@angryasianmomdad Did you read the article you posted?
Sorry, this one also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v.University_of_Texas(2013)
@VeryLuckyParent Thank you. Yes he worked very hard. Do you think high school students who work very hard and high school students who don’t work very hard, who should get admitted to good school?
Some of you guys are just bitter. Grades and rankings are not everything you know. Essays and recommendations count so if your sons have good grades but don’t stand out as individuals outside their academics, then you can’t continue to be angry. Move on and stop throwing shade
@lauraazumah, my son’s essay is great. I don’t think essays or recommendations are only reasons to count either. Did you miss any other factors?
I think in a perfect world we wouldn’t need to give certain groups a boost in the admissions process, because every child in the country would enjoy a basic standard of living, have a healthy home life, and attend good K-12 schools where students’ success depends only on their abilities.
Unfortunately, a lot of kids have no such luck. This trend is especially pronounced in certain demographic groups (see link below). So, in recognition of the fact that hitting a double requires a greater effort than scoring when you’re born on third base, we try and give certain groups a leg up. This also keeps our campuses diverse, meaning that students will be exposed to a broad range of viewpoints.
Some believe any advantage for one group is unfair. It should be recalled that URMs aren’t the only group that benefits from such criteria. For instance:
-Legacy status amounts to affirmative action for those whose parents attended college 30 years ago; most of them are white with parental incomes above the 50th percentile, myself included.
-Test scores are closely correlated with income; the playing field is tilted towards those who can afford tutoring, prep materials, etc.
-An emphasis on extracurriculars that wealthy students can access more easily doesn’t help; if your family can’t afford a car, commuting to any activity that’s not within walking distance is a real challenge, and transportation in general is a burden for the poor (second link below). Having spent 6 years travelling only via public transport, I can believe that. Some students also have to work to support their families, but part-time jobs are undervalued in the admissions process relative to ECs.
-Recommendations are usually more personal when students attend private schools with small class sizes and low GC:student ratios. This also means more essay feedback.
All these points help wealthy applicants, who are rarely URM students. So we give students from the most disadvantaged ethnic groups a boost through affirmative action.
I think the entire system is a little outdated, as millions of minority families have found success in recent years, and we’re far from the 1960s or 1970s when non-whites were almost invariably poor. Now, the picture is more complicated. If Barack Obama were still a professor at the UChicago law school, Malia Obama would get a leg up in the admissions process while a white child raised in a trailer park by a single mother wouldn’t. Given a choice, I would choose class-based affirmative action over race-based AA every time.
However, many URM families are still struggling. Many among the 75% above the poverty line aren’t doing too well either. An income of $25,000 would put a family of four above the poverty level, but is by no means luxurious. While I don’t see race-based affirmative action as the best system, it’s better than nothing. And many foes of AA propose to replace it with exactly that.
Between those two options, I don’t think anyone would have difficulty picking, assuming their results were in line with their level of effort. Having said that, when I was growing up, I had a friend who was just so much more gifted than I was, and always did better in school even though he put in much less work than I did. Looking at our results you couldn’t tell who worked harder. I did, but he always got better results 
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/1865655-harvard-rd-class-of-2020-result-thread.html #8 - another example, what is the explanation? I couldn’t figure out. Can you?
did anyone get off the waitlist today?
Damn! I feel for this kid. That looks pretty impressive on paper. But given that all schools dinged this kid, maybe the recommendations and essays weren’t as good as the kid thought it was? Maybe there was something in there that did him in? I’m just guessing here. On paper, it does look that these schools lost a great kid.
Bitterness is a natural reaction to perceived injustice. I wouldn’t want to dismiss it on therapeutic grounds. However, it is very hard to know in a particular instance whether an injustice was done. We can’t know all the factors that led to the acceptance of one highly qualified applicant and the rejection of another one. As many have pointed out there is not only subjectivity and a multitude of factors in play but an element of luck. At Chicago in particular there is that famously intangible notion of a certain type of student who fits the ethos of the place. I wonder whether Chinese kids, with all their excellences, have as many representatives of that peculiar Chicago type. Of course, this doesn’t explain similar effects at other elite schools.
In any event talented students will thrive at any number of institutions. Malcolm Gladwell has made the case in favor of strong state schools as against elite private schools - not only as a better deal for the money, but as providing a greater likelihood of a good college experience and future success. Too many kids go to the elites thinking they’ll stand out there in the same way they did in their high schools - only to become very depressed when this is not the case, and to end up dropping out of courses of studies for which they are perfectly well-suited and would have excelled at in a less competitive institution.
That doesn’t make injustice in the selection process of the elites, if such it is, any more acceptable. It’s a big subject and will take lots of drilling down into the stats and a Supreme Court decision to settle, if ever. The affirmative action part of all this troubles me less than another aspect - that Chinese kids may have a higher bar to clear, after factoring in all the relevant variables, than white kids of middle or upper middle class background. We don’t know if that is the case, but I highly suspect that it is. There may even be a benign explanation: the pronounced skewing of Chinese kids toward the sciences places them inherently in a more competitive pool than the generality of white kids, whose interests are spread more equally across the disciplines. The general level of grades and scores required of applicants with a preference for the humanities is a bit lower than that for the sciences. That would mean that there could be white kids with lower scores being accepted ahead of Chinese kids with higher ones for reasons having nothing to do with ethnicity but only a desire to achieve a balance among the disciplines characteristic of a particular university.
These are idle speculations in the absence of real data. Somewhere in all this there may well be real injustice.
@angryasianmomdad the only explanation is that they have to cut down the percentage of Chinese boys to reach thier race goal. I didon’t want to say anything anymore but wanted to support you. I know lots of people admit the discrimination even the admission officers. Some Ives officers felt horrible to let more excellent students down and accept much less performance students because they have to reach their numbers. public schools-Berkeley , UCLA are not allowed to put too much weight on race so the percentage of Asian is much higher, which means those top schools have to cut about 20% Asian students who should be accepted if no race discrimination. This boy is the victim of the 20% cutting. I am speechless and feel his pain deeply… Probably as Asians we should speak up more and louder. Thanks for your PM and support! our sons will be great but this is really good lessons for them about discrimination. I think this process makes my son think what he really wants to do for his career. He is talking about humanities major now because he wants to make this society better and fairer and probably engineer or programmer don’t have that much impact on it. The kids felt the unfairness directely . As parents we have to support them and try our best to minimize the hurt of the obvious injustice. Lots of people on CC don’t understand it because they are not experiencing it.
@angryasianmomdad one time a American professor told me that we need an Asian Martin Luther King. I totally agree on it:)
@cdlyw maybe your son’s essays just weren’t as good as you thought. There is a high level of subjectivity to it. You cannot with any measure of certainty say that the reason he didn’t get in was because of his race. Especially with a place like UChicago, where essays are probably weighted more than at any other school.
@VeryLuckyParent you can find more examples like this on CC Ives Threads. and I saw many examples in person also.
I think it’s time to move on. This is the Waitlist thread.
@goingnutsmom thank you!
Wow, I can’t believe that my comment on jinpachi’s ACT score on Post #391 lead to five pages on affirmative action… talk about a discussion starter! Nevertheless, it was quite an insightful read, and I do value everyone’s opinions on the matter. But I do think it’s time to move on to the waitlist… I think 70 comments on AA is more than enough.
@cdlyw Just so you know, I am a 36 ACT and 12 AP Asian male on the UChicago waitlist, so your son is not alone. But a great many wise people on here have told me that what one does in college is many times more important than where one goes to college. If you son keeps his determination and works as hard in college as he did in high school, I can guarantee you that he will be more successful than some of the people who went to the Ivy Leagues. In the end, the future is chosen by the person and not the school (although the school may help in the process).
@hello1221 From what I’ve heard, they’re mostly done at this point. They’re accepting gap years right now, so you can try to ask for a gap year if you truly want UChicago over any other school, but you should request this before the end of next week. Formal rejections should be coming out either during the week of May 9th or May 16th if past years are of any indication.
@jpa0115 @Hoped123 I’m waiting too, but I know that this year’s yield is really, really high. I wouldn’t game too much on the waitlist at this point. There’s really nothing else that can be done; if I had to guess, they’ll probably take around 5-10 more students after today, and that’s a generous estimate.
@ensigmapi May I ask why you think the yield will be ** really really high**
Wouldn’t it be closer to last year’s yield?