<p>cobrat, many of us senior members have read your posts for a long time and have ceased to put stock in them. You never fail to have NUMEROUS acquaintances and family members (eg, all your cousins posters have joked about) whose viewpoints and experiences coincidentally concur exactly with your own. Nor is there any topic about which you or said acquaintances and cousins have no opinion or related experience. It’s getting really old, especially when your anecdotal posts insult entire groups of people. </p>
<p>That said, if those profs you know really exist, then they are rude and unprofessional to talk negatively about their students to anyone, and especially to another student. Furthermore, one must always consider and question the personal bias of those making such indictments, which is impossible for us to do when the experiences are not even those of the actual person posting. Are these profs still smarting from some juvenile jock vs. nerd angst? I do recall that on another athlete-bashing thread, a poster who is actually a professor himself reported that in his experience, the athlete students were generally better organized and were no more deficient than the general student population. And if these profs were from Yale, well the culture there is more anti-athlete from the top down than at other elite schools, and should be viewed in the context of being more of an anomaly than a rule.</p>
<p>Reviewers have been divided about the conclusions and the methodology. For instance, Espenshade had to correct several times the faulty interpretations of his findings as people with specific agendas (think discrimination fanboys) misrepresented the nature of his conclusions. </p>
<p>The data is close to 20 years old (1997) and only provided insights in a small component of the admission files at 30 (afaik) undisclosed colleges. </p>
<p>Espenshade admitted he did NOT have access to what he called “soft variables,” like extracurriculars and teacher recommendations: The data he had is only part of the data that admission deans have access to. He also admitted that “It’s kind of hard to know how and to what extent things might have changed in the meantime"</p>
<p>“Harvard’s acceptance rate for legacies has hovered around 30 percent—more than four times the regular admission rate—in recent admissions cycles, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 told The Crimson in an interview this week.”- From the Crimson, May 11,2011</p>
<p>“We did a paper that found that if you are an athlete, you have 4.2 times the likelihood of admission as a nonathlete,” - Quote from Thomas Espenshade, New York Times article January 8, 2011</p>
<p>“A new study of admissions at 30 highly selective colleges found that legacy applicants get a big advantage over those with no family connections to the institution — but the benefit is far greater for those with a parent who earned an undergraduate degree at the college than for those with other family connections.
According to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants.” same New York Times article January 8, 2011</p>
<p>The data from the Espenshade study is from 1997, the data from the Hurwitz study is from 2007 and the comments from dean Fitzsimmons is from 2011 data (after reading the method section in the Espenshade study I believe he used data from Ivy League schools). The data from the Espenshade study show that for the 1997 data the SAT bonus for recruited athletes and legacy applicants were the same, which means in 1997 the “4.2 times the likelihood of admission” would also apply to legacy applicants. This is similar to recent Harvard legacy applicants. Because of the way the Ivy League calculates the Academic Index for recruited athletes ( which was started in 1985) the SAT bonus would be expected to stay fairly constant over time, which means the multiplier for the likelihood for admission should also stay constant.</p>
<p>When one takes into account the most recent published papers and news articles one can still conclude that the academic performance for recruited athletes at elite colleges would be the same as legacy admits.</p>
<p>In addition to the age of the data used by Espenshade, the way he defines the advantages numerically is questionable. But, even it were beyond criticism, why would the conclusions raise many eyebrows? </p>
<p>Consider that athletes and legacies often apply in the early rounds, how do their numbers compare to the overall REA or RD pool? How large is the REA bonus at Harvard? </p>
<p>Consider that legacies bring an intimate knowledge of the school and evident intent to attend, why is it surprising they are given benefits by adcoms? Again and again, the soft ingredients are just as important than SAT scores! The strict focus on scores by Espenshade is exactly why his findings are misleading. </p>
<p>And most importantly, if his findings were true and verifiable, they would fall TREMENDOUSLY short of providing an indictment of wrongdoing, and especially not one of discrimination. </p>
<p>A possible analogy would be to compile the IQ scores of employees and define their odds of hiring without consider experience and personal qualities. </p>
<p>I don’t think Swimkidsdad is quite right about the Academic Index, either. At least for football, there isn’t a single floor–rather there are several bands with different numbers of permissible recruits, based on number of standard deviations difference from the average Academic Index. The structure does encourage the schools to look for students who have both playing ability and stats, because they can thus avoid using up the slots for low-index students. Note that the whole purpose of the Academic Index is to restrain any of the Ivy League schools from recruiting too many weak students in order to bolster sports performance.</p>
<p>Look, it was simply my observation as an Ivy League student (and my kids have the same observation) that the range of academic abilities was wider among recruited athletes than among other categories of students. This is not surprising. Athletes have a talent that is very valuable to the university, and that is not necessarily linked to academic ability. (As I noted, the same could be true of development cases, but there just aren’t that many of them.)</p>
<p>It is much easier to hide one’s legacy status than one’s athletic status. Odds are there was one legacy who asked a stupid question in a gut class, but slid by without providing the fodder to perpetuate a “dumb legacy” stereotype. </p>
<p>I can assure you there IS a “dumb legacy” stereotype widely held not only by many private elite college students, but also by some of the older faculty who had them as students in class.* </p>
<p>Sometimes, other rival Ivy college students would use this factor as a way to taunt other rival Ivy colleges. </p>
<p>One Ivy which comes for a notable amount of these types of taunts/ribbing* from their Ivy rivals was once notorious for having the highest numbers of scions of southern planters during the antebellum and located in the same state which a singer known for songs like “41 shots” and “Born In The U.S.A.” calls home. </p>
<p>:)</p>
<ul>
<li>Understandable considering some were old enough to be undergrad classmates of or know more senior faculty in their departments who had students like a recent past POTUS well known for never being seen at the library and for being proud to be living proof even a C/C- average student can make it as Prez.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>** MIT students especially seem to relish this, especially considering the widespread perceptions MIT doesn’t take legacy status into consideration for admission purposes. I also recalled an MIT alum and CC parent in a past thread who stated as much and was so miffed when his/her child was rejected that he/she vowed to stop further financial or alum support for his/her alma mater. </p>
<p>I think it’s important to make a distinction between intelligence and academic preparation or preparedness. First, the Ivy feeder schools of yore were private, preparatory high schools. Isn’t it likely that to in order to find talented athletes in some sports like track or football they had to expand their net to public school students from schools on a different academic level than Exeter? Heck, in the Ivy town near me, none of the private schools even have a track or field track teams. Cross country maybe, but not track. Even four years ago when D attended an HYPS accepted student luncheon in our region, the only public school kids present were athletes. The rest of the accepted students all hailed from private and parochial schools and were obviously wealthier. Secondly, when a college student is spending long hours each day in sports practice, missing class to travel for games, and is physically tired from the activity and needs more sleep than the non-athlete, that student just may have less time to study and thus may be more prone to ask “stupid” questions.<br>
Don’t infer from that he’s stupid. Just tired and over-worked and trying to hold on at a tough school. </p>
<p>Also, there can be a rather significant cultural gap between a public school athlete from a blue collar town and the average HYPS student. An athlete friend of D’s who fits that SE description visited us over winter break. We went to the theater one evening and learned that the student had never in his life before then seen a production of “A Christmas Carol,” or the “Nutcracker,” which was very surprising to us and we are solidly middle class. So one can imagine how certain cultural references made in a classroom would not be understood by some students, and could make then seem dumb. </p>
<p>An immigrant family I suppose, but I think he went to a highly competitive high school, such as one of the magnet publics in NYC. That is not at all the same as an urban high school in a gang neighborhood in Chicago or Camden, where the education is abysmal and the graduation rate is extremely low.</p>
<p>Arguably a very large one with lots of cousins! As far as the high school goes, hard to miss that it is one famously skipped by Princeton’s Hargadon in terms of recruiting of athletes and legacies. A fact that permeates Cobrat’s positions and, seemingly, endless dialogues. </p>
<p>Cobrat’s high school and almost all of the top NYC high schools has a large majority of kids from immigrant Chinese or South Asian families. Not very attuned to “cultural references.” (My daughter went to another of those schools as well as to elementary school in Chinatown, with 60 percent Asian kids, 60 percent free-reduced-price-lunch kids, many families where English wasn’t spoken at home.)</p>
<p>Edited to add that the Asian enrollment at NYC public schools is under 20 percent, and the great majority of the kids or parents are first-generation and poor. Not so much at Stuy which is an outlier, maybe 30-40 percent free lunch eligible, but definitely at Brooklyn Tech where my kid went.</p>
<p>The free lunch eligibility percentage at Stuy was much higher than that when I attended in the early-mid '90s. </p>
<p>Also, the 30-40 percent sounds much lower than the figures I’ve heard bandied about by Stuy’s admins, alum/parent associations, and parents of current Stuy students. What’s your source if I may ask?</p>
<p>You’re assuming all students from Exeter or from comparable respectable/elite private schools are all well-prepared for respectable/elite colleges. </p>
<p>That’s not always necessarily the case depending on the individual student and given curricular track/courses he/she took. </p>
<p>One older college classmate who was admitted to at least one Ivy and attended a respectable private boarding school was allowed to get away with taking only 2 years of science courses…and non-lab “rocks for jocks” type courses at that. That and his weak math background caused him to struggle heavily in a science course for non-majors because he never performed a science lab experiment in his life till that point and to drop stats at least once because he was on track to actually failing it. </p>
<p>His knowledge gap in US history was serious enough to impede him in core courses in a related field and require a crash tutoring session with yours truly despite scoring a 5 on the APUSH exam. </p>
<p>
</a></p>
<p>That data was from 4 years ago and was probably a serious undercount as that was around the same period the parent/alum associations had a “get out the word” campaign to encourage more low-income parents, especially immigrants to fill out the forms to make them eligible for free/reduced priced lunches. </p>
<p>One issue is a lot of immigrants from older generations have moved out of once/current immigrant heavy neighborhoods or out of NYC altogether and there has been many changes in navigating the DOE bureaucracy. </p>
<p>Combine that with an influx of much more recent immigrants whose backgrounds/dialects may serve as barriers to interacting with more established immigrants*, I’ve been hearing that quite a few have fallen through the cracks from alum association members who are parents of current/recently graduated students. </p>
<ul>
<li>Speaking mainly of the larger Chinese community though this does apply to varying extents to other immigrant groups as well…including gaps between second generation or later immigrants who have nearly/completely assimilated into the mainstream US culture and recent immigrants and first/second generation immigrants who have not been/choose not to to the same extent/at all.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>As an actual NYC public school parent veteran who filled out the free lunch report for 13 years, I can tell you this: 4 or 5 years ago, the application added a box near the top for those who knew that they were not eligible, allowing them to submit the form without reporting their income. This made it much easier for schools to submit a much higher percentage of forms. Previously, parents who knew their kids didn’t qualify for the lunch benefit were reluctant to submit the form.</p>
<p>Back when I was in HS, I knew of many recent immigrant parents who didn’t submit forms at first because of issues such as language barrier, perceptions they may not qualify when they actually would have, perceived stigma for revealing one’s low income taken from the origin country to others…including those with positive helpful intentions, fears derived from living under a totalitarian/authoritarian governments which made them wary of revealing more than the absolute minimum to government agencies to get their kids enrolled even though they were low income and in need*, and lack of awareness there was even such programs and that they were eligible. </p>
<p>Fortunately, the earlier immigrants and newer immigrants were in the same neighborhoods or in close enough proximately to help bridge most/all of those issues which came up. </p>
<p>However, due to many such earlier immigrant families moving out due to jobs, desire for more space, and/or gentrification along with the fact newer immigrants may be from different regions of a given origin country where language/cultural barriers may be a serious impediment even with the earlier immigrants from the same origin country**, many old immigrant/ethnic group networks are nowhere near as cohesive as it was even 15+ years ago. </p>
<ul>
<li>Many immigrants from the former Combloc countries along with some Chinese immigrants.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>** I.e. Cantonese and Mandarin speakers(earliest/earlier immigrants) as opposed to Fujiannese speakers(recent immigrants). Even when all three groups can speak Mandarin, the pronunciation/accent differences can be enough to serve as frustrating impediments to communication as I’ve experienced firsthand. </p>