<p>I can't figure out how to paste in the article from The Amherst Student, but maybe someone else can do this for me. It's on the college website, under student publications. It is going to be an even tougher year for admissions at Amherst College. Good luck to everyone who applied! (and their parents).</p>
<p>Here's the link:</p>
<p>BTW, I'm not sure that these record numbers of applications make admissions "tougher". The increases come largely from the ease of slapping extra schools on the list when a student clicks the SUBMIT button on the Common App site and from international applicants. These are not the kind of students that were going to get accepted to Amherst anyway. So whether they are #4000 in the rejection list or #5000 doesn't really impact the thousand or so who will get accepted.</p>
<p>The great thing about these articles is that they often provide a little bit of data that helps understand admissions.</p>
<p>For example, there is the widespread notion that Asian-Americans are penalized in the admissions process. Yet, whatever data slips out shows that not to be the case. </p>
<p>For example, last year in this kind of article Swarthmore said the admissions rate for Asian Americans was about 50% higher than the overall rate.</p>
<p>In his article, Amherst states that 10% of their apps are from Asian Americans. Since their overall percentage of enrolled Asian Americans is much higher than that (and since Asian American yield is slightly below average), this means that Amherst's acceptance rate for Asian Americans is significantly above the overall average as well.</p>
<p>It is hard to argue that a group with signficantly above average acceptance rates is being discriminated against in admissions at top LACs.</p>
<p>"For example, there is the widespread notion that Asian-Americans are penalized in the admissions process. Yet, whatever data slips out shows that not to be the case."</p>
<p>The article states that the average SAT of the applicant pool is around 2070.
An Asian with 2070 SAT is a UC Irvine material. A typical Asian applying to Amherst type of school would have SAT well above 2200 if not 2300+.</p>
<p>"It is hard to argue that a group with signficantly above average acceptance rates is being discriminated against in admissions at top LACs.
Today."</p>
<p>Exactly.</p>
<p>"A typical Asian applying to Amherst type of school would have SAT well above 2200 if not 2300+."</p>
<p>A typical Caucasian applicant would also.</p>
<p>And actually, I looked just this week at the Irvine stats for '06 admits. As I recall, 2000+ was above average (or mean, I forget which) for there, too. And it doesn't matter what's "typical." Being typical or atypical does not prove discrimination. If a group was <em>required</em> to have higher scores than other groups: that would indicate a different standard: thus, discrimination.</p>
<p>One of the highest ranked students in my D's graduating class was an Asian who got accepted to the 2 Ivies she applied to. Her scores were in the 1500-ish range on the 1600 scale. But she also applied to a low-level State U as well, for some odd reason. (An extreme safety.) I see high-scoring Asians applying to colleges that are significant safeties for them, all the time. If you selected their profiles and did a (Wow!) "study," you might conclude that they "had" to have higher scores than non-Asian applicants. But they didn't have to. They had the scores. They chose to apply. End of story.</p>
<p>Not a rant against andystar but with respect to the previously interminable arguments in the Admissions threads recently.</p>
<p>andystar, where did interesteddad mention a dang word about the SAT? One element out of a hundred reviewed by admissions. Gee willikers. Try to see the big picture.</p>
<p>Can you point me to data for SAT scores broken out by ethnicity for Amherst or a similar school? I've never seen such data.</p>
<p>Based on data I have seen for very different schools (UVa and UMich), I would expect the Asian American students at Amherst to have SAT scores roughly comparable to, perhaps a tad higher than, white students.</p>
<p>"andystar, where did interesteddad mention a dang word about the SAT? One element out of a hundred reviewed by admissions. Gee willikers. Try to see the big picture."</p>
<p>No. He did not mention it.
Also, I should have included a disclaimer.
"Not that SAT is be all in college applications but it is the only thing that is common among applicants that we can use to compare them without looking at the entire application."</p>
<p>I've only seen SAT scores broken out by ethnicity overall, but not further, by college/U. The stats were posted on one of the 3 or 4 threads dealing with the fantasy Asian-discrimination topic on the Admissions forum. And to me it's still a big, So What? -- the issue of scores. If a segment of the population chooses to focus more on one aspect of education or one aspect of preparation for college, so be it. That's their choice; just don't lay it on the colleges that such a group has a higher profile for that among all applicants, and that such a higher profile indicates discrimination. (Whether that aspect is SAT's, the arts or a particular art, athletics, community service, leadership, etc.) And that goes for any segment of the population, too.</p>
<p>Look at the common data sets. The categories of consideration are not quantified. They are merely grouped by category of importance ("very" imp., important, considered, etc.). Further, common data sets only report tendencies, generalities. They would never indicate unusual weighting for particular categories & particular hooks in any given year, because that would always be predicated upon the number & content of apps received that cycle.</p>
<p>The article said RD applicants this year came to 6662, with 2933 men and 3719 women. Adding up men + women equals 6652. Either someone at Amherst can't do math, 10 students didn't submit gender data, or 10 students fall into the interesting "other" when it comes to gender. </p>
<p>Anyway -- notice the disparity between men and women. I'm more concerned about the bar being raised for women in college admissions, and unless Amherst is happy with a class that has a higher percentage of women, it will probably be tougher for women to get in this year. </p>
<p>And a comment on post #2 -- while some of the increase is due to more applications/student, isn't a lot of the increase due to the demographic fact of there being more HS seniors this year? I don't know if Amherst has supplemental essays, but I would guess that it does, so that it isn't as simple as just clicking off another box on the common ap form to apply there.</p>
<p>Andy,
I worked with a wonderful young woman this year who was had SAT scores below 2000 and a GPA of 3.75, and who happened to be Asian. She was accepted to Swarthmore ED. So, please, don't make assumptions unless you can provide actual data to prove that ALL Asians (or any other group for that matter) are really REQUIRED to have higher test scores than anyone else. In admissions, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make blanket statements that apply to ALL applicants, even all applicants in a sub-group. As interesteddad points out, there are too many variables involved.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Anyway -- notice the disparity between men and women.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There wasn't much disparity last year at Amherst. The acceptance rate was 18% for women, 19.3% for men. I think Amherst has a higher yield for men (probably because it's an Historically Male College), which offsets the application imbalance a bit.</p>
<p>The imbalance is more pronounced at Swarthmore, where the female acceptance rate was 16.3% versus 23% for men. There is no question that it is harder for women to get accepted than men, there. The applicant pool is 59%/41% compared to 55%/45% at Amherst.</p>
<p>A slight gender disaprity in yield at Amherst last year (Class of 2010): 39.7% for men; 36.2% for women.</p>
<p>Swarthmore was just the opposite. Slightly higher yield for females (41.1%) versus men (39.9%) -- they accept more ED which accounts for the higher yield. So, their yield tends to reinforce the gender imbalance in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>Amherst will end up with the same imbalance in a few more years. The historically male colleges didn't hit the threshold point of having more females until several years after the historically coed schools (from the few schools I've looked at). Swarthmore crossed the threshold of having more female students sometime between 1990 and 1995.</p>
<p>Yes, carolyn. (Post #11) And just to emphasize this point a little more, Irvine has proportionally the highest percentage of Asian students of any U.C. campus. Yet it definitely does not have the highest freshman scorers. That's evident on one of the Irvine admissions pages.</p>
<p>This whole issue became a heated argument on the Admissions forum, with poster after poster assuming (sometimes stated directly, sometimes imbedded in the poster's statements) that Asians always score higher than any other group. But the more important point is that you don't get Brownie Points because your "group" scores high, or higher, or highest -- historically, recently, yesterday, whenever. You are rated as an individual, no matter how industrious, competitive, accomplished, dedicated, or lacking in non-academic recreation any "group" is. (The argument was: Asians should have a higher admit rate than other sub-groups because of "their" academic records.) Ironically, these same posters "didn't want to be treated as a group."</p>