Reply to If Affirmative Action goes, legacy will fall.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]AA is a travesty in large part because of the significant disparity in the qualifications of URM applicants vs. the general applicant pool.  I'd be all for putting a finger on the scale in favor of URMs everything else being more or less equal....that would be fair.  I believe a saw a study that detailed the qualification gap for legacy admits and it was significantly less than URMs but still meaningful.  I'd be fine with the finger on the scale here as well given the benefits to the university......alumni loyalty, giving, etc.[/quote]

Why do the URM applicants have lower qualifications?[/quote]

Because the universities handicap their scores, on balance, to recruit a sufficient number to meet their URM quotas. Of course that's not to say that there aren't URMs that are off the charts and wouldn't have needed any help but on balance, they do.  Princeton did a study on the extent of the handicap a while back....just google it.  I saw another study that I think was authored by a Harvard professor that analyzed the qualification gaps for legacies and athletes.  Put the two of them together and you get a better picture of what is going on in admissions. I've always been curious about the quantifiable benefit of lesser hooks like geographic diversity or first-time college.[/quote]

You did not answer the question.  I asked [b][u]why [/u][/b]URMs have lower qualifications.[/quote]

DP.  The reason is that URM have lower qualifications in large part become of systemic inequalities in education that still linger today.  URM frequently come from poorer communities and poorer families due to the historical inequalities.  While there are some minorities that have risen to higher economic status and have moved into better school zones, the number of URM that have achieved such and are able to compete for higher education is still demographically below the collective representation in the collegiate pool.  Add that those that have achieve better educational standards then distribute among the many schools out there and you end up with the number of highly qualified URM are proportionally significantly lower than their representation in the population.

In order to give the URM the educations that will allow them to rise above the segregation and educational inequalities, institutions will handicap the scores to get the demographics of the student population to more closely match the URM representations within the general population.  This means more highly educated URM who will ideally go out, become employed at higher levels, raising the number of URM who have higher economic status and will move into better school zones and over generations, will even out the historical inequalities based on systemic issues, such as segregation.[/quote]

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