Each college will give an admissions boost to candidates who have a quality that the college feels that they need more of. That quality could be overrepresented at some schools and underrepresented at others.
“Affirmative Action” embodies the concept of giving a boost to historically underrepresented minority groups, but it is NOT a formalized process at private colleges. You could probably go to every private college website and look up “affirmative action” for admissions and not find any mention at all, because it is NOT something that exists in that context. YES, colleges can and do give admission boosts to URM’s … but it is not tied to some legal status or a particular race.
So if a college wants more Asian-Americans, that college will give those applicants whatever admissions boost is needed to help the college meet its admission targets.
@websensation This might be a helpful explanation as it relates to your specific question about how it has affected Asian Americans historically, and now, and in different contexts (colleges vs law schools after racial preference was legally prohibited in CA, for instance):
@OHMomof2 Read that link. Basically says Asian Americans were once accorded AA benefit but once they — except for certain Asian ethic groups who are still not well represented — achieved a high percentage of representation through hard work at certain colleges, they are no longer accorded AA benefits at those colleges. This supports what I am saying: that to be accorded AS benefits, you have to be discriminated and also underrepresented at that college. Taking an extreme example, of no Chinese American students apply to Yale, and as a result Yale has no Chinese Americans on campus for several years, then Yale will probably — if it wants to attract Chinese Americans — accord AA benefits to Chinese Americans, just as Notre Dame might actually give a bump to Asian American students because it doesn’t get too many Asian American applicants. That’s the logical conclusion from the site above that I am getting.
Do people think it’s a laughable idea that sports league such as NBA accord AA benefits also, just as some are asking high tech companies do? Logically, the argument seems to pass.
It is “the conventional wisdom” (It’s been said before, anyway) that Asian Americans were under-represented in college for a time but now are not at most colleges, though certain groups of them still are, like SE Asians (but maybe not Koreans or Chinese). But that’s a discussion of college preferences, not legal affirmative action.
I couldn’t find any evidence that Affirmative Action - in the legal sense - ever applied to Asian Americans or that it did but stopped applying to them at some point, or did and still does.
Don’t have time to google but maybe you do, and can report back @websensation
What AA benefits? The NBA currently takes the players it wants, of whatever race. They did have to be forced to allow talented black players to join the teams, they’d been playing separately before that.
My comment was meant primarily about not second guessing self identified race/ethnicity in college admissions, with the exception of NA, which is the point of the thread. In general though, if an adcom spends 15 minutes tops on an app, that’s barely enough time to cover the whole app, not scroll through your social media to find the incriminating selfie from sophomore year.
I agree @roethlisburger I wonder though if sometimes there are exceptions to the 15 minute rule (which is probably pretty accurate)…something unique about a student’s application that might cause an adcom to do some digging. I truly don’t know but I would think some applications might raise more questions than others? I truly don’t know. I would love to be a fly on the wall.
Colleges can still rescind admission after admission offers. Remember the Harvard case a year or two ago? At least 10 admitted students had their offers rescinded after their racist and/or sexually offensive messages on Facebook. Detecting applicants’ character flaws, including lies, is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible (within 15 minutes or not). How fair is it then to base an admission decision partially on something that can’t be ascertained?
Remember the 15 minute time frame only applies to the first read. From everything that I have gathered, as the funnel narrows, more time is spent on each application. Now I doubt that the AO is combing through SM of every “finalist” candidate, but they are looking at each part of the app pretty closely at this point and I assume would notice and be on the lookout for certain inconsistencies/aberrations which may merit further investigation. I would further assume claims for particularly strong hooks would trigger some checks because of their proportionate impact on admissions. Speculation on my part of course, but it seems logical to me.
In the past 6 years, a total of 3 students (1 recruited white male athlete with average grades, 1 brilliant white female scientist with extraordinary stats, 1 black male with average grades/SAT scores/mid rank) were admitted to Harvard from our high school. This year, 3 asian american students were admitted last week. With the recent Harvard law suit coming to light, have you seen more asian american students get in during SCEA this year?
@bluering that’s an interesting observation and I was wondering if that might happen. I’m very interested if anyone has noticed a similar trend. I don’t know any Harvard applicants this year.
“The demographic profile of the incoming group remains largely consistent with previous cycles. Asian Americans compose 26.1 percent of admits this year, an increase from 24.2 percent last year and 21.7 percent the year prior. Fitzsimmons said the trend is likely due to a corresponding increase in the number of Asian-American applicants. African-American admits dropped from 13.9 percent in 2017 to 12 percent in 2018, and Latinx admits clocked in at 10 percent, roughly consistent with last year’s numbers.” https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/12/14/2018-early-action-admits/
@websensation No clue. People like to watch who they like to watch, it’s entertainment. You can dunk and shoot well and help your team win (or you can sing or you can act) it’s all entertainment. If you have the skills and they appeal to people, the market will respond, absent discrimination.
You could make the opposite argument about hockey or golf or tennis or baseball. Should they be forced to take more black players? Is it fair that college recruited athletes in those sports are mostly white and get the biggest admissions bump of all?
With professional sports, fan preferences and demographics can influence how players are hired and the reaction to what they do beyond playing their sports (including actions relating to race/ethnicity-related politics).
But also, pipeline and discrimination issues starting in high school or earlier can make the effect of differential opportunity and segregation even within a professional sport where selection is highly merit-based, where analogies to colleges can be seen. For example: https://theundefeated.com/features/the-nfls-racial-divide/ .
“You could make the opposite argument about hockey or golf or tennis or baseball. Should they be forced to take more black players? Is it fair that college recruited athletes in those sports are mostly white and get the biggest admissions bump of all?”
Do you know who really gets the biggest admission bump - recruited URM athletes. You would cringe if you knew the scores. But the majority of URM athletes are not qualified and are not interested in these elite colleges (similar to the majority of all other serious athletes).
Great article @ucbalumnus. It just shows that in even the most competitive sports leagues in the world where winning matters more than anything, racial perception even colors the evaluation of athletes. US Professional Team Sports have reached a point closer to a meritocracy than most other organizational types and people don’t tend to question the motives of a hockey team or basketball team being mostly one race (especially when the main objective [winning] occurs).
I was talking with a friend recently about the Harvard Lawsuit and his take was one that may have been mentioned here, but I may have completely overlooked the actual ramifications. He thinks that Harvard/other elites will all just become test optional and start the whole court battle process over. Making the SAT/ACT optional would seem to make the admissions more subjective and much harder to compare students across the country, but he believes that U of Chicago policy change was just the opening salvo toward elite institutions finding ways to have diverse student bodies. I still disagree with parts of his premise (Schools may still have an issue if a large number of their URM populations at those schools came from the test-optional pool), but with more and more schools going that route, he thought that courts would have a hard time reversing the tide of the 1,000+ schools who have already gone to test optional policies. His strategy would be to update admissions policies at Harvard to make the lawsuit moot because they are not even following the policy/policies that triggered the lawsuit in the 1st place. Lawyers can sure be sneaky…
I’d expect the degree of admission boost for athletes to largely follow how key of a recruited athlete they are for the school/team, rather than their race. For example The, Ivy League athletic conference might permit up to 2 athletes who are in the minimum band 1 each year for football. These minimum band 1 athletes can have stats 2 SDs below the rest of the class, but must be above the minimum Ivy League limit of AI 171. Regardless of the athlete’s race, they still have the same AI limits.
Furthermore, the Harvard lawsuit analysis suggests large admissions bumps for different groups are generally not additive. For example, suppose URMs get an average boost of x, and other group get an average boost of y. The admissions boost for URM + other group is much smaller than x + y. As an example, using specific numbers from the lawsuit.
Legacy: +1.8
URM: +2.7
URM and Legacy: +3.4, not 1.8+2.7 = 4.5
Data, Any boost numbers for athletes would be highly artificial because athletic admission follows a totally different process. Quoted admission rate for athletes at %86 looks low. It seems you do not have boost numbers for Athletes or URM+Athletes anyway. And you are talking about football while I was talking about the “despised” sports like golf or tennis where the floor is generally pretty high and the average team AI is probably around 210-215. On top of that some teams may recruit athletically under qualified URMs to diversify the roster.
It seems like you are making a lot of guesses without supporting information.
I’m not sure why tennis and golf are “despised” or who made that quote. In any case, the Ivy League competes in Div 1 in tennis and golf, and they take recruiting for these sports seriously. For example, in 2018, Harvard’s women’s tennis recruitment class was ranked 11th and men’s was ranked 18th. The women’s class had three 5 star recruits including the 13th ranked player in the United States. A recruiting class like that tremendously influences the success of the team. Tennis and golf use an AI band system, like other sports, with only a few lower band recruits allowed. Do you think the coach is not going to use their few lower AI band recruit spots on top ranked players like this, unless they are URMs?
If The Ivy League is trying to racially diversify their tennis and golf rosters, they aren’t doing a good job of it. Across the combined men’s and women’s teams at the 8 Ivy League colleges, there is only one golfer who is classified as a URM in the federal roster. Tennis is a bit higher, with an average of 0.4 URMs per team. Looking at the Harvard’s women’s team roster, I see that they appear to have at least 1 of the rare URM players… perhaps 2. Both were at least 4 star recruits, so I see nothing to suggest their recruiting was based on an effort to diversify, rather than choosing the available recruits who were the best options for team performance.
The regression coefficient for recruited athletes in the lawsuit was +7.87 – far higher than the boost for any other analyzed effect in the lawsuit. Non-athletes with a low 4 academic rating had only a 0.07% chance of admission – almost impossible. In contrast recruited athletes with the same rating had a 70% admit rate – a thousand times higher. The number of 4 academic rating athletic rating admits far outnumbers the number of URM athletes, so it is safe to assume there are a lot of non-URM athletes with this low academic rating. However, athletes are usually pre-filtered prior to applying and the stats aren’t separated by sport or how key of an athlete the student is in their sport, so not meaningful to filter regression coefficients by URM status in the way I did in the earlier post for URM+legacy.
I’ll let Data10’s post speak for itself, but will add one data point from a NESCAC’s exhaustive, years-long athletic report which provides unusual insight into elite D3 recruiting.
The report concludes that athletic admissions preferences do not increase diversity, in fact the complete opposite, they reduce it.
Also, coaches get a certain number of below-average academically recruit spots (aka “athletic factor” admits). Annually across the sports, about 70, and these are separate from the recruited bump for academically-average students. If an athlete is also URM or low income or first-gen or fills some other institutional goal, the coach doesn’t need to “use up” one of those spots on that athlete, so those special low-academic-rating spots are specifically set aside for students who are NOT URM, not first gen and not low income.
You can look at this as holding spots for wealthy, family-educated ORM recruits or you can look at it as athletes taking away spots in the URM/first gen/low income buckets which might otherwise go to a non-athlete. Both are true. It’s also true that a URM/low income/first gen athlete who is so talented as to be recruitable is getting a good bump in admissions because, 2/3/4 for 1. But recruited athlete status doesn’t NEED any of those other bumps, they’re getting in anyway unless they screw up horribly.
