Tags
"Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity", Bigotry, Christy2012, Elitism, Eugenics, Jerome Karabel, Meritocracy, Poverty and Intelligence, Race and Intelligence, Racial Determinism, Racism, Robin J. Hayes, Scientific Racism, Social Darwinism, The Atlantic, The Chosen (2005), Yale
Scientific racism, using “evidence” to compare the Irish to the African, by H. Strickland Constable, Harper’s Weekly, 1899. (JasonAQuest via Wikipedia). In public domain.
I do generally loathe reading the comments sections of most news sites (any sites, really), but the one on Robin J. Hayes’ “Why Ivy League Schools Are So Bad at Economic Diversity” in The Atlantic is a real trip. There are dozens of comments in which people are playing amateur eugenicists, as they’ve connected wealth & poverty to intelligence. For these folks, the poor perpetuate themselves because they are stupid, and when they have kids, they’ll be born stupid as well, and therefore, will remain poor. As if structural inequality and structural racism have nothing to do with creating the gaps in wealth and education for millions of Americans.
I’m sure I haven’t seen more Social Darwinist /scientific racist /pro-eugenics comments anywhere, including on neo-Nazi websites. Apparently, the only thing The Atlantic’s commentators read while in college (as this is allegedly the profile of their readers) was Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994), as their arguments came out of studies that are now well over 100 years old. (I defy anyone to say they’ve read all 838 pages, though!) What these people should’ve been reading is Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen (2005) and Nick Lemann’s The Big Test (1999), both of which indicate the Ivy League’s long history of high racial and socioeconomic bias, not just high selectivity.
The Chosen (2005) front cover, March 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).
So I responded, using the lessons I’ve learned from my life and from writing Boy @ The Window, pointing out along the way that “Yale and the others offer what they offer to us po’ folk because they want to appear like they’re doing good, knowing full well that actually working to increase economic diversity is too much for them to fathom.” It elicited this counter-response from someone calling themselves Christy2012:
Pardon me for being so blunt, but you seem to imply that you were somehow obvious Yale material based on your top 2% status. However, you indicated on your blog that you earned a 2.6 GPA at University of Pittsburgh, a much less competitive institution, in your freshman year. Do you suppose you would have attained a higher GPA at Yale? Many rich people get turned down by Yale with even better credentials and Columbia is a fairly elite school itself. That Columbia offered you at chance and that you didn’t exactly hit it out of the park at UPitt is not exactly evidence that the schools are biased against the poor (maybe even the opposite).
Maybe there was (or is) an issue relating to how they consider deadbeat fathers in financial aid and scholarship consideration. It seems you should probably focus on that and that is probably an issue for more middle class applicants too.
It turns out that Christy2012 made these personal swipes from an extremely selective and incorrect reading of my blog because she believes all poor students and students of color really aren’t smart. I/we apparently benefited instead from “affirmative action and/or the pity of bleeding-heart White liberals,” and “not because of our abilities or because of hard work” (my translation of her other comments, by the way). Of course, Christy2012 never revealed anything personal about herself. It’s likely she never attended an elite college and has never met a poor person — especially one of color — that she didn’t feel superiority over.
From The Matrix: A sea of pods in which humans are fusion batteries (the future of the poor, as viewed by The Atlantic’s amateur eugenicists), March 5, 2014. (http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixNet.gif).
If this set of comments is any indication, it will be hard for Yale or any other school — even if they’re sincere in their efforts at racial and economic diversity — to fulfill them. So many folks even without holding positions of power or serving as gatekeepers decide before looking that poor folks and poor folks who look like me are incapable and unqualified for anything other than a mop, a broom or a jail cell. Is there any wonder that so few of America’s poor and of color have a chance at any higher education of significance, forget about getting into an elite or Ivy League institution?
Notes from a Boy @ The Window 
Hmm, I read those comments and I do not see anything to support your characterization of “Christy2012” position. It seems to me that her point is that your HS transcript and SAT scores would not put you in contention for the elite schools, i.e., you were not “low hanging fruit” under normal admissions standards. You might think that SAT scores and the like are not predictive or that the schools should somehow handicap these scores for poor black people more than they are already doing, but that is something that I and many other people would disagree with. Moreover, she mentioned the fact that you subsequently struggled to keep up at a much less competitive public school suggests that the schools decision was probably reasonable. If true, then I, too, think this is a reasonable point.
Where did she say that all poor or all black people are not cut out for the elite schools? I looked and saw nothing of the sort. Her point seems to be that there really is a shortage of qualified black and/or qualified poor students today that are academically qualified. I do not disagree with this view at least. Whether this is ultimately caused by lack of preparation or actual differences in ability is academic since there does not seem to be much that the schools can do to mitigate these problems in practice, i.e., by the time they apply to school in their senior year of high school it is usually too late.
You’re entitled to your opinion, and you’re also entitled to be wrong, very wrong. Two issues:
1. My use of my personal experience to was illustrate a larger point in Robin Hayes’ article about the efforts of Ivy Leagues and other elite institutions. My record regarding such institutions (PhD, Carnegie Mellon, acceptance, Columbia) should speak for itself (especially since you’re not an expert on qualifications from the 1986-87 school year);
2. Both you and Christy2012 made the mistake of making this issue a personal one, and in the process, engaged in stereotyping. If you’re not willing to read comments critically to figure out why people say what they say, then of course, all opinions are rational and of equal consideration. Gratefully, we don’t live in a world of words that’s as hermetically sealed as you imply here.
You put yourself forward as if it you were obvious “low hanging fruit”, i.e, an equally well qualified poor student, and implied that the only reason they might have rejected you is because they were never sincere about wanting poor students. Christy2012’s point, which I concur with, is that your record when you applied was not comparable to most of the actual admits at the time and that your record at UPitt certainly does not suggest that they made a mistake.
Your failure to provide a real exemplar of said “low hanging fruit” does not per se prove that it did not exist then or does not exist today, but it certainly does not advance your point and it calls into question your judgement on this particular issue. I do not understand how you can argue that we are “stereotyping” to judge your record on its merits. To the contrary holding groups to significantly lower admissions standards, as is clearly the case with affirmative action, is a blatant form of stereotyping: it suggests that we cannot expect poor or black people to perform as equals. This is especially true given the evidence that suggests that poor and black people do NOT to systematically over-perform their SATs and/or high school GPAs.
It seems to me that the fundamental disagreement is over the predictive power of these key admissions criteria and their use in the admissions process. Christy2012 and I both seem to think that they are good and unbiased predictors, whereas you seem to disagree. You are entitled to your own opinion, of course, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that you are wrong.
You’ve engaged in circular reasoning here, typically of most of the students I’ve taught over the years. It goes something like this:
1. College is a meritocracy, one where admittance is based solely on an SAT score and a GPA;
2. Black kids and poor kids don’t have good or great SAT scores or GPAs, thus they don’t go to elite schools;
3. A Black student has a very good SAT score and GPA, gets into an elite school, graduates and goes on to grad school;
4. Naw, not good enough! The score has to be really, really high, and a near 4.0, no, not good enough either.
Sorry to burst your meritocratic bubble, but the Ivy Leagues and a large number of elite colleges no longer use the SATs as an admittance requirement, precisely because it is a poor measure of student performance. More to the point, scholars and writers as varied as Nicholas Lemann, Jerome Karabel and even Diane Ravitch have shown that the meritocracy that we believe higher education (especially for elite institutions) to be is a near complete falsehood. Even former ETS executives such as Anthony Carnevale have long stopped arguing about SATs being an unbiased measure of student performance.
The fact that you keep selectively harping on the University of Pittsburgh and my first semester there says more about your issues with race and poverty than it actually does about me. And really, considering the larger point about the elitist and racially paternalistic lens from which a Yale could attempt to bring in more smart poor/of color students, your comments merely prove that your limited lens around higher education cannot fathom any poor or of color person competing successfully in your real (or imagined) elitist, lily-White world.
This is all I have to say on this issue (as I’ve pretty much said the same thing to Christy2012 weeks ago). Have a great evening!