"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

Applying to College
4781

The specific numbers I get are below. All are from the lawsuit period, rather than the most recent classes. Note that students can be in multiple ALDC categories, so the sum of individual components is greater than the ALDC total.
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Harvard White Admit Distribution
Legacy – 22% Admits
Athlete – 16% Admits
Special Interest List – 14% Admits

Faculty/Staff Kid -- 2% Admits

Total ALDC = 43% Admits
Total non-ALDC = 57% Admits

SES Disadvantaged = <1% ALDC, 15% non-ALDC
Total non-ALDC + not SES Disadvantaged = 49% Admits

Harvard Asian Admit Distribution
Legacy – 7% Admits
Athlete – 4% Admits
Special Interest List – 5% Admits

Faculty/Staff Kid -- 2% Admits

Total ALDC ~= 16% Admits
Total non-ALDC ~= 84% Admits

SES Disadvantaged = 3% ALDC, 22% non-ALDC
Total non-ALDC + not SES Disadvantaged = 66% Admits

Portion of full domestic admit class who is unhooked = non-URM (White or Asian) + non-ALDC = 45% * 57% + 22% * 84% = 44%; Hooked = 56%

Portion of full domestic admit class who is unhooked = non-URM (White or Asian) + non-ALDC + not SES Disadvantaged = 45% * 49% + 22% * 66% = 37%; Hooked = 63%

Portion of full admit class who is unhooked + not SES Disadvantaged + not international = 34%; Hooked + International = 66%

If you also count REA as a hooked/special category group, then the the portion unhooked/not special category would drop dramatically, as would the admit rate for that non-special category group.

4782

will i get banned if i mention the bell curve?

4783

If you added everyone with an athletic two or higher to the 66%, you would get a higher number.

4784

That has been discussed extensively, but it’s been a while. Some are willing to discuss, whereas others have already made up their minds about the book, in some cases without reading it.

4785

That’s a good topic to stay away from. It seems to upset the mods.

4786

The “hooked” number needs to be adjusted still higher to account for the large and demonstrated preference for feeder schools, Boston-area prep schools, and elite prep schools across the country.

There is a very significant boost for the applicant from the schools which are well known by the adcoms. At Harvard, about 11-12% of high schools contribute ~1/3 of the students, while about 75% of the high schools contribute only one student in a given year.

The adcom is well acquainted with such schools’ academic rigor and in many cases are well acquainted personally with the GCs and even several of the teachers. This helps the applicant enormously: if a well-known, rigorous calculus teacher at school X is famous for grade deflation, for ex., then an applicant presenting a mediocre or even a bad grade in that course will be viewed more favorably (or at least no less favorably) than a student from a no-name school with an ‘A’ in calculus.

We should increase our estimate of the ‘hooked’ % accordingly. There are probably another 20% (above the 66% ALDCers + URMs + Int’ls) who are not in the above groups but whose chances benefit tremendously from going to one of the 80 or so favored prep schools or elite publics. Doing so increases one’s chance of admission almost as much as being a legacy.

For example, the Boston-area elite schools (Andover, Exeter, Latin, Milton) routinely send 10+ students to Harvard alone each year. Another two dozen top Massachusetts and NYC schools will send 5+ students to H. each year.

Just these ~30 schools alone account for about 10% of Harvard’s class, which means a high-achieving applicant from such schools is about 10x more likely to be accepted at H. than his or her high-achieving peer at one of the 10,000 public schools which never or rarely send kids to any ivy, let alone H.

4787

One more hook: coming from an underrepresented geography. HYPM strive valiantly to get representation from all 50 states, so coming from the Great Plains, the northern Rockies, the Mississippi Delta or parts of Appalachia will give an applicant an admissions boost close to that experienced by an applicant from one of the 80 or so elite, well-known prep and magnet schools. Ditto for being first-generation.

That boost is about 10x the admissions odds for a high-achieving applicant from a no-name middle- or upper middle class suburban high school located in a medium-sized or large state.

So to the 66% ‘hooked’ figure for ALDC/URM/Int’l, add:

  • ca. 5% for the hinterland and 1st-gen admits, and
  • 30% from the top 80 or so elite and feeder schools
  • subtract ca. ~10% for the duplicates e.g. the Andover or Exeter kid who’s either an URM or 1st-gen or from Mississippi, etc

… and you get 66% + 5% + 20% = fully 91% of the admits to our top schools are hooked in one or more ways.

When you consider that about 80-90% of the top academic applicants-- those scoring a ‘2’ or higher per Harvard’s academic dimension-- are unhooked white and Asian middle- or upper-middle class suburban kids from not-famous, ordinary public high schools in medium to large states, it becomes obvious that the elite admissions process is ridiculously, horribly, insanely skewed.

An elite educational system designed so that 90% of the superior applicants compete for 10% of the available slots is not fair, or rational, or likely to produce good outcomes for society.

4788

Harvard intends to produce good outcomes for itself, which may or may not be the same as good outcomes for society.

4789

You need more data to make this claim. While a small number of feeder schools send a high number of number of students, most of those schools have a high number of ALDCs. It’s not clear whether the non-ALDCs attending those feeder schools have higher odds of admission.

4790

Roethlisburger, I made the assumption that about 1/3 of those admitted from the elite prep schools – which include the likes of Stuyvesant in NYC – are either ALDCers, URMs or Int’l. What you say is almost certainly true for those few Boston-area feeders that have large numbers of Harvard children, but is it really true that Harvard would so blatantly tilt the admissions odds for ALDCers from schools far from Boston – such as Stuyvesant in NYC or TJ in Virginia or Harker in San Jose?

The one-third proportion seems to me a reasonable estimate, but you’re right-- I don’t have the actual breakout for these schools.

4791

Those magent schools, along with the top boarding and day schools have a disproportionate number of academic high achievers, whether they themselves admit by test (Stuy)or some holistic process (Fieldston, Andover).

It makes sense that elite high schools would send more students to elite colleges than non-elite high schools.

4792

OHMom - you missed the point of our (my and Roethlisburger’s) discussion. The admission odds comparison we’re discussing is between one group of elite (top ~80 or so prep schools’) students and another group of students from the exact same schools.

Roethlisburger’s contention is that there is no special advantage to going to those schools and that the latent variable which explains these students’ vastly greater admissions success is actually their ALDC status.

My contention is that ALDC status does not explain all or even most of these students’ success, and that insititutional bias owing to adcom familiarity, personal ties to these schools, relationships with school staff, and marketing ROI/efficiency of spend account for much of the bias toward such schools.

In short, going to one of the top 80 or so elite prep schools is a ‘hook.’

An academic ‘2’ or ‘1’ applicant who has excelled in a rigorous, advanced pre-college curriculum at a no-name suburban school is very likely at a severe admissions disadvantage - probably at least 5:1, maybe as much as 9:1 or 10:1 - relative to his academic peer who attends one of the top ~80 elite prep schools.

4793

I don’t think so.

I don’t think that’s clear. Those schools already have tons of super achievers, is my point. Of course they will be over-represented at elite colleges.

I agree with that to a degree (prep school kids and magnet kids are generally wealthier, likely to be in the ALDC groups too) but I will add that there is a very high concentration of academic superstars at those schools as well.

Hard to say if Superstar X at Andover is getting in over Superstar Y at Plano High School based on high school alone.

4794

X’s counselors and teachers are probably better known to elite colleges than Y’s counselor and teachers,vand probably better trained at writing recommendations. And X will probably have a better “packaged” application because X’s counselors and teachers will provide more optimal guidance for applying to elite colleges, including better assessments of which ones are realistic for X to apply to and which ones are most likely to see X as a match in their view. Y will have to figure this out on Y’s own.

4795

At boarding schools, like Andover, and expensive privates, like Harker, I wouldn’t be surprised if nearly 100% of students admitted to Harvard are either ALDCs, URMs, or international. At public magnets, like Stuyvesant or TJ, you might find a higher percentage of unhooked kids. You would need more data to say for sure.

4796

OHMom,

Harvard’s own data indicates that the top 80 schools constitute about one-third of enrolled freshmen, or about 530. That number is about the same as the number of ALDCs among the enrolled freshmen, which is slightly lower at 30% or ca. 500.

Is it really the case that EVERY single ALDC was a graduate of a top 80 prep or magnet school? Not likely.

BLUF: Going to a top 80 prep school will probably boost the unhooked applicant’s odds by at least 2.5x, probably 4-5x.

Bear with me, here’s the long answer:

Many of those 530 top prep school applicants who were admitted-- extrapolating from the H. data, I’d guess about 40-50%-- were not ALDCs. Maybe a few were URMs or Internationals, so perhaps 40% is accurate, which gives you about 212 unhooked admits from the top 80 prep schools.

So the question becomes, what were the admission odds for
a) academically-superior unhooked kids from the top 80 prep schools
b) academically-superior unhooked kids NOT from the top 80 prep schools?

For a) the top 80 prep schools, we know that there are about 12,000 students in each year’s graduating class from the 80 or so top prep, magnet and other elite high schools. We also know, based on their published SAT data, that about 25-35% of them, and in some cases up to 40%, score 1460 or higher on the SAT. Call it 30% on average, and you get about 3,600 academically-superior POTENTIAL applicants.

How many actually applied to H.? Don’t know, but certainly far less than 100% across these schools. And certainly some, perhaps most, of the LDCs admitted were academically-superior. So maybe the unhooked total potential applicants from these schools is about 3,300 or so.

How many of these academically-superior kids from the top 80 schools applied to Harvard? One-third? One-quarter? Keep in mind, these schools are not just the “feeder” schools in the Boston or NYC area but also Stuyvesant, Harker in San Jose, and other schools around the country. (Just as not every high-achieving kid will apply to Stanford or Yale, many of the non-Boston/NYC kids will not even consider Harvard, for various reasons.)

If one-third applied, then their admission odds would be 212/1,100 or ~19%.
If one-quarter applied, then their admission odds would be 212/825, or ~26%.

Now, we know that, per Harvard’s admissions data there were a total of about 11,000 unhooked ie white or Asian students total in the top three academic deciles. If you subtract from this total ca. 3,000 of our 3,300 top 80 prep school applicants, and maybe a few hundred more for internationals, you get about 7,700 unhooked, academically-superior applicants who were NOT from the top 80 prep schools.

We know that such students constitute about 1 minus 66% hooked - another 12-15% for the non-ALDC/URM/Intl top 80 prep admits = 100% - 66% - 14% = about 20% of the admitted population, or about 400 admits.

400 unhooked non-Top 80 prep admits / 7,700 unhooked non Top-80 prep applicants
= about 5% admit rate.

Note that even if you assume that HALF of all the top 80 prep schools’ academically-superior kids apply to Harvard-- an unlikely assumption outside of the Boston- and NYC-area feeder schools, i believe-- you still come up with 2.5x the admission rate.

That’s a far cry from the 19-26% admit rate range estimated for their unhooked academic peers at the top 80 prep schools.

Again, going to an elite prep school by itself constitutes a major hook, worth about 4-5x the rate for those of similar achievements, also academically-superior, who are also non-ALDC/URM/Intl and who did not go to such schools.

4797

Andover isn’t a school of all geniuses. The average SAT score is only 1460. That’s not high enough to explain matriculating 10+ students to Harvard per year from a relatively small class of about 300 students without taking into account all the ALDCs.

4798

According to the article at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/?page=single , Andover applicants had a 13% acceptance rate for the class of 2017 compared to a 6% overall acceptance rate or 21% REA acceptance rate. If you assume Andover applicants are more likely to be hooked, apply early, and be academically qualified; the acceptance rate is not suggestive of a notable advantage.

Instead I expect one of the most important factors in why there are so many Andover students among Harvard’s class is a huge portion of Andover students apply to Harvard. The article implies that 18/13% = 138 Andover students applied to Harvard, which is a large portion of Andover’s class. The public HS I attended in upstate NY had a larger class size than Andover, yet well under 10 students apply to Harvard most years. Andover students appear to be ~30x more likely to apply to Harvard than students from my upstate NY public HS. If you compare the number of HSs in the US to the number of applicants to Harvard, then it suggests fewer than 2 students apply to Harvard at most US HSs. If fewer than 2 apply, your HS won’t have multiple acceptances. However, if 138 students apply like at Andover, it’s likely that your HS will have multiple acceptances.

4799

Just to be clear-- in contrast to Data10 above, my analysis was confined to ONLY those academically-superior i.e. ‘1’ or ‘2,’ >1460-SAT applicants from the top 80 prep schools.

IOW, in Andover’s case, not the majority of Andover’s class but only the top ~40-45%.

So for the academically-superior Andover applicants, the acceptance rate was not 13% but more like 25%.

Again, that’s likely 4-5x higher than the acceptance rate for their academic peers at the likes of Plano H.S. or Lynbrook H.S. and other academically-superb but non-top 80, non-connected suburban high schools.

4800

You’re misreading the article. The acceptance rate of applicants to Andover was 13%. That tells you nothing about the acceptance rate of Andover applicants to Harvard.