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<p>No, admissions officers should judge people individually based on their academic achievement and let the chips fall where they may. The reason for talking about group differences is to explain why the disparities produced by a race-neutral process are not a problem to be solved. You and my other critics are the ones who want to judge people according to their group membership.</p>
<p>^Then why are you so opposed to holistic admissions processes?</p>
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I am not entirely opposed to them. It’s OK to look at extracurricular achievements, although academics should be primary. But in practice “holistic” is a backdoor way to achieve racial targets at many schools, including Berkeley.</p>
<p>As if Berkeley achieves a racial target, LOL! Ever look at the student body at Cal or UCLA? It’s hardly racially balanced!</p>
<p>Academic achievement is a matter of playing the system, as it is. It takes little creativity to commit to the conformity. That utter conformity can be a liability. (Because, when you think about this as an adult, it IS a liability to limit yourself to the box.)</p>
<p>Yes, it is good to strive to achieve. But, the true bright lights can do more than “please” per the process that exists. The best apps reflect vision, maturity, awareness and on and on- that is so NOT limited to being Georgie Good Grades. </p>
<p>And, since Bel isn’t engaged in admissions, last I asked, he doesn’t know how race plays. </p>
<p>Bel, using the media articles and right wingers as proof just doesn’t hold up. You keep cycling back to your original point- that quantitative matters, that IQ is a pre-determinant, that “the box” is the superior measure.</p>
<p>It limits dialogue, is closed-ended. The links get in the way.</p>
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<p>It’s almost as though you don’t understand that almost every decision we make in life is made holistically. You didn’t rack up a spreadsheet and run an excel program on the women you dated … did you? I think it’s just that you’re uncomfortable because it requires using a skill set and intuition and considerations that you don’t have. So rather than be the big person and say - wow, I could learn something here, there are skill sets that I don’t have that are worthy of consideration and valuable – you dismiss them as unimportant and revert back to numbers-uber-alles. Look, we all overly value the skill sets we have and dis the skill sets we don’t. I can’t throw a ball, so it behooves me not to value that skill. But yours is a case of the extreme. You really don’t see what is so obvious to so many of us – that there are considerations other than strict numbers / GPA’s / SAT’s / IQ that need to be taken into account. And it makes me wonder – if you can’t see things that many of us, also very bright people, can see clearly – is it really you who is the superior one?</p>
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<p>I don’t believe this for a minute, given your history of posts. For example, if your son moved into the freshman dorm and was assigned a black roommate, it is very evident from the totality of your posts that you would assume that the kid’s scores were lower, he wasn’t as academically qualified, you’d be more likely to worry about the kid being a bad influence, dropping out and so forth. In the absence of ANY data about this hypothetical kid, who for all you know might be the school’s most brilliant admit this year.</p>
<p>Look at your recent posts about people with blue hair and tattoos! You used those as markers for (what you perceived as) a certain level of seriousness of purpose and maturity that you wanted / didn’t want your kids to hang around! Again, without the benefit of any data. That blue-haired kid who comes to visit your kid might indeed be a stoner slacker – or a budding genius with an immense work ethic. </p>
<p>Sorry, Bel, I don’t believe you. Your entire posting history consists of summarizing the averages of certain groups based on observable attributes, and then drawing conclusions about entire populations – “hanging” all of the members by whatever the average of that group is. You’re the one who harps on Asians > whites > blacks / Latinos. Not us. You’re the one who has criteria for who your kid can and should hang around with – and I don’t believe for one minute you’re hunky-dory with a black kid in that group.</p>
<p>Beliavsky is always whining about how wasteful it is to let people who are unprepared (and dark-skinned and/or poor) into college. But I have yet to see him be specific about what he thinks an acceptable alternative is, and whether it exists in the real world.</p>
<p>I agree with him this far: In an ideal world, not everyone should go to college at 18. Not every productive job in the world requires a college education, and not every kid is temperamentally suited to going to college. The problem is, there aren’t a lot of good alternatives anymore. Trades unions used to run really good apprenticeship programs, but – ooops! – we don’t really have unions anymore. The for-profit trade school market is fraught with exploitation and fraud, and is almost purely a device for hoovering up government subsidies. High schools do such an inconsistent job with their students that employers who shouldn’t need more than high school graduates (for jobs that 80 years ago went to kids with 8th-grade educations) are requiring AA degrees, or even BAs, in order to ensure themselves of sufficient skill levels.</p>
<p>So, Brandon’s hopes may have been dashed when his criminal justice degree didn’t land him a career-track job fast enough, but what would he have been doing if he hadn’t gone to college? Working variable hours for minimum wage and no benefits in retail, getting paid under the table as a day-laborer, or earning his living in the criminal economy? Or maybe he could have deployed a few tours in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . . (That’s not such a bad option. The military still DOES do a lot of training of non-college-grads. But it’s hardly an option that has never led to dashed hopes, and dashed lots of other things, too.)</p>
<p>The data seems to show that, on average at least, the Brandons of the world are still much better off going to college than not, although of course what is true for a population won’t necessarily be true for every individual in it. That the cost of college is going up faster than the benefits only means that, for increasing numbers of people, a college education may fail to help them out of poverty. But the alternative to a college education is simply that, poverty. </p>
<p>Beliavsky is apparently fine with that; I’m not.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, when you make statements like this:
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<p>it’s hard to take any of your positions seriously.</p>
<p>“But in practice “holistic” is a backdoor way to achieve racial targets at many schools, including Berkeley.”</p>
<p>Please tell me more as I would love to get my kids in that back door…I don’t think the entrance is very well marked.</p>
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<p>I agree. This is something that annoys me too. I remember encountering some resistance to facts I presented in this topic (last few pages) for seemingly perfectly reasonable analysis: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1360898-there-really-education-crisis.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1360898-there-really-education-crisis.html</a> </p>
<p>Just saying.</p>
<p>What we miss, in focusing on the Brandons (who really are meant to attract our attention to a point being made,) is the tales of the kids who do succeed. Each generation that lifts itself up, does so by increasing various skills.</p>
<p>There are, it is plain as day, kids in all classes who stumble. Including smart kids and those with educated parents. Even if we limited observations to some forms of measurable success, (eg, college graduation,) life has complex challenges and tasks- one could graduate with a top gpa, still fail at interpersonal relations, fail to manage finances, whatever. Life is a complex matrix.</p>
<p>Vladen, it doesn’t matter how many times I say that, ime, we judge them as individuals. The people who are focused on “race” are SO focused that they cannot imagine it other than what they already think, fear- and are somewhat obsessed by.</p>
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<p>It is actually a lot closer to balance with respect to UC eligible California high school graduates than to overall California high school graduates or overall California population. (However, there are some racial/ethnic variations in rate of applying to specific campuses, and matriculating to specific campuses, but these are the students’ choices, not admissions decisions.)</p>
<p>Of course, that does not indicate any use of race/ethnicity in admissions, since the expected result of a race/ethnicity-neutral admission process would be something like that.</p>
<p>the rub in that quote is that Bel says, “judge people individually based on their academic achievement.” Don’t be misled by “individually.”</p>
<p>We open a file, hoping for the best, hoping to be excited by a kid. If you assume all these great kids with rigor and stats are necessarily exciting to an adcom, you miss reality. There’s a multi-page app in which they get to present themselves. Many cannot do that well, because their goal has been the quantitative. Their hs status has been based on the hs box, academically, socially and in activities. Their “icing” often consists of those “box” activities, little sentiment, or evidence of perspective. follow the chance-me threads and you see it. Narrow thinking.<br>
Whose fault?</p>
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<p>I talked to the principal of D’s public school about course selection just last year when he asked how she was doing. We were working a charity sporting event together at the time. I’ve also had several in-person meetings with my kids’ guidance counselor and many email exchanges with that principal. </p>
<p>My D *IS *a tutor at her HS. There is a peer mentoring program in place for freshmen and any students who ask for help (or their parents do), and upperclassmen volunteer to be those tutors, and get credit for it. I know several families who have hired tutors for their kids when they were behind in a class or wanted to study for SATs, etc.</p>
<p>LDs…kids get tested for them at our school and outside of it all the time, and get IEPs (Individual Education Plan, I think that stands for).</p>
<p>We are an educated but not wealthy family in a pretty wealthy school district.</p>
<p>And for the record I agree that the OP makes no worthwhile point with the article.</p>
<p>The concern with unprepared kids going to college, isn’t that they may underperform, it’s that they may collect $10K+ in debt and then drop out without a degree. The real issue here is with undeforming schools and perhaps a sub-culture in some areas that is actively counter to education. </p>
<p>“Working class” families is a horrible tern to use. Plenty of working class families stress education, that’s why the % of kids going to college is at a record high.</p>
<p>Popping popcorn and pulling up a seat…</p>
<p>Another day…another article link…same old same old. I’m tired of it too, some old guy!</p>
<p>“too much cheerleading for the notion that everyone should go to college”</p>
<p>So what, Beliavsky? Is that really so detrimental to society? Would we be better off if we said “only upper-middle class need apply, preferably white or Asian”? </p>
<p>See, Beliavsky that’s the thing about a FREE society: tolerating the quirks of others. Like fat women wearing bikinis. Full-body tattoos. Socks with sandals. Poor brown people trying to go to college. </p>
<p>Welcome to freedom, bud.</p>
<p>Overall only 58% of first-time, full-time undergrads completed their degrees in six years or less in the most recent survey from the National Center for Education Statistics.</p>
<p>[Fast</a> Facts](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40]Fast”>Fast Facts: Undergraduate graduation rates (40))</p>
<p>And the highest-performing group, Asians, only completed their degrees 69% of the time. Beliavsky, maybe you should concern yourself with the 31% of Asian students who are not living up to their “superior” status.</p>