<p>Was it just me, or was Princeton SCEA 2017 extremely high stat oriented? Just looking through the result thread, and comparing it to the Harvard/Yale/MIT results, it seemed mostly everyone had 2350+ and quite a few 2400s.</p>
<p>My theory to this is that most academically strong unhooked applicants (regular kids with no connections) view Princeton SCEA as a fairly high chance of acceptance (~20%), and perhaps think they will get in with greater frequency than at H or Y. As a result, the H and Y pools become statistically weaker, and thus an unequilibrium is established resulting in better-than-normal odds.</p>
<p>To apply SCEA to Harvard almost required a bit of naivet</p>
<p>It seemed to me that it was minorities or people with very high SATs like you said. But I also saw people with high SATs that were outright rejected.</p>
<p>@bregle: Why the “minorities OR people with very high SATs” reference? Guess what? Minorities (and athletes and legacies) can have very high SATs, too! And most often do when you are talking a school as selective as Princeton.</p>
<p>One sees this kind of false assumption all too often on CC. Also, you need to bear in mind that CC stats aren’t necessarily representative of the larger applicant pool so it’s tough to draw any kind of meaningful statistical conclusions from this sample alone.</p>
<p>I had a lackluster SAT score (2100) and pretty bad subject test scores (690 math 2 670 physics) and was still admitted as a white male. There’s always some luck involved in these types of things. </p>
<p>@valdog please calm down. While URM’s have just as much a capability of achievement as any other race, lets not be naive to the fact that many are admitted with lower stats in the name of diversity.</p>
<p>@ram0276: It’s a tough time for many so I appreciate you feeling a need to react. But any teenager who feels his/her eighteen years of wisdom render him/her qualified to issue directives to an adult to “calm down,” much less to pontificate on matters of diversity in elite college admissions? Hmmm. My forty+ years allow me to remain eminently calm. Actually, I am sitting here with a glass of wine by the fire and Christmas tree, snow falling, confident that my kid’s college quest will ultimately work out without driving ourselves into a rabid frenzy or making inflammatory assumptions about “minorities” in the context of an Ivy League school’s HOLISTIC application review. </p>
<p>My original point remains valid and appropriate. Bregle, intentionally or not, threw down a blatant “either/or” presumption about “minorities” that was naive and potentially offensive whether or not we agree that minorities “are often admitted with lower stats.” If you review the toxic Columbia and Harvard threads filled with bitter, entitled kids blaming minorities for their deferrals and rejections (and failing to appreciate what a HOLISTIC review means, i.e., stats aren’t everything), you’ll see that it’s probably not a bad idea to nip such divisive, racist bits in the bud straight away. Anyhow, good luck with your apps, ram0276. It all really does work out in the end.</p>
<p>I will not suggest that minorities who are accepted do not have sufficient merit. However, I would suggest that “holistically”, but subtracting race, the applications of minority accepted students are often nearly identical too, and/or subjectively worse than white/asian students accepted. It seems naive to suggest that race doesn’t play a part.</p>
<p>Even the top schools have to compromise at least on their testing standards to get a critical mass of AA’s to attend because only a few hundred achieve high SAT scores that are typical of the non-hooked applicants who are admitted to these schools. </p>
<p>From the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:</p>
<p>“If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation’s most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Nationwide, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT. Therefore, black students made up 0.7 percent of the test takers who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1.2 percent of all test takers who scored 750 or above on the verbal section.”</p>
<p>@Valdog Yes I made a generalization and I’m sorry, I should clarify. There are minorities with high SAT scores but they are much less common. Being minorities as it is, there aren’t many of them among the low percentage of people who score between 2300 and 2400 on the SAT. </p>
<p>I am not the only one who has recognized a trend in the admitted applicants. I know that the holistic admissions process considers all aspects of an application, but I personally do not believe that race should be one of those aspects.</p>
<p>You might think that I am a racist, which I am not, but I do think it is unfair that colleges would consider race as part of your college application. As a nation, America seems to have become so focused on creating diversity that we have become even more aware of the differences between us.</p>
<p>Again, I apologize if I offended anyone. I hope this helps to clarify my point.</p>
<p>Whenever I see threads like this I think to myself:
Everyone of you great applicants completed these applications knowing the odds and rules of the game. “For this is the business you chose”</p>
<p>Saying that URM applicants are objectively weaker on average than white/asian applicants is not racist. What IS racist is the discrimination against Asian American applicants through affirmative action policies.</p>
<p>Ok, assume affirmative action is justified. Would it not be expected to negatively affect whites and asians proportionally the same?</p>
<p>This is a PRINCETON (biased in the OTHER direction) study demonstrating that eliminating affirmative action would only benefit asian applicants. Because guess what, whites are NOT harmed by affirmative action. Why? Because **** Asian Americans. They’re squinty-eyed perpetual foreigners. Yeah, let’s fight for more blacks and hispanics in our schools but no way are we going to let this hurt OUR white kids.</p>
<p>Proponents of affirmative action, get your heads out of the ground. I don’t care if it’s a logical fallacy: Your extreme hypocrisy is laughable and damages your argument beyond repair. By seeking to reverse the discrimination created by white privilege and stereotype threat , you are just perpetuating more racism.</p>
<p>See the NY Times OpEd piece today about how Asians are the new Jews…back in the 20’s, there were quotas for the number of Jews at each Ivy, and if you were in the wrong high school class, and Jewish, you were out of luck and if you were from NYC you went to CUNY. That era also was the advent of the interview concept. It was believed that an interview could help screen out the “obviously Jewish” candidate based on appearances and perceived ethnic characteristics.</p>
<p>Also, I apologize for telling you to “calm down.” Unfortunately, in a tragic turn of events I lost my clairvoyant powers. And so, I was unable to tell what age you are. The vivid imagery of you drinking wine was heartwarming, by the way. Are you a writer?</p>
<p>I am not making inflammatory comments of Affirmative Action. I’m simply pointing out my own views. Perhaps, I could have vocalized them in a less derogatory way. Nonetheless, I’m simply stating that I am not an advocate of affirmative action. College admissions should solely be meritocracies. Holistic approaches are great, but race is not something to be considered. Everyone should he judged based upon the environment they came from. Obviously, a elite prep school’s top student will overtake an inner city valedictorian quite quickly. However, the fact that the inner city valedictorian managed to overcome adversity should be the basis of his/her acceptance.</p>
<p>You can’t say that there’s discrimination through AA.</p>
<p>Those who are accepted into these top tier institutions have earned their place. Test scores are not everything my friend, if you want to determine acceptances by scores you don’t know what college admissions is.</p>
<p>you seem pretty heated tho, you need to chill</p>
<p>This thread is one of the big reasons I stayed away from this site for so long. Some people just don’t get that being a minority isn’t a one-way ticket into an Ivy League school, just like getting a 2300+ isn’t either.
I’m sorry if you’re Caucasian or Asian and didn’t get accepted, but that probably has nothing to do with Affirmative Action and everything to do with the fact that Princeton probably didn’t see you as a good fit for their school.</p>
<p>Well we found someone who is a minority! It’s not a guaranteed ticket, but it sure as hell makes it easier. Hopefully the Supreme Court will at least eliminate it for public schools (Fischer vs Texas) soon. Maybe we can see a stop to this discrimination. Also, if you look at dropout rates of top schools, it is much higher among minorities. Is that maybe because they got in despite being less qualified? Just postulating here.</p>