@57special Amherst recently did a two year long study of their athletic program, recruiting, diversity, etc and says they are in fact looking to increase diversity (racial and socioeconomic) on their sports teams. I don’t know what that means for your S specifically.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I have to admit that I have been cringing a bit while posting about this. We have NEVER played the “race card” but a certain (probably childish) part of me thinks it’s time for a bit of payback for the slurs thrown S1’s way over the years while competing in sports. The vast majority of people are great, but those two or three comments heard every year are always tough to deal with.
Amherst is a school we are going to be targeting, though it is definitely a reach, as it is for most. We have family who live in town, so it would great if he had family( and I bet they glom on to him for babysitting duties) close at hand as we are over 1000 miles distant.
I suppose any way one can stand out in a crowd of strong applicants helps. At selective schools the best hook of all seems to be to be a recruitable athlete.
Here’s the report I mentioned if you are interested: https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/2002%2520Diver%2520report.pdf
<<being asian="" can="" give="" one="" an="" edge="" at="" some="" schools="" like="" of="" the="" smaller,="" more="" rural="" lacs.="">>
Are you kidding me? ORM’s don’t have an edge anywhere, especially at smaller schools. And @hebegebe, yes this is a longstanding battle for ORMs. At some point the Supreme Court has to realize that MLK’s dream is for everyone, and racism does not belong in college admissions where all students deserve a level playing field to realize their own dreams.
@preppedparent Actually yes, it does, at the schools where Asian students are under represented.
You can see, for instance, that at many LACs, Asians are specifically included in the list of preferred applicants for fly in weekends which are recruiting events for students the schools put on, and pay for, to increase diversity.
http://blog.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/blog/college-fly-diversity-programs-2016-2017/
@Zinhead I think it’s actually much worse than what you have shown. What I mean is, there is an overrepresentation of whites among athletic recruits and legacies at highly selective schools, as well as a lot of low SES whites. These are all hooks, and when you back them out, the number of spots left over for unhooked whites is very small relative to the college age population. What this means is that athletic recruits and legacies actually hurt unhooked white applicants the most. I suspect unhooked white applicant is now an even worse demographic than unhooked Asian.
In response to the closed post about how unfair it is for Asians at places like Princeton:
what really needs to be considered is that many spots are taken at colleges by international students. These percentages are gettting bigger all of the time. I think Univ of Rochester is made up of approx. 25% internationals, many of whom come from Asian countries. Maybe it’s these international Asians who are taking these coveted spots from them, not the rest of the American population. I sound anti-int’l, and I’m really not, but I do wonder how less competitive admissions would be if there was a cap on In’tl admits.
Here is the breakdown for Rochester:
Ethnicity of Students from U.S.
0.2% American Indian/Alaskan Native
13.4% Asian
6.3% Black/African-American
8.4% Hispanic/Latino
3.9% Multi-race (not Hispanic/Latino)
0.1% Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander
58.6% White
9.1% Unknown
International Students: 17.4% from 113 countries
If you do a search on www.collegedata.com for schools with “Most” difficult or “Very Difficult” admissions and more than 20 percent international students, the following schools come up:
Art Center College of Design
Babson College
Boston University
Brandeis University
Bryn Mawr College
Carnegie Mellon University
Duke University
Earlham College
Juilliard School
Manhattan School of Music
Mount Holyoke College
New England Conservatory of Music
Pratt Institute
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Soka University of America
University of Tulsa
If you expand the filter to more than 10 percent international, more than 76 schools show up including most of the Ivies and numerous other elites.
At colleges.startclass where you can do comparisons it states that :
Non U.S. Citizen
24.2%
For Univ of Rochester. I know I have seen different percentages in different places. According to niche, 26% of the students are int’l.
My son, a white male, has been rejected or waitlisted from most of the “elite” non-Ivy League schools – you can probably guess some of them. He will graduate from a large, urban STEM magnet school that’s among the top 5 public schools in the country. Very competitive to get in and to stay with a graduating class of 100. The majority of the kids are low-income (so much that everyone has access to free lunch) and about 10% white, so lots of non-white kids, primarily Latino or black – many come from non-English speaking families and are first-generation college attendees.
Back in the fall, his counselors and principal, all people of color, were very blunt that white males will probably have the hardest time with college acceptances against females and people of color – all things being equal (which is hard to do). I applaud them for not being politically correct and telling it like it is, because it came to pass for us. Non-whites and females have gotten better acceptances and aid. We get it, are ok with it and understand it. But let’s don’t pretend it doesn’t happen – colleges need diversity. And, of course, race and gender are just the observable factors – who knows which kids have been playing jazz guitar or speak 5 languages, so we know there are many factors.
The kids and parents are very supportive of kids who get prime slots and everyone knows the score. It is what it is and everyone is all good.
Here is what startclass has for Rochester.
http://colleges.startclass.com/l/2915/University-of-Rochester
White 46.8%
Non U.S. Citizen 24.2%
Asian 8.6%
Race Unknown 7.6%
Hispanic 5.5%
Black or African American 4.7%
2 or More Races 2.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native 0.2%
Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 0.1%
The collegedata information clearly states that it is for undergraduates. I wonder if the startclass data includes graduate students? It would make sense as graduate schools tend to have a greater percentage of non-resident aliens than undergraduate.
Wouldn’t it be in the Common Data Sets? Do kids with green cards get classified with the international students for this kind of information gathering?
edited to add:
Institutional Research (similar to common data set) has this breakdown of the geographic origins of their 2016 freshmen class https://www.rochester.edu/provost/assets/ir/Factbook2016-17/Fall%202016%20census%20COHORT%20BY%20STATE.pdf 442 of 1461 came from not the US states. Probably there are US citizens living abroad included in the foreign countries pile.
all of their Factbook: https://www.rochester.edu/provost/ir/factbooks/current.html
@Rufusbaker Surprising to hear your story, because at elite LACS like Pomona males have higher admit rates over females. There are more female applicants, so males have an easier chance to get in. The average admit rate is misleading because the admit rate for male applicants is higher than female.
@Snowball City - startclass and collegedata are CDS aggregators. They package the data the school release. Here is the most recent CDS profile for Rochester.
For undergraduate enrollment, they report 6,386 students, 1,319 or 20.7% of which are NRA’s.
For overall enrollment, they report 10,779 total students, of which 2,918 or 27.1% are NRA.
It looks like both websites under report the number of NRA’s.
My son applied to engineering schools, rather than liberal arts. I know that they need to recruit females. Most of the engineering programs he applied to are 60-80% male.
Given the high school, Rufusbaker’s son was likely looking for STEM schools. If you look at a STEM LAC like Harvey Mudd, the female admission rate is more than twice that of males (21% vs 9%). The same is true for a school like MIT where women are admitted at a rate twice that of men (13% vs 6%). If is only at non-STEM LAC’s that the preference for males is evident.
So, after I get S1 sorted, I have to start worrying about S2, a White/Asian mix who is all about Engineering. Not good!
@Zinhead, yep, you got it pegged. Thanks. (Hope the Zin stands for Zinfandel, cuz I need some today.)
Continuing the closed Princeton Asian bias thread here. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1977209-princeton-and-bias-in-admissions-against-orm-p3.html
Quoting @websensation
MIT is probably one of the worst offenders among the elites when it comes to bias against ORM. MIT not only uses quotas for race but also gender. MIT has 1/2 as many women applicants than men, but still has close to 50/50 ratio among admitted students. The demographics that suffers most are Asian American males.
I recently came across, on a blog the essays of a student who was admitted to and attends MIT. The African American female student’s father immigrated from an African country I conducted an interesting experiment. As I read her essays, I replaced references to her African heritage with Korean heritage (randomly chosen Asian ethnicity) and references to female gender with male references. The student sounded like that of a stereotypical Asian male applicant to MIT interested in robotics and debate . Someone who would have had NO chance getting admitted.
Everyone, can you enlighten me on what factors colleges use to treat certain applicants as URMs? Is it because certain groups are under-represented in colleges regardless of whether the group was historically discriminated? Or is a certain group or groups being viewed as URMs by colleges because they have been discriminated in US society historically speaking? I guess my question is this: Is a certain group viewed as URM by certain college (should they choose to do so) because this group has been discriminated historically in US society, or because this group has been under-represented in colleges historically and more importantly NOW; or both?
Not trying to start any controversy but I just realized I should find out the reason.