Posted on 04/02/2014 9:37:09 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last week, high school senior Kwasi Enin found out he had been accepted to every college he applied to — including all eight Ivy League schools.
How did Enin pull off this impressive feat? The Long Island student scored a 2250 on his SAT, had taken 11 AP courses, and was in the top 2% of his graduating class, but that doesn't necessarily show him fully as an applicant. The answer could be in his college application essay, which The New York Post published today.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Same here. Underwhelmed.
The boy is undoubtedly smart and and a hard worker. He is certainly far more musically talented than I am and it’s good that music has such a positive influence on his life and his intellectual development.
It is still a very pedestrian essay, earnest, self-serving with a veneer of humility, and not terribly original. It’s like the application essays my daughter wrote and like the essays most students write.
I don’t want to denigrate this young man in any way - I wish him success. But there is no way on earth that essay or his achievements would have won him admission into every Ivy League University if he had been white. (Unless he was a football player too.) And that is no criticism of Kwasi Enin, but of the universities.
Let's put it into context. The 2250 is a great score on what amounts to an IQ test. 2400 is a perfect score, but they're returning to the 1600 max "in a major overhaul intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out."
The AP classes also show what he can do. Graduating in the top 2% means little depending on the school.
The essay is dullsville, but he deserves to get in if the criteria were simply academic. Those citing race as the major factor are ignoring all that.
The kid is sharp, but the real reason he got in everyone (in comparison to many a sharp white kid), is he is black.
I went to MIT and used my mother’s maiden name as my last name, which is not overtly Jewish as my surname (in face it’s Arabic, although she is Jewish).
My essay was about “growing up in the occupied territories,” which was true. Mind you, I was in Gush Katiff, and I didn’t lie, but I sure led them on.
Didn’t mention my military service, the fact I was married, or that I went to a Yeshiva.
And, yes, I had a 1550 SAT (back when it went to 1600) and a 4.0.
It’s all a game.
Kids like that are honestly a dime a dozen in my children’s high school. They are Asian and white and they don’t get offers from all the Ivy Leagues. The geographic location is comparable, New York suburb/exurb.
If Kwasi Enin’s name was Casey Enthoven and his ancestors hailed from Amsterdam, would he still have been accepted by all of those schools?
The lad’s score, coupled with his affinity for and love of classical music, puts him in a very small universe of highly intelligent individuals.
Just hope he’s smart enough to avoid the libtard indoctrination he will experience at any of those so-called institutions of higher learning.
In other words, let’s hope he survives the gauntlet and comes out the other end a Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams or Ben Carson as opposed to a Barack Hussein Obama.
To some extent, it was. His SAT was in the median range for Ivy acceptance, even slightly below for the most competitive like Harvard, MIT, Stanford. 11 AP courses is very good - but again, that's typical for all Ivy students. Many students have more. So he had smarts, good scores, took difficult courses - but Ivy's look for anything to differentiate a student - and this kid had one other HUGE advantage - the right skin color.
Getting into 8 Ivy's is unheard of. That last qualification pushed him well over the top. A simple fact is - a suburban white kid with the exact same application would be very lucky to get into 1 Ivy.
What would America be by now had the affirmative action movement been based upon ‘affirming the bright’ as precious gifts to our society, instead of aiming at mediocrity as a precious goal and means to ‘level the playing field’.
Yours is the best reply. He is clearly a smart kid, but he had the one special advantage all the Ivy's seek - and getting accepted at all 8 is absolutely unheard of without it. It shows the bias and mindset of the schools. Regardless - Best of luck to him. God gives us all advantages at one time or another - we must make use of them.
Essays count Big Time. I review candidates for my alma mater, and almost every kid has great grades/SAT scores. The essay is highly subjective and can tell reviewers something more about the person than their grades. My daughter got into an Ivy League college by writing a killer essay and by choosing an initial major that not as mainstream as most.
So now she’s been published in the WSJ. That ought to help.
I do not get it. “would have left me empty”
as empty as 99% of college students?
Ivy's don't offer scholarships. They only offer financial aid based on income and savings of parent and student. Having said that though - they all have so much money, a way will be found. For most Ivy's, a family income of <$60,000 per year means a totally free ride. I understand this kid's parents are professionals / Doctors who emigrated from Ghana. Money won't be an issue.
he could become a middle school music teacher with a qurter-million student loan debt
No. It simply gave him a strong advantage over other equally-qualified applicants. Acceptance to 8 Ivy leagues is unheard of.
i thought the orchestra teacher talked him out of that course to take orchestra instead. orchestra would not be a simple “music in our lives” minimum requirement class. orchestra is orchestra. that was the impression i got from his writing.
lolz
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