Getting into Harvard requires top grades, impressive extracurricular pursuits, and a dynamic personality.
But there’s another way in: the Z list.
Never heard of it? That’s generally the way Harvard likes to keep it.
But according to filings in the recent affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard, the university’s records show that every year about 60 students — mostly white and well-connected — enter Harvard through what is called the Z list. There’s a catch, though: These applicants are required to defer the start of college for a year.
Hardly. The Z list is anything but a secret. Not only, as mentioned upthread, has it been discussed on this site, Harvard admissions themselves have discussed it:
In my view, the most interesting part of the recent New York Times article was the fact that the judge told Harvard to reveal some fraction of the redacted material.
Elsewhere, I have seen reports that the Asian-American applicants to Harvard received noticeably lower “Personal” scores than applicants of any other ethnicity. Two hypotheses suggest themselves: 1) Asian-American applicants to Harvard are just worse personally than the applicants of other ethnicities. I reject this out of hand. It looks like pure prejudice to me. (I am not Asian-American.) or 2) Asian-American applicants are down-rated in the “Personal” category as a frequent practice.
I suspect that Harvard would like to advance the theory, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.” But personally I am beginning to doubt that.
And from where would Harvard be getting these low personal scores? Are they invented out of thin air? Do the AOs look for Asian last names before dinging the candidate’s personal qualities?
My guess would be that the HS GCs are sending recommendations that describe the candidate as “quiet” or in less than enthusiastic terms, that the bias is far deeper than just one college’s assessments.
Harvard also probably does not want too much information being released, because it may impact Harvard’s desirability to potential students. Some students who are not within any of the preferred groups (legacy, URM, recruited athlete, development) may conclude that it is not worth applying, because the admissions process at Harvard is shown (rather than just rumored) to be heavily “rigged” against them.
Asian applicants do well in counselor assessments – similar Harvard reader ratings of the counselor assessment compared to White applicants, and quite a bit better than URMs on average. However, it’s possible that the high counselor ratings are largely based on academic criteria, rather than personal ones, as you implied. The percentage receiving different scores in the personal ratings are below for the baseline sample (unhooked and RD). Lower is better. Asian applicants have lower average ratings, but the differences are smaller than many news articles suggest.
It is suspicious that Asian applicants receive slightly lower average personal ratings in spite of more similar average ratings to White applicants in all available components that contribute to personal ratings. However, essays are not among these available components, which is a key component of the rating. Having no information about the essays makes it difficult to say whether the ratings were deserved. The vague nature of the rating criteria further complicates matters, which is quoted below. How can one be certain whether the “many other qualities” were missing/present? The vague nature of the criteria also presents a possibility of unintentional bias.