I agree with someone upthread who noted that no one gets in without a hook of some kind. For White and Asian kids those might be somewhat invisible hooks: development, Legacy, sports, first gen, low ses. There are vanishingly few spots for kids to get in solely on academics. If more people realized this, perhaps the stigma of the URM hook would fade. So, long as its a “tip” and not a “sledgehammer” I think I’m ok with it. When they start admitting kids who are clearly not qualified to be there, thats a completely different matter.
The other possibility is that the stigma will extend more widely over students at super-selective schools, such that the true academic superstars will have to prove that they were more than “typical average excellent” high school students who had special “hook” privileges or preferences in admissions.
Indeed, that may already be the case among the general public, who are twice as likely to see college admissions as “rigged” rather than “fair”.
@gallent I don’t agree with the following:
“…no one gets in without a hook of some kind.”
I am an advocate of AA, but my white daughter at Georgetown had ZERO hooks. In fact, I wonder if being a white girl from NJ was the opposite of a hook. And I have to admit, she is doing quite well compared to her peers, many of them had hooks (mostly legacy). There are times she questions how some of the kids got in, but overall I think she is impressed with her peers’ academic abilities. Lots of smart and motivated students there.
True. What I’m suggesting is that the public will start to look that way at ALL the students of the top elite schools, whether URM or not. It will place the URM students in the same bucket as all the others. The most brilliant students there will prove themselves through their actions: achieving excellent grades in difficult coursework, or producing independent research or other measures. Simply attending the university and managing to graduate won’t be seen as a stamp of approval in and of itself.
This is similar to what has happened with high school GPA’s. I used to be dumbfounded when I learned that a student had a 4.0 GPA. Today, its common and means much less. You need other measures to validate it.
She also got into Dartmouth hookless.
@collegemomjam I said then number of kids who get in on academics alone was tiny, not zero. Your daughter was one of the very few. She is outnumbered by the hooked kids.
The apparent increasing tendency for high schools and students posting here to report only weighted GPAs makes 4.whatever GPAs common here, although an unweighted 4.0 in hard courses is not as common.
Weighted GPAs also induce students to overreach in their application lists when they compare their weighted GPAs to unweighted GPA ranges at colleges or GPA ranges calculated with lower weightings.
Yes, grade inflation is an issue, and really hurts the kids that are at high schools that don’t have grade inflation. This is why scores are important…not the be all and end all, but another needed data point sometimes when comparing candidates.
IMO grade inflation and weighted/unweighted GPAs are two different things.
A weighted GPA is an effort to take course rigor into account. (Though my kid’s HS began doing it because our state colleges offer merit scholarships for certain GPAs and do not distinguish between weighted and unweighted, so not weighting put our kids at a disadvantage, they said).
That said, colleges with the time and ability to do so, examine transcripts, grades, rigor and all that in the context of the high school profile that accompanies the transcript. If “everyone gets an A”, that will be clear from the HS profile. It certainly is in the ones I have seen, which shows the number of kids in each decile, average grades and so on.
Sounds like an incentive for high schools to use very exaggerated weighting, of the kind that can cause weighted GPAs to be in the 5.x or 6.x range.
It’s an incentive to go to weighted and probably that too, yes.
@ChangeTheGame, I am also an AA, living in North Atlanta. You and I have a lot in common, including being anti affirmative action. I have a senior graduating from Cornell next month, a junior a Yale, a freshmen at UPenn, and a current high school senior. I think our youngest is smarter than all of us. She’s in the sub 1% percentile standard test range, 4.00 plus GPA, great EC’s. She was rejected by UPenn, Brown, Duke, Rice, and Northwestern. She was accepted by WashU, Georgetown, UNC Chapel Hill, Boston College, and University of Georgia. She was waitlisted by Vanderbilt. So, it’s not a “cake walk” for high stats AA kids. Count me as someone, that enjoys your posts.
The Harvard lawsuit breaks down admit rates by AI decile for each race. AI is 2/3 based on score and 1/3 based on converted GPA/rank. The top academic decile applicants generally have stats in the top 75th percentile. African American students in the top decile had a 56% admit rate. I’m sure the admit rate would be lower today, probably below 50%, with the majority of top decile stat AA applicants rejected. However, this ~50% admit rate for AA applicants was much higher admit rate than occurred for the other races. The overall admit rate for top AI decile was 15%. There is certainly a strong AA preference, just not near certain admission for high stats alone.
HYPSM… type private colleges generally have holistic admission criteria that considers many criteria beyond academics, so hardly anyone gets accepted on academics alone. That additional admissions criteria includes more than just hooks or a “crazy EC”, so a large portion of the class is accepted without hooks or without a “crazy EC.” There is a lot of overlap in what criteria different selective colleges favor, so there are also plenty of unhooked kids who get accepted to multiple selective colleges, rather than the much smaller number of kids with multiple admits that would occur in a random distribution. I’m sure very few get accepted to 9. However, many of the unhooked kids who would be most likely to be admitted to multiple selective colleges apply SCEA/REA/ED/EA to their first choice and are accepted, so they end up only sending out 1 application.
@trackcoach79 Your kids are WOW!!! I stand corrected on the 75th percentile standardized testing point. Your daughter statistically has to be one of the top African American students in America and I have only seen outrageous success from the rare air that your youngest child is travelling in. You should have your own magazine, book, and television show sharing how you helped guide your kids to such tremendous heights academically. I would prefer to read your thoughts on how we (our society) can help URM students achieve, because you have found “it”.
@Data10, thank you for the data that shows about a 56% success rate of those top level African American applicants. Can you see how many African American students make up that top decile?
@trackcoach79 Hat tip to you for being a good parent! That’s an impressive record. I’m sure you had a major hand in their success. I am also guessing from your user name there was a recruited athlete in the bunch? I think a lot of people underestimate the concept of overlap in elite admissions -that different groups can excel at more than one thing… Also, it’s worth pointing out that being a URM recruited athlete means race had nothing to do with the admit.
@ChangeTheGame I do know one AA male friend of my DD that was rejected from Harvard with 4.0UW, 4.6W and a 35 ACT
I think that its more your hope then reality, the AA numbers are too small and the overall talent is to high at these schools for any “downfall” to occur.
I think you missed a portion of what I wrote. Schools like Harvard will be okay regardless whether AA is continued or ultimately removed. But schools that are much lower on the USNWR list (schools below 20 start to feel the lack of depth and their are approximately 450 or so schools that use race in admissions decisions) have no choice but to compromise their standards to get enough African Americans to diversify the student body because their are just not enough competitive candidates. I quoted a former Morehouse College president who (currently works at Harvard) on a past post that noted that only 50,000 young black men in America go to a 4 year college each year and he also noted that only 8,000 of those black male students had the academic backgrounds to be competitive applicants. What do you think the black male candidates look like when you get to the AA school ranked number 300 on the USNWR list? I personally think the Harvard case is too close to call (I have always said that case was a mistake because they get the best URM candidates) at this point, but the UNC-CH case looks much worse from the outside looking in. The downfall of AA will come from a school further down the pecking order that has to make too many concessions academically to reach diversity goals. Those schools have to “apply AA like a sledgehammer” because of the small pipeline.
@Shiprock1976 My Yalie, was a recruited athlete. I coached her from the age of 4 throughout high school. I was that parent that played classical music, when our kids were in the womb. Don’t know how much credit our parenting deserved. My wife and I, were both poor, but gifted students. Education is the reason, for the lives we now live. My mother, was a domestic in the 60’s and 70’s, making $25 a week. So, sometimes I stop to marvel at how far we’ve come in one generation. Our kids are a combination of nurture and nature. We read to them daily, and they could read, write, and do basic math, by the time they reached Pre-K. I am/was a bit of a “Tiger Dad”, I researched teachers from K-12, to make sure my kids had the best teachers in the building. They were always the “Black Kid”, in the honors, gifted, accelerated, dual enrollment, and AP classes. We didn’t demand all A’s, but we required them to live up to their full potential. So, if you’re an “A” student, then you must bring home "A"s. They were required to play a sport and an instrument. I believe playing an instrument does wonders for the development of young minds. The Ivy League, was not a goal for our family. It became a why not, when the solicitations started pouring in. Once you take the PSAT, you become inundated with mailings.
I am a volunteer track & field/cross country coach, and I guide all of my athletes through college admissions process, and if they’re brilliant, which a large percentage of my cross country athletes are, I nudge them to the elite LAC’s and Universities.
Ah, OK yes there could be a dilution at the lower ranked schools, but I still seriously doubt that it will lead to their demise.
@cu123 I don’t think he is saying it will lead to the demise of the school, but the demise of affirmative action.