<p>" the bill ... would have allowed public colleges to consider race in their admissions decisions"</p>
<p>It is good that the UC system is not following the Ivy and other private colleges in this. </p>
<p>Harvard's entering class of 2011 had only 42% of the seats open for the american students who don't fall within the categories of athlete/URM/legacy/internationals which totaled to be 58%. This basically cut the admission rate of asian americans to less than half of what it would have been if the entire seats were open (not closed off by this athlete/URM/legacy/internationals). This practice also tends to cut white american's admission rate, although not as much as for asian americans.</p>
<p>No one should be against true affirmative action, such as giving preference to some inner city kid who overcome massive obstacles to have stats within range of the usual admission standards.</p>
<p>But giving a spot to someone just because they are black or hispanic, to achieve “diversity”, is not right</p>
<p>The child of an upper middle class black person who went to a private school should not be given preference over a more qualified asian kid, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Could we stop treating people as falling into discrete categories? There are Asian athletes. There are Asian legacies. And btw, there are no quotas for legacies at Harvard or any other school. But you know that.</p>
<p>floridadad,
in the same vein (similarly to the URM), it should be that the Ivy schools and top private colleges do athletic recruits similarly to caltech. Caltech has a clear admission policy in recruiting athletes, in that they do not lower their standards in order to recruit athletes. They may favor an athlete over a non athlete when all the academic credentials are equal, but not sacrifice their academic standard in order to form a competitive team. Their sports teams are mostly made of students who did not do HS varsity sports seriously. So their teams have 9 year losing streak, etc. Why in the world Harvard or Yale try to form a team and lower the admission standards? Who would care if their teams lost 100 games in a row? Will it make them lose the prestige, or make their campus culture less intellectually vibrant, or make them no longer the most sought after school for the investment banking job? Or are they under pressure from their alumni to make vaiable sports teams against other Ivy schools? That athlete spot, as large as the URM spot, just do not make sense for these schools. They want to be top schools on standards that count for higher education, not by slicing and allocating such large portions of the entering class to these things.</p>
<p>Why “should” they? The great thing about America is - there are schools for every budget and every taste! There are schools that favor athletes heavily and have big athletic scenes - and schools that don’t favor them at all and have minimal or recreational athletic scenes. You can choose to apply only to those schools that you want - you don’t HAVE to apply to Harvard et al!</p>
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<p>It appears to be working for them. After all, you’re still dying to get your kid into those places, aren’t you? If their admissions policies didn’t produce the class they wanted – they’d change them. </p>
<p>You seem to be under some delusion that schools “should” change their admission policies to reward what you, personally value or what you / your kid personally have to offer. If Harvard wanted to do it like Caltech, they would do so tomorrow. Clearly they don’t. The fact that you don’t like it is – well, too bad. Don’t apply there.</p>
<p>PG, re.#3, you know I am not talking about a fixed number of seats for legacies or asian americans. But the seats given to ‘categories’ of URM/athlete/legacy/internationals, do suppress the success rate for most applicants that do not fall within the above ‘categories’.</p>
<p>He made it up. He pretends that there is some quota for legacies such that Harvard (or whoever) decides every year they HAVE to have 10% (or whatever) of the class be legacies. The athletes, ok, you can guess that by knowing the # of spots, but that doesn’t mean that those kids aren’t qualified academically. He also made it up that there is a quota of x% of URM’s. It’s people who are in-the-box like that who can’t possibly wrap their heads around holistic, and who still can’t break themselves of the mindset that the 2400/4.0 is by definition more deserving than the 2200/3.8.</p>
<p>There are no “seats” given. You really don’t seem to understand how holistic admissions works, and that if the applicant pool looks roughly the same every year, the % of people who are X is going to remain roughly the same. Like I said in a different thread, I bet the % of freshmen at Harvard who are Catholic stays pretty the much the same year to year - that doesn’t mean there is a quota on Catholics, it’s just that the admissions pool doesn’t go from 5% Catholic one year to 30% Catholic the next.</p>
<p>Well, toughyear, if you object to Harvard’s practices, don’t apply there. Problem solved. But it is more than a little whiny to complain how you don’t like how they draw their student body - but gosh, wouldn’t you just KILL to have your kid go there and join it. You seem also not to get the difference between being disappointed in a denial, and said denial being proof of “discrimination.”</p>
I don’t believe this statistic. Even if it’s true that 58% of Harvard’s entering class were athletes, URMs, legacies, and internationals, it still doesn’t mean that this number of seats is “reserved” for them. That would mean that NO persons in those categories would get in without having a reserved seat, which is almost certainly not the case. And what do they mean by “athletes?” Are they counting anybody who plays a sport, or only recruited athletes. Also, there are plenty of people who fit in more than one of those categories–I’ll bet anything they are being double-counted in this phoney “statistic.”</p>
<p>Thank you, but as we have learned a long time ago, about every line and every statistic that form the “discrimination” narrative is incorrect or incomplete. The opinions of sensationalists a la Golden become facts. Statements are reproduced well outside their general contexts. </p>
<p>At Yale, 23% of students are URM–if you assume that all of the 5.8% multiethnic students count as URM, and many probably don’t. About 10% of matriculants are legacies, and about 13% are internationals (some of whom may also be URMs, and thus shouldn’t be double counted).</p>
<p>I have no doubt that you can get to that number by adding up various numbers taken in isolation. Probably also by mixing up admitted class and enrolled class (for example, I think the top couple of schools admit more URMs than they are able to enroll.)</p>