In which the father of a high school junior in the Boston suburbs visits Brown University. His posts from our group chat:
Brown tour. A few prospective students wearing masks. Not Asian.
A few students who are cosplaying as lesbian.
A few girls with Muslim hijabs.
It looks like the bridge of Star Trek.
He shared a photo of the acceptance rate by gender ID (not clear if this is discrimination unless we also know the SAT scores):
They’re shown the essay prompt that enables applicants to tell the admissions Mandarins their race:
Somehow they ended up in a chapel and there was a copy of African American Heritage Hymnal for each person.
Almost no males here. It’s all short lesbians.
Plus some East Asians and Indian
Trans
Student tour guide is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy according to Joe Biden.
didn’t show us inside dorms. Didn’t show us any dining areas. Didn’t show us any classrooms, labs, or facilities. Didn’t show any sports or workout areas.
Three of the students giving the tours said one of their deciding factors was that Brown gave them free tuition.
The tourists were subjected to a Land Acknowledgement from a greedy nonprofit that refuses to give the land back and pay rent:
My friend and his child decided not to take the Slavery and Legacy Walking Tour.
He had been wondering “What research are seniors doing related to menstruation?” Answered:
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.
As 18-year-olds and their parents manage their grief over the stack of rejections received from elite colleges, here’s a Wall Street Journal article for those who were rejected by Duke (95 percent rejection rate): “He Had a Full Ride at Duke—Until America Cut Him Off”.
(This article could also be inspiring to Americans graduating next month from Duke with crushing student loan debt. They can sleep easier knowing that some of the money they borrowed and must pay back (unless Kamala Harris is defrosted and elected?) was used to give “a full ride” to a migrant.)
The villain of the article is Donald Trump, of course, referenced 6 times. Here’s a peculiar Trump reference. The South Sudanese are so smart that they thrive at Duke, but they aren’t smart enough to realize that any migrant is an enricher. They refused to accept a migrant on the grounds that he was Congolese rather than South Sudanese:
Trump’s displeasure with South Sudan began when it refused to accept a man being deported by the U.S. The man was Congolese, South Sudanese officials said, but the administration didn’t want to take no for an answer.
South Sudan has a GDP per capita of less than $400. We’re informed that migrants are an economic boon to any nation. Why doesn’t South Sudan want to become richer by accepting migrants from Congo?
A separate question: if migrants enrich the U.S. as a whole, why are migrants at Duke being funded by American students paying tuition at Duke? Shouldn’t full tuition for migrants be paid with federal tax dollars on the grounds that every migrant makes the U.S. better off?
We’re closing in on when parents find out the extent to which they’re going to be impoverished by college education bills. To celebrate April Fools’ Day, given that nothing is more foolish than handing over one’s life savings to a for-profit nonprofit university, I thought everyone might enjoy this exchange from a Jupiter, Florida Facebook group:
My son is zoned to attend Jupiter High School, and I’m a bit lost on how to navigate the course options. I’m trying to understand the differences between AICE courses, AP courses, and the various choice programs, especially in relation to qualifying for the Bright Futures scholarship.
Answer from a young lady: I am a recent college graduate and I also attended JHS. Thanks to AICE classes combined with dual enrollment courses, I was able to complete my bachelors degree in two years, all paid for by full bright futures scholarship (which was from completing the AICE diploma). If your kid is planning on going to a Florida college one day, I recommend the AICE program as more FL schools accept those credits.
Background from Google AI: AICE (Advanced International Certificate of Education) classes in Florida are part of a rigorous Cambridge University program offered in many high schools, allowing students to earn college credit, gain university-level skills, and qualify for Florida Bright Futures scholarships by passing challenging exams.
Bright Futures is free tuition (but the in-state rack rate is minimal in any case; less than $7,000/year at University of Florida) funded by the gambling addicts who purchase lottery tickets. “Dual enrollment” refers to the right of any Florida high schooler with decent grades to take college courses at state-run universities at no charge (taxpayers also have to pay for the textbooks) and get high school and college credit at the same time.
So, the parents of the gal who responded ended up with a 20-year-old college graduate at zero cost other than some rent/food/transportation expenses. My response to her: “your parents should buy you a car of your choice every three years for the rest of your life. #Legend”
Families are preparing to hear from colleges for their teenage darlings. Each acceptance will come with a price tag of up to $400,000 plus the cost of the darling not being in the workforce for four years (foregone wages). In order to cheer everyone up who is facing these costs, let me relate a conversation that I had with a farrier recently. We shared a row on a commercial flight to PBI, the second-closest airport to the equestrian gold mine of Wellington, Florida (there’s also a fabulous airpark right in Wellington!).
A farrier may prepare for the career with a half-year program (example; also, a 16-week $8500 program at Cornell) and then start as an apprentice. If joining a multi-farrier enterprise, the starting salary can be over $60,000 per year. After 10 years, a farrier who works hard among show horses should be earning about $250,000 per year. That’s with 6 months of post-high-school education and is about 2X what a veterinarian earns (BLS).
Note that this career does require maintaining some physical fitness: “Be able to lift 75 pounds and be in reasonable physical condition for the work,” says Cornell.
I visited University of Texas’s Austin campus last month. They seem to have about $10 billion in physical infrastructure, $20 billion in the bank, and the ability to tax 32 million people any time that they want more money. It is tough to understand how private universities, except for Harvard and the other Queers for Palestine League schools, can compete.
The buildings are beautiful and beautifully maintained.
First stop was the Ransom Center, home to a Gutenberg Bible and the Niépce Heliograph (1827), perhaps the earliest surviving photo. The special exhibit was of a collection of Saturday Night Live and related memorability from Lorne Michaels (a.k.a. “Lorne Lipowitz”):
In reviewing the memos among NBC network executives and producers, it is remarkable how many of them had Jewish last names. That era is apparently over. From “The Vanishing” (2023):
… a decade ago there were 22 Jews on The Hollywood Reporter’s annual list of the Top 50 Showrunners. In 2022, that’s down to 13. Other than the half-Jewish (and already famous) Maggie Gyllenhaal, you’d have to go back six years to find a single Jew on Variety’s annual list of 10 Directors to Watch.
Thanks to the odious new Hollywood house style that requires a detailed ethnic and racial classification at the top of all capsule biographies, we can see just how many self-identified Jews are in the Sundance writers and directors labs, or the NBC, Paramount, and Disney writers and apprenticeship programs—it is zero. It seems not being Jewish is actually a primary qualification. So much for Jewish control of Hollywood.
The school got some of Bill Gates’s money before it was all shipped to Africa (all without ever being taxed, since the appreciated stock was given to a tax-exempt foundation) and Sol LeWitt managed to harvest some of it.
I visited a friend on the faculty whose door is adorned with a diversity and inclusion sticker:
The publicly-funded school apparently sponsored a “Women and Gender Minorities in Computing Research Day”:
I don’t understand how this is possible at a taxpayer-funded school that is supposed to comply with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. It wouldn’t be acceptable to have a “men-only” computer nerdism day, right?
I don’t understand why these ardent Democrats stay in Texas and pay taxes every day to a government whose principles, e.g., abortion care restrictions, they say they oppose. Maybe it would be a step down in status to take a job at a Cal State university, for example, but wouldn’t that be a moral upgrade?
Speaking of morals, an on-campus church reminds visitors that “atheist” and Rainbow Flag worship are part of a “Christian community”:
The haters across the street at the business school falsely claim that “The family is the foundation upon which the world of business is built, and it is a vital force in the local, state and national economy” and hatefully display an apparent cisgender heterosexual couple with their artisanally-produced child.
Speaking of false claims, folks at UT reject the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 has been defeated. Outdoor maskers was reasonably common:
The university includes its own art museum.
The restrooms are for “everyone”, but non-Latinos need not apply for inclusion in a significant-sized gallery:
It’s an established fact that Asian women are victimized be being “fetishized” and “undervalued”:
Black Americans are victims of “continued injustice and violence”:
(The King of Hate (Grok) says that more than 90 percent of the murderers of Black Americans are… Black Americans (source: FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program).)
The 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is victimized and “marginalized”. Sign: “Neel painted Bourdon and Battcock, two well-known New York art critics and a romantic couple at the time, in an era when very few people were openly gay in the United States.” In other words, they were hated so much that they were forced to make a living by getting checks from publishers for their opinions about art and they were denied the opportunity to work in a widget factory. According to Wikipedia, Gregory Battcock “was murdered at his vacation home in San Juan, Puerto Rico on December 25, 1980. The murder remains unsolved”. The marginalization of David Bourdon was so extreme that “he served as an editor at Life from 1966 to 1971, associate editor at Saturday Review from 1972 to 1974, senior editor at Geo from 1981 to 1983, and senior features editor at Vogue from 1983 to 1986. He was also The Village Voice’s art critic from 1964 to 1966 and 1974 to 1977.”
Migrants are celebrated with a larger-than-life statue: “Border Crossing is a tribute the artist’s grandfather and to the determination of the thousands of immigrants who have traveled across the southwestern border in search of a better life.” From the artist: “People talked about aliens as if they landed from outer space, as if they weren’t really people. I wanted to put a face on them: I wanted to humanize them” (isn’t it the very humanity of immigrants that makes them destructive to the American working class? Because they’re human they compete for housing, jobs, and welfare dollars)
University of Texas, Austin acknowledges that it is on stolen land, but refuses to give the land back and pay rent to the rightful indigenous owners who were “violently displaced”:
The “Oil Field Girls” who are “most likely working as prostitutes” (1940) seem to have dressed much more modestly than today’s Instagram creators!
For those who want to celebrate Maryland’s leading citizen, pupusas are available on campus:
(Kilmar Abrego Garcia claimed asylum on the basis that his mother’s pupusa recipe had resulted in gangs targeting him for death.)
Circling back to the first question… how does a private school of higher ed compete with University of Texas? The Gutenberg Bible alone might be worth $150 million.
Financially struggling liberal arts colleges are probably already extending offers of admission to today’s 18-year-olds. If we leave aside the top 30 schools, would a young person be taking a huge risk by investing four years of his/her/zir/their life at a liberal arts college? Gone are the days when an American worker will spend an entire career at one company. Imagine the graduate of such a school applying for a job at age 50, exactly the age at which employers are believed to discriminate against older workers. It will be 2058. The school that was financially weak in 2026 will have shut down in 2035 and won’t be putting our PR about how great the school is. The hiring manager will therefore likely never have heard of the degree-granting institution on the resume. By contrast, University of ***pick your favorite state*** will always be there so long as there is someone to tax in that state. The hiring manager will have heard of University of AnyState if for no other reason than that university’s sports teams will be on television.
The demise of Wells College has become a familiar story. In the 19th century, pioneers and religious seekers built a constellation of private colleges across the Northeast, South and Midwest. Now these schools are steadily blinking out. The Council of Independent Colleges, a national trade association, had 658 members at the beginning of the fall 2023 semester. Over the next two years, it lost 18 colleges to closure and three to merger, adding to the dozens that had already closed over the previous decade.
Many liberal arts schools closed because they couldn’t recover from the pandemic. Others couldn’t keep up with the arms race for expensive amenities that students have come to expect. And all were early victims of a problem that is about to wash over the entirety of American higher education: not enough applicants.
The year before the 2008 financial crisis, there were 4.3 million babies born in the United States, the highest number in history. Last year, there were only 3.6 million. The birthrate decline that began in 2008 lit an 18-year fuse on a college freshman slump that starts next year. Many highly selective schools are getting more applicants by the year, meaning that the enrollment crisis will continue to burn through mostly small colleges for decades to come.
From a Texas A&M report, which mostly shows that forecasters aren’t very good at forecasting (huge change from 2017 to 2023!):
(I’m not sure how this number can be forecast by anyone, no matter how intelligent. If the president of the U.S. can by executive order either open or close the border then there is no way to predict the number of immigrants and, therefore, no way to predict the number of children of immigrants.)
This is the week that eager schoolwork nerds will get their Early Decision answers from the nation’s elite universities.
Our mole at NYU (over $100,000 per year including a few required extras, such as airfare and going out in Manhattan) was required to choose from a short list of core courses, only one of which had availability… French in the Americas:
Here’s a slide from the 12th week of the course:
The teacher explained to our mole that the indigenous were natural followers of Rainbow Flagism and that this native religion was suppressed by European colonizers who were also passionate gender binarists. My email to the mole:
They’re making you learn about an economically irrelevant subgroup within an economically irrelevant subgroup within an economically irrelevant country. (Natives within Quebec, which is on track to lose its language, religion, and culture to recent immigrants, within Canada, whose manufacturing output is perhaps 1/50th that of China?) It feels to me as though they’re teaching this because they have some professor who is an expert on the subject, not because any American needs to know this information. How could this possibly be justified compare to learning about the history of China, for example? Or if you want to talk about ethnic minorities, why not talk about the ethnic minorities of China or the noble Muslims who’ve settled in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. despite rampant Islamophobia?
(I later checked with Grok and learned that China does not have 50X the manufacturing output of Canada, measured in dollars, but rather only 36X.)
Here’s another slide from the same PowerPoint and I would love to know how it could relate to European migrants conquering the noble natives 200 years prior to the invention of the tank.
On the other hand, it is tough to come up with a scenario in which understanding the above images and being able to answer the “What do they have in common?” question posed by the professor would have a $100,000 value. On the third hand, maybe the ability to answer the question is worth $trillions? Let’s see how our future AI overlords do with it.
Grok:
Gemini disagrees almost completely!
ChatGPT also disagrees with Grok:
It seems as though NYU could replace all of its students with these three LLMs and still have a lively in-class discussion!
We’re closing in on college application deadlines. One of the albums that my mom kept included a recommendation letter for my own application to MIT in 1979. I was working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on the Pioneer Venus project (specifically, data analysis for information streamed back from the Orbiter). Goddard was a two-tiered plantation where the elites were federal government civil service employees and the slaves were employed by contractors. In my case, the contractor that actually sent me paychecks was Computer Sciences Corporation, though I worked on site at NASA every day. My boss was Naren Bewtra, who was born in India and came to the U.S. to earn a physics Ph.D. at Cornell.
Like Harvard, MIT takes an official position that inequality is bad. In an ideal world, all humans would have the same wealth and income and, therefore, all states would have the same wealth and income. Here’s an example from MIT’s official news page:
Inequality is “a threat to America’s values and political system”. MIT is a richer-than-average university and, thanks to the Feds pouring all of the nation’s wealth into higher ed and health care, its Massachusetts home is the richest state (Washington, D.C. is yet richer, but not a state). One would think that MIT would, therefore, refuse federal grant money, preferring to fund itself via state tax dollars and private/endowment dollars. Every dollar refused by MIT could be spent at University of Michigan, for example, a less-rich university in a poorer-than-average state.
Instead of refusing federal money, though, MIT is fighting to keep it while preserving the school’s passion for race-based admissions and Rainbow Flagism. The Hill:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would have required sweeping changes on campus in exchange for a funding advantage in federal grant awards.
The 10-point memo was provided to nine higher learning institutions last week, requiring reforms such as a rewiring of the admissions process by adjusting the consideration of race or ethnicity, student grading and demanding that transgender women be excluded from women’s locker rooms and sports teams.
I still can’t figure out why the Trump administration wants to fund the Racism League schools. What institution ever changed in response to being showered with billions of dollars? The federal government could send its research dollars to universities that never engaged in race discrimination and/or never adopted Rainbow Flagism as an official religion. The Queers for Palestine universities would find a way to replace the federal funds with state and/or private funds and/or research groups would follow the federal money by moving to to the non-racist universities. Nowhere in the MIT Mission Statement is “hoover up as many federal tax dollars as possible”. In fact, the statement describes MIT as a purely altruistic enterprise working to help humanity and, therefore, anything that MIT can do to reduce inequality would be a positive step:
Here’s an example of two Nobelists moving from MIT to Zurich in response to a “CHF 26 million donation from the Lemann Foundation” (26 million Swiss Francs translates to 32.5 million post-Bidenflation dollars; see exchange rate chart below for how the USD was worth 1.4 Swiss Francs in 2003 and, thanks to the inflation-free environment that Congress has created via deficit spending, is now worth 0.8 Swiss Francs):
The Nobel Prize-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee will join the University of Zurich in July 2026. Using external funds provided by the Lemann Foundation, the two researchers will establish a new center for development economics, education and public policy.
