Just a few comments ivygrad. While everyone wants every child to have a good childhood the plain truth is that your issues sound mostly the result of decisions made by your mother the what appears to be the lack of a contributing father(because in your post you never mentioned him). You talk about what additional things you think society should do but again from your post society appears to have provided you with many benefits.
multiple top schools recruited you and offered you a full scholarship
your mother was offered aid which she refused
you appear to have gained admission to an ivy league school in part because you were latino
When you say society should do more what exactly would you propose? To force someone like your mother to do things against her free will? As for “people being in peril for who there are”, I’m not sure what you are referring to. I live in coastal California and it’s simply untrue to claim any of the people in your list are in peril or targeted for anything. Very progressive politicians have been in charge for many years and control every lever of power in government and all the universities. Please keep in mind that just a couple of generations ago your experience was the norm in America. Both of my parents grew up poor and lived through the depression. No one offered them help or a free ivy education. It was the same for tens of millions of Americans. By every measure things are far better and much more generous today and no government program can ever address the issues you discuss in your post. It sounds like your childhood could have been better and I wish you the best of success with your fine education.
Brown IS a very elite school, however you define that. And most would agree that these are too: Amherst or Vassar or Vanderbilt or Pomona or Swarthmore or Pitzer or Wesleyan or Tufts or Davidson or William and Mary or Cooper Union and on and on. A list of acceptance rates for men v women at these schools have been posted many times, they speak for themselves for any who can comprehend.
Well there’s an interesting idea. Women who want an edge in admissions could identify as men…? Vice versa at that little handful of schools where women have an edge? I wonder if this has happened yet, or will.
Emotion and personal feelings are not a substitute for misunderstanding basic probability and statistics. Rejections from a student’s first choice college is understandably upsetting to both the parents and the student and quite naturally people look for some other explanation rather than the fact that there are just too many highly qualified applicants for most simply good students to stand out.
@SAY I was not recruited in any sense I understand. I am not an athlete and no one searched me out. I write here on this website because I can write and testify, for what good it can do. Most people I grew up with can’t.
My main point: there is indeed a basis for the “Hispanic” category in some cases, contrary to #14–who asserts a favorite misconception.
My other point is that college is already too late to save most underprivileged kids. We need to think about that sheer waste of human talent as a social shortcoming–instead of being focused on the personal details in each case. (Which makes some feel comfortably superior, as if no social change is necessary.)
Focusing on whose mother or father is to blame is just the kind of shrug by which thousands upon thousands of kids are thrown away. Think they starve kids in Iceland to make that kind of point?
My mother was never “offered aid.” She was never able to take time off work to spend ironing out things with a bureaucracy that wants to say “No.”
The scope of the problem is huge. It is getting bigger.
Is it too obvious to point out that admission rate for men are higher because most students desire a reasonable gender balance and fewer men apply? In most cases, anyway.
There is an overwhelming demand for gender balance in a college experience and the colleges are responding to that.
As a mother of girls I am certainly ok with that.
It is NOT male bias-white or otherwise.
Of course it isn’t. That’s exactly why colleges do it. I personally get it - neither of my kids would have wanted to go to a school with a heavily skewed gender ratio. My D eliminated several from her list for that reason (ones where she would have had the gender hook, in fact).
Kids want a certain atmosphere, to be able to find people to date, have a variety of friends etc.
Many kids want racial diversity and/or not to be one of very few “whatever race” at college and IMO that is also great. My kid also turned down some colleges she felt had too many white people.
I just read an article about the discrepancy in PRESCHOOL.
[quote]
Inequality in America is apparent by age 3: Most rich kids are in school, while most poor kids are not
The inequality that begins before kindergarten lasts a lifetime. Children who don’t get formal schooling until kindergarten start off a year behind in math and verbal skills and they never catch up
Post 1176 pretty much sums up the situation. Simple M/F admission rates do not tell the complete story. A parent’s own personal anecdotes doesn’t provide any support for the original statement which was that being male was a hook at Brown. This statement is simply false. Ivygrad has a very strong personal story but what he’s asking is beyond the scope of what is possible. No government program can ever provide that type of support. People differ in every category and ability and can never be made equal. It’s part of living in a free society which just happens to be the best that has ever existed on the planet. Not perfect but the least worst by far.
You’re confusing the College Board’s requirements for NMF with college admissions. The Common App doesn’t specify 1/4. There’s no mention of race or ethnicity on my birth certificate, so I don’t see how that could prove or disprove Hispanic status. Ultimately, what race/ethnicity you select comes down to an honors system. The only category, which is rigorously verified, is American Indian or Alaska Native, where the universities may ask for tribal status.
Which parent is providing personal anecdotes as evidence for a hook or lack thereof @SAY ?
Lots who claim their ORM child was discriminated against, in this thread. Anyone else?
Of course that’s true. We KNOW athletic recruits get in with average lower academic stats because that data is public for many college programs. We can only wonder what a higher admit rate for one gender means at MIT or Brown.
While Colleges may like to have a gender balance their primary motivation for having at least 50% male is skewered more toward having more Alumni donation in the future as men earn significantly higher than women on average.
Brown IS a very elite school, however you define that. And most would agree that these are too: Amherst or Vassar or Vanderbilt or Pomona or Swarthmore or Pitzer or Wesleyan or Tufts or Davidson or William and Mary or Cooper Union and on and on. A list of acceptance rates for men v women at these schools have been posted many times, they speak for themselves for any who can comprehend.
But you cannot claim from just the acceptance rates if it’s an advantage, you’d have to dig in to the qualifications to see if the men or women getting in were less qualified. Here are quotes from HMU and MIT adcoms:
“We are not choosing among qualified and unqualified candidates,” says Thyra L. Briggs, vice president for admission and financial aid at Harvey Mudd College, where women are admitted 2.5 times as often as men."
“At the uber-competitive Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the acceptance rate for women is twice as high as it is for men. But “it’s a false assertion that it is easier to be admitted if you are a woman,” Dean of Admissions Stuart Schmill told us in an email. As evidence that accepted women are no less qualified than the men who get in, Schmill points out that once they’re on campus, women have a higher graduation rate.”
Now if you’re point is that adcoms aren’t forthright about how a class is admitted and how the process actually is, that’s a reasonable one. That less qualified females get into MIT vs their male counterparts and less qualified males get in to Brown vs their female counterparts. While I have limited sample size in the bay area, it’s more than anecdotes, and the female and male applicants that are admitted into Brown, MIT, Cal Tech are very well qualified.
That just sounds like word play. Are they saying out of the pool of all applicants that are qualified to go to HMC or MIT that the gender balance is exactly 50% it’s just they get a whole lot more unqualified male applications that throw off the numbers? Of course not, they are still extended x number of offers to females out of a population of y and x number of offers to males out of a population 2y (or some more exact number).
And let’s not talk about what makes one qualified.
The fact is, women have a higher 6 year graduation rate, period. This is not unique to MIT.
The 6-year graduation rate was 62 percent for females and 56 percent for males; it was higher for females than for males at both public (61 vs. 55 percent) and private nonprofit institutions (68 vs. 62 percent). https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40
So now it seems we all agree that the statement that being male is a hook at Brown was factually incorrect. An athletic recruit with a likely letter has greater than a 95% chance of admission to Brown. 89% of un-hooked males are rejected. This appears settled.
JK had a 100% chance of acceptance to Harvard. Likely letter athletes have near 100% chance of admission. 89% of males are rejected. Most people would not lump them together but hey it’s a free world.