Yale Admissions came out today with a letter to interviewers summarizing steps it is taking to comply with the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action but still supporting a diverse and inclusive community. Some highlights if you or your child is considering Yale:
“Reviewers will not have access to applicants’ self-identified race and/or ethnicity, and admissions officers involved in selection will not have access to aggregate data on the racial or ethnic composition of the pool of applicants or admitted students.”
" To further facilitate Yale’s whole-person review, the admissions office has updated its application questions for the upcoming admissions cycle. Applicants will now respond to one of three short essay prompts, and may choose to reflect on an element of their personal experience, their membership in a community, or an experience discussing an issue with someone holding an opposing view." Yale is obviously inviting commentary that Roberts allowed in the majority opinion, that a school can consider how race affected the applicant’s life so long as it is tied to a quality of character or unique ability.
Beginning this fall, admissions officers will also incorporate new place-based data from Opportunity Atlas, an ambitious nation-wide mapping project that measures economic mobility at the census tract level. These data will complement the dozens of race-neutral and place-based datapoints included in the College Board’s Landscape tool."Looks like as many predicted, SES will have added importance.
I just checked our Census tract out on Opportunity Atlas. As expected, on its own it would give a misleading impression about us (in a way that might favor us, but that is obviously bad).
I also looked up Landscape:
In our case, I think the high school data they present could potentially offset some of the misleading impression, but on the other hand Landscape’s home neighborhood analysis is also Census tract based. So in a worst case scenario, this could be used to tell a very misleading story about us (again, likely in a way that could be good for us, but that is bad).
Of course other things about us–parental occupation and educational history, say–could help correct that. And to be fair, it is unusual for Census tracts to be like ours.
Still, they have a lot of challenges ahead of them to figure out how to do this accurately.
Our neighborhood is a truly eclectic mix of students, working-class retirees, and working people all over the income distribution, including because the housing stock is so varied. The school district has historically been very poorly rated, although has been doing things to improve recently. We use private schools, however, and have saved on housing costs by living here.
Overall, we love it. And it would be an incredible injustice if we got any college admissions benefit out of choosing it. And yet other people in the area might well be what Yale is looking for with this particular analysis.
So, I really do hope they sort this out reasonably accurately.
Ha, ha. We used to live in a high dollar neighborhood in the Bay Area that had great public schools (one reason why it was high $). I met a guy on a public golf course who had the opposite situation. He was complaining how his wife wanted to buy a house in X neighborhood because of the schools, and then decided to send their kids to a pricey private school.
Right. I assume the phrase “self-identified race” refers only to the self-identification “box” checked on common app. Note that they did NOT state that reviewers would not know the race of an applicant. Because, in fact, they will in a great many cases. Awards, club names, essays that reveal the information, etc.
Just spent a few minutes looking through this ridiculous “Opportunity Atlas” and it’s pretty bad in terms of getting it very wrong (in both directions). Also, in my town there are both $10m homes and rent controlled apartments all within a few blocks of each other. Something like this is a dangerous tool to be applying on hapless kids applying to college
That is very common here too. I’d actually say a significant majority of the people using our private HS (at least the non-boarders) also live in highly-priced, highly-ranked school districts.
Of course often there are other nice things about those neighborhoods, but usually they are just not our style. I’m also pretty wary about having too much of our savings in the form of home equity, but that’s a sensitive topic (like all personal finance).
Anyway, looks like Opportunity Atlas (I just checked) isn’t going to have a problem identifying what is up with them . . . .
Since it is distinguished from “reviewers” (is that their word for interviewers?) would one read this as AOs do have access to applicants’ self-identified race and/or ethnicity?
They mean the AO’s in both cases. Reviewers means the first and second readers or anyone who reads the applicant’s file. AO’s in the selection process probably is referring to the committee(s) that make the final calls. Without access to aggregate date they have a defense that they were not considering soft quota’s by race.
