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.