At a tour I went on of Northwestern recently, my dad asked if there were racial quotas imposed, knowing full well about affirmative actions etc.
The admissions rep responded there are no caps/quotas based on race, gender, location, major etc. How could this rep tell such an obvious lie? He must have thought we really had no idea about admissions to tell us this lie.
I thought this was funny, just wanted to share and hear your thoughts.
You call it an obvious lie because that fits your preconceived opinion which no one will ever be able to persuade you is wrong.
but isn’t it facts there are caps and quotas placed on race, gender, location etc? The admissions rep said students are admitted based on merit only, and if that was the case then the campus would have little URM and would be mostly Asian.
You may be thinking of “tipping points” that can influence admissions. These are not hard caps or quotas.
Colleges do not use caps or quotas. There is a difference between affirmative action and imposing rigid limits on the number of people who can be admitted from a certain ethnic group. However, if he said that people were admitted based only on merit, that is probably stretching the truth.
How does a school fill their freshman class? If we oversimplify, they need to fill their athletic teams (Northwestern competes in 19 D1 sports). Northwestern has a significant performing arts school that is audition based (Bienen) they need to fill that school. Plus they have an amazing journalism school (Medill) that needs highly qualified and interested applicants. And all of the other schools like Engineering, Professional Services, Arts and Sciences, etc.
What is the mission of the school? Do they actively attract first generation students? Is it popular internationally? Do they receive a lot of applications all across the country? Are there endowed scholarships geared to local students? Endowments geared to meeting financial need? Are there many legacy applicants? Is the home town / city / state / region diverse?
With holistic admissions and a large number of initiatives of importance, it is not surprising why schools like Northwestern are very diverse. And there are no quotas.
Schools get to define what they consider “meritorious”.
That may differ from what you consider meritorious, but they are not lying when they say that NU has no hard caps/quotas, which is true.
No college can admit they have hard quotas as that’s illegal and they probably don’t. However there are soft quotas, imo, on ORMs especially Asians and Asian males. So it’s not a number per se, more a general percentage of how they want to fill out the class, which is totally within their right.
Not all selective colleges do this btw, the STEM ones don’t - MIT, Cal Tech, e.g., and schools where AA was eliminated, the UCs come to mind. For sure the ivies and Stanford do. The thing to look for is whether the percentage of Asians stays about the same, then you’ll know the soft quota, for Northwestern it looks like the percent of Asians has been around 17-18% the past few years, so there is some soft quota going on there.
^ We’d need the number of applied vs. admitted for each group to conclude soft quota.
No college would release that unless forced to in court, even if that didn’t show a hard quota, if Asians know that their chance of getting in was 2% at HYPS or even less, those schools would get a less Asian apps, lowering their applications, increasing acceptance rates, which they don’t want as they’re in an arms race to see who can to 1% acceptance, 95% yield etc…
^ Right, so we have only opinion, not fact.
well the fact they don’t release that info should lead more credence to the opinion on the soft quota for Asians.
You’re assuming that the higher the test score, the more meritorious the student. People are more than test scores. You might think a 1600 SAT student is more deserving of admission than a 1400 SAT student, but colleges consider more than the results of standardized tests. Attitude matters too.
Asians are typically more academically driven. This is why there are a disproportionate amount in academic institutions.
I’m really not assuming anything. Attitude it a different topic, but academics matter the most to get into an academic institution.
Asians are more academically driven than URMs? Please provide links to the studies that prove this.
@theloniusmonk: MIT definitely takes race in to account. Caltech does not. But both take gender in to account. BTW, outside the STEM-heavy schools, it probably helps to be male rather than female if you are aiming for an elite (and especially a LAC) these days as there are more academically high-achieving girls than boys these days.