White people are getting squeezed in college admissions

White kids are losing out.  Given that education is thought the golden pathway to great success, these numbers matter.

Highly selective schools now have fewer than 50% of the spaces for white kids.  Ambitious white parents might blame affirmative action. Donald Trump is on the case, looking at college admissions and pointing to Harvard by name.

White resentment over college admissions

The problem is that there are a lot of really talented Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and Mixed Race kids.  They apply, too.

The whole subject may be a winner for Trump.  The more people talk about race and discrimination, the better for Trump.  He picks at scabs and keeps things bleeding. 

I am no expert on college admissions, but I am an eye-witness to a tiny slice of it.   I attended Harvard and Yale and I currently serve as one of the interviewers for local applicants to Harvard.   I get to see a bit of what kind of kid is applying to the selective schools.

The answer:  lots of really bright, able, ambitious kids who are from a variety of races and ethnicities.

Fifty years ago, when I was admitted to Harvard the college was transitioning from a place where the sons of the prosperous New England establishment sent their "well rounded" sons, into a university that intended to serve the national interest to create the next generation of leaders, based on some supposed objective measure of merit.  Sputnik going up in 1957 sent a shock wave through America's educational establishment.  The fact that we invented the atomic bomb before Germany did was understood to mean national survival.  Meanwhile, selective schools were blocking smart Jewish boys from the Bronx from being admitted to save the places for the White, Protestant well bred people who made up the generations of alumni.  The Soviet Union getting the bomb, then sending up Sputnik in 1957, meant that that window of clear American superiority in science had shut, in only eleven years, and maybe the country's select colleges were hoping to commit national suicide.   And Americans were aware that our top scientists were foreigners--Jews out of Europe.  

Perhaps we  were educating the wrong people, they thought.  They decided to change.  I was a tiny beneficiary of that change.

Beginning in the classes accepted in the early 1960s there was a new emphasis on smarts, with acceptance of boys (Harvard was still all-male then) who tested well. There was a lot of emphasis on the SATs, as if they measured something useful.  Harvard wanted geographical diversity and economic diversity, but mostly it wanted measurable smarts.  It also wanted to address the civil rights revolution by accepting black kids, so some 8% of the class was black in my class that entered in 1967.   There were almost no Asians back then.  Harvard had a class of 1,200 boys, about 1,100 of them white, the rest black.

Harvard then was not multi-racial.  It was bi-racial.  Whites and blacks.

Looking at the student body today shows an entirely different makeup, one much closer to the makeup of the high achieving high schoolers of today.   Number one, half of them are women.  Simultaneously, just under half are white.   It means that an entering Harvard class of 1,800 students has about 900 boys, of whom 48% are white: 440 white males.

Are white kids being discriminated against?  Ambitious parents and students may feel that way but in fact the numbers work the other direction.  Very able Asian kids are the ones discriminated against, if one looks at objective standards.  White boys are a smaller percentage of the pool of able high school students than they used to be.  America is changing demographically.  There are a lot of Black and Hispanic kids here, plus a lot of people whose race is complicated (like my son, Dillon, whose mother is ethnically Chinese and I am white.)  

The reality is that those very bright, studious sons of ambitious and successful white parents, often themselves high achieving people with important jobs and enormous social status, want their sons to go to the most selective schools.  They are bound to be disappointed, what with the number of white male admits fell from 1,100 to about 440.   But America has changed.   There are more black kids, more Hispanic kids, and a great many Asian families who put enormous emphasis on education.  Black and Hispanic kids are admitted well below their absolute proportional numbers among the college age population.   Asian kids are admitted well below their merit-based numbers, as defined by standardized tests and other purported objective standards of merit.

And, of course, there is the admission of women.  Girls are Americans, too. They, too, now go to Harvard and all the other highly selective schools, and as a group they are more likely to show evidence of serious academic ability and purpose than do boys their age.  If pure, objective merit, defined by standardized tests and grades and academic ability were to be used as the only criterion, then boys receive affirmative action at the expense of girls, and Whites receive it at the expense of Asians.

The Trump administration has taken up affirmative action as a cause.  It will appeal to the Trump theme of white resentment over the supposed disadvantages endured by the hard working long suffering forgotten white American.  In fact, admission to selective colleges is done with attention to a class that represents America and the world, plus attention to the college's goal of having an orchestra, a football team, reporters for college newspaper, scholars, the children of legacy parents, and much more.  Still, the issue brings up merit, qualifications, and selections.

Every parent thinks their own kid is special.  It is natural to wonder if someone else got an unfair advantage, then to resent it.

A hard look at Harvard admissions--on the assumption that there is some absolute standard of merit--is more likely to show that white boys are the beneficiary, not the victim, of subjective factors.  Still, it may play out well as a talking point for Trump: him looking out for whites.  Trump may win simply by asking the question with a skeptical tone?  is that black or Hispanic student really, actually qualified?   He made the statement repeatedly about Obama, demanding to see his Occidental grades and questioning why he was president of the Harvard Law Review.  

There is political potential here.  The various sides will rise to the bait.  Blacks will bring up the legitimate question of past privilege and current funding of schools in their neighborhoods.  Asians can bring up the legitimate fact of their children facing soft quotas.  Whites can question whether less qualified Blacks and Hispanics got accepted in advance of them.   Racial talk helps Trump because he appeals to white racial anxiety. 

The country is changing out from under them.  As this blog wrote yesterday, it isn't a question of fair.  It is a question of who wins.   The fair share of slots at highly selective colleges is dropping for Whites, and that means a loss.   Trump wants to fight back and win.