Admissions Bias against Conservatives

Applying to College
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<p>This is soooo not true in the Mountain West where I live. Hunting and fishing are a way of life here. Good luck trying to schedule elective surgery during the height of the hunting season when the hospital empties out. Deer and antelope jerky get passed around and recipes shared. Orvis clad people are the ultimate butt of jokes here and nobody’s heard of LLBean. Cabela’s, now there’s a real store for you. </p>

<p>But getting back to the main storyline, I don’t remember a single friend of my mine from a HS in upstate NY ever going hunting or fishing. While I am sure lots of that goes on there, the adcoms for NE schools are not likely to come from that subset of people.</p>

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<p>Yeah, Cabela’s is a big supplier, if there’s one nearby. But I think my relatives probably get their gear at Wal-Mart.</p>

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<p>I was curious, and took a look to see what you can tell about Yale’s admissions office staff. The counselor for Virginia is (I believe) a woman who graduated from Yale, and who previously graduated from a very nice private school in Wilmington, Delaware. She played field hockey for both schools. The guy who covers the deep South is from Georgia–philosophy major, acapella singer, plays classical guitar. I guess he might be a hunter–probably at least grew up with hunters.</p>

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<p>Btw, the expensive British Barbour jackets, which my Ds tell me are so popular with the Northeastern prep school set at their Northeastern colleges, can be purchased here at Orvis, Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops.</p>

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<p>^^ Wow, I picked up one of these jackets for $12 at a Sierra Trading Post Outlet. Maybe I need to go clean out their stock and resell on eBay.</p>

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<p>acapella and hunting? Pleeeease. Does not compute. Geographic proximity doth not interaction imply.</p>

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<p>I see here an all-too-human tendency to make assumptions about a class of people, then to build a whole fantasy based on those assumptions. There are a lot of people here making up stories in their heads about who admissions counselors are and what they want, and what the Northeast is and what Northeasterners want. Then, working backwards from that stereotypical image, some people here are imagining the reaction of those mythical creatures they are whipping up in their heads would be to some stereotypical Southern students. This is not a very helpful way to think about the admissions process of schools that one might want to get into or get one’s child into.</p>

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<p>Abercrombie & Fitch also started out as “an elite outfitter of sporting and excursion goods” in NYC (according to Wikipedia) and became famous in part by outfitting such celebrities as Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Ernest Hemingway, Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburne, Clark Gable, John Steinbeck, and John F. Kennedy.</p>

<p>I agree that the stereotyping of Northeasterners on this thread is absurd. Pennsylvania perennially is second only to Texas in the number of hunters. There are fewer hunters in places like New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in part because, really, where are you going to find a place to hunt in states as densely populated as these? NJ population density = 1,171 persons/sq. mi. (highest in the nation), RI 1,012 persons/sq.mi (2d), MA 823 persons/sq.mi. (3d), CT 723 persons/sq.mi. (4th). Fire a gun in that kind of crowd and you’re likely to hit 3 or 4 people before your shot stops moving. Same, obviously, in NYC, Long Island, and Westchaester, where the bulk of New York State’s population lives. Yet despite all that, the percentage of the population who hunt in these states is only slightly lower than the national average.</p>

<p>That said, I do think there is something of a cultural difference with regard to hunting. In the Northeast, as in England, hunting historically has been more a sport of the wealthy—the old Teddy Roosevelt/Abercrombie & Fitch crowd with their Adirondack “Great Camps” were the only urban dwellers who, as a practical matter, even had access to decent hunting habitat. That tradition still carries on today in people like John Kerry, who can fly to Montana to hunt elk, antelope, or bighorn sheep anytime he wants; while people in working class Irish South Boston don’t hunt because they can’t afford it. Not so in the South, Midwest, and West, where hunting either crosses class lines or, in some areas, is tilted more towards the rural poor and working class. Pennsylvania is, in this regard, more Midwestern or Appalachian than Northeastern. Hunting is also quite popular in western New York State where population densities and demographics are more similar to the Midwest than to the Eastern Seaboard.</p>

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Hey, think what you want and write about whatever you want. But I’m not making anything up.</p>