Some of the points Zachary Goldstein made in his recent article in "In admissions, many get 'special' attention" (The Dartmouth, May 13), on admit rates for students of color are off the mark. Though Goldstein might have the simple statistics to back his implications about the role race plays in the admissions process at Dartmouth, both his understanding of the numbers and his approach to the question of affirmative action at the College is simplistic at best.
The article on higher admit rates for students of color delved no deeper than the surface, throwing out sensationalistic admit rates without giving the total number of applicants for each group of students. Had Goldstein given us the full figures of the applicant numbers by racial group, it would have been easy to see that much smaller numbers of students of color apply each year, a dynamic that plays into the higher admittance rates for these groups. At Dartmouth's admissions office, each applicant is considered "holistically," which means the admissions officer will read and consider them as individuals in their specific context, assessing the privileges they have had and the adversities they have overcome. The students in the acceptance pool are all highly qualified students who made the best of what they were given in their school environments. They are never accepted to Dartmouth because they simply checked a box marked Native American, Hispanic, Asian or African American.
Media hype and articles like Goldstein's lead to the common misunderstanding about affirmative action's only being about a race. Especially in college admissions, regional background, socio-economics and gender are all factors when officers consider their applicants. So, a woman from a rural part of Wyoming is also benefiting from affirmative action. This method, called the "Harvard system," was approved by the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan Law School case and is the method that Dartmouth College and other Ivies use.
Goldstein is sadly representative of the shallowness of typical media coverage regarding this issue in that he has focused almost exclusively on race in his series. To be frank, you can dice the admissions numbers any way you want to and discover "inequity" in the admissions process. For example, May 11's article about the legacy system didn't address any of the deeper, systemic reasons why the admit rates for legacies might outstrip the general admit rate -- number one of which is that legacies are the progeny of at least one Ivy League-educated parent. The best predictor for a child's education is his or her parent's education and income. Often, people do not realize that- many of the students who attend schools like Dartmouth are first generation college students, and do not have the same advantages that students who attend first rate college preparatory schools offer, like an extensive curriculum of AP scores, a wide variety of extracurricular activities and many full time college counselors who write lengthy recommendations for applications. Another example: You could look at the admit rates for students who apply early decision (approximately 30 percent) and compare that to the admit rate for regular decision (the average 16 percent). Yet, no one would suggest that Early Decision students -- who comprise about one third of Dartmouth as a whole -- don't deserve to be here or didn't "earn" their way to Dartmouth like the regular decision admits.
Affirmative action does start to help give benefits to groups who have been underprivileged in the past. It is unrealistic to expect a student from a poor school in a bad neighborhood to have amazing test scores and a full resume of shinning extracurricular when he has never gone through Princeton Review test prep or his school doesn't have the budget for these after school activities. We have to keep in mind that part of Dartmouth's applicant pool comes from these schools, but this does not mean that the student cannot excel at Dartmouth. If the student has taken full advantage of what the school offered, then the admissions office considers this student a strong applicant. Affirmative action doesn't right the wrongs of the history of an education denied, but it does open up higher education to more people who can benefit from it.
As an Asian and a non-legacy (and a regular decision admit) -- groups Goldstein has implied should be "outraged" in his series of articles -- I am not outraged at the way Dartmouth does admissions. Instead, I am at the willingness not to dig deeper than the surface regarding highly complex issues such as the use of race in admissions.
