[e1g]

The original study does address whether ALDC applicants are "as good" as typical applicants -

> Overall, our results show that only one-quarter of white ALDC admits would have been admitted if they had been treated as a typical applicant.

And on athletes -

> Being a recruited athlete essentially guarantees admission even for the least-qualified applicants. An athlete who has an 86% probability of admission—the average rate among athletes—would have only a 0.1% chance of admission absent the athlete tip

[unyttigfjelltol]

But the article doesn't deal with whether recruited athletes as a category are diverse. Probably, they are diverse and these statistics mean something remarkably different from the knee-jerk narrative in the article and many comments here.

[kemayo]

Article doesn't, but the study it's based on does. Recruited athletes are less-diverse than the general applicant pool:

> For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white, yet the share of non-ALDC applicants who are white is less than 41%. All other racial groups see higher representation among non-ALDC applicants and admits than in any of the corresponding ALDC applicant and admit categories.

- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... page 16

My anecdotal understanding is that "recruited athlete" often functions as a way for rich people to get their kids in. Get your kid on an expensive-and-niche sports team in high school -- lacrosse, water polo, etc -- and that puts them into a much-smaller pool of students that can be "recruited" by the college team.

[thrill]

"For example, recruited athletes, legacies, and dean’s interest list applicants are all over 68% white"

75% of the US population is white, so it sounds like that group is underrepresented in athletic admissions.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222

[kemayo]

You're looking at a misleading data point on two levels.

First, note that the 75.5% figure in that table includes Hispanic/Latino people, which not all sources will -- importantly the study I was quoting doesn't include these under "white", so we can't compare those numbers. There's a different row in your table that excludes those to get 58.9% white. This alone gets us back to the ALDC group being disproportionately white.

Second, it doesn't matter if 75% of the US population is white, but rather what percentage of the college-admission aged US population is white. (Not that people outside of the 17-23ish bracket don't apply to Harvard's undergraduate program, but I suspect that they do so in insignificant numbers.)

Here's a source that breaks out US racial demographics by age: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_101.20.a...

It says that in 2021 amongst 18-24 year olds, 52.8% were white. Thus the ALDC group is even more disproportionately white than the whole-population number would make you think.

[jgwil2]

The claim was made about the applicant pool, not the general population. The white population skews considerably older than other groups.