On top of exceptional students getting denied, less qualified students such as legacies, athletes, and minorities are being accepted into prestigious universities, contributing to the flawed system. Rather than admitting students based on their potential to succeed and personal attributes alone, universities are often admitting slightly inferior candidates simply because their parents attended the school or they want to increase their diversity population. In A is For Admission, Michele Hernandez mentions some of these discrepancies when explaining that legacies, students who have a parents that attended the university, have a forty percent acceptance rate into Dartmouth in comparison with the typical ten percent acceptance rate (183). Additionally, Hernandez describes athletes have a lower minimum GPA and ACT/SAT than the admitted class (172) and African Americans and Hispanics have a much higher acceptance rate whereas students from Asian descent have increased difficulty getting admitted into Ivy League schools (Hernandez 198). …show more content…
Consequently, because legacies and athletes take up about 23% of admitted students at Dartmouth, about 500 possibly more qualified students, who do not have any special recruitment tages, are being denied or waitlisted. In a school like Dartmouth or Stanford, where 5% of 42,000 applicants are accepted and 74% of applicants have above a 30 on the ACT, colleges should not be lowering their standards to include students with lower grades lower than the majority of applicants simply because they have a “recruiting tag.” (CITE). Ultimately, because colleges are admitting less qualified students who are meant to increase diversity, athletic success, or the alumi system, possibly exceptional students are being denied, demonstrating one major flaw within the admissions