No. of Recommendations: 17
The current pitch of the current US executive department is to have universities admit students based purely on merit, rather than on demographics. Presumably, this is to open slots for well-educated red-blooded (but white-skinned) US citizens. Possibly, one of the reasons that foreign students are being discouraged is that they tend to out-perform our home-grown batch.
Two examples of how this can go "horribly" wrong:
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Columbia University shifted to a merit-based admission system, a large number of Jewish students were admitted. This happened because these universities previously relied on admission criteria like private school attendance, where Jewish students were underrepresented. When merit-based admissions became more common, a significant percentage of the student body became Jewish, reaching 40% at Columbia by the early 20th century.
The increase in Jewish students at Columbia and other universities prompted a reaction. An admissions update in 1914 read: “Most of these [Jewish students] are excellent and desirable students, but the danger of their prepondering over the students of the older American stocks is not an imaginary one. This has already happened at NYU and CCNY.”
Columbia introducing practices to control the proportion of Jewish students by the mid-1920's, effectively creating unofficial quotas to limit the number of Jewish students to under 20%.
I guess meritocracy wasn't all it was chalked up to be?
I have, on a few occasions, mentioned the STEM (to the nth degree) high school I attended, which required a significantly hard competitive entrance exam to enter. The school has produced half a dozen Nobel laureates as well as a long string of successful professionals. It was sued on a regular basis when I attended based on the logic that the test was biased to give Jewish applicants an unfair advantage. It is a rather large school, at 6,000 students, and is currently over 80% non-white with 60% of the school's students being Asian. Nearly 100% of the students go on to college (the vast majority to Ivy Legue schools). the majority of the students are immigrants or first-generation Americans and most live below the free school lunch poverty level. They are still using the same exam, but are now being sued that the test favors Asians and that they should open their doors to the demographic distribution of New York City (and the use of this exam for it and its competitor schools has become a factor in this year's gubernatorial election.
For those interested, the school is Brooklyn Technical High School (
https://bthsalumni.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...) which competes against similarly Minority majority Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science - all three of which frequently show up in popular lists of the best high schools in the nation.
Again, if "woke" is outlawed, what would be the consequence of the nation's top universities replacing what's left of their white population with Asians?
A current story: We are very close to an ethnic Indian family who lives in Singapore. At presumably significant expense, they sent their daughter to Brown in Rhode Island. After finishing her undergrad degree a couple of years ago, she went to MIT. Recently, she finished her stint there and a few months ago transferred to Harvard to work in a lab. She (and of course her parents) are beside themselves under the current conditions. Her (possibly smarter) brother just finished his military service and the father confided to me that he was happy he didn't have to worry about both his kids in the US at once. It will be interesting to see where he does his studies - but the US has lost him as a resource; and may be kicking his siter out.
Jeff
