<p>Wait, before you told us there was no formula. Now you admit you were just speculating too.</p>
<p>So, then what’s the formula? What are the points associated with - varsity football, school newspaper editor, playing the oboe, having the lead in the school play? Clearly if you think there is a formula, you have a sense as to what is worth what, and of course you believe it’s applied evenly.</p>
<p>Didn’t University of Michigan have a ‘formal’ until recently?</p>
<p>You might find this interesting:
[Z-Listed</a> Students Experience Year Off | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/30/students-year-harvard-zlist/]Z-Listed”>Z-Listed Students Experience Year Off | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>
<p>In any given year, how many kids do you think are hs seniors, children of long-time donors who’ve given tens of millions? Enough to scootch out a whole bunch of hypothetically overqualified Asians?</p>
<p>Whether you mean Mich has a dance or a formula…they are public.</p>
<p>Well, there are two ways in that seem to avoid the holistic process:</p>
<p>1) be a recruited athlete who clears academic index requirement (yes, the coach may make a holistic determination as to what is best for the team to win matches/games)
2) donate a certain amount of money.</p>
<p>The president of Duke went on 60 minutes when they were covering the Juan Li case and basically said that #2 does go on and it isn’t fair. </p>
<p>In fact, after Calvin Klein’s kids got into Duke, there was one high-ranking Duke official that somehow ended up on Calvin Klein’s board of directors.</p>
<p>I’m sure that even if there is no set formula, there are certain check-offs–for example, I know the top schools like to accept somebody from each of the 50 states, so somebody probably has the job of checking that, for example.</p>
<p>But I don’t entirely get the desire to know the formula. Harvard makes it pretty clear that it has preferences for athletes, URMs, legacies, and development cases. Who does it really help to know how much it helps? And I can pretty much guarantee that if there is a plot to hold down the number of Asians, it’s not in writing anywhere.</p>
<p>And if Harvard is prevented by law from considering race, it will simply consider socioeconomic status, ECs, and other factors to get the kind of class it wants. So stay off the Dragon Boat team!</p>
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<p>Because it marks you as Canadian?
[Laoyam</a> Eagles - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Id4L3bEPF4]Laoyam”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Id4L3bEPF4)</p>
<p>collegealum, I know many alumni who have give significantly over half a million dollars to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford over the years, and whose children have not been accepted. And I am talking about kids with 2350 SATs and top class ranks at competitive schools.</p>
<p>I think there IS probably a level of support that effectively assures the admission of a clearly qualified applicant – not marginally qualified, but clearly qualified. But that level is probably 10 (or more) times half a million dollars.</p>
<p>I also know people whose legacy kids (clearly academically qualified, or athletic recruits) were accepted despite lifetime contributions of well under $20,000.</p>
<p>And the following is often mentioned, although not publicized (because it’s not in the interest of any of the colleges to publicize it): Their legacy admission rates are only slightly higher than the rate at which they admit applicants who qualify as legacies at the OTHER colleges. In other words, if your parents went to Yale, you have just as good a chance of getting into Harvard as the child of Harvard alumni, other than true mega-donors and public figures. The real fraud is that there’s not really any legacy preference, just a preference for smart kids whose parents valued education a lot, and who understand roughly what Harvard is looking for. If anything, Harvard may cut off legacy admissions arbitrarily so as not to have too high a percentage of them.</p>
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<p>So now we have gone from “There IS no formula” to “Tell me what the formula is”. The result is that all Ivies have roughly the same admission rate for Asians. Universities with a race blind admissions criteria, like the CA schools, have double the Asian admit rate. </p>
<p>We recognize the lion by his paw.</p>
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<p>So the first kid in this example should be reviewed under the “Inner Ring” due to his circumstances. But I would have no problem with the second kid having the exact same chance, under the lottery system, as any other kid who had all the advantages.</p>
<p>When I said, pages ago, that the info missing from PG’s formula is what prompts suspicion, I did not mean that the colleges had a formula. I meant that I think there would be less suspicion if we knew for example, how many Asian and White students applied and where they are from, to plug into PG’s formula pages back that was supposed to help explain why certain groups are over- or under-represented. It won’t tell the whole story, because we can’t know the personal details of each applicant, but would be helpful to know that 30,000 White students applied, with 25,000 from NY and 10 from IL, or that 5,000 Asian students applied and all of them were from CA.</p>
<p>Charles Murray thinks Unz has proven that the Ivies have an Asian quota, but he does not comment on Unz’s assertion of pro-Jewish bias in the admissions process.</p>
<p>[At</a> the Ivies, Asians are the new Jews | AEIdeas](<a href=“http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/at-the-ivies-asians-are-the-new-jews/]At”>http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/at-the-ivies-asians-are-the-new-jews/)
Charles Murray
December 11, 2012</p>
<p>[…] Unz has documented what looks very much like a tacitly common policy on the part of the Ivies to cap Asian admissions at about 16% of undergraduates, give or take a few percentage points, no matter what the quality of Asian applicants might be.Thats a strong statement, but consider the data that Unz has assembled.</p>
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<p>And how many Asians live in CA compared to the US as a whole? If you compare the % of Asians at Berkley compared to the CA versus the % of Asians at Harvard compared to the USA those advocating an anti-Asian conspiracy will be greatly disappointed. I’ve taken this one level lower (Berkley; CA and non-CA … Harvard; by major states) … and it comes out the same … Harvard admits Asians at a HIGHER multiple of their target population than the UCs do. Wrong argument.</p>
<p>Asians are 13-something % in CA and 45% of the UC system. A state public system, beholden first to its populace. Harvard’s goal is not to serve MA kids. Does change things, a bit. But, really, we just can’t resolve all this by challenging each other with uncertain certainties and limited public info.</p>
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<p>Look two posts above yours:</p>
<p>**There is no formula for gaining admission to Harvard. **</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying to Harvard](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/index.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/index.html)</p>
<p>Other than a national exam like China or India (which I suspect few in US would favor) or a lottery (not sure Unz is really serious here or if he is simply satirizing the seeming random admissiosn decisions in the holistic process), there is no formula without exceptions and once you start making exceptions it gets hard to justify why there are some exceptions and not others and so at the end of the day you end up with something close to holistic. </p>
<p>So AO’s need discretion, but it would be nice to know that they are exercising their discretion in a fair manner and not using quotas. Why Ivy admissions are so suspect to me is that the admission rates do not vary annually from group to group by more than a percent or two. Given that every applicant group will have strengths and weakneses to me this suggest quotas. Also, there is the anomaly that the one movement in the numbers is a decline in Asian admissions (from about 21 - 17%) in the last few years without any comparable decrease in asian academic performance. </p>
<p>So then that leads to the question asked/points made by many posters – why does this matter and/or the cream will rise to the top from a good state school as much as from an Ivy. Lauren Rivera of Northwestern has studied this and received extensive press for her findings that the elite firms (espeically wall street, but also consulting and other businesses; she interviewed a total of 120 hiring officers ) pick students fprimarily from just a handful of schools. </p>
<p>They do so per Rivera because in their view the admissions process at the tippy top schools has done the weeding out process for them and virtually ensures an adequate amount of brain power for these positions – most of which are non-technical starter jobs. Firms have limited recruiting budgets and so why not focus on schools where you can see 30 good applicants as compared to two or three. </p>
<p>Once at these schools though Rivera finds that GPA is not nearly as important as interesting ECs and personality (ie so-called fit) and that going to a top school gets you a look but other factors get you hired. Indeed, per Rivera firms generally dislike students who they perceive as “grade grubbers” and will not seek to hire the top of the class absent fit.</p>
<p>Harvard clearly favors kids from northern New England, especially Massachusetts. I thought it was explicit about that. It has a special mission to serve Massachusetts (and Maine, I believe, which was Massachusetts for most of Harvard’s existence, and doesn’t have a snazzy private university of its own).</p>
<p>You think it’s taking all those kids from Cambridge Rindge and Latin, Boston Latin, Buckingham, Browne & Nichols, on purely neutral grounds?</p>
<p>All of the elite colleges favor their catchment areas – especially those parts of their catchment areas where the children of their faculties and administrators live and go to school. My daughter’s high school class sent 30 kids to Penn, and I’m sure some of them wouldn’t have gotten in if they had been applying from Baltimore or Hartford.</p>
<p>Here’s Rivera’s abstract for those interested.</p>
<p>[ScienceDirect.com</a> - Research in Social Stratification and Mobility - Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers? use of educational credentials](<a href=“http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027656241000065X]ScienceDirect.com”>Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers’ use of educational credentials - ScienceDirect)</p>
<p>The reason that the inner/outer ring concept is silly is that I suspect a small number of inner ring students are already virtual auto-admits at the university of their choice, as they should be. Whether it is PC to say it or not, there are a certain percentage of students who, in my opinion, really are “entitled” to admission to the top schools. The kid who medaled at the International Math Olympiad or the humanities kid who is producing potentially graduate level writing in 11th grade, assuming there aren’t any major red flags in his application, should be getting into HYP, if that is hisdesire. And for the most part, they do. Sure, there are kids who have equal talent but haven’t had the opportunity to show it (especially in the humanities), or who are late bloomers, but those whose applications demonstrate that really extraordinary ability are probably pretty close to auto-admits. </p>
<p>When a middle-class URM or an athlete or a kid from Nebraska with slightly lower scores gets in, they aren’t getting in over that “inner ring;” they’re getting in over other extremely deserving people who nonetheless don’t stand out sufficiently in an extraordinarily deep pool. And that’s OK. Once you get past that small top group, I don’t think a person “deserves” to go to Harvard over Northwestern or Oberlin or UVA. </p>
<p>Now, that isn’t to say I agree with all the institutional priorities of elite schools. Frankly, I’d be much happier if top schools paid more attention to academic qualifications and less to whether or not their volleyball team went to the NCAA or whether or not all 50 states were represented. I think it is great to strive for diversity and a range of talents, but once you start prioritizing too many non-academic factors (and this doesn’t include the low SES student with excellent, but not tippy-top scores), I think you are watering down the intellectual heft of your school. But the idea that the true geniuses out there are getting shafted because schools needed a black oboe player from Montana is probably wrongheaded.</p>