<p>sseamom–there are certain top colleges with especially low levels of URM’s that do indeed offer a lot of money to URM’s to attend. I know, because my S and an acquaintance of his were offered such a scholarship: full ride to a top 20 LAC. This was more money than the FA offered by the two Ivies that admitted him, but S disliked the social environment and location of the LAC.</p>
<p>Close reading: down
Assumptions : steady but with a rising trend</p>
<p>Reinterpreting another’s words or sentiments: scary</p>
<p>The Ivies cap FA at “need.”</p>
<p>I know that, lookingforward. It was clearly a minority scholarship, and a generous one at that. All the students at the scholarship weekend were URM’s.</p>
<p>Help! Am I being insulted or complimented now, quantmech?</p>
<p>Ability to understand satire and wit: still falling</p>
<p>minutia: rising</p>
<p>Just a lame joke, TheGFG–actually I agree with you all on that point, obviously. :)</p>
<p>(I mean I agree about the nonquantifiability of what’s important, not about the lameness of the joke!)</p>
<p>My friend wrote this!</p>
<p>Is she funny? Or a jerk?</p>
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<p>Yes Pizzagirl does this. In another thread she mocked “geniuses” who aspire to “live, work and play with a cohort of other bright, driven kids”. I guess her disdain came from the fact that they were reaching for MIT level schools.</p>
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<p>To me this is a case of “let them eat cake” (to borrow one of her favorite phrases).</p>
<p>What do you hope to gain by dissecting her posts?</p>
<p>Sheesh, lookingforward, you need to check your reading comprehension skills. I did not say that writing about your race or checking a box amounts to an auto-admit. I said the top colleges want to know about your race, because they use it as one factor in admissions. </p>
<p>If you don’t specify any race, you are categorized as white in the federal government statistics and treated in admissions the same way a white applicant is treated: no race advantage. </p>
<p>Sseasom
My 40% error was not in bad faith. I remembered off the top that Harvard was about 44% white and 17% Asian which left about 40%. In my haste I forgot about the mixed race, decline to state, and international categories. The way colleges account for their racial demographics has changed over the years so it can get confusing. (All of this stuff has been discussed in the AA threads. You can go there to research it if you want)</p>
<p>Again, the actual percentage isn’t the point anyway. The point is that they want a racially diverse class and tell us so, so of course you should tell them about your race in the application. Why wouldn’t you?</p>
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<p>I think admissions officers can make educated guesses of who is Chinese, Korean, Indian etc. based on applicants’ names. It might be a good idea for children with white fathers and Asian mothers to be given “white” first names to avoid discrimination against candidates presumed to be Asian (as opposed to white). Whether such discrimination currently occurs is controversial, but I would not be surprised if it exists.</p>
<p>It will be difficult to hide that Asian mother on the Common App.</p>
<p>One young lady we know, who is a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian born of blond, blue-eyed parents, has an unusual last name. It sounds a bit Asian to the ear, but doesn’t look like an Asian surname in spelling. She found out that she was being grouped by Yale admissions with Asian students, because she was put in an all-Asian group of students from our area to be interviewed by an Asian alum. She wonders if that impacted her admissions results there or elsewhere.</p>
<p>So I hope colleges don’t make a practice of guessing your race if you don’t identify, or second-guessing it if you do.</p>
<p>good on mokusatsu!</p>
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<p>I agree. Let us not forget that even many almost-everyone-is-admitted schools have honors programs where the caliber of student can be very good. A good student needs peers that will challenge him or her, but in many cases a handful of close peers could be enough.</p>
<p>It seems to me that nearly everyone who regularly posts on CC was or represents someone who was on the high school honors/AP track. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing – good students seeking “an adequate concentration of talented students” in order to be challenged rather than bored?</p>
<p>lookingforward, I am not trying to gain anything. To be honest, when I read post #1000, I was taken aback because this is not the Pizzagirl that I “know”. She is rather outspoken and does not mince words, so I summed up her position to be: get off your high horse; there are smart people everywhere; it doesn’t matter what school you go to, it’s what you make of it, etc. Now that one post has me wondering whether these same philosophies apply to her and her kids.</p>
<p>^ Courage: slightly up</p>
<p>I should clarify that quotations on the QuantMech Stock Exchange were intended to refer to me. (Yes, lookingforward, in this case the post <em>was</em> all about me! 
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<p>Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results.</p>
<p>The honors programs at some of the state schools are getting very very restrictive. Texas has auto admissions for upto 10% but UT restricts it down to 7%. However, the admissions to honors programs go down to top 2-3% with high scores like 32+ in ACT or 2100+ in SAT.</p>