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Business Insider reports:
With a perfect ACT score and 13 Advanced Placement courses under his belt, Michael Wang applied to seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013.
As an Asian-American, Wang suspected his race might work against him. But but he was still shocked when he was rejected by Stanford and every Ivy League school except for the University of Pennsylvania.
Wang says he worked incredibly hard and excelled in every area possible. But it still wasn't good enough.
"There was nothing humanly possible I could do," Wang told us, explaining that he felt utterly demoralized after his rejections.
After Wang was rejected from most of the Ivies, he says he filed a complaint with the US Department of Education alleging Yale, Stanford, and Princeton discriminated against him because he was Asian-American.
[...] Wang isn't alone in his belief that the Ivies discriminate against Asians. A coalition of Asian-American groups filed a lawsuit against Harvard University last month alleging the school and other Ivy League institutions use racial quotas to admit students to the detriment of more qualified Asian-American applicants. The more than 60 Asian groups are coming together to fight what they say are unfair admission practices.
[...] He also stressed that he was not just academically driven, but also a well-rounded applicant who maximized his extracurricular activities. He competed in national speech and debate competitions and math competitions. He also plays the piano and performed in the choir that sang at President Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:29AM
Well singing for the president (who never noticed him) doesn't buy much consideration in my book either.
Piano Cello, probably account for more.
But you should understand that the the ability to swing a bat or go on a pub crawl shouldn't help him academically either. Nor would it make him a more interesting person. In short being "interesting" hardly seems an appropriate academic criteria, unless one was going into teaching. And we know who goes into teaching.
When you set what the standards are for admission, then deviate from perfect scores in those standard, probably to admit some Pakistani or West African foreign student there is something seriously wrong.
Seriously, what standard COULD they have been using if it wasn't racial?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:07AM
And we know who goes into teaching.
Everyone apparently has biases, and you seem to be showing yours here. Exactly "who" do we all know "goes into teaching"?
Seriously, what standard COULD they have been using if it wasn't racial?
Even decades ago, I know for a fact that at least one Ivy League school rejected 200 students with perfect SAT scores in a single year, along with hundreds of valedictorians. I was told it directly by an admissions officer at that school. I'm sure Michael Wang is a fine student -- he got into Penn and is now attending Williams, after all -- but when you're faced with maybe 5 times as many "highly-qualified" applicants as you have slots, you need to make tough choices which can sometimes seem arbitrary.
Test scores are great, but they don't tell the whole story. Admitting people solely on the basis of a test-score threshold is dumb, since test scores have some variability and there's more to life and success than passing a standardized test.
What did his recommendations say? What did his essays say? Maybe they weren't as fantastic compared to some other students as he thinks they were. Or maybe the admissions people just had thousands of applications, and his didn't "stand out" in any way. It's not a matter of a single "standard" here -- admissions people are trying to piece together a bunch of data and make a hard decision based on a complex set of variables.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:33AM
Exactly "who" do we all know "goes into teaching"?
Those who can't, teach. (And those who can't teach, recruit.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 03 2015, @08:46AM
Exactly "who" do we all know "goes into teaching"?
Those who can't, teach. (And those who can't teach, recruit.)
Lets get this right, shall we? There will be an exam at the end of the thread, and your future life depends on your score vis–à–vis that of all the other Soylentils:
Those who can do, do. (fair enough, be ability to do does not entail understanding of what one is doing.)
Those who cannot, teach. (not fair, because what teachers do is teach, so they have know that, and what it is they are teaching.)
Those who cannot teach, administrate. (we actually pay these poor bastards higher salary, to soften the blow of admitting incompetence.)
Those who cannot administrate, run for elected office. (yes, meet the bottom of the barrel.)
And those who cannot get elected, became education reformers! (hey, did you see Michele Rhee's hubby is now the mayor of somewhere!)
At least the poor successful college student doesn't have to say, "You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @01:58PM
Thats just crap from conceited assholes trying to make themselves feel better because they're too dumb and incompetent to teach. The non-failures at life both do and teach.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:30PM
The difference being teacher vs. teacher I suppose. You can teach without it being your job.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"