<p>“um if we grew up on the same black, did the same activities, and basically wrote about the same activities, which we did, the things that are gonna stand out are the grades and the test scores.”</p>
<p>What’s also going to stand out is: who wrote the essay or got the recommendation that caught the admissions officer’s eye, who wowed the admissions officer, and whose application was read when the admissions officer was in a particularly good mood. There are a lot of factors --including some that are pure chance – that can tip a person in over others whose applications were very similar.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean the system is fair to all applicants, which is what I have been trying to say since I started this argument, and why I qualified my statement with “from the perspective of parity” rather than applying it generally.</p>
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<p>I think less of their accomplishments because of that, and I thought less of the Ivy League until I realized they were not unaffordable denizens of wealthy whites. I dislike the legacy system in general, and think it is just as unfair as affirmative action is today. Aside from athletes, I think academic merit, special academic skills such as writing ability, personality, and socioeconomic conditions should be the determinants of acceptance, moreso than legacy boosted by previously unfair practices or a contextless assessment of an applicant’s race.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why you’d think I supported such policies at all, considering my implicit support for parity, but that is your own interpretation. I haven’t been actively complaining about it, since that is not the topic of the debate, but I feel just as strongly about it as I do about race-based affirmative action.</p>
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<p>No, no, just…seriously, this isn’t that difficult. I don’t think we should have a complete meritocracy (although I would like to see it weighed a bit more); I just don’t think that race should be weighed as heavily, if at all, in the subjective factors, as it is today.</p>
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<p>You are blinded by something that seemingly inhibits your understanding of anything I try to say. If you read through my other posts, you will note that I’ve described exactly why its safe to assume that AA played a role in their acceptances. We are not denying that other personal traits may have helped, but we are also considering the situation realistically and recognizing that whether the minority likes it or not, their race played some factor in their acceptance. With a white person who does not benefit from AA, other factors by virtue of their independence from race, make logical sense as explanation to ascribe to the acceptance.</p>
<p>I’d like to see black people as individual first and minorities second, and I do in most instances. However, the current situation in college admissions makes such an evaluation of a person impossible.</p>
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<p>Don’t be stupid. Firstly, I am not a girl, and really aren’t sure how you got that perception. I don’t have any emotion in my writing (might as well go for misogyny along with my racism), and I’ve stated in multiple threads I am male. Regarding the kids finances, why do you think I would call them wealthy without any knowledge of them being wealthy (although he is not wealthy, but more as is way upper-middle class). I’ve been on a school trip with the kid - he spent money freely. I’ve seen his new car, and his access to test prep materials. I’ve heard him discuss his lack of FA from the two HYPS colleges that accepted him. What would give you any reason to think I would make a baseless accusation about his wealth?</p>
<p>I have class envy only in that he had more opportunity to appear good through ECs and more opportunity to prep for tests, while simultaneously receiving the boost he did. If you were in my situation, as you most clearly are not, you would understand how unfair and annoying it seems.</p>
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<p>I seriously hope none of you were trying to imply I was whining about the decisions that happened with these contributions of yours. It would be exceptionally ignorant to suggest this.</p>
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<p>With all due respect, you are the one not thinking. He commandeered their honor and respect through an 18 month campaign, and only if you consider support analagous to honor and respect. Will he still command their honor and respect if he is a failure as a president? No. And the military - does that mean that every US president since Theodore Roosevelt is exceptional, since the US military has been the greatest in the world since 1900? And on an absolute scale, the US military is only the greatest in the history of the world due to it being the most powerful and newest. You surely wouldn’t assert the military in 1945 was no less mighty for its time than ours is today. Moreover, if you want to maintain that the military today is the most powerful ever, wouldn’t that make the military of 2016, presuming a lack of significant budget cuts, even more mighty? Obama would then lost that qualification, wouldn’t he?</p>
<p>Very simply, exceptional people accomplish exceptional things for their time. Alexander the Great was exceptional and Albert Einstein was exceptional. While Obama has accomplished something great in being the first minority president, he hasn’t accomplished anything approaching conquering 50% of the known world or establishing the foundation of modern physics. That is why you need his legacy before you can pass judgement on his status as a truly exceptional individual.</p>
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<p>As Harvard is DI FCS and BC is DI FBS, it makes sense. That isn’t a tale of woe for the linebacker as much as an indication he wasn’t good enough to make an FBS team in a major BCS conference. I’m not sure how that relates to AA.</p>
<p>I just noticed this, so I’ll append it.</p>
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<p>This is exactly what I mean (although not mad as much as dismayed), and exactly why non-rich white kids see race-based affirmative action as so unfair. Consider that before you post another assumptive, rage-fueled attack on me.</p>
<p>I honestly think that this is just a bunch of BS that has been blown out of porportion. And it is true that blacks use the race card far too often, so who gives a d*** what you look like. Apperently, the media would rather spend the money on this stupid story then put it to better use.</p>
<p>Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. It just sounds like people want to complain and insult other people. As much as people go on about fairness and the like it is really jealous. No one really cares about fairness, they really only care about them. You got into Yale, I bet there were tons of kids who were more “qualified” than you who got rejected. Do you think that is fair? </p>
<p>Or what about geographic diversity? You are from Oregon if I am not mistaken which gives you a significant leg up compared to a kid from Long Island. Do you think that is fair? Or what about majors? Yale recently started admitting more science/engineering kids because they want to change the make up the school. Is that fair to the humanities enthusiasts who has to get rejected? </p>
<p>I pose these hypotheticals, because NOTHING in the admission process is fair. That is not what admissions at these schools are premised on because the schools choose who they want. </p>
<p>But noone ever complains about those aspects that are unfair in the process. No, they only complain about the black kid. Not even as much as Hispanics or native americans who receive the largest boost. No, it is always the black kid. I severely doubt any of these people really care about fairness, but rather are just miffed that for once a black person got a leg up whereas in ANY OTHER facet of life it is always worse to be black.</p>
<p>“That doesn’t mean the system is fair to all applicants, which is what I have been trying to say since I started this argument, and why I qualified my statement with “from the perspective of parity” rather than applying it generally.”</p>
<p>What’s fair? It’s up to the college to figure out what they want. Whether that means giving tips: to students who allow the college to have at least a 60:40 ratio of women to men; the best marching band in the country; more NCAA division 1 sports teams; students from every state and at least 100 countries; students who’ll major in classics – admitting whomever will help the college achieve its goals is what’s fair. </p>
<p>Applicants don’t have equal chances of getting in even if the applicants have equivalent stats and ECs. </p>
<p>The system, however, is probably the fairest it ever has been because now no one is eliminated from admission consideration because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity or socioeconomic class. In the past, there were many qualified people who never had any chance of admission because the top universities didn’t admit people of their race, class, etc. at all.</p>
<p>I think anything above a 2310 and 3.95 is equivalently qualified (less on the GPA if you go to a difficult school), since that allows for a couple high school mistakes, and 2310 is the lower range of perfection on the SAT, accounting for variance. My stats were above both, so no, I don’t believe anyone “more qualified” than me got rejected.</p>
<p>As for the geographic diversity, it would be lovely if that were true. It is, however, not. There were 16 Oregonians accepted in both rounds of Yale admissions. I asked my admissions officer how many Oregonians applied in both rounds. The answer - over 200. That is at maximum an 8% acceptance rate, not much off of Yale’s overall acceptance rate of 7.5%.</p>
<p>I know nothing is fair, but that doesn’t mean I am not allowed to argue against its lack of parity.</p>
<p>I am just discussing the black kid because this thread is focusing on that specific race (a result, obviously, of Gate’s race.) I dislike any race receiving a boost on virtue of their race, but am mentioning blacks here because it is the most relevant to the thread.</p>
<p>You are being entirely hypocritical you just posted arbitrary numbers to say that is what makes someone qualified. So by your standard a 2300 and 3.94 would be underqualified. </p>
<p>That is completely stupid. There is no reason that 2310 or 3.95 would make someone qualified. It is arbitrary and therefore why people admission officers don’t focus solely on numbers. Beyond a certain threshold it really doesn’t matter, and that threshold is alot lower than 2310 and 3.95 or else ALOT of white people wouldn’t be getting in.</p>
<p>Really you don’t know what you are talking about. For Texas about 60 people got accepted. From my city (Houston) alone 336 people applied and 13 were accepted for an acceptance rate of 3.86%. Meaning it is harder to get into Yale from Houston than it is to get in from ANYWHERE in Oregon. Compound that with the fact that students in certain regions tend to score lower on standardized tests then it means that your region DOES affect your admissions.</p>
<p>The average is an average because that takes into consideration the higher admit rates for certain areas and the lower admit rates for other areas. So yeah, geography matters.</p>
<p>“I think anything above a 2310 and 3.95 is equivalently qualified (less on the GPA if you go to a difficult school), since that allows for a couple high school mistakes, and 2310 is the lower range of perfection on the SAT, accounting for variance.”</p>
<p>But you aren’t qualified to make such a determination. You’re a total outsider. It’s up to college’s administrations and boards of directors to determine what they want in their student bodies. They are the ones who create the universities’ goals, and as long as those goals are legal, they can pick whomever they choose for their student bodies. </p>
<p>This is similar to what people do when they hire employees. The people running the company are who decides who gets hired, which may mean that even though you feel that your technical qualifications are stronger, the company may choose to hire someone who is less technically expert, but that the company believes will fit in better or can grow better into the type of employee that the firm wants. </p>
<p>Unless you move to a country that makes job and college decisions based solely on applicants’ test scores, life simply won’t be fair in the way that you want it to be.</p>
<p>“Curiouser and curioser”, said Alice…
And even more interesting was that this very afternoon, NPR devoted a full, five minutes to discussing what kind of beer each mane was going to be drinking at the wee, get-together, today. I wonder if anyone really cares…</p>
<p>Uh, no. But for the maximum level of “qualification”, at which no one can be more qualified (which I do think should be academic), they make sense. A person with a 2300 and 3.94 is still qualified, but they have people slightly more “qualified” than they are.</p>
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<p>No, I just think race should be weighed less, and objective qualifications should be weighed more. I don’t want one or the other being the sole determinant of acceptance or hiring decisions by institutions.</p>
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<p>Unless, obviously, 250 of those applicants had no business applying.</p>
<p>And it is not harder to get into Yale form Houston than anywhere in Oregon - I’m not sure why you’d use your example and not think that might be the case in Oregon somewhere. There were over 10 applicants from Lake Oswego (a very conservative estimate), none of whom were accepted. By your logic, then, it is harder, with this 0% acceptance rate, to get into Yale from Lake Oswego than from anywhere in Texas. See how it works?</p>
<p>Lake Oswego, is, as a note, the richest city in Oregon.</p>
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<p>Geography matters, but that doesn’t mean Oregon is giving me some amazing advantage by applying from here. If top colleges truly weighed geography near what you claim they do, I would have been accepted at Princeton as well as Yale. I was the only applicant in my geographic region to Princeton, and I got rejected. It doesn’t help. Other factors explain acceptances much more, such as quality of the applicants, random luck, or a bevy of kids with hooks.</p>
<p>And honestly, your response is kind of a non-response, as it never really addressed my initial point that my location did not help me in gaining acceptance.</p>
<p>Harvard thinks differently from you do, since they admit plenty of students with scores lower than that. Whether it’s because those students are athletes, legacies, from Montana, want to study ancient history, play the harmonica or have really-out-of-this-world activities. You keep seeming to think that there is some set of objective criteria that determines who “deserves” to get in. It’s not. The grades / SAT’s are just a minimum hurdle to demonstrate academic ability, and you’re full of nonsense if you think that a 4.0 / 2400 is automatically “more qualified” than the 3.95 / 2350.</p>
<p>“And honestly, your response is kind of a non-response, as it never really addressed my initial point that my location did not help me in gaining acceptance.”</p>
<p>What’s your hard evidence that your location didn’t help you? You can’t have any such evidence since you weren’t privy to the admissions committees discussions about their decisions. </p>
<p>While I can’t speak about Yale, I have heard Harvard admissions officers say that they have a hard time attracting students from the Pacific Northwest. Does that mean, however, that everyone or even anyone from the Pacific Northwest will get in? No, but it does mean that they have an advantage in admissions particularly when it comes to students from places like Florida, New York, and New Jersey, which produce an overabundance of excellent applicants.</p>
The elite colleges do not use numbers at that level to set qualifications. They take plenty of students who have lower scores and lower GPAs. If they have a minimum threshold, it is far lower. Probably around 1950 and/or 3.4, though Northstarmom would have a better sense of what the minimum they will consider is. Obviously it depends on the whole profile – no one is going to get accepted with a lower test score or GPA if they don’t have something else to offer. </p>
<p>But the bottom line is that 25% of Harvard admitted students have below 700 on at least one SAT.</p>
That’s probably why so many high stat applicants get rejected and then feel resentful. They probably put in applications with nothing standing out other than the grades and test scores and a very typical array of high school ECs… and then don’t understand why they didn’t make the cut.</p>
<p>I suffer no such blindness. I have indeed read through your posts, and the long of short of it is you believe that if any black applicant is admitted with lower raw stats than any other applicant in the admissions pool who happens to be white, it necessarily means that person was a beneficiary of AA. That, I categorically reject. I reject out of hand the notion that a black applicant’s acceptance is unjustified as long as he cannot be objectively shown to be the very strongest applicant in the pool. It puts black applicants in a distinctly no-win situation that totally negates his intrinsic worth, because literally no other applicant is being held to such a standard. </p>
<p>The problem is, you consider blackness as having absolutely no worth as a component in the social and academic milieu of an institution of higher learning. To you, apparently, there’s absolutely no reason to allow the admittance of a black candidate as long as a white candidate can be said to be the stronger candidate by dent of his/her GPA/test scores. Luckily, admissions directors disagree with this assessment. They believe learning doesn’t end at the classroom door, but continues into every aspect of campus life. It is completely valid to see as positive the fact that there are students at their schools who come from many disparate backgrounds, races and ethnicities, that it is indeed a necessary component to the best possible education. It’s good to admit students from as many other countries as possible, as it widens the global perspective of the overall student population, it’s good to have American students from as many parts of the country as possible because it broadens the dialog about what it means to be an American. It’s good to have represented a healthy mix of economic backgrounds, as this has the potential to enlighten all students as to the impact economics has on individuals. It’s good to have a mix of people passionate about The Arts, Sciences and The Humanities. It’s good to have students whose views span the political spectrum, as it opens the dialog (hopefully) on the various responses to citizenship, both nationally and globally. It’s good to have represented people who are Gay, Lesbian and/or Transgender, as it offers an opportunity for understanding and enlightenment to the community at large. It’s good to have the world class athlete, the accomplished musician, and the quirky poet, and it’s exciting to mix all the above elements into a vibrant soup that nourishes the overall academic environment of any given educational institution. Once an applicant has proven his or her ability to meet the minimal standards for academic excellence, elite schools are all about the business of crafting a class to reflect what they see to be this compelling interest. You are apparently comfortable with the idea that there might not be any black students on campus if they can’t be proven to objectively be the statistically strongest candidate. Somehow I suspect you wouldn’t feel that way about an absence of white students, however. Nor are you bothered by the presence of white students on campus whose stats occupy the 25th percentile. </p>
<p>But it’s OK, because fortunately for elite education in America, those in the position to make decisions feel differently than you do. And ultimately that matters more to me than what you think;).</p>
<p>PH, while it is hard to disagree with anything in your latest post, may I ask you if you support the idea that AA should be used to ensure that the population in our colleges, including the elite schools, should very much mimic the racial distribution of the United States in 2009? </p>
<p>And would your position change if the projections for 2050 hold true?</p>
<p>Read above, please. Note where I said that on academic qualifications, I believe 2310/3.95 to be the top, but not that anyone below isn’t qualified. It was in response to him asserting I got in over someone more qualified, or that people more qualified than me got rejected. I was trying to illustrate that for the purposes of determining qualification, which is implicitly (and should be explicitly) academics, 2310 and 3.95 is a good point where one could argue that everyone who has attained it is on equal ground. Yes, it is arbitrary to some degree, but a line must be drawn somewhere, and I think that line is logical where I drew it. By extension, your last statement about me being full of nonsense for thinking there is a difference between a 2400/4.0 and 2350.3.9 is itself nonsense, as I’ve stated quite clearly anyone with both of those numbers is equal.</p>
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<p>Please read above. I think the response to her post is relevant to yours. Honestly, both of you are acting as if I have no knowledge of how admissions works. I am not that ignorant nor stupid, especially considering I just went through the process myself. Please don’t misread my posts.</p>
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<p>If they truly had an advantage in admissions, then they would be accepted at a rate much greater than the overall acceptance rate of the college. As Oregon’s acceptance rate was 8% or less, I do not really think that my location helped me. This is likewise supported by my Princeton rejection - had my state or location played any role in the decision, I would not have been rejected (several reasons support this.) Moreover, I can attest, just by looking at the origins of students from my residential college, that states with a large of number of excellent applicants - Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and so forth - are much better represented than other states. Obviously I don’t know the individual admissions rates for each state, and can’t know the confounding factors such as applicant quality, but I can say that it doesn’t seem to be as competitive to get in from these states as you are saying it is.</p>
<p>And as a note, Yale does not have any issue attracting applicants from the Pacific Northwest, at least not in Oregon. Its interesting that Harvard would - or maybe Harvard is just bemoaning the fact that they don’t get a bunch of underqualified instant rejects from the Pacific Northwest.</p>
<p>Edit: I’ll respond to you shortly, poetsheart. You still aren’t reading what I am saying.</p>