<p>Mini, why would my friend be a loser?</p>
<p>Because your “friend” is not getting into Harvard, and will carry this chip on his shoulder for the rest of his life.</p>
<p>asian75 - what do you mean “real minorities”? While I’ll agree that 1/25th is pushing it, is one a “fake minority” if one is wealthy? Only the economically disadvantaged ones are minorities. If we’re talking an AA situation yes I agree this person doesn’t need it, but don’t argue someone’s heritage.</p>
<p>mini: You have no idea whether the OP’s friend is or isn’t a viable candidate for Harvard. And I’m surprised that you would launch an ad hominem attack against a student poster.</p>
<p>I am disappointed that an admissions counselor from any college would consider 1/25th a minority.</p>
<p>Re: 1/25th. I agree that it’s a stupid number, but I note that someone who had one full-blooded great-great-grandparent and one full-blooded great-great-great-great-grandparent (other than the ancestors of the first great-great-grandparent) would be 5/128ths Indian, which is tolerably close to 1/25th. It is a pretty good trick to identify your great-great-great-great-grandparents. For a current teen, that would probably go back to the early 19th Century. But not out of the question. Thanks to a somewhat O/C uncle, my kids could easily identify most of their great-great-great-great-grandparents in my mother’s quadrant, and when he died he was working on establishing our descent from some famous 16th Century rabbi.</p>
<p>This has the ring of urban legend. No one is being treated as Native American based on geneological research into their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents.</p>
<p>His getting into MITs minority summer program is not an urban legend.</p>
<p>“You have no idea whether the OP’s friend is or isn’t a viable candidate for Harvard. And I’m surprised that you would launch an ad hominem attack against a student poster.”</p>
<p>I don’t believe for one minute that there is a “friend”. As for “ad hominem”, I’m questioning the whining tone of the post. Fair game as far as I’m concerned.</p>
<p>“And now everyone else is afraid to apply to Harvard.”</p>
<p>Who, pray tell, is this “everyone else”? Do you mean all those inferior students who didn’t qualify as valedictorian? Or was he valedictorian because of racial preference as well? :rolleyes:</p>
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If he’s the only one, or one of the few, attending that event that did this ‘reaching’ for minority status, he’s probably going to feel somewhat conspicuous and out of place and perhaps embarrassed to respond to the inevitable question of “which minority are you?”.</p>
<p>You have to let it go. There will always be someone in life who has more money / status / connections / brains / looks etc. Such is life.</p>
<p>JHS re genealogy: I have done similar genealogy and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some of us might share the same g g g g g gparents and not know it. Which is a tenuous link. Which is why I agree with you that no one is treating this kid as NA based on such a small percentage and no evidence of tribal identity.</p>
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<p>AuburnMathTutor -</p>
<p>I’m not a math tutor, but I believe that having 3 Native American grandparents would make you 3/4th, not 1/3rd N.A.</p>
<p>As for the OP’s issue - the largest American Indian Tribe in the US is The Wannabes - white folks pretending to be be N.A.</p>
<p>You can indeed be 1/25 or 1/116 of some or other race, if some number of your ancestors have themselves some complicated proportion of “Indian blood” (hah, hah only in the USA could this ever matter).</p>
<p>The assumption that it must be 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 … etc assumes that each person involved in the tree is “pure” (laughing again that there are colleges that are interested in such things.</p>
<p>You are correct that the numerator needn’t be 1; in fact it could be anything up to one less than the denominator. But the denominator would still have to be 2 raised to some n. That’s true of anyone.</p>
<p>“You can indeed be 1/25 or 1/116 of some or other race, if some number of your ancestors have themselves some complicated proportion of “Indian blood” (hah, hah only in the USA could this ever matter).”</p>
<p>But that’s an infinite regress. Unless the first people in your line had a mix of different races, then there’s no way to get away from the 2^n dependence. It’s a natural consequence of everybody having two parents. Figuratively speaking, unless Adam was 1/5 N.A. and Eve was 1/5 N.A., there’s no way Cain or Abel could be 1/25 N.A.</p>
<p>I think the suggestion that 5/128 is “close enough” is probably the best explanation. Then again, as the poster pointed out, how you can go back 7 generations at a whim like that… well, that seems iffy to anybody.</p>
<p>Darn…I KNEW we missed something. We should have hired a geneologist…too late now…great advice for others.</p>
<p>Harvard does not have quotas. They certainly are not going to take others just because they have one kid that looks like a shoo-in. I have seen H accept a dozen kids one year and then none for a couple of years thereafter at a school, and such variations elsewhere as well.</p>
<p>This is one of those posts that I keep starting to respond to and then think better of it.</p>
<p>^…but you did…</p>
<p>I’m just glad that people have pointed out the math error, because that was driving me crazy.</p>