I went to Princeton High School, which is a public school located about a mile or so from the more famous university. I can’t find any numbers to support this, but my imperfect memory is that only a handful of my graduating class was accepted to the university. I can think of about five people who I know of, and I’m probably forgetting a couple. I did discover in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article about how to get into Harvard (or other similarly elite colleges) that 19 PHS grads went to Princeton in 2006 and 12 went there in 2002.
Those numbers seem a little higher that what the Class of ’87 produced, but I could be wrong.
There was an explanation for why so many PHS students get into such a selective university:
Jeff Lowe, the high school’s college adviser, says the numbers are so high in part because the children of Princeton professors are more likely to attend the high school, and they’re also likely to be good students. He says the school typically sends between 10 and 20 kids to the university every year. (The university subsidizes up to half the tuition for the child of a faculty member.)
My father taught briefly at UNC-Chapel Hill, but he wasn’t on the faculty at Princeton and he wasn’t a graduate of the university, either. I had no leg-up from my parents, and as a white male, I wasn’t getting any preferences for my demographic characteristics.
And it’s true that PHS was filled with good students. I’d get results back from standardized tests that showed me as being in the 99th percentile nationally, and substantially lower than that in my own school district. I still remember getting a 83rd percentile (local) rating in reading comprehension on a fourth-grade aptitude test that gave me a 99th percentile nationally. I remember it because it confused me and made me feel inadequate and smart at the same time. It drove home the discouraging idea that I could try as hard as I wanted, but I was never going to finish in the top of my class. And if I wanted to go to Princeton, I pretty clearly was going to have to be one of the very top finishers in both grade point average and SAT scores. I suspect that I could not have picked a worse school to go to in the entire country if my goal was to get into Princeton.
Maybe that’s a little inaccurate, but only for a different reason. Going to school at a very good public school with very smart students prepared me to go to an elite university even if it made it (in other ways) harder to get into one. If you were a white male and wanted to get into Princeton, your best bet was to be from a far-off low population state like Oklahoma or Alaska. They had few applicants to compete with, and the university at least tried to accept people from all 50 states. There were probably no more than 20 applicants from Alaska, let alone 20 people accepted from a single Alaskan school.
In any case, by the time I got to high school, I already knew that it would be nearly impossible from me to advance to the prestigious university down the street where so many of my friends’ parents were teaching. For a while, at least, my response to this was to not even try. I’m actually an extremely competitive person, but I don’t want to put in all my effort if I think the game is rigged against me. I know I’m not alone in not having had the most mature and healthy perspective on things when I was a thirteen year old boy. By the time I was fifteen, I had blown any chance I ever had to get into Princeton, and I tried to be okay with that. Who wants that anyway?
The truth is, I probably would have wanted to leave home anyway, but I’d have preferred that to be my choice.
There are other people from different places with different backgrounds who did get into an Ivy League school and then discovered that the social scene and the school work were very big challenges. I wouldn’t have had those problems just because my whole upbringing trained and acculturated me for life at one of these schools. Steve M. was one of those kids and he just wrote about the challenges he faced.
As I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog, I’m the white child of two high school graduates who made it to the Ivies and emerged with a sheepskin. I’d gone to a selective public school in the city (not the suburbs) of Boston — admission was based on a standardized test. A number of my friends from high school also made it to the Ivies or to similarly exclusive institutions.
But a lot of my friends dropped out short of graduating. And I made it through only because my default response to social anxiety is to withdraw and burrow, which made my college years lonely and miserable but left me a lot of time to get the coursework done.
My friends who didn’t make it through weren’t stupid. They were bright and well read. One friend in particular was one of the best-read people I’ve ever known, in both literature and history. He didn’t even get through sophomore year.
Some of my friends’ parents had attended college, but none had attended elite colleges. A lot of us were doing okay economically, but there were differences between us and the well-educated suburban middle class. We didn’t have models in our families and neighborhoods for how to navigate the world we were in. Yes, we’d done fine at a relatively demanding high school, but at college the work was harder and the distractions were greater. When things went wrong, we didn’t have people we could talk to who understood what was happening to us.
There’s a risk when someone writes about these types of issues that the response will be hostile. Most people don’t go to elite high schools or Ivy League schools, and the problems of those who do can come across as tone-deaf privileged bitching.
I only write about this now because Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia just said in oral arguments that affirmative action has the unfortunate side effect of placing black kids in schools that are too difficult for them. Steve M.’s point is that these schools are difficult for anyone, regardless of race, who comes from a lower socioeconomic class or who doesn’t have parents or other role models to guide them through the process.
I have another point, which is that it wasn’t affirmative action that kept me out of Princeton. The biggest strike against me was that I was from New Jersey, and that my school was filled with kids smarter than me, and that my school had a bunch of children of alumni and faculty, and that the university was flooded with applicants who had better test scores and the same teachers. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had been a Korean girl or the son of Sudanese immigrants.
In the end, I still had plenty of opportunities and the training to take advantage of them. I’ve always supported Affirmative Action and I think it’s a cop out to blame it for holding you back. It’s also true that it doesn’t matter if you’re a minority from the inner city or the son of an Italian bricklayer, it’s going to be a major adjustment to fit in and excel at an Ivy League school. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it nor that you shouldn’t be given the chance. Some people will fail and drop out. That’s also true for the children of the elite.
We shouldn’t strive for a completely fair admissions system, as that’s unattainable anyway. What we want are schools where the student body, through its diversity, is as much of an education as the classes. And we want plenty of churn in social mobility, which means that there should be fewer legacy admissions and more chances taken on folks who may or may not have what it takes to succeed at a top school.
What Scalia said could also be said for the legacy students like George W. Bush at Yale and Harvard. Or Donald Trump at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Or is Trump the product Wharton intends to produce?
In reflecting from retirement on my educational opportunities and my life experiences, I realized that having come from the top of the class (but not the very top) in a mediocre high school and having been accepted as an Honors student at a mediocre state university that was striving to raise its reputation, and then transferring on a geographically underrepresented preference to what is considered an elite university, I in fact got the tools to master my own future learning without the tools to “get a good job”. As for access to the elites that being at a university with a high reputation offered, I failed to capitalize on that because of my image of what that world involved, my social skills, and the fact that the concept of networking was then seen as something akin to cheating at the competition. “It’s not what you know but who you know.” came off as deserving the question “Well, why then are you putting so much effort in public school (and on quiz shows) trying to convince me that it’s what I know that matters?”
I also was not prepared for the amount of educational activity, regardless or the institution, that was essentially a form of academic hazing or intentional rites of passage. Learning and doing were less important than actual physical stamina or absence of even minor difficulties. You must compete and you must drink from the firehose of knowledge. The other thing I was not prepared for was the absolute divorce of universities from the world outside that they so insinuate themselves into as consultants and experts. It still galls me that the international relations program of one of the most prestigious international relations departments in the world failed to have a course on Vietnam and its history during the the 1965-1968 critical period of the Vietnam War. Nor were the academic views of the war even approaching the realism (and this was a “realist” academic department) of what we now know went down between the end of World War II and 1975.
Some of the difficulty that “affirmative action” people have, contra Scalia, is that they might understand some things much better than what course material is presenting, and the cognitive dissonance of having to answer what the professor wants to hear becomes overbearing.
Academic institutions seek to mold ideologies in their students as well as the exploration and widening of view through knowledge.
But then Scalia does not agree that 250 years of legalized slavery, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and 50 years of half-hearted and racist accomodation to legal decisions requires any reparation from the class of people who held all that in being through their control of the institutions involved is making sure that whites were privileged.
Finally, elite universities have competitive pressures because so many people are convinced that the only way one can have adequate income, dignity, and political power is to be part of the elite. And then there is the cult of fame.
This is amusing:
Trump likes to bellow that nobody at Columbia remembers Obama and yet, nobody at UPenn/Wharton remembers Trump either.
(Note: Michael Milken received his MBA from Wharton)
Or is Trump the product Wharton intends to produce?
Generally, yes!!
This is a complex topic. At the undergrad level, what are the inherent academic educational differences between the Ivies/elite universities (both public and private) and public colleges? Class size is one variable but often overlooked is that TAs/grad students handle a high percentage of the instruction at elites schools with the “star” professor making an occasional appearance. Professors at elite universities mostly graduated from elite universities. Professors at non-elite schools are hired from both elite and non-elite universities.
Elite schools have done a great marketing job in holding themselves out as admitting only the creme de la creme. Academically, they do probably get a higher share of those that fall into the “gifted” intellectual range than other schools, but that demographic is so small that their student population would be much smaller if that were the admittance criteria. The largest portion of their students are probably bright kids that had the privilege of living in wealthier homes/communities and attending better schools. Legacy admissions are mostly based on family wealth. AA students (not included the “gifted”) are intellectually equal to or smarter than the largest portion of the student body, but the lack of childhood privilege makes it difficult for them to do as well as their intellectual peers. And those that must work part-time as they attend school are further disadvantaged.
What elite schools offer the most is status and being in the right elite circles after graduation. A ticket punch for those the come from wealth, and the possibility of being accepted for those that come from more modest means. Had the latter shunned those institutions in favor of public institutions that were educating brilliant people, the elite schools today would be more like finishing schools for people like GWB. Instead we’ve let them, along with and to a lesser extent, the elite public universities act as the gatekeepers for business and government.
They may have all been men, but there was significant diversity as to the colleges and law schools that the Warren Court SC Justices graduated from. And we were better off for that diversity.
My daughter understands the value of the ivies quite clearly.
She and my son attended University of Illinois. Due to a tuition deal that I had as a consequence of my appointment at Washington University, she could have gone to many universities. I suggested she go to Illinois, as this would be a good deal for her, and for us. She went there, and was quite successful. My son was a little less successful.
She is now working in NYC. In NYC, the snobbiness about undergraduate institutions is astonishing. She has had to work very hard to get her current job, as it is predominantly Jewish, and predominantly Ivy. She is not Jewish, and there is a strong bias against non-Jews there. Also the bias against non-Ivy grads is very strong.
Another ridiculous bias in NYC, and Washington DC, has to do with grad school. At this point, she has decided not to do grad school, but she may later. Her boyfriend, that she is now afianced to, is a grad student at NYU in a language program. While he is doing well, we do worry about the jobs in the area. They socialize with mostly grad students, and there is a prejudice against those not in grad school. I can remember, when I was in grad school, having the same prejudice. So the wheel turns.
The main function of the Ivies is a sorting function. If you went to them, you are in the in-group. If you did not, you are not in the in-group. That is the sum-total of the deal.
Long-standing east coast thing. Heard a story about my employer’s east coast division manager in the late seventies when part of the midwest was put under his jurisdiction. A midwest guy put together a detailed proposal for an account presentation to the manager. Before opening the folder, the manager asked what college the CEO/owner of the company had attended. The midwest guy stumbled and quickly rifled through his file to find that he’d graduated from a state college. The manager pushed the unopened folder across his desk back to the midwest guy and said that’s not the sort we do business with.
That manager’s favorite subordinate was a UPenn grad (could have been Wharton). One of the lamest and mostly stupid man I’ve ever had to work with.
Scalia bases his racist remarks on an amicus brief in Fisher by anti-affirmative action sociologist Richard Sander, recapping the research reported in his Mismatch : How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
William Kidder’s review of the book in the Los Angeles Review of Books shows vividly why the amicus brief got a response
While the critics of R Sander’s are undoubtedly correct, they miss the larger picture. The projections, goals, intents of AA should have been near 99% complete within one generation. What undermined the effort was failure to fully implement AA and Brown v. Bd of Ed (schools are now more segregated by race and class than they were in 1970) and the financialization of the US economy and reduction in progressive taxation that significantly increased income and wealth inequality.
The elite schools obviously can’t admit enough students to compensate for that. In a way the programs are like voucher systems putting some tiny percentage of a minority population’s elementary schoolchildren in private schools. As a substitute for integrating and improving and equalizing the quality of public education for all, it’s pretty poor. And yet I can’t help feeling it’s good for society as a whole to have more of those black Harvard and Berkeley grads in existence and hate the attempts of people like Sander and Scalia to stop it.
As a strong and unwavering proponent of AA, and agree that overall it has done much good, that doesn’t mean being blind to obvious shortcomings.
Who would you choose to be a Supreme Court Justice: Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas? Would Thomas have had a chance for the appointment if he’d attended Howard U or a public college? Possibly, but he would have had to work much harder to get their on merit, and would likely have been a far better SC Justice if he had.
Whoa. AA complete in one generation? I’m an African American boomer baby. Went to an elite public university in 1968 as direct result of AA. I was prepared and able to succeed academically. However, those 4 years were the hardest years of my life. Like the African American students at Univ of Missouri I was not welcomed or ever felt safe. There is your one generation…still facing the same struggle to get an education in the USA.
I’m sorry that you weren’t made to feel welcome and safe, but that goes back to an AA implementation failure. At public institutions there needed to be no wiggle room from top to bottom, educators, staff, and students, were either to get fully on board with the program or be dismissed.
I guess in this instance, generation is an understatement — make it 30 years. An extra 10 years because implementation takes some time. It was about leveling the playing field and the student bodies of public colleges should be demographically similar to the population in the community/state/nation. The children of successful graduates, like you, wouldn’t need AA. And during that same period of time, disadvantaged children were to be given adequate resources in their K-12 schools so that they wouldn’t reach college age being educationally disadvantaged.
The children of successful graduates, like you, wouldn’t need AA. Nor would the children that received K-12 education that was equal in all ways to what the college bound white kids in segregated schools had been receiving before AA. AA was about society making up for shortchanging those if the schools had been equal would attend college on their own merit.
You’re not the only one that experienced college as extremely difficult and many of them are white and male and female.
Malcolm Gladwell – Why Choose a School that Makes You Feel Stupid?
No. No Gladwell. He is out of bounds; off limits. Whatever point someone is trying to make by citing Gladwell automatically fails.
is he always that clueless? I read the linked article and it is shit.
He was a briefly popular jackass.
You may not like his storytelling, anecdotes, and data, but that doesn’t make him a jackass. He presents good food for thought; something that most of the pundits that you enjoy parsing and critiquing don’t come close to doing.
you’ve got it backwards. He may have some interesting things to say and be occasionally worth listening to, but he’s still a jackass.
Oh well. Gore Vidal could be a jackass but is still worth reading. OTOH, none of the “conservative” jackasses have anything the least bit interesting to say.
He’s a paid shill. It’s well documented elsewhere.
Gladwell takes advantage of people’s yearning for convenient solutions. It’s all a crock. He’s valueless.
Bollocks. Mark Ames can be good, but he’s not immune to going off half-cocked on occasions.
And the only charge that Gladwell was a “paid shill” was from twenty-five years ago and concerned tobacco. And what he said, is exactly what the head of Harvard Med has also said — reduced smoking increases the aggregate cost of health care which is true. That’s not a pro-smoking position for either of them and both stated that it wasn’t and oppose smoking, it’s merely a freaking fact. Do with the fact what you will.
It’s bad enough that the rightwing can’t deal with facts and smears those that present facts, but I can’t do anything about them. To see the same MO on the other side of the aisle is what discourages me even more.
yes, it is documented. his “work” is to blunt arguments “nothing to see here, move along” shiny object books with attractive shiny anecdotes
Gladwell is entertaining when he’s writing about fluff about how we like Heinz ketchup or Ron Popeil products.
The link wasn’t to an article but Gladwell talking about the issue. As presented in his book <David and Goliath</a> it’s not at all clueless but very thoughtful.
Did you read the his chapters on this in David and Goliath? It’s actually quite good.
Gadwell, who as noted above, is a jackass, boils down to “nothing to see here, move along” shiny object.
This makes a lot of sense. If you choose a school where you will be in the bottom, you will not be successful. Scalia makes sense.
You need a school which challenges you, but not so much that you will fail. You want a school where you can succeed. If you will be in the bottom, as predicted by high school scores, you set yourself up for failure. You may succeed, but many like you will not succeed.
You need a school that will take into account that good students can come from underfunded schools and that SAT scores do not predict academic success.
Scalia does not make sense; he’s just a racist troll. And has been all of his career; that’s why he got appointed to the bench.
Too few people understand how affirmative action actually works.
Scalia does not make sense; he’s just a racist troll. And has been all of his career; that’s why he got appointed to the bench.
Same with Smilin’ Sammy and the Chief Justice.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t figure out why BooMan and everyone else here aren’t appalled and disgusted by Scalia’s remarks.
I think it’s pretty much incontrovertible that intelligence, like every other human characteristic, is pretty much distributed equally and randomly amongst the entire population, independent of race, gender, nationality etc. What happens with schools (as in BooMan’s story, and mine, and everyone else’s) is that the impedimenta of cultural divisions and social structures makes it easier or harder for some than for others to have their intrinsic value recognized. This is true, obviously, even before you get into the area of more overt biases and prejudices.
Of course there are some situations where it’s advantageous to be a white male and others where it’s less so (although the former tends to vastly outweigh the latter: BooMan himself was writing here a couple months ago about white people “playing the game on the easy difficulty setting”).
But to reverse the causality of advantage and disadvantage — to look at a trailer park and see “stupid people,” or to look at black students and see intrinsic academic inadequacy, is all wrong, for many reasons that shouldn’t even be open to debate, on this blog, in this country or in the chambers of the Supreme Court.
Again, I don’t understand why nobody here is roundly condemning what Scalia said. He contends, in so many words (and in a blithe tone, like it’s obvious) that black students — not students from certain disadvantaged backgrounds, or from certain school or academic programs, but the ones with dark skin — aren’t as smart and capable as the white ones. It’s right there in black and white, in the court record. And it’s thoroughly appalling.
Scalia’s an idiot and the research he’s citing is dubious at best.
But I wanted to make two points.
First, that it’s wrong to think about college admissions as a process where only the very brightest kids are admitted, however you try to define that. It’s never been that way and it shouldn’t be that way.
Second, that if you look at who struggles at elite universities and group those people in categories, like race, you’ll discover that socioeconomic factors and simple cultural factors play similar roles.
I didn’t say so explicitly, but we have prep schools that are supposed to prepare you for elite colleges. They do this quite effectively. I went to an unofficial prep school. It was technically a public school, but it prepped the students for elite education as well or better than elite private schools like Exeter or Peddie or Lawrenceville. If you didn’t go to a school designed to prepare you, you’re coming in at a disadvantage, regardless of race or any other factor.
So, it stands to reason that you can devise a study that will show that blacks students (as a whole) drop out at higher rates at elite colleges than whites. But, first of all, so what? And second of all, you can devise another study that shows that a better indicator of failure than race is whether you went to prep school or have parents who went to an elite school or simply had parents who couldn’t devote resources to giving you extra educational experiences outside of school.
I’m trying to say that Scalia isn’t just being a dick, he’s not just cherry-picking data, but he’s got the wrong goal and the wrong expectations.
Now, you can read what he said to be a blanket statement about the native intelligence of blacks vs. whites, and he invited that criticism by his sloppy use of language. But he’s relying on a study (however flawed) and the study isn’t as far as I know saying that blacks are inferior. It’s saying that affirmative action, by taking less bright students and putting them in an elite environment, does a disservice to those students. They’d be better off among peers more on their level.
That could be true in individual cases, but it isn’t a good argument for getting rid of affirmative action both because we never have had admissions based solely on academic promise and because (as the title of this piece suggests) we shouldn’t want our elite institutions to serve just elites. They should contribute to upward mobility, which means that it’s better to pick a middle class kid who might be overmatched than than an alumni’s child who might be overmatched.
Finally, I believe a diverse student body is very important. It’s educational for a kid from Bed-Stuy to be roommates with the son of a Goldman Sachs executive and it’s educational for the son of a Goldman Sachs executive to be roommates with a kid from Bed-Stuy.
Our elite institutions have kids from all over the world and the more socioeconomic diversity they have, the less snotty the graduate will be when they graduate. The strivers will also get a little boost into the elite where they can bring some much needed perspective.
But, if you need me to call Scalia a racist, yeah, he’s a racist.
Uh, are “elite institutions” OURS? Weren’t they created by wealthy elites for the children of the wealthy to keep wealth in the hands of the wealthy elites?
“Our” response to that inequality was to create public educational institutions. College admission based solely on merit. We haven’t done nearly well enough in accomplishing that goal for a variety of reasons (including allowing legacy admissions to public colleges), but that just means that we have more work to do. And looking at and worrying about what elite colleges do or don’t do shouldn’t be any concern of ours. (If only white prep school kids are admitted, they’ll slowly turn into mausoleums housing dumb kids afflicted with affluenza.)
It would be much more accurate to say that our elite institutions were created by our religious elites to try to teach the children of economic elites to be good solid citizens with a healthy concern for the poor and the needy.
You have a much higher opinion of religious elites than I do. They were mostly the spares and not the heirs of wealthy elites.
John Harvard
John Witherspoon
Ezra Stiles
Eleazar Wheelock
Samuel Johnson
Are these gentlemen, along with non-clergy like Ben Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Dickson White the kind of people you had in mind?
All colleges and universities for several hundred years were established by the clergy. In part to provide places of education for the next generation of clergy and in part to educate the male children of wealth. It’s not as if a child of wealth that was interested in law, literature, or science could attend a college that was not affiliated with a religion. But the parents weren’t sending heathen sons to college to obtain a bunch of higher level social principles.
That’s telescoping a long history into a very small space. They were created by religious elites to train ministers, period. The citizenship thing begins with Jefferson’s founding of America’s first secular college, U of Virginia in 1819, and gets going with large-scale secularization in the later 19th century under Charles Eliot at Harvard and Daniel Gilman at Johns Hopkins.
I think you can’t exaggerate, on the other hand, how the private schools, as opposed to the land grant colleges, provided a four-year initiation ritual for inducting (mostly male) hereditary members into the ruling class, as much about group identity as they were about education, until World War II and the GI Bill broke that up to some extent; and they still function that way, building a club of people who are earmarked for a certain kind of career success, even as they do offer spectacular educational opportunities to those who can take advantage of them.
Not just ministers; training for gentlemen’s professions, law and medicine, was introduced before the Revolution too. Nobody thought training was necessary for the low-class profession of schoolteacher until well into the 19th century, and it was mostly provided at cheaper institutions known as “normal schools”, the backbone of a lot of today’s state university systems.
I enjoyed Yale Prof. Jim Sleeper’s ruminations on the Puritan influence of our prep schools. Good and bad.
all true. his social science is for s**t; the review Yastreblyansky cites points out that schools began compensating for cultural/ socioeconomic shock/ lack of prep with support systems quite many years ago [the review mentions 1973]. schools that were serious about AA did this, and they were/ are serious for the reasons you cite. hours, years of meetings and planning …
Please inform David Remnick, unlike the NYTimes, The New Yorker doesn’t go for having “paid” shills as staff writers.
Suspect that most of us focused on the questions of elite schools and not what Scalia said because almost everything he says is retrograde, racist, misogynist, and more or less insane and in this instance no different.
Doubt that any of rejects that innate cognitive abilities are evenly distributed throughout a population and is for the most part independent of race, gender, and class. And IMO the variation of those innate capacities is much narrower than what appears to exists in schools and workplaces. However, nurture is a major variable in development. Poor nutrition and environments that aren’t rich in intellectual stimulation negatively impact brain development. Insecure home environments and abuse are additional negatives. Those negatives are also somewhat evenly distributed within the aggregate population across race, gender, and class lines. But poverty and single parent households (inter-related variables) rates are higher in the AA community (in part due to the racist “war on drugs”). 22% of US children live below the poverty line. (But this is another major issue outside the one under discussion; so will end my comment on that note.)
“I don’t understand why nobody here is roundly condemning what Scalia said.”
Because it’s Scalia, so everyone knows what he says is stupid.
As a hispanic who went to a private grade school and was put in tier under the elite kids even though I was smarter than they were, and who always caught up by the end of the year, fuck nino with a god damn telephone pole.
That’s too good a consequence for him.
Sodomy gives his Opus Dei ass the extra shame.
Meanwhile, after conservatives blood-libel Obama as a pal of DAESH, they now are pushing the story that Valerie Jarrett, born in Shiraz, Iran, is a Muslim and isn’t that scary.
The delegitimization of the Obama administration gets more shrill at their failure to achieve their objective. Dangerous.
The RWNJ’s have been pushing that “Valerie Jarrett is a Muslim” crap ever since November 2008.
○ Some schools are too fast for Black students says Scalia
○ SCOTUS blog: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin
I looked at one of his arguments and linked study at UNC Chapel Hill from 2005-2007 data. The diversity plan has worked quite well, reading the results over the most recent academic year, especially for Asians, another minority group Scalia prefers not to talk about.
Of course, science is not the thing for Justice Scalia or the Gran Ole Party.
○ How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers by Richard Sander and Jane Yakowitz
If you look in California, a growing number of Asian Americans oppose affirmative action, a classic American sign of a successful group.
This is a thorny issue. From the perspective of grades and test scores, Asian-Americans would be admitted to CAL, etc. at a much higher rate than their prevalence in the population. So, of course they oppose AA which takes both into account and rejects the notion that a much higher percentage of Asian-Americans are intellectually gifted. As a society we should be no more willing to embrace the notion that Asians are cognitively exceptional than AAs are inferior.
The difference that I can see is that Asian families are much more involved in their children’s education and MUCH more demanding of them.
Caveat, limited sample: two Chines immigrant families and one Indian immigrant family.
“Tiger Moms” have taken the place of “Jewish mothers.”
On the downside is that the competitive education fostered in Japan and China reduces the aggregate level of creativity and cognitive flexibility. The school system in Finland posts achievement scores as good as Asians at the top of the list, and does it with even lower levels of stress that is imposed on American kids.
My wife’s Vietnamese-American friend recently noted she thinks of herself as white. Thats a pretty big signifier to me.
Historically any American group (hell just about any group) exhibits “screw you I got mine” when they do in fact, get theirs.
Does Scalia realize that he went to law school at a time when most women were at best discouraged from perusing a career in law and at worst actively discriminated against? He wouldn’t see affirmative action for men even if it bit him on his butt.
I grew up in the western suburbs of Boston, where a lot of professors, lawyers, and medical professionals raise their kids. My experience in primary school pretty much mirrored yours.
I went to school in California, though.
“Elite,” eh?
Hmmmmmm…
A definition from Google:
Yup.
Them Ivory League colledges sho’ am full of the “elite,” awright.
Once upon a time…maybe…they were legit.
Now?
Not.
This goes for most of the entire U.S. academic system. It is a “pay for degree” system. The more you pay for a degree, the more money you will be able to make if that is your main object in life.
End of story.
This goes for everything from scientific studies right on through to the arts.
Pay particular attention to the last bit of info in the following short statement by Branford Marsalis, by far the most honest and forthright member of the Marsalis musical clan. (Emphasis mine.):
There it is. Thank you, Branford.
Deal wid it.
Ain’t no “elite” universities anymore…they have become purely for-profit organizations that use the capital they accrue from grants, donations from alumni, sports monies and tuition payments (usually borrowed at exorbitant interest rates) to buy massive amounts of gentrifiable real estate. Their status in the “educational” hierarchy is simply a matter of branding.
And so on.
WTFU.
Of course, you can get a fine education in many of them because some number of people who attend them take a good look around and decide to stay as graduate students/professors etc. because…well, because it’s an easier, more comfortable way of life than jumping into the shark tanks of corporate greed that we laughingly call “The American Business World.” That plus it still offers at least the possibility of actually doing something for the sheer joy of expanding human knowledge, although that island of honest effort is also rapidly shrinking under the flood of “publish or perish”/”cooperate or operate elsewhere” bullshit that passes for academic administration in this corporatist system.
So it goes.
Elite universities shouldn’t be just for elites ?
C’mon, Booman.
Get real.
They’re not.
Why?
Because they are no longer “elite” themselves.
That’s why.
Not by the following part of the above definition, for sure.
Bet on it.
They are now just another segment of the ongoing hustle that I like to call “The United States of Omertica.”
Don’t ask; don’t tell.
Don’t ask; don’t tell.
Yup.
Thanks again, Branford.
Pinned it.
AG
Now a standalone post.
Elite Universities? AIN’T No “Elite” Universities, Booman. WTFU.
Comment there if you have a mind to do so.
And please…don’t if you don’t.
Please.
Thank you and good afternoon.
AG
If your society has class-based elite universities – not merit-based ones like Berkeley or MIT, but schools like Princeton – then people who don’t belong to that elite are going to find the place alienating.
That’s got nothing to do with ability to do the work. The problem of students who go to a school where they can’t do the work is a real one.
I once worked with the head of an consulting firm who said, I hire from Drexel because I know I’ll get a dependable, well-trained worker. Maybe that’s condescending but he did hire Drexel engineers.
But if those Drexel students had been moved to MIT, they might never have graduated.
Actually, there is such a thing as legacy admissions at Berkeley. Perhaps not as perverse as what goes on at the Ivies (i.e. Berkeley might not have admitted a GWB legacy student and passed him with “gentleman’s C’s,” but academically not as strong as those admitted on merit.)
Sounds like the guy knew what was required for the jobs and knew the school that delivered graduates with the appropriate education and skills.