04

Some days are just déjà vu all over again. As was the case earlier this week, the top two most active threads were the Hunter Biden pardon thread and the soccer league age bracket change thread. Skipping those, the next most active thread was titled, "How to know a college is safe for POC" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. This thread is also a bit of déjà vu since similar threads come up regularly. The original poster says that her son is interested in a top liberal arts college but, according to the Common Data Set, only 22 Black students out of a class of 436 were accepted during the last cycle. Her son was hoping to find a community and is very discouraged by these numbers. The original poster asks whether they should just "throw in the towel". Threads such as this always attract posters who appear offended that the topic was even brought up. They normally call the original poster a troll and suggest that the poster is making things up. I deleted posts of that sort from this thread and the remaining posts were generally very helpful (or at least seemed to be from my point of view — I can't speak for the original poster). The replies generally fall into two different camps. One is the "don't give up on the school" camp. Posters in that group urge the original poster to contact current students at the school and try to hear their experiences firsthand. They argue that simple numbers don't reveal the entire story. These posters suggest contacting any Black-student affinity groups that might exist on campus or the admissions office to arrange video calls with current students. The college in question later turned out to be Pomona College and one poster in the thread has a child attending the school now. That child is a person of color, though not Black. Still, the poster was able to provide links to many helpful resources and describe her child's experience at the school. The second camp consists of posters who argue that there are better options than Pomona. They suggest universities instead of liberal arts colleges. Suggestions include Duke University, Emory University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia. The original poster said that her son was not interested in historically Black colleges and universities, but posters kept suggesting them. Some posters struggled to understand the vast spectrum of colleges that exist between one with 22 Black students and an HBCU, leading to some vitriolic exchanges. Many posters suggested that the original poster's son has very competitive statistics and would likely have opportunities at many top colleges or universities. However, those colleges also tend to have smaller Black communities. Therefore, this presents a struggle between a better school or a larger Black community. Despite the few bitter posts that I removed, most of the posts in this thread were quite supportive of the original poster and her son. One of the nicest, I thought, was posted by a poster of Korean heritage who described her desire to find a Korean community at college and chose a university accordingly. She attributed much of her success in college to that community.