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How to Get Into an Ivy League College
How do you get into a good college? T.M. Landry College Preparatory school in Louisiana boasts a 100 percent college acceptance rate. What is their secret? Well, according to the New York Times, they lie.
The Times article alleges that the school, “falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity.”
I get that lying about grades can help, but it is the “up-from-hardship tales” that got my attention. They claimed on a transcript that one young man’s “alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter.” That is awful but the student in question says none of it is true. Yet college admission folks evidently love those types of stories and they are the ones you need to impress.
I want to do what is best for my kids. Yelling about homework is getting old. For their academic future, should I down a few forties and beat the crap out of their mom? Colleges love that stuff . . . but, no thanks.
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Published in General
When a particular behavior gets lavishly rewarded, do we get more or less of that behavior?
And, if something is especially valuable, be on guard, eventually someone will try to counterfeit it.
The periferal issue is the media. Many outlets had, in the past, covered the story of the little school in Louisiana that consistently lands their kids in the Ivy League. All of them swallowed the story hook, line and sinker. Because they wanted it to be true.
File under, “too good to be true.” And, yes, “counterfeit” is the right word.
This is doing no favors to minority students, and by the way, is it not racist to perpetuate these ghetto stereotypes? And incidentally it of course does no favor to deserving white students who are getting the message that no matter how hard they study, they’ll never be disadvantaged enough.
Yeah.
College essays have been a primary determinant of college entry into the best schools since I applied. Wealthy people pay others to write the essay for their kids to give them the best possible chance.
The colleges want “well rounded” students. First, it was with extra-curriculars and volunteer hours. Now its sob stories of your unfortunate childhood and how you rose above the adversity.
It’s one of the reasons it is so plausible that Obama claimed to be born in Kenya to his college. Such exoticism is desired in college admissions.
Scamming the scammers.
I suppose my lingering question is … how did these counterfeit admits do in college? Anybody do that research that we know of?
I just have anecdotal info from my own experience. My freshman year of college (at a smallish private University) was at the dawn of these quota systems. On my floor in the dorm there were 8 or 10 black girls, all from the south side of Chicago, and all of whom had been admitted in order to reach a quota. I got to know them. They came from sub-par high schools which hadn’t prepared them for college, and every single one of them flunked out the first year, and some left in the first semester.
One of the saddest cases was a girl named Ernestine who had been a straight-A student at her high school, but was woefully unprepared for college-level work and was shocked to realize it. Two of the girls chased me up and down the hall late one night with a straight razor because they had seen a black guy talking to me.
Each of these girls took the place of a non-minority student with much better grades. And where are we all these years later?
There was a recent college professor for any ivie league – Amy something – who said some un PC things and caused a shit storm.
She also raised a big stink about unprepared minorities in freshman classes getting inflated grades because it hurts them more than helps them.
Apparently, she fails a lot of minority students and was accused of racisim.
I think @midge has written about her before for other work she’s done?
Amy Wax of Penn Law School said this. The SJWs were happy to hear another point of view. /s
The article mentions that some have done OK and others struggled. One of the sadder examples given is this:
And there was a surgeon, I believe in California, accepted in the 1970s to medical school under a quota, who lost his license in the 80s due to the number of patients who needlessly died on his operating table. So it can hurt the general population as well.
As a high school senior, a Vocational Rehabilitation counselor advised me: Well, you’ll need at least a Master’s degree, because you’ll need to work with your *mind*, not your *hands*. Perhaps guidance counselors need to dispense the opposite advice, occasionally? (Paging Mike Rowe and John Ratzenberger…). College isn’t a “rite of passage”; nor are substandard institutions worthy of support. Way to go, NYT!
Not every young person of color can have an influential Saudi Billionaire help them into Harvard.
I worked one summer for a general contractor. My first day on the job I met him at his shop and he drove us to the job site. He was not formally educated, but if you could draw it or describe it he could build it; and if it ever worked he could make it work again. On the way to the job site, he’d pause in his conversation to point out these giant houses … “I built that house for my oldest daughter” … “I built that house for my son and his wife.” … “I built that house for my younger daughter”
He worked like a rented mule, but apparently it paid handsomely.
(Unfortunately, none of that rubbed of on me. )
Somewhere an animal rights activist is taking offense at that remark.
PETA is apparently on the case.
https://wgno.com/2018/12/04/peta-wants-you-to-remove-speciesism-from-your-vocabulary/
I just read this as exorcism.
Feed two birds with one scone? That’s cultural imperialism. Why should we try to impose our food preferences on a culture that has its own values and lifeways?
Academia is thoroughly and hopelessly corrupt.
I long ago learned that whenever there is a change, any change, the Mafia is trying to figure out how to derive profit from it. You could call this tendency original sin. I call it the “Gods of the Copy Book Headings” (tm Rudyard Kipling). I also learned that there are those who know this and don’t mind. They accept the shrinkage as a cost of doing business, even if they are not the ones to pay the vig. They are like those humanitarians who said that to help humanity to the golden future we only need sacrifice one or at most two generations.
To each their own ;)
Far more important than the question of how to get into an Ivy League college, IMO is the question of why it matters so much. Why has America allowed these institutions to begin playing such a dominant role?
Peter Drucker, writing in 1969:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
Today, we as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above.
Drucker continued:
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman.
The Ivy League and American Society
There are segments of the politically involved who complain quite loudly when another Harvard law grad makes his seat on the federal court.
They have a point.
Edit: Redundant.
the message that I get is, “Who will sell their soul to get in to an Ivy?”
Any normal person should run. Run Away from Crazy like that.
Ocasio-Cortez went to Yale??
“Haha, I lied on my admission report and got into your prestigious school!”
“Joke’s on you, you majored in Women’s Studies and have a hundred grand in debt.”
She graduated from Boston University.
whew. that was a close one…my bad.
Sadly, this has an effect on military academies. Which obviously has an effect on the military.
When son #1 decided to apply for the Naval Academy, I did some googling. For roughly 1,000 spots, there were roughly 10,000 applicants.
No biggee, I thought. He can beat those odds.
But wait. A certain percentage was carved out for women (17% I think), some for minorities. And don’t get me started on the sports applicants.
All of a sudden those odds didn’t look so good.
But he carried on and gutted it out; a mountain of paperwork and recommendations. I think the Eagle Scout helped, he poo poos it. Being a blessed child of fantastic parents helped (he poo poos it); the “essay” probably didn’t have much weight.
It’s been seven years since he graduated. From his circle of friends with whom I have contact – you know who’s still in? Guys like him. The women are gone. The rock star athletes are gone. The couple of minorities I knew are gone.
You people are literally paying for the education of all who attend a military academy.
It’s criminal that some take the place of others, just because of race, sport skill, or gender. And I think it can be rather dangerous, as well.