[Free in Texas]

This really hits home with me. My wife has a 3.98 GPA and has been attempting to enter a locally administered state approved nursing program for several years at a nearby community college. Unprepared people with approved ethnicities and much lower GPA's that have been socially promoted all their academic lives are routinely admitted over other students only to flounder and drop out after a few months because, for the first time in their lives, their feet are being held to the fire and they must actually produce results. Worse, admissions occur once a year so if someone drops a third of the way or later through the semester the slot is not filled again until the following year. And it always filled with another loser.

After four years of being encouraged to re-apply yearly by the dean of the school as well as the head of the nursing program yet never gaining admission she and at least ten other students have changed their majors to medical business administration. This course is not subject to the whims of the multiculturalists and once she is degreed and gainfully employed she plans to try again at a different college or cut a deal with an employer (such as a hospital) to enter one of their programs. We will never give up, but it sure seems that melanin matters much more than work and preparation in the present scheme of things.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

One of my daughter's graduated from nursing school at the top of her class. Her achievement could not be announced in order to avoid making others feel less worthy. The administators told my daughter of her class standing privately.

[Soothesayer]

“Unprepared people with approved ethnicities and much lower GPA’s that have been socially promoted all their academic lives are routinely admitted over other students only to flounder and drop out after a few months because, for the first time in their lives, their feet are being held to the fire and they must actually produce results.”

It is not uncommon to find nurses in senior centers attempting to perform CPR on a patient with low blood sugar. They won’t even take them off the wheelchair...

Guess who?!

[9YearLurker]

I understand Drs. Williams and Sowell’s point, but to compare Harlem and Lower East Side students in the late 40’s and early 50’s does not seem illuminative. Was not the LES a rank slum of non-English-speaking Puerto Rican immigrants at that time?

Here’s a description of the immigrant population in the area in the late 40’s:

“...the area was becoming a destination for thousands of Puerto Ricans in a huge postwar migration. Men found work as janitors, women as sewing machine operators, settling with their extended families into tenements that had previously housed Jewish and Italian immigrants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/nyregion/11mission.html

[epithermal]

I experienced this stupidity in the work force at a major oil company. I was transferred to Houston to work on a project and our computer specialist for the project was the first black I ever worked with. He did absolutely nothing all day but sit around and read magazines, but the managers would do nothing about it. The rest of us had to work for a living.

[epithermal]

Ran across this which seems to have the same old new answers:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/09/new-answers-for-increasing-minorities.html

“New Answers for Increasing Minorities in Science”

For decades, the conventional wisdom was that increasing the number of minority scientists requires addressing every aspect of the pipeline—from elementary school through hiring and promoting faculty members. That’s still true, says a new report out today from the National Academies—but one approach stands out above the rest. The fastest way to train more minority scientists in scientific and technical fields, it says, is simply to improve the retention and completion rates of undergraduate students already interested in the natural sciences and engineering.

“We are missing what could be called the low-hanging fruit,” says Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and chair of the National Research Council panel. “These are students who have gotten into college and are majoring in math and science and who want to be in those disciplines. But more than half of them are not completing degrees in those fields.”

Although the report is titled Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America’s Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads, Hrabowski says its broader message is that shrinking the high attrition rates in the natural sciences and engineering is really an “American issue. It is simply unacceptable for 55% of whites and Asians not to succeed. And the situation is even more dire for blacks and Latinos. So the minority aspect is just one part of a bigger challenge we face. If America is to compete successfully in a global innovation economy, it must find ways for larger number of American students to excel in science.”

The report contains some good news, noting that the share of African Americans and Latinos in the overall pool of college students has grown over the past 3 decades to 26% of all undergraduates, including those seeking a 2-year degree. That figure still falls short of their 33% share of the college-age population, however. And minorities are even more underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. While the overall percentage of 24-year-olds in the United States with STEM degrees is 6%, it’s just 2.7% among African-Americans and 2.2% for Latinos. Yet the report notes that a longitudinal survey of freshmen finds “underrepresented minorities aspire to major in STEM in college at the same rate as their white and Asian-American peers, and have done so since the last 1980s.”

Retention and completion rates won’t increase until universities provide better academic, social, and financial support for underrepresented minority students, the report declares. Raising the overall share of the young adult population with STEM degrees to 10%, a target embraced by previous National Academies reports and national policymakers, would require a tripling of current degree production rates for underrepresented minorities. The report estimates that providing needy students with the financial support they will need to earn their degrees would cost $150 million a year for the first cohort and eventually rise to an annual level of $600 million. It says that support should come from all federal agencies with programs aimed at increasing minority participation in STEM fields.

[Inappropriate Laughter]

. Unprepared people with approved ethnicities and much lower GPA's that have been socially promoted all their academic lives are routinely admitted over other students only to flounder and drop out after a few months because, for the first time in their lives, their feet are being held to the fire and they must actually produce results.

I thought that the Supremes said that schools can't do that.

The really scary part will come, if it hasn't already started, when the professional schools lower the standards so that these people can get through.

Perhaps your wife could, at least for now, legally assume a Mexican last name.

[ronnie raygun]

This liberal equal crap has got to go. You work hard you reap the rewards you don’t you lose, plain and simple. Heard on Rush a caller told story of his daughter who strives to be the best aces a test, she and another student are the only ones who passed, teacher tells class this test don’t count that she will regive the test again to give an opportunity for the others to pass. This is the kind of crap going on in your childs classroom and it will only stop when you get up off your a##es and raise holy hell! We may be happy that the tide will change in the coming years but the criminals are still schooling our children and the children are our future