How Princeton’s Admissions Officers Talk About Race

With all the criticism of higher education not being diverse enough, why wouldn't they discriminate based on race? You can have a complete meritocracy where only the best students get in, or you can have an inclusive environment where minorities are given preference over other students, but we live in a world where different races have different levels of academic achievement, so you can't have both. Seems like a lose-lose situation regardless of what the admission officers do here.

As a Princeton Alumnus whose application data might actually be released in this probe[if they go back a lot of years], I have the following thought. I think people put way to much weight/stock in standardized test scores. I scored very highly in both GPA and PSAT/SAT, etc tests in my quest to get into an Ivy League school. Looking back, I think my high test scores were more a measure of my culture and socioeconomic background, then my aptitude. A lot of research seems to back up that inference as well. The problem for admissions officers is that they need an objective standard to create something objective, and they probably fail a lot at it. Thankfully people seem to be fairly adaptable and more or less people figure out their way in life. And also thankfully, Admissions people treat their job very seriously and try to 'craft' classes that they think would benefit all. Is it 100% accurate, probably not. But I don't think anyone reading this forum would actually like a Judicial System that is 100% decided by a dispassionate computer either. For me the two camps are analogous. Justice by computer, and school admission by test score. Human systems are a lot more nuanced than that in my experience. Maybe it works for CalTech, but every school is not CalTech and neither is every undergraduate a CalTech 'student'.

Underlying this whole debate is the idea of school = earnings potential. I think it's a false dichotomy to say that a great school = high earnings for life. They are definitely correlated, but in my experience, my classmates who have graduated and worked really hard are successful, and those that haven't by and large are not. I think if you took those same successful people and put them into different circumstance, re school, that they are the type of people to overcome that 'perceived' disadvantage. There is a weighting of privilege, but my lived experience indicates that it's more socio-economic and cultural than school based. Even at Princeton, the rich kids had their cliques that have continued into adulthood. So like everything, once at Princeton it was, what elite more selective group can I join to get ahead. I think this is very toxic thinking, though unfortunately intellectually easy so a lot of people do it. Figure out what matters to you and focus on that. The people I've seen do that, seem to find their way.