<p>Soozievt,</p>
<p>Great concrete example of how everyone benefits from diversity. Tell us more about the scholars program. Sounds from the preliminary report like your D had a wonderful experience.</p>
<p>For a thoughtful, informed post from an admissions officer addressing some of the contentions earlier in this thread, I’d recommend post #123 here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=285843&page=5[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=285843&page=5</a></p>
<p>“2. Hepstar knows zip about criteria for admission into AP classes.”</p>
<p>I take AP classes, so I have an idea of what it takes. At my high school, a student needs to have a high enough average (at least a 90) to be considered for an AP class. There are no quotas on students. If you get the grades, you get into the class. </p>
<p>As much as EC’s and recommendations apply to college admissions, colleges are for the most part academic institutions. Therefore, wouldn’t it make sense that the primary factor in admissions be academic performance? </p>
<p>“I don’t believe you can do it. That is my “point”. If you want to be taken seriously, show your cards. I’m calling your bluff.”</p>
<p>I’ll admit, I have no idea what scholarship my cousin won. I can assure you though, she exists and she did get a free-ride. My uncle (dad?s brother) is white and my aunt (cousin?s mother) is black. Therefore, she had URM status and she used it to her advantage. Why do you assume that my story is false when you have no idea if anyone on CC is telling the truth? </p>
<p>“what hepster neglected to consider in his posts re” “below school average is just that, “average”- which means that many scores are above and many below”</p>
<p>I didn’t neglect anything. Having a score that is around average for a school shouldn’t warrant a free-ride. Think about this. This would be like giving someone a free-ride to St. John’s University with a 1060 (school average ~ 1080). I got a 1350/1600 on the SAT and I didn’t get a free-ride to St. John’s. </p>
<p>When AA was first created in the 1960s, it was meant to help all minorities, INCLUDING Asians. However, since the Asians community proved to be very strong academically, their right to AA was revoked. I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t seem fair.</p>
<p>Many people on CC think that AA just applies to college admissions. This is so untrue, it isn’t even funny. I have anecdotes to support this as well, but all the AA defenders here will probably write them off as untrue. I don’t agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but I don’t attack your validity, as some of you have wit my cousin story (which I SWEAR is true).</p>
<p>
Because, hepstar, I have found zero students at RPI regardless of ethnicity or race that received a full ride for merit. None. If you know one, I want to hear about it. I have kids that I’m working with that would really like to know.</p>
<p>Here. I’ll help you look. This is RPI’s current scholarship page. I have searched every one of them . None are full rides. <a href=“http://admissions.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=4&setappvar=page(1)[/url]”>http://admissions.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=4&setappvar=page(1)</a></p>
<p>Pay special attention to this last part- I’ll bold it for you.;)</p>
<p>The merit awards available at Rensselaer include:</p>
<p>Rensselaer Medal Scholarship
Rensselaer Leadership Award
Emily Roebling Scholarship
Excellence in Communication
Excellence in Economics
Excellence in Science & Society
Excellence in Philosophy
Excellence in Psychology
Excellence in Writing
International Leadership Award
Leader Scholarship</p>
<p>PLEASE NOTE: If a student earns multiple Rensselaer merit scholarships prior to admission, Rensselaer will award the highest merit award for which the student is qualified, but does not combine multiple awards. Total Rensselaer provided scholarships and/or tuition benefits may not exceed tuition.</p>
<p>So where is that merit full ride for an entering freshman? If there is one, they are sure doing a good job of hiding it. LOL. </p>
<p>BTW, a number of the scholarships listed as “merit” have a need component. Most women appear to receive the Roebling.</p>
<p>hepstar, you may have been told that your cousin got a merit full ride at RPI. I’m just pretty sure that she didn’t. Whether you swear or not. ;)</p>
<p>Who ever said it was for merit? A person with a 1300 SAT score wouldn’t get a free-ride for merit alone at a school as competitive as RPI. IMO, the scholarship was probably a racial thing. Racial scholarships would make more sense if there was one for every race. Of course this will never happen. When a group of people established a Caucasian-American scholarship at Boston University, people complained. However, there have been exclusively black/hispanic scholarships for years. Why then is it a problem to have a white scholarship?</p>
<p>
And in my opinion you are grabbing at straws. </p>
<p>
So now what you are saying is that it’s not a generally available merit scholarship (I had asked if it was generally available earlier) , the scholarship was only available to URM’s and was a fullride at RPI for entering freshmen and was NOT based on need? It’s hard to hit a moving target. ;)</p>
<p>No, Hepstar. You know what it takes to get into AP classes at ONE school, not at all schools. Your statement was a generalization; it was not limited to YOUR school. </p>
<p>About 7-8 years ago, U Rochester gave merit scholarships to anyone admitted with 1200 on the SAT. It was not a race-based scholardship (the qualifyinf SAT score went up a couple of years later). There are such scholarships available that have nothing to do with race. And then, there are scholarships that were written in such a way that the only possible recipients are Caucasian.( and no, it’s not the BU one). I suspect there are some scholarships that are also available only to people of Asian descent.</p>
<p>O.K… I’ve looked over the RPI site again. I’m comfortable there are no URM specific non-need full-rides, either. Zero. Zip . Nada. So, none that are generally available without need , and none that are specifically for URM’s without need. That means none available for the cousin.</p>
<p>So , to bring us up to date. There are zero full-ride, non-need scholarships granted to entering freshmen granted by RPI for merit, race, ethnicity, or ability to spin yarns. 
hepstar , it looks like you’ve either been duped by your uncle or mistaken . You can take your pick. ;)</p>
<p>Let’s get back to the original topic of this controversial debate: the 2400 Asian girl. Why can’t you just admit that one of the reasons for her deferral was that she was Asian? Many of you said things like “MIT defers/rejects perfect scorers every year.” I guarantee that over 98% of these people were either Asian or white. Curmudgeon, you keep discussing my cousin, yet you haven’t identified a single 2400 URM who was deferred/rejected. You have also not explained why the URMs in this article had AA going for them, despite the fact that they attended good high schools. They weren’t the disadvantaged minorities commonly associated with AA. </p>
<p>Curmudgeon, you seem to like giving links to websites. I challenge you to find me a story about a URM with perfect SAT scores who was rejected/deferred from ANY school. It doesn’t even have to be MIT. You have not done this yet. </p>
<p>Here is the much-talked about story of Jian Li, an Asian student with perfect SAT scores and 2390 combined on his 3 subject tests. He was rejected from MIT, Harvard, UPenn, Stanford, and Princeton:</p>
<p><a href=“http://flathatnews.com/news/56/student-sues-princeton-for-discrimination-against-asians[/url]”>http://flathatnews.com/news/56/student-sues-princeton-for-discrimination-against-asians</a></p>
<p>“U Rochester gave merit scholarships to anyone admitted with 1200 on the SAT.”</p>
<p>Martie, were these full-scholarships? I highly doubt that they were. St. John’s gives merit scholarships to students with 1050 on the SAT, but they aren’t full. There is a big difference between a merit scholarship worth a couple thousand dollars and a full-scholarship. </p>
<p>“And then, there are scholarships that are written in such a way that the only possible recipients are Caucasian.”</p>
<p>Really? What scholarships would these be? Besides BU’s Caucasian-American scholarship, I haven’t seen any.</p>
<p>I don’t care about URM’s with 2400’s getting rejected. I support affirmative action in education and in the workplace. I don’t need to prove that such a rejection happens. </p>
<p>Quit whining. </p>
<p>On MLK Day it does my heart good to shoot down anecdotal stories like yours. Hey, I know it ain’t much but we’re iced in. ;)</p>
<p>Funny that the same nice folks that are worried about an African -American getting a scholarship to a school she’s clearly qualified to attend, are never so quick to have an anecdotal story of their black friend who got stopped for driving while black, shopping while black, or just living out in Tulia , Texas. Tulia is where 46 plain folks were sentenced to 30-360 years in jail (each) for drug-dealing it was later determined they never did, for the ever popular “breathing while black” . (Collateral damage in our nation’s racist war on drugs.)</p>
<p>It was repeated on court TV this morning. It is simply amazing that folks exist that think this fight is over.</p>
<p>Google it hepstar. “Tulia + justice” ought to do it. You might learn something today. It’d be a pretty good day to start. ;)</p>
<p>Do it and report back. See what you think about our even playing field. How do you think the kids of one of those defendants should be treated in the admissions/scholarship process this year? Same as you? No extra points on the SAT?</p>
<p>“I don’t care about URM’s with 2400’s getting rejected.”</p>
<p>Why then do you post in this thread? If you don’t care, you wouldn’t be posting here.</p>
<p>“I don’t need to prove that such a rejection happens.”</p>
<p>If this is true, then I don’t need to prove my cousin’s scholarship. Isn’t it funny that you question my lack of proof, yet you haven’t shown me an example to support your argument? isn’t it funny that I was able to locate a story about an Asian student with a 2400 who was rejected from colleges in minutes, yet you haven’t found a single one about a minority?</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, your argument isn’t based in anything but your own emotion. It is filled with personal attacks (“quit whining,” “you’re a moving target,” you don’t know what you’re talking about."). </p>
<p>AA was supposed to help the disdadvantaged, the people who are poor and stuck in the ghettos. My cousin doesn’t fit this mold.</p>
<p>And welfare abuse means that sometimes I am standing behind a women with a lot of bling and a fancy designer purse, paying for her shrimp and Cheese Doodles with food stamps (that happened just yesterday).</p>
<p>Doesn’t mean that I don’t think there are plenty of people who need food stamps.</p>
<p>There is abuse of any system. On average, AA and welfare help many more people than the programs suffer from abusers.</p>
<p>Hepstar…I am hoping that when colleges create diverse student bodies, that such diversity isn’t just about admitting the disadvantaged, along with those with means, but also that there is a mix of races, religions, background, states, nationalities, etc. </p>
<p>A black student who has the academic qualifications to succeed at a college (need not be perfect SATs!) is an attractive candidate in building a diverse class. They don’t have to be poor to be attractive to contribute to diversity. They don’t have to have a 2400 to be academically qualified either. </p>
<p>My kids are white and not poor and they didn’t have a 2400 either and they go to very selective schools. I’d hope that a Black student like them can also be admitted.</p>
<p>On this MLK I (white, middle class, just the type to get ‘hurt’ by AA) say this: AA is good. No, AA is better than good. AA is like women getting the vote; it’s like the GI bill: legislation that has had massive dramatic & positive impact on this society, that opened opportunities for tens of millions of Americans, that strengthened our economy and made our country a better place to live for us all. And I mean all. The fact that AA & its benefits are being questioned and overturned is as dismaying to me as it is frightening.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, since you want to extend this argument beyond the original topic, here’s an article I think you should read:</p>
<p>(NY Post article)</p>
<p>‘HATE’ KILLED NYU KID
By LARRY CELONA, ERIKA MARTINEZ and CYNTHIA R. FAGEN </p>
<p>April 6, 2006 – The NYPD hate-crimes unit is probing a report that a white NYU student killed by a car in Harlem was fleeing a gang of black teenagers screaming “Get whitey!” sources said yesterday. </p>
<p>If the report proves true, the violence could turn out to be an eerie replay in reverse of the infamous 1986 Howard Beach murder, where a black man was chased into traffic and killed by a group of white bigots. </p>
<p>The 20-year-old student, John Broderick Hehman, died yesterday, six days after the attack. </p>
<p>The sources said Hehman might have been targeted as a soft mark for robbers after the teenage gang spotted the caring urban-studies major handing pocket change to a wheelchair- bound man near the corner of 125th Street and Park Avenue Saturday night. </p>
<p>The gang of youths, some of them as young as 11, had been smoking pot inside a nearby Popeye’s fast-food eatery at 8:30 p.m. when they spotted Hehman walking by and then stopping to help the handicapped man. </p>
<p>An anonymous caller later tipped the CrimeStoppers hot line that a group of youths screamed, “Get Whitey!” and ran toward him. </p>
<p>Witnesses said Hehman fled into traffic against the light and was hit by a Mercedes-Benz traveling east on 125th Street. </p>
<p>The 38-year-old driver remained at the scene and was not charged. </p>
<p>“When we heard the crash, we thought it was two cars - it was such a loud noise,” said a witness. </p>
<p>“I couldn’t believe it was a person,” he said. </p>
<p>Hehman, known as “J.B.,” had been in a coma since he was struck. </p>
<p>He died of massive head trauma at Harlem Hospital. </p>
<p>His sister, Marisa, said he had been walking to meet a friend when he was attacked. </p>
<p>His father, Manhattan investment banker Thomas Hehman, lives on the Upper East Side. </p>
<p>On a student Web site, Hehman joked his off-campus interests included “doing laundry.” </p>
<p>Meanwhile, cops yesterday fanned out around the area where the attack occurred looking for witnesses and putting up fliers. </p>
<p>If one was to reverse the races in this story, it would be fornt-page news. Could you imagine the headlines “Group of white-racists kill black NYU student.” A thread might even be devoted to it here on CC. However, it was a group of black kids who chased a white NYU student into the street. Therefore, it doesn’t have the same racial undertones. This story was relegated to a blurb in the newspapers and a quick mention on the 10 o’clock news. The black kids in this article weren’t charged with a hate crime, despite the fact that numerous witnesses heard them scream “get whitey!”. If the races were reversed, the white attackers would be forever be thought of as blatant racists.</p>
<p>
Aww, come on hepstar. You can do better than that. </p>
<p>You asserted it was a fact. I challenged it. You can’t even prove that it might be true and I have shown by evidence that it is highly unlikely at best. </p>
<p>I never asserted that there were any URM’s rejected with 2400’s. You put that straw man up. Not me. I have made no assertion that such a kid exists. In fact, I have no idea.</p>
<p>hepstar, what possible reason do you have to justify posting that article in a thread about affirmative action? Do any of the youths involved have apps pending?</p>
<p>I admit I brought up Tulia as IMO it applies to the current state of the playing field in the U.S. Do you really believe this criminal attack does the same? In one case you have judges and juries and prosecutors and lawyers as the bad actors over a period of months and years and … in the other we have a bunch of doped up street thugs in an improvised attack that lasted minutes . Doesn’t seem that similar. I could be wrong. ;)</p>
<p>I think you need to have a look into your heart . Do a little soul searching.</p>
<p>This thread is about college applicants, not racially motivated crimes.</p>
<p>^^Thank you.</p>
<p>For the record, I didn’t bring up the crime issue. That was curmudgeon (see post #51). I posted the story of the NYU student to counter curmudegon’s assertion, which by the way, had nothing to do with AA.</p>