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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
This is fantastic.
The acceptable term these is days is “leased mule”. That’s leased mule.
Sincerely,
The Society to Prevent The Renting of Mules, or TSPRoM.
I worked at a small college in New England for almost 5 years (getting my MBA there while working a full-time gig, because that’s how white privilege works – you find a crappy job at a school so you can get another degree for free, while working a 2nd job at the school for extra income, and doubling up your credits to graduate faster and having about 4 free hours of downtime per week for almost 3 years…..but I digress).
The big secret in admissions is no secret. They cherry-pick who they want, and if an applicant checks certain boxes, they get in. That’s it. They take about 3 seconds to review the application and decide.
Many of those people who are let it due to the right box being checked struggle mightily in college, even with additional help, which the school provides. I know there are some studies on this type of dropout/failure rate, but I’m lazy bottoms this morning.
It’s almost criminal. The school admits someone they know will struggle, they get inevitably saddled with debt, the school always gets paid, and if a kid drops out, so what? There’s a thousand other kids behind that one, willing to sign up for the same deal.
It’s scam-tastic.
None of this is new or particularly surprising. @Annefy describes the long term results of Affirmative Action admissions to the military academies. I saw the same effect in the education system where less than qualified minorities were pushed through the University of Washington School of Education in order to increase their numbers in the classroom. That seemed a reasonable goal to me. However, what I also saw was that nearly every single one immediately began the process of getting their administrative credentials before they completed a single year of actually classroom experience. What was worse was when an essentially illiterate teacher became an administrator in a school building with less than five years of teaching experience. It didn’t end there. Their ambitions far exceeded their talents, and each attempted at some point to get as far away from the classroom as possible. My “White Male Privilege” made it useless for me to ever apply which was actually fortunate, since I really loved being in the classroom working with my students, though I will admit to a short period in my early career when I resented the stainless steel ceiling that kept me in place. I have said it in earlier posts, but it bears repeating here. Throughout my career, I found that ambition generally occurred in inverse proportion to ability.
I wonder if any of these powers-that-be thought of using science to evaluate the results of their policies. Maybe they would reply that science shows the benefits of racial diversity. If so, I wouldn’t be surprised, but that doesn’t mean science would show that their policies are having good results.
Yep.
You should all read Heather MacDonald ‘s The Diversity Delusion. She knows where all the statistical dead bodies are buried.
the sad saga all over the US.
It used to be many classroom years were required before you could get your admin creds. Now, people have those creds (I use that term loosely, very loosely) and move on before they even have 3 years of classroom evaluations.
It takes 5 years in the classroom just to integrate good ideas into your own approach. but here they are, baby teachers, in charge of entire buildings.
sad.
So….the kids pretend they’re Harvard material, then Harvard pretends to educate them.
Seems fair.
You don’t need science when you know you’re right.
Sincerely,
Hippies
Science denier.
We arrive at a closer understanding of the universe through a strict application of feelings; findings are peer-reviewed by by credentialed emoters and then published on the internet.
That is science, you fact fascist!
Well, if Oscar Wilde were alive today, he probably would be.
The other component nobody talks about are legacies. Family is loaded, kids aren’t that bright, new wing on the faculty lounge, and Junior’s admitted.
Apparently a tiny effect, compared to racial preferences; that is, legacies’ test scores are only a little below average for the particular school.
I think legacy families are clued in enough to keep their dumber kids out of schools where they are likely to fail.