@GMTplus7 OK.
The first kid (Shi) studied for “more than 2 years”. The next (Cheng)'s mom paid $2k a year for test prep. The next (Riyan) spent a3 years at a “cram school” that cost his parents $200 a month.
I do see the free prep that was originally for black/Hispanc students but is now 43% Asian.
All of this seems to confirm my post #93.
Actually there is a way to measure SES at Stuy and that is with the % of free/reduced lunch eligible kids.
It’s only 21%. http://high-schools.com/directory/ny/cities/new-york/stuyvesant-high-school/360007702877/
So almost 80% of students at Stuy have income over 185% of the poverty line.
In NYC schools as a whole, it’s 42%.
Even if ALL the free lunch eligible kids are the Asian ones, most still aren’t “poor”.
The students at Stuyvesant is not a random sampling of students in NYC. I’m pretty confident that 29% of Asians there aren’t from impoverished families.
It’s not the Asians that actually live in Asia that go hard, it’s the Asian-Americans. Most of the intl students are average, a lot of them just come to party. A lot of the Asian-Americans have straight up crazy parents like that Tiger Mom lady who wrote a book. All that is is a strategy for short term success with psycho issues and burnout looming on the horizon.
I am sure that many not so rich Asian-Americans parents spend their last money on this test prep. They have different priorities.
@CCDD14 “I am sure that many not so rich Asian-Americans parents spend their last money on this test prep. They have different priorities.”
I have to say that I think a lot of Americans can learn a lot from that. Putting the kids education first can have a multi-generational impact on the whole family. Where I grew up there is a sort of anti-education bias and they would make fun of people who did that. Later they would complain that they didn’t understand why those kids got opportunities that their kids didn’t.
Most of the Stuy student body when I attended and to a large extent, today still tend to come more from low-income, working class, or lower-middle class backgrounds. Vast majority were eligible for free or reduced priced lunches.
While we had a small contingent of well-off students from the UES and other well-off NYC neighborhoods, most such students tend to prefer attending private/boarding schools due to smaller class sizes, more personalized attention, and perceptions they aren’t as intensive of academic pressure cooker/“sink or swim” academic environment that Stuy, BXSci and BTech tended to be. Got to see plenty of this among some of those classmates’ neighbors/friends and moreso among LAC classmates from the NYC area who mostly graduated from private/boarding schools.
This mentality is also held by wealthier Asian-American families…especially those who assimilated quickly into the upper/upper-middle class mostly White suburban environments like many older relatives or are second/later generation.
http://projects.propublica.org/schools/schools/362058002877 37% of Stuy kids (all students) qualify for free/reduced lunch. If 69-70% of the student population is asian, and only 37% of ALL students enrolled at Stuy qualify for free/reduced lunch, its not possible that “the vast majority” of the asian students qualify for free/reduced lunch.
I certainly don’t refute that. But what boggles my mind is that people decry prep. If one knows that a test is important (i.e. the outcome could lift u out of poverty) then the rational thing to do is to prepare for it.
Do serious med school aspirants just take the MCAT cold? Do athletes who are participating in the Olympics trials not train?
Kids whose parents have bachelor’s degrees or higher would tend to have families that focus on education. So is some of the higher level of achievement among Asian kids due to the higher percentage of parents with college degrees? Is there actually a higher level of what might be considered overly harsh tactics or shaming over education in more Asian families? My kids knew they would disappoint me if they didn’t do their best but I don’t think they felt that a B would shame their entire family. I am also not at all sure that it would be worth the level of control, effort, and pressure needed to make turn good students into great ones. In addition, good social skills can be a huge plus in the working world. This is not to suggest that all Asian students that are top students are only that way because their parents cracked the whip, as I honestly don’t know if that is true. Certainly, the tiger mom stereotype (as in the book) is out there and may have some basis in truth.
Unfortunately, many Americans do not value education, make fun of studious kids, and value the “fun” of college over scholarship. Many families, especially poor families, may value education but do not have the resources or tools to help their children succeed or keep them from the lure of the streets. NYC (and all cities) need to do a better job of identifying students with high potential in all district schools and give those students the opportunity to get good preparation for the HS tests.
As for athletes, very few HS athletes have both the academic and the athletic ability to go to an Ivy or equivalent. Over the 12 years I have had kids at our HS, I can think of 3 or 4 that played varsity at an Ivy - far fewer than got into Ivys on academic ability and other ECs. None of the athletes went for the marquee sports. . A kid that can successfully balance an athletic career with top grades is rare indeed and likely to be successful in college (even if their overall GPA and SATs are slightly lower than the average for the school). The time and effort required, especially now that most sports are played at the Club level almost all year long, is significant. By the way, none of my kids have played sports in college.
There may also be some self-selection in terms of Asian families that make it to the US. While that was also true when my grandparents came over “from the other side”, society was different. It was possible to get a good middle class job without a college degree. The middle class was much broader.
I am a bit suspicious of the link you provided as their stated mission is “Our work focuses exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.”
From that despite their declaration of independence, it leads me to wonder whether they are carrying water for various educational activist groups and educrats who have been trying to justify shutting down or otherwise eviscerating Stuy and other SHS/similar public magnets like what happened with CCNY/CUNY after 1969 when they implemented the ill-conceived open-admission plan in the name of educational “equality” and “fairness”*. The very same activist groups and politicians which favored open admissions for CCNY/CUNY came close to eliminating Stuy and other SHS until the NY state legislature passed the Hecht-Calandra law of 1972 which temporarily put a stop to their nonsense.
Their numbers are not made up, cobrat.
I agree Cobrat that the answer is not to throw away the tests or to lower the standards. However, there may be other ways to identify students in under-represented parts of the city. It is not clear that a test that can be prepped for with endless hours of study necessarily identifies all of the students that could be success at Stuy, Bronx Science or other top schools. It is not an easy problem to solve, however.
Here’s where that other reference came from: http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/31/only-ten-black-students-were-offered-a-spot-at-stuyvesant-high-school-this-year-but-is-this-a-problem/
The irony is that the content of the test hasn’t changed since I took it in the early '90s and most SHS students in my generation and older didn’t prep or only spent a few weeks or a month or two at most. A reason why I and other alums in my year and older were shocked to hear students prepping for years.
Also, there were a higher percentage of URMs in my graduating class and prior graduating classes going back to the 1970’s compared with classes starting in the late '90s and later.
What changed from what our alumni association and some alums who are current public K-12 teachers in NYC found/experienced is that the K-8 curriculum for most students was substantially watered down during the Bloomberg years*. Things have gotten so bad now students need to attend one of the specific handful of G & T schools which one needs to gain admission to from early elementary school onwards to be on track to cover the content before one takes the exam in fall of 8th grade. Even attending a G & T homeroom in one’s local middle school isn’t enough from what some alum teachers and parents of current K-12 students have found. The Asian-American students who prep for years tend to be from low-income families who didn’t make it into one of those handful of G & T schools. In short, the prep is meant as an attempt to remedy the curricular deficiencies of their poor resourced local neighborhood elementary and middle schools.
Another factor in the drop of URM representation is the increasing availability of scholarship opportunities specifically geared towards URMs with high academic potential to attend elite private boarding schools like Milton Academy, Andover, Choate, etc. In short, those opportunities drew off many URMs who would have been admitted to Stuy and other SHS back in my HS years and earlier.
Almost no one takes the MCAT cold. The difference is that after all students put sufficient time in preparing it, some could score better (sometimes much better) than others could, especially in the verbal aspect of MCAT. (It is rumored that even the science sections of MCAT, it is still partly a verbal test in disguise. But I do not know why.)
It is rumored that, unless a student has been a competitive student in most of his/her premed classes (“fluffy” classes do not count) at a relatively competitive school or program, he or she will likely have a hard time to score well on such a test.
As an example, a score of 40 is considered very very good (definitely better than 2400 on SAT.) A single data point here: A student could boost 11 points with preparation! (I once heard that the average boost of all “moderately successful” test takers could be as high as 10 points, I think. So almost no one dares to take the test cold.)
Adding ECs only favors affluent (predominantly white) students.
As Michael Bloomberg said in response to the criticism over the stuy admission criteria: the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t discriminate…
The number of minorities (“students of color” which means any non-caucasian, including asian) from any one area gaining admission to the elite boarding schools, whose total freshman class may possibly be about 150-200 students, is probably only a few, so its impact on the application of these students to stuy and others is probably negligible.
Regarding the athlete tangent, the percent varsity athletes is often highly negatively correlated with size,often more so than how much the college focuses on athletics or admissions advantages for athletes. For example, ~30% of students at Caltech are varsity athletes. That’s higher than ivies, Stanford, or just about any public; yet it’s my understanding that being an athlete has very little influence on admissions decisions at Caltech, and Caltech places less focus on athletics than most colleges we discuss here. Several smaller LACs exceed 40% athletes beyond just the previously mentioned Williams, such as Colby, Haverford, CMC, etc. While the big state schools where athletics is huge and has major advantages in admissions have much lower percentages. For example, Arizona State is under 2%.
It’s not as difficult as one might think to find ivy-caliber athletes in sports where one can not realistically hope to go pro after college such as cross country, rowing, swimming, etc. Many of the same personality traits that help one excel in such sports also help one excel in the classroom, and doing so is often important to them. For example, the median GSR grad rate among women’s rowing team members at Div I schools is ~95%. That’s tremendously higher than the median non-athlete grad rate in this group of schools. Similarly women’s rowing team members tend to have high HS and college GPAs, good test scores, etc. I rowed at Stanford for a period. I wasn’t a recruited athlete. Instead I walked on the team without previous rowing experience. Team members tended to be quite impressive academically. There was a recent article in the alumni magazine mentioning the majority of the current team are engineering school majors. I also was on the cycling club-team for awhile and had a similar experience. Students who are admitted to ivy type schools usually pursue various interesting activities out of the classroom and do well at them, rather than just spending all their free time studying and getting good grades. They are used to excelling academically while still finding enough time to pursue various non-academic activities, including things like athletics.
@cobrat wrote
@jym626 wrote
Last admissions round, Stuy admitted 10 black students. If exeter, deerfield, choate, trinity, horace mann, etc didn’t siphon off only 10 black students, stuy had the potential to raise the number of black admits by 100%.
My kids’ boarding schools had a number of outreach kids from NYC-- all URMs. My son was roommates w one.