Jews vs. Meritocracy?

[dogtowner]

No.

Do you condemn the unjust treatment of white Gentiles and Asians?

So who exactly would require these private institutions set quotas pkeasing to you ?
There is no aspect of justice in how private institutions make admission decisions.

 

[Iolo2]

By and large, everywhere, the children of the successful are likely to go to the best universities. You have to be very serious indeed to influence that tendency.

 

[ThirdTerm]

Or consider the case of China. There, legions of angry microbloggers endlessly denounce the official corruption and abuse which permeate so much of the economic system. But we almost never hear accusations of favoritism in university admissions, and this impression of strict meritocracy determined by the results of the national Gaokao college entrance examination has been confirmed to me by individuals familiar with that country. Since all the world’s written exams may ultimately derive from China’s old imperial examination system, which was kept remarkably clean for 1300 years, such practices are hardly surprising.9

China's meritocracy is overrated and it's always the rich and powerful who get their way in both college admissions and later in their lives. It's said that there are luxury cars cueing up at the school gate of Peking University to pick up daughters of China's upper-class gentlemen these days. China’s imperial examination system was not even open to poor farmers, while the scions of the landed-gentry class had access to enough educational materials such as Chinese classics to prepare for the exam. The very act of studying was traditionally a privilege of the idle rich in Chinese society who had enough time and money to spend.

 

[abu-afak]

Is Jewish privilege a problem?
Asians in the U.S. produce far more high-performing students than Jews.
Yet Jews often outnumber Asians at elite universities.
White Gentiles produce far more high-performing students than Jews.
Yet Jews often outnumber white Gentiles at elite universities.
The Myth of American Meritocracy
How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?
Read the article and tell me why Asians and white Gentiles should not be outraged by this injustice.

Oooops!
PatPuchanons Amcon and the Stormfront OP are wrong of course.

https://sites.google.com/site/nuritbaytch/

A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy”
By Nurit Baytch

0. Summary
1. What is the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers and Harvard College students?
2. The national set of NMS semifinalists does not mirror the pool of qualified Harvard applicants
3. Unz’s enrollment ratios and the importance of accounting for geography
4. Do HYP discriminate against Asian-Americans?
5. Unz's gross underestimates of the proportion of Jewish high academic achievers
6. Misrepresentations and logical fallacies in Unz's article
7. Conclusion: speculation on Unz's agenda

[1]
Unz reached his conclusion that Jews are overrepresented at Harvard in relation to their academic merit by comparing the undergraduate Jewish enrollment reported by the Harvard Hillel (~25%) to his estimates of the percentage of Jews among high-performing students. Unz’s analysis of Jewish academic achievement is predicated on his ability to identify Jews on the basis of their names, which proved spectacularly wrong for the one data set on which there exists confirmed, peer-reviewed data about the ethnic background of the students: US International Math Olympiad (IMO) team members since 2000, among whom Unz underestimated the percentage of Jewish students by a factor of 5+, as shown by Prof. Janet Mertz.[2] This finding was not anomalous, as Unz tried to suggest, for I’ve been able to confirm that Unz also grossly undercounted the number of Jewish students in other data sets of high academic achievers, such as the Intel Science Talent Search winners.[3] The only objective methodology that Unz employed to identify Jewish students was Weyl Analysis, which gives an estimate of the percentage of Jews in a large data set (in this case, the names of National Merit Scholarship [NMS] semifinalists) based on the frequency with which specific distinctive Jewish surnames appear. Weyl Analysis yielded the estimate that 6-7% of NMS semifinalists are Jewish and also happened to produce results within 0.1 percentage point of Unz’s own subjective name inspection method.[4] Unz then concluded that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard since Harvard Hillel reports that Jews comprise 25% of Harvard undergrads. However, performing Weyl Analysis on the current Harvard College directory, which is publicly available, yields the estimate that 5-6% of current Harvard undergraduates are Jewish.[5] (Please note that I am not claiming that Harvard College is only 5-6% Jewish, but rather that Jews constitute a similar percentage of both Harvard College students and NMS semifinalists; that is, Unz underestimated the latter and used Hillel’s overestimate for the former.) Thus, when one uses the same objective and reproducible methodology (once clearly defined) on both data sets, the discrepancy disappears, invalidating Unz’s claims regarding the overrepresentation of Jews in comparison to their academic merit.

Unz erroneously concluded on the basis of his NMS semifinalist data that non-Jewish whites are the most underrepresented group at Harvard in comparison to their academic merit, as he based this claim on the invalid assumption that non-Jewish whites constitute only 19% of Harvard undergrads. Unz obtained this substantially underestimated figure for the % of non-Jewish whites at Harvard by subtracting Hillel’s 25% Jewish enrollment [over]estimate from enrollment data indicating that 44% of Harvard undergrads identified as white, ignoring the fact that 12% of Harvard undergrads did not disclose their race, among whom one would expect to find both Jewish and non-Jewish white students. Indeed, Unz's assumptions have proven to be unfounded in light of The Harvard Crimson's Class of 2017 Freshman Survey: 46% of whites identify as Christian, while only 15% of whites identify as Jewish (9.5% of freshmen overall identify as Jewish); Unz's calculations assumed that Jews constitute the majority of white students at Harvard, while non-Jewish whites comprise only 19% of Harvard undergrads.

I shall also demonstrate that the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists do not mirror the racial/ethnic composition of high-ability students, the underlying premise of Unz’s assertions regarding the overrepresentation of Jews and underrepresentation of non-Jewish whites at Harvard. Approximately 16,000 NMS semifinalists are selected from ~1.5 million juniors who took the PSAT/NMSQT, a standardized test similar to the SAT with 3 sections: a math, verbal/critical reading, and writing section (the highest score one can obtain on each section is 80 vs 800 on the SAT). But these 16,000 NMS semifinalists are not simply the top 1% of PSAT scorers in the US – they are the top scorers per state, and the total number of NMS semifinalists designated per state is proportional to each state’s share of graduating high school seniors.[6] NMS qualifying scores vary considerably by state, ranging from 201 (which is merely the 96th percentile and corresponds to a SAT score of 2010) in Wyoming to 221 in Massachusetts, which corresponds to a 200 point difference in SAT scores.[7]

I calculated that the correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites is negative, while the correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of Jews is positive (which is also the case for Asians). Roughly speaking, this means that in general, the more non-Jewish whites in a given state, the lower the NMS qualifying score for that state, while the more Jews and/or Asians in a state, the higher the NMS qualifying score.[8] That is, non-Jewish white NMS semifinalists are disproportionately from states with low NMS qualifying scores, while Asian and Jewish NMS semifinalists are disproportionately from states with high NMS qualifying scores. This finding suggests that the average non-Jewish white NMS semifinalist likely has a lower PSAT score than the average Jewish or Asian NMS semifinalist and that if a uniform higher national qualifying score were used, the range of [P]SAT scores among NMS semifinalists would more closely approximate that of Harvard students, and the percentages of both Asian and Jewish NMS semifinalists would likely be higher.[9]

The greatly varying NMS qualifying scores by state render the set of NMS semifinalists a flawed proxy for the pool of Harvard applicants, especially in light of the negative correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites. Hence, the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists cannot be used to predict the expected ethnic/racial composition of Harvard. I will also discuss other respects in which comparing the demographics of NMS semifinalists to that of Harvard undergraduates is a flawed methodology to deduce bias: the average NMS semifinalist likely has a lower [P]SAT score than the average Harvard undergraduate;[10] the distribution of intended majors among National Merit Scholars is weighted more heavily toward science and engineering than among incoming Harvard freshmen; Harvard College students are disproportionately drawn from Harvard’s geographical region, the Northeast (which is considerably more Jewish than the US in general), just as Stanford and Caltech undergraduates are disproportionately drawn from the West Coast (which is disproportionately Asian). The Weyl Analysis results from Stanford’s public directory yielded the estimate that 3-5% of Stanford undergrads are Jewish, which no more proves that Stanford discriminates against Jews than the higher percentage of Jews at the Ivies proves that they discriminate in favor of Jews, as asserted by Unz.

For the casual reader, this summary of my critique of Unz’s article may be sufficient, but for those interested, below ...

[.............]

 

[Hammerhead]

Oooops!
PatPuchanons Amcon and the Stormfront OP are wrong of course.

Ron Unz is Jewish and he called Baytch's work "confused and specious". Unz notes that Baytch "never made any effort to publish it anywhere".

Ron Unz's reply: http://www.ronunz.org/2013/02/13/un...of-gelman-on-jewish-elite-overrepresentation/

Oooops!

 

[Jason76]

More than likely, Jews are numerous at higher universities because they work harder than others, much as Northeast Asians do. I don't really buy the idea that stuff is biased or gamed in their favor. Actually, until recently, very few so called "Anglo-Saxon" Americans went to college. They just learned a trade or worked at a factory. However, now that globalization is hurting "common man" types of jobs, more people are having to go to college, where they might think things are biased against them, so to speak.

However, universities are all about trying hard. Do students try hard? If they do, then they should succeed and dominate, regardless of race or nationality.