How Asian Americans fare?
Cupertino schools are feeders to the UC system.
A lot of Asian Americans attend Cupertino schools.
The Asian Americans are put on a higher standard than whites when it comes to admission to the Ivy Leagues and top colleges.
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Little Asia on the Hill
By TIMOTHY EGAN
WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
"Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language," says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. "It's nice. You really feel like you don't stand out."
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. "Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars," reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, "just below the angels."
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle's, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it's like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it's like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear's Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of "selective self-racial segregation," which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. "The different ethnic groups don't really interact that much," he says. "There's definitely a sense of sticking with your community." But, he quickly adds, "People of my generation don't look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they're pretty much like your average American teenagers."
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state's vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation's most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report's top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year's freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from "the old Blues" — older alumni named for the school color — "who complain because their kids can't get in," says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. "It's the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense."
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. "It's a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences," he says. "I was never interested in that."
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation's best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the "new Jews," in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, "The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, "Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science."
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
"This is just a very, very egregious system," Mr. Li told me. "Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race."
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, "seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism."
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. "I'm not seeking anything personally," he says. "I'm happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter."
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important "to ensure a diverse student body," says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, "Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite" — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the "total package," in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. "There's no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students," she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. "We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections," Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world's finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
"We are a meritocracy," he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and '80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
"I've heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all," says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. "What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it's been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian."
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. "You really do feel like you stand out," says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. "I'm almost always the only black person in my class," says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
"Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it's overwhelmingly Asian," she says. "I don't feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don't really identify with the Asian community as a minority either."
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. "The problem is that because we're so few, we get absorbed among the masses," he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses "comprehensive review" — considering an applicant's less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
"I just don't believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state's premier public university," says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of "Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism." He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. "You could argue that the campus is more diverse now," because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university's job to fix the problems that California's public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: "I think we're now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they're different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest."
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen's families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of "The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker" and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
"I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy," says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book "Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life's Purpose." Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. "They're measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system."
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — "that tired old warhorse of the model minority."
"We shouldn't be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools 'Asian values,' " says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. "These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal."
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. "You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don't participate," she says. "Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it's not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing."
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. "This can make for some big problems," she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. "But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it."
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason "isn't a mystery," Dr. Markus says. "This needs to come out and we shouldn't hide it," she says. "In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that's the most honorable thing you can do."
BERKELEY is "Asian heaven," as one student puts it. "When I went back East my Asian friends were like, 'Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,' " says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
"About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library," one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: "Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn't joins a 'theme house' or is a member of a club related to race."
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. "You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone," says Ms. Nakata. "But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from." But she also says that the "celebrate diversity aspect" of Berkeley doesn't go deep. "We want to respect everyone's differences, but we don't mix socially."
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
"When I was in high school," he says, "there was this notion that you're Chinese, you must be really good in math." But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, "who don't think it will be very lucrative."
The story of Jon Lee's journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of "the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano." His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. "I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it's like at Cal," he says. "We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he's taught me a lot."
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America — in California, the first state with no racial majority — and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.
Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl."
September 8, 2006
Crowd Pleasers
An Age of Tainted Admissions and Too Much Homework
By JANET MASLIN
AUTUMN leaves, sharp pencils, new lunchboxes: back-to-school season is
always an exciting time. It's livelier than usual when muckraking is
part of the curriculum.
This fall education is a particularly hot topic in publishing. New
books raise a wealth of ticklish questions, beginning with the ones
about wealthy kids. What got them into those Ivy League classrooms?
Have they been pushed nonstop toward college from the cradle? Will
they self-destruct once they get there? How many coaches and essay
editors and tutors can dance on the head of a pin?
Although these are familiar topics, they have developed extra heft.
One reason: the privacy strictures that once protected even the most
knuckleheaded students can now be breached via the Internet. As
colleges deal with overwhelming numbers of applications by making
their calculations more blatantly quantifiable, embarrassing facts and
figures have begun finding their way into the public discourse.
Students' test scores, colleges' rankings in surveys and parents'
bribes all figure in institutions' decisions. So they have all become
fair game.
Daniel Golden uses these numbers for maximum embarrassment in "The
Price of Admissions: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into
Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates." (A big
authoritative subtitle is essential in this genre.) His conclusions
are expected; his tactics are not.
Mr. Golden, the deputy Boston bureau chief for The Wall Street
Journal, is the son of immigrants and legitimately worked his way into
Harvard. He now has an animus for students whose families are wealthy,
powerful or famous enough to shoehorn them ahead of more (in Mr.
Golden's opinion) qualified college applicants. "How the 'Z-List'
makes the A-List" is his chapter on Harvard's treatment of major
donors.
Michael Goldberger, a former director of admissions for Brown
University, is quoted here as acknowledging that "having a building
named after your family on our campus would be a plus factor." Point
taken — but Mr. Golden goes much further. His book is the season's
barnburner because it cites specific donations, test scores and even
essay topics that are linked to questionably qualified applicants.
Their names are named.
"The Price of Admission" describes "development admits" — applicants
with family money but no previous ties to Duke University, the most
egregious offender cited here — as "the dirty little secret of college
admissions." Somehow he knows that Dhani Harrison, who went to Brown,
wrote an admissions essay about playing music onstage with his father,
the Beatle, and Eric Clapton — and that celebrity-mongering Brown was
suitably impressed.
Mr. Golden's dishy, mean-spirited book delivers a mixed message: that
although prominent institutions select students unfairly, applicants
should still be fighting their ways into these same unscrupulous
colleges. A how-to guide, "The New Rules of College Admissions: Ten
Former Admissions Officers Reveal What It Takes to Get Into College
Today," raises the ante by suggesting that every applicant needs a
theme. ("That girl is going to be president someday!") No wonder
America's schoolkids have a collective headache.
And as described by Alexandra Robbins in "The Overachievers: The
Secret Lives of Driven Kids," they are all but strangled by creeping
Ivy, in the form of college-application consultants with names like
IvyWise and the Ivy Guaranteed Admissions Program. Ms. Robbins
describes a boy who, in light of this pressure, finds it no
coincidence that "SAT" overlaps with the name Satan.
She also scares one counselor into ditching a teenage client when the
client becomes one of Ms. Robbins's interview subjects. The student
could tarnish the counselor's reputation by failing to get into an
important college.
Ms. Robbins takes a soapy reality-show approach as she tracks a
cross-section of high school hopefuls through the admissions gantlet.
Her book is more anecdotal and less biting than Mr. Golden's. But she
does illustrate the scope of the problem by showing that it's a short
leap from identifying flash cards when applying to kindergarten
("letter, whale, broom, plug, snail, camel, shovel") to the full
kiddie rat race.
Similarly, in "Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child," Alissa
Quart describes an experiment measuring how big expectations warp
young prodigies. Some children who participated in I.Q. testing were
randomly told they were gifted. That reduced both their ability to
work persistently and their capacity for enjoyment.
"Hothouse Kids" is a more serious study than "The Case Against
Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do
About It." This blander book presents unsurprising evidence that
today's school workloads can be monstrous. Witness the kindergarten
girl from Fairbanks, Alaska, who from 5:30 to 6 each day "needs
cajoling from parent to do homework, while parent tries to cook
dinner."
On this book's back cover, it is suggested by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., that
every parent in America buy a copy of "The Case Against Homework" —
even though Dr. Kindlon now has his own "Alpha Girls" to recommend.
"Alpha Girls" reflects the kind of firsthand perspective that colors
many such studies of schoolchildren.
As the father of two teenage girls, Dr. Kindlon feels that
father-daughter connections are important and empowering in creating
successful alpha personalities. His book has a chart to prove that
girls with good relationships with their fathers have high
self-esteem. Another shows that the majority of alpha girls disagree
with the statement "I am shy."
Although "Alpha Girls" means to combat the idea of stifled female
ambition, its central insight is nothing new. The alpha was a smart
cookie even when she was known as a coed.
"College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Coeds, Then and Now" is
an entertaining work of feminist history that digs up every
conceivable manifestation of the she-student, from novelty item to
fashion plate to trendsetter. It helps to know that even when an
advertisement for fruit might feature a pretty model in cap and gown
(courtesy of the College Heights Orange and Lemon Association), and
girls were offered advice by books like "Co-Ediquette" ("if he gets
amorous, don't wander alone with him in the moonlight"), they were
still alpha enough to resist the brainwashing.
Whatever their sex, college students risk overreacting to years' worth
of torment once they finally leave home. What happens at college once
they get there? "From Binge to Blackout: A Mother and Son Struggle
With Teen Drinking" is an especially gripping cautionary tale on this
subject. And it is unusual in that it does not follow the standard
story template, from downfall to miracle cure. Instead this account is
divided between two narrators: Toren Volkmann, who slid with scary
ease from fun-loving party guy to desperate alcoholic, and Chris
Volkmann, his mother, who bought Toren's assurances that he was fine.
He had a secret, and she hadn't a clue.
In light of all this, perhaps there's a lot to be said for armchair
academia, the kind best reached via someone else's imagination. A
covert enjoyment of numbers, puzzles, cognitive tricks and pattern
recognition fueled the vast popularity of the novel "The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" — even though the author, Mark
Haddon, has not replicated this gambit in his new novel, "A Spot of
Bother." Instead this season's schoolbook of choice is Marisha Pessl's
"Special Topics in Calamity Physics," a novel that trades on classroom
cachet.
With chapters named for famously great books, this showily erudite
novel has a prep school for its setting. It has a bright young student
as its narrator, and a mysterious teacher at the center of its plot.
Best of all, it comes with a final exam. And as Ms. Pessl puts it, in
a last sentence that's a lovely feat of school mimicry: "Take all the
time you need."
Harrison Frist, Bill Frist's son, got accepted to Princeton even though he was the worst in the admission criteria. WHy? Because his grandfather donated $25Million for a GFrist Center. All 4 kids of Al Gore got accepted at Harvard. Al Gore III was not bright, delinquent, arrested while driving under the influence of marijuana while in high school and got caught using marijuana again at Harvard. He graduated in 2005 but his name was not even in the commencement.
Jaime Lee, who emigrated from Hong Kong through England in 2003, was a superstar. He got perfect scores in PSAT, SAT and 2 SAT II tests. He got 780 is STA 2 writing. He won awards in high school. He wrote and composed music that his high school band played. He invented a case for CDs. He applied to Havard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Darthmouth, Stanford, MIT. He got rekected by all of them. It was anti-Asian discrimination. He applied for early admission with Princeton in 2004, but Princeton delayed the decision until Sporing to reject him while at the same time Harrison Frist got accepted. When Golden contacted these schools, the answered were not clear. So Jamie Lee took a year off writing and composing music. He got his own hook. Golden tried to help and called Darthmouth to ask again for the reasons. Then Darthmouth, fearing a media backlash, offered Jaime Lee a spot saying that there were 25 available and he was lucky to get one of them. FInally Jaime Lee is in the class of 2009.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1226150,00.html
Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006
Who Needs Harvard?
Competition for the Ivies is as fierce as ever, but kids who look beyond the famous schools may be the smartest applicants of all
By NANCY GIBBS, NATHAN THORNBURGH
It's the summer before your senior year, and you're sweating. The college brochures are spread across the table, along with itineraries, SAT review books, downloaded copies of Web pages that let you chart the grades and scores of every kid from your high school who applied to a given college in the past five years and whether they got in or not. You're hunting for a school where the principal oboe player is graduating, or the soccer goalie, so it might be in the market for someone with your particular skills. You can be fifth-generation Princeton or the first in your family to apply to college: it's still the most important decision you've ever made, and the most confounding.
You're a parent watching your child, so proud, and so worried. Your neighbors' son was a nationally ranked swimmer, straight As, great boards, nice kid. Got rejected at his top three choices, wait-listed at two more. Who gets into Yale these days anyway? Maybe they should have sent him to Mali for the summer to dig wells, fight malaria, give him something to write about in his essay.
You're the college counselor at a public school in a hothouse ZIP code, and you wish you could grab the students, grab the parents by the shoulders and shake them. Twenty thousand dollars for a college consultant? They're paying for help getting into a school where the kid probably doesn't belong. Do they really think there are only 10 great colleges in the country? There are scores of them, hundreds even, honors colleges embedded inside public universities that offer an Ivy education at state-school prices; small liberal-arts colleges that exalt the undergraduate experience in a way that the big schools can't rival. And if they hope to go on to grad school? Getting good grades at a small school looks better than floundering at a famous one. Think they need to be able to tap into the old-boy network to get a job? Chances are, the kid is going to be doing a job that doesn't even exist now, so connections won't do much good. The rules have changed. The world has changed. You have a sign over your office door: COLLEGE IS A MATCH TO BE MADE, NOT A PRIZE TO BE WON.
"In my generation," says Bill Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard, "America wasted a lot of talent." Applying to college was less brutal mainly because "three-quarters of the population was excluded from these types of schools." Now 62% more students are going to college than did in the '60s, when Fitzsimmons was a Harvard undergrad, and while many of them head off to state universities and community colleges, the top schools are determined to tear down barriers to entry for the brightest of them. Admissions officers from Harvard, Yale and Stanford weave their outreach tours through low-income ZIP codes and remote rural areas, starting new summer academies for promising candidates and waiving their tuition if they do make it in. Harvard's class of 2009 included 22% more students from families who earned under $60,000 than the class of 2008. Like many other colleges, Harvard also gives some preferences to well-connected applicants like legacies (the children of alumni), but Fitzsimmons says his school is making a statement with its broader outreach. "The word has gone out that if you are talented, the sky is the limit," Fitzsimmons says. "If we don't take advantage of that energy, America will languish."
The math is simple: when so many more kids are applying, a smaller percentage get in, which yields the annual headlines about COLLEGE ADMISSIONS INSANITY. Princeton turned down 4 of every 5 of the valedictorians who applied last year, and Dartmouth could have filled its freshman class with students with a perfect score in at least one SAT subject and had some to spare. But in the meantime, partly as a result, partly in response to all kinds of social and economic trends, the rest of the college universe has shifted as well. The parents may be the last ones to come around--but talk to high school teachers and guidance counselors and especially to the students themselves, and you can glimpse a new spirit, almost a liberation, when it comes to thinking about college. "Sometimes I see it with families with their second or third child, and they've learned their lesson with the first," observes Jim Conroy, a college counselor at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill. Their message: while you may not be able to get into Harvard, it also does not matter anymore. Just ask the kids who have chosen to follow a different road.
Small Is Beautiful
The apostle of the alternative way is a white-haired, bespectacled former education editor of the New York Times named Loren Pope, whose book Colleges That Change Lives is the best-selling admissions guide, ahead of A Is for Admission: The Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges. He lays out all the ways in which the past 30 years have smiled on smaller schools. With rising prosperity, their endowments have grown. The number of Ph.D.s doubled from 1968 to 1998, meaning a deeper pool of professors to choose from. And in some ways the small schools gained an advantage over their prestigious rivals: after Sputnik, many colleges became research universities, "and smaller has been better for undergraduate education ever since," Pope says. "At big research universities, professors spend more time researching than teaching."
In a kind of virtuous circle, the "second tier" schools got better as applications rose and they could become choosier in assembling a class--which in turn raised the quality of the whole experience on campus and made the school more attractive to both topflight professors and the next wave of applicants. "Just because you haven't heard of a college doesn't mean it's no good," argues Marilee Jones, the admissions dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an outspoken advocate of the idea that parents need to lighten up. "Just as you've changed and grown since college, colleges are changing and growing."
Once students start Looking Beyond the Ivy League--the title of another Pope book--they see for themselves the advantages that can come with an open mind. They find a school that lets students work with NASA on deep-space experiments, or maintains a year-round ski cabin or funds a full year of traveling in the developing world. Schools once derided as "safeties" stand taller now, as they make the case that excellence is not always a function of exclusivity. Some kids end up getting into Harvard and then turning it down because of the $30,000 tuition or the lecture-hall class sizes or because in the course of the hunt they conclude that they would fit better elsewhere. And in making their choice, they get to make their own statement about what is important in an education, and even teach their parents some lessons.
Investing in the Future
Given the changes in the economy as well as the academy in the past 20 years, advocates for smaller schools argue that they give students a sharper competitive edge. "What most parents are concerned about is providing the best security for their child," says Gay Pepper, head of college guidance at Greens Farms Academy, a private school in Westport, Conn. "Some see going to a brand-name college as providing that security. We have to shift that thinking. A college that is right for the student is the best form of investment."
There's growing evidence to support that claim. The Quarterly Journal of Economics published a study in 2002 showing that students who were accepted at top schools but for various reasons went to less selective ones were earning just as much 20 years later as their peers from more highly selective colleges. Much of the old-boy networking value has diminished in an increasingly performance-based economy: only seven CEOs from the current top 50 FORTUNE 500 companies were Ivy League undergraduates. In an economy in which people typically change jobs seven or eight times and new fields open up all the time, Pope notes, "connections won't do a whole hell of a lot of good. It's your own specific gravity, not the name of the school, that matters."
For students aspiring to go to graduate school, the more personalized education offered at small schools can often provide the best preparation. Pomona College sent a higher percentage of its students to Harvard Law in 2005 than Brown or Duke. The academic might of these less fabled colleges was never a secret, but it's becoming more appreciated than ever before. "Most of the good, small schools were church related to begin with, and it was bad form to beat your chest and brag," Pope says.
James Sanchez, 21, from the dusty high-desert town of Española, N.M., is a senior at Davidson College in North Carolina and an aspiring neuroscientist. He figured that at a bigger school he would have been lucky to spend his lab time washing beakers for the star scientists. At Davidson, where there are no grad students, Sanchez's senior thesis is an integral part of a larger three-year study of memory and learning in rats that may offer new insights into Alzheimer's. His professor anticipates that the research will be published in a top-shelf neuroscience journal, and says that Sanchez will be listed as a co-author. That's a rare honor for an undergraduate, and Sanchez thinks it has given him a boost in his applications to medical school.
Students see a strategy: choose intimacy and attention now, and reach for the world-class research university for grad school. Ashley Rufus, 19, gave up a coveted spot on Harvard's waiting list in favor of Truman State University in rural Kirksville, Mo.: "It started out as a financial issue," says Rufus, who got a full ride to Truman. She loved Harvard when she visited, but she hated the idea of eight years of debt if she were to go on to medical school. Truman was closer to home, had a student-faculty ratio of 15:1, and its graduates have a "very impressive" rate of acceptance to medical schools. Carla Valenzuela, 18, who graduated in the spring from Martin Luther King Academic Magnet school in Nashville, Tenn., applied to 13 schools--and wound up picking her last choice. She turned down Amherst, Wellesley and Dartmouth in favor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Part of the draw was being near a big city; part was the offer of a Meyerhoff scholarship, a prestigious, four-year grant for talented high school students studying science and related fields. All 52 Meyerhoff scholars from the class of 2005 went on to graduate schools, 45 of them to M.D., Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. combination programs.
"If I wanted to work right after college, I would have gone to a more 'name school' like Dartmouth," Valenzuela says. But she hopes to become a doctor, so she did some research. "I definitely looked at the medical-acceptance rates of each college and how strong their pre-med programs were, and that helped knock out a lot of colleges." Students with clear professional goals will pay more attention to the reputation of a single department than the whole university. Among the artistically inclined, the Rhode Island School of Design has always been pre-eminent, but schools like the Savannah College of Art and Design, Emerson College and Northeastern University are now attracting kids specifically for their arts curriculums. Gabriel Slavitt, 17, who this spring graduated from Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Calif., says his stepsister "basically flipped out" when she heard he was turning down Brown University in favor of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. He admits that he applied to Brown for the name, but he concluded that its arts program was not as strong. "For what I want to study, it doesn't mean anything to me to be around students that are going to help me get a job later in life, business students and the like."
Make Me a Match
To see what a more ecumenical approach to college hunting looks like, you have only to drop in on Pope's Colleges That Change Lives tour, a kind of low-key Lollapalooza for freethinking colleges that are looking for liberated students. Last year more than 600 people attended each of the sessions in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco and Washington. In a crowded Manhattan hotel ballroom, Maria Furtado, director of admissions at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., grabs the wireless microphone in front of a crowd of more than 500 parents, students and college counselors and happily shatters conventional wisdom. "Every spring and every fall, this is what you will see and hear in the media: 'No one gets in anywhere,'" she says. "Gloom and doom. Well, we're here to tell you that people get in everywhere!" She polls the crowd: What percentage of kids do you think get into their first-choice school? One guess is 5%; another is 20%. Furtado beams and announces slowly, so as not to let the Good Word slip out too carelessly: " 79.8% of first-year students are at their first-choice school."
Other studies say the number is closer to 70%. But whatever the exact figure, if you want to be one of them, Furtado says, "you have to be brave and bold and explore a school you haven't heard of before." That shouldn't be hard for this crowd. As a group, the kids are unorthodox, outspoken late bloomers. "They're very bright, but they didn't discover it until they were juniors or seniors in high school," says Goucher College president Sanford Ungar, who makes the point that those who find their way to a place like Goucher can be more creative than their highly polished peers. "They haven't been flattened by steamrollers in high school," he says. "They haven't been so bruised in the application process that they are incapable of creative thought. Many kids have been so overgroomed by their parents and others."
Elizabeth Pantone, 17, listens closely as admissions officers make their pitch. She's an aspiring writer in an intense Westchester, N.Y., school, who is both pushing against the culture and admitting that she's working harder now in hopes of aiming higher. Her dad, meanwhile, has been trying to meet her halfway, since no matter what she does she's not likely to make it to the schools he originally had in mind. "It's been quite an education for me," he says. "I was thinking name brand in the beginning, but now I really believe in this match idea."
This can be a slow process, educating parents. "After Colleges That Change Lives came out, I got letters from all around the country from mamas saying 'You saved us,'" Pope says. "Well, more mamas need saving." At Brookline High School in Brookline, Mass., headmaster Bob Weintraub estimates that fully 1 in 3 of his students' parents went to Harvard. That means one of his many jobs is defusing the tension they promote. On their own, students set up a wall by the counseling office where they post their rejection letters. They call it the Wall of Shame, but it's a great way for them to realize they're not alone in having their Ivy dreams dashed. "It's a community of the rejected," jokes Weintraub.
At freshman orientation, Weintraub includes a plea for parents to check their college anxieties at the door. "Their kids are just transitioning into high school," he says. "They're going to be exposed to drugs, sex, lots of changes. Can we just deal with the developmental issues first?" By the time they enter the college hunt, many kids have been conditioned to treat the process more as a race than a romance, a test of who comes in first, not what will make them happy. "You ask students what they want," says Rachel Petrella, a counselor at California's La Jolla Country Day School, "and they say, 'What do you mean, What do I want? What do I get? I've been working for four years without daylight. I'm supposed to go to the most selective school I've earned, right?'"
Actually, no. And thus begins their higher education about higher education. "The more sophisticated kids who take on the search as a research project, they are getting past the prestige," says Petrella. Students see that schools like Vassar, Lehigh, Colgate and Dickinson really care about the quality of undergraduate life, she says. Since many counselors will advise the more anxious students to apply to at least nine schools (three stretches, three matches and three safeties), students run spreadsheets rating various criteria on a scale of 1 to 10, from the food to the student-teacher ratio to rates of acceptance into grad school. And then there are the unquantifiable assets. At Davidson, townspeople and professors bake cakes for the winners of the freshman cake race and students boast that scattered around the campus are dollar bills held down by rocks, tangible evidence of an honor code so entrenched that if a dollar falls on campus soil, it stays there until the owner claims it. Kenyon in Ohio includes a paragraph in its acceptance letter that is entirely personal to the particular student: good job on the essay, nice season in basketball. The big schools can't do that--"and it's making a difference," says Sharon Merrow Cuseo, dean at Los Angeles' Harvard-Westlake Academy. "I think of my students as cynical consumers of college propaganda, but they love that personal touch. They come in and say, 'Jeez, look at this note they wrote me. It's good to be wanted.'" She can map the change in priorities based on the school's spring 2006 college tour. Five years ago, they just did the northeast. This year the group, after visiting a campus or two in New York, split into two parts. The first went south to University of Richmond, Davidson, William and Mary, and George Washington. "People are starting to understand that a lot of the Southern schools in general are great," she says. The second broke north into Canada to visit McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto. Cuseo calls Canada "the new frontier."
Who Needs Consultants?
So how do the private consultants fit into all this? As many as 1 in 5 applicants to private four-year colleges get some kind of independent coaching, which can range in price from $469 for Kaplan's three-hour consultation by webcam to $36,000 for four years of hand holding offered by superconsultant Michele Hernandez. Although consultants are easy to caricature for sanding down and varnishing a nice, raw kid, admissions officers insist that they can see past the polishing to the real human being beneath. How useful counselors are may depend as much on the attitude of the client as the approach of the counselor. "Some of them are very helpful and are helping students learn how to tell us about themselves," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, in a rare defense of the breed. "I don't think it's fair to say they're all negative."
For better or worse, working with a consultant forces students to decide who they are as they shape their self-portraits and what sacrifices they are willing to make in the course of their college search. Emma Robson, 17, a junior in Westport, Conn., found herself wrestling with a consultant who tried to spike her favorite activity of the entire year, her seven weeks at a summer camp on Moose Pond in Maine, where she and a bunch of girls she has known since she was 10 sing campfire songs and canoe and make lanyards. Many of her classmates will be spending their summers racking up achievements, while Robson will be collecting and recollecting, in a very old-fashioned way, memories. "Camp is very dear to me," she says, and she's prepared to give up whatever edge a more intense summer might give her. "It's a time I get to recharge from a pretty stressful school year. If I spent the summer taking extra classes, I would just be worn down by the time school starts."
If parents see college admission as the culmination of years of investment--the homework showdowns and soccer shuttles--it's not hard to find kids like Robson who see it as their deliverance. "I don't really want to continue all this hypercompetitiveness," says Greg Smith, 18, a senior in Charlotte, N.C., who cringes as he notes how, when history projects were announced at his high school, there was a literal footrace to the library to be the first to get the key books. He won a Morehead scholarship to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a full ride offered to the very top students. It was not only the money but also the feel of the place that drew him. "The Ivy Leagues just seemed like a very intense four years where I'd get more of the same that I've been through here," he says. "There's such a seek-and-destroy mentality." Others seek out schools like Sarah Lawrence, which has no required courses and few exams but rather research papers and essays. Or Hampshire, where students focus on projects instead of courses and receive detailed evaluations rather than grades.
College students this spring watched the flameout of Kaavya Viswanathan, the prepackaged Harvard prodigy who published a best seller at 19 and had been exposed as a plagiarist by 20. That's not the way things are supposed to unfold. College is supposed to be about the Best Four Years of Your Life, "the love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books," not to mention pizza and football and long, caffeinated nights of debate and confusion and discovery. All that families have to do to succeed, say veterans of the admissions wars, is let go of some old assumptions and allow themselves to be pleasantly surprised by how much has changed on campuses across the country in the past generation. That ability in the end may be the admissions test that matters most.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1226164,00.html
Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006
How VIPs Get In
By NATHAN THORNBURGH
Growing numbers of kids may be discovering that they no longer need Harvard, but according to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, the Ivies still feel a need for certain kinds of kids. Golden won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his articles on the admissions advantage élite schools give to the children of alumni (known as legacies) and to the sons and daughters of big donors and celebrities. His book on that practice, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, will be published in September. He spoke with TIME's Nathan Thornburgh about the myth of college meritocracy.
HOW MUCH EASIER IS IT TO GET INTO A TOP SCHOOL IF YOU HAVE THESE SPECIAL PREFERENCES?
If the parent pledges enough money or is a big enough celebrity or powerful enough alumnus, the break can amount to 300 SAT points out of 1600, which is as much or more than a typical affirmative-action preference would be. About a third of the kids at the typical élite university would probably not be there if not for those preferences.
WHAT'S SO WRONG WITH A PRIVATE SCHOOL'S GIVING THE KIDS OF ALUMNI A LEG UP?
You have to remember that college admissions is a zero-sum game. For every kid who's admitted, there's another kid who doesn't get the space. There's a cost there. It hurts the quality of intellectual discussion in the classroom, the vitality of the university. These universities are nonprofits whose mission should be to identify the best and brightest students. Their mission shouldn't be to perpetuate aristocracy in America.
THE TOP SCHOOLS INSIST THAT THEY ARE EXPANDING THEIR OUTREACH. ARE THEY ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM?
Colleges do a lot of marketing to ensure that they bring in a huge number of applications, only to turn down most of them to make room for rich kids. It's true that many top colleges have announced expanded financial-aid opportunities for low-income kids. But none of these élite private colleges have announced any diminution of the preferences they have for wealthy kids or legacies, and they're not willing to give up their preferences for athletes in élite sports like squash, sailing, polo and crew. The losers here are the middle-class kids. All they bring is brilliance, hard work and achievement. Apparently that's not enough.
WHO HAS BEEN USING THIS IVY-LEAGUE BACK DOOR?
Lots of people. Take the example of Harrison Frist, the oldest son of [Senate majority leader] Bill Frist. His father is a Princeton alumnus and a very powerful politician. The family has given $25 million for Princeton's Frist Campus Center. Harrison wasn't in the Cum Laude Society, which is the top 20% of students at his prep school, St. Albans, but my research indicated that Princeton considered Harrison a very high priority for admission. [A Princeton spokesman says Frist was accepted on his own merit.]
HOW DID HE DO WHEN HE GOT TO PRINCETON?
He joined an eating club that is kind of notorious for rambunctiousness and was eventually arrested for drunk driving. He graduated this year but without academic honors. Now Harrison's youngest brother was just admitted to Princeton. He's entering in the fall. And he wasn't in the Cum Laude Society at St. Albans either. [The Frist family declined to comment.]
AND YET BILL FRIST OPPOSES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.
I think it suggests that he's glad to take advantage of one type of affirmative action for his own family while opposing it for people of a different race or of lesser means.
YOU WENT TO HARVARD AS AN UNDERGRAD. WERE YOU A LEGACY?
No. My dad went to City College of New York, and my mom went to Skidmore. In fact, my parents were both immigrants, exemplars of the kind of meritocracy that I believe in.
YOU'VE GOT A SON IN HIGH SCHOOL. WILL HIS LEGACY STATUS HELP HIM GET INTO HARVARD?
No, he's not applying to Harvard. Given this book and how colleges feel about me, I'm thinking of sending him to college in Canada.
CASNET, a free, moderated email list, is a project of the National Association of Scholars ( nas.org) and the California Association of Scholars ( calscholars.org). Thomas E. Wood, Research Director and Moderator. ***********************************************
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/01/the_new_yellow_peril.html
January 09, 2007
The New 'Yellow Peril'
By Thomas Sowell
A hundred years ago, there was talk of a "yellow peril" because of Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States in general and to California in particular. Today, there are echoes of that notion in a front page headline on the education section of the New York Times of January 7th.
"At 41 percent, Berkeley could be the new face of merit-based admissions. The problem for everybody else: lots less room at elite colleges."
Anybody of any race who takes a place at any college leaves one less place for somebody else. Does an Asian American take up any more space than anybody else? Are they all Sumo wrestlers?
This hand-wringing about too many Asians is an echo of the past in another painful way. Back in the early 20th century, various elite colleges decided that there were "too many Jews" applying and set quotas to restrict the number of Jewish students admitted.
One of the institutions that did not do this was the College of the City of New York, which admitted students according to their academic qualifications. Jewish students seemed to be an even higher percentage of the students at CCNY then than Asian students are today at Berkeley.
Because CCNY was both free and a high-quality academic institution, it became known as "the poor man's Harvard."
That was then. Today, CCNY has long since succumbed to the siren song of "inclusion" and flung its doors open to all and sundry, with no old-fashioned notions of academic qualifications. No one calls it a poor man's Harvard any more. Few would even call it adequate.
In the long and rambling New York Times article about Berkeley -- titled "Little Asia on the Hill" -- there is lots of space devoted to racial representation among the student body and remarkably little mention of qualifications and achievement. You might never guess that a university has purposes other than presenting a demographic profile that is politically correct.
In addition to such omissions, there is also misinformation. For example: "In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics."
There have been more black students in the University of California system than there were before affirmative action was outlawed. Black students have not been denied a college education. They have been redistributed within the University of California system, with fewer going to Berkeley and more going to Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and other institutions within the same system.
Something similar has happened within the University of Texas system after affirmative action was outlawed. Fewer black students went to the flagship campus at Austin but more went to the University of Texas system as a whole.
Back in the days when affirmative action or racial quotas were in full force, most black students admitted to Berkeley never graduated. Nor was Berkeley unique in that respect.
Critics of affirmative action have been saying for decades that putting black students in institutions where they are overmatched academically reduces their chances of graduating. This creates a wholly unnecessary problem, when most of those same black students would have far better chances of keeping up and graduating at other institutions where the rest of the students have similar academic qualifications.
The sheer speed at which material is taught can make it nearly impossible to keep up when the pace is geared to students with far higher SAT scores in math and English -- even though students with lower scores may be perfectly capable of learning the same material when taught at a more moderate pace.
What has happened to graduation rates of black students after being redistributed within the University of California system? Those who have asked that question have been denied the information. And of course the New York Times reporter does not even discuss such things.
Asians are no menace to blacks. They could serve as an example to blacks, as Bill Cosby once suggested. He told some black students: "They always get A's. That's why they call them Asians."
No, Asians are not being discriminated at Cal and other elite UCs. They are simply not being given preference the way blacks and latinos are. Asians are rated the exact same way whites are.
What a strange conspiracy theory to believe.
Yes, rich people and alumni have preferences in Ivy League schools. That is why they are private. Good luck getting that changed.
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