<p>I would quibble about two things with the above post.</p>
<p>First, my hunch is that underrepresented minorities don't all come from fancy private schools. Some are probably affluent enough to have gone to such schools (where they spent most of their schooling as one of a handful of 'others,' which is not a particularly enviable position) while another, less prosperous, group was recruited to these private schools because of exceptional promise. I don't have the data, but my hunch is that the bulk of URM's are from public school. The above inference is similar to the one that assumes incorrectly that the vast majority of Duke students attended elite prep schools--and that just ain't so. The underlying assumption is that students at these private schools have a cake walk to get into Duke, and by extension, a cake walk into a prosperous future. My impression of the most 'elite' private schools is that they primarily offer the opportunity get exposed to intense academic pressure at a young age, and, if you don't wriggle into the top half of your class, you may end up at a LESS elite college than you would have if you'd attended the local public school.</p>
<p>A second concern relates to the number of special admits. While Duke does seek out power forwards, rich people, etc., it should be underlined that you have to be among the top 5 power forwards in the country to gain acceptance and, as for money, your parents would have to be really, really rich for it to make a substantive difference. Being a starter on your basketball team (and being second-team all conference) will help your application a bit, while being the child of prosperous parents is probably less helpful than being the child of parents who didn't go to college. Anyway, they are looking for special talents, geographical diversity, and the maintenance of relationships with certain high schools, but it's not so programmed that the student doesn't make most of the difference. And, as for whether or not admissions offficers have taken classes in statistics, etc., well, all I can say is that they can take all the classes they want, but they are still dealing with applications turned in by teenagers, and that their predictions for future success are unlikely to ever be more than fairly good.</p>