US News: ... Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s.
Espenshade found that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities:
Whites were three times as likely to get fat envelopes as Asians. Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites. African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites.
To clarify, 1150 is similar to the average at a typical state university, 1460 similar to the average at a top Ivy, and 1600 is obtained by only a few thousand high school seniors each year (note, this is post-1995 re-centering of the SAT). Cognitively, these are very different groups of kids.
Related posts: Asian-Americans hurt by affirmative action, the ugly truth, the price of admission, Asians at Berkeley, the new white flight.
See these slides for more results. The bottom slide below suggests that if race-blind admissions were enacted the percentage of Asian students at elite universities would jump from 24 percent to 39 percent. Note that 39 percent is similar to the current Asian populations at Caltech and Berkeley, two elite institutions with (roughly) race-blind admissions; the former due to meritocratic idealism, the latter thanks to Proposition 209.
(Click for larger versions.)
