It has long been assumed that the Ivy League schools are racist against Asians, but it's been hard to understand the extent of the racism. There are some universities that try to run purely meritocratic admissions systems involving fewer subjective evaluations. For example, Caltech has an Asian enrollment of 43%, but it's not clear whether that's comparable to other schools because of the heavy engineering focus of the school. Berkeley is a more well-rounded university and it has an Asian enrollment of 41%, but it's a public university in a state with a high Asian population, so it's not clear if it's comparable to universities in other parts of the country.
Fortunately, Harvard ran the numbers back in the 2013, and they found that if they ranked students solely by academic qualifications, then Asians would make up around 40% of the admissions. Even if Harvard continued to set aside spots for athletes and undeserving rich people, then Asians would make up 31%. If extra-curriculars and other subjective measures were included as well, then Asians should still make up around 26% of the student population (even though in 2013, only 19% of the admitted class was Asian). I believe that the Asian population has only grown since 2013.
These numbers agree with the Berkeley and Caltech numbers, so I feel it's safe to use these numbers to do back-of-the-envelope calculations for how racist against Asians each university is. The Harvard numbers should be comparable with other prestigious, well-rounded, private universities that attract students from across the country. So it should be safe to compare the numbers to other Ivy League universities.
So I visited the websites of the Ivy League universities, and grabbed their reported diversity statistics on Asian admissions. The numbers are hard to compare because different universities categorized their students differently. If universities had a separate category for unknown and/or foreign students, then I left them out of the total. If there was a category for multi-racial, I did not include that number in the count of percentage Asians. As a result, the numbers are very noisy, but I think they still give a basis for comparing universities. I think that universities with Asian enrollment in the high 20s or low 30s are demonstrating low amounts of racism against Asians.
So here are the results:
1. Brown (18.16%) - most racist
2. Yale (21%)
3. Dartmouth (21.74%)
4. Harvard (22.2%) - probably worse than Dartmouth, but the numbers are hard to compare
5. Cornell (23.26%)
6. UPenn (23.56%)
7. Princeton (25.29%)
8. Columbia (29%) - least racist
And here's Stanford's numbers even though they aren't an Ivy League university:
Stanford (26.44% Asian)
Initially, the numbers seem to suggest that Brown is the most racist against Asians of the universities. They also have the lowest enrollment of African Americans of the other Ivy League universities, so they just fail on diversity in general. They do have a large number of students classified as multi-racial, which makes things unclear, but things still look bad after removing them from the totals. It's possible that Yale or Harvard are, in fact, the worst universities because they don't have a "multi-racial" category and their percentage of enrollment being Asian is pretty low.
There's a bunch of universities in the middle that seem to be sort of racist. Princeton seems to be the best of the middle.
The least racist, by far, seems to be Columbia, which achieves a high-20s in Asian enrollment, which is the safe zone. They also have strong African enrollment as well. It demonstrates that it is possible to have diverse minority enrollment without unduly punishing Asians.
So what's going on? These universities (other than Columbia) are using the implicit bias effect to willfully keep down Asian enrollment. These universities intentionally add subjective measures into student evaluations that are known to be subject to bias. They then hire admissions officers of dubious qualifications who don't understand the Asian experience or don't like Asians in general, who implicitly prefer applicants who are more like themselves, and who are told to find applicants who match an Ivy League "culture" or "character profile" that run contrary to Asian stereotypes and biases. As a result, they end up giving lower subjective scores to Asians. Is the applicant who plays badminton more or less "brave" than the applicant who plays football? Is the atheist applicant more or less kind than the church-going applicant? There is no way of knowing those things, but people will inevitably form an opinion based on their implicit biases. For example, Harvard gave lower "personality" ratings to Asian applicants in general. I can imagine that, yes, some universities might prefer people with certain personalities over others. But that mix of personalities should be evenly distributed among all people. If one race consistently score poorly on the personality rating versus all other races, then there's some implicit racism going on there that needs to be fixed. Strangely, no personality deficiencies were found during alumni interviews. The bias only appeared during the ranking of personal qualities by the Admissions Office.
Here are some more in-depth articles if you want a deeper dive in the issues involved: 1, 2, 3.
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Monday, June 18, 2018
Friday, January 22, 2010
We're Currently in a Golden Age of Literacy, and It's All Downhill from Here
During the past few months, I've slowly started to notice that a lot of the things that I used to enjoy reading about, I know prefer watching videos about instead. For example, I used to enjoy reading reviews about video games on the web, but recently I'll search for video reviews first, and I'll only fall back to text reviews if I can't find any videos. I'm also starting to do the same for educated political commentary and satire. In fact, if there was enough video content on my favourite topics, I might prefer watching videos to web browsing entirely.
The logical conclusion of all this is that this signals the end of literacy as we know it. Sure, we might now complain about the poor literacy skills of our kids, we decry their unintelligible text messages, and we bemoan their incoherent essays, but ten years from now, we're going to look back on 2010 as a golden age of literacy. It will be considered the pinnacle of literacy in the world--people all over the world actually had to type words in order to find information! People were required to read information and instructions! Children preferred sending messages to each other in the form of text! In between the television age of the 1980s and the Internet video age of the 2020s, the period around 2010 will be considered a renaissance of literacy where people actually had to know how to read and write text to survive in the world!
In ten to twenty years, there will no longer be a need to read and write information; everyone will use video. Instead of web pages, there will be videos. Instead of SMS and tweets, kids will send videos to each other. Instead of textbooks, there will be slides and accompanying video. Society will complain about how kids can't form well-thought out text any more, preferring stream-of-consciousness videos. Kids might now even write text any more but simply make videos, edit it together somehow, and then dump the text out. Similar to how people ignore people talking to themselves in the street (they assume that the person is using a hands-free cellphone) and ignore people checking e-mail during conversations, I think in the future, people will simply get used to the idea of people quietly making short video messages to others in the middle of a meeting (of course, it will seem extremely disruptive to us, but I imagine it's something that future generations will simply get used to).
There are a few weaknesses of video--because it is a linear medium, it's hard to scan through it quickly, so there will still be some text that people will read. This text will mostly be in the form of "headlines," "search results," and "transcripts." When we want to find videos to watch, we'll tell our computer what videos we want to watch (through a webcam, of course!), and the computer will show various video clips with meaningful text headings that we can scan through quickly to find what we want. And every video will have an accompanying transcript (in both text and screencap form) that people can use to quickly jump around to the parts of videos that they're interested in.
I see two impediments to this video future:
The main barrier to this future right now are patents on video technology. These patents inhibit standardization (so no two companies can agree on a video e-mail standard or a webcam standard, for example), which prevents a network effect from starting around video technology. The cost and licensing difficulty of patents also inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship in this area. New companies and researchers don't want to develop new ideas in this space because it's too complicated and too expensive to license technology in this area, so the potential rewards (with Internet technology, most of this consumer technology has zero revenue) aren't profitable. I believe this patent issue will work itself out once patents expire or once storage and bandwidth becomes so cheap that we'll just use raw video for everything. The day after a useful video patent expires, a standard for video e-mail will be made (or perhaps there will be some sort of proprietary Facebook thing that comes out before then that everyone will use--unfortunately, it will be a bit of a kludge getting it to work with cellphones and other devices).
The other barrier is the lack of accurate video transcription technology. As I mentioned before, video is a linear medium, so we need a way to search it and to scan through it. The minimum technology we need for this to be practical is automatic video transcription. Currently, speech recognition isn't quite at the point where this is possible, but I imagine this technology will be ready by 2020, perhaps even by 2015 (there might be patent issues on this technology that will delay its widespread use for a few more years).
It's sort of weird knowing that despite all the complaints that people have about literacy in 2010, this is actually the best it's going to get. I'm not sure about the ultimate implications and ramifications of the future age of video on society, but I think it's inevitable, so we might as well start preparing for it now. I suppose other people have also been evangelizing that video is the future, so my musings are perhaps not the most original, but they never tell you that the trade-off is the end of literacy.
The logical conclusion of all this is that this signals the end of literacy as we know it. Sure, we might now complain about the poor literacy skills of our kids, we decry their unintelligible text messages, and we bemoan their incoherent essays, but ten years from now, we're going to look back on 2010 as a golden age of literacy. It will be considered the pinnacle of literacy in the world--people all over the world actually had to type words in order to find information! People were required to read information and instructions! Children preferred sending messages to each other in the form of text! In between the television age of the 1980s and the Internet video age of the 2020s, the period around 2010 will be considered a renaissance of literacy where people actually had to know how to read and write text to survive in the world!
In ten to twenty years, there will no longer be a need to read and write information; everyone will use video. Instead of web pages, there will be videos. Instead of SMS and tweets, kids will send videos to each other. Instead of textbooks, there will be slides and accompanying video. Society will complain about how kids can't form well-thought out text any more, preferring stream-of-consciousness videos. Kids might now even write text any more but simply make videos, edit it together somehow, and then dump the text out. Similar to how people ignore people talking to themselves in the street (they assume that the person is using a hands-free cellphone) and ignore people checking e-mail during conversations, I think in the future, people will simply get used to the idea of people quietly making short video messages to others in the middle of a meeting (of course, it will seem extremely disruptive to us, but I imagine it's something that future generations will simply get used to).
There are a few weaknesses of video--because it is a linear medium, it's hard to scan through it quickly, so there will still be some text that people will read. This text will mostly be in the form of "headlines," "search results," and "transcripts." When we want to find videos to watch, we'll tell our computer what videos we want to watch (through a webcam, of course!), and the computer will show various video clips with meaningful text headings that we can scan through quickly to find what we want. And every video will have an accompanying transcript (in both text and screencap form) that people can use to quickly jump around to the parts of videos that they're interested in.
I see two impediments to this video future:
- patents
- speech recognition (specifically video transcription) technology
The main barrier to this future right now are patents on video technology. These patents inhibit standardization (so no two companies can agree on a video e-mail standard or a webcam standard, for example), which prevents a network effect from starting around video technology. The cost and licensing difficulty of patents also inhibit innovation and entrepreneurship in this area. New companies and researchers don't want to develop new ideas in this space because it's too complicated and too expensive to license technology in this area, so the potential rewards (with Internet technology, most of this consumer technology has zero revenue) aren't profitable. I believe this patent issue will work itself out once patents expire or once storage and bandwidth becomes so cheap that we'll just use raw video for everything. The day after a useful video patent expires, a standard for video e-mail will be made (or perhaps there will be some sort of proprietary Facebook thing that comes out before then that everyone will use--unfortunately, it will be a bit of a kludge getting it to work with cellphones and other devices).
The other barrier is the lack of accurate video transcription technology. As I mentioned before, video is a linear medium, so we need a way to search it and to scan through it. The minimum technology we need for this to be practical is automatic video transcription. Currently, speech recognition isn't quite at the point where this is possible, but I imagine this technology will be ready by 2020, perhaps even by 2015 (there might be patent issues on this technology that will delay its widespread use for a few more years).
It's sort of weird knowing that despite all the complaints that people have about literacy in 2010, this is actually the best it's going to get. I'm not sure about the ultimate implications and ramifications of the future age of video on society, but I think it's inevitable, so we might as well start preparing for it now. I suppose other people have also been evangelizing that video is the future, so my musings are perhaps not the most original, but they never tell you that the trade-off is the end of literacy.
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