Jewish applicants are considered to be part of the "white people" group by the bean counters.
Quite right. When was that decision made, and by whom? Who decided that all the many ethnic groups from Europee were henceforth to constitute a single agglomeration to be called "white?"
I assume you are aware that 100 years ago Jews weren't considered "white" by most Americans, and quite often neither were Italians, Greeks, etc.
If there is discrimination against Jewish applicants, it's precisely because all white applicants are discriminated against to make way for desired percentages (quotas) of African American and Hispanic students.
Well, no. There is still a large "white" quota, something like 60%. Within that large quota the slots are still distributed by merit. So Jews of merit still get in at the same proportion as if only merit were considered. At elite colleges this is in the 15% to 30% range or higher, iow 7x to 15x their proportion of the population. (Or considerably higher, depending on how you determine who is a Jew.)
I assume you will agree that Jews have been highly prominent in actively pushing for affirmative action programs that prevent large numbers of otherwise qualified whites from attending these colleges. Yet, since within the white category slots are distributed by merit, very few Jews are disqualified who would otherwise have qualified to attend.
Which can easily be seen by the wildly disprortionate number attending. Few would claim that instead of 15% to 30% Jews at Harvard, without affirmative action we'd instead have 50% or 75%.
My complain is not with successful Jews, and certainly not with the young man who wrote this essay, or with you.
It's with the very large group of "progressive" American Jews who enthusiastically promote policies that disadvantage large numbers of white people, most of them less privileged than those promoting the programs.
I would be entirely happy, as would you, with admission based entirely on merit. It is probably roughly the same number of Jews would get in on that system as do now.
I would be much less happy, though I would be able to see something resembling fairness, in admissions intended to "mirror America," with admissions distributed to provide equal representation for all groups.
Here's a quote from an article about what "diversity" means in practice in America.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html#sthash.ns6FcQRM.dpuf
What I object to is a policy that pretends to provide opportunity for all groups evenly, while in practice being a savage restriction of opportunity for one group (in reality an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups, just as "Hispanic" is an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups), gentile white Americans.
Primarily, the creepy leftist politicians who inscribed that notion into law, regulation, and policy.