The Justice Department confirms investigation into admissions practices at Harvard University

Which part of the following sentence were you unable to parse when you wrote what you did above?

Bringing this back to Harvard, remember at the end of the day, college application and acceptance is a deeply individual exercise. Colleges can craft a class among possibly tens of thousands of applicants, but individual students are looking at a handful of applications. They have no interest in being held to higher standards because too many students like them were accepted.

Or to explain it a different way to @collegedad13, talented students want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

Having more women apply does not automatically mean a school has to admit men less qualified than women to maintain a gender balance. Nor is it true that all colleges have a lopsided applicant pool. The applicant pool at UCB has nearly equal numbers of male and female applicants for undergrad. However, if a public college is discriminating on the basis of gender in admissions, they should be investigated for a violation of the equal protection clause and Title IX.

Not in the slightest. My kids played “the game” of NYC high school admissions – and they did it exceedingly well. However, even as an elected board member of the Stuyvesant High school Parents’ Association – and the Fundraising Chair for two years in a row – I complained that too many Asians and too few African American and Hispanic students were admitted to the school. Think about it for a minute:

With the above percentages and an enrollment of 3200 students, it means 2368 students are Asian, 32 are African American, 96 students are hispanic and 640 are white. My kids, who are white, were one of the minorities in the school. Imagine what an African American student feels like? Or a Latino student! Those percentages are NOT representative of the mosaic of NYC or anywhere else in the world except maybe China, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong etc. That kind of environment is homogeneous and NOT culturally diverse – and I think the school was lacking because of it.

So what? I was the only one of my minority in a predominantly white high school. Was I supposed to feel like an outcast? Fortunately, I didn’t get that memo.

@hebegebe: Here’s another perspective: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/education/black-at-stuyvesant-high-one-girls-experience.html?pagewanted=all

If you want to increase the percentage of URMs, and that is a laudable goal, the right way to do so was discussed in the article. This is through outreach to the URM groups such that they are aware of Stuy and other exam schools, and the preparation required to compete for admission.

Don’t lower the bar for URMs. Get more of them to clear the same bar, just as the capable young woman in the article did.

^^ Again, if you would like to start a new thread about Stuyvesant High School, I would be more than happy to continue this discussion on ANOTHER thread. However, additional comments about Stuyvesant HS are taking this thread off of it’s Harvard topic – and as such the moderators will soon close this thread. So, be warned!

MODERATOR’S NOTE: Since this thread has gone totally off track, I am closing it.