“students has a more balanced opinion about AA, with very different percentages than occurs on similar questions in surveys at HYPSM… :”
These are students from five campuses in liberal or blue states, of course they’re going to say AA is great. If would be politically incorrect if they didn’t. This is a biased sample, no doubt, the gallup numbers indicate that generally people favor AA, except when it hurts them :-).
“Now, there is another benefit to legacy students in that they may come to campus already knowing much of the history, culture, and traditions of the college. That too is valuable.”
Here’s the thing with legacy, it can be a tremendous hook (33% of legacies get in at Harvard, compared to 3% RD) for doing nothing to achieve it, nothing.
“It looks like he tagged along with a random group of people in his summer program (where the summer program is designed to handhold students through writing papers like this) and just put his name on the paper, something that anyone in his program could have done.”
Ok, you can’t assume he tagged along when the others didn’t just because he’s black and the other three were not (looks like two are Asian and one white).
“Princeton admissions would likely be influenced by how he described the experience at Rutgers and related research in his essays, interview, and possibly LOR.”
His essay was on identity and race as someone mentioned earlier, maybe in the interview he went into it in more detail. There’s now way to tell who did what from just looking at the authors except it was sponsored by the professor and the two RU students helping out.
