Since I’ve twice or three times been misquoted here, I copy/paste what I actually said as an aid to those with poor reading comprehension.
You’re welcome.
And what you actually said implies that you think in the absence of racial preferences, blacks will go to “yeehaw directional state.” So no, I did not misquote you, and I don’t apologize for calling you out on such absurdity.
@fabrizio like I said, reading comprehension issues. Maybe a little less STEM and a little more English is in order in your case?
That certainly means a lot coming from a person who deliberately misinterprets discussions for the sole purpose of refusing to admit the uncomfortable truth that there is evidence in favor of mismatch and who obstinately refuses to acknowledge that she herself quoted the reason why a research paper made a specific decision that she disagrees with. So pot, meet kettle.
Good grief.
@Fabrizio: Apology accepted, and thanks for the tip about Georgia Tech. I’ll have to check that out.
OHMom you do realize that not many poor blacks go to Yale or any of the elite schools. The kids you are advocating are upper middle class blacks and URMs. Less than 10% of the student body at elite colleges are middle to low income students.
So although poor outstanding blacks are not going to elite schools in droves, they are going to schools that are much superior to "“yeehaw directional state”.
If elite schools do give huge preferential admission treatment to any student, I hope that they do what the Posse Foundation has been doing to make sure those students have the support they need to persist and graduate.
^^ Columbia has a very strong financial engineering program.
I was just adding it to your list of top schools for quant.
Zeke please do not use isolated anecdotal evidence, the gist of the racial preference issue is with collective data. We don’t know what “hook” the examples you use have or what the circumstances where. If the average SAT of accepted Asians were 2150 and the average of accepted whites were 1950, then we can talk but not isolated cases. For every one you mention, there are hundreds more with similar stats that were rejected. That can not be said of blacks who score 2150. At that level, black acceptance rate is near guaranteed.
VOR, Understood. However, without being on the inside, we don’t know how many of the individual Asian SAT scores were 2050 or 2150 and how many were 2350s, we just know the averages. Yes, I have see lots of evidence in the acceptance threads of Asians and whites getting in with much lower stats than Guywith. Again, I am NOT making some argument for racial preferences! I am simply saying that Guywith may never have made it into Harvard, because others were more interesting…other Asians and whites, that is. We don’t really know why they made the decision that they made. So, it is unfair for him to assume that a URM stole his spot. If no URMs were even in the picture, there is still no guarantee that Guywith would have been in.
@Zeke you seem like a really decent fellow. Good luck to you and your kids! I wouldn’t worry about sending your kids to a top school. My daughter who’s at Harvard has repeatedly told me that just about every single kid who’s there belongs there. I went to a top Ivy years ago and the attitudes were different then but things have changed for the better.
@highego At Stuyvesant, where they have scores of high performing kids, schools such as Harvard rely heavily on counselor and teacher recs to tell them who the ones they should take and who to reject. Apparently, your classmates that got in were given much stronger recs than you regardless of their race.
Thanks, Falcon, but I’m a gal, and not just recently 
Sorry! I edited the autocorrect to really not recent. I’m on my phone. Also, sorry I should have said person but now I know to say woman. Anyway, best of luck to you. I like your demeanor.
Crazy, I just had to go look it up. I guess they’re on a one year hiatus now. Haven’t seen them live since around '89.
The thing about be being BLACK is that you face discrimination every single day. If you’re white, you don’t. Its as simple as that (+ white privilege). Affirmative action is a way of saying, “these people face hardships throughout their lives that no one else experiences, let’s be a little more lenient with them”.
@0br0123 No one else except blacks face discrimination? What about white cops, they can’t do their jobs without someone discriminating against them.
@albert69 No one race on Earth has faced discrimination as much as those with African descent, yes. And if by “doing their jobs right” you mean killing innocent black teens then yes. I really can’t see you’re argument here.
@0br0123 Really? What about the Irish people that were forced to live in poverty because only the crummiest factories would hire them? What about the Jews who have not only been enslaved multiple times but were killed in the hundreds of thousands during the holocaust? What about the Chinese workers that faced incredible discrimination in California during the gold rush? What about the Japanese that our government forced into camps after Pearl Harbor? That “white privilege” sure helped all those people. What about the American Indians?
The only people who complain about race in college admissions are people who are bitter they didn’t get into their dream school and want a scapegoat so they don’t have to feel as though they personally didn’t work hard enough or aren’t smart enough. And, for the record, in many scientific communities, the IQ test is widely-regarded as an ineffective way to gauge intelligence.
Colleges designate places for URM applicants. If a black student got in with lower stats than an white student, the black student didn’t “take” the spot of the white student. He took the spot of a black student with lower stats.
I was raised in a culture that expected much of me. College was an expectation, not something to be dreamed of. SATs and grades were incredibly important to my peer group during adolescence. I have the luxury of growing up in an environment that enabled me to thrive. This idea of cultural influence on personal achievement transcends economic barriers. In fact, poor Asians consistently do better on SATs than upper-middle class or wealthy blacks. Obviously, Asians are not inherently smarter than blacks. When achievement is expected and encouraged, you’re going to achieve more. That’s why I won’t be bothered if a black or Hispanic student with lower stats gets into my dream school with lower stats than me and I don’t. The cultural affront to academic achievement that occurs in many black communities is one less hurdle that I had to clear in order to get to the point where I am today.