<p>Do not bank on URM status for a boost on any application. U need to be qualified for that position or admission. No URM wants to be accepted because of affrimative action or because someone had pity on you because you are an URM.</p>
<p>do not bank on it, but it does improve your chances</p>
<p>Uhuh. Okay…?</p>
<p>Which minorities are underepresented?</p>
<p>Many students ask questions about if an URM status is helpful. I have seen question like " I have a 3.3 and I would like to apply to cornell university. How important is URM status and does it weight a lot on my application?" To answer questions smiliar to that in a nut shell, getting admission does not depend on if ur African American, Asian, Indian or white. People are admitted if they qualified. Stop banking on a URM status for admission. No URM wants other people to see him/her as someone who was unqualified for this school and because he/she was a URM they were admitted. Any student who is admitted is qualified and were not selected based on Affirmative Action.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what the point of this post is. Of course being a URM improves your chance of acceptance…a lot. It changes how your application is viewed and judged. There’s no need to be politically correct.</p>
<p>No offense but there are people who are URM and have very low stats but still get admitted. Many would not consider them “qualified”.</p>
<p>“No offense but there are people who are URM and have very low stats but still get admitted. Many would not consider them “qualified”.”
Thank you yellowdog, If anyone gets admitted because they are an URM, people like Yellowdog will consider you unqualified and was most likely you were admitted as a pity case.
No offense Yellowdog, I believe URM should believe in themselves and not hope to be a pity case in order to get admission. Like every students admitted under regular or ED admission. They are qualified to be at that school and they were not a pity case.</p>
<p>Affirmative action policies were not enacted out of pity. </p>
<p>It’s silly to deny that being a URM carries an enormous boost in admissions to competitive colleges.</p>
<p>Norcalguy, are you saying that URM at competitive schools were not actually qualified for the school, but these students were selected based on their URM status.</p>
<p>URMs do not get accepted when more qualified URMs apply. When URMs are admitted, they push out less qualified URM applicants – not non-URMs.</p>
<p>Admitted URMs do not “take” the spots of non-URMs, of athletes, of legacies, of international students. These (and various other set-aside) groups have their unofficial quotas set before the first application is read. X number for athletes, Y for legacy/development kids, Z for science prodigies, etc.</p>
<p>URMs compete in their own pool – which admittedly may have less applicants than say the International pool. Thus their admit rates can be higher and their avg metrics can be lower. But the same can be said about the recruited athletes or music prodigy pools. An instance can occur where not enough URM applicants meet the minimum standards. Cornell can decide to strip those spots away from the URM pool and award them to other pools. Thus, the insitutional goal (quota) can be unmet given any year’s circumstances. One can easily imagine this happening to a very specialized pool such as music prodigies.</p>
<p>But as to sheer aggregate nos. of non-URMs being admitted or not – URMs don’t affect it. That number is already pre-set. The avg white/asian kid’s was never in contention for the spots allocated to the URM pool. Just like that kid was never in contention for a spot allocated to the recruited atheletes’ pool, the music prodigy pool, the international pool, etc. </p>
<p>**This is called “category admissions”. **For a further explanation, read this:</p>
<p>[Reed</a> College Messages Essay](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/admission_messages.html]Reed”>http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_articles/admission_messages.html)</p>
<p>The reality is this for the URM applicant: Your competition (unless you qualify for being in more than one category) is other URMs. And this goes for everyone: your competition is the other candidates in your pool.</p>
<p>The worse group? Internationals. Their competition is the most severe.</p>
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<p>The URM’s admitted at competitive schools are more “qualified” than the URM’s not admitted. That’s about all we can say. T26E4 is largely correct, which is that URM’s are evaluated within their own pool with an entirely different set of admissions criteria from the ORM’s. So, we can’t say that a URM admitted with a 3.7 GPA and a 1950 SAT score is more or less qualified than a ORM admitted with a 3.9 GPA and a 2300 SAT score because Cornell’s definition of “qualified” is different for ORM’s and URM’s.</p>
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<p>No. Everyone has the same definition; diversity value is just a factor included in the judgment of every applicant.</p>
<p>norcalguy: “The URM’s admitted at competitive schools are more “qualified” than the URM’s not admitted.”
Isn’t that statement contradicting, are you saying that in a pool of URM applying to competitive schools, most of those admitted will be “less qualified” then those rejected.
@T26E2: I disagree, students are not admitted based on their race. When someone is applying for a position, they compete with others applying for the same spot.</p>
<p>Competitive schools (ivy league) do not admit students based on sports. This is the reason why they are an ivy league in the first place. Saying that, not every URM are talented in sports or singing. students’ race and citzenship do not affect one chanes of getting admitted or not. I know for a fact that people international students have is getting financial aid. There maybe a cap number the university hope to attain for URM, but thatmean that once a certain number of URM are admitted they stop taking anymore URM. </p>
<p>Please note I am not trying to offend anyone.</p>
<p>T26E2 I read the link and I will ask the admission office at my school.</p>
<p>xtarion:
The Ivies (and many other private schools) clearly have certain pools (or categories as mentioned in the Reed college essay). </p>
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I don’t know what you mean because favored athletic recruits have been the norm for generations. The number of athletic recruits is finite for each of the eight Ivies. This number is agreed upon by the Univ presidents and they have developed an academic index to equalize each colleges’ ability to go below a certain academic threshold. Others athlete applicants who aren’t recruited are lumped into the larger “general” category.</p>
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This flies against the evidence. Then note how admissions by sub-groups (URMs, internationals, and others) stay roughly static each year for each school. This is the clearest indication of unofficial quotas there is. URMs are ABSOLUTELY targeted and heavily recruited (I participate in that process heartily).</p>
<p>If you don’t believe that, then look at the gender numbers at the 8 Ivies. They all mysteriously hover at 50/50 when every single year, more women apply then men. Another unofficial quota. </p>
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Quite correct. This is one of the reasons why the int’l pool is monstrously large and the schools cap the # of admits and thus, the admit rate for internationals is the most grim.</p>
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No. They look at the entire pool and make offers to the top lot. It’s not first in, first served.</p>
<p>No offense taken. I understand these are sincere questions. It’s in that light I’m offering you my knowledge and perspective as well. I hope I’ve illuminated things for you. Good luck on your college applications.</p>
<p>They are “qualified” in that the URM status helps them be “qualified.”</p>
<p>I remember when I visited Princeton, they showed us some statistics for the student population. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but there was a significant portion of URM’s, when, proportionally, the general population of the US (for that URM) was much smaller (it compared them)</p>
<p>“No URM wants to be accepted because of affrimative action or because someone had pity on you because you are an URM.” What? If I was a URM, I’d take an ivy league education any day, even if it meant banking on my cultural background. I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. I wouldn’t care if someone “had pity” on me.</p>
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I’m not sure what you’re implying in light of what I discussed earlier. If you’re saying that the URM avg metrics might be lower than the metrics of the “general” category, I agree. But that doesn’t make those offered admission any less “qualified” IMHO.</p>
<p>If Cornell had the opportunity to admit the five premier musicians on the whole planet graduating from HS this year and they were roughly a standard deviation below the statistical mean of other admitted music students, would Cornell be rational in offering them admission?</p>
<p>I would think so. Yet, by my caveat, these five could dramatically decrease the avg statistical measure of the “music prodigy” pool this year. Is that going to split the earth? Are those five not “qualified” to bring something spectacular to campus?</p>
<p>If Cornell could land the highest performing footballer or gymnast with a +1900 SAT in the country, why shouldn’t it do so? </p>
<p>It’s all about what you have to offer the university. The univeristy has consistently stated what it values in terms of a dynamic entering class. That includes a wide array of sub-groups. To compare them to each other solely by measure of SATs/transcripts is crude. </p>
<p>But this is the line for everyone who says top college admissions are “unfair”.</p>
<p>Again, which group consistently gets the shaft? Internationals. You’ve got to be a rock star, stats-wise, to be even considered. Why aren’t all the “fairness” people taking up their cause? Their applicant pool’s avg SATs blow away the Cornell “general” pool. Where’s the indignation? Where’s the call to “give” them more seats because they “deserve” them? When Cornell quietly caps the number of Chinese, Korean and Indian freshmen, everyone else is nodding vigorously.</p>
<p>Consistency, if you take this line of argument about “qualified” or “fairness”, is elusive.</p>