<p>Y’know, the only thing worse than the fact that people are being mean to the OP for getting into Princeton is that the Princeton posters on this board did not call thebioguy out for these statements:</p>
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<p>You have absolutely no idea whether it played a role, and you’re reacting exactly like the people at her school are. Having lower stats means nothing; Princeton and its peers get so many high-scoring students that they *have *to differentiate among them based on a host of other factors, the least of which is race. How can you be so sure that it was not one of them (recs, essays, etc.) that pushed the OP into the accept pile? You should know that Princeton cares far more about a student’s background and opportunities so that they can evaluate their accomplishments in context. Thus, one’s accomplishments are even more impressive in the face of significant adversity. Yes, this goes against the CC wisdom of “URM = accept.” But this is the reality of elite admissions today. Just look at the acceptance threads; high-scoring URMs are rejected in droves. Why do you think that is? Because most of them had the same advantages as upper-class white students. For a few years now, schools like Princeton have gotten so many applications from accomplished well-to-do URMs that race has had to become less important.</p>
<p>If you’ve paid attention to the AA vs. socioeconomic debate (and I mean admissions officers’ statements, articles on the shifting admissions landscape, and the like) over the past 4-5 years, you’d see there’s a huge change. Consider that at the top 146 colleges, only 3% of the students are from the bottom economic quartile, while 74% are from the top economic quartile. The income disparity in the US is terrible, roughly on par with third-world countries such as Kenya and Uganda. It’s far worse on the Ivies’ campuses, where those in the top 3% alone are overrepresented by a factor of at least 3 relative the general population, while low-income students are represented at 1/5 the rate that they are in the general population. </p>
<p>Because universities like Princeton continually garner a critical mass of accomplished URMs, they can get a racially diverse class and keep their average SAT score and such high, no problem (there are nearly 30k applicants; there’s a critical mass of nearly every demographic there is, unless you’re from South Dakota). They realize the unfortunate reality of the socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies, so they’re working hard to fix these vast socioeconomic gaps, hence why all the Ivies except Cornell and Harvard are partner colleges with QuestBridge (as well as Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and a bunch of other elite colleges).</p>
<p>By contrast, they get far fewer applicants from low-income backgrounds. They know that the opportunity gap is terrible in the US, and that’s why they’re willing to view students’ accomplishments in that context. That terrible status quo is what makes those accomplishments all the more impressive. A low-income, first-gen applicant should not be able to score a 31 on the ACT; it’s a statistical anomaly. The average ACT score for that group of students is about a 20. Getting a 31 on the ACT while being from that background is far more impressive than having a 35 when your family makes $250k+, your parents have PhDs, and you went to a private high school (this kind of student is a dime-a-dozen; this demographic gets a 33+ easily). </p>
<p>This is true across racial lines; a disadvantaged Asian applicant has a better shot than a privileged URM. Just look at the accepted student threads: when you see an Asian without the typical 2200+ and piano competitions, and you wonder how it was that they got in when amazing Asian applicants are rejected, it’s almost always because the former came from a disadvantaged background. That’s why Asian students are rejected in droves - because they are on average far more privileged than other minorities in this country. Elite colleges are defying the “reproduction of privilege” in the country, and rightly so. They’re the only ones with the money to do it (almost all private universities simply have to enroll high numbers of paying students, for financial reasons).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, CC still clings to the “URMs have it easy, they’re the reason I didn’t get in” mentality, despite the evidence and the evolving dialogue that shows why that’s not true. (Honestly, I don’t think most of them are paying attention to that dialogue, so they have no idea that it’s changing.)</p>
<p>To the OP: not only do you need to know all this, but you need to know that Princeton accepted you for a reason. They wouldn’t accept you if they didn’t think you could handle their undergraduate education. It’s important to appreciate this because there is a terrible tendency at the elite universities for minority students to perform worse relative to their peers, as a result of the naysayers. </p>
<p>Stanford did a study recently, wherein they took a random subset of the incoming black students and held a few sessions with them in which they encouraged them, explained to them the reality of admissions (that race is only a very, very small consideration, that socioeconomic background is far more important, etc.), and generally gave them empowering knowledge. This was only a couple of short sessions at the beginning of freshman year. They tracked them throughout their undergraduate years, and at the end discovered that they did far better than their black peers who did not participate in these sessions. I don’t mean some marginal improvement; I mean they actually blew their peers out the water in their achievement, indistinguishable from the achievement of non-minorities. Why is that? It was a randomly chosen group, after all. It’s because their peers still believed the absurdities fed to them - that they aren’t “good enough,” that their race is what got them in, etc. This is a form of self-actualization: you perform as others expect you to perform, not as you would on your own strengths.</p>
<p>Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t let your high school peers, their parents, your teachers, people on CC, or people you may meet at Princeton, ever allow you to feel like your admission was less deserved. Don’t enter Princeton with the anxiety that your peers are looking at you and assuming that you’re an AA case; if any such students are, rest assured that it’s because they’re ignorant of the realities of admissions and have been spoon-fed misconceptions about it. You can ignore them.</p>
<p>Honestly, I wish that people on CC would try to inform themselves more about these issues. They don’t bother. They prefer to think they were rejected because they weren’t black, or from Montana, or a legacy, but in every case, it’s just a way for them to patch up their egos and blame factors out of their control rather than face the uncomfortable reality that there’s a large set of students who were simply better applicants. While I’m appalled at the lack of reaction to such absurd statements earlier in this thread, it’s actually not surprising at all.</p>
<p>TL;DR: self-actualize according to your own strengths, not according to what others think. Best of luck to you at Princeton or wherever you go. :)</p>