If culturally-discriminating WASP admissions officers were the main barrier, one would not expect non-Jewish whites to be the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League. Circa 2019, looking at non-international students only:
Ivy League US Ratio Mean SAT score [1]
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16 n/a
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower estimate)
Percentages don't sum to 100 because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown"/"other" by the universities were excluded. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.
What's taking assessment tests out of that picture likely to do to the percentage?
It's not more WASPs, there are exactly twenty of those matriculating per year and they all drink blood out of a skull†. It's less Asians and more, heartfelt college essays about: you can fill that in, I'm sure.
†I'm not actually blood-libeling WASPs, something about how conversations have gone here recently compels me to point this out. Remember the 2004 election? Me neither.
> Jews and Asians are overrepresented because they give the hard signal. Some absurd double-digit number of Asian students at Harvard have a perfect SAT score.
That is why I included the SAT score in the table. Non-Jewish whites don't benefit from a higher score - they get admitted at approximately the same rates as Hispanic and Black students, despite 100-180 points higher mean SAT scores.
On the other hand, the smaller, 70 point lead of Asians gives a 6.6x higher admission rate, and the unknown lead of Jewish students a 12.8x higher admission rate. Strange, isn't it?
Why don't you teach me? How are SAT scores distributed, that raising the mean by 175, from 966 to 1141, does not change the area above the Ivy League admission cutoff, but raising it by another 75 points to 1216, increases that area by a factor of 6.6x?
Certainly not by the normal normal distribution - unless there were truly dramatic differences in the standard deviation. Do you have any evidence that there are, and are in the correct direction for your argument?
Or you could look at e.g. Harvard's own documents and see that they required higher SAT scores for whites, and highest for Asians [1]. Of course they do not count Jews separately in those figures.
The fact that you haven't mentioned standard deviation shows that you don't know how a normal distribution works.
Moreover, you are talking about "admission rate" which you haven't clearly defined.
Also, the normal distribution is a law of averages - that does not apply here. You have to use the actual distribution of data, not the normal distribution of averages.
If you want to make a proper statistical argument you must have the acceptance ratio at a given college for every race for a particular SAT score (say a SAT score of 1250) Any other data is just muddling signal with noise.
Asians most discriminated.
Whites and Pacific islanders a distant second. Hispanics and multiracial follow closely at 3rd position. Blacks benefit the most, but given that the number of students in each ethnicity is not specified then the discrimination level is unclear.
If there are very few Asian students and plenty of black students, whites can be experiencing discrimination. However, if there are lots of Asians and very few black students, then whites are beneficiaries!
They could have used the average as a zero control, but they used whites, which means that definitive statements can only be made about black and Asian students!
A very good point! We can also ask why whites are underrepresented at Addis Ababa University, and why there are so few Latinos attending Osaka University.
Because each university belongs to the whole world, and none were founded to serve their country.
This is a very good point. In particular, it completely throws out the "overrepresentation" ratio for Asian students. What's the actual ratio by number of applications?
It's the opposite. In a poll, WASPs gave Jews the 2nd highest rating (69, higher than Catholics, rating only themselves higher at 82), while Jews rated themselves at 89, and gave Evangelical Christians the lowest rating, 34.
In other words, WASPs have a positive view of Jews, while Jews have a very negative view of WASPs.
I wonder if the college administrators who enforced quotas on Jewish students would answer similarly (not being sarcastic, I generally wouldn't be surprised if they said in a survey that they had warm feelings towards the Jews)
There's no evidence of anti-Jewish bias in Ivy League admissions (the opposite, in fact), and polls also show friendly attitudes towards Jews among the general population, so I don't know what it would take to convince you.
On the other hand, Ivy League students are only 33% non-Jewish white, and 4-5 of the 8 presidents are Jewish, per their wikipedia pages (Martha Pollack is listed as Jewish, but the citations in support of that claim are ambiguous, hence the uncertainty), so what makes you think that admissions are the exception where WASPs reign?
[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...