<p>“it’s kind of a sad reality… I’m asian and my high school counsellor told me scoring 800 on SAT math basically doesnt mean anything…”</p>
<p>Well, it does. Just not at HYPSM.</p>
<p>So, should colleges just accept students with the highest grades and test scores? Nothing else should be a factor?</p>
<p>So in line with kmccrimmel´s excellent post and to rephrase bundles´ question: Should achievement to date be the only factor in elite college admissions? I think the universities clearly and openly answer that question as no. Of course, achievement, be it test scores, gpa, extracurriculars are extremely important in identifying potential future achievement, but on paper, statistics can truly misrepresent the inner talent of a person. We all know that an outstanding gpa and phenomenal test scores are achieved by a combination of hard work and natural intelligence–but you can never know through stats what that combination is for any individual. So another question is: Should an exceptional work ethic and ambition be the sole criteria for admitting students to the elites? I think adcoms have also clearly answered that as no. There is a greater proportion of high-achieving Asians, because there is a greater proportion in that group with these qualities. (Let´s leave out debate about racial IQ differences, because if they exist, they do not account for the differences we´re seeing). There are many highly intelligent students of all races, who although also work very hard, may not put quite as much effort into raising their statistics, but instead use more time to think creatively. And many of these kids will be the greatest future achievers. The problem is that it very difficult to identify which applicants are which, but I genuinely believe that´s what adcoms try to do. I´ve seen many acceptances of Asians with less than perfect stats on CC admitted to the top schools, as was the case with a Chinese girl from my kids´school who was admitted to HYPS. They obviously have the je ne sais quoi that adcoms are looking for, and I submit that that elusive quality is equally distributed among all races.</p>
<p>private colleges can shape their students bodies as they wish in a manner that they feel is best for their institution. They set certain benchmarks for admission and then choose amongst the candidates. Again, a heavily Asian campus is not going to be attractive to many top applicants. That’s just the way it is.</p>
<p>As for the Berkeley ■■■■■■ on this thread, have you been on campus lately? And that Pell grant number from 2003, it is now 26% and dropping fast. Is it that as a campus becomes more Asian, the low income students get squeezed out?</p>
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<p>Supporting a policy that makes an already unfair life more unfair, what a sense of justice!</p>
<p>This discrimination has been going on for years. The only thing that has changed is the target group, and even that’s debatable. (see below).</p>
<p>The modern “holistic” approach to admissions started about 75 years ago as a deliberate effort to minimize the number of Jewish students enrolling at HYP. See Karabel’s book “The Chosen” for a well documented discussion of the when, how and why. As part of this effort to “control” the number of Jews, these colleges even implemented strict quotas. These quotas, but not their partner holistic admissions, were eliminated only in the early 1960s! Even more curiously, the SAT was developed by these same colleges to make admissions more meritocratic, get fewer under performing legacies, and raise academic standards. This backfired because to many “undesirables” rose to the top of purely meritocratic admissions. </p>
<p>So why should we be surprised that top colleges continue to use the same subtle tools to limit the number of high achieving but “undesirable” groups today? In many ways, asians have become the Jews of the 21st century. </p>
<p>One should note both that rather overt discrimination against Jews has happened in relatively recent times. See [Princeton</a> Puzzle: Where Have Jewish Students Gone? - The New York Times](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/02/nyregion/princeton-puzzle-where-have-jewish-students-gone.html]Princeton”>http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/02/nyregion/princeton-puzzle-where-have-jewish-students-gone.html) as well as the Daily Princetonian articles the NYT references. </p>
<p>If you dig out the references, you will find that when admissions dean Hargadon at Princeton discontinued recruiting at urban high schools with high numbers of Jewish students in the 1990s, enrollment of Jewish students at Princeton plummeted. Whether this was deliberate on Hargadon’s part or not I leave to you to decide. Regardless, it shows how simple it can be to manipulate the number of any group that is admitted. Want to reduce the number of asian students? Just de-emphasize activities like orchestra that are common among asians, especially Chinese and South Asians, and increase emphasis on sports they don’t do, like football (just look for team membership - no need to be an athletic recruit!).</p>
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I wish there was a “like” button for this lol!</p>
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<p>Have you read [Malcolm</a> Gladwell](<a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge]Malcolm”>Getting In | The New Yorker)'s essay on this topic? It’s long, but he convincingly argues that the elites do, in fact, package a product.</p>
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<p>As I said earlier to another poster, if you think we’re really missing out on thousands of these latter-day Ramanujans, fund a program that seeks them out.</p>
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<p>Dr. Espenshade did not recommend that, and Jian Li has gone on record as saying that he supports holistic admissions; he is simply against racial preferences. Opposing racial preferences is distinct from supporting a system that “just accept[s] students with the highest grades and test scores.” This is a straw man argument that never dies.</p>
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<p>As I wrote in post 33, I agree that “private colleges can shape their students bodies as they wish in a manner that they feel is best for their institution.” In return, I ask only that they say “no” to federal funding for financial aid. If they want to discriminate to maximize brand appeal and image, they can do so out of their multi-billion endowments.</p>
<p>I see that you have not taken my challenge. Write “a heavily [black] campus is not going to be attractive to many top applicants.” See what responses you get. And, if you can’t do it, then ask yourself whether you have double standards or whether you’re simply being “sophisticated.”</p>
<p>The 26% figure is unsourced, but if true, it still reflects well on Berkeley as the percentage of students on Pell Grants at other elite universities doesn’t even come close. You have no evidence that increased Asian admissions results in fewer poor students. Instead, you attributed causality to temporality.</p>
<p>I agree with kmccrindle. However I also think kids who have both parents working full time deserve bonus points. Our kids are very much responsible for their education (and often meal prep, housework, babysitting etc). When i read the article on cc a while back about the boy from Texas whose dad quit his job and devoted all his time to preparing his son for college admission I thought how can we ever compete with that. I think the disparity in parental involvement is huge and creates a very unlevel playing field.</p>
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<p>I’ll note for the historical record that many universities in the United States, including my alma mater, have been racially diverse since before my grandparents were born. There have been a lot of United States college graduates from a lot of different “races” for a long time. </p>
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<p>Yes. I’ll tell a story here I’ve told in other threads about race as a college admission factor. I’m a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I’m a good bit older than most people who post on College Confidential. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated–the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation–and I remember the “long hot summer” and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.</p>
<p>One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern “white” parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was “Negroes”), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn’t all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.</p>
<p>It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn’t shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.</p>
<p>One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term “affirmative action” still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don’t.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term “Negro” or “Afro-American” or “black” was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, “What do you want to be called, ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American’?” His answer was, “I’d rather be called Henry.” Henry’s answer to my classmate’s innocent question really got me thinking. </p>
<p>It will be a win for our society when people are regarded as just people, and there are not official “race” categories (which have changed and realigned in my lifetime anyway). The Census Bureau says about the current “race” categories </p>
<p>[Black</a> or African American persons, percent, 2000](<a href=“http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68176.htm]Black”>http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68176.htm) </p>
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<p>We can outgrow having our brains stuck on those arbitrary categories, and outgrow any other kind of thinking that denies individual differences, on the one hand, or our common national heritage (or common human heritage) on the other hand. In my lifetime I’ve heard of bloody civil wars and even genocide in Lebanon (among “white” ethnic groups), Sri Lanka (“Asian” ethnic groups), the former Yugoslavia (“white” ethnic groups), and Rwanda (“black” ethnic groups), and all those examples are examples I hope the United States never follows. Government classification of people into ethnic groups is dangerous. </p>
<p>[Group</a> Classification on National ID Cards - Jim Fussell - 15 Nov 2001](<a href=“http://www.preventgenocide.org/prevent/removing-facilitating-factors/IDcards/]Group”>Group Classification on National ID Cards - Jim Fussell - 15 Nov 2001) </p>
<p>Equal treatment for all races under the law is a rule that all colleges in the United States must follow, </p>
<p>[Race/National</a> Discrimination Overview](<a href=“http://www.ed.gov/policy/rights/guid/ocr/raceoverview.html]Race/National”>Race, Color, or National Origin Discrimination Overview) </p>
<p>and that’s not only the law, it’s a good idea.</p>
<p>Here’s a rather moving set of articles about a Harvard football player from Taiwan: </p>
<p>[Harvard</a> tailback*Cheng Ho’s mother is schizophrenic - Kevin Armstrong - SI.com](<a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/kevin_armstrong/11/21/cheng.ho/index.html]Harvard”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/kevin_armstrong/11/21/cheng.ho/index.html) </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529319[/url]”>http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529319</a></p>
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<p>Right tail admissions is an interesting game, and most of us don’t have access to the data. Its basically restricted from those who might make a point with it against the wishes of the elite schools agendas. </p>
<p>Noting that, though, it hardly seems likely that there is any discrimination against Jewish students at these schools…even at Princeton. A little math with Hillel numbers will show you that at Yale and Harvard, somewhere near half of the caucasian students are jewish. Yale, for instance shows about 2400 white nonhispanics and the hillel number for undergraduates is 1200. You’ll find similar numbers at Penn and Harvard. Princeton may lag that, but so what. I doubt they get the same pattern of applications that H and Y do…and they have long been regarded as the most southern of the Ivy’s. </p>
<p>Maybe its like the NBA…perhaps there should be more blacks there, and perhaps there should be fewer white Christians at Harvard Yale and Penn. and more jews, or asians, or what have you. But in the universities, its really hard to believe that the majority religious/ethnic group in the country is properly represented at 50% of its population share, even with self selection and cultural differences in aspiration levels. </p>
<p>I’m frankly surprised this researcher got access to this data when he uses it to say that a black 1150 is the equivalent of a 1450 for others. I doubt he’ll get much access in the future.</p>
<p>dadx,</p>
<p>Check your math. The Yale Hillel website says " Jewish students consistently make up between 20-25% of Yale’s undergraduate population of 5,300. "</p>
<p>Further, if you took the time to read any of the sources I referenced, you would find that Yale has enrolled the highest percentage of Jewish students for many years, even back in the quota era.</p>
<p>Finally, I never said Harvard or Yale continued such discriminatory practices. But to say “Princeton may lag that, but so what.” is like a company saying “we don’t discriminate against XXX. We just don’t find any qualified candidates…”.</p>
<p>Did you even bother to read the references before you dismissed the Pton situation? </p>
<p>Yale has, according to their website, 5,247 undergrads. You don’t really expect me to believe that over 1/2 their student body is hispaniic or of color, do you?</p>
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So, let’s take the white kid from the state’s top ranked (double per capita funding) school district, six prep tests, the availability of AP classes, the paid tutor, the teachers who like their jobs, and see how they do on the SAT. No one would get terribly excited about an 1150, I’m afraid.</p>
<p>Take the Asian kid, who has spend about double the time learning and discussing things over the last 18 years, whether in the urban or suburban setting, who has been given high expectations to meet and the understanding that it is their JOB to be a student. No one would get terribly excited about an 1150, again. It would not benchmark superior achievement within the opportunities available. </p>
<p>Take the single-parented black kid, who may have been latchkey since grade 3, who’s mom tells him to do his homework, say out of trouble, loves him a lot and gives him all the affection she can spare, but who just doesn’t have the time in the day to be teacher and doesn’t have the money to hire one. Have this kid score an 1150 – single sitting – at an underfunded and underperforming school where he ranks in the top 10%. Maybe he has a 4.0. Maybe he’s gone as far as he can go in his environment and is hungry for more. This kid volunteers at the food kitchen, plays in the school band, spearheaded a group for urban revitalization.
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<p>You forgot about the Pell-Grant-eligible Asian kid who works three jobs, was born in America with a mother in the U.S. and a father still sending money from China. And the half-black, half-Asian kid who was raised in an identical environment to your “Asian kid.” And the Latino kid from Colombia whose father makes enough as a university professor to pay full freight at an Ivy, with a home library 3x the size of mine (and I LOVE books, but I’ve had to build my library from scratch).</p>
<p>Those are, by the way, REAL examples with small details changed for anonymity.</p>
<p>This argument-by-example is really an argument for socioeconomic affirmative action (which I completely support), NOT racial affirmative action.</p>
<p>Didn’t “forget” examples like the ones you cite at all, which is why I said I realized there were many mixed permutations and combinations of circumstance and race – in fact, your examples reflect almost exactly my son’s cohorts. I totally support case-by-case socioeconomic affirmative action as well, and do not support blind racial affirmative action (eg. benefit for race alone without examination of all factors/variables). What I was attempting to do in my post was to comprehend and illustrate, by way of example, how an adcom could come up with an 1150 SAT black admit and not a 1400 or 1600 SAT white and asian admit, based on a qualitative assessment that theoretically COULD be found within applicant information and might belie statistical quantification. And note, I said attempting, not necessarily achieving : )</p>
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<p>Once a college reaches a certain percentage of any one race, it is going to impact the campus culture in some way. As someone who visited UCLA and environs recently after having frequented it in the '70s, I can tell you there is a palpable change in the presence of Asian restaurants, for example.</p>
<p>I am not saying that this is good or bad, only that it is. Because they will make a particular college their “home” for 4 or more years, students generally take into account the entire living experience when choosing a college. </p>
<p>Some students will feel uncomfortable at a college that is dominated by an unfamiliar culture and they can choose to go elsewhere. My guess is that colleges take this into account when they attempt to manipulate the composition of their student bodies, and make an effort to attract a “critical mass” of different races, so that their campus is appealing to everyone. Of course, the debate and our debate is whether it is Constitutional for them to do this.</p>
<p>It could take another 100 years for selective private colleges to change view about race in admission. But it does not mean selective private colleges always do the right things. It took Harvard more than 350 years to admit women.</p>
<p>at the risk of going further afield from the asian theme of the thread.</p>
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<p>I haven’t been up to Yale for a while, and never counted when I was there, but I did a quick calculation from this site. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.yale.edu/oir/open/pdf_public/W010_Enroll_MinInternl.pdf[/url]”>http://www.yale.edu/oir/open/pdf_public/W010_Enroll_MinInternl.pdf</a></p>
<p>A total of 2367 male and female students (non international) indicated they are white non-hispanic. The national Hillel website summary shows 1200 as the figure for jewish undergraduate enrollment at Yale, while the Yale hillel site shows .23 x 5500 which would be 1265.</p>
<p>Assuming that all jewish students are in the white non hispanic category, I get 50.7% of the caucasians at Yale are jewish. There are 452 international students which could distort this calculation. If none of them is jewish, but all are white non hispanic, then the percentage would shift to 1200/2819 or 42.5%. Obviously it is somewhere between those, but I think my point is pretty well made by the data. </p>
<p>I’ve read those Princeton articles and I am in the “so-what” category about that. There are a lot of other schools where jewish students are underrepresented and if you look at them, in most cases, its because jewish students prefer not to go there. IF you do similar calculations, its very hard to see any discrimination towards jewish applicants from Princeton, even if they don’t admit or enroll as many as Harvard or Yale. </p>
<p>Who knows what the “fair share” of slots is for asians, jews, blacks, or whomever?. We’d need to see who actually applies and whate their qualifications are. What is clear is that white christians certainly have no advantage at the elite northeastern colleges.</p>