Rejection and college students

MWolf
Sun, 18 May 2025 06:54:00 +0000

AustenNut:

It seems we’ve created a vast multilayered system that evaluates the worth of millions of young adults and, most of the time, tells them they are not up to snuff.

This is actually BS, and demonstrates what people have repeatedly said here (and what I repeat way too often).

These articles are being written by people who grew up in privilege and are surrounded by privilege, and they have absolutely no idea what is happening outside their little bubble of Elite Private schools, mostly in the NE, and the private high schools which feed into them, or in one of the public high schools that serves very wealthy communities.

No, Brooks (of COURSE it was him), this is not “millions of young adults”. Maybe “hundreds of thousands”. This is not the experience of the vast majority of young adults in the USA.

Even among the top 20% by income, fewer than 10% will attend an “elite” college. It’s only when you hit the top 1% by income do you see a substantial percentage of students who attend “elite” colleges.

If one looks at the number of applications submitted to “elite” colleges by students at a high school you see that, for high schools which serve kids who are below the top 20% by income, only a small percent are applying to “elite” colleges. It’s only at the schools for the wealthier families do you start seeing hundreds of applications being sent to colleges with admissions rates of under 20%.

However, even at those high schools, especially the public schools, you only really see a lot of stress and angst among the kids who are in the top 10% academically or so. If you look at the bottom 75% of the class, they’re not applying to college which “reject the majority of the qualified applicants”. Most of them are applying to colleges that accept all qualified applicants. Only in the “elite” private or public magnet schools will you see classes in which more than half of the graduating seniors are applying to “elite” colleges (mostly private).

When I read that an article was written by David Brooks, what comes to mind is always “this article is going to provide the perspective of his bubble of wealth and privilege, and have very little research”. He didn’t disappoint. This case is even more egregious. He has moved from implying that what he sees among the wealthy and privileged is the general experience of all the USA, to explicitly making that claim.

I’m sorry, but these articles are starting to look like the journalist equivalent of Shower Thoughts, generated by thinking about the claims of the wealthy educated parents in his circle of friends and acquaintances.