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Why would a college want to admit a bunch of students who have gone through life dutifully fulfilling mom and dad's dreams and studying hard without actually living a life?
Because that's what employers want? And it wouldn't be hard for colleges to admit people who had 'made mistakes' - they choose to ignore those people.
And I went hiking plenty of times and never got lost, so I'm just saying that categories of mistakes aren't universal. I almost drowned once, but it was 30 seconds and I'm not sure I could turn it into a full-page college essay or that I learned anything from it.
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She's teaching them to differentiate themselves and to have an interesting story to write about.
No she's not. If she is, why the narrow topic? I met the guy that shot the UT shooter and wrote a school story about that. It was not a mistake.
Ugh. Forgot about the research aspect. I’m not entirely convinced they couldn’t find a workaround. I’m also not sure who would hold whom hostage here. Can Harvard afford to continue to conduct their research without federal help? I think so. I’m not entirely sure how they could get around the lack of access to govt ran agencies like NIH though if they decide to sever ties. Who needs whom more i guess would be the question.
Full disclosure, i dont think the Ivies have a bias against Asians. I’m in that camp. I also believe they should have a right to limit who can and cannot be students in their schools. I dont understand how anyone that looks at the admissions numbers can come up with that conclusion.
“Asian students, especially the high achievers tend to suffer from ‘sameness’.” That is a comment straight out of a college counselor friend that currently works at a eastern prep school that places an astonishing number of their kids in Ivies.(due to legacies mostly.. but i digress) according to her the Ivies shy away from admitting too many of the same type of kid be it eastern prep milled waspy types, studious asian kids, or home schooled activist genius types. They cant do much about the legacies (actually they can but wont go there) so they aren’t about to have the remaining 70% be a cookie cutter group especially given their history. In contrast they are nowhere near having a critical mass of either athletes or minorities of non-asian origins so yes, that is a goal for them.
Over time even their legacy admits are becoming a diverse bunch; but diversity not just of race but of interest, ability, origin etc is still a goal they pursue.
Luckily for them, they have the pick of the litter. And the fact is that in that litter, there aren't enough minorities to justify the ‘i wasnt picked in favor of the C grade African American kid’ argument. First of all, there arent any C grade kids of any race being considered. Second, many simply aren’t picked because too many kids of a particular group apply with extremely similar credentials.
At least that’s how she sees it...and I agree.
In other news: African-American groups have accused the Ivies of admitting too many affluent/ upper middle class kids of African origin at the expense of disadvantaged black American kids. They claim that a disproportionate percentage of the ‘black’ population at the Ivies comprise of foreign born blacks and first generation children of african immigrants compared to African-American kids from generationally African-American families.
Damned if you do, damned if you dont.
1. Until someone offers and supports a workaround there isn't one. On balance NIH exposure is critical to these folks winning contextually important acclaim and designations/memberships like, "National Academy of Sciences", "National Academy of Medicine", "American Academy of Arts and Sciences", "Hughes Medical Institute Investigator" etc. Further, and I'm replaying the old saw, "correlation does not imply causation" in my head but there is also a strong tie between NIH funding/relationships and Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.
You might make the argument that Harvard could break free of federal funding and dig into its endowment and collect cash from grads and private enterprise...........I'd say the chances of them trying approach zero.
2. If academic merit is a significant part of the admissions equation Asians not only face obvious bias at Harvard but most academic institutions across the country.
The AAMC is near heroic for publishing these numbers and they publish far more than just this. But from the chart supplied in the piece you can see how Asians and whites to a lesser degree face significant numerical biases in medical school admissions.
I'll gladly tack on links to other AAMC data if you'd like some of the problems posed by those minorities who gain admittance via lowered standards are:
They are far more likely to never finish medical school at all
They are far more likely to need 5th or 6th years to complete MS-1 through MS-4.
They score worse on the The USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 tests. Their failure rates on the Step 1 test are higher.
People from these groups fail to make residency matches more often.
The damning part is this for the years shown above the average medical school admit who is black or AA scored an MCAT at around the 61st percentile the average Asian around the 91st percentile (27.3 v. 32.8 old MCAT). Now there are perfectly reasonable people who will claim that that sort of thing is OK in efforts to solve past discrimination. But what one cannot say with any degree of reasonableness or accuracy is that Asians in particular do not face bias.
What did she expect? What other kinds of (memorable) mistakes are studious kids making? There is reason parents put their kids in adult-guided activities - to keep them out of trouble.
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Originally Posted by TheOverdog
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Why would a college want to admit a bunch of students who have gone through life dutifully fulfilling mom and dad's dreams and studying hard without actually living a life?
Because that's what employers want? And it wouldn't be hard for colleges to admit people who had 'made mistakes' - they choose to ignore those people.
And I went hiking plenty of times and never got lost, so I'm just saying that categories of mistakes aren't universal. I almost drowned once, but it was 30 seconds and I'm not sure I could turn it into a full-page college essay or that I learned anything from it.
But, EVERYONE makes "mistakes" at some point. EVERYONE does something that is "suboptimal". Realizing that, admitting it, and learning from it is a crucial part of a person's development. Nobody ever perfectly plans for everything. No matter how hard one tries, sometimes you overlook something, sometimes you value something as more important than it actually is, etc.. True, some "mistakes" are "hindsight is 20-20", but some are actual mistakes/misjudgments/whatever.
To my mind, being unable to admit to an actual mistake or shortcoming speaks volumes about a person - and not in a good way. It means that when the INEVITABLE mistake comes up, a person may be unable to adjust or adapt to it.
Employers may want robots, but in reality they are getting people (until AI is good enough to completely replace all of us in everything, I guess, but then who will the employers be?). People are going to screw up somewhere sometime somehow. People who can't realize this quickly and take corrective action can cause a small problem to become a large one. Employers DEFINITELY don't want that.
Besides, studying, like money, or like "going to a good school" is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.
If you check JFK courage essay contest, 2017 winner is an Arabian, and 2016 winner is a Chinese.
You are fooling yourself if you believe top Asian students cannot write or at least fabricate some fancy college application essays.
Life would be much easier if Asian students actually lack language skills, or don't know music, or don't play sports.
The problem is they just don't give up and keep checking the boxes, and now Ivy colleges have run out of metrics to filter out Asians. These were obstacles to deny Jewish people, but Asian students are overcoming them through "the endless practice".
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“Asian students, especially the high achievers tend to suffer from ‘sameness’.” That is a comment straight out of a college counselor
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Princeton’s admissions officers repeatedly wrote of Asian-American applicants as being difficult to differentiate, referring to them dismissively as having “very familiar profiles,” calling them “standard premeds,” or “difficult to pluck out.”
Admissions officers were only asked once about a time when they explicitly mentioned an applicant's Asian background as a positive — a half-Korean, half-Hispanic applicant that the officer called a "neat blend."
This is where things become disgraceful and ugly.
They are applying a racial quota, but they don't want to admit. How are admissions officers going to justify themselves then? Only by using textbook racial stereotyping and profiling to demean certain racial groups.
That's why I would rather Ivies and many other colleges apply a transparent racial quota system. It's good for everybody.
1. Until someone offers and supports a workaround there isn't one. On balance NIH exposure is critical to these folks winning contextually important acclaim and designations/memberships like, "National Academy of Sciences", "National Academy of Medicine", "American Academy of Arts and Sciences", "Hughes Medical Institute Investigator" etc. Further, and I'm replaying the old saw, "correlation does not imply causation" in my head but there is also a strong tie between NIH funding/relationships and Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.
You might make the argument that Harvard could break free of federal funding and dig into its endowment and collect cash from grads and private enterprise...........I'd say the chances of them trying approach zero.
2. If academic merit is a significant part of the admissions equation Asians not only face obvious bias at Harvard but most academic institutions across the country.
The AAMC is near heroic for publishing these numbers and they publish far more than just this. But from the chart supplied in the piece you can see how Asians and whites to a lesser degree face significant numerical biases in medical school admissions.
I'll gladly tack on links to other AAMC data if you'd like some of the problems posed by those minorities who gain admittance via lowered standards are:
They are far more likely to never finish medical school at all
They are far more likely to need 5th or 6th years to complete MS-1 through MS-4.
They score worse on the The USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 tests. Their failure rates on the Step 1 test are higher.
People from these groups fail to make residency matches more often.
The damning part is this for the years shown above the average medical school admit who is black or AA scored an MCAT at around the 61st percentile the average Asian around the 91st percentile (27.3 v. 32.8 old MCAT). Now there are perfectly reasonable people who will claim that that sort of thing is OK in efforts to solve past discrimination. But what one cannot say with any degree of reasonableness or accuracy is that Asians in particular do not face bias.
Okay, so let me put it this way..,
Is there a mathematical, merit based bias against asians in the college admissions process? Yes there probably is. Because no college anywhere will admit students based on merit alone even if they wanted to. Given that fact, Asians who are a high performing group will notice collectively higher scores creates a disadvantage mathematically. Yes absolutely.
Institutionally however, no there is no bias imho because every group has a disadvantage that is outside of their control. Assuming all scores are exceptional in ranges typical of that group; Caucasian kids have a history of advantages not of their own making to contend with, African-American kids have Achievement gaps also not of their own making, Hispanic kids are a mixed bag but mostly share Achievement gaps for similar reasons as African American kids, as do Native American kids. So admissions officers have the difficult task of determining which kids get in in spite or because of the various biases against them. Its no easy task; some qualified kids of whatever stripe are bound to get left behind in favor of others they may deem less so for whatever reason. Its not the end of the world. Those with high scores are bound to get in elsewhere. College admissions aren’t purely a merit-based system. The sooner that is understood the sooner all can move on with life after NMSF. I don’t believe there is a grand scheme to lower the number of Asian kids in college. I think what these schools are trying to do is keep their schools from being for just for one type of student.
At the end of the day, IQ and testing ability do not correlate with achievement in the real world. Colleges know this. They simply want kids who can do the work. And if a particular school feels that a Med school kid that got an MCAT in the 61st percentile can practice medicine the same as one in the 99th percentile, that’s their decision to make. The two may go into different specialties based on ability but at the end of the day, can they both become effective doctors? Chances are yes, they can.
I never said they did. I agree that everyone makes mistakes. I said that bookish people who study a lot make bookish mistakes, process these mistakes internally as the same as little Timmy wrecking mom's car, and yet they got denigrated for writing about them.
I never said they did. I agree that everyone makes mistakes. I said that bookish people who study make bookish mistakes, and they got denigrated for writing about them.
They got denigrated for writing about them after specifically being asked not to. Kids that are good at taking tests should be good at following instructions, should they not? My assumption is that the teacher was trying to get them to think outside THEIR box. And failed.
They got denigrated for writing about them after specifically being asked not to. Kids that are good at taking tests should be good at following instructions, should they not? My assumption is that the teacher was trying to get them to think outside THEIR box. And failed.
This. She's trying to help them stand out from the thousands of other kids who are going to answer the same way. It's the equivalent of a candidate for a position answering the ubiquitous question of, "What is one of your weaknesses?" with "My greatest weakness is that I'm a perfectionist." When I interview someone and they answer that way, and almost all of the younger people I interview have that same answer, it's an automatic mark against them. I'm more impressed by the person who has something less common and seemingly less rehearsed and more genuine to say. (And please, don't criticize the question - I have no control. It's a mandatory one from HR!)
This. She's trying to help them stand out from the thousands of other kids who are going to answer the same way. It's the equivalent of a candidate for a position answering the ubiquitous question of, "What is one of your weaknesses?" with "My greatest weakness is that I'm a perfectionist." When I interview someone and they answer that way, and almost all of the younger people I interview have that same answer, it's an automatic mark against them. I'm more impressed by the person who has something less common and seemingly less rehearsed and more genuine to say. (And please, don't criticize the question - I have no control. It's a mandatory one from HR!)
To the kids’ defense (sort of). Its not their fault. Starting in kindergarten today’s kids are groomed so much that I really dont think too many of them have an original thought. Everything is tested and researched to death. Everyone seems to be on a predictable path to a pre-determined end goal.
So yes, you will encounter lots of ‘im a perfectionist’ responses to that question. Some article on google told them to say that. Much like tutors or parents hammered it into those SAT takers to give their college essays an academic slant, probably due to some ‘research’ showing that is preferable.
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