<p>Yeah,</p>
<p>I’d hate to think this was someone’s real viewpoint! Eww!</p>
<p>
Well, my town has crew. Solidly middle-class, not even one of the top 75 high schools in the state. The town I was born in, blue collar, 40% minority, with a median income of about $52,000 usually sends kids to the Olympics for crew. It’s not necessarily a wealthy sport. If you’re on a river, you can have a crew team.</p>
<p>I’m quite sure Percy was using the “big nose” slur to emphasize how poorly Jews were treated by admissions in the past. Definitely a “Not our kind, dear,” sentiment was the norm.</p>
<p>I don’t see racism in his posts. I see frustration. If blacks were scoring the highest of all races, I bet he’d be demanding they be let into elite schools in greater numbers. Obviously most posters here don’t want to use a stats-only admissions process, and that’s just something he doesn’t agree with.</p>
<p>
Definitely. And what I was trying to say isn’t exactly that we’re all the same (although from a bird’s eye view, we are) – just that you can’t pick an individual, analyze his/her genome, and say unambiguously what race he/she would be considered.</p>
<p>In that sense, race is very much a social construct – the way we would divide people into races (primarily by skin color and other superficial features) doesn’t accord very well with their actual genetic heritage.</p>
<p>A few papers on this topic are [url=<a href=“http://beck2.med.harvard.edu/week4/Duster%20Science.pdf]here[/url”>http://beck2.med.harvard.edu/week4/Duster%20Science.pdf]here[/url</a>] and [url=<a href=“http://beck2.med.harvard.edu/week4/COOPER.PDF]here[/url”>http://beck2.med.harvard.edu/week4/COOPER.PDF]here[/url</a>]. These papers deal mostly with the idea Percy Skivins expressed in post #1533 – that race is a useful way to classify people for the purposes of diseases and pharmaceuticals. The conclusion of these two papers is that race is a poor proxy for actually identifying people in this way, and that doctors and scientists use race to classify people only in ignorance of their underlying genotypes.</p>
<p>EDIT:
No one disputes the data. What we are discussing here (or what we should be discussing, if we’re not) is if those differences are real or meaningful.</p>
<p>“Science does not involve using the absence of data to intone ominous hints about looking under dangerous rocks, as though knowing in advance (before having the data) what the results would look like.”</p>
<p>Well unless of course you are talking aout global warming - the phrenology of the 21st century.</p>
<p>Mollie, you are right…I really don’t think there is such a meaningful difference between a 1450 SAT and a 1550 in terms of who can succeed at MIT and do great things. Once the SAT goes over a particular threshhold, I think a lot of OTHER criteria about a person plays a bigger part in the meaningful differences between those two individuals. Add to that, a balance of all sorts of students in the student body enriches the learning environment for all. The diversity in this sense is beyond race, btw.</p>
<p>If all these “lesser” individuals, as Percy seems to imply that get into MIT, are not academically worthy, how come the graduation rate is so high? I think MIT knows what it is doing in accepting the types of students whom they feel can thrive at MIT. They can decide what characteristics they want in their students. They have not chosen to go by SAT scores alone, thankfully. However, I am sure to be admitted to MIT, one must have academic talent that is very strong.</p>
<p>I liked your post wheretogo2008 #1574.</p>
<p>soozievt: Really, the circles are giving me a headache. I know, I know–don’t read the thread then. :)</p>
<p>Just to clarify - the “big nose” remark was written as what an anti-Semite of the early 20th century might have said at the time and obviously does not represent my personal view - I know things don’t always come thru in type but I’m surprised that people could miss that given the context of the sentence. Actually, if you read the Karabel book, what they actually wrote at the time is much worse. </p>
<p>Here is what a Harvard alumnus wrote to President Lowell after attending the Harvard-Yale game in the '20s:</p>
<p>“Naturally, after twenty-five years, one expects to find many changes but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fea[r]ful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater.”</p>
<p>Lowell himself wrote:</p>
<p>“The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no school at all.” {I don’t know whether he was referring to Columbia there?}</p>
<p>For those asking about me personally, I am Jewish and a first generation American. I have no connection with MIT in any way, but of all schools, in my view it is the clearest that they should be judging applicants purely on brain power - a lot of other U’s have “angry studies” departments where they can stick the AA admits where they will cause no harm to the other students. I identify very strongly with the Asian kids that I see - I see a lot of me in them, and given my family’s experience in Poland before WWII (where there were special “Jewish benches” at the universities and a favorite sport of the Polish Catholic students was ejecting Jewish students from the windows of tall buildings on campus), not to mention what happened during the war, I am very suspicious of any government or even private classification by race - I really think it is nobody’s business, especially not the government’s and not any university’s or employer’s, what race or religion you are - this should be absolutely irrelevant to any admissions or other decision making process. I think we are going absolutely in the wrong direction by setting up privileged castes (even if these were once oppressed groups - two wrongs do not make a right) and by making race “valuable” we are setting ourselves up for racial tests as in Germany, where it will be necessary to prove that you have the requisite amount of the proper blood in order to receive the privileges and benefits associated with that racial status - I find that creepy. I think that applications should be coded in a way that the readers are unaware of the race or gender of the applicant in order to prevent even subconscious racism or sexism from affecting their judgment of the applicant’s merit either way - as MLK so eloquently said, we should be judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.</p>
<p>Well, okay that’s great but I think what people are arguing is that “content of our character” is more than test scores.</p>
<p>“I believe that every student accepted to MIT is worthy of admission, including academically worthy.”</p>
<p>soozievt - the question is not is every admit academically qualified. Schools defined qualified by the least qualified student they admit. The question we are asking is were persons demonstraby more academically qualified rejected because they did not belong to a favored racial, ethnic, or gender group.</p>
<p>I do not really give a rat’s behind about AA. I think it is wrong ut then I think there are a lot bigger problems in the world and less divise issues. However what does irritate me is that most of these elite schools are happy to give out the impression to kids like mine that they might actually have a shot at getting in if they apply. I would hold them in much higher respect if they told the bwrk white or Asian kid that he has absolutely 0% chance of being admitted with numbers in the bottom 25% and minimal chances with numbers in the 25% - 75% range. He or she is going to make up 90 or 95% of the applicant pool and perhaps 55-60% of the admits.</p>
<p>Give these kids realistic expectations and stop trying to pad your admit rate by encouraging kids who have no chance to apply. That is where the harm comes as far as I am concerned. Do what you want to do with AA but publish disaggregated factook numbers so kids have a realistic understanding of what their chances actually are if they are not a URM, athelete, or legacy. Heck it will probably encourage more URM applicants at the same time as they won’t be scared off by the skew of the white and asian 2400 SAT scores.</p>
<p>
But that’s the thing – URM students at MIT are engineering majors out of proportion to their numbers. About 55% of MIT students in general are engineering majors, but 65% of African-American and Hispanic students and almost 70% of Native American students at MIT are engineering majors. (The raw data is all [url=<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar]here[/url</a>], although I had to do a lot of moving numbers around in Excel to get the final result.) Interestingly, the only group overrepresented in the school of management (seen by MIT students as an intellectual copout, whether that’s fair or not) is Asian students – about 8% of MIT is in management, but about 11% of MIT’s Asian students are in management.</p>
<p>The URMs at MIT are not majoring in fluff subjects at a rate any higher than any other group. They’re disproportionately in engineering majors, and graduating in engineering majors.</p>
<p>EDIT:
But everybody in the applicant pool has a very low chance of being admitted to a school with an 87% rejection rate, no matter how B or WR the K. 
I know plenty of non-URM, non-athlete guys here who didn’t have perfect numbers. My fiance is one of them – he’s a white kid from Massachusetts, and he had a 1410 on the SAT.</p>
<p>There are some kids with bottom 25% stats who are actually very likely to be admitted based on strength in other factors. It’s just that it’s impossible to tell which ones beforehand.</p>
<p>
Agreed. Sometimes I think it’s even harder for the high-SAT kids who come here – they’re so used to everyone thinking they’re awesome that it’s really quite a shock for them to fail a test. The mid-1400s kids come in realizing they’re going to have to put the pedal to the metal.</p>
<p>“Larry Bird is a white boy who could jump.”</p>
<p>Actually Larry couldn’t jump but he sure could play basketball. In the vertical leap department he left a lot to e desired.</p>
<p>I knew I’d get called on that.</p>
<p>“I’d hate to think this was someone’s real viewpoint! Eww!”</p>
<p>What? That a lot of Jewish people have big noses? How about this for a stereotype - a lot of liberals are professional victims and permanently aggrieved. Lighten up. If I had a dime for every Jewish girl I know who has had a nose job I’d be rich. If I had a dime for every Asian girl I know who has had one I couldn’t afford a cup’a’noodles. Some stereotypes are offensive and some are just stating the obvious even if the stereotype does not apply to every group member.</p>
<p>From a New Yorker Magazine article on elite school admissions </p>
<p>
</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge[/url]”>Getting In | The New Yorker;
<p>No one has a “Right” to attend any of these schools,
Admittance is a privilege granted to a lucky few.</p>
<p>The fallacy is that students think they can “Earn” admission by their own “Merit” if they just do the right things.
Then they are disappointed and resentful when they are overlooked by the admissions committee in favor of some other student that they perceive as having “less merit”.</p>
<p>Percy,
I appreciate your explaining a bit about your background. Thanks, it helps. Also, thank you for explaining the reason for your use of the remarks about Jews which I commented on. It is hard to discern on the internet at times, as to the meaning of such remarks. </p>
<p>I do not agree with you on a lot of things but that is fine. I do not think that URMs, for example, at MIT, are less qualified to be admitted. I think once a candidate has the academic talent at the level MIT wants, they seek out different types of kids with different strengths and things to offer the student body. I think you are using SATs as the “measure” as to who is qualified. I think MIT sees all the kids whom they admit as qualified to do the work, no matter the major, or they would not accept them. </p>
<p>I don’t see a Black student as taking the place of a white student in the class. I see MIT having a BIG PILE of MANY VERY qualified students, of all races. Since so many are qualified academically (and some on the pile are not and are discarded more easily), MIT can then pick and choose various types of kids with various things to offer. I have no problem with that. It is not like they are taking a race, a gender, a special talent OVER academic talent. Everyone admitted has academic talent. It is just that YOU are defining academic talent as the highest SAT scores on the pile of apps. I don’t. Thankfully, the adcoms don’t either. If I had a kid who had a 1600 and was rejected at MIT, I would totally understand it given the very low admit rate. I would not feel that she wasn’t qualified or that someone less qualified was admitted over her. I would feel that she was a valid and appropriate candidate to MIT and the luck of the draw when it came down to dwindling the pile of app files, she didn’t make the cut of the grouping they chose to make up the freshman class. Given the low admit rates at elite colleges, it goes with the territory. They are REACHES for everyone, even those with superb credentials. Those with superb credentials, however, usually do get into a few top notch colleges, but just can’t be assured of getting into all of them or even a particular one. Those are the odds. It is all fair to me and my kids surely understood the situation going into the elite admissions process. By the way, neither applied to MIT but both applied to schools with very low admit rates. </p>
<p>Higherlead, </p>
<p>I disagree with you about the impression colleges give and how you feel it is misleading to applicants. My own kids, as well as those whom I advise in coming up with a college list, understand the very difficult odds of admission for those even with the RIGHT stats to get into schools which have VERY low admit rates. These must be considered a reach, not because they don’t have what it takes but because of the odds. They do have a chance of getting in, however. I feel by examining the published stats and other information about admitted students to a college, along with the admit rate, I can get a handle on the odds vis a vis someone’s total “package” or profile. I disagree with the notion of a zero chance for a white or Asian kid who is in the lower 25% tile of the admitted student stat profile. The odds surely go down for someone in that range but they are not zero. In fact, someone with SATs below the 25% tile might have other really good credentials to balance out the SAT. Sure, they have a lesser chance than someone in the upper 25%tile of admitted students’ stats. But even if an applicant is in the upper range, it is still very chancy given the low admit rates. Chances ca not be ascertained ONLY by looking at SAT scores. SO much more goes into evaluating an applicant! If it was simply about numbers, they could avoid the whole app process practically! Submit scores, done. That is why when I look at chances posts, I cringe because a list of stats is not enough to go by. Many students have the stats, so a lot of other factors play a part and that is why I gather a lot of information about a student before evaluating their chances.</p>
<p>A student entering the elite admissions process must understand the odds. I agree with Molly, every applicant to MIT has LOW odds of admission! The problem as to whether an applicant is a “realistic” one or not doesn’t lie with the adcoms. It lies with the students and their parents who are sometimes NOT realistic themselves about the odds. They may see that they have stats in range and think they have a good chance. Not so. The odds are tough for everyone given such a low admit rate. And if one’s stats are on the lower end for the school, it is simply a FAR Reach. But with stats in range, it still is a Reach. I see many families who are unrealistic when it comes to creating a college list. It isn’t the adcoms fault. Anyone who researches elite college admissions, can understand if someone is a realistic applicant or not. And even IF the applicant is an appropriate one to apply, the odds are STILL tough. Some applicants are not even in range. Others are but are not too exceptional. Still others are exceptional across the board but must treat the school as a big reach no matter what, given the low acceptance rates. That is how my kids approached it. They knew they were appropriate candidates but they knew the chances were still very tough to get in and if they didn’t get into a particular elite college, it wasn’t because they were not qualified. Schools of MIT’s caliber could admit a second class of freshman just as qualified as the first group. Unfortunately, they cannot. Applicants need to be realistic about the odds. I have never found the colleges to be misleading about the odds. It is up to the applicants to build a balanced list of schools with varying degrees of odds. For top applicants, they still must treat schools with very low admit rates as reaches. I see some students on CC with top credentials who have a college list made up entirely of elite schools. That is highly unrealistic to do.</p>
<p>rich…that is a good point with which I agree.</p>
<p>“But everybody in the applicant pool has a very low chance of being admitted to a school with an 87% rejection rate”</p>
<p>Yes but if the rejection rate is 95% for some groupd and 55% for others and if the 25-75 ranges were also significantly different wouldn’t that be a useful bit of info to share with the potential customer? It would make MIT’s adcom’s lives easier for one thing as a lot of people with no chance would self-select out and save themselves an admissions fee. At the same time it might attract more applications from the favored group if they knew what MIT was looking for from folks like them.</p>
<p>“No one has a “Right” to attend any of these schools,
Admittance is a privilege granted to a lucky few.”</p>
<p>richs - Nobody has a right to a hotel room in New Orleans during Mardi Gras either, but they do have a right to not be refused one on the basis of their race, gender, or ethnicity. If these schools have a quaota based on race, gender, or ethnicity then they are practicing illegal discrimination.</p>
<p>"In fact, someone with SATs below the 25% tile might have other really good credentials to balance out the SAT. "</p>
<p>Yes absolutely. Something really relevant like the color of their skin. </p>
<p>sooz, as long as race counts as a plus for somebody it is necessarily a minus for somebody else. Admissions is a zero sum game for a fixed number of slots. I’m pretty sure any of the math whizzes around here can explain the math behind it. If race tipped one person in then it tipped another out. The fact that you cannot know for sure that you were the on tipped out does not mean it didn’t happen.</p>
<p>AA is what it is and it is not going to go away, but it is morally corrosive in no small part ecause it makes people lie to themselves about what is going on. Are there bigger and worse prolems in the world absolutely.</p>