<p>But without AA, you’d still see at least 1% of each class with blacks in it.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus,
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<p>She was recommended in 6th, by her 6th grade teacher, meaning for the following year, 7th, sorry I was unclear. She did take it in 8th which is one year ahead of many kids. But her HS requires a year or summer equivalent of AB before BC. So her path without any summer work is 8-Alg, 9-Geo, 10-Alg2, 11-Analysis(taken with Physics at this HS, “IAP”), 12th - Calc AB.</p>
<p>…and her HS is one in which a lot of kids are ahead in one way or another. I think most of her class in Alg 2 are also sophs.</p>
<p>There’s one kid who exhausted the Calc offerings after middle school so goes to a local LAC for math, and at least a dozen boys in her grade in Analysis this year. Those are the boys she’d have been in class with.</p>
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<p>Interesting way to frame your point/assumption. But is the opposite also true: if folks don’t believe that a “representative number…is beneficial to everyone…” then by definition are they ‘uneducated’? Is that what you are saying, p-grl?</p>
<p>re: legacies - While you may not have asked gmt, I don’t care about athletic recruits either. (But perhaps that’s because I’m a college sports fan.)</p>
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<p>Actually, No, Bluebayou. My response was to a young URM who is concerned he will be looked down on on campus for his race. And, in my experience, very few educated people, the people he will encounter on campus will be judging him this way. The modifier was “most.” Not “all.” </p>
<p>But thanks for asking.</p>
<p>Chashaoboa,</p>
<p>Agree the Sanders article in Stanford Law Review is a good read and the statistics he cites about the performance of AAs circa 2004 and before at elite (top 20) law schools is troubling (half of AAs in bottom 10% of class). But there are some positive statistics there as well, including that 95% of AAs graduated from top tier schools and they passed the bar on their first try at nearly an 80% rate. Those statistics come straight from data sets and are not controversial. </p>
<p>But Sander’s broader conclusions that (1) more blacks would become lawyers without AA and (2) there is a mismatch (between school and academic performance) that leads blacks to perform more poorly on bar exams than they would if they had gone to matching tier 3 schools, has come under heavy statistical fire, including in a detailed analysis in the 2005 Stanford Law Review by Ayres and Brooks of Yale. </p>
<p>Using the same data set as Sanders, Ayres and Brooks show how AA actually increases the number of black lawyers who pass the bar by over 10% and also show that, contrary to the mismatch hypothesis (using different data from Sanders that compares blacks attending tier 1 law schools with similarly credentialed (ie similar LSAT and GPA composite scores) blacks attending tier 3 schools) attending elite schools tends to increase AA’s performance on bar exams.</p>
<p>“However, for other groups it is not that going to a less selective school doesn’t impact their earnings …”</p>
<p>Translation: Let 'em attend HBCUs … anywhere but where superior persons like me attend.</p>
<p>(Yeah I know that’s “over the top.” But as long as we’re throwing unsubstantiated claims around …)</p>
<p>“But without AA, you’d still see at least 1% of each class with blacks in it.”</p>
<p>I don’t see the “without AA” world that way. President Obama’s experience has illustrated the depth of anti-black bias in this country … “show us the birth certificate, show us his SAT scores, we basically don’t believe a black is qualified to be President” … BUT the educated citizen is thrilled about black progress in America. </p>
<p>I’m not saying it’s time to dismantle AA. Frankly I’m not qualified to say. But how can it be a bad thing that blacks are attending and graduating from Tier 1 universities? Unless the SCOTUS edicts “No more blacks at Harvard” it’s hard to see how admission decisions would change much if AA was suspended.</p>
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<p>I think you are being overly sensitive if you think that the ridiculous demands for his birth certificate & SAT scores are about race. I recall that Bush-haters also demanded to know his SAT scores and his grades at Yale. </p>
<p>The rabid “birthers” aren’t demanding Obama’s birth certificate because they want to throw him out because he is black. They want a reason to throw him out because he is a Democrat.</p>
<p>Not all all people who act like asses are racists. Some asses are just asses. </p>
<p>Remember that it was a majority of mostly white people who did believe a black is qualified to be President, and that’s why we have a black president.</p>
<p>"Remember that it was a majority of mostly white people who did believe a black is qualified to be President, and that’s why we have a black president. " </p>
<p>What a convoluted way of phrasing that! To be clear, Obama won the presidency in 2008 <em>without</em> winning a majority of white voters. As a matter of fact, he only had 43 percent of white voters.</p>
<p>^Yeah, sorry GMT. I will give you a pass because you live outside the country. It is very much about race and the rise in hate groups and hate speech directed at him since he has been in office (among other things) offers proof.</p>
<p>Scott Brown in Massachusetts has been trying to use the AA thing against Elizabeth Warren, who has Native American roots, as well.</p>
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<p>There is a recent paper on this topic:</p>
<p><a href=“http://economics.mit.edu/files/7956[/url]”>http://economics.mit.edu/files/7956</a>
Heterogeneity in High Math Achievement Across Schools: Evidence from the American Mathematics Competitions
Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson
July 2012, 41 pp, NBER Working Paper 18277</p>
<p>Yea. Pure politics. If this continues maybe the thread will be mercifully closed.</p>
<p>I think it is misleading to talk of a general salary premium for STEM majors, when it seems to be large in engineering and imperceptible in science, according to the data in</p>
<p>[The</a> College Majors That Do Best in the Job Market - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/the-college-majors-that-do-best-in-the-job-market/]The”>The College Majors That Do Best in the Job Market - The New York Times) .</p>
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<p>I would check the facts on that</p>
<p>Professor Sander has recently issued a report on holistic admissions at UCLA:</p>
<p>[Debate</a> over admissions and race at UCLA | Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/31/debate-over-admissions-and-race-ucla]Debate”>Debate over admissions and race at UCLA)</p>
<p>If a debate over the last week at UCLA is any indication, however, holistic admissions may not protect campuses from intense controversy over just what they can do to admit members of underrepresented minority groups.</p>
<p>The current debate was sparked by a report issued last week by a law professor at UCLA who provided what he said was evidence that UCLA was interpreting holistic admissions in ways that resulted in the admission of black students with significantly lower scores (not just based on grades and test scores, but on the holistic factors as well) than those of students in other groups.</p>
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<p>The “S” is silent</p>
<p>That is interesting, Beliavsky. Holistic review is not likely to protect campuses from intense review, nor should it. I think schools should be held accountable to applicable laws. Do you think there’s any possibility that the black students who did better than similarly rated candidates of other races upon supplemental review had overcome more hardships (on the whole) than these other kids? (For those who haven’t read the article, “overcoming hardship” is a consideration in the process, not my idea of what constitutes a reasonable factor in admission decisions.) I’m not being argumentative, just wondering if it’s possible that there was no race bias but whether there was instead a bias for people based on their social circumstances.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, thank you for that paper. Very interesting.</p>
<p>Just a quick clip:
"There are about 32,000 residential ZIP codes in the U.S. and about 5,000 U.S.
students scored over 100 on the 2007 AMC 12. If all students were equally likely to score
100 on the AMC 12, then (taking into account that some ZIP codes are more populous than others) we’d expect about 12 percent of ZIP codes to have at least one AMC high scorer: about 10% would have one high scorer, another 2 percent would have two high scorers and less than one percent of ZIP codes would have more. Extreme concentrations would be very rare: there is less than a 0.0001 chance that even a single ZIP code would have ten or more high scorers. </p>
<p>Reality looks very dierent from this. Only 6% have any high scorers.
And 58 ZIP codes have ten or more."</p>
<p>Which is why I continually (but not continuously) get frustrated with the assertions on CC that proficiency at these exams should be a “marker” for admission to elite schools. Which is not to downplay the significance of these students’ achievements, at all - but just a note that the very fact of participating in these tests is a marker simply for where the parents happened to live and / or send the child to school, and the opportunity for participation in those tests is basically not-there except for EXTREMELY motivated kids who live elsewhere. Again, most math teachers in the country have no clue that these tests even exist - and then you have a handful of schools where the math teachers are all over these tests.</p>
<p>“Overcoming hardship” provides a context. Let’s oversimplify: harder to get to those DE classes by bus than in the family car. Harder to do whatever it is when holding a job. Not: poor and underserved, middling academic record, so lets give 'em a break. </p>
<p>There are plenty in CA from large, poor families. Hardship is not a criteria- it is an additional light thrown on achievements.</p>
<p>Sometimes, I wince at the notion on this thread that it’s a matter of noblesse oblige. No academically competitive college is going to miss the chance to assess “capability of performing here” or ability to thrive and grow.</p>
<p>What they do often care about is how a kid is exhbiting far more “get up and go,” vision and determination, when the context doesn’t allow for easy attainment. </p>
<p>From my little corner, what I see is that many of these driven kids who “benefit from holistic” are clearly already “on deck.” Fully capable. From my perspective, there is little room for sympathy admits. Many of the kids we’re talking about have achieved at substantial, impressive levels.</p>
<p>Not subpar kids.</p>
<p>I have been reading this thread for quite some time and have participated in the conversation. I stepped away for a day or two. When I logged back on to continue reading the conversation, I wondered why we are spending so much time debating this topic. Our energies should be focused on a solution which would provide campus diversity in a fair way.</p>
<p>I would like any thoughts as to how we could accomplish this goal. Hopefully, a plan that will be acceptable to all. Hearing from both sides of the argument might reveal some common ground.</p>