Yeah, California has always had a great public college system as far as I’ve been aware of it. Wisconsin’s is good, too. Don’t know about New York’s, but there are certainly a lot of SUNY options. I look at the US News rankings just as a rough guide, but it seems pretty silly that the best public universities - Virginia, Cal, UNC, Michigan (sorry if I’m missing one) - are at the bottom of the top 25. It’s almost certainly because of money. Not that the other schools on the list aren’t really good, but it’s not like they aren’t all excellent academic institutions.
I’d love for my kid to get into Virginia - don’t think she can in this competitive environment - but boy, paying Harvard prices for a public school, even though it’s a great one, would be painful. Sounds like she wants to stay in-state, so again, hopefully she can get into UGA or GT (Emory, sure, but she wants more of the “school spirit” experience, which you don’t really get with Emory).
Lots of her friends are older than her and she said a bunch are going to Kennesaw State or another “lesser” state school and then planning on transferring after a year or two.
Yeah, the problem is that this is exactly what the elite institutions were historically for and no one has really thought much about changing the core business model. People obsess over sorting out kids so only the very smartest ones get on the lifeboat instead of just building more lifeboats. We could just build more lifeboats, this country is stupid wealthy.
Mismeasure of Man is a great read, it tells the story of how the Ivy League started implementing SAT testing once they weren’t allowed to explicitly be a whites-only institution. The idea was only WASPs would ace the SATs (because they’re the master race ldo) which kind of blew up in their face when this Jewish guy named Kaplan figured out how to cheese the standardized tests and teach other kids how to ace it. So now they have all kinds of silly legacy rules and loopholes like squash scholarships to make sure the right kids get in and the place still functions as an elite gatekeeping/networking institution.
Amazingly, no one before Kaplan ever even bothered trying to improve their standardized test scores because it was thought they measured an innate quality. Then these Jews started acing the SATs because they preped for them and no one knew what to do.
We have hundreds of lifeboats. Even state schools are perceived as better than overseas options.You can’t make people like a state school as much as an Ivy.
Putting aside the question of what schools should or shouldn’t do, or what they should be allowed to do, I can tell you that my school is taking this SCOTUS affirmative action decision very seriously. For the first time ever, I’ve been contacted by the school’s legal counsel, asking me for very detailed information about how exactly we evaluate applications, what topics we cover in interviews, and what rubric we ultimately use to make admissions decisions.
Fuck em. All this nuance on education can be put to the side, until you can see the brainwashed braindead acknowledge Hunter is being prosecuted by a Trump appointee lmao
I don’t know, I think if I were going to use my tenure status to entertain myself or joke with other people (potentially at their expense), I’d try to limit that to people who are kind of assholes. Like, using tenure to mock students or shit on staff is bad (even though lots of people seem to thrive on doing so). I think the legal people I’m talking to are genuinely trying to do run admissions the right way, got hit with an enormous shock to the system, and are now trying to get things back in order in time to run upcoming admissions cycle without too much disruption. (Like, our admission application is supposed to open 8/1–that’s not much time!)
[Sorry, nothing like responding to a harmless post with an overly serious reply.]
