<p>Public post-secondary institutions receive increasingly small percentages of their support from the government coffers. Some of the best, like UMich, receive practically nothing.</p>
<p>How much oversight?</p>
<p>I think the situation in Texas is unique to Texas, the way CA runs things is unique to Cali. I don’t see all that much similarity in how these things are handled, state to state. the Michigan system is practically a private, at this point. North Carolina admits very few from out of state. Virginia has a big battle about this, since they need money. New York’s system is so strange when you consider Cornell is partially a public, partially a private. </p>
<p>The bigger problems for the state schools, at this point is how to fund themselves. I don’t even understand how much oversite you even want from the federal government in this situation. JMO</p>
<p>@Pablo’s desire for transparency in admission decisions: How could one make the adcom minutes truly anonymous to protect the privacy of the applicants? Given that each student is unique, it might not be as easy as it sounds. An 1860-SAT saxophone-playing running back from zip code 55616 who wrote an essay about a personal tragedy involving his younger brother might be pretty easy to identify, especially in the internet age. Not to mention, how exactly would one quantify the unquantifiable? (“Participation in 11 Nutcracker performances equals an EC value of 6.5.” “Personal statement made 3 adcoms laugh.” “Student is granted a hardship factor of 2.1 for traveling .75 hours to and from school in a bus that travels at an average speed of 43.5 MPH.”)</p>
<p>I mean, I could arguably see a situation in which the justices are deciding against the quota system at one school and deciding discrimination based on race in a different system.</p>
<p>It is so not obvious how to balance these things. I mean, if you are firmly of one opinion, maybe, but I’m not sure it is as simple as one or the other. </p>
<p>It is interesting to read the way O’Connor made her decision in the Michigan case. It is also interesting how quickly people want to have gotten to that utopian point in which we no longer need any of this. But, we have simply not gotten there yet.</p>
<p>Nobody on this thread believes all of our students are receiving equality of opportunity under the current system. Perhaps all high schools should be Stuyvessants, and we should forego the special enrichment programs? I just don’t see how you can have it both ways. special treatment on the one hand, and no special consideration on the other. I simply do not understand how you can justify this.</p>
<p>It is another example of how arbitrary this kind of thinking can get to be.</p>
<p>Hernandez graduated from Dartmouth in 1989. She worked in admissions for 4 years. I am willing to guess that she probably worked there shortly after graduation and before attending grad school.</p>
<p>This will help. This “Academic Index” provides a way to compare the academic qualifications of admitted and matriculated student-athletes to their
classmates within each school, while creating a common vocabulary for discussions across schools…
The Academic Index system is not designed, and does not presume, either to be the basis for individual institutional admission decisions or to result in identical admissions decisions at each Ivy school.
It goes on to refer to AI avverages among groups of admitted athletes [related to] the school’s previous four matriculated classes. The link is old, but you can dig through it.<br>
It shows me why I do not see it. <a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/~ivyorg/ivysummary.pdf[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/~ivyorg/ivysummary.pdf</a></p>
<p>I don’t think the English paper analogy entirely works. Admissions committees at Ivy League or other super-selective schools are dealing with thousands of people who submitted A papers. Getting an “A” is not a guarantee of anything. And one “A” paper (i.e., admitted student) doesn’t necessarily have the same ingredients as another. Look at the common data set for any school and you can see roughly how much weight a particular factor has. But you are not going to be able to figure out if you are going to get into Harvard by exactly adhering to a rubric. There is no one rubric. Isn’t this obvious? If you get in, you are fortunate. You should be happy. If you don’t, the least productive thing you can do is obsessively read tea leaves. </p>
<p>Anyway, if you know of ANY school that will tell someone exactly why they didn’t get in, tell us about it. It’s just that with most schools, people aren’t so obsessed. (Be honest, do you care about the rubric at Kalamazoo College, where my daughter goes? No? I didn’t think so.) People seem unable to live with the uncertainty attendant upon applying to a school where single digit percentages are admitted.</p>
<p>Several people have complained that the demanded “transparency” in the admissions process has not been defined. Here is what I would like to see. Many selective colleges require the</p>
<p>SAT or ACT
two SAT subject tests
high school GPA and class rank when available</p>
<p>and give preferences to</p>
<p>athletes
children of alumni
development cases
URMs</p>
<p>Because the colleges use “holistic admissions”, there is no mathematical formula that predicts accept/reject decisions with 100% accuracy from these inputs (the preference variables would be coded as dummy variables). However, a logistic regression could be fit
to the data and made available as an online calculator. This is effectively what researchers such as Espenshade have done. A user could plug in various inputs and see how they affect the chance of admission. Thus applicants could understand roughly how decisions have been made in previous years.</p>
<p>Why should Harvard et al. do this? Since many people do question racial and legacy preferences, I think large publicly subsidized institutions should explain how large of an edge these attributes confer.</p>
<p>Nobody on this thread believes all of our students are receiving equality of opportunity under the current system. I also thought that was self-evident, through this thread. But, what I have trouble with is- and, yes, I am pulling it out of context:</p>
<p>The poor parenting in many poor URM households is what it is. The comments that suggest URM parents don’t believe kids should study Sunday to Sunday or that a better solution might be to “yank kids out of homes and put them into boarding schools.” Cracks about higher SES URMs not caring? </p>
<p>I am going to be very quiet now. Someone else can argue how astounding these comments are, how they generalize.</p>
<p>Thanks for the article re the index. This does appear to mean that the index is calculated for every applicant. How much it is used in actual admissions decisions probably depends at least in part on the individual officers and I would be surprised if it does not at least provide a baseline.</p>
<p>Muck
-admitted and matriculated student-athletes
-AI averages among groups of admitted athletes [related to] the school’s previous four matriculated classes</p>
<p>-not applicants in general.</p>
<p>Poetgrl, not at all. I am agreeing with you. Apologies for any confusion. The cracks about URM households came from elsewhere. GMT and apparently Pablo.
But really, I will take a break now. I’m open to pm’s but I dont think ayone needs my thoughts. For a while. :)</p>
<p>Lots of top schools do require SAT IIs (or strongly recommend them). If I’m repeating something you already know, sorry. (But I know of a top student who was surprised by this requirement so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to state for the record!)</p>
<p>The Duke admissions & graduation data (scroll hundreds of posts back to my post #173, or was it #273?) shows that URM STEM majors switched to a less demanding major, at a higher rate than other groups.</p>
<p>From your posting “This “Academic Index” provides a way to compare the academic qualifications of admitted and matriculated student-athletes to THEIR CLASSMATES WITHIN EACH SCHOOL.” </p>
<p>See also <a href=“http://www.mka.org/uploaded/college_counseling/Publications/AI_Guidelines_Worksheet.pdf[/url]”>www.mka.org/uploaded/college_counseling/Publications/AI_Guidelines_Worksheet.pdf</a>, which notes the Ivy Academic Index (AI) includes calculations for all students at each Ivy league school (the Campus AI) and that the Team AI must be within one standard deviation of the campus AI.</p>