MIT After Affirmative Action
The predicted has happened.
NYT (“At M.I.T., Black and Latino Enrollment Drops Sharply After Affirmative Action Ban“):
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s incoming class of 2028 saw a precipitous drop-off in the percentage of Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students, the university announced on Wednesday. It is M.I.T.’s first undergraduate class to be admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year banning affirmative action, and M.I.T. is the first major university to release statistics on the composition of its freshman class since the high court’s ruling.
For the incoming class of 2028, about 16 percent of students are Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander, compared with a baseline of about 25 percent of undergraduate students in recent years, the announcement said.
The comparison to the class of 2027 was also dramatic. The percentage of Black students enrolled dropped to 5 percent from 15 percent, and the percentage of Hispanic and Latino students dropped to 11 percent from 16 percent. White students made up 37 percent of the new class, compared with 38 percent last year.
On the other hand, the percentage of Asian American students in the class jumped to 47 percent from 40 percent. (The percentages do not add up to 100, according to M.I.T., because students could declare more than one race.)
“The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions,” Sally Kornbluth, president of M.I.T., said in the announcement, adding, “What it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the M.I.T. community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades.”
Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully sued to end race-conscious admissions, welcomed the decision as proof that the Supreme Court ruling was having a positive effect.
“Every student admitted to the class of 2028 at M.I.T. will know that they were accepted only based upon their outstanding academic and extracurricular achievements, not the color of their skin,” Mr. Blum said in an email.
The contrast between the enrollment decline in Black and Hispanic students and the rise in Asian American students is consistent with the evidence in the two lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, brought by Students for Fair Admissions.
The lawsuits argued that Black students, who on average scored lower on standardized tests, like the SAT, were being given a significant boost, while Asian students were being penalized. With the elimination of race-conscious admissions, Black enrollment could be expected to go down, and Asian American student numbers could be expected to go up.
Because it is a science heavy school, M.I.T. requires a very specific kind of educational preparation. Still, its admissions results could put pressure on other schools, particularly Harvard and the University of North Carolina, to demonstrate results consistent with those of M.I.T. Otherwise, they could open themselves up to critics who might say they found a way to defy the Supreme Court’s ban.
None of this is the least bit shocking, of course. Indeed, the whole argument for the program was that and admissions regime that was mostly based on test scores and grades would dramatically increase the percentages of white and Asian students in the class while lowering the number of Black and Hispanic entrants. Given that the lowest scoring diversity admits were still extraordinarily qualified, the schools argued that the advantages of the broader learning environment outweighed the harms to the Asian students, who would after all still get admitted to a great school.
Presumably, the minority students who would otherwise have gotten into MIT will win up at another great school. It’s not like going to Cal Tech or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute instead will be a career handicap. But MIT and the Ivies will be significantly different campuses in the years to come.
Oh yeah, nobody sees white.
There are other ways to get a diverse class of students. But first, universities and admission offices have to give up the concept that they can predict the future success of students by test scores, after school activities, essays, etc. They can’t. Other ways to achieve diversity. Base it on economic class. Or base it on minimal standards and then hold a lottery. I’m betting they would get an equally successful cohort of students.
Oh yeah, nobody sees white.
I think it’s only a good thing if white people have to stop using “affirmative action” as an excuse to ignore the poor level of education being provided in some minority communities. Or do you join with “The Bell Curve” devotees and think black and Hispanic kids are just genetically dumber than Asian children?
When the anti-affirmative action people make just as much stink about legacy admissions, then I’ll start believing their arguments about “fairness”.
@Scott: There are other ways to get a diverse class of students.
What is the purpose of diversity? How does diversity make you a better engineer or physicist?
There are some fields where there’s a legitimate argument to be made that greater diversity can have a positive impact. But there are other fields where the racial makeup of a classroom will be utterly irrelevant.
It’s too bad there’s no way to really blame Republicans or conservatives for the awful state of schools run by Democrats in cities run by democrats (often in states run by Democrats). If there were, maybe we could do something to fix the real problem.
I remember reading that black students at MIT had an average SAT of around 1490 while the average for Asian and white students was around 1580. In the pathological world of elite schools this gap is the gap between Einstein and a Trump voter, but how important can it be? You could probably replace the entire admitted class of Harvard/MIT/etcetera with those who were decline and have a very similar student body. (Donations to the endowment might be affected.)
There are real problems with education happening in this country. This constant focus on elite schools has become ridiculous. The actual benefits of being white in this country is the ability to chill out and have fun all while going to a very good school on your parent’s dime and then come out the other end fine and ready for a good career.
@TheRyGuy:
Formal education is just part of the game, obviously. Ask any overachieving student who busted their ass to be valedictorian and then went to Yale and discovered that St Paul’s and Andover exist, and there’s a totally different world out there.
We have this myth in this country that poverty is endemic because of laziness and a lack of discipline. It’s useful because it hides how much room inherited affluence gives kids and young adults to grow and learn what they want to do. Grind harder is not what people with money are telling their 15-year olds who are struggling.
@TheRyGuy:
A major reason to be concerned about the overall diversity of individuals at elite levels of education is the degree to which those institutions replicate and propagate pre-existing social stratification.
If, in fact, it is the case (and it is) that it is far likelier that white students as a group have had various built-in advantages that black students as a group have had (which I believe you, yourself noted above, if I understood your point) then unless there are systematic attempts to rectify those comparative advantages, they will perpetuate generation to generation.
Clearly, there is substantial value in going to MIT, else we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
And yes, BTW, having a room full of white engineers from similar backgrounds and experiences matters versus having a room full of people with differing backgrounds and experiences. The math doesn’t change, but the way problems are solved can be quite different. And it can definitely matter on the management side of things in terms of who then moves up the ladder in the organization.
It all matters on a host of levels.
Legacy admissions are so woke.
Will conservatives complain just as much about the outsized power of families with money?
@TheRyGuy:
If you really want an answer, and you’re not just making a silly point – I’ll explain.
Engineers, for example, create products that people use to do things. If every engineer was a 30-something, white, male, right-handed American then that would affect the design of things. Standing desks would be designed only for people over 5′ 8″ tall. Apply that to every design of every object, and you’ll see the problem.
When I was working, my company saw DEI as a *strategy*, not a compliance exercise. Our customers were diverse – and our products needed to meet their needs. Without representation – our diverse customer needs would never be voiced in design meetings. We’d just fail to meet their needs and some other company would step in and take our market share.
Diversity brings new perspectives that make our products and services better.
@TheRyGuy: If we were to weigh awfulness of education in cities and states run by Republicans vs. Democrats, I think you would find the GOP comes out a bit heavier in the category of bottom dwelling educational systems.
@~Chris: “If we were to weigh awfulness of education in cities and states run by Republicans vs. Democrats, I think you would find the GOP comes out a bit heavier in the category of bottom dwelling educational systems.”
Fortunately they’re on their way to fixing that by removing all books from classrooms except for the bible, posting the ten commandments everywhere, and using Prager U propaganda instead of actual textbooks. I see them rocketing ahead any day now!
@wr: Oh, and on the level of higher ed, not only are they getting rid of all those wasteful humanities classes and the loser students who want to take them, they are cleverly taking money out of the schools and handing it directly to Republican political operatives. True, this is only Ben Sasse in Florida so far, but now that he’s proven that with a Republican governor a public university is just one more treasure trove for looting, I’m sure that academic program will spread far and wide!
Don’t forget – despite all the bleatings from conservatives who intentionally obfuscate – the E in DEI is equity, and means making decisions based only on job skill and not the things that white males from money have in spades… personal relationships.
Thus when you “remove DEI” you’re actually restoring the old-boys network of promoting your country club buddy rather than the guy who creates the best deliverables.
@TheRyGuy:
While I would shift the phrasing to “the poor level of educational outcomes in some minority communities,” I don’t think anyone would argue with this. The reality is it’s an easily observable fact. The issue isn’t recognizing the data point, it’s reaching agreement about the root causes.
Which gets us to:
The good old right wing talking points. What’s especially important about this is how it again reduces the issue to party versus policies. For the record, rural schools, especially those in high-poverty areas, often have outcomes that are near-to or mirroring urban schools in high-poverty areas. And in those cases, those are Republican-led municipalities, counties, and states. It’s almost that poverty and the various social challenges accompanying it play a significant role in successful learning.
@Steven L. Taylor & @Tony W:
TY for addressing the diversity claims so I didn’t have to. The history of product development is filled with examples of unconscious (and conscious bias) creating things that work for one segment but not others. For example see the history of inclusive skin tone band aides: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/the-story-of-the-black-band-aid/276542/
Never forget that the adage “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was [and is] intended to give wild advantage to the people with the network.. because the people with a network know that nothing happens outside the network of relationships.
Yes, the person with a network still has to be competent.. but the person with the network has the 99% chance to be the one to get his white foot in the door first.
In no small measure, “pull yourself up” also puts the responsibility for failure on the person rather than acknowledging the network.
DEI was a conscious effort to untie that, and obviously the heathens were getting promoted, so we can’t have that… we’d rather promote the drunken rich guy.
Why are we focusing on White students? It’s clearly Asian students who have profited. Whites dropped a point, Asians gained seven.
@TheRyGuy: I’ve served on a graduate admissions committee. It was clear that there were more candidates who could be successful in our program than we had slots for. Quite a few more, and we weren’t an elite institution, for which this would be even more pronounced. And while those test scores might have some value in predicting how well people do in our program, they don’t do very well at all at predicting how someone will do in life, or what kind of impact they will have on our program.
This is the environment that affirmative action lives in. Why not tweak the mix? I really don’t think 50 points on the GRE is some kind of Heaven-sent mandate.
@Matt Bernius:
Any number of people noted that crack cocaine in inner cities was addressed as a crime problem, but opioids in rural communities is a public health problem. Both areas responded similarly to poverty, lack of opportunity, and poor education. I would think the lesson is we should try to attack the conditions that produce broken families, crime, and addiction. JD and others seem to think the thing to do is to also attack a segment of white people for some ethnic or culturally determined weakness. While exploiting their condition to get their votes.
This MIT issue is not about legacies or White racism. What we have here is a new norm where half of the student body will be Asian. In the 20’s and 30’s the ‘problem’ was too many Jews in elite schools, so steps were taken to reduce the number.
Any effort to re-introduce DEI would be targeted at reducing the percentage of Asians, not the number of Whites. This is not about a White majority, it’s about an Asian majority, and that Asian majority is not there because their daddies were alumni. In fact, given that Whites are ~60% of the US population, we would be using DEI to expand the number of Whites as well as Black and Hispanic students.
Right? Or did I have a stoke?
@Michael Reynolds:
If the end result of banning race conscious admission policies is to further reduce white enrollment, just in favor of Asian students, I wonder what the Federalist Society’s next feverish demand will be…
I’m a little surprised they didn’t maintain diversity similar to previous years based on considerations such as low income, first generation, overcoming adversity, entrepreneurship, extraordinary performance relative to school and neighborhood, etc.
The fact that MIT doesn’t do legacy admits should leave more room for everyone else. Although they do give preference to other factors such as recruited athlete. MIT also has a bright line cutoff for SAT math scores (must be near perfect) evident in their published CDS data.
@Steven L. Taylor and @Tony W: I think, more to the point, the problems that are addressed can be quite different.
@TheRyGuy:
There’s actually pretty strong evidence that diversity on the team brings important insights, even in STEM fields.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s about white racism because poor educational outcomes for black people versus white people has been blamed on either genetics or cultural dysfunction. But genetics argument has completely failed, and dysfunction seems to amount to teenagers being teenagers, with black people being held to much different standards than white people.
And regarding Asians, it’s not as if the stereotypes of Asian-American culture has never been what successful white people have embraced.
The real question isn’t why are there worse outcomes for black people, but why are there better outcomes for white people. And I think we all know the answer. Brett Kavanaugh spent his teenage years getting shit-faced and trashing vacation homes (at the very least) and yet he ends up at Yale and the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, a few miles away in DC, the same kid is being treated like a super-predator and demonized.
@TheRyGuy:
I’ve got to get to the dentist, so I only have time for one example: Police Facial Recognition Technology Can’t Tell Black People Apart.
@James Joyner:
To that point about the value, see the following articles which all link to various academic studies:
https://www.packard.org/insights/perspective/why-diversity-in-stem-matters/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/calvinmackie/2022/11/29/diversity-in-stem-is-a-matter-of-life-and-death/
https://www.insightintodiversity.com/classroom-diversity-linked-to-higher-stem-grades/
@James Joyner: I would like to endorse, as a life-long STEM guy, that creativity and the ability to think outside the box are very valuable. And differing backgrounds often inspire different approaches, some of which may provide exactly that inspiration.
@Grumpy realist: Ya can’t do that. A big part of “fairness” is who “deserves” the opportunity. Fairness and merit are the conjoined twins of the argument.
@Gromitt Gunn: To be fair though, that may be one of them “feature/bug” thangs.
@Modulo Myself:
OK, let’s do the math. Warning: I only got a 610 on my math SAT.*
The new class is 47% Asian. 16% Black, Hispanic et al. And according to the Google, 7% Jewish. Which means that 30% are gentile Whites. The population is ~60% gentile, non-Hispanic White. IOW, Whites are getting 50% of the places their population would suggest. Blacks are 5% of the new class, against ~13% of the population, so they are getting 38% of expected places.
If this is a tale of White racism, I have to say the White folks are doing a piss poor job of it. Probably they’re bad at math.
*Although I’d only completed 10th grade and had taken almost no math and had earned a mercy D.
@TheRyGuy: To double down on @Matt Bernius: point, come here to lily white rural Misery and see how well our schools are funded, where the libraries are currated around the lowest common Christian* denominator, and how the hierarchy likes to jettison the good teachers whenever they get out of line and start talking about forbidden facts.
* and for the record, I don’t give a rat’s ass how somebody worships their god. At least until they try to shove it down my throat.
@Eusebio: actually, MIT does ask about whether any of your family has gone to MIT but in my experience that’s been used more for statistical tracking and alumni-reminding. The main “benefit” you get from having had a family member going to MIT is the assumption that you know something of the MIT culture and aren’t going to totally freak out when you go there. (The main problem we have with new students is with kids who have been at the top of their class with little effort, get into MIT, and then discover that even with all their effort, they’re only average. It’s quite a blow to the ego and it takes some time before they can accept that hey, being “only average” at MIT is still awfully good.)
Oh, and the culture of MIT? “Getting an education from MIT is like getting a drink of water from a firehose” does sum it up nicely. Learning how to pull 100 hr work weeks will be the least of it…
Do we know what actually happened to the MIT students in the DEI era? Do blacks have different rates of first authorship in high impact journals ten years after graduation from MIT? Do we know what happened to whites who were turned down? Do they go to Carnegie-Mellon and have great careers? MIT is highly selective, and getting in is a plum for anyone.
@Michael Reynolds: Take whatever comfort there is in knowing that the SAT measures the ability to recognize the two most incorrect answers as more important than being able to correctly compute the correct one. You status as a cool kid that doesn’t math is safe.
(Scored ~90th %-ile on the GRE math test. Higher than my SAT and more than 20 years after I failed (spectacularly, if I do say so myself) Calculus in my second quarter dodging the draft.)
@Gavin: “Thus when you “remove DEI” you’re actually restoring the old-boys network of promoting your country club buddy rather than the guy who creates the best deliverables.”
You say this as if it were a problem and not the very point…
@just nutha:
Interesting, because that is precisely what I’ve always believed. It’s not multiple choice, it’s a 50/50 shot once you eliminate the two outliers. Sometimes there’ll be an additional ‘tell’ in the question. But basically eliminate the two outliers, flip a coin, and you’ve got 75% right. Which given the competition put me in the 15th percentile, IIRC. Which is absurd.
The English (790) isn’t any different, structurally, but there I can intuitively ‘hear’ the right answer.
The SAT has always been raw IQ plus specific test-taking skill + self-confidence. I suppose it’s of some use, but not much.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s what I taught the displaced workers taking intro classes to prepare for re-entering education. It dispells a fair amount of test anxiety.
On the “English” section, the Analogies test is the big problem child. You really do have to know the mind of the test creator in order to have a decent shot at the a:b::&:∆ questions. Back when you and I were in school, that was the test that pushed Verbal Skills scores down. Particularly for the ” not like us” cohorts. Gotta keep that meritocracy intact, ya kno.
@Michael Reynolds:
My point was what you’re saying. White people’s educational outcomes aren’t all that great. White American kids with families who have been here generations work as hard as black American kids whose families who have been here as long or longer…and yet there’s an entire history of disparaging black people for being the cause of their poorer educational outcomes.
The reason being is that there is a huge gap in what education is supposed to provide: wealth. We can’t admit that mediocrity is rewarded in America if you’re white and average enough, and that this–along with the New Deal and post-WW2–is the reason why white people have more money than black people.
@just nutha: that’s the main reason for SAT training: to learn what analogies they want. Same with the LSAT, which I kept tripping up on because my logic of metaphors wasn’t their logic of metaphors. Taking the bar exam was less infuriating.
@Modulo Myself:
The analogy I use for differing outcomes is this: imagine Usain Bolt has a perfect clone. Run them against each other in 100 races, you get 100 ties. Now take a little piece of gravel, just a tiny piece. Put it in the shoe of Usain #2 and run the races. Now the outcome is 100 to 0.
The point being, in a competitive world it doesn’t take much to cause dramatically different outcomes. It doesn’t take the KKK burning a cross on your lawn, just the small but crushing drag of small-bore racism.
@Michael Reynolds:
There’s no real guarantee Usain Bolt’s clone will ever show up to race him. This is the flaw of our current understanding of genetics. We just have no conception of how to filter out what it is mediated from what is raw.
I’m old enough now to be watching my bad cholesterol as it hovers around 200, but nobody can test my genes and see that I have a sweet tooth and enjoys a few drinks and is slightly hedonistic but also likes to surf (badly) and is somehow a person who has kept his worst impulses in check (so far). Maybe one day that test will work and they will nail the me who is raw before I was forced to be social. They will be able to see what I started off as and then what I and the world made me into. But right now all we have are pretty archaic tools to quantify humans with.
@TheRyGuy:
Because when a team consists of nothing but white dudes you end up with things like facial recognition software having issues with colored people (especially women).
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2019/NIST.IR.8280.pdf
YOU can find more examples of studies at Harvard and such.
@Grumpy realist: One of my favorite stories from a study of the TEFL/TESL language test from my time in Korea was about the discovery that test designers were using several different grammar instruction models to write questions that, subsequently, had 4 answer choices that were all correct. The test was could the test taker find a clue in the question that would reveal the correct grammar model.
Firefox win 10 no edit ever. Is that a me problem now?
I went to respond to THeRyGUy before reading the rest of the thread. Now I see that I wasn’t the first one to mention the obvious example of facial recognition issues. In my experience having people from a diverse background helps by bringing different viewpoints/experiences to the brain storming sessions. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to get into white guy group think about stuff.
@Michael Reynolds: I’ve always scored higher on tests than I should just because I seem to have a talent at guessing the answer via elimination.
@TheRyGuy:
Bruh, you need to read Kevin Kruse’s “White Flight.” It makes quick work of and lays waste to that not-cleverly-disguised racist argument you’re offering.
@Matt: “Because when a team consists of nothing but white dudes you end up with things like facial recognition software having issues with colored people (especially women).”
Why would you assume RyGuy would see this as a problem? If they all look alike to him, why should his tech be any different?
@Matt: Win 10 MS Bing no edit ever. No, it’s not just you.
@Matt:
Thanks for that heads up. I am working on the exit button issue but I cannot figure out where the problem is.
@Michael Reynolds:
The lawsuits were funded by lily white Heritage Foundation types (I forget where they were actually from, but one of those), who were using Asian students as a stalking horse because showing disproportionate results harming a minority gets a lot of middle of the road people and judges to take it more seriously.
It’s not implausible that they were bad at math, but I have a different theory — they’re doing the math at a different level and are solving a different problem.
MIT is an outlier, as an elite technical school. I’d look for data at Harvard and Yale, the elite nontechnical schools where most judges seem to hail from, and the second level technical schools.
My theory is that technical schools were seen as acceptable losses, especially since Asians (particularly light skinned East Asians, but no one remembers Indians are counted as Asian) are the “ideal immigrant” anyway. But those schools where the leaders of tomorrow are forged*… make sure to keep Blacks, Latinos, and those types of people out.
——
*: we really should shut down Yale until we can figure out what is going on there. So many lawyers with no respect for the law come out of there and end up in politics at one level or another.
@mattbernius: For the record, an edit button would be nice, but I coped without one before; I’m old enough to still be able to.
@Gustopher:
Do you suppose they’ve been misspelling “Jail” all these years?
With respect to diversity being valuable in STEM, I absolutely agree that diversity helps STEM teams. And also: there is more to life than numbers. Diversity helps STEM students be well rounded people. The kind of people that have enough empathy to be good friends, and good citizens that don’t just vote for whatever politician they calculate as the most advantageous to their wallet
@Grumpy realist:
Good to know, but MIT reps say that it doesn’t have legacy admission preference. I don’t know if we should be skeptical of such claims. Our state flagship university says in-state and out-of-state applicants are given equal treatment, but a frequent refrain is that it favors OOS because they pay much higher tuition.
As for MIT’s rigor, I think it’s well known and well advertised to prospective students, and I’d expect incoming freshmen to be extraordinarily well prepared. But as you say, that makes them average.
@Eusebio: I keep telling students: if you want to raise your chances of getting into MIT, request an interview. That, hands down, will help get you noticed. If there’s any legacy admit points, they’re swamped by the I-asked-for-an-interview benefits. ( yes, there are statistics to back this up.)
Also, don’t apply unless you know WHY you want to go to MIT. I kept doing interviews where I would ask “so why do you want to go to MIT?” and get the total deer-in-the-headlights look. It was very obvious that for a lot of these kids, they or their parents had applied to MIT with the hope of getting in just so that they could brag about it but no one had done any background research. And they didn’t seem in fact really interested in taking advantage of what MIT has to offer-if they even would go if they got in.
MIT is a very different world than your typical university and you will have culture shock.
@TheRyGuy: What is the purpose of diversity?
Color film was built for white people.
@Matt: Because when a team consists of nothing but white dudes you end up with things like facial recognition software having issues with colored people
Combine that with police enforcement and you get this: Facial recognition technology jailed a man for days. His lawsuit joins others from Black plaintiffs.