<p>Andy Ferguson's new book "Crazy U", which chronicles his own son's adventures getting into college, has been generating a lot of discussion about the increasing mania surrounding "good college" admissions. Here is an interesting paragraph from the book:</p>
<p>In a way you had more human diversity in the old Harvard, a friend once told me, after a lifetime of doing business with Harvard graduates. His attitude was more analytic than bitter, however. It used to be the only thing an incoming class shared was blue blood. But bloodlines are a pretty negligible thing. It allows for an amazing variety in human types. You had real jocks and serious dopes, a few geniuses, a few drunks, a few neer-do-wells, and a very high percentage of people with completely average intelligence. Harvard really did reflect the country in that way back then. You still have a lot of blue bloods getting in, multigeneration Harvard families. But now a majority of kids coming into Harvard all share traits that are much more important than blood, race, or class. On a deeper level, in the essentials, theyre very much alike. Theyve all got that same need to achieve, focus, strive, succeed, compete, be the bestor at least be declared the best by someone in authority. And theyve all figured out how to please important people. Harvard grads disagree with this, of course. They like to say that the new Harvard represents the triumph of meritocracy. No, my friend said. Its the triumph of a certain kind of person.</p>
I know, it’s a damn shame that Harvard is no longer made up of exclusively rich people like this. Travesty! Lack of diversity!</p>
<p>And I think we can all trust each others’ anonymous “friends” about this issues.</p>
<p>On a related note, the author warned people to stay away from CC and is proud that his son is “majoring in beer” (his words) at a state university where he substitutes partying for studying.</p>
<p>In one sense what ferguson is saying makes sense. Harvard today prides itself on diversity, for now lets assume harvard’s “diversity” comes from URMs and underrepresented geographic areas/internationals. Sure these people have different skin color, and accents, but deeper down, like ferguson is saying, most are high achieving types with a sole focus on success. Here is where you can disagree with me and say, well thats a good thing, and it is, but in the sense of diversity, admitting a 1500 kids or whatever who all have this need for success, a value for grades, and so on and so forth, is less diverse than letting in you average people who all don’t have the same motivations. Maybe what I am saying doesn’t make sense, but I do kind of agree with ferguson on the fact that what people perceive as today’s typical harvard student is the same regardless of race or location, they are Type-A people, hard working, and successful. Again, thats not a bad thing, but if everyone is like that, its not really diverse either.</p>
<p>So work ethic and a drive for success are the only parameters that differentiate people? </p>
<p>Jimmy is a black, male, from Georgia, middle-class, and hard-working.
Rachel is Arab-American, female, from Michigan, upper-middle class, and hard-working.
John is white, male, poor, from South Dakota, and hard-working.</p>
<p>You think these people are all the same? Their backgrounds, life experiences, perspectives, political beliefs, aspirations, are all the same because they do well in school? I agree with the above poster’s assessment of this as “idiotic.”</p>
<p>The Ferguson book = win at multiple levels. Have to agree that the trend of preferentially admitting students of high intelligence had greatly damaged the level of diversity at Harvard. Now we no longer have people here majoring in beer. </p>
<p>"Then there’s Dad handing his procrastinator a book on successful college essays and watching the boy vacantly turn it over in his hands. “I thought of the apes coming upon the obelisk in the opening scene of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ " Dad writes. “He did everything but sniff it.” And here’s Dad encountering a mother who gloats that she and her daughter worked three solid months on the essays every day after school, plus weekends. “We did three months of work too,” he tells her, “in twelve days…””</p>
<p>Mr. Ferguson, what you have just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.</p>
<p>Harvard is only Harvard because it is made up of the type of ambitious and successful people it admits. If you want diversity in that you want “slackers”…then there are more than enough colleges to choose from. Harvard is but one university, it’s not perfect, but it certainly values the people who have their acts together.</p>
<p>They’re not really the same, despite your greater critical reading prowess. The first article argues that elite colleges should admit less successful people to be truly “diverse,” making the claim that all Harvard students are success-oriented and thus all exactly the same.</p>
<p>The second article doesn’t really have an overarching argument, but instead is a list of things that are wrong with elite education. Here’s a representative sample: </p>
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<p>Wow! According to William Deresiewicz, I am guaranteed to be rich. Fantastic.</p>
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<p>Fortunately, though, we Ivy League students have developed an ingenious method to dealing with this problem (because, of course, everything we do is ingenious). While it’s true that non-Ivy Leaguers such as Starbucks employees speak a different dialect of English, about half of them are usually literate to some degree. So if you hand them a note that says, in big block letters, “COFEE CREAM SUGAR” they can usually gather most of it. </p>
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<p>Yes, there are no poor people at elite colleges and any of the many statistics that say otherwise are obviously fabrications. </p>
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<p>Yes. As everyone on this website knows, all you really need to get into an Ivy League school is a perfect SAT and GPA. And, while we’re here, that’s really all that’s important. When someone introduces himself to me, he says “Hi my name’s Steve, I’m in Adams House and I have a 3.9 GPA.” If my GPA is less than his, I’m expected to bow in deference because one day he will be my boss. </p>
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<p>Yeah, I’ve always wondered why it’s only Ivy League schools that use an ID Card system…And the guardtower on Mass Ave with snipers is really frightening!</p>
<p>To be fair, the author does make some good points. He argues at one point that elite colleges tend to give more “excuses” in terms of extensions, expulsions, deadlines, etc. I think this is true. </p>
<p>However, in large part, this is an article playing upon outdated or fictional stereotypes for an audience that presumably wouldn’t know otherwise. I’m not sure if the issue is that Deresiewicz went to Yale in the early 80s and things were different then, or if it suits his rhetorical purpose to imagine that every student at an elite university lacks the ability to communicate with “normal people” because they’re infatuated with their own GPA. His premises are simply untrue and ridiculous.</p>
<p>The biggest problem I see with the admissions process at our elite institutions is that it does tend to reward people who are all about themselves, their grades, their test-scores,their leadership positions and their awards. That is why we are seeing leadership that ultimately cares more about taking care of themselves instead of the larger society, leadership that sees itself as elite and above “the great unwashed” and unintelligent humanity in general. Bingo- people on Wall Street, for example, who rob people of their retirement savings because they have always been told they are “better” and deserve a ride on the backs of people who are less smart, less hardworking and less talented and less deserving than they are.</p>
<p>Try get into Yale without an ounce of community service and see how that goes. Once there you are part of one of the most community involved campuses in the world. While Harvard is perhaps not so involved, it is almost certainly not less involved than the ‘average’ university.</p>