Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (10 page)

The two sides argue over other practical issues: Could the
government accurately judge when attractiveness is irrelevant to a job? Would
legal protection unleash
a wave frivolous lawsuits
?
More importantly, critics point out that unattractive individuals have not been
discriminated against historically the way that minorities and women have
— a justification for legal intervention. Yet just as legislation aims to
protect women, minorities, and the elderly from the consequences of irrational
biases — women can’t be good executives, for example, or black men and
women are less intelligent — unattractive people are constantly on the
losing side of irrational biases.

Company policies that favor attractive staff may seem defensible
for jobs where the halo effect means that a worker’s looks will benefit the
business. But companies seem to favor attractive employees even when looks are
irrelevant.

In an experiment run by Harvard and Wesleyan professors, for
example, participants performed a task in which beauty was of no help. Other
participants acted as their bosses and set their compensation — either
blindly or while aware of their attractiveness. Mirroring real world findings,
attractive participants earned wages 12% to 17% higher. Yet, as the researchers
wrote, the lion’s share of the wage gap was explained by how “employers
(wrongly) expect good-looking workers to perform better than their less
attractive counterparts.” This suggests that attractive people enjoy advantages
even in fields like software engineering or corporate management where their
looks don’t benefit the business.

Beauty is just as irrationally beneficial in the supposedly
egalitarian setting of a courtroom. Researchers tracking the outcomes of court
cases find that attractive (and guilty) defendants receive lighter sentences.
In another experiment where participants decided how much money to award the
victim of a negligence case, they awarded the victim almost twice as much if he
or she was more attractive than the defendant. Justice is not blind.

In stories, villains are usually ugly and the heroes are
good-looking. We expect the same in life. Children and adults alike associate
physical attractiveness and height with strength, intelligence, and goodness
and associate ugliness with corresponding character flaws. Studies of
schoolchildren find that teachers view misbehavior by a good-looking child as
less naughty. Teachers also assume that attractive children are more
intelligent than their less-attractive peers. One educator notes that this can
“become a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers expect better looking kids to
outperform in school and devote more attention to children who are perceived to
have greater potential.”

Personally and professionally, the halo effect of attractiveness
shapes people’s lives in ways that go far beyond people holding the door for a
pretty girl. And unlike the case of an actress’s stunning looks propelling her
to stardom, it often operates subconsciously. Good-looking people earn more
money, are judged more positively, and even receive more lenient treatment in
court than their plainer looking counterparts.

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover. But we do.
All the time.
And everyone’s life is affected by it.

8.

DO ELITE COLLEGES

DISCRIMINATE AGAINST ASIANS?

A
pplying to
colleges in the United States is a stressful, competitive process. In 1970, the
acceptance rate at Stanford University was 22.4%; today, only 5.1% of
applicants are accepted into the school. Across the country, top schools like
Harvard, MIT and Yale are reporting record-low acceptance rates. The number of
students applying to elite colleges is exploding, and those applicants have
better test scores than ever. It’s never been harder to get into a selective
university.

Asian-American students face an extra source of stress: deciding
whether to respond to the application question asking for their race and
ethnicity. True or not, there is a perception that Asians are at a disadvantage
in the college admissions process. Asian students going through the process
related their experiences to USA Today:

A:
"I didn’t want to put ‘Asian’ down… because my mom told me there’s
discrimination against Asians in the application process… Not to really
generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs, perfect GPAs, … so
it’s hard to let them all in.”

B:
“As someone who was applying with relatively strong scores, I didn’t want to
be grouped into that stereotype… I didn’t want to be written off as one of the
1.4 billion Asians that were applying."

Are these fears justified? Is it statistically more difficult to
be accepted into a top university if you are Asian? Ivy League colleges and
their ilk deny this, but what does the data say?

Statistical
Evidence of Discrimination

Those
who contend that selective colleges discriminate against Asians point to three
main sources of data.

First, some top colleges have in the past (though not recently)
released detailed admissions data. Second, in 1996, California banned state
universities from considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. The
result is a natural experiment where you can see what happens to the number of
Asians accepted before and after this decision. Finally, researchers have tried
to quantify whether the number of high performing Asians has been increasing
and whether that has corresponded to more placements in selective schools.

The most cited, well-researched evidence that it’s harder for
Asians to get into top colleges is presented by Princeton professor Thomas
Espenshade
and his collaborator Alexandria Radford in their
2009 book,
No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal
. In this book, the
researchers analyzed the complete application histories of eight “elite”
universities in 1997 (the last year these schools released this information).
While the data is over 15 years old, it’s the most complete dataset publicly
available.

Espenshade
and
Radford use the 1997 data to show the overall acceptance rates by race and
class at public and private universities with highly selective admissions
criteria. According to their data, at private schools Asians have an 18.4%
acceptance rate versus 25.7% for whites, 26.7% for Hispanics, and 31.0% for
blacks.

The authors find that being Asian instead of white is the
equivalent of a 140 point score penalty on your SAT when applying to top
private universities. For example, a white student that scored 1360 on the SAT
would be on equal footing with an Asian student that scored 1500. Asian
applicants have 67% lower odds of admission than white applicants with
comparable test scores.

Ultimately,
Espenshade
and Radford
come short of making any conclusions about whether Asians are discriminated
against. Their data indicates that Asians needed higher standardized test
scores than whites to get accepted to top schools in 1997, but this doesn’t
consider other parts of a “holistic” admissions process such as athletic
prowess, legacy status (being the child of an alum), or quality of admissions
essays and recommendation letters.

The next piece of evidence frequently cited in the debate is the
admissions data of public universities in California (Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD,
Davis,
etc
). In 1996, it became illegal for these
schools to consider race in their admissions criteria. This created a natural
experiment showing what happens to the number of Asian students at a school
when admissions officers are not allowed to consider that they are Asian.

Since these are state universities, the admissions data, which
includes the race of students, is publicly available. Let’s consider the data
for UC Berkeley, the most prestigious and selective public university in California.
Over the past 25 years, the percentage of Asian students accepted into UC
Berkeley has exploded from 25% (1989) to 45% (2014).

While this is interesting, it’s not necessarily proof that
Asians were discriminated against prior to the 1996 ruling. If the number of
college-aged Asians rose dramatically during this time period, it would be
natural that more Asians are accepted at Berkeley today.

So let’s look at what has happened to the acceptance rate over
time. Did it get easier for Asians to get in after admissions officers could no
longer consider their ethnicity? Of course, it has gotten a lot harder for
everyone to get in over the last 25 years, so let’s compare the Asian
acceptance rate to the acceptance rate for everyone else at Berkeley.

In 1989, Asians had a 31% acceptance rate at UC Berkeley versus
a more generous 44% rate for non-Asians. It was a lot harder for Asians to get
into Berkeley than for non-Asians. By 2012, the opposite was true —
acceptance rates for Asians became 21% versus 16% for all other races.

Finally, the fact that the growth in the Asian population has
not been reflected in their numbers at top schools is also cited. Not only have
the number of college-aged Asians increased in the last two decades, but the
number of academically high performing Asians has as well.
This
viewpoint is summarized quantitatively by Ron
Unz
,
founder of The American Conservative — a publication that is quite vocal
about this issue
.

The data
Unz
has compiled shows that
while the number of college aged Asians has increased dramatically, Asians’
presence at top schools has shrunk or remained flat. By contrast,
CalTech
, which has a strictly race-neutral admissions
policy, has kept pace with the growth in the Asian population (this is also
true of
the
 
school
we previously examined).

Unz
also
contends that you should see a lot more Asians at Ivy League schools during
this time, because they were kicking ass and taking names academically. Asians
now make up 58% of the US Math Olympiad winners, 75% of the of the Computing
Olympiad winners, and 64% of the finalists for the Science Talent Search
— percentages 3-5 times higher than they were for Asians in the 1980s.

According to standardized tests and talent competitions, there
is strong evidence that Asian Americans aren’t just doing pretty well —
they’re completely dominating.

The
Counter Argument

"Harvard
welcomes talented students from all backgrounds, including Asian-Americans… The
admissions committee does not use quotas."

(Jeff
Neil, Harvard University Communications Department)

It’s
hard to find evidence that contradicts what’s presented above. While the data
is either stale or limited, all of it indicates that Asians are
under-represented at top schools. At the same time, admissions officers
vigorously deny that there is any bias against Asian Americans. Moreover, this
author knows former admissions officers and they’re all really nice people.
It’s very hard to imagine them hatching dastardly plots to keep Asians from
their schools.

The gist of the argument that top schools don’t discriminate
against Asians is that academic qualifications are only one of the many
criteria used in a “holistic” admissions process. There are so many students
with great academic qualifications relative to the spots available that
academic qualifications almost don’t matter for serious candidates. Given that
so many students meet the minimum academic criteria (which are high),
successful applicants need to contribute more than just
brain
power
to their school of choice.

This viewpoint is crystallized by
Rod
Bugarin
, former member of Brown and Columbia
admissions committees
:

"Yes, if you considered only test scores, Asian and
Asian-American students would seem to be at a disadvantage. But the students
who rise to the top of the highly personal and subjective admissions process
are those who have submitted the strongest comprehensive applications."

The unstated implication of this quote is that while Asians have
high test
scores, the rest of their applications, on
average, are deficient in some manner.

The next argument is that top schools aren’t actually biased
against Asians, but rather biased against people that aren’t athletes or
children of alumni. In 1990, the US Office of Civil Rights concluded an
investigation into whether Harvard discriminated against Asians. The commission
concluded that most of the under representation could be explained by the fact
that few Asians were recruited athletes, or children of alumni.

This might explain why the number of Asians at Harvard was
relatively low in 1990, but it doesn’t explain why that number is still about
the same after two decades of growth in the Asian share of America’s
population.

Finally, there are those who argue that the “Asian
discrimination question” is merely being used as a “wedge issue” to overturn
affirmative action and lower the number of blacks,
hispanics
,
and historically under-represented minorities on campus. While this is a valid
concern, it evades the question of whether Asians are held to a different academic
standard than the baseline group (whites). That’s the question we’re focusing
on.

Reading the universities’ responses to accusations of an
anti-Asian bias in admission decisions is frustrating because they don’t
provide any data to back their refutations. They simply state that there is no
discrimination today. They refuse to even release recent admissions data in
order to refute the old and stale data that suggests Asians have to score much
higher on the SATs than whites in order to be accepted into college.

Holistic admissions policies, as they stand today, are a
subjective black box that could be used for any purpose — good or evil,
inclusion or exclusion. In absence of providing any data, Ivy League admissions
offices are saying, “Trust us, we use our power for good.” But how have
universities used this power in the past? Are they really worthy of trust?

A History
of Discrimination

Colleges
in the United States likely think of themselves as progressive institutions.
They have forward-thinking faculties, a stated objective of inclusion, and
commitments to public service.  This author might even personally think
they are wonderful, progressive places. But no generation ever thinks of itself
as racist or discriminatory, even when it is. If the data suggests you’re
discriminating against a group, and you’re forced to come up with qualitative,
opaque explanations for why the discrepancy exists, historically, that has been
a bad sign.

Has the Ivy League, for example, proven itself as an institution
that should be given the benefit of the doubt over accusations of
discrimination? Schools in the Ivy League have been around for almost 400
years. For the vast majority of that time, women, blacks, or anyone other than
white men were not allowed to attend. During this period, the educators,
admissions officers, and alumni undoubtedly considered themselves a part of
great institutions bringing light to the world, but the hindsight of history
proves they had racist and sexist admissions policies.

Holistic admissions criteria emerged at Ivy League schools in
the early 20th century and were almost immediately twisted for virulently
anti-semitic
purposes. Until the 1920s, students took an
admissions test and those that did well on the test were admitted to the
colleges “almost entirely on the basis of academic criteria.” This resulted in
lots of Jewish men on Harvard, Princeton, and Yale campuses.

An alumni visiting the Harvard campus around
this
time was shocked by the scene
:

"Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many
changes, but to find that one’s University had become so
Hebrewized
was a fearful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of
me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the yard
with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of
the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater."