How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?

[Pizzagirl]

<p>How do the women’s colleges manage to do it? Sincere question, as my D attends one of them.</p>

<p>Regardless, it’s still hard to argue that these institutions are “discriminating against” Asians (or anyone else) when they are still far, far overrepresented relative to size in the population AND admission rates are so low that the vast majority of applicants will be rejected.</p>

[GrandPoobah]

<p>Before we can even begin to take this article seriously, can we understand what a “likely Jewish name” is? It looks like he just went to national merit results and did a ctrl+f for “gold”, “silver”, and “cohen”.</p>

<p>

Although Jewish names are not quite as absolutely distinctive as East or South Asian ones, they can be determined with reasonably good accuracy, so long as we are careful to note ambiguous cases and recognize that our estimates may easily be off by a small amount; furthermore, we can utilize especially distinctive names as a validation check.

</p>

<p>His footnotes about names include a CC article (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13210307-post724.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/13210307-post724.html&lt;/a&gt;) and [Steve</a> Sailer: iSteve](<a href=“http://isteve.blogspot.com/]Steve”>http://isteve.blogspot.com/) x 2.</p>

<p>Basically, he found that there was only 1 Cohen but a whopping 49 Wangs! Seems statistically significant to me :P</p>

[Canuckguy]

<p>

poetgrl, I read the first 50 posts and the last 50. No differences.

</p>

<p>I agree. What I don’t understand is why would folks make over 10 thousand posts to win this argument. Is it not easier just to admit that the world is large enough for more than one opinion?</p>

<p>

A possible remedy would be to hand over to professors the responsibility for real academic interviews (similar to the Oxbridge process). Give professors (not professional adcoms) some say in what students they’d most like to have in their discussion sections or research projects. Then drop race and ECs from the application altogether (but do maintain a genuine recruiting effort in underrepresented communities).

</p>

<p>I like your approach, tk. It is not going to happen because what is in the best interest of the professoriate is not necessarily in the best interest of the colleges.</p>

[JHS]

<p>It’s not going to happen because the professors (who have a huge voice in running the university, especially at Harvard) don’t want it to happen. They don’t want that time suck and that responsibility, and they are by and large perfectly happy with the students the admissions staff provides them. </p>

<p>For a contrary view, see the Helen Vendler piece currently under discussion in another thread. No one on this thread seems to be arguing for even less reliance on objective criteria, but that’s what you probably would get if you left it up to the professors, just as that’s what you get when they select applicants for PhD programs. Furthermore, there is no indication, none, that the “professoriate” at elite universities doesn’t fully support things like affirmative action and developmental admits. And involving faculty more in the admissions process would practically demand that, like Oxbridge and other European universities, the colleges would require applicants to make a firm choice of major while they are still first-semester high school seniors. That is complete anathema to practically every elite American university, and it would probably be resisted furiously by departments with no high-school curriculum equivalent.</p>

[lookingforward]

<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying: Freshman Application Process](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/tips/decisions.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/tips/decisions.html)
Some words about how decisions are made. Includes reference to Vendler.</p>

[lookingforward]

<p>Harvard also has a Faculty Standing Commmittee on Admissions and Financial Aid. I thought one of the links in the past few days included, at the bottom, names of profs engaged in admissions.
“which includes about 30 members of the faculty of arts and sciences, formulates and implements policies on admissions and financial aid. Members of the standing committee also review applications that are representative of the entire pool — and those which present unusually strong scholarly credentials, demonstrate exceptional creativity in the arts, or raise questions of admissions policy.” From the Fitzsimmons NYT blog. [Guidance</a> Office: Answers From Harvard’s Dean, Part 1 - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/harvarddean-part1/]Guidance”>Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 1 - The New York Times)</p>

<p>I know we’re all getting tired of this. It’s been interesting, but I think most still hold the opinions they came in with. fwiw.</p>

[bogibogi]

<p>

It would be best not to confuse % makeup of a class with admissions rates.

Good point. I meant to say % makeup.</p>

<p>For those who say:“It isn’t because he was Asian that he was not accepted. He was just not the oboe-playing-poet-from-Alabama-who-is the-student council-president that the school was looking for.” What if, by pure coincidence, you had two equally qualified applicants with the same credentials where one was Asian and the other African American? I would argue that the African American would have the clear advantage. In this regard, race does matter and anyone who believes otherwise is being naive.</p>

<p>As long as Asians look different and their presence on a campus affects the visual landscape, their representation at the “elite” schools will not increase. I don’t know if there is discrimination against Asians, but there is a definite non-preference of “too many Asians” A reflection of this disheartening sentiment is often mentioned on these boards. “There are sooooooooo many Asians in my math class.” </p>

<p>I am hopeful that race will become a non-issue as inter-racial marriages become more commonplace with each generation. Then with racially ambiguous facial features and the confusion of checking the right box, it might not be worth the energy to engineer a certain level of racial diversity.</p>

<p>This is an extreme measure, but I often think that if the government gave some tax incentives to marry outside of one’s race, it could lessen a lot of the racial tensions. That Mark Zuckerberg married his Chinese American classmate is good for society. Give that man a tax break. :)</p>

[texaspg]

<p>I hear Mark, because of his networth / banks using the networth to leverage the mortgage, got several million dollars almost free of interest for his home loan.</p>

<p>Should we chalk it down to his asian wife?</p>

[JHS]

<p>

That Mark Zuckerberg married his Chinese American classmate is good for society. Give that man a tax break.

Are you aware what a cultural cliche it is for young Jewish men to be attracted to their Asian classmates? If you gave them a tax break, there wouldn’t be any left. You could probably make a dent in the deficit by taxing it more heavily. (Luckily for everyone, the 14th Amendment probably forbids both options.)</p>

[Beliavsky]

<p>

@lookingforward

Harvard College Admissions § Applying: Freshman Application Process
Some words about how decisions are made. Includes reference to Vendler.

</p>

<p>From the site:</p>

<p>'As admissions officers read applications and discuss them in the admissions selection meetings, many questions are on their minds:</p>

<p>[…]</p>

<p>What sort of human being is the candidate now? What sort of human being will she be in the future?'</p>

<p>People who think they reliably judge “what sort of human being” an applicant will be in the future based on a college application should be kept off admissions committees. Unfortunately, the task of “holistic admissions” attracts such people, who will go on making their subjective judgements, safe in the knowledge that they will never be evaluated on their accuracy.</p>

[texaspg]

<p>May be they need to change the questions. It looks like Harvard collects all the introverts in the nation.</p>

[bogibogi]

<p>

Are you aware what a cultural cliche it is for young Jewish men to be attracted to their Asian classmates? If you gave them a tax break, there wouldn’t be any left. You could probably make a dent in the deficit by taxing it more heavily. (Luckily for everyone, the 14th Amendment probably forbids both options.)

</p>

<p>No, I was not aware. I was referring to all kinds of inter-racial marriage, I just happened to use the Facebook guy as an example. My point was to say that some behaviors are motivated by incentives. I also admitted that it would be an extreme measure.</p>

[Hunt]

<p>As for the Unz article, it totally lost any credibility to me when he noted that many Ivy presidents had Jewish wives. Really? I thought mentioning that was so stupid that I couldn’t take the rest of his screed seriously.</p>

<p>

Anyone who says yes when asked the question “Are you Jewish?” is Jewish.

We were in New Haven this weekend, and there was a large group of young Orthodox Jewish men there asking passersby if they were Jewish–if you said yes, they’d try to persuade you to be more observant (ie., give you Hannukkah candles). Here’s what we heard at one point:
Male voice: “Are any of you Jewish?”
Group: “No.”
Another male voice: “But Miriam, you’re Jewish.”
Female voice: “SHUT UP!”</p>

<p>So, it’s not so easy to figure out whether somebody is Jewish or not, at any given time.</p>

[Periwinkle]

<p>

People who think they reliably judge “what sort of human being” an applicant will be in the future based on a college application should be kept off admissions committees. Unfortunately, the task of “holistic admissions” attracts such people, who will go on making their subjective judgements, safe in the knowledge that they will never be evaluated on their accuracy.

</p>

<p>So funny that people obsess about Ivy League admissions, then, as the holistic admissions model does call for the admissions committee to make such judgements. The judgements are subjective, but over time the colleges have benefited from such decisions. If you look at any list of an elite college’s outstanding graduates, with the exception of the Nobel Prize winners, I’d venture to say that the majority of prominent, successful alumni would not have been admitted under “objective” criteria based only on the very highest grades and test scores.</p>

[Hanna]

<p>^^^ LOL Hunt! Unfortunately, other Ashkenazim can always recognize me, so there’s no fooling the proselytizers when I pass.</p>

<p>“safe in the knowledge that they will never be evaluated on their accuracy.”</p>

<p>You think that the college doesn’t keep the admissions files and look at them when someone excels or flunks out? They certainly do. It’s true that a single admissions officer would never lose their job because a few students failed, since every student is admitted by a committee majority. But they do attempt to refine the process and learn from how previous admits fared during college.</p>

[texaspg]

<p>“So, it’s not so easy to figure out whether somebody is Jewish or not, at any given time.”</p>

<p>It sounds like a status of mind.</p>

[bogibogi]

<p>

There are no “points” added up by category. It boils down to: have you made yourself a draw for this school? Did you show you know this school, have an idea of what it is about, what we value in applicants and in current students, what we aim to accomplish, what you will do with your time here, etc- incl, have you gotten beyond simplistic and emotion-based “dream school” statements? (Or, their sisters.) Did you give a few words to describe that project- or focus on prom dec?

</p>

<p>Sure, there are some kids who could put together a package on their own that would “wow” the adcoms. However, there are so many ways to “game” the system, as evidenced by the website reference of OHMomof2. [Asian</a> Advantage College Consulting LLC](<a href=“http://asianadvantage.net/faq.html]Asian”>http://asianadvantage.net/faq.html)</p>

<p>

or short list a few thousand, throw them up in the air catch the number needed.

That is exactly what Unz is advocating for with his “Inner Ring and Outer Ring”.
From the article:

The 300 Inner Ring students would certainly be quite different in all sorts of ways from the average high school student, even aside from their greater academic ability and drive; they might not be “diverse” in any sense of the word, whether geographically, ethnically, or socio-economically. But the remaining 1300 Outer Ring students would represent a random cross-section of the tens of thousands of students who applied for admission and had reasonably good academic ability, and since they would constitute 80 percent of the enrollment, Harvard would almost certainly become far more diverse and representative of America’s total population in almost all ways than is the case today, when 30 percent of its students come from private schools, often the most elite and expensive ones.117

</p>

[OHMomof2]

<p>

there was a large group of young Orthodox Jewish men there asking passersby if they were Jewish–if you said yes, they’d try to persuade you to be more observant (ie., give you Hannukkah candles). Here’s what we heard at one point:
Male voice: “Are any of you Jewish?”
Group: “No.”
Another male voice: “But Miriam, you’re Jewish.”
Female voice: “SHUT UP!”

</p>

<p>When I pass “Get Smart, Get Saved” or other evangelical born again groups in the street or wherever I don’t ID myself as Christian either…don’t want the hassle.</p>

<p>Question on racial diversity: if Harvard did adopt a policy that resulted in a lot more Asian students, and probably fewer black, Hispanic, etc students…would Asian students (at least any participating in this thread) like that racial atmosphere better or not as much?</p>

[lookingforward]

<p>some kids who could put together a package on their own that would “wow” the adcoms I do advocate that kids put together a well-done, well-considered app, not assume that their that the app is just a chance to list things and that the CA and supp questions are random. If you know the school, what it offers you (more specifically than rep,) if you carefully decided what makes it a fit for you, is it that hard to project what’s relevant? Without intervention by an expensive middleman?</p>

[Bay]

<p>

As for the Unz article, it totally lost any credibility to me when he noted that many Ivy presidents had Jewish wives. Really? I thought mentioning that was so stupid that I couldn’t take the rest of his screed seriously.

</p>

<p>I agree it sounds stupid, but for a moment, try to ignore any anti-Semitic intent on the part of the author. As a federal investigative attorney, one thing we looked for were <em>any</em> possible associations among people, including last names that sounded like similar ethnicities, when trying to develop a case. </p>

<p>If a man is married to a Jewish woman, it would be logical to conclude that he would not be biased <em>against</em> Jewish students. It doesn’t say he would favor them, but it might remove any credibility he might have had to assert something like, “Of course I don’t favor Jewish students, I don’t even know that many Jewish people.” It is just a tiny piece of factual information. Sometimes when you accumulate enough of these tiny pieces, it does develop into something. (I’m not saying it does in this case).</p>