<p>I've always considered myself fairly liberal, but I have found lately that it's easier to talk liberal values than walk liberal values.</p>
<p>What do I mean?</p>
<p>I just can't help feeling a twinge of something negative (anger, resentment, jealousy?) when I read about a UM who was just admited to an IVY with stats which are materially lower than non UM's in the RD round (SAT < 2000).</p>
<p>I guess it's just like everything in life, until it directly hits home the reality doesn't really set in. I see how hard my DS works and I think, "Yes, we need to level the playing field - but not at my son's expense".</p>
<p>Kind of sad on my part, but I just can't help it.</p>
<p>I don't understand why you put the 'blame' squarely on the shoulders of that URM. How about all the non-URM legacies, recruited athletes, kids of big donors, famous people's kids, etc that may have gotten in 'at the expense' of your DS?</p>
<p>I don't mean to belittle your painful experience, but just to put things in perspective...</p>
<p>My son is just a junior, so it's not related to an actual rejection. I just don't like that I feel this way when I read it - not really consistent with the values I thought I had.</p>
<p>
[quote]
just can't help feeling a twinge of something negative (anger, resentment, jealousy?) when I read about a UM who was just admited to an IVY with stats which are materially lower than non UM's in the RD round (SAT < 2000).</p>
<p>I guess it's just like everything in life, until it directly hits home the reality doesn't really set in. I see how hard my DS works and I think, "Yes, we need to level the playing field - but not at my son's expense".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The URM will not get admitted at your son's expense. It was most likely at the expense of another URM. Your son did not get admitted at the expense of the thousands of other non-URMs.</p>
<p>Again - and I'm sure our posts crossed paths - my son is a junior.</p>
<p>Your statements makes it a given that quota's should exist. I'm not going to argue whether that is right or wrong, but you make, as a premise, the issue which is the heart of the controversy. I really don't understand your line of reasoning.</p>
<p>I totally understand how you feel. We dont' want our kids to be "rejected" in favor of "saving spaces" for URM's that have lower scores. The "saving spaces" is exactly what is going on. </p>
<p>Note to Sybbie: The fact that a lower stat URM got admitted at the "expense of another URM" (who presumably also had lower stats) is proof that the whole "plan" is at the expense of people who have higher stats. Meaning if a college "sets aside" 200 (more or less) spaces for URM with lower stats, that means those spots are being taken from the general group that has higher stats.</p>
<p>SB Dad...i wouldn't feel too bad...it's not unusal for people to question their beliefs when the issue 'hits home.'</p>
<p>having said that, i think sybbie makes some good points. i'd go further and say that you simply can't look at anyone's stats and get a feel for their admission chances at an ivy or other top school. success at that level has much more to do with passion and accomplishment than grades and test scores ... and both are very difficult to gauge from CC posts. how well a student presents themselves in their application, essays and interviews also matters a great deal, and we CC people are simply not privy to any of that, save for our own children.</p>
<p>and lastly, a true story: my son applied early and was accepted to an ivy two years ago. at the end of his hs senior year, the hs blindly published all the grades and test scores, by college, of all the kids who had applied. acceptances, rejections and waitlists were all duly noted. About 50 kids had applied to this particular ivy; 10 were accepted. Of those 10, my S had the lowest grades and test scores. they were good, but the others were better. and there were kids with better stats who had been rejected. i will add at this point that we are NOT a minority. shortly after these stats were posted, another parent, familiar with my S approached me and remarked that all the kids accepted to this school had done exceptionally in their hs careers, adding that the kid at the bottom must have been a URM. When I replied that, in fact, that kid was my S and that all the URMs who had been accepted had better grades and test scores, he was shocked.</p>
<p>i think that if you have the opportunity to tour the schools and speak to students, you will be impressed with virtually all of them. i have yet to meet a single one that did not impress me as being fully deserving of being there.</p>
<p>I would like to know at what point in time has admission to any elite school been totally based on a system of merit? </p>
<p>Let's see, they started out as bastions for the rich, white and privileged and many were admitted on the basis of "who's your daddy?" </p>
<p>A few hundred years later they majority of students at many of these are still rich, white and privileged and still depending on who your daddy is our how loud you money talks, it trumps any URM so in this respect the process hasnt changed much.</p>
<p>unless your kid is going into the process with a string of 800#s, there is always going to be some one with "better stats" than theirs. </p>
<p>If your kids goes in with a string of 800#s and gets rejected, there is always going to be someone who got accepted with "lower stats".</p>
<p>I think we need so start serving up some cheese with the amount of whine that has been going on recently because it seems like no matter what the situation is no one is happy.</p>
<p>"I don't understand why you put the 'blame' squarely on the shoulders of that URM. How about all the non-URM legacies, recruited athletes, kids of big donors, famous people's kids, etc that may have gotten in 'at the expense' of your DS?"</p>
<p>it really irritates me when people compare recruited athletes to URMs. URMs have done nothing to get that status other than they are born. to get to the level worthy of being recruited for a sport takes hours and hours of hard work.. completely different than being a URM</p>
<p>"I just can't help feeling a twinge of something negative (anger, resentment, jealousy?) when I read about a UM who was just admited to an IVY with stats which are materially lower than non UM's in the RD round (SAT < 2000)."</p>
<p>Well, if their income was $100k less, the stats might not "materially lower" at all - just their face value. According to the CollegeBoard, a 1400 SAT (old score) is just a 1200 plus $100k in income.</p>
<p>The admissions meritocracy does not exist because schools don't want only the academically most talented kids. They want a mix of various talents and attributes. If a school needs violists, left handed pitchers or scientists to fill up the new science building, that is who will be admitted.
It is frustrating because we wish we had a formula.</p>
<p>sapphire07
wow...i never realized what an accomplishment it is for kids to be born to wealthy white parents who both attended an ivy league college.</p>
<p>i agree that being a successful athlete requires much more than being born with talent. and i have no problem with schools that recruit them, or anyone else.</p>
<p>how convenient it is to ignore what urm stands for. the first two words ... under represented ... are really the key here. generally speaking, urms are not present in the college population to the same extent that they're part of the population at large. yet some complain as if their acceptance was taking something away from the rest of us. </p>
<p>as others have mentioned here, there is no set criteria for admission to highly selective schools. they are attempting to create an entire community.</p>
<p>I would not have a big problem if kids were admitted based on talents and attributes as spinner said. I have a huge problem with kids getting admitted because their skin is brown, or because their ancestors were native, or because their ancestors just came here last year, or w/e. This makes as much sense as admitting only students with even shoe sizes. These types of things have nothing to do with the worth of the applicant and everything to do with filling the reserved slots that jlauer mentioned. It doesn't matter if there are many slots or few slots - it is just wrong. I don't have an athlete, but at least athletes have a measurable talent to set them apart from the crowd. To admit a student based only on race is just as bad as denying a student based only on race. (I know this is not the popular opinion.)</p>
<p>Just an aside: my son was told (very kindly) that he needed to audition better than every URM, because if it was even close, he would lose. How about that? (He won, but that system still really irritates me.)</p>
<p>"I just can't help feeling a twinge of something negative (anger, resentment, jealousy?) when I read about a UM who was just admited to an IVY with stats which are materially lower than non UM's in the RD round (SAT < 2000)."</p>
<p>Face it: There are plenty of nonURMs admitted with such stats. These include students who are legacies, large donors' offspring, reside in underrepresented states, are very disadvantaged, have worldclass athletic or other abilities. </p>
<p>In addition, I am sure that the URM had more going for him or her than skin color. I have seen personally plenty of URMs with higher stats including sky high gpas rejected from Ivies and similar schools (as is the case with nonURMs).</p>
<p>The students whom I have seen accepted -- both URM and nonURM -- have a lot on the ball, things that often may not be known by their peers or posted on a website like CC.</p>
<p>You earn props from me for being forthright about your ambivalence. :)</p>
<p>Still, decisions are trickling in now from some top schools (and the decisions of other top schools have already been publicized). If you go to the chatboards of these schools you will see students, both admitted and rejected, posting their stats. Based on those alone, I would be hard-pressed to know why some were accepted and some rejected. Some applicants with lower GPAS and board scores than others were admitted. Some absolutely stellar students were rejected (but admitted at some equally excellent schools). I don't think we can conclude from these posts that ethnicity was the major factor. </p>
<p>Colleges seek to build diverse communities. If you followed the post about UCLA or prostitute college, you will find that it seems that a Caucasian student was able to impress the admission committee at UCSD with her passion for Russian. Some colleges may want to bolster certain academic programs; they may also want to have a full complement of rowers or hockey players; some years they want oboists, in other years they want French horns. If an applicant has those characteristics s/he will get in over someone with better "stats." We, on the outside, don't know the colleges' desiderata from year to year so we can only guess as to why applicants are accepted or rejected.</p>
<p>Diversity is a wonderful thing. Harvard rejects thousands of kids with perfect 800 SATs who are also valedictorians.</p>
<p>There is more to life than "stats" (altough you wouldn't necessarily know it, reading here for awhile). A class full of high stat kids could be very boring. It takes a full range of kids to make an intersting class composite, and yes, some of those kids will have brown skin with lower stats than your child. But maybe that brown skinned kid has actually overcome more difficulty than your child, and is actually as deserving, or more, of the change to attend said school.</p>
<p>It kind of amazes me, when I read things like this, to tell the truth.</p>
<p>I'm not really sure my orginal point got through.</p>
<p>I DO believe that URM's are a valuable part of a balanced college community.</p>
<p>My point is that it's easy to believe when you don't have to give anything up or incur any pain. It's harder when it starts to hit home.</p>
<p>Just one point. It's interesting to me that the posters who defend URM representation seem to have non URM kids who have been admitted to the prestigious schools they sought. They really didn't have to incur the pain, did they?</p>
<p>ps It really amazes you, Allmusic, when you read that people might not believe in URM quotas? That amazes me. Have you heard of the University of Michigan supreme court case??</p>
<p>I understood your original point and it makes sense. Some just think any comments made regarding URM's being admitted with (much) lower stats is just not acceptable. There is nothing wrong with just "thinking about this subject" or "discussing this subject." </p>
<p>Your comment about "incurring pain" is very true. It's easy to think "one way" when your child hasn't been made to suffer for it.</p>
<p>And while my original post was anecdotally based, I think everyone has to concede that published statistics prove that URM stats are lower that non-URM stats (see Gratz v Bollinger).</p>