Lionel Shriver on elite college admissions

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.