Reply #80: No it isn't

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html?_r=1&ref=columnists

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

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I will say I don't agree with everything, or even much, of what this column says. But this is certainly not the first study showing that whites need higher SAT scores and GPAs to get into universities than blacks. Again, I am not saying this is unjustified, but I am saying that by any reasonable definition of the word the whites who don't get in despite having scores higher than the blacks who did are getting discriminated against. Telling them they aren't doesn't make it any less real.