The example quoted in post #356 may not be a good one (The example is very outdated at least. It was in the days when the “brainy” Jewish kids were still discriminated against.)
But my main point is that there may be some quality that URMs (or women in the old days) were either truly or perceived as lacking for the advancement of careers in corporate America.
I am aware of an incident: A graduate from Wharton School was bypassed for a leadership position because of his personal quality that is more common among URM. The one who got the position was a graduate from a no-name MBA program but he has what it takes to be successful in this kind of job (talking to the investment community.) Academics is just small part of the ingredients for someone to be successful at a workplace. Maybe the life of an URM could put himself/herself in a disadvantaged position due to his/her upbringing. (Lack of connections, or even perceived or real lack of self-confidence.)
@goinggoing My definition of smart is purposely vague. If you think you raised a smarty - please share what you feel was the secret recipe. The idea is to encourage sharing the pieces that went into a successful student that aren’t always caught by academic research or political pundits on the subject. Your experience, your observation.
For URMs: American Indians/Alaskan Natives, African Americans/Blacks, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans are typically considered URM’s.
How about all of the other “hooked” students (developmental, recruited athlete, legacy, etc.)?
Or a student who gets into a “reach” school on the basis of non-academic strengths (or perhaps just because s/he likes a less popular major at a school that admits by major) despite academic qualifications at the bottom of the range for that school?
Perhaps there is selection by immigration going on here? I.e. the immigration system is selecting immigrants of that ethnic group for high educational attainment?
Re: post #366: At many colleges, there are always some “easier” tracks/majors. Not all tracks/majors at the same college are created equal.
As long as the student does not “gun” for what s/he does not excel at, the “success” rate could be higher. (When someone claims that some school has “grade inflation”, this is usually not the case for some more challenging track/major.)
I heard of a non-PC rumor like this:
On the first day of a class at the beginning of a semester, if you see a large group of students who wear the uniform to the class, you know you are in a class that will not be challenging. Those students won’t have much time to devote to the academic work due to the high demand of their athletic activity (e.g., they may need to wake up before 5 am to practice for many hours every day during the season.) They have no choice but to know what class to take in order to fit into their tight schedule.
While certainly there are immigrants of any given ethnic group from all levels of educational attainment, the way immigration selects educational attainment among each ethnic group is likely a big cause of URM/ORM phenomena among immigrant-heavy ethnic groups. When 50% of immigrants from China, 70% of immigrants from India, and 4% of immigrants from Mexico have bachelor’s degrees (versus 28% of non-immigrant Americans), why is it surprising that the first two are ORM in colleges, while the last one is URM in colleges? People may be attributing that to visible characteristics of race and ethnicity, rather than immigration selection which is less apparent.
Ordinary legacies don’t seem to have a problem. They tend to be just as well qualified as their peers.
Do colleges really admit underqualified kids on the basis of non-academic strengths? Or do they choose kids with non-academic strengths from the pool of the well-qualified? I thought it was more of the latter.
There definitely can be problems in instances where certain majors are more difficult to get into than others. When I was in college, the university had a nutrition major that was designed for students who would go on to careers in dietetics. Such majors usually do not require ultra-elite academic credentials. But at this school, the pre-dietetics students found themselves in the same basic science courses as the pre-medical students, who did have ultra-elite credentials. Some of the pre-dietetics students were overwhelmed by the rigor and the competition in these courses. (Fortunately, they could go on to their chosen careers even with C’s in basic sciences, which is something the pre-meds could not do.)
Somebody else pointed out (thank you!) that recruited athletes might find themselves at a school where they are out of their league academically, just as some URMs do. Good point.
I’m not sure about developmental admits or another category that we rarely talk about – children of faculty. Would a college admit a kid in one of these categories who was not adequately qualified? It seems to me that doing this could backfire. It doesn’t do the college any significant harm if a particular URM kid flunks out, but if the child of one of your major donors or most prominent professors flunks out, there could be negative consequences. It might be best to avoid those consequences by not admitting an underqualified child in the first place.
UCB, those 2 countries, you must have degrees or money to be allowed to migrate here, maybe that’s the reason. But it’s not universally true of other non-Mexico countries either.
I agree 100%. In our son’s case, he attended elementary and middle schools in a poor ethnic neighborhood. Subsequently we couldn’t get our competitive suburban high school to give him a break and let him attend. They insisted he attend an alternative high school, a feeder to trade / vocational colleges, that didn’t offer Honors and AP courses. So, we had to fight for our son to attend a regular high school.
In our son’s case, the high school counselors and administrators were basically pushing this future National Merit Semifinalist and National AP Scholar who scored 700+ on all SAT sections and later 330+ on the GRE (at the end of sophomore year in college) to a trade / vocational school education. I am guessing they were convinced that the academic gap is established before age 6 and doesn’t improve significantly between age 13 to 17 or something.
Therefore, I am not sure high school counselors should push kids to stay away from elite universities. I spoke about the issue of Mismatch with admissions at MIT who told me that they don’t encounter this problem because they have been doing this work for a long time, know what to look for and wouldn’t offer admission to someone who couldn’t handle the work.
Someone has to be in the bottom 25% of the admission class in academic qualifications (these are the students for whom the college was seen as a “reach” when they applied). Either it is non-academic strengths (including, but not limited to, “hook” characteristics) or the unpopular major thing at schools that admit by major (but not all schools do).
To prevent such an embarrassment, the college could provide extra support and advising services to direct them to courses and majors that they can pass (at least C grades) to graduate, like colleges commonly do with recruited athletes (who also have large athletic time commitments).
We (actually, mostly our child) needed to “fight” in order to get into the accelerated (really just “academic”) track also when we moved into a “good” school district. It appears that the administrators believe that if the family come from a school district that is not as “regarded” as their school district (even though he had been in the gifted program since early elementary school), the child is not as qualified as most children in their school district. They believe that “Poor parents bring up less academically qualified kids.” Either the kids need to fight for themselves or the parents had to help the fight. In our case, we were mostly unable to help much. (BTW, our kid turns out to be the rank-1 student in his HS class at the time of college application.) Thankfully, the administrators in this “good” school district still believe in an IQ-test-like standardized test. So the kid still has a fighting chance. If they used the “holistic” evaluation approach to decide who are in or who are out of the academic track, whoever have less competitive PARENTS will likely lose out. Despite the fact that I really do not like and do not (in general) believe in the validity of a standardized test such as this, it at least gives some kids a fighting chance.
@mcat2#375: Not even just when moving into a “good” school district—the one we’re in has some good schools but is certainly a mixed bag, and they didn’t believe that our oldest should be in the gifted program until they’d run their tests (which she blew past more thoroughly than the ones she’d taken in our previous school district).
Assessment into the GATE alas did not really benefit us. For one of the boys the option was such that he could have gone to an all GATE classroom in an under-performing school. We passed mostly because we loved his public magnet school. Other than that there really wasn’t much k-8 gate-wise. In high school they offer some field trips and so on for the GATE kids. But by that time there are so so many opportunities for the kids that they seem redundant and we’ve just skipped them.
If I were king, I would let gate kids get as far ahead as they wish via computer learning like ALEKS Math. That was the main pain point where S1 felt held back by the regularly scheduled programming of elementary school. If a fifth grader wants to advance to trig - why not let him? Not only let him - support him! As it is you could have call some aspects of public schools the “No Child Gets Too Far Ahead” program.
@patertrium: Or you could do what my school system did when I was growing up—they let me fly through math so that I was taking (and getting an A in) advanced algebra in 7th grade, and then since my middle school didn’t have anything higher, in 8th grade they…had me take advanced algebra again (which I nearly flunked, and which soured me on math for years). L-)