I’m okay with this. And I think the good enough bar is pretty high at most schools. My older son probably lost “his” place at MIT because he was male not female, but that’s okay with me. Part of the reason why MIT *is *more desirable than the other tech schools is because it has a better M/F ratio. He ended up at a great school that IMO would have been even better if it had been more diverse.</p>
<p>BTW I was on a teacher search committee at my kids’ elementary school exactly like what Epiphany described. Our principal (white woman for what it’s worth, the committee had both whites and African Americans) let it be known right from the start that because we’d lost a couple of male teachers and a couple of minority teachers she really, really hoped we’d be able to find candidates who were either male or minority. In the end we hired three people one white woman, one woman of Korean background, and one African American woman. Sadly even though we interviewed every man that seemed okay on paper there was no one who was “good enough”.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is fair to compare foreign universities to their US counterparts, as they have different missions and vastly different resources. </p>
<p>It is obvious that each country has highly selective schools. The reputation of IIT is well established, but again, it does not fit the US environment very well. The same could be said about the best European universities.</p>
<p>It is kind of interesting that no one is complaining about the 7-10% seats given to the Internationals. It seems like the threshold is lower if you want to come in from some countries while the competition is fierce for others. The same rule seems to apply if someone wants to go from US to UK/Europe where some of the colleges have a much lower threshold for Americans vs their own countrymen. At least in UK, it is really hard to get into some of the schools but they do accept a lot of foreigners at full pay.</p>
<p>Yes this is absolutely true. About 10% are from the Dalit class, though there is a quota for up to 25%. But IITs can’t find enough qualified candidates to fill up the full 25% and seats go empty. The cutoff for the Dalit students is 50% of the average score of the general admission students.</p>
<p>What’s funny is that selectivity in the IITs is 2%, while selectivity in the Ivies is 7-8%. Yet, I am far more nervous about Ivy admissions than IIT admissions (if my kid were to be in India). This is because the selectivity of the IITs is completely objective and open. Not so for the Ivies. My kid will have to live or die by the subjective criteria of a certain AdCom, and that just burns me.</p>
<p>If the likes of HYPSM had a top-2% who were admitted solely based on open, objective criteria (whatever the criteria were, but not based on race or SES), I wouldn’t complain at all.</p>
So if the criteria were that you had to get a certain score for admission to Harvard, unless you were from a certain group, in which case you only needed 50% of the score, that would be fine with you?</p>
<p>Yes. So this is how it would work. Let’s say the exam has a total of 100 points (between exam and ECs and hooks, and you have to have an objective and open, auditable criteria to rate the ECs and the hooks, and race or SES is not a criteria for hooks). Let’s say Harvard has a total open seatcount of 2000. Let’s say you keep 25% seats for the URMs. Let’s say your yield rate is 60% for non-URMs and 80% for URMs.</p>
<p>Now you start to rank each applicant by their point count (out of 100) and keep allocating seats till you have reached 1500. No racial classification is allowed here. Then, to adjust for the yield rate, you keep going till you have made offers to 2500 kids without any racial classification.</p>
<p>Now you take the median score of this 2500 kids. You divide it by two, this is your floor.
Then you start to allocate seats to URMs who haven’t yet got an offer, again ranking them by point count. You keep going till the point count drops below the floor, or you reach 625 offers to URM kids.</p>
<p>I would support this system completely. For each student, accepted or otherwise, I would post their total score, how that was calculated, and what the cutoffs were. Then a computer could do the jobs of the adcoms.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I wouldn’t keep 25% seats for URMs, since many URMs will get in from the general pool as well. I would make it something like 10-15%.</p>
<p>And I wouldn’t even require this system for all colleges. Just, say the top-20 will be enough.</p>
<p>Is your beef not that the URM are accepted, but that the reason they were accepted is not posted somewhere? </p>
<p>Are you also suggesting that students be assigned an Admission Score of some kind and that this would be made public? Individually or in groups?</p>
<p>Something along these lines:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Or along the lines of the AI that was exposed by M. Hernandez? Or any other scorecards that have been revealed such as the Cal or MIT ones?</p>
<p>See, here’s the thing. In my system, any non-URM kid would know that (s)he is competing for 1500 slots instead of 2000, and the selection criteria is completely objective. (S)he will download the criteria, and prepare hard from 1st grade to meet it. (S)he will either be able to meet it, or not, but if (s)he does meet it no one will be able to keep him/her out based on race. That’s perfectly fine by me. No bias involved at all. No discounting of Asians for being piano playing math grinds who are textureless. No discounting of Asians because there are already too many Asians. In this system, people who are diligent, and have very involved and driven parents will succeed. Others won’t. That’s meritocracy. There will be no guessing of secondary proofs of merit - it will all be in the open and objective. I can guarantee you that Asians would sweep this system.</p>
<p>xiggi, this is what I want to be able to do. First, I need a pool of applicants where race is not a criteria. My kid will play in that pool. Then, I would like a clear criteria with objective scores that would be used to measure my kid. No more or less. I will download that criteria and make sure that my kid cracks it - by putting in as much effort and getting as much help needed. </p>
<p>This particular pool may be totally imbalanced by race, SES, interests, gender, proficiency, what have you. But that needs to be OK, and I don’t want AdComs trying to balance that out using subjective judgment. That’s it really.</p>
Well, I guarantee you they won’t, because from the start you set aside somewhere between 10 and 25% of the spots for URMs. So they won’t sweep those slots. </p>
<p>The other spots, I’m certain they will be well represented. But sweep? Well, I suspect Evan O’Dorney might disagree.</p>
<p>26 out of the 40 finalists are Asian. Which means 65% Asian.</p>
<p>But still, nothing like a healthy competition. Bring it on!</p>
<p>By the way, I am only thinking of the 75% general population when I said that Asians would sweep it. So, the final composition may be something like</p>
<p>In other words, 50% of the incoming class will be Asian, which is like the UCs. I think 50% Asian is the steady state level for the top schools when measured by merit.</p>
<p>Caucasians wouldn’t like this at all. </p>
<p>You know why Asians want race blind admissions? They will take spots either from URMs (if there is no URM quota) or from Caucasians (if there is URM quota). What will be interesting to see is how the Caucasians who now support AA would react to this system.</p>
<p>First of all, your system might be great for URM? Why? You set aside 15 to 25 percent of the admission pool for them, and let the rest compete for the remaining spots? And this at the top schools? That would be great at UCLA and Cal! </p>
<p>32,000 applicants at Harvard and URM might get 500 spots? What if 2,000 fight for those 500 spots while the other 30,000 fight for the remaining 1,500 spots. Not sure how Asians would like THAT system anymore than the current one.</p>
<p>As far as an Asian sweep, how comfortable are you with your expectations of academic superiority? Are so sure that Asians would do universally better than the white cohort? What if the Jewish students happen to have better subscores?</p>
<p>Last but no least, how quickly do you think you would run out of all those superior Asians when filling the spots at the top 20 universities (and I assume top 10 LACs.) How quickly would the top asians scorers find themselves … just better than average, and facing a competition that is three or five times more numerous? </p>
<p>I think a better way of admissions actually would be to rank the schools on your application so a few people don’t get admitted to 10 schools and a second person with similar qualifications does nt get thrown out everywhere because they have already taken the same person as the best everywhere.</p>