This black teenager was recently accepted to all 8 ivy league schools. She seems well qualified to have been accepted to at least one but all 8 is the sort of achievement that is largely restricted to a small subset of the population. Namely, Nigerians. You wouldn’t know it by her name but Ifeoma White Thorpe is of Nigerian descent. Decades ago, the Ivy leagues were reasonably well populated with African Americans… of Caribbean descent. Many of them are reasonably wealthy and as some of the articles imply, this particular acceptee may not qualify for financial aid.
This is an extreme example (noone gets into all the ivy leagues without being well qualified) but it highlights the point I am trying to make, this is a feat that is accomplished overwhlemingly by Nigerians, Ghanans, etc.
The number of students like Michele Obama were few and far in between. Is this a problem or are we fine with creating diversity in the professions, the middle class and the upper class by importing our diversity from places like Jamaica and Nigeria?
Assuming that I am not missing something huge, ISTM we aren’t addressing past injustices particularly well by giving these advantages mostly to children of people who were never American slaves or lived under segregation?
Is affirmative action helping us achieve what we intended or is it just making us feel like we are achieving it?
Are we measuring the impact of AA entirely by how it plays out for the Ivy leagues?
That seems remarkably misguided to me.
Premier schools will always appeal to the highest echelons of every nation. But how many Harvards are there? Only one! So the elite of many nations are well represented, black or white. For reasons that have nothing to do with AA. And everything with being one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutes.
Check out enrolment breakdowns for Cambridge or London school of Economics, where no AA exists to my knowledge. I think you’ll see the same multinational elites represented.
Nobody attending college today is the child of a slave, and damned few of them come from parents who lived under segregation. Affirmative Action isn’t a reparations program for descendants of people who were discriminated against, it’s an attempt to adjust for systematic discrimination that tilts the playing field against certain classes of people. While Ms. Thorpe herself is not (apparently) descended from slaves, she is a native-born African American, and has spent her entire life living with the direct and indirect repercussions of centuries of American racism.
One, I feel like the real trick to sweeping the Ivys is convincing Cornell not to waitlist you because it’s so obvious you’ll get better offers.
Two, I think that in general, once you are in the pool of the very talented, very hard-working kids with a real shot at highly selective admissions, immigrant or 1st generation kids often have an edge because the experiences of those kids often develop the exact same traits those schools are looking for: grit and independence. When you’re a first generation kid, you learn at 12 how to pretend to be your mom and haggle with the electric company to keep the lights on, because she doesn’t speak English. You feel this incredible pressure to be successful–you mom literally gave up her own family, will likely never see her own mother again, just to give you this chance–but you get little practical guidance: you have to figure out everything about school–the language, how the system works, how to advocate for yourself, all of it. Most kids do not rise to the occasion on these things, but those they do come out like tempered steel, and it shows.
Even well-off children of immigrants grow up living in two cultures, which can provide a unique sort of perspective and flexibility and confidence.
I had an Asian kid this year get into CalTech and MIT with very good but not amazing scores (by the standards of those institutions). But he’s an amazing guy–and a lot of that comes from being a poor immigrant. I had a little girl sweep 7/8 Ivys one year–she was a Serbian refugee, tough as nails and wise beyond her years. So I suspect that black kids at highly selective schools are disproportionately African–but that’s true for every other group, as well.
As I said, I am picking an extreme example. But the fact still remains that the filter for affirmative action seems to be picking up the children of reasonably well off immigrants from Nigeria.
I thought we were talking about Nigerian Americans. Not Nigerian international students.
International students probably. But we’re not talking about international students are we?
I would think the schools all use similar standards for evaluating the applicants. They are looking at the same transcript, same set of test scores and letters of recommendation, etc. Being accepted by 8 shouldn’t be much harder than being accepted by 1.
When I was an assistant teacher in upstate New York, I noticed that black students who were direct immigrants from Africa often were very responsible, motivated and successful whereas black students who were born in America - African-American - were often comparatively disrespectful, less motivated, more prone to blame others, less successful, etc. And this correlation often held true in other arenas of society for other folks as well - Asian-Americans would pursue their studies less diligently than direct-immigrants-from-Asia Asians, etc. The ironic thing is that African-Americans often looked down on African-Africans, and some Asian-Americans often looked down on Asian-Asians.
It’s not about race, it’s about culture. There is something about America that just tends to decay students after a generation or two.
What is the purpose of Affirmative Action? Some people think that it is to make up for past discrimination, others to level a tilted field, others to provide other students with a diverse learning environment.
If it is to make up for past discrimination it should not apply to immigrants.
If it is to level a tilted field it should not apply to Nigerian americans because they are already doing better than other groups.
If it is to provide other students with diverse experiences it should apply to immigrants because that is extra diversity.
If this is true to any extent, I think it’s likely true because “average” students don’t study abroad… only bright and motivated students study abroad. So no matter what country they’re coming from, exchange/foreign students are likely to be the “cream of the crop” from their country.
I think this is probably true the other way too – I don’t know for sure, but I bet other countries probably notice and remark upon how American exchange students seem to do very well. Anyone have any experience with this?
It’s to adjust for an unfair playing field. It’s not perfect, and not exact, but IMO it equalizes opportunity to a better extent than it would be without it. As to immigrants, I see no reason to believe that African immigrants (which include members of my family) or foreign students are less discriminated against than African Americans, even if they are typically good students.
He is talking about immigrants, not exchange students. And I think the reasons for that are what I laid out above: the immigrant experience can be a kind of crucible that is really unique, in terms of having to be independent and self-motivated while still having a lot of external pressure to succeed.
It’s inherent in the nature of affirmative action programs to provide the most benefit to the least disadvantaged members of disadvantaged groups. This has been observed not just in the US, but in India and Malaysia.
In India, it’s the well off members of the scheduled castes who are in a position to take advantage of relaxed college admissions standards, not the untouchables who beg in the streets. In Malaysia, it’s the middle to upper middle class Malays, not the rural poor rice farmers who can use the preference to get into college and govt jobs ahead of the much higher scoring ethnic Chinese.
Of course, when we talk about Aff Am in the US, we always talk about black people, not white women, the biggest beneficiaries. Not Latinos, the single largest cohort eligible for Aff Am. Not Native Americans or Pacific Islanders - also eligible, but not numerous enough or threatening enough to white folks to merit comment.
As Africa continue to develop and grow economically, African students and the children of African immigrants will probably crowd out ante-bellum black Americans altogether in elite colleges and jobs.
Affirmative action will probably disappear altogether with the Trump Supreme Court. It’s not the anti-white evil that so many closet racists make it out to be, but isn’t really defensible now that the justification has been switched from overcoming historical disadvantage to an amorphous notion of diversity.
1 ) It gives the job or scholarship based on ethnicity or gender over ability.
2 ) The person who gets the spot often is viewed as a privileged and under qualified.
3 ) Any USA school that received federal or state funding should not pick underqualified foreign-born students over natural born USA citizens.
The best solution is for these schools or organizations to give money to K-12 schools in underprivileged areas to produce their own rightly qualified individuals. Simply pick the best students and fund challenging programs for them until high school graduation.
And perhaps give a little bit less to the basketball or football programs.
Its at least partly remedial in nature isn’t it? I mean if all we had was racism without the slavery or segregation, then would affirmative action really be justified? I mean, its not like affirmative action would be justified as long as the KKK exists absent some government action the existence of racism in society doesn’t seem to be enough to justify affirmative action.
I thought the notion was that this country did more than treat them like shit, we actually enslaved them, dragged them over here against their will, raped them, took away their kids, beat them and forced to work for nothing… for centuries. Then we had laws that treated them as second class citizens for another century.
We can always strive for a more just society but affirmative action is a pretty extreme measure to take to combat the effects of general racism absent more.
I agree that immigrants have an advantage in the same way that the Fremen in Dune had an advantage. But should these children of immigrants be beneficiaries of affirmative action that was implemented to reverse some of the effects of slavery and segregation?
I don’t know what you mean by this? The children of African immigrants (and caribean immigrants) are grossly over-represented in the ivy leagues (and pretty much every other competitive college) in large part due to affirmative action that wasn’t really intended for them.
If you are saying that we will see more Asians with immigrant parents at great school than 4th or 5th generation Asian kids, then I agree, that’s probably right. But that doesn’t really rebutt the notion that affirmative action is mostly helping kids whose family immigrated to this country after the civil rights movement.
Sure, its possible. The fact that the majority of kids that achieve this feat are African immigrants or the children thereof (a teeny tiny sliver of our population) makes me think otherwise.
Do you seriously doubt that affirmative action had nothing to do with this?
I think the criticism is that affirmative action is a form of race based discrimination. A pretty extreme remedy for any problem or issue. Creating a diverse environment is not nearly as tolerable a basis for race based discrimination as reversing the effects of slavery, segregation and American Indian genocide.
Can you make an argument that diversity is important enough to justify race based discrimination?
Maybe there is something to AA that is about combating the injustices of the past, but it really is about making a better present and future.
I don’t know that AA is what is best utilized to combat racism, but racism does impact minorities ability to get into good schools and to get good jobs. AA is not so much a quota system for admission, but is a system to help to ensure that unconscious biases do not cause qualified minorities to be overlooked.
I see no reason to assume that. Just as I don’t assume that the racial make-up of the NBA is due to AA.
It could be that these children are not only highly intelligent, but also highly motivated, in that they can directly see the sacrifices that their families made to give them this opportunity.
To make the assumption without any reason other than their race that they only got accepted into these colleges because of AA is exactly the type of racism that makes AA necessary in the first place.
Do you seriously think there is any way to know for sure? You seem to be assuming that the only way blacks can get into Ivy League schools is because of AA.