well, I’m too lazy to type out my arguments, plus mifune is writing down everything that I would have said. it’s your opinion that mifune’s argument is “hopelessly flawed” because you are a proponent of AA. opposers of AA would say the same thing about YOUR argument. affirmative action is controversial (EVIDENTLY) and it’s something that is debated here. don’t make it seem like your side is totally right and our side is totally wrong- there are obviously valid arguments for BOTH sides. continue your debate without taking that self-righteous tone.</p>
Yeah I think Nearl is noble for arguing in FAVOR of a policy that hurts is so horribly these kinds of debates are always interesting and londwinded
anyway- I totally agree with the second half of your post. next to AA, the second thing that p*sses me off is those types of schools. it’s absolutely ridiculous. of course the students are better quality, but I feel like the adcoms think, “we HAVE to take at least X amount of students from this school each year” while we kids at “regular” public schools are lucky if ANYONE gets into an ivy league each year. sigh</p>
<p>To the discussion of feeder schools - I have to tread lightly here because I came from a pseudo-feeder school. And I definitely do not think that the quality of applicants is necessarily always better than the rest of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>However, knowing my school’s situation, I do not think that the adcoms feel like they have to take a minimum number of students from that school. For example, 5 kids from my school got into Yale (and are attending). This number has varied from 1 in previous years to I think about 6. So there is a huge variance on the number of kids that get in. There is also the same variance in the acceptance rate from some of our rival schools. One school sent a considerable number from their school last year. This year? 1.</p>
<p>I think that a few things happen. One is that inevitably, some schools can produce more than one competitive applicant so more than one gets in. Some schools just have special relationships with the schools/adcom so they know how to angle their applicants to make them seem more appealing. (This can or cannot be a problem, obviously. I definitely think it’s fishy, but not anymore than the admissions process already is.)</p>
<p>Why do people say “that school sent a student to Brown this year”? Do private/boarding schools really hold students’ hands that much? My public school doesn’t do anything for its students, and if a student ends up at an Ivy it’s because he or she worked for it. So, the school didn’t send them. I am peeved by that phrase.</p>
<p>Did you do DS like some humanity majors do? Did you take 3 sciences with two labs like some hard core science dudes do? Did you take a super hard class like Math 230(?) or the intensive introductory physics (260?) or (a much easier one here compared to the previous few I mentioned) freshman orgo or the regular orgo while taking 4.5 to 5 courses including a time-consuming language class? Many students are doing these and get very good grades on almost all of them.</p>
<p>I hated it when ANY students at ANY school started to comment that the classes at his/her school are easier than the classes at his high school. A difference between a college (at least for a top-20 school) and a typical high school is that it is not easy to consistently get very good grades in all classes every semester and it is not easy to excel in your classes if you choose the classes that are taken by the best of the best in your class in that particular subject area. Many academic superstar at high school quickly learn to be humble at college. To some extent, the difficulty of your course load is what you make it out to be.</p>
<p>I believe you have been doing well academically compared to the majority of students and this is a great achievement. But please do not say it is easy because nobody knows what class you have taken. (BTW, in freshmen year, there are still many 4.0 – but there are much fewer after 2 to 3 years especially after some “weeder” classes like orgo. But I think, after 4 years, about 30 percents of all students still maintain their GPA above 3.77, and 5 percents above 3.93.)</p>
<p>Okay, I can see why this phrase can be irksome. Private schools (and public schools with ample resources, I’m sure) do have pretty good college advising. For example, at my school, every student gets a college adviser starting at the end of junior year and they begin meeting with them immediately, crafting a list of schools to consider. Then, in senior year, they help a lot communicating with the school and just getting things organized (and some just keeping you sane). Our college advisers also had good relationships with adcoms and were also very experienced with college admissions. One of our college advisers had worked at the Princeton admissions office as an admissions officer and another had a pretty good relationship with most of the adcoms at top schools (Yale included).</p>
<p>Now, do they necessarily hold our hands? I don’t think so, in that most of the work is obviously done by the student. They’re only there to help you through the process. However, the language is simply how I personally refer to admissions. I would say the same thing for a “bad” public school; I would say, “That school only sent one person to X University.” However, depending on my mood, I also say “Only one person was accepted from that school” or “Only one person came from that school.”</p>
<p>@drbigboyjoe- yeah but that sounds a lot better than we have it at public school. you guys get a COLLEGE counselor, but our entire grade (400 people) has to share 4 GUIDANCE counselors who “double” as college counselors. we had ONE meeting about college, and he didn’t help at all. in fact, I think I know more about college admissions than him xD furthermore, our guidance counselors can’t write us good recs because each one is responsible for so many of us, and none of them no us at all. THERES your difference in admissions</p>
<p>^Haha, my class has 550 students (school has about 2300 students in total) and only 3 counselors who are forced to deal mostly with changing under-performing students’ schedules. My counselor is nice and pretty knowledgeable but there are so many students that I think I might be lost in the crowd.</p>
<p>EDIT: To make it clearer, there’s one counselor for approximately 750 students each.</p>
<p>This is very true and I do not deny that there are HUGE disparities in college guidance, especially between private and public schools (by sheer virtue of the size difference).</p>
<p>Why do people assume that without AA college admissions would suddenly become a meritocracy? That just is not the case and a meritocracy has never existed. Whenever an African-American is admitted to a prestigious university, everyone assumes the acceptance is based on race. However, when the legacy, or the athlete, or even the poor ORM with lower stats (yes, this does happen) is admitted, no one bats an eyelash. This is ridiculous. The truth is that colleges have thousands of highly qualified applicants to choose from and are able to mold their incoming classes accordingly. But you can bet that ALL students accepted have in the academic ability to succeed and that is all that matters. This thread reeks of entitlement and subtle racism. If you aren’t accepted at a college, your first thought should not be to blame your race. Chances are, there were both better qualified and individuals with lower stats of your race that were accepted. If they wanted you, they would have accepted you. (And this is coming from an Asian.)</p>
<p>I have, unfortunately, read all 21 pages of this discussion. The only question I can come up with is why is mifune, someone who is advocating equal treatment for every college applicant REGARDLESS of race, being called unfair, racist, etc.? How is eliminating the part of the application that asks you to indicate race unfair?</p>
<p>^ Because people are pointing out that he is deliberately ignoring or understating the history of race in America and the plights of students of color today. Therefore, they are calling him unfair, racist, etc. Extreme? Perhaps.</p>
<p>I’m an ORM at my dream school. Clearly, I was not negatively affected by AA…</p>
<p>AA has less affect on me than legacy status and athletic recruiting, both of which do nothing for elite universities, but compose some 30% of admits. Those two initiatives are the biggest scam in admissions and get no attention. Probably because they benefit whites. At least I can say that diversity at Yale has yielded numerous powerful experiences that I would not have had otherwise. I can’t say that about legacy or athletic recruiting.</p>
<p>Meritocracy, as defined by opponents of AA isn’t meritocratic at all. It’s meritocratic when objective measures are convenient (white v. black) and subjective when its not (white v. Asian).</p>
<p>Mifune in a nutshell: Native Americans and blacks were murdered by the millions, enslaved, and then pushed to the fringes of society for hundreds of years. Whites undermined all their efforts to assimilate and accrue economic and social capital for themselves. However, they’ve been basically free from institutional racism for a whole, like, 40 years! They should be fine now! Never mind that the vast majority of Native Americans and blacks either experienced racism directly or has a parent that was affected by institutional racism! They should be fine! They should get over it! It doesn’t matter that white Americans have a several century head-start. If minorities run just as fast, they’ll reach the finish line at the same time!*</p>
<p>*anyone who is familiar with basic physics knows that, if one object is a head of another object and they’re both propelled in the same direction at the same speed, the object in front will remain in front.</p>
<p>What mifune fails to realize, is that meritocracy can not exist in a country that purposefully undermined the development of substantial portions of its society until just 40 years ago. It’s the equivalent of holding down a sprinter until he’s already being lapped several times and expect him to catch up! Nothing about such a race is meritocratic or fair, and if the other sprinters win, it is not because of their abilities but their advantages.</p>
<p>In addition to that, he wants minority students to be required to be objectively better than whites and ORM because, in his racist mind, that’s the only way a minority could be possibly equal to his white and Asian peers - if he’s undeniably better. This very idea smacks of racism.</p>
<p>I haven’t thoroughly read through all the posts made thusfar, so excuse any belaboring I may incidentally commit. </p>
<p>I’ll approach my analysis to this problem with one goal in mind (one that I presume is the object of (admittedly, perhaps quixotic) concensus): that no breakdown of student successes by race will reveal statistcally significant and uniform disparities. </p>
<p>If the present disparities are indeed the product of inequitable maltreatment and inherited prejudices, general racial variations in success would slowly recede in a likely asymptotic fashion to negligible levels; that is, performance among races would equilibrate to an essentially equal level. Indeed, data indicate the trend is in this direction.</p>
<p>Affirmative action practices can be thought of as an artificial mechanism of catalyzing this equilibration; at least, that is presumably the intent. But several important questions arise:
[ul]
[<em>]Is the present and decided inequality (because, let’s face it, affirmative action is far too blanket and inexact to be anything close to an equalizer, in that it would approrpriately compensate for environmental disadvantages to minorities, at present) an acceptable vehicle for eventual, potential equality?<br>
[</em>]Does affirmative action brood and in turn perpetuate animosity among races, thereby contributing, in compound: sacrificially (see question one), to a greater inequality in the future?<br>
[li]Does affirmative action actually do nothing to foster future equality in its potential and incidental effect of having minority beneficiaries of affirmative action being complacently satisfied with this advantage and therefore feeling no need to rise to the level of fellow students who are held up to a higher standard? Does this state, then, stagnate into an enduring “need” for affirmative action?[/li][/ul]</p>
<p>I don’t know the answers to these questions.</p>
<p>Two things that the above post made me remember.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I personally think that the active search for a diverse class is amazing. Being on campus and experiencing it, I must say that I am glad that Yale does not rely solely on numbers. That would make for a very boring class. I cannot count nor recount the many wonderful experiences and conversations I’ve had with people who would not have gotten it based solely on numbers. </p></li>
<li><p>The other thing about “under performing” minorities being accepted over “better performing” non-minorities. Once these “under performers” make it to Yale, and other places, they even out the achievement gap. That is, they do just as well if not better than their previous “better performing” counterparts. Here, you gave an opportunity to someone who wouldn’t have gotten one otherwise. It’s not as if this person was less deserving because they didn’t get a 2400, 5.0 GPA but rather all they needed was the opportunity.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>You can argue against schools taking it upon themselves to do this. But, in the end, you have no control over it. And, in fact, I would argue, that those who do argue against this approach are perpetuating a system of inequality in our nation.</p>
these kinds of debates are always interesting and londwinded