@whatisyourquest I’m sorry your claim and/or @OHMomof2 's claim that Harvard is using recruited athletes to get more whites in is NUTS. Harvard wants the best athletes and the smartest kids that are also the best athletes… Harvard just gave the boot to a white hockey player recruit named Bode Wilde who is a top NHL draft pick next year. The kid (who is a notoriously bad student) immediately committed to Michigan. Bode Wilde is white.
Additionally, I think one thing people are missing (not just here but in general) is that students go to college for many reasons and they want different things out of the experience. Clubs, sports teams, arts etc are an important element of the college experience. In seems that part of the argument by those saying Asians are being discriminated against by letting in less qualified students (blacks, athletes and so on) are ignoring the fact that “college” serves many goals. Do you want to go cheer for Harvard’s football team or Yale’s hockey team while you are getting a great education? Or are you just going there as some resume building feather in your cap so you can go work at Goldman Sachs?
The only racial preferences that are explicitly, legally allowed in admissions are to URMs via affirmative action. So this does, definitely, target URMs.
Maybe you are seeing something else in the brief?
Just as an aside, he makes at least one very sloppy mistake in this brief that makes me wonder if he knows everything he thinks he knows.
I think we all know that H has SCEA, not ED. Early admits are NOT obligated to attend.
racial preferences are wrong and should be made illegal. They hurt everyone and are denigrating to those they purport to help. Nonetheless -“holistic” admissions decisions allowing accommodations for various talents is a good thing. A bunch of drones who do nothing but study and are deemed failures if they dont attend an Ivy League school is not the purpose or benefit of a true liberal arts education.
“Or are you just going there as some resume building feather in your cap so you can go work at Goldman Sachs?”
That’s exactly the charge being made by professors at some ivy league colleges, the students there are either going into finance or consulting without actually learning how to think. It’s chronicled in William Deresiewicz’s book, Excellent Sheep. I’m pretty sure it’s been discussed on cc. So if they’re just going there to get into a G/S then they probably wouldn’t notice football or hockey missing.
…except of course for the fact that sports teams - esp the “waspy” ones - are an excellent way to get to know the kids of the employers at GS and places like it.
“…except of course for the fact that sports teams - esp the “waspy” ones - are an excellent way to get to know the kids of the employers at GS and places like it.”
Valid point on the waspy sports, but this seems more like ex-athletes at ibanks helping current athletes, not really current athletes helping their classmates. I guess there could be some residual networking, however athletes tend to hang out together and not really integrate with rest of the campus, sometimes their own dorms etc.
“racial preferences are wrong and should be made illegal. They hurt everyone and are denigrating to those they purport to help. Nonetheless -“holistic” admissions decisions allowing accommodations for various talents is a good thing. A bunch of drones who do nothing but study and are deemed failures if they dont attend an Ivy League school is not the purpose or benefit of a true liberal arts education.”
Holistic is just another way for colleges to use race in making decisions, something you’re decrying as wrong. And you would still use essays, recommendations and ECs to figure out who will contribute to the campus and who will just study. Btw, even at colleges that are not considered rigorous (insert favorite Ivy here), students still study a lot. Especially if they’re pre-med or engineering.
what do peopel think trump affirmative action policies will look like? I think a shift to the rich. The nigerians and egyptians will still have a chance poor african americans and latinos will hurt
I think a lot non-Asian parents will literally get into a fist fight if their kids are not given sports opportunities on the field. It is pretty lame for Asian parents just complain loudly about unfair treatment.
I think whichever side of the debate you are on if you are intellectually honest you should be for one thing which is seeking truth. If the schools just let people see their admission data a lot misconceptions will be cleared up. What is there to hide if no bias existed. Unfortunately, Stanford and Yale are destroying their admission files, Princeton is claiming them as business secret and Harvard is fighting against releasing them in court. With that secrecy the debate and distrust will go on forever.
I have seen similar advice given on these forums to Asian applicants. But it seems like similar advice tends not to be given to white or black students. Indeed, sometimes there is a backlash when suggesting that a merit scholarship seeking white applicant consider a school with an attractive merit scholarship that happens to have mostly non-white students.
"But he said he advises these students to "look for schools with low Asian populations."
Actually I would argue high or increasing, if you see a university that has kept it’s Asian to say a small range, 15-20%, you know there’s a soft quota going on, so you’d avoid. Similarly if it’s low, they could be seen as not valuing Asians. You want to apply to the Cal Techs, Berkeley’s of the world, where race is not considered as important as other factors
“Tom said that the colleges to which Asian-American parents want their children to enroll in are hyper competitive, so it is difficult for anyone to get in. She said she must stress time and again that, applying to these colleges, top grades and test scores, “are not special,” but are “the norm” and no guarantee of admission…”
Most Asian applying to top schools realize this, that’s why 75% of NSF and Olympiads are Asians, and many are presidents of their classes.
Not necessarily – it could be that the school has not attracted much interest among Asian applicants, for whatever reason (sometimes the location). Of course, since many students (Asian or otherwise) prefer to have some minimum threshold percentage of their own race/ethnicity, a school with a very small percentage of a given race/ethnicity often has a hard time attracting more.
Or often, Asian students aren’t interested because it’s a LAC (no engineering/weak STEM perception or the idea that if it isn’t a well known big U it’s not worth attending), or it’s not on a coast or big city (too far from home for many), or there are simply too few other Asian students, as @ucbalumnus said.
Well black students are under-represented at most elite colleges - there aren’t more than a small handful (I’d list 3) where they aren’t so they are basically always applying to places where there are few of them, to varying degrees.
I have suggested some HBCUs to white students (including my own), but I agree that a lot of white students can’t imagine being the minority group so wouldn’t apply just on that basis.
Whites are a minority in most public schools in CA.
Believe it or not, schools can be “too Asian” for Asians…
And majority Latino schools have other issues.
It would seem to me that opening up the admissions data would deepen the divide on this issue? Data alone is not going to provide the context of the ECs, essays, recommendations, etc and surely we can not expect them to release those. Without that context, we are stuck with just the numbers. I think we already know what the numbers will show (yes there will be outliers but for the most part) and then where will we be? In the same place IMO. If you are going to include as admission factors anything other than just GPAs and test scores, there will never be an agreement on how much those other factors should weigh. Never. I’d love to hear your thoughts on why you feel doing so will stop the debate and lower distrust.
(Side note to all: I very much appreciate the ability to come to a place where such an issue can be discussed in a civil manner. Humanity is winning here.)