There are thousands of schools to choose from.
What is the benefit you are complaining about? One of the schools mentioned in the article was Alma College. It has an enrollment of 1,450, COA of $50,000 a year and an average ACT score of 24. These kids are paying big tuition bucks to play a sport at a school with minimal academic standards.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=457
This one, and ones like it:
Alma et al are just trying to catch up to the big boys who already use these preferences to attract lots of rich white kids.
Harvard’s incoming class is “majority minority”:
http://nypost.com/2017/08/04/minorities-make-up-majority-of-harvards-incoming-class/
"The Ivy League school’s incoming freshman class is comprised of 50.8 percent of minorities — including African-Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans or Pacific Islanders – compared to 47.3 percent last year, the Boston Globe reported.
Asian-American students make up 22.2 percent, followed by 14.6 percent of African-Americans, 11.6 percent of Hispanics or Latinos and 2.5 percent of Native American or Pacific Islanders, according to statistics."
The US itself is not yet “majority minority” so if mirroring America’s demographics is the goal of raced-based college admissions, then Harvard seems to be leading the charge. Harvard seems like a very poor example, when you are trying to make the case that universities put their thumb on the scale for whites.
@whatisyourquest - If whites don’t need a “thumb on the scale” why does Harvard keep giving them one?
And of course, unsaid in your stats is that there are more whites than any other race. Don’t look for that to change anytime soon.
^ @dragonmom3 Nothing bad. The point some of us are trying to make is that now (as always) far and away the most important demographic for these schools is white-high-ses students. These schools were founded by that group for that group and as long as they are around that is how things will be. The effort and money spent to keep things that way (white-high-ses recruitment) is staggering compared to what is done to recruit URMs for example. Not just indirectly with sports such as lacrosse and the myriad other methods mentioned earlier but ALSO directly with admin officers flying the country doing multiple visits to coveted white prep schools and their public equivalents (high income zip codes…) while completely ignoring the rest (vast majority) and those where URMs live. The few URMs that are targeted you will find are not much different in many ways than the kids produced by these schools, they are just more spread out so it doesn’t pose a problem as they can grab a few to look good and still fill the class with again: high-ses-white kids. Too many talented URM applications from one group? Oops they are out too.
Bottomline it is pointless to try to view this as URMs are taking away ORM seats as URMs (as well as ORMs btw!) are there to maintain the status quo and not the other way around… So if anyone thinks that less URMs means more room for ORMs, well no sorry that won’t happen. The only realistic possibility is actually the opposite, that these schools revert to what they were originally…
The big problem as I see it is that current generations always thinks that things are better nowadays but only in retrospect find out how wrong they were. The imaginary belief that one is better than another because of _______ (<<< fill blank with favorite status symbol) is as true and ridiculous today as it’s always been. The irony here is that the the allure these places carry stems in big part from their racist-elitist-exclusive origins so using the: “Foul! I was not let in because they are racist” card really makes no sense whatsoever… 
@OHMomof2 Ok, yes, of course, whites represent 49.2% of the Harvard incoming class, so there are more of them than any of the other races. But whites represent 72.4% of the US population according to the 2010 census:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
So, again, if mirroring US demographics is the goal of raced-based college admissions (that’s what URM and ORM mean, right?), then Harvard has far overshot the target. In that sense, whites are underrepresented at Harvard (49.2% << 72.4%).
Oh, and yes, Harvard should keep putting a thumb on the scale for some whites – low SES ones.
For what it is worth (“white” means those who are not Hispanic or Latino in these numbers):
US, 2016: 61.3% white https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045216
US, 2017 high school seniors: ~58% white based on births in 2000 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2011/08/26/america-reaches-its-demographic-tipping-point/
US, 2010 births: 50.2% white https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2011/08/26/america-reaches-its-demographic-tipping-point/
Perhaps it would be more interesting to note how many of each racial/ethnic group is of recent skilled-worker-or-PhD-student immigrant heritage. We know that this is a big factor in making some such immigrants and their American descendants racially identifiable (Asian, due to the volume of such immigration relative to the small previous Asian American population), but it is likely that less visible white and black skilled-worker-or-PhD-student immigrants now have their American descendants overrepresented at Harvard and other colleges.
Some people romanticize idealized visions of the past.
This includes those who are Hispanic or Latino. White people who are not Hispanic or Latino were 63.7% of the US population in the 2010 census: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045216
In the “past” people talked a lot less about race and got along a lot better.
From my experience–in California.
BTW I had Black, Asian, and Latino friends and we never discussed race.
@ucbalumnus You are right. I should have read my own reference more carefully…
So, the comparison in #1090 should have been 49.2% (Harvard’s white income class, excluding Hispanics and Latinos) vs 63.7% (US white population, excluding Hispanics and Latinos). Even with this correction, whites are still underrepresented at Harvard (49.2% << 63.7%).
@ucbalumnus “This includes those who are Hispanic or Latino. White people who are not Hispanic or Latino were 63.7% of the US population in the 2010 census: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045216”
And the only reason they are not matched 1:1 is because Asian students are over-represented. If the change from URM to ORM status in college admissions affects Asians it is because schools want to keep their main demographic (their bread and butter…) as unaffected as realistically possible. It has absolutely nothing to do with putting other minorities (URMs) in their seats.
Depends on which era of the “past”. Things got rather nasty in California politics in the 1990s, as the state population trended toward white people no longer being the majority (which actually did happen some time around 2000 +/- a few years).
This comparison of Alma and Harvard is absurd.
No one compared Harvard to Alma, it was an example of how those schools were starting to ape something that Harvard has been doing for ages to tap into a similar SES but otherwise different (lower GPA/ACT obviously… oh this place! … …) demographic …
There is an old saying that to the person who sells hammers, every problem looks like a nail.
To many people on this thread, everything they disagree with seems to be caused by racism.
@zinhead I think you are missing the point. The new incarnation of this thread started after it became news that a group of Asians are suing Harvard for being rejected. They are accusing Harvard of racism because they believe the school accepted URMs that (they think) are less qualified than them.
What “many people” on this thread are saying is that the above scenario is ridiculous because the only thing Harvard et al is doing is protecting their main (and originally only…) demographic base and brand name, money flow, image etc… as any super rich organization would do. So if they want to cry racism that’s fine but don’t take it against URMs because
1- URMs can’t do anything for them. After all they are still, well, URMs…
2- Things happen for a reason and when it is not clear why then oftentimes it is useful to follow the money trail.
I really don’t think that any of the law suits have argued that Asian are losing out “because they believe the school accepted URMs that (they think) are less qualified than them.” Please provide a source for this claim that these lawsuits are specifically targeting URMs. I believe that the claim is more general: that they are not given a fair shake relative to the ENTIRE applicant pool.
You haven’t read the Fisher case? Or any case challenging affirmative action?