Posted on 04/03/2013 8:09:12 AM PDT by TSgt
Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.
Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.
I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people's pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you're using someone else's misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you're golden.
...
Then there was summer camp. I should've done what I knew was best—go to Africa, scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life. Because everyone knows that if you don't have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you're able to talk about what other people have to deal with.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Hard to work that “illegal alien native american” in there, isn’t it?
Suzy will come to realize that they did her a favor. She will likely go to a state college and get a good education without going into massive debt.
Even state colleges these days are charging outrageous tuition amounts.
I interviewed a lot of them. Try asking one why manhole covers are round.
They want someone who can count and speak English.
The really interesting thing is the contempt emanating from some lefties and the diversity-industrial complex I saw when I did a Google News search for her, angrily and sarcastically asserting that she feels entitled, when clearly she doesn't.
One thing we know about the left, they are utterly incapable of laughing at themselves.
If she really wants to go to one of these colleges, she'd better get some experience in carpet management.
She did do ballet up to her twenties and was applying to a New York City ballet company when at my urging she applied to a prestigious "Ivy." She was accepted. She graduated with honors(Not Magna Cum Laude, but Cum Laude.)Got a job with a prestigious publishing company and married a Phd physicist from M.I.T. who is a Wall Street "Quant."
The two lessons I got out of her experience is her teachers were much better-I was impressed- plus the social contacts that are made. My daughter is smart-not a genius-just smart and very personable. She has made contacts that are still on going and now moves in an elevated status-more exalted than her Mom and I. She attends church every Sunday and is a Republican of a conservative bent. She was never discriminated by her Professors during college for being a Christian and conservative-and some of them were really left leaning.
Not all is lost at the "IVY's."
No they don’t. They want someone that can qualify for a full ride regardless of qualifications.
Even USNA has its affordances.
I know because I went there, and some animals were definitely more equal than others.
It’s amazing the cynicism that the college admission system promotes in kids. I was at a friend’s house where his daughter and some of her friends were talking about it and complaining about having to join clubs and extra curricular activities they didn’t care about just to get some extra check marks on applications. I joked that they needed to form a “leadership” club where every member can be a Vice President of the club just so they had leadership experience for applications.
The best thing for young women to do is to opt-out of the whole liberal lie in the first place. Instead of going to college, piling on the debt, and then working 20 years to just get to where you break even before you can start a family at 40 why not just tell the feminists to **** off?
I did.
Got married at 18 and started a family. In the middle of it all I went to a trade school to learn how to cook (my mother taught me how to ‘cook’ with a microwave) and I work part time while being a full time mom.
I’m happy as a clam. Meanwhile my old friends are struggling to get through schools that don’t have room for them and they have student loans that will have to get paid even if they don’t get a degree. A family and a home are not even in their dreams.
Give them 20 years and maybe they can start a family right about the time I will probably be holding my first grandchildren.
Maybe.
Feminist liberalism is a lie. Nice to see another young woman discovering this before it’s too late.
By the time their sophmore year rolled around, they decided a much more modestly priced university would do just fine. They tried without sucess for some scholarships, including some that I thought they were even overqualified to get.
Daughter #3 learned a lot from their sad experience. She didn't even waste her time on scholarships over $2000 because she knew from her sister's experience that there would be WAY TOO MANY applicants. She picked up several of the more modest variety where the competition was considerably thinner. Her sisters had been finalists in the higher value types but ultimately lost out.
The biggest difference is that the low value scholarships were awarded by real people within a generation or two from the people who provided the money for the scholarships. They asked real questions. One was actually impressed that she had chosen a conservative college with very modest tuition and asked whether she had made a mistake when she wrote down $4000 per year instead of $40,000 per year which was more typical of places most of their applicants chose. When she told them $4000 was correct, the committee decided that their $1000 per year award would go a lot futher with daughter #3 than the competiting applicants.
Meanwhile, the older daughters who made it to the finals on two of the high value scholarships told me that the committee interviewing them were your typical academic stuffed shirts who had little or no connection to the people who actually earned and donated the money to the scholarship pool.
I'd urge any good Freeper parent who is helping a kid choose a college start with the list of best conservative colleges and honorable mentions at Yaf.Org.
How can you say she should have done better in school and on her SATs? You don’t know her grades or scores, do you?
I have seen national merit scholars with 4.0 gpa’s and straight 800 SATs get rejected from Harvard. I’ve also seen non-so-good students with less than 500 SATs get accepted.
The girl writes well and her argument is persuasive. Wherever she goes she’s going to do fine. Better than fine, actually.
I know a young fellow who was surprisingly admitted to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His grades were decent, but not outstanding. “Wow, that’s a tough school to get into. Congratulations!”, everybody said. The young fellow even went down to Chapel Hill with his proud parents for an orientation, and the school was quite impressive.
Then, strange mailings started showing up in the home mailbox - - invitations to join black fraternities and support groups for the parents of black students, for example, along with all kinds of scholarship and financial freebie come-ons directed at minorities. The thing was, the young man was whiter than Ashton Kutcher. He finally admitted that he checked the ‘African-American’ box on his application. He said he thought it would improve his chances of getting accepted. Well, it worked.
He finally changed his mind about going to UNC and attended the local community college instead.
This is why your daughter will make out much better in life than most, including those Hispanic women.
Society constantly castigates whites for ascending to the upper levels of business, but they never consider that those people often had to fight and slog through life. Whites don't have handouts for being a special color or a special background. There are no scholarships for being of Scots-Italian heritage. There are no grants for having an SAT score in the 93rd percentile while being the first in your family to ever go to college. There are no loan waivers for being brown-eyed and fair skinned.
Like your daughter, I worked several jobs in college. I was a bouncer and a cashier. I slung beer kegs at a local grocer on the weekends. I tended bar and helped local bands get set up in the student union for a free concert. I tutored high school kids in English and French, and I volunteered at a local hospital. None of these things gave me a leg up on the left-handed adopted gay black kid or the Iranian lesbian from a single-parent home. Matter of fact, they often showed up at the club or the store or the grocer at which I worked.
Bottom line is that the more hardship we see in our youth, the more we appreciate life and hard work when we're older. It makes it easier to recover when we lose a job or have to struggle that little extra bit for groceries or to pay the mortgage. We don't need handouts. We're self-sufficient, and we learned that through adversity. Diversity doesn't mean you're owed anything. Nowadays, it often means you had more things given to you, and in the wild, that laziness could mean your undoing.
Are you sure that you didn’t mean 40 in 4.9? 3.9 would be significantly faster than anyone who has been timed in the NFL.
“College admissions favor the elites, diverse and perverse.”
Not really.
My son is a white male, never been to Africa, nor any other place farther than the nearest Catholic church, to assist any unfortunates. He started no charities, ran no foundations, cured no cancers.
He is a good student, got great grades and test scores in high school, engaged in a few school extracurriculars, and even had leadership positions in a couple.
Because of his grades, his test scores, his rather run-of-the-mill extracurriculars, his winning personality and his ability to articulate himself, both in writing and when interviewing, he made a credible applicant to top colleges and universities. As a result, he was rejected from a couple, but accepted to our state flagship university as well as four of six elite universities to which he applied. He's currently at Harvard.
He's not from an elite family. We're upper middle class, but nothing near wealthy. I'm a small business owner who does pretty well most years, but that's about it. He's not diverse (at least not ethnically or religiously). He's not perverse. He's more conservative than most of the folks here at FR.
Most of his classmates are a lot like him - great students from solid families. He knows some rich folks, but plenty more middle class folks.
Here's something interesting: Most of the students he knows come from intact families. Not a lot of divorce in the families of Ivy League students. Hmmm.... I wonder what the connection might be.
A lot of the students he knows are shallow liberals who are trending libertarian. A fair number of the students he knows are conservative, again, who are trending libertarian.
It's pretty well-known that he's conservative, since he's the publisher of the campus conservative periodical. Some of his faculty are fairly liberal, yet, knowing that he's a conservative, they nonetheless treat him fairly and with respect for his thoughts and ideas.
This young lady trades in a lot of silly stereotypes to get a laugh. Unfortunately, many folks think her comedy routine actually represents reality.
sitetest
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