Brutal Admissions Year!

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03/30/2015 12:39

Subject: Brutal Admissions Year!

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Of all the people focusing on affirmative action I have the following points.

1. The numbers are African americans and Hispanics at elite schools are relatively small, less than the percentage
in the general population. For example, there are 88 African amercians in last year's freshman class at Darmouth. Out of 1152.
2. Why is it accepted that athletes are okay but seeking other types of diversity is not? What value does a lacrosse player really add? I don't agree with this premise. It gives you an admissions edge even when there are no scholarships attached. Thus, it becomes a preference based upon your ability to pay for Lacrosse (or fill in the blank) in order to gain an admissions edge.
3. Most of you suppose that all or most of the minority applicants are unqualified. It presumes that they are nearly always inferior, and therein lies the cruelest of all lies. First, most minority applicants that are admitted have very high qualifications. Refusal to acknowledge this devalues these young men and women and is, frankly, insulting. Look at the Common data sets for school. Most admitted students meet a very high standard and it is very few who fall below a certain SAT and GPA.
4. Pretending that it does the minority no favors and that you feel sorry for the poor minority who cant cut it in the big leagues is also really laughable.
5. Scapegoating minorities is not going to make this process any less competitive.

I could go on but you get my points.

The easy answer to minority admissions being given the appropriate respect as opposed to assumptions that they are the result of preferences is to make ALL admissions to be based on merit.

Legacy and sports related preferences don't draw a distinction when it comes to race except to the extent that legacy admissions for historical reasons go more to whites than other races.

If one is going to offer some sort of preference to the disadvantaged then the criteria should be based on socio-economic status. The child of a coal miner in West Virginia is disadvantaged but if he/she is white then there is no preference given to that applicant. Yet, the child of an affluent black or Hispanic parent would get preference just based on race.

Exactly!!

Of course there's preference for the coal miners kid. Ever hear of geographic diversity? That's why people say to move away from here because it's easier to get in elsewhere. Plus, if you're the first in your family to go to college AD's look at that. You are silly.

You are an idiot: geographical diversity does not have socio-economic constraints or preferences - both the coal miner's child and the executive's child would provide geographical diversity if he/she were from the same state.

More to the point, why should someone who is black or Hispanic and socio-economically well-off, be given any sort of preference?

Nope, not an idiot. First of all, yes, the "executive's kid" in coal-country gets the geographic diversity nod, but how many of those do you imagine their are? There is no perfect way of doing this, but the geographic diversity does serve as a blunt proxy so you're not getting all bankers' kids from NY. But, again, yes, the "my Dad's a coal miner and I'm the first kid in my family to go to college" story of COURSE matters to the AD's. Put that in the essay, of course. In the Ivies and better SLACs, there's no formula. They don't add points for being a minority. It's all a "holistic" view. So, yes, being first in your family or a coal-miner's kid would of course be a step up.
You'd prefer a system in which it was all based on parental income, I suppose. That's fine, except it would be incredibly laborious/nearly impossible. First of all, it would have to be geographically weighted (we all know that making $80k in DC is very different from making $80k in Louisville, KY). Second, you can't just count income, you'd have to have information on assets. Otherwise you get the rich grandkids of parents who are "artists" or whatever who live in multimillion dollar houses and go to private school and trips to Paris. Essentially, every applicant would have to provide the information required of FA applicants. Don't know if that's workable.
Third, I do still think that there's reason to want to achieve ethnic/racial diversity separate and apart from socioeconomics. I still see racism in my kid's classroom. I still see racism in the role models presented in society. And I still think there's value in having our educational institutions mirror the makeup of our society.