I saw a prominent article yesterday which struck a chord with me personally.
You’ll recall that the Supreme Court ruled against race-based admissions. I cannot overstate my support for this decision. An institute of higher education is supposed to be finding the best minds. The fact that, for decades, the most elite institutions (with increasing virtue-signaling) would give staggering advantages to the “disadvantaged.”
There’s a cost to this, however. If one person gets in who shouldn’t, then someone who should have gotten in doesn’t. It’s a zero-sum game.
The class of 2028 is the first post-Supreme Court-ruling admissions cohort. Now, as left-wing as admissions committees tend to be, I’m sure they still tried hard (by way of weird names and regions) to tilt things in favor of “desired‘ groups anyway, but even with that, the contrast is stark.
Let’s set white kids aside, because it doesn’t seem the dial has moved much (from 37% to 38%). Let’s focus instead on the Asians and Blacks.
The percentage of Asians jumped up nearly 20% (in absolute terms, from 40 to 47) whereas the percentage of Blacks plunged from 15 to 5, a full two-thirds diminishment! It’s painfully evident that, for years, thousands and thousands of extraordinary Asian kids who would have excelled at MIT were turned away so that tens of thousands of less qualified “disadvantaged‘ kids had the red carpet rolled out for them. And what, pray tell, have they done with that undeserved admission? I’d be interested to know. Yep.
Now, I never had aspirations to MIT, nor did any of my beloved children. My kids were admitted the very highest tier of the most elite U.S. colleges even in the face of the pre-ruling discrimination. They got in because they are so exceptional that they were able to overcome the unfair race-based system., And even with their amazing-ness, it wasn’t easy. It was, in fact, very challenging.
On the other hand, I wasn’t so lucky. My dream as a teenager was to get into Stanford. I was certain that they would throw the doors open for me. Brown University did. Princeton University did. But Stanford? Nope. Instead of me, an extraordinarily unremarkable and unexceptional black girl from my high school was admitted to Stanford. She got the thick envelope, and I got the thin one. What she ever did with that education is unknown to me. I don’t even know if she managed to graduate.
Let’s just say that disappointment was scarring to me, and as broken as our country is, it is refreshing to point to at least one good thing that has happened to actually improve our reality. I’m glad that the kids today are not at the mercy of this disgusting and unjust quotas, and they can truly seek to advance themselves by, yes, the content of their character as well as the power of their minds.
