"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

Applying to College
1501

I addressed that in the post. That race is a protected class makes race-based policies subject to strict scrutiny. It doesn’t mean that they are automatically forbidden.Intent and context matter. Once we grant colleges a legitimate interest in having a diverse class (in the broadest sense of the term), it simply doesn’t make sense to say that schools can take into account essentially any non-academic factor except for race/gender/religion. If we acknowledge that a school can try to ensure that it includes students from different regions of the country, why shouldn’t it try to include students from different demographic groups?

Again, legally and morally speaking, context matters. Protected classes emerged out of a world of discrimination based on identity-based animus. They weren’t supposed to mandate color-blindness in every situation.

Under this logic, Asian applicants have an anti-discrimination case, I think, to the extent that it could be demonstrated that schools are trying to prevent their student bodies from getting “too Asian,” or relying on class-based assessments of the personal and intellectual qualities of Asians as a group They don’t have a case simply because schools are looking for students from a lot of different backgrounds, in the same way that they look for students with a variety of interests or give an edge to students with unusual life experiences.

1502

You have provided a heartwarming anecdote. And given that this is about your daughter, this is the only example that should matter to you. Congratulations to her!

But in terms of setting policies, what matters is not anecdotes, but data. So, let’s look at some data about graduation rates. Here are graduation rates reported in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education for black students relative to white students at highly selective colleges:

https://www.jbhe.com/2013/11/black-student-graduation-rates-at-high-ranking-colleges-and-universities/

We can see that at UPenn, the graduation rate for black students is 93%, vs 96% for white students. On the one hand, both rates are excellent. But looking at it another way, black students fail to graduate at about nearly twice the rate of white students (7% vs 4%). This should be concerning, because once admitted, graduating from most Ivy League colleges is really quite easy. As my nephew said about his Yale experience: “It’s hard to get an A, but considerably harder to get a C.”

Next let’s look at the selective college that are known for the rigor even after admittance, and how often black students fail to graduate relative to white students:

MIT: 3.00 (18% black, 6% white)
Cornell: 2.17 (13% black, 6% white)
Chicago: 1.88 (15% black, 8% white)
Princeton: 1.75 (7% black, 4% white)
Columbia: 1.71 (12% black ,7% white)
Johns Hopkins: 1.55 (14% black, 9% white)

Now this data is a few years old at this point, but clearly five years ago there were relaxed admissions standards for black students relative to white students, to the point that it significantly affected failure to graduate.

1503

“Under this logic, Asian applicants have an anti-discrimination case, I think, to the extent that it could be demonstrated that schools are trying to prevent their student bodies from getting “too Asian,” or relying on class-based assessments of the personal and intellectual qualities of Asians as a group They don’t have a case simply because schools are looking for students from a lot of different backgrounds, in the same way that they look for students with a variety of interests or give an edge to students with unusual life experiences.”

They do have a good case but it’s hard to prove since it’s a soft quota and not a hard one like the one used to keep Jewish applicants out by the ivies in mid 20th century. The claim is that Asians are compared to other Asians when selecting a class at the selective universities and they settle on a goal for the percentage of Asians in the class. So if you see a university with a stable percentage of Asians, it’s a soft quota, while if it’s rising (MIT, any UC, Cal Tech) there’s no quota and adcoms are not biased against Asians.

Here’s the thing, iirc, the group suing the ivies found e.g. that an applicant had the word “typical pre-med” on their file at Princeton, implying high stat Asian, stem ECs, probably plays an instrument. It’s definitely stereotyping (legal) but is it discrimination (illegal)? GCs know this is happening at least in the bay area, they advise asians to retake the ACT if they score below a 33, something they do not advise students of other races. They know that Asians with a 32 or lower will be compared with other Asians who will be in the 34-36 range.

1504

Actually, that’s exactly what they were meant to do. There’s nothing in either the text or the legislative history of the 14th amendment, which suggests that AA would be permissible.

1505

@hebegebe but are those studies you cited statistically significant? What were the margins of error? Plus the POC not from middle class suburbs like my DD are subjected to a great deal of financial and family stress that contributes to the data you provided. There are sociological issues here, also validated and written about. The fact that the graduation rates are so high is a testament to holistic admissions.
At 93% vs. 96%, the discrepancy is small enough to compare it to many other situations that affect timely graduation.

1506

You’re assuming failure to graduate is an academic issue. There are other things that prevent someone from graduating. There are transfers. There’s failure to acclimate. There’s financial. Some groups are affected by non-academic issues more than others.

PS - the stat your using, especially when looked at by race, may be meaningless, because of the small number of data points.

1507

They don’t count the things you listed above as “failure to graduate”. Failing to graduate brings the colleges rankings down in specific areas, so they wouldn’t qualify transferring as failing to graduate

1508

How do they sift out transferred, took a year off and decided to stay close to home, etc etc? I don’t think they can. In fact, it could falsely reduce the white stat if they’re socio-economically capable of down-transfer. There’s no substantial evidence that this is an issue.

For many of the people that think there is foul play, it’s the first time someone is telling them that they aren’t the best. Just because someone doesn’t like the metrics used to make admissions decisions, doesn’t make it discriminatory or an illegitimate metric.

1509

There really isn’t any doubt that race preference admits at elite schools disproportionately perform near the bottom of their classes. So, it should be no surprise that they disproportionately fail to graduate. Really, how could it be otherwise? The very essence of a preference - be it race, legacy, development, etc. - when it is actually used to admit a particular applicant, implies that that applicant would not have been admitted otherwise. In aggregate, then, in a competitive admissions system the group of enrolled preference students will be less qualified than those enrolled students who received no preference. This strikes me as simple logic.

The only questions, then, in my opinion are really whether the preferences are useful and/or whether they are “fair” (the latter implicates legal concerns, especially with respect to public institutions, although all schools receiving federal funding and even most that do not are pulled into a complex legal web when the preferences are race-based).

Fairness considerations aside, are race-based preferences are even useful - do their costs exceed their benefits? I of course am squarely in the camp that they do not. This is a pretty useful survey article that examines some of the costs to the actual recipients of race preferences from a number of angles:

https://www.nas.org/images/documents/report_the_changing_shape_of_the_river.pdf.

The data on pp. 30ff (starting under the “Perverse Incentives” heading) are especially illuminating in light of the posited 1450/1500 SAT top 5%/10% hypotheticals. The scales have changed of course since the original research in the 1990s - the SAT scoring metrics were changed to try to mask underperformance of certain groups and high school GPAs have been inflated - but the underlying true differences in average ability between groups have remained largely constant. Also, I think that no one who has actually been at an elite (HYPMS+ level) university will fail to recognize the race dynamics described on pp. 28-30. Well worth reading imo.

1510

I know a lot of the top schools are really committed to trying to help the URMs that matriculate be successful and graduate. Some of them have programs designed to reach out to these students and make sure they have the support they need. Many of them may come in towards the bottom in ability, but some of them are able to “catch up”. A lot of it may depend on how much the student takes advantage of the support services available to them. I know of a specific program that starts recruiting top students from underrepresented communities when they are in high school and monitors their progress and gets them support throughout college. I think generally speaking they try to pick students that they think will succeed and want them to graduate.

1511

@imptime18 is correct. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/05/stories-students-not-counted-federal-graduation-rates

Of course there’s doubt, you encounter it even on this thread regularly. But saying it that way makes it sound settled I suppose.

Satchel is referring to “mismatch theory” and it’s not settled at all. I’d say it’s been debunked totally but there are still holdouts, so I’ll just say it’s not settled.

it’s hard to argue that a 93% grad rate indicates that those students shouldn’t be there or are somehow harmed by being there.

Actually it doesn’t. As supporters of athletic recruiting like to say, most of them would get in anyway. They’re wrong actually as pertains to elite colleges - about half definitely wouldn’t (the athletic factor recruits) and about half might, but only at the same rate as other qualified applicants. I doubt it’s very different for AA or legacy. A few bring something so awesome to the table that even with somewhat lower stats it’s worth taking that student, but most are in range and just get a tip over other similarly qualified students.

1512

@OHMomof2 - “Actually it doesn’t.” I beg to differ here. If a preference was used to admit someone, then by definition that person would not have been admitted otherwise. Of course, not all athletes, URM, legacies, development kids, etc. would need such a boost. Some - perhaps many - would have been admitted anyway.

The pernicious aspect of race preferences is that it stigmatizes an entire group in proportion to how large the race preference is (or is perceived to be). In the case of black students, those preferences are very large. Insiders like Bok and Bowen, or Sander and Wightman in regard to law school admission, or the Brookings Institute, etc. have repeatedly acknowledged that absent race preferences, black enrollment at the elite universities would fall precipitously, likely by 80% or more.

I don’t expect people to accept that on faith; that’s why I post articles and data where I can. I hope that people who are interested in the subject will do what interested people should - track down the source articles and data and make a determination for themselves. The most recent piece I linked to in post #1512 above does a nice job of collecting just a little of the source material and stats.

With regard to race preference admits finding themselves disproportionately at the bottom of their classes, the whole piece is illuminating, but just to provide a data point here:

“At the most elite law schools in the BPS database, 52% of blacks had first-year grades that placed them in the bottom ten percent of the grade distribution, while only 8% of blacks placed in the top-half of their class. The median black student at these elite schools had first-year grades that were equivalent to those of whites at the 5-6th percentile of the white distribution.” (p. 40).

I’d say that is pretty much disproportionately at the bottom of their classes, wouldn’t you? (College is a little trickier because of course selection and difficulty issues, but the same basic patterns emerge.)

As I said above, for people who are really interested in all this, that article is worth reading not only because it touches on some of the data, but also because it addresses in essay form some of the sociological aspects and implications of race preferences. My thinking has started to change. I have for the most part accepted that differences in academic achievement are largely rooted in genetic intelligence/behavioral characteristics, but after reading Sander, the Steele brothers, Ogbu, et al. I am beginning to see some merit in other explanations.

1513

Graduation rate - and even GPA – only gives a very rough portrait of performance because not all majors are equally rigorous, and I say this as a humanities person. I certainly don’t think it is easy to write a good analysis of a novel, but it isn’t all that hard to write an analysis that will earn a “B” at an Ivy League school, let alone one that will earn you a passing grade.

1514

@SatchelSF I’m not debating mismatch with you. In the hundreds of pages of this thread you can search and find all my arguments in that regard, with data, from the past several years.

Just challenging your assertion that there “isn’t any doubt” There is.

You seem to contradict yourself here.

A preference of some kind (let’s call it “met an institutional goal” , since that’s what it is) was added to that person’s total application and it put them over the top. They might have been over the top anyway, we don’t know.

Malia Obama went to a prestigious day school where she likely did well. She had interesting internships. Her father was our president. Do you think she wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard if not for AA? Of course not.

1515

@OHMomof2 your example of Malia Obama doesn’t fundamentally make sense. Sure, she might’ve gotten into Harvard without being AA, but the fact that her father was the president of the US, AND she had URM and legacy status is a HUGE boost. There may be more qualified AA students, but she was accepted because of the inevitable recognition of her last name. The thing is, the boost is given to legacies, URM, and athletes because universities NEED those types of students, and realistically, there are very few people who apply to college that meet the institutional needs they have to meet

1516

@OHMomof2 - “You seem to contradict yourself here.” I’m not trying to; I guess I am just not being clear enough in my writing. Perhaps my concern that my posts tend to be too long (TL;DR, lol) is working against me :slight_smile:

So, let me be crystal clear. Preferences exist. For compactness and relevance to the thread, let’s confine ourselves only to preferences for blacks at elite schools.

There is a pool of black admits to such institutions. A portion of that pool would have been admitted under a “race-blind” admissions system. Let’s call that Group X.

Among the members of that Group X, there may have been other preferences at work for some. For instance: athletics; development (unlikely, of course); legacy (increasingly likely). Being famous and the child of a president would also qualify. The rest of the applicants in that Group X simply “won” the competition for an admissions spot on the more familiar metrics of grades, scores, leadership qualities, etc. that unhooked candidates face all the time. Regardless, being black added nothing to the admissions profile for this Group X; in other words, its members would have been admitted had race been unknown, in a “race-blind” system, as I wrote above.

There is another group within that general pool of black admits who would not have been admitted absent race preferences. For that group, race was the deciding factor. That is the essence of a racial preference. This is not a “gentle finger on the scale.” This type of preference is akin to “wholesale racial gerrymandering” ( https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-scandal-of-diversity/).

What Bok and Bowen (in The Shape of the River), Wightman and Sander (in their law review articles), and the liberal Brookings Institute (see p. 8 here: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/9780815746096_chapter1.pdf), among countless other insiders and commentators over the years, are saying, and remember that these are all insiders with access to the actual data, is that Group X is less than 20% of the overall black admit pool to elite institutions. In other words, under a “race blind” system, black representation at the elite schools (and we could debate which places comprise these schools) would fall in aggregate from somewhere near around 8-10% to around 2%. At elite law schools, Wightman argues that it would fall to approximately 0.5%, although Sander thinks that might be too harsh (maybe only to 1%?).

You are free to quibble with the data, of course, but I hope that clears up what I am saying! Also, you clearly think that such a reduction in black representation would be a huge loss for the institutions involved and society as a whole. The Nieli piece I linked yesterday (https://www.nas.org/images/documents/report_the_changing_shape_of_the_river.pdf) makes a cogent argument that recent research and common sense suggest that removal of race preferences would be a very good thing, echoing what some prominent black commentators like Thomas Sowell, Professor McWhorter (Berkeley), Shelby Steele and even Justice Thomas have argued. Again, it’s a piece worth reading and pondering, especially the final sections on these more societal questions.

About Malia Obama, I have no idea whether she did well or not at Sidwell Friends, whether she scored well, etc. I do know that you don’t know either. I strongly suspect that her aptitude doesn’t matter anyway, just as it wouldn’t have for Chelsea Clinton. I see that fact as more an indictment of our higher education system than a feature, but others disagree of course. We rarely get aptitude/scoring info for famous people. An interesting tidbit might be Dante DeBlasio, Mayor DeBlasio’s bi-racial son. He did not score high enough on the SHSAT to gain admittance to Stuyvesant High School, but did manage to make the cutoff for the significantly easier Brooklyn Tech. Didn’t stop him from being admitted to every Ivy he applied to, something that I am sure irks many of the poor, hard-working immigrant kids at Stuyvesant!

1517

That was my point. President’s kids who are even remotely qualified for admission get in. Probably a lot who aren’t remotely qualified as well. She didn’t need any help from affirmative action. A lot of students probably don’t, because their app is outstanding in some other way.

I do. But more importantly, these institutions do.

I almost used him as an example :slight_smile: Yes famous dad, mayor of our largest city is probably getting in no matter what race/gender he is or how fast he can row. Getting into Brooklyn Tech is still pretty hard (lower test score, it’s the biggest one, or as when I took the SHSAT). He’s a good test taker, at least. "On average, approximately 30,000 8th and 9th graders take the test each year with between 1,450 and 1,600 being admitted into the incoming cohort. "

Fair or not, Malia or Dante choosing your school is a boost for the school. Kids those years get to say they went to school with so-and-so. There’s all kinds of great press generated for the college. Same with Natalie Portman and Harvard, or Brooke Shields and Princeton. Colleges fight to get those kids.

1518

^ I actually think that Harvard’s prestige would increase had they turned down Malia. “Hey guys, I got into Harvard and even the President’s daughter couldn’t!” I do know that Princeton was not happy with her mother’s senior thesis floating around out there (not hard to find - I urge people to google it and read it, flaws and all). After all, Princeton did try to hide it :slight_smile:

1519

^ @SatchelSF " I actually think that Harvard’s prestige would increase had they turned down Malia. “Hey guys, I got into Harvard and even the President’s daughter couldn’t!”…
Guess what, that is exactly what Harvard’s admit kids were saying this year when they found out a celebrity like Nathan Chen applied but didn’t get in during EA round. Well, Harvard may already have too many qualified Asian boys. :wink:

1520

Nathan Chen should have switched to Ice Hockey, then Harvard would have loved him :smiley:

(Seriously he didn’t get in? Weird.)