<p>If you look at the straight stat of Jewish or Asian population at top schools, you may think it would be easier to be from that group but the opposite is true because so many more Jewish and Asian students apply to the top schools.</p>
<p>"By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.</p>
<p>As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising."</p>
<p>“In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.”</p>
<p>“it’s like being from the Northeast, there are a high percentage of kids from the Northeast at Ivies, but it doesn’t mean a prospective applicant should move there!”</p>
<p>That was my first point if you live in the northeast, you should move. It is a statistical impossiblity that a group that represents less than 2% of the population can comprise 30% of the Ivy’s incoming classes, without some other factors being involved. My point is simply if you are the parent of a unhooked white kid appling to an Ivy like Brown, 28% of 2011 class people of color, 9% international, quessing at 15% athletes and legacies, 30% Jewish (ethnic not religious), thats 83% take out say 8% overlap, so an ethnic group that comprises 70% of America has a shot at 25% of the open slots. I express no opinion other than it is interesting and should be realized when choosing an app strategy.</p>
<p>I thought we were beyond suggestions of a Jewish conspiracy. And since our family name is not Jewish sounding at all (our actual name from Russia as attested by people of met from my great-grandparents’ small town) and my kids check the box for no religion because they are both total agnostics I don’t see how any school would know they’re Jewish.</p>
<p>BTW: I know this post must seem confusing. Both my kids elected my surname.</p>
<p>I find this kind of mention of Judaism vaguely anti-semitic.</p>
<p>Yes, I do value education, enormously. It does come from the Talmudic tradition (what other culture has an initiation ceremony based on being able to read from a book), but I don’t think that’s why my S got a 34 on his ACT and 2200 on SAT without any studying.</p>
<p>And some of our relatives go to very lackluster schools and are not great scholars.</p>
<p>In fact, I can’t think of a worse demographic for acceptance anywhere than to be a white, Jewish girl from a LI public HS, especially if she is interested in the Humanities and not science. Many admissions folk came right out and admitted this to my D when she was disappointed at her admissions results.</p>
<p>The women’s colleges were saviors for her; there her credentials were not trumped by guys with lesser credentials to keep the “balance” (Her 96 average, 7 AP’s against a guy in her grade 91 average, 3 AP’s at Vassar.)</p>
<p>I am not bitter about this at all; she has had a wonderful time at Barnard and received a very rigorous and interesting education. I just can’t see how her being Jewish helped her at all or even came into the equation.</p>
<p>I’m sorry Windy, I don’t want to contradict anyone, but really, there is no advantage to being Jewish when applying to the Ivy League.</p>
<p>I don’t think being any religion is a hook for a non-religious college unless you want to write your essay about it. I haven’t read the books discussed above so I don’t know if either author would recommend if you’re really interested in another religion, converting while in high school so you can write an essay about it?</p>
<p>In Judaism, scholarship (studying the Torah and Talmud) has always been the most respected profession. In the old days, the Rabbis were always the philosophers, teachers, judges, lawmakers. There job was to study to attain wisdom and pass it on. As a result, Jewish kids (or at least boys) were always taught critical reasoning skills at an early age. Transport that tradition to the early 20th century and it’s not a huge leap to map those values into a more general education. Even poor Jews were taught to develop critical reasoning skills on par with the most educated elite. </p>
<p>Even today, I feel that my daughters’ Hebrew school has taught them those skills and values much earlier than they would have otherwise learn them in school and the impact is natural. For example, by the time they started preparing for their Bat Mitzvahs, they had already done a fair amount of text study - carefully reading biblical passages and asking and answering questions about what it really means to them. Of course we don’t do it for college admissions, it’s simply a byproduct of our tradition.</p>
<p>You can not learn to be smart, you are or you are not. Tradition has no impact. Reading to children at a young age is the only thing a parent can do to help a child learn. Lots of studies on that. I don’t understand the term antisemetic. Palestinians are semetic people. Stating known stats has no bias, they are simply the numbers.</p>
<p>Okay. You are born smart. Colleges look for smart kids. Should we send our kids to college as soon as they pass a smartness test? My kid was deemed smart when he was in first grade. Maybe I should have sent him to Harvard then? Oh. I did encourage him to read. But, although I’m not Jewish, a love learning is part of my family’s tradition, too.</p>
<p>Note that no one has claimed that Jews were smarter than other people. Merely that in their tradition, a love of learning was encouraged.</p>
<p>And Windy, for someone with several degrees, could you try to spell semitic correctly?</p>
<p>Actually, my dear friend, who is a cognitive psychologist, tells me that intelligence, including IQ is about half heritable and half environmental. He points out to me that one example of this is that oldest children usually have highest IQ’s (not always) because they spend more time with adults.</p>
<p>“Reading to children at a young age is the only thing a parent can do to help a child learn.”
Oh really? So taking children to cultural events, zoos, museums, different countries has no impact huh?
REALLY! And, pray tell, where do you get these "facts’?
Windy, I’m going to give you a hint, since you are a relative “newby” to CC. Most adults who post on CC, unlike many other forums, aren’t here to argue or make “black- white” declarations, looking for others to fight with. If that’s what your’e looking for, you might want to look for another forum, or at the very least, some less knowledgable targets than marmite-[9800 posts] or other veteran parents on CC, because such statements as you seem to love to make are of little interest to those who know better. Now if you are here to LEARN about the whole college application process, then you’ve come to the right place.</p>
<p>However you define smart, smartness is malleable over the course of childhood and over the course of a lifetime. I have done extensive research on this subject and have presented it at public seminars for my state association on gifted education. I’ll just post one link here that I find particularly helpful to parents on that issue. </p>
<p>Marite raises an important point here. Every thinking adult agrees that even though being smart is a necessary condition for being ready for college, it is not the SOLE necessary condition for being ready for college. Maybe among 100 young people who are equally smart at age 10, some of them gain much more preparation for all other aspects of being ready for college than others. Family influences that interact with a child after a child’s genome has already been set do matter somewhat in influencing who is best suited for what college.</p>
<p>Never cared in the slightest whether my kids were smart or not - figured all along and still figure they are just average in terms of ability - only cared if they were interested in learning and getting the opportunity to keep learning. I’m Scotch-Irish and so is my H and we have always sought learning environments where our kids could be with as many Jewish and Asian kids as possible - not because they are smart but because (duh!) they work really hard. And THAT is cultural, not inherited.</p>
<p>“Actually, my dear friend, who is a cognitive psychologist, tells me that intelligence, including IQ is about half heritable and half environmental.”</p>
<p>True, but only when factors in environment are outside the norm. Malnutrition, abuse, disease, educational deprivation, and the like. Very little of which you would find within a control group like children of posters to CC.</p>
<p>“You can not learn to be smart, you are or you are not. Tradition has no impact. Reading to children at a young age is the only thing a parent can do to help a child learn. Lots of studies on that.” </p>
<p>Nonsense. There are many things parents can do to encourage their kids to learn. Interestingly, though, the authors of Freakonomics say that reading books to children is not one of them. (Although I loved the book, I just can’t buy that one.) Anyway, their conclusion was that reading books did not correlate with higher test scores. Just owning books did. </p>
<p>“I don’t understand the term antisemetic [sic].”</p>
<p>From the Random House Dictionary: anti-Semitism: discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews</p>
<p>Post 163 implies that although Jews make up 2 percent of the population they make up 30 percent of Ivy enrollment, so other factors must be involved. Assuming those numbers are true, the only “other factor” is that a high number of Jewish students apply to Ivy League schools. ANYONE can apply to an Ivy League school. The actual percentage of APPLICANTS may in fact be higher than 30 percent.</p>