The University of Virginia announced its numbers today for the next entering class. 36% of the 16,252 applicants were admitted, etc.
The racial and ethnic breakdown was not released today, although I’m sure it will be later (just as I’m sure that information on the SAT scores, etc., by groups will not be released).
The lead editorial in today’s Cavalier Daily, “By The Numbers,” listed some salient facts about the new entering class, such as
87 : Percentage of accepted students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.
But the one that really caught my attention was the one that immediately followed:
13 : Percentage of accepted students who are special for other reasons.
What, pray tell, makes that 13% so special? (Surely all entering UVa first years are special; just ask their parents.) Since just yesterday I had occasion to note (here) that “‘underrepresented minorities’ (blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans) make up 13% of the undergraduates at UVa,” I strongly suspect the the reason the Cavalier Daily’s “special for other reasons”13% are special is their race or ethnicity.
If that is the case, I suppose it is a sign of some vestigial, perhaps unconscious, respect for the principle that individuals should be treated without regard to their race or ethnicity that made the CavDaily editors uncharacteristically reticent on this point. Such embarrassment at openly calling race a badge of specialness deserving special treatment, if that’s what it was, reminds us of the days when civil rights advocates argued that all people should be treated the same. How long ago that now seems.
UPDATE [5 April]
That 87% of admittees who were in the top 10% of their high school graduating class and the 13% who were “special for other reasons” are obviously a matched pair, i.e., the 13% were not in the top 10% of their classes.
Mike, a commenter below, and several emailers have written to let me know that “special for other reasons” or something similar is often used at universities not just for preferentially admitted minorities but also for athletes or others given special preference. But we are in luck here; the CavDaily edit also gives the following number:
160 : Athletes recruited by the University
Those 160 athletes make up not quite 3% of the newly admitted students. If we assume that none of these athletes was in the top 10% of his or her class, and thus subtract them from the 13% of the admittees who are “special” for some reason, that leaves 598 admittees, or a shade over 10% of the entering class who were not in the top 10% of their class but were “special for other [but not athletic] reason.”
In theory some of these non-athletically “special” students could be legacies, preferentially admitted sons or daughters of alumni, but if UVa is similar to other selective schools that number may be small. As I pointed out here some time ago (here and here), the legacies accepted to Vermont’s selective Middlebury College a few years ago “had an average SAT score that was 33 points higher than the class as a whole.
“Special in other ways” is reminiscent of the Church Lady’s “Well, isn’t that special.” If so, the paper was actually being notably sarcastic. Indeed, I expect the paper and the reporter will be charged with dangerous insensitivity.
Consider also that “special in other ways,” and just “special” have been used to indicate states from just a little off to seriously mentally challenged.
Either interpretation suggests an editorial statement unfavorable to the system, and perhaps to the lower 13% of admits, in a news article.
This may not reflect your hypothesis directly, especially as the breakdown of scores by race is as likely to be hidden from the paper as from the general readership. Also remember to consider scholarship ‘atheletes’ of all kinds.
I think the intent of the article in saying that 13% were “special in other ways” was to indicate that the 13% was special even though they weren’t in the top 10% of their class. Note that 87% and 13% sum to 100%.
I think you are jumping to conclusions when the intent was merely to be cute and say “We’re all special!”
Anon-
I agree, the author could have meant the statement completely without irony. There is some beauty in hitting the boundary between irony and straight with such precision. If irony, it is so much more enjoyable like that. In any case, the reporter has plausible deniability.