Amherst to stop offering legacy preference in admissions

BKSquared
Thu, 28 Oct 2021 21:31:42 +0000

Actually, 66% of non ALDC admits (of all non-ALDC admits) were in the first 3 deciles, leaving a third of non-ALDC admits in the remaining 7 deciles. 21% of non ALDC admits were in the 5th decile or lower if we look at Data’s table at #243. That table however does not account for the URM lift as non ALDCs and LDC’s are taken as a whole. Note that these deciles relate to the admittees Academic Index which is derived from a formula comprised of GPA and test scores that is used for purposes of athletic recruiting requirements. While correlated to the Academic ratings, more goes into the ratings and the number of students rated in each group is not equal as Data also points out.

Trying to triangulate this from another angle using the table I looked at which does distinguish between races so that we look at qualifications of ORMs (Whites and Asians), we do see 11% of White non-ALDC’s in the admitted group with a 3 rating of all admitted White non-ALDCs , and 5.6% of Asian non-ALDCs. While these are unfavorable numbers for Academic 3’s of ORM’s, it’s not as if they have 0 chance.

To close the loop where we might speculate that only a small number of non ALDC’s are admitted, I looked at Table 4 of the Arcidiacono report which provides gross numbers of admits by race and ALDC status. The LDC % and non ALDC data are my calculations using the Total Admits, LDC Admits an Athletic Admits in Table 4:

| White | African American | Hispanic | Asian American
Total Admits | 4,993 | 1,392 | 1,283 | 2,443
LDC | 1,362 | 81 | 122 | 270
LDC% | 27% | 6% | 10% | 11%
Athletes | 817 | 124 | 54 | 101
NonALDC | 2,814 | 1,187 | 1,107 | 2,072
Non ALDC % | 56.4% | 85.3% | 86.3% | 84.8%

So from here, we can see that LDC’s still are a minority of admits, with Whites having a much higher percentage of LDC’s relative to other groups.