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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: 2) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:38AM
If they only accept the 'best candidates' according tom some scoring formula then the only people at an ivy league school will be people exactly like him.
I think you need to think that through.
It appears to be your own bias, based on your own stereotypes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:48AM
I think the grandparent is saying if you distill everyone down to scores like GPA and number of extracurricular activities, you're going to end up with a single type of overachiever being admitted. There will be no room for the creative, outside-the-box thinkers that promote diversity of thought.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:11AM
Except of course diversity of thought is already explicitly forbidden in every institution of higher learning. It is the forbidden diversity, which must not be tolerated by the tolerant for it leads to all manner of intolerance. All races, religions, gender identities come together to think exactly the same goodthoughts; is this not the only possible definition of tolerance and diversity. Sounds like you are engaging in some crimething there Citizen, you need to get your mind right.
And of course it can't be racism to have arbitrary quotas setting maximum levels of Asian (and Jewish) admissions and it is crimethink to even discuss it. Therefore solyentnews is racist for posting this story since it can only encourage doubleplus ungood crimethinkers to come out of the woodwork and criticize the most obviously enlightened policies of The Party. Let all praise The Party's wisdom! Just like it isn't racism to have quotas setting minimum numbers of other racial backgrounds who must be admitted regardless of test scores... because testing is itself racist; this is obvious since all races are exactly equal and the tests (designed by crimethinking white males, can their crime be any more obvious) had disparate impact.
And in the final analysis, since nobody is 'better' in any discernible or measurable way, college itself is pointless since, obviously, there can also be no discernible difference in the before and after scores on the racist tests that don't actually measure anything useful. Wanting to attend a college is probably a sign of feelings of superiority and probably of being a so called 'intellectual'.... eventually The Party will have to purge these malcontents so we can have a more peaceful and harmonious world.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:40AM
Except of course diversity of thought is already explicitly forbidden in every institution of higher learning.
Didn't we just have an article on the failure of multiculturalism. [soylentnews.org]
Many of the sub-top-tier admissions to these schools are expected to flunk out. The school gets the brownie points for admitting them, and the fact that they are gone before the first year is quietly swept under the rug, but the school keeps the federally funded scholarships, and the kid goes home with a mountain of debt.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 03 2015, @07:05AM
Yes, but... just for the sake of debating...
So why should be a player suffer because the game organizers realized their mistake and changed their minds? (he who was that one so stupid to say "GPA and extra-curricular activities matter the most" is at fault)
.
(for the record, one of my tenets is "Life is not meant to be fair. Should be enough if it's interesting to worth living it". So, don't accuse me of being a SJW tribe member, I'm only pointing that the reductionism of "using metrics to assess value" is a dumb and slippery path - because this world/life is by far more complex than anyone can hope to constrain in a few metrics. Unfortunately, a dumb thing proposed quite a while ago and widely embraced by the education sector [wikipedia.org] - you can see TFA as an example of it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @09:29AM
it's not the fault of the person who says "Tell me how you measure me and tell me how I'll behave", but it's the fault of the ones that came up with a stupid metric.
Are you sure it's not the fault of the idiot who thought they were serious about the silly metric? As Admiral Ackbar, who never went to no silly Ivy League school, said: "It's a trap!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Wednesday June 03 2015, @04:50PM
I think you need to think that through. It appears to be your own bias, based on your own stereotypes.
Which bias or stereotype are you referring to? By "exactly like him" I simply mean people who spent their whole life padding their ivy league application forms.
I expect he is the ultimate example of someone who was "taught to the test". Where the "test" is getting into Ivy League schools. I expect the school's applications team spotted him a mile away; I expect he's not genuinely more intelligent, or more creative, or more well rounded than the average; and that they were right to reject him; recognizing him not as actually exceptional, but merely exceptionally scoring due to a life spent working on getting an exceptional score.
Yes, I see he's Asian, and yes there is a stereotype there, and yes I am inclined to think his parent(s) were heavily involved in his academic and extracurricular activities with the objective of getting him into an Ivy League school. But that's really beside the point. Regardless of race or parenting style, perhaps the Ivy League applications simply saw him as someone who had gamed their scoring systems; and they decided they wanted someone else.
That's not to say I agree with racial quotas; I don't. But even in the absence of racial quotas I'd want the school to feel free not to accept someone simply because they scored "best".
In some sense its like a job interview; the best candidate is not necessarily the one who has all the certifications, contributes to open source projects, has a game on the app store, has a copy of the openGL 'red book' in his bag, has participated in RFCs, and has a perfectly inoffensive facebook page showing him kayaking, cycling in a marathon, and celebrating raising $10,000 for cancer. That might be a great person, and a great hire... but what if you start to get the sense that the entire thing is staged -- he didn't accomplish these things in the pursuit of any actual interests or passion for them -- he accomplished these things precisely so he could list them on his resume; and rather than being exception he's entirely average (he's perfectly competent but no more so than any of dozens of other applicants); albeit with his spare time dedicated to making a CV to wow HR drones.