When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race. More specifically, they are talking about blacks. A diverse college campus is understood as one that has a student body that -- at a minimum -- is 5 to 7 percent black (i.e., equivalent to roughly half the proportion of blacks in the general population). A college or university that is only one, two, or three percent black would not be considered "diverse" by college administrators regardless of how demographically diverse its student body might be in other ways. The blacks in question need not be African Americans -- indeed at many of the most competitive colleges today, including many Ivy League schools, an estimated 40-50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants.

...

Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have "too many" Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students -- those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s -- are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.

While almost all college administrators and college admissions officers at the most elite institutions think in racial balancing and racial quota-like terms when they assemble their student body, they almost always deny this publically in a blizzard of rhetoric about a more far-flung "diversity." Indeed, there is probably no other area where college administrators are more likely to lie or conceal the truth of what they are doing than in the area of admissions and race.

Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.

Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an "other things equal basis," where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.

The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student's chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550. Here the Espenshade/Radford results are consistent with other studies, including those of William Bowen and Derek Bok in their book The Shape of the River, though they go beyond this influential study in showing both the substantial Hispanic admissions advantage and the huge admissions penalty suffered by Asian applicants. Although all highly competitive colleges and universities will deny that they have racial quotas -- either minimum quotas or ceiling quotas -- the huge boosts they give to the lower-achieving black and Hispanic applicants, and the admissions penalties they extract from their higher-achieving Asian applicants, clearly suggest otherwise.

I thought that was pretty crazy, having to get a 1550 out of 1600 just to compete on the same level with someone who scored an 1100. Based purely on race.

Micheal, I get what you are saying, and for the big picture it seems logical. However, in the 16 years that I have lived in Mississippi, all that big picture theory is doing for the blacks down here is promoting a sense of entitlement and imho, only making the situation worse.
Perhaps things are much different elsewhere.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him and his family for his lifetime.

This is old news; however, individuals of a certain political persuasion will maintain, regardless of actual data, that it is the which guy who needs the 1100.

What are you going to do about all those brown people who are getting screwed because they don't have access to all the resources that Asian and non brown people typically have?

How much resources do you need to have decent healthcare, security, quality educational opportunities and vocational training, housing subsidies, etc.

I'd say that "diversity punishment" could be good for those it "punishes" and bad for those it "protects".

Sorta like survival of the fittest, those folks who overcome obstacles when others have artificial advantages will end up stronger just by breaking even, and those who allow others to make excuses for them will NEED excuses.

Outside a totalitarian government takeover, excuses don't count in the real world and performance is where it's at - and the person who learns to overcome will be the better for it.

The term "artificial advantage" is hilarious.

You define words funny. It's amazing you can communicate and function in society at all. There must be a lot of misunderstandings when people try to converse with you, because it sure *sounds* like you're speaking English, when really you're speaking an entire language all your own where the words just sound like English words, but mean entirely different things to you and only you.

So you're contending that a lower SAT requirement, for instance, is not an advantage over a person with a higher SAT requirement?

You define words funny. It's amazing you can communicate and function in society at all. There must be a lot of misunderstandings when people try to converse with you, because it sure *sounds* like you're speaking English, when really you're speaking an entire language all your own where the words just sound like English words, but mean entirely different things to you and only you.