<p>Mike99, what kind of family did you grow up in? Were your parents druggies who didn't encourage you at all in your education or something? I grew up /seeing/ poverty too, and I realize not caring about education is in part cultural, but I still have empathy. And I still think equal access to education and health care are /huge things/ everyone deserves access to. And you know what? Not everyone is born with the capabilities to succeed at a top college. I don't think intellectual hierarchy is any better than racial hierarchy. People who work minimum wage jobs often work very hard, and society couldn't function without them. And that /is/ something I know first hand.</p>
<p>It also does not make sense to talk about an ethnicity all as one group. I /can/ tell you that Asian immigrants are often (not always, but often) reasonably well-off people in their home countries, whereas this historically has not been the case for Hispanics and blacks (who were brought over mostly as slaves).</p>
<p>you can go back to trying desperately to fit in by adopting a (pseudo)free-thinking, liberal attitude promoting reverse discrimination becuase it's politically correct. guess what dwincho? youre not impressing anyone. your silly analogy that you probably heard from your mom is way off-base and completely unapplicable. AA in the college admissions process does nothing but put the white male at a disadvantage. i have seen it first-hand, as i am sure you have. there is no justification in allowing a black/hispanic male from a wealthy family to achieve "National Achievement Scholar" status with a score of a 170 on the PSAT while denying a poor white male the achievement of "National Merit Finalist" with a score of 209 on the PSAT. if any AA programs exist, they should exist with socioecomics as the discerning factor, not race. in allowing skin color to give such an advantage to minorities in the admissions process, racial discrimination grows, not diminishes. in witnessing a black male from my class with a 2100 and ranked in the third decile and no EC's get accepted to princeton while our valedictorian with a 2400 (and SC president) get rejected from princeton, i can say with confidence that such programs do nothing but promote hatred and racism more than ever, forcing the gap between black and white to be even larger.</p>
<p>colleges /do/ help out low-income whites as well. nearly all the elite colleges will look at the opportunities students had, and then look at what they did with them. someone on CC had a story about how Harvard attempts to recruit low-income whites.</p>
<p>"forcing the gap between black and white to be even larger"</p>
<p>This is a lot of common rhetoric from those with your political position. I guarantee you things have not gotten worse. They've gotten better gradually since the 1970s, in terms of minorities graduating from college and graduate school. </p>
<p>"your silly analogy that you probably heard from your mom"</p>
<p>pirt, I hope for your sake your political views are totally different from your parents'</p>
<p>And nobody is saying AA is perfect. But it's better than nothing at all. With nothing at all, the number of truly disadvantaged students given opportunities offered by top colleges would just plummet. So what is your better solution?</p>
<p>you hope that my political views are totally different from my parents? haha since when is that an admirable goal? are you kidding? i guess i'm sorry for having respect for my parents, the people who raised me, and have given me everything. i feel sorry for you if your views are completely different from your parents just for the sake of doing so. what a ****ty philosophy.</p>
<p>anyway, i already proposed a better solution. you may have to read again, since youve already proven yourself not to have adequate skills in reading/ writing from your other thread. my solution, once again, was that AA programs, if they exist at all, should exist on the basis on socioeconics and not merely race. (and yes, i know that some programs already do; but in reality, the intention of AA and the majority of AA programs remain race-based). that way, an underprivelaged white male (maybe someone from the "redneck ghetto" you grew up in) could take advantage of the same help an underprivelaged black male could, rather than allowing a wealthy black male to receive "help" while the truly underprivelaged cannot TOTALLY b/c of skin color.</p>
<p>my views are not totally different from my parents, though they are a little bit different. my point was that you were taunting another poster by saying he/she probably got an analogy from his parents. apparently, you too got your views from your parents. so i think it's really sleezy of you to try and say one position is superior to another on that basis. you need to learn to have political debates w/o personal insults. i'm sure you will eventually learn this, hopefully. i could continue, but i'm going to bed now.</p>
<p>"AA in the college admissions process does nothing but put the white male at a disadvantage. "</p>
<p>LOL - I had to chime in here. Did you know that it is now easier for white males to get into college right now than it is for white females? That males are given an SAT and GPA "break" over their female counterparts in the interest of creating balanced classes at co-ed schools? Female applicants have to be BETTER in general than the male applicants in order to secure a spot at the same school.</p>
<p>Are you complaining about that? Of course not. </p>
<p>Schools look for balance and diversity, whether in gender, ethnicity, geography, or experience.</p>
<p>On what basis are all you guys rating? By PhD production or admission %, Smith would be 3.) Grinnell would be 2.) by a lot of criteria, as would Barnard, Vassar, CMC</p>
<p>i found this on another thread. it's an incomplete list notably missing grinell. i don't mind this ranking as it's not as subjective as prestige or reputation. the original poster also included geographic preferences, diversity, ect in their calculations as well so the endowment numbers are mixed somewhat.</p>
<p>momwaitingfornew,
who says that science cannot conform to the liberal arts? hmm? it has only been since the industrial revolution that science has become something that does not strive to explore for the sake of exploration. pythagoras and plato would scorn the present view and goals of science... that the goals of science are to promote industry. that is not why i am doing science and i find it quiet fitting that harvey mudd is a liberal arts college....because it really teaches you more about humanity and the mind more than anything else.</p>
<p>an excerpt from my "book":</p>
<p>"A very distinct shift occurred when industrialization reformed science. Before, science existed in conjunction with philosophy to try to explicitly determine some of the everlasting questions that humankind has pondered for millennia. Of these, questions of existence and purpose were at the heart of the scientific endeavor. Science was primarily fortified philosophical thought, as the Ancient Greeks believed that the purity of science came from a non-physical interaction with the world. Pure science consisted of no direct measurement of the physical. Science, instead, aspired to manipulating theoretics and finding everlasting correlations between patterns, numbers, or ratios in the natural world. "</p>
<p>Rocket, I did not say that science could not be a part of the liberal arts. I said that a specialty college by definition was not a liberal arts college. </p>
<p>Harvey Mudd is a fine school, one of the best in the country, but it does not qualify as a "liberal arts college."</p>
<p>momwaitingfornew: how can you place Vassar, grinnell, W&L in a tier BELOW reed and smith with any legitimacy? vassar, grinnell, W&L undoubtedly have more name recognition/ prestige (not that that is very important) and better academics than reed and smith.</p>