<p>Are you kidding me??? Wouldn’t everyone say they were gay if they thought it would get them in???</p>
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<p>This must be some sort of attempt at humor? There is no such thing in the EC section. Maybe a Gay-Straight Alliance membership or something, but nothing definitive. </p>
<p>The main thing that frustrates me about this piece is that some impressionable high schooler, who could conceivably get into a top school, will read this and decide not to apply to any top schools based on the illusion that acceptance is hopeless. Believe me, white kids who haven’t made their own charities or traveled on mission trips to Haiti have gotten into top schools. To say otherwise is borderline irresponsible. </p>
<p>Also, it isn’t that funny. Lorne Michaels would never let such lazy writing on SNL.</p>
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<p>^^This fits the description of our family too except I have two kids instead of three. So we had only a Harvard and a Dartmouth kid, no Brown. And my girls excelled in music instead of sports.</p>
<p>BUT, I also found the piece to be witty and funny - a classic example of making a point by satirical exaggeration. An overstatement that is not literally true but has a grain of truth behind it that mocks the current system. </p>
<p>I knew from my own experience that you didn’t really have to have all or even any of those diversity attributes to get admitted. Middle-class white kids with great stats but no hooks do sometimes get in. I’ve got two examples to prove it. But I’ve been around the admissions game long enough to know that all those factors can sometimes count, and even count a lot. If you think selective colleges don’t value and reward diversity in the admissions process then you haven’t been paying attention.</p>
<p>The part that rang truest for me was the schools saying “just be yourself.” Yeah, just be “yourself” instead of what we are looking for and we will be happy to immediately reject you. To avoid this outcome is exactly what drives the booming applicant “packaging” industry. It’s why the largest Indian tribe in the US are the Wannabes - white folks who suddenly remember their Cherokee great, great, grandmother when Jr. is applying to college. It’s why kids who were born in South Africa to white parents, before moving to the US, engage in linguistic sophistry to justify labeling themselves as “African American.”</p>
<p>But overall, I think everyone needs to lighten up. We are taking satire here. We know that the article is not literally true in every respect or to the last degree. There are many exceptions to the assertions made. But it accurately captures the desperate “gaming” of the admissions process that goes on in the current system and is abundantly evident every year here on CC.</p>
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<p>Of course not. But that’s an example of the author’s satirical exaggeration. She’s saying she would have done just that if only she known. Her line about that was to the effect of “Show me a closet and I"ll come out of it.”</p>
<p>It seems Suzy didnt get into some of the schools she was interested in. That’s always tough to deal with, and I feel for her, but to suggest that schools would have taken her if she wore a headdress or had come out of the closet is silly. Yes, the top schools want a student body with lots of different experiences and there’s a reason for it. I hope that wherever Suzy ends up going she’ll meet a Native American student so she can understand their life experience and see first hand why colleges want students with such different life experiences.</p>
<p>I’d personally have a hard time rooming with someone like Suzy because her perspective seems a little sheltered, but then again if I did have to room with someone like her, Im sure I could learn a lot from her and vise versa.</p>
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<p>Doesn’t Tina Fey’s have a new movie “Admission” that also pokes fun at the same resume hooks that Ms. Weiss points out?</p>
<p>Did anybody even READ the last paragraph, or actually, ANY of the piece?</p>
<p>It’s funny.</p>
<p>Don’t be so defensive.</p>
<p>Alternate theory: maybe it’s not actually that funny.</p>
<p>I agree with poetgrl.</p>
<p>She may have succeeded had she dressed up and emulated the following dudes:</p>
<p>[Horrible</a> Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube](<a href=“Horrible Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube”>Horrible Histories - Literally: The Viking Song - YouTube)</p>
<p>Lorem asked … Do you know any URMs with 2400 SATs / 36 ACTs plus #1 rank plus leadership roles who got rejected from multiple schools?</p>
<p>My answer? I do. And plenty of people on CC do. </p>
<p>Despite being a loaded question as not many people with a 2400 SAT feel to have to sit for the ACT unless their clueless state bought the Iowa KoolAid from the masquerading as educators farmers, and made that bastardized SAT test mandatory, the answer is that it did happen to a kid from …Illinois who ended up at Brown after getting rejected by his more prestigious schools. </p>
<p>Kinda funny, he? Or perhaps, in a twisted way a tad offensive? Was there an attempt at humor here? Or a bit of irony? I am not sure, but it relates to the type of piece submitted to a newspaper.</p>
<p>Was the piece humorous? Was it accurate? The answer is clearly subjective? My inclination is to think that the mental masturbation of a disappointed teenager is hardly in the Swift ballpark. But could it be, by any stretch of the imagination! </p>
<p>Offensive or humorous, it does not matter. This type of contribution is not worth reading any more than Chua’s or Ferguson’s drivel. The only mitigating factor is that it was produced by a clueless kid and not a clueless adult. </p>
<p>It may amuse some, and hurt others. But it surely will not help anyone.</p>
<p>No, I just don’t find it funny when someone says “if only I was a member of an oppressed minority, say the child of people whose marriage isn’t legally recognized and who seem to give at least one member of the Supreme Court agita, I would have gotten into a top college, hahahaha.” Nope. Not funny. Privileged.</p>
<p>Guess thats what makes horseraces, as my mother used to say. I thought it was funny. But others may not share the same sense of humor. To each his own.</p>
<p>“it did happen to a kid from …Illinois who ended up at Brown after getting rejected by his more prestigious schools”</p>
<p>I thought he was only a quarter URM.</p>
<p>There is bias in admissions; it’s just not politically-correct to flag it as a reason that more qualified white students aren’t accepted while less qualified by comparison URM students are accepted at that same highly-selective elite college. I recalled a 300 point spread between scores of URM black students and scores of white students at elite colleges, and tried to find my source before posting. Didn’t find the original article, but found another relevant citation by googling “SAT scores by race” and “elite college”, and found many references. From the American Conservative web-site, which isn’t my preferred reading, I’ve extracted following quote from an article concerning admissions policy at elite colleges:</p>
<p>"Perhaps the most detailed statistical research into the actual admissions practices of American universities has been conducted by Princeton sociology professor Thomas J. Espenshade and his colleagues, whose results were summarized in his 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, co-authored with Alexandria Walton Radford. Their findings provide an empirical look at the individual factors that dramatically raise or lower the likelihood of acceptance into the leading American universities which select the next generation of our national elites.</p>
<p>The research certainly supports the widespread perception that non-academic factors play a major role in the process, including athletic ability and legacy status. But as we saw earlier, even more significant are racial factors, with black ancestry being worth the equivalent of 310 points, Hispanics gaining 130 points, and Asian students being penalized by 140 points, all relative to white applicants on the 1600 point Math and Reading SAT scale."</p>
<p>DS attends an economically and ethnically diverse college prep high school, and URM students’ admission success seems to follow this trend: URM students there do gain admission at elite colleges that otherwise won’t accept equivalent score/GPA white students from same HS. I found similar stats at several highly-selective Midwest LACs that DS was interested in; if DS was URM, he’d have been a shoo-in. A diligent research can eventually uncover admission stats for each school.</p>
<p>And our DS is one generation away from blue-collar working-class, w/three grandparents w/o HS diplomas, and he’s 1/8 native american (not flagged), w/first-generation college-educated parents who happened to pole-vault themselves into the upper-middle-class. Fellow students w/URM high-income parents w/elite college diplomas still received the URM benefit.</p>
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THen CC must be the most politically incorrect website on the internet.</p>
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Ding ding ding. We have an Epenshade! We have an Epenshade! Is this the first of the season?</p>
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<p>Not sure if it is the first, but I’ll bet my life it won’t be the last.</p>
<p>higgins, in another thread you mention importance of demonstrating interest. Maybe those kids didn’t, and that’s why they didn’t get in. You really don’t know.</p>
<p>My URM didn’t get into the one Ivy where he applied, and you don’t hear me complaining. If they had tried to give him 130 extra points, he would have busted 2400. :D</p>
<p>The truth is the colleges are building a class, and we don’t know why they pick one person over another.</p>
<p>I get a bonus?</p>
<p>Hmmm, tell that to the six (going on seven) Ivies that rejected me.
They must not have received the memo…</p>
<p>I’m also the daughter of a single mother and we’re incredibly poor. Oops, not a middle class black. Maybe that’s why.</p>
<p>The Princeton study should be called the Tulips and Daffodil report. </p>
<p>It always blooms in early April.</p>