Not in my view, of course. All of the kids in the documentary got into very good schools, but for some “very good” isn’t enough - it’s the old Ivy or bust mentality. To me, the travails of students who fail to achieve their Ivy dreams pales in comparison to the number of kids who are receiving a sub-par K-12 education or the fact that college remains little more than an unaffordable pipe dream for many kids from under resourced communities. That’s the real tragedy - not that some high stats kids have to attend UCLA instead of Harvard.
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While magnet schools are wonderful in many ways, allowing high-achieving students to be among their peers and offering courses that meet them where they are, one of the small tragedies of them is that many students leave them feeling that they are not “all that” and that they are not destined to do great things.
While it’s good to see what the big pond fish look like, it’s rather sad that an 18 year old who has gifts and talents may no longer believe they can do or be anything. That’s one of the best things about being young! It’s like the person who misses the Olympic team by one place deciding that they were never much good at swimming anyway. The world really needs all these kids to be out doing their best.
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Agree.
The opposite phenomenon can also occur at many high schools (particularly, but not limited to, more ordinary ones), where the top students may not realize until they get to college (or do not get admitted to the most selective colleges that everyone in the high school thinks they will get into) that they are not “all that” in college or college admissions as much as they were in high school.
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I don’t believe that the reason British-Asian students face much longer admission odds has anything to do with merit. If the system was truly based on “merit” I would expect the actual acceptance rate for British-Asian students would match the expected acceptance rate (based on predicted grades and area of study). But in the case of British-Asian students, the actual rate has significantly lagged the expected offer rate, thus suggesting that with regard to British-Asian students, the system is not as “meritocratic” as you suggest.
Likewise, if a system is truly meritocratic, it must provide a reasonable pathway for bright, high performing kids from all aspects of society, not just the privileged few. While it has improved, historically schools like Oxford have failed miserably in this regard. A disproportionally high percentage of its students came from privileged schools, families, and areas, while most of the rest were either shut out or never even considered Oxford a reasonable and attainable option no matter their intellectual potential for success. (About five years ago, Oxford admitted more students from a single privileged London area school than it admitted Black-British students from the entire country.) It is similar in the the US, where increased reliance on the supposedly more meritocratic and measurable “bars” for admission would result in students being accepted from a narrower and narrower demographics; prep schools, magnet schools, rich neighborhoods, families with the acumen and resources to prepare for the tests from an early age, etc. Almost everyone else would be left out. That’s not my idea of merit based admissions.
The “5% difference” you find significant is not indicative of Harvard’s acceptance practices at the time of the lawsuit. Rather it included data going back over 25 years when relatively few URM’s even bothered applying to Harvard. While the numbers from the mid 1990’s interesting, they are not necessarily relevant to admission practices at the time of the litigation. (Plaintiffs were suing over existing practices, not past practices)
At the time of the lawsuit, the gap in acceptance rates between racial groups had had narrowed significantly. For the class of 2017 (the most recent data available) the breakdown is a follows:
- Overall: 5.8%
- Asian American: 5.6%
- White American: 7%
- African American: 6.8%
- Hispanic American: 6.1%
These numbers are a more accurate representation of the admissions practices around the time of the litigation, and in my opinion they do not come close to presenting “clear” evidence that, at the time of the litigation, Harvard had a quota (hard or soft) designed to intentionally limit admission of Asian-Americans.
Athletes, Legacies, and Deans List (donors) and Children of Faculty definitely get a boost in admissions, and the benefactors of the boosts are disproportionately white. But ALDC admissions are not aimed at intentionally limiting admission of Asian-Americans, nor does the ALDC boost improve the admission changes or non-ALDC white applicants. The odds are longer for all non-ALDC students, regardless of race. Moreover, if there are secret racial “quotas” as you suggest, then it would be mostly non-ALDC white applicants who would be hurt by ALDC admissions. According to lawsuit data, 40%+ of admitted white students are ALDC preference, even though a much smaller percentage of white applicants are ALDC.
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One thing that has been shown on CC before is Harvard’s awful practice of marketing itself to students that it very unlikely to accept. The worst case was actually its marketing efforts in increasing the number of African Americans applicants with low scores when it had no interest whatsoever in admitting them (I believe Data10 showed that of over a thousand that applied with a certain academic rating, none were admitted). That’s a good part of the explanation why the African American admit rates have nearly converged with that of other races, and it’s not a pretty one.
Going back to the larger point, the downside with holistic admissions as practiced in the USA is that most applicants have no idea what their admission probability actually is. While Harvard’s acceptance rates might be 4%, is not 4% for the typical applicant to Harvard, as that 4% average includes all those that are hooked and therefore have much higher admission rates. The same is true for most selective colleges. Unless you know you are in a preferred admission group due to hooks such as legacy, race, athletics, or simply due to outstanding achievement, you are likely in the low probability unhooked group.
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Yes, for unhooked applicants the admit rate is likely well below 2%.
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So then, even with holistic admissions, these students do know what their admissions probability is, at least in approximate terms. It is very, very low. Unless they’ve done something truly extraordinary, they are extremely unlikely to be admitted.
They or their parents may not accept it, but that is the reality. And it would be the reality even without holistic admissions. If Harvard provided clear guidelines on what it took to be academically qualified, most of the applicants would match or exceed them, and there would still be way too many qualified applicants for the same number of spots. It is even possible that further spelling out and widely publicizing the academic qualifications would lead to more applications, not less. The academic “qualification” for Harvard is just not that onerous, and there are a lot more academically qualified students than currently apply.
What often goes unsaid by those opposing holistic admissions is that they aren’t just looking for transparency. They want Harvard (and such) to adopt a much, much higher and more narrowly defined “academic” bar, one more in line with their particular conception of what “qualified” should mean, so that most of the currently academically qualified applicants would be auto-rejects.
But if the “academic” bar for admission were set much, much higher than it currently is, then primary and secondary education would be turned into a winner take all competition where nothing else mattered except for who could go the farthest and the fastest, according to the narrowly define “academic” standard. More and more students would be accepted from a narrower range of privileged families, and/or families who would be willing to train their kids to master these new “qualifications” from an early age. And students without access to high performing schools, tutoring, summer classes, gifted programs, camps, contests, parents who pushed them, etc. would be left out of the competition all-together, because they wouldn’t have the where-with-all or resources to do what it took to succeed in this rat race.
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Too bad people here could not Try Harder! to talk about the movie and the students involved, rather than wandering off into the usual talk about what elite college admissions should or should not be like in their view, the fate of so many threads around the forums.
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Agreed. Not to mention a surprise “chance me” detour thrown in!
Why? In a system that aims to measure individual merits, why any demographic group should “expect” certain outcomes, as long as the measures (which are much more than GPAs, BTW) are transparent? Asian Britons are an entirely different group of individuals from Asian Americans, with generally no overlap between the two. The same with white Britons and white Americans.
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By your logic, we should send all the athletes directly to the Olympics.
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The expected acceptance rate is based on the actual qualifications of the individual applicants. In other words, the expected acceptance rate is a check on merit, and Asian students are accepted at rate that is much lower than predicted by their individual qualifications and area of study.
Plenty of athletes qualify for the Olympics even though they are nowhere near the best. The selections are by country and region, not by overall ranking. Thus only three American sprinters, etc.
Maybe forum posters are trapped in a box that draws posters into the usual talk about what elite college admissions should or should not be, analogous to the box that Alvan says he is in. But it looks like the forum box is self-imposed, rather than being externally forced on people by others.
Perhaps the real challenge for forum posters is to Try Harder! to avoid pulling every topic into this usual talk about what college admissions should or should not be. Will that challenge be more or less difficult than getting admission to an elite college?
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