"Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion 12

[OHMomof2]

@theloniusmonk The main flaw in the study is that Espenshade and his co-authors would not share the data as it was proprietary and the colleges prohibited the sharing.

IMO the main flaw is that he couldn’t look at recs, essays, ECs, and other factors that often tip the scales at these schools.

You are maybe confusing Espenshade with the Princeton/DOE case. Princeton shared the data with the DOE but would not publicly release it.

It was NCES data actually. And the data was very limited and is now very old.Some conclusions clearly reflect that, like that back then more men than women applied to selective colleges -that has reversed.

…we use data from the National Study of College Experience (NSCE), a project whose purpose is to understand the paths different students follow through higher education. Ten academically selective colleges and universities participated in the NSCE and supplied individual-level data on all persons who applied for admission in the fall of 1983 (or a nearby year), 1993, and 1997.

The information for this analysis comes from three private research universities that represent the top tier of American higher education. These are not the only NSCE schools that give admission preferences to underrepresented minority students, athletes, or legacies, but they were able to provide complete information for all three entering cohorts in our data on whether an applicant fell into any of these groups.

That kind of glaring weakness (for making broad claims about college admissions today) aside, Maybe read the actual study. There is fascinating stuff in there, it’s a good read.

But as far as I can discern, scores and race and athletic/legacy were all they had for all 3 colleges all 3 years. At only one college did they even have GPA and class rank for the 3 years.

https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Admission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf

The conclusion, as limited as it must be in scope, is different from the way it is characterized by opponents of AA:

Critics of affirmative action in American higher education sometimes lose sight of the fact that elite universities give added weight to many different types of student characteristics. In this article, we examine the roles played by
preferences for athletes and children of alumni. Based on complete data for three applicant cohorts to three of the most academically selective research universities, we show that admission bonuses for athletes and legacies rival, and sometimes even exceed, the size of preferences for underrepresented minority applicants