<p>its sad that we have such large inequality of income in this country and that we reject attempts to address it directly.</p>
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<p>PG, although I directed my comments to Northstarmom who is quickly dveloping a habit making statistical assertions, I’d say that there other points. The high rates of admissions at all-females schools reflect that many non-coed schools have not been able to increase their pool of applicants over the past decade, and this against a tide of exploding number of applications, and especially a fast growing pool of … female applicants. Another point is that NSM decide to build her examples by discussing LACs despite that such schools have also experienced substantial growth in their applicant pools. Simply stated, how can one decree that a school has a problem attracting male (or female) applicants when the school might very well complain about the growing difficulty in selecting applicants, and the agony of rejecting them. </p>
<p>Lastly, and to limit this discussion to the essential, as a mother of a young daughter who IS considered an all-female LAC, I believe you’ll find plenty of opportunities in admission (see female LACs ED admission rates) and scholarships offered at non-coed schools. I believe that it is a gross misrepresentation to pretend that the pool of scholarship available to LAC applicants is skewed towards the male gender. </p>
<p>Perhaps, we ought to drag our old friend Curmudgeon to settle this discussion with his own notes of available money for a female applicant.</p>
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<p>Why would she think her son is more qualified? Who’s qualified and who’s not depends on 2 things - the goal of the school and the randomness of the admissions process. To survive and thrive (an ultimate goal) a school needs to do a lot of things, minor difference in test scores and GPAs means nothing. Admitting a lower scored URM could be more beneficial to the school than letting in a 2380 SAT/straight-A ORM or white.</p>
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<p>xiggi - I am fortunate enough in that I am not paying attention to scholarship opportunities so I don’t know to what extent the female LAC’s offer scholarships. I’m sure they do. I would imagine that NSM was thinking about coed LAC’s as her default and observing that the pool of scholarships available to those applicants was skewed towards males. I don’t know if that’s true or not, nor do I know what happens when you add in the female LAC’s to the mix – I don’t have a real sense as to how big the female LAC’s are in the context of all the top LAC’s (are they 1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? Beats me).</p>
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he “didn’t get in because they accepted an Indian student and a black student.” "</p>
<p>Or maybe they admitted a Phillips Exeter or Andover student who comes from much privilege and has the benefit of a school counselor who is buddy-buddy with the adcoms. Note how no one ever claims their spots are “stolen” by elite prep school grads, though it’s just as much of a possibility as being stolen by a URM!</p>
<p>I realize that the son of the woman whose remarks led to this thread son attended a local high school where a misguided counselor had told another Harvard applicant who had been EA deferred that he definitely would be rejected because “Harvard never takes 2 kids from one school.”</p>
<p>The deferred student – who was the strongest student whom I had ever interviewed – called me in a panic asking if what his GC had said was true. I let him know that Harvard doesn’t have that kind of quota. Indeed, there are high schools where as many as 30 students are admitted a year to Harvard.</p>
<p>He got in.</p>
<p>Incidentally, he was an Asian male. The student who got in EA was a white male. Maybe his GC thought they got in only because no URMs applied and took “their” spots.</p>
<p>I suspect that the GC may have caused the woman in my original post to think that her son didn’t get into Harvard because the college chose instead minorities from his high school.</p>
<p>Excellent Post #318, Xiggi.</p>
<p>From NSM
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<p>Yes I do. I have questions about the admission of some legacies (but not all), some athletes (but not all), some development cases etc. In this thread, I mentioned the wayward daughter of a guy whose donated a chair and more who got in despite her lack of interest in studying relative to partying. In another thread, I mentioned a young woman who was majoring in geology on the East Coast and I speculated that her atypical major probably got her in to some good schools that she might not have gotten in without her record.</p>
<p>From Pizzagirl
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<p>Is this the goal? Is the implication that we should have quotas for all groups? Implicitly, if we redress the under-representation of groups that are defined by our political process as under-represented, we must inherently redress the over-representation of some other groups. This may not help groups like poor whites who, as NSM pointed out, don’t have political organizations to lobby for inclusion in the list of under-represented groups and may not stay poor after college.</p>
<p>And, in an applicant pool that is increasingly international, what end-targets (i.e., what population measures) for national and racial composition should we use?</p>
<p>I didn’t say it was or should be an explicit goal to have the % of blacks at a given school mirror the population at large, but I understand why an institution wants to be within reasonable spitting distance. If they didn’t want that - then they would simply accept all the 2400s, then the 2390s, then the 2380s and let the chips fall where they may. </p>
<p>If you (gen you) don’t like that policy, then there are plenty of universities that are numbers-based.</p>
<p>“Yes I do. I have questions about the admission of some legacies (but not all), some athletes (but not all), some development cases etc. In this thread, I mentioned the wayward daughter of a guy whose donated a chair and more who got in despite her lack of interest in studying relative to partying. In another thread, I mentioned a young woman who was majoring in geology on the East Coast and I speculated that her atypical major probably got her in to some good schools that she might not have gotten in without her record.”</p>
<p>However, unless I read incorrectly what you posted before (please correct me if I did), you question the qualifications of all URMs who are at top colleges. Why not question the qualifications of all people who may have been tipped in by factors that weren’t their academic stats? This would mean questioning not only legacies and athletes, but also people in unusual majors or who come from underrepresented states and regions or who are poor or who have overcome major challenges.</p>
<p>“Excellent Post #318, Xiggi.”</p>
<p>I agree, so far… about post #318. </p>
<p>I realize this is not the forum for such an issue, but whenever I follow one of these threads, my eyes glaze over, and that is what I think about. All this energy over maybe 1000 black kids. A big deal sure, when it feels like 50 “spots”, but FOR ME the tragedy is the thousands, maybe millions of 17 year old black kids, especially the boys, who have NO idea what we are even talking about. </p>
<p>What can we learn about those 1000 kids?</p>
<p>Yesterday I even thought, forget the NBA, how about affirmative action for jails, juvenile hall, and foster care? </p>
<p>I’m sure we can make a case that the kids there “earned” it, but maybe underrepresented groups in juvenile hall, etc, should get a “bump”?</p>
<p>But I know, not here.</p>
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<p>Good thought. And here’s another one - When kids talk about ECs such as helping poor people in a faraway country, why don’t they help people right here such as in Detroit or an inner city nearby?</p>
<p>NSM, I think you are reading incorrectly. I explicitly do not question the qualifications of all URMs at top colleges. Likewise, I do not question the qualifications of all legacies, people with unusual majors, development cases, Alaskans, or people who are poor (though from Espenshade and Radford, there doesn’t appear to be a tip for people who are poor). With all categories who are tipped, I think it is likely that there is a proportion of kids who are not up to it but were pushed over the threshold by the tip (and many who are up to it). That was the point of my examples with the young woman geology major and the hard-partying legacy/development case. I don’t see any difference between any of the tipped categories in this regard. I think the point you were trying to make to the other poster was that he/she probably only questioned URMs’ qualifications and not others and therefore, he/she was incorrect in questioning the URMs’ qualifications. I think the converse is probably the intellectually valid way to approach things.</p>
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<p>Funny, I feel the same way about athletes, as I fail to see how hitting, kicking or throwing a ball well has any bearing whatsoever on whether one deserves a spot at a good university. I think that’s far, far more of a sham than aff action will ever be.</p>
<p>From Pizzagirl
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<p>I do think that this is a bit simplistic (and probably so do you, Pizzagirl) but I hate argumentation like this. There are clearly more choices than a loose quota system (what you think schools are trying to do) and a purely numbers-based system.</p>
<p>In post #198, I pointed out the the origin of our holistic admissions policy was social engineering – to please anti-Semitic donors and professors but to avoid the political embarrassment of quotas, HYP came up with holistic admissions policies to keep a 15% quote on Jews without saying that they were doing it. Geographic distribution requirements, athletic tips, and other things that most people assume as sensible and appropriate derive from that discriminatory intent. I further pointed out that the universities now face a different set of constituencies and political pressures, which has led to the selection of a particular set of groups defined as URMs in addition to legacy, development, athletics, geography and other tips built into the holistic admissions policy. Some of this is a much more virtuous version of social engineering; others not so virtuous (at least to me). I think I also contrasted Canada to the US in terms of which groups are thought to merit tips – it is inherently a political process and reflects each country’s less than virtuous historical treatment of certain groups. But some groups that were not systematically mistreated by government policy do get defined as tip-worthy classes and some groups that faced explicit government discrimination do not get defined as tip-worthy classes. </p>
<p>But, I think that the whole discussion needs to reflect what elite universities are trying to do, which is to try to select for categories of folks that they want to have as alumni. Look at which kinds of alumni they lionize in the Harvard Magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly or Stanford. From #198,
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<p>For the same reasons, I think the quasi-quota system that Pizzagirl has not explicitly advocated but thinks schools are shooting for is a bad choice. You don’t pick leaders with one from column A and two from column B. You also don’t pick leaders effectively if you systematically exclude groups, like we did with African-Americans for many years. You pick leaders by looking for them (and it isn’t easy to predict).</p>
<p>So then how do you pick leaders, if that’s the goal? Remember, you’re not going to have too many rural black students serving as captain of the water polo or lacrosse teams.</p>
<p>“I think it’s sad thAt solely because a person is a urm they are more heavily recruited than equally hard working white students.”</p>
<p>If the top schools took only outstanding, hard working white students, there still wouldn’t be room for all of them. What would be the point of recruiting them as much as URMs now are recruited since the bulk of those hard working white students still would be rejected by those top colleges?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, most high scoring students in the country do get contacted by top colleges – as long as the students allowed the College Board to release their information. The overwhelming majority of students at Harvard got some kind of mailing from Harvard encouraging them to apply. Schools like Harvard want a large pool of excellent students to choose from.</p>
<p>“Funny, I feel the same way about athletes, as I fail to see how hitting, kicking or throwing a ball well has any bearing whatsoever on whether one deserves a spot at a good university.”</p>
<p>At many of the Ivies (as well as many others) the football games are way to keep alumni connected, which is key to fundraising. At other schools (not the Ivies so much) the athletics seems to be central to campus social life, and is key to recruitment in general.
(though that doesn’t work out so cleanly - we were at Syracuse, they made a big point on the tour of showing off the football stadium, DD was turned off and decided not to apply even as a safety)</p>
<p>^^Don’t forget that football is a huge money maker at D-I schools.</p>
<p>Even for non-revenue sports and even at DIII schools, generous alumni fill seats, and they open their wallets when teams win. So a student’s ability to “hit, kick, or throw a ball” is money in the bank for colleges. Not as immediate or splashy a payoff as the multi-millions that may be donated to ensure admission for a development case, but a significant source of good will and revenue nevertheless.</p>