A Sense of Those Who Matter

http://www.vdare.com/articles/graduate-school-admissions-race-and-the-white-status-game

This is particularly damning:
"Data gathered by Richard Sanders of the UCLA Law School shows that 53% of the black students who enter law school fail to qualify to become lawyers, versus 24% of white students. About 40 percent of black law school graduates (many of whom will have taken out crushing loans to pay three years of tuition) never pass the bar exam, compared to 15 percent of whites. Some will also waste additional years working dead-end day jobs while paying to take bar exam review courses at night, before finally giving up in despair."

Anywhere intellectual standards are imposed, major racial differences appear. Ideally, the analysis would also include Jews, who are not a comfortable fit within the white category. Their numbers are doubtless even better than those of the Asians. My first thought in seeing numbers like these is to wonder whether a sufficient number of men in the top IQ percentile are pursuing the ideal of progress, rather than just the idol of Mammon.

Horizon Shifters

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/jewish-genius/ An excellent piece on what strikes me as a fascinating mystery: why has a small Semitic tribe had such vast influence over mankind's intellectual development? Note particularly the statistical oddity that, for a normal distribution (like IQ), a modest advantage in averages translates into a great advantage at the far ends of the distribution. For example, assuming the Ashkenazim possess average IQs of 110 and gentiles run at 100--this means that a member of the former group is 13 times as likely as a member of the latter group to manifest a 160 IQ (which is 1 of 30,000 gentiles and 1 of 2,300 Ashkenazi). The ratio would be 7:1 at 145 IQ and 4:1 at 130 IQ. You see the pattern. This may largely explain the huge disproportion in Jewish Nobel prizes and Fields Medals relative to any other group. Also, these numbers match what I recently found in looking at gentile vs. Jewish acceptance rates at the top 10 American universities. Supposedly, half of such students are accepted on academic merit. This means the top tenth of a percent of gentiles are accepted--their average IQs exceed 146. At that level, statistics would lead to the expectation of a 7.5:1 acceptance ratio. Jews have a 14 fold greater acceptance rate, meaning the top 1.4% make it in. This would instead imply a 13 point gap in average Jewish-gentile IQs, assuming meritocratic standards are applied equally to Jews and gentiles. But, it's likely that the Jews work harder and have more admissions through legacies and university employee preferences--so the gap probably is closer to 10 points after all. I may post some of the stats I gathered later.

The Garden of Academe

http://www.economist.com/node/7945858

This article is essentially a review of the book: “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates."

The Economist opines that it "deserves to become a classic." The book reveals the shocking truth that college admissions officers rarely even attempt "fairness," as that term might be understood by most of those actually "competing" for admission to college. A vast collection of applicants have "unfair" advantages in this game: affirmative action cases, athletes (even in obscure sports), and the offspring of alumni, the rich, and college employees. The author, Daniel Golden, estimates that only 40% of the slots at elite universities are available to applicants without one of the above listed categorical advantages. The result: "Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites." I would extend that to all whites who are not in one of the favored categories.

Tellingly, at some elite schools blacks are better represented than non-Jewish whites, despite the fact that whites have much higher test scores and grades than blacks--and despite the fact that whites are better represented in all the favored categories except affirmative action. It would be very interesting indeed to see a breakdown of those who make it in on merit. My guess is the gentiles, Jews, and Asians each take a third of the 40 percent of the class admitted on merit. The Jews are in the highly fortunate, and far from accidental, position of being lumped in the "white" category despite having higher IQs than the Asians. Though they're only 3 percent of the "white" population, they typically take 30-50 percent of the slots allotted to "whites" at the Ivy League schools. Several other studies have made it clear that the overall result of the web of social and financial preferences leads to various levels of admissions standards for the four primary races in America. From most advantaged to least advantaged the list runs: Black, Hispanic, White, Asian. Of course, it's no accident but precisely the intent that this is the inverse of the actual academic performance of each group--the better the performance, the more that group is punished by exclusion and higher standards. Thus, like American government, American academia has become an institution designed to benefit the rich and the welfare cases, at the expense of the merely meritorious. They are clever enough, though, these wiley academic beguilers, to sustain a core of high merit students and capable professors to provide shade for all the coddled rich kids and race-based incapables.