I wouldn’t draw that conclusion. The Ivy League isn’t in the FBS division. If a nationally competitive football team is your priority, you would attend a state flagship or maybe Stanford or Duke. The Ivies wouldn’t be on your target list to begin with. There may be racists who care about an explicit racial balance and won’t apply to Harvard now that’s its majority minority. Those seem like exactly the type of students Harvard would not want to admit.
I don’t think it’s very far out. They’ve had a history. For such a sensitive subject, it’s astounding that Harvard has not given any official guidance to their admissions officers on the use of race all these years. They’ve allowed their admission officers to have free reign on the use of race throughout the entire admissions process (at least until they’ve been sued for it).
Harvard can pre-filter marketing based on applicant test scores and academics. They do this with Asian and white students. They send out materials to black students with absurdly low test scores, ones that map to an academic index score that basically has no chance of acceptance.
I agree that most applicants have a low chance except for hooked applicants. But that is because the process is noisy and random due to the subjective personal and overall ratings, not because the non-URM applicants are of low quality. Short of absolutely amazing stats and accomplishments and without hooks, most applicants (including most admitted applicants) enter a lottery when applying to Harvard.
There is a difference between low and no chance. From what I gather, the minimum bar to be seriously considered is an academic index of 3. Lower than that, there’s no chance. 50% of African American applicants and 35% of Hispanic applicants have no chance. They don’t even enter the Harvard lottery.
Harvard is consciously recruiting URM applicants that have no chance, that are different than the non-URM applicant pool. I find that very weird. The only motivation I can think of is lowering the acceptance rate. Given their history, I wouldn’t put it past them.
Harvard is certainly not the only school playing that admission game of lowering their admission rate. U Chicago and Wash U go nuts with their mailings. Talk about trying to get people to apply that have no chance. If Harvard’s only motivation was decreasing their admission rate, they might add more application options, become SAT optional, not require students to send scores, etc.
And targeting people with low stats…don’t they use the PSAT score for that which often comes up for a lot of people? My daughter ended with a 1540 SAT (old) and her first PSAT was no where near that…definitely the equivalent of over 200 points lower. Maybe 300.
I am not saying Harvard is perfect, but they are in no way the worst culprits when it comes to targeting applicants that don’t have a chance (relative to their other applicants, that is). If they were just trying to attract more applicants, it might make more sense to target more people with high scores since they might actually fall for it and apply.
"For such a sensitive subject, it’s astounding that Harvard has not given any official guidance to their admissions officers on the use of race all these years. They’ve allowed their admission officers to have free reign on the use of race throughout the entire admissions process "
There is no need for them to give their admissions officers guidance on the use of race because the admissions officers aren’t making the final admit decisions. The only thing the admissions officers do is whittle down the unmanageable number of applications (40,000+) to a list of 5000 or less applicants who all would succeed and meet Harvard’s needs. That list - the Lop List - then goes to the Dean of Admissions, WRF, who then personally and in private with no documenting records shapes the class by choosing from that Lop List.
The only function of the AOs is to act as a pre-filter. No single person could possibly handle reviewing and choosing from the huge volume of apps that H receives, so the AOs and committee are used to filter the list into a manageable size. Once the list is a manageable size, the AO and committee work is done and WRF does the final selection.
So again, there is no need to train the AOs on the use of race in admissions because the work of actually selecting the class from the filtered applicant list is done by one person - WRF.
“It seems that SOME of the people “not on Harvard’s side” (for lack of a better way of classifying them) are reading “sinister motives” into their actions and I think that is totally uncalled for.”
Sinister may be too strong a word, but they’re misleading if not outright lying when they say they use holistic, are need blind, care about the individual, etc…
“No matter what they do, they will be attacked.”
Well if they were open, more transparent, straightforward, and truthful, they wouldn’t be attacked. And Harvard has done this before with Jewish applicants, so given their history, they’re not getting any benefit of the doubt, and they shouldn’t.
They would still be attacked, because there is no way to satisfy all of the interest groups who may attack. Indeed, being transparent would give the attackers hard evidence to attack with, rather than vague suspicion.
Nothing to new to most of us here, but good read anyway:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/college-sports-benefits-white-students/573688/
Afraid there is a chance, for SOME (and I’d add serious donors and z-list to this):
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/6/30/athlete-admissions/
…and here’s a “4” according to Harvard:
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000166-9690-d166-a77e-9f9c92f10001
TBH a Harvard academic “2” is pretty standard territory for the typical CC kid: 2. Magna potential: Excellent student with superb grades and mid-to high-700 scores (33+ ACT). My D would have been a high 2/low 1 in stats (but Academic 1 looks for serious academic achievement outside of class as well) had she applied to H.
As far as I know, they assign the actual ratings which are an integral part of the admissions process (as demonstrated by the quantity of analysis based on the ratings in the trial). Also, it’s not like the 5000 or so applicants that go into lopping are that much better than the 5000 students ranked directly under them. AOs are still making the subjective decisions that are eliminating thousands applicants close in strength.
But that’s besides the point. Harvard had absolutely zero guidelines on race (as far as I know) at every level, including the committees that make the final decision. Harvard consciously chose to give admission officers, committees and everyone free reign on the use of race despite the very slippery slope of racial discrimination and the numerous past supreme court cases advising universities to very narrowly tailor their use of race.
I don’t think you would find that many people who are against affirmative action who are also in favor of significant athlete boosts (outside of the main sports like soccer, football and basketball)
For comparison, Harvard recruits African Americans who have 1100 reading + math combined SAT
At Harvard and most similar schools, recruited athletes do not make up a much bigger portion of the class than legacies. For example, in last year’s Harvard freshman survey, 18.3% of the class had at least 1 parent attend Harvard. 10% said they were athletes (recruited or non-recruited). In the lawsuit reference year, there were 259 lineage, 72 double lineage, and 180 recruited athletes.
While recruited athletes in preppy sports tend to come from more privileged backgrounds than the student body average, it’s nothing compared to legacies at Harvard In last year’s freshman survey, 35% of the overall student body reported incomes of $250k+ compared to 39% for athletes. However, 69% of legacies reported incomes above this threshold with 46% above $500k – far beyond both athletes and the overall student body, but probably less than Z-list or Dean/Director’s list.
I believe the recruiting reference is based on PSAT score, while the reader guideline is based on SAT score. It’s not unusual to improve PSAT score to the range listed for 3 academic (general guideline, not strict cutoff), especially when considering applicants choose whether to submit SAT or ACT.
Harvard doesn’t publicly report acceptance rates by race, so I doubt that they are trying to decrease Black and American Indian acceptance rates for a public benefit. If they are trying to hide something in case the numbers came out publicly in a lawsuit (or similar), it would be fairly obvious what was going on. There are much more effective ways to manipulate the numbers. Rather than trying decrease acceptance rate of specific races, I think it is more likely they were hoping to get a few future diamonds in the rough who would improve scores between the PSAT and SAT/ACT, or a few who would get accepted in spite of the lower scores. The acceptance rates by SAT score show a smoothish curve, rather than sharp jumps at a particular threshold, suggesting that Harvard is not using a strict score threshold, as one might interpret from the reader manual quotes. Instead I expect this is somewhat of a loose, general guideline.
To the extent this is true, it would be a reason for Harvard to lose the lawsuit as they have not tried race neutral alternatives to increase diversity.
“The acceptance rates by SAT score show a smoothish curve, rather than sharp jumps at a particular threshold, suggesting that Harvard is not using a strict score threshold, as one might interpret from the reader manual quotes.”
They do use a threshold, if the athletes don’t meet it, Harvard tells them to take a gap year and get the grades needed for admission, reapply, and a spot will be waiting for them. This would explain the smooth curve rather than spikes.
I meant a strict score cutoff for the academic rating. The Ivy League athletic conference uses academic index bands for athletes, with a certain number of athletes allowed in # SD bands compared to the overall school. For example, a small number of athletes are allowed to be 2 SDs below the overall class. A larger number are allowed to be between 1 and 2 SDs below the overall class. While this is somewhat of a hard threshold, I would not expect it to show up in admission rates by SAT score because most recruited athletes are pre-filtered, so ones who would not be admitted do not apply; the threshold depends on AI rather than SAT score directly; and there is also a team AI requirement leading to a higher AIs in between thresholds being desirable, such that -1.3 AI is more desirable for recruiting than - 1.9AI even though both are between a hard -1 SD and -2 SD threshold.
Our son was recognized as a National Hispanic Recognition Program Scholar last month, but we live in Kalifornia where universities are barred from recognizing any sort of ethnicity as part of the application process.W e are soooo depressed. All of those who are outside of this awful state we live in are very lucky.
NESCAC schools moreso than Ivies due to size. But at Ivies its the athletes who are getting more slack for middling academic records.
Maybe you are thinking of the z-list for important kids who don’t meet the bar? They wait a year but they don’t do anything about their grades, they’ve graduated.
Some HS athletes do a post-grad year (at a boarding school) but I thought that was more to improve athletic performance not academic (that’s the case at my D’s college, in general), but I suppose it can be used for both. In any case, there’s one more nice admissions tip for those who can afford $75k for that year (and who are again mostly white). I’m guessing there’s not a lot of financial aid for post-grad years.
Small Div III LACs are a different story. With a small student body, a larger portion of students need to be athletes to be able to field teams. As much as 40% of students are athletes at some NESCAC schools. And being Div III with such a large portion of being athletes, most athlete admits get far less benefit than at Harvard and similar. The NESCAC permits something on the order of ~14% of the class to be “athletic factor” admits who are recruited athletes that are endorsed by coaches, which is usually similar to the portion of legacies, depending on the specific colleges.
Some recent Harvard grads I know have pointed out that for a university of its size, athletics are actually very important at Harvard – at least financially. This is essentially a different manifestation of being “need-aware,” or rather, funding-aware.
My apologies if this has already been mentioned, but have any of you seen the new thread on CC about the “New College Board Tool Helps Admissions Officers”?? I will post the link, but it basically discusses how now college admissions offices can access info about applicants NEIGHBORHOOD and HIGH SCHOOL (as well as SAT score) which more or less gets at the popular opinion that SES would be a “fairer” data point in college admissions.
No surprise, as the conversation on the thread suggests, finding a way to accurately measure a students’ opportunity based on SES opens a whole new can of worms, just further supporting the fact that we will never be able to make everyone happy!
Hope this link works, but you should be able to find the thread if you are interested: