Final Thoughts, For Now, on the CEO Study of Wisconsin Admissions
In CEO’s report on racial disparities in UW admissions, they highlight an extremely misleading statistical concept — that of “odds ratios” — to leave the false impression that black and Latino applicants to UW are hundreds of times more likely to win acceptance than whites. They also leave more than a thousand students of color out of their applicant sample, inflating admissions percentages for blacks and Latinos by excluding weak applicants from that pool and distorting statistics on Asians by excluding all applicants of Southeast Asian origin from their study.
In addition to all that, they engage in a variety of petty manipulations of data, as when they scale their admissions rates chart to begin at 50% rather than 0%, thus dramatically enhancing the visual impact of the graph at the expense of accuracy and readability.
Strangely missing in all this statistical sleight-of-hand is any straightforward statement of the magnitude of the