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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I hear the new meta is moving your kid to a bottom-tier high school for senior year, since a lot of colleges have committed to taking the top x% of grads from such schools.

Not sure if going to Angela Davis high school is more torturous than being forced to play the vuzuzela for ten years because your preschool's college advisor said it makes you a shoo-in for Harvard orchestra recruiting.

I hear the new meta is moving your kid to a bottom-tier high school for senior year, since a lot of colleges have committed to taking the top x% of grads from such schools.

This is apparently common in the UK where Oxford and Cambridge discriminate against applicants from private schools in favor of those educated at public (‘state’) schools. Wealthy parents send their kid for one year of education at a ‘sixth form college’ (a kind of high school for only the last two years of schooling) before their exams, then they apply as a ‘state school’ student (since you don’t list your whole educational history on your application) despite 12 years of private school.

This is a bit of a myth actually. There are two main areas where "positive discrimination" comes into the admissions process. Probably most importantly, the extensive outreach and support provided to target backgrounds and demographics, schemes such as UNIQ and reserved open days/state specific mentoring mean that smart state school kids can often get their hand held throughout the admissions process. This might also include admissions test help and mock interviews, provided by current students or that way inclined profs. In practice this tends to benefit the middle class state school kids more than those right at the bottom of the pack, ignoring base rate intelligence. And you probably wouldn't be able to take advantage of this unless you did at least 2 years of state sixth form, and then they'd still likely check your prior history. On top of the long standing class based programs there are increasingly racially oriented schemes.

The other obvious way the scales have been tipped is by dropping standards. Classics admissions, for example, no longer require prior knowledge of Latin/Greek, although I think there are only a few of these places available where they fast track you up after you've arrived. If you lower the bar, then more people get over the bar, and so you can start to do a bit of selection for people who may be "diamonds in the rough".

In terms of direct discrimination in applications, officially this very much doesn't happen, or at least that was the case 10 years ago. Occasionally there was some extra leeway afforded over grades (getting AAB for example), but having seen behind the curtain a bit the only point where the thumb can actually get on the scale is the interviews/GCSEs, as future grades and entrance exam are scored identically for all.

As interviews are semi-subjective (although scored by multiple tutors), ideologically inclined tutors could happily penalise a posh Eton boy and help out the nervous inner city kid, but this would vary substantially. But the interviews make up at most 25% of the scoring process (tends to be a semi filtering and then 50% admissions test, 50% other stuff depending on subject). So in theory sending your kid to the good state sixth form probably shouldn't have that much of an impact unless you want to try and take advantage of the tutoring/open day opportunities. But if you go to a good enough private school then this shouldn't outweigh the benefits.

Having said all that, there are some particular sixth form colleges which seem to do exceptionally well (Hills Road, Peter Symonds) either through an extremely middle class catchment area, or extremely selective admissions (Harris Academy). The top 10 schools for admissions in 2024 are split 5/5 for state/private, and of those 10 there's a 37% admission for the private sector and 29% for the state. So it doesn't look like things have substantially changed in the last 5 years.

I am still waiting for this to get common enough that we get a TV shows about the reverse Fresh Prince, where a promising young rich kid is sent to live with his ghetto (or hillbilly) auntie for a chance to get into a better college.

I imagine the plot would be sort of a twist on the oft-forgotten Jamie Kennedy vehicle Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Taiwanese immigrant tiger mom sends her striver son to live in Compton in order to up his street cred. Unfortunately, her perceptions of America being thirty years out of date and skewed by pop culture, she doesn’t realize that Compton was gentrified by Latino immigrants more than a decade ago and isn’t even a particularly unsafe area anymore. However, her son desperately needs to maintain appearances so his mother doesn’t realize her money (she’s paying his rent, which is no longer dirt-cheap in Compton) is being wasted. So, he hires some of his black actor friends to pretend to be hardcore gangsters every time his mom comes to check on him.

However, when a real gang confrontation does break out (instigated by a very real and very scary Latino gang) he and his fake gangster buddies have to put their money where their mouths are, with the protagonist displaying surprising aplomb and bravado. This is witnessed by a Harvard admissions officer, who offers full-ride scholarships to him and to his “gang”. (None of whom, mirroring real life, are actual poor urban blacks, but who will happily count toward Harvard’s black quota)

Great premise. Not too different from current asian meta of 'personality hacking' instead of achievement grinding. Asians are unpopular so use a Nigerian immigrant pretending to be ghetto in order to get the best success at hollywood scripts.

this is very good.

This sounds hilarious, but also raises a genuine question. Why aren't the tiger moms already doing this? It seems like a lot of striving asian families are still doing things the old-fashioned way, sending their kids off for piano and violin classes. They seem smart enough to realize that the system is rigged against them (hence the lawsuit), but not smart enough to work the system and send their kids to the ghetto.

My guess would be that they fear the damage done by a ghetto school would outweigh the benefits.

well, you could find some other way to work the system. Start a "service club" where you do volunteer work in the ghetto, rather than practicing violin. Something like that. The volunteer work could be anything, it doesn't even have to be real.

Asian Americans (Indian and sinics) end up crowding the meta. Relatively safe New Jersey shitholes got rapidly gentrified and flooded with Asians to pull test scores up too fast. Its like a tragedy of the commons, too many smart hardworking kids in a shithole make them stand out less.

I'm reminded of that joke on reddit of the guy who lets off a few shots every now and then to keep property prices low. The actual meta for Asians should be to loudly complain that their kids sre getting bullied and becoming stupider at some low achieving district in order to dissuade overachievers from crowding out their kid. If the current meta favors 'best in class', then cripple the class at the outset.

But a lot of them are still doing the same old grindfest. "good grades, good test scores especially in math. No extracurriculars except violin, piano, and helping in the family business." It really causes a lot of them to punch below their weight.

I'd watch that show.

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