http://nypost.com/2016/02/07/former-yale-admissions-officer-reveals-secrets-of-who-gets-in/
As far as I can tell it’s basically a disadvantage to be a white male when applying to school, especially an upper middle class one. If your parents are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to buy your way in, forget it.
Same thing with the MBA process now. I suspect that we will see a lot of wealthy underrepresented minorities, gays, and women in the future. That, and people will stop caring about where you went to school, since everyone knows merit is only 30% of the equation.
Respect
Exploit the affirmative action
I thought the criteria were reasonably fair - look for those who ‘win the race’ weighted for the difficulty of the incline. They do this with Olympic diving too. You can perform a perfect dive, but if the difficulty level isn’t high enough you still won’t win the gold.
I could think of at least one more disadvantaged group. But yes I agree affirmative action is getting ridiculous.
You obviously have to be into that whole Yale thing.
What “whole Yale thing”?
I’ve been on admissions committees. My experience was that people who are qualified generally get taken and people who are unqualified are rejected. Then there’s this large grey area where all sorts of things can tilt the balance, up to and including whether the case came up just before a meal or something. This is where affirmative action kinds of things and “hey, this guy plays an oboe”, and “we’re missing a Lacrosse forward,” can make a big difference. Those student’s aren’t unqualified - it’s just that the ones that passed straight through on the first round were slam-dunk obvious, and these guys weren’t. Perhaps they will perform toward the bottom of their class because they were on the border of getting in, but again, it doesn’t mean they were not qualified to begin with. All it means is that they nudged out some ther similarly qualified/unqualified candidate who probably would have performed on that level.
Schools like Harvard and Yale might have a different situation, where even accepting 100% of the qualified people might lead to a class size too large. But in those cases, it’s typically not difficult to get a diverse student body of people who are pretty much all qualified. It’s just that your chances of getting rejected while being otherwise qualified are different across demographic groups.
In my experience as a professor, I have seen some students who were questionably qualified and it made me wonder if they were admitted because of legacy issues or donation issues or diversity objectives. However, it’s typicaly a low percentage (perhaps 2-3% of a class), and it doesn’t divide very neatly along racial/ethic lines, even if there is a larger representation of afirmative action groups there than in the remainder of the class. But that statistic can be very misleading, because it tells you more about what the bottom 2-3% of the class looks like than what specific demographic groups look like overall in terms of performance. What’s more striking is that if you look at the students that are doing well (say the top 1/2 of the class), there’s a good mix of ethnicities and backgrounds there. Would those students have that mix of backgrounds without affirmative action? I’d hope so, but it’s certainly not guaranteed, and it’s worth researching (I’m sure there are studies, but I haven’t seen them - they would need to test the diversity of the top 1/2 of the clas based on whether AA rules are enforced or not.).
People like to suggest that affirmative action means that classes are going to admit lots of unqualified students to meet quotas, but at least at the good schools, it’s not so hard to find qualified minorities to fill those spots, and so if you are truly an unqualified student, affirmative action policies aren’t really likely to help as much as you think they would.
Perhaps when AA was created, this wasn’t true. And it’s likely that as you go down the quality scale of the university, you may find that AA starts having a noticeable effect on the quality of a subgroup. But at least at the top, this has not been my experience.