Specifically, he found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change…
“Sociologists have found that whites refer to ‘qualifications’ and a meritocratic distribution of opportunities and rewards, and the purported failure of blacks to live up to this meritocratic standard, to bolster the belief that racial inequality in the United States has some legitimacy,” Samson writes in the paper. “However, the results here suggest that the importance of meritocratic criteria for whites varies depending upon certain circumstances. To wit, white Californians do not hold a principled commitment to a fixed standard of merit.”
Samson raises the idea that white perception of “group threat” from Asians influences ideas about admissions criteria — suggesting that they are something other than pure in their embrace of meritocratic approaches.
From another source:
- “According to a 2009 study by sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford, Asian Americans must score 140 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance at admission to private colleges as whites.”
- “College enrollment trends show that the percentage of Asian Americans in many Ivies has stayed flat — between 15% and 18% — in the last 20 years, even though the college-age population of Asian Americans has doubled.”
The college admissions criteria and system we have in place today was rooted in keeping Jews out of elite colleges because they were outperforming sons of wealthy WASPs:
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on “Race and Color,’ “Religious Preference,’ “Maiden Name of Mother,’ “Birthplace of Father,’ and “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ “
At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that “undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it. (x)
With that, they limited the percentage of Jews at elite colleges at 15% and now they limit Asian Americans at the same percentage under similar-enough-to-rhyme justifications and stereotypes (e.g. not enough sports, too robotic/too focused on studying, not enough leadership, too many of the “same” faces, and other racist hocus pocus).
In short, affirmative actions does exist for wealthy whites; it’s called “legacy admissions” at the expense of Asian-Americans. The crap white supremacy criticizes non-Asian PoCs about (e.g. not studying hard enough, etc.) they romanticize in themselves and their children. So when they advocate to get rid of affirmative action but keep legacy admissions and quotas on Asian Americans, what they really mean is to control PoC at the numbers they want so whites can continue dominating elite paths and hence power. They disguise white supremacy under the facade of “meritocracy.”
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