<p>
</p>
<p>And I am suggesting that removal of antisemitism was all that it took for Jews to enter elite universities in greater numbers. When anti-Asian sentiments are removed, Asians will take up 50% of seats in the US elites</p>
<p>What the Jews did afterwards had nothing to do with entrance to the Elites.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is impossible, there are more (in numbers) Whites with high scores across the board AP, SAT, IB etc than the number of Asians with high scores, so it will be absolutely impossible for this to happen. </p>
<p>I hope you know that universities track their students and they know what qualities make them successful at their schools. There is a reason why about 98% of students at elite schools graduate.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Finally a statement I can agree with.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Sounds like Wall Street at Christmas 2007.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It had a lot to do with their entrance—a lot of them became college professors, won Nobel prizes, won field medals, etc. </p>
<p>The universities are trying to build a class: musicians, athletes, students who will work on college paper, students who will run for student government, future college professors, future politicians, future business people, future big donors etc. GPA and SAT scores do not capture all the qualities the admission committee looks for. This system works. </p>
<p>Despite larger number of Asian graduates very few of them become, college professors, politicians, are in journalism, are in high powered finance, etc. If the committee feels that they need some of their students to enter into these professions, they will look at other qualities beside test scores and GPA.</p>
<p>Is that true at LAC’s and Ivies and non-siloed schools, tega?
I have never heard that AdComms specifically think about creating a diverse group of post-college careers in the classes they craft…
Many applications do not even ask what the applicant will major in; many applicants have no idea what they will major, let alone what career they will go into…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Think again.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Far away from Wall Street.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thank you for finally agreeing that there is an anti-Asian sentiment when it comes to college admissions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you sure?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is the kind of stuff that was once used to keep Jews out, as apparently they all wanted to be accountants. It is racism, pure and simple.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You keep coming back to this … I understand your desire to pick the students rank order ignoring all sorts of criteria currenty used (not that I agree but I get your preference) … however I really don’t get how you think ignoring majors is practical/doable.</p>
<p>Schools have infrastructure including tenured professors. To use my school Cornell, as an example, there are seven separate undergraduate schools … and something like 80% of the applicants are qualified to attend Cornell. So if they ignored majors/schools while considering admissions each year the enrollment in each of the colleges would likely be a mismatch to the capacity of each school each year … some oversubscribed and some undersubscribed. How do you suggest the school deal with the much larger year-to-year fluctuations in enrollment by school then they currently see (or should they just add infrastructructure (cost) to handle the high demand years for each school)? Cornell mission includes educating/training students in all these fields. Claiming it’s racism for Cornell to fulfill it’s mission and maintain some form of efficiency by filling each of its schools while possibly accepting, for example, a 93.390 in the Architecture school instead of a 93.402 in the Arts & Sciences school seems to be stretch in my opinion. In addition, this again raises the issue of how precise this measurement system is going to be … the requirements for the Hotel and Architecture school are significantly different than the other scholls … so the idea of one mast list of ranked students again raises all issues about the precision of this measurement system.</p>
<p>PS - If you could show me examples of schools that added a filter for colleges and majors after their Asian population started to grow and that adding the filter dampened the Asian population I might buy the arguement. However Cornell, for example, has been admitting students this way since the school started about 150 years ago (including accepting women and African Americans) so to claim that this is now a plot to keep out Asians seems a bit of a stretch.</p>
<p>My question meant to focus on LAC’s and NON-siloed schools Cornell is a siloed school.
I was addressing tega because tega wrote of personal experience helping with admissions.</p>
<p>IF non-siloed and LAC schools did/do think about careers of applicants in creating a diverse class, let alone majors (which are not usually required to be specified by applicants to these types of schools), that would appear to be a stretch. God help us if the stretch is based on race.</p>
<p>For example, does Brown assume a Hockey recruit will be a Pro Hockey Player? Does Columbia assume that the President of the Debate Club will be a lawyer or politician??</p>
<p>Doesn’t the research show that a large percentage of students change their major at least once??</p>
<p>(Certainly, if a student applies to a specific “school” at a university, that is a commitment or a silo… that is not what I am referring to, however.)</p>
<p>In fact, I wonder what statistical correlation (shown via back-testing) to applicants’ HS EC’s and avowed interests there is to choices in college of courses, majors and activities … I do not dispute that the AdComms are trying guess this, and do need a diversity and balance in a given class, in order to fully utilize the resources at the school. But this is very different from career balancing!</p>
<p>3togo, It seems that Cornell is not admitting students as a whole to Cornell. They are admitting students to many different sub-colleges, and once in kids cannot switch. In that case, how about using my criteria for each college individually? However that may end up in a biology class that is 100% Asian … and apparently colleges do not like that.</p>
<p>My main objection, however, was to the notion that Asians must be restricted because they do not become college professors, for example. However, a kid in any school can become a college professor, or not. Choice of major has nothing whatsoever to do with it. So, what you are saying is very different from the comment that I was responding to.</p>
<p>
They cannot assume much about the ultimate career choices of any given applicant. What many selective private schools do assume is that it is possible to craft a class that has certain dynamics, as a community, based on the diverse qualifications, interests and personalities of the selected individuals. Presumably they would like to think such a community will tend to produce outstanding alumni in many fields.</p>
<p>Does this consistently occur? In recent years, up to 40% of Harvard alumni have entered investment banking and business consulting. This may be good for alumni giving, but the administration and students don’t seem to consider it an especially desirable outcome. *“When students were asked to set financial concerns aside, they said they would prefer to work in the arts, media, and public service rather than in business, consulting, and finance (20 percent said they would remain in those sectors).”<a href=“%5Burl=http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2008/6/22/harvard-graduates-head-to-investment-banking/]Harvard%20Graduates%20Head%20to%20Investment%20Banking,%20Consulting%20|%20News%20|%20The%20Harvard%20Crimson[/url]”>/i</a></p>
<p>Elite schools don’t build public bragging rights on the number of graduates heading to Wall Street firms. Career training is not the educational mission. Bragging rights come from outcomes such as the number of Rhodes scholars, Nobel Prize winners (which aren’t awarded for accounting or electrical engineering), or seminal academic publications. Consider a page like this one: [REED</a> COLLEGE PHD PRODUCTIVITY](<a href=“http://www.reed.edu/ir/phd.html]REED”>Doctoral Degree Productivity - Institutional Research - Reed College) Can anyone find a similar college brag sheet for the number of graduates in bulge bracket banks? </p>
<p>Look at the Latin mottos of famous, selective universities ([List</a> of university mottos](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_university_mottos]List”>List of university and college mottos - Wikipedia)). I have to believe that many adcoms sincerely wish to select some students who will at least pay lip service to those ends. So what is the best process for doing that? Racism and anti-semitism definitely have affected college admissions. So have well-intentioned social engineering goals. These factors are mixed up with, and not always easy to tease apart from, what I’d consider legitimate concerns about how admissions should support larger institutional goals. Many excellent public universities do use an almost purely numbers-driven approach. So if you like that approach, choose those schools.</p>
<p>What is interesting is that even among public universities (and some privates that give out merit schollarships) that select top students for honors colleges, special programs, or large scholarships, some use a strictly numbers approach, while others employ a system that surpasses Ivies wrt what it demands from students, including additional essays and recommendations and campus interviews by professors and current students. I have yet to hear complaints about any of these programs discriminating against Asian students.</p>
<p>The expectation is that the school is selecting students who will later establish and distinguish themselves in ways that will reflect well on the school and expand alumni networks and philanthropy, and schools are willing to spend large amounts of money per student, compared to students not in such programs, to achieve these goals. Once accepted into an honors program, students continue to receive perks not limited to scholarship money (although some schools explicitly state that the scholarship money is given in the hope that a student not burdened by debt will feel less pressure to accept a job that pays well but does not offer opportunities for personal growth), from opportunities to collaborate with professors and special honors classes to greatly enhanced advising.</p>
<p>I would guess that in time it should be possible to tell which honors programs are doing a better job in preselecting students who will go on to achieve at a high level. In the meantime, it fascinates me that although PSU Schreyer does not use SAT scores, and Pitt honors does, the published SAT ranges of admitted students are roughly equivalent for both schools, and not all that different from several elite schools. </p>
<p>OTOH, Asian representation is not very high in either school, compared to elites.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>They might not ask you what your major might be. Even if they ask, how many people change their majors? But they can infer from you E.C.s and essays. </p>
<p>They do know a lot about their students: they know the student who has set up his own business and have been generating positive cash flows for the last several years; this student will likely be an entrepreneur after college. They know about the student who is in an all state orchestra; this student might decide not to be a professional but he can audition for the school orchestra, which will benefit the entire college. They know about the student who was in the Olympics; this student will probably choose to concentrate on his sports after college. They know about the students in the various Olympiads; these are probably the future college professors. They know about the student who has been doing active research, this student is a future researcher. They know about the student who was involved with student government, or the student who worked as an intern for a congresswoman, or was involved in community service. Etc etc etc </p>
<p>They also know about the students who have to work or help parents in the family business. </p>
<p>They know a lot about the students who apply to their schools, at some SAT cutoff other qualities become more important. They are running a community and in order for the community to function well, they need all sorts of students: from the pianist, to the dancer, to the budding researcher, to the singer, to the budding politician, to the violinist, to the budding mathematician, to the jock, to the ……. </p>
<p>I can’t imagine how they make these decisions given the vast number of very qualified students.</p>
<p>Every institution has its own criteria for choosing its students. There is reason why students from Reed, Swarthmore, Chicago, etc attend graduate schools in higher proportion that other schools. This is by design.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How is this even possible for them to think this way? Jews have been philosophers, mathematicians, bankers, physicist, etc for years. They were excluded because of anti-Semitism. America was a very racist country back in that time, and if you were not WASP you were discriminated against by the power brokers.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Cornell does admit by college and I believe does NOT ask about majors within colleges … the individual colleges deal with the ambiguity of not knowing how many kids will pick any particular major within a major as the students pick their majors … so, yes, your system could be implemented by each college . I brought this up because awhile ago there was a discussion about the apparent concentration of Asians in STEM majors and your response that schools should just take the best students irregardless of majors … your suggetion now that they do use your system school by school is inconsistent with your objection back in the discussion on STEM majors. This structure of applying to particular schools is true at Cornell, Penn, Stanford, and Columbia at least among top schools so even if they used your system at each college the overall population of Asian at the university would likely be surpressed somewhat as Hunt mentioned a couple hundred pages ago due to this concentration of STEM applications (and the relative lack of applications in other schools).</p>
<p>Fyi, at Cornell students can apply to switch colleges after admission and while it is not automatic it is fairly easy for students in good standing (it may require extra time to graduate especially if one of the more unique schools like architecture or the hotel school are involves where there is little course overlap). </p>
<p>Two more comments and then I am going to bow out of this conversation.</p>
<p>First, I keep mentioning the lack of precision of a selection by one overall number system. You’re an analytical guy so let’s try another crack at this … this about one overall number system and its’ statistical signifigance. If I understand your preferred system the students are lined up by the overall number and the schools accepts the students in rank order. There is NO way there is statistical signifigance of the difference between the 94.0002 of the last student admitted and the 94.0001 of the first student not admitted … absolutely NO WAY there is any statistical signifigance between the rankings of these two students. And I would guess that given the level of accomplishment of the applicant pools at top school that at a 95% signifigance level that there are at least hundreds of students (if not thousands) near the cutoff where there is no statistical signifigance to the difference of their absolute ranking. So, in essence, what you are proposing if that schools rank order by a measurement that can not really differentiate among tons of candidates near the cut-off and blindly use this impercise measurement that the schools know is not really differentiating among students … instead of picking among these hundreds (if not thousands) of statistically indistinguishable students by using subjective criteria such as home state, URM or not, women engineer or not, concert pianist, etc … in other words use a measurement beyound it’s precision and rely on luck to see how the demographics of the incoming class turn out … instead of building a dynamic class when the applicants have moved beyond where the numbers truely differentiate the applicants. I understand you prefer this system … but I am VERY glad none of my three schools do use this method and believe it will be a very sad day in their history if they ever do.</p>
<p>I do appreciate your openness and willingness to discuss the topic. One thing that is clear ot me is that you either do not get or do not agree with that for which the admissions committees are looking. Numerous times you have made comments such as you wish the schools would make their selection criteria visable and explicit so that students and parents could plan and work to meet and exceeed these criteria. I think that belief is at the heart of the disagreement you have with the schools. The schools are not looking for students who are pursuing academic and ECs to meet the criteria of their schools … what they are first and foremost are trying to find are kids who have terrific academics and terrific ECs because they were compelled to do these things because they were drawn to them and not because they were trying to check off a box for Harvard. For example, a couple pages ago I mentioned the student who was a soccer player, coach, ref, and started soccer charity … she began as a ref when she was 12 (I believe) and started the charity somewhere in that time frame in response to a world event … this amazing young women is not the creation of a Harvard application prep plan but someone whose love of soccer branched out and filled her life from a very young age. To be honest when I read posts from parents (I am not talking about you) complaining that the top schools are asking too much of students and that their kid is killing themselves to get into a top school … my immediate reaction is “love the kid on your couch” and maybe your kid isn’t a Harvard kid; please encourage them to breath and have some fun now and also please be psyched when your amazing accomplished child “only” ends up at Cornell or Bucknell.</p>
<p>I support holistic admission where it uses real achievements, academic and otherwise, and takes account of socioeconomic background (not color of skin).</p>
<p>But I am skeptical of this ‘crafting a class’ narrative (or myth). It just sounds like an excuse to take anyone you want for any reason (like magically simulating what would happen with a race-based quota). </p>
<p>Taking a student for some cutesy admission essay about goatherding with grandpa in Albania is plain silly, and easy to fake.</p>