IvyAdmisions

A lottery among the academically qualified students would produce a class with many fewer African American, Native American and Latino students which would be politically untenable. Those cohorts score much worse than caucasians and asians on standardized tests.

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.

Just remember that the heads of admissions are the ones coming up with these policies (in tandem with other university leaders) and personally reviewing all the applicants in the end to make sure they're carried out.

Lots of downvotes. To clarify my point: The elite schools only want to admit so many future doctor/lawyer/engineers. Today, the way they limit those numbers hits asian applicants disproportionately hard. 80 years ago, jewish applicants were hit disproportionately hard. There was racism mixed in then as there is now, but having read a bit about those policies and experienced the current ones, I think the main thrust was the same: managing the large number of applicants looking for a ticket to the upper middle class.

Agreed and for similar reasons imo, to guard against admiting too many students with no ambition beyond a comfy middle class lifestyle.

The kids winning the "at large" bids have 6-12 extracurriculars and standout in many of them OR they have 1-2 and are distinguished in them at the state or national level. So if you had a project that ate up all your time like that, we'd look to see if you'd won any sort of national or state recognition for it. If not then it wasn't going to help the cause.

Alumni Interview programs exist mainly to create a sense of continued involvement with the alma mater post-graduation so alumni will donate more. Their interview reports were rarely material to a decision.

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.

I wasn't taking aim at robotics club (which is awesome). I was taking aim at slim resumes with 1-2 activities.

On what basis?

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.

Generally they want a mix of people like that; people skilled in sports, music, various arts; and some people TRULY gifted intellectually (actually doing research or showing strong promise to). They also need to admit enough rich kids to satisfy the annual giving org and make sure enough poor kids and black and latino kids get in to meet liberal/progressive racial goals.

Correct. There's a belief at the very top of these schools that they only want so many people leading one-dimensional lives focused on entering upper middle class trades like law and medicine.

From an earlier thread:

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.

Not touching that!

Agreed. Here's how I put it elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17336374

And they'd be WAAAAAY more overrepresented if the "Great Academics, Boring eveything else" applicants got in.

The asians will still get rejected. They're not rejected for racial reasons. They're rejected because they submit uninspiring, cookie cutter applications en masse. This may be because of something in the asian culture. That's outside my expertise.

Lawsuits like this, I'd imagine.

Also, waaaaaay more asians need to be running for Congress. It's getting better but they're still underrepresented slightly (4.8% of reps are asian while 5.6% of americans are).

Like I said, it's not a race thing, its that a lot of the asian applicants all basically look the same on paper and have the same stated goals. Lots of white kids apply with the same "look" and also get rejected. Those students are not seen as bringing enough to the table.

As to your second point, like I said, it wasn't about asian people. There were TONS of white kids with applications like the ones I outlined. Those kids got whacked too, but asians were the biggest group in the cohort.

I didn't stick around past two years because I regularly had to make decisions based on assumptions that I outlined above and I just wasn't comfortable with it. It felt bad reading a pretty good application from a kid in Puerto Rico, but passing because "We'll see much better Puerto Ricans in the NYC schools when we review those". Those kids didn't know they were competing, but they definitely were.

I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college.

Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably.

The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian.

In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college.

Race is only a proxy for what really happens in these admissions processes. Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 20,000 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 doesn't cut it), play an instrument (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 massively asian. No one was out to discriminate against asian people when I worked where I worked, their applications were just very problematic at scale.

I was an ivy league admissions officer for a few years after college.

I promise you your application was viewed as "well, here's another really smart asian kid who's otherwise unremarkable from the other 1000 we'll see". Meanwhile, hers was treated like precious gold.