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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]* Get rid of the essays.  They can and are being gamed.
* Tests - Provide everyone the opportunity to prep online.  My kid used Khan Academy and one other online course (Prepexpert).  Khan Academy is free.  Prepexpert cost about $600.  Pay poor kids to take these courses.  
* ECs - [b]Make a list of "real" ECs - Jobs, community service, ECs related to your major IN SCHOOL, etc[/b].  I'm sure others can come up with an equitable list.  
* Assign a certain percentage of seats to poor people and "[b]true" URMs (Native Americans and Blacks with slave ancestry on both sides of the family[/b]).  Others should be covered by the "poor" category.

Can colleges be forced to do play?  
- State schools can, by Government mandate.
- The so-called Private schools will play along if you threaten to remove their tax subsidy (i.e. make them pay tax on their income).[/quote]

Wow. Re: the bold, you'd say that kids who want to go to college would have to ignore doing any ECs they actually enjoy, or which fulfill them personally, because they'd have to spend that time on "jobs, community service, ECs related to your [college] major [in high school]." I guess you can counter that kids can do whatever they want but shouldn't put anything on college applications except the three categories you list.

1. There are not necessarily "ECs related to" a kid's desired [i]college[/i] major available at the kid's [i]high school[/i] or elsewhere; and many high schoolers don't yet know what they plan to choose as a major so how would they rack up those college-major-related ECs in high school? 
2. Community service is already a high school requirement in many school systems. 
3. Jobs? Are you one of the adults who believes there are endless jobs out there for high school kids? Do you have any idea how much time advanced HS courses can take up even on weekends? Sure, there are kids who work jobs and also take the hardest HS courses and succeed. But it's not a given that having a job is doable, or desirable in EVERY case. It certainly shouldn't affect a kid's college admission if he or she couldn't work a job for pay while in HS. Some kids live in areas where there aren't jobs for the asking. Maybe you're unaware of that....

[/quote]

Those were just suggestions.  See the sentence that follows " [i]I'm sure others can come up with an equitable list. "[/i].[/quote]

It's difficult to come up with criteria where SES would not give an advantage to some extent. For example, my kids have loads of community service, but most of it depended upon our ability to transport them these opportunities.  [/quote]

I hear you. The URM category is tough to monitor. It's tricky though. My mom is Mexican-American. Thanks to 23andMe, we know that she is about 60% Native American as well as 7% African. She is very brown. Does she qualify? I'm her daughter. I'm probably about 30% Native American. I could look Italian. Do I qualify? My DD is about 15% Native American. She is very white. Does she qualify? My guess is that my mom counts as a minority for sure, but maybe not me and my daughter?  I have a friend. He is a very light-skinned Black man, but looks identifiably Black. Does he qualify? What do we do with someone who has a slave ancestor but also predominantly white ancestry? Does this person qualify? I have another friend who is a Mayflower descendant with a trust fund. He adopted Ethiopian kids. Do they qualify? It's tricky. I do agree that giving URM preference to descendants of wealthy Latin Americans is probably not in the spirit of affirmative action.[/quote]

Here's how you go about it..

Dedicate a certain % of seats for Poor/URMs (with a nicer nomenclature of course).  Let's say that's 10% (could be 5, 15 or even 20).   5% of that (flexible) is assigned to what I called "true" URMs, those systematically disadvantaged over a long period of time.  IMHO, that's Native Americans and Blacks who were brought here as slaves.  We could arbitrarily set the bloodline requirement to 50% and over time change that to 100% for Native American heritage.  For Blacks, it would be the ability to trace their ancestry to slaves on BOTH sides of the family.  This would be regardless of their financial status.

If the bloodline % is lower, say they married a White, they will not quality but if they became poor or continue to remain poor, they would be covered by the other 5% of the 10% quota.  Something along those lines.  The purpose of this is to eventually emancipate everyone so these set-asides disappear for everyone other than people who are poor.

This will exclude Hispanics (from Spain or from Latin America), African Americans who just showed up yesterday, etc.  If they are poor, of course they would be covered by the other 5%.  This way, we don't have to worry about pleasing every URM as well as prevent colleges from coming up with their own version of URM benevolence.[/quote]

I can’t even believe I just read this.  Or that someone actually thinks any of this is rational.[/quote]

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