I truly believe that GENERALLY speaking, colleges truly try to admit students that will be successful and make it through. Potential “customers” would be turned off by a school, especially an elite one, that had a lot of students not make it back for sophomore year or not end up graduating. Yes, the standards might be different for people of different backgrounds, but I would think they do what they can to find the students that have what it takes to succeed. Succeed meaning graduate. As with anything else, there are exceptions to the rule.
@theloniusmonk thats is not true at all the majority of an endowment support is coming from those who were undergrads at the university not graduate students. When someone says they graduated from Harvard no one asks which grad school? they all assume it was Harvard college, which is generally much more difficult to get into than grad school.
I went to an enigma of a high school, which I didn’t realize was special until I graduated. Long after. But the school system I grew up in, I later found out, was sort of an “experiment”. Back in the late 60’s or early 70’s it merged two towns with diverse residents (but neither town had any poverty…all middle class pretty much, with some neighborhoods being much nicer than others, but still not poverty).
This was in Westchester County outside of NYC where there were and still are some amazing schools systems. While I was there I think my high school was about 40% African American. But we also had a lot of Asians. I am white and not Jewish but many of my friends were Jewish. We were a mixed group but we were all friends. Very little racial tension, if any by the time we got to high school (as we grew up with each other!) We went to the same parties (it was a small school…less than 200 in my class). Interracial dating was common (not always approved of by some parents but it was very common). In my opinion, the experiment worked. Oh, and those of us in the top 10 were also diverse…I think our Valedictorian was Mid Eastern, Salutatorian African American. I was third, a white Catholic, first generation Italian. After me came my best friend who was a WASP and lived in the best neighborhood in our town whose father was a big wig at a fortune 500. There was another woman in the top 10 that was African American and she (as well as the Salutatorian) are both Ivy League educated and are both DOCTORS today.
I went to a great college but not my first choice (and for the record some of my diverse peers did get into better schools than me I’m pretty sure because of AA, back then first gen didn’t count) whose only flaw was that it was very, very homogeneous. There were girls on my floor freshman year that had never met a Jewish person, let alone a black person, or any other URM. It blew my mind. They were wonderful people, but just, to no fault of their own, grew up in a bubble.
Anyway, my point for bringing this up is because of the point that was made earlier that students might be happier and/or more successful in more segregated settings. I don’t only disagree, I feel like I personally experienced the complete opposite of this. We just can’t seem to always get it right but we need to keep trying.
Since I left for college (I am in my early 50’s now) I have been disappointed to learn, present day more than ever, how far we still need to go with all of this.
That sounds like New Rochelle back then, @collegemomjam, or maybe someplace like Lincoln or Roosevelt in Yonkers (less likely)?
Those experiments in Westchester didn’t work out very well, especially after the lawsuits in the late 1980s. Take a look at the stats at places like Lincoln or Roosevelt now (or New Rochelle High School - the recent stabbing there was big news), and cast your mind back to what they were 35 years ago. And in general the most desirable Westchester districts today (Scarsdale, Rye Brook, Ardsley, etc.) are anything but “diverse,” at least as people usually think of the term. As always, people are voting with their feet.
If you are Italian American, I’ll just take a wild guess that your family moved out of the Bronx by the mid 1970s. Most who could, did. Had you stayed, I bet you would have had a very different high school experience and perspective.
@venus12, I doubt VERY SERIOUSLY that UCI is not accepting any Asian students this year. Probably less than 1/000 of 1% chance of that.
I do note, however, that the LAT featured an article a few years back reporting an interesting trend at the UC’s: In short, the article stated, rather flatly, that UC A’s were looking specifically for (ethnic) diversity as revealed, either directly or indirectly, on essays. I wonder if UCI might not be practicing a bit of that? Pure speculation there, however.
@epiphany I cannot “like” your post enough. This thread gives me a stomach ache.
@collegemomjam, ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^
Thank you, @picktails
@SachelISF no, not one of those towns but I was surrounded by the less diverse towns you mentioned.
I think our high school experience was a success in that those of us that went through it truly benefited from it. The district is still the same and draws from the same two towns. But I think it is less white than it used to be. You can read into that what you want…kind of sad because I truly think, as a white person, I am a better person because of this diverse environment that I grew up in. I think my timing in the school system was good. No one was the minority.
I had such great friends from all different backgrounds. I often think of the challenges in particular that African American teenage boys face and it makes me so sad. I had African American friends that were boys that would have done anything for me, they were such great friends and great people from great families. I wonder sometimes how they all dealt with life after they left the bubble we lived in, where the color of your truly didn’t seem to matter.
Anyway, @SatchelSF my dad grew up in the Bronx and my mom is from Yonkers. They moved out of Yonkers when I was a baby. Hadn’t they moved, I probably wouldn’t have even gone to college like all of my cousins that grew up in Yonkers and the Bronx and would have absolutely no interest in College Confidential, lol! Ironically, my sister and I were both top students and both have graduate degrees, yet my parents never even knew what SAT’s were and when I got my MBA, I had to explain to them what that meant. No complaints. I’m in a great place.
Education opened doors for me as a first generation student. I hope that others can benefit in the same way that I did. And even though I guess you could say I was technically a “victim” of AA because I didn’t get into the Ivies like some of my high school peers did (I have to admit, I wasn’t happy at the time and I actually did get into Cornell off of the waitlist but chose another college), I hold no grudge and still believe in its purpose and overall benefits to society. That’s just my opinion.
“One more person who believes everything he hears. The college knows who is qualified and who is not,”
I don’t know the reason for this statement about believing everything I hear, but the lawsuit is actual fact. Here is some info from a NYT article (12/01/17):
“Harvard has agreed to turn over years of confidential applicant and student records to the United States Justice Department, which opened an aggressive investigation into whether the university has systematically discriminated against Asian-American applicants, officials said Friday”
“and without access to every file of every applicant, no filer of any lawsuit would know who is comparatively more, less, or as qualified as anybody else”
See above, they will get applicant files, the NYT article said the DOJ asked for 160,000, and Harvard will grant that as long it’s done at Harvard to protect confidentiality.
"If a lawsuit filer has not read every teacher LOR and has the experience to understand what is being said by the teacher between the lines, then that lawsuit filer is utterly unqualified to determine the qualifications of who is admissible to an institution the filer is not a member of.
Well guess what, the DOJ will get access to this in addition to the adcom’s rating of each applicant which summarizes the application, test scores, LOR etc… The DOJ is not an ordinary lawsuit filer, they have of course thousands of lawyers and investigators, many educated at Harvard I’m sure.
The lawsuit – and others like them – are facts. The so-called phony discrimination is not a fact but a subjective evaluation, and I doubt that all of the supposedly Harvard lawyers (you’re assuming where they got their law degrees) will be stabbing H in the back. Wishful thinking, I’m sure – by you and many others, but the idea of the quality of a student body being controlled by outside institutions instead of those actually qualified to determine that is not necessarily something that will stand any test of time. And I agree with @picktails about the nauseating smell of this entire thread and its rather racist tone of Entitlement, backed up by ignorance.
Penn just ran an interesting article on Angela Duckworth, PhD professor of Psychology. Her book on ‘grit’ is well known, and her years of helping the disadvantaged achieve higher education goals is extraordinary. Again, it is not solely an issue of IQ for the top tier, as some repeat commenters here seem to wish for and cite studies of repetitively (most outdated.) I admit I am not an academic, only an avid reader. There is a massive amount of counter arguments and research regarding the IQ “studies.” But as I have said, the real world deals with real people, real behavior, real results. You can preach research all you want, but I’ll take human interaction any day. As stated by @epiphany, the use of certain data to support a world view is quite obvious here.
Many of us are not repulsed by the idea of affirmative action and see it as a different thing than, say, redlining to keep black families out of a white neighborhood or separate drinking fountains or other examples of discrimination based on race.
Maybe stick to “I” and not “we”.
You can speak for me, too, @OHMomof2. 
Nor am I repulsed by it, and 14 years of postings on CC demonstrate that. Those postings were pro-AA and against the racist sense of entitlement of the privileged based on arbitrary standards they have remotely set, without authority, for the elite colleges they assume they are “qualified” for.
Glad to see you are not being judgmental about people that hold views different from yours. 8-|
“but the idea of the quality of a student body being controlled by outside institutions instead of those actually qualified to determine that is not necessarily something that will stand any test of time.”
I agree and never said or implied otherwise. I’m not a fan of AA at least for colleges, I’d like to see preferences based on lower income, but private colleges should be able to select who they want.
No, in fact I am not being judgmental. Those who assume that Asians are inherently “smarter” than all other groups and are being “discriminated against” for their supposedly superior brains based on stupid test scores are the ones who are judgmental and who cannot tolerate a different viewpoint from theirs when it comes to how a U.S. college determines academic qualification. The viewpoint that is not being tolerated is the viewpoint held by the elite colleges in the U.S., which ironically such disgruntled individuals, disgusted with that viewpoint, demand to be admitted by on their terms, not on the terms of the colleges admitting or not admitting them in already extreme and already deserving proportions.
For many years – nay, decades – in this country blacks endured offensive talk about IQ scores. Now it’s just a segment of a different group complaining about their self-assessed superiority to whites, blacks, and apparently all others.
When I applied for college, I was treated as URM, but now my kid is treated as ORM. A perspective.
Stereotyping of any kind is bad even if it’s legal, and colleges may not discriminate but the files that have been released in previous cases show a lot of stereotyping of Asian American applicants by these colleges. Yes saying that blacks generally have low IQ is bad, but so is saying Asians can’t think or feel deeply.