the Sam Jackson College Experience

About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).

I found an explanation for why Jian Li might have expected to be admitted to Princeton and all those other schools which waitlisted him: perhaps he went and used Michelle Hernandez’s Academic Index Calculator? Michelle Hernandez is “America’s premiere college consultant,” according to her website.

Hernandez invites us to calculate our own academic indices using this calculator: “Want to calculate your own Academic Index and give yourself a baseline for your chances of admission to top colleges? Enter your SAT I, SAT II and rank information below.” This Academic Index is analogous to the “numbers” that readers give to applicants on the basis of academics; apparently, this calculator approximates the ‘formula’ that all these top schools use.
There are some words of warning about the incomplete nature of this calculator as a tool, but it still reads a (lot) bit deceptive to the unwary:

Obviously admissions offices that use the AI use it along with all the subjective information and make informed decisions about how to understand the most complex part of the formula, the CRS. Why then does the AI matter? Most importantly, it will help you gage your chances for admission since there is a very high correlation between high AI’s and high acceptance rates.

Uh oh! ‘Correlation’ –that’s always dangerous, because people are so quick to leap from correlation to causation and assume dependency. Anyways, I put in Jian Li’s stats and played around with them a little bit since we don’t have a complete picture.

So how’d Jian Li fare?

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This is a ‘part 1′ because this is a very big very thorny issue which concerns affirmative action and much more. As such I will in the near future be writing a ‘part 2′ which directly addresses any AA-related concerns I’m having about this topic here… but for now, my understanding of the issue:

Pulitzer prize winner Daniel Golden wrote a piece about “whether elite colleges give Asian-American students a fair shake” in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It focused specifically on the case of one Jian Li, a Chinese permanent legal resident who went to a NJ public school having emigrated at age 4. Mr. Li recently filed a complaint against Princeton University for rejecting him through the Dept. Education’s Office for Civil Rights; he is currently a freshman at Yale. (n.b., this is not a tort case, it is a complaint about what Li feels was discrimination.)

This is an issue that throws a lot of people off sometimes, because some people confuse a) Affirmative action with b) race-based discrimination. Private universities in the United States are not required to have the same ‘objective’ qualifications that businesses or real estate have; race discrimination is only happening if there a pattern (in this case acceptance / rejection) unique to one race or ethnicity on the basis of unfair (nonstandard) comparisons–hence the problem with Berkeley’s law program back in the early 90s, which took Asians out of the general pool and compared them against each other.

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hOtIvYlEaGuEwAnNaBecHiCk from College Confidential’s forum has some interesting thoughts on college admissions. She began her thread “Good Schools for Muah!” with this; amusement ensued.

Hello everyone! I’m new to College Confidential, so I’d just like to introduce myself. I live in California and I’m currently a junior in one of the top private schools in the nation. Here are my stats.

SAT I: 1580
SAT II: 780/800/770
GPA: 4.67
Rank: 1/432

ECs: Concertmistress of two youth symphonies, Varsity cheer (captain), Varsity basketball (captain), Varsity softball (co-captain), featured in the prestigious “Who’s Who in American High School Students,” recipient of Principal’s Award for Best Math Student, Best Science Student and Best English Student, recipient of school’s AllStar Athlete award, AIME qualifier, editor of my school newspaper, editor of my school yearbook, ASB Class President (3 years), tutor (voted “top tutor” by peers).

I am also president of the following clubs at my school: Amnesty International, Speech and Debate (Recipient of the prestigious Lincoln Award), Young Republicans and Helping Hands. I also volunteer at the soup kitchen, library and hospital.

I’m currently looking into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, and my safety, Cornell. What do y’all think? Thanks in advance!!!

Full thread here. Some decent trollage.
yes I know it’s not quite real but it’s still TOP SHELF SATIRE.