"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

Applying to College
4201

I don’t think this part helped your argument. As others have said, only about 200-300 spots are reserved for the “bright minds” that win those contests you mentioned, or shine some other way academically. These are the students that are expected to become future leading professors, scientists or entrepreneurs that will reflect positively on the college in the future.

Much of the rest of the class is filled by preference groups (legacy, URM, athlete, geographical, etc.). While nobody is a dullard here, they are simply not held to anywhere close to the same academic qualifications as the “bright minds”.

Note that I am not saying that “bright mind” and preference group are mutually exclusive. You could very well have a John Urschel type who ticks many boxes at once, but these are exceptions rather than the norm. I am also not advocating that all spots should be for “bright minds”, as that would make these colleges much less vibrant.

4202

@MWolf

With the arguments I have made, I don’t understand the basis for this question, which makes me believe it is being asked for provocation.

Lots of hand-waving in these statements, but those are different topics. Although, you appear to be saying that, in addition to affirmative action, athletics and legacy are also responsible for the decline in value of degrees from top colleges. Glad you are on board with my arguments.

Also, regarding your focus on Harvard, I don’t care about Harvard. In terms of volume, it is affirmative action at the flagship state schools that is degrading the degree for URM’s, and displacing more qualified applicants. Lower standards for admittance, lower standards for both the award and maintenance of diversity scholarships, etc.

4203

Which actions? Opening up the country to people across the globe in the largest mass migration in the history of the world? Educating their children and providing them healthcare? Creating fabulous economic opportunities? Guaranteeing individual liberty and freedom backed by constitutional government and powerful institutions?

Kids are going to notice and feel attacked when you take the actions of a fringe element and apply it across an entire group that shares none of those beliefs or characteristics. It’s very dangerous.

4204

I didn’t say it quantified success. But it should quantify a high competency. And with grades and standardized testing coming up 1st and 2nd in the Pew poll, I think most Americans are looking to quantify what makes a qualified student in college admissions, especially with the fierce competition to attend at our nation’s most hallowed higher learning institutions.

@Shiprock1976 I agree with you that students of color would do much better with just a similar standardized prep work ethic. Congratulations to your nephew and your son for their high achievement, but they will always have to live with those achievements being diminished like my own children. What’s funny is that this phenomenon would not bother me at all if it just happened to me, but to see your own kids go through it is a terrible feeling.

@OhiBro

I have seen a similar dynamic. My teenage son and I volunteer/tutor/mentor in our community and there are many African American students that we work with know that they can get away with less, so they do less. I believe this is a terrible “side effect” of AA that AA proponents do not care about or do not believe exists.

4205

I agree with your statement, but I have to put in my own caveat when it comes to flagship state schools. Since those schools are funded with taxpayer money, I do believe that they have a duty to state residents first that muddies the waters for me. In my state of residence (GA) 34% of graduating high schools seniors are African American. Does that mean that I expect that UGA have a similar percentage? Nope, but I do believe that the state has an obligation to look at its taxpayers 1st when dictating spots. Since UGA’s most recent class was 7-8% African American, I don’t think that my flagship is taking any students who are not truly qualified (not going to bash athletes here), but Georgia does have other state schools (Georgia State’s most recent class was 41% African American) that service Georgia residents. But that dynamic could be different in every state.

4206

I don’t know about Georgia, but U Michigan had a point based AA system that awarded twice as many points for being black or Hispanic as for being a Michigan resident.

4207

@OhiBro I only use Harvard as an example because their detailed data is readily available, as well as their admissions process. The situation is almost certainly the same in most every other T-25.

I would like to know about this mythical time, when students were only accepted to T-25 colleges based on merit alone. When every student was required to be in the top 1% of GPA and SAT, when no legacies or athletes were allowed in unless they had the exact same GPAs and SATs as non athletes and non-legacies.

Legacies and recruited athletes have always been a substantial number of the admitted students to selective colleges, and the number of less-qualified recruited athletes and legacies has always far outnumbered under-qualified URMs. So, unless you are able to remember what the selective colleges were like before the use of Holistic Admission processes, back in the 1920s, when American Colleges were inferior to their European counterparts, you are remembering a time that didn’t exist.

Simply put - there has been NO sudden drop in academic standards in any college. Elite colleges have ALWAYS had a substantial number of academically underqualified admitted students, from the day that holistic admissions was established. This percentage has not changed much since at least the 1950s. This is true for every college out there. Read James Thurber’s description about the academic performance of a star football player in his class, when Thurber was at OSU in the mid 1910s. One of the repeated themes when talking about the elite colleges is how many of the leading figures of today who went to selective colleges would not be admitted because they would not qualify. That really does not point to a “drop in standards” now, does it?

The “recent drop in standards” is an invented phenomenon. It simply did not happen, and was invented, like much of the fake news today, to paint specific groups as Destroying All That Is Good And Beautiful In The USA. The claimed timeline “drop in standards” is suspiciously well-aligned with the increase in the number of URMs that have been admitted to selective colleges, so it’s easy to see which ethnic groups this “drop in standards” narrative is blaming.

This narrative is both false and racist.

Speaking of racist, @DoNotStudy, that’s quite the screed, you know? I would also like to know who you think this “nefarious force” is. I have a feeling that I know, since I used to be active on Twitter, and have read a number of very similar screeds, though they mostly did not include Asians among those who they felt are suffering oppression at the hands of Minorities And Their Nefarious Overlords.

4208

I just want to comment that @ChangeTheGame is brilliantly disarming and a pleasure to read.

4209

tpike12 wrote:
Kids are going to notice and feel attacked when you take the actions of a fringe element and apply it across an entire group that shares none of those beliefs or characteristics.

Great, everyone is being stereotyped, so what happens? People retreat to the safety of their tribe. There is a very good reason why multicultural societies have always failed and nations have ended up mostly homogenous. My belief is that any type of racial-based preferences are poisonous in a multicultural society and cause more harm than good. Each American citizen should be judged solely on their merits and we need to get back to having one tribe, the American Tribe.

4210

It is not about preferences for Arab or Iranian Americans (who would probably be ORM for college purposes anyway). It is about recognizing that many people want to define The American Tribe in a way that excludes them (and/or other minority groups) or treats them as lower caste. Recognizing that they are sometimes treated worse does not necessarily mean giving them preferences in anything – the goal commonly being to eliminate anti-preferences that exist.

4211

@MWolf

Thanks for your detailed response. I think I better understand your position.

I’m not sure legacies and athletes belong in the same argument as URM’s, as the former provide much-needed cash infusions while the latter do not. Not ideal, but something you hold your nose and do, like funding extracurricular programs with bingo.

So what is responsible for the increasing number of URM’s? Every metric available says they are less prepared than others. It sounds like you’re saying the supply of qualified URM’s has outpaced the supply of qualified non-URM’s.

4212

Actually, the notion that legacy preference = more donations is questionable, although legacy preference can be effective at tipping the SES level of the students higher.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/legacy-admissions-preferences-ivy/586465/
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/production.tcf.org/app/uploads/2016/03/08201915/2010-09-15-chapter_5.pdf

Considered cynically, URMs may also be a component of a college’s marketing, since colleges may want a sufficient presence of each racial/ethnic group* in order to be able to market itself to potential students (and donors, etc.) of all racial/ethnic groups (a significant enough number of students will hesitate to attend a college where there are “too few” of their own racial/ethnic group). Yes, this looks kind of like quotas (though somewhat squishy ones)…

*Yes, this includes non-URM racial/ethnic groups as well as URM ones. Legacy probably also helps some of the colleges keep white enrollment up, since the white percentage was higher a generation ago. Not that that helps non-legacy white applicants…

4213

@OhiBro the increase in URMs is partly part of Affirmative Action which is an attempt to rectify centuries of these groups being marginalized. Since the HS that serve URMs are generally extremely underfunded, and URMs, as a rule, lack the resources to get the type of academic support enjoyed by the majority of students applying to selective colleges, the academic standards are adjusted to where they would be for this majority of applicants, if they did not have the resources they have. How much does somebody increase their SAT scores with a tutor’s help?

Of course, if we had a well-funded, high quality, public school system available to all, it would solve much of the problem, but unfortunately, too many people in the USA believe that a high quality education is a privilege, not a right.

BTW, it is wrong to think that all URMs are Black or Latinx. These make up about 17.2 % of the incoming class of Harvard, which I’m again using because the data is open on my laptop. Other categories include 1st generation (of which about 30% are White, and 17% are Asian, from states which send few applicants, which are almost all White, and poor, which I do not know how many there are, but I expect that they pretty much overlap by 70%-80% with 1st generation status. that means that about 40% of all URMs are White or Asian.

No, what I’m saying is that the “drop in standards” is fake news, it’s a made up story, which was made up to create an illusion that the entry of URMs caused a drop in standards. The racist narrative goes as such: “the Ivies were all great schools, until they let unqualified URMs in, and now it have become a substandard mess”.

BTW, most minority students who get into an Ivy leagues school seems to be prepared enough, since they almost all graduates. The number are between 96% graduation rate for Black kids at Harvard, 94% for both Yale and Princeton, while Columbia has the lowest rate of 85%. Since the graduation rate at Columbia is 95%, that means that Black students are graduating at about 90% the rate of other students, at the lowest. That is hardly an indication that these kids were not prepared.

4214

@Mwolf excellent points and summary. I couldn’t agree more, especially the part about the inequities in public school education. And your point about someone increasing their scores with a tutor is right on as well. Yes those kids work hard and deserve to be rewarded for their hard work (my kids all used a private tutor and I have no regrets, it worked), but it doesn’t mean they deserve a spot more than someone who hasn’t had the same resources, might also work as hard and has as much academic potential but they look “weaker” on paper.

4215

Graduating from many Ivy League colleges basically means you have a pulse. As my nephew said about his Yale experience: “It’s hard to get an A, but harder to get a C”.

4216

@MWolf and @collegemomjam
You both bring up points that I believe are mythical. First, that URM (blacks, specifically) are underfunded. I’m sure this varies by geography, but last I checked, blacks received WAY more funding than whites. They also had brand new schools built with the promise of closing the achievement gap. But throwing money at them did absolutely nothing. Total myth. Now, they’re asking for more money. (SMH)

Second, high-achieving whites are just assumed to have advantages that URM’s don’t have. What about the kids that ace the ACT or SAT with zero preparation? They are the product of working hard for years alongside URM’s in the same schools and learning environment. If a simple prep course can raise scores so much, why not pay for URM’s to have such a course? Unfortunately, colleges ignore so many kids in favor of a single essay, which URM’s can cheat or write a compelling sob story (excuse), as was the case at Berkeley.

Finally, the definition of URM can mean anything a college wants. Some even classify LGBTQ, 1/2 black, 1/4 black, as URM’s. (SMH) One YouTube personality shamelessly said she is 1/8 black to get into Harvard.

4217

https://edbuild.org/content/23-billion says that the national average funding per student in school districts is:

$14,121: >75% white, low poverty
$12,987: >75% white, high poverty
$12,205: >75% non-white, low poverty
$11,500: >75% non-white, high poverty

Ohio does appear to be a slight exception to the national trend, with $13,223 funding per student for >75% non-white, high poverty districts versus $13,016 and $12,978 for >75% white, low and high poverty districts respectively. Ohio apparently has no >75% non-white, low poverty districts, and has 74% of students in districts that are either >75% white or >75% non-white, suggesting a higher level of segregation than the national average (53%).

More at https://edbuild.org/ .

4218

@ucbalumnus
Thank you for the data breakdown, and the interesting site link.

I hesitate to put too much faith in aggregate data because it can underestimate the investment in low-cost areas with high minority populations, and overestimate the investment in high-cost areas with few minorities.

But using some of the data from that site and a KY school reporting site (OH reporting is not that great / detailed), there is a pocket in eastern KY of poor white kids that outperform minorities from the more affluent urban areas.

Also, this NYT report states “Even in districts where white students and their minority classmates had similar socioeconomic backgrounds, academic gaps persisted.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html

4219

@tpike12 Thanks for that complement. Now if I could just get my wife to agree that I am disarming;)

@ucbalumnus You are right to show that money matters, because it always does matter. The thing that I do see is some districts seem to be much better at using (what OhiBro’s NYT article shows when it comes to some student outcomes). My home district (Gwinnett County Public Schools) uses size and scale (13th biggest district in America along with the biggest district in America that buses students) to keep the average funding per student to $9,653 per student in an area right at the US average for cost of living/household income. I have watched them do a fantastic job to keep costs down during 2008-2009 recession and continue to keep taxpayer costs down over the years. My district matches up very favorable to other GA districts (a definite top 20 district in the state of GA for student achievement by any measure) despite ranking 113 out of 159 GA districts (saw this ranking a couple of years ago in a newspaper article) for average spending per student and a majority minority student population.

One thing that I believe will change the AA debate in the elite college admissions over the next couple of generations (if the courts don’t change it) is the change in the US population demographics. What happens when current underrepresented minorities become the majority of the US population? Non-Hispanic White Americans are right at the 50% mark currently for young students and I have seen projections where the total number of Non-Hispanic White Americans in 2060 will be less than today’s numbers, while the Black, Hispanic, and Asian American populations continue to grow (The population is expected to grow by up to 100 million people in that time frame if birth rates/immigration patterns hold). From that point of view, does it change the context of the debate when URMs become the majority of the population?

4220

Not unless they enjoy the benefits that accrue to the majority, no.

South Africa has always had a black majority by population. That didn’t mean they had/have the majority of resources and opportunities.