<p>I listed this under Harvard, but I am talking about the WHOLE Ivy League and other such schools. Why are minorities given such a biased, slanted admission to top schools? What I mean is why is it that if you have one black and one white student with the SAME AMOUNT of extracurricular activities, SAT scores, blah blah blah...why does the black guy get an automatic admission. I have nothing against any minority group at all, in fact, most of my friends are minorities. I just don't want my OWN diverse background to be taken out of account when I apply. I am white, but I come from a VERY DIVERSE situation and have been very unfortunate growing up (ever heard of "from homeless to Harvard"? yeah, I'm like her.) How can I make this very clear to admissions staff without coming off as if admissions to BIG NAME schools are all about who has the saddest story? Thanks, army guy.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying: Statistics](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/statistics.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/statistics.html)</p>
<p>Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you go to the above site, add up the percentages of ethnicities (minority enrollment) and subtract from 100 – you will find that whites account for 56% of Harvard’s class of 2015. How can that possibly mean minorities have an advantage in Ivy League admissions?</p>
<p>Whites are 66% of the population according to the 2010 census. That would mean that they are under represented. Plus whites have to be more unique and talented than a black or Hispanic. Asians have it about the same, more for some schools like mit and cal tech but less for lacs like Amherst and Williams.</p>
<p>College admissions is all about building a class. Think of a high school musical director who is choosing a cast for a show. Let’s use “Guys and Dolls” as the example. The director needs to cast so many males, so many females, so many sopranos, altos, etc. They need to cast for particular roles. </p>
<p>Admission to a top college works much the same way. In a very real sense, you aren’t competing against everyone in the applicant pool for admission; you’re competing against those who can play the same “role” or “roles.” So, at most top colleges, about 15% of the places will be reserved for athletes. If you’re not an athlete, those spots are not for you. Is it fair? No, but that’s how the system works. About 10% of the spots will go to internationals; if you are a US citizen, those spots aren’t for you. Fair? Not really, but that’s the reality. Some seats will go to underrepresented minorities (URM’s). Again, if you’re not a URM, that’s not a role you can play. </p>
<p>Blacks are not competing against whites or asians for the same spots – they are competing against each other for the roles each can play.</p>
<p>Very true ^^</p>
<p>armyguy: Privates like the Ivies attempt to answer your question every year. But it’s a zero sum game, wouldn’t you agree?</p>
<p>The Admissions deans get a constant flood of requests from alumni, faculty, big donors, the general public about increasing the number of admits from these groups:</p>
<p>Internationals
Chinese/Indian/Latin Americans/Europeans, etc.
US students
Canadians
Men
Women
Gay Lesbian Bisexual or Transgender
Athletes
Math/Science whizzes
Theater people
dancers
singers
musicians
Jews
Gentiles
Muslims and others
Disabled
Footballers
Softballers
Fencers
Swimmers
Rowers
Polo players
First Generation
Legacy
Northeasterners
Southwesterners</p>
<p>you get it? Pick the sub-category of your choice and I guarantee you someone has asked the Dean if they can’t have more next year.</p>
<p>Re-read what gibby says and masticate on it.</p>
<p>By the way, if you don’t like their policies, no one has a gun to your head asking you or your kin from applying. By all means, apply to the 85% of US colleges that take nothing like ethnicity or background for consideration in admissions. The 8 Ivies just don’t happen to be in that number.</p>
<p>Please consider the following as not a negative personal attack, but rather, to ask you to perhaps reconsider what you said in your post. </p>
<p>With all due respect, you are either being a bit disingenuous, or else you are really not aware of the true state of affairs.</p>
<p>The minorities on this sight themselves routinely give people their ethnic background when asking everyone to “chance” them, because they themselves know they are sought after. </p>
<p>Rightly or wrongly, it is well understood and generally accepted in this country that a reasonably qualified minority will have an advantage over a more qualified white person. The Supeme Court has considered this issue many times.</p>
<p>So you are denying something that simply is fact.</p>
<p>To conclude that because 56% of the people who get into Harvard are white shows that minorities don’t have an advantage is faulty reasoning. I say this because it may be that more than 56% of the top applicants are white. If 10% of the people accepted are asians, and asians only make up 5% of the population, your reasoning would seem to be that this shows that they are being treated more than equally, but if, for example, 1/3 of the best applicants are asians, then they ARE in fact being discriminated against. </p>
<p>I don’t know if you are being politically correct, or if you actually believe what you just wrote, but just ask any asian, and they will tell you that they are routinely rejected even though they are the most qualified applicants, because they are considered over-represented minorities.</p>
<p>Since blacks and hispanics are considered under-represented minorities, colleges go to great lengths to recruit them, and to admit them. </p>
<p>I am not saying that is even wrong, although I do have problems with Barack Obama’s children, or the children of upper middle class minorities, getting preferential admission treatment merely because of their race.</p>
<p>As the guy who wrote this post noted, there are white people in this country who also grew up in disadvantaged environments.</p>
<p>I once read that if it were done simply on merit, that UC Berkeley would be something like 80% asian, 15% jewish, 4% white, and 1% minorities. In our society, rightly or wrongly, such a situation is considered simply not acceptable. So we accept a minority who “only” has a 1400 SAT instead of a white or an asian who has a “1500” SAT, because we conclude that the minority person is “qualified enough”. This is poor solace to the white kid who does not get into his dream school, when he sees minority kids in his high school with lesser statistics in every way get into that same school.</p>
<p>Using the “Guys and Dolls” analogy: If you are a girl – a soprano – with the best voice in your grade and you try out for “Guys and Dolls”, do you expect to get cast as the lead, Nathan Detroit? No. Why, because that role is not for you; it is a role for a guy. Unless you are attending an all-girls school, you will never get cast as Nathan Detroit – not in a million years, no matter how much more talented you are than the guy they ended up casting. Were you ever seriously in the running for that role? No. Were you ever in competition with the other guys auditioning for that role – no. The same goes with college admissions. Top asians are in direct competition with each other for the spots (roles) reserved for asians. If you are white – just like the girl in the “Guys and Dolls” example – you are not in direct competition with asians applying to the same school. Ditto with blacks, hispanics etc.</p>
<p>I strongly disagree with you.</p>
<p>Why should an asian, born in America, be limited to those spots only reserved for asians?</p>
<p>And why should a jew, born in America, be limited to those spots only reserved for jews?</p>
<p>Would you find it acceptable, for example, that in professional football or professional basketball, that we say that 20% of the spots are reserved for whites, because they are under-represented. No. Because we take the most qualified person, regardless of race.</p>
<p>I guess that the United States of America has fallen to such a sorry state that such quota like views are considered mainstream.</p>
<p>Now, we have “group” rights, rather than individual rights.</p>
<p>
Easy. You write about how it has affected you, how you’ve overcome it, how you have managed to accomplish the things you have, and how you’ve grown from it. If none of this applies and you haven’t done any of this, then your challenges are no more worth writing about than the fact that I have green eyes would be worth writing about in an essay.</p>
<p>floridadad55: See: [The</a> Secret World of College Admissions](<a href=“http://ivysuccess.com/therecord013005.html]The”>http://ivysuccess.com/therecord013005.html)</p>
<p>
But this is sort of interesting, analogy-wise, because relatively widely-played, low-equipment sports like football and basketball might be said to be equally accessible to all Americans, regardless of their race, location, or income. The athletes who make it to the professional draft probably do approximate the most talented players who exist.</p>
<p>But for a sport like skiing – which is expensive to pursue and for which it is tremendously useful to live near a skiable mountain – it’s likely that the restriction of access to local and/or wealthy athletes means that the hypothetical best skiers aren’t exclusively contained in the ranks of the pros (or top amateurs). An organization that was interested in fielding the best possible US ski team might be well-served by recruiting potentially highly-talented young athletes from low-income families or from geographical areas far from ski resorts, then training them to be the best at skiing.</p>
<p>Admissions officers at places like Harvard believe that they are more like skiing than basketball – that some of the applicants who appear highly talented only appear that way because they have had unequal access to academic opportunities, and that some applicants whose profiles aren’t as impressive simply haven’t had the access they needed to shine. A place like Harvard isn’t just a museum of smart teenagers – it’s a training site, and its professors intend to craft the next generation of thinkers.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that “white” does not mean white americans, but also includes middle-easterners and Europeans, as well as people of other countries.</p>
<p>That should account for the rather large percentage of whites at universities.</p>
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<p>Pro sports is not blind to questions of race. There isn’t a set quota but many pro sports teams do in fact give a “tip” to athletic URMs (i.e. white guys) in making the final cuts and determining the final roster. They can’t afford to take race into much account among the stars and the starting line-up. Because those guys are going to determine whether they win or lose. But ever look down at the far end of the bench on an NBA team? That’s where white guys become increasingly common, because that’s where the athletic version of Affirmative Action gets put into practice. </p>
<p>Not that those white guys riding the bench are lousy players. Quite the contrary - all of them were fabulous stars on their college teams. But at the level of the NBA they are merely competent and not NBA star-quality. So when you are the head coach and you are making cuts to determine the final slots, and you have five black guys guys and one white guy all of pretty much equal talent competing for that last spot, are going to just pick randomly or are you going to look for “balance” or “diversity” and put a white face on the roster?</p>
<p>And when a white guy comes along who can actually star in the NBA the league goes nuts over him, much the same way colleges now go nuts over a black kid with top academic stats. I recall back in the 80s when Danny Ainge came out of college and had a choice between pro baseball and pro basketball, there were scouts and officials from the NBA, including African American ones, recruiting him hard, in fact BEGGING him, to sign with them “for the sake of the league.” Because they couldn’t afford to let that opportunity to put a white face in the starting line-up get away from them.</p>
<p>Thank You SeekingUni, for answering my ORIGINAL QUESTION!!! This doesn’t have to be a debate about sports and groups rights and crap. I am talking about college. Anyway, thanks everybody who responded, especially you SeekingUni.</p>
<p>floridadad55. “Rightly or wrongly, it is well understood and generally accepted in this country that a reasonably qualified minority will have an advantage over a more qualified white person.” That’s what I was talking about in the first place but good job making yourself look like an @$$.</p>
<p>
Glad I could help. 
</p>
<p>To gibby:
Well, in Shakespeare’s days guys can play a woman’s role. So why not?</p>
<p>If an “SameRace A” is competing with “SameRace B” and “SameRace B” is ‘better’ in a sense, and B gets in, ok.
But if “Race A” who had just lost to “Race B” is competing against “DifferentRace C”, and although A is better in a sense, but lost to C, wouldn’t that be unfair?</p>
<p>Also if 55% are already whites, wouldn’t it be unfair to other races as well? (Because they are saving spots for “whites only” 55% even, more than half…)</p>
<p>armyguy. 55% are whites, what else can you ask for? </p>
<p>Why should you be worried anyway since you seem like a “smart person”: QUOTE ARMYGUY “That’s what I was talking about in the first place but good job making yourself look like an @$$”</p>
<p>Don’t verbal-attack floridadad55, did he verbal-attack you?</p>
<p>I’m with Jimmykudo. Like what the heck do you mean minorities have more of an advantage if whites take up more than half of the school? I get what you’re saying, when you refer to the actual selection process but the end result (55% are white) shows no advantage lol</p>