Re: WOT: Guilt

Jane wrote:
Pogonip wrote:

My older son's best friend (since they were 2 and 3 years old), who is a
white male, went to Harvard for his undergraduate degree, and was a
scholarship student. He's 34 now, and has a Master's from Cambridge
(actually a degree plus a fee for the master's) and a Ph.D. from Harvard
and is teaching at Columbia except this year he's on sabbatical in
France. His parents are solidly middle class and far from wealthy.
There was no legacy, either. So, I think it is possible to get into
Harvard.
--
Joanne


Nobody is saying it's not possible, and in point of fact Harvard's
AA program is less egregious than most.

But at my old college, SAT scores 200 points lower than those that
would even get you considered if you're white will at least get your
application read if you're not, and a fair proportion of the applicants
with those lower scores actually get in.

So the standard you have to meet is higher if your race is white
than if it is not, and that is indeed racism, even though white
students do get in. They just have to be better qualified than black
and Latino students to do it.

That's pretty much the same system that applied to Jews at most
Ivy League universities before World War II (Harvard limited the Jews
to 5% of its undergraduate classes) and to women in law schools prior
to the 1960s (some of the more elite law schools restricted women to 1
to 3 places in a law school class.)

This is what racism is--judging people not as individuals but
first and foremost as part of their group
(race/ethnicity/religion/whatever), and by different standards
according to which group they're in.

And the system is not a good one. For one thing, at at least
some places, where the standards differential is really wide, it
fosters the old-fashioned kind of racism: since the black kid sitting
next to you in math IS less qualified than you are, and you never meet
a black kid AS qualified as you are, you're likely to get the idea that
black kids just can't do it.

That's because AA does not in fact admit black students who would
not otherwise go to college. What it does is trade them up--a black
kid with the credentials to go to Bucknell goes to Harvard instead, and
that leaves Bucknell forced to take the kid who would usually only
qualify for UConn.

There really ARE black kids who fully qualify at Bucknell's level,
but Bucknell students don't see them, because they're at Harvard, where
they don't meet the standard, so the kids there...

Etc.

What's more, the vast majority of minority kids who benefit from
AA are not poor. They haven't gone to lousy schools. They're the
children of the black upper middle class. Quite a few of them have
gone to schools like Exeter and Hotchkiss.

And even with all that, dropout rates of AA admits are vastly
higher than those of regular admits--40% higher on average, and as high
as 70% higher in schools with aggressive AA programs.

I DO think that some things should have been done, and should be
done, to redress the problems caused by slavery and Jim Crow, but we'd
all have been better off if those things had been pouring tons of money
into poor schools and raising and maintaining standards in those
schools to a "white" level rather than indulging in yet more racism in
an effort to "fix" racism.

Oh, and there's one more thing. AA doesn't really keep white
kids out of schools. When California was required to stop affirmative
action admissions at its universities, the number of black and Latino
kids went down, the number of white kids stayed relatively the same,
but the number of Asian kids went WAY up.

Most of those Asian kids refused admission to California's elite
campuses because they were the "wrong" race were of parentage that
could not possibly be connect to slavery, or Jim Crow, and some of them
came from families that had been racially discriminated against
themselves in the years before the end of WWII.

Jane Haddam
http://www.janehaddam.com


College admissions themselves are strange. Other than AA and the factors one expects. My son and a friend in his graduating class -- same school -- applied to UVa. The friend had a slightly higher GPA, and a few other things on his application - for instance, my son didn't become active volunteering until his senior year when he found out that a history of volunteerism was a plus. My boy was accepted. The other boy was not. The only thing we could figure was the key was Kyle's essay. By the time he got through the application to the essay part, he was wiped out. His essay read: "I can also juggle."
--
Joanne
stitches @ singerlady.reno.nv.us.earth.milky-way.com
http://members.tripod.com/~bernardschopen/
.

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