They usually also have alternate admittance system but that's for 2% or 3% of students.
7% of girls are eliminated in the Computer Science branch (MP-Info), versus 27% of boys.
More info, in french: https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2014/11/25/l-ecole-pol...
And besides, the real filtering is actually done after the Baccalauréat: not everyone gets to be admitted to the big Parisian Lycées (Henry-IV, Louis-Le-Grand, etc.).
The problem is there are 400 million people in the USA, and the 1-2% of entering freshmen across the country having high scores mostly apply to the same few schools.
40% for book learning (memorisation)
30% for variations on things you've seen before
30% for applying concepts in new ways, requiring "deeper" understanding
Unless we want to train a generation of rote-memorizers and elite test takers, this is not a direction that should be pursued.
The legacy/z-list stuff demonstrates that the curation/engineering of the student body aspect of the process is bullshit. Kids who are marginally qualified and have rich parents seem to be able to make it.
Introducing a lottery system would eliminate the injustice and resentment where some admission officer is applying a "cool filter" to determine whether chinese/korean/indian people are worthy, or creating the assumption that other minorities were somehow unworthy of their opportunity.
I'm just an idiot who went to a SUNY school. In the 90s, if you met an SAT threshold and were a B-ish student you were in. We used to joke that we were the 13th grade of Massapequa high school -- there was no curation of the social skills of the student body. That said, we had a fine social life, and in rigorous subjects the dopiest idiots were filtered out. Computer Science 201 was a lecture hall with 800 students, and about 40-50% of the population was culled each year. About 40-50 students graduated. It was no Harvard, but we seemed to muddle though.
Sorry but what makes you think students with stellar grades have no social life? My memory of my four years at an "elite" NYC high school is that the students with the best grades (I was not even close) were just as social as the rest of us and participated in plenty of after school clubs and whatnot (more than I did).
"Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?"
Ironically that is a career path with a reputation for attracting anti-social psycopaths (but maybe this is a myth -- after all, Harvard admissions committees are there to find the applicants who proved their pro-social personalities by participating in exactly the sort of extracurriculars Harvard is looking for).
"No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale."
The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."
So regardless of intent, it's conclusively, unequivocally "racist" if the outcome of a selection process doesn't fall perfectly within a normal distribution?
Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.
Philip Greenspun on “Lean In”:
> Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David...takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.
If the admissions departments are just looking for higher numbers every year without even considering if they are plausible, that sounds like they are just asking for resume padding or fraud
"These people work too hard for too low aspirations, we need more people who work less hard but have higher aspirations"
Those people are the rich and powerful.
i was a smart enough kid that i probably could have done well academically at an ivy league school, but the whole time i was in college i knew i had no loftier goals than just getting a nice job as a software engineer and enjoying my time after work. there are hundreds of good state schools that do a great job preparing you for this kind of life if you put in the work. a spot at a school like MIT would honestly have been wasted on me, even though i was likely "smart enough" to be there.
The Ivy League schools understand that admission is a ticket to a comfy-but-historically-and-culturally-insignificant middle-class life. Their goal is to guard against applicants seeeking that and to look for those who will go further.
It's not unlike VCs who guard against investing in founders who will take the first acquisition offer they see so they can score a few million and live comfortably. That outcome does nothing for them.
Imagine a company that maintains a culture of grooming executives through the ranks. After reviewing their data, they find that more women than men leave to start families. Are they then justified to hire only men, or more subtly divert resources to only groom male junior employees?
OK, so an Ivy League school wants to continue with policies with racist outcomes because it's better for the school. It's probably going to stay legal for quite some time, so they'll be free to continue. But they shouldn't receive a dime of government money, and will deserve the scorn they'll be viewed with in history.
What's most frustrating is this case is a stalking horse for white racists who want to eliminate race as a consideration to keep higher education predominantly white and therefore economically advantaged.
They're definitely justified in filtering out people (men and women) who are more likely to leave to start familier, and prefer those who won't.
This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.
There's a premise here (and in many similar arguments) that the capitalists and their decision-makers (the managers) can only follow financial incentives; they are almost victims of circumstance with no agency of their own.
Markets and financial incentives are useful tools, but very imperfect. To keep society functioning and to do good and do well, we all must sacrifice some financial benefits. What is the financial incentive for soldiers, as a simple example, or for nurses who serve in Ebola zones? For Albert Einstein? 'The market made me do it' is not a defense; there are financial incentives for murder too; we must make our own decisions and we are responsible for the consequences.
From another perspective, it's ironic that capitalists, traditionally more conservative, take on this structuralist argument, usually abhorred by the right. If we say the system makes minorities and women poor, they say it's nonsense. If we say the system makes capitalists do evil, well what else could they do?
No that's just your interpretation.
> there are financial incentives for murder too
Indeed, whici is why the society introduced significant non-financial (and financial) disincentives for murder to counteract them.
Still doesn’t sound great. If you use race as a feature, you’ll give and deny opportunities based on race.
Are they largely looking for people with ‘change-the-world’, ‘make-a-big-impact’ potentials and great academic records (with the former being the more important criterion)? Or something else?
I expect these criteria can be described in words and it is not only learned through apprenticeship as supposedly there are tens or hundreds of officers doing the filtering.
I guess they might miss out on some exceptional generalists who tend to shine a bit later in life.
Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men. When they analysed the numbers, they found that it was because women generally applied to very departments with low admission rates, and men generally applied to departments with high admission rates.
There is a bit of self selection in the outcome here.
That's the Simpson's Paradox [0]. In Simpson's Paradox, you observe a trend in sub-groups but this trend disappears when these sub-groups are combined. I'm not sure of how this is the same. Could you explain how this is the same?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...
I'm not claiming Simpson's Paradox here. I'm commenting on the observations IvyAdmissions made (which was also my observation when I was in school). If what he says is true, the bias doesn't appear to be entirely from the admissions committee, but from the fact that Asian Americans are targeting a few professions (e.g. medical school) in a much higher proportion than other races.
Although I did not go to an Ivy league, I did go to a top school, and I saw pretty much the same thing. I hung out a lot with the Asian students, of which there were many. The Asian undergrads with top grades (South or East) were very reliably predictable: They either aimed for medical school, an MBA, or law school. The motives were all similar: These were high paying jobs. Almost none of them showed any passion for any of these fields. None of them wanted to become a lawyer to fight for worthy causes - they all wanted to go work at a law firm to get high pay. The pressure from their parents to go into one of these was strong - so much so that some of them did exhibit a passion for something, but they abandoned that passion and went into one of these career paths for grad school due to parental pressure. There were exceptions, but they stood out.
If this is reflective of the reality, it's understandable why Harvard is not admitting many of them.
This was quite a few years ago, and anecdotally I do see differences in the latest batch of Asian students - they are much less prone to the pressures of "must go be a high paying doctor/lawyer/businessperson". I do see a lot more creativity, variety and entrepreneurship, so things probably have changed.
Of course, all the usual caveats of relying on anecdotes apply here.
from here:
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination...
A main reason for this is that alumni, like newly minted admission officers, have no clue how preposterously competitive the process is and how many monstrously academically qualified applicants there are. So they write rave reviews of smart kids who really aren't all that special in the context of the applicant pool.
More seriously if your aim is to limit the number of people applying for premed then limit the number of pre-med slots and let the applicants know.
If demand is greater than supply then just put everyone over the acceptable score into a pool and draw out at random. Why resort to outright racism to solve a problem of supply and demand?
The data is pretty shocking and closely guarded by the testing people who believe they'd be asked to shut down altogether if it got out.
[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
Such an approach will likely encourage diversity as people who think they don't have a chance under the current system will apply.
Let's take your low end of 600 students. Let's say you are a former musician and could judge their ability after listening to a mere 1 minute of music. Plus perhaps 30 seconds to reflect upon what you heard and make some notes.
That alone is 15 hours of your work week as an admissions officer, or 3% of your total time for the review period if you figure a full 3 months of reviews for applications. That's assuming you didn't listen to musical excerpts from the thousands of other musician students you ostensibly reviewed to fill in the slots for the rest of the Freshman class.
Did you do that as an admissions officer?
I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest the OP do differently with this comment.
Compare with:
Of course you don't spend 3% of the process critically reading essays. You look to see what writing groups they were in as a kid, what essay contests they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list writing as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the English department at the university you're applying to, let them read your entrance essay, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.
The difference is that we presume the OP did take the time to critically read those essays. Imagine if OP had written, "I didn't see much in the way of extra-curricular writing activities, so I can assumed those 600 essays were boring." It's not a serious statement.
Presumably there is a web portal for retrieving the essays, reading them in the browser, making comments, etc. Presumably that web portal exists because admissions can assume with impunity that admissions officers are literate and can critically read and rate an essay according to some predetermined rubric.
We don't have that same kind of API for musical excerpts because we don't have the same rate of musical literacy we have for reading literacy. That's unfortunate because an admissions officer could tell a lot about the applicant's propensity for risk taking, sense of humor, and a lot of other important characteristics that are difficult to convey in test scores and essay form.
Again, I'm not sure what you're suggesting the OP do differently. It's not feasible for admissions directors to be experts in every area they're evaluating candidates on, so they have to outsource some of that to people who have already evaluated the candidates on those dimensions.
Same goes for playing an instrument. You have to listen to the applicant to know whether their playing is remarkable or not.
To be as clear as possible: OP should have reserved judgment on the musical prowess of the applicants instead of claiming all 600-1000 applicants were unremarkable players without having listened to them.
tldr; "I didn't see any musical accolades listed in their packets" != "unremarkable players."
Then why do college admissions factor in race at all?
> Their grades and scores are STELLAR!
But the complaint is that their grades and scores aren't stellar. That lower grades and scores are being chosen over higher grades and scores based apparently on race.
> What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?
Once again, the complaint is that people with equal or better extracurricular activities and better grades are being passed over based on race.
> No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.
But we know this isn't true. We know that college admins have discriminated before.
Your argument is just a rehash of the anti-semitic discrimination against jews decades ago.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/18/harvard-ad...
It's pretty much boilerplate word for word copy of previous racist admission policies.
I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies.
The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist.
Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply.
You review the applications and notice to your horror that 600-1000 of them all have perfect or near perfect test scores, boring essays, so-so extracurriculars (Overwatch tournaments and robotics club don't cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.
Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can't do pre-med. Once the pre-med spots fill up what will the rest do? That seems like a very horrible situation to put students in. There's just not enough spots.
What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who's going to produce art and go into politics? Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?
So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They'll get into fine schools and be successful, there's just only so many slots of students like that in the class.
This cohort of students happens to be disproportionately asian. No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.