In Defense of Legacy Admissions, Sex Discrimination and Racial Discrimination at Elite Universities
In a perfect world, people would undergo extensive cognitive, genetic, and neural testing at the age of about 15, and those results would become publicly available. But this world does not exist, so universities select their students for academic and nonacademic performance, and employers select their employees for educational attainment and a few other variables. There are also elite universities which attempt to select for the best students - these selection mechanisms are fairly effective, but they will never be perfect. Because of this, they should select their students based on other variables, namely:
Race
The base rate of eminence within each race, even after controlling for intelligence, is not the same. Notably, the relationship between national intelligence and billionaires per capita is positive (r = .69), but imperfect.
Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan perform about as well as expected based on their national IQs, but these are urban and extremely wealthy areas that are likely to attract and create billionaires. Larger and more representative samples of Asians such as Korea, Japan, and China perform at the level of Turkey, Romania, Brazil, and Uruguay, which score about 15 IQ points under them on tests of intelligence and scholastic ability.
It is worth mentioning that the data on billionaires per capita does not come from country of birth, but country of residency. To test whether the amount of Asian billionaires was underestimated due to immigration, I consulted a table which reports the number of billionaires each race produces.
Based on this data and the population sizes of each racial group at this point in time (see appendix), the number of billionaires per million of each race is:
Jews: 13.8 per million
Europeans: 0.669 per million
Arabs/Central Asians: 0.169 per million
Asians: 0.140 per million
Latinos: 0.114 per million
South Asians: 0.0405 per million
Blacks: 0.00594 per million
This is almost identical to the IQ rank order, with the exception being Asians, who underperform quite a bit relative to their IQ.
Asian underachievement also holds up for cultural and scientific achievement as well. The distribution of significant figures in science and culture has been shifted towards Europe ever since the start of the 15th Century, as shown by Charles Murray.
80% of these European significant figures come from a small area in Europe:
Murray determined whether people were significant figures based on rankings of the histories best scientists and artists - which may have an eurocentric bias. Murray alleges this is not the case for several reasons. The best evidence he presents is that the most authoritative source of scientific figures (the Database of Scientific Biographies, DoSB) yields the same geographic distribution of significant figures that other sources Murray identified have.
This is relevant for reasons besides the fact that the DoSB has a lot of prestige: scientists are much easier to compare across cultures than artists, and this dataset was created in an era where there was lots of scrutiny to avoid race and gender bias:
The test of this hypothesis is to compare a source that is unimpeachably authoritative with the results from the less comprehensive histories and chronologies. Such a source exists in the form of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DoSB), sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, now up to 17 large volumes plus an eighteenth for the index. It is designed to be a definitive source in the hard sciences and mathematics (it is not intended to be definitive for medicine and technology, and I exclude those categories from this analysis). The DoSB’s editorial staff includes experts in Arabic, Indian, and East Asian science drawn from universities around the world. Consistent criteria are applied to the choice of who does and does not gain admittance.
What makes the DoSB even better for our purposes is that the core 14 volumes first appeared in 1970 and the last two supplemental volumes were issued in 1990, giving the editors two decades to hear about omissions—decades in which such sources were under intense scrutiny for omissions of women, non-whites, and non-Europeans. It seems reasonable to conclude that the DoSB in its present form has been as thoroughly cleansed of Eurocentric bias as it is possible for a source to be.
Murray also notes that Chinese and Indian texts do not claim discoveries that are not acknowledged by the west:
When it comes to the period from –800 onward, the period for which I shall be analyzing the inventories, historians of science have done excellent work in reconstructing who discovered what. Nor is there much residual disagreement among historians of science from different cultures—no Chinese or Indian texts claim a significant set of scientific or mathematical discoveries that are not acknowledged as well by Western experts on those subjects. Since the act of discovery—being first—is the requisite for getting into an inventory, this reduces the number of uncertainties to a small set.[40] I have been unable to find evidence that inventories of scientific, mathematical, technological, or medical accomplishment drawn from reputable sources in any non-Western culture would look much different from the inventories we will be working with.
This isn’t because Asians vary less in cognitive ability than Whites - Steve Hsu notes that East Asian countries have PISA SDs that are comparable to or larger than those found in European countries.
Below is what I obtained from the 2006 PISA mathematics exam data (overall rankings by average score here). To get the data, scroll down this page and download the chapter 6 data in .xls spreadsheet format. Level 6 is the highest achievement category listed in the data. For most OECD countries, e.g., France, Germany, UK, only a few percent of students attained this level of performance. In NE Asian countries as many as 11% of students performed at this level. Using these percentages and the country averages, one can extract the SD. (Level 6 = raw score 669, or +1.88SD for OECD, +1.28SD for NE Asians.)
OECD AVG=500 SD=90
NE Asia (HK, Korea, Taiwan) AVG=548 SD=95
The NE Asians performed about .5 SD better on average (consistent with IQ test results), and exhibited similar (somewhat higher) variance. (After doing my calculations I realized that there is actually a table of means and SDs in the spreadsheet, that more or less agree with my results. The standard error for the given SDs is only 1-2 points, so I guess a gap of 5 or 10 points is statistically significant.)
Some think that the fact Chinese/Asians study and cheat more on tests makes their academic test results less predictive - it’s possible to empirically test this using regression analysis; unfortunately I believe this has ever been tested properly. There are differential validity studies that test whether the correlation between SAT scores and outcomes differs by race, though that is not the proper way to do the analysis because races may differ in variance in these variables, which may inflate or deflate the variables. In the College Board’s analysis of the racial bias in the SAT, they found that the correlation between outcome variables and SAT scores are roughly the same within Whites and Asians.
While it’s true that part of the reason that Asians outscore Whites on academic tests like the SAT is because of practice, the effect does not appear to be large enough to matter in practice. I could believe that this effect does start to matter at the tail end of ability where elite institutions will select students, but it remains to be proven.
Instead I hypothesize that it’s due to higher levels of mental stability, which translates to lower levels of creativity. Because of this, Asians excel at tasks and professions that rely less on creativity and more on mental ability - so they are more likely to become doctors or engineers, and less likely to become businessmen, artists, or scientists. I think it’s possible that some of the difference is due to culture or the extended phenotype - Asians within Western countries don’t seem to be as underrepresented in creative fields as those born in Asian ones.
Class
SAT scores and grades, while predictive of intelligence and competence, cannot perfectly measure it. If somebody’s parents were able to acquire status and resources, and parents and children relate in traits, then parental class will predict competence beyond SAT scores and grades.
Take, for example, legacy students. Based on a study of 11,837 students at 27 private and selective universities, legacies on average have higher GPAs than normal students in comparison to normal students, but after controlling for parental background, this advantage disappears, and possibly reverses.
This is a bit unintuitive, but the reversion is because legacy students tend to come from high class backgrounds, and because class predicts GPA beyond whatever the admissions process is measuring. This is true even after controlling for SAT scores.
Sex
Attracting the top talent is the most important feature of an elite universitie, but that’s not their only purpose. Another is to attract students who are wanted there, namely women. Women are unlikely to become extremely eminent - they make up only 2.2% of the significant figures in Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment.
But the fact remains that the male students want the women there - a lopsided sex ratio would disfavor them in the dating market. And I assume the women want to be there too, after all, they applied. Due to greater male variability, an unbiased admissions process at an elite university would let in more men (but not many more, as greater male variance in intelligence is not large). Instead, sex discrimination in favour of women should be practiced to force the ratio to 50:50.
Final notes
Many will object to having race or class based admissions in principle based on moral intuition. I ask: what distinguishes an SAT score or a grade point average from parental class or race? They are both, in the end, traits that are decided by genetic and environmental factors that predict competence. There is no real reason to select for the former and not the latter. Keep in mind that these are also elite universities - the point of them is elitism, not be the garrison of moralism in favour of racial and socioeconomic equality.
Some may be concerned that overt race or class based discrimination would harm the reputation of those universities. Yes, it definitely would. Universities optimize their admissions process for several outcomes - performance, public appeal, and political needs. Discriminating against Asians overtly might increase the number of significant figures that are associated with the universities, but it would be publicly unappealing. Instead, they cover up their tracks by doing things like affirmative action. It’s good for PR, has a small negative effect on performance (increase in minorities is partially compensated by the decrease in Asians), and fits in well with the political climate of the country.
It would be improper to end this article without a nod to those who have helped me develop this argument. One to BAP for his thread on the effects of the introduction of Asians on elite universities, one to Richard Hanania for his regression to the mean argument, and a final one to Charles Angleson for his defense of legacy admissions.
Appendix
Race populations (when possible, they were averaged):
Europeans are overestimated in population size in the first two charts. To adjust for this, I subtracted the underestimated Latin American population (326000000) from the overestimate of the European population (1214375000) to calculate the true European population (888125000) and added the underestimated Latin American population to the original Latin American population to generate an estimate of 660000000. The Jewish population was estimated to be 21 million, a number that accounts for converts and mixed Jews.
A 50:50 sex ratio would ruin STEM focused universities (and most unis should be focused on STEM).
"Cognitive, genetic, and neural testing at the age of about 15." Yes, but for a different reason. All of the Jewish and white (including Asian) advantage comes from Human Growth Hormone (HGH) levels, which can be safely and cheaply manipulated. If done correctly, a genetically predisposed child with an IQ cap of 90 will grow to be 130+ and have equal opportunities in every aspect.
And a lot of European (and Jewish) advantage actually comes from HGH hacking like milk and a high protein diet, fasting, and hygiene. It's the main thing determining not just your genetic IQ, but also lifelong performance, hence why it's the biggest open secret for anyone earning enough to buy HGH from good Danish pharmaceutical companies. (Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9625733/)
In conclusion, yes, testing should be done at 15 or better at 1-2, and optimal levels of HGH should be ensured to achieve IQ, memory, and executive function necessary to excel in modern society. It's cheap and already done on a national level in countries like Russia (https://www.paralympic.org/feature/no-44-doping-russian-athletes-thrown-out-london-2012) and the USA, so guess why Trump can be sharp at 80 and have a son over 2 meters in height.