Strong on anecdotes. Weaker on verifiable data. It fits the mood of angst of parents of young people who are applying to college this year. (I am a parent of a current applicant, but I'm trying not to be so anxious.)
"as many as one-third of admissions, he writes, are flagged for special treatment at the elite universities"
Yale keeps records on its Web site that show that legacy students have made up between 13 and 16 percent of incoming classes in the last 10 years. Most schools don't make this available, so where did the data come from? The use of the qualifier "as many as" means there has to be one university, but which one is it?
"Of course every college boasts about its efforts to enroll a more racially diverse student body. But here are the facts: A New York Times article in 2004 revealed that Harvard’s incoming freshman class was 9 percent black, but between one-half and two-thirds of those black students were actually West Indian or African immigrants or the children of immigrants, and many others were biracial."
Without the information of how many actually applied, how many were on the appropriate level to apply and how many wanted to go to any college, this part seems meaningless. Is it still wrong if it was also 9% that applied in the first place? Maybe the number was higher, maybe lower - we have no context to judge.
I found this argument structure pretty ridiculous, along the lines of: correlation is not always causality, but let's just pretend it is and not report on any changes in demographic qualities of student populations.
"When the SAT was instituted in the 1920s it was done precisely in the name of changing the admissions process to a more egalitarian one....In truth, the SAT, which is thankfully being phased out at many schools, has had the opposite effect....While correlation isn’t always causality, economics professor Jesse Rothstein of Berkeley has called it a proxy for other demographic components and for high school resources."
Overall, the biggest problems with this nonsense article are the common presumption that college admissions are supposed to correct for all inequality, conflating equal opportunity with equal ability, and a stated desire for a meritocracy while simultaneously rejecting any approaches to measuring merit that don't come up with an answer that equally represents every way he's decided to slice up the population demographically.
Maybe what we really need is more high school admission tests, so we can keep pushing the problem identification further back.
I see viraptor has provided one of the two examples that readily come to mind. Harvard in 2004 may not generalize to most colleges today, and black people who are biracial is largely irrelevant, because a person with one white parent and one black parent has always been "black" for purposes of enforcing Black Codes
and other mechanisms of legally supported prejudice against black people.
"A counselor told me when my daughters were applying for college admission that the first thing I had to do was withdraw my application for financial aid. When I said that colleges professed to be 'need blind,' she laughed."
Not only is that an anecdote, that is an anecdote from a biased source. Professional college admission counselors use parental anxiety on the part of wealthier parents to generate their business. They are never going to refer to information that might suggest that large categories of applicants don't need their services.
There may indeed be some evidence that colleges favor wealthier rather than poorer students,
and I for one would like to know what the most recent and most carefully gathered data show on this issue, but I wouldn't take a professional college admission counselor as a competent, objective source on such an issue, and no journalist should either.
Your comment upvoted because you asked me to provide evidence for my statement in the grandparent comment.
