There may be many reasons for this, but a possibly less troubling reason might be that really accomplished non-immigrant kids may look at a different range of colleges, including historically black colleges and state flagships, and they just may be less likely to apply to all of the Ivies even if they’d be likely to get in.
Here is another student accepted to all eight. No mention of his family history.
http://www.wncn.com/story/28737925/nc-high-school-student-accepted-to-all-8-ivy-league-schools
He also wants to be a neurosurgeon!
These kids are unusual because while they are URMs for the colleges, they also fit the smart immigrant striver profile that has led to academic success for other groups in the past (and in the present). Even if it’s the case that their really stellar admissions results are partly because they are URMs–something that is pretty hard to deny–they would have very, very good results anyway.
why does there always appear to be an undercurrent of racial animosity on these types of threads?
The female student from MN is exceptional. There’s no information on grades and scores, but presumably they’re Ivy-level. Her teachers are enthusiastic. With her record, I am sure that she would have been admitted to most of these schools if she’d been a white and born in the US. Of course, her accomplishments were driven by her experiences. She’s going to be a force to be reckoned with. What school wouldn’t want her as an alumna?
This is pretty easy to explain. Many colleges in the United States make it clear that they practice affirmative action to obtain racial (and other kinds of) diversity. This means, practically, that some applicants who are from under-represented minorities get admitted who otherwise would not be admitted (some of them would be admitted anyway, but not all). Some people resent this, especially people who believe that college admission should be entirely based on academic stats like grades and scores. Where there is a conflict in interests, animosity is to be expected.
If you are suggesting that my prior post reflects racial animosity, you are mistaken. I support affirmative action.
Here’s another student - immigrant as well.
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2015/04/08/north-central-senior-accepted-every-ivy-league-college/25492819/
That kid messes up all our theories. My only observation about him is that he used Notre Dame as his safety school.
I’m ok if my upper-middle-class, born-on-third-base kid gets turned down for an Ivy League (ok, hypothetically, he didn’t apply but YKWIM) for one of these immigrant striver kids. The opportunities mean more to them than to our already-privileged kids.
On the Columbia + Dartmouth point that so baffles or troubles some CC members, last night I asked my daughter, a recent Dartmouth grad, if she knew of any others, besides herself, at Dartmouth who had also applied to Columbia. She said yes she knew of several. She said it was a reasonably common thing to have done, and no one thought it was unusual or saw anything “wrong” with it.
She said one of the most visible was a kid who in high school had competed in the Jeopardy Teen Tournament and had proudly announced on TV that his future plans were to go to Columbia. Well, he didn’t win the Jeopardy tournament and he didn’t get accepted by Columbia either. So he went with his second choice of Dartmouth,
So whlle applying to both Dartmouth and Columbia is not uncommon, in her experience applying to all eight Ivys is uncommon. She did not peronally know of anyone at Dartmouth who had applied to all eight. It struck her as being a little over the top.
I am a first generation black immigrant American and I can tell you that the expectations were set very high for me from birth. We were all expected to be doctors, and if not that, engineers. Every family member or friend reminded you of that expectation. No one chased prestigious schools. For our immigrant parents, your closest college was good enough.
I have yet discovered the reason why there is a greater disparity with African Americans vs. black immigrants except that the black immigrants, in my own culture, were highly educated in their country. They were the highly educated and highly motivated immigrants competing against the general American population. So I think the comparisons were not fair. For example, my aunt had a Masters in mathematics, a law degree and nursing degree from her country. She came here and received a BS in nursing and eventually a PhD. My uncle was an engineer, accountant and mathematician. This was typical in my culture even though they arrived poor to the US. But we were in households that pushed the kids to achieve very highly. We didn’t know anything differently than what we saw at home. Though, we were discouraged from mingling with friends who weren’t from our culture. I think there was a genuine fear that those friends who interfere with our goals.
I think if you compare immigrant black children from highly educated families with AAs children from highly educated families, I would assume that there should be no difference in outcome. That’s my assumption backed with only anecdotal evidence.
@frugaldoctor, thank you, that is very interesting and enlightening.
GMT’s point about the minimal numbers of African-Americans matriculating at elite colleges is valid. No conscientious person intends to demean or minimize young Mr. Ekeh’s accomplishments, but what disturbs folks who have paid a lot of attention to the affirmative action debate over the years is the seemingly patronizing attitude by colleges towards this issue. It was only recently that colleges were exposed for puffing their diversity and inclusion statistics by counting international students and recent immigrants among their “African American” enrollees, when in fact the schools had relatively few students from the original “target groups” of Affirmative Action. It would be equivalent to U.S. companies recruiting Caucasian employees from Spain and the upper classes from places like Costa Rica and Argentina and deem them URM Hispanics, rather than search for and mentor promising candidates from the Yakima Valley or the rural communities of California.
It all reminds me of author Richard Rodriguez’ observation in one of his books about the shock and discomfort that officials of the Mexican government would experience during their first trip to Chicano areas of Los Angeles; to paraphrase: ‘everybody here is an Indian!’
@frugaldoctor, thanks for weighing in. You confirm my point that family expectations – and not affirmative action as some would claim – play the deciding role in the success of immigrant kids. These high-achieving African/Asian kids are no different than the children of Jewish immigrants back in the 1950s who began entering Ivy League schools en masse (despite quotas, etc.) simply because they were so much better than most of their competition. They came from families that respected education, encouraged (in fact, expected) excellence, and took hard work at school as a given. Let’s face it, the US became the intellectual/academic power that it is (was?) thanks largely to these driven, talented immigrants. We should all thank our lucky stars to have them in our midst.
Sorry Hunt. ( I was wondering which of those schools was his safety.)
@katliamom what is your point point? AA doesnt work because most of them come from bad families? Jewish immigration occurred around 1900 for the most part not 50 years later
The reality is that, considering other areas of CC, the racial animosity has been pretty tame, with I believe only one post that considered AA disgusting. The problem for the usual complaining voices is that Harold was eminently admissible based on standards of academic excellence. The typical attacks hurled at non-competitive URL who stole the seat of the 2400 SAT with 12 APs did not fit the pattern. Yet, you can expect Ed Blum and his mercenaries to be a lot less charitable and add poor Harold to his list of statistics to establish discrimination at schools like Harvard.
@SlackerMomMD–thanks for that post. The student from Bulgaria is very similar to the kid from Nigeria with respect to smarts, academic accomplishments, strong work ethic, and desire to be the best. Didn’t someone up thread suggest that an Eastern European immigrant with the same stats as the Nigerian wouldn’t get into all the Ivys? Seems like this case suggests otherwise.
There are many ways to look at this. In the past, there have been numerous reports of the Black URM numbers at Harvard being inflated by immigrants or second generations from the Caribbean or Africa. Northstarmom, for instance, posted many times on this issue.
Further, researchers such as Carnevale and Rose did expose the poor correlation between the success in balancing race with enrolling lower SES students. In so many words, they did a much better job in enrolling Blacks and Hispanics than they did in enrolling poor students. This did not stop at the Ivies --which might be outliers in some cases-- but encompassed the “top” 200 schools in the country.
All in all, this issue deserves a lot more than being fodder for journalists. If there was a silver lining in the attacks by Blum and the flimsy hope that their flimsy brief survives the first round, it is that schools like H might have to be a tiny bit more upfront about their review system. I doubt it will happen, but we could use a lot more transparency and a whole lot less smoke and mirrors.
I think katliamom is really referring to what happened in the 1920s and '30s, see https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/harvard.html.
I think colleges have a dilemma with respect to ethnic diversity–should these recent immigrants from Africa, who fit the striver model but who do not share the history of black Americans, be “counted” toward these diversity goals? Should they benefit from affirmative action (and are they getting such good results because they don’t need as much affirmative action as American black kids from poor families)? I think most colleges are genuinely trying to do the right thing, and I give them credit for that.