What college application essays are really for
14th June 2011
Steve Sailer pulls no punches.
One reason colleges can pull the wool over the public’s eyes on this is that very few people think in systems terms about how this works. It’s hard to think about the effect of more than one college doing this at a time. If Rice was the only college in the country to have a quota, then, sure, it could fill its quota with black applicants who are “fairly indistinguishable” from the white norm.
But, funny thing is, Harvard also has a quota, so all those black applicants are going to Harvard instead of Rice. And the black students who are just below the Harvard-bound are going to Stanford and MIT on quotas instead of Rice. So, Rice takes the blacks who would be going to Texas A&M if nobody had a quota, and Texas A&M takes …
The whole system winds up pretty accurately reproducing at each college the one standard deviation gap seen in the whole population. But that’s really hard for most people to grasp.
The myth that colleges have a merit-based admissions process is one of the most persistent in American political folklore. When you get down to it, saying that colleges ought to admit the best-qualified student that are going to do well is like saying that a restaurant should only serve gourmands who will most appreciate the meal or that a movie theater should only admit trained theater students who will most understand the cinematic nuances of the films being shown.
Of course, in a world where there are more applicants than places, a college needs to have selection criteria. How about having an auction? Think of how much Harvard would pull in a year if students had to bid for a place; it’s endowment would soon be the size of the national debt, and it could still flunk the kid out freshman year if he weren’t qualified for work at that level. Differentiating service by price is what a free market is all about; that’s the American way. (Want to tax the rich? Make them bid against each other to get their kids into Yale or Stanford or MIT.)
Of course, many of these application essays are written by professional essay writers or the like, so I guess it all evens out in the long run.
That’s why British Universities, and British public schools, at least before the rot set it, used to have entrance examinations that one would sit for, like the SATs. if colleges truly cared about the quality of their students, they would require that essays be done in a limited amount of time under the eyes of proctors. Otherwise it’s just a gauge of how well the kid (and his family) can game the system.
Anyway, the message from Rice U. is: If you’ve got it, play the Race Card. Over and over again. Be as authentically nonwhite as you can. (We can tell!) You’ve got to feel deep down that you deserve this quota spot.
One commenter once noted that Dreams from My Father sounds like the President’s monstrously enlarged Diversity Essay.
I can’t improve on that for snark so I won’t even try. Steve’s a professional, after all.
For getting into college, black is best, and the one drop rule applies to who gets called black, so anybody who credibly claims to be part black will be treated as black for quota / bragging rights purposes.
And that’s the bottom line.