You might remember Deplorable Lionel Shriver from these pages, e.g.,
- The Mandibles: Nobody can agree on what caused the collapse
- The Mandibles: Inter-generational Conflict
- The Mandibles: turning sex into money before and after an economic collapse
- Lionel Shriver imagines the next logical step in DEI
- A 2012 novel about the victims of COVID-19: Big Brother
She has a new book: A Better Life. It’s about a NYC progressive who lives her principles by taking in a migrant (with a $3,300/month rent from taxpayers under the “Big Apple, Big Heart” program) and the effect that this has on her adult children, one of whom is a failure-to-launch-after-coronapanic boy.
“I don’t know how long the program is budgeted for. Who knows, our first experiment could be short-lived. Most migrants are anxious to find work and establish their own home.” “In the most expensive city in the country.” “Yes, even here. As a rule, migrants are resourceful. Resilient. They’re natural problem solvers. Our creaming off the most aspirational people in other countries is a kind of stealing. A porous border would be a policy of fiendish demographic genius, if only it were intentional.”
(the mom’s principles were somewhat flexible: “She got alimony, which before the divorce she’d claimed she didn’t believe in,”)
The relevant section for today’s post is on the near-impossibility of getting into elite colleges when applying from the Northeast:
Furthermore, confirming he was way dumber than his parents and teachers had alleged, he’d bought wholesale into his country’s glib formula for winning the college admissions game: earnest study + fanatical test prep + an overkill of extracurriculars both broad and a little quirky + savvy reading up on tips for making your essay stand out from the pack (when the rest of that pack was acting on the same tips). But imagining that anyone named Nico Bonaventura had a crack at the Ivies in the 2010s was hilariously naive.
He wasn’t a legacy candidate; his father went to Bennington, his mother to Smith. Whatever its in-august status in 1992, Ditmas Park no longer qualified as deprived. All the top schools had an excess of applications from New York. His parents were too wealthy for him to qualify for scholarships but not wealthy enough to seem like potential big donors down the line. He didn’t have a sob story (truly determined to gain admission to the rarefied ranks of higher education, he’d have run out in front of a bus). His test scores were near the top, but not, like those of his high school’s Asian math whizzes, perfect. The coup de grâce: he was white.
His parents might have spared him that blizzard of form-filling: “Honey? You haven’t a prayer. You fit the profile of exactly the candidates every selective admissions office in this country is bending over backwards to reject. Remember that Borough of Manhattan Community College accepts anybody.” Because not only were all his first choices nonstarters, but so were the second-tier “safety schools”—Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Rensselaer. He was left with third-tier, or no-tier. Meanwhile, word spread at his high school that certain students, who everyone knew full well were academic mediocrities at best but who also displayed the, ah, qualities that these fastidious admissions officers were looking for, got into Brown (irony alert), to Yale, and to Cornell. The whole college scramble was a con, and having jumped all those hoops like a performing seal—joining the chess club, studying the oboe, taking that AP course in International Relations—left him feeling humiliated.
Anecdotes from friends’ white male kids this year:
- applied from New Jersey with 1590 on the SATs (test taken in 10th grade for the first and only time) and perfect grades at a public high school in a rich town: rejected at every Ivy League; waitlisted at a “near-Ivy”; accepted at Rutgers.
- self-starter with a passion for engineering who applied from an expensive formerly-mostly-Jewish suburb of Boston with 1540 on the SATs and $240,000 of elite private high school tuition expended: rejected at every Ivy League and quasi-Ivy science/engineering schools (MIT and CalTech)
Let’s assume that Ivy League colleges still hate accepting Jews and Asians as much as they did before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (in which the Supreme Court officially found that the colleges that claimed to be anti-racism experts were racist to an extent that violated the U.S. Constitution). Because of the Supreme Court they can’t simply hang out a “no Jews/Asians wanted” sign anymore. What if they simply cut way back on accepting applicants from the Northeast? That gets rid of half the Jews/Asians who apply in a manner that can’t be attacked in court.
All these college related posts seem to mention things that people do to help their children get into colleges.
With many people saying that Trump undemocratically rolling back so many diversity initiatives, are any non-diverse Trump opposers trying to adjust for that by taking steps to make their non-diverse children *less* likely to go to top colleges?
Anon: You raise a great point. Democrats who aren’t in a victimhood group and who champion DEI, now ruled illegal and unconstitutional, should refrain from applying to elite colleges (“sit down” as the stock phrase goes) so as to make room for diverse candidates. If we assume that Democrats live their principles, the only white cisgender heterosexuals applying to Harvard at this point should be Republicans (easy rejects, in other words, on non-racial grounds!).
> Trump undemocratically rolling back so many diversity initiatives
Were the initiatives democratically rolled in?
I’m the real hero, on like almost every progressive issue, because I have no kids to educate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement
Incels are our allies, BTW. Be the change, man.
What shocks me is that colleges for decades have been playing these ridiculous games with our tax money. Then when Trump came about and said hey maybe don’t be racist everybody lost their minds.
What is wrong with these admissions officers that they think they can play God and create perfect little societies with my money?
If they are so eager to do what they want why don’t they reject all the federal money in the first place?
Anybody remember the “Costco Essay”? For a number of years the gold standard. This got a girl accepted into 5 Ivies:
> Managing to break free from my mother’s grasp, I charged. With arms flailing and chubby legs fluttering beneath me, I was the ferocious two year old rampaging through Costco on a Saturday morning. My mother’s eyes widened in horror as I jettisoned my churro; the cinnamon-sugar rocket gracefully sliced its way through the air while I continued my spree.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/college-game-plan/essay-about-love-costco-wins-student-admission-five-ivies-n551601
Cute, cute, cute…but odd storytelling, how do chubby legs flutter? I guess if she was sitting in the cart, it might make some sense, but if she’s rampaging on foot…doesn’t mass/gravity constrain chubby leg fluttering? Has anyone read a recent PhD dissertation? I read several a year, where I struggle to find the advancement of “the literature”. Yikes. From admissions officers to Ph.D. advisors the whole system is wack. All leading to a society where professionals prefer Crafting Interpreters to Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools, which is apparently outdated like reason and common sense.
I got rejected from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1997 despite a few years of requisite, solid, corporate Fortune 500 experience and a 99th percentile GMAT score. All the well, ended up with a full free ride at the MBA program at the University of GA.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2023/07/20/a-lover-of-diversity-lockdown-static-climate-and-democracy-is-demoted-at-stanford/#comment-379373
Nico Bonaventura? “Never admit more than 5 Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all” – Yale medical school instructions in the 1930s. What would be the 2026 version?
> What would be the 2026 version?
In song:
Wilma’s rainbow of peaceful colors
The richest junk dealer
— Helmet, Wilma’s Rainbow
Professors at research universities are raising alarm bells that there not enough US citizens pursuing graduate degrees in engineering and science. If our undergraduate admissions systems are mismatching talent with resources, it probably limits the talent pool that graduate schools can work with and just incentivizes them to go with foreign students.
My American hetero white male offspring was a minority hire at a Big 5 company fresh off an Engineering BS from State U. Three years in he now leads his team, receiving top level reviews and pay increases. There is no indication from management his advancement will slow down, quite the contrary. The only reason he would even consider graduate study would be to change his particular field of focus.
Sure it is not an AI?
“taking that AP course in International Relations” but looking to apply to “second-tier “safety schools”—Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Rensselaer”
CMU – top ranked CS and EE programs, they had self-driving cars zooming around Pittsburgh in mid-2010th, Rensselaer Poly – Nvidia founder graduated from it, U of Michigan – string CS, Vanderbilt – strong life sciences/medical/fiscal ? I mean, even liberal arts major author would know difference between Rensselaer and Gorgetown.
make it between Rensselaer and Georgetown.
A Helmet fan lurking? Nice.
This article peak 18 year-olds was quite intersting.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2024/12/11/college-age-demographics-begin-steady-projected-decline
I’m not sure there is an acronym for it, but thanks to the the diversity, equity, and inclusion on Phil’s blog, the ten or so of us geezer Helmet fans still alive don’t have to lurk in the shadows anymore. In fact, speaking of college (I think that’s what we were talking about), I outed myself as Barnard-ophile on this very blog. I find these jokes in poor taste:
https://www.wikicu.com/Barnard_jokes#List_of_common_Barnard_jokes