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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]URM harping wrt Ivy admissions always fascinates me, because it is clear to me that most people don't fully understand or appreciate the pool of applicants. Just doing a little bit of math can actually illuminate things dramatically.

Harvard being Harvard has their pick of any and all applicants, black, white, latino or asian. Now the US Dept of Ed estimates that there are about 12 million college students in the US, of which about 15% are black. So there are roughly 1.8 million black college students. Of those, the College Board tells us that the 99% for college bound black SAT takers is a score of 2100. That means that there are 18,000 black college students in the country with a score at least 2100, if not higher.

According to the Princeton Review, 2110 is the 25th percentile for admitted SAT scores, while Harvard self reported a mean SAT score for the class of 2017 of 2237.

So taken at face value, there are at least 18,000 black college students with SAT scores at Harvard's 25th percentile or higher. Which I would deem to be standard minimum qualifications.

However, Harvard has an undergraduate student enrollment of about 7200, of which 12% is black. Therefore, there are about 1080 black students at Harvard, which is 6% of the 18,000 black college students with minimum standard qualifications for enrollment. And it cannot be farfetched to assume that these are the absolute cream of the crop, with an expectation that their test scores would be significantly higher than the 99th percentile of SAT scores for black college students.

So stop it with this undeserving URM nonsense already.[/quote]

Actually, if you look at the statistics it's not anywhere close to that number.

[b]"If we raise the top-scoring threshold to students scoring 750 or above on both the math and verbal SAT — a level equal to the mean score of students entering the nation's most selective colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and CalTech — we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT and 363 black students scored 750 or above on the verbal portion of the test. Nationwide, 33,841 students scored at least 750 on the math test and 30,479 scored at least 750 on the verbal SAT. Therefore, black students made up 0.7 percent of the test takers who scored 750 or above on the math test and 1.2 percent of all test takers who scored 750 or above on the verbal section."[/b]

So, there are probably a few hundred Black students who scored at or above the mean score for Harvard.   [/quote]

Nice try, but I found the source of your data and it is from 2005. The College Board has changed both the exam and scoring since then. My data comes directly from the College Board itself and is from 2013.
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-By-Gender-Ethnicity-2013.pdf

There are also a lot of other things about this that are not as clear cut as you think that this quote supports. Your data is for annual test takers, while I am extrapolating to the entire population of college students. So if these percentages still hold from 2005, despite modifications to the exam, it still proves that there are at least 1,000 black college students at or above the Harvard SAT mean. Which means that a substantial proportion of black Harvard undergrads will be above the mean score.

Anyway you slice and dice it, you are going to have a hard time finding significant preference for URMs in the data. [/quote]

PP here, I would just add one more thing. If people want to object that it is "easier" for highly qualified black students to gain acceptance over equally qualified whites or asians, that is a fair criticism because the pool of highly qualified black applicants is significantly smaller. But the idea that lesser qualified black students are gaining admission to America's top colleges over more qualified white or asians, the data just does not back that up.

However, since the pool is smaller and once you add up all the highly qualified blacks enrolled at Ivies and other top colleges, you could probably wage a fair argument that many black students gaining admission to many of the "second tier" liberal arts colleges are probably not as highly qualified as their classmates, e.g. Bowdoin, GW, etc. But then I would suspect that the qualifications would even out again at the public universities, particularly since at many (e.g. Maryland) there is a lot variability around the mean as well as many in states like Washington, California and Texas that have race neutral admissions policies.[/quote]

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