<p>Well since I’m an interviewer, I can back up the post that that Northstarmom’s post. </p>
<p>Get off this old tired horse about URM’s being underqualified. Unless you’re prepared to all level that at women, white rural kids, orphans and foster kids, etc.</p>
<p>Colleges find - within a certain test range - that students do equally well. Some who score lower, actually perform better as students. Stats aren’t everything and are the easiest thing to manipulate with enough specialized coaching and prep work. Which is why “scores” are being de-emphasized and many Adcoms (whether they tell you that or not) glance at them, but give the majority of weight to the applicants other “attributes.”</p>
<p>I just looked at the MIT stats from this past year and it would surprise people to know that the largest pool of applicants to be accepted are not scoring in the top category and based on my interviews over the last few decades, a lot of them are white males.</p>
<p>So could we skip the tired, worn out speculation? At least at top schools, the pool of applicants runs 10 for every spot. There isn’t any need to adjust standards for any one subset of student to achieve campus diversity.</p>
<p>But - more often than not - that finger you are pointing may actually apply to a white kid who suffered some adversity, or grew up in a rural area without access to resources, not the stereotype of a woman or URM people keep stoking as a smokescreen to mask their own failure to achieve something.</p>
<p>I never understood why some - who have traditionally been the beneficiaries of an advantage, suddenly howl with outrage when the “playing field” is leveled for everyone else.</p>
<p>Get over it people. Give Adcoms more credit than that. If you didn’t get your top choice - “attitude” may have done more to doom the application than someone taking “your spot.”</p>
<p>“But honesty requires recognizing that those “hook” characteristics add weight to the scales as compared to people who don’t have them. The colleges don’t deny this. Whether this is a good or bad thing is an entirely different question.”</p>
<p>Same applies to people who, for instance, get tipped into Harvard because they live in a rural area, or the Pacific NW or are a double legacy or have parents who are multimillionaire donors.</p>
<p>Well, most individuals aren’t aware of what’s happening to them until 2-3 years of age.<br>
The “traditional beneficiaries of an advantage”, white males I assume, enjoyed great advantages back in the 50’s and 60’s. However, the subset of “traditional beneficiaries of advantage” that are applying to colleges today do not fully appreciate these advantages since they had them 30-40 years before they were conceived. Advantages in college admission or the workplace are not much an advantage before you become a zygote.</p>
<p>“The “traditional beneficiaries of an advantage”, white males I assume, enjoyed great advantages back in the 50’s and 60’s. However, the subset of “traditional beneficiaries of advantage” that are applying to colleges today do not fully appreciate these advantages since they had them 30-40 years before they were conceived. Advantages in college admission or the workplace are not much an advantage before you become a zygote.”</p>
<p>Males of all races are at an advantage when it comes to college admissions. I don’t hear females howling about this or males offering to give up their advantages.</p>
<p>For instance, it’s well known that excellent football players can get into many colleges colleges even if their stats are well below the colleges’ averages. Football teams are large and are …male.</p>
<p>It’s also well known that LACs have a hard time attracting males, so males are at an advantage in admissions and for merit aid.</p>
<p>It’s also worth noting that pre-zygote, white males are half-egg as well as half-sperm. Yeah, sure, my sperm-self enjoyed some great advantages. Painting the town with my good-time buddies. Flaunting society’s conventions. Even slapping the plasma membrane of an egg with my tail to amuse myself. I didn’t care. But my egg-self had none of these advantages, and in fact was discriminated against, restricted only to activities that were possible while confined within the cell nest.</p>
<p>So all in all, I think the advantages of future male are cancelled out pre-zygote.</p>
<p>^ Lol, hilarious post! Seriously, though, don’t mind about any of this Affirmative Action stuff. What people really need to focus on instead is finding where their interests lie and pursuing them to the best of their ability. Oh, and keeping up their grades wouldn’t hurt either.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t agree with LAC’s giving advantages to males, though I don’t think places like Amherst or Williams have significantly less male applicants. When I hear about this LAC thing, I usually hear Kenyon College mentioned. </p>
<p>In any case, I don’t endorse affirmative action for males. In fact, I find it insulting. </p>
<p>As for football players, it’s kind of a specious argument to say that males have a better chance of getting in because they have the opportunity to play football and those who are good enough to get recruited. But I’m fine with ending advantages for them too, especially if you want to argue that it’s sexist. </p>
<p>I’m not necessarily opposed to affirmative action, but I don’t think every flawed argument supporting AA should get a free pass. I think it’s ridiculous that people are arguing that white male applicants today deserve payback because they somehow enjoyed advantages before they were born.</p>
<p>It’s not payback, it’s a leveling of the playing field. You can’t systematically disadvantage groups of people for basically the entire existence of the country and then expect them to bounce back and be able to play equally in just 50 years. Underrepresented minorities, on AVERAGE (not always, but average) have lower household incomes, are less likely to live in the nation’s top school districts or have the means to send their children to expensive college prep academies, and score lower on standardized tests. In general, basically, they have less access to the trappings of admissions to elite schools because of societal disadvantage. Even when we’re talking about economically advantaged Hispanics and African Americans, in particular, they are still less advantaged than their peers within their socioeconomic group (and there’s research to support this).</p>
<p>So African American and Hispanic admitted students overall have a lower average SAT score than white students and Asian students. However, because they GENERALLY have lower average scores that would be true regardless of whether the school took their ethnicity into account or not.</p>
<p>And when these arguments come up, the focus is always on standardized test scores - which actually are a small part of the process anyway. Standardized test scores don’t say much about one’s ability to succeed beyond the first year of college, and there are far more important things in the package. No one’s yet showed me that underrepresented minorities also have lower average GPAs than their fellow white and Asian applicants, for example.</p>
Well, sure. Although except for the legacy/donor, those others don’t seem to provide as big a tip vs. grades and scores. Look, I’m in favor of affirmative action, and I think it’s fine to recruit athletes. But we ought to tell the truth.</p>
<p>Colleges are not admitting entire races of people! They do it on an individual basis. Asians and Caucasians are not completely impervious to societal disadvantages; some Asians do live in poor areas with poor schools and poor whatever else.</p>
<p>But, I’m not going to go there. Most if not all the points that can be made in either direction can be found in the 7 threads of AA discussion.</p>
<p>What irritates me is the conflation of individuals with groups. The whole defense of affirmative action by juillet was unnecessary and beside the point.</p>
<p>Exiealum asks why white males “suddenly” protest when they said nothing when they had an advantage. The use of “suddenly” implies that these individuals were fine with discrimination and are now hypocrites. Well, many of these individuals were born decades after this advantage ended.</p>
<p>I understand those who feel affirmative action is necessary for the greater good of society, and certainly there are some arguments with which I agree. I never gave it a second thought when I was applying to college. But I don’t agree portraying others’ unfairly in order to protect a sacred cow.</p>
<p>I think the over-all application should point at a passion in an activity. The Ivies look for someone who would be an “action-student” in campus not just a book nerd who spends studying all the time. It would be better for the school to have someone who shows passion in something(cause that person would have the potential to be great in the real world) than a guy who has the typical background(good grades, nice SATs, ECs here and there, nice essays but no signs of passion).</p>
<p>It all comes down to packaging. The way a student packages himself in front of the adcom.</p>
<p>One favor though, can you chance me? I’m a new member. thanks :)</p>
<p>"xiealum asks why white males “suddenly” protest when they said nothing when they had an advantage. The use of “suddenly” implies that these individuals were fine with discrimination and are now hypocrites. Well, many of these individuals were born decades after this advantage ended.
"</p>
<p>Males of all kinds still are at an advantage when it comes to admissions at most colleges. This especially is true of LACs, but also is true of other types of colleges. The exception are tech schools, where females are at an advantage. </p>
<p>Well, I’ve never seen that it is at “most colleges” as you say. For instance, I haven’t seen anything suggesting that it happens at state schools, except perhaps major specific gender balancing for english majors. If you can find evidence that male admits at state flagships have lower stats than female admits, please feel to post that. Certainly, it doesn’t happen at the ivies and is not relevant for the top-stat male as there are 20% more males than females in the top SAT range (2250-2400), the regime that is most relevant to ivy admission. But as I’ve said before, I don’t agree with it. I think they could deal with gender imbalance in a more creative way, perhaps by hosting dances and socials between schools. Or by dealing with the source of the problem instead of trying to socially engineer it. And by the way, I’ve seen people come up with crazy reasons for why males do worse on average in high school as well. One “expert” in a major magazine like Newsweek or Time theorized that it was because they have to learn sitting down in school, which is unnatural because they pee standing up. I’m still trying to figure that one out! </p>
<p>While female advantage seems to be a popular complaint on these boards, male advantage does seem to be the only thing the press complains about. And every time it comes up people act like they found this special gem. You certainly never hear about gender AA at tech colleges in the press.</p>
<p>The biggest advantage men have over women is that they aren’t naturally whiny, nagging, complaining, and insufferable. We can be that way, too, but for men it’s learned behavior and not innate.</p>
Seriously, though, don’t mind about any of this Affirmative Action stuff. What people really need to focus on instead is finding where their interests lie and pursuing them to the best of their ability. Oh, and keeping up their grades wouldn’t hurt either.</p>