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Wow I'm just seeing this. Sorry for the late reply.
That "analysis" is based on a basic misunderstanding of how admissions officers define merit. It is not the highest test score wins.
The baseline is "student has taken the most rigorous couses available and earned a high GPA doing so" resulting in the student being in the top 5-10% or so of their educational environment AND they have test scores in high percentiles to back them up.
Once you pass that threshold you are in the pool for consideration.
Besides, listen to yourself. You are really arguing that students who have scored better than 95% OF THE COUNTRY on the SAT/ACT while loading up on the APs and such are "inferior" somehow. People are really fighting tooth and nail to say those students don't "deserve" their place. (!!) They're not "smart enough"(????!!!!!)
Is that the level we've descended to? Doesn't that strike you as petty?
To me the real problem is people are so invested in going to an elite school that they get this anxious about being let in, to the point they will fight each other tp the death like it's a bloodsport. It's totally out of control.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grlzrl
This is what I have seen reported as well.
I understand the selection process just fine. Its an elite group. What I'm telling you, is what is common knowledge...there are far fewer blacks in that tier than non-Hispanic whites are Asians, in terms of the distribution. It isn't to say there are none. There are. But relative to this tier (and its only the top 1-1.5% that are generally offered admission to a school like Harvard), they are not qualified.
It is of no benefit being in the top 5%. The bar is WAY higher at Harvard.
And yes it is common for many students at that level to :
1. Have high GPAs - 4.4-4.6
2. Have high SAT and ACT scores (top 1-2%)
3. Have plenty of extra-curricular activities and volunteer experience.
The facts are that on the basis of the above, ie, "academic merit" blacks are VASTLY over-represented and 90% of them wouldn't be there, and for Hispanics it was almost as much (over-representation).
This is because of the AA policies Harvard instituted solely to meet an arbitrary "diversity" score.
And in the process of admitting unqualified minorities, they passed over qualified minorities (Asians), and qualified whites (minorities depending where they are from - CA for example, whites are a minority, even if the largest one). That is the source of the racial discrimination lawsuit.
USC is not on Stanford's level academically but is still a hugely desirable school. I think the kicker might have been that these girls fell close to the admissions standards for USC so that was the top end for them.
To be honest I was more shocked Wake Forest, University of San Diego, Texas and UCLA were on the list- but that probably is just bias on my part. I'm assuming that if its cheating you go big or go home- but maybe the parents were logical about how far they could stretch. And in truth those are schools that are a reach for the majority of students.
I would pay to see a psychologist take apart all of the comments on this thread given how many of these schools are getting dissed, people are insisting presidential children would all but fail out of community college, there seems to be a perception that athletes get in with a 1.5 and 650 SAT as opposed to the lesser discounts they actually receive....
I wasn't shocked to see Texas on the list. I graduated from UT-Austin in the 1990s when admission was a bit less of an arms race (Gen X is a pretty small cohort). Texas's "top 10%" rule was established the same year I graduated. I predicted at the time that admission to UT-Austin would be ridiculously competitive 10 years later. I was right. I should also add that UT-Austin is not the only university to use auto admissions policies; the "top 10%" policy is statewide and university system-wide.
Nowadays, UT-Austin restricts its auto-admit pool to the top 6-7% of a candidate's graduating class. If your class rank puts you there, admission is a given; you just need to fill out the application. If you don't, you are subjected to their "holistic" admissions process which itself has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, mostly around "less-qualified" minority students being admitted instead of "highly qualified" white applicants.
Last I read, the acceptance rate for non-auto admit students was 14%. For out-of-state students, it's even lower. UT-Austin has an extremely large undergraduate student body (one of the largest in the country). It was listed as a "public Ivy" over 25 years ago and has only built its reputation since then as a world-class institution. It does not recruit out-of-state students; you'll never see them at a college admissions fair in Oklahoma, California, New York, etc. Its non-auto admit acceptance rate is lower than USC's...so if USC is an elite school, UT-Austin is even more elite. However, as a state institution, it is also bound by Texas law....hence the auto admit policy.
In Texas, UT-Austin is rightly regarded as the best public university in the state, hands-down. The only university in the state that can top it (public or private) is Rice University in Houston. All other state schools are ranked below UT-Austin in nearly every category. The only thing that holds UT-Austin's rank lower than it really should be is student retention. UT-Austin is merciless when it comes to weeding out underperforming freshmen. If you don't swim, you sink...and they let you drown. For a lot of students, getting in is the easy part.
LMAO at Dr. Dre bragging about how his daughter got into USC on her own merits. Some people are so stupid you just know it took big bucks to get their kid into the school, and in his case, it cost $70 million.
LMAO at Dr. Dre bragging about how his daughter got into USC on her own merits. Some people are so stupid you just know it took big bucks to get their kid into the school, and in his case, it cost $70 million.
Green privilege.
And so many thought that all these wealthy entertainers were just so great that even their offspring were born with super high intelligence levels. Hahaha.
LMAO at Dr. Dre bragging about how his daughter got into USC on her own merits. Some people are so stupid you just know it took big bucks to get their kid into the school, and in his case, it cost $70 million.
Green privilege.
The donation was made 6 years ago when Ms. Young was only 12. I'm pretty sure she had other things in mind than which college to attend. Also, this was done in the public eye just like every other college does with large donations. I attended a college that had a business department named after a founder of a chain of retail stores. There was a building specifically for studying poultry science that was named after a family that founded a poultry company. The sports complexes all have a person's name prominently attached to them and they have been there for decades. That part is nothing new.
I'm almost certain that the college admissions forms don't have a field titled "How much money did your family donate to this institution?" Maybe she got some special treatment if someone recognized the name Andre Young. I wouldn't and I've listened to his music since the 1980's.
As far as we know, there were no bribes and she actually took her SAT/ACT test(s).
Ann Landers July 19, 1999 https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-07-19-9907190166-story.html A woman wrote that a parent does their child no favor by giving them everything they want on a silver platter. Her parents gave her everything. She says if she had to pay for her college education, she might have worked harder for better grades.
Yep. The LA Times piblished an article on it, citing a study by Princeton.
Quote:
"In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.
Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.
Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic — one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.
"Let's talk about Asians," she says.
Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term "bonus" to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a "bonus" of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
"Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points."
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission."
Breaking: Huffman and thirteen others will plead guilty.
Being reported by NBC News - no other details yet.
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