The Incredible Shrinking Harvard?

Who are you to predicate your beliefs as to what the admissions criteria for any school is?If your children have any of your manners, they confirm what we already know - charm school is worth EVERY penny!

POPPY! wrote:

What do you think the these kids are morons! Why don't you tell that to the other 10 kids in his class. They know why they can't get in the big schools. Are you an idiot! These kids are way beyond any of your bullshit liberal parenting! They don't go for this minority crap. You liberals and your national teachers union better be careful. These kids don't give a crap about all the affirmative action. They worked their asses off and get crapped on. They don't care what happened 150 yrs ago. Or even in the 60's You tell these kids your bullshit and they will spit in your face. Like we all should be doing. Everyone of these kids scored over 2100 in the SAT. This kid that got in is laughing with his 1480.

I don't care who caused the housing mess but I am just a dumb hillbilly that took 3 colleges and 6 years to get a crappy degree. I made a ton of money selling houses when the going was good and even more money buying foreclosed houses cheap, cheap, cheap to rent out when the going got bad.

Whenever someone asked if I did land contracts or held a mortgage myself on a house I was selling, I always told them "Are you crazy, the last thing I want to be is a bank!!"

You POP! wrote:

Love to see Harvard go down. My kid is 4.0, I.B., AP's and I'B's all 5. Him and 12 other kids. Harvard took a minority kid with basically b's and freakin c's!

So which one of those thirteen stellar candidates would have been admitted if the minority kid hadn't been admitted? Or do you believe that all kids with similarly inflated GPAs and test scores should be offered admission without having to distinguish themselves in any way?

I've been against race-based affirmative action, as it has been practiced at places like Harvard, for many years -- long befor the Supreme Court's Bakke decision in 1978. I've also been against preferences for athletes and children of alumni. It's not merely a question of fairness in admissions. It's also a question of "branding" or certification. For better or for worse, top universities play an important role in a broader credentialing process throughout society, and certain types of preferential treatment undercut justified reliance on certain credentials. That a dim bulb like GWB could obtain, through family connections, admission to Yale College and Harvard Business School undermines, at least to some slight extent, the "certification" value of such admissions decisions in the broader society. That a thoughtful but nevertheless mediocre academic candidate like Bill Bradley could parley his basketball skills into a Princeton diploma and a Rhodes Scholarship may also call into question the informational value of Princeton admissions and Rhodes Scholarship selections. Conversely, race-based affirmative-action programs, insofar as they result in the admission of mediocre or poor academic candidates to top universities, diminish or degrade the credentials of genuinely brilliant minority students like Barack Obama.

So I remain rather strongly against many of these various preferences -- at least as they have been applied -- in university admissions decisions. But don't kid yourself. There were a lot of white kids who didn't have family connections and weren't athletic recruits who still got admitted to Harvard this year. For whatever reason, Harvard wanted them more than it wanted your child. Maybe Harvard passed up a future Nobel Prize winner and Fields Medalist, as it did when it turned down John Nash for a faculty position in its mathematics department fifty years ago. Maybe it passed up a great investing genius, as it did when it rejected Warren Buffet's application for student admission before that. Schools have imperfect information and imperfect selection processes. But if your child has been rejected by a number of top schools, you might consider the possibility that, quite apart from issues of racial preferences, your child just didn't impress those schools very much.

You are confirming your other statement about MIT vs HC, in that HC is a "brand" vs MIT which really is an "anti-brand", or "education"

By extension, those who choose to attend HC are really opting for branding. If the institution's goal is to broadcast wider standards of higher education (HC), rather than higher education itself (MIT), then the student faces a very clear choice, and must live with the consequences

The process occurs in the workplace - do you want a branded candidate (no thought required) or are you willing to talk with them and take a look.

We'd like to think "the best" are admitted to HC, but they are not, and thats not really the admission committee's goal.

They are financial screwed though...

I'm not sure that I follow you. I think that Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Juilliard, Hamburger University, and (while it existed) Clown College are all brands. Pretty good ones, too, although some may be more valuable than others in certain contexts, and they may all stand for somewhat different things.

The Harvard brand, like the Yale and Princeton brands, has undergone some considerable changes over the years. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Charles William Eliot, Harvard's brand developed significantly away from a finishing school for rich New Englanders toward a great research university with entrance examinations, with a greater emphasis on producing first-rate scholars and a lesser emphasis on producing winning football teams, but Harvard has perhaps not gone quite so far in that direction as, say, MIT, Cal Tech, and the University of Chicago. If I were king of Harvard University (or, as you suggest, Harvard College), I might push the school a bit further in that direction, but I don't think that Harvard's brand has been fatally diluted. I think it's still the most valuable brand in higher education, at least in the U.S., and I don't blame anyone for choosing it over another.

As for Harvard's finances, I still think they're in great shape, despite the dire news from alumni fundraisers. Rich minus 30% still equals rich. There aren't many universities that wouldn't trade places with Harvard.

In its latest incarnation, the priority of the brand of Harvard is the brand itself. This is in contrast to other brands - MIT, Hamburger U etc, - where the brand matters, but is lower on the list of priorities.

What I have observed is that in the case of Harvard and other schools, the goal of the brand has changed from maintaining the academic integrity of the brand, to maintaining the brand. The brand's #1 goal is now to maintain the brand.

As you suggest, it has not gone so far off the rails as to be a completely self-reifying vainglorious parody of itself. But some (alumni especially) would claim as much.

Disagree, the point is one race of people are getting in over others. Affirmative action. You can smoke it up all you want and hide it with your liberal bull crap. What do you think every last kid is doing in high school!!! So lets just tell them all that there is NO DARN REWARDS for working hard in HIGH SCHOOL! Its what..who YOU think will do well in the environment you have put together in OUR colleges. My failed dreams... you have no idea who your talking with. I'll bet your some liberal admissions fool. Lets just say I could pay for all 12 of these kids to go for 45,000 a year for the next 4 years. Your just a liberal shit that has never lived with the race you promote, but it all makes you feel good about yourself. Just go to Africa and adopt, my kid is way beyond any ideas of mine.

So you are living in a house the tax assessor says is worth 2 bucks? Congratulations - welcome to the East/West coast.

I would hazard to speculate that these children can at least write and spell better than you, so they are not too disadvantaged. They will get into good schools, do well, and be happy (unlike you).

One race..the human race? Thats the only race I know.

Try taking out the word "race" and put in the word, "economic strata" and you get a better idea of what admissions officers are trying to accomplish. They have the luxury of choosing among candidates. There are many "under the radar" schools that do not have the application ratios, nor the financial resources to attract qualified students w/ financial need, but are just as solid as Harvard and others.

Its competitive to get into any school of note. Certainly more than 30yrs ago, when demographics were on the applicants side.

Its tough waking up w/ a hangover, I know...

Poppy! wrote:

my kid is way beyond any ideas of mine.

you have ideas...when did this happen?

Getting into college is not a 10k. The criteria are not cut and dried.

There are many MANY Asian parents in CA pissed off that their straight A children are not getting into STATE schools like Cal, or UCLA. UC Irvine is 25% Chinese/Taiwanese already - Asian parents want it to be >50%, and it could be 60-70%.

Based on your criteria, these "special kids" you plump for would get absolutely smoked by most Asian students - they would not have a hope in hell. There is plenty of affirmative action for Caucasian students in the US, pal. If they just looked at test scores/grades/AP (as you do), most US universities would look like Singapore: Chinese and Indian.

Out of curiosity where do the "non-traditional" students fit into your acceptance rate? For example, I had an average gpa in high school, graduated in '94, entered the USAF for 4 years and upon being discharged (honorably) I enrolled in a local community college. I took every math class I could since it was a subject that was holding my interest and in my two years I had the first AS in Mathematics from this school. Now, several faculty thought I had a pretty good head on my shoulders and encouraged me to continue my education through the traditional feeder school where the majority of the cc students went, but I had other ideas. I wanted to apply and go to the best school in my area, so I sent my application in and was accepted. Upon my first visit I sat down with the math dept chair at the time and he bluntly stated that I wouldn't be able to hang with these "kids" as they are the top 5-10% of their graduating class. I thought I could and I said so. Next thing I know he's having me solve some linear algebra problems on the chalkboard in his office. Cut to 2 years later and I walked out with a BS in Applied Mathematics and an overall GPA of 3.01. major GPA was 3.3. And you can damn well believe that I earned every tenth and hundredth of that GPA, as did my fellow students. I was encouraged by some faculty to enter an advanced degree program but being a little older than most I had to hit the workplace. I also came close to a minor in German and managed to make a few friends all the while working 30+ hours per week and commuting to class an hour each way everyday.

Now I could have went to a less challenging school as suggested by faculty from both institutions, but I wanted a challenge and am only so thankful that the admissions department gave me that chance.

The College of William & Mary.

Again, everything you say is just bull liberal smoke and mirrors. I'm real happy my man. I live in the only state that I can sell my house for what it is worth. Now why would that be? Let me see your people always use the race word. Since I am a white I have to only use it, as a tough guy, like you says. I never tasted gin in my life. I'll bet you have. I could care less about my writing on a little forum like this. Its fun to get on here and stir the poo with you fools that like to hide behind your computers. Tough guys like you throw out personnel insults to men that you would never dream of face to face.

You have no idea who I am. If you knew you would just die.

Got a couple people here everyone is laughing so hard ...you stupid fool white boy.

I would much rather see colleges and universities spend more time and effort looking for "non-traditional" students -- "diamonds in the rough" with real promise and drive who bring true diversity of background into the the school -- instead of using race and ethnicity as a surrogate for socioeconomic diversity. From what I saw at Harvard, most of the black students, like most of the white students, came from privileged backgrounds. They were very frequently the sons and daughters of rich, famous, or highly educated men and women. I see little good, and no small amount of harm, in giving preferences to such individuals in the admissions process, especially at the expense of carrying out a more robust "affirmative action" program that would seek out talent from often overlooked or less privileged parts of society.

Avocados Number wrote:

You POP! wrote:

Love to see Harvard go down. My kid is 4.0, I.B., AP's and I'B's all 5. Him and 12 other kids. Harvard took a minority kid with basically b's and freakin c's!

Conversely, race-based affirmative-action programs, insofar as they result in the admission of mediocre or poor academic candidates to top universities, diminish or degrade the credentials of genuinely brilliant minority students like Barack Obama.

Barack Obama is an example of a genuinely brilliant minority student?

Please describe some of his brilliant academic papers at Columbia or his legal articles when he was president of the Harvard Law Review. Better yet, give us any example of his brilliance at Columbia, like his GPA or the awed testimony of his impressed professors.

As far as is known, there is scant evidence of any great academic achievement before his political coup of being elected president of the Law Review. There is more evidence of academic indifference, such as his high school record and his time at Occidental College. He has refused to release his records at Columbia.

According to his own accounts, he was still boozing and getting stoned during his two years at Occidental College, so where is this display of brilliance that opened the doors of Harvard to him?

Or was he just a smart kid without any special academic brilliance, kind of like George Bush, Al Gore and John Kerry but with better speech reading skills?

Ticktock wrote:

Hahaha "Hollywood crowd" is that who we're blaming now? I guess we've moved on from blaming the jews for all our problems, to blaming liberals. Blacks are hardly admitted in "droves" and I'd just about guarantee that all the ones who are admitted, are smarter than you. The real issue is all the rich children of the powerful who get admitted by pull, because by and large they're idiots and some of the laziest, most-entitled feeling people you're ever likely to meet.

You know who's at fault. As for the bulk of the student body, it's comprised of the children of a certain group of the rich and/or connected. Speaking of Jews, they and Asians are of course admitted to Harvard in high numbers. In fact, they are admitted at rates three times what they would be if grades and test scores were the only criteria. So what's the agenda with that? Why are other groups with qualified people ignored - or more tellingly, why are they avoiding Harvard and similar institutions today? It certainly can't be because of competition, as that has tailed off. The quality has dropped tremendously the last 25 years at Harvard and Yale.

The Chicago Way wrote:

As far as is known, there is scant evidence of any great academic achievement before his political coup of being elected president of the Law Review.

Instead of "As far as is known," why not say "As far as I know," which puts the burden of ignorance on the proper person? I actually know quite a lot about Barack's academic performance at Harvard, both before and after his election as president of the Harvard Law Review, and I have also heard "the awed testimony of his impressed professors" at Harvard. (By the way, a word of advice: If you want to sound knowledgeable, stop using that looney right-wing line about the absence of "legal articles" written by Barack when he was president of the Harvard Law Review, which has a well-established policy of not attributing authorship of any student works to any particular individuals, reflecting the view that all student works in the Review are a collective effort of the editors.)

You've made these comments on a number of threads before, under various pseudonyms. You've even used the passive construction before in describing your own ignorance about Obama's academic record. I have nothing against repeated expressions of arguments and opinions; I do the same myself. But at some point, you might consider the alternative of obtaining information about the subject rather than reiterating your ignorance about it.

Avocados Number wrote:

As for Harvard's finances, I still think they're in great shape, despite the dire news from alumni fundraisers. Rich minus 30% still equals rich. There aren't many universities that wouldn't trade places with Harvard.

you might find this interesting: citing "unprecedented financial limitations that we (Harvard) are presently confronting" the Reginald A. Daly Post-Doctoral Fellowship program was not funded this year. The decision not to fund a fellow was made after they had solicited, accepted, and (at least partially) reviewed applications. Not sure if that is just financial trouble for the the Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences or the whole university, but someone in cambridge is hurting.

Forget about trying to sound knowledgeable.

What are all of you arguing about? Lots of side arguments popping up, huh?

I'm considered a minority student. I wasn't the best student in high school. And I'm not the best now. But, I did get accepted to Harvard. I chose to go to Stanford instead. I did well enough to stay (accepted into their school of medicine).

I didn't see myself as getting accepted because of the bubble I filled in where it said 'RACE'. And I don't think it matters. Universities aren't doing wrong by allowing non-white applicants to stroll on in. My 3.95 undergraduate GPA proves this. BUT, they are in the wrong if they choose to ignore their poor performance AFTER being admitted.

No, I've only used this pseudonym when talking about Obama, because, as you infer, my first-hand knowledge does not come from his time living on the east coast. I am, however, very familiar with the Chicago machine and the corrupt way that its dirty politics have infected virtually every business and institution it touches . This includes the University of Illinois, which just recently revealed that there is a list of students who are given preferential treatment because of political connections. This extends to the University of Chicago, which, if you ask your friends (or friends of friends) who are on the faculty at the U of C, will tell you that Michelle Obama was given a huge amount of money to fill a job that was eliminated as soon as she moved on with her powerful husband. You also might hear (if the professor is not a left wing Obama cultist) that Obama was a political hire, and did not have the requisite background to be offered a full professorship (although the school would happily have kept him as a lecturer.)There is a reason why so many politicians in Illinois are under investigation, indictment or in prison. Not to pick specifically on you, but Ivy League "progressives" have very little understanding of the extent of the corruption of Illinois politics. Obama is "brilliant?" He will move politics beyond partisanship and race? He is the last honest man who was able to progress through Chicago politics without the stain of the endemic corruption of every part of the system? And what follows is sincere, because I can certainly enjoy the information that can be occasionally gleaned on LetsRun. And even though I would assume we are largely not politically compatible, I appreciate your ability to construct a sentence, a thought and an idea in a coherent manner. So tell, what was his published (or written but not published) evidence of academic "brilliance" when he was at any of his post-graduate stops - Occidental, Columbia or Harvard. Please link or show me how to find an academic paper or dissertation that he has written. One thing I can tell you with certainty is that every U of C prof is quick (to an almost boring degree) to share his academic writings and the grand thesis he or she has constructed from his or her years of study.

Avocados Number wrote:

The Chicago Way wrote:

As far as is known, there is scant evidence of any great academic achievement before his political coup of being elected president of the Law Review.

)

You've made these comments on a number of threads before, under various pseudonyms. You've even used the passive construction before in describing your own ignorance about Obama's academic record. I have nothing against repeated expressions of arguments and opinions; I do the same myself. But at some point, you might consider the alternative of obtaining information about the subject rather than reiterating your ignorance about it.

The Chicago Way wrote:

You also might hear (if the professor is not a left wing Obama cultist) that Obama was a political hire, and did not have the requisite background to be offered a full professorship (although the school would happily have kept him as a lecturer.)

From the website of the Law School of the University of Chicago:

"Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined."