<p>Also, you’re delusional if you think the deck is stacked against minorities. I’d love to see some statistics on average scores by race for admitted students. I think they would be very telling. Does anyone know if this information is available, or if someone could FOIA Michigan for it? Bearcats?</p>
<p>It helped in the sense that my family expected that I get good grades and get into a good school. It’s a cultural issue, just like bearcats said. But in the end, I still had to do the work and get the scores myself. My parents didn’t do that for me.</p>
<p>@ThisIsMichigan </p>
<p>Of course it helps, but what does an individual applicant’s resources have to do with that person’s race? After all, this thread is about diversity.</p>
<p>Bro, I have been against any race, gender or ethnicity based admissions since the beginning of the thread.</p>
<p>It is just funny as hell to hear “I came from a white, rich, privileged family! I had to pull myself up by my own bootstraps!” hahaha</p>
<p>I wonder what any females in this thread that are against any boosted admissions for race or ethnicity think about boosted admissions for females in some fields?</p>
<p>ThisIsMichigan, my first two posts in this thread were directed at Grizzly17. He/she implied that many applicants get into Michigan BECAUSE they come from privilege, or because they are white, or because their parents attended. That simply isn’t the case.</p>
<p>Was I fortunate to grow up in the environment that I did? Absolutely. But that alone was not sufficient to gain me admission to Michigan.</p>
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<p>Not sure which part of this you’re disputing, Vlad, but the University of Michigan does give admissions preferences to children (and grandchildren, and stepchildren) of alumni, and there’s no disputing that alumni skew whiter than the population as a whole.</p>
<p>Here’s what a University of Michigan Alumni Association undergraduate admissions FAQ says about it. This language comes straight from earlier versions of the Admissions Office web pages.</p>
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<p>And here’s a recent Michigan Daily editorial on the subject:</p>
<p>[From</a> the Daily: Legacy admissions - The Michigan Daily](<a href=“http://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/daily-legacy-admission]From”>From the Daily: Legacy admissions)</p>
<p>As far as I know, the University of Michigan Supplement on the Common App still asks applicants to identify parents, grandparents, step-parents, etc. who attended the university; at least it did last year (Fall of 2012) when my daughter (a double legacy) was applying (she was admitted, by the way, but elected to attend another school). The only purpose for this is to give a legacies boost in admissions. How much that legacy boost is worth is hard to say, though a recent study found that at elite private schools legacies are on average 45% more likely to be admitted than similarly-credentialed non-legacy applicants, and much higher than that at some schools, e.g., Harvard (legacy admit rate 30%, overall admit rate 5.8%) and Princeton (legacy admit rate 33%, overall admit rate 8.5%).</p>
<p>[Legacy</a> Kids Have An Admissions Advantage - Business Insider](<a href=“http://www.businessinsider.com/legacy-kids-have-an-admissions-advantage-2013-6]Legacy”>Legacy Kids Have an Admissions Advantage)</p>
<p>Another factor that may tend to skew Michigan’s undergrad student body more affluent, and by extension whiter, is its FA policy, in particular its inability to meet full need for OOS students who in recent years have represented upwards of 40% of the entering class. This likely means that a higher percentage of OOS enrolled students are full-pays, since admitted students with unmet financial need are more likely to go elsewhere for a better financial deal. And full-pays are more likely to come from affluent, and predominantly white, suburban areas of New York, Chicago, DC, etc. </p>
<p>Now it’s certainly true that not all white students are affluent, and it’s equally true that not all URMs are low-income. But we’re playing the percentages here; the more affluent the student body, the whiter it is likely to be. According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 13.5% of white households earned over $100,000/year, compared to 7.5% of Hispanic households and 6.5% of black households. At the other end of the scale, 32.4% of white households had incomes under $35,000/year, compared to 46% of Hispanic households and 53.2% of black households.</p>
<p>Inability to meet full need for OOS students would tend to screen out well qualified admitted students from low- and moderate-income backgrounds regardless of race, but this facially race-neutral policy is likely to have a racially disparate impact because of the way income distribution skews.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see racial and SES breakdowns for OOS v. in-state students, but I’d be very surprised if the OOS students weren’t whiter and more affluent, on average.</p>
<p>The university is planning to address this, in a race-neutral way: apparently raising sufficient endowment funds to meet full need for all students is going to be a major goal of its upcoming capital campaign.</p>
<p>On this notion of “forced diversity”</p>
<p>We live in a world where, unfortunately, the government has to back programs in order to promote diversity. I’m not speaking of Affirmative Action specifically, but in general, when things are left the same, things will not be diverse. Ending Affirmative-Action and race conscious policies will only do one thing; increase de-facto segregation. The new argument (which is very crafty indeed) is that diversity has no special benefits. But that’s not where these Civil Rights Era policies came from, and that’s not the spirit of them. Things like Affirmative Action are put in place to stop de-facto segregation. Sure, the mechanism can be abused, but so can anything else. Not trying to be offensive, but if you think sitting for 4 hours on a Saturday and bubbling in answers that people spend and make billions of dollars on to coach and prepare for shows merit, you are mistaken. </p>
<p>So please, study the Civil Rights Movement. Segregation is completely detrimental to any democracy, and the past lawmakers of this country fought to end it. Prop 2 does not follow in that legacy.</p>
<p>right, and how come this de-facto segregation did not hurt Asians and Indians collectively, ever?
But obviously, it can’t be a cultural or community issue; of course there is something wrong with the system so the guberment has to step in and pick winners and losers! That’s how everything is in our nanny state nowadays anyway. </p>
<p>On the same note, should we end de-facto segregation in the revenue generating sports world by allowing more unqualified asian and indian mathletes into the NFL and NBA via quotas and “race conscious policies”?</p>
<p>Legacy help is O.K. with bearcats. But the University doesn’t want to get rid of the legacy assistance in admissions because they fear donors would stop writing checks. Hmm… now why would they stop writing checks? Oh, probably because they look at it as a way to buy their kids or grandkids into Michigan…which bearcats claims is impossible.</p>
<p>@bearcats, comparing the Asian American experience with the African-American one is mistaken. They did not have a systematic devaluatiom of their human rights for 400 years, and institutions specifically tailored to continue that institutional challenge afterward. Comparing the two doesn’t work; segregation has been and still is a tool used against minorites in America, specfically African-Americans and Hispanics.</p>
<p>Secondly, claiming its not recognized as a cultural problem is false. Civil Rights groups actively engage the communities they defend and attempt to improve education, and thankfully some students do excel. But taking a West Bloomfield student and claiming that their higher scores, compared to a Detroit student from a failing school shows more merit, is incorrect. Their economic and social inequality is not created or sustained by the student, and they cant be blamed for it as a whole.</p>
<p>Your comparison of athletic ability with success in University and what you will bring is unfounded. Test scores are not a neutral, fair standard of academic merit, and so cant be compared with academic ability. If colleges want to play a hard and fast stats game, is it too much to ask that the evaluation is fair and realistic, and actually takes into consideration age old social constructs that define just about every institution in America?</p>
<p>cant be compared with *Athletic ability</p>