<p>It is a falsehood that the 20 points for being low-income or disadvantaged and 20 points for URM status weren't mutually exclusive. Applicants might be assigned one or the other, but never both. Your source on that is wrong.</p>
<p>It is also false that U-M is doing the 'same old system' but are just being sneaky about it. While they certainly hope to still recruit a healthy mix of diverse, interesting students, and will freely admit that, they will not defy the Supreme Court to do it. They have a completely new system for evaluating applications, using a new set of evaluators as well, who have access to much more holistic information about applicants and their socioeconomic status, parental education, and their own assessment (via essay) of what they have to bring to campus.</p>
<p>You may not agree with the objective of recruiting a diverse class. Many people don't. Even on U-M's campus. Please be assured that there are not militants waiting to attack you. Your disagreement with affirmative action does not justify making up false information. You are speculating, and you're off-mark.</p>
<p>Finally, it is hardly a mind-blowing revelation that some scholarship athletes have a lower graduation rate than their peers. It doesn't matter whether or not a campus considers is "dirty laundry" for The NCAA has done substantive reporting of their own on this very matter. Not all athletes enter college with an intent or interest in graduating, and this is compounded by the fact that many athletes are admitted with less college preparation and lower educational aspirations than their peers. It's hardly a problem exclusive to U-M.</p>
<p>Hoedown is right on all fronts. If you want proof that the new U-M system isn't the same as the old, just look at the numbers for this year's freshman class, the first admitted under the new system. URMs are way down. And the size of the 1st-year class is way up. The U-M didn't plan for it's 1st-year class to be as big as it is...if the new system were a duplicate of the old, they would have been able to model the take rate better. </p>
<p>As for athletes, U-M is hardly the only offender. This happens even at the most elite Ivy League schools - where SAT scores for athletes are much lower than for non-athletes.</p>
<p>Don't mean to but in, but my Grandmother is an administrator at Umich, so I check the boards once in a while.</p>
<p>I believe your comparison to the Ivies is off the mark.</p>
<p>First, the Ivies don't offer any scholarships to athletes.</p>
<p>Second, the majority of athletes at Ivies have nearly identical Scores/grades as the general student population. Athletic ability is viewed as an EC, similar to musicians, researchers, legacy, awards. </p>
<p>I love Umich. I just think that athletetes at such a great school should reflect the overall student population, rather than another class of student. It seems almost as if athletes are treated more like free-agents offered a contract, rather than as aspiring scholars looking for an education, which is after all the true reason that Universities exist.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to know at what point Umich began to view their athletes as a seperate class of student to be recruited, rather than the best athletes who happen to attend the school.</p>
<p>To someone who is going to an Ivy school, it seems corrupted. Much more like a market driven pro sport than academicaly driven collegiate sport.</p>
<p>If elite schools like UMich, Berkeley, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern adopted the Ivy standard it may have a ripple effect throughout the rest of the Universitiies (not including Ohio Stat--Michigan State, for obvious reasons....lol).</p>
<p>Amen, FountainSiren. Many, many big universities use different academic standards when it comes to recruiting gifted athletes. Sure, schools like winning teams, and alums LOVE winning teams, but there is something wrong when institutions start admitting an entirely different student simply to make their teams competitive. It's a very troubling trend. I think many administrators and faculty (and even students and alums) hate it, but don't have the will to change it.</p>
<p>oh, back onto high school. i moved away from MI in 7th grade, but i wouldve been at Andover (one love to bloomfield hills). how come only one person mentioned international academy?!?!</p>
<p>it was the freaking #1 high school in the COUNTRY according to newsweek, last year i believe. oh, you better believe it looks good. ahem, another bloomfield hills school. hell yeah to bloomfield hills (except lahser ;) of course)</p>
<p>Here is an exerpt of a study, published in Princeton University Press:</p>
<p>"Recruited athletes-defined as those applicants included on a coach's list-enjoy a significant admissions advantage over other applicants. This advantage was most pronounced in the Ivy League, where recruits were four times more likely to be admitted than similarly situated applicants who were not on a coach's list, but it was present and substantial in each group of schools for which we have data.</p>
<p>Recruited athletes arrive on campus with substantially lower SAT scores than both their fellow athletes and other students. Recruited High Profile athletes (men playing football, basketball and hockey) had SAT scores more than 100 points below those of students at large at the Ivy League universities, the NESCAC colleges, and other coed liberal arts colleges. Though not as pronounced, SAT gaps also existed between students at large and recruited male Lower Profile athletes and female athletes. "</p>
<p>Once they get to college, recruited athletes do not do as well academically as their peers. From the same study:
"Recruited athletes earn far lower grades than both their fellow athletes who were walk-ons and other students. At the Ivy League universities, 81 percent of recruited High Profile athletes were in the bottom third of the class, as were 64 percent of recruited Lower Profile male athletes and 45 percent of recruited female athletes. A similar pattern was present at the NESCAC colleges."
Link to study summary: <a href="http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/releases/m_7577k.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/releases/m_7577k.html</a>.</p>
<p>Yes, but they give nothing even bordering on the 40 points you got for being an URM athlete under the old system. That's the difference between a 2.0 and a 4.0 HS gpa people!</p>
<p>Stats don't lie - AA admits (who would have been rejected w/o AA) drop out of Michigan at 7x the normal rate. That's all AA admits, not just athletes.</p>
<p>weedit, how could you possible determine that they wouldn't have been admitted without AA?</p>
<p>More importantly, how do you know that they are dropping out because they were underprepared or underqualified?</p>
<p>Here's just one thorny factor: students from lower income families and who are first-generation have lower retention rates. To some extent, there is a correlation between being a minority and having those characteristics. So the reality is, their graduation rate might very well be lower no matter what school they were admitted to, even if no affirmative action programs were used to enhance their candidacy. </p>
<p>You are wrong, I think, to assume a lower graduation rate means they should never have been admitted in the first place. There are many reasons for dropout, and they don't all have to do with being let into a place that was 'too hard'.</p>
<p>
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weedit, how could you possible determine that they wouldn't have been admitted without AA?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>With the points system (when this study was done) it was easy to tell.</p>
<p>
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I can just feel the animosity, weedit. Did someone take your place at a big name universtiy? What is the reason for your rancor?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The only place I was rejected from was Harvard. I chose Michigan over Penn, Columbia, NW, ND, and Chicago (because my ultimate ambition is to got to MLS and Michigan serves the purpose I need it to without giving me 6 digits of debt for just undergrad).</p>
<p>A URM athlete did not get 20 points for being a URM and 20 points for being a scholarship athlete under the old system. Of the "miscellaneous" items - socioeconomic disadvantage (20), URM (20), men in nursing (5), scholarship athlete (20), Provost's discretion (20) - only 1 of these could be applied. Up to 110 points were applied for academic factors -- GPA, tests, school quality, curriculum.</p>
<p>Now that you're a student at Michigan, I imagine you're enjoying the benefits of being in a school with a strong sports program. So if I were you, I'd just forget about the fact that a few athletes don't meet your standards and sit back and enjoy the game.</p>
<p>Weedit, just because a student earns an bonus 20 points doesn't mean he or she could not have gotten in without those points. It is not possible for you legally have information about those students' "selection index" was. Therefore what you seem to be saying is that you can look at someone, and if their skin color is dark you automatically assume they are in the University only because of affirmative action. Surely that can't be what you mean?</p>
<p>Why is it so scandalous that one only got 12 points for a perfect SAT? (It was 12, not 13). Surely with your knowledge you are also aware that students got 80 points for a perfect GPA. U-M gave the exact same 12 points to a person who scored 1400! Obviously U-M didn't place a lot of relative weight on SAT scores and ACT scores, and doesn't place any weight on getting a perfect score. It's curious to me that you focus on on the relative weight of URM status compared to SAT, when there were numerous other factors that earned students as many or more point than a perfect SAT, like curriculum or school quality (which started this thread) or GPA (which grossly outweighs every other factor). Perhaps you feel that U-M should have a greater emphasis on test scores. That is a separate issue from AA, isn't it?</p>
<p>Again, whatever source informed you that athletes got an extra 20 points regardless of points awarded for Socioeconomic status or ethnicity was wrong. Someone or something is sorely misleading you about your alma mater, and that's unfortunate. Your assessment of the former admissions criteria is bleaker than it would be if you had more reliable information.</p>
<p>I'm sorry, my last post should have read curriculum AND schools quality, not OR school quality. Together these could award you anything from -4 to +18 points.</p>
<p>I'm debating off the top of my head. I really don't have time to look everything up, so you may be right. Actually, I need to go buy my books right now, but all I'm saying is regardless of the totality of the advantage, it is stupid to award points based on skin color. Also, regardless of relative weight of standardized tests, there's a big difference between a 3.0 and a 4.0 in a HS gpa.</p>
<p>I think the study may have been voluntary. Simply asked people what their entering gpa and scores were and calculated their points total (to see if they would have been accepted without AA). Those who were "AA admits" dropped out at rates in the thousands of percentage points higher than everyone else and had GPA's almost a full point lower.</p>
<p>Either way, by all accounts, AA in AA is going the way of the dodo in 2006. Ward Connerly for president!</p>