[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[zimablue]

Extracurriculars have been moved away from in the UK because you're basically discriminating on class. I went to a uni much like the one you describe, Imperial College London. It has it's problems but I wouldn't have traded all the engineers and scientists for lit students. Pretty sure we produce our share of investment bankers. A uni discriminating on extracurriculars and perceived sociability is insane. We're supposed to be building a meritocracy not constructing weird model societies based on your own preconceptions of what that would look like.

[drawnwren]

Keep in mind that top 5 US schools are taking a much smaller percentage of a much larger population. They simply can't differentiate on academic performance alone. They generally admit somewhere around 5% of their applicants. Keeping in mind that those applicants are self-selecting, to some degree, thanks to the previously known admit rates and high application fees -- they have to use something else. A professor of mine at Stanford told me that Stanford starts by disqualifying all students that they believe won't make it at Stanford. This leaves them with about 60% of the applications. They then take the academic prodigies out. You know, researched mouse cancer at 14. That's about 1%. Stanford's admit rate was 4.something% last year. Getting that other 3% is a pain for US institutions.

[arkh]

In France, the most sought after enginnering schools use an entrance exam. No need to check for old academic performances as everyone is tested on the same things.

They usually also have alternate admittance system but that's for 2% or 3% of students.

[melkiaur]

In France, Polytechnique is probably the most sought after. There's an oral exam to get in, and guess what ? Only 25% of student from Paris are eliminated, versus 40% of kids from la province.

7% of girls are eliminated in the Computer Science branch (MP-Info), versus 27% of boys.

More info, in french: https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2014/11/25/l-ecole-pol...

And besides, the real filtering is actually done after the Baccalauréat: not everyone gets to be admitted to the big Parisian Lycées (Henry-IV, Louis-Le-Grand, etc.).

[Amezarak]

By 'academic performance' he is almost certainly including their ACT and SAT test scores, which serve essentially as standardized university entrance exams in the US. The problem is for schools like Harvard or Stanford, almost all the applicants have near-perfect scores, so they're not a good differentiator - people with lower scores will not apply, since they know they will not be accepted.

[thecleaner]

I guess thats a problem with the SAT. I saw a couple of questions and a lot of them are very easy for college entrance exams. I think university entrances should be a bit on the tough end (China's standardized tests and JEE from India come to mind). Of course schools could look at a lot more but if so many people get perfect scores then that clearly is a problem with the tests themselves.

[Amezarak]

0.06% of ACT takers scored perfectly in 2013. A smaller percentage get a perfect score on the SAT. I don't think the problem is the test is too easy.

The problem is there are 400 million people in the USA, and the 1-2% of entering freshmen across the country having high scores mostly apply to the same few schools.

[georgecmu]

The challenge of SAT is not in the difficulty of the questions. The challenge is that there are 40 questions and you have 1.25 minutes to do each one.

[jstoeffler]

The French system he’s talking about is more a contest than an exam. They are intentionally too hard/long for anybody to score perfectly. This way it’s possible to differentiate between two excellent students. Not saying it’s perfect, but at least it’s sort of fair.

[extra88]

Don't the families who are well off spend a lot of money on test prep? The bright students who don't have the time or money for that are at a disadvantage. There's also the unlucky ones who have something happen and can't do their best on the exam. High-stakes testing has its own problems.

[cycrutchfield]

If you want to see how putting the entire admissions process on a single entrance exam will play out, look no further than the dystopian cram schools of China and India.

Unless we want to train a generation of rote-memorizers and elite test takers, this is not a direction that should be pursued.

[home_boi]

Those admissions processes are actually seen as very fair processes in those countries. IIRC, there is very high economic diversity in the top colleges in China and India which can't be said about the Ivy League schools.

[cycrutchfield]

Those admissions processes are actually well-known for producing excellent students of rote memorization and standardized tests. They are not well-known for producing well-rounded students that are capable of thinking outside of the box.

[baud147258]

In particular, these written part of the entrance exam usually cover multiple schools, which allow students to pass two or three written examination, whose result will examined by multiple schools.

[Spooky23]

Just do a random lottery, assign points for objective achievements, whether academic or extracurricular. Pick some low (say 5%) percentage of admissions subject to discretion.

The legacy/z-list stuff demonstrates that the curation/engineering of the student body aspect of the process is bullshit. Kids who are marginally qualified and have rich parents seem to be able to make it.

Introducing a lottery system would eliminate the injustice and resentment where some admission officer is applying a "cool filter" to determine whether chinese/korean/indian people are worthy, or creating the assumption that other minorities were somehow unworthy of their opportunity.

I'm just an idiot who went to a SUNY school. In the 90s, if you met an SAT threshold and were a B-ish student you were in. We used to joke that we were the 13th grade of Massapequa high school -- there was no curation of the social skills of the student body. That said, we had a fine social life, and in rigorous subjects the dopiest idiots were filtered out. Computer Science 201 was a lecture hall with 800 students, and about 40-50% of the population was culled each year. About 40-50 students graduated. It was no Harvard, but we seemed to muddle though.

[SiempreViernes]

Just do a unbiased lottery draw for the rest, that's about as fair you can do until you go down the really dystopian full facebook micro surveillance.

[betterunix2]

"What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?"

Sorry but what makes you think students with stellar grades have no social life? My memory of my four years at an "elite" NYC high school is that the students with the best grades (I was not even close) were just as social as the rest of us and participated in plenty of after school clubs and whatnot (more than I did).

"Who's going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?"

Ironically that is a career path with a reputation for attracting anti-social psycopaths (but maybe this is a myth -- after all, Harvard admissions committees are there to find the applicants who proved their pro-social personalities by participating in exactly the sort of extracurriculars Harvard is looking for).

"No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale."

The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."

[totalZero]

Investment banking is a highly social business. Everyone lies and there is a lot of manipulation, but social skills help you navigate that world.

[mikec3010]

> The simple version of that sentence would be of the form, "I am not racist, but [racist statement]."

So regardless of intent, it's conclusively, unequivocally "racist" if the outcome of a selection process doesn't fall perfectly within a normal distribution?

[paulsutter]

You might want to reconsider your distaste for the robotics club. Take a look at the CEOs of the 10 most valuable companies now vs 10/20/30 years ago (Hint: Larry Page, Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella...) Jack Ma was rejected by Harvard Business School ten times, by the way.

Expect big changes in banking over the coming decades as well. You may want to evolve your thinking.

[IvyAdmisions]

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

[paulsutter]

You might also give Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates a reason to actually stay at Harvard (I’m taking aim at the slim technical curriculum and easy As)

Philip Greenspun on “Lean In”:

> Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David...takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

[extra88]

They teach Humanities courses at Caltech too. And Harvard teaches Physics. Mixing critiques of grade inflation and the Humanities weakens both.

[NikolaeVarius]

Whats wrong with one or two activities? I did design build fly in college, and it took up every single moment of time I wasn't studying or working.

[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[paulsutter]

When hiring, I’d eagerly interview the design-build-fly candidate, and immediately reject candidates with 6-12 extracurriculars. You want problem-solvers with strong interests, follow-through, and real teamwork. Not superficial resume padders.

[lovich]

How does a kid realistically do 6-12 extracurriculars, school, sleeping, and eating in a 24 hour day?

If the admissions departments are just looking for higher numbers every year without even considering if they are plausible, that sounds like they are just asking for resume padding or fraud

[pnw_hazor]

resume padding then?

[sincerely]

Why would someone apply to a school ten times??

[reitzensteinm]

We don't discriminate against asian people, just their problematic culture.

[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[zimablue]

This is just classism dressed up as racism. People who don't want to enter the upper middle class and have strong extracurriculars are just the already upper middle class/upper class. The professions like law/medicine are what the lower classes shoot for, trying to be a journalist or a political player is the domain of the higher classes.

"These people work too hard for too low aspirations, we need more people who work less hard but have higher aspirations"

Those people are the rich and powerful.

[leetcrew]

ivy league educations are obviously a very scarce good. is it really so wrong to want to limit the amount of unambitious professionals they matriculate?

i was a smart enough kid that i probably could have done well academically at an ivy league school, but the whole time i was in college i knew i had no loftier goals than just getting a nice job as a software engineer and enjoying my time after work. there are hundreds of good state schools that do a great job preparing you for this kind of life if you put in the work. a spot at a school like MIT would honestly have been wasted on me, even though i was likely "smart enough" to be there.

[extra88]

I don't think that's always the case but the important distinction is classism is legal, racism isn't.

[golergka]

I description is very precise, but the tone implies a value judgement - is it intentional?

[reitzensteinm]

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that history will judge this line of argument poorly.

[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[reitzensteinm]

You're making an argument of rational self interest, which doesn't at all speak to morality.

Imagine a company that maintains a culture of grooming executives through the ranks. After reviewing their data, they find that more women than men leave to start families. Are they then justified to hire only men, or more subtly divert resources to only groom male junior employees?

OK, so an Ivy League school wants to continue with policies with racist outcomes because it's better for the school. It's probably going to stay legal for quite some time, so they'll be free to continue. But they shouldn't receive a dime of government money, and will deserve the scorn they'll be viewed with in history.

[extra88]

Asian students make up a much greater percentage of Harvard College students than the percentage of Asians in the U.S. population, that doesn't sound like a racist outcome.

What's most frustrating is this case is a stalking horse for white racists who want to eliminate race as a consideration to keep higher education predominantly white and therefore economically advantaged.

[tomp]

> they find that more women than men leave to start families

They're definitely justified in filtering out people (men and women) who are more likely to leave to start familier, and prefer those who won't.

This is of course a bad outcome for society, but that's how capitalism works - and if we want companies to optimize for/prefer families, then we should structure the societal incentives such.

[kanel_]

Tsk tsk, of course we should restrict those who seek upper middle class lives in law and medicine, when clearly we should instead be selecting for upper-upper middle class livelihoods in I-banking and, once in a blue moon, management consulting!

[jessaustin]

I think you missed some sarcasm there. Are you sure you were in admissions at Harvard?

[imgabe]

Funny how you substituted culture for the word application in the OP. Is it your belief that college applications are the sum total of Asian culture?

[jessaustin]

Clearly 'reitzensteinm is baiting this "IvyAdmisions" [sic] character. No one who had a job at Harvard for more than a month would tolerate that statement, but "IA" agrees heartily. He's going to claim that he was in admissions at a different Ivy, but no matter how people might look down on Penn or Cornell, they wouldn't have this joker around either. This account has existed for 42 days, and is trolling this entire thread.

[chillacy]

We don’t discriminate against black people, just their problematic culture.

Still doesn’t sound great. If you use race as a feature, you’ll give and deny opportunities based on race.

[nopinsight]

So out of curiosity, what would be some optimal sets of characteristics for being admitted to top Ivies?

Are they largely looking for people with ‘change-the-world’, ‘make-a-big-impact’ potentials and great academic records (with the former being the more important criterion)? Or something else?

I expect these criteria can be described in words and it is not only learned through apprenticeship as supposedly there are tens or hundreds of officers doing the filtering.

[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[nopinsight]

Interesting and thank you for the reply. So they aim to admit people truly outstanding at something or with the potential to do so and strong evidence to back that up.

I guess they might miss out on some exceptional generalists who tend to shine a bit later in life.

[extra88]

Of course. No process is perfect and there are more exceptional people than there are spaces for them at Harvard or at all the Ivies.

[BeetleB]

>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.

Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men. When they analysed the numbers, they found that it was because women generally applied to very departments with low admission rates, and men generally applied to departments with high admission rates.

There is a bit of self selection in the outcome here.

[denzil_correa]

> Kind of reminds me of the 1970's lawsuit against UC Berkeley where women were claiming discrimination because of lower grad admissions than men.

That's the Simpson's Paradox [0]. In Simpson's Paradox, you observe a trend in sub-groups but this trend disappears when these sub-groups are combined. I'm not sure of how this is the same. Could you explain how this is the same?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox#UC_Berkele...

[BeetleB]

I intentionally did not mention Simpson's Paradox as it would be distracting. The fact that the Berkeley case is a good example of the paradox is mostly a cool artifact. My point would be as valid if in every department the admission rate was roughly equal. In terms of the actual lawsuit, the issue was that there was no bias - or rather, the bias was in the preferences of women/men, not in the admissions process. Men opted for departments where admission was easier.

I'm not claiming Simpson's Paradox here. I'm commenting on the observations IvyAdmissions made (which was also my observation when I was in school). If what he says is true, the bias doesn't appear to be entirely from the admissions committee, but from the fact that Asian Americans are targeting a few professions (e.g. medical school) in a much higher proportion than other races.

Although I did not go to an Ivy league, I did go to a top school, and I saw pretty much the same thing. I hung out a lot with the Asian students, of which there were many. The Asian undergrads with top grades (South or East) were very reliably predictable: They either aimed for medical school, an MBA, or law school. The motives were all similar: These were high paying jobs. Almost none of them showed any passion for any of these fields. None of them wanted to become a lawyer to fight for worthy causes - they all wanted to go work at a law firm to get high pay. The pressure from their parents to go into one of these was strong - so much so that some of them did exhibit a passion for something, but they abandoned that passion and went into one of these career paths for grad school due to parental pressure. There were exceptions, but they stood out.

If this is reflective of the reality, it's understandable why Harvard is not admitting many of them.

This was quite a few years ago, and anecdotally I do see differences in the latest batch of Asian students - they are much less prone to the pressures of "must go be a high paying doctor/lawyer/businessperson". I do see a lot more creativity, variety and entrepreneurship, so things probably have changed.

Of course, all the usual caveats of relying on anecdotes apply here.

[dilap]

how do you explain the fact that admissions officers rated asian students lower on "personality" than alumni interviewers?

from here:

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/06/harvard-discrimination...

[IvyAdmisions]

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.

[home_boi]

Don't admission officers actually come from worse educational backgrounds than alumni? I think many AO never reach educational or career heights that would help them appreciate the accomplishments of applicants while alumni do.

[danieltillett]

Umm they are out to discriminate against Asian people.

More seriously if your aim is to limit the number of people applying for premed then limit the number of pre-med slots and let the applicants know.

If demand is greater than supply then just put everyone over the acceptable score into a pool and draw out at random. Why resort to outright racism to solve a problem of supply and demand?

[bigcostooge]

I think you can answer that by asking yourself another question: who at Harvard understands supply and demand?

[danieltillett]

A lottery is such an obvious solution that we can only conclude that the people who developed the Harvard admission process are irredeemable racists.

[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.

[danieltillett]

This would only happen if you set the threshold too high. If Harvard wants to be an institution with lots of AA, NA and LA students then just set the threshold at a level where these groups can enter the lottery.

[MagnumOpus]

A lottery at any threshold will create a student body biased away from blacks/natives/latinos, since the entire bell curve of their SAT results is to the left of whites/south Asians/east Asians. (Unless the top students stop applying, which is an unacceptable outcome for any elite school.)

[1] https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

[nindalf]

A lottery appears to be a reasonable solution but it has a problem. The admissions system has two objectives - selecting students according to criteria that Harvard deems important and second, giving the public perception of selecting quality students. If it was publicly known that getting was a lottery, then the perception of quality takes a hit.

[taormina]

I mean, if we really have this many "perfect on paper and equivalent" students applying, toss out everyone who was less than perfect and then run the lottery on the cream of the crop.

[frockington]

Imagine if the lottery produced only White and Asian males being accepted. The meltdown and tears that a even a less than 0.01% event would cause prevents the lottery concept. I personally agree that a lottery is a valid suggestion but I don't think it would ever happen, at least completely random without "supervision"

[danieltillett]

How could a lottery produce such an outcome with tens of thousand of people in the pool and thousands being chosen? Set a threshold to get into the lottery (say a SAT score of 1200) and then choose at random.

Such an approach will likely encourage diversity as people who think they don't have a chance under the current system will apply.

[WillPostForFood]

In Harvard wanted to stay a top school, they wouldn’t set the lottery threshold to 1200, they’d set it to 1500, with minimum 4.0 GPA. They’d still have a huge pool of applicants, but it would likely end up with a class around half Asian, which is what they are explicitly trying to avoid.

[frockington]

I'm not disagreeing with you. But someone in Admissions (who is heavily incentivized to not use a lottery) is going to vehemently argue the opposite

[WillPostForFood]

May I ask, what was the racial breakdown of the admissions officers? Were there any asians?

[jancsika]

> play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably),

Let's take your low end of 600 students. Let's say you are a former musician and could judge their ability after listening to a mere 1 minute of music. Plus perhaps 30 seconds to reflect upon what you heard and make some notes.

That alone is 15 hours of your work week as an admissions officer, or 3% of your total time for the review period if you figure a full 3 months of reviews for applications. That's assuming you didn't listen to musical excerpts from the thousands of other musician students you ostensibly reviewed to fill in the slots for the rest of the Freshman class.

Did you do that as an admissions officer?

[jeffreyrogers]

Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest the OP do differently with this comment.

[jancsika]

> Of course you don't do that. You look to see what orchestras they were in as a kid, what competitions they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list music as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the music department at the university you're applying to, perform for them, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

Compare with:

Of course you don't spend 3% of the process critically reading essays. You look to see what writing groups they were in as a kid, what essay contests they've won, etc. You'll immediately see that most people who list writing as an extracurricular are decent, but nothing extraordinary. If you are really good then you can meet with someone at the English department at the university you're applying to, let them read your entrance essay, and if they think you're good enough they'll tell the admissions department and give your application a boost.

The difference is that we presume the OP did take the time to critically read those essays. Imagine if OP had written, "I didn't see much in the way of extra-curricular writing activities, so I can assumed those 600 essays were boring." It's not a serious statement.

Presumably there is a web portal for retrieving the essays, reading them in the browser, making comments, etc. Presumably that web portal exists because admissions can assume with impunity that admissions officers are literate and can critically read and rate an essay according to some predetermined rubric.

We don't have that same kind of API for musical excerpts because we don't have the same rate of musical literacy we have for reading literacy. That's unfortunate because an admissions officer could tell a lot about the applicant's propensity for risk taking, sense of humor, and a lot of other important characteristics that are difficult to convey in test scores and essay form.

[jeffreyrogers]

That's not really a fair comparison. The equivalent would be someone listing writing as an extracurricular activity and then you look and see what novels they've published, what anthologies their poetry has appeared in, whether they've written essays or journalism that got published in the New Yorker or a similar, high quality publication.

Again, I'm not sure what you're suggesting the OP do differently. It's not feasible for admissions directors to be experts in every area they're evaluating candidates on, so they have to outsource some of that to people who have already evaluated the candidates on those dimensions.

[jancsika]

Regardless of what you think the fair comparison is, it wouldn't be serious to claim that the writing is unremarkable without... reading the writing.

Same goes for playing an instrument. You have to listen to the applicant to know whether their playing is remarkable or not.

To be as clear as possible: OP should have reserved judgment on the musical prowess of the applicants instead of claiming all 600-1000 applicants were unremarkable players without having listened to them.

tldr; "I didn't see any musical accolades listed in their packets" != "unremarkable players."

[citizenkeen]

I don't believe you have to listen to a student musician to judge them. You can see on their application what they've achieved. Are they third chair in some youth philharmonic? That's not remarkable. If they were remarkable, they would have remarkable achievements on their application.

[paidleaf]

> The outcome is racist but there's no intent to be racist.

Then why do college admissions factor in race at all?

> Their grades and scores are STELLAR!

But the complaint is that their grades and scores aren't stellar. That lower grades and scores are being chosen over higher grades and scores based apparently on race.

> What's going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all?

Once again, the complaint is that people with equal or better extracurricular activities and better grades are being passed over based on race.

> No one is out to discriminate against asian people, their applications are just very problematic at scale.

But we know this isn't true. We know that college admins have discriminated before.

Your argument is just a rehash of the anti-semitic discrimination against jews decades ago.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/06/18/harvard-ad...

It's pretty much boilerplate word for word copy of previous racist admission policies.