s/o - Cheating and Checking Diversity boxes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Context matters.

In the college application context, schools are trying to find Latinos who have been historically frozen out from higher education in an attempt to address their low representation among the college-educated. That's their motivation for wanting to know your race/ethnicity. And they (of the schools that care) want to create a critical mass of Latino students who can turn to one another for social support on campus. The last thing you want is for a kid to be the only one of their type on campus. Separately, they're interested in increasing the number of students enrolled who are the first in their families to go to a 4-yr college. Given that these are both institutional priorities for most schools, students who can check both of those boxes will be of greatest interest to them.

Most selective colleges will have AOs who are familiar with the socioeconomics of different schools within their territory, so finding students from the lower income neighborhoods who indicate that they are Latino/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano will be prioritized over finding kids from UMC families who happen to have a grandfather from Peru. In UMC neighborhoods, they'll be most interested in those applicants who themselves, as kids, identify as Latino/Hispanic/Boriqua and who demonstrate in a variety of ways across their application materials that they will contribute something to the Latino community on their college campus. It's like playing that game "tell me you're Latino without telling me that you're Latino." If your kid can't do that and you live in NW DC or Fairfax, don't bother marking the box.

Marking the box might get your kid's application a second look when it otherwise would have gone into the rejection pile. But it won't ever be enough to get them into the accept pile without a lot of other things that make them stand out. At best, it might get your kid into the Latino pool, in which case they then have to be among the best in that group. And they will almost certainly have an AO who is an expert in recruitment of Latino students and/or a Latino themself. That person will be reading your kid's application closely and they will spot a poser in less than 2 minutes with their application.

My own kid (UMC, very rigorous DMV high school and courses and above average ECs) didn't get into most of the more selective schools. They speak Spanish as a native, studied it all through school, have Spanish names, etc... Marking the box definitely does not get you a free pass. If they'd attended school in a low-income neighborhood and had parents who didn't attend college, they'd almost certainly have done even better in the admissions process. But they ended up in a great place for them with merit aid, so all is good. As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work.

(I'm Latino and graduated from highly selective universities.)

This PP is correct. I am a former SLAC admissions counselor and we were all experts at sussing out the applicants who fit the profiles that we were looking for. Example, Cuban Maria Garcia from Coral Gables, FL who attends Ransom Everglades School ($45k/yr) with a law partner mother and surgeon father is going to be evaluated very differently than Salvadoran Ana Cruz from Wheaton, MD who attends Wheaton HS with a mother who is a cleaning lady and a father who is a mechanic. They may both check the same race box, but we know.

I agree with PP's statement that this is how it should work. The hope is that Ana Cruz's children will BE Maria Garcias in the next generation. For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

Why are these stats relevant? In 1947, fully 49% of all students admitted to colleges in America were veterans. FORTY NINE PERCENT! Prior to WW2, the overwhelming majority of American college students were wealthy (white) elites. The GI Bill dramatically changed the American higher ed landscape and brought millions and millions of white Americans out of poverty and the lower middle class into middle class prosperity. The number of degree holders in the US DOUBLED from 1940 to 1950, even though there was only a 14% increase in total population from '40 to '50, because of the GI Bill. This is exactly why URMs and first generation college students are advantaged. The lasting effect of a system that America created to lift whites out of poverty, that WORKED, really well. Now, you and your children do not need, nor deserve a leg up, handout, additional support of any kind. You already got it. You are probably paying for college with wealth accumulated from the GI Bill house your parents inherited from your grandparents.

Black Tyler Jenkins' grandfather also fought in WW2, but he was denied those benefits, and came home with no opportunity, and Jim Crow still the law of the land. All while white Johnny Murphy's grandpa was able to go to University of Maryland, get a good federal job, buy a little rambler in Bethesda for $30k with a low interest, subsidized loan and the rest is history. You want to erase everything leading up to 2022 and say - well, we aren't racist anymore. Now, you've deemed the system unfair because it considers the set of circumstances that led to Tyler Jenkins at Montgomery Blair and Johnny Murphy at Walter Johnson and why Tyler has only one extra curricular activity because he works, or his parents need him to watch younger siblings while they work; all while Johnny plays travel sports, has an SAT tutor and a brand new Macbook pro.

This time in the past, where white people seem to think the racism occurred, is still here, affecting us all every single day.

[Anonymous]

Wow, what a lesson to teach your kids. Take a system that is intended to help kids from less privileged backgrounds and use it to help your over-privileged self get in.

Couldn't they avoid all this hair splitting about who is in and who is out of these vague categories and just ask in a nice way "are you poor?" That's ultimately who they are trying to help, or so I thought. Even if it has to include poor white people.

Colleges already ask “are you poor?” That’s what the FAFSA and EFC calculation does. Colleges absolutely know which of their applicants are poor, and if they wanted to admit people on the basis of race-blind poverty, they could do that. But they’re not doing that. They are advantaging people on the basis of race independently of their economic status. This is a political decision, and nobody needs to feel bad about gaming a clearly immoral system.

[Anonymous]

For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

What a load of absolute bs. The GI bill was not and is not a handout. In order to obtain it, you had to serve your country for years. This is in no way comparable to “give kids a leg up because their skin is brown or black.” If you want to create a program in which blacks and Hispanics received educational benefits in exchange for four years of national service, great, let’s have that. But don’t pretend giving people a diversity advantage in college applicants is just like the GI bill, because that’s utter crap.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

What a load of absolute bs. The GI bill was not and is not a handout. In order to obtain it, you had to serve your country for years. This is in no way comparable to “give kids a leg up because their skin is brown or black.” If you want to create a program in which blacks and Hispanics received educational benefits in exchange for four years of national service, great, let’s have that. But don’t pretend giving people a diversity advantage in college applicants is just like the GI bill, because that’s utter crap.

NP: you missed the part where Black veterans got nothing from the GI Bill. Do you think that was fair? Do you think white veterans didn’t benefit from their service?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My take: Asians have pretty good cause to worry about fairness in the system, but the rest of us - especially white folks - should just STFU. You’re fine. You’ve caught every break under the sun since Columbus killed the natives. It’s time to share the wealth.

Not only is this very presumptuous, you’re also assuming all non-white people have battled generational “unfairness”. You can’t lump everyone in one pot due to their skin color or ethnicity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My take: Asians have pretty good cause to worry about fairness in the system, but the rest of us - especially white folks - should just STFU. You’re fine. You’ve caught every break under the sun since Columbus killed the natives. It’s time to share the wealth.

Not only is this very presumptuous, you’re also assuming all non-white people have battled generational “unfairness”. You can’t lump everyone in one pot due to their skin color or ethnicity.

Very true.

There are very priviledged non-white people, and very non-priviledged white people.

Policies focused on race are racist by definition.

[Anonymous]

As I was driving home from the gym today, I heard an advertisement on WTOP (103.5 PM) from a national Hispanic organization. I was stuck that the ad emphasized that its members did not have to 1) speak Spanish or 2) look Hispanic in order to join. I did not catch the name, but it was fascinating that this is now entirely normal to identify as Hispanic without any meaningful connection.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Context matters.

In the college application context, schools are trying to find Latinos who have been historically frozen out from higher education in an attempt to address their low representation among the college-educated. That's their motivation for wanting to know your race/ethnicity. And they (of the schools that care) want to create a critical mass of Latino students who can turn to one another for social support on campus. The last thing you want is for a kid to be the only one of their type on campus. Separately, they're interested in increasing the number of students enrolled who are the first in their families to go to a 4-yr college. Given that these are both institutional priorities for most schools, students who can check both of those boxes will be of greatest interest to them.

Most selective colleges will have AOs who are familiar with the socioeconomics of different schools within their territory, so finding students from the lower income neighborhoods who indicate that they are Latino/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano will be prioritized over finding kids from UMC families who happen to have a grandfather from Peru. In UMC neighborhoods, they'll be most interested in those applicants who themselves, as kids, identify as Latino/Hispanic/Boriqua and who demonstrate in a variety of ways across their application materials that they will contribute something to the Latino community on their college campus. It's like playing that game "tell me you're Latino without telling me that you're Latino." If your kid can't do that and you live in NW DC or Fairfax, don't bother marking the box.

Marking the box might get your kid's application a second look when it otherwise would have gone into the rejection pile. But it won't ever be enough to get them into the accept pile without a lot of other things that make them stand out. At best, it might get your kid into the Latino pool, in which case they then have to be among the best in that group. And they will almost certainly have an AO who is an expert in recruitment of Latino students and/or a Latino themself. That person will be reading your kid's application closely and they will spot a poser in less than 2 minutes with their application.

My own kid (UMC, very rigorous DMV high school and courses and above average ECs) didn't get into most of the more selective schools. They speak Spanish as a native, studied it all through school, have Spanish names, etc... Marking the box definitely does not get you a free pass. If they'd attended school in a low-income neighborhood and had parents who didn't attend college, they'd almost certainly have done even better in the admissions process. But they ended up in a great place for them with merit aid, so all is good. As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work.

(I'm Latino and graduated from highly selective universities.)

This PP is correct. I am a former SLAC admissions counselor and we were all experts at sussing out the applicants who fit the profiles that we were looking for. Example, Cuban Maria Garcia from Coral Gables, FL who attends Ransom Everglades School ($45k/yr) with a law partner mother and surgeon father is going to be evaluated very differently than Salvadoran Ana Cruz from Wheaton, MD who attends Wheaton HS with a mother who is a cleaning lady and a father who is a mechanic. They may both check the same race box, but we know.

I agree with PP's statement that this is how it should work. The hope is that Ana Cruz's children will BE Maria Garcias in the next generation. For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

Why are these stats relevant? In 1947, fully 49% of all students admitted to colleges in America were veterans. FORTY NINE PERCENT! Prior to WW2, the overwhelming majority of American college students were wealthy (white) elites. The GI Bill dramatically changed the American higher ed landscape and brought millions and millions of white Americans out of poverty and the lower middle class into middle class prosperity. The number of degree holders in the US DOUBLED from 1940 to 1950, even though there was only a 14% increase in total population from '40 to '50, because of the GI Bill. This is exactly why URMs and first generation college students are advantaged. The lasting effect of a system that America created to lift whites out of poverty, that WORKED, really well. Now, you and your children do not need, nor deserve a leg up, handout, additional support of any kind. You already got it. You are probably paying for college with wealth accumulated from the GI Bill house your parents inherited from your grandparents.

Black Tyler Jenkins' grandfather also fought in WW2, but he was denied those benefits, and came home with no opportunity, and Jim Crow still the law of the land. All while white Johnny Murphy's grandpa was able to go to University of Maryland, get a good federal job, buy a little rambler in Bethesda for $30k with a low interest, subsidized loan and the rest is history. You want to erase everything leading up to 2022 and say - well, we aren't racist anymore. Now, you've deemed the system unfair because it considers the set of circumstances that led to Tyler Jenkins at Montgomery Blair and Johnny Murphy at Walter Johnson and why Tyler has only one extra curricular activity because he works, or his parents need him to watch younger siblings while they work; all while Johnny plays travel sports, has an SAT tutor and a brand new Macbook pro.

This time in the past, where white people seem to think the racism occurred, is still here, affecting us all every single day.

Then why not base the preference simply upon the income of the parents?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:From the thread about cheating via extended time, some mentioned that white/Asian students are being coached to check the box that they are black or Hispanic.

Is this really what our college application system has become? I cannot imagine anyone that I know doing this. And doesn’t the high school guidance counselor have to review the application and verify information anyway?

How do they explain their last name (if Asian)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As I was driving home from the gym today, I heard an advertisement on WTOP (103.5 PM) from a national Hispanic organization. I was stuck that the ad emphasized that its members did not have to 1) speak Spanish or 2) look Hispanic in order to join. I did not catch the name, but it was fascinating that this is now entirely normal to identify as Hispanic without any meaningful connection.

My son is Hispanic and doesn't speak much Spanish. His dad (from Mexico) moved away when he was little so he only learned Spanish in school. Some of my Hispanic students don't speak any or much Spanish. They tend to be the ones with older siblings who speak English to them.

I am not Hispanic. My son is light skinned (like me) but with black hair and light brown eyes. He tans a lot easier than I do. I teach Hispanic students and they all look so different. A few look like my son (so maybe one of their parents isn't Hispanic) and some are black (from the Dominican Republic) and some look like native Americans. Every few years, I have a red headed Hispanic student.


The point is that the term Hispanic covers a wide variety of people. Colleges can probably figure out a likely story for applicants by looking at other information. For example, they will see that my name is not Hispanic and I have a Master's degree. They will see my ex's very Hispanic name and that he doesn't have a high school diploma. They will see that I'm a teacher and a single parent and that we live in a decent zip code but we are probably the poorest people here. He won't get first generation status but if they are short on Hispanic male applicants, they'll take him for their quota no matter what his story is. All I have to do is come up with the $$$ to finance this.

[Anonymous]

The whole thing feels so absurd to me and I can only point to deleterious effects. My Asian-American friends have felt they have to outperform everyone else their entire lives to even have a chance — and the numbers back them up. Middle Eastern people of color are directed to tick white, yet deal with bias on a daily basis. Many people don’t realize how broad a group of people can reasonably identify as Hispanic or Latinx, so I feel as much as people play games with ticking that box, it is actually a significant undercount.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From the thread about cheating via extended time, some mentioned that white/Asian students are being coached to check the box that they are black or Hispanic.

Is this really what our college application system has become? I cannot imagine anyone that I know doing this. And doesn’t the high school guidance counselor have to review the application and verify information anyway?

How do they explain their last name (if Asian)?

You don’t have to explain anything. Period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Context matters.

In the college application context, schools are trying to find Latinos who have been historically frozen out from higher education in an attempt to address their low representation among the college-educated. That's their motivation for wanting to know your race/ethnicity. And they (of the schools that care) want to create a critical mass of Latino students who can turn to one another for social support on campus. The last thing you want is for a kid to be the only one of their type on campus. Separately, they're interested in increasing the number of students enrolled who are the first in their families to go to a 4-yr college. Given that these are both institutional priorities for most schools, students who can check both of those boxes will be of greatest interest to them.

Most selective colleges will have AOs who are familiar with the socioeconomics of different schools within their territory, so finding students from the lower income neighborhoods who indicate that they are Latino/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano will be prioritized over finding kids from UMC families who happen to have a grandfather from Peru. In UMC neighborhoods, they'll be most interested in those applicants who themselves, as kids, identify as Latino/Hispanic/Boriqua and who demonstrate in a variety of ways across their application materials that they will contribute something to the Latino community on their college campus. It's like playing that game "tell me you're Latino without telling me that you're Latino." If your kid can't do that and you live in NW DC or Fairfax, don't bother marking the box.

Marking the box might get your kid's application a second look when it otherwise would have gone into the rejection pile. But it won't ever be enough to get them into the accept pile without a lot of other things that make them stand out. At best, it might get your kid into the Latino pool, in which case they then have to be among the best in that group. And they will almost certainly have an AO who is an expert in recruitment of Latino students and/or a Latino themself. That person will be reading your kid's application closely and they will spot a poser in less than 2 minutes with their application.

My own kid (UMC, very rigorous DMV high school and courses and above average ECs) didn't get into most of the more selective schools. They speak Spanish as a native, studied it all through school, have Spanish names, etc... Marking the box definitely does not get you a free pass. If they'd attended school in a low-income neighborhood and had parents who didn't attend college, they'd almost certainly have done even better in the admissions process. But they ended up in a great place for them with merit aid, so all is good. As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work.

(I'm Latino and graduated from highly selective universities.)

This PP is correct. I am a former SLAC admissions counselor and we were all experts at sussing out the applicants who fit the profiles that we were looking for. Example, Cuban Maria Garcia from Coral Gables, FL who attends Ransom Everglades School ($45k/yr) with a law partner mother and surgeon father is going to be evaluated very differently than Salvadoran Ana Cruz from Wheaton, MD who attends Wheaton HS with a mother who is a cleaning lady and a father who is a mechanic. They may both check the same race box, but we know.

I agree with PP's statement that this is how it should work. The hope is that Ana Cruz's children will BE Maria Garcias in the next generation. For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

Why are these stats relevant? In 1947, fully 49% of all students admitted to colleges in America were veterans. FORTY NINE PERCENT! Prior to WW2, the overwhelming majority of American college students were wealthy (white) elites. The GI Bill dramatically changed the American higher ed landscape and brought millions and millions of white Americans out of poverty and the lower middle class into middle class prosperity. The number of degree holders in the US DOUBLED from 1940 to 1950, even though there was only a 14% increase in total population from '40 to '50, because of the GI Bill. This is exactly why URMs and first generation college students are advantaged. The lasting effect of a system that America created to lift whites out of poverty, that WORKED, really well. Now, you and your children do not need, nor deserve a leg up, handout, additional support of any kind. You already got it. You are probably paying for college with wealth accumulated from the GI Bill house your parents inherited from your grandparents.

Black Tyler Jenkins' grandfather also fought in WW2, but he was denied those benefits, and came home with no opportunity, and Jim Crow still the law of the land. All while white Johnny Murphy's grandpa was able to go to University of Maryland, get a good federal job, buy a little rambler in Bethesda for $30k with a low interest, subsidized loan and the rest is history. You want to erase everything leading up to 2022 and say - well, we aren't racist anymore. Now, you've deemed the system unfair because it considers the set of circumstances that led to Tyler Jenkins at Montgomery Blair and Johnny Murphy at Walter Johnson and why Tyler has only one extra curricular activity because he works, or his parents need him to watch younger siblings while they work; all while Johnny plays travel sports, has an SAT tutor and a brand new Macbook pro.

This time in the past, where white people seem to think the racism occurred, is still here, affecting us all every single day.

Very thoughtful and informative. Thank you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Context matters.

In the college application context, schools are trying to find Latinos who have been historically frozen out from higher education in an attempt to address their low representation among the college-educated. That's their motivation for wanting to know your race/ethnicity. And they (of the schools that care) want to create a critical mass of Latino students who can turn to one another for social support on campus. The last thing you want is for a kid to be the only one of their type on campus. Separately, they're interested in increasing the number of students enrolled who are the first in their families to go to a 4-yr college. Given that these are both institutional priorities for most schools, students who can check both of those boxes will be of greatest interest to them.

Most selective colleges will have AOs who are familiar with the socioeconomics of different schools within their territory, so finding students from the lower income neighborhoods who indicate that they are Latino/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano will be prioritized over finding kids from UMC families who happen to have a grandfather from Peru. In UMC neighborhoods, they'll be most interested in those applicants who themselves, as kids, identify as Latino/Hispanic/Boriqua and who demonstrate in a variety of ways across their application materials that they will contribute something to the Latino community on their college campus. It's like playing that game "tell me you're Latino without telling me that you're Latino." If your kid can't do that and you live in NW DC or Fairfax, don't bother marking the box.

Marking the box might get your kid's application a second look when it otherwise would have gone into the rejection pile. But it won't ever be enough to get them into the accept pile without a lot of other things that make them stand out. At best, it might get your kid into the Latino pool, in which case they then have to be among the best in that group. And they will almost certainly have an AO who is an expert in recruitment of Latino students and/or a Latino themself. That person will be reading your kid's application closely and they will spot a poser in less than 2 minutes with their application.

My own kid (UMC, very rigorous DMV high school and courses and above average ECs) didn't get into most of the more selective schools. They speak Spanish as a native, studied it all through school, have Spanish names, etc... Marking the box definitely does not get you a free pass. If they'd attended school in a low-income neighborhood and had parents who didn't attend college, they'd almost certainly have done even better in the admissions process. But they ended up in a great place for them with merit aid, so all is good. As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work.

(I'm Latino and graduated from highly selective universities.)

This PP is correct. I am a former SLAC admissions counselor and we were all experts at sussing out the applicants who fit the profiles that we were looking for. Example, Cuban Maria Garcia from Coral Gables, FL who attends Ransom Everglades School ($45k/yr) with a law partner mother and surgeon father is going to be evaluated very differently than Salvadoran Ana Cruz from Wheaton, MD who attends Wheaton HS with a mother who is a cleaning lady and a father who is a mechanic. They may both check the same race box, but we know.

I agree with PP's statement that this is how it should work. The hope is that Ana Cruz's children will BE Maria Garcias in the next generation. For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

Why are these stats relevant? In 1947, fully 49% of all students admitted to colleges in America were veterans. FORTY NINE PERCENT! Prior to WW2, the overwhelming majority of American college students were wealthy (white) elites. The GI Bill dramatically changed the American higher ed landscape and brought millions and millions of white Americans out of poverty and the lower middle class into middle class prosperity. The number of degree holders in the US DOUBLED from 1940 to 1950, even though there was only a 14% increase in total population from '40 to '50, because of the GI Bill. This is exactly why URMs and first generation college students are advantaged. The lasting effect of a system that America created to lift whites out of poverty, that WORKED, really well. Now, you and your children do not need, nor deserve a leg up, handout, additional support of any kind. You already got it. You are probably paying for college with wealth accumulated from the GI Bill house your parents inherited from your grandparents.

Black Tyler Jenkins' grandfather also fought in WW2, but he was denied those benefits, and came home with no opportunity, and Jim Crow still the law of the land. All while white Johnny Murphy's grandpa was able to go to University of Maryland, get a good federal job, buy a little rambler in Bethesda for $30k with a low interest, subsidized loan and the rest is history. You want to erase everything leading up to 2022 and say - well, we aren't racist anymore. Now, you've deemed the system unfair because it considers the set of circumstances that led to Tyler Jenkins at Montgomery Blair and Johnny Murphy at Walter Johnson and why Tyler has only one extra curricular activity because he works, or his parents need him to watch younger siblings while they work; all while Johnny plays travel sports, has an SAT tutor and a brand new Macbook pro.

This time in the past, where white people seem to think the racism occurred, is still here, affecting us all every single day.

Excellent post.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Another comment re: Hispanic. DS's friend was a national "Hispanic Scholar". Did not speak spanish, had not lived anywhere other than Fairfax County, no hardship, went to an Ivy.

It's amusing when the students that speak Spanish at home take Spanish as their foreign language and do worse than the kids who have never been exposed to the Spanish language prior.

It should not be “amusing” to you it’s because many many Spanish teachers are actually white women who travelled a little and majored in Spanish in college and probably harbor some deep seaded racism themselves. My white American mutt kid who is raised by her Hispanic stepfather and speaks Spanish at home and feels affinity with the Hispanic people - just dropped her Spanish 3 course through Virtual Virginia the teachers Spanish was *terrible*. She made numerous mistakes and when I helped DD bring them to the teachers attention because she was marked down on a quiz she was accused of cheating even though she was drawing on knowledge from her life and home