Black Acceptance Rates
Lafayette: 10.5%
Pomona: 12.9%
Wesleyan: 13.1%
Davidson: 13.3%
Swarthmore: 13.7%
Barnard: 14.1%
Trinity: 14.6%
Hamilton: 15.8%
Colgate: 15.8%
Oberlin: 18.3%
Bryn Mawr: 18.8%
Bates: 19.2%
Claremont McKenna: 20.5%
Bowdoin: 20.6%
Wellesley: 22.4%
Macalester: 22.7%
Bucknell: 23.1%
Grinnell: 29.2%
Scripps: 30.8%
Harvey Mudd: 35.3%
Amherst, Smith, Williams, Vassar, Middlebury, Mt. Holyoke, Washington & Lee: NA
As the supporting analysis notes,
One other possibility is that black applicants may be applying to more reach schools in the hope they’ll be admitted even with weaker stats.
I have no evidence of this-just throwing the idea out there.
As in many other threads, admission rate without context of the strength of applicant and admit pools gives too little information on which one can draw a meaningful conclusion.
This falls short of social science, but I think it can be concluded that most of the listed colleges should be regarded as challenging admits for “typical” AA applicants who apply to them.
I think it’s just what it’s always been. I used to work in college access with mostly AA applicants and now that my own kids are teens, I know a lot of AA teens applying to colleges. They are locked out, denied merit aid that they deserve and generally just do not have good chances in the admissions process. As soon as schools don’t feel reputational damage they revert to admissions practices that disfavor Black applicants.
I find that hard to believe @CCtoAlaska – not my personal experience with my (somewhat) limited view of admissions. In my personal (albeit limited) experience there are special recruitment outreach initiatives into the AA community, fly in programs, overnights, special lunches and brunches to help accepted AA students then accept the institution, special cohort-meeting events for AA admitted students to feel the welcoming community once there, and the like. And in my experience also the adcoms and higher-ed administrators are increasingly AA (and other URMs) themselves.
The issue has been that there are too few applying for the amount of welcome they would receive. Most decidedly the issue is NOT that AA students are somehow not wanted, as your post seems to imply.
I hear that your personal experience seems different from what I describe. I’m wondering if your kids or those you advise are perhaps seeing the normal course of rejections that any student gets as based on race rather than simply the normal course of getting rejected. There are on this forum, for example, time and again high-stats kids who bemoan how they are rejected over and over. And then you discover that their essay is a regurgitation of their resume. And then you know: probably that’s why they are rejected when otherwise qualified.
What a difference 50 years can make. I can remember when the chief bogey-man pitted against AA was that eager college administrators would be willing to reach the bottom of their applicant pools in order to meet racial quotas. If a school like Wesleyan can achieve a 10% Black first-year enrollment while still rejecting 87% of their Black applicants, they must have one heck of an applicant pool!
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say:
“This falls short of social science, but I think it can be concluded that most of the listed colleges should be regarded as challenging admits for all “typical” AA applicants who apply to them.” (though not necessarily based on just admission rates)
Though philosophically appealing, there might be good reasons not to say that, @ucbalumnus. Lower than average acceptance rates for any subgroup raise those for the remaining groups. Mathematically, then, one might infer inter-group differences that could be quite large, and which would therefore contraindicate generalized statements.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: As has been stated many times, there is ONE thread only where race in admissions may be discussed.