We live two thousand miles away from Claremont and three thousand miles from the east coast. We were not deeply invested in either region other than i grew up in NY and lived in LA for a while. My daughter lusted after an east coast LAC for a year before she visited it and then the luster was off that apple. She happily matriculated at Pomona and spent four happy years. At the end of the day, it is still about fit.
I don’t buy the lack of LAC’s on the west coast as having an influence on the acceptance rate. You would have to take the population of say a radius of 700 miles. I think the population outside of California is not dense in comparison to say NY’s surrounding states. Meaning if you would look at population for the east coast vs west coast based on several states vs CA. And then look at the top LAC’s vs Claremont and a few more selective LAC’s in the area. Someone would have to pull the numbers and examine it to really make that argument.
As far as I know, colleges don’t disclose the data you would need to compare applicant pools. If you knew where the applicant pools were coming from, and more importantly the relative strength of the applicant pools, then you could come to some more meaningful conclusions. But I find it ironic that people criticize the OP for not backing up her statement with data, yet at the same time the low Pomona acceptance rate is routinely dismissed without data to support the claim that it’s full of “low outliers” because it’s one of the few elite LAC’s on the west coast. (I’m talking about many discussions on these boards, not specifically this thread.)
Oh come on now. This has nothing to do with East Coast bias. I haven’t lived on the East Coast since 1978. A comparative assertion was made that wasn’t backed up by data. I’d say the exact same thing if it had been Haverford or Amherst or Davidson or Wellesley or Swat or any other elite LAC. If you’re going to say something is better, then show the numbers. Otherwise you are in the weird position of asserting something is better when it’s likely pretty much the same as all its competitors on those dimensions.
Pomona’s a fine school. You don’t need to be uber defensive over it. But if you’re going to assert it’s soooooo much more diverse than its peers, back it up.
At some point the diversity will be so high that it will start to become less diverse.
sorgruham—like yogi berra said nobody goes there anymore it is to crowded.
"But I find it ironic that people criticize the OP for not backing up her statement with data, yet at the same time the low Pomona acceptance rate is routinely dismissed without data to support the claim that it’s full of “low outliers” because it’s one of the few elite LAC’s on the west coast.
Who says that, other than idiots?
[QUOTE=""]
Pomona's a fine school. You don't need to be uber defensive over it. But if you're going to assert it's soooooo much more diverse than its peers, back it up.<<<
[/QUOTE]
This is getting ridiculous! All of this started with a benign comment about the increase of diversity in this year’s admission at Pomona and that this did not appear to decrease the selectivity at that college. A further comment was about a comparison to Stanford.
You have asserted that I did not do my homework and failed to provide data and assumed that this was based on a lack of information or knowledge. You could not be farther from the truth but it really does not matter.
For the record, you might want to compare the admission data of Pomona with Wellesley’s before accusing others to ignore the data. This might help understand my comment about Stanford. Heck, I’ll do it for you.
http://www.wellesley.edu/admission/facts
Lastly please note that I have no connections to Pomona as a student or parent. My children graduated from the school I was comparing Pomona to!
dupe
Amherst Pomona Swarthmore Wellesley
<pre><code> A P S W
</code></pre>
American Indian 0% 0% 0% 0%
Asian American 13% 13% 16% 23%
African American 12% 7% 6% 6%
Hispanic/Latino 13% 14% 13% 9%
Hawaiian/Pacific 0% 0% 0% 0%
White/Non His 42% 43% 42% 40%
Two or more races 5% 7% 8% 6%
unknown 5% 7% 5% 5%
Non-resident alien 10% 9% 10% 12%
I’m not seeing a massive difference here, though it is Amherst that has the highest % of African-American students, by a lot, and a similar number of Hispanic students.
But good for Pomona.
Thank you! To illustrate the points I made earlier regarding how Wellesley is an outlier among elite LAC and how it compares to Stanford, here are the latest numbers from The Farm:
African American 7.8
Asian 22.9
International 8.8
Mexican/Chicano 6.5
Native American 1.9
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 1.0
Other Hispanic 6.1
White 42.5
The above are for undergraduates in general and not for the 2019 cohort.
To circle the wagons, perhaps this issue should be revisited in October when Pomona releases its CDS. Observers will be able to evaluate the yield attrition, the changes in average scores, and the number of AA admitted students who matriculate. Perhaps the announced increase in AA might not become an enrollment reality.
Those numbers also don’t tell the whole story, either, since they don’t tell you about economic diversity. I do think Pomona and some other elite LAC’s stand out, particularly for their commitment to recruiting through partners such as Questbridge and Posse. If you look at the NY Times index of economic diversity, Pomona, Amherst, Grinnell, Smith and Vassar stand out. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/09/upshot/09up-college-access-index.html?action=click&contentCollection=The%20Upshot&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article&abt=0002&abg=1. Other LAC’s such as Bates, Middlebury, Swarthmore, don’t fare as well.
OhioMom:
you forgot one aspect of diversity: gender. 
Re #50 and economic diversity
However, the super selective schools in general tend to have about half of students getting no financial aid, meaning from top 3% or so income families. They also tend to have under 20% on Pell grants, or from the bottom half of the income range.
A few QB admits do not change the overall picture that their students are very skewed toward wealthy backgrounds.
@ucbalumnus for the Pomona Class of 2019, out of 400 enrolled there were 13 QB Match and 20 Posse. In addition, on Move In day, I’m pretty sure they said at the welcome reception that there were 50 total QB admits counting non-finalists, which would mean 12% of the enrolled class was admitted through QB. Not saying this is unique because Amherst is another LAC with a strong commitment to ethnic and economic diversity. But some are trying harder than others and some are more successful than others.
"Thank you! To illustrate the points I made earlier regarding how Wellesley is an outlier among elite LAC and how it compares to Stanford, here are the latest numbers from The Farm:
African American 7.8
Asian 22.9
International 8.8
Mexican/Chicano 6.5
Native American 1.9
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 1.0
Other Hispanic 6.1
White 42.5"
How does posting data about Stanford illustrate your point about Wellesley being an outlier? Aside from being more Asian (explainable since W had historical prestige via Madame Chiang-Kai Shek), and obviously less diverse in gender by definition, I don’t really see much difference between any of the elite LACs here. These are just all basically in line with one another. Just as one might expect them all to be.
Re #53
12% QB out of 18% Pell means that few from the bottom half of the income distribution get in through the normal way.
You don’t know how many apply, ucb. Really tired of people not understanding that to understand “favoritism” you have to index the % of those accepted to the % of those applied.
The Stanford numbers were meant to complete the table posted in #48.
This is probably the most confusing CC thread I’ve read in a long time.
One of the problems with this thread is that there seems to be some comparison of apples to oranges here. Switching back and forth between admittees and attendees results in a rather convoluted analysis. Instead let’s compare the information from the OP’s post (2020 admitted class) with the same information from 2019.
2020:
2019:
https://www.pomona.edu/news/2015/03/20-introducing-pomona-college-class-2019
@Zeldie,
It appears that the profile of students admitted to Pomona for the class of 2020 is not substantially different from the class of 2019. 2020 letters went out to slightly more African American and slightly fewer Hispanic students. Standardized test scores are down very slightly, but not at a level I would find at all significant. Whether the school yields these students is yet to be seen, but I would anticipate a class pretty much statistically indistinguishable from the class before.
In any case, Pomona does do a good job admitting a diverse and talented class. I hope we can all agree on that point.