversation. What are your reasons for considering Card’s analysis to invalidate Arcidiacono’s? Based on what I have read, I find Arcidiacono’s reasoning on interaction variables persuasive (I will be happy to respond in more detail once you have given your top level take) and that leads me to believe Card is obfuscating.

Since it might be useful for this conversation I will repeat this link to court filings: https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/sffa-files-motion-for-summary-judgment-against-harvard/

It‘s not reading comprehension, I am purposely insulting you because you‘re a Harvard man and I don‘t like Harvard. I am a dick that way.

I suppose that depends on what the meaning of “intrinsic” is.

I would argue that it is possible to detach the cachet of the name brand from the thing itself and the latter is the intrinsic thing – in this case the quality of the education.

For example, say I presented an expert panel with glasses of wine in a blind taste test – they might prefer A to B – that’s the intrinsic quality of the item.

But in the market, B might be Château Lafite Rothschild and A might be a Napa Valley wine that sells for a fraction of the price, because of the status of the Lafite name.

Social status is by definition EXTRINSIC – it’s not what’s in the bottle, it’s how people perceive the label. Social status can be gained as a result of past performance – the way Lafite came to have high social status in the first place was (in part) because it had high intrinsic value at some point. But things change – you can rest on your laurels. The quality of the product can go down. Competitors can improve their product, etc.

Nice try. I fail to see how accepting a government grant to research, say cancer, obligates the entity to comply with rules outside cancer research. The Supreme Court answered this “strings attached” issue in the Medicaid expansion question under Obamacare with a denial.

Based on your rationale, nothing is truly private and there are no limits to government coercion. It’s a popular assertion–but one that only finds favor under the rubric of who’s ox is being gored.

I happen to disagree the government has (or should have) such sweeping coercive power.

You cite circumstances as dispositive proof, when it pure conjecture or opinion. If the issue was as clear-cut as you imply, it wouldn’t have been taken up in a private civil action–but rather, the government imposing what you claim government has the power to do.

If I am paying, I am the customer — if not the boss.

That’s true only when the power relationship is equal or nearly so.

I get what you are saying, but could you elaborate on how that works in your view? I understand the difference between commodity and luxury goods (generally based on limited supply, exclusivity, and perceptions) and its relevance here, but the Harvard example seems to go beyond that. I don’t think anyone would argue the customer is unimportant to the luxury goods provider, but perhaps Harvard is different in having such a large pool of realistic (roughly comparable) customers that it has power beyond that. I suppose Harvard’s role could be best seen as choosing the next generation of the powerful (who don’t really care about the price, nor does Harvard care that much about the tuition).

So in that sense Harvard can be seen as needing to be sold on your suitability for that role. That selling need making them the customer. Is this what you mean? With most of the academic selectivity a reputation preserving sideline?

Are there any examples other than elite universities which show this dynamic? I have heard occasional stories of idiosyncratic high end car companies (e.g. early Enzo dominated Ferrari, IIRC) which reject potential buyers as “unworthy”, but can’t think of any others.

This comment is one of the best I have seen at elucidating multiple informative responses. Thanks to all of you.

Without going into the merits of the competing experts, I’ll repeat what I said earlier – the only reason why we can have this discussion at all is because garden variety E. Asians (we will put aside the Nepalese, Bhutanese, etc. that Harvard talks about because they still have value as exotic rarities) do not possess a lot of Diversity Pokemon points. Substitute one of the higher ranked groups (blacks) for Asian and Harvard’s experts would not even DARE make the arguments that they are making and that you are making – that the reason the Harvard admission officers ranked BLACKS as less likable is because they really ARE less likable. That they are just reflecting the opinions of others – teachers, interviewers, etc. who are giving recommendations and that those others are not themselves fatally infected with racism that taints their judgments. Etc. As I said before, all you need to do is substitute the word “African-American” for “Asian” and Harvard’s whole defense would be considered a war crime.

Thanks to both you and Buzz Mohawk for providing a good example of constructive disagreement. I am enjoying your conversation.

Yes, I read the statistical analysis in the expert reports. Both sides make some mistakes. Card is clearly smarter than Arcidiacono, but he has more to explain.

The key point is Harvard’s rebuttal on the personal ratings of Asians. Card is right, and Arcidiacono floundering, about whether to do year-by-year analyses and combine them. Of course you want single-year analysis and combining is not an issue. Of course you want the larger set of variables, especially SES data on the parents, for predicting admission. Card then replaces the supposedly biased personal ratings by Arcidiacono’s regression-predicted ratings (minus the adverse Asian “bias” coefficient that he estimated as his proof of discrimination), and re-runs the admission analysis on this bias-free data set that shows Asians’ supposedly higher level of personal quality. This procedure should show worse Asian effects than the real data set, since the admission results are the same but Asians’ ratings have been raised. But instead of this procedure isolating an Asian discrimination effect, it replicates the finding that the Asian coefficient fluctuates in sign year-to-year and is small/insignificant combining the years.

The plaintiffs have not publicized their counter-arguments to this analysis, but their options are pretty limited and lame. They are already arguing that Card is trying to noise up the analysis in the hope of swamping the Asian coefficients. The data set is way too big for that, and it doesn’t explain how the Asian coefficient comes out positive in some years, when according to plaintiffs’ theories, Harvard should be having to discriminate massively to get the observed white/Asian enrollment.

I find the societal buy in to the idea of the Ivy League as a marker of intellectual excellence ridiculous in light of their admissions policies with regard to affirmative action, legacies, and athletes.

There is certainly intellectual excellence at those institutions, but the idea that “X is intellectually elite because they went to Y university” is hard to sustain without a close look at X’s background.

I don’t think anyone would argue the customer is unimportant to the luxury goods provider, but perhaps Harvard is different in having such a large pool of realistic (roughly comparable) customers that it has power beyond that.

Harvard is in an unusually good position in that they have 18 potential customers for every seat on sale (admission rate 5.6%) but it’s not unprecedented in other businesses. Think of Hamilton tickets or the waiting list for Hermes Birkin bags and so on. Hot clubs have guys who stand at the door whose entire job description consists of turning away customers. All of these business could theoretically equalize supply and demand by either increasing supply or raising the price, but they have economically valid reasons for rationing their products by turning away customers instead.

Jack makes a good point here. The biggest overriding factor is social class, or whatever you want to call it, economic level, caste, whatever. Your real leaders.

We are naked apes, after all. There are dominant apes and submissive apes. If you prefer chickens, there is a pecking order, and it is somewhat independent of religion or ethnicity.

For example, our “betters” are the people who want non-whites to come on into the homelands of the white, global minority. They are making sure this continues to happen. It means cheap labor (servants) for them and a submissive underclass.

Those elites do not seem to care who or what we are. They will ruin our countries, because they somehow see themselves as above it, independent of it, and in control of it.

Their children go to Ivy League universities, because that is where ruling-class people go to college, no matter how dumb they are.

People who’ve attended the better schools know (among other things) that the workload alone would crush most beasts of burden.

How much would you say that varies by major? FWIW I know exactly what you mean by the bit I quoted.

I’ve long said that the only way either of our two children will get into Harvard College is if the Admissions Office suddenly comes down with a case of Mad Men-style nostalgia for the Bad Old Days, through which the kids attain token high-WASP status so that Harvard can have them adorn the place like Beefeaters. You know: for the rubes!

Do you really think this is true given that your children are double (and multigenerational) legacies? I would expect them to be fast tracked given the admissions data I see for Harvard legacies (one of the fun side effects of the Asian admissions lawsuit).

Irelands GNI being the same as U.K. is a better measure and without EU bribes the per capita GDP would be much less.

Thank You!

This must surely be an American Essex? Not sure I’d expect to get my phone back in Southend, UK.

(“piss-up” = “drinking session or excuse for one, like an annual dinner”)

Yale is another of “our” universities that was taken over by a racist-supremacist, foreign sect a LONG time ago. Remember that the trustee for “Skull & Bones” is still from Russell & Co., the biggest jewish opium trafficking company of the 19th century. Yes, people get introduced into deep state corruption there – for example Skull & Bones provided BOTH presidential candidates in 2004.

Again this is nothing unique – every brand can either rest on its laurels (and decline in the long run) or maintain brand equity via advertising and favorable publicity (rather than intrinsic quality) or go from strength to strength. A brand was once literally a brand (like what is used on cattle) that was stamped onto the end of a barrel of flour because you could then buy a barrel of flour that had the “Joe’s Mill” stamp burned onto it and know that it was flour of good quality without even having to open the barrel and check the contents.

But say after a while the owners of Joe’s Mill get sloppy and sometimes their flour is moldy or wormy or off tasting and no longer always the top quality that Joe’s Mill was renowned for, but they are letting it go out their doors anyway (see every American car company in the 1970s). For a while, people are so used to buying the Joe’s Mill brand (and hearing its advertising jingles and seeing their friends buying Joe’s) that they will keep buying it anyway. But after a few bad barrels, they may decide to switch brands or at the very least to lift the lid on the barrel and check the contents closely before they just buy based on the brand alone.

You can see that the exact same analogy applies to a Harvard diploma.

Good points. Hot clubs are the perfect example. Speaking of which, how do they avoid running afoul of the discrimination police? Is it because the “cool people” get in?

Regarding your product examples, I imagine there was a fair amount of prestige based (and/or currying favor, etc.) selectivity in the way Hamilton tickets made their way through the distribution chain, but did any of that happen at the level of the theater box office itself (which I think would be the best analog for Harvard admissions)?

Does Hermes play any games with its waitlist (either positive or negative discrimination) based on who its customers are? Does anything like that happen at the retailer rather than manufacturer level?

I guess I should be more explicit in saying that the defining characteristic of the point I am attempting to draw out is the seller exercising non-price based discrimination with respect to their customers. And just how far this goes to counteract the idea of “I am paying therefore I am the customer and have power.”

It is natural personality aversion to a dominant oriental archetype. To the more extroverted type Caucasian, East Asians simply look autistic. To the more insular, perceptive, and autistic sorts of Caucasians, East Asians look normal. The latter aren’t in power and rarely are (Nixon being a rare example) while the former have achieved overwhelming supremacy in America. This aversion is a two way street though as we are deeply distrustful of the “I am your friend type”. The more you tell me you are my friend, the faster I count my silver.

Yes if I was American Stalin I’d have most of the hpy MBA types shot and replaced with white middle class gentiles from intact families and non coastal states that were top of their class from public engineering schools. Hard to go wrong with those types.

Gold box.

Excellent comment DoQ. Strikes me as spot on. Conformity isn’t “collectivism”. And you take here:

True collectivism, as in “my tribe, f*ck you” is actually rare amidst the people of the Far East because those attitudes are only made possible by multi racial/cultural/religious environs where ingroup endogamy is the norm.

i think nails the motivating–evolutionary–factor.

You are both wrong. Legacy is a “plus” factor but it doesn’t mean either auto-reject or auto-accept. Harvard is not completely lying when they say they have a “holistic” process. Once you get past the secret racial quotas (i.e. among white people) it really does work that way more or less. So if your kids are on the borderline for white people at Harvard (which would be pretty high – even 1600 SATs is no guaranty) then legacy might be the plus factor that tips the scale and gets them in, while their best friend with identical scores but no legacy might not make the cut (or it might not if they don’t take a liking to the rest of your package).

If they are not otherwise plausible candidates (say SAT below 1400) then even 10 generations of legacy (without a high seven figure donation attached to the application ) wouldn’t help. The legacy admit rate is something like 3x the non-legacy rate so it is a major advantage (there are very few other things besides being a recruited athlete that a white person could do that would triple his chances) but since the overall rate is now under 6% that still means that most legacies are going to get rejected too.

Really excellent follow-up comment Johnny.

The bullsh*tter and Steve’s “Men with Gold Chains” concepts are quite useful in parsing what’s going on–what’s happened to our nation.

Thanks for replying. This will go better if we both refer to the actual arguments in context (though that might be more effort than either of us wish to undertake).

First, let’s be very clear. I am much more concerned about the merits of the case than things like “Card is clearly smarter than Arcidiacono” though at least you conclude by acknowledging “but he has more to explain.”

I found Arcidiacono’s discussion of interaction variables in section “3.2 Professor Card errs in failing to include interaction terms” (pp. 19-22) of http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-2-Arcidiacono-Rebuttal-Report.pdf
persuasive. That argument seems so clear (I especially liked the quoting of Card’s conditions for when those variables should be included) I am led to believe Card is obfuscating.

Can you point to the location of the Card argument to which you refer?

Do you have any rebuttals for Steve Hsu’s blog posts on this topic?

P.S. Are you aware of a resource for the defendant’s filings similar to https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/sffa-files-motion-for-summary-judgment-against-harvard/ for the plaintiff’s filings?

P.P.S. I would be interested in any insights Twinkie has to offer from his stint in an Ivy League admissions office.

Regarding your product examples, I imagine there was a fair amount of prestige based (and/or currying favor, etc.) selectivity in the way Hamilton tickets made their way through the distribution chain, but did any of that happen at the level of the theater box office itself (which I think would be the best analog for Harvard admissions)?

Absolutely. “This is the office of Hillary Clinton calling. President and Secretary Clinton would like to have 2 tickets in the 3 row center of the orchestra for tonight.” Box Office: “The tickets will be waiting for them at the box office.”

Harvard’s money has been badly managed for the last several years. The fact that they’ve been getting a lot in donations has been covering up for this.

Quote from the linked article below: “The endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2017 ranks dead last among the 88 largest endowments that have reported their results, according to Bloomberg data. It’s not just one year. Harvard’s three-year, five-year and 10-year returns rank 73, 66 and 55, respectively.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-02-22/harvard-alumni-cook-up-a-dumb-idea-for-its-endowment

If it weren’t for generous donors, their endowment’s growth would be considered unremarkable, as well as unremarkable long-term.

From the article: “Harvard, along with other big university endowments, pioneered and still uses the so-called endowment model of investing, which calls for investments in high-priced hedge funds and private assets alongside traditional stocks and bonds.”

One thing about hedge funds is that their long-term results mostly suck. They’re great destroyers of capital. They make money for their managers in terms of fees, which is why they keep being set up, but for the sucker investing in them? HA HA HA.

Look up what Warren Buffett says about hedge funds. He made a famous long-term bet against them.

One thing you can say for Harvard’s massive hiring of diversity admins, namely chicks, blacks, and browns, is that they don’t know how to handle money. This is typical ‘diversity’ behavior when it comes to cash. Their current plan, “Duh, maybe buy an index fund,” is what happens when you have no one in the money department who knows how to invest. Buying and long-term holding an index fund is what you do when you don’t know enough to actively invest money yourself, don’t want to learn about the investing process, and don’t want to be bothered with it. Harvard’s money mangers are overpaid for the service that they’re providing.

Frankly I wouldn’t want to send my children to the “brand management” practiced by Harvard, which according to “independent” rating agencies is down to #4 in the US.

World University Rankings 2018
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2018/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats

Too much corruption at Harvard.

The legacy admit rate is something like 3x the non-legacy rate so it is a major advantage

You are mistaking correlation for causation. Legacy status also correlates with genes and wealth.

Do you really think this is true given that your children are double (and multigenerational) legacies?

Actually I have no idea and have done no research on the matter. But applying from New York City doesn’t help, and the College’s increasingly open war on White Privilege and even generalized elitism[!] doesn’t bode well.

I do know a lot of people who went there and nevertheless had their perfectly worthy children denied admission. Then again the son of a couple of Ur-WASP friends who married after Harvard and live on the Upper East Side did get in a few years ago–out of Hotchkiss, no less. So maybe you’re right.

You are both wrong. Legacy is a “plus” factor but it doesn’t mean either auto-reject or auto-accept.

Come on, Jack. I never said auto-accept. “Fast track” might have been a bit much, but look how much legacies and athletes move just the raw demographics:

According to this article, the legacy admissions advantage is closer to 6x (34% is nothing to sneeze at, vs. 6% for non-legacies) than 3x: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-lee-harvard-legacy-student-advantage-20180622-story.html

The thing that confounds all of this is that many legacies (those whose antecedents were admitted on merit at least) are likely to be smart in the first place. I assumed this was the case for slumber_j’s children based on that, his comments here in general, and the tone of that particular comment. It would be interesting to see how legacy status interacts with test scores and demographics for admissions percentages.

I sincerely wonder about your hypothetical. I would like to believe it is true, but I do wonder. She is an extreme example, but do you think essentially any SAT scores (say over 1000 or 1200?) would have kept Malia Obama from being admitted to Harvard?

Fair enough, but how far do you think that extends? Two questions that might help clarify my point:
– Is there any blackballing?
– What proportion of tickets from the box office are distributed as in your HRC example? Thinking about NYC a bit, that number is probably far higher than my gut reaction, but I would still be interested in your take.

Yes, Harvard does have a lot of money, in the 40-odd billion endowment range. But they spend in the high 4 billions every year just for the operating expenses for the school. The math says they HAVE to earn 10% in income from their endowment just to break even and keep from having to draw down it down. Their spending keeps climbing, and it’s close to 5 billion a year right now.

Making 10% year after year is doing extremely well investment-wise, and no one should count on it long-term. It’s very unlikely. Thus Harvard HAS to have generous donors just to keep their endowment from being run down.

Harvard does not make any attempt to cut its costs or run a tight ship. Spending almost 5 billion a year to read a freaking college is ridiculous.

I have no idea, but that makes sense. Anyway, you seem to know a lot more than I do about this.

Agreed, but I think you will notice that none of that counters my actual point about how ridiculous taking the Ivy League brand at face value for indicating intellectual excellence is in the current year. Though it probably is still quite good at indicating “this person is intellectually capable relative to what is typical for those possessing their other attributes” which, thinking about it some more, is probably good enough for most people using the metric.

The interesting questions with respect to your brand deterioration point are things like:
– How much can product quality deteriorate before causing damage?
– What are the time constants involved?
– How much can marketing counter this?

But applying from New York City doesn’t help, and the College’s increasingly open war on White Privilege and even generalized elitism[!] doesn’t bode well.

Agreed.

I do know a lot of people who went there and nevertheless had their perfectly worthy children denied admission.

This helps substantiate your initial concern. As I mentioned in a response to Jack D, it would be interesting to see how legacy status interacts with other variables with respect to admissions percentages.

Could you be a little more precise? Are you talking about more not getting in than were admitted? What would be the rough admit/reject percentages for legacies you know in a similar demographic category? The legacy admission rate of 34% I linked to above is probably a good baseline. I am assuming (without reasonable cause perhaps) that a decent proportion of the 66% rejected were not worthy.

Then again the son of a couple of Ur-WASP friends who married after Harvard and live on the Upper East Side did get in a few years ago–out of Hotchkiss, no less. So maybe you’re right.

The Hotchkiss wikipedia page makes it look like a good track to Harvard. Am I missing something?

Was there anything else going on with their son (athlete, parents movers and shakers, especially smart, etc.) that might have influenced his admission?

The thing that confounds all of this is that many legacies (those whose antecedents were admitted on merit at least) are likely to be smart in the first place.

Uh, yeah, smart AND wealthy (with the educational oops that affords). Do you mean people aren’t controlling for those variables?

How about this Twinkie…. See how simple that was

How about this? We keep Twinkie, regardless of changes going forward. See how simple that was?