"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

@crimsonmom2019 My thought is that there is a real possibility that Asian American students may indeed suffer from the deficiencies that many people think exist in their applications(we have heard a lot on this board, too). The applications can easily be anonymized so that all aspects of the application can be evaluated. I know that essays can be hard to anonymize and objectively scored, but at least it can be done roughly right, just like ACT/SAT writing sections. It could be a great learning experience for many on all sides of this debate to see what we value as society and what skills are lacking among different groups that are essential for future success.

“It could be a great learning experience for many on all sides of this debate to see what we value as society and what skills are lacking among different groups that are essential for future success.”

I don’t think adcoms are a good indicator as they have been in the past on any kind of social commentary. I’m not sure we’d gain much except to learn the randomness and opaqueness of the admissions process. While most adcoms are good at their jobs, they’re flawed, make a lot of mistakes and would not look to them to figure out what society values. Maybe the opposite of what society should value.

@jzducol But if their deficiencies fall around ECs, essays and recs, which are mainly contextual things that can not be objectively scored (your ACT/SAT writing section idea not a bad one), we are back to numbers, right? Perhaps I am in a pessimistic phase right now but I just don’t believe most people value context when doing so will mean they don’t get in to (insert top 10 school here). If we did, this thread wouldn’t exist.

@crimsonmom2019 Out of EC, Essay and LOR the essay is probably the most subjective part. But even that should not be the reason for its being undoable as I mentioned earlier. People routinely evaluate and rank things whose context is far more complex. We rank schools and rate movies all the time. It will not be precise but it can be roughly correct. Previous published academic studies on college admission didn’t delve much into the subjective part of the admission files, which lead to assumptions and misconceptions.
I understand that some people just don’t want to make any inquiry because it can result in change and change is the last thing they want. Before even looking at the files they already concluded the files wouldn’t reveal anything for anybody.
But just like police practice, if there is a large segment of the society that have great discontent and distrust we owe it to whole citizenry to as least make an inquiry and see if there are problems to be identified and improvements to be made. Refusing to even make an inquiry doesn’t seem to me a sincere and sensible approach to such problems.

Letters of recommendation can be highly subjective, add the quality of the recommender into the applicant’s file, and are the least observable part of the application from the applicant’s viewpoint.

You can run a linear regression on far more than just GPAs and test scores. You can include factors such as whether someone is a recruited athlete, geographic location, what sport they play, first gen, boarding school vs. private school vs. public, high school rank, and legacy. Slightly more difficult, but still doable would be to include whether an applicant’s family has a history of donations and at what level. You can add interaction terms. Is the boost from some factors contingent on others(is the legacy boost contingent on donations)? The point wouldn’t be to reach agreement on what those factors should weigh, but to find out what they do weigh in elite college admissions. Right now, there’s no agreement on how much those factors influence admissions. Such a study would be eye opening, but colleges don’t want that information getting out.

You can add in ECs, perhaps rating them on a scale of none, ordinary, school noteworthy, city or county noteworthy, region of state or small state noteworthy, large state noteworthy, nationally noteworthy, internationally noteworthy.

But then you run into non-observable (from outside the admission office) factors like essays and (especially) recommendations.

You would only be able to do a full analysis of the various influencing factors with the cooperation of the admissions office in terms of providing access to the applications. An example is the Hout report at Berkeley.

“You can run a linear regression on far more than just GPAs and test scores. You can include factors such as whether someone is a recruited athlete, geographic location, what sport they play, first gen, boarding school vs. private school vs. public, high school rank, and legacy. Slightly more difficult, but still doable would be to include whether an applicant’s family has a history of donations and at what level. You can add interaction terms.”

Isn’t that what the Espenshade study did at least for a few of the variables? His study concluded that the biggest advantages in admissions were given to athletes, blacks, Hispanics and legacies, in that order.

@theloniusmonk

Yes, but there’s two main criticisms of Espenshade: the data is two decades old at this point and he didn’t control for enough variables.

From our experience, race plays a big role in college admissions. I am all about diversity but putting white/male on a college application is the kiss of death.

^^female Asian is dead sooner.

White males are pretty sought after at most colleges. Curious what experience @amyandscott have to say this? That your one white male son didn’t get in everywhere he applied or you work in admissions or…?

My white female child did fine. She didn’t get in everywhere she applied but she did very well in the end. So from my experience, the system is perfect. But my experience is based on a sample of one so I know it’s not representative of everyone else, I find it funny that others think they know how things are because of how their kids, or their kids’ friends or their friends’ kids did…and why.

White males without hooks are not sought after at any elite college. A statement like that flies in the face of reality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/with-diversity-comes-intensity-in-amherst-free-speech-debate.html?mcubz=0

@say “White males without hooks are not sought after at any elite college. A statement like that flies in the face of reality.”

That is just not true. The number of male college students is way down and top schools like to have a student body that is close to 50/50.

Here is a recent article about it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-benefits-from-affirmative-action-white-men/2017/08/11/4b56907e-7eab-11e7-a669-b400c5c7e1cc_story.html?utm_term=.c98009ce6996

My statement is completely accurate. It’s like saying tall people are sought after by the NBA. The only thing less accurate would be to claim Asians are sought after by elite colleges. I guess it does mean how you define top colleges. But the top 10 schools are rejecting the vast majority of qualified white males along with many other qualified students. The WaPo article does not support your argument. It merely shows that the Asians have a tougher pathway. It in no way shows that unhooked white males are sought after by any elite college.

Absolutely correct. “Unhooked white males” is illogical since at many schools being male IS a hook. It’s like saying “unhooked hockey champion”.

We can look at the top schools’ CDS and see that at elite colleges, especially at LACs (and especially not the handful of tech schools), the acceptance rate for men is higher, sometimes by a lot, than it is for women.

Amherst maintains a 50/50 ratio but they turn away more women to do it - in 2016 men had an 16% accept rate and women had an 11% rate. That’s a serious bump.

Vassar has 42m/58f and to do that they have to dig down in to the male applicant pool and take a 35% of them. For women, it’s a 21% accept rate. So a third of men get in, and a fifth of women. That’s a significant advantage.

This older article explains the phenomenon pretty well: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/to-all-the-girls-ive-rejected.html?mcubz=1

Or this one: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/college-admission-tough-times-for-girls/

White men specifically? They are the main beneficiaries of legacy and athletic hooks. As has been discussed dozens or hundreds of times here before in this thread.

Brown University is a top school whose applicants are mostly women, so they admit men at a much higher rate to balance it out.

“White men specifically? They are the main beneficiaries of legacy and athletic hooks. As has been discussed dozens or hundreds of times here before in this thread.”

But those are hooked white males, the post was referring to unhooked white males being sought after, which they probably aren’t. They’re not getting invited to any diversity day e.g. Sought after and being accepted or two different things, unhooked whites or Asians are not going to be sought after, but they will be accepted. And they may be sought after at the schools where the f/m ratio favors them.

“^^female Asian is dead sooner.”

Yeah they may be, working and meeting many Asian women and men in silicon valley, I think at the top, Asian men and women are pretty similar wrt academics, scores, ECs, service, essays etc… But I think as you get to the middle and lower Asian women tend to outperform Asian men.

Absolutely correct. “Unhooked white males” is illogical since at many schools being male IS a hook. It’s like saying “unhooked hockey champion”.

There seems to be some confusion about what constitutes a hook. Yes being a recruited hockey player is a hook and most of them are white. However simply being a white male is not remotely a hook at any truly elite college and anyone who believes that has a fundamentally incorrect understanding of the admissions process. This is because there is a huge oversupply of academically qualified white males so that being a white male offers only an very tiny advantage over being a white girl or an Asian of either sex. While not a perfect analogy it’s sort of like the person who thinks he has a much better chance to win the lotto because he buys five tickets. But in truth the odds of winning are little changed. To claim this is a hook is total nonsense. A hook is something that gets an applicant into a separate admission category with a much higher acceptance rate. On there other hand there is a slight advantage to being male in admission to a LAC like Vassar since they have a harder time attracting men in general. But at the true elite schools such as HPYS,MIT,Cal Tech and a few others being a white male is simply not a hook.
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