Great…Read through all 37 pages of this thread and now feel guilty about my college application. Lower Middle-Class, First-Gen, African-American male with a 36 on the ACT now feels more like a crutch than an accomplishment.
On the bright side, at least you did not read the prior 11 editions of this thread.
You can start here if you like:
Congratulations on the 36. Less than 2,300 test takers score that well.
@OHMomof2 - I was oversimplifying, you’re right that they don’t do that quick a sort into piles. They do take a few more minutes to look at recs, essays before assigning a rubric and them comparing with the other person(s) who has read the application. However it will take a lot for the URM with a 34 to get in the reject pile and the Asian with a 25 into the accept pile.
It will take a lot for anyone with a 25 to get into the accept pile at a very selective school @theloniusmonk - they better have something special going on, whatever their race or ethnicity.
…and a 34 is a pretty baller score for anyone, though it is never enough on its own.
@collegemomjam I am all for diversity as long as it’s applied to all areas, including professional sports, acting etc. I also know Asian-American students who don’t want to go to certain good schools because they are perceived as too white. It works both ways. There are good and bad points. Generally speaking, I am for letting the market forces and competition determine the students makeup, and I feel that any argument against this should bear the burden of making a strong case. I also think the reasons for race-based Affirmative Action are getting weaker and weaker and should be replaced by income/asset based factor or first-generation.
As long as there is a more fair replacement, I agree. But you are saying two different things…letting market forces determine college admissions vs. making new rules based on income/asset or first gen. Which one is it? Market forces would probably result in less people from the lower socio-economic areas getting into the better schools because those people first of all don’t have the same educational opportunities from the second they are born and on top of that don’t have access to the tutors and services to help them perform as well on standardized tests and in school in general. I’m not saying we need to level the playing field completely, but having some kind of AA to give more opportunities to the disadvantaged is needed. People in these communities need to have a shot at the american dream too, and they desperately need role models.
To get at the problem discussed earlier of AA sometimes helping the wrong URM’s, I do think AA should be based more on “neighborhood” than ethnicity. For example, a white kid in the Newark public system should justifiably be held to a lower standard than a Hispanic kid from an upscale school system or prep school.
How do you just omit an entire survey as false because it’s a interview? There are many surveys where the ethnicity applicants claim was Jewish. It’s not my job to Google the mfor you. I mean how do you know x % of white students attend a college if it isn’t from interviews or surveys?
And your claim that Asians aren’t discriminated are absurd. Please see why UofC schools aren’t allowed to discriminate anymore after the NYT published a report showing Asians had to score x points higher than their white counterparts. This isn’t culture or projecting assertions but about statistics
And funny enough the DOEducation DOES release statistics that would make these decisions easy, plausible , and pretty much automatic (ie control/adjust an SAT score of a poor black/asian child in a newark/jersey city school district and present the SAT score as such). Hell they can even automate it when they use SATs scores as negative filters at top schools
But they DONT do it…not because they care about diversity, but becaus ethey can present the facade of education and diversity by giving minorities who don’t deserve affirmative action (Nigerians or white Cubans)
These days I’d say many inner city African Americans, middle easteners, and central americans are in FAR dire need of affirmative action than Nigerians/Cubans/white American Jews. For Christ sakes they were spied on the NSA, called rapists by the President, called to be ban/discriminated by their religion/national origin.
A sad part is within the Latin community tthe Cubans have a notorious reputaiton for basically ‘getting it all’ for nothing, it’s no wonder why we have them insulting blacks in the FL state house. If you never had to fight for or were denied eduational opportunities, would you be willing to fight for them, or care for the opinions minorities like blacks who originally marched for them? I doubt it.
@Ohiomomof2 wrote
"I don’t think there is a single Ivy that requires interviews and none count them heavily, at all, to the point that none even offer them with admissions staff, only with volunteer alumni. So how can interviews be used by admissions to cap numbers of anyone?
Then he cites science competition winners as evidence that Jewish students have a leg up over Asian students.
But let’s say the notion that Jewish people are favored over Asian people in college admissions is correct.
Who, where in this thread, is anyone saying that would be OK?"
Before college apps started soaring, some Ivies did require interviews, and Brown still does today. His point that interviews were added in the middle of the 20th century to put quotas on Jewish applicants is true. When I was applying (early 80’s) most of the ivies screened applicants, then gave interviews to the top candidates, so you needed an interview to get in. That probably still doesn’t happen because of the volume of apps.
Back then colleges used the term well rounded, now they use holistic to put quotas on Asians. That’s a fair and well substantiated point, there’s data to show that Asians need to score much higher than URMs, like 200 pts on a 1600 pt scale and 140 pts I think over whites.
Asians, like the Jews before them, win a wide share of math and science competitions. When the Jews were winning, the they saw an increase in admission to the elite colleges – that is not happening with Asian American students to the extent it did with the Jews.
I know of one Asian male who was so far ahead of his peers in a highly competitive high school (1500 is 85th percentile), won group and individual awards at the math and science competitions, as talented and accomplished a kid I’ve seen, who was w/l at one of HYPS (got into M). And he’s not a book nerd who’s only good at math and science, he played a varsity sport and has excellent writing skills. There is no doubt, none, that if he were anything but an Asian male, he’d have gotten in anywhere. The other counter is that only upper middle class can afford the trips, but a lot of them were paid (e,g NSF). People that believe discrimination is not happening in college admissions don’t want to accept that it is a reality for many Asian-American students and other unhooked ethnicities.
One talented kid didn’t get into 3 schools with 5%ish acceptance rates (but did get into one) and that’s the source of your certainty?
The whole “SAT points higher for different racial groups” argument is traced to one single study - Espenshade - that has been discussed ad infitum here and I believe is flawed for various reasons. You can search this thread for “Espenshade” to read all of those arguments if you like.
I agree with you. But “Nigerians/Cubans/white American Jews” generally have much higher grades and, especially, test scores than inner city “African Americans, middle easteners, and central americans” so there are lot more of the latter group that make the cut, so to speak. Which is probably why elite colleges also consider first-generation status and income level.
UC schools dropped affirmative action completely (and as a result has a very low percentage of African American, Mexican and other URM students).
Califorina also has a much higher % of Asian people - http://www.asiamattersforamerica.org/sites/default/files//field/image/asian%20american%20share%20of%20population.png - than any other state so their high representation in UCs would be due, at least in part, to that.
This kid got into MIT. Out of 19,000 applicants last year to MIT, over 17,000 were rejected. That’s awesome for him. He beat astounding odds.
He was WL at one of HYP? Let’s look at those odds. Last year:
H: 39,044 applied, 37,014 were rejected
Y: 31,455 applied, 29,483 were rejected
P: 29,313 applied, 27,429 were rejected
And you know this kid would have gotten into all 3 if he’d been anything but Asian? Right.
Numbers courtesy of https://www.forbes.com/sites/willarddix/2016/05/24/rethinking-the-meaning-of-colleges-low-acceptance-rates/#17b3dc161dd0
@OHMomof2 - do you think admissions are not based on race, ethnicity, first gen in addition to academics, ECs, essays and recs? I do and so we probably have to agree to disagree there. My point is that this applicant was compared with other Asians and not to the applicant pool at large. I’m not saying all four, but the cross admit rate for MIT and HYPS STEM is very large that not getting into any is definitely a soft quota on Asian males.
I think it is based on all of those, However, I am not convinced that race comes into play other than in explicit Affirmative Action.
I know that most elite colleges try to recruit more qualified URMs (and athletes and legacies and people to fill their orchestras and newspapers and less popular academic departments and so on).
I get that you believe that, and some people would agree with you and some would disagree with you. It is a belief you hold, but there isn’t definitive evidence for it. There’s the Espenshade study, that’s about it.
There are several lawsuits pending too, mostly filed by Edward Blum who filed Fisher v Universty Texas and is very anti-affirmative action. He’s now suing some Ivies with Asian applicants as plaintiffs, though his goal is to get rid of AA altogether, so I’m not sure he’s really a big advocate for Asian students: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/20/365547463/new-affirmative-action-cases-say-policies-hurt-asian-americans which refers to his site at http://harvardnotfair.org/ . In other words, he’s got an agenda.
Princeton already was investigated, and cleared: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/24/ocr-clears-princeton-anti-asian-discrimination-admissions -
- Is there any study on race and college admissions you think is better than the Espenshade study?
- What do you think he should have done differently? If you were conducting your own study, how would you have done a better job?
- There are really no studies that use actual admissions data, complete with applicant and accepted student info.
- I'd get actual admissions data from the colleges, as the DOE did with Princeton.
Assuming you did get access to all that data, how would you analyze it? The OCR had the narrow task of seeing if Princeton’s program was compliant with the convoluted rules in various Supreme Court precedents. The OCR was not tasked, with examining the broader questions of does Princeton provide an admissions advantage to URMs relative to whites and ORMs, to whites relative to ORMs, and if so, what is the magnitude of the admission boost in each case. Espenshade and the OCR were looking at entirely different questions.
@OHMomof2 “The whole “SAT points higher for different racial groups” argument is traced to one single study - Espenshade - that has been discussed ad infitum here and I believe is flawed for various reasons. You can search this thread for “Espenshade” to read all of those arguments if you like.”
Espenshade put his work in a book published by Princeton which would have been careful for publishing a flawed study. The main flaw in the study is that Espenshade and his co-authors would not share the data as it was proprietary and the colleges prohibited the sharing. I agree that’s a flaw as it prevented others from getting similar results. That being said, a lot of reputed authors, educators, use this study because the methodology, sample size, conclusions are valid.
Whether I believe it is not that relevant, the important people that should read the work and adapt to it are Asians in high schools. They already know they need excellent academics and ECs, but the hope is that they will apply to only a couple of the elite schools and set reasonable expectations. And focus on recs and essays more. College advisors are already advising Asians that they will be compared with each other for the elite schools, and once guidance counselors do, the process will be better for them.
I am fairly certain the answer to the question “does Princeton provide an admissions advantage to URMs relative to whites and ORMs” is YES, they have said they do. That’s what affirmative action does and why they defend it in court.
" to whites relative to ORMs" is a different question, and would involve many complex factors that would make a study very challenging.
Factors that can complicate the “higher-test-scores-show-racial-discrimination against Asian students” idea that many people take away from that Espenshade study: Let’s say there is a tendency in the fairly recent immigrant Asian-American community to want to do a STEM major in college, because a lot of recent Asian immigrants have STEM-ey parents, that’s how they got visas to work in the US in the first place, as engineers and scientists etc. A lot of these kids are not planning to major in theater or art or philosophy or whatever (and they do not pursue ECs in these areas). Is it fair that the college wants to have students in all of its liberal arts majors and that disproportionately affects these students? At a school like Caltech, this is not an issue. Everyone is doing STEM. At most good schools it’s MUCH harder to get into CS or engineering or “pre-med” than it is to other majors. If Asian kids are pursuing those in greater numbers, it makes sense that this increased selectivity would also disproportionately affect them.
In CA, there are more Asian students as a % of population than anywhere else. It’s not surprising that there are so many in the UC system, AA or not. There are more since AA was dropped, and it seems to have mostly filled places of Hispanic and black students, not white ones, though I don’t have those #s in front of me.
But geographic diversity is another factor here.
Add in all the other factors - essays, teacher/counselor recommendations, various ECs, talents, and changing institutional needs from year to year and that would make such a study very, very difficult to conduct, I’d think. But I’m not a statistician, if the schools released the info it’s probably possible to draw some conclusions.
As you probably know, they maintain their process of choosing is a trade secret of sorts and Princeton only gave the DOE what it did because it was forced to.
IMO the main flaw is that he couldn’t look at recs, essays, ECs, and other factors that often tip the scales at these schools.
You are maybe confusing Espenshade with the Princeton/DOE case. Princeton shared the data with the DOE but would not publicly release it.
It was NCES data actually. And the data was very limited and is now very old.Some conclusions clearly reflect that, like that back then more men than women applied to selective colleges -that has reversed.
That kind of glaring weakness (for making broad claims about college admissions today) aside, Maybe read the actual study. There is fascinating stuff in there, it’s a good read.
But as far as I can discern, scores and race and athletic/legacy were all they had for all 3 colleges all 3 years. At only one college did they even have GPA and class rank for the 3 years.
The conclusion, as limited as it must be in scope, is different from the way it is characterized by opponents of AA: