Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think what is upsetting people is they think w good grades, great scores and ECs, it would be easy to get into the top 20 or ivies. Problem is there is grade inflation so it is difficult to judge the caliber of the student. Then you have the prepping that favors those who can afford them. Legacies and $$$ gives an advantage more than peuple realized. So for the average person who did their best, it would be pure luck to get into the top 20s and to have this scandal revealing how the wealthy group who already have a leg up in admissions trying to tilt it further, is defiantly depressing.

Poorly calibrated expectations are the root of the problem. People greatly underestimate the amount of chance that is involved in the college admissions process.

I am PP and I agree. They need to think in numbers: let’s use Dartmouth. There are 2000 seats. So u have a DD applying. That means 1000 seats. 25% of Dartmouth admits are athletes- small school w lots of sports teams. Not an athlete? That leaves 750 spots. Let’s say 10%-15% each for legacies, URM, first gen, wealthy/development cases, international, musical talent (they need musicians also) - there will be overlap so let’s use lowerbound of 10%. This total around 500 kids. So we are left with 250 spots at best for all the unhooked kids...if this shows how much pure luck it is for the remaining.

Anonymous wrote:I think what is upsetting people is they think w good grades, great scores and ECs, it would be easy to get into the top 20 or ivies. Problem is there is grade inflation so it is difficult to judge the caliber of the student. Then you have the prepping that favors those who can afford them. Legacies and $$$ gives an advantage more than peuple realized. So for the average person who did their best, it would be pure luck to get into the top 20s and to have this scandal revealing how the wealthy group who already have a leg up in admissions trying to tilt it further, is defiantly depressing.

Poorly calibrated expectations are the root of the problem. People greatly underestimate the amount of chance that is involved in the college admissions process.

I think what is upsetting people is they think w good grades, great scores and ECs, it would be easy to get into the top 20 or ivies. Problem is there is grade inflation so it is difficult to judge the caliber of the student. Then you have the prepping that favors those who can afford them. Legacies and $$$ gives an advantage more than peuple realized. So for the average person who did their best, it would be pure luck to get into the top 20s and to have this scandal revealing how the wealthy group who already have a leg up in admissions trying to tilt it further, is defiantly depressing.

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Anonymous wrote:Based on our suburban public school three years in a row

At most 1% of kids get into a top private. Here are some stats

Rank #3 - White female. Deferred from Stanford. Got into Brown and Duke. Went to state flagship

Rank #2 - Asian female, Applied ED to Penn, went to Penn

Rank #1 - Asian Male. Only got into Cornell and Dartmouth. Went to Dartmouth

Anecdotally, only URM's or diversity cases in our school make it to HYPSM


End of Story.

I guess you can keep hating on minorities, but the reality is that these schools are still majority white, with a national demographic that is now nearly not for that cohort. I have no idea what's going on with your school, but it's not the case that white kids are locked out. Not remotely true.

Incorrect. Whites comprise less than 50% of the student body at most of the ivies. White students are down to 36% of undergrads at Stanford.

Here are facts:

The number of today's 17 and 18 year olds who are white is barely over 50%. Hard to claim that there is any big disadvantage to being white.

Schools play with how they count ethnicity, including whether international students are in or out and percentages of admits versus students matriculating. But most top schools are still majority white among US students, and once you get out of schools that are at the very top and/or in more urban areas, the percentage of white students soars (here's looking at you, Dartmouth, with 65% white).

There is no top ranked school that has a percentage of African Americans or Latinos (or Native Americans or Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, for that matter) among their student body that exceeds the percentage in the population generally. For URMs, every top school is LESS diverse than the national population of college-age people.

So, you can keep blaming minority students when your kid doesn't get in to a school, but that's just scapegoating.

What is the distribution of races amongst college applicants?

Whites and Asians make up a huge proportion of those who are "college ready" based on test scores, so comparing their proportion to the general public is irrelevant.

I found this interesting--the acceptance rate for all racial groups at Harvard has actually fallen in recent decades, with the *steepest* declines for African Americans and Latinos:

"...the acceptance rates for all racial groups did not fall at the same rate. African-American applicants saw the steepest decline — their acceptance rates fell by 12.4 percentage points over 18 years. In the 1995-1996 admissions cycle, 19.2 percent of African-American Harvard hopefuls earned a spot at the College; in the 2012-2013 cycle, just 6.8 percent of African-American applicants did so.

Hispanic-Americans saw the second-steepest decline of 8.9 percentage points, while white students saw a decline of 5.4 percentage points. Asian-American applicants saw the smallest decrease: their acceptance rate fell by just 3.6 percentage points in that time period."

This doesn't fit the popular narrative on DCUM that it's easier to get in for "URMs." Looks like it's actually more difficult, relative to whites and Asian Americans, than it was a couple of decades ago.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/19/acceptance-rates-by-race/

People on DCUM struggle with understanding statistics sometimes. This graph does show that it is easier for AAs and Hispanics to be admitted compared to Asians and Whites. The admitted percentages have fallen for every group as more qualified applications are submitted. The increase over 20 years will obviously be greater for URMs due to outreach and efforts by universities, the College Board and high schools to extend college prep and expectations to a more diverse group (not to mention that the number of Hispanics in this country has increased dramatically in 20 years.). Anyway, the thing that people are complaining about when they say it is easier for URMs is not the acceptance rate, but the level of academic achievement needed for admittance. The difference in achievement between groups will be least at HPYS because they can recruit the highest achieving URMs, but as you go down the rankings, it would become acute.

PP here. I have to run to a mtg, so just a quick response. I actually do have a good handle on statistics (I have a Ph.D. in a research field). I only meant to suggest that there are different ways of looking at this. Yes, URMs ave. test scores are lower, but *as a group* they are less likely to be admitted now than in the 90s relative to whites and Asians.

As for level of "achievement," it depends on how you define it. You would like more emphasis placed on test scores, which is a fine position to take. However, with universities valuing holistic admissions, they disagree. And so you feel it's unfair that test scores don't get more emphasis, but universities are looking at what else applicants bring to the table. The latter seems especially key in the face of the current scandal over admissions, and the extensive test prep cottage industry.

DP -- what if you're both right? One pp is looking at what is happening at a DC area school, and the other is looking at nationwide statistics. A lower percentage of all applicants are getting admitted to Ivy League schools because a variety of factors have led to more students filing more applications per student (including URMs) for the same # of Ivy League slots, so the increase in applications is geometric. There are more MC/UMC+ educated URM parents (at least per capita) in the DC area than perhaps anywhere else in America, meaning there is a relatively big pool of high achieving URM students in the DC area that are competing for those spots. If we also posit that the Ivy League is only going to accept a certain # of students from a given school and/or the DC area (for geographic diversity purposes), it could also be true that the kids that are getting accepted from DC area are more likely to be URMs than the nationwide statistics would show. It definitely seems true that a white kid from Montana has a better chance of getting in to an Ivy than a white kid from DC. I don't have data on this, but it feels like the common app also has more kids applying from more different places than was true before. So it is possible that the kids from the DC area are getting squeezed from all sides. It does seem that the eastern seaboard used to have the Ivies pretty much to themselves (and before that, white people had the Ivies to themselves -- on top of competing with a smaller overall cohort of applicants), so this is a shock to people who are living in a different world than the one they grew up in. Go read the thread on the departing Sidwell college advisor. It's rough out there.

Agree with PP. thanks