Getting into Ivies the Easy Way?

<p>Just to point out: hahlolk said I sounded racist, and I know that would hardly be a minority view, and I knew that when I typed it out. So even if you didn’t accuse me of it, I was responding to a broader audience.</p>

<p>If you are really neutral, what’s with the cursing and down-talking in your initial post? In these forums, people are snarky much beyond my post, and that kind of response rarely appears at them. Also, why was all of the hot air not directed at the guy who started it? You are really pulling at straws now trying to pretend to be neutral. It’s pathetic, but yes, enough of this.</p>

<p>I acknowledged that the person before you was a ■■■■■ that was trying to rile people up. You didn’t realize that and still made that comment, and then proceeded to mention that you use the forum as a place to express your true feelings. So yeah, I’m gonna think you’re rude lol. I guess that makes me pathetic</p>

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<p>Same here, I mean I know AA exists and makes a difference, but it can’t be thattttt significant can it?</p>

<p>President George W. Bush was a beneficiary of legacy admissions policies. He was a C student at Phillips Andover in Massachusetts. He received 1206 on his SATs – 566 verbal, 640 math. That was 180 points below the median score for the Yale University class of ’68.</p>

<p>Yes, but keep in mind, admissions were a very different game in the 1960’s compared to today</p>

<p><a href=“Study Finds Family Connections Give Big Advantage in College Admissions - The New York Times”>Study Finds Family Connections Give Big Advantage in College Admissions - The New York Times;

<p>“According to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants.”</p>

<p>@cormy3: It appears that the poster who said they liked their advantage in admissions was banned, but anyway, I still think that comment, while not necessarily racist, is pretty shallow. </p>

<p>Personally, I think race based affirmative action is the wrong way to go. It should be more of a “succeeding despite disadvantages” kind of affirmative action. Do you get what I am saying?</p>

<p>There is no way AA is a 400+ point difference. That’s BS. I’ve seen ORMs with 2250 be admitted to Ivies. Ever see a 1850 be admitted?</p>

<p>bzva - Yes I have… Plenty.</p>

<p>Being a Canuck, I guess I am influenced by British empirical philosophy far more than I care for; it just pains me to see folks argue on the basis of personal self-interest instead of empirical data. Be that as it may.</p>

<p>Quakerstake is on to something. AA is a divide and conquer strategy used as a cover for a bigger game. This game involves nothing less than the transfer of privilege from one generation to the next, using the ivies as the conduit. This thread shows how and why it matters so much (please pay particular attention to sakky’s post #32):</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1068825-brown-cornell-second-tier-3.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1068825-brown-cornell-second-tier-3.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Interesting stuff.</p>

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I agree with this.

So you should be really pained to read this, right?</p>

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<p>Really? I know his post was deleted, but isn’t ban kind of harsh?</p>

<p>Depends what you mean by succeeding-despite-disadvantages. If what you mean is socioeconomic-based affirmative action, most would agree with you that it is a justified thing to do. Yet if you read the studies, you’ll see that this wouldn’t nearly be enough to preserve current percentages of URMs in elite schools. Are you ready to give up URM representation to stand by your principles?</p>

<p>If what you mean is that race is, in and of itself, a disadvantage, distinct and independent from anything that can be measured, then you would be calling for a system that LOOKS like the one we have today. In other words, race-based but not about race, rather about the disadvantage that can be apprehended only through race. Why do I say this description would only LOOK like what we have today? Keep reading. </p>

<p>First, a tangent: on the whole, I think such a policy would be based on a correct point of view. I think it’s the implicit point of view of most of AA’s more clear-headed proponents. See the earlier post where someone said that despite Chris Rock’s wealth, many white people still would not want to be him in our society. I agree, there is no way a black person and a white person are on equal footing even if they have the same income. I would in fact like to hear more about this, but unfortunately people are busy chasing AA down the wrong paths, like it being about holistic admissions, or that the justification is irrelevant because AA doesn’t make a big difference, etc. </p>

<p>Nonetheless, if you were to implement such a policy, you would not end up with the system we have today. Even though it would give URMs an advantage over whites, it would definitely not disadvantage Asians compared to whites, as is done currently and actually. In fact, Asians, as a minority group no doubt discriminated against in our society, would have to be advantaged by this kind of AA, and doing that would largely negate URMs’ advantage. The end result, again, would be significantly reduced URM representation at elite colleges than what we have right now.</p>

<p>So really, any way you look at it, the system of affirmative action in place today is not about smoothing out the advantages/disadvantages certain races have as a result of their race. It is not about making things “fair” in any recognizable form of the word. It’s about stubbornly and bluntly forcing through the race distributions that college administrators and the public think is befitting a “non-racist” education system.</p>

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<p>Not only have I seen 1850’s admitted on these forums, those are exactly the types of students least likely to post their stats on an online college board.</p>

<p>You have to remember that the 400 point difference is an all-else-being-equal difference. I’m assuming the things that were held equal included GPA. It’s quite common for URMs to have not only lower SAT scores but also lower GPAs. So a 400 point difference while holding GPA equal, that might turn into something like a 200 point difference when allowing GPA to be lower, as we know it actually is. You might not see many 1850/equal-to-ORM GPA acceptances, but I think you’ll find a good share of 2050/lower-than-ORM GPA acceptances.</p>

<p>Just a note on the 400 points. Surely nobody thinks that is the *average *difference?</p>

<p>Uhh, what other kind of difference would the study be talking about? Maximum difference? Of course we’re dealing with averages.</p>

<p>And, keep in mind, we’re dealing with Asian vs. Black, the biggest group disparity that exists.</p>

<p>If Blacks had the same average GPA as Asians, then the average difference between them would be 400 (to be precise, 450) SAT points. That’s what the study concludes. But because Blacks probably have lower average GPAs, probably substantially lower, the actual average SAT difference is probably smaller, maybe like 250 points, and hence more believable.</p>

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<p>Yet I said it before and I’ll say it again. A short, ugly guy will never be on par with a tall, handsome guy even if they had the same outcome, yet clearly it’s not his fault if a guy is short and ugly. So why don’t we have AA for him? Why does AA only seem to be predicated upon race?</p>

<p>400 average? Lol. So assuming the mean is somewhat close to the median, we are contemplating as much as an 800 point difference on the outlier.
A 2300 ORM can make it into an Ivy. So are you insinuating that a 1500 URM can make it in?
Until I see that methodology, I’m not buying it for one second.</p>

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<p>All I said was that the point of view is correct, not that such a situation being the case warrants a program to fix the inequities. Nor that such a program should be of the magnitude that AA currently wields. Nor that such a program should, justly, be the only such program to correct for societal group inequities.</p>

<p>The point is that you’re right, there’s a huge leap from “blacks are disadvantaged for being black” to implementing a program like AA. In any case, this is irrelevant because, as I tried to show above, the program of AA existent today is not predicated on correcting racial inequities. So arguing against it would be arguing against at most a hypothetical.</p>

<p>But let me play devil’s advocate and entertain that hypothetical – an AA whose purpose is to level the racial playing field. (Note again that doing so would involve boosting Asians in admissions, something so unlike what actually occurs, so this argument is very much irrelevant to what goes on today.) </p>

<p>First, why race? Because we live in a very racial society, by which I mean people perceive others in terms of their race. We stereotype and judge people by their race. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just that it is true and very prominent. Furthermore there is a long history of perceiving by race that created negative consequences more cruel, at least more salient, than for any other type of social category. If we can’t correct for everything, race seems on par with something like socioeconomic status in terms of consistent disadvantage that is conferred on the individual in society.</p>

<p>Second, why not physical appearance? No good reason, just that this isn’t a category that socially works. An ugly person would rarely admit to himself that he’s ugly, let alone have an admissions committee determine that for him objectively. Short people are surely discriminated against, and this is probably well documented, but they don’t form a coherent group that can clamor for its own rights and, importantly, LOOK oppressed. I guess it’s just that physical appearance is a factor that has not been politicized, so it would seem wrong to offer a political solution. So right now it exists in the realm of things that we should try to acknowledge and fight individually, but would seem grotesque to institutionalize and try to solve politically.</p>

<p>Sakky, in the grand scheme you’re right. Do you know what I think the biggest disadvantage in college admissions is? Low intelligence. The low-IQ applicant has suffered the greatest unfairness – certainly more than what race or economic status can do to one’s chances of getting in. Despite this, all it takes to eliminate the possibility of “Affirmative action for dumb people” is that it would be socially and politically infeasible – in fact, laughable. Can you imagine it? Extending the logic across all realms of life, and we might as well be conducting a national lottery for Harvard admission.</p>

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<p>What? How do you know what kind of distribution the data follows? Who said what the standard deviation was, and why are you assuming it’s so large when it obviously isn’t? In other words, did you just pull the 800 number out of thin air?</p>

<p>Even if an 800 difference were possible, the 1500 URM would have to have the SAME GPA as the 2300 ORM, which would almost never happen, so the 800 all-else-being-equal difference would manifest in an actual score difference that is much smaller.</p>

<p>Also I wanted to mention that for the study, I don’t know if the 400 points is the average difference of Black-vs-Asian applicant stats, or if it’s the approximated difference of Black-vs-Asian admission-cutoffs. That would make a big difference in applying the findings.</p>

<p>I too would like to see the methodology, but that doesn’t make the study vulnerable to weak criticism.</p>

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Yes. It would not be entirely socio-economic, but that would play a large role. Clearly, a person who makes 30k in a nice town with a good school is much better off than one who lives in a ghetto. So all things equal, the second one would have an advantage. </p>

<p>I believe such a system would benefit the colleges and society more.</p>

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Only because of the difference in SAT score implies that the ORM has higher potential for scholastic achievement. Not because one is an ORM and one is a URM.</p>

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<p>So it would be socioeconomic. I believe the “socio” accounts for things like living in a ghetto that the pure “economic” does not.</p>

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<p>Of course, the “this HAS to happen” is only meant to show what has to happen to abide by the study’s findings. It says nothing about the admissions rationale. They probably don’t even know they have a 400-point gap, at least not in the same way that the study’s specific methodology determined, let alone are consciously trying to replicate it each admissions cycle.</p>