<p>If you think about it, we’re all–</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>and sharers in</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Does anyone truly go to college because she thinks it offers a better education than an autodidact can get? No. We go to get jobs, “network,” enjoy a nonpareil social experience, a feast of sweetmeats and comestibles, a veritable carnival carnivalesque. The Reed and Sewanee folk are as invidious and shallow as any Princeton man!</p>
<p>(Appreciate irony.)</p>
<p>@Hunt, no reason to be so unhappy. There are many highly highly qualified kids at Yale (hard to admit as I attended Princeton, Stanford and Harvard). Maybe Yale doesn’t have a Z-list but I’ll bet it has its equivalent. Most of the candidates I’m talking about are good enough – that is, qualified academically – but benefit from the association with their parents. With so many qualified candidates and a 6% or 10% probability of admission, the association increases the probability of admission. No? Just think linear regression (or logistic regression). If having an elite parent has a positive coefficient when the dependent variable is admission, that means the kid with the parental hook (or athletic or other hook) has a higher probability of getting in than someone who is otherwise identical. It’s like a very light finger on the scale when measuring. Not huge, but there. </p>
<p>No one said that the only hooks were for elite parents. As you know, being a URM is a hook, which is one but only one reason that Yale and its ilk have many more URMs than they did when you were there. Maybe being poor is a hook (at a few schools, I think it is, but at many others probably not). Social engineering by school admissions departments has indeed altered elite school student bodies over time. As a middle class Jewish kid, I was grateful that when I applied they weren’t tipping so hard for aristocratic kids and less hard against Jews. </p>
<p>I am sure I benefitted at each stage from my admission into an elite institution. But, I try to have a little humility about it. I think Michael Lewis’s speech at Princeton really captured things well: <a href=“Princeton Baccalaureate 2012: Michael Lewis - YouTube”>Princeton Baccalaureate 2012: Michael Lewis - YouTube. </p>
<p>@Hunt That is a straw man. I never said the best of the best are not attending the elites; I am saying a portion of the students attending the elites are not among the best.</p>
<p>Based on what was posted here on CC (by collegehelp), Harvard’s 75%tile range for the SAT(M+CR)for 2010-2011 was 1590, What is of more interest to me is that Harvard’s 25%tile range was only 1390 (CalTech, in comparison, was 1470). These folks would not have made Manzi’s first cut. Even my back-of-the-envelope approach would have spotted them. I am not convinced that Harvard did not have stronger applicants out there then that.</p>
<p>As far as your other point goes, you may very well be a member of the 1%, but not at .1% as this article clearly puts it:</p>
<p><a href=“http://ampedstatus.org/who-rules-america-an-investment-manager-breaks-down-the-economic-top-1-says-0-1-controls-political-and-legislative-process/”>http://ampedstatus.org/who-rules-america-an-investment-manager-breaks-down-the-economic-top-1-says-0-1-controls-political-and-legislative-process/</a></p>
<p>“camouflage for the real purpose”</p>
<p>Yes, that is exactly what I am claiming. </p>
<p>If you think those low scorers are mostly (or even significantly) rich kids from prep schools, I have a bridge to sell you. They are helmet sports athletes and URMs. The opposite of your theory.</p>
<p>That is not correct. Have a look at the Arcidiacono study:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2012/01/17/unpublished-study-draws-ire-minorities”>http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2012/01/17/unpublished-study-draws-ire-minorities</a></p>
<p>Here is what the study has to say about legacies:</p>
<p>"As a robustness check, we now consider a group where convergence would seem unlikely: legacies.</p>
<p>Legacies likely come into college more prepared due to their advantaged backgrounds. Hence, we would expect legacies to perform relatively worse than non-legacies in their senior year compared to their freshmen year.</p>
<p>Looking at raw grades, however, reveals evidence of legacies improving their position over time, with legacies starting out 0.17 points behind their white non-legacy counterparts and improving to 0.06 points behind by their last semester of the senior year. Table 5, however, shows this convergence is illusory by repeating the analysis of Tables 3-4 for legacies.</p>
<p>The first set of columns in Table 5 show that legacies gain over 5.5 percentage points relative to their white non-legacy counterparts, making up a third of the initial gap. However, just subtracting off the mean grade before calculating class rank shows instead that legacy position drops over time. Namely,median legacy position relative to their non-legacy counterpart drops by 2.1% from their freshmen year to their senior year. Note that this occurs both because legacies are taking more harshly graded courses as freshmen and because they are taking more leniently graded courses as seniors.</p>
<p>The last set of columns adjust for selection into courses. Selection into courses has no effect on legacy rank as seniors relative to the second set of columns. However, controlling for course selection as freshmen raises legacy rank. The net effect is then a widening of the gap between white non-legacies and legacies over time. While the unadjusted class rank showed the median legacy improving their position relative to the median white non-legacy by 5.5 percentage points, adjusting for selection shows their position actually falls by 3.8 percentage points. The convergence pattern between legacies and white non-legacies are then similar to African Americans, though the legacy estimates are less stable."</p>
<p>I have never seen any study that shows a preferred admission category performs as well as the regular admits. </p>
<p>Canuckguy
sounds like a study done with a shovel.</p>
<p>The press choose to sensationalize the study. All the study is saying is that weaker students protect their GPA by switching from hard subjects to easy subjects. If you were to check the GRE scores of various majors, you will see that engineering, hard sciences, and economics do indeed score high:</p>
<p><a href=“CARPE DIEM”>http://mjperry.blogspot.com/search?q=GRE+scores</a></p>
<p>Hunt’s son scored 2390 on the SAT. He clearly belongs in Yale. No one is claiming otherwise.</p>
<p>Btw, the study was peer reviewed and published by The Journal of Labor Economics in October, 2012. What I find interesting is that the protestors are themselves evidence of the study’s validity.</p>
<p>As I always say, if you want to check for SES, look at the school; if you want to check for ability, look at the major.</p>
<p>And something new from a ‘favorite’ author…</p>
<p><a href=“Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | The New Republic”>http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere</a></p>