<p>^</p>
<p>mathmom: Another real example. I went to law school with a black fellow who grew up in Newark, NJ’s inner city. What used to be called the ghetto. He was an affirmative action admittee to Brown University, which way back when was looking for promising minority students from the ghetto who attended dreadfully substandard, crime-infested inner city public schools. He admitted all of this to me. Despite SAT scores barely over 500, lousy teachers, inferior texts, and a “no-win” classroom/learning environment, someone thought he demonstrated potential (his 500s were the top scores from his HS). So off he went along with a handful of others from similar inferior circumstances to Brown University. </p>
<p>He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown. He laughed as he recounted how it seemed every week the well-meaning liberal staff at Brown would offer special tutors to him and the others in his group, under the assumption that without “special attention” they would fail miserably up against the scions of the wealthy, white and privileged. Some did, but my friend always refused the help. After all these years, I can still remember how he chuckled as he told me “It wasn’t that hard, really.” </p>
<p>To me the only measure of whether someone belongs at a certain college/university is if they can do the work. Not where they finish in class rank, but whether they can do the work. If they can, they belong; if they can’t, they don’t. It’s that simple. It’s admirable that so many CC kids are practically geniuses because of the 800s on their SATs, or the 35 APs they took, and their 4.0 GPAs, and it’s admirable that others simply worked extremely hard to get top results out of high school. However, not everyone is so fortunate, but that doesn’t doom them. All the pre-judgments about “stats” going into college frankly count for beans, and mean even less after you begin a career.</p>