Obviously, GPA is correlated to class rank, though it is not a perfect correlation.
UC tries to control weighted GPA inflation due to greater honors (including AP and college) course availability by using the weighted-capped GPA (up to 8 semesters of honors courses get +1 points in the recalculation). The recalculation with weighting is an attempt to capture course selection rigor.
The problem is that statistics from these schools and Hillel themselves say another story. I’m not dismissing your individual experiences, but they can be part of your microcosm, they are certainly not reflected in the statistics.
many posters here have a problem with sourcing. if we don’t, this is just a whole thread of he said vs she said.
No? Please see the graphic comparing asian vs white vs jewish enrollment at top ivy league in ronald unz’s article
That’s a pretty absurd thing to throw back to, so some poor vietnamese or muslim american should be denied admissions outright or mestizo/mulatto latinos due to richer whiter latinos getting their slots, because Jews faced pre1965 discrimination (mind you a fraction of which compared to blacks).
This is why I have no qualms with the affirmative action decision being overturned. SO MUCH of what we considered ‘black’, minorities etc has changed drastically. One year after the Civil Rights SC decision we had the Emigration Act of 1965, we have since then had MILLIONS of carribean and African migrants come into the US, who do not share the history of slavery or segregation that African Americans do.
So why do they deserve the same entitlement of Asians, Muslims, non-white Latinos? It makes no sense. This is rationalizing nepotism at it’s finest.
Also the common retort of 1600+ perfect SAT score doesn’t make sense. Plenty of Asians also had that, they disqualified them on ‘personality’ oftenn missing notes on the candidates or using a ‘screen’ to arbitrarily deny candidates entry…and this is my biggest qualm, WHILE TAKING PELL GRANTS. That’s PUBLIC money! There has to be transparency!
Hillel’s claims about percentage of Jewish students are highly suspect. First of all, at best they are estimating; my understanding, from a conversation with a Hillel rabbi at a top university (who believed the stated numbers of Jews at his institution was exaggerated), was that the number was derived in part by taking the number of people who showed up at Jewish events and extrapolating from there under the assumption that that represented x percentage of the total number of Jews on campus. That’s obviously a really imperfect measure, as it the other tactic of making educated guesses based on last names. Consider as well that it is to Hillel’s advantage to be very generous in these estimates: if they can claim to be serving a higher number of students, that’s going to be good for funding. In addition, Hillel houses want to attract active members of the Jewish community to their campuses. The best way to do that is by creating the impression of an already active Jewish life on campus. I’m not accusing anyone of blatant lying, here, but certainly some semi-plausible massaging of the numbers would be likely.
From that and similar conversations, I do believe that there are specific situations where some Jews will get a boost. The idea of a “critical mass” has quite literal importance for observant Jews - if you don’t have enough observant Jews on campus, you probably can’t sustain daily prayer services, or perhaps even weekly/holiday ones. If a religious kid sees that Harvard Hillel is really struggling to get a prayer quorum on a daily basis, maybe he goes to Columbia. So if the university sees that, disproportionately, they are losing applicants or admits from a particular demographic – which in this case would not be “Jews” but “Jews of a certain level of observance” – it will take that into account in admissions, and it probably will be somewhat easier for a high-scoring student from a Jewish day school to get into that university for the next few years.
I don’t believe that there is any boost for the average Jewish student at a public suburban high school.
I think the number of observing Catholics, and probably Christians overall, is also diminishing. Do you think this could help observing Catholics also get in to certain colleges?
My oldest is at a Catholic (Jesuit) university and she hasn’t been to church once since she started back in the Fall of 2015. Some of her friends go, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of them. I went to the same school and we went almost every week (they make it easy…often have Mass right in the dorms).
So like being Jewish, being Catholic also isn’t “Race” but @apprenticeprof raises some good points about keeping certain campuses observant enough.
@collegemomjam I suspect the same reasoning would apply. Top schools frequently state that they could replace their freshman class with the next however many thousand applicants and not miss a beat. That may be true when it comes to the majority of the class, but there’s always going to be a certain percentage of students that the schools REALLY wants on the basis of genuinely extraordinary academic or other talent. If the school doesn’t have enough musical theater people to stage some quality shows each year, it doesn’t get the next Lin Manuel Miranda. If it doesn’t have a competitive swim team, it misses out on Katie Ledecky. And if there’s no active organization for Catholic students, it doesn’t get the off-the-charts brilliant Catholic kid.
The possible difference between this and racial affirmative action is that I think these things really are “tip” factors. A number of years ago, Princeton famously said that it was looking for more “green-haired people” in an effort to shift its preppy image. That didn’t mean it was lowering the standards for artsy fartsy types - I suspect green-haired people admitted to Princeton the following year had comparable profiles to green-haired people admitted to Harvard the same admissions cycle. It just meant that if Harvard took one artsy student for every one Future Business Leaders of America student with otherwise similar academic qualifications, maybe that year Princeton was taking two.
Here is an article from the Jerusalem Post regarding percentage of Jews on various campuses. Someone else can tell me if this is considered a legitimate source. Note that it too uses Hillel estimates, and therefore may suffer from the biases @apprenticeprof lists above.
Since I believe that Jews are admitted on merit, I consider their over-representation (even if the exact numbers are off) as something to be celebrated by the community.
@apprenticeprof thanks for that analysis, it makes sense. So the moral of the story I guess is that applicants should disclose as many “unique” qualities as they can because you never know what the school might be looking for that year.
Do you think disclosing religious affiliation can ever hurt a candidate? I’m assuming not, but it’s the next logical question!
"Do you think disclosing religious affiliation can ever hurt a candidate? "
My opinion only. Again, just a guess… but if I had to bet $1000 on a response, my bet would be on “heck, yes.”
Think about the political atmosphere on some of the campuses. Think about some of the preconceived ideas about what people with certain religious beliefs support. Do you really think some of the campuses blithely view certain candidates as having a defensible religious belief or is there fear that that applicant is an ignorant rube, clinging to guns and religion who handles snakes at home and will be judgmental of the school’s LGBTQ population?
@milee30 Thanks for the reply.
You raise some good points and I can see your point of view. By the same token, I feel like many schools both with and without religious affiliations, might want the diversity of thought on campus. They might not want an “ignorant rube” (no matter that their views are) but if someone has the academic credentials you would think they would possibly help round out a campus that might be trying to shake a stereotype. Yes, it might cause tension on campus (unfortunately) but I feel like MOST schools are trying to round themselves out, not become more exclusive.
Georgetown (Catholic/Jesuit) makes it so clear that they are genuinely interested in educating people from all faiths and really drive this point home at all stages of the application process…when you are touring before admission, accepted students day, and at orientation. At their convocation for first years, they have a priest, a rabbi and an imam all speak. And they speak about some classes they teach together. And it’s for real. The college was founded by John Carroll who wanted to create an American university that didn’t discriminate based on religious beliefs because he was forced to study in Europe as a Catholic because none of the American schools at the time would admit him. I found this aspect of Georgetown’s character to be extremely appealing. Yes, the school is predominantly Catholic, but it is very welcoming to students from all different religious/ethnic/racial backgrounds. (At least from what I have seen through my daughter who attends and from my experiences on campus.)
I’m sure I sound very idealistic and I probably am. But I would hope that with all that is going on in the world, the colleges would welcome religious diversity as well as other diversity.
My point is that overrepresentation of Jews at elite institutions does not equate to schools giving a preference or an entitlement to Jews. One previous poster stated a Jew would need a 1400 SAT while a white non-Jew would need a 1550 SAT. If there are statistics showing that, it would certainly support what is a shocking claim. If it were true, I would be against that just as I am against what appears to be discrimination against Asians at elite institutions.
Citing past antisemitism, which is still a real problem today, was to say that it has never been the case throughout all of history that society reaches out to help Jews succeed (hence, the original quotas at HPY artificially lowering the # of Jews who would otherwise have been admitted). And this is completely unsupported, but given that the % of Jews at each top university tends to be stagnate, I would suspect that there still is an attempt to keep the Jewish population from being too high, just as it appears there is for the Asian population.
Maybe this will help explain the overrepresentation of Jews at elite institutions: “As of 2017, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 892 individuals, of whom 201 or 22.5% were Jews, although the total Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the population. That means that the % of Jewish Nobel Laureates is at least 112.5 times or 11,250% above average.” Wikipedia
I don’t think you can make a case that the Jews so honored were given these prizes as an entitlement, but again, if there is proof of this, it must be exposed and those people must be stripped of unearned recognition. This is over-simplified, but Jewish families have always stressed education, usually over everything, including sports, because it was the only way they saw to rise up from persecution and an antisemitic environment. My perception is that the Asian community has a similar but even stronger focus on academics and preparation for college. No group should be discriminated against or benefited on the basis of race or religion.
A simpler explanation for Asian educational achievement in the US is that Asian immigrants are largely selected as skilled workers and graduate students – 70% from India and 50% from China have bachelor’s degrees, far higher than non immigrant Americans, and far higher than in India and China. High educational attainment among parents strongly correlates to high educational attainment of their kids (both nature and nurture are favorable, regardless of which you think is more important), and probably accounts for much of the apparent correlation to race and income.
I.e. Asian Americans are a selected subset of people of Asian ancestry, and that subset was selected specifically for skills and education, which continues to transmit across generations.
You again use absurd examples. I mean admitting an ethnic group as FOUR times the next ethnic group (Asians) with lower scores, which is the same group as the presidents/administrators at many top schools (Jews) definitely means preference, not being able to clearly show it due to a system that is not transparent, isn’t a reason to say ‘there is no rpreference’ They are just good at hiding it.
Also citing Noble Prizes when you give a specific group easy entry into top schools is like saying ‘why don’t the poor pick themselves up’ when you have a millionaire father and easy upbringing all your life. You were given 95% of the journey to get there.
In fact Scots had higher percentages of Noble Prize Winners at times before the 1980s and Indian Americans alreayd have higher IQs than Jewish Americans.
No. To demonstrate bias, you have to demonstrate first that Jews are being admitted disproportionately to their representation in the applicant pool, or with lower scores than white non-Jewish applicants. You have not done this.
The relevant number is not what percentage of the total population Jews represent, but what percentage of APPLICANTS they represent. If, hypothetically, a group makes up 25 % of the applicant pool, and also 25 % of the admits, that does not show bias, unless you could show that that group had relatively poorer statistics than the rest of the pool.
Even if Jews only made up 15 % of the applicant pool, and 25 % of admits - which I doubt – in order to prove bias, you’d have to confirm that Jews didn’t actually have objectively stronger applications.
You have produced no evidence, only uncorroborated suspicions.
I have if you look at the graphic I posted, as well as the reference I gave to the Ron Unz article. Whether you accept these sources isn’t up to me, as far as Hillel’s numbers etc that’s something you can t ake up with these sources, but I’d trust their word over your’s or mine’s
@ucbalumnus in post 2115, while I generally agree that Asian American overachievement can be attributed in significant measure to a selection of a subgroup with positive educational attributes, both in nature and nurture, I do think there is a separate cultural component related to the value of education in the home culture of many Asian Americans and which is also common to many groups of new immigrants. I point to this based on the overwhelming number of Asian students who test into the special HS programs in NYC and who are overwhelmingly coming from working class lower SES families. These are not daughters and sons of engineers, doctors, lawyers and professors.
@ELopez1275, I’m not going to take all that seriously any metric that operates based on presuming identity based on last names. About half of Jews marry out of the religion. “Jewish” names among my acquaintances include Trimble, Grafton, Runyon, and Petersohn. I’ll concede that names remain a reasonable proxy, but counting only people with traditionally Jewish names as Jews when you’re looking at lists of Putnam winners or NMS semifinalists is going to wind up lowballing the actual numbers. This is far more true today than it would have been a generation ago, when fewer Jews had mixed ancestry. Furthermore, while NMS data by state may be somewhat meaningful, NMS data across states is not, because different states have different qualifying thresholds. Jewish students who fall short of the semifinalist level in NY may nonetheless have significantly higher scores than non-Jewish whites from Arkansas and Mississippi.
You don’t need to take my anecdotal word for it on Hillel numbers. Those numbers have to be imperfect, because they rely on extrapolations from imperfect data. I’m not sure that Hillel has access to common app responses to the religion question in the first place, but even if it did, that’s a harder question that it appears. Judaism is a religion and an ethnicity. A Jewish atheist may put down his or her religion as Jewish, or not. A person with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent may consider themselves members of one, both, or neither of the religions. How do they identify themselves on the application? How does Hillel identify them? Does Hillel assume “known” Jews represent half of all Jews on campus, or eighty percent, and on what basis? As far as I know, top schools don’t provide official breakdowns of the religious identity of their students in the same way they do with race.
Again, maybe you’re right that Jews are being favored over non-Jewish whites in elite admissions. But we simply don’t have the data, and Unz’s numbers don’t cut it. If you’ve got real numbers that indicate the average SAT score for Jewish admits to the Ivies is lower than the average SAT score for non-Jewish whites, I’d like to see it.
Given the size of NYC, there will be some students from lower SES families who will be high achievers with high aspirations. Other threads have mentioned that high-achieving students from high SES families are not as interested in the NYC test-in high schools, often preferring private schools.
Of course, immigrants who emphasize education are not uniquely from Asia. But immigrants from Europe or Africa are relatively small in numbers compared to other European or African Americans, so the immigrants with education emphasis do not define the public perception of their racial/ethnic groups.
Can you guess what state has the highest percentage of Asian Americans in the population, and as undergraduate students in the state flagship?
If you guessed Hawaii, you are correct. But now you have to consider why University of Hawaii is not generally considered an elite university, and educational attainment in Hawaii is not at the top the US states, if you believe that Asian race/ethnicity is so strongly tied to educational achievement. (Hint: Asian immigration to Hawaii historically was not as heavily biased toward highly skilled labor and graduate students compared to Asian immigration to the US overall.)
@ucbalumnus But U of Hawaii’s Asian American students are not new immigrants. A few who were became its most prominent graduates like Sen. Hirono who fits the profile of NYC low SES Asian students more than that of native Hawaiian Asian students.
I only point out the widely reported statistics on the huge over representation of Asians in the special NYC HS’s, particularly Stuyvesant where 75% of the student body is Asian, a significant percentage of which are eligible for free or reduced priced lunches (90% of the 45%± of students eligible are Asian).
"The Mayor’s Office of Operations’ annual report on poverty in the city, released this month, noted that 24.1% of Asian-American New Yorkers lived in poverty in 2016, the latest year for available statistics, compared to 23.9% for Hispanics, 19.2% for blacks and 13.4% for whites.
This is borne out at Stuyvesant. While 75% of current students are Asian-Americans, they also, according to Department of Education statistics, constitute over 90% of students qualifying for free or subsidized lunch, the measure of poverty used in educational circles." http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/stuyvesant-serves-needy-minorities-article-1.3944199
I also don’t think you can ignore the high stakes and test heavy nature of admissions to the top universities in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and India, which are still seen as the best path for upward SE mobility in those countries for the lower and middle classes. There have been plenty of articles on the prevalence of after school cram courses and the unhealthy level of pressure on many of these students. This is not a phenomenon that is commonplace in countries outside of Asia to my knowledge.