Neither are your examples offensive. They just showed the absurdity and hopelessness of classifying people (or college applicants in this case) by their ethnicities. There’re too many ethnic groups (at least 650, according to a group of economists/social scientists from Harvard Institute of Economic Research, with many African countries and some Middle Eastern countries being the most ethnically diverse:
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I agree but that might make “things” harder to quantify. What these “things” are, I’m not really clear on.
As for legacy, I’m in favor of private universities doing whatever they like but losing their special (exempt) tax status.
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They appear to be based on pre-existing race classifications as people tended to see others as (and sometimes apply racial discrimination against).
Of course, formalizing such often informal subjective classifications for whatever purpose will encounter situations where definitions may not produce a matching result, or may not produce a result that fits the purpose.
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Frankly, I’m surprised that you’re surprised. I pegged you as a kindred spirit rabid fan of Division 1 cfb. We won’t be having any more program debates in light of this new information. 
Are you referring to legacy or affirmative action admits?
Which group is more likely to major in STEM vs ethic or gender studies?
I was referring to only those admits who clearly wouldn’t be admitted without substantial preferential treatment from all preferred groups, not any particular group. I’d specifically exclude all those who could be admitted on their own merits within each of these groups.
Um, yes. That is the key hole through which an enormous number of kids are being judged, including one from the south side of Chicago* raised by a single mother, not all that long ago in the scheme of things. Swarthmore could have scored their first presidential alumnus had they widened the keyhole a bit more, but Barack Obama eventually wound up at Columbia by applying the same prestige factors that drive many Asian families.
*actually Honolulu, HI.
Referring to whom?
You have to keep reading.
Barack Obama was born and mostly raised in Hawaii (with some years in Indonesia), not the south side of Chicago.
Point well taken.
Wasnt he raised from the age of 10 by his grandparents and attended prep school in Hawaii?
What is your point?
He eventually did end up there. But first he attended Occidental for two years. Admissions as a transfer student is a different beast than admissions as a first year students. He transferred to Columbia because it was a better place for him to continue pursuing his career in politics. That is also why he went to Harvard Law School, rather than to Northwestern.
I would also like to point out that when Obama did his undergrad, it wasn’t about “prestige”. Having an Ivy degree opened all sorts of doors, that were closed to all, and, for a mixed-race kid from Hawaii who wanted to get into politics, that was extremely important.
Moreover, the ingrown world of the Ivies was far worse then. If he wanted to attend a law school which opened further doors in politics, he needed to attend a school like Harvard, and it was easier being accepted to Harvard Law school from an Ivy League college than from a smaller LAC in California.
He was an outsider, trying to break in. These colleges provided him with that ability.
So the factors which drove his choice of transferring were very different than what is driving most applicants to colleges like Harvard today.
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Everyone who applies to an impossibly selective college has their rationale for doing so. Columbia chose Obama; Obama had nothing to lose by applying and by the time he did so as a transfer student, he was more than just “a mixed-race kid from Hawaii”. He had a resume and it matched what Columbia was looking for. The only thing that’s changed since Obama’s day IMHO is that there are more people than ever claiming or wishing to claim “outsider” status. Some of them may have Obama’s potential as a future politician, but not as many as the Ivies would like to see. And, yes. It is an entirely subjective process.
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My point was, and is, that Obama genuinely needed those Ivy League degrees in order to do what he wanted to do. It wasn’t that he perceived himself to be an outsider, he was an outsider.
In the 100th congress, in 1987, there were 22 Black congressmen (5%), and not a single Black senator. That was the world in which Obama was entering politics. The 117th Congress has 58 Black representatives (13.5%), and 4 Black Senators (4%). So a lot has changed.
Moreover, the admissions landscape in the late 1970s was not comparable to that of today either. The “Elite or Bust” mentality was not something that had taken over entire school districts. For most parents, even in the affluent communities that today are obsessed with getting their kids into “elite” colleges, the state flagship was prestigious enough in 1979. Unless a kid attended a private “elite” prep school, especially on the East Coast, Ivy League colleges were not the main target for the top achieving students.
Finally, the whole narrative of prestige driving Obama’s choices doesn’t match his life until Occidental. Moreover, acceptance rates to Columbia in 1979 were 47%. If he wanted to attend Columbia when he graduated high school, he could have been accepted. He initially chose to attend Occidental.
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First of all, Obama didn’t choose Occidental. It was the best school that he could get into at the time. Occidental chose him. Likewise, I think it’ safe to assume Columbia wasn’t the only college he applied to as a transfer student. None of this takes away from the fact that his two terms as president were historic.
Secondly, I don’t think we have a disagreement here. Mistakenly or not, every person who applies to an Ivy League college or university feels that their life depends upon the outcome in one way or another. There wouldn’t be so many lawsuits around so few places at stake otherwise. I see nothing incongruent about Obama’s desire to become a successful politician by attending an Ivy League college.
Attending the most selective college you can get in to may be a common strategy on these forums, but among the full population, most students choose which college to apply to and attend for other reasons. Obama mentioned he chose Occidental over other colleges he was accepted to primarily because of a girl. A quote is below. Also note that Occidental accepted the vast majority of applicants at the time.
“I had graduated without mishap, was accepted into several respectable schools, and settled on Occidental College in Los Angeles mainly because I’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawai’i with her family,”
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It’s hard to know what to make of Obama’s statements regarding Occidental over the years:
Even former U.S. President Barack Obama has dealt with college rejection. He had dreamt of attending Swarthmore College and said the rejection “really broke [his] heart.” He later attended Occidental College and then transferred to Columbia.
https://eab.com/insights/daily-briefing/enrollment/how-barack-obama-and-6-other-leaders-felt-after-a-college-rejection/
Ironically, had he attended Wesleyan (which would have likely accepted him) he would only have been a year ahead of Edward Kennedy, Jr '84, the son of one of his future mentors.
Well, I certainly didn’t mean to shut down the whole thread for the sake of an exegesis of Obama’s early life. The larger point I was trying to make was that Ivy league colleges are totally on the lookout for future influencers and that includes politicians, artists, performers as well as investment bankers and, if they make their admissions requirements too stats dependent, they can miss out, as Swarthmore did in the late seventies.
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