<p>In an ideal world by my definition, I totally agree. We’re just not quite there yet. Hopefully by the time my grandchildren are applying to the same constellation of elite universities, that “check race” box will have gone the same way as “what is your religion” and “Irish need not apply.” But that’s my definition of ideal. I’m not sure the administrators at those institutions will agree…and that’s their prerogative, and my as-yet-unimagined grandkid’s right to decide whether or not he/she wants to be part of that process. Who knows, by then directional-State-U may be really prestigious.</p>
<p>@TheGFG - I really think that you misconstrue how colleges currently use race in admissions. I don’t think it is a broad scale category as you posit. I think it’s a plus factor for any race/ethnicity that adds value in the sense of being different or under-represented on campus. I think it’s a plus factor that may have more weight than some and less than others – but it is still just one factor among many. </p>
<p>The categories are being imposed by the spectators – the CC’er who opened this post by labeling the daughter as “SWF” and the other rejected students who are quick to note when some URM from their high school is accepted over them. But that’s their speculation.</p>
<p>Why did the OP even focus on the d’s race at all? I sincerely doubt that any of the colleges that rejected or waitlisted her ever even looked at that – she was probably just seen as an academically strong well-rounded kid in a sea of other academically strong well rounded kids, and she happened to be one of the ones who didn’t get chosen. </p>
<p>@TheGFG - I don’t pretend to know exactly why they use race. As others have said there is a good chance that it has more to do with improving their image and desirability as a vibrant place than a desire to right historical wrongs. What I DO know through experience is that the more exposure I have to people of backgrounds different from mine the more understanding I have of the basic humanity of every one no matter what race or creed. My son is very involved in an activity that in the last year has taken us several times a week to the historically black neighborhoods of our city (because of red-lining). As I have spent hours and hours there and driven in several times a week, hung out at the library and community center, gotten to know kids and families and been to people’s homes I have realized that people are people. It seems pretty basic but as egalitarian as I like to think I am intellectually I did have some internal feeling of prejudice: How will it be? WiIl I be safe? Wait, they have breakfast bars and mini vans in the “inner city” and are “regular” middle class people like me? It sounds dumb and I am sort of ashamed to admit it, but I have grown as a person just by interacting with regular people who look different than me. It has broken down micro-prejudices that I didn’t even know I had. I’m sure the same could be said for interacting daily with any person who has a different heritage, background, regional culture etc. than your own. It is good for students in the aggregate as citizens of a diverse nation. </p>
<p>I mean really, I still think that southern accents and New Jersey accents make people sound kind of simple. If I spent any amount of time around people form the south or NJ I would likely find that accent has nothing to do with intellectual capacity. That knee-jerk prejudice would change with exposure. Yes, I can tell myself that already, but I haven’t experienced it enough to not harbor that prejudice on a deep level. Supposedly Ivy League students aspire to be movers and shakers and doers of great things in the world. A worldly education is a good place to start.</p>
<p>@3girls3cats – way off topic, but one of the more memorable and amusing moments for me was when my son and I attended a presentation by 4 of the Claremont colleges - there was a panel discussion and then breakout sessions in separate areas for each college. After the main discussion I headed toward the Pitzer group, thinking that or possibly CMC would be the best fit for my son ---- and then looked around and couldn’t find my son. He’d gone over to sit with the Scripps group! I had to go over to fetch him and gently break the news to him that he wasn’t eligible for admission there. </p>
<p>“here was absolutely NO expectation of acceptance based on the fact that he was a URM. If you could have seen him when he opened the e-mail, you would understand. My son is one of the calmest people you could ever meet. He doesn’t outwardly display emotions of either a positive or negative nature. Witnessing his pure joy and surprise at his SCEA acceptance made my heart smile. I have never seen him so flabbergasted in his life”</p>
<p>That’s fine. That has nothing to do with the fact that for a certain percentage of URMS, if it weren’t for the URM status, that acceptance would not have happened. Perhaps you son was a URM who would have been accepted even if the admissions process did not flag URM status, put them in a separate pool and do admissions in a way where that pool has an accept rate 4 to 10 times that of kids not put in such a pool. I know a number of such URMs; absolutely it is not the case than every single URM would not likely have made the admissions cut at any given college had that status not been an issue. But the fact remains that there is a lot of “color for color’s sake”. It’s a reality. That possibility is always there for a URM, just as it is for an athlete on a school team, a celebrity or development kid, legacy, first generation, etc. You want to make the mesh finer, maybe that classics major would not have gotten in as a premed. That male would not have gotten in had the school been gender blind and if that guy from Idaho had been from NY, he’d not be there either. You can see where this goes. Color is something that is often obvious in a glance. </p>
<p>So to deny this is happening, admissions taking non academic features into heavy consideration, and yes, skin color, ethnicity are in that mix, is being unrealistic. That’s just the way it’s done. Yes, those with the highest test scores would prefer that system because they would autoadmitted. Those with the highest grades would like that measure (Texas does that to some degree for UT Austin) As it is, those academic marks ups the ante considerably for admissions, and a student in the highest echelons that way most likely will get into some highly selective school. Just not all of them, and the chances of getting into the absolutely most selective, like HPY are still not large because so many such kids will be applying and the simple fact is that there isn’t enough space for them all. </p>
<p>It’s not that there aren’t places where top stat kids won’t get accepted, it’s that they tend to all want the same few schools. </p>
<p>You are probably right, calmom. However, if students and parents don’t feel it works that way, which clearly many don’t, then doesn’t awcntcb have a point?</p>
<p>Ellemom, by saying “we’re not quite there yet,” do you mean past wrongs haven’t been righted yet? Or America isn’t color blind yet? Or colleges are afraid that race-blind admissions will yield too many of one race and not enough of others? And if the latter is true, then are colleges acknowledging that some racial groups are better-qualified on average than others, and therefore they can’t risk not looking at race if they want fair racial representation, however they define it?</p>
<p>If you took all of the URM kids out of the equation, the high stats “tippy-top” white kids STILL wouldn’t all get admitted. That’s how small a drop in the bucket this “problem” really is.</p>
<p>I do not have a problem with race/ethnicity being part of the context of an applicant’s background in terms of his/her life experiences as they are holistically considered. However, I would not be surprised if college admissions committees often use race/ethnicity in a lazy fashion based on the check box, without regard to the context involved (including, for example, the differing life experiences of African American kids of highly educated recent African immigrants versus descendents of slaves, or the differing life experiences of Asian American kids of immigrants who came as PhD students on F-1 visas versus those who came as refugees from some war).</p>
<p>And if you took all the true development admits (I’m not talking about mom and dad donating $1K per year to the annual fund) and took THEN out of the equation, you’d still not be making a meaningful change. There just aren’t that many rich folks (and they don’t have enough kids) to meaningfully alter the calculus.</p>
<p>The problem is all the elite schools deciding to admit women back in the 1970’s. Clearly the source of so much angst since they doubled the applicant pool overnight without expanding their facilities.</p>
<p>I’m a bit older than you are and I am fairly sure a big part of my acceptance to an Ivy was the fact that I applied from the Midwest. I’d hazard an educated guess–based on my own experience–that the co-ed Ivies, and, I assume, the Seven Sisters, weren’t on your radar in large part because your teachers, your parents and your classmates generally viewed the “East” as that awful liberal place filled with people who were protesting the War in Vietnam and were campaigning for that crazy man, George McGovern, for president. Roughly 2% of my large public high school class went out of state to college. Over half of those went to a junior college near a retirement community in a warm state to which their grandparents had retired. (A lot of people from the community chose the same place to retire to.) That wasn’t because the Ivies weren’t interested–the only other person in my class who applied to any of them was also accepted. It was because it was really, really hard to get anyone interested in going out of state. </p>
<p>By the time you would have applied, my alma mater was roughly 10% Catholic and 25% Jewish. It was harder to interest Catholics–I am one–because most of them, especially men, preferred Georgetown and Notre Dame. In all honesty, whether or not you had money had less impact on your social life at “my” Ivy than it did at state U where the Greeks were powerful and anyone who couldn’t afford the “right” clothes wasn’t going to fare well in sorority rush. </p>
<p>There was a small group of rich kids who hung out together. They had zilch impact on my life. If both of your parents were college educated, you would have been a bit unusual in my group of friends. My dad went to college; my mom did not. My roommate’s mom had 1 year of college; her dad left school at 14. BTW, she wasn’t on financial aid–his well-paying, blue collar job disqualified her. One of our suitemates was from a fairly well to don Long Island family. The other was dirt poor and the first in her family to go to college. We did have some wealthy friends too–we only found out how rich one was when we went to her wedding. We didn’t have a clue before that. (She got married the summer before junior year.)</p>
<p>Another good friend’s dad had been the assistant manager of a Woolworth’s until he died her junior year in high school. Her mom had always been a stay at home mom but after his death she got a job as a taxi dispatcher. </p>
<p>You get my drift–the idea that the child of two teachers would have been out of place is all in your head. </p>
<p>However, URM students would be best advised to make their reach, match, and safety assessments of colleges without considering URM status, since colleges tend not to be transparent about how much it matters (if it does matter). Also, most people (URM or otherwise) tend to overestimate the effect of being URM in admissions (and often believe that it matters at schools where it explicitly is not considered), so making such overestimates can result in overreaching in college selection, resulting in disappointment in April.</p>
<p>The same applies to legacy status and other “hooks” that are considered in the opaque holistic admissions process (as opposed to “hooks” where assurance or likelihood of admission can come through an alternate channel, like athletic recruiting).</p>
<p>Well, from my point of view, it just illustrates to me that there are a lot of students and parents with stellar SAT scores and impressive GPA’s who just aren’t that smart.</p>
<p>I happen to value social and interpersonal intelligence + common sense as much as any other type of intelligence. So I would think that a reasonably intelligent person should understand that college admissions is not about the value of the individual student, but about what the college that is doing the admitting needs and wants. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to insult anyone here, but I do see a narrowness of perspective and inability to see the issue from from the perspective of a college president or director of admissions. </p>
<p>Hmmm . . . from today’s paper . . . waitlisted at Cal but accepted at Yale and a whole range of schools from highest ranked to Cal State East Bay . . . taking nothing for granted . . . educated, hardworking parents AND difficult circumstances. Interestingly he didn’t carpet bomb the Ivies he applied to schools that all have something in common.</p>
<p>umm…Since you posted this in response to me, .I assume you are unaware of the fact that Nigerian-Americans are the most highly educated ethnic group in the US. They put ENORMOUS value on education. </p>
<p>Not stereotypes on my part…the Ivies weren’t considered among the students from my high school not because they were “awful” or “liberal” (my parents actually voted for that crazy guy from So. Dakota) but because there was a general feeling that “people like us” (i.e., rural and basically poor or lower-middle class) didn’t belong and because the schools themselves did little to counter that impression. </p>
<p>Finances were an issue. Not in terms of fitting in socially, but in terms of being able to afford to send kid(s) to college on a teacher’s salary (or farmer’s or preacher’s—the three main occupations of my classmates’ parents). At the time, the tuition for a semester at our flagship U was $356. (I remember the exact amount, because I earned half of it the summer before I went to school and then received a scholarship so my parents didn’t have to pay after the first year.) </p>
<p>In terms of elite universities, there was no outreach, no reps, no info about scholarships, or FA coming the way of my rural high school. Did that reflect the intentions of the institutions? I’m not sure. But with no communication from the universities and no local role models to learn from, those elite institutions were not part of the consideration set (as, it seems, was true for your class as well, since only two students applied).</p>
<p>Institutions’ admissions policies and marketing efforts reflect the values of the institution—now and in 1971. </p>
<p>But here’s the thing…I was okay with that then and now. I got a great (almost free) education at an excellent research university that gave me the opportunity to pursue graduate studies and post-grad fellowships at a school that was, if anything, more respected than virtually all the Ivies in my field. </p>
<p>My point is that there are different paths. From where I sit, just about any kid who has the grades and stats to qualify for the elite-lottery and the wherewithal to apply, should be able to find a path to their goal even if it isn’t covered with ivy. I worry a lot more about the educational futures of the 59% of kids at my daughter’s school who are not meeting PSAE standards in reading but are still being handed a fairly useless high school diploma than I do about the student with a 2350/4.0 who was shut out of the Ivies. </p>
<p>Seems the same few are posting on this thread. I keep saying, no, I will not respond again, but alas here I am. It seems overwhelmingly, this thread focuses on URM, which is offensive. No one is grousing about the legacy student, or the athlete that may be totally unqualified. However, let a minority gain acceptance and all heck breaks out. As someone previously mentioned, I am sure hyp knows the historical stats of minorities, and know who they think will be successful. Again, if they strictly went on test scores, even more whites would be shut out, it would be overwhelmingly Asian. . </p>