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<p>You might as well flip a coin, because under no circumstances can I assign superiority to one over a 20 point difference on the SAT. It’s an insignificant number and reflects nothing.</p>
<p>If more people experienced more of other sorts of groups, we wouldn’t have all this “us versus them” talk, all these assumptions URMs are lesser, can’t be engaged, are all about sob stories. As it is, too many just can’t imagine some poor inner city, rural or border kid could possibly be doing something of value, challenging herself more, having some early impact, maybe even more than our little Susie and Bobby and their hs set. </p>
<p>And we get so many rolling excuses on CC- Billy can’t be engaged, he doesn’t have a car, he has so much homework and is up til midnight, as it is, plus his sports take a few hours each day. While the striving kids are doing sports, in clubs, getting on a bus to some volunteer work, doing their homework, too. </p>
<p>These conversations remind me of some novels about attempts to engineer a Utopia. So now Penn is including LGBT kids in their special programs along with racial minorities. What other category of student might they decide needs adequate representation in their class, and how will that decision be made? Are they soon going to feel the need to distinguish among the subcategories of those groups so they can ensure a critical mass of, say, transgender kids? Some boys only like to date blondes. Do they need a critical mass of blonde girls? If they’re distinguishing by pure genetics in their admission preferences, (since skin color does not necessarily entail even one other characteristic, such as SES background, national origin, culture, religion language, etc.), then why not? What about religious groups? What is the right number of Catholics or Muslims at a school? What about obese people? Surely they need to make sure there aren’t too few or they may feel uncomfortable or may choose not attend. What about all the subdivisions labeled Caucasian or Middle Eastern? All whites are not the same, and yet get lumped together in admissions. Italians and Greeks are pretty tight knit ethnicities around here. Do they need to ensure a critical mass of Italians and Greeks? Not all East Asians are the same. What about if the school accepts too many Pakistanis and that makes the Indians uneasy about attending. Africans are culturally distinct from American blacks, and do not see themselves as belonging to the same group. So should a school determine the optimal percentages of these two categories also?</p>
<p>Many, many colleges include lgbt. Since Bowdoin was noted, did you know they let kids self-select whether they are URM? I think the example was “short.” I think one really has to do a lot of research into a lot of colleges around the country, dig, to see what really is up. Religious groups can be included as URM. All sorts of kids. </p>
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<p>lookingforward, I think this is key. The disdain, or even outright contempt, some people here have for those who are not like them is astonishing. My kids have also grown up in an incredibly diverse school district in an otherwise very homogeneous city and state. They value the relationships they have with all kinds of kids, including many of very different backgrounds. And we DO notice the diversity (or lack thereof) of the colleges we visit. It’s hard with LACs to find much diversity but many of them are trying.</p>
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<p>Actually, some colleges like CUNY and many other institutions do regard Italian-Americans as URMs for purposes of admission, hiring, and promotions. </p>
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<p>However, if there is an admission target for white students, and the actual number of white students is close to the lower bound of that target, then wouldn’t it be possible that colleges are putting a thumb on the scale for white applicants in order make the admission target for white students?</p>
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<p>Cobrat, your schoolmates sound like a bunch of schlubs, a host of arrogant, pendantic boors. </p>
<p>From your many descriptions, your peers discussed grades, SAT scores, future college attendance more in one lunch period than my classmates did during my entire senior year. I think if I had attended a school like that, I would have lost my sanity, or at least my faith in humanity. Even as off putting as your school culture sounds, I normally would have assumed that they would have outgrown it, but by your own accounts, many former classmates didn’t attend the 10 year reunion because they would have been harassed about the fact that they had attended “less than” schools by those who attended the “acceptable” institutions. </p>
<p>Sounds sad, actually. If this is what being brilliant gets you, I thank my lucky stars for being just “intelligent enough.” LOL, I went to my state flagship and was THRILLED to be there.</p>
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<p>The problem is that you are talking about feelings and perceptions on the part of applicants…neither of which are necessarily the fault of institutional policies. That’s basically a problem of reality not matching expectations.</p>
<p>From what I have read and heard about the holistic review policy, I, personally, know that adcoms are looking at applicant variables that include subjective and objective measures. When D is rejected by at least half of the schools she applies to, we will not see it as her fault or blame it on the institutions…because we realize there is a lottery aspect to process. </p>
<p>Until someone comes up with a better answer, though, that’s what we’re dealing with. I have not seen an appropriate alternative—best score wins (no), highest bidder with tuition that reflects supply and demand (no), first come first served (no). No better system for meeting the needs of the institution has been suggested yet (and that’s the objective…not meeting the needs of the students but meeting the needs of the university, remember.) </p>
<p>Until reality can be changed…expectations need to be managed. I think there are a few different places where blame for unrealistic expectations can be placed, and only one of them rests primarily with the institutions:</p>
<p>• Overly effusive marketing outreach to less-than-qualified potential applicants (that one is under the control of the institution…and should be reviewed).
• Inadequate guidance on the part of GCs and others at the high school that lead to unrealistic expectations and poor application strategies.
• Parents and other loving, but uninformed, adults in the student’s life who do not understand the process, the pool of applicants, and the true relative strengths and weaknesses of the applicant…but who speak from a position of authority.<br>
• Other students, especially, anonymous ones who provide opinions without facts to back them up.
• Media, including sites like Cappex and Parchment (and even CC), that suggest rubrics and make use of algorithms that often result in misleading advice.<br>
• The cultural ideal that “life is fair”…it’s not.<br>
• The fact that 17 and 18 year-olds often lack the perspective to understand the situation and their role in it. </p>
<p>And I’m sure there are more. </p>
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<p>Catching up a little on some back posts, but I’ve been to a couple of the kinds of sessions Elliemom and fireandrain refer to where parents are given the chance to act as a faux admissions committee. They can be enlightening. For instance, in one session the “committee” agreed to admit a kid with slightly lower SATs than an otherwise similar candidate who was waitlisted. The kid who was admitted was also a varsity athlete and I can just see kids at her high school assuming that’s what made the difference. In actuality what really sent her to the admit pile was that she had taken Latin and Greek in high school and the college was trying to shore up their classics department. The waitlisted candidate was a perfectly good applicant but she took Spanish.</p>
<p>At a session at a different high school (coincidentally with a rep from Brown) we had 5 hypothetical applicants to 2 schools. The kid with the highest GPA and scores wasn’t admitted to either school. We saw that he had sky-high scores but hadn’t challenged himself in high school. For instance, he wanted to be a math major but chose to stop at AB Calc. his junior year even though his school offered BC. His essay on the “My room” prompt was boring. It answered the question but not in a way that gave the committee any insight into what made this kid tick. (“You’d see baseball trophies because I play ball, and postcards from Europe because I took a trip there” etc.)</p>
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<p>What the…?!? I need a reference for that one. </p>
<p>^ ^</p>
<p>Here you go:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/affirmativeaction/”>http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/affirmativeaction/</a></p>
<p><a href=“Italian-Americans Want More Affirmative Action at CUNY - The New York Times”>Italian-Americans Want More Affirmative Action at CUNY - The New York Times;
<p>I’m getting on the phone and telling my Italian-surnamed sister about this one! </p>
<p>“Pizzagirl, surely even you would take the 2310 over the 2290 if they were otherwise identical.”</p>
<p>The thing is people AREN’T otherwise identical - race completely aside. </p>
<p>Sue, that kind of admissions session isn’t that impressive to me. Of course there are high-stats kids who come off as slackers, jerks, drones, etc, and lower-stat kids with other qualities that more than make up for any “deficiency” in SAT + GPA. And if I’m an adcom setting out to prove how infallible my judgment is, I’m going to cherry-pick a few applications that show exactly what I want them to show. Obviously, I’m not going to choose to highlight the athlete who barely met league minimum academic standards, or an excellent but not overwhelmingly impressive legacy or URM who gets the nod because of the hook. </p>
<p>Hunt, I’ve really appreciated your posts this afternoon. </p>
<p>Re CUNY: The links show affirmative action for personnel (hiring of employees), not for admissions (students). </p>
<p>CUNY may or may not have preferential admissions for Italian-American students… but no source has been cited to show that they do. </p>
<p>Awcntdb writes: “The students who feel discriminated against in the college process is just the beginning of the negative repercussions. And if you think they will forgot feeling slighted by a process they perceive as illegitimate, think again.”</p>
<p>That is a point that should not be so easily dismissed. We are sending a generation of non-URM students to college who have not observed racism (cue set response that “of COURSE they don’t have memories of racism – they are white!” Please read on). They will be tomorrow’s leaders They did not grow up in a generation where one saw Bull Connor and his dogs attacking protesters, or the Freedom Summer, or Dr. King’s assassination, or anything of the sort that the parents on this thread may recall. Instead, they have grown up in a country that has twice elected a black President. For many of them, their first encounter of a race-based decision will be the topic being debated on this thread (fueled by the 600 SATs for many URMs who post on the “admitted!” threads in the top schools on CC). Some of them may conclude that we have gone from George Wallace standing in the doorway of the university barring an African-American for no reason other than race, to an African-American barring THEM from that doorway for no reason other than race. You can debate the correctness of that view, but have no illusions about the culture of resentment this is creating, and the way that this can affect the formation of these future leaders’ views on many downstream social justice issues. It may be legitimate social engineering, but it comes at a cost.</p>
<p>Ok, it comes at a cost. Everything comes at a cost when it’s a zero sum game. Harvard could have 50,000 undergraduates but it wouldn’t be Harvard- so anything smaller than that means that some folks who want to attend can’t get admitted, some folks who want to attend don’t even apply because they don’t think they can afford it, etc. Zero sum game- Harvard’s classrooms do not fit all the kids who want to sit there, so if you get in, someone else won’t.</p>
<p>NHDad, are you seriously suggesting that Harvard and Yale should worry that by trying to create a diverse class they will trigger some downstream racism by the kids who went to Rice or U Chicago or Vanderbilt or Wesleyan because some African American kid took “their” seat?</p>
<p>Everything has a cost. The cost of creating a generation of entitled and self-absorbed kids who think it is their “right” to attend Harvard or MIT and that they’ve been cheated by “only” being accepted to U Chicago is a very high cost indeed.</p>
<p>GFG, do you have any notion of what it means to grow up as a Gay teenager? </p>
<p>I’d be inclined to question the educational qualifications of applicants who don’t understand historical antecedents that didn’t occur in their lifetimes. </p>
<p>My children were born in the 80’s. I’m quite sure that they would probably be more familiar with the details of the events of the Civil Rights movement than I am. For them, it is something they have studied in school, and they have viewed many times through television documentaries. (PBS, the history channel). For me, it may be more of a hazy memory from early childhood. But my kids understand things that happened before they were born.</p>