Reply to a final warning to high school students in the college admissions game

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[quote=Anonymous]I think the extreme STEM focus and the number of kids who've aggressively been prepped to attend a T10 school are both issues.

Too other things that may be issues at Princeton are the eating club culture and the administration:

[u]Eating Clubs[/u]:  People associate the Princeton eating clubs with exclusive, preppy White culture, and of course this was the case well into the 1970s.  By the 1970s and 80s, the number of selective "Bicker" clubs was equally matched by more democratic, "sign-in" clubs that anyone could join.  The members of those clubs often deliberately avoided the "Bicker" system and thought the selective clubs were anachronisms that would fade away over time.  Instead, the Bicker clubs adapted - both by accepting more women and minorities and then expanding their membership numbers.  If you were a Black woman at Princeton in 1985, you could be just as uninterested in Ivy Club as Ivy Club was uninterested in you, and the close-knit community at the then-Third World Center would almost universally share that perspective and have your back.  But if you're a Black woman or an Asian man at Princeton in 2024, and you get hosed at Ivy, Cap and Gown, and Cottage, they'll be dozens of other Black and Asian members of those clubs reminding you that you didn't make the cut, and it wasn't just because of your race.  That's a different, and in some ways equally hard, pill to swallow.  Replacing the eating clubs with four-year residential colleges would help, but the administration does not want to antagonize the many alumni who defend the clubs.

[u]Administration[/u]: Chris Eisgruber is a very smart guy with a social IQ of about 50.  I know his wife, and she told me years ago - with absolutely no sense of humility or doubt whatsoever - that he was the most brilliant person she'd ever met (and she went to Harvard).  He's done some things very well, and he's avoided some of the gaffes that sank the careers of other university presidents, but he's remote and not particularly accessible to students.  In general, the meritocracy has served him extremely well in life, so he's about the last person on earth to be temperamentally inclined to change the "sink or swim" atmosphere at the school.  Replacing him with someone who is more in tune with the challenges that students today face, and willing to restore the balance between liberal arts and STEM at the school, would probably be a good move at this point.   [/quote]

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