"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

Applying to College
3621

and Berkeley and Caltech don’t have legacy students?. Berkeley has lots of athletes and is a div 1 FBS school.

btw Stanford has less Asian students proportionally than Berkeley. You think Stanford doesn’t discriminate against Asian students?

and lastly you still didn’t answer why Asians were the only group to score lower on personality scores than other races including whites at Harvard?

Harvard’s own data shows it prefers underqualified whites over more qualified Asians… while some may claim these racist policy effects are small… (as if partly racist is ok) it is found only with Asians and suggests a systematic policy in the admissions process that is far from small.

when you abolish race as a major consideration those schools have proportionally more Asians.

3622

White – 51% (actual 43%)
Asian – 26% (actual 19%)
Black – 2% (actual 10%)
Hisp. – 4% (actual 9%)

this is where the analysis fails. this analysis canabilizes from blacks and hispanics

in the scenario where Black and Hisp are kept steady…Asians would canabilize from whites… Asians would gain proportionally more vs Whites all else being equal.

this is the reason why Harvard wants to keep this discussion about “affirmative action” when it really is about promoting underqualified whites over more qualified Asian students.

3623

I have two questions for you @calmom. Why is this a “problem”? And how would you solve it?

Now if you said that the “problem” is that only having 1% of black students would make them feel too isolated, there I actually agree. I would welcome CalTech and other elite colleges performing more outreach to find highly talented black students that have not considered attending elite colleges. The difficulty CalTech faces here is that those same kids are recruited by every elite college. If given a choice between Harvard and CalTech, or even MIT and CalTech, very few will choose CalTech.

Solving the problem is hard. IMO, CalTech is the most difficult college in the US. Granted this is anecdotal based upon some very bright students from our high school that struggle there, but our high school pushes students hard, to the point that most find college easier. They still have to work hard at places like Cornell, Princeton, MIT, and UChicago, but they do fine. Harvard is a breeze by comparison.

CalTech seems to be in a world of its own in terms of difficulty. Got perfect grades in high school, an 800 on the Math section on the SAT, and an 800 on the Math II? That doesn’t mean you are qualified for CalTech. It just means you are not woefully unqualified. Part of it is that they take 5-6 classes on a quarter system, whereas Harvard students take 4 classes per semester.

So the very worst thing you could do is relax standards to admit students, regardless of whether the reason is geography, race, athletic ability, or anything else. Add to that the fact that CalTech has few fallback options outside of tech, and its remoteness limiting interaction with people off campus. An unqualified student can easily fall into depression. So I contend that CalTech’s emphasis on maintaining its academic entry standards is not a “problem”, but in fact a kindness to its entering class.

While its most direct competitor is MIT, they are quite different in that MIT is in a city with 50K+ other college students, students can easily cross-register at Harvard, and MIT itself has highly ranked courses in business, economics, linguistics, etc.

3624

@sbballer While I think that the Harvard analysis is not perfect, it makes sense that white students would still easily be the majority because you are not accounting for the Athletes, Legacy, and Dean’s Special Interest List which are all majority white. @Data10 posted the numbers on the previous page and all of those preferences are over 70% white with only 10-15% share of those students being Asian-American. I don’t know what percentage of the student body falls into 1 of those 3 categories, but it is a significant amount of each class. My guess is that an unhooked white student may have as many issues as an unhooked Asian American student when it comes to being admitted into Harvard.

3625

Attacking CalTech admission is like attacking NBA for wanting to draft the best players regardless of race. I am glad that CalTech is uncompromising in its admission requirements and that USA offers at least one college with this type of admission requirements. But for most of CalTech kids, their love of science probably overcomes any issues with racial differences. I give a lot of respect to any African American or URM kids going there or even wanting to apply there. I know one kid woho got denied at MIT but going to CalTech. Great in science and also a good writer.

Having said this, I am generally in favor of the holistic admission in trying to give a little more weight to “potential”. Specifically, I am not so much espousing promoting diversity for diversity sake but for trying to include certain applicants who show a lot of potential despite their backgrounds and circumstances.

3626

Interesting fun fact about MIT students that we learned from a Boston University tour guide, showing the easy interaction between students from different colleges, in contrast to CalTech.

Most of MIT’s fraternties are across the river in Boston, and some of them are on the same street that contains BU housing and a BU dining hall. Of course that alone encourages interaction, but it goes further. Apparently some MIT frat students figured out how to hack into the BU dining hall card system, giving themselves free meals for a while. :))

3627

My wonderful SIL is at Caltech. The whole race card just doesn’t play in that environment. These people are scary bright, they live and breath their passion 24/7. You know what they say about people in lab coats…they just don’t have time for that stuff…

They also don’t have any high level sports teams…which often highly racially imbalanced.

3628

Legacy is not a factor in UCB admissions, although there are certainly students there who have parents who are alumni, given the size of the school now and historically.

Because of the size of the school, the number of recruited athletes given special admission consideration (up to 300 per year, according to https://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/student_athelete_admissions_policy_2016-2017_approved.pdf ) is a relatively small percentage of the admits per year (13,558 frosh and 4,495 transfers for fall 2018, according to https://admissions.berkeley.edu/student-profile ). A small school with a full set of sports teams will have a much larger percentage of its admissions class given to recruited athletes.

3629

Over the last thirty years, the most underrepresented group at the elite institutions that practice holistic admissions are not Asians, they are white students that are not jewish or a recruited athlete, but I don’t think we’re supposed to discuss it.

3630

The phrasing of Caltech’s statement is not very different from any other holistic review college. They all deny quotas, of course, of any kind (except recruited athletes).

At the same time they’re clear that they don’t just take the highest test scores.

3631

@tpike12 - Do you have any facts to support that?

3632

There’s one significant difference. Caltech clearly places a greater emphasis on academics within its holistic review than almost any other college in this country. Of course, its academic evaluation of applicants is way beyond test scores or transcripts, because test scores and HS grades just aren’t sufficient to differentiate its applicants. There’s some correlation of its criteria with test scores, however. The students that met its academic criteria also tend to have higher test scores. So it’s not surprising that, on average, Caltech students have by far the highest test scores of any college.

3633

Agree. And also note that high test scores often correlate with desirable applicant attributes, not only at Caltech.

MIT Admissions has a whole blog post on that topic.

3634

@OHMomof2 The admissions representative told us that CalTech uses holistic measures, and I believe they are. From my conversations they are looking for math/science gifted students above what current standardized test looks for, and they will give some leeway for those students without tippy top verbal scores. But there is definitely no leeway in the SAT Math 2 (800 at the 25 percentile for all students) or SAT Math section scores (790 at the 25th percentile for all students when you look at the class of 2022 student profile. The class of 2022 profile’s ACT score for the 25th and 75th percentile is unheard of (35 at 25th percentile and 36 at 75th percentile). But all holistic means from my view is that they will take a 680 verbal score kid that is a math genius, over a kid with a 780 verbal and 780 math score). Like many posters have said on CC, the SAT/ACT/SAT SUBJECT tests are too easy so they are looking for those next level math and science prodigies in their holistic review, not to lower their rigorous admissions standards.

http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/apply/first-yearfreshman-applicants/class-profile

3635

I’m sure that’s true. Caltech has a unique mission and is looking for kids that fit it. Stem majors only with a heavy emphasis on the t and the e.

That accounts for a high number of Asian kids, especially male, I imagine.

3636

Actually, mostly STEM majors with emphasis on all but the T. Numbers are from a recent graduating class as listed in https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?id=110404#programs .

S = science (12 biological, 51 physical, 67 CS)
T = technology (Caltech does not offer engineering technology majors)
E = engineering (91; 67 CS)
M = math (which all Caltech students are required to take in proof-heavy form; 28)

There was also 1 English major and 4 business/managerial economics majors in that class.

3637

They have a lot of engineering and CS majors. I was putting CS in the “T”. YMMV.

3638

I agree. There’re a lot of ambiguities in classifying the CS majors. I would also classify them under T, even though some of them worked on computational theories so they could be classified under S, and some worked on robotics, etc. so they could be classified under E. I would also put some applied sciences majors (e.g. material science majors) under T.

3639

The point was that the colleges have different admission criteria and applicant pools from Harvard. Berkeley and Caltech have legacy students, but both schools claim that they don’t give those legacy students an admission advantage (according to quote from Caltech prestident). In contrast, Harvard gives legacy students a strong admission advantage. Similarly according to Forbes,varsity athletes at Berkeley make up ~4% of students at Berkeley compared to ~18% of students at Harvard being varsity athletes. Harvard has a much smaller student body and much larger number of athletes, so it makes sense that a much larger portion of students are athletes.

Perhaps the most important difference between Berkeley and Harvard for the purposes of percent Asian is Berkeley is a public school in CA. 15% of CA residents are Asian compared to 5% Asian in the US as a whole. With 3x as many Asian persons in CA, Berkeley gets a lot of Asian applicants compared to colleges that has a large portion of non-CA residents. The Hout report mentions that Berkeley receives 18% more (ratio) Asian applicants than White applicants If admissions was a purely random lottery without considering stats, there would still be more Asian students at Berkeley than White students. This is quite different from Harvard’s applicant pool. The lawsuit mentions 52% more (ratio) White applicants than Asian applicants at Harvard.

My earlier post mentioned the Plantiff’s analysis found that eliminating the “Asian penalty” would increase the percentage of Asian students from 22% to 23% while considering the personal rating, and would increase the percentage from 22% to 24% without the personal rating. While the increase is higher without the personal rating, the percentage change is still a small 1-2% in either case. The reason why the change is relatively small when excluding personal rating is because the difference in personal ratings between Asian and White students is much smalerl than is typically suggested on various websites. Specific numbers are below assume the 3-, 3, 3+ group has an average of 3 and the <3 group has an average of 2 (there are few 1s). A lower number is better.

Unhooked White Personal Rating; Average ~= 2.78
Unhooked Black Personal Rating: Average ~= 2.80
Unhooked Hispanic Personal Rating: Average ~= 2.80
Unhooked Asian Personal Rating: Average ~= 2.81

3640

Hi @EyeVeee,
It comes down to math, but you have to make some assumptions since we do not officially collect information on Jewish students. The best data comes from the Jewish Hillel organizations on campuses and they have reported Jewish populations from 15-25% in the Ivy Leagues, so let’s say over the last 30 years, 20% are Jewish on average.

In a USA today article, I saw an estimate that approximately 20% of all Ivy Leaguers are recruited athletes with about 70% being white (14%). Some of those could get in on their own or are Jewish, so lets get down to a nice round 10% for non-jewish white, recruited athletes.

If minorities make up 50-55% of the student body, then the white students are 45-50%. Let’s go with 50%. It was probably higher previously, but it has been trending down. I checked Princeton and it is currently 43% white students.

50% Total White Students
Minus 10% white recruited athletes needing a tip
Minus 20% Jewish students
Equals 20% for non-Jewish, non-recruited athlete, white students

Jewish students made up 2% of the student population during this period while on average, white students made up 55% of the student population. I’ll be the first to admin some of these numbers are a little fuzzy, but a population of 2% sending a similar number of students to the Ivies as a population that makes up more than 50% of all students, has to raise some eyebrows.

Look at it this way.
3,500,000 graduating seniors
1,750,000 non-Jewish white graduating seniors (50%)
70,000 Jewish graduating seniors (2%)

There are approximately twenty times more non-Jewish white students than Jewish students, yet they send similar numbers to the Ivies? Mathematically impossible, thus legacies and holistic admissions.

High-achieving, non-Jewish white students are losing spots to less talented minorities (not all of course!), recruited athletes and Jewish students.