It sounds like the easiest way to find safeties that are great fits is not to get hung up on prestige and rankings.
^There are SO MANY gems out there. We wrapped college visits into trips, and everyone enjoyed doing them. So we saw many schools before wrapping up the last round recently. There are many, many schools with beautiful campuses and hardworking, amazing faculty, staff, and students. To me, families often do themselves a disservice by overly weighting “prestige” as a criterion. Yes, one can get a great education at Yale or Dartmouth, but so many other schools offer equal/similar educations and may very well be a better fit for a particular student.
Also, I hate Google’s auto-correct. It seems to be getting worse and worse.
“@northwesty So EDing those at 1-6 won’t help? Then why do some of the 6 keep EDs?”
ED does not exist at HYPS and M…
@shortnuke I heard of a kid that got into Notre Dame like his dad. He was top of his class. His parents have tons of money to pay for any school he wants. He still chose North Eastern like his brother. He was able to get some merit money. His dad was very successful in his career going there. He said he did not want to follow the money. Yet he still did. He was full pay at Notre Dame. He was very religious.
I’ve learned that extracurricular passion can make up for semi-lacking grades and test scores at Ivies and other top schools.
Discussions of UnderRepresentedMinorities “getting unfair breaks” spin quickly into ugly territory. But there’s so little to go around nowadays that people are looking for scapegoats to blame for what they’re not getting.
Only recently has it emerged that Jared Kushner’s father (an ex-con billionaire) bought his mediocre son’s way into Harvard for $2,000,000. Yeah, there are undeserved breaks given away daily, have been for centuries–and they were not going to URMs.
Affirmative action isn’t most important for the URM individuals who may be recognized now for their talents and abilities. It’s most important for our society, which has been starving itself of those important contributions of talent and ingenuity.
I’ve never had a Latino doctor have you? Can’t remember ever seeing one in any practice I’ve been a patient in. Yet the World Health Organization ranks U.S. health care at a lowly #38 in quality (and #1 in cost.) Perhaps we’ve been hanging on to our biases too long, maybe even at the risk of our own lives.
@IvyGrad09 - A $2,000,000 donation seems like a very deserved break.
@Zinhead Undeserved on academic grounds
$2 million was a long time ago, and it was long before Charles Kushner went to prison. It would take a lot more than that to get a Jared Kushner into Harvard now. People who bought their way into Harvard aren’t taking up a lot of space there.
I think Jared Kushner turns out to have been a fine “investment” on Harvard’s part. Not only did his father provide an immediate return to the university, but he has had the kind of career Harvard hopes its graduates have – he proved a competent successor when his father was convicted, he played a public civic and business role in the nation’s commercial capital, he had a big role in getting his father-in-law elected President, and he is a key figure in the U.S. government and its international relations. So what if he didn’t earn all of those opportunities on “academic grounds,” either. If he does anything worthwhile with them (and Robert Muller doesn’t send Kushner fils where he sent Kushner pere) Harvard comes out even farther ahead.
Yikes. Let me guess, a lawyer? First a distraction and then a justification for cheating.
My point remains that affirmative action is a valiant attempt to reset years of superstious belief that authority should be invested in a particular color, type, and gender. I hope as a culture we can question a system by which more and more of us are destined to lose.
Our confidence has been misplaced, as the dwindling middle class and our teetering economy suggests. Public discourse is less than civil and diplomacy for any meaningful aim is in peril.
That 1% can buy advantages in college placement undermines the principles of the endeavor we are engaging in: fairness, merit, a chance for intelligence to trump graft. There may be many justifications and excuses one can generate for why it’s ok to cheat, my point is that URMs are not the problem in the unfair advantages department.
You’re new here, but we have 1 thread for debating the role of race and ethnicity in college admissions. We’re not allowed to create any others or hijack existing threads for that conversation.
There’s no “hijacking” of this thread going on in what I wrote. The URM aspect of college admissions was introduced around #232, and further discussion included 282, 274, 298, 328, 327, 326, 325, 324, 323, 322, 352, 359, 358, 348, 321, 320, 333, 336, 335, and especially contentiously with 340, 342, 329, and a comment about a URM butterfly.
Some of those posts you listed are probably against the TOS. Continuing to talk about race is a good way to get this thread locked.
IvyGrad your analysis about Kushner seems more about politics than anything else. Where is your outrage about Chelsea Clinton, Malia Obama, or the Obamas themselves neither of which deserved admission to Harvard law School based on merit. How about John Kerry, George Bush, the Kennedy’s and cores of other powerful people. You may not like it but that’s the way it is and always will be. Only young snowflakes believe that everything in life is fair.
MODERATORS - This is the OP. I am saddened by the turn this has taken. May I request you close this thread?
Instead of closing, can we just stay on topic?
I reread post #100, which knocked a minority student protest, mocked student identity protests, and threw in a belittling of Rosa Parks’s legacy.
No one here objected.
My case about Jared Kushner had zero to do with politics. The topic I weighed in on, already long established here, was the nature of unfair advantages in college admissions.
@suzyQ7 – agree…staying on topic might help future applicants.