<p>I read a lot and I do consider the context and the source. The author of the book cites numerous specific examples and provides source references at the back of the book. As I mentioned earlier, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The Wall Street Journal, so he has some credibility in my opinion.</p>
<p>I think diversity is a great goal for any great university. Wouldn't it be nice if this goal was met and the admissions office was wealth-blind?</p>
<p>I read part of this book thus far. I could recognize several of the names he cites. One was in my Expos class last semester and I'm actually a peer academic advisor for a daughter of a family mentioned in the book this year. Both are fantastic people and they are absolutely qualified to be here. They are very self-motivated, thoughtful and intelligent.</p>
<p>I believe that he is blowing "development cases" out of proportion. Yes, Harvard does admit students who are legacies and development cases (as if this is not known already), but the vast majority who are accepted do not have any special status that Golden states in his book.</p>
<p>So now elite schools are going to get rid of early admissions (something that should have, in the interest of fairness, been done away with long ago), but the rich can still purchase seats and opportunistic candidates for admission can claim unfounded URM status while the schools look the other way. The solution is simple: If these elite schools want to be the educators of tomorrow's leaders (or even just tomorrow's citizens), these schools should practice honesty and integrity in admissions. Anything less than simple decency is unacceptable. What's at fault here--the students, the schools, the parents, or the times?</p>
<p>Harvard's abolishing early admissions is disingenuous. The stated reason is to provide less wealthy applicants a level playing field, implying that early admission is an advantage to the more wealthy. That may be true for a pure Early Admission policy, but my understanding is that Harvard's policy has been an Early Action which means the less wealthy applicant can get assurances from Harvard without having to commit themselves to Harvard. This gives them time to compare the cost of attendance at each school whcih accepts them and they can delay notifying Harvard until all information is provided.
This new policy seems like a smoke screen designed to get attention in the media and divert attention from all the true biases in their admission process.</p>
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opportunistic candidates for admission can claim unfounded URM status while the schools look the other way
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</p>
<p>Proof for this unevidenced assertion?</p>
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<p>If 50% of the class is in the 1500-1600 range and the other 50% is in the 1250-1400 range, it's pretty easy to see how you could end up with their stated range.</p>
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<p>No, that isn't easy to see. Only ~25% of the class had a math score below 700, and only ~25% of the class had a verbal score below 700. You can't just add those two together and get 50% of the class scoring 1250-1400.</p>
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<p>these schools should practice honesty </p>
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<p>How has Harvard ever hidden the fact that (1) URM's get a boost, (2) recruited athletes get a boost, and (3) people whose dads donate a building get a big boost? I started working in the Harvard Admissions information area in 1998, and at least as far back as that, anyone who asked got a straight answer on those points...I answered these questions truthfully myself and also observed many other staff members doing so. I don't have any reason to think that this was an innovation introduced in 1998.</p>
<p>Yes, confirming Hanna's post #27, all of those facts were well known by the time of the publication of Michele Hernandez's book A Is for Admission. This is not new news. </p>
<p>I would add, thinking from the applicant's point of view, that it can add value to the college experience to </p>
<p>a) have classmates of varied ethnic backgrounds, </p>
<p>b) have competitive sports on campus, </p>
<p>and </p>
<p>c) have a rich endowment fund and newly built buildings. </p>
<p>So for the other applicants who get in, there really isn't much to gripe about in the admission policies of any elite university. The people who gripe, of course, are usually the people who don't get in, but they might not get in anyway in an applicant pool ten times larger than the size of the admitted class.</p>
<p>If the middle 50% range of scores is between 700-790 on both Math and Verbal, then of course that means 25% scored below 700 on Math and 25% scored below 700 on Verbal. Without knowing the distribution of scores for the combined test (I could not find this on the College Board or Harvard web sites) we really don't have any way to support your argument or mine. However, if you are correct, you could have someone with a 620 Math score combined with a 720 Verbal score for combined score of 1340. Not bad, but certainly doesn't stand out to me as Harvard or Ivy League material. Until we have full disclosure from the admissions offices on this, we'll never really know how many don't really cut it. According to the Harvard web site, they enrolled 1684 Freshmen for the class of 2010. Let's pick a number: If 300-500 of these are admitted only because of some elite preference (legacy, prep school athlete, development case, actor, political connection, etc) and this is fully disclosed and everybody understands this is an important part of what Harvard is all about, then I don't really have a problem with it.</p>
<p>I often gripe about Harvard giving a leg up to athletes in sports that don't draw big crowds -- I don't think it did very much for my undergrad experience to have a championship squash team -- but it really doesn't bother me when it comes to football players, or URMs, or Bill Gates' kids, should they decide to apply. I speak as someone who was rejected twice, and might well have gotten in on the second try rather than the third if I'd been black or Latino. C'est la vie.</p>