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Disbarring perfectly competent Asian people because they "harsh the vibe" is one thing, and then going onto admitting a qualitatively lower crop of blacks (at least the ADOS, I'm sure the Nigerians are doing better) who act as the DIE equivalent of fake succulents on a shelf is another.
I despise the former, but the two combined makes me see red. I never had any aspirations of going to Harvard, even if I guarantee that I could write a sob story of an essay and make even a few of the more cynical marms grading them mist up, something akin to this one, albeit I had no such intentions at the time of writing it.
I come from a country that still takes meritocracy seriously, tarnished as it is by our degenerate brand of AA. My father went from being a penniless refugee fleeing a genocide to a famous doctor held in high regard amongst his peers, and as such I have no choice but to fight for the system that helped put me where I am today, even if I represent a regression to the mean in some important ways (maths talent for one, his teachers used to call him up to solve problems for the older students when they couldn't, he'd have taken up maths if he didn't have a starving family to feed).
We've fucked a lot of it through AA and explicit quotas, quotas that are long past their legal expiry dates or relevance. Even then, our local wokescolds still pay nominal homage to egalitarian and meritocratic ideals, they simply claim against all evidence that the people they forcibly try to uplift are just as good and talented as the broader sample they replace. Our system is legible, and its sins don't hide in the dark.
I'd like to see it burned down on principle, but with $50 billion in their endowments, they couldn't care less what I think.
Minor nitpick, but Harvard admits very few ADOS, especially when you exclude white people with an octaroon great grandmother.
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It has been speculated that there are actually very few (possibly zero) students at Harvard who have four grandparents who are descended from slaves.
How many Americans fit that category at all?
Which category? Most blacks in America are descendants of slaves. There has been relatively little migration from Africa since then
Hmm, I guess so. I haven’t seen direct stats, but Wikipedia says only 3% have “recently immigrated” ancestors.
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you're indian, you've never really interacted with black people. they're undeniably much cooler than asians - see their overrepresentation in sports and entertainment, where they absolutely mog asians without any sort of AA boost.
in fact, given that the real filter is vibe cultivation (something that only shaperotatorcels deny the importance of), the ~25% of boring asians with interchangeable personalities that harvard admits are actually beneficiaries of a different sort of AA
Call me crazy if you like, but I for one see absolutely no reason for sports and entertainment to count for anything in the context of a college, both for the purposes of getting in or staying in it.
In the vast majority of the world, India included, the very idea that a college should have a semi-professional sports team is met with sheer disbelief. You're letting athletes in? Why on Earth would you do that? What does the ability to dunk a ball through a hoop have to do with academics?
It's one of the most utterly bizarre things in the US, for all that it's so normalized that you guys take it for granted.
Call me old-fashioned or the very opposite, but I think an ideal college is filled with smart and hard working students studying diligently, with enough free time to have fun and fuck around with their interests. It shouldn't have any reason to be a sports club.
I'm aware that it's a money making opportunity, but a college shouldn't be involved with every single possible thing that is a net income.
I have interacted with black people in the UK, and I like them more than their American counterparts. Most of them were hard working and quiet people who came to a new country solely to improve their lot in life, and they share my jaundiced assessment of many of their second or third gen British counterparts, or god forbid, African Americans who aren't straight off the boat.
Edit: The closest equivalent in India is national or state scholarships for extremely talented athletes. It's meant for of a way to soften the opportunity costs of going all-in on athletics, and they're in it to study as well, since they need to have a career after their body fails them. Even then, they're few and far between. The college gets nothing but some of the scholarship money, and doesn't get to pimp them out.
Sports as team building exercise are invaluable. I suspect this kernel of usefulness, having school sports teams that are taken serious by the students, grew naturally into recruiting for them in particular for prestige with students that no longer directly participate in them. I 100% endorse colleges have intermural leagues for their students and taking them somewhat seriously. I also support being a good team member/leader as a qualification worth mentioning and rewarding on college applications. But these things have definitely mutated paste their use.
I have no issue with amateur sports, or students who have been admitted for other reasons then being encouraged to engage in whatever sports they enjoy or are talented at.
Since your proposition is strictly superior to current norms, while I don't entirely agree with it, I won't grumble too hard.
They were always supposed to be amateur, which was the basis for them not being paid. But with serious competition comes pride, with pride comes spectators and people putting your school higher on their list because of the team and with spectators(money) and an edge on recruitment you quickly get what we see today. That and they're just fun, it would be better if they were more amateur but people enjoy the rivalries and school spirit.
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u missed the point. everyone admitted to hypsm meets some min bar of intel. what im saying is that they don’t have what the zoomers call ‘the rizz’
also, it’s very typical of ghee drinkers to downplay the importance of physical fitness. but it’s important u know
I can't tell if you're being intentionally redditor or just lazy, but along with the crack about "ghee drinkers," this just looks like low effort antagonism. Don't post like this.
I could hardly understand what he meant in the first place, leaving aside the mild insult about ghee. After all, Indians do tend to value physical fitness less than Westerners, even if I wouldn't phrase it that way.
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To quote Heinlein:
"The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance."
Trust me. There are similar reactions I've seen with students in the US. Not in athletics. But I've seen it quite a bit with computer science undergraduates, needing to take 'Anthropology' over something like studying for the A+ certification.
I think it probably owes more to incidental, historical path dependencies rather than a dedicated decision someone made, to see it intentionally end up that way. I could be wrong though.
Your sports club shouldn't come at the 'expense' of your college education. But it's ironic to see people say on the one hand that school didn't leave them prepared for what laid ahead after graduating, while treating the extracurriculars as unimportant. The latter is what I think is intended to supplement that more practical function that's needed. I personally hate extracurriculars as a program 'requirement'. That's putting the cart before the horse. But I can see a rationale for why it's there.
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Funny that the younger generations are increasingly watching Asian cartoons then. I hear anime is cool now? Was it K-pop that white girls in the states moon over?
And sports? Really?
notice that the asians that are cool are not the rubik’s cubecels
jimmy chin isnt applying to harvard. the techlead phenotype is
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But aren't Asians also good at vibe-cultivation? Some of those very same successful black entertainers are also really into anime and video games, even if, as RandomRanger notes below, they may tend to be less-represented in nerdier media where there are less barriers to entry. Now, granted, Asian-Americans haven't been quite as successful at injecting contributions to the global-culture-public-consciousness as Asian-Asians, but still.
Asians can make good content, but their lack of personal charisma puts them at a distinct disadvantage in an American setting. This seems to be what Harvard's "personality scores" were trying to get at and what people mean when they complain about Asians being a bunch of boring interchangeable nerds. In my experience this is mostly a product of cultural differences and will start to disappear as the proportion of recent immigrants in the Asian-American population goes down.
I think they've just made different contributions. Bruce Lee was the introduction of martial arts into mainstream western society. Even Dana White and other big figures in the UFC have paid homage to him as the 'father' of their sport. But today his legacy remains niche and his long-term contributions have bled away into obscurity to the people who don't follow that stuff closely. I think their contributions are slowly making inroads over time, with anime for instance, as indicated above. It hasn't received broad, widespread acceptance yet, but undoubtedly has more popular and common cultural market share than it did say 20 years ago.
I think anime has long since been made mainstream. Most people have at least heard of anime, and could probably name at least a couple of franchises in the genre. Their merch is pretty mainstream and available everywhere down to Target and Walmart. Korean and Chinese dramas are much more niche, as most people haven’t ever heard of them and couldn’t name a single show.
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Entertainment? So they're integral to directing and writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels, making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers are black?
The places blacks do well are in highly centralized domains like music, acting or sports, not making any kind of sophisticated content.
wordcelry. who’s actually on screen?
vidya
i get that this board is a bit of a ‘tism bubble. try and think of what mainstream americans think of as culture
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/531479-video-game-industry-bigger-than-sports-movies-combined-report/
https://www.myboosting.gg/blog/esports-news/the-video-games-industry-is-bigger-than-hollywood
I'd rather be autistic than obviously wrong. Get out of your bubble, look at the real world.
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...But vidya is mainstream. Mario is/was more recognizable than Mickey Mouse.
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This isn’t just Harvard. It is every American university except the ones that admit anyone with a pulse (and wouldn’t turn down the living dead if someone paid their tuition), and perhaps a smattering of religious schools. Even Caltech debased their admissions not too long ago.
This is actually most schools. Most colleges in the U.S. have an acceptance rate of over 2/3rds.
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I know, but I'd rather lightning strike the tallest peak first.
Burn them all down and replace them with IQ and aptitude tests if I'm allowed to day dream.
You know why that'll never happen though. Society can't want equality and a meritocracy at the same time, despite espousing the virtue of both. Americans can't forever pretend that different subcultures in the US don't value things like education differently than others do. Because most people inherently know that merit has a tendency to cluster in homogenous pockets if given the green light and left unchecked. You won't get the goals of modern 21st century liberal and progressive sensibilities, so trying to achieve those objectives will always be a paradox at odds with itself.
I thought the OP was being too elitist. I can't speak to the institutional structure of Harvard, but I've had more than my fair share of interactions with Stanford University students. And at least from my interactions, there's a lot of high profile students, or rather, students with high profile backgrounds, that were not a result of their hard work and intellectual achievements. Meeting the daughter of a well to do small business owner certainly doesn't hurt, as far as getting your foot in the door goes; as no interaction I ever had with her left me with the impression she was exceptional by academic standards. She was certainly exceptional as far as the open doors and opportunities went.
Major universities have always sold themselves on their prestige, and to a large measure it was probably earned, historically speaking. But a hard and pure academic evaluation I think leaves something to be desired, when a person wants to come along and tell me you'll get a better 'education' at Harvard than you will at this second or third tier university. The only university that immediately comes to mind when a person wants to sell me on academic ability and intellectual talent is MIT. Background and extracurricular activities should not play as substantial a role in the selection process to strict educational requirements.
You won't find me disagreeing with anything you said, quite the opposite in fact! I'm well aware why the things I suggested are well outside the Overton Window (I did say I was day dreaming).
At any rate, while I haven't had the 'good fortune' to meet many Ivy league students, I've already had my fair share of awe inspiring encounters with people who are both tack-sharp and hard-working in other contexts, and I don't think Harvard has a monopoly on them. I'm no slouch in the brains department myself, but I'm intimately familiar with knowing that some people are still way out of my league. I just think normal means like "fuck hard exams that exert massive selection pressure" are more than sufficient to tease them out, no essays or similar nonsense needed.
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Isn’t this the whole debate re equality of outcome v opportunity?
It got pitched in those terms back in the 80’s and 90’s in policy circles and shows like Free to Choose. It’s difficult to think the spectrum of that dialogue hasn’t shifted to a much more extreme form these days.
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