<p>Well deserved! Good to see </p>
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<p>I agree with this. I think the idea that immigrants have it harder than citizens is oftentimes a fallacy, and the opposite is just as likely to be true. Recent immigrant children may well have had a superior education to their US citizen peers, and have not been indoctrinated into the negative aspects of American culture that can end up harming the educational progress of some of our citizens.</p>
<p>My parents are both from Nigeria and my mom is a nurse…maybe I should apply to all the Ivy Leagues too!</p>
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<p>I don’t know if she is right or not, but our GC would disagree with you. Every year she makes a speech about how students who have been admitted early to their first choice school have an obligation to withdraw all of their other apps, so that another student can get the offer.</p>
<p>Doesn’t pretty much every Ivy League admit have some kind of hook?</p>
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<p>Seems like a pretty average high school if you get away from the forum bubble of high schools where 99% go to four year colleges and “low achieving” high schools send “only” about two thirds of graduates to four year colleges.</p>
<p>“His parents are both nurses. What gives you the impression that they would not be sophisticated enough to do this?”</p>
<p>It is my impression that a very small percentage of parents, nurses or otherwise, have the application savvy that folks here on CC have come to expect. I am sure I have posted this a million times, but I found CC because my husband said my D should practice/take a class for the SAT and, and take it twice. I thought that was so carazy, I had to look it up. We are both black, and both physicians, but he went to a high school that was totally into polishing their students, while mine was totally into getting them to move on. . </p>
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<p>That came from statistical data released to the local public. </p>
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<p>The “superior education” only applies to some countries and is highly dependent on SES status in origin country, quality of overall education system in origin country AT ALL LEVELS, and/or whether their academic assessments(tests, grades, teacher/admin assessments) placed them on the higher academic tracks rather than the lower ones. </p>
<p>If one’s on the lower academic tracks, it’s likely the student may have little to no advantages…especially considering many other countries place greater prioritization of educational spending on the most gifted/above-average students and expect others to keep up or be pushed aside into lower tracks. </p>
<p>Not to mention the possibility the immigrant child is attending school in the US because his/her disciplinary issues were such he/she was expelled and no other school’s willing to take him/her in the origin country. </p>
<p>Knew an older Japanese student who was in this exact situation after being involved in a schoolyard fight in 7th grade sometime in the '80s and ended up being kicked out by his family due to the shame he brought them after they found no middle school was willing to take a risk in admitting him. </p>
<p>Ended up finishing his education here in the US* thanks to a Japanese benefactor who felt for him after seeing him working unskilled factory/odd jobs to make ends meet and hearing his story. When I met him, he was a 26 year old college senior who was graduating from what is now a top 50 US university with flying colors. </p>
<p>As for mentioning “indoctrination into the negative aspects of American culture”, you obviously aren’t aware of how prevalent US pop culture from Hollywood movies to TV shows are worldwide…even in countries where they’ve tried their best to ban/strongly discourage them. </p>
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<li>Middle school to university.<br></li>
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<p>Note that many first generation Americans are kids of parents of high motivation (needed to move to a completely new country) who have been further screened by the immigration process (e.g. visas for PhD students and skilled workers). So it may not be surprising that such people are often academic overachievers relative to their higher generation American peers, given the home environment with parents of high ability and motivation encouraging their kids to achieve highly (yes, “tiger parenting” can get too extreme…).</p>
<p>Most people here are familiar with the “Asian academic overachiever” image, but that is likely due to a high percentage of low generation number descendents of PhD student and skilled worker immigrants. Low generation number descendents of PhD student and skilled worker immigrants are probably more like each other in terms of academic achievement than they are to high generation people of their same racial or ethnic background.</p>
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<p>Or parents who themselves were “failures” in their origin country’s educational system*, experienced the negative life outcomes from that, and do their utmost to protect their children from experiencing the same…even if their life experiences isn’t necessarily applicable in the US context. </p>
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<li>Am talking folks whose parents never finished HS or sometimes even middle school…much less gone off to college. Plenty of them worked in various low-paid labor intensive jobs for long hours to support HS classmates and the family. </li>
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<p>In response to ariesathena, this is what Obama said when asked if his daughters should benefit from affirmative action: </p>
<p>“I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed. So I don’t think those concepts are mutually exclusive. I think what we can say is that in our society, race and class still intersect, that there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling, that even those who are in the middle class may be first generation as opposed to fifth or sixth generation college attendees, and that we all have an interest in bringing as many people together to help build this country.”</p>
<p>And from a NY Times article dated 8/3/2008: During a presidential debate in April, Mr. Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, “who have had a pretty good deal” in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.</p>
<p>He’s not an immigrant. He was born in the US. It’s always interesting to me how black kids whose parents are immigrants are also considered immigrants, but the same doesn’t seem to apply to white kids. No one seems to think that a kid whose parents were born in France, India, China, etc but was born and raised in the US is an immigrant. </p>
<p>I suspect that supply and demand applies in college admissions just as it does in many situations. The supply of black males with 2250 + SAT scores is extremely small, so the demand will be high, especially if they have matching grades and ECs. Doesn’t mean he’s not qualified or that it’s unfair. If there were a subset of Asian males from Montana who were football quarterbacks and Tuba players, and had 2250 SAT scores, I suspect their chances of multiple Ivy admissions might be high also. </p>
<p>Sigh.
I understand that American colleges are, after all, American, but this is especially disheartening for international applicants. If his family had stayed in Ghana (?) and he’d had an equally strong application, I really, really doubt that he would have gotten up to two out of eight.
Never mind that an African (not African American) applicant who has those stats has likely worked a lot harder to get there, because opportunities here are severely limited. I’ve played the keyboard for years, for example, but there isn’t even a district orchestra. Hospital internship? “Kids shouldn’t play with sharp objects.” You’re a great athlete? Nobody cares.
As a very black person, I think he got into all eight (notice I said all eight) because he’s first-gen African-American. Never mind that it doesn’t necessarily make him more “diverse” than the WASP girl down the street. It’s horrible how in a bid to not be racist, the world is developing a new form of racism (class oppression, marginalization, whatever the heck you want to call it).</p>
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<p>Is anyone claiming that he is an immigrant (as opposed to a first generation American)?</p>
<p>In any case, American born members of non-black visible minority groups do often encounter assumptions that they are immigrants.</p>
<p>I give him my all do respect! Thanks be to God for the blesses he has poured onto him! I see this young man bettering society in the long run and continues to inspire young Black/ African Americans to keep working hard for a better future! Don’t hate, appreciate this young man for going above and beyond than society thought of his limitations! </p>
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<p>Ha, this sounds like Jim Yong Kim. (Well, I don’t know about the tuba…) :)</p>
<p>From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>“Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy.[5] Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, president of his class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD in anthropology at Harvard University in 1993.[6] He was among the first enrollees of Harvard’s experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.”</p>
<p>When I saw the headline and remembered it was April 1, I admit I was skeptical. :D</p>
<p>^^^^ How is one “very black”?</p>
<p>@beachlover15 Ummm…I’m of pure Bantu-Congo ethnicity (politically correct speak for "is a native West African Black whose ancestry goes back native West African Black since like forever), I live in a ninety-nine percent black community, and I’ve never been in a country where blacks are the minority.
Granted, that makes me very very blind to race, but I was just trying to shield against people accusing me of making a racist comment…</p>
<p>As I said above, this student is certainly qualified for any college. Also, I support affirmative action. What troubles me a bit about this is that hIs college will “count” him as African-American for their diversity stats. Of course, he is African-American if he was born in the US, but if a significant percentage of the African-Americans at the ivies have backgrounds like his, those diversity stats don’t mean what they may appear to mean.</p>