Would it be possible @skieurope, @happy1, @Gumbymom for this thread to be divided so that people who have already had some very thoughtful comments on the issues of privilege and their effects on schooling can have those posts all together as the start of a new thread, while this thread can continue on the issue of college rejections?
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So why were only some posts deleted and not others?
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#6
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Same, my D waitlisted at 5, accepted WL at 4 of those 5. Has already committed to another school that she seems excited about and at this point might only realistically consider 2 of those waitlisted schools if either comes through. On one hand the waitlists are painful, on the other she is proud that she “made the cut” for these schools but that there just weren’t enough spots… in her mind that was better than an outright rejection.
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good luck to her!
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OP here. Wow this took a turn. I can see how “privilege” comes up, because the modern narrative has taken the ideas of “merit” and “talent” and turned them into something that isn’t just a fabrication, but also a red letter A.
It was sometime in the past few days I stumbled on what I would call a piece of gibberish journalism claiming to explain why a society that seeks to achieve meritocracy is damaging. To that, I would say simply that America was - in the middle central mass of the curve - a meritocracy for over a century, and did far better than the competing systems. As economists or sociologists, there is no disputing the positive feedback loops that should be more prominent the more meritocratic a society becomes. If there is an incongruity, lying to youth and investing them in a system of meritocracy, when in fact the day comes to cash in the shares, they get the Bernie Madoff treatment is tantamount to a massive fraud on our youth. And not just any youth, but the ones who generally speaking have done the most to cultivate their gifts.
Certainly privilege plays a role in the cultivation of those talents. In my own case, I was a pretty good swimmer, but attended a high school without a swim team. This was at a time when, among the entire population over many years, there was only one case where someone had moved high schools to the one school with a swim team (actually their parents gave the HS swim coach there legal custody of their daughter so she could swim on his team as a “resident” of that school district - how’s that for a pandora’s box of issues). Now, I have a daughter about to enter high school herself (not the candidate that was subject of this post). She is an outstanding swimmer and is likely to break at least 2 high school records as a freshman. So you say to yourself, of course if we had not moved out of District X, she would not be looking at the front end of a potentially significant “college hook” from swimming. A hook that I obviously did not enjoy, not so much from lack of talent, but lack of so-called privilege. What we used to call “opportunity”.
Getting back to the applicant that was the subject of this post, the applicant faced a number of what would be fair to call “opportunity restrictions”. She finished BC calculus as a sophomore and had no other math classes to take at her school. Should her family have paid for a Northwestern virtual class in multi-variable calculus? They chose not to. That was in part due to a need to recoup the cost of 1.5 years of private school which went well academically (she probably held #1 GPA at that school when she transferred out) but nonetheless it left applicant well below where she would have been in the class ranking at this public school, which is deeply invested in grade inflation to ensure its athletes look like scholars with 4.0 GPAs. I am being blunt. My own daughter has been and will continue to be a beneficiary of this system.
When you look at how our system is supposed to measure merit, it has always been a hybrid system. There was the standardized testing. There was the “EC factors” that demonstrated aptitude in terms of time invested in grades vs time invested in life. But as we embrace the sickening narrative that meritocracy itself, not the Bernie Madolf parents selling meritocracy to their kids, is hopelessly flawed, and instead embrace a “social justice” narrative, we are basically accepting that the system will rather than balancing between objective and subjective reads of a candidate, instead simply rely on AC social engineering to optimize their own ideas of who is deserving and who is not deserving.
Like most of society, it seems that the system has seized up under information failures and more general market failures. We can talk about existential things like defining success and the importance of humility, but when it comes right down to it, we continue to be swayed by a narrative that its not “what your know”, but “who you know”… something that in my opinion, as I think I’ve stated above, gets you a society full of lawyers who are incompetent at reading case law, doctors who are better at golf than recognizing the outlier result on a test the first time it shows up (or if they recognize it, knowing what to do about it!) But we are really good at putting balls in the hands of people who jump the highest and throw the farthest.
Back in grade school I had a teacher by the name of [redacted by moderator]. He was a middle-aged “retired” cop who had gone into teaching under some program NYS had for cops way back when. Anyway, he used to really dig into us, saying that society needed good doctors and lawyers, not people who were good at catching and throwing a ball. That of course included people who could swim fast, which is why the idea of moving to another district to swim never even crossed my family’s mind.
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I’m unsure why you’re still complaining when the applicant you talked about got accepted to a great school for her interests and music with UR, and OSU, USF are not exactly slouches either.
Now I’m wondering why they even bothered to apply to those schools if they’re just going to stick their nose up at acceptances?
There are a LOT of really good students out there competing for “lottery” schools. That’s the way life is. Those who got accepted weren’t picked from the bottom of any school’s graduates.
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So at the end of the day, this seems to have been an “asking for a friend post,” which we discourage. Maybe it wasn’t; the OP tried to be vague about the student but managed to call out past teachers by name, which is a no-no Partly for seeming to be an AFAF post, but more importantly because I think we’ve exhausted the conversation, I’m closing.
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