Discriminations

If a student is obviously qualified for Bowdoin, Shain said, he or she will get in independent of race. Five to 10 percent of applicants are accepted in this way, he explained, while about 30 percent of applicants are just as quickly rejected. The students who are left, though, may be judged with race in mind.

"In that middle group, you may tilt it toward population groups that make your campus become the community you want it to be," said Shain.

So, skin color discrimination will be the sole factor for those who cannot get in based on merit. Well, what else is new.

Elmer Moore, coordinator of multicultural recruitment in Admissions, said he thinks that the Admissions Office should always aim higher.

"There's never going to be a point, as long as I'm breathing, that we say, 'OK,' [that's enough]," said Moore.

Wow, even if 100% of the students are black, it won't even be enough! Hell, we need 110%, 120%, higher, higher, higher!!!!

If you dig into the numbers, things are even more skewed than they first appear. Regardless of whether affirmative action is a good thing or a bad thing (and arguments go both ways), somebody’s not telling the truth here. It’s just impossible that this is happening without conscious race-based admissions. Or else the statements made by the admissions officer are false.

Based on the numbers in the article and the publicly available overall yield of 40%, it is easy to extrapolate. Here, we’ve got a pool of 6263 applicants (6008 majority, 254 minority), 1190 accepted students (1085 majority, 105 minority) and a freshman class of 476 (434 majority, 42 minority).

So far, so good. But we know that about 10% got in “automatically” because they can do the work, and 30% were automatically rejected. Let’s assume that both of these groups had the same relative proportions of minority/non-minority and the same yields as the general applicant pool. This is a very generous assumption. Regardless, that means that 25 minority students were accepted that way (and 10 decided to go). Similarly, 600 majority applicants were accepted, and 240 went. Of the 30% who were automatically rejected, that means that 1802 were majority and 76 were minority.

Where does that leave us? Well, in the middle 60%, we’ve got 152 minority applicants, of which 80 get in (over 50%) and 32 went, compared to 3600 majority applicants, of which 484 get in (about 13.5% and 130 go.
So one group that constitutes 4% of the remaining pool has an acceptance rate that is four times as great as the other 96%--52% vs. 13.5%.

Bowdoin can accept whomever it wants and can run its school according to whatever values it finds agreeable. This policy may very well be a good idea. I just don’t understand why they feel the need to lie about it. That type of deception certainly isn’t something that anybody should look for in an institution of higher learning.

James E.,

What you highlight is not some freakish exception. Indeed, the educational industrial complex has colluded to systematically discriminate against individuals based on skin color and genital morphology for over 30 years now.

This is no surprise to those "in the know," that is, those who are intimately involved in this process.

Now, imagine that Texaco, or Denny's, had such a policy, but this time discriminating against blacks. What would happen to them?

Well, if you recall, both paid large sums of money because a few individuals in their companies were said to behave in a "racist" way, say by not serving blacks a coffee refill.

So, on the one hand, we have a few individuals at isolated companies who some call "racist," and the consequence is the payment of MILLIONS of dollars.

On the other hand, we have universities in which affirmative discrimination is practiced not just by a FEW individuals, but rather as a matter of POLICY. In addition, the discrimination decides peoples' futures (not just whether they get a coffee refill). Finally, the whole educational industrial complex (Black Power Structure, as Cobra would call it) colludes to perpetrate this affirmative discrimination so that whites do not even have a choice as to whether they will be discriminated against in higher education.

Now, why are universities NOT being sued? Why should not the top 25 universities (say) each have to pay a few hundred million dollars to every white citizen in the country in a class action suit? (Those who feel guilty because they have done something bad to blacks could donate their proceeds to the NAACP, or whatever).

I sat on the board of trustees at Bowdoin in the 1980s and part of the 90s. Not certain where you got your data on AA students, sounds off. I do however recall that the legacy rate, like at most competitive institutions was very high, 49-50% and the prized athlete rate was quite high as well. Of course both of those groups were about 98% white.