<p>IP: you are so rigid in your thought process, is this backfiring on you at work? I have a feeling this thread is just a place for you to work out your frustration with the fact that corporate America is passing you by . If they only saw things your way…</p>
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<p>What kind of STEM insight would an URM have that an Asian won’t?</p>
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<p>LOL, I am just as flexible as the defenders of AA, or those that want an Asian quota. Corporate America has been great for me. No AA here.</p>
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May God forgive me, but I’m beginning to hope so. ;)</p>
<p>“The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race…”</p>
<p>If Afirmative Action still meant ensuring that applicants were treated “without regard to their race,” employers and colleges would have no need to request racial identification.</p>
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Absolutely. Yes.</p>
<p>It’s often a perfectly good question whether, for a particular kid, going to Harvard as an affirmative action admit is going to be better, in the long term, than the next-best non-AA choice. I’m sure there are URM kids who crash and burn at Harvard – just as there are non-URM kids who crash and burn there – who would have continued to be successful if they were in a somewhat different environment. (A long time ago, that happened to one of my roommates, a kid who had effectively been kidnapped off the street in SE DC when he was in 8th grade and sent to Groton. For a variety of reasons, many of them related to the social contradictions in his life, he left Yale after three semesters and never returned. I ought to say that he thought he would have done better if there had been more Blacks at Yale.)</p>
<p>Anyway, believe it or not there are plenty of qualified URMs who do NOT choose to play the AA game at HYP. Looking at 6 kids who were URMs and also friends of my son at school, five of whom were successful students at a good public school that regularly sends kids to Ivies, and one was a decent student at a top private school. The private-school kid (whose family was well off, but who had plenty of connection to the experience of being African American) went to one of HYPS. Of the five others, only two even applied to any of them, unsuccessfully. Two went to elite LACs close to their families. One only applied to HBCUs. One went to a second-tier, out-of-state public that gave him a lot of merit money. And one went to a “lesser Ivy”. As far as I know, these different strategies worked well for all of them.</p>
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Aren’t you the guy who thinks that somebody who is white and lives in an affluent neighborhood can’t support racial preferences?</p>
<p>As for people like Clarence Thomas and others, I can somewhat sympathize with their feelings that their own achievements may be discounted because people think they got where they did because of affirmative action. But I also feel like they are somewhat like city folks who move to a nice small town and then complain when more city folks want to move in and spoil the bucolic atmosphere.</p>
<p>JHS wrote:
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<p>This is mirrored in the colleges scoring the highest on the GMAT (results of >700.) HYPMS are in the top ten, but, so are Brandeis and Rice. Only seven of the eight Ivy League universities made it into the top twenty:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard 738.0</li>
<li>Yale 732.0</li>
<li>MIT 731.7</li>
<li>Rice University 731.3</li>
<li>Brandeis University 729.4 </li>
<li>Princeton 727.7</li>
<li>Stanford University 724.0</li>
<li>Brown University 722.2</li>
<li>Williams College 721.6</li>
<li>Carnegie Mellon 720.9</li>
<li>Duke University 720.2</li>
<li>Dartmouth 716.7</li>
<li>Wesleyan University 716.2</li>
<li>Amherst College 714.4</li>
<li>Carleton College 714.2</li>
<li>University of Chicago 712.9</li>
<li>Columbia University 712.2</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania 712.2</li>
<li>Northwestern 712.0</li>
<li>UC Berkeley </li>
</ol>
<p>[Which</a> College Scores Best on the GMAT? - BusinessWeek](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>^ I have a hard time believing the average GMAT scores have much if anything to do with the quality of education at those colleges, as opposed to how much weight they place on SATs in admitting students and cultural patterns about what sort of students there apply to business school.</p>
<p>I agree, my GRE scores were exactly the same as my SAT scores. I don’t think it’s because I didn’t learn anything in college - it’s just that when you are already talking about scores over 700 there’s not much room for improvement.</p>
<p>No. They are not.</p>
<p>^^^Oh, I agree with all the above; if anything, I’d go one step further and posit that GMAT scores are the closest we have to a surrogate marker for the SAT scores of white and Asian students at the listed colleges since it’s almost impossible to bracket out scores by race via the colleges themselves.</p>
<p>IndianParent, do you think there is any tipping point at which the percentage of Asian students in a particular school might be problematic?</p>
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<p>Yes, I am the guy who thinks that it’s funny for you to be advocating a “diversity” tax when you live in an affluent, mostly white suburb far away from “diversity” as you define it. </p>
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<p>You say “people think they got where they did because of affirmative action.” Who are these people?</p>
<p>See, there’s an irony here. Racial preference supporters often argue against the “achievements may be discounted” critique of affirmative action by stating that the problem lies not in the policy but in the people who choose to discount blacks’ achievements.</p>
<p>But these supporters only do this for blacks who SUPPORT racial preferences. For blacks who OPPOSE racial preferences, the same people who dismiss the “achievements may be discounted” criticism now use it. They say that Justice Thomas shouldn’t oppose the policy because he benefited from it!</p>
<p>It is the supporters of racial preferences who discount his achievements, not the opponents.</p>
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<p>I am not IndianParent but my answer to your question is a thundering NO.</p>
<p>The issue of tipping points comes up when the female-male ratio gets high. The Dean of Admissions at William and Mary once said, “We are, after all, the College of William and Mary, not the College of Mary and Mary.” William and Mary is widely thought to hold female applicants to higher standards than males in order to keep the ratio below 60-40. (Of course, this is hard to prove, especially with holistic admissions.) I understand the reasons for wanting to keep the ratio down, but I still find quotas troubling, especially for a public university.</p>
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The reason I ask is this: There is a prestigious high school in my area which has been highly sought after since it was founded about 20 years ago. I had two older kids apply for high school and it was THE school for academics at that time (about 8 years ago), and I have a kid who will be applying this coming year. He is a musician, so we’re taking a different path for him, but he and many of his friends are in a middle school magnet program and some of them (not mine!) are among the top academic students in the area at that age. At meetings this spring and in personal conversations, I’ve been absolutely shocked to learn that almost none of those kids are applying to that school, unless they are doing so as a fallback to a different choice, and the reason given across the board is that the tone/feeling (whatever it’s called) has been changed because the school is now predominantly Asian and has become unwelcoming to non-Asian families. Now, I have absolutely no idea if that is quantifiably true (we’re not applying), but the perception is pervasive. So there will be an impact on who applies and attends going forward. Is that a problem for the school, the current students, anyone? Again, my kid isn’t applying, so it’s not about him, it’s just a truly shocking turn of events for me and I don’t know what to make of it.</p>
<p>In the context of private school and colleges (like HYPSM), I don’t see why the racial composition would become a “problem” unless it impacts them economically. I would be interested to know the racial composition of the full-pay students at HYPSM.</p>
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<p>I am not surprised. This is the same as the white flight in the previous decades when Whites left the cities when Blacks moved in.</p>
<p>The thing is, it’s not a “white” thing, so please don’t assume. My kid goes to a school that is only about 24% white, so we’re talking about the high-achieving black, (particularly) Hispanic and Asian kids. It happens to be that in his grade (which is the application grade) the highest performing kids in the academic sense are Hispanic and they are not applying to that school at all.</p>