Asians: Too Smart For Their Own Good?

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/opini ... -good.html

Op-Ed Contributor
Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?
By CAROLYN CHEN
Published: December 19, 2012



AT the end of this month, high school seniors will submit their college applications and begin waiting to hear where they will spend the next four years of their lives. More than they might realize, the outcome will depend on race. If you are Asian, your chances of getting into the most selective colleges and universities will almost certainly be lower than if you are white.

Asian-Americans constitute 5.6 percent of the nation’s population but 12 to 18 percent of the student body at Ivy League schools. But if judged on their merits — grades, test scores, academic honors and extracurricular activities — Asian-Americans are underrepresented at these schools. Consider that Asians make up anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the student population at top public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York City, Lowell in San Francisco and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va., where admissions are largely based on exams and grades.

In a 2009 study of more than 9,000 students who applied to selective universities, the sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that white students were three times more likely to be admitted than Asians with the same academic record.

Sound familiar? In the 1920s, as high-achieving Jews began to compete with WASP prep schoolers, Ivy League schools started asking about family background and sought vague qualities like “character,” “vigor,” “manliness” and “leadership” to cap Jewish enrollment. These unofficial Jewish quotas weren’t lifted until the early 1960s, as the sociologist Jerome Karabel found in his 2005 history of admissions practices at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

In the 1920s, people asked: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Jews? Today we ask: will Harvard still be Harvard with so many Asians? Yale’s student population is 58 percent white and 18 percent Asian. Would it be such a calamity if those numbers were reversed?

As the journalist Daniel Golden revealed in his 2006 book “The Price of Admission,” far more attention has been devoted to race-conscious affirmative action at public universities (which the Supreme Court has scaled back and might soon eliminate altogether) than to the special preferences elite universities afford to the children of (overwhelmingly white) donors and alumni.

For middle-class and affluent whites, overachieving Asian-Americans pose thorny questions about privilege and power, merit and opportunity. Some white parents have reportedly shied away from selective public schools that have become “too Asian,” fearing that their children will be outmatched. Many whites who can afford it flock to private schools that promote “progressive” educational philosophies, don’t “teach to the test” and offer programs in art and music (but not “Asian instruments,” like piano and violin). At some of these top-tier private schools, too, Asian kids find it hard to get in.

At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to “being Asian.” They are too smart and hard-working for their own good.

Since the 1965 overhaul of immigration law, the United States has lured millions of highly educated, ambitious immigrants from places like Taiwan, South Korea and India. We welcomed these immigrants precisely because they outperformed and overachieved. Yet now we are stigmatizing their children for inheriting their parents’ work ethic and faith in a good education. How self-defeating.

To be clear, I do not seek to perpetuate the “model minority” myth — Asian-Americans are a diverse group, including undocumented restaurant workers and resettled refugees as well as the more familiar doctors and engineers. Nor do I endorse the law professor Amy Chua’s pernicious “Tiger Mother” stereotype, which has set back Asian kids by attributing their successes to overzealous (and even pathological) parenting rather than individual effort.

Some educators, parents and students worry that if admissions are based purely on academic merit, selective universities will be dominated by whites and Asians and admit few blacks and Latinos, as a result of socioeconomic factors and an enduring test-score gap. We still need affirmative action for underrepresented groups, including blacks, Latinos, American Indians and Southeast Asian Americans and low-income students of all backgrounds.

But for white and Asian middle- and upper-income kids, the playing field should be equal. It is noteworthy that many high-achieving kids at selective public magnet schools are children of working-class immigrants, not well-educated professionals. Surnames like Kim, Singh and Wong should not trigger special scrutiny.

We want to fill our top universities with students of exceptional and wide-ranging talent, not just stellar test takers. But what worries me is the application of criteria like “individuality” and “uniqueness,” subjectively and unfairly, to the detriment of Asians, as happened to Jewish applicants in the past. I suspect that in too many college admissions offices, a white Intel Science Talent Search finalist who is a valedictorian and the concertmaster of her high school orchestra would stand out as exceptional, while an Asian-American with the same résumé (and socioeconomic background) would not.

The way we treat these children will influence the America we become. If our most renowned schools set implicit quotas for high-achieving Asian-Americans, we are sending a message to all students that hard work and good grades may be a fool’s errand.

Carolyn Chen is an associate professor of sociology and director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern.

How much can the courts act against private colleges as opposed to public universities where they could and have restricted affirmative action programs determined to too biased?

[Stark]

Isn't this more a comment not the hilariously corrupt nature of private college admission than anything about DEM ASAAAAAAAAINS? As much as it may surprise you, the idea admission to these universities is entirely based on merit is fucking laughable.

[weemadando]

It's all based on merit. The merit that your parents can bring via their wallet.

[Gandalf]

Isn't this more a comment not the hilariously corrupt nature of private college admission than anything about DEM ASAAAAAAAAINS? As much as it may surprise you, the idea admission to these universities is entirely based on merit is fucking laughable.

It seems as though the moral of the story for this article is "Don't scare old white guys by being good at stuff they value, remember what happened to the Jews".

[Crown]

I still don't understand how 'extracurricular activities' are used to determine your suitability for higher education.

[Crown]

Isn't this more a comment not the hilariously corrupt nature of private college admission than anything about DEM ASAAAAAAAAINS? As much as it may surprise you, the idea admission to these universities is entirely based on merit is fucking laughable.

It seems as though the moral of the story for this article is "Don't scare old white guys by being good at stuff they value, remember what happened to the Jews".

They got to run the mass media?

[Broomstick]

I still don't understand how 'extracurricular activities' are used to determine your suitability for higher education.

The rationale is that when every applicant to a program is a straight A student taking high level courses there needs to be some way to distinguish the top from the bottom - thus, perfect grades become the baseline and what you do in addition to that becomes what rules you in or out.

[Stark]

It helps that it also discriminates against the poor. I mean you could just rank people by results or other existing criteria; but that doesn't waste enough time.

[Gandalf]

I still don't understand how 'extracurricular activities' are used to determine your suitability for higher education.

The rationale is that when every applicant to a program is a straight A student taking high level courses there needs to be some way to distinguish the top from the bottom - thus, perfect grades become the baseline and what you do in addition to that becomes what rules you in or out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian ... ssion_Rank

Students are ranked by their results, and given a number. Universities publish their requirements for various courses. Simple, with no need for resume building.

[Broomstick]

I wasn't defending the practice, just repeating the usual justification.

[Iron Bridge]

Unlike the old anti-Jew policies they cite, this isn't about WASPs being afraid of competition. Rather, it's just the consequence of following the logic of affirmative action to its natural conclusion. US politicians claim that their race-based admissions policies are not really discriminatory, because everyone 'should' be about equal, and therefore admission proportions should reflect the proportion of each race in the population. Any divergence is because society has in some way, however indirectly, discriminated against whatever race is underrepresented. Affirmative action is not discriminating against anyone, merely correcting an imbalance caused by discrimination elsewhere in society. If you accept this logic then asians are, however implausible it may seem, being discriminated in favour of by society, and deserve to be treated more harshly in admissions. If you think that they do better because of individual traits or choices, like being more intelligent or working harder, then there is no a priori reason to think the same isn't true of whites relative to blacks, and blacks relative to hispanics. And the logic on which the whole system is based falls apart.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing - I am glad to live in a country that does not have race-based selection for higher education - but that is why we will not see some sort of half way house where asians are treated as "honourary whites" but where blacks and hispanics still get special favours.



edit: In fact, I find the whole tone of the article bizarre, like as if the author is desperate to twist some way that she is a victim of those nasty whites. The US race culture seems to become no less poisonous as the laws that created it exit living memory.

[Simon_Jester]

I still don't understand how 'extracurricular activities' are used to determine your suitability for higher education.

The justification Broomstick gave isn't totally empty. Looking at my own students, it's partly a measure of how well you can keep your academics going while simultaneously spending 5-20 hours a week on organized hobbies. Which is actually significant. I can tell a lot about a student by knowing whether they get C's without extracurriculars, C's with lots of extracurriculars, or A's with or without extracurriculars.

Unlike the old anti-Jew policies they cite, this isn't about WASPs being afraid of competition. Rather, it's just the consequence of following the logic of affirmative action to its natural conclusion. US politicians claim that their race-based admissions policies are not really discriminatory, because everyone 'should' be about equal, and therefore admission proportions should reflect the proportion of each race in the population. Any divergence is because society has in some way, however indirectly, discriminated against whatever race is underrepresented. Affirmative action is not discriminating against anyone, merely correcting an imbalance caused by discrimination elsewhere in society. If you accept this logic then asians are, however implausible it may seem, being discriminated in favour of by society, and deserve to be treated more harshly in admissions. If you think that they do better because of individual traits or choices, like being more intelligent or working harder, then there is no a priori reason to think the same isn't true of whites relative to blacks, and blacks relative to hispanics. And the logic on which the whole system is based falls apart.

Uh... no?

The big assumption behind keeping affirmative action in admissions is this: Poverty means that students who make the same choices will get worse outcomes in school. A kid with the same brain will know less if their parents didn't teach them to read, and they had to learn in kindergarten instead of learning earlier. They will achieve less if their parents pressure them to work a part-time job outside of school during their last years of high school. They will probably retain less knowledge if they are stuck in a classroom full of disruptive idiots who might as well have been raised by wolves, even if they themselves are responsible and intelligent.

None of this has much to do with the student's personal choices: you can't choose your parents, and it's damn hard for a sixteen-year-old to choose to ignore their surroundings entirely. Not if they're remotely normal.

So if you take the kid who achieved X despite all those problems, and the kid who achieved X+1 without all those problems, you are likely to find that they both have the same raw competence. Especially when you take them out of the stupid nonsense that made the lower achiever have a problem.

When I look at Asians' higher success rate, I see no reason to attribute that to social bias. They're starting out at an economic level more comparable to whites. If there is a bias, it's a systematic pressure to develop good habits, and I'm not too worried about the idea that our educational system rewards people with good habits. It should also be trying to break children's bad habits before they're set in stone, but that's another matter.

[Iron Bridge]

Unlike the old anti-Jew policies they cite, this isn't about WASPs being afraid of competition. Rather, it's just the consequence of following the logic of affirmative action to its natural conclusion. US politicians claim that their race-based admissions policies are not really discriminatory, because everyone 'should' be about equal, and therefore admission proportions should reflect the proportion of each race in the population. Any divergence is because society has in some way, however indirectly, discriminated against whatever race is underrepresented. Affirmative action is not discriminating against anyone, merely correcting an imbalance caused by discrimination elsewhere in society. If you accept this logic then asians are, however implausible it may seem, being discriminated in favour of by society, and deserve to be treated more harshly in admissions. If you think that they do better because of individual traits or choices, like being more intelligent or working harder, then there is no a priori reason to think the same isn't true of whites relative to blacks, and blacks relative to hispanics. And the logic on which the whole system is based falls apart.

Uh... no?

The big assumption behind keeping affirmative action in admissions is this: Poverty means that students who make the same choices will get worse outcomes in school. A kid with the same brain will know less if their parents didn't teach them to read, and they had to learn in kindergarten instead of learning earlier. They will achieve less if their parents pressure them to work a part-time job outside of school during their last years of high school. They will probably retain less knowledge if they are stuck in a classroom full of disruptive idiots who might as well have been raised by wolves, even if they themselves are responsible and intelligent.

None of this has much to do with the student's personal choices: you can't choose your parents, and it's damn hard for a sixteen-year-old to choose to ignore their surroundings entirely. Not if they're remotely normal.

So if you take the kid who achieved X despite all those problems, and the kid who achieved X+1 without all those problems, you are likely to find that they both have the same raw competence. Especially when you take them out of the stupid nonsense that made the lower achiever have a problem.

When I look at Asians' higher success rate, I see no reason to attribute that to social bias. They're starting out at an economic level more comparable to whites. If there is a bias, it's a systematic pressure to develop good habits, and I'm not too worried about the idea that our educational system rewards people with good habits. It should also be trying to break children's bad habits before they're set in stone, but that's another matter.

1. Affirmative action is not based on socio-economic status. If it were, poor whites would be given the same advantages as blacks, and rich blacks the same disadvantages as whites. And immigrants from the PRC would be given far more advantages than native blacks or hispanics, who are near-universally much richer than the typical citizen of the PRC.

2. Affirmative action allows for differences in outcome due to choices, parental involvement, IQ, socio-economic status, etc. within each race, just not for aggregate differences in those things between races. If 20% of white people, 20% of black people and 20% of asians grow up in poor households to ignorant, abusive parents, such that the proportion of each race going to university is the same, affirmative action does nothing about this. If 10% of white people, 20% of black people, and 5% of asians grow up in such households, then affirmative action slaps a penalty on all whites and all asians, including the ones in poor, ignorant, abusive households..

3. Although my examples are designed to show this policy is silly (and I think it is) the basic assumption is not that unreasonable and probably accepted by most people: on average, people of all races are equally intelligent, good, etc. The purpose of the policy is to say that, instead of deciding exactly where and how imbalances have emerged and correct them, we'll try to cut them off at the end by rebalancing college admissions, the reasoning being that equal access to college should 'correct' a lot of these imbalances at the next generation. According to this logic, asians are already, like whites, well adjusted enough, and blacks and hispanics should have opportunities instead of them so that the black and hispanic race average outcome is improved. Indeed, they're better adjusted than whites, so even whites deserve to benefit at their expense.

[ray245]

It helps that it also discriminates against the poor. I mean you could just rank people by results or other existing criteria; but that doesn't waste enough time.

Well, given that the universities were originally founded to cater to the upper class, I am not that surprised. The old Harvard entry exams would most likely disqualified a majority of the people from our board because most of us never got to learn Latin and Greek in a public school.

[Haruko]

It's all based on merit. The merit that your parents can bring via their wallet.

Yep. Along those lines, the following about "legacy admits," or students admitted because their parents are university alumni (or donors), is worth quoting again (emphasis mine):

The debate over preferential treatment of minorities continues even today. For many, the use of race as a criterion is a bogus argument, so the controversy will remain. On the other hand, Chicanos point out that other groups, such as veterans, the children of alumni, the children of donors to the university, or those over 65 years of age, receive preferential treatment. Today society has ramps for the handicapped, which some people would call preferential treatment. According to Alex Liebman, for Princeton's class of 2001 the overall acceptance rate was 13 percent; the statistic for "legacy admits" (children of alumni) was 41 percent; and that for minorities (which includes Asians) was 26 percent. The assumption was that Latinos and African Americans were not qualified and that the legacy admits were qualified, which was not always the case. At Harvard University during the 1990s, the children of alumni were almost four times more likely to be accepted than other prospective students. Harvard University admitted about 40 percent of its entering class using the criterion that the student was the son or daughter of an alumnus or donor. In the same period, 66 percent of children-of-alumni applicants were accepted by the University of Pennsylvania whereas the overall acceptance percentage was 11. Admissions officers saved 25 percent of Notre Dame's first-year class openings for the children of alumni. The preferential treatment given to legacy admits highlights the hypocrisy and racial bias of those who challenged affirmative action.

Source: Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (p. 269), 7e Pearson Custom Library. San Bernardino Valley College.

This book is banned in Arizona, by the way. Just think that is interesting.

[Iron Bridge]

It's all based on merit. The merit that your parents can bring via their wallet.

Yep. Along those lines, the following about "legacy admits," or students admitted because their parents are university alumni (or donors), is worth quoting again (emphasis mine):

The debate over preferential treatment of minorities continues even today. For many, the use of race as a criterion is a bogus argument, so the controversy will remain. On the other hand, Chicanos point out that other groups, such as veterans, the children of alumni, the children of donors to the university, or those over 65 years of age, receive preferential treatment. Today society has ramps for the handicapped, which some people would call preferential treatment. According to Alex Liebman, for Princeton's class of 2001 the overall acceptance rate was 13 percent; the statistic for "legacy admits" (children of alumni) was 41 percent; and that for minorities (which includes Asians) was 26 percent. The assumption was that Latinos and African Americans were not qualified and that the legacy admits were qualified, which was not always the case. At Harvard University during the 1990s, the children of alumni were almost four times more likely to be accepted than other prospective students. Harvard University admitted about 40 percent of its entering class using the criterion that the student was the son or daughter of an alumnus or donor. In the same period, 66 percent of children-of-alumni applicants were accepted by the University of Pennsylvania whereas the overall acceptance percentage was 11. Admissions officers saved 25 percent of Notre Dame's first-year class openings for the children of alumni. The preferential treatment given to legacy admits highlights the hypocrisy and racial bias of those who challenged affirmative action.

Source: Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (p. 269), 7e Pearson Custom Library. San Bernardino Valley College.

This book is banned in Arizona, by the way. Just think that is interesting.

This passage gives interesting statistics then applies an overwrought analysis.

1. Disapproval of affirmative action doesn't imply approval of legacies.

2. It doesn't say how many legacies were actually admitted. If general admittances are 99% of the intake then doubling the proportion of non-whites admitted (presumably artificially) is much more significant than quadrupling the proportion of legacies admitted relative to white general applicants.

3. Legacies are a private policy adopted by autonomous universities. Affirmative action is public policy.

4. Since legacy admittance requires you to already have and pay far more money than the education is actually worth, it's unclear how this is entrenching racial advantages. Rather, it should be eroding them.

Also I wasn't aware it was constitutional to ban books in any state.

[Terralthra]

Please don't emphasize text with colors, as not everyone uses the same theme you do. On a white background, the color you chose is nigh unreadable. Use bold, italics, or underline. Size if you really must.

[Simon_Jester]

1. Affirmative action is not based on socio-economic status. If it were, poor whites would be given the same advantages as blacks, and rich blacks the same disadvantages as whites. And immigrants from the PRC would be given far more advantages than native blacks or hispanics, who are near-universally much richer than the typical citizen of the PRC.

Now you speak of matters of which you are ignorant.

First of all, the demographics of the United States: there are plenty of poor white families, but with a few exceptions, they don't cluster the way urban black populations do. Poor whites grow up in communities where they are at least exposed on a daily basis to more successful whites, which helps a great deal.

Whereas there are millions of black people who live in neighborhoods varying from "anarchic slum" to "working but still has the lowest concentration of advanced education and services in the metropolitan area." That's a whole different level of disadvantage. We can find individual white children who have it just as bad. But they don't form demographic blocs so large that the state is forced to come up with some kind of policy to handle them because otherwise they're literally writing off 10-20% of the population of a large city.


Second of all, the demographics of the world: personal income is not the only factor. Having twice as much money does not mean you get twice as much access to education, IF the society you came from put in more effort to ensure your exposure. Within a given country there's a strong tie between academic outcome and class; across international borders not so much- especially because the immigrants who come to the US to go to school are usually the ones who would be specially gifted back home.

If Chinese graduate students do well, it's partly because only the most talented ones are willing to move across an ocean to get here in the first place.

2. Affirmative action allows for differences in outcome due to choices, parental involvement, IQ, socio-economic status, etc. within each race, just not for aggregate differences in those things between races. If 20% of white people, 20% of black people and 20% of asians grow up in poor households to ignorant, abusive parents, such that the proportion of each race going to university is the same, affirmative action does nothing about this. If 10% of white people, 20% of black people, and 5% of asians grow up in such households, then affirmative action slaps a penalty on all whites and all asians, including the ones in poor, ignorant, abusive households..

I would favor an attempt to figure out who's growing up in poor, ignorant environments- a white kid in West Virginia who does well might deserve to get into a college ahead of an equally white kid from Massachusetts if they have the same scores. But the correlation between inner-city urban poverty, weak educational systems, and overwhelmingly black neighborhoods is so strong you have to be willfully blind to ignore it.

[Iron Bridge]

1. Affirmative action is not based on socio-economic status. If it were, poor whites would be given the same advantages as blacks, and rich blacks the same disadvantages as whites. And immigrants from the PRC would be given far more advantages than native blacks or hispanics, who are near-universally much richer than the typical citizen of the PRC.

Now you speak of matters of which you are ignorant.

First of all, the demographics of the United States: there are plenty of poor white families, but with a few exceptions, they don't cluster the way urban black populations do. Poor whites grow up in communities where they are at least exposed on a daily basis to more successful whites, which helps a great deal.

Whereas there are millions of black people who live in neighborhoods varying from "anarchic slum" to "working but still has the lowest concentration of advanced education and services in the metropolitan area." That's a whole different level of disadvantage. We can find individual white children who have it just as bad. But they don't form demographic blocs so large that the state is forced to come up with some kind of policy to handle them because otherwise they're literally writing off 10-20% of the population of a large city.

Affirmative action doesn't take account of individual circumstances. Herman Cain's children get the same benefits as a black kid growing up in a bad area of Detroit, and a white kid growing up in the same area gets the same penalties as Mitt Romney's children. The policy is clearly not intended to account for individual economic circumstances, but as a counterweight to "institutional racism" - racism that is not due to specific racist actions or policies but to the structure of institutions - that is assumed to present because of lack of equal outcomes when averaged over race.

Second of all, the demographics of the world: personal income is not the only factor. Having twice as much money does not mean you get twice as much access to education, IF the society you came from put in more effort to ensure your exposure. Within a given country there's a strong tie between academic outcome and class; across international borders not so much- especially because the immigrants who come to the US to go to school are usually the ones who would be specially gifted back home.

If Chinese graduate students do well, it's partly because only the most talented ones are willing to move across an ocean to get here in the first place.

And if that equally talented person had been born in the US, had his own room rather than sharing a hovel with 5 other kids, if his grand parents hadnt been murdered in the 1960s for owning a pair of glasses, etc. he would have done even better, surely?

2. Affirmative action allows for differences in outcome due to choices, parental involvement, IQ, socio-economic status, etc. within each race, just not for aggregate differences in those things between races. If 20% of white people, 20% of black people and 20% of asians grow up in poor households to ignorant, abusive parents, such that the proportion of each race going to university is the same, affirmative action does nothing about this. If 10% of white people, 20% of black people, and 5% of asians grow up in such households, then affirmative action slaps a penalty on all whites and all asians, including the ones in poor, ignorant, abusive households..

I would favor an attempt to figure out who's growing up in poor, ignorant environments- a white kid in West Virginia who does well might deserve to get into a college ahead of an equally white kid from Massachusetts if they have the same scores. But the correlation between inner-city urban poverty, weak educational systems, and overwhelmingly black neighborhoods is so strong you have to be willfully blind to ignore it.

One easy way: ask for parental income on the application and don't ask for race. Since black people are poorer on average and asians are wealthier on average, the discrimination will still go the same ways over all. But it at least won't punish people double for being born poor and white, or poor and asian, rather than just one.

[Haruko]

Also I wasn't aware it was constitutional to ban books in any state.

Believe this is a case of a state just getting away with something clearly unconstitutional because it has not been challenged. Reminds me of the violations by several states of the no religious test oath.

Please don't emphasize text with colors, as not everyone uses the same theme you do. On a white background, the color you chose is nigh unreadable. Use bold, italics, or underline. Size if you really must.

Noted.

[ryacko]

Also I wasn't aware it was constitutional to ban books in any state.

Believe this is a case of a state just getting away with something clearly unconstitutional because it has not been challenged. Reminds me of the violations by several states of the no religious test oath.

I don't think there is a constitutional requirement for institutions, state-funded/managed or otherwise, to keep a copy of a book, or not to keep a policy prohibiting the purchase of a book.

Unless you think that Arizona has banned possession of a book.
That's just silly.

[Haruko]

Should have mentioned I mean a state mandate banning books of a certain perspective. So not only Acuña but, say, Victor Villaseñor (Rain of Gold) and Carlos Muñoz, Jr. (Youth, Identity, Power), whose books are also banned because they are critical of the perspective that Arizona lawmakers support, which has to do with such issues as assimilation and multiculturalism. My understanding is that instructors have leeway for what books they may use in their courses, that what is acceptable should not be based on what politicians like or dislike.

[Haruko]

I keep alluding to a certain act, so should include links for that:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ethnic- ... -1.1007105
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/0 ... 41253.html
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2 ... n-arizona/

[ryacko]

My understanding is that instructors have leeway for what books they may use in their courses,

Are you homeschooled?

In Los Angeles at least, instructors are provided with textbooks and books by the school, already purchased. Instructors can give students materials of their own choosing, but it would be an out of pocket expense. Districts, state, and federal organizations and departments create curricula and fund curricula.

[Haruko]

No, but sometimes I do feel particularly dumb, yeah.

I meant university instructors, but I assume you are referring to that, too. If not, once again should have clarified.