[lbo-talk] Douthat on class and race in and college admissions

[Joseph Catron]

"Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria
Walton Radford, published a book-length
study<http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9072.html>of admissions and
affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and
universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed
to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed
higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K.
Nieli pointed out last
week<http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html>on
the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were
most
disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the
working-class.

"This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study.
For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the
more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the
reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely
to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualification ...
"Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most
extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite
school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like
high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works
against your chances."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."