Rethinking the D-Bus Message Bus - <AUTHOR> https://dvdhrm.github.io/rethinking-the-dbus-message-bus/ <comment><USER2> _We rather consider a bus a set of distinct peers with no global state._

If they've gone that far, they may as well implement QNX messaging, which is known to work well. QNX has an entire POSIX implementation based on QNX's messaging system, so it's known to work. Plus it does hard real time.

The basic primitives work like a subroutine call. There's MsgSend (send and wait for reply), MsgReceive (wait for a request), and MsgReply (reply to a request). There's also MsgSendPulse (send a message, no reply, no wait) but it's seldom used. Messages are just arrays of bytes; the messaging system has no interest in content. Receivers can tell the process ID of the sender, so they can do security checks. All I/O is done through this mechanism; when you call "write()", the library does a MsgSend.

Services can give their endpoint a pathname, so callers can find them.

The call/reply approach makes the hard cases work right. If the receiver isn't there or has exited, the sender gets an error return. There's a timeout mechanism for sending; in QNX, anything that blocks can have a timeout. If a sender exits while waiting for a reply, that doesn't hurt the receiver. So the "cancellation" problem is solved. If you wan to do something else in a process while waiting for a reply, you can use more threads in the sender. On the receive side, you can have multiple threads taking requests via MsgReceive, handling the requests, and replying via MsgReply, so the system scales.

CPU scheduling is integrated with messaging. On a MsgSend, CPU control is usually transferred from sender to receiver immediately, without a pass through the scheduler. The sending thread blocks and the receiving thread unblocks.

With unidirectional messaging (Mach, etc.) and async systems, it's usually necessary to build some protocol on top of messaging to handle errors. It's easy to get stall situations. ("He didn't call back! He said he'd call back! He promised he'd call back!") There's also a scheduling problem - A sends to B but doesn't block, B unblocks, A waits on a pipe/queue for B and blocks, B sends to A and doesn't block, A unblocks. This usually results in several trips through the scheduler and bad scheduling behavior when there's heavy traffic.

There's years (decades, even) of success behind QNX messaging, yet people keep re-inventing the wheel and coming up with inferior designs.

<comment><USER3> So, SIMPL?

 _Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for LINUX (SIMPL) is a free and open-source project that allows QNX-style synchronous message passing by adding a Linux library using user space techniques like shared memory and Unix pipes[3] to implement SendMssg /ReceiveMssg/ReplyMssg inter-process messaging mechanisms._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMPL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMPL)

[http://icanprogram.com/simpl/](http://icanprogram.com/simpl/)

<comment><USER2> If you do it via pipes, the performance will be terrible. If you do it via shared memory, there's a good chance that one side crashing will take down the other side.

QNX itself implements pipes via messaging.

<comment><USER4> Since QNX is proprietary, QNX messaging is likely patent encumbered.

What's a good open alternative, or starting point for new innovation, given current investments in microservice architecture?

      - ZeroMQ (and nanomsg)
      - gRPC (Google)
      - Apache Thrift (Facebook)
      - Finagle (Twitter)
      - L4/seL4 IPC

<comment><USER5> The wamp protocol is interesting imo. It's independant a serialisation and transport despite the fact it uses websocket + json by default. It does routed rpc and pub/sub out of the box. But no low level router yet.

<comment><USER6> Check out crossbar.io, it's a broker from the authors of wamp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That sounds reasonable. I'm very surprised. Disabling remote targets, ignoring SELinux, focusing on reliability.

DBus is the one part of the modern linux desktop I would like to/have to install to get the applications I want running, even though I dislike it a lot (pulseaudio and systemd one can just not install). One example is the password remember function of steam. Having a more reasonable implementation could help with this a lot.

<comment><USER8> For the record: dbus-broker has full SELinux support.

<comment><USER7> Well, I don't mind either way. [https://github.com/bus1/dbus- broker/wiki#using-dbus-broker](https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker/wiki#using- dbus-broker) says it has to be disabled.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, thanks for the pointer! Removed that now (it was left-over from before we got SELinux support).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dbus is bloated hell. Whoever came with the idea "let's cram all communications from all sources into the single unified data stream, and let the clients fish what they need out of it" had the strange mapping of mental processes, to say the least. Most other forms of IPC are better (more scalable, more elegant, more comprehensible) — "everything is a file" is better, actor model is better, and I nearly think that even plain shared memory is better than a common bus.

There is a reason there is no "shared bus" in Internet communications.

<comment><USER10> Well, there's multicast, but nobody uses that. Some things use link-local broadcast.

Personally I think the Windows messaging system would actually be a pretty good model to follow, especially if you could give it an actual payload and not just two words. It would certainly solve the actual problems DBus was built to address - media change notifications and things like that.

<comment><USER11> We actually rely on multicast here at the NRAO for monitor and control of the VLA. I admit it's the only place I've heard of it being used.

ZeroMQ is getting used more for those kinds of purposes; the Greenbank Telescope uses it for one of their instrument backends and we are now using it for VLITE and REALfast. The new archive system I'm helping build uses AMQP.

<comment><USER12> This is fascinating (as an amateur astronomer), have you written anything else on the systems design of these types of instruments, or have any good pointers? I imagine for large instruments there is a massive amount of data involved and lots of stuff to control. I know it's bad enough with just my one telescope setup :)

<comment><USER11> There is quite a bit of technical documentation about our systems, and the code is supposed to be open-source (though a lot of it isn't publicly accessible as it should be). But I haven't written anything meant to be a high-level overview of how it works. I think I will try and do that in a few days and send you an email.

I have been joking about how we should build a "total sh*t array" out of old Dish/DirecTV antennas, so that we could explore the systems design without worrying too much about whether anything could be done with the data collected. This hasn't interested my coworkers that much :) There is an amateur radio astronomy society, and there are plans for how to build various levels of radio telescope, starting from ~$50 and an old Dish receiver and going up. And our open-skies policy means that you do not have to be a professional astronomer to use our instruments, although I only know of one or two amateurs that have proposed for time. (They did get it, though).

As a rough back-of-the-hand deal, we allow anybody who gets time to access about 25 MB/s of data. The correlator we have currently (WIDAR) can certainly output much more than that, up to gigabytes per second, but the rest of the infrastructure certainly can't keep up at that rate sustained. It's not unusual for an observation to top a few TB in size. ALMA data files are probably even larger on average.

We are already in the early design stage for a next-generation VLA, which will increase the number of antennas to about 300. At that point, we probably won't be able to keep correlated but unprocessed raw data, just because of the sheer size of it.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, this is interesting! I work at JHU/APL where there are people that do similar stuff, although I don't personally. The APL Astronomy Club is actually in the midst of trying to get some of our unused scopes & equipment in better shape and possibly put to use so I'm thinking about ways to automate things. Plus I'm not happy with the state of data processing for amateurs, it seems like everything is bespoke and old freeware or expensive software packages. That is what got me thinking about how the pros do things. Looking forward to your email!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Linux Only"

I like this approach more and more these days. For example, I run murmur(mumble) servers sometimes, and they deprecated d-bus support for ZeroC ICE (gplv2 or proprietary), but it seems almost as bloated if not more so. The reasoning was mostly around the portability bindings...

Recently though, I have been refusing to support Windows and OSX as a concious decision. One thing I've found is that the constant want/need to target every platform adds an ever-increasing amount of complexity, which really seems to go against the unix philosophy. So I applaud others willing to buck the trend and narrow scope down.

In the end, I think the main problem with the many eyes theory is that code has gotten so complex that there simply aren't enough eyes, and therefore I think the future of software is going to be in reduction of complexity. For example, loc isn't the best measure, but the Minix 3 kernel is at ~20kloc, while the Linux kernel is now at, what ~11mloc!? Not even redhat can audit that shit properly. (another reason we need a Hurd microkernel, but I digress)

<comment><USER14> Ice is doing a lot more stuff than dbus, it's mainly features rather than bloat.

<comment><USER13> I def see a lot more features that actually work in ice, that's for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just noticed that this lives under bus1 github organization; does that imply that eventually it will be using bus1?

Btw, whats happening at bus1, haven't heard about it lately?

<comment><USER8> > Just noticed that this lives under bus1 github organization; does that imply > that eventually it will be using bus1?

That is something we intend to explore. The idea would be to let bus1 be used under the hood by dbus libraries to do peer-to-peer communication where possible (circumventing the broker) but still stay compatible to the D-Bus semantics.

> Btw, whats happening at bus1, haven't heard about it lately?

We spent half a year working on dbus-broker ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As I remember from more than a decade ago, the selling point of DBUS was that they were not trying to design a high performance message bus with sophisticated work mechanisms in spirit of Corba and Bonobo, but a small, flexible, and utilitarian one.

Things like implicit message buffering were deliberate design decisions.

<comment><USER17> IMHO the problem with D-Bus was that it was _never_ small and utilitarian. They decided (correctly) to ignore all the engineering effort involved in performance and scalability, and put all that overengineering into the API instead.

D-Bus code is basically unreadable, as not only are the bus names heavily scoped (java-style) to avoid collisions, but also the interface and method names. A tiny python (or whatever) script to invoke a single method on a well- known object _should_ be a one-liner but in practice lives over 6-7 lines just due to verbosity.

D-Bus types are inexplicably low-level for a "utilitarian" IPC mechanism, leading to a bunch of type conversion to do simple things, and a _ton_ of marshalling code in the core. Javascript has shown us how far you can get with just IEEE doubles and UTF-8 strings, yet D-Bus suffers with a type model that looks more like C.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I used to have a whole bunch of shell scripts to automate KDE 3 apps via dcop and then when dcop was dropped in favor of dbus, the complexity of the latter system discouraged me from porting the scripts.

Whatever technical limitations dcop may have had, its command line was amazing: space separated words and a emphasis on discoverability made it a joy to use

<comment><USER19> qdbus is an almost adequate replacement for that. It's still more verbose and a bit more difficult to pass some arguments (this is all from memory) than dcop was, but it's servicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ahh yes, we know this all too well, the Linux desktop trap:

iterative work is lame, the old solution is so bad it's not even wrong, here is my idea for a rewrite, look it's even still compatible (for another few minutes).

<comment><USER21> I disagree with this characterization, because they explicitly state that compatibility with the original is a goal. When people have the more careless "re-write and throw-away" attitude, they often abandon the old API too.

So this reads more of a strategic re-write, or re-do of implementation while keeping API, which I think is often a smart way to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So is the dbus-broker the latest project from the kdbus/bus1 guys.

Since from the text dbus-broker does not use the bus1 kernel module, does that mean the bus1 project is dead?

<comment><USER8> bus1 is very much not dead. We intend to work on the next RFC soon.

<comment><USER23> If bus1 magically landed tomorrow, what would that mean for dbus-broker? Are the projects related at all, or mostly doing different things?

<comment><USER8> At the moment dbus-broker does not have code to take advantage of bus1, but we intend to explore adding bus1 support to dbus-broker, so that peers (if their libraries support it), would seamlessly communicate peer-to-peer (circumventing the broker) when possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> are you still required to reboot the system if you upgrade "dbus-broker"?

<comment><USER8> Yes, for the time being we do not support reexecution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing that I wonder about this is how it deals with the D-Bus Death Rattle.

* [https://jdebp.eu/FGA/dbus-death-rattle.html](https://jdebp.eu/FGA/dbus-death-rattle.html)

<comment><USER8> This is an application issue, not a brokre/daemon issue. The broker will (as dbus-daemon(1)) does, deliver all signals that clients subscribe to. If they subscribe to things they don't care about, that is something that should be fixed in the clients. During the kdbus times, quite some time was spent on fixing clients to avoid too broad subscriptions exactly to fix the issue described in that blog post.

<comment><USER25> Not every page on the WWW is a blog post, nor even every WWW site a web log to have blog posts on.

<comment><USER8> My apologies, it read like a blog. Seeing the parent page I see that it is not. Either way, my comment stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm sure systemd would be happy to take over responsibility for this functionality. (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

<comment><USER27> If systemd does it right (just like it did with making service management) then I see no issues with this.

<comment><USER28> The problem with systemd usurping basic Linux functionality is that it makes it really difficult for non-systemd distros to keep up.

It's not like you can run 'systemd-udevd' standalone, for example. Instead there are massive "porting" efforts like eudev and elogind, just to extract the functionality BACK from systemd. And then you have obsolete-but-necessary components such as ConsoleKit and PolicyKit that are stuck on ancient pre- systemd versions with no current replacement.

I started using systemd back before they even took over "udev". Back then systemd was a breath of fresh air. Now I'm using a different service manager and observing systemd gobbling up various critical parts of the Linux desktop like some damn Katamari is like watching a train accident in slow motion.

<comment><USER29> Have you ever considered why it is so much effort to extract this functionality?

systemd can iterate quicker, and work faster and better, because they can share more code between projects.

Code that should have been in the stdlib, provided by the distro, but which no one does. So it ends up in systemd.

You see the issue even in GNU yes, which implements its own version of a buffered output, or in cat, which does the same, but slightly different.

All these things should be in the stdlib, and because they're not, those projects that can use premade solutions iterate a lot quicker, and can get better, faster.

<comment><USER30> If what they are doing is so fundamental, why isn't it more modular?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And i see the PR team is already out in force to sell this and defend what has already been sold.

We should really just move to BSD already and let them sink this ship.</comment>


All Is Not Lost - <AUTHOR> http://www.allisnotlo.st/index_en.html <comment><USER2> Really enjoyed the techniques used here, but my initial instinct when the video loaded was: "Oh no! Popups!"

Due to this, I doubt anyone but OKGO could really get away with using these techniques...

Your thoughts?</comment>


Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against Asians? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-against-asians <comment><USER4> Well... They probably do, I'd be surprised if they didn't.

But let's not pretend that Ivy League school operate on anything resembling merit. The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics, which you can get that in many other places, but as a shortcut to the old-boys networks. Unfortunately those old-boys networks don't serve as patrons out of the goodness of their hearts, so they require that many of their otherwise unworthy offspring to get admitted.

It's a tough nut to crack. If Ivy Leagues started admitting based solely on merit, they'd lose much of what makes them desirable, hence they need to add vague criteria so admissions personnel can safely discard and let in the right people.

Basically, Harvard is Harvard not because the exams are tough, but because the scions of the rich and powerful go to Harvard. So how can you have both the scions of the rich and powerful go there AND admit people based on merit?

<comment><USER5> "The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics"

I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.

<comment><USER6> The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.

<comment><USER5> At the lower levels, sure. But once you start getting into more specialized fields, there are generally more courses and more professors compared to less prestigious counterparts.

It's not that there aren't sharp people at less prestigious schools, but that there are generally more at more prestigious schools.

<comment><USER7> In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (<http://www.hmc.edu>). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail.

edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.

<comment><USER8> Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too.

(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A former admissions officer of a good medical school in California once told me that the way it works is that they separate applicants based on ethnicity, and they then look at the top 5% of each stack. His words were "so if you're Asian with a 3.9gpa, good luck, you're a dime a dozen. But if you're an African American with a 3.4gpa, you're getting in." On top of that, many who share my ethnicity -- a minority in even our native country -- put down African American or, what's now the trendy thing to do, Underrepresented Minority, because they know it gives them a huge edge over the competition. I don't fault them for it. The whole application process is one big game and they're learning how to play it to their advantage.

<comment><USER10> When my eldest daughter had her visit at Princeton, it was pretty obvious that there was no cap at 5% Asian. On the other hand, why should they?

My youngest daughter was adopted from Korea, but our family heritage is almost entirely Swiss-German ... She's been part of our family since she was 11 months old, and she loves the ethnic German foods we eat (mostly Pennsylvania- Dutch type cooking), but is also fond of many Korean dishes (such as Bulgogi). What should an admissions office consider her ethnicity? A twist on the classic nature versus nurture conversation.

<comment><USER11> kyro did not claim there was a 5% cap on the proportion of Asians at schools. He claimed that the admissions pool was drawn out of the top 5% of each ethnic bracket. Those are two different things.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for pointing that out ... I missed it as I read the article. In that case, I can tell you that the pool of WASP kids (like my daughter) at Princeton consisted of those who had "almost perfect" SAT scores, documented extra-curricular activities, proof of social awareness (best shown by volunteer work with disadvantaged populations) and good interview skills. I'd say it's pretty hard to get into that population as well.

<comment><USER12> > WASP kids (like my daughter)

white nope anglo saxon nope, and not even if she were your biological daughter. protestant ... maybe. is she religious?

<comment><USER10> I was referring to my biological daughter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This issue is pretty close to my heart because I'm a high school senior this year. I'm also Asian, play an instrument, have perfect SAT scores, and applied for a STEM major (well, half STEM).

I was also rejected/waitlisted from every one of my top choices.

To be honest, I'm not really sure now to respond to this article. From the point of view of a student applying to college, these "discriminations" exist pretty universally, and not just to Asians. The notion that race, gender, wealth, etc play a role in college decisions is very widespread among my classmates and peers at other schools. I don't view it as particularly bad, though, even if these colleges will never publicly admit such a thing.

College is not a completely merit based system. I think that we all like to believe that it is, but colleges also have duties outside of admitting the best students. They have to keep their alumni happy, somehow obtain outside funding, keep its population diverse enough (this is ambiguous and controversial, but I think it's a legitimate concern). Most importantly, a college also has the duty to improve society, and that's where a system like Affirmative Action comes into play. It's not perfect, but it does allow for a great deal of social mobility where society would otherwise resemble something like plutocracy. After all these considerations, there's only a fraction of each year's class that they have for purely "merit" based acceptances. And at the level that these elite colleges are at, it's almost impossible to differentiate between candidates. So this small group of accepted students is essentially random (or I like to tell myself).

There was a quote by a Yale admissions officer who lamented that he could've filled 3 identical classes with students on the waitlist.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that one of the benefits of our society, especially in the entrepreneurial community, is that success is ultimately the result of hard work and talent. College is not the end-all and certainly not the determinant of your future.

<comment><USER14> Man you sound like me 15 years ago :) I am Chinese American, got almost perfect SAT scores, top of my class, etc. I got rejected from all the schools Asian parents like (Harvard, MIT, I think Yale, etc.)

I ended up going to Cornell (I think my other choices were UPenn and CMU). Anyway, it ended up great. There were tons of things that interested me in school; I got very high grades but didn't concentrate on them. I played in bands and partied. I developed a reputation for being the guy who stayed out all night and still got 100 on all the tests people were cramming for. There is freedom in not trying to compete with others.

Like everyone, I had some rough years after college, but with a decade of hindsight it all turned out great. I also did better on the Asian parent metric of making more money than peers who went to Harvard, etc. I think it was mainly by valuing honest work (i.e. problems people actually have) rather than working on things that are supposed to be hard or prestigious. If you follow the advice of a lot of Asian parents, you'll end up working hard and not smart.

It sounds like you have a great head on your shoulders, and a great outlook on the situation, so good luck to you!

<comment><USER15> Cornell is a great school. There are certainly easy majors and easy courses available, but I was able to find courses that would kick my ass, and made lifelong friends with people who were hard working and incredibly bright.

Getting into college is only the starting point; the key is to find a place where you have room to grow and that will challenge you, and where there is an overall good work ethic. Those are the things that will really determine your trajectory later in life.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I also meant to say that one of the things I appreciated most about Cornell is that, unlike almost all prestigious schools, it is outside the normal "east coast metro area" mentality (i.e. Boston - NY - DC).

Alan Kay (who I previously bashed here) has said "perspective is worth 80 IQ points" and that definitely applies to your education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While it is a very easy "excuse" to hide behind, I believe in holistic admissions qualifications. I think charts of SAT score x race x admissions are as good of a metric of assessing a potential student as college GPA are of assessing a potential employee. To some degree there's a baseline expectation for the practical purposes of filtering (with lots of outliers for various reasons), but at the end of the day it doesn't say much about how intelligent or capable someone really is. Intelligence and capability can't be reduced to a test-taking skill.

I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- ""Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.

<comment><USER17> Asian-born student life sounds like it involves a lot of after school classes, and group cramming sessions. Maybe this leaves less time for community service and class representative. If Asians do less of this they'd not be chosen compared to all the other 'equally' 'perfect' applicants.

<comment><USER18> The question I think is how we are weighting extra-curriculars. How does piano compare to... say.. windsurfing? I'd put both about on the same level as far as merit goes (one taxes the mind and dexterity, the other taxes the body and dexterity, both are fairly out of reach for the underprivileged).

If the "holistic admission" thing is being used to disqualify Asian candidates I would expect that two students with equal grades would be disadvantaged if they played piano rather than windsurfed.

From my anecdotal experience, I find this very plausible. (I'm a white guy who had _extraordinarily_ poor grades in highschool yet was accepted to the school of my choice. My Asian peers almost universally far outclassed me in academic skill _(proper student discipline in general)_ ; if you told me that I was accepted because I was on the swim team instead of another student with better grades who played the piano (both forms of self-improvement, not community service), I would not be surprised. Very disappointed, but not surprised.)

<comment><USER19> What about diversity of extra-curriculars? I don't know how it breaks down, but maybe they felt they had enough Asians (or anybody) who play the piano. Maybe you got in because they didn't have that many people who swam as an extra-curricular.

<comment><USER18> As far as I am concerned, a sport is a sport. I primarily swam, but I did some track as well, and did and continue to do casual weightlifting. They work different muscle groups but they are all fundamentally the same (all have very low leadership/teamwork opportunities, all require a decent amount of drive and dedication, etc. These are all fundamentally "selfish" sports; most participants will spend most of their time competing against themselves). The other class of sports, the "team sports", are fundamentally different of course but also essentially all the same.

So do universities _honestly_ think they have too many classical musicians, but not enough casual athletes? I don't think so. That seems incredibly implausible. I don't think they are thinking anything at all along the lines of _"we better introduce some athletic viewpoints into our student body, lest all the musicians dominate discussion."_

I think they are arbitrarily classifying hobbies as "well rounded" or "square" to allow themselves to shape their student body demographics to their liking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some basic facts about college admission in the United States:

1) Most colleges admit large numbers of students who are officially reported as "race/ethnicity unknown." (The graphic in the submitted article, showing race/ethnicity questions from a college application, is dishonest by omitting the part on the application that says that whole section is optional, as it must be by federal regulation.)

2) The definition of "race" categories in current United States regulations is arbitrary, acknowledged by the Census Bureau to be unscientific, does not match categories used in any other country, and has changed several times in my lifetime.

3) "Jewish" has never been an officially regarded category in the United States for tracking data on the issue of college admission, but Jews once faced considerable barriers getting into many colleges.

4) The subset of United States high school students who are college-ready by what courses they have completed during high school has a much different "race" composition from the general United States population.

Several of the replies in this interesting thread speculate about details of the practice of colleges in the United States, so I will refer here to the definitive FAQ about "race" in United States college admission,

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/admissions-hindsight- les...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/admissions-hindsight-lessons- learned/1366406-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-10-a.html)

so that those of you who like to look up reliable sources and check facts are able to do that about this contentious issue. The FAQ will have to be revised, of course, after the Supreme Court issues its opinion in a pending case (cited in the FAQ). Full references to the facts listed above can be found in the FAQ.

</comment><comment><USER21> A nice, if lengthy, article on that topic: [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth- of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american- meritocracy/)

TL;DR Asians are "the new Jews" and are discriminated (often implicitly) - <USER2> example they ace at high-school STEM competitions, yet they don't make that many undergrads as they should (with a notable exception of Caltech).

<comment><USER22> For a critique of Unz's data analysis, see Andrew Gelman's blog post here: [http://andrewgelman.com/2013/02/12/that-claim-that- harvard-a...](http://andrewgelman.com/2013/02/12/that-claim-that-harvard- admissions-discriminate-in-favor-of-jews-after-checking-the-statistics-maybe- not/)

<comment><USER11> Did you read the analysis? I mean, the length of his critique should already tip you off, since Unz's article takes at least 2-3 hours to read. Gelman only criticizes Unz's assertion that Jews are overrepresented.

 _Gelman says in that critique that he agrees there is an underrepresentation of Asians._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't speak to whether admissions officers are, consciously or not, discriminating against Asians.

What I can contribute, however, are my (admittedly anecdotal) experiences with Asian households, and my own personal experience with the college application process. I am not Asian.

Probably because of my own interest in sciences and mathematics, many of my friends in high school were Asian. They tended to excel in schoolwork, in no small part because they were under _huge_ amounts of pressure from their parents. I'm not saying that all Asian families "force" their children to study ad-nauseum, but the "high expectations Asian father" Internet meme is at least _somewhat_ based in truth, stereotyped or not.

Because of this pressure (and supportive culture of success), Asians tend do incredibly well in school, as well as on standardized tests... but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do _other_ activities that make students "well-rounded," which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value.

My _personal_ college application process involved SAT scores that were very good, and a GPA that was solid but somewhat average. However, I had done several sports in high school, done a considerable amount of community service, had _three_ technical jobs (two as a developer, one as a security analyst), and released open source software--all while passing my classes. I was passionate about computer science, and I believe that that helped me gain admission to very good universities.

I'm not trying to "blame the victim" with this comment--it may very well be that admissions officers harbor prejudices against Asians--but I also think it's worth noting that when you're talking about the top-tier of our education system--the Stanfords, Harvards and MITs of the world--great grades _aren't enough_ to gain admission.

<comment><USER24> "but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students 'well-rounded,' which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value."

"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past." Look at the kinds of things colleges value: community service, sports, etc. These are the things that used to in years past set people of good breeding apart from the regular people who were too busy keeping a roof over their head.

<comment><USER25> Trying to experience a bit of everything isn't a WASP thing, it's bona fide Humanism. As Montaigne put it : « I like better a well rounded head than a well filled one ». Western Universities are (or should be) the heirs of this tradition.

<comment><USER24> Montaigne is a WASP thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't get is, how is this surprising?

When affirmative action is letting more people from some group in than they normally would, then isn't it kind of obvious that other groups will take the hit?

It's not some magical force... when A + B is to be constant (total capacity), then increasing B decreases A.

<comment><USER27> If that is the case, then why do Asians underperformed compared to Whites? If affirmative action is meant to help underrepresented groups, shouldn't the overrepresented group be the one "taking the hit"?

<comment><USER28> Asians are the overrepresented group.

<comment><USER26> Overrepresented? Is the Asian to non-Asian ratio is higher fir college students than for qualified applicants to those colleges?

<comment><USER28> You'd have to define "qualified" first to answer that question... but anyway, that's not what overrepresented means.

<comment><USER26> What does it mean then?

<comment><USER28> There is a higher proportion of X in Y than there is of X in the total population.

<comment><USER26> That's like saying children of age 6 are overrepresented in kindergarten, because there is a higher proportion of kids of age 6 in kindergarten than in the total population!

The "natural" (equally-represented) proportion isn't that in the total population, it's the proportion in the population of interest, which in this case is the set of qualified applicants.

<comment><USER28> The meaning of words does depend on context of course. Regardless, rest assured that when you hear someone say "overrepresented" and they are talking about higher education, they are using the definition I gave you above.

<comment><USER26> Well then the word is quite uninteresting and meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Being an Asian American that fits the model minority stereotype, I already expressed my thoughts on Quora, specifically on affirmative action and racism which you can read here: <http://qr.ae/TEVfO>

It's fairly obvious to me that colleges do discriminate against Asians, and that this reverse racism does need to stop whether it's intentional or not.

Everyone here talks about how Asians are like this or like that... the reality is that Asians are a pretty diverse group of people, and while you do have your nerdy, book worm types, you also have Asians who were captains of their basketball team or who played football or another major sport. Most people who are at the top of their class are extremely gifted in more ways than one and good parenting isn't the only factor that gets them there. I have cousins who have 'tiger-mom' parents but their grades are still suffering. We need to stop generalizing everyone into the same buckets, that's part of the problem.

I'm all for diversity, I would love to see colleges adopt a race blind admission process and focus on all the criteria that they value and see what happens. I almost guarantee that we will see the Asian acceptance rates rise even with the focus on "diversity". Right now, it seems like it's straight forward discrimination at play that is guised as diversity seeking... since by diversity, what they're really saying is that we want less Asians in our top schools.

<comment><USER30> I don't disagree with you, but I'm curious how you explain the test performance disparity across races. If you look at the top public high school, TJ, blacks/hispanics compose 4% of the class at 25% of the population while asians make up 60% of the class at 5% of the population. Is it because asians are that much more naturally gifted?

I realize with regard to affirmative action that race is a poor proxy for socioeconomic status, but it is statistically practical with regard to cultural values. You mentioned "I went to an Ivy League school, I fit the Asian model minority stereotype pretty well." How much did your parents influence your priorities in weighing education?

One of the issues seems to be that colleges are attempting to address institutionalized racism too late in students' lives.

<comment><USER31> If a child grows us with a crummy culture with regards to education, has he experienced "institutionalized racism"?

I feel like the english language is being rapidly perverted.

<comment><USER30> Well black kids were first let into white schools in 1960. That's 50 years ago. You don't think that exclusion shaped cultural views toward education?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So much tiptoeing. The answer is 'yes.' They do.

I had a tougher high school course load, a better GPA, significantly higher SAT I and SAT II scores, and comparable extracirriculars to everyone in my class who got accepted to elite university X.

Thing is, I'm Asian, and they were all more coveted minorities.

The good news is, your university does not determine your future. You do. Once class is out and you're in the real world, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is PRODUCING VALUE.

</comment><comment><USER33> What's interesting to me is that elite colleges are doing this under the pretense that qualifications other than SAT and grades, like life experiences, character, community involvement, etc, matter greatly, but statistics suggest that Asians without the scores and the grades are even more out of luck when it comes to the top schools.

Admissions officers are not some kind of mind reading wizards who are able to churn through thousands of applications and figure out who are amazing people despite bad test scores and grades and who are frauds despite high test scores and grades, merely based on short descriptions of what they did outside of classes. They are underpaid paper pushers forced to judge people who are likely smarter than they are, with very little information. There are two main reasons for the holistic evaluation. One, to give themselves plausible deniability when they need to tweak the student body to fit institutional purposes. Two, to introduce sufficient randomness into the process to reduce the incentive to game the process.

The truth is that top private schools are in the business of soliciting donations from wealthy donors and selling an image of prestig while avoiding major controversies. Having a heavily Asian-dominated student body doesn't serve any of those goals. They are politically weak, not a threat to organize and are seen as foreign by a large portion of the population.

</comment><comment><USER26> > "Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including > Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind."

Yes, because using quotas would be illegal.

But I don't understand how "does not use quotas" translates into equal treatment.

Wasn't the whole point of the UC v. Bakke case to say that quotas are illegal, but race is still a legitimate factor to consider in admission? This sentence means nothing.

<comment><USER34> Would quotas be illegal for a private university?

<comment><USER35> They accept government funds and grants so I _think_ that the government can force them to do almost anything.

<comment><USER34> That's not true. They couldn't, for example, demand editorial constraints on the Harvard _Crimson_. Private organizations don't give up their rights, including their right to free association, just by accepting government dollars.

<comment><USER26> You misunderstood what the parent was saying.

By "force them to do X" he meant the government can refuse to fund them if they didn't do X (which forces them to abide by the government's rules if they are accepting its funds), _not_ that the government can legally mandate them to do X unconditionally.

<comment><USER34> Conditions placed on the recipients of government expenditures are not unrestrained by Constitutional limitations. Witness the Supreme Court throwing out some of the strings attached to ACA's Medicaid expansion.

<comment><USER35> You are going on tangent after tangent as if to prove something. No one said that "unrestrained by Constitutional limitations" are ok.

Suppose you have the right to exclude Blacks or Asians from your college (freedom of speech, associations or whatever)

Once you take even a penny of federal dollars, directly or indirectly, you may have to agree not to discriminate. So YOU give up that right voluntarily. No one forces you to take the government's money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Maybe they do, but this whole discussion is missing the point that going to an "elite" university is not an essential step in having a successful life and career. I quoted a bunch of this data in a previous thread that I'm too lazy to search for right now, but the gist is, you have approximately as good a chance of becoming CEO of an S&P 500 company if you go to the University of Wisconsin as if you go to Harvard. So even if your goals are at the _extreme_ upper end of the spectrum, you aren't necessarily hurt by not going to an Ivy League school. A well known, well regarded State university puts you on pretty good footing as well.

None of this, of course, is meant to say that discrimination is good, or that I encourage it or anything like that. Personally, I think admissions should be completely race-blind. I'm just saying there's a bigger picture that we should look at as well. If you don't get into Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard or wherever, fine... go to Georgia Tech, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Clemson, University of California at Irvine, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Texas, Pitt, Penn State, Miami, etc., etc., etc. You'll most likely do just fine.

Heck, as far as that goes, there are some public, State universities that are probably as well regarded as some Ivy's, at least in some people's eyes. Look at UCal-Berkely. They are one of the most famous, well known, and well regarded schools in the frickin' world. Or how about UIUC? Not exactly a shabby reputation there. Or UM-College Park? You could do worse...

<comment><USER37> I think you confuse the odds of a given exec being from Harvard vs. OSU with the odds that a Harvard student becomes an exec vs. that an OSU grad becomes an exec.

All things equal, if you want to be a leader (especially in finance), going to Harvard is a better choice than Ohio State.

<comment><USER36> In retrospect, you may be right, when factoring in the different size of the student populations. But nonetheless, I stand by the point that going to a good State school is a perfectly sufficient step to have a good - even amazing - career. Keep in mind that there are only, well, 500, S&P 500 CEOs. But a pretty damn successful and amazing career might be being the CEO of a multi- million dollar textile manufacturer in South Carolina, that nobody on HN has ever heard of.

Of course I'm not arguing against aspiring to go to an Ivy if you have that chance. But one should absolutely not define their life by whether they get into an Ivy (or other "elite" ) school or not. Your ultimate success is going to, IMO, have more to do with how hard you work, and other characteristics, than the name on your degree.

<comment><USER37> This is independent of school -- if someone like Steve Jobs didn't go to college for very long, he'd be fine (oh wait, he was).

I'm involved with Thiel Foundation/20 Under 20; I think in a few years, it's possible that at the top end, it's not going to be as key to go to college. However, as that happens, the value of going to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, CMU, Caltech seems to be going up, relatively. It actually seems to be that the value of going to the next batch (other Ivies, Berkeley, UW^2, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, etc.) is going down, and the ones blow that is falling through the floor. Sort of the same thing that's happening to the economy as a whole -- the top 1% is doing exceptionally well, the next 4-9% is doing better, and the rest is falling apart.

<comment><USER38> There's that payscale list of best ROI per college which mostly confirms this, but there are some colleges in the top 20 I wouldn't have thought of (Duke, Babson, Harvey Mudd).

<http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value>

<comment><USER37> Means or even medians are probably not terribly useful (Stanford and Harvard should be crushing the stats just based on Google/Facebook/etc.). A school which has a lot of people who go into public service or other low compensation positions would also be unfairly penalized.

"Percentage of graduates who live the life they want after graduation" is probably the ideal metric, along with "net benefit to society".

On a pure ROI basis, it's obviously going to go to the service academies and maybe Olin/Cooper Union, too. Good incomes on zero cost.

But all of this also discounts the inputs; I'd consider a school which turns a bunch of otherwise-losers into median success citizens to be a success, while someplace which takes the children of Googlers and achieves the same result would be a horrible failure.

It's complex.

<comment><USER39> Its funny you mention Cooper Union, the grey lady had an article today about a change in tuition policy. The change being they will now charge:

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/nyregion/cooper- union-t...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/24/nyregion/cooper-union-to- charge-undergraduates-tuition.xml)

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I saw that :( And I think Olin may have changed their policy a few years ago (I'm not sure); seems to have tuition now, and a half scholarship for everyone.

I think the proper tuition is something where a student can work during the year and summers to pay for it and emerge with little or no debt, or choose to do non-work activities and have debt which could be repaid with 10-20% of reasonable income in 10 years. I'm not sure if half of inflated tuition covers that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I get so tired of seeing this sloppy thinking. Discrimination isn't bad. Its an essential part of clear judgement. Prejudicial discrimination is bad because its piss-poor discrimination. Of course universities are discriminating against a wide variety of people; they can't accept everyone. The question is whether its prejudicial, as in they've pre-judged these people because of a group they belong to before they've looked at them as an individual.

<comment><USER41> Do you think discrimination by public institutions is not bad?

<comment><USER40> I think you misunderstood my post. Your question is exactly the problem I addressed. Universities HAVE to discriminate; they cannot accept every applicant. The question is how are they doing it, is it a good way, and is there a better way.

You discriminate every time you purchase one product over another, take one job over another, live in one area over another, befriend one person over another, etc. We all do. The key to doing it well is clear, analytical judgement about such decisions. Personally, I haven't seen much of that in University admissions at any school.

<comment><USER41> I am ok with private businesses or individuals going about their own business with whatever racist, homophobic, sexist policies. I don't care. I simply won't visit them or pay for their service. I read my fair share of Rothbard, Friedman and Block. Discrimination in the sense of making choice so long as the choice doesn't violate the rights of other is ok, even if it is morally despicable.

This issue of universities is completely different. Even private universities get public funding. Universities are inexplicably tied to tax payers including Asians. This is where I see the problem. Either remove public funding from universities operating admission based on racism or stop having a racist admission standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yes.

We should just take race off the applications, like we did on loan applications decades ago. If you want an affirmative action proxy, we can just use high school data, and zip code information, and questions like "did your parents attend college?"

<comment><USER43> This is of course much better, to avoid AA going to rich black kids over poor white kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It is interesting how SAT scores are unconsciously used as an indicator of low iQ in the black population while simultaneously being used to show that high asian scores in the test is an indicator of hardwork,not brilliance.

</comment><comment><USER45> Thomas Sowell recently released a new book on this subject:

[http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race- ebook/dp/B00BAH...](http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-and-Race- ebook/dp/B00BAH8D6K/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1366837955&sr=8-1)

Clearly discrimination against Asians was one of the unforeseen consequences of affirmative action. What's particularly sad is it doesn't even help the people it was supposed to. For example:

"Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were 'modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an increase in black and Hispanic degrees.'"

</comment><comment><USER46> Asians are fairly poorly represented compared to their raw "paper intellegence" in the business, cultural and politics of the United States. The following statements will include many generalizations, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that most Asians are studious, but rather shy, passive. Asians tend to generally not be viewed as "strong" personalities or leaders, but "born followers" that know how to get the job down quickly. It doesn't help that China always copies everything.

As much as stereotypes are deceiving and ill for our society, I tend to think they hold a small, but ruthless grain of truth in them. and i am Asian.

</comment><comment><USER47> They're not directly using quotas, but they get the same result by putting less emphasis on test scores and grades.

There is a real argument that test scores are easily gamed, and that studying for the SAT for 2 hours a day because your parents made you, doesn't necessarily translate to success in college/life/business.

</comment><comment><USER48> Alright, what's up with this weird article shuffling on HN lately? This was in the top position on the home page. I refresh the page, can't find it anymore, spend a few minutes checking my browser history, and suddenly it's at the bottom of the home page. This happens a lot lately, and it's confusing me. Could we at least get a moderator note when the article is moved or a different color to let users know it has been moved?

EDIT: Holy cow, now it's on the 2nd page. What the heck? (And I bet I'm never going to get an explanation either.)

<comment><USER49> False positive by the flamewar detector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've always wondered what happened if you lied, particularly if you had an ambiguous or misleading name.

(If you really wanted to manipulate the system, join/start the Kenya club at your high school or something, and claim to be deeply interested in exploring your African roots. Don't mention that they're from 150000 years ago and not 300 years ago. You could potentially even leave the race question blank, or write in that you find race a European-centric concept which doesn't reflect your humanity...)

<comment><USER50> I was made uncomfortable enough honestly reporting my racial background I can't imagine kids actually doing that. I am of mixed race, had a culturally non-White upbringing, but look as White as Wonderbread. College was a very weird experience, because I felt like I was either unfairly infringing on the challenges of the students who were obviously minorities at my school, or I had to ditch most of my upbringing and pretend to be as White as I look.

<comment><USER51> Just like a young Barack Obama. You could be president one day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> When I was an Asian student (I'm still Asian), my strategy was to apply to good-but-not-elite schools, and spent my time trying to load up diversity scholarships and merit-based scholarships.

I got a full-ride to a great non-elite school; there are plenty of schools like the one I went to that would love to have more non-white students, and are even giving away money for it. I'd much rather go to a good school for free than to go to an elite one and be in debt.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why does ethnicity play a role in the USA in 2013? Is someone born here to parents who came from Asia considered "Asian"? Because he/she looks Asian? And what if he/she is 4th generation in the USA and looks Asian, is that considered Asian?

This is baffling.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is not a question. It's a statement. I knew about reverse racism in college admissions when I was 10 and starting to go to a college admissions counselor.

I would also like to add this to the conversation: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling- admis...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/education/a-grueling-admissions- test-highlights-a-racial-divide.html?pagewanted=all). When the criteria to get into elite schools is completely objective, Asians get in disproportionately (what is called overrepresentation) because their families put a higher emphasis on education and doing well on tests. Not every Asian family has a Tiger Mother, but a significant portion of the Asian family places a lot of emphasis on academic achievement. I found the discussion about Jews to be interesting, because Jews in some ways are close to Asians. Jewish culture also places emphasis on scholarly achievement, but to a lesser extent than, for example, Amy Chua. That's why her mother-in-law and husband, who are Jewish, objected sometimes to Chua's overly rigorous methods.

</comment><comment><USER55> The current educational system utilizes SAT scores with a variety of other sources for determining acceptance. While there are other factors such as athleticism, social endeavors etc. SAT score is still often viewed as one of the key determining factors. It is of no doubt that Asians that apply to these top universities as a whole have higher SAT scores. However it does not say of their other qualities, those were perhaps the reasons why there was a lower acceptance rate for them.

In our current educational system, the only transparently comparable bar is the SAT score, while every other factor is more or less arbitrarily judgmental, e.g. can be manipulated. Asians learn that in order to become better, they'll at least put down efforts to increase the clearly visible bar to increase their chance. It is not to say that they will overlook the other factors, just since they aren't as apparent and obvious, they will make sure their SAT score does fare better.

One argument can be that because Asians put down more effort and time in their SAT (bookworms), then they will not be able to fare better in other metrics. I won't say that this doesn't make sense, it does, but it calls for generalization bias. Especially when a data set has been collected that speaks for a year's worth of group, I do not believe the general idea that Asian are less adept in other metrics is true.

Under this assumption, when we see data that SAT score (the only visible metric) is actually leveraged against a person's race, that is plain racism. Not saying racism is a bad thing, if schools determine that collectively as a whole they need diversity to strength the core values, racism is just one factor to play with to achieve their goals. The only problem that I do have with though is, with all the metrics you throw out there, the group of people that just naturally put down more effort to increase their chance gets punished, because of racism/diversity reasons.

<comment><USER41> You did mention it in the last paragraph, but let's reiterate that. In the end, it is plain racism against Asians, solely for being Asian. People can continue to shroud this fact with more comforting language such as "diversity" that's politically salient, but end result for Asians is all the same, plain old racism.

No one is saying that SAT is the sole standard of admission. But does anyone really believe that Asians as a group collectively are so horrible in admission standard (with exception of SAT score) that huge disparity in number of Asian applicants and Asian admissions are justified?

<comment><USER50> Asians are not underrepresented relative to population-wide demographics, so it is only "obviously" discrimination if you assume that more Asians are qualified than students of other races. Otherwise, it is possible that these studies are failing to take into account some dynamic.

To play devil's advocate, for example: Asians may be more likely than other groups to apply to these schools. It may be that Asians with high SAT scores but weaker applications in other areas are more likely to apply to highly selective schools than comparable students of other races, which would lead to lower admission rates.

The numbers here wink suggestively, but they present a far from airtight case.

<comment><USER41> <<Asians are not underrepresented relative to population-wide demographics, so it is only "obviously" discrimination if you assume that more Asians are qualified than students of other races.>>

I am not assuming that Asians are more qualified than students of other races. Purely from the statistics provided by the blog, I find it hard to believe that Asians are doing so poorly in other admission standards that having several hundred extra SAT score doesn't put them in equal footing.

Aren't you the one who is assuming that Asians are obviously failing in admission standards other than SAT compared to other races?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I had a prof I was friends with after graduating tell me they 100% did judge test scores and gpa of asian applicants differently than other races.

His stance was that they wanted to select the very "best" applicants. Where best in his mind meant most likely to do great research and otherwise be brilliant. gpa and test scores are just one way to assess that.

His experience was that with asians, gpa and test scores were a particularly bad metric for determining brilliance because the culture demanded 4.0 and perfect test scores more than in other cultures.

Discrimination? Racism? I don't think so. Dangerously subjective? Definitely. But I'm not sure he was doing the wrong thing given the observable fact that there was low correlation between gpa/scores and performance. Not sure what is right either.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to propose an alternate interpretation:

There is some desired heterogeneity of intellect. Elite Colleges aren't just looking for sharp mathematicians. They want to attract sharp physicists, sharp philosophers, sharp linguists, sharp artists, sharp musicians, sharp poets etc.

Now, in my experience there is a set of areas in which asians excel, but that doesn't comprise 100% of all areas. There are many areas where predominantly white people dominate.

If you weight the distribution of ethnic origin along those lines, I suspect asians will be underrepresented relative to the distribution measured by SAT scores.

</comment><comment><USER57> The comparison between Caltech and the Ivies is a bit unfair. Caltech is in California, which has more Asians, and people tend to attend schools near home. Adding in Stanford would be illustrative.

<comment><USER58> Yup, I'd like to see Stanford as well. I'd also like to see what the breakdown for asians that are US citizens versus foreign nationals or immigrants.

The other problem is that this article automatically assumes that private schools are "elite", and public schools aren't.

That's true for certain fields-law and finance, for example, are dominated by the ivy league schools. STEM, on the other hand, is a much more even distribution. Many of the engineering programs at most of the Big 10 state schools are considered to be some of the best educations you can get, and the UC system is full of very good programs. UIUC's CS program is considered one of the best in the nation, as are Purdue's ME and aeronautical engineering programs.

<comment><USER57> As far as public schools go, the article only excludes the UCs because they can't consider race. In fact, it uses Berkeley as a peer for the elite private schools. There's no other public school that has a reputation _across all disciplines_ similar to the elite private schools, so I don't think the article made any real oversight. There are many programs within public schools that are considered peers, though.

<comment><USER59> I thought UMich was considered very good too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The sad part is there will always be discrimination, all attempts to counter discrimination are in themselves discrimination.

Until students/people are judged purely off their merits there will ALWAYS be discrimination.

The truly sad part is it is openly acceptable to discriminate against whole groups of people purely based on statistics of whole groups. If this isn't the definition of stereotyping i don't know what is. Just because one's motivations are sound doesn't mean we should unanimously assume so are there actions.

Judge people for who they are, not where they are from.

<comment><USER43> Define "merits". That is a huge problem in itself, as traditional measures of merit encode cultural discrimination.

<comment><USER60> I suppose that depends on what the goal of a school is. If the goal is to teach(which i think everyone can agree is there purpose?), then cultural discrimination, or any discrimination has no place in it education process. In school students are judged by their grades, so should they be in the selection process. Any deviation from this IS discrimination, again assuming the goal is to teach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This brings up another question. Just how far are these things verified? What would happen if I checked the box marked "African American" - would they ask for documentation? If, somehow, someone decided to look into my ancestry, and they didn't find any other people identifying as the race I checked on my admissions form, what would be the consequence? Would I get in trouble or something?

There's gotta be case law on this...

</comment><comment><USER62> Honest question: How well do good academic scores in high school correlate with success in non-scientific majors? I go to a top-tier engineering university, and I know of multiple individuals who had perfect SAT scores and GPAs in high school that have been utter disappointments, and I've known people who by no reasonable metric should have gotten in that break curves in nearly every class. Hell, I was the first of 3 boys to get accepted here through normal means, but both of my older brothers ended up transferring in and subsequently graduated with GPAs of 3.96 and 4.0, with one now working on a PhD in physics under a Nobel Laureate and the other working in investment banking. I've honestly started to question how much predictive power these tradition metrics actually have among the subsets of students who think they have a good enough chance of getting in to a school to apply in the first place. If anyone knows of any good studies on the subject or perhaps has a data set that could be used for such analysis, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER63> For anybody interested in running their own numbers, there is a wealth of demographic data on college admissions available called IPEDS from the National Center for Education Statistics.

<http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx>

</comment><comment><USER64> Allow me to posit that a primarily intrinsically-motivated Asian student dealing with high-pressure immigrant culture is in a particularly shitty situation:

1\. Feels forced to spend the extra time - at diminishing returns - to do well at everything with a grade attached. This comes at the expense of passion- based activities, regarded as 'useless' or invalid as a 'line item for the resume'. (There is wide understanding that you need extracurriculars to look good. As pg says, these are mostly bogus.)

2\. The pressure itself is killing your intrinsic motivation, which means the surviving applicants are primarily conformist types.

3\. Even if you somehow make it through intact, colleges will assume the stereotype and view your application through those lenses.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can't speak for Harvard, but I'm at a pretty good public engineering school and I'm quite confident that we aren't discriminating against Asian students. If anything, they are sought after to help keep the lights on (they are the only ones paying full tuition).

<comment><USER43> Are you referring to Asian-Americans, or Asian international students?

Public schools love the international student tuition money these days, it's such a farce, turning "public" education on its head.

<comment><USER65> Asian internationals. I hear rumblings that U.S. schools are falling out of favor with Chinese, but I haven't seen evidence and my colleagues have more applicants than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Even state schools have some sort of quota based on region. For example, its much easier to get into UW if you are from Eastern Washington than if you are from Western Washington (otherwise, UW would be dominated by kids from the Seattle area).

</comment><comment><USER67> In my view, the top universities' admission process is just like how the VC select start-ups. The school's goal is to seek the maximum return just like any other investors. What will this student bring to the university as the return of the investment, it could be more chance to get donation from a potential entrepreneur, academic fame from a genius, or a beautiful story of a student coming from some difficult background. And also, this seems aligned with the long term success defined by the main stream. No sure for the public school, though no problem with the private school.

</comment><comment><USER68> I don't remember if my college applications (not an ivy league school) asked my ethnicity, but on principle I always answer "prefer not to say" anytime I'm asked in a form. It's just a dumb criteria for anything.

</comment><comment><USER69> What bothers me most about elite colleges is that they're based on sheer amount of work, not actual ability.

Thus you get a lot of droids who are good memorizer/regurgitators but not necessarily all that wise, perceptive, creative, etc.

In my experience, schools discriminate against groups which they see as proxies for this group, such as doctor's kids, nerds, Asians, because having too many of them will mean a miserable "is this on the final?" campus with no commitment to learning.

</comment><comment><USER70> I would be interested to see how prevalent this is at top institutions around the world. I can be fairly confident that my program does not do this as my class is very far from diverse. (the large majority of students being asian males)

I have heard of a little bit of black magic that is involved in the acceptance process but in order to accept people who are more likely to succeed in the program. But race definitely does not come into play.

</comment><comment><USER71> Yes. Now what is anybody going to do about it?

Asian-Americans lack the numbers and the political clout as African- and Hispanic-Americans. Asians do not have a Sharpton. It's also tough to sympathize with a bunch of kids protesting how they weren't let into Harvard / Princeton / etc. It's unfair, and it sucks for them. Jews got around it after Asians came around and took their place. Who can Asians wait for?

<comment><USER72> Jews 'got around it' due to sustained media and political pressure in the 1950s - we didn't wait for anybody. Nor did Asians take our place - <USER3> against Jews in elite universities were largely lifted before the widespread adoption of affirmative action, which is when Asians' problems began.

If you want to do something about it, don't wait for some other minority group to come along and be the goat, organize. There's a lot more Asians than Jews in this country - you should be able to build an organization at least as effective as the Anti-Defamation League. And for god's sake, at least stop voting for politicians who support affirmative action. If you vote for politicians who discriminate against you, those politicians are going to quite reasonably conclude that you don't really care about being discriminated against.

<comment><USER73> I think it will first take realizing that they don't deserve to be discriminated against. A lot of my asian friends are just like, oh well, nothing to be done about it. It's an attitude I find quite perplexing. Even the ones that do care about it do so only mildly--nowhere near the level of outrage that is mustered by a hispanic or black person when they (increasingly more rarely, today) encounter a similar problem.

<comment><USER74> Theres a bit of culture of submitting to authority in the asian zeitgeist. This is probably because of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Maybe another way to think of it is, "Do Elite Colleges Discriminate Against The Kinds of Things Asian Tiger Moms Think Will Get Their Kids Into Their School?"

At risk of sounds discriminator and stereotyping, the number of Chinese and Korean kids applying for college with 4.0 GPAs, perfect SATs with awards for Math and who play either expert level piano or violin is just simply not interesting anymore.

</comment><comment><USER76> I worked on the web side of a non elite but good universities student recruitment department. I would hear stories all the time of Asian parents coming in and handling their whole child's enrollment process. Many of the administrators found it kind of funny/horrifying/sad all at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER77> Ha! Jokes on ivy league! I only applied to UCs! But yeah I often hear lots of my Asian friends talked about changing their race. Like if they're half white they would rather put white down. I joked about being blackanese.

Wow, good for Cal tech though, non race specific admission likewise for the UCs.

</comment><comment><USER78> Judging talent is extremely difficult, especially when the pool of candidates is at arguably the most volatile point in their lives.

I think setting some standard benchmark is necessary, but diversity needs to be guaranteed. (Even if it is as heavy-handed as basing it on race)

</comment><comment><USER79> Isn't it strange that middle easterners have to go through life being treated as non white and dealing with all sorts of social issues around that - especially in the past decade - and yet get no "benefit" when it comes time for admissions?

<comment><USER73> Race based discrimination that favors any given minority will only come after the political/social upheaval that disadvantaged them has ceased to exist, more or less. At least, you have to reached the peak of your civil rights movement for that particular group, so that it's "obvious" that it's not just a "political opinion" to discriminate against them. This is why you presently see homeless GLBT kids who don't qualify for federal financial aid, while wealthy hispanic/black kids at private high schools get easy admits and full rides to wherever they apply.

It'll happen for middle easterners only once people no longer mind them--of course, then people will think it unfair that they are so oppressed, and whatever the current group-to-be-hated of that decade is will be further discriminated against in favor of correcting for a social pressure that has long since disappeared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Not at Cambridge or Oxford. Recruiting international students is what they do especially for science or mathematics, where education in these areas is a lot better in some Asian countries than the UK.

</comment><comment><USER81> This is the opposite of news. The fact that whites actually benefit from affirmative action, to the detriment of Asians and Asian Indians, has been well known and obvious for a long time now.

<comment><USER82> [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth- of-...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american- meritocracy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Asian American student at an Ivy League school currently here, if you'd like anecdotal evidence.

Ask away!

</comment><comment><USER84> this is true for medical schools too

<comment><USER84> this is all really just a debate of how to strike a balance between diversity and fair admissions. all a moot subject anyhow as we move towards open collaborative learning online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> There are several problems with corralling peoples of varying regional backgrounds into a neat label or two.

This poses a problem for the sake of consideration of applicants for admission into institutions of higher learning not unlike it does for consideration of peoples for any other purpose.

The immediate problem is of the question of homogeneity.

Although both Asian, are people of Filipino extraction similarly prone to academic excellence as their Chinese counterparts?

Although both Black and hailing from much the same coordinates, do Haitians benefit from a culture that values the merits of higher education as do their Jamaican and other Carib brethren?

Although all White, are the rates of adoption of fields of study uniform among Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans and all other non-Hispanic white Americans?

( The former president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers has famously commented on how few numbers of Irish-Americans, as opposed to other whites, are to be found in high-finance. He has made more controversial statements about women in science and mathematics which are less relevant here. )

The more sensitive problem - and one that the universities seek to handle delicately - is the problem of producing a class of pupils that is deft at handling problems of the larger world that are not entirely limited to the narrow confines of their chosen area of study.

Over the course of hundreds of years, universities have come to learn that a purely academically flourishing candidate, otherwise deficient in certain key qualities that make for a ringleader, is less than ideal for those larger missions.

This has led to the emergence of the much vaunted, deservedly so, "well- rounded candidate".

The candidate who sets himself or herself apart in matters of moral earnestness, social conscience and a world view. He who is not just driven by an achievement trophy-besotted vigor that sees education as a means to a higher rung.

I'll leave it to the discursive minds here to explicate on the matter of how various groups including "piano playing, hard working" Asians fare in this regard and if that positively accounts for the disparity in acceptance rates for those groups.

<comment><USER86> As much as I loathe Larry Summers' economics (he's a Goldman grad, after all), I have to defend him against the casual slur implied above.

He didn't "make controversial statements about women," he simply asked a question about a fact, which is why men are far and away the (high end) outliers in math and science, and whether there might be something based on nature (vs nurture). For asking this un-PC question, he was basically driven out of the presidency at Harvard.

When you can't even ask questions about reality without getting pilloried, you know things are rotten in academia.

(Summers was a year ahead of me at school, though I didn't know him then.)

<comment><USER85> I didn't mean to draw attention to the uproar over Summers' comments.

If I hadn't been upfront about that portion, I was certain that people would try to scuttle the validity of the comments on Irish-Americans in light of what he said about women.

People love to flog dead horses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> While I disagree that people should be discriminated based on ethnicity, I do think that a lot of asians who fit the bill as high GPA and high SAT are not doing themselves any favors by just sitting on those qualifications. In my professional experience working with a lot of early high-achievers (asian or not) they tend not to do that great in the professional world: lack of innovation, lack of creativity, willingness to only follow- not lead. Many also seem to get burned out by the time they start their career and start to show lack of discipline.

I think theres a lot of value in looking beyond that GPA/SAT. We don't want a lot of identical personalities on a campus nor in the workplace. High GPA/SAT does not necessarily breed the innovation and creativity that makes this country strong (how's China doing on that front?).

Lets make the conversation about that. Thats really what this should be about.

</comment><comment><USER35> _"Harvard College welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The admissions committee does not use quotas of any kind."_

....but we do value diversity :)

and that's the same thing. It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B, and more than SAT scores and GPA should be at play.

<comment><USER88> >It's unfair to Asians but then no one is entitled to being accepted at school A or B...

Uh huh. Substitute "Blacks" for "Asians" and somehow suddenly it's no longer okay.

<comment><USER89> This makes no sense. This kind of sloppy thinking on a topic like this does nothing to further the discussion.

<comment><USER73> It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.

I guess the idea that we should stop with race based discrimination altogether is too novel yet. So long as this is the case, the cycle will continue to repeat.

<comment><USER89> The topic of Affirmative Action, or race- conscious admissions in general has _nothing_ to do with entitlement. Conflating the two is the sloppy thinking I'm referring to.

>It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.

Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms (generalization, but I'm just making a point). This is just more sloppy thinking from you folks.

<comment><USER88> >Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms...

That's just a rationalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> And once again, if the headline is in the form of a question, the answer is no.</comment>