For many reasons living your life as a URM/low income/1st Gen relative to opportunities and experiences isn’t “fair” either nor is it particularly debatable.
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As a former 1st gen and low income student myself, I know it isn’t fair. That said, whether AA is the solution is debatable (it’s actually debated all the time.) I personally think AA is a public good in most situations, but also see the merits of having some situations where it doesn’t occur.
I actually think we are agreeing😀. I wasn’t saying AA is non debatable, I was specifically saying the lived experience of being URM, low income or first gen often presents challenges, obstacles and experiences that aren’t fair and should be considered.
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Given your post, you might enjoy the “Shame Deficit” by Brookings Senior Fellow Richard Reeves, published in The Atlantic last month. A few extracts:
It’s odd.
The United Kingdom has a hereditary monarchy and a hereditary aristocracy, but strong norms against nepotism in education and the workplace.
The U.S. is a republic, a nation founded on anti-hereditary principles, where nepotism is not only permitted but codified—most obviously in the practice of legacy preferences in college admissions. My eldest son has two parents who went to the University of Oxford, but if that fact had made a difference to his own chances of getting in, both he and we would have been appalled, as would all the other applicants. (He did not get in.)
…
As a transplant from the U.K., I’ve been repeatedly struck by the weakness of norms against nepotism and opportunity-hoarding in the American elite, not least among those who would describe themselves as liberal. Few feel any shame in sending their children to expensive private K–12 schools or providing internship opportunities to friends and family. Even many parents who profess a desire for a fairer society appreciate that legacy applicants get an admissions bump equivalent to an extra 160 points on their SAT. Parental interest is often seen as an unalloyed virtue. Blood is thicker than justice.
…
Up until the late 1950s, Oxford colleges gave a very clear preference to the sons of “gentlemen” (i.e., aristocracy) and of alumni. But in the more egalitarian postwar era, this kind of privilege became socially toxic. There was rhetorical pressure from politicians, certainly. The postwar Labour governments of the 1940s and ’50s were determined to make society less constricted by social class, and Oxford and Cambridge were important symbols in this crusade. As early as 1949, Walter Moberly, the chair of the University Grants Commission, lamented the role of Oxbridge in “buttress[ing] the existing social order.” But it was the colleges themselves, sensing a shift in public and political opinion, that ended legacy preferences.
In the U.S., the history of legacy preferences is the other way around. Elite colleges adopted legacy preferences in the early part of the 20th century, largely to keep down the number of Jews filling the lecture halls. In the 1960s, the dean of admissions at Yale, R. Inslee Clark, reduced the weight of legacy status and halved the proportion of legacies in the freshman class, from 24 to 12 percent. Outrage ensued. The conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. complained that without legacy preference, “a Mexican-American from El Paso High with identical scores on the achievement test … has a better chance of being admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint Paul’s School.” Clark lost his fight, and today legacy preferences are treated as business as usual.
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Thank you! I will check this out.
I do think that if the Supreme Court strikes down AA in admissions, that colleges will start to be shamed for LADC (aka affirmative action for white people) and will eventually eliminate it. Although maybe the preference for athletes will continue.
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This is the third episode in a series Freakonomics radio is doing on higher education. I listened to it on the way home yesterday. Steven Dubner interviews the President of Brown University. Anyone else hear it? Thoughts? It was one of the most awkward interviews I’ve heard. There were some tough questions and I, personally, did not think said president answered them very well. I’m sharing it on this thread because I think the media is a big contributor to the frenzy (for a lack of a better word) in our society surrounding the Ivy League and other elite institutions. Freakonomics and Dubner also have a bias of inviting experts onto their show from these institutions. When all you hear or read in the news is the Ivy League you are left wondering if there are any other universities out there worth going to.
As far as Asian stereotypes, the first time I came across them was on CC. My kids go to a majority Asian school district and their friends are also majority Asian. They are all unique humans that would bring diversity of personality, interests and intellectual acumen to any college campus. Their parents do seem to have a lot more stress regarding college admissions but I have never truly understood why other than they want the best for their kids and their family. All these kids are wonderful, however, so these parents are doing something right even though many of us think that they might not be playing the college admissions game right. And the kids are loved and supported. Once that’s in place, the rest pales in comparison. I’ll have to watch try harder. Even though I don’t share the desire for my kids to attend these private, elite institutions (I’m actually against it) it might help me understand why so many of their friends’ parents share this desire.
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This is, in fact, not true. There are widespread issues with mental health of students in the UK because their exams are so high stakes. So not only the kids who want to attend Oxbridge are stressing out, but far more students:
So no, the idea that British kids are not losing their minds over the stress of attending university is patently untrue. Moreover, it’s far worse. The GCSE determine everything about a kid’s higher education. A bad exam day, and that’s it, 10-11 years of hard work is out the window.
So would people PLEASE stop idealizing the UK system as “being better” for the mental health of their kids? It is, if anything, worse.
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I listened to all 3 episodes on higher education and thought the series was reasonably balanced. I enjoyed the discussion with Ruth Simmons but felt Morton Shapiro was less thoughtful/convincing in his defense of the current system. Dubner also extolled the UC system, particularly in being able to adjust (i.e., expand) to accommodate higher student populations, whereas he intimated that the tippy tops were more interested in preserving their “luxury goods” status/scarcity value.
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Was Ruth Simmons in the first episode? She was a pleasure to listen to. Very inspiring.
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That’s completely false, as these exams take place over an entire month and there are multiple modules (sat over multiple days) for each subject. Yes, they are high stakes but the exams are spread out so that no one exam (or even a few) will sink a student’s future.
Moreover, students can retake the exams (more likely to happen with A levels, as these results form the basis of university offers).
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Yes and in the unlikely event you were unaware she proceeded Chris Paxson as President of Brown having served in the role for 11 years.
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This I agree with, in terms of the schools that most CC threads are about. It’s about the Ivy League. The Top 10. Top 20. Hey, let’s be super open-minded and consider the Top 50! Except that those schools have 3-5% acceptance rates. Or maybe up to 20%. And these are the only schools that far too many families consider “acceptable.” So there’s the continual rat race to take more APs and college courses and extracurriculars and starting their own nonprofits or businesses and doing 20,000 other activities. And the end result is either some definite fabrication or there are children running on an ever-accelerating hamster wheel trying to achieve the goal of attending an “acceptable” college. And it is breaking way too many of our students, whether they “make it” to the desired college echelon or not.
As it was mentioned upthread, students and families need to start looking far more broadly at colleges. I believe that most colleges accept most of their applicants. Those colleges are looking for students that they think will succeed at their college. So if the grades and/or standardized test scores show that one is likely to be successful, then they’re in! Colleges also like to have a variety of extacurriculars, but they don’t expect applicants to cover all of them as individuals. So they’re happy to grab someone who was on the school paper, or a baseball player, or the ubiquitous oboe player mentioned on CC. But applicants don’t need to be the editor of the paper, captain of the baseball team, AND 1st chair oboist while maintaining superlative academics.
Someone said on here that they had read a study showing that most college students end up being happy with their college experience. It wasn’t most college students at Top X universities…it was at colleges generally. I think that if families and students started investigating options outside of the Top X, that they would find many options where they could be happy and be happy while growing up without the stress of needing to be superhuman to end up “successful” in life. There are certainly students who love and thrive on their countless achievements & extracurriculars. But I think it is a very small minority of students who are actually doing all of this STUFF because they truly find pleasure in it. The rest are hoping to make it before they are completely broken down.
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No competitive college admission system is going to be stress free. An exam may be stressful for a period leading up to the exam, but not for years like we have in this country. An Oxbridge interview may also be stressful for a candidate who makes it to that level mostly during that hour of interview and maybe some finite number of hours leading up to that interview but there’s only so much an interviewee can prepare for. Most importantly, no other competitive college admission system, including UK’s, is generating progressively and significantly more stresses and more complaints among students, each and every year, year after year, with no end in sight.
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But the process isn’t stressful for years for most students in the country. It is only stressful for years for those that choose to set their sights on the top schools. If high school students did not feel this pressure to go to colleges with minuscule admissions rates then they wouldn’t be so stressed out.
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It is very stressful in the US for most UMC unhooked students, as the process is not transparent and thus can not be accurately assessed. It is not stressful for most UMC kids in the UK; they know what they need to do to get in to Oxbridge and have a better understanding of their relative ability to accomplish that goal.
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What is UMC?
Upper middle class
United Methodist Church was my best guess😀
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That too, but the first definition covers most of the CC community!
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That was before USNWR, before Common App, before ED/ED2/REA/SCEA, before the EC arms race, before TO/TB, before Score Choice, before superscoring, before mass mailings (targeted or not), when grades weren’t as inflated, and when high test scores actually meant something.
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