I was listening to the radio this afternoon, and the topic was focused on Asians and suspected discrimination in colleges and universities. The host interviewed an Asian student at Harvard who said she’d left off her race on her application so that she’d have the satisfaction of knowing that she’d gotten accepted or rejected based on merit, not on race (even though her name was obviously Asian).
It got me thinking about my own college experience. I didn’t hide my race or my gender when I applied to my university. So I have no idea if Affirmative Action got me in the door. I suspect it did, though. I was a good student in high school, but I wasn’t teh gifted. I had AP classes on my transcript and a high exam score for one of them, but none in math and sciences–kind of important for an engineering school. I didn’t even take calculus in high school. And lastly, while my SAT score was above average compared to the general population, it was below average compared to my college schoolmates. I didn’t even have a lot of extracurriculars to brag about. Just orchestra, which wasn’t exactly “extracurricular” since I’d attended a performing arts school.
So I suspect I was a beneficiary of AA. If not for my race, then for my gender. I don’t think I would have gotten accepted if I had done what the Harvard student had done and submitted a “raceless” or “genderless” application. (And yes, women were underrepresented at my school. So much so that I was given a scholarship just for being one.)
Do I feel guilty? Now I don’t. Because I realize that even though I wasn’t as “good” on paper as other applicants who were rejected, I was still qualified to be there. My grades, letters of recommendations, research activities, and success in graduate school confirm this. I also outlasted and out-competed many of my classmates who’d intimidated me with their superior credentials and confident ways. I don’t know what intangibles I had that they lacked, but the experience taught me that college admissions are a crap shoot when you get to a certain point of “qualification”. It taught me that the things we call “qualifications” are often just arbitrary criteria.
But as a young college kid, I did feel weird about it. I was plagued by a constant sense of not-belonging and the belief that I wasn’t as smart as my classmates. Even when I had empirical evidence that this wasn’t true, it was hard to shake that feeling. Perhaps this is what compelled me to work so hard. It is kind of cool to think that the feeling of inferiority had a paradoxical effect and actually pushed me to succeed.
How do you think you measured up to the admission standards at your college/university? Did you hit the “average”, exceed it, or sneak in beneath it? And how do you think the experience affected you?
Whatever got me in the door, it was up to me to succeed. I’m female and Caucasian, but I was pretty qualified. If my gender helped get me in, I have no idea, and never gave it much thought.
My SATs were high, high ranking, AP classes etc. I wasnt valedictorian, or close, but I belonged.
Hmm, when I was a Senior in high school I was accepted into one of the most prestigious unis in my state (and a so-called “Public Ivy”)…and now I’m going to a community college. Haha, needless to say I’m so far removed at this point from even caring about college admissions or university prestige or whatever, so this question strikes me as (only mildly) funny.
Was my admission deserved? Hell, I don’t know; I honestly think that in my case my admission was more reliant upon how I performed in comparison with the other kids at my school than how I stacked up against other kids nationally. I had excellent grades, a decent amount of AP classes (I didn’t overdo it, though, as there were kids in my graduating class that took twice as many AP’s as I did), and some pretty good test scores. I remember that my SAT score was the 2nd highest in my class and that I was the only person from my year to get a perfect score on the CAHSEE (in CA the importance of that test really just amounts to pass/fail though).
I will say that, on the whole, kids in general take this college admissions and prestige thing FAR too seriously. And honestly, I was the same way, as when you’re that age school and academics are all that you have going for you and so you’ll understandably take it very seriously. It wasn’t until I started working in the real world that I realized that there’s a lot more to life than JUST academia, and to be perfectly frank, in the US at least it doesn’t matter where the Hell you get your degree; a BA from a no-name state school is just as important as the equivalent degree from an Ivy League.
White female, which did nothing for me. My scores met the criteria, but only just barely. What actually got me in was a) I was from a town where not many kids went to college, much less the one I was applying to, and b) I spent my junior year abroad as an exchange student, which presumably showed me to have qualities they wanted. As it was, I didn’t make the first cut and got in as a second-semester freshman.
I guess they were right; my experiences really did stand me in good stead. While quite a few of the effortlessly smart kids around me crashed and burned, I was perfectly fine with feeling lost and overwhelmed. I expected it, since I had gone in knowing that I was outclassed in intelligence by many of my peers. I wasn’t brilliant (I was in fact unprepared for the level of work and was too ignorant to know it), but I did OK overall, got a masters’ and am gainfully employed and educating my children better so THEY can go if they want.
I did actually get offered a scholarship for being female at a different college I got into, provided that I opted for a STEM major and lived in the honors dorm. This idea struck me as ludicrous, so I didn’t give it a minute’s thought. Now I kind of wish I had, but not really, since I met my husband in college.
I completly believe that a BA from a no-name university is quite close to the same degree from an Ivy league; The sea is the same level everywhere. But what about degrees that give you marketable skills?
A BS or MS in computer science from MIT isn’t much better than one from a no-name university? Would Obama have been as likely to teach at the University of Chicago, become senator and then president if he hadn’t graduated from Harvard law? I understand that many big law firms and big consulting firms recruit almost exclusively from prestigious universities.
To answer the question: White male. Philosophy and then law degree. They only looked at grades. I went to public school in a working class neighborhood.
My company has a restricted list of colleges from which we recruit from, and getting someone in from another college is hard or impossible. It is usually the case the companies actively recruit from select universities, but more are being even more restrictive.
Beyond that, there is a definite halo effect from having a degree from the “right” school. I saw it myself from having an MIT degree, and my daughter sees it from having a University of Chicago degree in economics.
As for me, I had really, really good SAT scores, so I was okay - but an Admissions Official in Technology Review noted that my class was not as smart as recent classes - but more interesting.
Yeah, I was always academically strong. I got offered a full ride at a state school (without even applying there) because of their valedictorian program. My getting accepted was, therefore, pretty much a given. No affirmative action there: the program was for any valedictorian in the state regardless of color, nationality, or gender. I just had to maintain a 3.5 GPA to keep the scholarship, which I did. I don’t think I’d have made it into the Ivies, but I never wanted (or could have afforded) that anyway. My parents wouldn’t contribute toward my education, so I took the scholarship and ran like hell out of the house.
Once I was there, though, I suspect that being female helped me qualify for quite a few extra scholarships/grants when I changed majors to a male-dominated major (IT). The female-to-male ratio in IT at my university was actually *worse *than the ratio for the school of engineering. So I did financially benefit from AA, but I had already been at school for 2 years (with a GPA of 3.8) by then.
Of course, I didn’t graduate, but high school doesn’t give grades based on mental illness.
Why? I can think of a few reasons why a business would hire restrictively* but it just seems very wasteful of opportunities. Do they have the gall of saying they like diversity?
The prestige of being able to say "We have X% of Ivy league graduates’. The fact that recruiting from the Ivy league cuts out the bottom, to an imperfect but large extent.
“It doesn’t matter where you go” is reassuring, but it’s simply not true.
A bright kid who is motivated and self-directed can do well just about anywhere. Put them in a barren environment and they will scrounge up resources to challenge themselves and make up for short-comings in their curriculum. They will be noticed by professors as a stand-out and be pushed towards internships and other opportunities that pave the way for future success.
But most students are not bright AND self-motivated–which includes traits like assertiveness and ambition. Most students will accept what’s in their environment and not go “above and beyond” it. They will not write a twenty-page term paper when ten will suffice. They will not travel fifty miles to use the resources at a better endowed university’s library. If their professors don’t tell them about internship opportunities, they aren’t going to ask about them.
Your average student gets an advantage going to a “name brand” school. Opportunities are likely to be more numerous there, and one does not have to hustle as hard to find them. Even though competition will be fiercer, competition makes a person tough and hungry. It makes them ambitious.
And it’s sad to say that there’s also a halo effect that comes with a “name brand”. You could be a C student, but having a “good” school on your resume means something to people. If anything, it makes you memorable. Sometimes that’s all the edge you need.
By 1994 standards, I guess so – I got in, after all, and as I’m not an alumni brat, an athlete, or a member of any underrepresented groups, I doubt there were any special preferences involved.
That said, I am pretty sure the same qualifications – 1480 SAT, 3.4 GPA, barely in the top 20% of my high school class, a few desultory extracurriculars – would not get me into my alma mater today, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Mainly, though, I feel that the admissions game has gotten way too competitive, rather than that I didn’t deserve to be admitted in the first place. (Considering that I went on to get a PhD, I like to think I made good.)
Yeah, I had ridiculously good grades and test scores and references and the like. I don’t feel any of those things were necessarily “deserved” or that they really demonstrated anything about my abilities, but by their criteria, I was golden.
I went to a big State university with a 4.0 from high school and high SAT/ACT scores back when admission was less competitive. Mouth breathing morons got accepted to the school I went to, although out of state students, like me, had to be able to breathe through their noses or have AA admittance.
I had great grades and extracurricular and a great ACT score and wrote amazing essays (cuz I had a lot of free time). I wanted to go to the local state school while everyone else at the top of my class aimed a little higher.
I had no problem going to my first (and only) choice for free. I wasn’t too special otherwise tho - a female journalism student at a journalism school with top marks in English was nothing new to them.
I posted this earlier in the GD thread about the Asian discrimination probe:
I’d say it was deserved. I could have gotten in to much better schools based on my LSAT score alone; I chose this one because of its mission, geographic convenience and low cost.
I have very little doubt that I’ll be one of the school’s more prominent graduates, and that I’ll have some small impact on the value of the degrees it will award in the future.
Mmm, yeah, I guess I did. I had a good GPA, high class ranking, activities, and my SAT scores were above the average for my school. I’m not a child of alumni, or an athlete, and I’m a white male. The only bonus I may have had was that I graduated from high school in an area with few applicants, so they may have given me points for that.
Doesn’t matter, though - I was completely unhappy in college!
As a white guy barely in the middle class going to a State university from a podunk high school where I didn’t even know about AP classes until I started college, I’d say I got in on my own merits. Of course, in the late 70’s it didn’t seem quite as competitive as today unless you wanted to be a doctor or a vet.
I’m too lazy to look up the cite but I think it was Malcom Gladwell in one of his books. Anyhoo, a study showed that affirmative action students in IIRC ivy league grad schools all fared equally in the post graduate world. His point being that what really mattered was matriculating from the school and not how one got in.
I worked for Lehman Bros for a year. That was a firm that totally bought into breeding for their entry level program. You could move to Lehman’s from another firm regardless of background, but if you wanted to start at Lehman’s fresh out of college/grad school, they *only *took Ivy Leaguers and West Pointers. And no I wasn’t in the least saddened when those same Ivy League shitheads ruined the company and went bankrupt.
Yeah. I didn’t really put all that much effort into looking at colleges… IIRC I only applied to four schools (and was accepted by two). The school I ultimately went to was good, but with my grades, test scores, extracurriculars, etc., I was definitely better qualified than most of my classmates.
(I ended up working in the school’s admissions office my junior and senior years. One day my friend and I were asked to take a bunch of boxes of files out of storage and take them over to be recycled. In the process we realized that the boxes contained the admission applications from our class. It was kinda fun to be able to crack open our old applications and read what the admissions officers thought of us, etc.)
