Racially Driven School Admissions

So, I'm a senior now (engineering) and I've applied to med school(s).  While looking around, I found a breakdown on percentage acceptance based on MCAT score and GPA.  This was further broken down into ethnicity.  It shows what I think is a somewhat ridiculous trend.  The vertical axis is %chance, the x axis is MCAT score from 25-40 and the lines represent cGPA.

Overall:

http://i55.tinypic.com/v4o2om.jpg


Hispanic or Latino:

http://i53.tinypic.com/2w2lgdi.jpg


Black:

http://i52.tinypic.com/35bw9jc.jpg


Asian:

http://i53.tinypic.com/ra9mp4.jpg


White:

http://i52.tinypic.com/2efkcaf.jpg



I understand the desire to have a diverse population in a profession, and that test scores are only one part of what makes a person appealing to an admissions committee.  However, these graphs seem to show a clear difference in the likelihood of acceptance based on race with whites being about average, hispanics and black above average acceptance, and asians below average acceptance. 

For some numbers, take a 3.5 GPA and 30 MCAT which is about average.

Chances of being accepted based on race:

overall  50%
hispanic 78%
black 88%
asian 45%
white 52%

I could understand a 5 percent difference...but accepting on average 32% more black people than asians with the same test scores?  Come on...



Edited by ArthurBignose - 31 August 2011 at 5:35pm

I think that college admission is tricky business. The education game is changing, and setting the bar isn't as easy as it used to be.

I know that there are alot of factors that contribute to admissions that may not be represented here. Like with law school, it's perfectly within reason to get in with a 3.5 or even lower if you have the right writing skills and community service experience.

I don't really know what motivations that colleges have for keeping a diverse population, but I'd imagine it's important.

All of that said, it is disheartening to know that you can work your butt off and still be at a disadvantage. I expect this is a trend that's only going to get worse as the percentages of higher level degrees goes up.

Your second link doesnt seem to work for me, but not a big deal. If true, seems pretty odd. I wonder if anything has to do with sheer numbers? Do the graphs include applicants that may have been accepted to multiple programs and declined to go? Are Asians more apt to send out more applications? I'm not Asian, but I sent out multiple applications to colleges when I was looking around and got accepted to all of the ones I sent in. I obviously only went to one of them.

Are the sample sizes for each ethnicity of similar range?  

I'd imagine that, to some extent, the fact that the sample size for black applications/acceptances is a considerable amount lower than that for white, and Hispanic is remarkably lower, is causing some of the discrepancy in the statistics. Even the Asian sample size is more than double that of the black sample size. 

Edited by agentwhale007 - 31 August 2011 at 6:40pm

ArthurBignose wrote:  It could make an interesting study for someone