The only way to fight that ignorance is to respectfully rebut the outrageous claims. A few UA students, alumni, and parents appear to have taken to the comments section to respond. Feel free to join them!
Coming from a town loaded with high scoring Asians, I can tell you that by and large they go to name brand schools. That’s one group where school prestige usually ranks above all. Doubt in our lifetimes that Alabama will ever penetrate that market.
^^ That will slowly change. If the scholarships remain, they will come hard to resist to more and more parents, especially the educated ones not following the herd.
Sadly, the herd mentality is alive and well. I do not see it dying off at all. Too many people that really have no clue about the vast majority of this country they live in other than the self inflicted bubble they have trapped themselves in thinking that they are the “better” for being in whatever area they live in vs everyone else.
My skeptical UA relative asked me how many Asian students were at UA . . . inference being that stat is a gauge of the academic strength.
It’s about 2% Asian students, about the same as the general US population. I actually liked it that my son wasn’t going to have an Asian clique to let him isolate himself in like he would have found in our state flagship. He was forced by necessity to make friends who didn’t look like him and had different backgrounds.
But that 2% does not include international students I believe.
LucietheLakie,
I tried to clear up misconceptions but got fatigued after reading scores of comments showing concern about the supposed lack of Black students at UA. These people are nuts! They are so filled with hate towards the South. It is just unreal. They just assume that UA has few Blacks. And those that know that the percentage is a relatively high 12% complain about how it should be 25% to reflect the actual percentage of Blacks in the state. Racial bean counting is disgusting! No acknowledgement whatsoever that more Blacks might enroll at UA if they had a higher average ACT score.
One will know that the tide has really turned when we see folks from the elite privates (Andover, Exeter, etc.) and publics (Stuyvesant, Boston Latin, etc.) from the NE joining Alabama.
Andover
https://www.andover.edu/Academics/CollegeCounseling/Documents/PASchoolProfile2014-2015.pdf
Exeter
https://www.exeter.edu/documents/2015_Profile_for_Colleges_(Web).pdf
As one can see from the above lists, some public universities do make their list, including some Southern ones (UNC, GTECH, etc.)
My DS is from an elite public, their first grad ever to attend UA. First to even apply, as far as his guidance counselor can recall.
28 TJHSST in Alexandria, VA (#1 rank in USNWR) had 12 students apply and accepted to UA in the Class of 2015.
^^ How many joined UA from those? The “operative” word that I used is “joining” … and TJH is strictly not in the NE.
TJ is ranked higher than Stuyvesant. But nevertheless, it speaks to the quality of UA when it can get kids who otherwise would have gone to UVA or VT to consider an Alabama school. BTW, Northern VA is hardly the South anymore.
Derek Faase, the Alabama recruiter assigned to Arizona, was one of 88 college recruiters to visit BASIS Scottsdale, USNews’ number-two-ranked US high school. As a result of Derek’s visit and presentation, several BASIS students have applied, including my son, who has been accepted and awarded the Presidential and Engineering Leadership scholarships. He is now very interested in UA, and we have not even visited yet.
My son graduated from the same private HS as the daughter of the current president a much-ballyhooed Ivy. He turned down a couple of “elites” to go there and has no regrets.
Asians are 5.6 percent of the U.S. population. They are the fastest growing group.
Sorry, I was in a rush when I posted #34. I meant to write that my son graduated from the same private HS as the daughter of the current president of a much-ballyhooed Ivy. He turned down a couple of “elites” to go to Bama and has no regrets.
Re Asians, they comprise 5.4% of the current U.S. population. If you add in Pacific Islanders and Native Hawaiians you get another .2%. See here: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
In Alabama, Asians comprise just 1.3% of the population, with another .1% Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/01000.html
Anyway, it was refreshing to be at a school where Asians were not overrepresented.
Meanwhile, in New Haven:
@LucieTheLakie . You make a good point, and it is particularly that point that is creating innovation at some universities. Alabama is NOT pretending to be a school to educate its increasingly declining numbers of college age students in less than optimally performing school systems in the state. It intends to become a national university like some of those you mentioned, particularly the elite public national schools. It won’t become a private elite university ( Rice, Vanderbilt), but UVA and Michigan are schools are in fact schools that do not pretend to exist to educate only students in those states with 30 ACT scores. They are national schools, and those national schools serve the state economy by creating economic activity and business models by recruiting high caliber students, out of state students who pay, national research funding, and branding dollars (athletic, academic). I laud Bama’s bold ambitions; they are high, and giving full scholarships to high potential OOS students certainly create economic dollars to attract the auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. And future successful alumni that donate later on. A self-perpetuating model not easy to create.
Craig Barrett (former Intel CEO) and his wife created Barrett Honors College at ASU for a similar but different reason–attracting industries and economic activity requires an availability of highly talented graduates to fill those jobs. Intel is right down the road, and they could not recruit enough of the best engineers at UofA or ASU. Now Intel, GoDaddy and others have a growing local pipeline of capable talent. ASU claims that 30% of its engineering students are Barrett Honors college students.
Asians follow status and reputation of the name more than any assessment of excellence or fit. Watch those numbers grow over 10 years at Bama and then we’ll know whether or not Alabama has been successful in its academic mission. Not one Chinese student would ever claim they went to Berkeley, MIT, BeiDa or Qinghua because it just seemed a better “fit” than another school. Kudos to the forward-thinking schools like Alabama and Arizona State.