‘Lopping,’ ‘Tips’ and the ‘Z-List’: Bias Lawsuit Explores Harvard’s Admissions
From an earlier thread:<p>I was a college admissions officer for a few years and am familiar with the process at the top Ivies.<p>The outcome is racist but there&#x27;s no intent to be racist.<p>Imagine your job is to create the best possible 2000-student freshman class for Harvard from the 40,000 students who apply.<p>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&#x27;t cut it), play an instrument (very well, but not remarkably), and want to study pre-med.<p>Their grades and scores are STELLAR! But if you admit these students your campus is fucked. Half the freshman class can&#x27;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&#x27;s just not enough spots.<p>What&#x27;s going to happen to campus social life if half the class has a history of not being social at all? Who&#x27;s going to produce art and go into politics? Who&#x27;s going into investment banking to pull down big bonuses 10 years from now?<p>So you work your way through them and try to take the very best of them. The rest of them you reject. They&#x27;ll get into fine schools and be successful, there&#x27;s just only so many slots of students like that in the class.<p>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.