In reply to: Thank you for a more eloquent explanation posted by dulac89
actually the same as yours. the admission process taking that into consideration said this is the kid we want to come here based upon the work ethic he exhinbited and the success he achieved. The rejected parents then claimed he only got it because he was black.
assume he was and some of the facts were reversed. Between a wealthy black student with tutors and a 1350 SAT and a white student with a 1500 SAT and a harder life, who gets admitted? I have a hard time imagining it's not the black student. The Harvard/UNC SCOTUS case gave some hard facts on the amount of preference given to certain groups vis-a-vis other groups, and it was absolutely massive. It's not the gentle thumb on the scale that people like to characterize it as.
as to whehter or not the student was black, the post does not state it specifically but states every they use the quote every time a white person does not get something they wanted a a person of color does. He then cites this specific example which I took the mean the kid who was accepted was black oitherwise the story makes no sense.
With regard to the Harvard case keep in mind it was also reported the bigger issue was the use of legacy preferences in admissions. Linked below is a Vox article showing that legacy and geographic preferences will continue to affect Asian applicants even after the decision. They cite a study that determined privileged white students were admitted at higher rate than asian students largely due to those two preferences. I have linked the article below.
THis quote is from a NYT article:
Harvard gives preference to applicants who are recruited athletes, legacies, relatives of donors and children of faculty and staff. As a group, they make up less than 5 percent of applicants, but around 30 percent of those admitted each year. About 67.8 percent of these applicants are white, according to court papers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/us/politics/harvard-admissions-civil-rights-inquiry.html#:~:text=Harvard%20gives%20preference%20to%20applicants,white%2C%20according%20to%20court%20papers.
I think part of the difficulty of this conversation is we all have our anecdotes but we dont really know why decisions were made. My son attends a private HS here in Chicago and has a number of friends who would fit your description. I will tell you having watched their acceptances the past couple of years I think the legacy is probably a bigger factor for most of these kids. One kid in particular was an excellent student with great grades and scores, good activities, father is a C Suite member of a Fotune 500 company here in Chicago. He was accepted at Michigan (Dad's alma mater) but rejected from the schools you say he would be given the preference for admission.
I think the problem is we all know great applicants who were rejected from lots of schools. What we dont know is the kid who go the spot instead of them. Geography is a large factor in this as well and one not easily understood. And when we talk geography dont forget international students.
Keep in minds the schools we are talking about on average reject 9 out of every 10 kids who apply. There are great kids from every race, religion and economic group that get rejected every year. The easy answer for many parents is my kid lost out because some other kid was favored.
I am fairly certain despite the decision last fall admission rates for every group will go down at ND this year (and likely every elite school) for the simple reason there will be more applications. When I applied in the mid 1980's as near as I can determine we likely had 5,500 applications. I think our class size was 1,875. This year I think they are looking for a class of 2,200 and I expect they will receive around 30,000 applications. Your odds of enrolling at the University have gone from 40% to 7.3%. During that same time period UCLA has gone from an accpetance rate near 90% to the low teens.
The other factor is the early decision process. Northwestern was on my son's inital list. His counselor (a former NW admissions officer) told him you are a great candidate at NW and I think you would be admitted IF you apply ED. Applying ED of course meant choosing NW overr ND and he was not going to do that. If you are a kid who knows where you want to go you can improve your odds significantly by applying ED.
With a HS senior I have had to adjust expectations which has been easier for me than my parents. He may get accepted in March he may not but what I do know is he is a thousand times more qualified to go to any school than I ever was and it is much more difficult for him to get into any school today but it is not becuase he is a white male.
Edited to add this. One of wife's college roomates has a daughter (my goddaughter) who is graduating from TCU this spring. Great kid bright student. Four years ago all we heard about was how college admissions punished white kids because everyone wanted black students her parents had become big Trump fans attending boat parades and the like. We never pried about scores or grades and just kept our mouths shut.
Four years later our son started the process. During conversations the parents let us know her grades and scores. Iin this day and age anyone with a superscore 32 ACT should not have an expectation of going to an elite school but that did not stop the parents from saying for years how she just did not get in because of affirmative action. That is not to say she couldnt do the work but given the number of applicants and the number of spots the odds of you gaining admission are pretty low.
Saying my child would have been admitted if they were black is very different than saying my child would have been admitted if admissions were race blind. For the latter, you're essentially saying that your child was one of the top 2-3% of non-admitted students, which is statistically unlikely, not to mention impossible to prove.
I was not admitted to Columbia Law School (life went on . . . and with much less debt I'll add). I'm highly confident I would have been admitted if I were black. I'm almost as equally confident that giving a preference to a couple dozen minorities/legacies/donor kids/etc. probably wasn't the difference between me being admitted versus not admitted.
For the record, I'm actually not opposed to affirmative action. I just get frustrated because I feel like in so many cases people aren't having an honest conversation about it.
for white kid to get into the top schools today. Now I will readily admit it is more difficult than it used to be and affirmative action plays a role in this. However, dont come to me complaining about it when your superscore isnt even in the top 2% of scores. To me in that case affirmative action isnt the reason your kid did not get in to the top schools. As I posted elsewhere many of these schools admit a larger % of the class from legacies, athletes, and faculty children then they do black students but we dont hear the same complaints even though those are not focused soley on the merit of the applicant.
The reason your kid did not get into the top schools is because there is no longer room for a well rounded good kid with a 32 in those schools. They want a lot more than that and whether it is the common app or another reason kids today are more likely to apply to more than one of those schools. PLus the business of the schools forcing kids into Early Decisions hurts the kids chances unless you know for certain you want to go to a certain school.
Take Boston College as an example. Per the website below they received 2800 ED applications and admitted 960 students for an admission rate of 34%. If the numbers are similar to last year they will have 36,000 to 37,000 regular applications. and will accept an additonal 4500 students or somewhere around 12%. So if you want to go to BC your odds are 3 times better applying ED. And that process is designed solely to benefit the kids not the schools.
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What the decline in college aged population as we transition away from the millennial population bump. Colleges have been seeing higher and higher numbers in the applicant pools and that will reverse in the years to come.
Alternatively it'd be nice if more top 20 schools expanded their undergraduate enrollments. The hairs that are being split to decide who goes where are pretty small.
But the take away from liberals on this board is it’s impossible to measure merit in academic and hr.
Measurement that everyone agrees upon so there is a subjective component. Even within that group of white males schools don’t simply take the top 100 by test score and gpa. How do you value the kid with top Grades but lower test scores? How do you value the kid with great test scores but the grades while good don’t reflect that score? Above a certain point you have shown the ability to do the work and it is making a subjective judgment of who you want in the school because they all merit admission. If not there would be a computer program where you put the information from
The application in and it spits out the acceptances and rejections.
When I was first out of law school I worked at what at the time was a “larger” insurance defense firm in the City. There was a recession in the legal Profession and suddenly our firm was getting applicants from schools that we had never received applicants from. The partners were impressed with the credentials when they reviewed resumes. The only problem was these people could not carry a conversation at lunch because they had no personality. Not a great trait for litigation firm that still held a talent show after new lawyers were sworn in where the new lawyers would
Tell jokes and perform skits making fun of the lawyers at the firm.
They objectively “merited” being hired more than our normal students based upon their grades and schools but subjectively they were the wrong people for our firm long term.
Like height and 40 times. They're useful to a point, but you probably don't want to be like the Raiders of old and draft exclusively on 40 times.
Additionally the top schools have so many applicants that they can pick minority candidates that aren't very different on paper than their white/Asian counterparts. The numeric gaps open up more as you stray away from the top.
Personally I'd like to see the federal government threaten to remove tax benefits on endowments unless schools reduced tuition, scaled up aid, or increased enrollment if they're sitting on the kind of money ND or wealthier schools have. "Winning" in the college arms race has become so divorced from societal aims that we need to change the system's incentives.
Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University, recently wrote, “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” See the interesting discussion on standardized testing in there NYT (01/08/24).
I agree it should be used, but it's not the only predictive factor. It's a great way to determine which disadvantaged students are prepared to enroll.
But again, the NBA doesn't just draft the tallest human beings on the planet and the NFL doesn't draft WR's solely based on 40 time.
Per the article even at MIT test scores are the not the main factor but part of the process. My takeaway from the article is the tests are helpful for students who attended schools that traditionally dont send students to the elite schools. For those that regularly send kids the HS work might be as probative.
I also would be interested in a fuller explanation of what they mean disadvantaged kids who have enormous potential even if their test scores arent that high. To me that seems to say there is a recognition that teaching the test makes a difference. I know that is something lots of folks dispute.
I also wonder what role the ncreased extra time allowances are playing in the overall scheme.
They're not especially teachable and that training for the test has diminishing returns after some studying.
It's testing a combination of overall intelligence combined with a lifetime of learning/education.
A kid from the wrong side of the tracks might never match the kid who's had all the advantages in life, even if given an intense prep course.
The university has to decide if the kid with worse numbers can hack it. And if they'll add something to the school that the other kid can't.
This thread has evolved past what my point is which is when a wealthy privileged white man who has had every advantage evokes that MLK quote to decry perceived unfairness for themself or other white people they are tone deaf
It was wrong when my friend said it. It was wrong when Ackman said it and to use it in the context that they are using it demonstrates entitlement