DEI is as bad as you thought, or maybe worse, now that the post-Harvard Asian discrimination SCOTUS ruling is showing up in some new college cohorts and revealing the magnitude of prior racism in those admissions processes.
DEI claims about persistent white supremacist education in the US have long been undercut by evidence that some minority groups significantly outperform Whites academically. The first group was Jews, but DEI advocates wriggled out of that by redefining Jews as White. Asians provide a tougher challenge, since they are officially classified as non-White and historically faced far more legal discrimination in the US than did Hispanics. Asians comprised 5% of US school students in the 2010s but 40-45% of top scorers on AP Calculus BC. Blacks and Hispanics, eight times as numerous as Asians, made up less than 9% of top scorers. Success in increasing the shares of Blacks and Hispanics taking AP Calculus did not significantly change this; in 2020 the College Board stopped reporting those breakdowns to reduce embarrassment. Here are more details on comparative math performance.
Harvard and UNC consistently denied discrimination, invoking vague “holistic” criteria that coincidentally turned against Asians. In another remarkable coincidence, their Asian admissions started rising after the suit was filed. By 2022 when the Supreme Court heard the lawsuit, Asian American shares of freshmen were 28% at Harvard and 25% at UNC. While the Asian share at UNC has not changed much since the Supreme Court ruling, it has since surged to 41% of freshman at Harvard.
In still more coincidence, Asian Americans comprised 18% of Johns Hopkins undergrads in 2014, 27% in 2022 and 49% of freshmen now. To repeat, “Asian enrollment at Johns Hopkins is skyrocketing. No one can say why”. Asians now comprise 40%-50% of freshmen at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Rice. Coincidentally, that broadly matches their shares at more merit-based Cal Tech
Why not 100%? If there’s no D or E of any kind, and Asians are scientifically and disproportionately higher achieving, shouldn’t their enrollment be reaching 100% at all the top schools (assuming there are enough of them applying)?
the asian population in the US is quite small compared to the rest of the population (~5%), and
the bell curve distribution of IQ, etc, even with slightly different averages and asians with an advantage there, means there’s a wide variation of ability among the population. so it’s not surprising to have lot of smart top tier white students for example, even if the white average IQ is maybe 0.3 standard deviations lower than the asian IQ, since there are a lot more white students in the US.
Caltech was for quite some time known for not lowering their standards for diversity, and they had around 40% asians, so in a top tier technical field, this about what you should expect for the US.
It’s shocking that they are not routinely audited each year. Contracts awarded to family members would probably be very easy to spot and forbidden. Businesses regularly get their books audited by independent firms. Do these organizations have a privileged status to be as financially opaque as SPACs and the like?
There’s very little to distinguish students at the top. That was the case for one of my (non-asian) kids. 1600 SAT, 36 ACT (each taken only once), 4.0 unweighted GPA, only AP (5 in each so far including calc BC) and IB classes in junior and senior years, national merit finalist, etc. Still, he didn’t get admitted to every ivy school he applied to. So there is some randomness in admissions, hence why I think it’s gonna be hard to get very close to 100% at every one of them. Especially if schools can pick whoever they want between these perfect score students without risk to look biased.
Yes, this is another insidious consequence of DEI pressures, both internal and external, on the testing organizations. they couldn’t get the favored minorities’ scores up to the average of everyone else, so to “help” the SAT and AP tests have been dumbed down and/or heavily curved so there’s little to distinguish the very top from the top. This is what Harvard and others wanted so they could take a “top” scoring non-Asian minority and claim they were similarly good to everyone else when it usually just wasn’t true (and hence not have clear statistical evidence of their discrimination).
For example, here’s the lowest tier physics AP exam history of how the scores (from 1-5, 3 being passing and 4-5 being quite good) have been dumbed down over the past decade.
It used to be a 5 score was only 5% of all test takers, and over half the test takers (already a smart, fairly well-prepared population) got under a 3 and presumably would not be able to get college credit for the material. Now 5’s are 20% of the larger, less good testing group and 2/3 of people get 3+ instead of 40%. The average score had been inflated by a whole 1 point out of 5!
The SAT did a round of grade inflation in the mid 1990s, where for example an old 730 score on Verbal was now a “Perfect” 800.
And all this is just the scores, not counting that they made the test material easier too - no more antonyms or logical reasoning or even writing on the SAT these days. The GRE and LSAT pulled their logic sections, which were the hardest and most demanding for intelligence because… they were too good at being IQ tests and the new DEI liberals don’t like to think about IQ and certainly don’t like to be reminded that there are meaningful IQ differences between groups and those explain outcome differences way better than invisible micro aggressions and don’t give you any racism cudgel to go beating the rest of the population with.
The right hand knows what the left hand is doing. That is why these programs have little or no impact in reducing homelessness and other social maladies. It’s only when a whistleblower, journalists, or somebody who didn’t get their expected share complain that we see out in the open what we suspect in our guts. And then politicians are shocked, shocked! to find out.
I’m not sure that’s what the chart tells me. It tells me that the dumbing down happened in 2025. Prior to 2025, say 2021 vs 2017, the mean score seemed pretty stable to me even if trending slightly up over the years. But the big shift in 2025 doesn’t seem to fit with DEI pressure explanation. Starting in Jan 2025, we saw a lot of rolling back of DEI policies so I’m really not convinced that this was the explanation behind the score inflation in 2025. That year was also the first where the AP went with fully digital tests (bia bluebook app) so I wonder if that was at least partially the cause of the much increased scores. We’ll see in a month if the trend continues or if the college board adjusts how easy the digital tests are.
Btw, asians also had a fair number benefit from the AP score inflation in 2025, not quite as many in percentages as Latino and Black students but still. AP statistics on credits earned
That deliberate loss of granularity of test results never made any sense. All the “recentering” did was pretend education standards were not dropping dramatically at the cost of saturating the top of the scale. Up to the new perfect score, all it did was have admission officers change their thresholds 80/20 points up. But for top colleges, they just have a much larger cohort of perfect test score students. Thankfully the ACT has not gone that route. Composite score has actually dropped slightly - probably accurately reflecting drop in education standards - since the 90s.
Trans high school runner beats out his own sister for gold medal in California track and field championships
A trans high school freshman in California won a prestigious track and field championship meet in late April, defeating his own sister for the top slot in the 400-meter race.