The Supreme Court is expected to rule that colleges can no longer rig for racial diversity. Some say ‘that’s dangerous and cruel.’ Others say it’s about time.
Putting aside the larger question of the rightness or wrongness of affirmative action in general, consider that in focusing on education, specifically Ivy League caliber education, we are looking at the wrong metric if we want to do good by the needy.
If the goal is to actually help black children increase their chances for societal success, myopically focusing on whether Harvard or Yale has a black student population of 8% or 10% is a diversion. We, as a society, are ignoring the hundred of thousands of public school students, black and white, who can’t read, write or understand basic math. There is a large population of now 2nd and 3rd generation underclass citizens with no hope for a personal future.
We’ve had 50 years of racially based affirmative action in education and corporate America and what minimal benefits achievable from it have been banked. The left’s patting itself on the back for affirmative action policies that do no good for those in need while failing to address the disaster in our primary educational system is the height of hypocrisy.
For some reason, we have allowed the left to give us a binary choice; support affirmative action or let millions remain in poverty. Even though the beneficiaries of affirmative action are a small minority of our disadvantaged population, we accept this false choice as providing the only options available. I have no idea why.
The binary choice is false in itself. Rich Black students benefit the most from affirmative action, poor Asian students are hurt the most. Affirmative action is not about lifting people out of poverty, but about making liberals feel better about themselves.
My daughter’s class at Harvard had black American Express CEO Ken Chenault’s son and also in her circle were a number of privileged blacks from Westchester county, a wealthy county in NY, as well as a number of wealthy, non-American blacks from Africa and elsewhere. And not in her class, but also attending Harvard now, is ‘The View’s' black, big-mouthed, bigoted, millionaire Sonny Hostin’s son. Seems like what should be the real focus is not skin color but the lack of ‘economic diversity’ at these so-called prestigious colleges.
The progressives I know are kind, decent people. They are not evil monsters. Demonizing and oversimplifying them fails to give us any traction on creating a better alternative.
That's not to say it isn't tempting. I've very frustrated with that ideology, to say the least.
But one of my many differences with that ideology is that I prefer to seek a functional path, rather than an emotional release which makes me feel better about myself. Hate on them, call them names, oversimplify so as to put them down. I don't want to fall into the same mental trap that I am critiquing on the modern left.
The woke are mostly caring decent humans who have fallen into a problematic ideology. Their initial motives are usually very noble, if perhaps weak on critical thinking. They care about marginalized people, and feel guilty that it has taken so long to bring them up to speed as full coparticipants in a multicultural society (do to past actions which were indeed bad, but which nevertheless get exagerated). They want to DO SOMETHING to make it better.
Of course, once this mind virus gets in via the compassion port, it can offer other less noble psychological payoffs to believers - like feeling constantly morally superior to non-believers, which is intoxicating. I don't think that's usually the first attraction tho.
One facet of the firm belief that the infected have that they have the moral high ground, is they can relabel naked power seeking as really just seeking justice, a laudable (of conveniently malleable) goal. Hey, we aren't even taking control out of selfishness - we are doing it for the marginalized! So we don't need to apply the normal rules of the old liberal order (like, say, symmetrical rules about stereotyping), we're on a mission from God.
I see them as infected by a remarkably potent mind virus which evolved in the aftermath of the enlightenment transformation, and thus has adaptive mechanisms for defeating the evidence and reason tools used to defang the Catholic Church's power.
We have to have a strategy which can counter this virus, but calling it names is not much of a strategy. I think we need to focus on things like calmly highlighting internal contradictions, or disappointing real world results of its policies. Our target is not the most thoroughly infected, but the larger halo of partially infected psyches, who still hold some liberal values. Like some of them don't feel fully comfortable with abandoning Free Speech, but they need some support in standing up about that.
That's one reason I think that disaffected liberals need to be involved; they can have more insight into where a counter theme might have traction. Few of the (partially) woke have residual conservative perspectives to invoke, they mostly come from the liberal side and thus have that small or large residual perspective.
So I both resonate with your characterization, and want to avoid going down that rabbithole because I don't think it's an effective counter to the invasive ideology. Name calling is their home territory. Reason is ours.
I shouldn't be shocked by that story, but I am. My son graduated from PSU two years ago - he loved the school and I don't think he ever came across this type of BS. I sincerely hope that professors wins that case in a very large way...of course, PSU will pass on whatever they have to payout in increased tuition. sickens me.
My personal assumption is that all Harvard graduates are functioning morons who despise normal Americans in their intense quest to rule the world. But without danger to their person. With no risks to themselves. It is all Kubuki theater now.
I agree that progressives can, at times, embrace activism for its self-congratulatory benefits. I don't know if that is true of old-school liberals; I draw a distinction between the two groups because the former seems to have arisen in prominence with the advent of social media which incentivizes their virtue signaling. This conflict is beautifully captured by the recent conflict between Mayor London Breed and a white progressive supervisor, where the progressive accused Mayor Breed [who is black and grew up in poverty] of not understanding the plight of black and brown people.
Old school liberals invented it. See e.g. Malcolm X's comments about white liberals being black folks worse enemy. Or Leonard Bernstein using the Black Panthers as party props.
I disagree as I would say progressives’ number one priority is virtue signaling. Not “can,at times.” I can’t think of a single policy of progressives whose main goal isn’t patting themselves on the back. Most fail horribly and are financial black holes. The biggest group of hypocrites I’ve ever seen.
Alice, I understand why you might think that. But the same can be said of bombastic people who call themselves conservative when all they really want is power and attention. I try to avoid stereotypes, in the end they are shortcuts for lazy thinkers who don't see nuance.
100% both sides and everywhere in between. I'm not so much talking about progressive citizens, but the progressivism politicians in government. The censors, cancelers, debate-squelchers. You can't question the govt!
Check this out, from the National Association of Scholars, a dot org.:
"What we call the “New Civics” redefines civics as progressive political activism. Rooted in the radical program of the 1960s’ New Left, the New Civics presents itself as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works. Though camouflaged with soft rhetoric, the New Civics, properly understood, is an effort to repurpose higher education.
The New Civics seeks above all to make students into enthusiastic supporters of the New Left’s dream of “fundamentally transforming” America. The transformation includes de-carbonizing the economy, massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international “norms” over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals. New Civics advocates argue among themselves which of these transformations should take precedence, but they agree that America must be transformed by “systemic change” from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.
The New Civics hopes to accomplish this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist, and it puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures.
New Civics builds on “service-learning,” which is an effort to divert students
When my daughter went to International Baccalaureate high school more than twenty years ago, many of her classmates were formerly homeschooled, Jewish, or Asian.
Why was that? You know why. She has a PhD in microbiology.
Public schools are designed to make them stupid.
Asians, Jewish, and homeschooling children should be unleashed to be their best. Let them rock and roll. I truly hope that the US Supreme Court ends affirmative action for colleges and universities to unleash the intellectual power of our children.
Rich black kids indeed. I grew up as a not-well-off white immigrant and went to med school with some rich black kids. They told me about their upbringing:
Country clubs, golf, private schools, tutors, lessons, debutante balls. My childhood was working starting at age 12 (babysitting) followed by a real job starting age 16. My GPA/SAT/MCAT scores were much higher than theirs but they got into so many schools they could pick.
If they actually wanted to lift people out of poverty, they would look at income rather than race/ethnicity. Better yet is to judge on merit.
I"m sure you know that equal outcomes, a goal of the Left in this country, is a communist, Marxist concept, in direct contradiction to the American value of competition. It is based on the absence of merit, and guaranteed to produce poverty and military take-over.
And the number one suspect in the deplorable lack of education provided to black students is the teachers union, headed by the execrable liar, Ms. Weingarten. And who is the recipient of the teacher's union's largess - why the Democrat Party, that's who. Connecting the dots isn't really that hard.
I recently saw some really shocking stats about graduates of Baltimore public schools. When a school system fails to be able to educate its students in basic reading and math skills, it should be promptly closed down. The real discrimination is sentencing kids to these institutions during their prime learning years. This is criminal. And don’t blame the students. My parents grew up desperately poor and were able to access decent schools. Stop the excuses.
Half of graduating black high school students in SF can’t read properly. SF is the Mecca of far left progressive policies and it’s leaving generations of uneducated black and brown kids behind. And somehow they are blaming Asian Americans for this inequity instead of their own policies of lowering expectations to the point that their victims aren’t learning anything.
The teachers' unions have an obscene sway over the Dem/Soc Party. They fight school vouchers tooth and nail and the Dem/Soc swine support the unions. They don't give a damn about the failure of public education. (Not all public schools are failures but the ones that are need to be shut down .)
If the leftwing swine in congress are so opposed to school vouchers because vouchers will destroy public education, then how come these congressmen and women send their kids to private schools?
Leftwing fanatics always point to the Scandinavian countries as social paradises. All of the Scandanavian countries have school vouchers. They allow the parents to chose the school they think is right for their kids. What a novel, revolutionary idea, letting parents chose what is right for their children! These parents are probably terrorists.
Neither the Dem/Socs nor the Rep boobs have ever done anything about the terrible state of our school system. We need school voucher legislation. This will create competition between schools to provide better education. Socialist hate competition.
If the Reps gain control of the presidency and both houses of congress. They could force school voucher on the states. All they have to do is threaten to cut off federal funds to the states that don't offer vouchers.
I have said all along the Dem/Soc party is evil. The Reps are just incompetent.
And it is telling that schools such as Harlem Academy that hold black kids to high standards get fabulous results and successful kids. Imagine thinking that the answer doesn't lie in lowering standards to fit the racist narrative of the Left......
Perhaps black families from SF should move immediately to the Central Valley to a farm, and learn to do something real. To feed Americans. Work for a pittance, and then learn something, and then work really hard and do something real, and then buy their own farm. There are not enough Black farmers now. Every good man deserves a favour.
In Chicago we are told that we can’t possibly expect schools to teach reading and math because of societal problems. So first we create a perfect society, and THEN they can teach.
The state pf Texas has taken over schools in Houston twice now for this reason. And you should hear the wailing. All they do is rehabilitate them.and then relinquish control. The education industry is anything but educational for far, far, far too many.
The other thing that strongly affects these students is significant lead in their home environments. There are terrible problems with this in spots all over the country but Baltimore is a particularly bad example. There is some money provided in the infrastructure bill for this, but this issue is actually tragic. Both Freddy Gray and the cop that gave him a rough ride had been flagged as having high lead levels in their systems as kids. Crazy.
This is an extremely important and underreported issue. A woman called Lead Free Mama, I think, out of the West coast writes a blog about this—her kids were lead poisoned. High lead levels have been associated with crime for decades. Also, of course, with learning difficulty. Addressing this issue I believe would really pay for itself.
I'm certainly not a fan of Randi Weingarten, but I think it's a bit unfair to blame her for all the problems of our school system. The real culprits are those who confer so much power on her and her union. And if that's the Democratic Party, then the fault lies with the citizens who support and vote for Democrats.
To quote Walt Kelly's comic strip "Pogo": "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us".
I agree with your point about the need to “address the disaster in our primary educational system”.
How much of this university issue would be solved if kids were taught a solid foundational education K - 12. Maybe not all but I would guess a significant amount. And better support for trades programs where 4 year degree isn’t always needed.
That is only going to be part of the answer. Putting a student into the best school in existence won't overcome a lack of desire to learn. Without a home that values education or achievement a great school is heavily hindered from doing its job. Culture is important. The reason Asians do better statistically is not because they all go to great schools. It is because they are taught from a young age to learn and study and work. Not everyone gets that part of the equation.
Its the old "you can lead a horse to water..." issue.
Exactly. Funny how the academic performance of all those elite high schools plummeted once they stopped merit-based admissions. The schools/teachers weren’t making the students great -- the students were making the schools great.
I agree about the crucial importance of motivation in education. As an example, consider the life of the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, He became quite literate, mostly through his own efforts. As the Wikipedia article about him says: "Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself to read and write. He later often said, 'knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.'". He overcame much bigger obstacles to his education than those faced by today's students, despite having been provided with far fewer resources outside of his own will and desire to learn.
That was a big thing I learned when I went to College in the 90's...I was going to have to teach myself. My experience with community college was more like High School. The teachers, taught. They wanted you to do better. State University? None of my teachers even cared if I came to class. And I realized that I was just going to have to teach myself. Which was part of why I left (the other part was my major didn't actually reflect the career I wanted). i wasn't going to pay thousands of dollars to teach myself. And, at the time, I didn't have the motivation to do it anyway.
By my limited experience has been that very few people I know actually owe much of their success or failure to College or lack of it. Even engineers I worked with needed years of mentoring to actually get to a level where they were designing or running projects. And it made me wonder if those 4 years could have been better spent working at an engineering firm getting the basics out in the real world where they wouldn't also have to spend money taking a humanities class
"How much of this university issue would be solved if kids were taught a solid foundational education K - 12"
Makes you wonder why virtue signaling schools with huge endowments, like Harvard and others, don't fund charter schools in the worst academic zip codes. Oh yea, it would cost them money.
Wrong. I’d say 90% of charter schools in Memphis are predominantly black and their parents enrolled them bc the public schools are a complete disgrace.
Nope. Saying charter schools are a right wing effort to completely destroy public educations and commodify from the very beginning , so that only those of certain income level/background can send their kids to elementary school, etc. That"s what I'm saying. ;) So let's not strawman this.
Already went after Head Start programs. This is the next logical stepm
It is interesting pretending that you give a hoot and furthermore trying to manufature some hypocrisy on Harvard's part when they are a private institution and are operating EXACTLY as designed in a free-market, capitalists system. So what are you complaining about?
Comprof --- Charter schools are public schools! Where do you live that they aren't? That's the whole point of charter schools — they're public and receive government funding but are basically "self-governed" for lack of a better term. They're started by concerned parents or communities that want better or more specific schools than their district provides (for example, some have IB programs or dual language curriculums).
There are many very good charter schools in Atlanta that are predominantly black and not in wealthy neighborhoods, so your assertion that "charter schools are a good way to make sure that only kids from a certain income level can go to school" makes absolutely no sense. You may want to look up the definition of "charter schools" before commenting.
"...charter schools are a right wing effort to completely destroy public educations..."
Too late, the left-wing Marxists have already destroyed inner city public schools. Test scores in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia…offer irrefutable proof of that. So, you’re the one creating a straw man. It’s a tiresome cliché, blame the failures on white privilege, systemic racism, blah, blah blah even though every failing inner city school district is run by democrats, a majority of whom are black. In defending such epic failure, one must be an ignorant result of the failed public school system or an affirmative action beneficiary of it. In your case, I’m going with both.
BTW, an educated person would know that a free market, capitalist system operates on merit. In that realm, poorly performing public schools would cease to exist and underperforming teachers would be forced to find another scam to extort money from tax payers.
I think we are seeing some movement on the latter at the state level and in general. I think the more practical and smarter parents and kids are starting to question the value of college as a post secondary experience without a specific goal. However, as is often the case, that realization does not filter down to the black underclass. Sadly.
Absolutely. No affirmative action will be needed if our children graduated from good public schools with decent grades. The skin color is the least important criteria that should be used to solve the education problem in our country. Invest in public schools with small classes with dedicated smart teachers. I know it sounds like a revolution, but is there another way? Instead we are focused on astronomically expensive higher education institutions that grant students vanity degrees, but we are forgetting about kids growing up with no basic skills in math and reading.
I am not even touching upon another problem: cultivating conditions for gifted and talented kids to thrive. That’s a whole different issue, but the country will not succeed without us taking care of budding talents. We do seem to move in the opposite direction of lowering the common denominator and canceling all kind of tests and grades to keep everyone happy. That’s going to lead to disastrous results.
I agree with Just an Observer. Some years ago I tutored reading and writing in a disadvantaged community. One youngster was very gifted in both subjects as well as math, and I told him so and that he could have a bright future if he continued his studies. Sadly, he told me that at school he had to hide his ability because his classmates mocked him or beat him up for being smart. They told him he was trying to be white. He was black. The schools need to change, but also the culture. Intelligence should be something celebrated and encouraged, not condemned.
It is not only ghettos that condemn education and culture. It is coming from all political sides in the society, and our country has become anti-intellectual.
Progressives, obviously, are not interested in the quality of education removing merit from the school admission criteria and replacing it with the skin color. Even “economic disadvantage” is no longer as important. Outstanding scholars, professors and teachers who do not subscribe to this religion are fired and ostracized.
On the other side of political spectrum is a conviction that the reason progressives live in a bubble is their elite education and that we are better off without it.
There is a reason Silicon Valley companies are dying to get more foreign workforce and advocate for business visas. There is not enough engineers or scientists here. Kids do not choose fields where you have to study hard. Why bother? Get a meaningless and useless degree in business administration and work from home for a customer service agency. No wonder our economy is severely unbalanced and dependent on countries we claim to be our enemies but cannot function without.
Going back to education, I want to clarify, that I suggest investing in education for everyone, not only for racial minorities or poor. Our education system is now extremely unfair. There is an unsurmountable gap between wealthy and everyone else who are in public schools. I see toddlers in private daycare in the Metropolitan Museum of Art sitting on the floor and listening to their teacher explaining art. A wonderful and necessary idea to introduce art to 3-year-olds! In private middle schools in Manhattan kids read Shakespeare and other classics at the age of 14. None of this no is happening in public schools with their overcrowded classes and metal detectors. And programs for gifted and talented in public education are almost extinct because they appear to provide advantage to other races over blacks.
I don’t really know how to get out of this vicious circle. All I know that the future of my beloved country appears bleak. Historically, we valued innovation and initiative. Alas, we are going backwards.
No one wants to admit that the real problem is a combination of our abysmal public school system and the breakdown of the nuclear family. It isn't about race, it's about poverty. The Orwellian named "affirmative action" is a way to distract from decades of ineffective policies pushed by largely Democratic politicians who have utterly failed to improve the lives of the poor. Using the laughable "lived life experience" as a pretext to divide available college spots along racial lines isn't going to fix the real problem.
Affirmative action also doesn't "benefit" the poor and disadvantaged. A great example of this is the privileged girl that got into Duke where her Mom is a professor. Why does she "deserve" a spot over Asian or White kids that grew up in poverty but were told by their parents to key to success is hard work? It is high time to end this nonsense and figure out real solutions.
Because no one actually gives (as my grandma would say) a tinker's damn about poor and disadvantaged kids. The policies that got us here aren't ineffective - they accomplished every real goal they had. (Those goals just don't include improving the welfare of the "served.")
The perfect drone voter is illiterate, disinterested and dependent. The utterly abysmal state of public education in the poorest areas serves the smug chattering classes very well.
If they're black, they have an added benefit - their kids get a free pass into "elite academia". Harvard isn't going to reject the kid of a prominent leftist (like an Obama daughter), or a symbol of the left (Jazz Jennings) regardless of how ill prepared they are to get anything educational out of Harvard. (Very similar to how high performing student athletes are guaranteed admission and "assistance" throughout their college matriculation.)
Some of the problem stems from the prison industrial complex and the psychological effect prison/gang culture has on kids growing up in poverty stricken area's. It has its own value system and replaces, for young men especially, the grounded self-esteem building rite of passage affirmation once provided by father's and a working class community. Where did the jobs, families and fathers go? Could self-interested inept and corrupt elected political leadership and bad social economic policy be a factor?
The DNC "woke" political pretended concern, exploitation and conflation of crime with revolution encouraged during the George Floyd riot's represents in large part the cause of the shop lifting, carjacking street violence we are seeing today. For the poor uneducated child at the bottom, is it better seeing oneself as a self-empowered victim with revolutionary agency and purpose or accept that my life and my future has been cancelled and I have been reduced to prison/street fodder by the rigged game narcissism of a corrupt financial elite. Is it combination of both? (We should probably all ask ourselves that question. I'm sure the J/6 people, Assange, Snowden, the growing thousands living cancelled lives and those incarcerated for thought crimes across the globe do so every day.)
Each year huge sums of tax payer dollars ear marked for education are flushed into the bureaucratic cesspool. Yet the child can't read and has no sense of the history and culture that should empower and inform his experience of America. Even the elite graduates we see assuming positions of power don't seem to actually be literate or connected to the cultural values that empower and define these things. And, the poor child is left with the metal detector he must pass through to enter the school building each morning and the atmosphere of emotional and physical violence it affirms.
We are no longer a literate society because the individual and an educated citizenry is a threat to the grift. Any half dozen articles across Substack will confirm this. Or, we can continue to believe there is no method behind this madness and those responsible can never be held to account. The violence, chaos, ignorance and disintegration will continue to escalate and it is already impacting every life here.
"I'm eighteen with a bullet/got my finger on the trigger/I'm gonna pull it..." Paul Wingfield
No it isn’t all about poverty — in fact , very little is about poverty. It’s about the out-of-control conditions in many classrooms today. If children won’t respect the authority of the teacher to stop chaos within classrooms then it doesn’t matter if every kid has an IQ of 140. No will learn anything. This is an aspect of our failing schools that’s rarely discussed because it’s labeled “racist.”
Poverty has a lot to do with it if your public school is primarily poor kids, like many are where I live in Memphis. Every kid eats lunch free and that is sometimes the only guaranteed meal of the day. And the poverty and lack of education are multi-generational. Very hard to overcome. Charters are key to getting out of bad schools in some cities.
If the Democrats were to admit the real problem is poverty. Then they would have to include white Americans and that doesn’t work well into their agenda. (Which is muddled and confused I admit but helping white Americans doesn’t work in to the plan)
I was initially going to post something about this, but you've said it all quite well.
If there is a genuine public interest in addressing persistent inequalities in circumstance and opportunity - not just by race, but also by class and geography and other kinds of situations that may hold people back unfairly - admission to elite universities is the very last place we should look.
Make sure every child in America has an opportunity to learn to read and do math; to understand the shared history and cultural heritage that somehow both unites and divides us; and above all to think, clearly and critically.
If only the Ivy''s weren't the only schools always mentioned in these articles. My ex=husband went to Harvard in the 60's . He was very smart, the son of a WHITE school teacher single mother in the hinterlands of the state where he lived. Ergo, although smart in scholastics, he was not a sophisticated well traveled 18 year old when he went off to Harvard on a full scholarship.
What he found was a freshman class filled with those "elite' ) all of whom belonged to the right clubs had traveled the world over and fit into the Harvard society. He had to work, live in a dorm with the other non-elites and was never considered a "Harvard{" type. He would never "network" with his peers. And his dorm mates were never invited to dinner at the professor's home. Professors were not above currying favor with those students from notable families.
On top of that, he said the education he received was not as advertised. All of the required classes in the first couple of years were held in huge rooms with 200 plus students,mostly taught by TA's. The big come on in those days was that Henry Kissinger was on the faculty as well as a lot of other big names, but they were never to be seen in classroom.
He hated it so much he took a year off between his junior and senior year and hung around Boston to get a taste of the life he had never lived back in his rural isolated town. He eventually graduated, went to medical school and ended up as a professor but he said he would have been happier at a smaller school with real teachers teaching real students.
I think that the pressure to succeed - not only academically but socially as well --is daunting at the Ivy's for all but the most privileged of 18 years olds. Sometimes a smaller college offers a better education and is TRULY diversified without all of the pretence ..
100% right. When my daughter went to college, she picked a small school because she said she would never get noticed or get attention in a large university. She is a shy introverted young woman, and the small school worked perfectly for her. Large elite universities lure big names and various laureates so they can brag they are on their faculty, but these professors are more like honorary figures too busy to appear in person and delegate teaching to TAs.
Agree, Bob K! Sadly the Progressive WOKE Left are more concerned about (and insisting on pushing) DEI and CRT over reading & math. Math, as well as Science, are now considered “racist” and a product of “White Privilege”
As is most every other thing the WOKE can blame in lieu of the Democrat failings to the people of color. I would say minorities, but it’s obvious the Left now views Asian people as “Whites” + any person of color who dares goes against the WOKE narrative/agenda is simply labeled a “White Supremacist of color”
The same argument can be made for gun control. Ban guns while ignoring the slaughter of blacks every week in Chicago and the underlying causes.
The same argument can be made for the police...defund police while ignoring the rampant increase in crime and the underlying causes. Banning and defending are much easier rallying cries than let's take an honest look at underlying causes.
The article points out that blacks are now over represented at Harvard, 15+% of their class of 2026 admissions. Maybe eventually if they get to 30% or 50% black then all problems “in the black community” will be solved?
I know several high-school teachers and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM sees high-school affinity groups as the place where good younger Black kids being to shift from being good students to becoming angry and adopt a societal victimhood mentality. Those affinity groups should be disbanded and if I had an African American kid in school, he/she would be absolutely forbidden to take part in it....I'm surprised adult Blacks even allow them to exist.
Keep in mind that we’ve had multiple generations that grew up in the affirmative action belief system. It would take independent thought for a black parent to buck the system. All parents, black and white, have a hard time doing that. Until COVID that is.
Well, of course no one’s child has to participate. But when people say things like, “The organization should be disbanded in schools,” that’s a different thing. And it’s a pointless conversation, because if we’re talking about public schools, it’s not even legally possible.
You're right. I don't know why anyone would send their kids to public schools, and increasingly, to private school. An all-girl Catholic school has a trans now. Grown young man in a dress uniform.
Well said. The answer to the "problem" of the diversity in college and university is to actually improve our school system in general. If our high schools and elementary schools actually taught our children then the playing field for entry to higher education would be leveled. And as you rightly mention, this would improve life not just for those who go on to college but for every child.
The left needs the black underclass to stay relevant. The elite “all for me, none for thee” crowd is why public education is failing for most of us. Us meaning African Americans.
I’d like to see stats on the graduation rates based on these lived experiences/race (since they cherish those stats for describing their student body.) And I mean at ALL schools from elite to pedestrians! I’ve heard much anecdotal evidence that kids given access who are not qualified and have no skin in the game (free rides) drop out when then work needs to be done. How is that working out for bragging rights?
Stuart Taylor and a colleague wrote a book about the mismatch problem years ago, and describing how this harms the intended beneficiary by maximizing the potential for failure at the select school.
I’ve seen that discussed. I totally agree with it and would take it one step farther. The mismatch is not just educational. If there is no family or similar infrastructural support for the student it’s is easy for them to get lost in their first true academic environment. Candidly that happened to me 50 years ago.
I have also seen the mismatch study easily demonized by a “so you think these kids are inferior “ argument. Wrongly but effectively unfortunately.
Philly Guy, this is a great point, and it is the right one. I hope you enjoy these two articles. The affirmative action piece has allowed the U.S. to become distracted from the realities on the ground. Reading scores are abysmal. Not just for minority groups, but boys in particular across all races.
Affirmative action and DEI are the most pernicious forms of systemic racism in this day and age. There is no other policy that so blatantly discriminates on the basis of race. Asian American kids growing up working-class immigrant communities are hurt the most by far. I grew up in such a community and have seen the damage wrought by these policies, of kids doing everything right and still being rejected by colleges. These are the kids of restaurant cooks, laundromat workers, rideshare drivers... parents living near or below the poverty line who scrimp together whatever little they have so that their kids can succeed, but then their kids are still seen by college admission boards as grinds with no personality.
Affirmative action refuses to consider that class matters. In this article, we hear that Green’s mother is a administrator at an elite college. Green has lived a privileged life class-wise. The same cannot be said for many children of working-class Asians, or White kids living in hollowed-out manufacturing towns in Appalachia filled with opioids and other traps of poverty.
Affirmative action also creates the sense that Black and Latino students cannot make it on their own, that they are forever dependent on special benefits just in order to succeed. It invalidates the achievements of students that could’ve succeeded without affirmative action, and makes the ones that do unable to catch up with the curriculum. The dropout rate for Black students is far higher than other races because those students are mismatched to colleges they cannot perform well in. Many end up in race/gender studies programs.
I wonder if there is a relationship between the admittance of AA students and the creation of bullsh-- majors, like gender studies. These universities have become petri dishes for the cultivation of grievance and entitlement. Anyone remember Michelle Obama’s senior thesis? Oh, how hard it was to be black at her Ivy league college, boo-hoo. Some brilliant Asian kid didn’t get in so Michelle could.
There is definitely a relationship between the two. A few findings from prominent affirmative action researchers:
•Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
•Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.
•About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
•Black law-school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.
•Interracial friendships are more likely to form among students with relatively similar levels of academic preparation; thus, blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched.
Many early Engineering students crash and burn on advanced calculus and La Place transforms, which quickly are added to systems engineering and thermodynamics. More and more and more, until they break and change degrees. Love of math in high schools matter.
62 years ago, I started college in Engineering. Big assembly--about 650 students, as I recall. The Dean said: "shake hands with the guy next to you. By the end of the first year, one of you will not be an Engineering student."
We had one class where department policy was that 50 percent would fail. You could take it twice. Odds of getting through the first time were about 25 percent.
Four years later, 110 graduated.
Nothing "ist" about it. Engineering school is tough.
"...blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched." They don't WANT to be integrated! Remember Evergreen College?
In many ways, it is systemic racism, and here is how:
1) there is a belief that a hispanic/black child cannot do math, English, etc. and the standards are lowered and the grades are inflated. Students rise or fall on the expectations.
2) schools and admininstration are dinged for having a high rate of minorities receiving resource services. If a school has 100 students and 5 are black and 2 are indiginous and 93 are white (this includes Asians now), then 5 indiginous students enrolled in resource may indicate that there is a racist/unconscious bias by the school staff rather than 5 students need help. Help for a struggling student is by the numbers not the need and this is a racist tragedy.
Taught for a while at a technical college that catered heavily to minority students. My observation was that, by and large, they had perfectly adequate brains. But, their secondary education was beyond abysmal. Almost none would have passed my 9th grade algebra class. Almost none could construct a complete sentence. Almost none even knew what a complete sentence was. I would tell them that I was an Engineer, not some literary genius. A complete sentence starts with a capital letter, ends with a period and has a subject and a verb. Most had no idea what I was talking about.
Was it because they were judged to be incapable because of their skin color? Or was it because they were skated through because of their skin color? Or something else? I have no idea. What I DO know is that they had been horribly failed by the education system.
Raises the questions of a) Ms. Green’s major—is she majoring in one or another “studies”?—and b) how she’s doing academically. If she’s majoring in mathematics or biophysics and doing well, great. If she’s majoring in feminist studies, I’ll be a bit less impressed. But I’ll be curious to know how she does with the latter degree in the real world. I notice that there’s no mention of either of these factors in the article. And wonder whether that’s intentional or a mere oversight.
Ms. Green apparently couldn’t resist playing a race card:
“Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.” “
“…the old meritocratic way….”
That would seem to mean that it’s laudable that Duke would get to know the whole Ms. Green’s person and admit her. I’m sure that her mother’s position at the school had nothing to do with her being admitted. But either they didn’t get to know Asian students or if they did, found them personally wanting.
Uh huh. Right.
I’m sure she will have a very fulfilling career following in her mother’s footsteps and will be an administrator at a college or university. With her kind of “logic,” probably at one of the Ivies. Where, with her connections, her children will have become just what the university will have been looking for that incoming class.
If Ms Green was the best advocate they could find, I don't think that speaks well for that side of the discussion.
You can see how this woman's brain works. She equates being black as a monolithic thing that defines all black people in the same way. As though a black person from Jamaica is the same as South Africa is the same as Brooklyn is the same as Iowa. It seems like she thinks that a person viewer her solely through the lens of how she acts and what she has done is somehow LESS than basing it off of her skin color.
She seems to want us all to judge all black people strongly based on the color of skin...the exact opposite of what we have been trying to do my entire life.
I feel sad for her...to have a part of your life be so crucial to who you are and yet not be a thing you have any control over and have done nothing to achieve it. And maybe that is why she is ok with affirmative action. Label and lump everyone based on a chromatic scale and then dole out what they 'deserve' based on things no one can control.
It's really kinda mind-blowing how clueless Ms. Green is about the racism baked into her outlook. Imagine believing you are opposing bigotry by looking at someone's skin color and assuming a whole story in your mind about who they are based entirely on associated stereotypes and historical narratives. And then believing you're on the moral high road. Yikes.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found this young woman just as entitled as she claims her classmates to be. Her race alone "entitles" her to be there. How does she think that's better than the white "legacy" admissions whose parents & grandparents were alumni.
She thinks she can tell Asian people that in fact they weren't discriminated against. I doubt she'd take it very well if someone (correctly in all likelihood) said the same to her. It seems "listen and believe" only applies to some.
It is helpful to remember that we’re only talking about “elite” schools here, so the absolute number of involved is really very small given the overall population. It is also a marvelous thing that a marginal student like Ms Green would be welcomed at hundreds of campuses around the country. It really is progress.
However if you want to hang with elites you need to be elite. Do we really want a world where black kids are held to a lesser standard? How racist is that? Why can’t she see she is a poster child for tokenism? As a Duke grad myself I’m embarrassed.
On the other hand , I would have loved to have Ben Carson as a surgeon if I needed his skill. He earned his place in medicine and science through exceptional hard work and intellect.
I expressly do not feel sorry for arrogant people, especially those who feel they deserve entitlements. Ms. Green clearly checks both of those boxes. She's great and wonderful and qualified and a person with depth and a meaningful life--unlike the Asians she handily dismisses as obviously unworthy, and who need to look into their own souls to see where they come up short. So ~very~ unlike her.
Feel sorry for her, if that's your wont. But yours will be a fairly lonely voice here....
There absolutely is - see Stanford and Yale educated Heather Macdonalds book “The Diversity Delusion”. The entire branch of African American studies was created because Ivy League colleges could not retain minority admissions after they went wild accepting them with a 4th grade reading level straight out of high school. With the most primitive education backgrounds, these kids couldn’t keep up with the high standards of these curricula, and were dropping out at over 80% rates (which was a bad look for the diversity-toting Ivy leagues). So what is one to do? Create an entire department of “education” with majors easy enough for even the barely literate to be able to complete.
Just skimmed it - absolute drivel. It’s so basic, it’s embarrassing someone signed off on that degree. I always suspected it might be nonsense, as no actual doctor or PHD that I know insists on being called Dr (myself included). One would think when your title is First Lady, surely no other title is necessary to massage your ego.
My degree was a Juris Doctor, yet no-one ever addressed me as Doctor. My clients' opponents addressed me as shyster, blood sucker or other pleasant descriptors.
Social sciences. I’m ok with this. The problem, their science has not been subject to the scientific method and has escaped the lab and infested corporate America and civil society. If they has stayed in the lab, no harm no foul.
There isn't much mentioned in the article about the discriminatory financial aid policies also in place at many colleges that are designed to woo the few qualified "preferred minorities" to their college vs. their peer institutions. In many cases, wealthy black and Latino applicants are offered substantial financial aid - far better than less-affluent (and more qualified) white and Asian applicants.
My brother-in-law, the son of hard-working but poor immigrants from post-WW2 eastern Europe, graduated #1 in his college class, scored highly on the MCAT exam, and wound up paying full tuition to attend med school. He worked as a hospital aide on weekends and during school breaks to buy food and pay rent, and pretty much maxed out on school loans. Some of his black and Latino classmates - the sons and daughters of physicians and lawyers - were receiving substantial financial aid during med school. During vacation breaks, they'd jump in their BMW convertibles to go skiing in Vermont, or fly down to the family condo in Florida or the Caribbean to enjoy some sun. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law stayed on campus and headed over to the hospital to work another shift as an aide.
Just like me. I worked my way through college and was unable spend time volunteering or doing research. Med school admissions committees don't care about that
There is a bias against lower middle class or working class students in med school admissions for that reason. I think they are looking for upper middle applicants or those with the right skin color.
I think they're really looking for upper-upper class, not upper-middle. A big part of the idea behind "early decision" college admissions is that it targets students whose families can afford to pay full tuition.
Colleges especially will go out of their way to accept students who come from famous and/or politically-connected families. If you're related to the Kennedy dynasty, you're pretty much guaranteed admission to Ivy League colleges regardless of how many boarding schools you were thrown out of or how often you were arrested for drug use.
I love how you turned "systemic" back on them. "Systemic" means "of a system." Although we hear incessantly of "systemic racism" our system is quite the opposite. Our laws and mores explicitly prohibit racial discrimination. Apartheid SA and the Jim Crow South practiced systemic racism. Modern America is the opposite of that. Well, except for "affirmative action."
How many examples of "systemic racism" in society have you heard? I have not heard one example from the
SJW crowd. "Systemic racism" is a buzzword. It is also circular thinking as the proponents of system racism will say it is systemic and therefore impossible to quantify or give concrete examples of.
“Systemic Normalization “, which normalizes normal folks for doing normal things.
Like being good at what they do, and striving to be excellent at what they do, to help all people. Or not being jerks promoting “trigger warnings “ for small slights, and equating that to violence. Or just respecting other folks and letting them live their lives.
And so….? About the day in 1966 Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, idiot southerners switched to the Republican Party to continue to delay the equality of all Americans, assured if they did not do so, they quickly would become the minority in the USA!
Nonsense. Who is still the party pushing abortions for negro communities? NYC for example has more abortions in black families than live births of babies. Who is not prosecuting crimes in large blue cities? And releasing hardened felons and thieves and murderers from prisons into minority communities? Who is withholding real education in large cities and pushing degenerate lifestyles? Who says a man in a dress or swimsuit can compete in sports with actual women, destroying Title 9 protections for women’s sports? And who is pushing for the genital mutilation, sterilization, and queering of grammar school aged children and teens before their minds are fully formed.
Oh yes, Democrats.
Ps, your ancient meme is obsolete. Woke up from the stupid.
One more point, and this one is pointed directly to Bari Weiss.
Bari, I worked almost exclusively with Israelis before I retired in my last job. I loved them much. They loved me. We were both argumentative and forceful. But then, we all mellow out eventually and look more broadly around and see life a little more gently.
Bari, thank you very much for leaving your fake news channel. And then starting something new and much better.
The actual origInal reason for press freedom in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution is to root out truth and expose it. And hold our horrible government accountable. And then correct their actions.
Bari Weiss, you do that right now. Expand your actions to promote free speech.
It's a lie to say that racist Democrats switched to the Republican party. Try to come up with a list of names of prominent racist Dems that switched to Republicans. You won't be able to because there wasn't any wholesale switching of parties.
Oh, and by the way, a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
My family were and stayed democratic in the 50-60s. I was in college at UGA when the color barrier came down. I spent the next 35 years in HR and labor relations both in govt and a major private labor intensive industry. I left the south for New England in 1971. By that time friends had aligned themselves with Republican racism. And they still are today.
My family were Republicans in the Deep South during the dark days of Jim Crow. It was not helpful to their careers then. So what?
Martin Luther King, Jr was a Republican. Anyone wish to slam him?
At the end of time, God will sort this all out. Then we will all face Him for judgement. I will declare myself to be a sinner. And then say, that I belong to Jesus Christ. Body and soul. Jesus is my only hope. He died for me.
If our powers that be focus on class, they create a large group of unmanageable people who, if they become successful, will challenge the elites’ children for success. Instead of focusing on class, they instead have chosen a “pull up selected moat bridge” strategy. This cynical strategy allows our elite to maintain their strategic advantage for their children while simultaneously project a benign and caring public face. No one really benefits except those already in power.
Imagine the godlike ability to decide what groups and individuals to let into heaven and what groups to ban! We are governed by the Soup Nazis of society.
Cynical strategies for maintaining power and privilege while appearing "compassionate" are the bread and butter of the Democratic Party. This is where they pivoted after Civil Rights became the law of the land: policies that would keep the majority of black people at the bottom of society by "helping" them in unhelpful ways, while simultaneously gaining black votes for their "help."
These “elites” are ok sacrificing society so their children can get ahead. Note HaRvArD’s silence and lack of action when a real crisis came their way in the name of Covid. Not one dissenter to the lockdown close-up shop theory of public health. Not one debate about the safety efficacy of dosing healthy young men and women with an EUA drug. If not at Harvard or Stanford, MIT, Yale etc., then where? All sheep fell into line. The elites have a purpose in this country. They are supposed to be the best educated with moral fortitude and courage. Take the trans swimmer from UPENN. Not one girl from the ivies league said a peep until Riley from a state school came forward. These elite schools select for self promotion and cowardice. Shame!!
The most dangerous and wicked aspect of it is the idea that "diversity" is a moral priority, and that our nation's leaders have a right to dictate what the demographics should look like, and judge the people who disagree as racists and bigots.
They see themselves as our moral leaders, as our gods. They will punish people for daring to say, "I don't believe in diversity." They force people in academic, military, and business programs to explicitly kowtow to their new morals of Marxism and Diversitarianism.
Personally, I think "diversity" is one of the most vapid and evil moral constructs, because in my perspective, to value the innate worth of every human being means that diversity is completely irrelevant. To dehumanize mankind with arbitrary and nonsensical "diversity" categories is an abuse of our rights and our sacred worth.
People are not colors. Latinos come from all sorts of ethnicities. "Asians" are not a single homogenous collective. The queer alphabet is not one single group of people who agree on everything. All of these categories are nonsense.
Great points, and you could also add that Jews were not considered fully “white” in the past with limited rights and privileges here and were the most discriminated minority in Europe. When the skin color is used as a the main criteria in admission to education or jobs, it is the most naked, shameless and ostentatious racism. How anyone cannot see and feel that way boggles my mind.
It's only horrifying if you use the colors "red" or "yellow".
One of the big differences I have with leftists is that I view the phrase "brown people" (which they use frequently) the way they view "yellow people". And this demonstrates how shallow and capricious ideas about "racism" can be.
“Personally, I think "diversity" is one of the most vapid and evil moral constructs, because in my perspective, to value the innate worth of every human being means that diversity is completely irrelevant. To dehumanize mankind with arbitrary and nonsensical "diversity" categories is an abuse of our rights and our sacred worth.”
Excellent points and so very true of the struggles within the Asian community. Yet the people rise above it and continue to work and get ahead without blaming history or some unseen figure as the reason for failure. I know so many who just will work until they die. Why? They don't want to be poor again or depend on others.
"...or depend on others." And this personal value is what is being driven out of whole segments of society by promoting the victim mentality that is underlying so many of the cultural changes being promoted today. Those at the top of the power structure understand that if people can be made dependent then they can be controlled.
My husband is the son of immigrants: grew up in a low income urban "ghetto", didn't speak English until he went to kindergarten, first in his family to finish high school (much less attend college) and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.
Add in his years of experience, and you would think he is a shoe-in for a position as a school administrator in an urban school system, right? Bringing competence, street cred and "diversity"?
LOL did I mention his parents are immigrants from a European country?
Nevermind.
He is a Privileged White Man and therefore unhireable for a leadership position in a public school today.
I think the most blatant discrimination was when he applied for a position as a district coordinator for his subject area in the city he grew up in, with impeccable credentials and experience. The job was given to a young middle class black woman from the affluent suburb next door who hadn't even completed her certification program and had so little relevant experience as an administrator that she *called him the next day* to get advice on how to do the job.
And the even stupider part is that if his mom had been born literally 5 miles further east, over the border in Spain, he would be able to check the "Hispanic" box.
And he would get fired, because you aren't allowed to just "identify" with racial categories.
BUT.... he could identify as a "woman."
Which leads to this whole other level of crazy:
A man can identify as a woman - something he can never be or even be similar too - with a mere change of pronouns. Ta Da! Intersectional Magic.
But the son of Portuguese immigrants, who grew up in a poor urban neighborhood with a sizable Hispanic community, went to school and church with Hispanic kids, watched Spanish TV, fluently speaks the Spanish language along with his own Latin language, who is dark and swarthy enough to get regularly asked "you from 'round here?" by people in my very Germanic midwestern hometown, and whose parents grew up in dirt poor peasant poverty within walking distance of Spain, cannot under any circumstances identify as "Hispanic", and must identify as "White", even though he has had Nada of the supposed "privileges."
I found this interesting- Note that Brazilians and Filipinos were also excluded from the "Hispanic" category. Yet Filipinos could be considered Asian or Pacific Islander? Whereas Brazilians tend to have a lot of African, so could they be considered in the Black category?
The problem is that Portuguese are essentially White adjacent.
The Portuguese are considered technically Hispanic, or Latin. I saw that somewhere. Because it's on the Iberian peninsula. He totally should have checked that box and would have been accurate in doing so.
The Spanish are also technically "European." They tend to be much lighter-complected than American Hispanics. I think when Hispanic is discussed in America as a minority group, it's referring to Central and South American hispanics, not European hispanics.
Yes, many of these black applicants to college end up majoring in RACE. They then go on to destroy institutions and the minds of young people with their racial obsession. Note that Greene's "arguments" are appeals to emotion. What about her black "identity" qualifies her for Duke?
I've been privy to numerous black "scholars" who destroy everything they touch; the Classics guy who wants to tear down the classics (Petrillo, I think his name is -- he destroyed a true Classics scholar for questioning his motives at a conference) -- rather than write scholarly papers and publish them in journals he squanders his time scouring journals for "representation..." We now have to endure "anti-bias" training, futile because these race-baiting narcissists will distort anything a white person says for personal gain....
In other words, it's not helping anyone to admit people into college because of the color of their skin -- and it's usually black skin that enjoys this privilege. And ironically, despite this privilege, it's never enough.
College would provide a better experience for everyone if they took race off the application and admitted people on merit. Everyone would know they got in on merit. Students might even be able to enjoy expressing their authentic thoughts instead of walking on eggshells around the unprepared race narcissists. Actual learning and discourse could recommence.
SY - are you forced to conclude, as I am, that there are inherent cultural positives among Asian Americans (typically referring to ethnic Chinese/Korean/Japanese l)? The hardworking, education-focused attitudes are consistent and prevalent…and way upstream of affirmative action laws and such.
Today, many college administrators make more than professors. In fact, there has been this boom in hiring a ton of administrators in just the last five years. Google the public tax filing 990 of any well known college and you'll be stunned. People with titles in DEI, HR, or any executive title are pulling in millions. Yes, millions. I'm not sure what kind of administrator Green's mother was, but even secretaries at top universities can pull in 6 figure salaries.
The secretary to the dean of my college - Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State, hardly an “elite” university - makes over $100k. Tenured professors don’t even make that.
A secretary in my office makes over $100K, our top HR person makes 1.3 million per year, and the DEI Chief and makes close to half a million. Top colleges are now following a corporation blueprint and the student is the customer--a director is hired for every facet of these services from mental health to laundry services. https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs
That they are such a lifeline is precisely why meritocratic admissions (and enrolled student policies) must be crushed - for the benefit of powerful people with personal/political power. Asian students who work a thousand times harder and start with a couple of orders of magnitude higher IQ are not likely to become the drone voter they're trying to create. Hence, they must be disadvantaged (to "level the playing field....)
Totally agree, Sheluyang Peng! No one wants to talk about “the dropout rate for Black students is far higher than other races bc those students are mismatched to colleges they cannot perform well in”
Also, the Southern University I attended was all about athletics. Many Blacks we’re literally accepted, then given a pass to graduation, if they played football or basketball. Rarely did a Professor give a failing grade, or even expect them to stay awake during lectures. And if it was an early morning class, they simply didn’t attend.
I carried my youngest during my junior year and finished my senior year with elementary to toddler age kids
My baby got pneumonia and I sat up with him five days and four nights.
The prof wouldn’t allow me to turn in an assignment late because my baby was seriously ill but the football player who had a hangover was given an extra week for the same assignment.
Systematic racism isn't "bad" if the targets (victims) are whites and Asians. Then it is "good". Even mandatory. You are entirely correct about meritocratic admissions. At one time, most of the students attending elite (academically) high schools in NYC were Jewish. Now the high schools are predominantly Asian.
“Some students who were not recipients of affirmative action—when you meet them, it makes you wonder why they’re even there. They don’t seem to really care about the world, care about people, or care about society,” she said.
Sounds to me as if this person considers social activism as the most important qualification for college. But a lot of kids are more interested in learning biochemistry or genetics! Or in playing the violin! Or in immersing themselves in 19th-century American poetry! Or in learning how to teach math to seventh-graders!
And that's just fine. You shouldn't have to be obsessed with saving the world to go to a top college.
Agreed. I found that statement annoying and judgmental. That young lady will be a real pain in the ass in whatever work situation she finagles herself into.
What? Go to college to learn? How passé. College is for being taught what to think and learn how to be offended. Not to actually learn math. Ridiculous.
I actually think the country would be better off if we didn’t have so many self-appointed saviors. The colleges and all professional schools are pushing this virtuous cupidity.
Sorry Sonya Green, but in the piece you offered no coherent defense of affirmative action in your statements; judging people based on the color of one’s skin is discriminatory no matter whom it benefits.
So true because colleges no longer even CARE about the interview. I was stunned to learn this. My kid - despite having to overcome a father who didn’t want to be in her life and being raised by a single mother (she’s spent only a few days in her father’s presence) - refuses to deal with the “oppression Olympics.” She will not talk about that difficulty nor her learning differences, which make her achievements even more profound. Pretty sure we won’t mention we are Jewish since that actually might be met with discrimination (the number of Jews at prominent colleges has also fallen as a result of the “holistic” approach. Her grades are amazing except in math and her ACT in the 30s, president of a club to help those with intellectual and developmental disabilities at her school. She’s a wonderful speaker and she gets things done. She’s become demoralized about her chances to get into a school she wants to attend- and there are zero Ivys on her list. College admissions are now just racist and everyone knows it, especially high school seniors.
I’ve been encouraging her broaden her field more but even then, so many of these colleges are employing the same devices and have single digit percentage acceptance rates. Also, now it seems that as many as a third of kids get in via early admission, so you must pick ONE school - that if it accepted you - you would attend. Schools want to even more easily fill their slots. The result of this is that competition is super fierce for the non-black kids and they must narrow their choices. And we wonder why depression rates in teens are so high?
To clarify one point, you’re talking about early decision, not early admission. Kids can still apply to schools other than their early decision school, but must withdraw other applications if accepted. Early admissions lets kids apply very early in the year, but doesn’t lock them into the school the way ED does.
Your daughter sounds like an amazing and level-headed young woman. I wish her the very best.
yes, she is amazing but it takes a toll on kids who are in many ways exceptional to not be supported but diminished in this process. And these kids have experienced the efforts of DEI in high school and barely survived COVID.
The ugly irony that Jewish kids—often the grandchildren of immigrant and first-generation Jews who were excluded by universities (as well as in many white-collar occupations and industries) because of well-known quotas—have for many years now been discriminated against by a quota system imposed under the cloak of more acceptable names (“affirmative action;” “diversity;” etc.) remains a sadly-overlooked injustice.
See David L. Bernstein’s book, “Woke Antisemitism.”
"Oppression Olympics"is a great description for college applications because every student needs to overcome adversity and discrimination. It has got to be a whinge fest reading through applications. Why can't a student meet the challenge of slope formula and dangling prepositions with the sparkle of outside interest and call it good?
Hang on, back up. Her family situation and religion should be irrelevant to admissions, but to not mention her learning differences is to not give colleges a full picture of her accomplishments. It’s not about trying for “pity points” or “special treatment,” it’s about something extremely relevant.
She will not do that. What I meant by adding that information is that people must tailor themselves to what the admissions offers want. They WANT to hear the pity sob stories of single mothers, parental neglect. We jokingly talked about calling her “non binary” to get attention. I keep telling her that her abilities, work ethic and personality will win out in the end, no matter what college she goes. That’s all we can do in a system that doesn’t currently make sense and is rife with corruption and lacks transparency.
I think it's like someone trying to win a competition in which each person submits a recording of themselves playing the piano. If they flawlessly perform a difficult piece, that's wonderful - but if they flawlessly perform a difficult piece and only have nine fingers, that's out of the ordinary.
I don't know what her learning differences are, but you realize that a lot of people with those issues just drop out of high school, right? For example, thirty-something percent of teenagers with ADHD quit high school, compared to 15% of the general population. Your daughter's accomplishments, in light of her learning differences, show that she's particularly persistent when it comes to academic success. And that's an accomplishment in and of itself.
Of course it is but I have only heard of discrimination in that area. One is more likely to gain admission by claiming to be non-binary than to have overcome learning differences.. and, so many these days claim to be diagnosed with variants in order to get extra time on tests etc. ironically, the same tests that now have little impact on acceptance.
A balanced article. I also appreciated many of the comments. I do believe that university admission criteria have gone too far, and are as racist as the criteria used 100 years ago.
Please, let’s not make cruel, personal attacks against the interviewees. Surely those viewpoints one strongly disagrees with can be disputed using arguments that do not do so.
In this case they used a name, right? What’s their plan if the kid changes his name to L-a (“ladsaha”) and then applies as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body?
Well, a man claiming to be a woman is higher on the progressive org chart than an actual lesbian. The name change however could end up being seen as cultural appropriation, since you are allowed to gender swap but not race swap (yet).
I am sorry, but they didn't teach intersectional math back when I was in school, so I don't think I can solve this one.
I was struck by the language each side uses to defend their position. One side employs objective metrics, historical facts, and law while the other utilizes more subjective and euphemistic catchphrases - “holistic approach,” “erasing identities,” and “a good fit.” This is the fundamental divide in this country right now.
I thought the analogy between Asian Americans today and Jews of the past was a very salient point. Sonia uses the language of Asians not being a “good fit.” How is that any different than what was done with Jews at Ivy League institutions? Or blacks during Jim Crow? Hell it was used about black quarterbacks in the NFL for decades - they weren’t a good fit for the position. The moral assuredness and historical ignorance of so-called progressives is extremely troubling. Though the Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow, so maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising after all...
Affirmative action might possibly have (briefly) made some sense sixty years ago, but it has definitely outlived any usefulness it may have had. People should be judged on their performance and qualifications, not by immutable characteristics. Or do its proponents believe, deep down, that blacks are less capable than whites? In this day and age, people of color (except for East Asians!) get preferential treatment yet we still hear the myth of "systemic racism". If it does indeed exist, it certainly doesn't target blacks. I often wonder what people would say to Martin Luther King's immortal words about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Would he be called an Oreo? An Uncle Tom? Would he be told "you ain't black"? Identity politics will destroy this country if it is allowed to continue unchecked.
Bravo, Heide. To what you accurately describe as “Martin Luther King's immortal words about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin,” I would add the following immortal words spoken several weeks earlier by President John F. Kennedy - a Democrat - in his June 12, 1963, Television and Radio Address to the American People on Civil Rights: “race has no place in American life or law.” A succinct (nine words) and powerful statement. It is unfortunate that current-day Democrats who would publicly endorse that statement are about as rare as passenger pigeons.
I think a lot of liberal whites are just white supremacy attempting to conceal it with support to these policies and projection of their own racism on their political opponents.
They definitely think someones race defines much about that person, rather that race simply being a physical characteristic. They seem to think it is the sum total of a person. Which I agree, shows what they REALLY think about people.
What is never addressed is the fact that AA kids with ACT scores in the 20s, admitted to prestigious schools where they typical score is 34 out of a possible 36, are totally unprepared for the rigors of the curriculum. Just the list of books that are to be read as part of the general humanities curriculum everyone must take is pretty daunting. Prof Amy Wax of Penn got into deep doodoo when she observed that her black law students were at the bottom of her class. So these AA kids are pushed through, handed the sheepskin, while highly qualified Asians are denied for being too good. Do we need more consultants in DEI firms or engineers?
That's no problem. When the students can't handle the rigor of the curriculum, schools can just make the curriculum less rigorous. Or just give everyone an A.
And then at their new high end jobs, their bosses will end up expecting less (but still expected to hire) of these students. I almost feel like this is a purposeful plot to cause more racial division.
A very pernicious aspect is that these disparate standards will train people at the schools to associate black people with lower average performance. It's probably creating subconscious bias in the name of fighting it.
The problem I have with affirmative action is that it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Instead of tinkering with college admissions and abolishing gifted programs because they're not inclusive enough, I wish that we could talk about creating better conditions/a better environment for struggling students so that they could perform at a higher level.
It's like the current ruling class isn't capable of actually solving issues, so instead of fixing America's broken healthcare system, horrible food or bad inner city schools, we just say that you can't fat shame and gifted programs are racist.
Another I just learned about is “degrowth”. Apparently the woke have decided that society should get poorer and smaller to save the earth — likely just a rebranding to cover for their decay-causing policies.
By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.” ---- What a typical you owe me attitude. Choices and elections have results. You vote Democratic and get crap for your neighbors and self and then you want blame others? Most homes have maybe one parent and you want to blame others? Little opportunity based on rime and you want to blame others? When does the blame others stop? Never is when.
I have a half Asian family and let me tell you this. Your struggles are not more than many of the things we have gone through. I know families that fled with the communist in pursuit and wanting to kill them. They had to decide to run as their baby was crying and others wanted them to suffocate the baby due to noise. They choose to go on their own. Refugee camps and immigration, learning a new language, way of life, and working their asses off to get ahead. Making their kids understand, nothing is free, you must earn it. Kids completed college and are successful without crying about race.
To say they are not a good fit to a school is racist in its self. Our grandchildren are getting ready for college, all A's and both parents both work and they won't get crap for assistance. So save you poor me and try and understand, your free, means someone else pays for that. You see free as equality, others see free as being taxed for things they never were a part of. Everyone wants to be equal and accepted, well until its time to pay. Any student who is rejected by the bigoted Harvard, Yale community when they are the top performers are being discriminated against, bottom line.
And that is something that really steams me. I went to a private school with plenty of black kids, some of whose parents were more affluent than mine. That’s a measure of how hard-working and persevering they were, given that they achieved their success in pre-civil rights Alabama. Their children and grandchildren inherited that well-earned wealth. Why should those grandchildren, with the same access to excellent K-12 education as whites, now have an extra leg up on poor white Appalachian kids or Asian kids?
Because, to some people, simply being black means they somehow inherited all of the bad things that happened to some black people. And because they are told this from a young age, they see it everywhere.
Imagine if your parents told you that redheads were out to get you. From the day you could walk into adulthood, every redhead wants to get you alone and suck out your soul. You would see every casual glace from a redhead as something sinister. You would be tense around them and that would impact your interactions negatively which would in turn continue to fuel your ginger paranoia. The only way to move past this would be for you to make a choice to put yourself at risk to find out the truth...and most people won't take that road.
"What a typical you owe me attitude." -- Right?! She judges her Duke peers as being entitled with statements that make HER sound entitled!
"When does the blame others stop?" -- That right there is the result of the CRT "oppressor/oppressed" narrative. When people are convinced they are a "victim", then everyone/thing else is to blame.
Carson added: “There’s something very offensive to most people about being judged, not by their own achievements, their work ethics, or their accomplishments, but just being judged based on something they had no control over.”
That right there is the point!
Any race based criteria is discriminatory against someone. The sooner we as a society can get there the better. The same holds true for any other identity based criteria for admissions.
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”
How utterly hateful, racist and exclusionary. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal...”. NOT “we think you’ll be a good fit in this new country.”
Affirmative action has institutionalized racism and unfair treatment. It had LED to a sense of exaggerated grievance, entitlement and division between peoples. And as Booker T. Washington declared, there is a segment of our society which exploits and perpetuates that grievance and division for profit. Let it die a well-deserved death.
With all due respect to Sonia Green, I think the only reason she supports affirmative action is because she benefitted from it. Her arguments in favor of it are extremely weak.
Her mother works there, therefore, she received full scholarship. Duke didn’t really pick her as a deserving candidate. She is full of herself without any self awareness.
Stephen, this is not a fair comment. Connecting with nature requires a drive/values to do so (taught) and physical access (bought). E.g., city kids have to be physically schlepped a distance by car or bus to be anywhere near green. I am personally fortunate to have been raised to love and spend time outdoors by my family of farmers and hobby athletes and to have grown up in a place where yes - we just open the window for birdsong. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Indeed. In LA, there are all kinds of inner-city kids with no green space within walking distance--just concrete. They’ve never been to the beach. If they’re lucky, they go on a field trip now and then and get excited to be able to dig in the dirt for the first time in their lives.
Everyday there is a culture war article. And, everyday most of the same people comment. Our culture is changing with the speed of the internet, and we’re cracking up under the pressure. We just can’t seem to handle it all.
Like all rebalancing programs Affirmative Action was necessary at the time it was created. Most people just wouldn’t hire women or other minorities over men. At 25 yrs old in 1983 I worked at GE corporate headquarters (then a Fortune 10 company) and was still ridiculed by some male superiors for being a working wife, furthering my education at the same time, and even more ridiculed when I became pregnant and continued to work and go to school. Those were pioneering days, and things did change.
Like all pendulum swings and rebalancing programs, it is time to end them when the intent is accomplished. The intent was accomplished. It’s time to move on. It’s as simple as that, yes.
Absolutely agree. However, it seems that rather than letting the pendulum swing back, there are those who've grabbed hold of it, refusing to let go, and are even up on a ladder pulling it up higher.
So the question asked is, What will change as the result of the court striking down AA?
Answer, Nothing. Universities have already figured out their work-arounds. They will continue to churn out mediocre graduates with bullsh— degrees who will get jobs in consulting firms and governments where they can create more policies to control us.
Yes many of the top schools have already dropped the SAT from admissions in preparation. If you can’t measure who has merit you can’t get in trouble for not running merit-based admissions.
Hmm. Our son is white, has a 4.1 GPA, works 2 part-time jobs (for the work experience in the field of his desired major), and wants to apply to a college that has dropped the SAT requirement. We thought he'd be a shoe-in, but now I'm worried.
Sadly you are right to worry, depending on what schools he is applying to. His skin color and gender will move him to the bottom of the pile in certain schools. And most of those schools won't be honest about it.
However, there is hope. If your son has good values, a strong work ethic, and is willing to learn (which is seems like he does), he will be fine. His path may not be the one he thought it would, but he will find a new path and forge it well.
You may be right., but there are reasons to believe that Americans still favor merit. University of California regents may have erased affirmative action in 1995, but a public vote on the matter affirmed the measure in 1996.
Over time, California has turned much more blue. In 2020, another proposition was sent to state voters, one that would reinstate affirmative action as a factor in state college admission decisions. It was supported by the governor and many, many officeholders, but it failed by a slightly larger margin than the 1996 one had passed.
My guess is that admissions officers on CA campuses (actually ALL campuses) are putting thumbs on the scales for favored candidates, but proving such, given the deeply larded bureaucracies involved, would be impossible.
Putting aside the larger question of the rightness or wrongness of affirmative action in general, consider that in focusing on education, specifically Ivy League caliber education, we are looking at the wrong metric if we want to do good by the needy.
If the goal is to actually help black children increase their chances for societal success, myopically focusing on whether Harvard or Yale has a black student population of 8% or 10% is a diversion. We, as a society, are ignoring the hundred of thousands of public school students, black and white, who can’t read, write or understand basic math. There is a large population of now 2nd and 3rd generation underclass citizens with no hope for a personal future.
We’ve had 50 years of racially based affirmative action in education and corporate America and what minimal benefits achievable from it have been banked. The left’s patting itself on the back for affirmative action policies that do no good for those in need while failing to address the disaster in our primary educational system is the height of hypocrisy.
For some reason, we have allowed the left to give us a binary choice; support affirmative action or let millions remain in poverty. Even though the beneficiaries of affirmative action are a small minority of our disadvantaged population, we accept this false choice as providing the only options available. I have no idea why.
The binary choice is false in itself. Rich Black students benefit the most from affirmative action, poor Asian students are hurt the most. Affirmative action is not about lifting people out of poverty, but about making liberals feel better about themselves.
"Affirmative action is not about lifting people out of poverty, but about making liberals feel better about themselves."
This one sentence encapsulates the whole liberal/leftist paradigm!
You nailed it.
The way AA is interpreted today, it is about having a race based society, which is OK so long as the favored race is not white.
My daughter’s class at Harvard had black American Express CEO Ken Chenault’s son and also in her circle were a number of privileged blacks from Westchester county, a wealthy county in NY, as well as a number of wealthy, non-American blacks from Africa and elsewhere. And not in her class, but also attending Harvard now, is ‘The View’s' black, big-mouthed, bigoted, millionaire Sonny Hostin’s son. Seems like what should be the real focus is not skin color but the lack of ‘economic diversity’ at these so-called prestigious colleges.
On a related note, read this to the very end. This describes just how pernicious these leftwing schools are:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/penn-state-professor-says-school-forced-him-to-teach-english-language-is-white-supremacy-religious-cult/ar-AA1d5IaQ?cvid=dd3aa7536cd54deaa91338e0d2928123&ei=25
The WOKE are just nutso bigots....it's as simple as that...it's all about POWER and they are craven.
Alas, I don't think it's that simple.
The progressives I know are kind, decent people. They are not evil monsters. Demonizing and oversimplifying them fails to give us any traction on creating a better alternative.
That's not to say it isn't tempting. I've very frustrated with that ideology, to say the least.
But one of my many differences with that ideology is that I prefer to seek a functional path, rather than an emotional release which makes me feel better about myself. Hate on them, call them names, oversimplify so as to put them down. I don't want to fall into the same mental trap that I am critiquing on the modern left.
The woke are mostly caring decent humans who have fallen into a problematic ideology. Their initial motives are usually very noble, if perhaps weak on critical thinking. They care about marginalized people, and feel guilty that it has taken so long to bring them up to speed as full coparticipants in a multicultural society (do to past actions which were indeed bad, but which nevertheless get exagerated). They want to DO SOMETHING to make it better.
Of course, once this mind virus gets in via the compassion port, it can offer other less noble psychological payoffs to believers - like feeling constantly morally superior to non-believers, which is intoxicating. I don't think that's usually the first attraction tho.
One facet of the firm belief that the infected have that they have the moral high ground, is they can relabel naked power seeking as really just seeking justice, a laudable (of conveniently malleable) goal. Hey, we aren't even taking control out of selfishness - we are doing it for the marginalized! So we don't need to apply the normal rules of the old liberal order (like, say, symmetrical rules about stereotyping), we're on a mission from God.
I see them as infected by a remarkably potent mind virus which evolved in the aftermath of the enlightenment transformation, and thus has adaptive mechanisms for defeating the evidence and reason tools used to defang the Catholic Church's power.
We have to have a strategy which can counter this virus, but calling it names is not much of a strategy. I think we need to focus on things like calmly highlighting internal contradictions, or disappointing real world results of its policies. Our target is not the most thoroughly infected, but the larger halo of partially infected psyches, who still hold some liberal values. Like some of them don't feel fully comfortable with abandoning Free Speech, but they need some support in standing up about that.
That's one reason I think that disaffected liberals need to be involved; they can have more insight into where a counter theme might have traction. Few of the (partially) woke have residual conservative perspectives to invoke, they mostly come from the liberal side and thus have that small or large residual perspective.
So I both resonate with your characterization, and want to avoid going down that rabbithole because I don't think it's an effective counter to the invasive ideology. Name calling is their home territory. Reason is ours.
I shouldn't be shocked by that story, but I am. My son graduated from PSU two years ago - he loved the school and I don't think he ever came across this type of BS. I sincerely hope that professors wins that case in a very large way...of course, PSU will pass on whatever they have to payout in increased tuition. sickens me.
My personal assumption is that all Harvard graduates are functioning morons who despise normal Americans in their intense quest to rule the world. But without danger to their person. With no risks to themselves. It is all Kubuki theater now.
They sure do NOT care about diversity of thought or socio-economic diversity
I agree that progressives can, at times, embrace activism for its self-congratulatory benefits. I don't know if that is true of old-school liberals; I draw a distinction between the two groups because the former seems to have arisen in prominence with the advent of social media which incentivizes their virtue signaling. This conflict is beautifully captured by the recent conflict between Mayor London Breed and a white progressive supervisor, where the progressive accused Mayor Breed [who is black and grew up in poverty] of not understanding the plight of black and brown people.
Old school liberals invented it. See e.g. Malcolm X's comments about white liberals being black folks worse enemy. Or Leonard Bernstein using the Black Panthers as party props.
Fair enough. No group is a monolith.
I disagree as I would say progressives’ number one priority is virtue signaling. Not “can,at times.” I can’t think of a single policy of progressives whose main goal isn’t patting themselves on the back. Most fail horribly and are financial black holes. The biggest group of hypocrites I’ve ever seen.
Alice, I understand why you might think that. But the same can be said of bombastic people who call themselves conservative when all they really want is power and attention. I try to avoid stereotypes, in the end they are shortcuts for lazy thinkers who don't see nuance.
100% both sides and everywhere in between. I'm not so much talking about progressive citizens, but the progressivism politicians in government. The censors, cancelers, debate-squelchers. You can't question the govt!
Activism is taught in our schools and colleges: progressive activism.
Check this out, from the National Association of Scholars, a dot org.:
"What we call the “New Civics” redefines civics as progressive political activism. Rooted in the radical program of the 1960s’ New Left, the New Civics presents itself as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works. Though camouflaged with soft rhetoric, the New Civics, properly understood, is an effort to repurpose higher education.
The New Civics seeks above all to make students into enthusiastic supporters of the New Left’s dream of “fundamentally transforming” America. The transformation includes de-carbonizing the economy, massively redistributing wealth, intensifying identity group grievance, curtailing the free market, expanding government bureaucracy, elevating international “norms” over American Constitutional law, and disparaging our common history and ideals. New Civics advocates argue among themselves which of these transformations should take precedence, but they agree that America must be transformed by “systemic change” from an unjust, oppressive society to a society that embodies social justice.
The New Civics hopes to accomplish this by teaching students that a good citizen is a radical activist, and it puts political activism at the center of everything that students do in college, including academic study, extra-curricular pursuits, and off-campus ventures.
New Civics builds on “service-learning,” which is an effort to divert students
national association of scholars
When my daughter went to International Baccalaureate high school more than twenty years ago, many of her classmates were formerly homeschooled, Jewish, or Asian.
Why was that? You know why. She has a PhD in microbiology.
Public schools are designed to make them stupid.
Asians, Jewish, and homeschooling children should be unleashed to be their best. Let them rock and roll. I truly hope that the US Supreme Court ends affirmative action for colleges and universities to unleash the intellectual power of our children.
Rich black kids indeed. I grew up as a not-well-off white immigrant and went to med school with some rich black kids. They told me about their upbringing:
Country clubs, golf, private schools, tutors, lessons, debutante balls. My childhood was working starting at age 12 (babysitting) followed by a real job starting age 16. My GPA/SAT/MCAT scores were much higher than theirs but they got into so many schools they could pick.
If they actually wanted to lift people out of poverty, they would look at income rather than race/ethnicity. Better yet is to judge on merit.
I"m sure you know that equal outcomes, a goal of the Left in this country, is a communist, Marxist concept, in direct contradiction to the American value of competition. It is based on the absence of merit, and guaranteed to produce poverty and military take-over.
And the number one suspect in the deplorable lack of education provided to black students is the teachers union, headed by the execrable liar, Ms. Weingarten. And who is the recipient of the teacher's union's largess - why the Democrat Party, that's who. Connecting the dots isn't really that hard.
I recently saw some really shocking stats about graduates of Baltimore public schools. When a school system fails to be able to educate its students in basic reading and math skills, it should be promptly closed down. The real discrimination is sentencing kids to these institutions during their prime learning years. This is criminal. And don’t blame the students. My parents grew up desperately poor and were able to access decent schools. Stop the excuses.
Half of graduating black high school students in SF can’t read properly. SF is the Mecca of far left progressive policies and it’s leaving generations of uneducated black and brown kids behind. And somehow they are blaming Asian Americans for this inequity instead of their own policies of lowering expectations to the point that their victims aren’t learning anything.
The teachers' unions have an obscene sway over the Dem/Soc Party. They fight school vouchers tooth and nail and the Dem/Soc swine support the unions. They don't give a damn about the failure of public education. (Not all public schools are failures but the ones that are need to be shut down .)
If the leftwing swine in congress are so opposed to school vouchers because vouchers will destroy public education, then how come these congressmen and women send their kids to private schools?
Leftwing fanatics always point to the Scandinavian countries as social paradises. All of the Scandanavian countries have school vouchers. They allow the parents to chose the school they think is right for their kids. What a novel, revolutionary idea, letting parents chose what is right for their children! These parents are probably terrorists.
Neither the Dem/Socs nor the Rep boobs have ever done anything about the terrible state of our school system. We need school voucher legislation. This will create competition between schools to provide better education. Socialist hate competition.
If the Reps gain control of the presidency and both houses of congress. They could force school voucher on the states. All they have to do is threaten to cut off federal funds to the states that don't offer vouchers.
I have said all along the Dem/Soc party is evil. The Reps are just incompetent.
And it is telling that schools such as Harlem Academy that hold black kids to high standards get fabulous results and successful kids. Imagine thinking that the answer doesn't lie in lowering standards to fit the racist narrative of the Left......
Kids crave standards and boundaries.
Perhaps black families from SF should move immediately to the Central Valley to a farm, and learn to do something real. To feed Americans. Work for a pittance, and then learn something, and then work really hard and do something real, and then buy their own farm. There are not enough Black farmers now. Every good man deserves a favour.
In Chicago we are told that we can’t possibly expect schools to teach reading and math because of societal problems. So first we create a perfect society, and THEN they can teach.
Uh huh 🙄 My kids knew better than to try that approach by the time each hit kindergarten.
it is perfectly legitimate to "blame the students."
But it's more accurate to blame parents who allowed schools and their children to reach such a state.
But if the parents object, the demonic dwarf who runs the DOJ will sic his FBI goons on them.
As well the FBI should. After all parents who don't want schools grooming their children to be leftwing nut cases are terrorists.
What self respecting parent would ever allow their children to be subjected to government schools and indoctrination camps, actual Hitler youth camps?
Everyone I know homeschools their children or goes to a Christian school. We don’t wish for Drag Queens to rape our boys. Or to teach them CRT.
The state pf Texas has taken over schools in Houston twice now for this reason. And you should hear the wailing. All they do is rehabilitate them.and then relinquish control. The education industry is anything but educational for far, far, far too many.
The other thing that strongly affects these students is significant lead in their home environments. There are terrible problems with this in spots all over the country but Baltimore is a particularly bad example. There is some money provided in the infrastructure bill for this, but this issue is actually tragic. Both Freddy Gray and the cop that gave him a rough ride had been flagged as having high lead levels in their systems as kids. Crazy.
This is an extremely important and underreported issue. A woman called Lead Free Mama, I think, out of the West coast writes a blog about this—her kids were lead poisoned. High lead levels have been associated with crime for decades. Also, of course, with learning difficulty. Addressing this issue I believe would really pay for itself.
I'm certainly not a fan of Randi Weingarten, but I think it's a bit unfair to blame her for all the problems of our school system. The real culprits are those who confer so much power on her and her union. And if that's the Democratic Party, then the fault lies with the citizens who support and vote for Democrats.
To quote Walt Kelly's comic strip "Pogo": "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us".
"And if that's the Democratic Party, then the fault lies with the citizens who support and vote for Democrats."
No argument there.
Yep, she is a bloodsucking vampire who hates our children. And yes, she has no children at all.
I agree with your point about the need to “address the disaster in our primary educational system”.
How much of this university issue would be solved if kids were taught a solid foundational education K - 12. Maybe not all but I would guess a significant amount. And better support for trades programs where 4 year degree isn’t always needed.
That is only going to be part of the answer. Putting a student into the best school in existence won't overcome a lack of desire to learn. Without a home that values education or achievement a great school is heavily hindered from doing its job. Culture is important. The reason Asians do better statistically is not because they all go to great schools. It is because they are taught from a young age to learn and study and work. Not everyone gets that part of the equation.
Its the old "you can lead a horse to water..." issue.
Exactly. Funny how the academic performance of all those elite high schools plummeted once they stopped merit-based admissions. The schools/teachers weren’t making the students great -- the students were making the schools great.
Pithy! I don't know if you originated that ending turn of phrase, but I'm stealing it.
Steal away!
I agree about the crucial importance of motivation in education. As an example, consider the life of the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, He became quite literate, mostly through his own efforts. As the Wikipedia article about him says: "Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself to read and write. He later often said, 'knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.'". He overcame much bigger obstacles to his education than those faced by today's students, despite having been provided with far fewer resources outside of his own will and desire to learn.
That was a big thing I learned when I went to College in the 90's...I was going to have to teach myself. My experience with community college was more like High School. The teachers, taught. They wanted you to do better. State University? None of my teachers even cared if I came to class. And I realized that I was just going to have to teach myself. Which was part of why I left (the other part was my major didn't actually reflect the career I wanted). i wasn't going to pay thousands of dollars to teach myself. And, at the time, I didn't have the motivation to do it anyway.
By my limited experience has been that very few people I know actually owe much of their success or failure to College or lack of it. Even engineers I worked with needed years of mentoring to actually get to a level where they were designing or running projects. And it made me wonder if those 4 years could have been better spent working at an engineering firm getting the basics out in the real world where they wouldn't also have to spend money taking a humanities class
"How much of this university issue would be solved if kids were taught a solid foundational education K - 12"
Makes you wonder why virtue signaling schools with huge endowments, like Harvard and others, don't fund charter schools in the worst academic zip codes. Oh yea, it would cost them money.
And it would benefit “deplorables.” So much of this ends up being about class.
Probably because charter schools are a good way to make sure that only kids from a certain income level can go to school.
Wrong. I’d say 90% of charter schools in Memphis are predominantly black and their parents enrolled them bc the public schools are a complete disgrace.
No. I'm right. That's the ultimate plan/goal.
Now, as far as your "I'd say 90%" I'm sure that is not an accurate assesment and you have no valid data/info to back that up.
Also, btw, the "charter" schools in Memphis are public, and under the SCDS, etc. :)
So, you'd be wrong on two different issues. And, once again, I'm right, Alice.
You people should be getting tired of this by now.
Are you saying that elite universities like Harvard don’t give a hoot about poor kids?
Nope. Saying charter schools are a right wing effort to completely destroy public educations and commodify from the very beginning , so that only those of certain income level/background can send their kids to elementary school, etc. That"s what I'm saying. ;) So let's not strawman this.
Already went after Head Start programs. This is the next logical stepm
It is interesting pretending that you give a hoot and furthermore trying to manufature some hypocrisy on Harvard's part when they are a private institution and are operating EXACTLY as designed in a free-market, capitalists system. So what are you complaining about?
Comprof --- Charter schools are public schools! Where do you live that they aren't? That's the whole point of charter schools — they're public and receive government funding but are basically "self-governed" for lack of a better term. They're started by concerned parents or communities that want better or more specific schools than their district provides (for example, some have IB programs or dual language curriculums).
There are many very good charter schools in Atlanta that are predominantly black and not in wealthy neighborhoods, so your assertion that "charter schools are a good way to make sure that only kids from a certain income level can go to school" makes absolutely no sense. You may want to look up the definition of "charter schools" before commenting.
"...charter schools are a right wing effort to completely destroy public educations..."
Too late, the left-wing Marxists have already destroyed inner city public schools. Test scores in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia…offer irrefutable proof of that. So, you’re the one creating a straw man. It’s a tiresome cliché, blame the failures on white privilege, systemic racism, blah, blah blah even though every failing inner city school district is run by democrats, a majority of whom are black. In defending such epic failure, one must be an ignorant result of the failed public school system or an affirmative action beneficiary of it. In your case, I’m going with both.
BTW, an educated person would know that a free market, capitalist system operates on merit. In that realm, poorly performing public schools would cease to exist and underperforming teachers would be forced to find another scam to extort money from tax payers.
I think we are seeing some movement on the latter at the state level and in general. I think the more practical and smarter parents and kids are starting to question the value of college as a post secondary experience without a specific goal. However, as is often the case, that realization does not filter down to the black underclass. Sadly.
Absolutely. No affirmative action will be needed if our children graduated from good public schools with decent grades. The skin color is the least important criteria that should be used to solve the education problem in our country. Invest in public schools with small classes with dedicated smart teachers. I know it sounds like a revolution, but is there another way? Instead we are focused on astronomically expensive higher education institutions that grant students vanity degrees, but we are forgetting about kids growing up with no basic skills in math and reading.
I am not even touching upon another problem: cultivating conditions for gifted and talented kids to thrive. That’s a whole different issue, but the country will not succeed without us taking care of budding talents. We do seem to move in the opposite direction of lowering the common denominator and canceling all kind of tests and grades to keep everyone happy. That’s going to lead to disastrous results.
I agree with Just an Observer. Some years ago I tutored reading and writing in a disadvantaged community. One youngster was very gifted in both subjects as well as math, and I told him so and that he could have a bright future if he continued his studies. Sadly, he told me that at school he had to hide his ability because his classmates mocked him or beat him up for being smart. They told him he was trying to be white. He was black. The schools need to change, but also the culture. Intelligence should be something celebrated and encouraged, not condemned.
It is not only ghettos that condemn education and culture. It is coming from all political sides in the society, and our country has become anti-intellectual.
Progressives, obviously, are not interested in the quality of education removing merit from the school admission criteria and replacing it with the skin color. Even “economic disadvantage” is no longer as important. Outstanding scholars, professors and teachers who do not subscribe to this religion are fired and ostracized.
On the other side of political spectrum is a conviction that the reason progressives live in a bubble is their elite education and that we are better off without it.
There is a reason Silicon Valley companies are dying to get more foreign workforce and advocate for business visas. There is not enough engineers or scientists here. Kids do not choose fields where you have to study hard. Why bother? Get a meaningless and useless degree in business administration and work from home for a customer service agency. No wonder our economy is severely unbalanced and dependent on countries we claim to be our enemies but cannot function without.
Going back to education, I want to clarify, that I suggest investing in education for everyone, not only for racial minorities or poor. Our education system is now extremely unfair. There is an unsurmountable gap between wealthy and everyone else who are in public schools. I see toddlers in private daycare in the Metropolitan Museum of Art sitting on the floor and listening to their teacher explaining art. A wonderful and necessary idea to introduce art to 3-year-olds! In private middle schools in Manhattan kids read Shakespeare and other classics at the age of 14. None of this no is happening in public schools with their overcrowded classes and metal detectors. And programs for gifted and talented in public education are almost extinct because they appear to provide advantage to other races over blacks.
I don’t really know how to get out of this vicious circle. All I know that the future of my beloved country appears bleak. Historically, we valued innovation and initiative. Alas, we are going backwards.
You and John McWhorter. He’s starting something new:
https://youtu.be/5CU3hQfyEKQ
FairForAll.org/JoinUs
No one wants to admit that the real problem is a combination of our abysmal public school system and the breakdown of the nuclear family. It isn't about race, it's about poverty. The Orwellian named "affirmative action" is a way to distract from decades of ineffective policies pushed by largely Democratic politicians who have utterly failed to improve the lives of the poor. Using the laughable "lived life experience" as a pretext to divide available college spots along racial lines isn't going to fix the real problem.
Affirmative action also doesn't "benefit" the poor and disadvantaged. A great example of this is the privileged girl that got into Duke where her Mom is a professor. Why does she "deserve" a spot over Asian or White kids that grew up in poverty but were told by their parents to key to success is hard work? It is high time to end this nonsense and figure out real solutions.
Because no one actually gives (as my grandma would say) a tinker's damn about poor and disadvantaged kids. The policies that got us here aren't ineffective - they accomplished every real goal they had. (Those goals just don't include improving the welfare of the "served.")
The perfect drone voter is illiterate, disinterested and dependent. The utterly abysmal state of public education in the poorest areas serves the smug chattering classes very well.
If they're black, they have an added benefit - their kids get a free pass into "elite academia". Harvard isn't going to reject the kid of a prominent leftist (like an Obama daughter), or a symbol of the left (Jazz Jennings) regardless of how ill prepared they are to get anything educational out of Harvard. (Very similar to how high performing student athletes are guaranteed admission and "assistance" throughout their college matriculation.)
Carter started the Department of Education in 1979 and schools have plunged straight downward in quality from that day to this.
DoE should be closed and all of its employees placed on 'do not re-hire.'
Yep.
Some of the problem stems from the prison industrial complex and the psychological effect prison/gang culture has on kids growing up in poverty stricken area's. It has its own value system and replaces, for young men especially, the grounded self-esteem building rite of passage affirmation once provided by father's and a working class community. Where did the jobs, families and fathers go? Could self-interested inept and corrupt elected political leadership and bad social economic policy be a factor?
The DNC "woke" political pretended concern, exploitation and conflation of crime with revolution encouraged during the George Floyd riot's represents in large part the cause of the shop lifting, carjacking street violence we are seeing today. For the poor uneducated child at the bottom, is it better seeing oneself as a self-empowered victim with revolutionary agency and purpose or accept that my life and my future has been cancelled and I have been reduced to prison/street fodder by the rigged game narcissism of a corrupt financial elite. Is it combination of both? (We should probably all ask ourselves that question. I'm sure the J/6 people, Assange, Snowden, the growing thousands living cancelled lives and those incarcerated for thought crimes across the globe do so every day.)
Each year huge sums of tax payer dollars ear marked for education are flushed into the bureaucratic cesspool. Yet the child can't read and has no sense of the history and culture that should empower and inform his experience of America. Even the elite graduates we see assuming positions of power don't seem to actually be literate or connected to the cultural values that empower and define these things. And, the poor child is left with the metal detector he must pass through to enter the school building each morning and the atmosphere of emotional and physical violence it affirms.
We are no longer a literate society because the individual and an educated citizenry is a threat to the grift. Any half dozen articles across Substack will confirm this. Or, we can continue to believe there is no method behind this madness and those responsible can never be held to account. The violence, chaos, ignorance and disintegration will continue to escalate and it is already impacting every life here.
"I'm eighteen with a bullet/got my finger on the trigger/I'm gonna pull it..." Paul Wingfield
No it isn’t all about poverty — in fact , very little is about poverty. It’s about the out-of-control conditions in many classrooms today. If children won’t respect the authority of the teacher to stop chaos within classrooms then it doesn’t matter if every kid has an IQ of 140. No will learn anything. This is an aspect of our failing schools that’s rarely discussed because it’s labeled “racist.”
Poverty has a lot to do with it if your public school is primarily poor kids, like many are where I live in Memphis. Every kid eats lunch free and that is sometimes the only guaranteed meal of the day. And the poverty and lack of education are multi-generational. Very hard to overcome. Charters are key to getting out of bad schools in some cities.
Wrong. People with money wouldn't tolerate that shit in their kid's school for a nanosecond.
If the Democrats were to admit the real problem is poverty. Then they would have to include white Americans and that doesn’t work well into their agenda. (Which is muddled and confused I admit but helping white Americans doesn’t work in to the plan)
I was initially going to post something about this, but you've said it all quite well.
If there is a genuine public interest in addressing persistent inequalities in circumstance and opportunity - not just by race, but also by class and geography and other kinds of situations that may hold people back unfairly - admission to elite universities is the very last place we should look.
Make sure every child in America has an opportunity to learn to read and do math; to understand the shared history and cultural heritage that somehow both unites and divides us; and above all to think, clearly and critically.
If only the Ivy''s weren't the only schools always mentioned in these articles. My ex=husband went to Harvard in the 60's . He was very smart, the son of a WHITE school teacher single mother in the hinterlands of the state where he lived. Ergo, although smart in scholastics, he was not a sophisticated well traveled 18 year old when he went off to Harvard on a full scholarship.
What he found was a freshman class filled with those "elite' ) all of whom belonged to the right clubs had traveled the world over and fit into the Harvard society. He had to work, live in a dorm with the other non-elites and was never considered a "Harvard{" type. He would never "network" with his peers. And his dorm mates were never invited to dinner at the professor's home. Professors were not above currying favor with those students from notable families.
On top of that, he said the education he received was not as advertised. All of the required classes in the first couple of years were held in huge rooms with 200 plus students,mostly taught by TA's. The big come on in those days was that Henry Kissinger was on the faculty as well as a lot of other big names, but they were never to be seen in classroom.
He hated it so much he took a year off between his junior and senior year and hung around Boston to get a taste of the life he had never lived back in his rural isolated town. He eventually graduated, went to medical school and ended up as a professor but he said he would have been happier at a smaller school with real teachers teaching real students.
I think that the pressure to succeed - not only academically but socially as well --is daunting at the Ivy's for all but the most privileged of 18 years olds. Sometimes a smaller college offers a better education and is TRULY diversified without all of the pretence ..
100% right. When my daughter went to college, she picked a small school because she said she would never get noticed or get attention in a large university. She is a shy introverted young woman, and the small school worked perfectly for her. Large elite universities lure big names and various laureates so they can brag they are on their faculty, but these professors are more like honorary figures too busy to appear in person and delegate teaching to TAs.
Agree, Bob K! Sadly the Progressive WOKE Left are more concerned about (and insisting on pushing) DEI and CRT over reading & math. Math, as well as Science, are now considered “racist” and a product of “White Privilege”
As is most every other thing the WOKE can blame in lieu of the Democrat failings to the people of color. I would say minorities, but it’s obvious the Left now views Asian people as “Whites” + any person of color who dares goes against the WOKE narrative/agenda is simply labeled a “White Supremacist of color”
Improve candidates, not lower standards? You horrible man! ;)
I know, I know. I'm such a reactionary troglodyte!
The same argument can be made for gun control. Ban guns while ignoring the slaughter of blacks every week in Chicago and the underlying causes.
The same argument can be made for the police...defund police while ignoring the rampant increase in crime and the underlying causes. Banning and defending are much easier rallying cries than let's take an honest look at underlying causes.
You nailed it.
The article points out that blacks are now over represented at Harvard, 15+% of their class of 2026 admissions. Maybe eventually if they get to 30% or 50% black then all problems “in the black community” will be solved?
Right. Would have loved if the reporter had dug in a little - what exactly about her lived experience makes her deserve the spot.
Can you imagine having so little self-repect?
Wow. You sound upset about Harvard.
NBA numbers or Bust! That is where federal employment is going.
I know several high-school teachers and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM sees high-school affinity groups as the place where good younger Black kids being to shift from being good students to becoming angry and adopt a societal victimhood mentality. Those affinity groups should be disbanded and if I had an African American kid in school, he/she would be absolutely forbidden to take part in it....I'm surprised adult Blacks even allow them to exist.
Keep in mind that we’ve had multiple generations that grew up in the affirmative action belief system. It would take independent thought for a black parent to buck the system. All parents, black and white, have a hard time doing that. Until COVID that is.
You can’t just “disband” an affinity group in a public school. It’s a First Amendment issue.
Yes, but your child doesn't have to participate.
Well, of course no one’s child has to participate. But when people say things like, “The organization should be disbanded in schools,” that’s a different thing. And it’s a pointless conversation, because if we’re talking about public schools, it’s not even legally possible.
You're right. I don't know why anyone would send their kids to public schools, and increasingly, to private school. An all-girl Catholic school has a trans now. Grown young man in a dress uniform.
Well said. Harvard is a crimson herring.
Well said. The answer to the "problem" of the diversity in college and university is to actually improve our school system in general. If our high schools and elementary schools actually taught our children then the playing field for entry to higher education would be leveled. And as you rightly mention, this would improve life not just for those who go on to college but for every child.
"...a binary choice; support affirmative action or let millions remain in poverty."
Less a choice than both and.
You wrote the wrong conjunction. That should have been “and”.
Hmm... reply not sticking. Trying again, I was using a quote (forgot first quote marks) so you'll have to take that up with the author.
The left needs the black underclass to stay relevant. The elite “all for me, none for thee” crowd is why public education is failing for most of us. Us meaning African Americans.
I’d like to see stats on the graduation rates based on these lived experiences/race (since they cherish those stats for describing their student body.) And I mean at ALL schools from elite to pedestrians! I’ve heard much anecdotal evidence that kids given access who are not qualified and have no skin in the game (free rides) drop out when then work needs to be done. How is that working out for bragging rights?
Are they held to a grading scale? Does one even exist any more?
Stuart Taylor and a colleague wrote a book about the mismatch problem years ago, and describing how this harms the intended beneficiary by maximizing the potential for failure at the select school.
https://www.amazon.com/Mismatch-Affirmative-Students-%C2%92s-Universities/dp/0465029965/ref=la_B001H6IBCU_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405540387&sr=1-2
I’ve seen that discussed. I totally agree with it and would take it one step farther. The mismatch is not just educational. If there is no family or similar infrastructural support for the student it’s is easy for them to get lost in their first true academic environment. Candidly that happened to me 50 years ago.
I have also seen the mismatch study easily demonized by a “so you think these kids are inferior “ argument. Wrongly but effectively unfortunately.
Glad you brought this up. I was surprised the author didn't make this point as it seems to be a central problem that undermines the entire project.
Philly Guy, this is a great point, and it is the right one. I hope you enjoy these two articles. The affirmative action piece has allowed the U.S. to become distracted from the realities on the ground. Reading scores are abysmal. Not just for minority groups, but boys in particular across all races.
Education in Black and White: https://gibm.substack.com/p/education-in-black-and-white?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2FAmerican%2520education&utm_medium=reader2
Sense and Sensibility: https://gibm.substack.com/p/sense-and-sensibility
Affirmative action and DEI are the most pernicious forms of systemic racism in this day and age. There is no other policy that so blatantly discriminates on the basis of race. Asian American kids growing up working-class immigrant communities are hurt the most by far. I grew up in such a community and have seen the damage wrought by these policies, of kids doing everything right and still being rejected by colleges. These are the kids of restaurant cooks, laundromat workers, rideshare drivers... parents living near or below the poverty line who scrimp together whatever little they have so that their kids can succeed, but then their kids are still seen by college admission boards as grinds with no personality.
Affirmative action refuses to consider that class matters. In this article, we hear that Green’s mother is a administrator at an elite college. Green has lived a privileged life class-wise. The same cannot be said for many children of working-class Asians, or White kids living in hollowed-out manufacturing towns in Appalachia filled with opioids and other traps of poverty.
Affirmative action also creates the sense that Black and Latino students cannot make it on their own, that they are forever dependent on special benefits just in order to succeed. It invalidates the achievements of students that could’ve succeeded without affirmative action, and makes the ones that do unable to catch up with the curriculum. The dropout rate for Black students is far higher than other races because those students are mismatched to colleges they cannot perform well in. Many end up in race/gender studies programs.
If you want to read more about how meritocratic admissions are a lifeline to the children of poor immigrants, from Jewish immigrants back then to Asians now, read my Tablet article about it: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/last-holdouts-american-meritocracy
I wonder if there is a relationship between the admittance of AA students and the creation of bullsh-- majors, like gender studies. These universities have become petri dishes for the cultivation of grievance and entitlement. Anyone remember Michelle Obama’s senior thesis? Oh, how hard it was to be black at her Ivy league college, boo-hoo. Some brilliant Asian kid didn’t get in so Michelle could.
There is definitely a relationship between the two. A few findings from prominent affirmative action researchers:
•Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.
•Blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.
•About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes (and the bottom 10 percent in law school).
•Black law-school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.
•Interracial friendships are more likely to form among students with relatively similar levels of academic preparation; thus, blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/
Students that are mismatched often cluster in race studies / gender studies classes that are much easier to pass.
Yeah, I understand that the first year of engineering is also referred to as “pre-business”.
Or "pre-education".
Many early Engineering students crash and burn on advanced calculus and La Place transforms, which quickly are added to systems engineering and thermodynamics. More and more and more, until they break and change degrees. Love of math in high schools matter.
PhD, EE here. I describe it as "ten years of calculus and differential equations".
62 years ago, I started college in Engineering. Big assembly--about 650 students, as I recall. The Dean said: "shake hands with the guy next to you. By the end of the first year, one of you will not be an Engineering student."
We had one class where department policy was that 50 percent would fail. You could take it twice. Odds of getting through the first time were about 25 percent.
Four years later, 110 graduated.
Nothing "ist" about it. Engineering school is tough.
"...blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched." They don't WANT to be integrated! Remember Evergreen College?
Their counter argument is that these failures are due to systemic racism.
In many ways, it is systemic racism, and here is how:
1) there is a belief that a hispanic/black child cannot do math, English, etc. and the standards are lowered and the grades are inflated. Students rise or fall on the expectations.
2) schools and admininstration are dinged for having a high rate of minorities receiving resource services. If a school has 100 students and 5 are black and 2 are indiginous and 93 are white (this includes Asians now), then 5 indiginous students enrolled in resource may indicate that there is a racist/unconscious bias by the school staff rather than 5 students need help. Help for a struggling student is by the numbers not the need and this is a racist tragedy.
Taught for a while at a technical college that catered heavily to minority students. My observation was that, by and large, they had perfectly adequate brains. But, their secondary education was beyond abysmal. Almost none would have passed my 9th grade algebra class. Almost none could construct a complete sentence. Almost none even knew what a complete sentence was. I would tell them that I was an Engineer, not some literary genius. A complete sentence starts with a capital letter, ends with a period and has a subject and a verb. Most had no idea what I was talking about.
Was it because they were judged to be incapable because of their skin color? Or was it because they were skated through because of their skin color? Or something else? I have no idea. What I DO know is that they had been horribly failed by the education system.
They have been educated by morons from the woke schools of education. “Each one teach one.”
Well, everything is.
...which also means nothing is. Or 5hat its meaningless because the idea can't be falsified.
Such painful statistics
Mismatch is the right word for this.
Are there any mainstream media organizations that have put the information on mismatch out into the public sphere ?
It would seem to me that the numbers would speak for themselves.
Raises the questions of a) Ms. Green’s major—is she majoring in one or another “studies”?—and b) how she’s doing academically. If she’s majoring in mathematics or biophysics and doing well, great. If she’s majoring in feminist studies, I’ll be a bit less impressed. But I’ll be curious to know how she does with the latter degree in the real world. I notice that there’s no mention of either of these factors in the article. And wonder whether that’s intentional or a mere oversight.
Ms. Green apparently couldn’t resist playing a race card:
“Green said that the old, meritocratic way of determining who gets into elite universities was actually discriminatory. “Being colorblind is racist, because it erases part of somebody’s identity,” Green said. “By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.”
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.” “
“…the old meritocratic way….”
That would seem to mean that it’s laudable that Duke would get to know the whole Ms. Green’s person and admit her. I’m sure that her mother’s position at the school had nothing to do with her being admitted. But either they didn’t get to know Asian students or if they did, found them personally wanting.
Uh huh. Right.
I’m sure she will have a very fulfilling career following in her mother’s footsteps and will be an administrator at a college or university. With her kind of “logic,” probably at one of the Ivies. Where, with her connections, her children will have become just what the university will have been looking for that incoming class.
If Ms Green was the best advocate they could find, I don't think that speaks well for that side of the discussion.
You can see how this woman's brain works. She equates being black as a monolithic thing that defines all black people in the same way. As though a black person from Jamaica is the same as South Africa is the same as Brooklyn is the same as Iowa. It seems like she thinks that a person viewer her solely through the lens of how she acts and what she has done is somehow LESS than basing it off of her skin color.
She seems to want us all to judge all black people strongly based on the color of skin...the exact opposite of what we have been trying to do my entire life.
I feel sad for her...to have a part of your life be so crucial to who you are and yet not be a thing you have any control over and have done nothing to achieve it. And maybe that is why she is ok with affirmative action. Label and lump everyone based on a chromatic scale and then dole out what they 'deserve' based on things no one can control.
It's really kinda mind-blowing how clueless Ms. Green is about the racism baked into her outlook. Imagine believing you are opposing bigotry by looking at someone's skin color and assuming a whole story in your mind about who they are based entirely on associated stereotypes and historical narratives. And then believing you're on the moral high road. Yikes.
She sounds pretty arrogant. She’s deserving, unlike the Asians. And she’s going to lecture them.
Right.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who found this young woman just as entitled as she claims her classmates to be. Her race alone "entitles" her to be there. How does she think that's better than the white "legacy" admissions whose parents & grandparents were alumni.
Well said.
She thinks she can tell Asian people that in fact they weren't discriminated against. I doubt she'd take it very well if someone (correctly in all likelihood) said the same to her. It seems "listen and believe" only applies to some.
Yes, her "personality" is black. And that is all.
FYI a reminder: there is no more "feminist" studies. All that have been eliminated for "transphobia". There is now only "gender studies". Seriously.
It is helpful to remember that we’re only talking about “elite” schools here, so the absolute number of involved is really very small given the overall population. It is also a marvelous thing that a marginal student like Ms Green would be welcomed at hundreds of campuses around the country. It really is progress.
However if you want to hang with elites you need to be elite. Do we really want a world where black kids are held to a lesser standard? How racist is that? Why can’t she see she is a poster child for tokenism? As a Duke grad myself I’m embarrassed.
Imagine having so little self-respect that you're proud to be a token? And P.S., EVERYONE has a lived experience.
Hopefully she doesn’t become a surgeon.
On the other hand , I would have loved to have Ben Carson as a surgeon if I needed his skill. He earned his place in medicine and science through exceptional hard work and intellect.
She’s just parroting what the woke admissions people tell everyone. I actually feel kind of sorry for her but more sorry for America.
I expressly do not feel sorry for arrogant people, especially those who feel they deserve entitlements. Ms. Green clearly checks both of those boxes. She's great and wonderful and qualified and a person with depth and a meaningful life--unlike the Asians she handily dismisses as obviously unworthy, and who need to look into their own souls to see where they come up short. So ~very~ unlike her.
Feel sorry for her, if that's your wont. But yours will be a fairly lonely voice here....
There absolutely is - see Stanford and Yale educated Heather Macdonalds book “The Diversity Delusion”. The entire branch of African American studies was created because Ivy League colleges could not retain minority admissions after they went wild accepting them with a 4th grade reading level straight out of high school. With the most primitive education backgrounds, these kids couldn’t keep up with the high standards of these curricula, and were dropping out at over 80% rates (which was a bad look for the diversity-toting Ivy leagues). So what is one to do? Create an entire department of “education” with majors easy enough for even the barely literate to be able to complete.
I refer you to “Doctor” Jill Biden’s “doctoral” “thesis.”
Just skimmed it - absolute drivel. It’s so basic, it’s embarrassing someone signed off on that degree. I always suspected it might be nonsense, as no actual doctor or PHD that I know insists on being called Dr (myself included). One would think when your title is First Lady, surely no other title is necessary to massage your ego.
My degree was a Juris Doctor, yet no-one ever addressed me as Doctor. My clients' opponents addressed me as shyster, blood sucker or other pleasant descriptors.
🤣🤣
A Middle School student could write a better thesis than that one.
PhD’s require a Doctoral Dissertation.
Not sure what the schoolmarm’s requirements were. Obviously, no rigor.
Social sciences. I’m ok with this. The problem, their science has not been subject to the scientific method and has escaped the lab and infested corporate America and civil society. If they has stayed in the lab, no harm no foul.
There isn't much mentioned in the article about the discriminatory financial aid policies also in place at many colleges that are designed to woo the few qualified "preferred minorities" to their college vs. their peer institutions. In many cases, wealthy black and Latino applicants are offered substantial financial aid - far better than less-affluent (and more qualified) white and Asian applicants.
My brother-in-law, the son of hard-working but poor immigrants from post-WW2 eastern Europe, graduated #1 in his college class, scored highly on the MCAT exam, and wound up paying full tuition to attend med school. He worked as a hospital aide on weekends and during school breaks to buy food and pay rent, and pretty much maxed out on school loans. Some of his black and Latino classmates - the sons and daughters of physicians and lawyers - were receiving substantial financial aid during med school. During vacation breaks, they'd jump in their BMW convertibles to go skiing in Vermont, or fly down to the family condo in Florida or the Caribbean to enjoy some sun. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law stayed on campus and headed over to the hospital to work another shift as an aide.
Just like me. I worked my way through college and was unable spend time volunteering or doing research. Med school admissions committees don't care about that
There is a bias against lower middle class or working class students in med school admissions for that reason. I think they are looking for upper middle applicants or those with the right skin color.
You would be right. And the more elite the school, the higher and more connected the better. Sometimes I think the crooked “elite” designed all
This affirmative action stuff to keep the public’s attention off of their real motive which is to serve the elite, for the elite, and by the elite.
I think they're really looking for upper-upper class, not upper-middle. A big part of the idea behind "early decision" college admissions is that it targets students whose families can afford to pay full tuition.
Colleges especially will go out of their way to accept students who come from famous and/or politically-connected families. If you're related to the Kennedy dynasty, you're pretty much guaranteed admission to Ivy League colleges regardless of how many boarding schools you were thrown out of or how often you were arrested for drug use.
I love how you turned "systemic" back on them. "Systemic" means "of a system." Although we hear incessantly of "systemic racism" our system is quite the opposite. Our laws and mores explicitly prohibit racial discrimination. Apartheid SA and the Jim Crow South practiced systemic racism. Modern America is the opposite of that. Well, except for "affirmative action."
Affirmative Action is systemic racism - by definition.
It is the ONLY place truly systemic racism actually exists in the US.
How many examples of "systemic racism" in society have you heard? I have not heard one example from the
SJW crowd. "Systemic racism" is a buzzword. It is also circular thinking as the proponents of system racism will say it is systemic and therefore impossible to quantify or give concrete examples of.
Perhaps we need a new meme word…..
“Systemic Normalization “, which normalizes normal folks for doing normal things.
Like being good at what they do, and striving to be excellent at what they do, to help all people. Or not being jerks promoting “trigger warnings “ for small slights, and equating that to violence. Or just respecting other folks and letting them live their lives.
Jim Crow “south” laws were passed by Democrats. They also formed most of the Ku Klux Klan.
And so….? About the day in 1966 Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, idiot southerners switched to the Republican Party to continue to delay the equality of all Americans, assured if they did not do so, they quickly would become the minority in the USA!
Nonsense. Who is still the party pushing abortions for negro communities? NYC for example has more abortions in black families than live births of babies. Who is not prosecuting crimes in large blue cities? And releasing hardened felons and thieves and murderers from prisons into minority communities? Who is withholding real education in large cities and pushing degenerate lifestyles? Who says a man in a dress or swimsuit can compete in sports with actual women, destroying Title 9 protections for women’s sports? And who is pushing for the genital mutilation, sterilization, and queering of grammar school aged children and teens before their minds are fully formed.
Oh yes, Democrats.
Ps, your ancient meme is obsolete. Woke up from the stupid.
One more point, and this one is pointed directly to Bari Weiss.
Bari, I worked almost exclusively with Israelis before I retired in my last job. I loved them much. They loved me. We were both argumentative and forceful. But then, we all mellow out eventually and look more broadly around and see life a little more gently.
Bari, thank you very much for leaving your fake news channel. And then starting something new and much better.
The actual origInal reason for press freedom in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution is to root out truth and expose it. And hold our horrible government accountable. And then correct their actions.
Bari Weiss, you do that right now. Expand your actions to promote free speech.
Thank you.
You’re truly a sad neo- intellectual.
How so?
I never claimed to be an intellectual at all. Nor a pseudo anything.
My preference is for actual real human beings to speak truth. You know, normal folks walking all around you every single day.
I would consider myself to be a cephalopod. A thinking person (cephalo) who likes to hike on top of tall mountains (pod). You know, a “head foot”.
It's a lie to say that racist Democrats switched to the Republican party. Try to come up with a list of names of prominent racist Dems that switched to Republicans. You won't be able to because there wasn't any wholesale switching of parties.
Oh, and by the way, a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.
My family were and stayed democratic in the 50-60s. I was in college at UGA when the color barrier came down. I spent the next 35 years in HR and labor relations both in govt and a major private labor intensive industry. I left the south for New England in 1971. By that time friends had aligned themselves with Republican racism. And they still are today.
My family were Republicans in the Deep South during the dark days of Jim Crow. It was not helpful to their careers then. So what?
Martin Luther King, Jr was a Republican. Anyone wish to slam him?
At the end of time, God will sort this all out. Then we will all face Him for judgement. I will declare myself to be a sinner. And then say, that I belong to Jesus Christ. Body and soul. Jesus is my only hope. He died for me.
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
If our powers that be focus on class, they create a large group of unmanageable people who, if they become successful, will challenge the elites’ children for success. Instead of focusing on class, they instead have chosen a “pull up selected moat bridge” strategy. This cynical strategy allows our elite to maintain their strategic advantage for their children while simultaneously project a benign and caring public face. No one really benefits except those already in power.
Imagine the godlike ability to decide what groups and individuals to let into heaven and what groups to ban! We are governed by the Soup Nazis of society.
Cynical strategies for maintaining power and privilege while appearing "compassionate" are the bread and butter of the Democratic Party. This is where they pivoted after Civil Rights became the law of the land: policies that would keep the majority of black people at the bottom of society by "helping" them in unhelpful ways, while simultaneously gaining black votes for their "help."
These “elites” are ok sacrificing society so their children can get ahead. Note HaRvArD’s silence and lack of action when a real crisis came their way in the name of Covid. Not one dissenter to the lockdown close-up shop theory of public health. Not one debate about the safety efficacy of dosing healthy young men and women with an EUA drug. If not at Harvard or Stanford, MIT, Yale etc., then where? All sheep fell into line. The elites have a purpose in this country. They are supposed to be the best educated with moral fortitude and courage. Take the trans swimmer from UPENN. Not one girl from the ivies league said a peep until Riley from a state school came forward. These elite schools select for self promotion and cowardice. Shame!!
Harvard takes children, some open minded, and turns them into globalist fascists who hate and/or despise normal Americans.
A Harvard degree should be considered to be a badge of shame.
The most dangerous and wicked aspect of it is the idea that "diversity" is a moral priority, and that our nation's leaders have a right to dictate what the demographics should look like, and judge the people who disagree as racists and bigots.
They see themselves as our moral leaders, as our gods. They will punish people for daring to say, "I don't believe in diversity." They force people in academic, military, and business programs to explicitly kowtow to their new morals of Marxism and Diversitarianism.
Personally, I think "diversity" is one of the most vapid and evil moral constructs, because in my perspective, to value the innate worth of every human being means that diversity is completely irrelevant. To dehumanize mankind with arbitrary and nonsensical "diversity" categories is an abuse of our rights and our sacred worth.
People are not colors. Latinos come from all sorts of ethnicities. "Asians" are not a single homogenous collective. The queer alphabet is not one single group of people who agree on everything. All of these categories are nonsense.
Great points, and you could also add that Jews were not considered fully “white” in the past with limited rights and privileges here and were the most discriminated minority in Europe. When the skin color is used as a the main criteria in admission to education or jobs, it is the most naked, shameless and ostentatious racism. How anyone cannot see and feel that way boggles my mind.
It's only horrifying if you use the colors "red" or "yellow".
One of the big differences I have with leftists is that I view the phrase "brown people" (which they use frequently) the way they view "yellow people". And this demonstrates how shallow and capricious ideas about "racism" can be.
“Personally, I think "diversity" is one of the most vapid and evil moral constructs, because in my perspective, to value the innate worth of every human being means that diversity is completely irrelevant. To dehumanize mankind with arbitrary and nonsensical "diversity" categories is an abuse of our rights and our sacred worth.”
5 star thought. Memorize and repeat everywhere.
Excellent points and so very true of the struggles within the Asian community. Yet the people rise above it and continue to work and get ahead without blaming history or some unseen figure as the reason for failure. I know so many who just will work until they die. Why? They don't want to be poor again or depend on others.
"...or depend on others." And this personal value is what is being driven out of whole segments of society by promoting the victim mentality that is underlying so many of the cultural changes being promoted today. Those at the top of the power structure understand that if people can be made dependent then they can be controlled.
My husband is the son of immigrants: grew up in a low income urban "ghetto", didn't speak English until he went to kindergarten, first in his family to finish high school (much less attend college) and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.
Add in his years of experience, and you would think he is a shoe-in for a position as a school administrator in an urban school system, right? Bringing competence, street cred and "diversity"?
LOL did I mention his parents are immigrants from a European country?
Nevermind.
He is a Privileged White Man and therefore unhireable for a leadership position in a public school today.
I think the most blatant discrimination was when he applied for a position as a district coordinator for his subject area in the city he grew up in, with impeccable credentials and experience. The job was given to a young middle class black woman from the affluent suburb next door who hadn't even completed her certification program and had so little relevant experience as an administrator that she *called him the next day* to get advice on how to do the job.
And the even stupider part is that if his mom had been born literally 5 miles further east, over the border in Spain, he would be able to check the "Hispanic" box.
Well he should have just "identified" as Hispanic.
And he would get fired, because you aren't allowed to just "identify" with racial categories.
BUT.... he could identify as a "woman."
Which leads to this whole other level of crazy:
A man can identify as a woman - something he can never be or even be similar too - with a mere change of pronouns. Ta Da! Intersectional Magic.
But the son of Portuguese immigrants, who grew up in a poor urban neighborhood with a sizable Hispanic community, went to school and church with Hispanic kids, watched Spanish TV, fluently speaks the Spanish language along with his own Latin language, who is dark and swarthy enough to get regularly asked "you from 'round here?" by people in my very Germanic midwestern hometown, and whose parents grew up in dirt poor peasant poverty within walking distance of Spain, cannot under any circumstances identify as "Hispanic", and must identify as "White", even though he has had Nada of the supposed "privileges."
The entire system is just ridiculous.
https://www.heraldnews.com/story/news/2020/09/24/why-portuguese-should-not-be-considered-hispanic/42900975/
I found this interesting- Note that Brazilians and Filipinos were also excluded from the "Hispanic" category. Yet Filipinos could be considered Asian or Pacific Islander? Whereas Brazilians tend to have a lot of African, so could they be considered in the Black category?
The problem is that Portuguese are essentially White adjacent.
It's all very arbitrary, confusing and stupid.
The Portuguese are considered technically Hispanic, or Latin. I saw that somewhere. Because it's on the Iberian peninsula. He totally should have checked that box and would have been accurate in doing so.
The Spanish are also technically "European." They tend to be much lighter-complected than American Hispanics. I think when Hispanic is discussed in America as a minority group, it's referring to Central and South American hispanics, not European hispanics.
Wish I could like this comment but that’s the opposite of how I respond to such absurdity.
Yes, many of these black applicants to college end up majoring in RACE. They then go on to destroy institutions and the minds of young people with their racial obsession. Note that Greene's "arguments" are appeals to emotion. What about her black "identity" qualifies her for Duke?
I've been privy to numerous black "scholars" who destroy everything they touch; the Classics guy who wants to tear down the classics (Petrillo, I think his name is -- he destroyed a true Classics scholar for questioning his motives at a conference) -- rather than write scholarly papers and publish them in journals he squanders his time scouring journals for "representation..." We now have to endure "anti-bias" training, futile because these race-baiting narcissists will distort anything a white person says for personal gain....
In other words, it's not helping anyone to admit people into college because of the color of their skin -- and it's usually black skin that enjoys this privilege. And ironically, despite this privilege, it's never enough.
College would provide a better experience for everyone if they took race off the application and admitted people on merit. Everyone would know they got in on merit. Students might even be able to enjoy expressing their authentic thoughts instead of walking on eggshells around the unprepared race narcissists. Actual learning and discourse could recommence.
SY - are you forced to conclude, as I am, that there are inherent cultural positives among Asian Americans (typically referring to ethnic Chinese/Korean/Japanese l)? The hardworking, education-focused attitudes are consistent and prevalent…and way upstream of affirmative action laws and such.
Slight correction- Green’s mother was a administrator, not a professor.
Today, many college administrators make more than professors. In fact, there has been this boom in hiring a ton of administrators in just the last five years. Google the public tax filing 990 of any well known college and you'll be stunned. People with titles in DEI, HR, or any executive title are pulling in millions. Yes, millions. I'm not sure what kind of administrator Green's mother was, but even secretaries at top universities can pull in 6 figure salaries.
And you wonder why tuition is $70,000/yr.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/14/2021-financial-disclosures/ or https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/941156365 It's all readily available online.
The marketplace will catch up to this and works it’s magic after “the student loan leviathan” is slaughtered.
The secretary to the dean of my college - Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State, hardly an “elite” university - makes over $100k. Tenured professors don’t even make that.
A secretary in my office makes over $100K, our top HR person makes 1.3 million per year, and the DEI Chief and makes close to half a million. Top colleges are now following a corporation blueprint and the student is the customer--a director is hired for every facet of these services from mental health to laundry services. https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs
Yes, administrative staff also greatly outnumber professors.
You can’t get more upside down than this.
So her mom probably has an unnecessary job that she got largely for having the right beliefs. It is little wonder her daughter believes what she does.
Any employee at most colleges gets preferential admission treatment. I've known half a dozen people in my life who were admitted thus.
Still middle class , right?
For sure...but even more mediocre bc she is just a glorified paper pusher.
That they are such a lifeline is precisely why meritocratic admissions (and enrolled student policies) must be crushed - for the benefit of powerful people with personal/political power. Asian students who work a thousand times harder and start with a couple of orders of magnitude higher IQ are not likely to become the drone voter they're trying to create. Hence, they must be disadvantaged (to "level the playing field....)
Excellent points!
Totally agree, Sheluyang Peng! No one wants to talk about “the dropout rate for Black students is far higher than other races bc those students are mismatched to colleges they cannot perform well in”
Also, the Southern University I attended was all about athletics. Many Blacks we’re literally accepted, then given a pass to graduation, if they played football or basketball. Rarely did a Professor give a failing grade, or even expect them to stay awake during lectures. And if it was an early morning class, they simply didn’t attend.
I carried my youngest during my junior year and finished my senior year with elementary to toddler age kids
My baby got pneumonia and I sat up with him five days and four nights.
The prof wouldn’t allow me to turn in an assignment late because my baby was seriously ill but the football player who had a hangover was given an extra week for the same assignment.
🤬
Systematic racism isn't "bad" if the targets (victims) are whites and Asians. Then it is "good". Even mandatory. You are entirely correct about meritocratic admissions. At one time, most of the students attending elite (academically) high schools in NYC were Jewish. Now the high schools are predominantly Asian.
In the Left's own parlance, Green is "white adjacent"!
I keep reading that a large majority of AA beneficiaries are drawn from the highest tiers of the groups the seek to "uplift".
“Some students who were not recipients of affirmative action—when you meet them, it makes you wonder why they’re even there. They don’t seem to really care about the world, care about people, or care about society,” she said.
Sounds to me as if this person considers social activism as the most important qualification for college. But a lot of kids are more interested in learning biochemistry or genetics! Or in playing the violin! Or in immersing themselves in 19th-century American poetry! Or in learning how to teach math to seventh-graders!
And that's just fine. You shouldn't have to be obsessed with saving the world to go to a top college.
Agreed. I found that statement annoying and judgmental. That young lady will be a real pain in the ass in whatever work situation she finagles herself into.
What? Go to college to learn? How passé. College is for being taught what to think and learn how to be offended. Not to actually learn math. Ridiculous.
Not to learn how to think and reason, either.
I actually think the country would be better off if we didn’t have so many self-appointed saviors. The colleges and all professional schools are pushing this virtuous cupidity.
Sorry Sonya Green, but in the piece you offered no coherent defense of affirmative action in your statements; judging people based on the color of one’s skin is discriminatory no matter whom it benefits.
...less “likable, courageous, kind, and respectable.”
Judged by people they never met.
So they just made that up.
And that pattern is everywhere right now.
So true because colleges no longer even CARE about the interview. I was stunned to learn this. My kid - despite having to overcome a father who didn’t want to be in her life and being raised by a single mother (she’s spent only a few days in her father’s presence) - refuses to deal with the “oppression Olympics.” She will not talk about that difficulty nor her learning differences, which make her achievements even more profound. Pretty sure we won’t mention we are Jewish since that actually might be met with discrimination (the number of Jews at prominent colleges has also fallen as a result of the “holistic” approach. Her grades are amazing except in math and her ACT in the 30s, president of a club to help those with intellectual and developmental disabilities at her school. She’s a wonderful speaker and she gets things done. She’s become demoralized about her chances to get into a school she wants to attend- and there are zero Ivys on her list. College admissions are now just racist and everyone knows it, especially high school seniors.
There are many alternative - and probably better - universities at which your daughter will prosper and thrive. Don't let her become demoralized.
I’ve been encouraging her broaden her field more but even then, so many of these colleges are employing the same devices and have single digit percentage acceptance rates. Also, now it seems that as many as a third of kids get in via early admission, so you must pick ONE school - that if it accepted you - you would attend. Schools want to even more easily fill their slots. The result of this is that competition is super fierce for the non-black kids and they must narrow their choices. And we wonder why depression rates in teens are so high?
To clarify one point, you’re talking about early decision, not early admission. Kids can still apply to schools other than their early decision school, but must withdraw other applications if accepted. Early admissions lets kids apply very early in the year, but doesn’t lock them into the school the way ED does.
Your daughter sounds like an amazing and level-headed young woman. I wish her the very best.
yes, she is amazing but it takes a toll on kids who are in many ways exceptional to not be supported but diminished in this process. And these kids have experienced the efforts of DEI in high school and barely survived COVID.
The ugly irony that Jewish kids—often the grandchildren of immigrant and first-generation Jews who were excluded by universities (as well as in many white-collar occupations and industries) because of well-known quotas—have for many years now been discriminated against by a quota system imposed under the cloak of more acceptable names (“affirmative action;” “diversity;” etc.) remains a sadly-overlooked injustice.
See David L. Bernstein’s book, “Woke Antisemitism.”
"Oppression Olympics"is a great description for college applications because every student needs to overcome adversity and discrimination. It has got to be a whinge fest reading through applications. Why can't a student meet the challenge of slope formula and dangling prepositions with the sparkle of outside interest and call it good?
Curry College. That’s their specialty.
Hang on, back up. Her family situation and religion should be irrelevant to admissions, but to not mention her learning differences is to not give colleges a full picture of her accomplishments. It’s not about trying for “pity points” or “special treatment,” it’s about something extremely relevant.
She will not do that. What I meant by adding that information is that people must tailor themselves to what the admissions offers want. They WANT to hear the pity sob stories of single mothers, parental neglect. We jokingly talked about calling her “non binary” to get attention. I keep telling her that her abilities, work ethic and personality will win out in the end, no matter what college she goes. That’s all we can do in a system that doesn’t currently make sense and is rife with corruption and lacks transparency.
I think it's like someone trying to win a competition in which each person submits a recording of themselves playing the piano. If they flawlessly perform a difficult piece, that's wonderful - but if they flawlessly perform a difficult piece and only have nine fingers, that's out of the ordinary.
I don't know what her learning differences are, but you realize that a lot of people with those issues just drop out of high school, right? For example, thirty-something percent of teenagers with ADHD quit high school, compared to 15% of the general population. Your daughter's accomplishments, in light of her learning differences, show that she's particularly persistent when it comes to academic success. And that's an accomplishment in and of itself.
Edit: typo
Of course it is but I have only heard of discrimination in that area. One is more likely to gain admission by claiming to be non-binary than to have overcome learning differences.. and, so many these days claim to be diagnosed with variants in order to get extra time on tests etc. ironically, the same tests that now have little impact on acceptance.
I wish there weren’t bias against Jews - but all evidence points otherwise.
No, I'm saying, "Her family situation and religion should - ideally - be irrelevant, so I understand why you're not including those things."
A balanced article. I also appreciated many of the comments. I do believe that university admission criteria have gone too far, and are as racist as the criteria used 100 years ago.
Please, let’s not make cruel, personal attacks against the interviewees. Surely those viewpoints one strongly disagrees with can be disputed using arguments that do not do so.
She didn't need to meet them. She knows their race/skin color, which tells you everything you need to know about a person.
In this case they used a name, right? What’s their plan if the kid changes his name to L-a (“ladsaha”) and then applies as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body?
Well, a man claiming to be a woman is higher on the progressive org chart than an actual lesbian. The name change however could end up being seen as cultural appropriation, since you are allowed to gender swap but not race swap (yet).
I am sorry, but they didn't teach intersectional math back when I was in school, so I don't think I can solve this one.
I wonder if the name "Ladasha" would ever be a negative.
Based on a review of their Facebook and Twitter post histories which many colleges want to see these days.
Any sane kid would follow my youngest’s example and have zero social media accounts.
How in the world do you judge that?.. it’s so preposterous.
Right?! Those criteria are completely subjective! Not surprising, since everything has become about "feelings" now. This country is so F'd.
I was struck by the language each side uses to defend their position. One side employs objective metrics, historical facts, and law while the other utilizes more subjective and euphemistic catchphrases - “holistic approach,” “erasing identities,” and “a good fit.” This is the fundamental divide in this country right now.
I thought the analogy between Asian Americans today and Jews of the past was a very salient point. Sonia uses the language of Asians not being a “good fit.” How is that any different than what was done with Jews at Ivy League institutions? Or blacks during Jim Crow? Hell it was used about black quarterbacks in the NFL for decades - they weren’t a good fit for the position. The moral assuredness and historical ignorance of so-called progressives is extremely troubling. Though the Democrats were the party of slavery and Jim Crow, so maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising after all...
Affirmative action might possibly have (briefly) made some sense sixty years ago, but it has definitely outlived any usefulness it may have had. People should be judged on their performance and qualifications, not by immutable characteristics. Or do its proponents believe, deep down, that blacks are less capable than whites? In this day and age, people of color (except for East Asians!) get preferential treatment yet we still hear the myth of "systemic racism". If it does indeed exist, it certainly doesn't target blacks. I often wonder what people would say to Martin Luther King's immortal words about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Would he be called an Oreo? An Uncle Tom? Would he be told "you ain't black"? Identity politics will destroy this country if it is allowed to continue unchecked.
Bravo, Heide. To what you accurately describe as “Martin Luther King's immortal words about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin,” I would add the following immortal words spoken several weeks earlier by President John F. Kennedy - a Democrat - in his June 12, 1963, Television and Radio Address to the American People on Civil Rights: “race has no place in American life or law.” A succinct (nine words) and powerful statement. It is unfortunate that current-day Democrats who would publicly endorse that statement are about as rare as passenger pigeons.
Lol. King was for affirmative action, reparations and UBI.
You might want to learn a bit more besides a partial, out of context quote. Do you know any others?
It never made sense. Like most leftist concepts, it was a prescription for disaster.
I think a lot of liberal whites are just white supremacy attempting to conceal it with support to these policies and projection of their own racism on their political opponents.
They definitely think someones race defines much about that person, rather that race simply being a physical characteristic. They seem to think it is the sum total of a person. Which I agree, shows what they REALLY think about people.
Lol. King was for affirmative action, reparations and UBI.
Might want to learn more that a partial, out of context quote. Do you know any others?
What is never addressed is the fact that AA kids with ACT scores in the 20s, admitted to prestigious schools where they typical score is 34 out of a possible 36, are totally unprepared for the rigors of the curriculum. Just the list of books that are to be read as part of the general humanities curriculum everyone must take is pretty daunting. Prof Amy Wax of Penn got into deep doodoo when she observed that her black law students were at the bottom of her class. So these AA kids are pushed through, handed the sheepskin, while highly qualified Asians are denied for being too good. Do we need more consultants in DEI firms or engineers?
That's no problem. When the students can't handle the rigor of the curriculum, schools can just make the curriculum less rigorous. Or just give everyone an A.
Problem solved!
They already give everyone an A at many of the ivies
And then at their new high end jobs, their bosses will end up expecting less (but still expected to hire) of these students. I almost feel like this is a purposeful plot to cause more racial division.
And society's demise.
There's nothing rigorous about the humanities programs at any of these schools.
They've taken care of that day lowering standards to the point where the bottom no longer fails or by eliminating grades altogether in some cases.
A very pernicious aspect is that these disparate standards will train people at the schools to associate black people with lower average performance. It's probably creating subconscious bias in the name of fighting it.
The problem I have with affirmative action is that it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Instead of tinkering with college admissions and abolishing gifted programs because they're not inclusive enough, I wish that we could talk about creating better conditions/a better environment for struggling students so that they could perform at a higher level.
It's like the current ruling class isn't capable of actually solving issues, so instead of fixing America's broken healthcare system, horrible food or bad inner city schools, we just say that you can't fat shame and gifted programs are racist.
Brilliant! Problem solved.
No, no, no, the grifters cannot allow the problems to be solved! That would mean the end of their jobs.
Oh posh, they'll just find new jobs complaining about something else. Grifters are in ultra-high demand right now, I'm not worried
Consider this: what did the LBGT+ grifters turn to once gay marriage was the law of the land?
Do you really want to challenge grifters to find ever more radical things to complain about?
Another I just learned about is “degrowth”. Apparently the woke have decided that society should get poorer and smaller to save the earth — likely just a rebranding to cover for their decay-causing policies.
By 'society' they mean everyone but themselves
Right, but try to convince them to give up their iPhones and go back to flip phones. See how well that goes over
Better yet, landlines and hardline internet!
Senator and Presidential Candidate Tim Scott talks about exactly that in his interview with Bari.
By saying that you don’t see someone’s race or you don’t see their color and you just see them as a person, it tells black students that you don’t see the communities that they’ve grown up in and you don’t see the experiences that have made them who they are.” ---- What a typical you owe me attitude. Choices and elections have results. You vote Democratic and get crap for your neighbors and self and then you want blame others? Most homes have maybe one parent and you want to blame others? Little opportunity based on rime and you want to blame others? When does the blame others stop? Never is when.
I have a half Asian family and let me tell you this. Your struggles are not more than many of the things we have gone through. I know families that fled with the communist in pursuit and wanting to kill them. They had to decide to run as their baby was crying and others wanted them to suffocate the baby due to noise. They choose to go on their own. Refugee camps and immigration, learning a new language, way of life, and working their asses off to get ahead. Making their kids understand, nothing is free, you must earn it. Kids completed college and are successful without crying about race.
To say they are not a good fit to a school is racist in its self. Our grandchildren are getting ready for college, all A's and both parents both work and they won't get crap for assistance. So save you poor me and try and understand, your free, means someone else pays for that. You see free as equality, others see free as being taxed for things they never were a part of. Everyone wants to be equal and accepted, well until its time to pay. Any student who is rejected by the bigoted Harvard, Yale community when they are the top performers are being discriminated against, bottom line.
Also, this girl‘s mother is an administrator at Duke—its not like she grew up on the streets.
And that is something that really steams me. I went to a private school with plenty of black kids, some of whose parents were more affluent than mine. That’s a measure of how hard-working and persevering they were, given that they achieved their success in pre-civil rights Alabama. Their children and grandchildren inherited that well-earned wealth. Why should those grandchildren, with the same access to excellent K-12 education as whites, now have an extra leg up on poor white Appalachian kids or Asian kids?
Because, to some people, simply being black means they somehow inherited all of the bad things that happened to some black people. And because they are told this from a young age, they see it everywhere.
Imagine if your parents told you that redheads were out to get you. From the day you could walk into adulthood, every redhead wants to get you alone and suck out your soul. You would see every casual glace from a redhead as something sinister. You would be tense around them and that would impact your interactions negatively which would in turn continue to fuel your ginger paranoia. The only way to move past this would be for you to make a choice to put yourself at risk to find out the truth...and most people won't take that road.
And her father is??
What’s your point?
I wonder if he is in the picture.
AMEN!
"What a typical you owe me attitude." -- Right?! She judges her Duke peers as being entitled with statements that make HER sound entitled!
"When does the blame others stop?" -- That right there is the result of the CRT "oppressor/oppressed" narrative. When people are convinced they are a "victim", then everyone/thing else is to blame.
Carson added: “There’s something very offensive to most people about being judged, not by their own achievements, their work ethics, or their accomplishments, but just being judged based on something they had no control over.”
That right there is the point!
Any race based criteria is discriminatory against someone. The sooner we as a society can get there the better. The same holds true for any other identity based criteria for admissions.
She suggested that Asian Americans who felt as though they’d been discriminated against by elite universities should rethink that. “I don’t think it’s just because you’re Asian,” Green said. “It’s probably because the school didn’t see you as being a good fit, or the school didn’t get to know enough about you as a person.”
How utterly hateful, racist and exclusionary. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal...”. NOT “we think you’ll be a good fit in this new country.”
Affirmative action has institutionalized racism and unfair treatment. It had LED to a sense of exaggerated grievance, entitlement and division between peoples. And as Booker T. Washington declared, there is a segment of our society which exploits and perpetuates that grievance and division for profit. Let it die a well-deserved death.
With all due respect to Sonia Green, I think the only reason she supports affirmative action is because she benefitted from it. Her arguments in favor of it are extremely weak.
That’s putting it kindly.
Her mother works there, therefore, she received full scholarship. Duke didn’t really pick her as a deserving candidate. She is full of herself without any self awareness.
Wow Sonia Green is incredibly unlikeable. Oozing entitlement.
Duke liked her. Says a lot more about Duke than about the “talented” Ms. Green.
Equitable access to the outdoors? Where do you find these imbeciles? Open a window, moron.
Stephen, this is not a fair comment. Connecting with nature requires a drive/values to do so (taught) and physical access (bought). E.g., city kids have to be physically schlepped a distance by car or bus to be anywhere near green. I am personally fortunate to have been raised to love and spend time outdoors by my family of farmers and hobby athletes and to have grown up in a place where yes - we just open the window for birdsong. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Your point is not race-based. That is culture based. Plenty of black people grow up in areas that are in or around nature.
Indeed. In LA, there are all kinds of inner-city kids with no green space within walking distance--just concrete. They’ve never been to the beach. If they’re lucky, they go on a field trip now and then and get excited to be able to dig in the dirt for the first time in their lives.
Wait until you read this: "“If we start connecting the dots,” Lee said, “the issue becomes excruciatingly clear that historical institutional racism has banished people of color from the great outdoors.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/14/us/national-parks-history-racism-wellness-cec/index.html
Everyday there is a culture war article. And, everyday most of the same people comment. Our culture is changing with the speed of the internet, and we’re cracking up under the pressure. We just can’t seem to handle it all.
Like all rebalancing programs Affirmative Action was necessary at the time it was created. Most people just wouldn’t hire women or other minorities over men. At 25 yrs old in 1983 I worked at GE corporate headquarters (then a Fortune 10 company) and was still ridiculed by some male superiors for being a working wife, furthering my education at the same time, and even more ridiculed when I became pregnant and continued to work and go to school. Those were pioneering days, and things did change.
Like all pendulum swings and rebalancing programs, it is time to end them when the intent is accomplished. The intent was accomplished. It’s time to move on. It’s as simple as that, yes.
Absolutely agree. However, it seems that rather than letting the pendulum swing back, there are those who've grabbed hold of it, refusing to let go, and are even up on a ladder pulling it up higher.
So the question asked is, What will change as the result of the court striking down AA?
Answer, Nothing. Universities have already figured out their work-arounds. They will continue to churn out mediocre graduates with bullsh— degrees who will get jobs in consulting firms and governments where they can create more policies to control us.
Yes many of the top schools have already dropped the SAT from admissions in preparation. If you can’t measure who has merit you can’t get in trouble for not running merit-based admissions.
Hmm. Our son is white, has a 4.1 GPA, works 2 part-time jobs (for the work experience in the field of his desired major), and wants to apply to a college that has dropped the SAT requirement. We thought he'd be a shoe-in, but now I'm worried.
Sadly you are right to worry, depending on what schools he is applying to. His skin color and gender will move him to the bottom of the pile in certain schools. And most of those schools won't be honest about it.
However, there is hope. If your son has good values, a strong work ethic, and is willing to learn (which is seems like he does), he will be fine. His path may not be the one he thought it would, but he will find a new path and forge it well.
Thank you for your encouraging words. My family are all fighters, so if he experiences this form of discrimination, we won't take it lying down.
Glad to hear it. We need more of that these days.
You may be right., but there are reasons to believe that Americans still favor merit. University of California regents may have erased affirmative action in 1995, but a public vote on the matter affirmed the measure in 1996.
Over time, California has turned much more blue. In 2020, another proposition was sent to state voters, one that would reinstate affirmative action as a factor in state college admission decisions. It was supported by the governor and many, many officeholders, but it failed by a slightly larger margin than the 1996 one had passed.
My guess is that admissions officers on CA campuses (actually ALL campuses) are putting thumbs on the scales for favored candidates, but proving such, given the deeply larded bureaucracies involved, would be impossible.