• shanghaibebop@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    ^^ This.

    it’s hard to have a factual conversation about this. Mediocre ANYONE isn’t getting anywhere near those schools. You have to be at least the top 5% to even be in the conversation in the first place. In fact, due to the concentration of wealth and education in certain class and geographical locations, it’s even harder for the “average” student to be close to the same level as the “exceptional” student.

    Now back to affirmative action, all the elite schools still are still heavily gated through non-academic evaluation criteria. Legacy, athletics, and extracurriculars disproportionally benefit upper-class white folks. Even the supreme court decision doesn’t explicitly ban the evaluation of racial impact through personal statements. It remains to be seen how that will impact the racial composition at top schools.

    • latte@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      yup exactly!! there seem to be a lot of ways that this information is being oversimplified in misleading ways, especially given how opaque and complicated the college admissions systems already seems in its acceptance factors.

      my other thought about all this is that all these talks about class- or race-conscious admissions at the top tier schools are a bit of a red herring… realistically the impact of these policies from a social mobility perspective is going to be much bigger from mid tier/more publicly accessible schools (eg: state schools).