<p>Whatever, canuckguy. If it makes you feel better, I have no general impression of you other than that you’re a poster on CC whose screen name is canuckguy. As for not fitting into some stereotype you have of a math major - well, I got that in college too, when I was assumed by a few people not to be a “serious” student because I wore makeup, dressed attractively in the fashions of the day, was in a sorority and had a boyfriend. Their problem, not mine. Expand your horizons.</p>
<p>"“There are many ways to look at the data. I am looking at within group data…”"</p>
<p>You may want to read the article more closely. The authors have already eliminated several factors.</p>
<p>StillGreen is correct. Here is an easier read:</p>
<p>[How</a> Effective Is Affirmative Action? - Boston.com](<a href=“http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-18/bostonglobe/30639995_1_affirmative-action-students-advance-african-american]How”>http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-18/bostonglobe/30639995_1_affirmative-action-students-advance-african-american)</p>
<p>I think this is the crux of what we are talking about, jym626:</p>
<p>“In part, students are catching up simply because the grade distribution tends to contract as students advance – upper-level courses for juniors and seniors tend to have narrower grade distributions than introductory ones.”</p>
<p>Personally, I am more focused on the following, as far as this thread is concerned:</p>
<p>“Legacy students, they find, tend to make the same shift: They are often less prepared than their non-legacy peers, and then catch up to them by making a similar shift toward majors with higher grades.”</p>
<p>There were students in Duke, apparently, that also mis-interpreted the data. Aren’t the Duke students suppose to be first rate?</p>
<p>Sorry for the dig, can’t help it.</p>
<p>To clarify, agreed that the AA students didn’t “catch up” compared to the caucasian students when the majors were covaried out. That was poor phrasiology on my part. The interesting part of the graph, IMO is the improvement within the AA group over the 4 years, though the # of students in the group did drop over the 4 years. I suspect that weed out also explains some of the variance.</p>
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<p>Canuckguy, it really isn’t respectful to assess another member of CC right ON the forum. Think what you will of another poster but keep it to yourself or share it off forum. I really don’t wish to read what you think of Pizzagirl on the forum. And if she says she was a math major, she WAS a math major. Geez. </p>
<p>Carry on…</p>
<p>"“my prototype of a math major is one who tends to be male, fastidious in analysis, and cautious in diction.”"</p>
<p>Hi CG, you do have to stir up some trouble? 
Let’s just say that I have the same impression…</p>
<p>
The reality is that if you use grades, and especially standardized test scores, as an important element of your holistic review, you simply won’t have very many URMs in the class if you don’t consider race. You can appear to exclude race by using other characteristics that are proxies for race, but it’s really the same thing. Whatever the reason for this, it’s a fact–there simply aren’t enough high-scoring URMs to go around. Note: I fully approve of AA, but I don’t believe in pretending that it doesn’t result in the admission of URMs who otherwise wouldn’t be admitted, solely on the basis of race. It does.</p>
<p>
We have friends who visited us recently both got PhDs. from Caltech in biology, but both made the deliberate choice to focus more on teaching than research. They’ve been moving from institution to institution down the prestige ladder. I can’t remember the name of the college they are at now. But if you aren’t doing research in the field going to the conferences etc. it is very hard to keep up with current research. They said that after the first year they simply had no idea what their biology major son was doing any more. It does indicate that while they may have degrees from a fancy institution, that if you don’t use it you lose it. I really don’t think they have as much to offer now as they did when their degrees were freshly minted.</p>
<p>Yes, Canuckguy and Stillgreen, it’s quite evident to me that you deal in stereotypes. It’s a little appalling that in the year 2012, you’re still working under a stereotype that someone who majored in math must be male, but whatever. I’ve done ok for myself.</p>
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<p>Right. This is only a “problem,” though, for the unsophisticated people who believe that only 8 or so universities in the country are worthy of attending and that it’s some great injustice against humanity if the kid “only” gets into Duke instead of Yale or whatever. Such people aren’t really worth the time of day, as their thinking is shallow, narrow, constrained and completely at odds with reality, and their perceptions of what opportunities abound in this country are completely outdated.</p>
<p>It’s a pretty standard feature of most standardized tests that they favor those who are in the majority population, both in subject matter and in language. Also, there is a bump in test scores based on socioeconomic class, partially due to better prep work and partially due to better education and partially due to the fact that most standardized tests are standardized to test a certain cultural perspective as well as IQ.</p>
<p>So, I’m not sure saying someone was admitted solely based on race is a fair assessment. It’s true that schools prefer to have a diversity representative, to some extent, of the population of the united states. Some people are admitted soley because they are from Alaska. I’m just not sure you can boil it down to something that simplisitic, honestly.</p>
<p>If you are from an overrepresented area of the country, there are parts of the country where you are not overrepresented, for one reason or another, in their honors program. Many of these parts of the country have excellent employment prospects once school is over, as well.</p>
<p>broaden your horizons. It’s a huge country.</p>
<p>
Obviously, you can’t say it about any specific person, because there is a range of scores among all groups. But the numbers make it pretty clear to me that if the top schools didn’t consider URM status to be a significant factor in favor of admissions, they would have significantly fewer URMs. This may be true of people from Alaska as well–it’s certainly true of recruited athletes. Surely nobody would argue that all–or even most–of the recruited athletes at Ivies would have gained admission without their athletic abilities? Some of them would, just as some percentage of URMs (or Alaskans) would have gotten in anyway. But I don’t think we should pretend that certain characteristics–like being a recruitable athlete, or a URM, or an extremely rich person–don’t matter. They matter a lot. It’s fine with me that they matter.</p>
<p>I don’t want to turn this into more of a discussion of affirmative action than it is already, but I’ll repeat something I wrote about years ago that is relevant to this discussion. One of my son’s close high school friends had almost exactly the same grades – their GPAs and class ranks were microns apart, and I think they only had two classes different from one another in their last two years of high school – and very similar SATs – my kid had somewhat higher CR and writing scores. But there were huge differences underlying those similarities. My kid came from an affluent, hyper-educated family. He was (is) very smart, very verbal, and something of a “leader”, but basically what he was doing was living up to expectations with tons of support for that. It would have been easy to find 50 fundamentally similar Jewish kids in his age cohort in our metropolitan area, and indeed he knew lots of them. The friend was almost certainly the highest-performing Hispanic high school student in the region. His parents were undocumented; no one in his family had even thought of college; there was real hardship to keep him in school rather than working to help support his family. He lived in a community were, practically speaking, there was no support for academic achievement or higher education. Just waking up and getting to school every day required independence and strength of character, much less holding a single-digit class rank at a competitive high school.</p>
<p>The two kids had almost the same numbers, but the difference in their actual achievements was staggering. Affirmative action or not, I can’t believe anyone would have seen them as interchangeable. I thought (and think) the friend was a much better candidate for super-selective colleges than my son.</p>
<p>Neither got into Harvard, by the way.</p>
<p>
I’m not insinuating anything. I’m stating as a fact: Quality researcher doesn’t imply quality instructor and vice versa. Quality researcher does not imply quality writer. Quality instructor does not imply quality mentor. These qualities are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they always, or even mostly, found to go hand in hand.</p>
<p>Pizza, it’s actually an overstatement to say that it’s only a problem with regard to the Ivy League. If you look at law school admissions the impact of AA is even more pronounced. With good social engineering at its core- many groups in the country are “under-served” in their access to legal representation, and therefore the law schools see it as part of their mission to help address that by encouraging members of these groups to enroll in law school. Nobody is arguing that you have to be a homeless person in order to represent a homeless person (or a group of homeless people) in court… but helping people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds to become lawyers is believed to be part of the process.</p>
<p>Since law school admissions are far less 'holistic" and much more scores and GPA driven at the top schools, the impact of the “finger on the scale” is easier to tease out.</p>
<p>Personally I think this is a good thing for society and am not troubled in the slightest that a white Anglo Saxon male from Winnetka with a 174 LSAT score can’t get into Yale Law school but a black female from the South Side of Chicago with a 172 can… but that’s me.</p>
<h1>310 PG wrote
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<p>my point:</p>
<p>Annasdad argues the ivies are not excellent institutions of learning (based on Deresiewicz and now the Harvard cheating scandal) and that a motivated student can get an excellent education many places (based on the Pascarella and Terenzini study).</p>
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<p>You argue a student should just get over it if they don’t win the ivy lottery because there are many schools where someone can get a great education. It’s not all about the elites and that it isn’t valid to criticize admissions decisions. (I hope that is a correct characterization)</p>
<p>Some very focused potential scholars, who are interested in a particular field will definitely receive an educational advantage attending an elite college. It does matter they have the opportunity to study with certain professors. (though not suggesting all those professors are at ivy schools) For our generation it was possible to attend almost any college and end up a professor. I do not believe it is possible today. If you hope to be a mainstream scholar in the academy, undergraduate opportunities are going to make or break that dream. imho</p>
<p>So I disagree with annasdad because he is dealing with very broad generalizations. For some students an ivy will be a profoundly intellectual experience and he refuses to acknowledge that fact (maybe he just doesn’t believe it) and because in my way- too-much time spent on this board it seems to me the most useful discussions are helping specific students find the right school, the right fit… not slamming a whole category of schools as universally overrated and anti-intellectual. Where exactly are all the intellectuals hanging out anyway? I would love to hear annasdad’s answer. Maybe not in the university at all?</p>
<p>And I question your position that it isn’t that important a potential scholar is rejected from a school with the best opportunities for that particular student and they should just quit whining.</p>
<p>Does any of this matter? Is society enriched by physicists or art historians? Is there a difference between a student wanting to attend a very competitive school which, coincidentally, has the very best art history or physics department or wanting to attend a very competitive school because it attracts IB, wall street, business recruiters? I guess we are talking about impact of perceived prestige in both cases. Or maybe not?</p>
<p>mathmom #328 makes an excellent point there may be significantly different opportunities available to students based on professorial background. </p>
<p>I would really like to read some more of QuantMech’s views on this. Maybe a post has gone up while I’m writing. :)</p>
<p>ALH- I think part of Pizza’s worldview (which I don’t disagree with) is that if a student does not get into MIT or Caltech, is his or her future compromised by attending CMU or JHU or Harvey Mudd? I think most posters (but not all) would agree that studying math at University of New Haven is qualitatively different than studying math at MIT. Different experience, different professors, different peer group, and for sure different outcomes in terms of where math majors at UNH end up vs. where math majors at MIT end up (both employment, grad school, or both.) But it’s less clear that those differences are substantial (they may be subtle but not substantial) in the case of MIT vs CMU. (not to pick on any single school but I think you get my point.)</p>
<p>And of course, there are lots of people who would argue (and they’d have data on their side) that Berkeley or Michigan or Illinois or Virginia offer way more to a particular student in the way of intellectual opportunities than some colleges who are considered “more prestigious” in the popular view. </p>
<p>But what’s so ironic about all of this is that the number of kids who really care about the substantive differences between studying Art History at Swarthmore vs Williams is tiny in the real world. And the number of parents who understand that majoring in math at Rice is probably a better launch pad than majoring in math at U Penn is equally tiny. And nobody likes to concede that a mechanical engineer at U Missouri Rolla (I know they’ve changed their name) is likely to be better trained than a mechanical engineer from at least a dozen small universities which are considered “more prestigious” in the popular view.</p>
<p>And at the end of the day- given how few kids end up studying what they think they’ll study, is this even a useful way to think about picking a college???</p>
<p>But I would argue that yes it matters; physicists matter, art historians matter, political scientists matter, it all matters. And despite what some posters claim- in many cases (not all, but many) the “perceived prestige” of some universities is actually born out in fact. Better resources. More professors. More access to whatever is new and cutting edge in the field, and more access to the “repository of knowledge” whether it’s an archive, a library or dozens of libraries, museums, etc. I know college kids who graduate with degrees in history who have never once used an original document to write a paper. Not once. No professor ever said, "Walk into our XYZ archive or library and ask for the Civil War librarian. Pick a letter from a soldier to his mom and then your assignment is… " whatever. I know college kids who graduate with degrees in the sciences whose lab experience consists of replicating a process that someone else has designed and then documenting what happens in a report. That’s not science, that’s compiling a cookbook.</p>
<p>And so on. Rant over. Yes it matters, but it doesn’t matter to everyone and I guess that’s fine too.</p>
<p>Re: #309 and <a href=“http://seaphe.org/pdf/whathappensafter.pdf[/url]”>http://seaphe.org/pdf/whathappensafter.pdf</a></p>
<p>That does not contradict #308, since the study is about URMs at an elite highly selective university (Duke).</p>
<p>Presumably, Duke has the luxury of being able to select from a pool of very highly qualified URMs applying, even if they may be slightly less highly qualified on average than the pool of non-URMs applying. That is not a luxury that the moderately and less selective state universities that educate most college students have, since they set their admission standards based on levels indicating whether the student is college-ready at all (e.g. 2.5 HS GPA / 900 SAT CR+M for freshmen and 2.0 GPA for junior transfers to get into the least selective state universities in California). At such universities, URMs are URMs because not enough have become college-ready at high school graduation, or transfer-ready after community college; affirmative action in the college admissions process merely redistributes those URMs who are college-ready to different colleges.</p>
<p>I think quality of faculty, quality of student body, and prestige are all part of a feedback loop.</p>
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<p>If they don’t “get over it” what exactly do you propose they do? Specifically.</p>