IMHO it's sour grapes from someone that tried to game the system but didn't get the prize they wanted.

Try: speculative, imaginary, and unsubstantiated by evidence. Stereotypical, if you’re feeling adventurous.

I’m not discounting that you could be right, just that you could be right in a totally contrived scenario.

And this is not a "totally contrived" scenario. The guy is posting his kid's resume on some blog post about SAT scores in another state. That's very strong evidence as to his involvement and importance he placed on college admissions.

https://www.baylorisr.org/wp-content/uploads/Boy-Scouts-Repo...

If a kid does that of their own volition then it's evidence of something.

If a kid does it because their parents made them do it in order to put it on their college application then it's meaningless.

Seriously. Let's compare to scouting, which starts young. Every year, 4.14 million students participate in track across all age groups. There are at most 9,516 D1 track and field scholarships. That's a maximum 0.2% (not 2%, 0.2%), often lower. Again, good enough for a D1 partial scholarship is often the "bar" for consideration of athletics in admissions beyond "participation item". And even then, it's not automatic admissions. It's just the bar you need to clear for them to care. To consider it as part of the package. You probably need something else, in addition to this and great scores.

And, to be clear, the difference between 5% ability and 1% ability is HUGE. The difference between 1% and 0.5% is again huge. In many activities, there's an exponential curve in terms of talent and effort. So we're not merely talking about a few percentage points, we're talking about a very qualitatively significant difference in kind.

The other issue with scouting in particular is that it's not competitive and the requirements are, honestly, mostly box checking. And the ones that aren't pure box checking are subjective and opaque.

Now, don't get me wrong. Scouting is a worthy endeavor and achieving Eagle Scout is RIGHTFULLY a crowning achievement for many youth! It's something to be proud of and which should be awarded!

But here, the sour grapes are not about good or even great schools. It's about admission to the absolutely most competitive departments at the absolutely most competitive schools. And in those cases, Eagle Scout just doesn't move the needle as much as people here assume. It's the minimum to even start taking scouting seriously as a resume item, not a needle mover.

Aside from grades and AP scores, it's a lot of "showing up" dressed up as accomplishment. JV track explains itself, the debate stuff is the equivalent of getting third place in one track event at one regional meet, and Eagle Scout is impressive but IMO doesn't show anything that doing well in school doesn't already show.

Everyone applying to CMU CS or Harvey Mudd has high GPAs, high standardized test scores, and lots of 4s and 5s on AP tests. So the extra curricular stuff really does matter, because there are way fewer seats than people with good grades and test scores. And in this applicant's case, the ECs just are not there.

The applicants who are setting themselves apart via debate are consistently doing well at the best national tournaments in the most demanding and competitive formats for years; not getting 3rd place in Congressional at one regional tournament. The ones setting themselves apart with track are participating in Varsity at least a few years, doing well at State, and a likely courting at least D2 athletic scholarships. The ones who are setting themselves apart via scouting are going way beyond the minimum requirements for Eagle Scout.

Also, Northeastern and Amherst have fantastic CS programs and getting into CS programs like those at Harvey Mudd or CMU is probably harder than getting into ivies these days.

> The ones setting themselves apart with track are participating in Varsity at least a few years, doing well at State, and a likely courting at least D2 athletic scholarships

Sports (especially track and field) don't set you apart at all as an applicant for unless you're good enough to make the college's varsity team. That's the sole metric highly selective schools are using to assess athletic ability unless you have some extenuating circumstance that makes your participation in the sport especially meaningful.

I think his point was that any kid of any race other than Asian with identical stats would have been accepted.

And my point is that this is not true.

His scores are near the median for those cohorts, and only a tiny fraction of students with those scores are admitted. Test scores are literally the only non-average thing on his resume for college applicants in general, and among CMU CS/HM CS they don't set him apart from anyone admitted or even tons of other people rejected.

Now, if he received an NDT bid and/or made it deep into nationals? Placed in State and had D1 track scholarship potential? Special distinctions from the Scouts? Sure. Those might raise my eyebrow. But he has average scores _for the cohort_ and nothing else of note on his resume other than participation in a few after-school activities.

Schools like CMU CS and HM can demand both his scores and also excellence in other dimensions. They have tons of applicants with NDT bids in policy/PF/LD and similar or better scores. They have tons of applicants who are on Varsity track teams, even do well at state, and have similar or better scores.

Even more importantly, they have tons of applicants who do really interesting and unique things outside of the official college prep extra-curricular stuff -- run apps/websites with tons of users, OSS packages with lots of stars, various types of civil society involvement, and so on. Those students also have similar or better scores.

And they turn down a lot of those applicants who have the same scores as this student but are also top percentile at their extra-curricular activities.

Good test scores aren't enough to get into CMU CS/HM, and that's all this student has. It's not racism. It's merit.

Again, this discussion is about a real person and it's a shame his dad entered his resume into this discourse non-anonymously.

But the narrative is just wrong. The bar is absurdly higher than this dad thinks it is. Period.

Maybe it should be different--for example, I'm at a loss to understand how athletics might predict success in computer science programs (grit, maybe?)--and there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

Grit, leadership, team work, the crucible of (a different type of) competition, tactics and strategy, etc. Again, not sports in general, but specifically being good enough at a sport to get a D1 or D2 scholarship, requires significant discipline and inter-personal skills.

(I also think tech folks under-appreciate that physical movement is a type of intelligence that might just correlate well with certain types of high-stress/low-information decision making... at least as well as IQ correlates with similar types of things... but that's an evidence-free conjecture on my part.)

> there's probably a reasonable argument that the four-factor (academic, extracurricular, athletic, personal) model creates more systematic biases than it avoids. But what you're saying is pretty accurate.

That's definitely true -- eg a student from outside the college-going class or without enough economic capital wouldn't be able to participate in niche sports and become elite by virtue of big fish/small point dynamics. And their parent wouldn't have friends who could give advice or open doors. But, do note that the student in the referenced paragraph is not a victim of that type of systematic bias. His father, a partner at IBM, is exactly the type of person who is positioned to provide those unfair advantages.

Getting good grades is "gaming the system" now?

But either way that's just one part of the resume. It's all the extra curriculars that look like blatant box checking without any real accomplishment.

To me, it says that a kid had ambition, intelligence, determination, and conscientiousness, but to each his own.

Will the presidents, chancellors, board of governors, or deans of these institutions ever have to compete for these seats? Obviously no, and their own children will likely benefit in some form, whether it is legacy status or academic nepotism/networking, from their parents’ existing positions of power.

So on whom does the burden of balancing the scales, not in theory but in practice, fall? Not white students at the nation’s elite schools, whose enrollment numbers even after various forms of affirmative action have been implemented have remained steady. Not black, latino/a/x, or Native American students whose enrollment numbers have benefited from targeted recruitment. Not international students, whose full-tuition payments have ensured their enrollment numbers have only increased with the decline of public funding (in the case of public institutions) and budgetary restructuring (in the case of private institutions).

From a racial dimension, the primary group paying for higher education’s experiments in educational racial composition have primarily been Asian-American students, among whom there are prospective students (as we can see in the linked comment) with top-percentile scores in their respective areas of study, high-level achievement in non-academic pursuits, and a widely dispersed range of target schools.

For all the moral certainty that higher education likes to presume, they have a dumbfounding lack of self-awareness when it comes to the moral hazard of making others pay for the consequences of their self-appointed mission.

This is, of course, assuming they aren’t fully aware and satisfied with the results they’ve produced.

Full disclosure. I am mostly done with affirmative action. Standardized testing all the way. It is not perfect, but its better than 'whose ancestors suffered the most recently'. Otherwise we will continue to see a steady degradation akin to students voting a chemistry out for tough grades ( recent news that is making rounds on social media ).

It seems racism is accepted in academia, when it affects a demographic you deem 'problematic'

(Go ahead. Downvote. It does wonders to change my mind lol).

Personally, I find treating people like trading cards and trying to "collect them all" is much more abhorrent.

You have to make a conscious choice to accept some adjustments higher if the foundation is systematically unfair. It might feel unfair to the folks who benefit from systematic advantages early.

And yeah, fixing that is going to cost some folks. Good news, we could figure out who benefitted or even just tax the very wealthy to get it fixed.

Besides, every other country in the world gets to have its own cultural identity. The "real world" is very much a collection of monocultures. Only in America is it considered bad to have a cultural identity.

Here you use the term "monoculture." You appear to be using culture and race interchangeably. Clearly they are not the same. Are you referring to monoculture or monorace?

As far as why I'm interested in these buckets - it's because this seems to be a very pressing matter of national concern - isn't there a supreme court case regarding this issue on the docket now?

You could do that, but if we disregard race as a factor and use a completely unbiased approach (example: simply select the highest scores and roll a dice in case of a tie), it is easy to see what the distribution would look like based on that table.

This includes universities, high-prestige schools like medical schools, and a lot of creative industries (mentorship opportunities and scholarships just aren't there for you). This is unfair, but it's difficult to discuss this openly non-Asian people due to a lot of skepticism about disadvantages.

But the nice thing is that the private sector truly doesn't care as much. So long as you can help make a company money, they will be eager to hire you. This includes FAAMG, Jane Street, and other companies - I personally know East Asian friends who had no difficulty working there, whereas others with similar or stronger work ethics faced a far more uphill battle getting into medical school. There is a lot of room for success at the most pragmatic and practical organizations, and there are plenty of other applicants for people doing do-good work that directly benefits society (hence the rejections despite hard work).

If you really still want to contribute, effective altruism via donations to effective charities is still an option, along with entrepreneurship for good via founding your own company.

What does this mean? Does it mean proportionally compared to the US population or does it mean proportional to their test scores?

[1] has data on US med school matriculants for MD granting institutions. It seems to show that of the approximately 22k matriculants to US med school between 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 admissions cycles, 5k (4,687 at the lowest and 5,151 at the highest) are Asian Only. So Asian Only is roughly 21 to 22% of med school matriculants.

US census results from 2020 seem to say Asians make up 6% of the population [2]. I know this isn't perfect because we really care about Asian population from those in the med school application age range, but I'm not familiar enough with US census data to find it.

Unfortunately I can't find data for DO schools or for GPA and MCAT scores for admissions by race.

[1] https://www.aamc.org/media/6031/download?attachment

[2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race...

The college rejections are weird, yes, but I don’t feel bad for him

A lot of these people spend hours a week studying for the SATs and courses with the dream and imagination of getting into an Ivy League. You could say it's a misplaced effort, that these kids should lower expectations, and that these people should be happy with the opportunities they have, and there's merit.

But in the moment, it's a huge blow to feel like hard work just won't pay off, and it certainly caused depression among a few people I knew. This can be mitigated by good mentorship and parenting, but not all people end up with good mentors, and parents who didn't experience the process might not understand it either.

Unfortunately that point it’s a pain in the ass to go back.

Getting something out of College is a lot of what you put into it. At Umass we had students who didn't go to class and did rather poorly. Many left. We had some who worked really hard and went on to Ivy league grad schools. Northeastern had the Coop program which was really useful for friends that went there undergrad to get work experience. Some of college is luck (who you end up meeting, if classes give you background on work. My CS Operating Systems class was invaluable for me in my first post grad school job)

Probably lots of fraud the other direction. E.g.: A white person claiming to be Native American.

Colleges definitely look to the other way a bit to hit metrics / numbers, but what about the other direction?

UIUC and UT Austin I agree, little surprising, but again, the CS program is very competitive, and it doesn't surprise me he didn't get in. Stats are irrelevant for Asians - if you have a 1500+ you're considered "good", you can't gain anything by having a 1580 vs. a 1520 for example. It really does come down to your essays, extracurriculars, and overall 'package'. Which I genuinely believe is the most fair way to accept folks into college.