Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/07/class-of-2026-yield-at-nearly-84-percent, https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026profileweb.pdf, https://admission.princeton.edu/apply/admission-statistics, https://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile/, https://facts.stanford.edu/academics/freshmen-class-profile/

Tools: Excel, PowerPoint

Woah, it's almost like there's more to college admissions than high standardized test scores.

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This is racism in action pure and simple. It's funny because these same universities have apologized for doing the exact same thing to Jews in the past.. but now that it's Asians it's suddenly OK.

How do you mean that? Whose money are you talking about?

Am I reading this correctly and 33% of the school population is URMs?

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Why would you do that?

This is true of college as a whole (and there are a lot of other wealth related inequities), but actually not for affording it, once you get into Harvard. These schools in the graphic all have really amazing financial aid.

If your household income is <120k for instance, you go to Stanford for free if you get in, flat out.

You are a bit screwed if you're properly middle class in a HCOL area esp. if your parents recently had a salary bump, but that's definitely not the same as low income students.

What is fucked up, is that a lot of the URM students at these places themselves come from insane amounts of wealth. The cross sectional view of race and wealth is probably a very different picture.

The SAT is a load of horse-ahem, anyway. It's not a predictor of intelligence or life outcomes or even college graduation. So much so that many colleges don't even require it, anymore. GPA is a better predictor of college success. And even that has serious limitations, post-Covid.

I get what the author is implying. Just wish they would come out and say instead of (probably) posting back to the thread under another handle.

The careerism these days is exhausting.

Yes and sadly this is reflected in the performance of these students at higher levels of education. As a college instructor, I can attest there is severe grade and degree inflation

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This is correct: 33% of the HYPMS domestic student population is URMs

That is incorrect

You're right, I'll delete my post. Misread.

Sure, but you're missing the competitive piece. You have 10 students who have nearly identical academic records. You can admit 5. 4 of them come from significant wealth and are likely to bolster your endowment. 6 come from low income families and would qualify for full financial aid.

Of those 10, all 4 endowment boosters are getting in. Period.

A lot of people won’t like the implications of this graphic lol

I'm pointing out how ridiculous it is to screech about demographics and diversity. I know that wasnt the point of this post but thats the mindset of every college these days.

How many Jews do your think exist?

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Are your serious? Whites are under represented too. Are you going to say white people are oppressed? Also what requirement is there that a private universities demographics have to directly match the demographics of top testing students? If that is some requirement who set the arbitrary data point for which we compare test scores? Gtfoh

Edit. I think people are misunderstanding my comment. I'm not saying that anything is justified because it happens to white people. I'm also not saying what happens to white people and Asians is racism as the commenter above me suggested. I'm saying their should be no expectation of demographic fairness or proportional equality in university admissions.

What is "this" exactly? And how it reflected in "which" students?

Read the graph, figure it out

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All is as it should be. The only thing the SAT measures is the ability to pay for courses and tutors to learn how to pass the SAT. I has no correlation to the actual performance of student later in their academic life.

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The SAT is actually one of the most predictive metrics of future success we have.

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"the only thing the SAT measures..."

Very true, but let's not forget that the only thing college measures is how well you do random busywork. Even the really technical majors still have a ton of BS classes, depending on the college.

I would argue that the SAT measures exactly the kind of thing that colleges demand out of their students.

Your conclusion is completely unsupported by fact. First off, what we see here is a massive advantage for black and Hispanic individuals. Your argument would therefore suggesr these individuals to be higher income than Asian and white families. That is simply false. Secondly, admission to these schools is completely need blind and they offer extremely good financial aid packages. If your family is low income you will go for free.

Family wealth is also predictive of future success. Should colleges try to admit students from wealthy families?

Yeah obviously, affirmative action doesn't attack the real problem. Broken culture, broken families, and broken windows.

Also, university here in America need to be reworked to be 95% US citizen. It is ridiculous that talented students are being rejected to keep that sweet international student tuition. This would help Asian and White Americans who are being cheated.

The whole point of standardized testing is to provide a way for smart kids from poor backgrounds to compete with the kids of the wealthy.

Based.

Good thing we look at more than SAT scores for college admissions. Otherwise we’d end up with a student body that is in no way representative of our society.

It’d be nice if it worked that way. After accounting for academic performance in high school, a lot of the remaining variation in college success explained by standardized tests reflects student background.

Edit: source for the downvoters

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Honestly this seems like a step toward the right kinds of things. More representation in these institutions is good.

White people are being oppressed just as much so its okay its they are doing it to Asians

Race should play 0 factor in college admissions

They can’t read graphs or figure things out— they’re part of that ‘special’ group who just got in because…. You know. 🤷🏻‍♂️

The "problem" is simply that the kids of the rich are legitimately the smartest kids. There's a considerable "nurture" component to intelligence and higher income kids receive it more than poor kids do. By the time they're 17 kids from high income families are just factually more intelligent and well rounded individuals. And that's not to mention any genetic intelligence advantage they may receive.

PS: While rich kids are nurtured better than poor ones I'd argue it's certainly possible for poor parents to provide a good head start to their kids. We see that even poor Asian kids greatly overperform on academic metrics because their parents stress it a lot at home and focus what resources they have primarily on education.

Diversity hires in a nutshell

I agree AA doesn’t fix the problem. But hard-working, talented people who are passionate about bringing their skills to the US shouldn’t be allowed to go just because they weren’t born there? That’s totally out of their control. That just shifts the problem to somewhere else

I totally misread this chart. I'm an idiot, ignore me lol.

How is denying people who are intellectually capable in favor of 'URM's the right step?

This is what systematic racism looks like, and you're calling it good..

If you factor out people who don’t factor out Jews, then you’ll find that the remaining Jew-factor-outing people are quite underrepresented in Universities.

Many more people are intellectually capable than are admitted. Legacy admissions are a tradition at all schools and this almost always favors affluent white families by putting legacy ahead of intellectual criteria. As a practical matter, legacy admissions help pay the bills by generating generous donations and fund raising that less well endowed schools depend on to operate. Affirmative action is necessary to provide more opportunities for underserved people of color who are also intellectually capable of doing the work required to graduate. SAT scores have never been the sole criteria for admission, nor should they be.

Unless you're Asian. Then it's not so good.

That’s not really true (about Asians). If you look at, say, the Hmong population in Minnesota, or the Burmese population where I currently live, they are less successful academically than average. Everyone loves to talk about “Asian culture” as a reason for Asian-American academic success, but it’s way overstated. The main reason Asians are successful is simply that a large portion of us are children or grandchildren of immigrants and immigration to America (aside from poor refugees) selects from the highest socioeconomic strata of foreign countries.

Edit for sources: for a general overview of what causes immigrant success in America I recommend Boustan and Abramitzky’s recent book, Streets of Gold. I also like Ed Lazear’s paper on the nuts and bolts of selection in America’s immigration system, but that’s a bit technical.

"Asian" is a poor way to lump together dozens of different ethnicities. It's obviously not true that they all value the same things, however in general there's no doubt Asian culture is more focused on education.

And in response to the first paragraph, the question is whether you want the post secondary education to simply reflect people’s advantages up to that point, or whether you also want to capitalize on ability that has been underdeveloped and under-recognized. If you want the former, reward standardized test (or straight-up family wealth). If you think the latter has benefits you can use policies like Texas‘s top percent policy which gives automatic acceptance based on percentile performance within schools. This is empirically shown to increase college attainment among economically disadvantaged students with no real downsides.

Edit: here’s the Texas Top Percent research

I guess your perspective really depends on what you think the test tells you and what you think HYPMS should value and what getting an education from a place like this means.

If you see HYPMS admissions as a kind of emblem to say you’ve maximized certain modifiable factors about your childhood education, then yes, this looks like it’s not so great for white or Asian people. But there comes a point where candidates of a certain caliber just look identical in all measurable ways. And at the point where you have more people like that applying than slots, there are other values that come into play. For example the community as a whole being more diverse is thought to benefit the education of people of all races who attend.

I’m not sure what people are worried about for the sake of high performing kids. If they aren’t going to undergrad at a place like this, they’re not going to magically become low performing kids. I don’t have data on this but I would imagine a high performing student who doesn’t attend one of these schools is likely to pay less tuition, have greater value added (https://www.brookings.edu/research/using-earnings-data-to-rank-colleges-a-value-added-approach-updated-with-college-scorecard-data/ for example), and potentially go somewhere like this for graduate school if they want to. Or somewhere that actually does what they’re passionate about better than these schools do. They’re very likely going to be fine if they don’t burn out, and if they do, they would have in a place like this too.

What I think rubs people the wrong way about this is that there’s a perception that maximizing every modifiable factor is somehow “earning” a spot that you’re then entitled to on some level and losing to a minority kid. That’s just not how that works. Admissions rank your application on many factors (including legacy in some cases), but all of them will tell you that some aspect of who gets in is just random. There are still too many maximal candidates. And some aspect is about being unique and interesting not just maxing out. So given that, would I rather go to school with a perfect distribution of who maxed out on a single test score? Or rather that the company I pay for my education values a bigger picture of what constitutes a good community for learning? I think I care more about the latter.

Dear science over nonsense, We are out numbered. Signed, someone who values the same.

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What evidence do you have that SAT scores don’t correlate with freshman-year retention rates, 6-year graduation rates, and all sorts of life outcomes such as income, post-grad degrees, or book authorship, because I’ve seen pretty consistent evidence of those correlations repeated across decades?

GPA and family income correlate strongly, too, perhaps a bit more than SAT, but ‘school quality’ obscures the significance of GPA and disadvantages those from less affluent backgrounds, whereas SATs help such students demonstrate college-readiness despite poorer grades that might result from life events or other burdens.

Or perhaps you don't really have a point and your an elitist intellectual snob looking for a space to be a victim.

Must these schools be gatekeepers for meritocracy? Or are they providing a world-class education as defined by themselves?

In other words, why should a private institution be required to serve a meritocratic function, rather than be free to determine for themselves the product they wish to offer?

Dude what admissions officer hurt you? You tell me the point this assclown is trying to make? How are you choosing to interpret this data to fit your narcissistic worldview and victim mentality?

What point are you even trying to get across? /r/iamverysmart

I think top colleges should admit the most qualified students. Lowering the standards of our top academic institutions isn't the solution to poor parenting and school funding. State colleges are perfectly fine institutions of higher learning and a person attending one has plenty of opportunity to succeed in life. A Harvard education isn't required to get ahead for an intelligent and motivated individual. If politicians want to do something to help poor people get more educated they should change the way schools are funded since the current model of using local property taxes is manifestly unfair. The reality is that by the time a person is 18 its already too late to make up for a learning deficit acquired early in life.

Race can't play a factor for the simple fact a kid can't change it.

We have had this discussion time and time again, but at the end of the day everybody should be treated equally regardless of sex, race and any other factors not related to the content of their character.

Schools should be able to decide who to except off of GPA, SAT, essay, whatever they want but race shouldn't play a factor in it. Period.

I thank all of our lucky stars that there are smart people out there in positions of power who disagree with you

You are advocating for racism

Plain and simple

I don’t care about Harvard either, to be honest. I care much more about public universities. It simply doesn’t follow that admitting the “most qualified” students maximizes the benefits of the education system. It doesn’t. It is actually less efficient than a design like in Texas.

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because it's nothing more than an ego-stroke on a resume. The final result is a piece of paper that says 'I PLAYED THE GAME'. And guess what happens when the URM's that played the game goes into a job interview and the other candidates didn't get the pity admission?

LOL, Systematic racism is alive and well and you act like it's acceptable.

This is what systematic racism looks like

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So "URM'S" aren't actually "under represented", score lower, and get into HYPMS anyways...

Ya I'm sure this won't come back to bite society in any way, shape, or form....

It also makes you wonder, how smart and how "qualified" the people running these institutions are anyways? Why are they doing this?

I too love to throw alley oops to racism by leaving out important context! For example: SAT scores have a positive correlation to exactly the kinds of economic and pre-college educational privilege URM populations have less access to, meaning we should expect fewer high SAT scores in those populations even when assuming the underlying intelligence distributions are identical. Bonus (speculative, but based on a phenomenon that is very well established in easier-to-measure professional contexts): more heterogeneous populations are less prone to groupthink, suggesting that selecting for diversity could actually improve educational outcomes.

And, bonus: by comparing raw percentages of massively different-sized populations, this chart implies that more URM students are being admitted than have the test scores to "back it up" (just look, the middle bar is bigger on the right than the left) despite saying literally nothing about the actual test scores of the actual ORM admittees. Every single minority student at those institutions could be sitting on a 1550+ without changing this chart a whit.

Anyway, I hope and assume that OP was not actually trying to feed the reactionary trolls with this; but looking at some of the other comments here, it's happening anyway.

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No one is victimizing, though you do seem to be projecting. It’s just data, presented simply. Barring apparent manipulation, my point is self evident. I’m sure you’ll figure it out soon, keep trying

Settle down, okay?

Keeping in mind that URM are systemically more likely to be in poorer schools with fewer resources, it's not surprising. On one hand, I'm glad they are being given a chance to "break the cycle," on the other hand, breaking the cycle is basically a myth to begin with and I fear many of those students are going to lack the full financial resources they need and just end up going into debt only to face continued racism once they enter the job market.

That is messed up that their race is a factor in their admissions

>Affirmative action is necessary to provide more opportunities for underserved people of color who are also intellectually capable of doing the work required to graduate. SAT scores have never been the sole criteria for admission, nor should they be.

Source needed

Harvard isn't supposed to be representative in any way, it's meant to have the best of the best

Then how do you explain the variation in SAT scores among those of equal wealth with equal ability to pay for courses and tutors.

Harvard is a private institution.

So what, private businesses can be racist? Not surprised someone like you has such weak points.

It was a factor in their non-admission long enough, I'm okay with them making up ground.

I just think it’s more complex than any single factor or goal. And I think there’s a free-market for private institutions so long as they’re not actively discriminating against any single individual or barring entire groups based on race.

Ah, reverse racism, fight fire with fire

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Maybe it’s because it’s a major determining factor to what college you get into which is also a pretty strong predictor of success

Usually if you come from low income family ivy schools are free.

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Harvard isn’t being racist.

Not weak. Just the truth.

>Broken culture, broken families, and broken windows

Is some white supremacist bullshit, just ignore that person and move on.

Quit showing actual systemic racism you're ruining our agenda bigot!!!

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One of the many ways to twist statistics to suit a narrative is to refuse context and let people run roughshod with assumption instead.

Only if you meet their criteria or get the right scholarships. E.g. 2 parents working just above minimum wage jobs might have income above their threshold but would be a problem if you're only 1 of 5 children. Even then, who knows how much applying for that need-based full ride ends up affecting your admission. Some stats I've seen estimate only 20% actually get those scholarships, which might end up being less than half of the minority group in the end, so they still end up paying at least some money and pulling out loans. At Ivys, even small percentages of tuition will add up fast.

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Looking at more than SAT scores when admitting students isn’t racist. The world isn’t a technocracy run by people with the best test scores. That’d be a terrible society.

It’s at Asians’ expense though.

Not all Asians are wealthy. Especially those from Laos, Vietnam, or other poorer countries.
Lower income Asian kids are really getting screwed here. Why should they have to score much higher than others, to get to the same colleges?

If we need to discriminate at all, if anything, it should be based purely on wealth/income, not race. To somewhat counter wealthy peoples ability to afford expensive schools, private tutors, and SAT prep classes.

This would still indirectly favor URM, since they tend to be lower income. But it would better handle cases like poor Asian kids, or rich black kids.

And this is why these schools are about to lose a major case at the Supreme Court.

Instead of making admission easier for urms, maybe we should actually change the fucking circumstances that make it difficult for them to go to school.

And there are underpriveleged people who aren’t urms? Or urms who are rich.

As opposed to accepting a permanent racial underclass based on previous racist policies with broad based socioeconomic implications.

Every year I swear Harvard students get dumber and dumber. Everyone who got in just wrote a good essay and founded some random non profit. What is the merit of a Harvard education when there is no merit involved in admissions.

>Also, university here in America need to be reworked to be 95% US citizen. It is ridiculous that talented students are being rejected to keep that sweet international student tuition. This would help Asian and White Americans who are being cheated.

This to me is a major problem. There are way, way, way too many international students at many public universities. They are mostly there because their tuition is so high it is a windfall for the school. Unfortunately it often means we are training individuals who go back to a foreign country and undertraining our own population.

We should definitely take as much top talent as possible. However many public schools are there with a mission to educate the population of that state. So if local students are displaced for international ones there is a conflict between that and the desire to scoop up international talent.

Harvard stats:

• Families with annual incomes of $75,000 or less do not pay anything toward the cost of a Harvard College education.
• Nearly 1 in 4 undergraduates comes from a family whose annual income is $75,000 or less.
• 55% of Harvard undergraduates receive financial aid and pay an average of $12,700 per year.

If you are poor, Ivys are the place to be.

I’m gonna go ahead and hope this is straight up trolling about the absurdities of “Christian/European demographics” being oppressed in the U.S.

In my experience thought it isn't poorer URM that are benefitting. It is typically a wealthy URM going to these schools that then gets an extra bump because of their race. The economic diversity at many colleges is much worse than their racial diversity.

Thoughtful comment. That’s for pointing some of these things out.

Ok that’s fine, and they have no moral desert for attending the most prestigious colleges. Go take your fallback option at Vassar, Rick, privileged white kid. If your aptitude for life mirrors your aptitude for tests that education will serve you just fine…

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> SAT scores have a positive correlation with economic and pre-college educational privilege

True. But it is concerning that this hits Asian kids considerably harder than even whites! Asians still experience some racism in this country, and probably don’t deserve that.

Not all Asians are wealthy. Especially those from Laos, Vietnam, or other poorer countries (maybe they should be classed as URM).
Lower income Asian kids are really getting screwed here. Why should they have to score much higher than others, to get to the same colleges? Because of the color of their skin?

If we need to discriminate at all, if anything, it should be based purely on wealth/income IMO, not race.

Wouldn’t income be a better proxy for privilege, than race? To somewhat counter wealthy peoples ability to afford expensive schools, private tutors, and SAT prep classes.

This would still indirectly favor URM, since they tend to be lower income. But it would better handle cases like poor asian/white kids, or rich black kids.

Did you forget what this conversation is about? It's about including race in your admissions. Maybe you have a memory of a goldfish.

That's some funky propaganda you've been reading

all of these schools are test-optional except MIT

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I got invited to apply to an ivy leage university after my not very high ACT. I'm sure was because I'm Ecuadorian, and US universities crave to collect nationalities like if we were Pokémon, just so they can print that they represent 77 nationalities on their brochures.

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I agree. I specifically avoided Ivy/other prestigious schools because I was afraid of not fitting in with the "wealthier" groups. I went to a state university instead and still noticed an insane shift in culture - I can hardly name anyone other than myself who didn't have at least well-off parents paying for their college, and even some who did got some hefty loans while doing it.

like when welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household causing marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage to risk a mother’s economic well-being

I just honestly can't wrap my head around how a person could logically think the solution to racism is... more racism. This world is so fucked with that sort of logic.

In concept that’s true, but in my 3 years as a grad student at a top ranked R1 university, I saw an awful lot of international students who couldn’t string an English sentence together to save their lives, wasting lots of tuition money on a program they were really ill-prepared for, because the school just kept accepting them and flunking them (or shoving them through, depending on the particular flavor of lazy professor they had) just to collect that sweet, sweet, international tuition money.

The US training foreign elites is how we export our culture to the rest of the world. It's very intentional.

But the dude you are responding to has for an argument the idea that universities do this because more diversity might benefit education.

Call me crazy, but I think good professors is really what makes education good, but if you require those mental gymnastics to claim statistics are being twisted to deny context, that right there is part of the problem.

An average of $12,700 leaves you with $50k total debt after 4 years. Even if you assume most of that is outliers who receive no aid, leaving with $25k can still be tough. The reason why "breaking the cycle" is such a myth is because getting an education leaves you in debt, so you spend time paying that off. Once you do, the money that you might spend investing or saving often ends up going towards your parents, who couldn't save for themselves. Once you are ready to send your own child to college, the money that you would have saved for them has gone to your parents, and so they end up going with no savings - but now you make money so need-based scholarships are hard to get. Unless you are getting your education completely free, you'll probably have less debt somewhere else and after a few years experience nobody will care that you went to an Ivy school.

WAY to many people don't understand this. The reality is that unless you're rich the better the college you go to the LESS you will actually pay. Too many people get scared by the "sticker price", but that's mostly to fleece international students.

So you believe that current socioeconomic disparities in the in the U.S. just naturally resolve themselves over time? And I’m the one brainwashed by propaganda…

Harvard said in court it was because Asians did worse in the interview process. Interestingly enough, they almost categorically scored lower in "likeability"- essentially that the interviewers liked URMs better than Asian students, on average- which is literally (not figuratively) racist.

Ya, bad policy is bad policy? I think this is not the gotcha you think it is.

>Keeping in mind that URM are systemically more likely to be in poorer schools with fewer resources

And the solution should be to provide those schools with more resources.

Also, AA might make sense if it were based on socioeconomic status, but it's NOT. It's based purely on race. Poor Asians still get discriminated against and rich black people still get the benefits.

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I think the idea is to even up the societal balance by giving this generational a handicap. Just imagine starting a game of monopoly mid way through with a bunch of players that already own half the board. It's impossible to compete, right?

Story time. Back in 1997 when I was looking at colleges I attended a "Bridging the gap" seminar at my local state university. Only prospective students whose parents didn't attend college were invited. In the packed ballroom we were the only white family in attendance. It seemed clear to me that the personal history captured by this metric was more meaningful than the color of one's skin, and that there were other more meaningful metrics that captured disadvantage as well, income, location, schools attended, etc.

So what does a Harvard degree get you? I know a teacher in a private catholic school that went to Harvard.

Make affirmative action about socioeconomic status instead of skin color then. The moral problem here is that you can't fix the past. You're punishing people who didn't have anything to do with the injustices of the past. That's doubly true for Asians whose ancestors were often ALSO victims of colonialism.

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How is it possible to have those data in the USA ? Is it legal ?

Race isn't playing a factor, test scores are, for schools like this high test scores get you an interview. The schools value a good story, be that hard work, overcoming adversity etc, every single person you see in this graph scored amazing on tests every single one earned a spot at these schools but there isn't enough spots. interviews said this breakdown deserved a spot. plain and simple.

It is funny you’re afraid to say it explicitly though

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Good professors do make for a good education....diversity of ideas also makes for a good education. Both can be true at the same time

Grouping minorities together makes their representation a bigger, I could make the same graph with two groups URM and Asians & whites and it would seems disproportionate as well. That said the proportions of SAT score and HYPMS might still draw the same conclusions

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Underclass is poor people.

Discriminating poor people by race is racist.

Now let's take Bayes formula and reverse this.

(need more raw data though)

I wish they would publish the raw data (no PII of course).

these are Ivies. Where massive amounts of the most populace ethicity on the planet are applying and pretty much every applicant is 1400 plus if not 1500 plus… there are schools in china and japan that are more prolific in many areas than the US schools and the high school prep of certain asian countries is directly geared towards high SAT scores, along with cultural emphasis that is lacking in many communities urm… i’m a professor as well as defender of my PhD at a college that sucks compared to harvard in rankings but is massively better recognized in snake venom research which is all i care about as a venom a researcher… harvard can keep its endowment. they don’t have 209 venomous snakes i can extract 5 minutes from my lab.

The truth is that a lot more than sat scores and grades are taken into account including relative performance amoung those of similar background and personal desire to go to this school for this reason apart from “you are the most prestigious”. I guarantee that those who had reached out to, and won over a faculty member. demonstrating why THAT school and THAT lab interested them, race was less of a factor among those that did that.

not saying it’s not still fucked up… but admissions are not based on morality police. they are based on statistical evaluations of many factors by people who understand the cost/benefit analysis and how to do the best with very limited info we have… and until we have less limited information… that really is the best we can do

You should make a point to only send your kids, or loved ones, to URM physicians for life saving care.

So because black people in the past were unfairly treated, the solution is to treat other races unfairly now? Especially the young people now, who in no shape were responsible for the past?

Imagine the UN decides that all Americans now have to live in severe poverty (global poor - famines, etc.) for two generation, because their grandparents were born in a rich country.

Makes sense also?

That's simply not true. Like the sheer amount of money these institutions have, you think you can bribe them with 1 or 2 million, or even 10 or 20 mil? Please.

Also the folks who work in admissions aren't at all the folks who work with the endowment.

The kind of wealth that can buy a Harvard seat can get in on soft power -- being a senator or a billionaire, and there aren't really a lot of those types. And tbh, that's not 100% a bad thing -- though I also can't defend the policy entirely. Because the reason Harvard is the ticket to a stable income and good life if you're from a lower class background is in a large part the connections you make there -- which involves meeting these types of rich kids.

As an aside, the competitive piece is why the URM component is larger in the final admissions. They're not being cut slack and let in because they're URM. There are just a lot of qualified kids. You could admit three times as many without lowering standards. And that means you can afford to optimize for diversity, to make the experience more enriching for the kids that attend.

Ironically Whites are literally a URM by definition in this setting.

Only 89 upvotes, but in reality it’s probably 5000 upvotes but being suppressed by downvotes.

How long before this post is locked?

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Careful, this isn't painting the proper picture, because you don't see where the rest of those top students go. Are there more Asians in the top 100 colleges in the US? I believe so.

The URM are not being cut slack and let in because they're URM. There are just a lot of qualified kids. You could admit three times as many without lowering standards. And that means you can afford to optimize for diversity, to make the experience more enriching for the kids that attend. (Also at these colleges URMs are often from other countries where they were the top students. They're not all American in this chart.)

What you can disagree with is whether attending a diverse college (on ethnicity) is more enriching than otherwise. (I personally think it is more enriching to have that sort of diversity, but I can see the other pov)

I am all for helping URMs but this should be done at the school (middle school and high school) levels and not at the university levels. This is just not fair.

What, that racial discrimination is OK as long as it supports the right races?

Yes, in fact that’s exactly what happens when you award automatic admission based on relative performance within one’s high school. Economically disadvantaged students have improved education and employment outcomes, while kids at top-ranked feeder schools have essentially the same outcomes, but some of them attend less prestigious colleges.

Because US education is incomparably better than the majority of where the foreign students come from

There was an analysis done a couple of years ago that found out that the most elite chinese, russian or indian computer science student at their countries version of an Ivy League, are quite a bit worse than the -average- computer science student in the US.

So... Harvard & co. Are being racist to Asian guys?

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“This” : URM students being accepted to these colleges to fulfill a quota, rather than based on merit.

“Which” : URM is defined in the graphic.

For 90% of American families Harvard is more affordable than their local state school.

The median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate 10 years after starting amount to well over $70,000 a year. For graduates of all other schools, the median is around $34,000.

I went to a state school for two years after attending CC for my first two and still came out with a debt of ~30k. I would have zero debt had I been accepted and attended Harvard.

No it‘s not.

Passing on a student because they aren’t likable doesn’t make the recruiter or the institution racist. It just means they weren’t likable. Get a personality.