<p>What (in your humble opinions) do you suppose is the academic profile of accepted URMs at top 10 ranked colleges?</p>
<p>11-20?</p>
<p>And so on?</p>
<p>I mean stats. Like test scores, GPA, rank, etc.</p>
<p>Just how much does being a URM help?
And why do you think this?</p>
<p>It would be very helpful if you could provide me any info about this.
(You can hold the "Oh, AA sucks; Oh, AA must stay" discourse for some other thread.)</p>
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<p>Provided the URM has grades and scores that meet the top school’s average, it’s probably an automatic home run to being admitted.</p>
<p>This thread is doomed for deletion.</p>
<p>The best you can find out are the gradations of importance or not for the category in the common data set for each school; given the holistic reviews used at most or all such colleges, the exact level of importance (if it is considered) is not knowable to people on the outside of the admissions office.</p>
<p>Most non-URMs tend to overestimate the effect of being URM.</p>
<p>I suspect the Obama daughters will get into any schools they want. URM? VIP kid? Excellent student who has gone to outstanding schools? Legacy (for Princeton, Columbia, and Yale)? How can you separate these?</p>
<p>“Just how much does being a URM help?”</p>
<p>What sort of answer are you looking for? Something quantitative? C’mon.</p>
<p>Top schools tend to evaluate applicants holistically. They look for kids who can do the work but more importantly can add to the student body.</p>
<p>The 4.0 book wonk from Northern VA w/o personality but is African American is not as attractive as the 3.8GPA white kid from rural Kansas who works her parents’ farm but also does great research at the nearby university. Also the 3.7GPA, 2000 SAT Mexican American from East Texas whose parents are illegals may interest the readers more than the FB captain from Grosse Pointe.</p>
<p>There’s no linear way to describe it. The 2 main keys to selective school admissions: show academic achievement/potential and be interesting.</p>
<p>One’s ethnic background can play into this interest factor but is not so overwhelming as these top schools have great applicants from many minority backgrounds.</p>
<p><a href=“You%20can%20hold%20the%20%22Oh,%20AA%20sucks;%20Oh,%20AA%20must%20stay%22%20discourse%20for%20some%20other%20thread.”>quote</a>
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<p>Per CCs TOS, the only thread that this type of discussion is permissible is the Race FAQ sticky thread at the top of this forum.</p>
<p>As for the OPs question, T26E4 said it all. Anyone who thinks that there is a pat answer or set stats for what a URM applicant needs to get into a school is naive or misinformed.</p>
<p>An ideological barrier seems to be making this thread unproductive. While nice, many pronouncements so far are not at all helpful or honest.</p>
<p>T26E4 is a nonanswer. You might as well just respond, “I don’t know.” It spouts trite facts about college admissions without even considering the question the OP asks. </p>
<p>Of course there IS quantitative information out there that would answer my question in pretty precise terms. A quantitatively deduced academic profile of URMs can be produced by any college that collects information about minority status from its applicants. Whether its process is holistic or not. Obviously.</p>
<p>entomom is diverting the issue and also being unhelpful. First, focusing on a parenthesed addendum in a way that was not even relevant to the discussion. Second, validating a weak, roundabout response to a rather straightforward question. Third, trying to negatively construe the discussion as being about something it wasn’t about.</p>
<p>There certainly is a pat answer to my question. And not one person on this thread has even suggested that there are set stats for what a URM applicant needs to get into a school. </p>
<p>But there is definitely an academic profile. Just as there is a general academic profile. And I’d like some thoughtful, educated opinions about what that profile is.</p>
<p>Thought about comparing the stats of URM CCers who claim to have been accepted to top schools to those of normal students, but because of the obvious problems associated with obtaining a sample in this way, it wouldn’t be very useful. But it would definitely help give an idea.</p>
<p>"There certainly is a pat answer to my question. And not one person on this thread has even suggested that there are set stats for what a URM applicant needs to get into a school. "</p>
<p>Philo my non-answer to you is the answer. I challenge you to find any selective college who would publish any metrics for minority applicants. The mere hint of the existence of such a guideline, memo or even gathered statistics would cause their legal counsels to break out in cold sweats. Pat answer? No way. Lawsuits.</p>
<p>Do unofficial “pictures” of URMs exist? Surely. That’s why there seems to be a consistent target number of URMs admitted year to year. By keeping everything under the blanket of holistic evaluations, no “pat answers” need to be formulated much less shared with us, the general public.</p>
<p>Remember, the affirmative action, athletic, celebrity and development boosts today that can be had with holistic evaluations were originally developed in times past to keep OUT too many Jews or gay men. You think those memos were printed in the NYT?</p>
<p>“But there is definitely an academic profile.” Yes. Be excellent and be able to contribute to the community. If you’re looking for a GPA or SAT cut off, you’ll be looking for a very long time.</p>
<p>And I don’t know what philosophical bent you perceive in my advice to you. I whole heartedly support these private institutions’ efforts to develop their student bodies as they see fit.</p>
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<p>Schools want a diverse student body. </p>
<p>Although this may change with Fisher v. University of Texas.</p>
<p>But I was under the impression that Fisher v. UofT could only affect public Unis – not private ones… Am I mistaken?</p>
<p>MODERATOR NOTE:</p>
<p>For the final time: Discussions of AA, including court cases, belong on the Race FAQ sticky thread.</p>
<p>Philo, T26E4 is EXACTLY right. Don’t be the kind of unsophisticated CC poster who thinks that there is some magic formula whereby URM counts for x points, and if the total package is y points, an acceptance is in the bag. It can count, but it might count more for some than for others. I know it’s cute to want a magic formula and assign URMs x number of points, but it doesn’t work that way. Sorry.</p>
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<p>[University</a> of California: StatFinder](<a href=“http://statfinder.ucop.edu%5DUniversity”>http://statfinder.ucop.edu)</p>
<p>Also, the [Hout</a> report](<a href=“http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf]Hout”>http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/committees/aepe/hout_report_0.pdf) discusses Berkeley holistic reading of applications with respect to race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are not supposed to be considered under California proposition 209.</p>
<p>But the true answer to your question is what people have told you above – it depends.</p>
<p><strong>just clarifying</strong></p>
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<p>Yes, you’re right and OP did include public U’s as well as privates in his/her generalizatoin</p>
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<p>I’m not seeking to do that. And if I was, it wouldn’t be because it seemed “cute”. I’m seeking to figure out what the academic profile of URMs accepted into top colleges is. There certaintly is an average SAT, an average GPA, an average everything admissions counselors even regularly quantify recommendation quality and essay quality. </p>
<p>There’s this book Admissions Confidential that shows that admissions counselors do quantify their admissions criteria. At Duke in the 90s, at least:</p>
<p>Course rigor, academic performance, testing, recommendations, essays (well, personal qualities), ECs
all graded on a scale of 1 to 5</p>
<p>The numbers were added up to a sum. Some numbers counted twice (for 10 instead of 5, for example)</p>
<p>Have a high enough sum (upper-40-something), and you’re an auto-admit. Have a low enough sum, and you’re an auto-deny. Be in the middle, and you will be debated in a committee.</p>
<p>The auto-admit sum for african americans, for example, was significantly lower than that for normal applicants. It is not that African Americans had more moving personal qualities that they got admitted. They were explicitly given an edge. They even had a special admissions counselor for african americans whose role was to ensure that every african american application got read a third time instead of the normal two.</p>
<p>I had this hope that someone, somewhere, had done a lot of research on the information available in the public domain to come up with information about this topic. There are bits and pieces of useful information even real statistics! cited in various threads that help clarify the differences between the URM applicant’s experiences and the regular applicants, but none of it has ever been unified or evaluated.</p>
<p>You guys don’t seem to be willing to accept, despite the wealth of available information indicating otherwise (perhaps you aren’t aware of it, instead?), the fact that indeed, in principle, there are pat answers to my questions and that, indeed, information does exist in the public domain to help one come to an educated guess about the nature of that pat answer.</p>
<p>It’s rather annoying, but it gives me something to do. I’ll collect and organize that information, myself, and then post it in a thread. And I’ll prove you wrong. </p>
<p>Though you guys haven’t really said anything that is wrong. You just haven’t answered my question. Perhaps you’re misinterpreting it. There are indeed, many indications of this the question, again and again, gets misconstrued as a search for a magic formula, or as a request for numbers that everyone knows aren’t readily available. </p>
<p>No, I just asked for an educated guess. The closest thing I’ve gotten to that was GMT’s response, but I doubt that it was educated, as he provided no info to back up his opinion. That is a shame.</p>
<p>philo: be our guest. And aside from ucbalumnus’ info about UCBerkely, I will posit that no collection of the info you’re seeking exist for the express intention of keeping things murky. Imagine if say, Dartmouth kept and made available the tracked avg metrics of African American students (applicants and acceptees) in terms of GPA or test scores etc. Since these metrics for the entire pool are available, it would be easy to see how much one sub group’s stats varied from the school average.</p>
<p>This would immediately generate challenges of “favoritism” or “reverse discrimination” and chaos in general. Clearly some colleges have diversity goals and it’s understood that means differing levels of avg stats for certain sub groups. But the release of any of this data would be catastrophic for the colleges admissions policies. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Plausible deniablity. That’s why I find it highly unlikely you’d find this stats package for even ONE top private school. Is this line of reasoning clear to you?</p>
<p>Re: #15</p>
<p>Simply because Duke does admission decisions a specific way does not necessarily mean that some other school does it similarly. Or even if they do it similarly, that they would have the same difference in threshold scores.</p>
<p>The answer remains, “it depends”.</p>
<p>(Of course, T26E4 is correct that most colleges want to be vague and opaque about their holistic admission processes, to avoid being pinned down for criticism of favoritism or excessive favoritism for some non-academic characteristics, not necessarily limited to URM preference. The public ones may be required to disclose more information for various reasons, but the private ones can be as secretive as they want here.)</p>
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<p>But so what? What if you found out (hypothetically speaking) that the average SAT, GPA, etc. of black kids was lower than that of white kids by X points? If you’re a white kid, what are you going to do with that information? That’s known as focusing on the wrong things. It’s a dumb waste of time. You focus on the things you can control, and you just can’t worry about the rest. It’s like worrying about the bump athletes get when you’re not an athlete.</p>
<p>The other thing that you’d have to do is understand the size and characteristics of both the applicant pool and the admitted pool. Assuming for the sake of argument that higher SAT/GPA = “higher qualified” (I don’t, but just play along), if the characteristics of the applicant pools are different, then even if admissions were done randomly (choose every xth student), that wouldn’t mean “discrimination.”</p>
<p>" . At Duke in the 90s, at least…The auto-admit sum for african americans, for example, was significantly lower than that for normal applicants. It is<em>not</em>that African Americans had more moving personal qualities that they got admitted. ?..There are bits and pieces of useful information — even real statistics! — cited in various threads that help clarify the differences between the URM applicant’s experiences and the regular applicants, but none of it has ever been unified or evaluated."</p>
<p>" Normal" applicants? Ouch. My abnormal D just graduated from Duke, but she wasn’t admitted in the 90’s, so maybe she’s not THAT abnormal. </p>
<p>If it was out there, I like think I’d know it. I’ve found nothing, even in the most heated debates ( follow me on # shrinkraponracefaq…jk…)since the 15 year old Espanshade data, which specifically excluded all but select “elite” schools, and the annual report from Blacks in Higher Education. This is about Blacks, not URMs, and includes less data then you would need to draw the kind of conclusions you want.</p>
<p>And if I had it, I’d share it privately, rather than fuel more hate.</p>