My son is starting at Bennington you bastard.
Wait. I meant Bennigan’s.
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Middle class white kids of my generation were sold on the idea that they could work hard in school, do some extracurricular stuff, and study up for the standardized tests, and then by demonstrating that level of intellect and hard work, they’d earn a spot at an appropriately credentialed institution of higher education, which would subsequently correlate with your ensuing economic prosperity (at least within the context of how you applied yourself there and what sort of field you went into). I’m not saying that’s true, but that was the promise, and people finding out that the promise wasn’t true, or even that it’s no longer true, is going to have them lashing out in anger. People are pretty bad at directing their anger, so here we are.
Out of curiosity, which state were you living in?
South Carolina
Damn there goes my state hypothesis. What was the most prestigious school or handful of schools you got into?
I guess there could be stuff my classmates kept hidden that helped them get in. I didn’t apply anywhere and occasionally still beat myself up for what life could have been like, but maybe that wasn’t even possible to begin with.
It’s rare now that I let it get to me, just because if I couldn’t force myself to do the apps, how can I think I would’ve been able to force myself to do the coursework
Yeah they definitely care to some extent. I just don’t know what that is.
But also I seem to remember hearing and reading that admissions criteria and the execution of it all can just plain be less consistent than you’d think from one year to the very next, or even the same year.
I’m not sure how to ask this without it feeling like a weird brag, but, um, how much did I wreck my life by choosing not to go to an Ivy that I got into?
I mean you might have become the next Teddy K
It’s useless to “what if”
Or does it motivate me more to think about all the wasted potential that I feel I have to make up for?
One thing that the article mentioned is that most schools did not require standardized tests last year, so her high SAT score didn’t count for much. In fact it sounds like she may not have taken the SAT her senior year and that the score they give may have been from the PSAT.
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I think there’s definitely something to the state hypothesis. I got in at plenty of good schools, but there was also a clear dividing line between schools where my academic record was good enough to get me in, and those where it wasn’t. And I got into one school above that line where I wrote an insane YOLO essay that apparently landed well.
All I’m really saying is that getting into a hyper selective school requires the admissions people to be actively wow-ed about something in your file, and you’re not going to dazzle an Ivy League admissions officer on academics with a 1550 SAT. You certainly won’t get dinged for it and it’s probably a solid plus, but it’s not going to make your case.
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If this girl goes to ASU after we faded Rittenhouse, that’s an amazing turnaround. Go Devils.
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This article is has some incredible passages.
this paragraph is chefs kiss.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
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I don’t understand how people think those USA military costs don’t have the return of preventing Germany from becoming Chinorussia or whatever
How that lines up with the other things they say and believe
The thing is that 2nd tier private schools don’t have a lot of signaling value
Great story about LA’s resident mountain lion. For some reason I thought he had died back when he got sick from rat poison. But he made a full recovery.
I’ve read that this is the case. Don’t have source handy but I’ll look around when I have a moment.
It depends how old you are if it’s easier now - there was a big recentering of scores back in 1995 that made 1600s go from nearly impossible to much easier. (I know the exact year this happened since I took the test first year after it was recentered). Not sure if they have subsequently made it easier to get 1600s.