As an aside, I do want to say that the college admissions thing is complicated. I volunteer and do college interviews and outreach for my alma mater (which is not Harvard but has similar admissions statistics).
And the fact of the matter is that with more than 20 kids competing for every single seat at those schools, the question of who is most qualified gets really tricky.
I would say at least 75% of the kids I interview are A students with excellent test scores, who are some combination of their class president, varsity athlete, LA Mayor's council, captain of the debate team, captain of the robotics team, editors of their school newspaper, doing university research, etc.
Off the top of my head, I can tell you I've interviewed kids who have started non-profits to feed the homeless, started their own companies (real ones that make money), world-ranked athletes, and published novelists, not to mention kids who are holding multiple jobs to help their families.
For some reason, the interview algorithm also gives me mostly black and latino students, and large number of students who will likely be first generation college students.
I have not had one kid admitted yet. Not one. Not even a kid waitlisted.
So the question of who gets admitted now is hard, and yes, I am sure Harvard could fill its class MANY times over with just very qualified and talented Asian concert violinists from New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and basically forget everyone else.
But if you're a Harvard, you're picking from a pool of EXTREMELY qualified kids already, and a class of kids from very similar backgrounds, no matter what it is and however qualified they maybe, is not going to make for an optimal class. And really, how do you compare how "qualified" a kid from Stuyvesant (NYC's top STEM magnet) is vs. a kid from a tiny town in Mississippi with a high school that doesn't offer anything beyond geometry?
I sincerely think a major university does have a mission to facilitate intellectual discourse by admitting students from a diversity of backgrounds. (I saw this as a once-Asian kid from Los Angeles who had to fight it out in college admissions with all the other Asian concert pianists in my high school class).
And really at that level, basically any kid who is admitted is already special in some way.
@sidwich thank you for weighing in. Powerful testimony. I had always gotten the impression, can’t say it is scientific though, that white dominant culture wants to keep it that way, i.e., white dominant, by limiting the people of color and the Asians from forming a freshman class that is no longer white dominant.
@enkasongwriter Please explain how the Asian massage parlor shootings of 8 people are a distraction from Trump's taxes.
I felt the timing is uncanny.
I felt the timing is uncanny.
It is not. We're in the deeps of the Great Unraveling/Great Turning, where headline-grabbing events will occur daily. These pileups of events should be expected as symptomatic of a time of global transition if one is to avoid falling into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
As for #45's taxes, I trust that now that we have a new administration in the White House, the DOJ and the Manhattan prosecutor's office are working diligently to get to the bottom of the grime and will make their findings public when appropriate. So I will give that matter attention when new developments become newsworthy, as they most surely will. In the meantime I'm going to go ahead and live my life. That includes integrating the racial hatred that has festered in this country for centuries and has been made evident most recently in the shooting deaths of 8 people in Asian massage parlors.