American society is so focused on race that it is blind to class

In my experience, a typical parent thinks that a student with 4-year varsity sport participation (more than one doesn’t help if it’s just participation), president of a school club, and member of some group or two (one probably being a local community service group) as being “strong”.

I would call this nice, but similar to 10k-20k other applicants, mainly because it’s fairly easy to manufacture this.

Some sports teams take anyone who is willing to play. It’s often trivially easy to start a club with your friends and declare yourself president (and essentially do nothing). It’s trivially easy to join a group or two and tag along. I have heard of and seen all of these examples that were done precisely to game elite school admissions.

Is this what happened with OP’s kid? Who knows?

What strong in one or more of these same categories might look like:

- all-state first team in a sport, and/or talented enough to be recruited in a sport. If it’s not a school sport, then winner of a regional or larger competition (depends on sport).

- started a club/group that went on to do something meaningful, with “meaningful” roughly being that it was probably worthy of being written up in a local or regional newspaper.

- participated in a group (like a music group or academic group/team) that was highly competitive to join and won regional, national, and/or international competitions.

- participated in a group (like an existing service group) that did something incredibly unique, most likely led by the applicant (e.g., some sort of decent-sized development project, local or international).

One or more of the above, substantiated in recommendations and/or supporting materials (e.g., newspaper articles, bulletins, etc.) will make an applicant much more unique.

> Though I do agree the odds are quite insane lately, with the top schools receiving applications from the top students of the entire planet. Basically everyone has to shift their sights down the rankings as a result.

This is largely not true.

Outside of covid years (those years are outliers), the main reason the acceptance rates are lower is because more people are applying. In general, the overall quality of those additional applications is relatively low — it’s just much easier to apply now (especially with a mediocre application) than it was in the past, and it’s getting easier every year.

Harvard had 60k applicants last year, and about 13k 30 years ago. The strong applicant pool has not increased 4x-5x over the past 30 years.

Is it tougher? Yes, but only slightly, imho. I think the internet has allowed some students who are not in elite university feeder schools to get info on how to be a strong candidate. This info was much tougher to access 30 years ago.

As a simple example, Cal Newport has written some good blog posts and books on how to be an outstanding applicant.

That said, many people don’t avail themselves of this information and still stubbornly think that grades and SATs are the main criteria for elite school admissions.

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571629

> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]

People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/sunday/it-was-nev...

Based on the replies I get here and elsewhere (I beat this drum a lot since I think many people have such in accurate perceptions), many people still think that grades and scores are the primary determining factor in elite school admissions, apparently with a dose of racism thrown in to hold down groups who are good at grades and scores.

I get very few people who really embrace the idea of “the hook” (link below) and try to learn more about it. I’m imagining because it’s hard and not concrete — that is, there is no formula to create a good hook and there are few litmus tests to know if your hook is good enough.

https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/articles/15-tips-minority-st...

> You think Asians are in some way on average inferior in a way that’s obvious to admissions staff but not to alumni interviewers.

Yes, I trust the staff to have a better idea of where all applicants (including Asians) fit into the total applicant pool versus the alumni interviewers.

If I had to take a guess, I’m guessing that bias in personal score (for all people, not just Asians) impacted fewer than 20 applicants at Harvard last year. Maybe fewer than 10. There are strong efforts to combat rater bias in the process.

One of the Supreme Court justices asked why that score was used if it mattered so little. The short answer is that really strong scores probably got straight admitted, really weak scores got straight denied, and the marginal candidates are selected based on a number of variables (so this score would be just one of those).

Said another way, finding bias that is going to make a few percent of failing applicants have a slightly better failing score is something that should be looked into (mainly to see if it impacts marginal candidates), but it’s not going to change the admission status of those candidates. In Harvard terms, if the personality score is in a very low category, bumping it up one notch doesn’t make any difference. Any time spent on fine tuning one failing rating in a failing application is inefficiently used time, and these folks are on a clock.

Are you aware that the majority of STEM seats in Indian colleges are set aside for either affirmative action for ‘lower’ castes (itself an arbitrary criteria) and women?

The average man in India is competing for approx 10% of college seats!

And saying an Indian STEM degree is worth millions in lifetime earnings reveals even more ignorance - outside of a handful of colleges, the India higher education system is considered woefully inadequate, underfunded, pumping out graduates who only succeed out of personal initiative.

Every major corporation in India essentially has a retraining program to actually teach what’s necessary for work. The worker training issue is one of the top challenges faced by businesses there.

Perhaps it’s time you described your own ethnicity and background etc. Let’s learn a little more about where your biases flow from.

If you actually grew up in India in the time period of the OP, or knew anything about it other than nonsense in woke publications, you would feel ashamed for your tone and envy and render a sincere apology to the OP.