<p>I get to quote myself! Part of the document cites sections of the book, The Price of Admission. This thread has also cited the book. I found, through internet searches, a number of the students Mr. Golden held up as “less worthy” Groton grads, on the basis of SAT scores. This first quote pulls from one of my earlier comments on the Prep School Admissions forum on CC.</p>
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<p>Red Owl Analytics won “most innovative company” at RSA Sandbox this year. <a href=“http://www.redowlanalytics.com%5B/url%5D”>http://www.redowlanalytics.com</a> (By the way, according to the Golden book, Forbes Reynolds McPherson had a 1480 SAT scores, and attended Harvard by way of the z-list.)</p>
<p>Does anyone have an update on Henry Park or John Roberts (Groton grad, not Supreme Court Justice)?</p>
<p>It comes down to values. All the Groton grads cited in the book that I’ve been able to find online have gone on to do interesting things. For Harvard, it is better to admit a mixture of students who will found schools, teach in the inner cities, serve in the Marines, and found companies, as well as future doctors, than to admit a class of all the students most likely to attend medical school. </p>
<p>"Pizzgirl it isn’t cultural mindset but that those are the only quantifiable data that is provided. Check any ranking entity such as USNWR, Forbes, etc. Everything else is unquantifiable. "</p>
<p>LOL! Don’t tell me, let me guess. When you look at schools for yourself or your kids, you go down USNWR and select the top 5 / 10 / 20 / whatever. Because that’s “the best.” And #4 is clearly better than #5 and clearly better than #7 and well, #15 isn’t even on the same planet as #4. And if kid got into #4 or #15, you’d make him take #4 because then everyone will realize how superior he is.</p>
<p>Don’t any of you people who “can’t handle” the Harvard admission process ever HIRE people?</p>
<p>You interview people who meet some baseline requirements for your job. Then the rest is done on evaluating, through an interview and sometimes references, HOW this person thinks, how they act, how you might reasonably work with them, what personal character traits they have that are relevant to your business, how creative, how innovative, how open-minded, how pleasant to work with, how collegial. You don’t need to sit there and “score” people on these things. You know at the end of the day. Maybe this person has only 5 years experience and this person 7, but the person with the 5 years experience really shone when you gave her the case study. </p>
<p>It’s an art, not a science. The same way you “evaluate” and select your friends and your life partner. You make judgments based on both qualitative and quantitative factors. You don’t reduce people to a set of numbers.</p>
<p>@GMTplus7, as I stated and you quoted, I have no idea whether the violin is popular or a rarity among hispanics. I was not the one who brought this subject up. If you’re going to label someone for racial stereotyping, please at least label the person who made the comment. That was you. The points I was making are (1) I think college admissions look for kids who go above and beyond the routine expectations of their school and community. (2) With a relatively small class, a school like Harvard needs to fill a lot of institutional needs and goals. Any kid who can fill multiple needs/goals is probably at an advantage over one who fills fewer needs/goals. And any kid who goes beyond those routine expectations probably gets a pat on the back.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl Read my other posts about Ivies vs public colleges. I believe none of what you have stated. My issue is with discrimination which you have clearly failed to see.</p>
<p>As to your interview analogy everything you say is reasonable except you can’t discriminate by race. If you had after interview an Asian applicant, but dismissed her because you have too many Asians working in the finance department, guess what happens? That is essentially what is going on at Harvard and many other schools.</p>
<p>The thing I think you are not “getting” is my perspective on this. I understand your perspective, completely.</p>
<p>But, look, what is “fair” to you has very little to do with what Harvard’s more global and historical perspective considers “fair.” All situations are not equal. All K-12 educations in this country are not equal. We know this. As a fact.</p>
<p>Harvard is not seeking to ferret out the top SAT scorer and highest GPA from Stuvyesant, although that is quite impressive. They repeatedly discuss trying to find the under served in this country. Even the new SAT has as a part of it’s mission to find the under served students.</p>
<p>Fair is not one concept. Harvard, and most schools like Harvard, see Fair as a much broader concept than you seem to see it, and they see it this way for very good reason.</p>
<p>It is purely speculative to make such a proclamation. It is something some present as an allegation and others are refuting. </p>
<p>The better qualifications are in the eye of the beholder. And in this case, the only eye that matters is Harvard. It is rather inconceivable that a school might deliberately prefer a lower qualified group of students. The basic issue, repeated here ad nauseam, is that the definition of better qualification is hardly as narrow as some keep hanging on. </p>
<p>Obviously, there is NO convincing either group that one version is truer. Hence the utter futility of debating this over and over. The place to do so is in the courts. This has happened and we should wait for that outcome, and the undoubtedly developing legal maneuvering of Blum whose ulterior motives are the elimination of AA policies and the regression to a world of ordered inequality. </p>
<p>“Brown, Princeton, and Harvard don’t exist merely to educate the world’s neurologists. They’re also very proud to educate teachers, writers, Marine Corps officers/businessmen, and many other professionals. Certainly their online news feeds boast of their graduates’ successes in such fields.”</p>
<p>This is why it’s always so amusing when people on CC try to rank colleges based on salaries-of-their-graduates (regardless of who they use - Payscale, mid career, whatever). What kind of dork actually believes that the lady who founded the school in Nashville is “less successful” than the guy who founded an analytics company, because (presumably) she makes less?</p>
<p>When I hire people I think about if the person could do the job, I don’t worry about if the person’s race, sex, age, or hobby to try to build a “community” at the work place, whereas colleges do. A class room full of Asians discussing civil rights would be very different than a room full of students with diverse background. A dorm with mostly Asians would have a very different dynamic than a dorm with students of different race.</p>
<p>I think it would be interesting if a student who happens to be Hispanic and DID score a perfect 2400 and 36 were to join this group of plaintiffs and offer his rejection history to the cause. </p>
<p>xiggi That is what the Southern Racists said in the 50s when they were deny basic rights to non-Whites. The argument isn’t that there shouldn’t be a diversity of thought, interests, ideas etc., but that there should not be discrimination based upon Race.</p>
<p>There probably aren’t any Hispanics with a perfect score getting rejected by Harvard. You saw the data from UNC data that Blacks with the top scores were accepted at 98%+.</p>
<p>oldfort what do you mean by the last part of your comment?</p>
<p>poetgrl What do you think my perspective on this is?</p>
<p>There are different “jobs” for students in colleges. Some of the admissions art surely comes from admitting students with a range of interests. The students who participate in linguistics competitions or computer programming competitions during high school are more likely to major in linguistics-related fields or computer-related fields, respectively, than students who compete in science fairs. If a school has a strong Russian language program, they might like to admit students who have already shown an interest in Russian history and culture.</p>
<p>Even there, though, if the admissions team thinks they only need three Russian language or linguistics-inclined freshmen, they aren’t likely to admit twenty students from the piles of prospective Russian or linguistics majors. Within that small group, they might admit the students most likely to do well at Harvard.</p>
<p>Periwinkle Then explain the problems with URM who are interested in STEM degrees but fail to graduate in STEM at a much higher rate than Asians and Whites?</p>
<p>oldfort Not sure why you brought up that issue after discussing how Race doesn’t matter in your hiring practices. Generally if there is a change in dynamics then Race would become a factor in hiring because comfort level and productivity might be at stake. So why the comment?</p>
<p>How do reach for such a parallel from my … post? Or are you saying that Ed Blum happens to espouse the rhetoric of the Uber Races Supremacists? </p>
<p>VOR, many students change their majors. As the numbers of graduates in each field seems to remain steady, with adjustments, the admissions teams at top universities seem to be able to enroll a class of students each year who will fulfill the institution’s needs. </p>
<p>Given the current STEM-centric cheerleading by STEM industries and the government, I’m not concerned about an “undersupply” of STEM graduates. I’m not convinced we have a national lack of STEM grads, unless you define keeping STEM salaries low by increasing the supply of STEM workers as a national priority.</p>
No. I have never found race to be a factor at work. I don’t have to eat, socialize or have a debate about politics, religion with my co-workers. I don’t understand why there would be a difference in comfort level when working with different race. A black person doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, nor does a white or brown person, as long as they are competent at their jobs.</p>
<p>Periwinkle read the research in my post 267 about Dartmouth or you can search Google for STEM retention. </p>
<p>oldfort Then why do you think there’s a change in dynamics if a dorm is composed mostly of Asians versus composed mostly of any other Ethnic group?</p>