<p>Also, to add: my agreement with Pizzagirl’s #1000 referred only to the idea that what is really important is nonquantifiable.</p>
<p>Still processing the other elements of that particular post.</p>
<p>count me as bemused…</p>
<p>just when I had about decided intellectual elitism was a “bad” thing…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are we talking top 20 or so USNWR rankings? dept rankings? top 50? what is elite?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A place that will accept my kid and reject lots of other kids. ;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The support for my statements is now posted on that other thread. If you care to apologize for accusing me of posting “untruths,” I’m all ears.</p>
<p>Well, to continue to beat the horse that is post #1000, I have one other observation. There are some posters who love to pounce on anyone who is an elite school striver. Yet, there is nary a peep from of any of those people regrading Pizzagirl’s post, which I consider to be one of the more elitist statements that I have seen in a while. I suspect that if anyone else had made such statements the pouncing would be relentless. Just found this to be very curious.</p>
<p>Great humor, all around.</p>
<p>Bogi, I get what she says. Perhaps because I and others do want whatever that elusive best is, for our kids. It’s often not a generalization, ie, gotta be this, gotta be that. It’s the right fit or the special something. Whatever it IS.</p>
<p>The complaint isn’t against one having a kid at Brown or Harvard or Duke or whatever. It’s about a subset of folks whose vision is so constricted that anything else is a devastating loss.</p>
<p>Sorry I don’t get the drama which is “hating on” PG right now. Anyone with a pulse can spend a day at University of New Haven and then a day at Yale and quickly figure out that despite their proximity, the fact that they both have University in their names, etc. that the experience of being a college Freshman is radically different at these institutions.</p>
<p>Do you want a BS in Dental Hygiene? Then don’t go to Yale, since you can’t get one there. But to pretend that the experience of studying literature is going to be superior at UNH vs. Yale is PC gone amok.</p>
<p>I think that’s the point PG was trying to make. There are smart kids everywhere-- and I’ll bet there are brilliant kids every year. But to pretend therefore that the intellectual experience is identical on every campus and in every discipline is actually absurd. It’s not; sorry if that’s too elitist for your tender ears. I have friends who are and have been faculty at a wide range of institutions. Ask a professor of literature what it’s like teaching a literature course at a university where your entering Freshman have verbal SAT’s in the mid to high 400’s vs. teaching at Yale. Ask a chemistry professor what it’s like teaching Chem 1 in a place where the students have math SAT’s around 500. Ask if that’s meaningfully different- teaching the kids who got B- and C+ in HS algebra-- vs. teaching kids who walk into college ready for university level chem.</p>
<p>And no hating on Yale please. Yes- there are dumb kids at Yale who don’t deserve to be there. I get that. There are dumb kids at Yale whose parents donated a 7 figure building; yup, got that too. But ask a Yale professor if he or she wants to trade the Yale student body for the one up the street and I’ll bet you get an answer pretty quickly.</p>
<p>Hey PG-- hope all is well.</p>
<p>Harvard, btw, does quote 40%. Includes AA, Latino, Asian American and NA.</p>
<p>But, if your kid ends up at U New Haven, I will happily- and sincerely- give it the positive spin. I looked up Truman State and there ate some great things there, too. My own D1’s 2nd choice was a top 50.</p>
<p>Lookingforward, The 40% was related to URM, Asians aren’t considered underrepresented. In fact they are overrepresented.</p>
<p>Oh bogibogi, I’ve been very consistent over my posting history on this board that I am a fan of elite schools and think they do provide some things that aren’t found in as vast quantities as other schools. I’ve also been quite clear that a smart, hardworking person can do well anywhere and being obsessed with 8 schools is ridiculous. I’ve already shared that even though my kids both attend schools that (for most) fall into the category of elite (top 10 LAC, top 20 uni), that they had a range in their list and that it wasn’t at all top-20-or-bust. There is nothing new that I’ve said here. I don’t know what stereotype you had of me or my posts to suggest that I all of a sudden became elitist, but it seems as though everyone else seems to get it.</p>
<p>Jane, its from their website.</p>
<p>“Asians aren’t considered underrepresented”</p>
<p>Harvard does include them under minorities.</p>
<p>I think the term usually used is “persons of color” which is everyone who is non-white or partially non-white. So 40-some percent is not that tough a goal to meet without lower one’s admissions standards too radically.</p>
<p>Bay didn’t say that Harvard’s class, or anybody’s class, was 40% minority. He stated that colleges aim to create classes that are 40% URM. That is that 40% of their students are either African American, Hispanic or Native American, the 3 groups that are considered “underepresented”. I then questioned why, if that’s a universal goal, Harvard doesn’t even come close, given that they seem to have a large enough applicant pool that they can build any kind of class they like. </p>
<p>Yes, Harvard is approximately 40% people of color/racial or ethnic minorities. But that wasn’t the question. The question was specifically about underrepresented minorities, that is groups for whom the percentage of students in the university population is lower than the percentage in the nation. Asians don’t fall into that category, so a 40% statistic that includes Asians isn’t relevant.</p>
<p>Universities do not use ORM and URM. They use minorities as the term.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, Harvard claims to actively recruit Asians.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College Admissions § Applying: Minority Recruitment](<a href=“http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/minority_recruitment/index.html]Harvard”>http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/hrp/minority_recruitment/index.html)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It most certainly is if you are the one writing the press release. What is the first thing a URM will think when reading that 40% of the incoming class consists of “persons of color”? If it’s “I have a chance, I should apply” it’s all to the good, even if the stat is somewhat misleading. Besides, if 40% of the class were truly URMs, then by definition they would no longer be URMs because they wouldn’t be underrepresented.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Both of these statements are correct. Basically, Asian-Americans are considered ORMs…Over-Represented Minorities. </p>
<p>Several decades ago, there were massive fears among the Ivy set admins that another minority group was going to be “overrepresented” at the expense of the favored dominant group…upper/upper-middle class WASPs. </p>
<p>As a result, they moved towards what we now know as holistic admissions and the modern college application. In fact, the entry for an “optional photo” on Columbia’s application was once mandatory and was used as an additional means to screen out “undesirables” through the discredited pseudoscience known as Physiognomy*. </p>
<ul>
<li>Discredited by the end of WWII due to its notorious use by Nazis and other White supremacist groups to justify their discriminatory and genocidal policies. George L. Mosse’s “Towards The Final Solution” covers this pseudoscience and its despicable uses in Europe from the 19th century till the 1940’s.</li>
</ul>
<p>L.I., I haven’t read the press release, but presumably it wasn’t written to uphold Bay’s notion that colleges aim to include 40% underrepresented minorities. The statistic that seems to be taken from the press release, which isn’t linked here so I haven’t read it, is that 40% of Harvard’s students are racial or ethnic minorities. If this is true, and it seems like it probably is, it still doesn’t answer the question of whether Harvard, or any other university, aims for a student body that is 40% URM, given that URM is a subset of the group they’re talking about.</p>
<p>Harvard is making a claim about minorities. UNDER and OVER are CC made up terms.</p>
<p>“Minority representation remained strong. The admitted class is 19.9 percent Asian-American, 11.5 percent African-American, 11.5 percent Latino, 2.2 percent Native American, and .5 percent Native Hawaiian.”</p>
<p>[College</a> admits 2,029 | Harvard Gazette](<a href=“http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/03/college-admits-2029-5-8-percent-of-applicants/]College”>College admits 2,029 – Harvard Gazette)</p>