<p>A lot of people have said that X college will look at your application or grades holistically. What exactly do they mean by this?</p>
<p>This means they have a non-quantitative method of admissions where you cannot predict success based on GPA, ACT/SAT, class rank, etc. It came about in the 1920’s to exclude Jewish students from the most selective schools when based on numbers alone, they would have taken too many places from traditionally protestant institutions. In current form it enables the schools to craft a “well-rounded” student body and balance out M/F numbers, true scholars, athletes, musicians, etc. It no doubt works against asian females today who would otherwise be represented in higher numbers based on quantitative stats alone as seen in schools like UCB which specifically says they do no such balancing. When a school practices holistic admissions and uses essays, teacher recommendations, geography, and ECs to craft the class, they have much more lattitude to exclude ACT 36/ SAT 2400/ 4.0 UW GPA students or those approching those stats.</p>
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<p>Not true. UC Berkeley switched to a holistic admission process in 2002, UCLA followed in 2007, and UC President Mark Yudof is proposing that all UC campuses make the switch to holistic admissions review. Holistic review did not significantly reduce the representation of Asian students, or Asian females in particular, at UC Berkeley or UCLA.</p>
<p>Essentially all it means is that a human reader evaluates and rates the application, instead of following a rigid, mechanical, numbers-based formula. That allows the school to consider “soft” factors like essays, ECs, teacher and GC recs, community service, special talents, special circumstances, etc—things that a machine can’t grade. It also allows for more nuanced consideration of context: an “A” is not just an “A,” its value depends in part on the rigor of the school’s curriculum and whether the student was taking the most challenging classes available. Holistic review might still use a point system, but the points are assigned by a human grader. </p>
<p>[Yudof</a> Proposes Systemwide Adoption of Holistic Admissions Process - The Daily Californian](<a href=“http://www.dailycal.org/article/108911/yudof_proposes_systemwide_adoption_of_holistic_adm]Yudof”>http://www.dailycal.org/article/108911/yudof_proposes_systemwide_adoption_of_holistic_adm)</p>
<p>The historical point is also inaccurate. Ivy League schools didn’t need holistic admissions to exclude Jews in the 1920s; they simply relied on rigid numerical quotas. According to one widely quoted source, the Dean of the Yale Medical School gave precise instructions to his admissions office: “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.” Source: David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story, Oxford UP 2006 (explaining how Dr. Jonas Salk ended up at NYU Medical School, along with hundreds of other highly qualified Jewish medical school applicants). </p>
<p>The admissions policy that allowed Ivy League and other highly selective schools to achieve the same result without relying on crude quotas was the legacy preference, introduced at Yale in 1925, which allowed the admissions committee to pass over Jews and other non-WASP ethnic groups in favor of “Yale sons of good character and reasonably good record.” Since previous generations of Yale grads were virtually all WASP males, the legacy preference operated as a powerful barrier to entry by non-WASP applicants. With the legacy preference in place, Jewish enrollment declined sharply at Yale, and other highly selective northeastern schools quickly followed suit.</p>
<p>Everything will be reviewed in context: your GPA in the context of course rigor, your rank in the context of your class, your achievements in the context of your financial and geographic opportunities, etc.</p>
<p>bclintock:</p>
<p>Asian students make up 45% of the undergraduates at UCB. They can call their process “holistic” but they clearly are not using non-academic soft admissions criteria to balance out class diversity the way similarly selective universities do on the east coast. Also, the quotas you speak of are only justifiable in the course of “holistic admissions” so I’m not certain I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make. It is hard to say you take the best and brightest and then institute a quota. If you say that numbers are not all that matters, then you can find ways to preferentially select or avoid certain students. </p>
<p>Legacy preference can’t explain the limited number of Jewish students accepted between the 1920-30’s since legacy admits never exceeded 24% of the class. It was Harvard, in 1926, that announced that its new admissions policy would place greater emphasis on character and personality and then Yale was to follow. It was clear that admitting students based on academic meritocracy would exclude many traditional Yale students and their children. According to Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen”, it was the increasing reliance on a group of eight private feeder schools (Exeter, Andover, Choate, et. al.) that most influenced the reduction in admitted students citing fuzzy leadership and character traits not seen in jewish public school graduates. This is the essence of “holistic admissions” and I otherwise agree with your description of the same.</p>