Advantage to be a URM?

snipersas
Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:09:06 +0000

I do not mean this in any offensive way, but is it true that african americans have a higher chance of acceptance than whites or asians with similar accomplishments?



There was actually a study done on this topic a few years ago by a professor at Princeton. As you might imagine for a peer-reviewed study, the dataset analyzed was rather solid:



methods:

Logistic regression analysis is used to link information on the admission decision for 124,374 applications to applicants’ SAT scores, race, athletic ability, and legacy status, among other variables.



And the results supported what most people believed - the bonus associated with being black worked out to 230 points on the old SAT, or around 350 points on the current one, over an otherwise identical white candidate, or about 430 points over an otherwise identical Asian one.

The numbers are substantial, though several caveats do exist. First, the data set used is now several years old, so changing admissions standards might have since thrown the numbers off. Second, the data set used was an aggregate “basket” of several highly selective schools (which may or may not include MIT), so it is doubtful that MIT’s numbers match this number exactly. Still, given the published makeup of each incoming class at MIT and elsewhere it is probable that such preferences still exist - the only highly selective school that does not practice any affirmative action whatsoever is Caltech, and their incoming class usually runs around 1% Black versus 10% for many of their peer schools.

So to answer your question - yes, probably, but as schools don’t regularly publish their admissions datasets, it’s unlikely you will ever know the exact number without a very good friend in the admissions office.

Source can be found here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webAdmission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf