Harvard Class of 2020

[Anonymous]

The thread symbolizes America for the last 2 decades. The Latinos. Asians, and Indians never bitch about the admissions process. Its always the whites pointing out that the blacks that get admitted are objectively less qualified than those who were refused admission from these other groups and the blacks steadfatly refusing to acknowledge that reality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^^NP here. Not taking sides but that is such a BS response and so over used on DCUM.

You're right of course but there is no upside to continuing an argument with an irrational actor.

There is an upside to admitting you played the game and lost. You thought that "getting in" was a game based on getting the highest score on the SAT and GPA and you were wrong. Instead of just accepting that you were wrong you want to point out into the world and say, the world is wrong.

It's not healthy, seek help.

What are you babbling on about? My DC was accepted at his first choice college which is ranked in the top 10. My wife and I both graduated from Ivy league institutions and have MBAs from top 10 schools. We understand far better than you ever will what the admissions process is all about.

So, you DC did NOT get into Harvard. Nobody cares about your kids admission process.

[Anonymous]

Wait till Bschool where you are point blank told you have to best your "applicant cohort" whilst they create their statistically diverse class. Asians have it worst.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One of the County' s venerable institutions: Walt Whitman High School

Note almost 80 percent of students make the Honor Roll and 20 percent (1/5) of the students have straight As. This phenomenon is increasingly typical around the County, City, State and Country. How do kids differentiate themselves to Colleges when a A grade is given out like M and Ms falling from the skies. Surely dummies here believe these honor roll kids from this one HS belong at Harvard or MIT or else some other brown kid took their place? In the 19th and 20th century this result would have been certain. There were no seats for brown Americans.

Honor Roll


First Grading Period 2015-2016

1542 Students Made the Honor Roll This Grading Period
out of 1983 Total Students for 77.76%

433 Freshmen, 361 Sophomores, 387 Juniors, 361 Seniors

*361 Students Received All Grades of A
23.41% of the Honor Roll and 18.20% of All Students

Congratulations to all these students!

Thank goodness my kid is a good hockey player plus all of the above. I might go look at his coach's recruiting website again... Go BeanPot 2019!

[Anonymous]

Mine will continue to parley the longstanding and multi-generational affirmative action policy of legacy (silent code for White race)

[Anonymous]

The system has been stacked against AAs for a long time. Most AA kids are still in low quality public schools. I think as a society, we deserve to give them a boost in college admissions. Yes, some wealthy AA families get an unfair boost but they are a minuscule number. I am a white parent and am eternally grateful that my kids don't have to deal with the stigma of racism, unconscious bias and police targeting. Asians generally have a positive bias towards them which can be a help overall rather than an obstacle. Most people tend to generalize and assume when they meet an Asian person that they must be smart, hardworking and good at math whether that is actually true for the individual or not. Positive biases can be very helpful in pushing individuals along in life in a positive direction whether a person realizes it or not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The system has been stacked against AAs for a long time. Most AA kids are still in low quality public schools. I think as a society, we deserve to give them a boost in college admissions. Yes, some wealthy AA families get an unfair boost but they are a minuscule number. I am a white parent and am eternally grateful that my kids don't have to deal with the stigma of racism, unconscious bias and police targeting. Asians generally have a positive bias towards them which can be a help overall rather than an obstacle. Most people tend to generalize and assume when they meet an Asian person that they must be smart, hardworking and good at math whether that is actually true for the individual or not. Positive biases can be very helpful in pushing individuals along in life in a positive direction whether a person realizes it or not.

Most of what you wrote is reasonable, but this is not true. Any strong bias that prevents you from seeing a person as a whole is problematic. And while people stereotype Asians as smart, they also stereotype them as lacking creativity and being only book-smart. It can cut both ways. I was the top of my class at a competitive, private HS, and anyone who knew me at all knew that I had basically zero interest in going into a lucrative profession like medicine (both my parents were MDs). Guess what? In a local newspaper article about top students a school administrator with whom I had a good relationship, I thought, and whose class I was currently taking was talking about how I was planning to go to med school...based on literally nothing but the fact that I'm Indian-American.

Off-topic but ironically for this thread, I also had turned down admission to Harvard, which was kind of a big deal to have done at the time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The system has been stacked against AAs for a long time. Most AA kids are still in low quality public schools. I think as a society, we deserve to give them a boost in college admissions. Yes, some wealthy AA families get an unfair boost but they are a minuscule number. I am a white parent and am eternally grateful that my kids don't have to deal with the stigma of racism, unconscious bias and police targeting. Asians generally have a positive bias towards them which can be a help overall rather than an obstacle. Most people tend to generalize and assume when they meet an Asian person that they must be smart, hardworking and good at math whether that is actually true for the individual or not. Positive biases can be very helpful in pushing individuals along in life in a positive direction whether a person realizes it or not.

I agree with the first bolded sentence, and strongly disagree with the second for many reasons. The most important reason is that it doesn't fix the real issue. ALL kids deserve good public school, a strong and safe community, and a loving family. Giving a few black kids a space in an elite school that they are not prepared (or qualified) for is not likely to help them or the thousands of kids who are stuck with crappy public schools. Also, even if the numbers are small (and I don't think they are as small as affirmative action advocates want to believe they are), the kids who work hard enough to have a fighting chance at admission to elite schools are not the part of "society" that should have to pay the price for crappy public schools.

It is shameful that our schools are still so bad. The blame falls on many shoulders, including parents who don't give a crap about education, don't expect anything of their children or the schools, and expect someone else to solve the problem. It also falls on the shoulders of administrators and politicians who refuse to tell people what they don't want to hear. It falls on the shoulders of taxpayers who don't want to pay decent salaries to great teachers.

I think we should stop AA based on race, put more money toward improving schools and increasing the number of black students who deserve and are prepared for elite institutions (because there is no inherent reason they can't be), and stop making excuses.

[Anonymous]

+1. The assumption is also that Asians are pleasant and happy to take a backseat no matter the qualifications. In that light, of course the view is generally positive and the chagrin over the realization that we're not interested in our children having a ceiling, This has been an ugly discussion based on an assumption that we want for our children preferential treatment. More to the point we want equal.

[Anonymous]

Need based scholarships have mostly disappeared. Schools need to look way beyond scores, grades, clubs to delve into the actual grit of minority applicants from lower income backgrounds. The Ivies are trying and lots of other schools need to try harder. Look at SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor, from the projects, worked retail in h.s. and scholarship to Catholic high. She didn't have the highest grades, the top test scores or the club presidencies but she had the grit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The system has been stacked against AAs for a long time. Most AA kids are still in low quality public schools. I think as a society, we deserve to give them a boost in college admissions. Yes, some wealthy AA families get an unfair boost but they are a minuscule number. I am a white parent and am eternally grateful that my kids don't have to deal with the stigma of racism, unconscious bias and police targeting. Asians generally have a positive bias towards them which can be a help overall rather than an obstacle. Most people tend to generalize and assume when they meet an Asian person that they must be smart, hardworking and good at math whether that is actually true for the individual or not. Positive biases can be very helpful in pushing individuals along in life in a positive direction whether a person realizes it or not.

I'm a white parent of white kids. I agree with the bolded statements, but here's my concern: most of the kids accepted by Harvard whom they label as "AA" are NOT the ones with low SES status. Look at the above-cited figures on SES distribution at Harvard. Harvard is taking well-to-do AA's and wealthy Nigerians, etc. That's their version of affirmative action!

I strongly support taking lower-scoring kids from disadvantaged backgrounds -- if they've done well in school and engaged in the world, then I'd put my money on them to achieve in adulthood as well!

BUT it's a sham for Harvard to take a Nigerian oilman's boarding-school-educated son and then count him in its "African American" or even "diverse" numbers -- and then showcase those numbers as evidence of practicing affirmative action! Yet that's the story at Harvard and other top schools. Watch this piece: https://www.eurweb.com/2017/08/harvard-admits-blacks-african-american-video/# Its black author cites criticism by Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates about the high numbers of blacks and "African Americans" who are NOT African American, who are NOT from families that have suffered the effects of slavery. To use the words of the video, those black international students "don't bear the costs of the legacy of slavery." Harvard and other schools aren't faithful to the intent of affirmative action. That's the hypocrisy that doesn't get talked about.

I'd love to see schools practice REAL affirmative action, and not the fraud they're peddling as affirmative action.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Need based scholarships have mostly disappeared. Schools need to look way beyond scores, grades, clubs to delve into the actual grit of minority applicants from lower income backgrounds. The Ivies are trying and lots of other schools need to try harder. Look at SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor, from the projects, worked retail in h.s. and scholarship to Catholic high. She didn't have the highest grades, the top test scores or the club presidencies but she had the grit.

I don't think this is what the conversation string has been about. We're talking about discrimination based on race not SES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The system has been stacked against AAs for a long time. Most AA kids are still in low quality public schools. I think as a society, we deserve to give them a boost in college admissions. Yes, some wealthy AA families get an unfair boost but they are a minuscule number. I am a white parent and am eternally grateful that my kids don't have to deal with the stigma of racism, unconscious bias and police targeting. Asians generally have a positive bias towards them which can be a help overall rather than an obstacle. Most people tend to generalize and assume when they meet an Asian person that they must be smart, hardworking and good at math whether that is actually true for the individual or not. Positive biases can be very helpful in pushing individuals along in life in a positive direction whether a person realizes it or not.

I'm a white parent of white kids. I agree with the bolded statements, but here's my concern: most of the kids accepted by Harvard whom they label as "AA" are NOT the ones with low SES status. Look at the above-cited figures on SES distribution at Harvard. Harvard is taking well-to-do AA's and wealthy Nigerians, etc. That's their version of affirmative action!

I strongly support taking lower-scoring kids from disadvantaged backgrounds -- if they've done well in school and engaged in the world, then I'd put my money on them to achieve in adulthood as well!

BUT it's a sham for Harvard to take a Nigerian oilman's boarding-school-educated son and then count him in its "African American" or even "diverse" numbers -- and then showcase those numbers as evidence of practicing affirmative action! Yet that's the story at Harvard and other top schools. Watch this piece: https://www.eurweb.com/2017/08/harvard-admits-blacks-african-american-video/# Its black author cites criticism by Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates about the high numbers of blacks and "African Americans" who are NOT African American, who are NOT from families that have suffered the effects of slavery. To use the words of the video, those black international students "don't bear the costs of the legacy of slavery." Harvard and other schools aren't faithful to the intent of affirmative action. That's the hypocrisy that doesn't get talked about.

I'd love to see schools practice REAL affirmative action, and not the fraud they're peddling as affirmative action.

+1 Low income kids also come in other colors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mine will continue to parley the longstanding and multi-generational affirmative action policy of legacy (silent code for White race)

Thanks for being honest. What irks is when people claim it's not a real advantage; their kids are just naturally more interesting despite doing all the exact same things our kids do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mine will continue to parley the longstanding and multi-generational affirmative action policy of legacy (silent code for White race)

Thanks for being honest. What irks is when people claim it's not a real advantage; their kids are just naturally more interesting despite doing all the exact same things our kids do.

Who doesn't claim being a legacy is an advantage? It's an often spoken about advantage.