As I rode a train this week, I re-watched Admission, the 2013 film which starts by highlighting the elite admissions process at Princeton but ends as a romantic comedy. While Hollywood loves the dramatic, this movie does get some things right, including the obsession of parents, the robotic-like approach of applicants, the rejection of highly-qualified applicants, and the behind-closed-doors negotiations. The message is haunting: this is a scary process.
For some more insight into this process, check out this article: What’s Really Wrong With Our Flawed System of Elite College Admissions. I suppose my question is, if more and more people are highlighting these issues, why do we continue to practice the same way? The answer is simple: rich schools are getting richer and they don’t want to change. 3 in 4 think race shouldn’t factor into college admissions decisions, but it does. Did you know that Harvard had extensive ties to slavery? This is not good news for a school that just recently had some significant issues with admitting Asian Americans by discriminating against them as they did Jewish students. Stanford’s founder was a member of the eugenics movement. In the wake of public protests and action to remove relics of historical racism, is it not time for us to apply the same logic and action to our institutions of higher education, which sit at the apex of what is to exemplify a country, and yet these institutions go relatively unpunished (i.e., their admission rates remain the same, their doners do not vacate, their rank remains, their statues still stand, and Harvard spends $100 million on slavery research (from its $53 billion USD endowment). These schools should be better.
0 Comments
|
AuthorOlder blog posts were for the UCLA Ext course "Using the Internet for College Counseling" Archives
February 2023
|