<p>Great program going on right now on NPR re admissions.</p>
<p>Guest made an interesting statement about the Ivies. He said that athletes, legacies and under represented minorities comprise 50% of admissions. Wow.</p>
<p>I guess that means that admit rates for the large majority of applicants is one-half of the stated rates.</p>
<p>Ouch.</p>
<p>No, that's not necessarily the case. You don' t know what proportion of applicants are non-athletes, non-legacies, and non-URMs. You don't know if they make up a "large majority" of applicants, as you're assuming. You'd have to know the proportion to make any sort of statement about the admit rates for that group.</p>
<p>Intuitively, wouldn't you think that athletes, legacies and URM's are a smaller pool? Do you really think that there would be more outside that group than inside that group?</p>
<p>Which show on NPR aired this? Morning Edition? Talk of the Nation?</p>
<p>Diane Rheem (sp?)</p>
<p>I think the legacy pool is probably sizable.</p>
<p>However we speculate on the size, we can test your assumptions using numbers.</p>
<p>Let's say out of 1000 applicants, 100 are admitted (this is a for-example, not real numbers, but it's close to Harvard's actual ratio).</p>
<p>From the radio program you cited, we know that 50 of those 100 admits are from the "ALM" pool (for Athletes, Legacies, Minorities of special interest).</p>
<p>If the pool was split 50-50 ALM/Others, they have exactly the same admit ratio: 50/500, or 1/10 on both sides (10% admit rate).</p>
<p>If the split was 300/700, ALMs would have an admit rate of 16.7% and Others would have a rate of 7.1%.</p>
<p>if the split was 200/800, ALMs would have a 25% admit rate, and Others would have a 6.3% rate. </p>
<p>As you can see, the ALM pool would to be pretty small before the admit ratio for the Others would be cut in half as you've stated. In fact, I think the ALMs would have to be admitted at a 100% take rate to halve the admit ratio for others (and you still wouldn't quite make it). Assume that a mere 5% of those 1000 applicants were ALMs. Their take rate would be 100%, and the admit rate for the other 950 would be 5.3%. Almost, but not quite, halved.</p>
<p>Good example. </p>
<p>I think you're 200/800 example is probably a good one.</p>
<p>So admit rates, in that example, go from 10% to 6.3%. </p>
<p>Although not one-half, still pretty depressing.</p>