It has peer cred as a bonkers party/fun school with great weather?
Yeah, I heard of lots of people who went to ASU to study a broad.
6 Likes
I get that there’s value in human interest stories, but “girl doesn’t get into Stanford because it’s very selective” is least interesting or informative story I’ve heard all week. At least the former hipster dating a cop has a fun soap opera quality to it, although I’m not sure why it’s worthy of press coverage in the NYT.
UT has that too. Lots of schools do.
Maybe I just read it differently from you, but I didn’t get a feeling of entitlement from her. It seemed to be more just depression/futility.
I work in Boston with almost all Ivy League undergrads/grads or both. A Cornell/Harvard reports to me and my two closest peers are Tufts/Harvard and Harvard/Stanford. I went to two state schools for undergrad and grad. I feel ~0 behind them. Probably it was harder for me to get my first job, that’s it. It’s really not a big deal once you graduate if you’re good at what you do, unless you’re aiming to be a mega-multimillionaire. If you’re bad at what you do or you want to make billions, it probably is worth it maybe?
It definitely wasn’t one of those where she was blaming minorities (or anyone really) for taking her spot. She was basically lamenting getting a couple of Bs when she was a sophomore and wondering what else she could have done.
Not applying to your local Pitt, Binghamton, Indiana, or whatever is insanity. Your education is basically exactly the same as an Ivy and it’s a ton cheaper than out of state party school.
1 Like
My theory on those types of places it makes no difference for the very smartest kids (or probably the very dumbest kids). But if you are an average or just a bit above average that prestige bump opens a lot of doors. But as you say, once you get through that door, you have to perform.
1 Like
Yeah, I’m sure there was some of that. She was on meds for anxiety. How much of that was due to all of this pressure is impossible to say.
Agree with all the rest.
The hard part of this for me is I knew that if I crushed everything in HS, then I could get in pretty much anywhere, and that is pretty much exactly how everything worked everyone I knew. It’s a whole different ball game for my kids. So part of the difficulty is getting people in my generation to realize that times have really, really changed.
I mean this kid couldn’t even get her preferred major at UT-Austin. How crazy is that?
1 Like
It hits a lot differently if you have kids.
My opinion on the newsworthiness of this topic was basically identical to Trolly’s until reading this bit. This makes sense as being worthwhile messaging. Does the article seem to be framed that way? (I am not a WSJ subscriber)
It’s not the quality of the education but the quality of the connections you make plus the quality of the doors that open for you after graduation.
I think it was mostly that. The article did mention how she was in an overrepresented group, so I guess one could read some anti-affirmative action into it. I thought it mostly not about that, but maybe that’s just me.
In the middle they get into “white kids just can’t catch a break these days,” territory. The girl herself doesn’t give off that vibe, but the author of the story does.
But also a 3.95 GPA just isn’t that impressive, and I understand she had good reasons for her B’s, but still what is Harvard supposed to do? Take her over a 4.0 or 4.X GPA student with a higher SAT score?
I had like a 4.2 or 4.3 GPA (A’s in a few AP classes pulled it above 4.0) in an extremely competitive school and didn’t even consider trying to go to an Ivy. I applied to like 10-12 schools and got into all but UNC and Duke. Not getting into UNC was disappointing, but only like 18% of their students are out-of-state and most are athletes. It is what it is.
I ended up getting into the #1 school for my major anyway, loved my time there, and wouldn’t change a thing.
Yeah her quotes/attitude seemed fine, though I’m curious how this ended up getting written. I assume her parents?
It seems like her main mistake was weighting her applications too much to Ivy’s/elite of the elite schools. She applied to 12 schools, got into 2, and was waitlisted at another. She applied to 5 Ivy’s, Stanford, USC, Cal Berkeley, Northwestern, UT Austin, Rice, and Arizona State.
She should have applied to more top-50 and top-100 business schools, and some in-state safety schools. Her guidance counselor fucked up IMO.
Yeah, definitely this.
An equally big fuck up is that no one dissuaded her from an undergrad major in business. That’s a waste of education, imo. Even something like economics would be infinitely better. Pretty much no successful MBA that I know, majored in business in undergrad.
1 Like
I forget the exact term they used but I think they said that was the unadjusted GPA or something like that. It implies to me that with AP classes and such, her actually GPA was > 4.0. But that was true for 22 other kids in her graduating class. So, the conclusion is the same. Not as impressive as it may seem.
Right, like I can’t remember my exact number but 4.2ish. But out of maybe 300 kids in my class I was probably top 10, but the gap from me to #1 would have been significant. Before HS I was always #1 but in smaller class sizes. Like a dude in my HS got a 1590 on his SAT and was depressed for weeks. I think we had four kids get 1550+. Even those kids applied to more than just Ivies. We were all advised to apply to an in-state safety school. I got a 1450 and shrugged and was like, “Yeah, not taking that again, whatever.”
I knew with 1400+, good extracurriculars, and my GPA I could get into 90% of the schools I seriously wanted to go to, so that was good enough for me. I briefly considered applying to Harvard or Yale just out of sheer curiosity, but I didn’t really have an interest in going there given my desired major and desired college experience, so wasting the application fee or the time on it seemed pointless.
Basically I had been the smart kid/nerdy kid my whole childhood, and I really wanted the chance to go to a school where I could recreate myself (well that’s anywhere), have a fun experience with some partying involved, have major college sports to watch, and then of course get a good education still.
I don’t know how I figured that out at 18, after being all about my grades and obsessed with my grades and GPA for my entire childhood, but for all the things I didn’t understand at that age, I think I hit that one out of the park, thankfully.
1 Like
The obvious problem with the narrative is most of the Ivies are like 1/4 non-Asian POC. Of this, a considerable chunk foreign, and many non-Asian POC students would gain admission with or without affirmative action.
If affirmative action becomes illegal, it’s going to be a super super marginal benefit to white 1550 SAT/3.9 GPA kid. Like their ranks may grow 5-10% at these schools.
1 Like
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1589773496330354688
this is some greek philosophy, empircism-ignoring stuff. “I have worked it out in my super brain, we don’t need to check any actual facts to see if this is true because my brain says it must be.”
3 Likes