Am I only good because of my demographics?Answered
Hi, this is my first time posting a question here so I hope everything is alright. MIT is my dream school and I was elated to see that I had a 65-69% chance of acceptance. I referred this website to one of my very smart (Asian) friends and he was upset because he had a much lower chance of acceptance. After we messed around with the site for a bit, we noticed that the demographic stats heavily impacted acceptance rates. When I changed the stats from a Hispanic female to an Asian male, my chances plummeted from 65-69 to 1-3. I consider myself to be a strong applicant, but this was particularly upsetting. Is this a problem with the site? Or was I only given such a flattering score because of these factors? I think the acceptance scores for minorities are very inflated, I shouldn’t have been given such a high chance just because I’m part of an underrepresented group. If someone could tell me what’s up that would be very much appreciated.
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2 answers
So to be honest compared to other chancing tools collegevine is hands down the best but it definitely has some flaws. With out knowing you and your friends profile I can’t say with certainty what the issue is but yes demographics play a significant part. I’m a white male and at Michigan I have a 15-20% but if I’m black I get a 80-82% chance. (My SAT isn’t good enough for ivies)
So yes demographics play a huge part becuase everything is reviewed in comparison to your demographics. A 1570 SAT might be average for white/Asians at MIT while a 1490 might be average for Latinx and African Americans. So there is definitely a basis for it but I’d agree your chancing is a bit higher personally I’d say it’s more like 40-45% which is phenomenal for MIT but schools with sub 20% admit rate I say never has over a 50% chance.
Also consider MIT 7% admit rate and know that Asians are typically admitted at a much lower rate and have higher scores so 3% seems legit.
If you want more detailed questions email support@collegevine.com as I can’t speak about the chancing tool professionally.
Hope this helps and please comment if you need clarification as I’d be happy to help clarify!
Demographics play a huge role in it. I wouldn't doubt that these statistics are real. Realistically, yes, the difference in your acceptance rates (if everything else pretty much stayed the same) came from your demographic groups. This discrepancy is even wider for black students. While Asian males individually are "least likely" to get accepted (i.e. they have the lowest acceptance rates), black females have the highest, and by far. This means that competition for Asian males is extremely high; they must be very, very qualified in order to beat out all the other Asian males. It also means that expectations are much lower for black females; relative to the Asian males, they may only need to be moderately qualified to get into the same school. Does this mean that Asian male applicants are generally more qualified than black females? Not necessarily, but on average, very likely so.
Acceptance scores for minorites are undeniably inflated. The bars colleges set for groups based on race is very different. And yes, they do care, a lot, about how underrepresented you are, and they are very willing to manipulate acceptance rates in order to present a "diverse" and "well-represented" group.
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