Reply to Who thinks the new TJ admissions proposal will increase URM enrollment?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I predict not. I believe the root of the issue is lack of interest, so a lottery, or even an open admissions policy, won't fix that. [/quote]
What you don't understand is that many highly qualified URMs don't want to attend TJ because they think they won't fit in. DD is a straight A student in AAP at a TJ feeder and she refuses to apply to TJ because she thinks she will not fit into the culture (a culture of cheating, racism, few minorities, few girls, etc...). This is sad considering that she loves STEM and wants to be an engineer. [/quote]

How do we go about convincing people that these perceptions of the culture are incorrect?[/quote]

Change the culture.  The school board is right.

Whether this new admissions process will work is something that we'll find out in the next few years.  Something needed to change though, so it's good that they did this.[/quote]

+1000. The culture at TJ is so toxic that most of the kids and parents there don't even realize it because it's the only thing they know from their feeder middle schools and prep classes.

You see tons of parents posting on this board that they don't believe that it's so toxic, but when you get current students talking to alums from 10-20 years ago, the elders are horrified at what the school has become. Not because of the racial demographics, but because of the narratives that the kids present about what the school is and how they just accept that "that's TJ, that's what you sign up for".

TJ wasn't always insanely competitive. TJ kids didn't always spend every waking hour worrying about college - but the kids still mostly got into the schools they wanted to get into. TJ kids weren't always obsessed with taking every 8th period and trying to cram in another resume-booster or another study period. [/quote]

How much of this is due to changes at TJ and how much is due to changes in the volume of college admissions and the top colleges constantly signaling that they are looking for candidates who aren't just "normal great" like the bulk of TJ students (and many other kids at base  schools) but have some special "it" quality (that, as often as not, is harder for Asian kids to demonstrate to the satisfaction of admissions officers)?

You can reconstitute TJ but that doesn't make the college arms race disappear overnight. [/quote]

You kind of told on yourself here. My point is, [b]back that long ago TJ kids were not that worried about what college they went to[/b]. They largely understood that there were tons of colleges that students could go to and have a wonderful experience, and that their eventual outcomes wouldn't be tremendously different depending on where they went. They understood that it was really hard to get into an Ivy League school, and many of them didn't worry about applying. They generally didn't want to sacrifice their wonderful high school experience to try to maximize their chances of winning a game they were likely to lose anyway. And you know what? A lot of them ended up there anyway because they had great experiences to draw from in their essay writing.

And that's the greater point. Families at TJ now view college as an arms race to be won, largely because that's what TJ has been for years and that's the game they've been playing to get there. But that's not the college game - and in spite of TJ counselors trying to get families to understand that, they refuse to and their kids keep losing, and stressing themselves out in the process of losing.[/quote]

That is completely false.[/quote]

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