A much smaller and self-selected (the median was ~700) group took the math 2 subject test, which went through pre-calculus. The bog standard SAT math section is far more basic but more people take it.
Colleges are dropping the SAT requirement. My guess is because it’s embarassing to their AA students.
From the Harvard Crimson we can see the disparity of SAT scores by race.
To get into Harvard these are the average scores aross the SAT exams:
Asian: 726
White: 713
Native American/Hawaiian: 658
Hispanic: 650
African-American: 622
We’re not talking about a tiny difference here - the average African American at Harvard scored more than 100 points lower on the SAT than did the average Asian.
Also, the acceptance rates were the inverse of the SAT score, with Asians the lowest accpted group and African-Americans the highest.
My conclusion is that Harvard really hates Asians and Jewish people.
While looking at that article I found some info about perfect SAT scores:
Those numbers are much higher than the other quoted ones. They are presented by lawyers as a defense, so perhaps they are cooked a bit.
…what exactly is embarrassing here? Who should be embarrassed?
I shouldn’t have said students. It’s just an embarassing stat for the university when you are trying to claim that you don’t discriminate yet their are huge gaps in average SAT scores between various races admitted to the school.
And if yiu are trying to claim that you are a high-standards school, admitting people in the 75th percentile or whatever if they are of the correct race while only taking the 95% percentile for Jewish people is hard to explain. Much better to just make it all subjective, so you can’t be criticized.
I suspect they are selective, not cooked. So they don’t point out the amazing fact that many outstanding high school students don’t want to go to Harvard.
According to multiple web sites, it is much easier to get the maximum score of 36 on the ACT than 1600 on the SAT.
I’m going out on a very short limb to suggest they could never fill their classes with students that get a 36 AND have straight A’s. Of course, they don’t want to because then, no more holistic admissions.
Those aren’t the scores for admitted students. And they average in earlier years when the gap was larger.
This seems to mirror comments here about Republican animus that I generally disagree with.
Current admissions policy comes from a combination of conservative inertia – we’re good people, so what we always do must have merit – and an idealistic ideology revolving around the supposed benefit to humanity of reverse discrimination.
If they did what you or I seem to suggest, a lot of jobs in the admissions office would go away. And, if it really was down to just test scores and/or grades, most intercollegiate athletics jobs would not make much sense anymore either. I believe Spelman College, a selective HBCU, got rid of intercollegiate athletics some years back, so it isn’t totally inconceivable. But the Ivy League is, among other things, an athletic conference, and I think a school would lose every game without giving admissions preference to athletes (who seem overwhelming white for all except the highest profile sports). It’s not a matter of hating Asians to care about your sailing team (much as I think a sailing team goes against the justified mission of a government-subsidized research university).
I think you might need to do more listening to what the posters in this thread who actually have personal knowledge of work in college admissions departments have been saying.
Believe me, college admissions departments tend to be extremely non-inert. They’re closely connected with their institutions’ Communications and Marketing professionals, and they have a very keen awareness of how important it is to maintain and publicize admissions policies that make the maximum possible numbers of desirable potential students want to apply to your institution, and to attend your institution if they’re admitted.
You’re getting closer to the right track when you point out that reducing admissions criteria to academic scores, and thereby eliminating competitive athletics, would be a disaster for a college hoping to attract applicants.
No, college admissions departments don’t promote goals of diversity, representation and inclusion out of innate “idealistic ideology”, although of course they try to make it sound that way. They promote such goals chiefly because it helps attract the students they want.
Huge numbers of students who are high-achieving, pursuing multiple hobbies and activities, civic-minded, socially supportive and responsible, enthusiastic, cooperative, and—not incidentally—law-abiding, strongly prefer to live and work in environments where they can meet lots of different people with different backgrounds and experiences. Those are the young people who are most likely to end up loving their college, bringing positive attention to it in high-visibility contexts, and—let’s be honest—making it easier for the college to raise money, via direct contributions and/or reflected enthusiasm.
The paradox is that even among applicants who may be disadvantaged by diversity-and-representation admissions goals, most of the most desirable students still want to attend a school with a diverse student body and a philosophy that promotes diversity and representation. Any undergraduate school that seriously tried to reduce admissions criteria solely to narrowly quantifiable academic scores would end up losing applicants in droves.
ISTM that it’s totally inconceivable that the choice made by Spelman College—a small women’s college of about 2000 students, which had a grand total of 80 intercollegiate athletes playing on Division III teams about ten years ago when they shuttered their sports teams—would be realistically imitable by any of the other institutions this thread’s been talking about.
What about ETH Zurich? They are tied with Columbia at #11 in the Times Higher Education world university rankings. And ETH bases domestic admissions on complex rules based almost completely on academic preparation. Rather than being a disaster, ETH is a bigger treasure for Switzerland, relative to population, than any American university.
Every great world university has athletic clubs among its extracurricular activities. I get that the disproportional American attention to athletics is locked in for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court, in likely future cases concerning whether schools are complying with Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, would ideally recognize the equal protection implications of opaque athlete preferences, but is highly unlikely to do so. However, all is not, from my POV, lost. When they see that Asian students are still being disadvantaged by unfair practices, I think SCOTUS will get more prescriptive, in ways other than athlete preference, about how admissions needs to work in schools that get federal funding. The farther the next Supreme Court AA case goes in that direction, the better, because this poster comment seems to me prescient:
Haha, sorry, since this conversation has been specifically about US higher education, I didn’t realize you would be casting your comparison net wide enough to include Swiss universities!
And I think that comparison is even less meaningful in terms of current US college admissions policies than your previous comparison of typical American colleges to Spelman. The Times Higher Ed university ranking system is considering a whole bunch of factors specifically pertaining to “research-intensive universities”, many of which have very little direct relevance to undergraduate college life. E.g., research influence measured by publication citations, postgraduate research student population, and so forth.
(Note, moreover, that one of the THE ranking criteria is percentage of international students, which on its face has jack-shit to do with intrinsic academic “merit”, right? So even major research universities are being evaluated partly on diversity-and-representation status! 
)
The fact that ETH Zurich ties with Columbia in this system for its rank as an international research-intensive university tells us very little about whether American college applicants in general would be attracted to its undergraduate experience. (I’ll also note that the Swiss secondary education system, like most others in Europe, is far more heavily regulated and standardized by the federal government than its US counterpart is, so there’s much less local variation in educational opportunity.)
Yup, and so are many other persistent aspects of American culture, such as immense variability in secondary education programs and ongoing racial discrimination. If we’re advocating for American colleges to use the same admissions policies as Swiss universities, without first remaking American secondary education to be meaningfully comparable to Swiss secondary education, I call bullshit.
Giving an attractive undergraduate experience, to the our most privileged young adults, is rightly not a legal requirement. Refraining from racial and ethnic discrimination is. And I think that refraining from wealth-related discrimination, and gender discrimination in coed schools, should also be, if not illegal, at least grounds for withholding all federal funding. By itself, that’s just a matter of opinion. But I suggest to those who judge such discrimination, reverse or otherwise, favorably, that preferential policies eventually generate so much resentment as to fuel populism and become politically unsustainable. Better to avoid them.
I don’t think anyone in the thread advocated that. My mention of other nations was to point out that a university can have a strong undergraduate program without the holistic admissions system continuously used, in elite American colleges and universities, for the last century, as a tool for morally questionable discrimination.
A perfect high school transcript means something extremely different in New England boarding schools, wealthy suburbs, and ordinary Philadelphia public schools. Grade and high school educational disparities are a bigger problem which shouldn’t be papered over by making Harvard superficially look like America.
I think you need standardized testing, in American admissions, because of the terrible disparities between high schools.
We don’t need standardized testing for school, just like we don’t need it for job hiring, sports drafting, play casting, or just about anything else. Although BASF did ask me for some German high school test score when I applied for a job in Ludwigshaven. That was hilarious for a job that required a PhD.
But like it or not, giving an attractive undergraduate experience to a wide variety of young adults—a large percentage of whom are, yes, highly privileged—is ultimately the engine that keeps American colleges running. And for most of the students that American colleges consider most desirable, an attractive undergraduate experience includes not only high-quality and enriching post-secondary education, but a wide variety of enjoyable extracurricular options and a diverse range of compatible fellow students to share the experience with.
Trying to lump those preferences in with actual racism and bigotry under the label of “morally questionable discrimination” is AFAICT basically a prop attempting to shore up a fundamentally weak argument.
Of course, I want all students seeking higher education to have access to a fulfilling, affordable and enjoyable undergraduate program. We all do. But I think it’s dishonest to imply that students’ desires for interesting and engaging variety in all aspects of college life—rather than single-mindedly seeking to maximize the number of their fellow students who have perfect high school transcripts and standardized-test scores—are comparable to bigotry and oppressive discrimination.
Making the Harvard student body look more like America, instead of like a very narrow slice of overwhelmingly privileged metropolitan American elites, is ISTM a good thing in itself. Nobody is expecting that it’s singlehandedly going to solve the problem of pre-college educational disparities in the US, but that’s not a reason to abandon it as an aspiration.
I agree with puzzlegal that demands for exclusively grades-and-scores-based “meritocracy” in American elite higher education are mostly about preserving traditional patterns of socioeconomic privilege. “My high-achieving expensively schooled and cultured affluent teenager deserves to get into Harvard because his/her grades and test scores are so high, and other intelligent teenagers who didn’t have similar advantages to help optimize their achievements are just SOL. Their disadvantages are the fault of existing educational disparities which aren’t my problem to deal with.” Sure Karen, just keep on kicking that can down the road, and tell yourself that it means you’re taking a principled stance against discrimination. Uh-huh.
Rather than questioning motives, I would look at socioeconomic results.
Here’s an early indication that the SCOTUS ruling may actually reduce “socioeconomic privilege:”
As for the last sentence quoted above, it reminds me of impossible-to-verify claims sometimes heard that racial preference is a small plus factor.
The Wesleyan blip is just the beginning. Despite the bad Roberts’ gamification loophole for minorities (they will get preference for writing an essay on how racism hurt you, often polished by consultants the rich can afford to pay), I predict the Supreme Court ruling is going to reduce the net advantage of the rich in many still-opaque admissions formulas. There may even be some elite colleges that replace racial preferences, now disproportionately going to students of color from prep schools, with family-income-based reverse class discrimination. While I don’t like reverse class discrimination either, there is a better case for it than for reverse race discrimination, and some schools will try it.
Am I sure that elite college admissions will start skewing to a lower family income profile, even with the loophole? No, and it will take years until studies appear on how this played out. Just a prediction.
Fyi, the elite colleges already gave a bump for “lower socioeconomic class”.
It will not surprise me at all if the closest thing to a positive impact that this regressive anti-diversity ruling turns out to have is to galvanize outraged opponents into pushing back against “legacy admissions” policies. Legacy admissions, unlike pro-diversity admissions policies, actually are a form of unfair deliberate favoritism.
But it says a lot about the fundamental weakness of the anti-diversity position that the best it can realistically hope to accomplish, in terms of fighting genuine unfairness, is to inspire a copycat movement with a more ethically chosen target.
Meanwhile, at least in this thread, UNC has never felt better about being ignored…
I wouldn’t of course call it anti-diversity. And I’d say the best realistic hope is another Supreme Court decision, years from now, getting rid of opaque admissions criteria with gamified loopholes.
But as for the best realistically accomplishable in the 2020’s, Larry Summers took a reasonable try at it here:
I suppose that Harvard is too progressive to listen to listen to Larry Summers, especially when palling around with Bari Weiss. But maybe other elite schools will try most of these ideas.
One realistic idea not mentioned is for elite schools of education to put more effort into directly turning a few local public schools into long-term, high-funded, elite-college-oriented prep schools. While an expensive idea, some of these elite American universities have had such tremendous endowment growth that they can spend more. I think feeder school improvement a better way to spend any available boatload of money than Summers’ suggestion of increasing elite school class sizes.
Affirmative action for rich kids: It’s more than just legacy admissions : Planet Money Affirmative action for rich kids: It's more than just legacy admissions : Planet Money : NPR
Quick summary: a detailed study with access to a lot of data found:
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The very rich are much more likely to be admitted to the “ivy plus” schools (the eight Ivy League schools — Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and UPenn — as well as Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago.)
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This is only partly explained by legacy admissions. Very rich kids are also more likely to be recruited for athletics or to have really impressive extracurricular activities. Really rich kids have the opportunity to develop these credentials.
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while attending an ivy+ school has little impact on a student’s average income (the schools select success, they don’t make it, at least for average income) it does have an oversized impact on becoming a “leader”
“These colleges have a huge causal effect on getting you access to the upper tail — to positions of influence, to becoming a leader,” Chetty says. We’re talking about elite positions like corporate executives, U.S. Senators, top professors, Supreme Court justices. “I think what these colleges do is really open doors for some folks to get to a set of positions that they really would not have had much access to had they not gone.”
Since the ample opportunity for self-correction was not taken, I’ll do it myself. The scores presented as “the average scores across the SAT exams” “to get into Harvard” are in fact the scores of applicants. You can tell by the “Among Applicants” and “Among Admits” labels in the legend for the plot these numbers were pulled from. When you mouse over them, there’s even a popup that says “Among Applicants” or “Among Admits”. These numbers are also averaged over the classes of 2000–2017. So the actual average gap over that range was 63, not 100. And the gap ten years ago in 2013 (for the class of 2017) was 51, down from 72 ten years before that.
So the numbers were wrong and the use of present tense was inappropriate.