<p>Bovertine - going back to percentages, whatever numbers are there for your example group of rich parents blowing off their kids educational dreams, it can’t be a lot of people if you consider the rich being in the top 6% with only some of those kids feeling the pain vs low income people being over 50%, all of who tend to feel the pain. So my contention is that your pool size, while important to you (I am assuming some are your friends and trust me when I say I know exactly the types that are required to take over the family business after having gone to some of the elite schools and colleges in my native country that involved zero engineering skills they learnt) just does nt feel like an overwhelming issue compared to the large numbers involved in the low income pool.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap - It sounds like your daughter did quite well in school and if she got into Harvard (I dont know where she went), there was no reason to attribute that to anything other than her own merit as opposed to her ancestry. </p>
<p>For those of you who claim being in top 20% is good enough to get into HYPSM because someone wrote excellent essays, I have nothing to say. The adcoms must be seriously delusional when they keep harping on the fact that the transcript is the most important part of one’s application. I guess they forgot to add - btw, it applies to only some of you.</p>
<p>Just more Fabrizio games! It is tiresome and … truly pathetic. But, considering the total lack of substance and validity of your “claims”, it is hardly suprising.</p>
<p>I’m curious what you think makes an applicant “exciting.” To myself, an applicant is exciting if they have the ability to make creative insights in a field, whether it be the humanities, math/science, or in business. Also, they would need sufficient ambition and work ethic to make their insight bear fruit. </p>
<p>Boring as they may be on paper, math/science contests do correlate somewhat well with potential to make creative insights. The correlation isn’t exact, but a couple of people I know who went into math are good examples. One guy rocked IMO and everything, another guy won ARML (a lower level math competition but still pretty impressive) but never made the training camp for the U.S. Math. The second guy made the faculty in math at Harvard. The IMO guy had a photographic memory and was lightning fast, but the second guy was better at drawing relationships between field. Regardless of the fact that the best contest guy wasn’t the best at research, they both were at an extremely high level nationally. So it makes sense to use math/science awards as an important criteria.</p>
<p>Not sure I follow… are you objecting to my use of the word “bigoted”? Perhaps “racially based” or “disgusting and racially based” would flow better. Regardless, I imagine you understand my meaning. Now if you object to my calling their selection procedure these kinds of things, that’s one thing…</p>
<p>As far as I’m concerned, the question stands: if HYPS stopped basing admissions on diversity, would the long-term result be that these schools became less prestigious? I felt the original wording was merited by the response to my first posting (to the effect that since HYPS are prestigious, admitting based on diversity must be good). Frankly, I doubt that accepting more qualified students rather than less qualified but more diverse students would do much, if anything, to change these schools’ reputations.</p>
<p>If anything, I might think more highly of them.</p>
<p>Do you realize how clueless your rewording of my words is when you write “Coming from someone who thinks that a certain subgroup (read: Asians) are “overrepresented” only because their culture (monolithic?) condones cheating and encourages “trophy hunting”?”</p>
<p>Do you even remember what I wrote and what the context was?</p>
<p>That was the end of a paragraph that you LATER claimed was sarcastic in nature. (Though it is not the only post you made in this thread deriding trophy hunters.) Fine. I guess the following was meant to be sarcastic as well?</p>
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<p>glido and Professor101 called you out for that comment, too, but you refused to play the sarcasm card and have not backed down from it.</p>
<p>Speaking of blowing off, I guess this means you are blowing off my simple question.</p>
<p>Do you believe what you wrote?:
</p>
<p>I don’t expect an answer. If you don’t respond I’ll just assume you know you wrote something really ridiculous, and would rather not admit it. I don’t blame you.</p>
<p>Sorry Bovertine- I was reading it differently when I first wrote it (I assumed they would still have access to money and not cut off). I heard from a few kids who complained to me that their parents don’t seem to follow anything they want to do in terms of application process etc although when money was requested, it was never refused. If the kids want to do some programs and their parents ignore the money requirement, it is no different than being poor.<br>
OTOH - if a rich kid writes about parental oppression for the poor performance, do the adcoms believe it?</p>
<p>But no amount of data release of the admittance rates of people who are rich, poor, white, black, from the sticks or from the city is going to help with understanding a holistic admissions process.</p>
<p>For the life of me, have none of you ever done any hiring? Once you’ve established the person is within the competency realm, it comes down to feelings, perceptions, patterns, empathy created.</p>
<p>It seems like a big fat duh to me that it’s a matter of happenstance whether the adcom who reads your app at School X feels you’d be interesting and the adcom who reads your app at School Y says, “Eh, it just didn’t intrigue me.” It’s like trying to predict friendships or romantic relationships.</p>
<p>Sigh. Because they are still elite schools. My S’s school is in the top 15 of research u’s and my D’s school is in the top 5 of LAC’s. I don’t know if they are “overrepresented” or “fair share represented” since I don’t know what % of the applicants to each school are Asian. I certainly can’t say that they are underrepresented, though, when Asians are only 5% of the pop. </p>
<p>Go ahead, pretend that there isn’t a tighter focus on elite schools among Asians in general than among Americans in general. Here’s a clue - a broader % of Americans than Asians live in parts of the country in which elite schools don’t predominate and in which the smart kids go to state flagships. No one has said this is BAD. It just IS. But it results in a relative concentration of Asians all competing for the same schools, and since they are concentrated geographically as well, that leads to a lower admission rate.</p>
<p>Fabrizio, why would I “back down?” I stand by the EXACT words I wrote. </p>
<p>Read them carefully and you will see how you continue to interpret them incorrectly and adding your own twists to my words. By the way, I hope you will understand how silly it is to conflate overrepresentation and … trophy hunting. </p>
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<p>The French have a great say, namely … Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.</p>
<p>Individuals who belong to the same group would all naturally bring something different to the campus but it would be limited to the diversity within that group. If you have ever been to a school that is dominated by one race it would be quite apparent. </p>
<p>I attended two years of high school in a place where everyone was white (I am also white). I went to school there after attending school all of my life in CA where there was a lot of diversity. I can say I was totally blown away by the “red-neck” mentality of the students. I definitely felt like they were lacking in the “ways of the world” and would have a rude awakening if they ever moved away. Even though the high school was socioeconomically diverse the student body was lacking alternate points of view. They were definitely at a disadvantage and had a hard time understanding how anyone could possibly see things differently.</p>
<p>As I chose which college to attend, I definitely looked into the racial make up of the students (this was more important than the socioeconomic make up of the students). Don’t ever put me around a bunch of red-necks again! I feel very strongly that we should be educated in an environment that reflects the world we want to live and work in if we are to successfully understand each other. </p>
<p>For some people that may mean going to an all white university where everyone thinks the same way (the world they want to live in). IMO they will be limited. For other people it may mean going to a university where people are defined only by high standardized test scores. This will invite more diversity but will still tend to favor a particular “type” of student. Again IMO, limiting the educational experiences of the student.</p>
<p>So, If I were in charge of a major university that wanted to produce the future leaders of the world, I would want a class of students who were not only intelligent but diverse in their experiences and backgrounds. I would want students who can challenge each other think think from a different perspective. I doubt I could find this sort of group if I strictly paid attention to 2400 > 2300 > …seems kind of simplistic to me. We all know that standardized test scores are imperfect and can only give a small insight into a person; to think they can do more than that is naive. </p>
<p>It seems to me that the universities that are being called “racist” are being called this by people who have a very limited perspective of education. They want these universities to think like they do and cannot even fathom that there may be another way of thinking. That is what happens when we are limited to only the views of the group into which we belong.</p>
<p>Well, that’s “to you.” The colleges have been more than abundantly clear as to the factors they look for, which include things like community service, leadership / playing well with others, as well as creative insights and brainpower. Ten years ago, when road trips to Guatemala to build houses were all the rage, before adcoms wised up to that one, these trips didn’t speak to “creative insight” or “ability to make contributions to an intellectual field.” </p>
<p>Haven’t you guys read / heard the podcasts from Tufts and Amherst about how they do it? Taking them as representative of elite schools - and I see no reason why not – it is abundantly clear that they want SOME OF EACH. So they want SOME who are there because of sheer brainpower, SOME who are there because they have a sense of community and service, SOME who are there because they uniquely make creative insights, blah blah blah blah. Why you people keep trying to make it monolithic is truly beyond me. Just because they want SOME high-scoring math contest winners in the soup doesn’t mean they want ALL high-scoring math contest winners, or that high-scoring math contest winners are inherently more worthy of admission.</p>
The authors of that study recognized its limits–that it really only compared stats, not other factors. The question that’s difficult is how, exactly, one can look into the allegations. </p>
<p>I again, tiresomely, repeat that I haven’t seen what, aside from what I listed above, is the basis for the belief that Asians are being discriminated at Ivy League schools on the basis of race. Even if an official at Princeton wasn’t forthcoming enough, that’s pretty weak stuff. Remember, you’re asking people to believe that a great injustice is being perpetrated–there has to be some pretty persuasive evidence before you can expect people to be outraged. What’s the evidence? And fabrizio, I’d like to request that if you choose to respond to this, try to do so with a couple of declarative sentences, rather than asking me to explain the motivations of an individual who works for Princeton. Tell me if there is something that wasn’t on the list I posted earlier.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl: I actually do understand how admissions works. However, when people use perjoratives like “textureless drones” in the same sentence as high math/science achievement, it makes me wonder if they know what it takes to do well in math and science and how that reasoning ability is applicability in other walks of life. Actually, Marilee Jones used the same perjorative, and my conclusion was that she didn’t understand what science is or what goes into being good at it. </p>
<p>Anyway, I guess this tangent is somewhat off-topic, although I concede that an anti-intellectual (or at least, less intellectual) value system may falsely make it look like there is anti-Asian bias, when in fact it is only bias if you make a so-called “disparate impact” argument.</p>
<p>However, the fact that a major admissions director can make the statement, “It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament … yet another textureless math grind.” Moreover, Jones retained her status after that as the darling of the admissions world. Had an admissions director spouted a stereotype about another ethnicity, they probably would have been fired or at least denounced by academia. The lack of any response tells me that these attitudes are deemed acceptable, and that applicants with the same EC’s and academic aptitude may be hurt if they are Asian. I don’t know for sure, but it’s certainly possible.</p>
<p>Textureless drones who invent facebooks and yahoos vs beautiful essay writers destined become english teachers that put kids to sleep in class. Sleep is definitely more important.</p>
<p>Can someone here please explain to me why Pizzagirl seems to be the the expert on elite college admissions? I asked this awhile back – is she an admissions officer at HYPS? I’d just be able to handle her posts better if I understood the sort of scolding, know-it-all tone of them.</p>
<p>I will repeat what I posted earlier this morning. I have sent a kid to an HYPS and that kid happened to “get in” to every Ivy he applied to (HYPS). And I’ve been parenting kids thru schools that son a LOT of kids to Ivy institutions so I really don’t need to be lectured about what HYPS is looking for, blah, blah. It really is just a tad offensive.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone on this thread is anywhere near as ignorant and ill-informed as Pizzagirl and to some extent Epiphany seem to think.</p>
<p>Yeah . . . we get it . . . don’t be a boring angular standardized testing/AP drone.</p>