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<p>Somebody who makes catty comments like “this guy is mathematically inept” should at least get the math right in his own postings. </p>
<p>Optimality and tradeoffs not only have nothing to do with it, but including them would tend to defeat the possibility of a computerized matching system.</p>
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<p>Please tell us that you have a verifiable source for that! No school publishes that information unless compelled to in the discovery phase of a discrimination lawsuit (e.g., Michigan). </p>
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<p>Davidson may also be applying a similar level of affirmative effort to a different applicant pool and with different amounts of money to spend. The population of qualified AA candidates (meaning, within X standard deviations of the average non-AA admit) thins as you drop down the college ranking food chain, and Davidson is lower on that scale than Swarthmore. Soliciting more applications doesn’t necessarily get around this problem. There are only so many black engineering students to go around and Swarthmore took the ones that weren’t already grabbed by Amherst from the leftovers of Brown which took what MIT and Harvard didn’t enroll.</p>
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<p>Sometimes, they just let something slip. In this case, Swarthmore’s admissions dean gave the ethnic breakdown of applications received then a month later in a subsequent press release, the number accepted. The acceptance rates for both Asian Americans and African Americans was in the mid 30% range at a time when the overall acceptance rate was around 24%.</p>
<p>I agree, it is unusual to see that kind of information. I was a little surprised the Asian American rate was so high and the African American rate so low. Both are testiment to the strength of Swarthmore’s applicant pool. I don’t think Swarthmore gives Asian Americans a preference. Instead, it seems the applicants are incredibly strong and they don’t impose a cap like many schools seem to do. The affirmative preference for African Americans was really small, especially considering that Swarthmore enrolls a high percentage. The idea that every qualified African American applying to these elite schools gets accepted is simply not true. Again, a strong applicant pool.</p>
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<p>I’m not buying that. The African American population of N Carolina and the surrounding states is huge. UNC-Chapel Hill has no trouble enrolling African Americans. They’ve equalled Swarthmore’s high water mark of enrolling 12% of a freshman class African American – the highest number ever for an elite university and a liberal arts college. I see no evidence that Davidson has tried very hard.</p>
<p>Sure the applicant pool is strong enough that nobody is guaranteed admission. But the depth of the pool differs between groups, and brain-drain effects play a role. There are also proportionally fewer AA candidates than whites interested in LAC. If higher-ranked, wealthier, or otherwise advantaged schools are going all out to enroll that population, it leaves less on the table for those further down the food chain, in a way that can end up being incompatible with even the kind of AA that athletes receive (“no more than one standard deviation less qualified”).</p>
<p>Swarthmore counts Asian-Americans as “students of color”, which is a number they promote as part of their diversity angle. They will break it down later, but it does help imply they are doing more for under-represented minorities, when in reality a substantial numbers are high-achieving Asians.</p>