College bound? Now hand over $30/k please!
Posted on 05/28/2007 7:03:46 AM PDT by jude24
Concerned that the barriers to elite institutions are being increasingly drawn along class lines, and wanting to maintain some role as engines of social mobility, about two dozen schools — Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Virginia, Williams and the University of North Carolina, among them — have pushed in the past few years to diversify economically.
They are trying tactics like replacing loans with grants and curtailing early admission, which favors the well-to-do and savvy. But most important, Amherst, for instance, is doing more than giving money to low-income students; it is recruiting them and taking their socioeconomic background — defined by family income, parents’ education and occupation level — into account when making admissions decisions.
(snip)
Mr. Jack’s high grades and test scores — a respectable 1200 on the SAT — won him a full scholarship to the University of Florida. But the median score for his Amherst class was 1422, and he would have been excluded had the admissions office not considered his socioeconomic class, and the obstacles he had overcome.
“Tony Jack with his pure intelligence — had he been raised in Greenwich, he would have been a 1500 kid,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admission. “He would have been tutored by Kaplan or Princeton Review. He would have had The New Yorker magazine on the coffee table.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The dumbing down of America continues.
It appears obvious that greedy politicians and the corporate elite want to drag America down to third world status.
Liberal lies they tell themselves so that they can remain masters of their universe.
“had he been raised in Greenwich, he would have been a 1500 kid”
I coulda been a contendah!
P.S. Lock your dorm rooms.
I think it’s a good thing. Poor kids who are smart aren’t always motivated in the best ways. I don’t believe this is a social experiment at all.
I dunno. Rich kids were just as likely as poor kids to steal.
Clearly, social engineering is in vogue at colleges today - but not all social engineering is bad. It's not like the kid got points just because he was a minority.
So what?
Rent the movie “Idiocracy” (if you have not seen it). It is where we are truly headed. !
LLS
There was a classic Three Stooges epsiode based on that theory... I believe the end result was one helluva pie-fight.
This is good stuff, but based on what I see, socioeconomic factors are secondary to the fact the kids have good grades, SAT scores and are getting into good schools anyway.
Kudos to those schools who are moving away from the legacy programs!
I know kids in low income families, they are more honest and hardworking than some rich kids I know. The rich ones are the ones who get away with everything because who their momma and daddy are.
Regardless, scoring a full ride to U of Florida is nothing to sneeze at, this student will go far.
College bound? Now hand over $30/k please!
This doesn’t look like “dumbing down” to me. This young man’s SAT scores were below the median for Amherst’s accepted students, but very like within the low end of the range of all students accepted under normal criteria. He graduated from a middling private prep school in Miami, which he alse attended on scholarship. He was clearly prepared to do the work at the level of other students (in fact, he graduated with honors and earned high grades in no-fluff courses including calculus and organic chemistry).
These “elite” schools know they have way too many lazy rich kids on their campuses, and want to balance that with some serious students. The insane parent-driven and prep-school-driven measures that have been commonplace in the effort to get upper and upper middle class kids into “elite” colleges have gone so far overboard that it’s safe to assume most of those kids would have much much lower SAT scores, grades, extracurricular resumes, etc. if they’d been left to their own efforts and normal levels of parental supervision. In NYC, it’s very common for parents to hire consultants to help market their tots for admission to the “best” nursery schools. And that level of insanity continues right through high school, with expensive standardized test prep courses starting in middle school.
It’s been my observation that industrious people will succeed regardless of what is or isn’t given to them. Smart people, regardless of their advantages or lack thereof, will succeed if they’re motivated. McCollege isn’t a guarantee to success anymore—just ask all the Shakespeare-quoting french fry chefs out there.
Actually a 1200 is quite respectable! It's 170 points higher than the average SAT for a public schooled child and 100 points higher than the average home schooled student - nearly 2 full standard deviations above the mean. I agree - in a higher SES class, this young man would be in the 1500's for SAT's.
As far as jokes that people should lock their doors for fear this young man will rob them - nice try, but inaccurate. I went to a Christian University and still had to lock my stuff up if I didn't want it to go missing.
It MUST be based on MERIT. Otherwise it will be a joke.
There's good and bad at all levels.
There's no data that I know of that says poor kids are more honest than rich.
Another way of taking money from the “haves” and giving it to the “have nots”. Americans of European background pay higher tuition fees, so that the colleges can give away tuition free to others.
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