So this is how fairness works. An article in the Los Angeles Times, which not only buries the lede but bears the unilluminating title “For Asian Americans, a changing landscape on college admissions,” reveals that the SAT — the standardized test used by college admissions offices the nation over — is guilty of racial bias … against students of Asian extraction.
And for so-called students of color.
According to Ann Lee, “co-founder of HS2 Academy, a college prep business that assumes that racial bias is a fact of college admissions and counsels students accordingly”:
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points….
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”…
Asian Americans … are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.
There is no mention of whether white students are penalized, but even if they are not, they are still disadvantaged by the edge given to black and Hispanic students.
The article goes on to acknowledge that “complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students,” adding:
In November, a group called Students for Fair Admissions filed a suit against Harvard University for admissions policies that allegedly discriminate against Asian Americans. The group cited the 2004 Princeton study and other sources that offer statistics about Asian Americans’ test performance.
At the University of Texas at Austin, an affirmative action policy that allows admissions committees to consider the race of prospective applicants has been argued all the way to the Supreme Court. (The policies were upheld by a lower court, but that court’s decision was voided by the Supreme Court. Another court upheld the policies and another appeal is pending.)
The revelation in this article comes at a time when one prominent university, the University of Minnesota, has knuckled under to demands from black students that the skin color of perpetrators of campus crime be kept out of crime email alerts lest the school be guilty of racial profiling. Is it not fascinating that racial profiling can be seen as a positive as long as it benefits minority students?
