April 1, 2007

College Fools' Day

My VDARE.com column:

April 01, 2007
Thoughts On College Fools' Day
By Steve Sailer

April Fools' Day is the traditional deadline for American colleges to mail out to applicants their letters of acceptance (thick) or rejection (thin).

The admissions process has been more frenzied than ever this year. Harvard has rejected an unprecedented 91 percent of its record 23,000 applicants. Remarkably, more than 3,000 Harvard wannabes were ranked first in their high school class. The university probably turned down over half of these valedictorians.

Many other elite colleges also saw new highs in applications received. This is due both to the growing convenience of applying to multiple colleges using the Common Application website, and to the ever-growing national (and even global) competition among students to attend a prestigious American college.

College administrations spend vast amounts of money recruiting top high school students. The administrators know that the surest way to acquire smarter, harder-working alumni, who can afford to donate more money to the old alma mater, is to bring in smarter, harder-working freshmen in the first place.

Doing a better job of recruiting is much more likely to have a sizable payoff than trying to do a better of job of, well, educating the kind of students you already get. …

One curious aspect of the college craziness: the seeming self-contempt with which white students at many elite colleges derisively refer to the predominantly white makeup of their schools' student bodies.

Take the Princeton Review's Best 361 Colleges guidebook, which summarizes students' opinions of their schools. An undergrad at well known little Colorado College in Colorado Springs, a school that is only two percent black, declares: "The typical Colorado College student is white and from an upper-middle-class home in a metropolitan suburb, but wishes this weren't true …" It's common for students quoted in Best 361 Colleges to lament the lack of ethnic diversity on their campuses, and to call for their administrations to do more to bring in minorities.

Is this the much discussed (but surprisingly little observed) phenomenon of White Guilt? Or is something else going on?
[More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's necessarily white guilt informing these complaints but boredom. This is why so many kids want to go to NYU -- they're tired of their bland, homogeneous surroundings, and when they finally escape their parents' home, they want something interesting and exciting. And what could be more exciting than living in NYC? They've got "diversity" out the wazoo (and if they really want to deal with "diversity", they should live out here in Queens, and not in dorms in the Village. I'm sure the NYU kids are unpleasantly surprised as to how "undiverse" the student body in their dorms are. Well, at least they can get any type of cuisine desired delivered in 15 minutes.)

I certainly understand this, as I came to NYC because there was so much going on, and it was so stimulating. The wide variety of cultures and entertainment was a part of it. I had a chance to go to Boston or Ithaca instead, but they were nothing compared to walking around a 7-block area of Manhattan (which is all it took for me to get hooked -- that, and a quick trip to the Met (museum, not opera).)

Anonymous said...

Ditto here. Young people are eager for new experiences, stimulation, challenges. Which is good: it builds a solid foundation for wisdom later in life.

Steve Sailer said...

Has anybody ever done a profile by age of desire for racial/ethnic diversity.

It's low in young children -- they are just learning about diversity in sex, age, and personality type.

It seems rise quickly after puberty, then decline both as people have children and as they get older and lose interest in novelty.

Anonymous said...

NYC isn't just ethnic diversity, it's restaurants, movies, nightclubs...shoot, there's plenty of stuff you really cannot get anywhere else.

Anonymous said...

good article steve.

i don't understand why mexicans get affirmative action. it makes no sense. i suppose as america becomes brazil, we can make a game out of guessing which immigrant group will qualify for affirmative action next.

i guess i disagree that white teenagers complain about going to a college that is "too white" because they are bored. this generation is the first to grow up with a media that constantly tells them "white bad, anything else good". lots of them buy into that completely.

it was only 10 years ago that bill clinton addressed an auditorium full of white college students and happily told them that they would be the last generation in america with a european majority. they cheered, obviously relieved that the living nightmare would soon come to an end. now that many states have a mexican majority in the public school system, these same people are probably thinking twice about the joys of having their kids outnumbered, harrassed, and legally discriminated against by the state and federal government for college admissions and jobs.

Anonymous said...

good article steve.

i don't understand why mexicans get affirmative action. it makes no sense. i suppose as america becomes brazil, we can make a game out of guessing which immigrant group will qualify for affirmative action next.

i guess i disagree that white teenagers complain about going to a college that is "too white" because they are bored. this generation is the first to grow up with a media that constantly tells them "white bad, anything else good". lots of them buy into that completely.

it was only 10 years ago that bill clinton addressed an auditorium full of white college students and happily told them that they would be the last generation in america with a european majority. they cheered, obviously relieved that the living nightmare would soon come to an end. now that many states have a mexican majority in the public school system, these same people are probably thinking twice about the joys of having their kids outnumbered, harrassed, and legally discriminated against by the state and federal government for college admissions and jobs.

Anonymous said...

sorry about the double post. there needs to be a way to edit.

in summary, i don't believe any american college student 30 years ago was saying "This place is pretty cool, but it would really be a lot better around here if there were way less white people."

the whole "this place is boring because it has too many white people" thing is totally a product of the recent "diversity is strength" propaganda. an ingrained, knee-jerk reaction that an entire generation of euro americans has learned. up is down, left is right, green is red, diversity is strength. any town, any business, any enterprise that has too many white people is automatically wrong and needs to be changed, corrected, and diversified.

Ron Guhname said...

I guess I do feel white guilt--guilty that I just helped an unqualified black student into an elite PhD program. (I'm a prof.). She has taken three classes from me, her highest grade has been a B, and I would estimate that her IQ is around 110. What am I going to do--tell a black girl she's too dumb for this program? She should lower her sights a little? (By the way, I think she gets an additional advantage because she is a good-looking black woman). She'll probably drop out in a couple years and give up on her career dreams. Or maybe she'll make some smart, generous friends who will write the technical parts of her dissertation for her.

Along the same lines, I can think of two black women who have interviewed for jobs in my department. Their demographic put them way out of our league, but the funny thing was that they seemed to have the attitude that, "I'm a black women so I'm really worried that I won't get this job." They seemed to actually buy the hype that the system is against them. I'm sure they were shocked to find that programs much better than ours wanted them and wanted to pay them big bucks. I'm also sure they were aggressive negotiators, saying to themselves, "I've gotta be strong so these white folks don't screw me." Meantime, they come in probably making $10k more a year than white women.

Jim O said...

These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quint-essentials of good citizenship. If you can add that he is as honest as the average of his neighbors - But I think that question is affirmatively answered by the fact that he is a successful business man.

The basis of successful business is honesty; a business cannot thrive where the parties to it cannot trust each other. In the matter of numbers of the Jew counts for little in the overwhelming population of New York; but that his honesty counts for much is guaranteed by the fact that the immense wholesale business houses of Broadway, from the Battery to Union Square, is substantially in his hands. I suppose that the most picturesque example in history of a trader's trust in his fellow-trader was one where it was not Christian trusting Christian, but Christian trusting Jew.

...

The Jew has his other side. He has some discreditable ways, though he has not a monopoly of them, because he cannot get entirely rid of vexatious Christian competition. We have seen that he seldom transgresses the laws against crimes of violence. Indeed, his dealings with courts are almost restricted to matters connected with commerce. He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it.

He is a frequent and faithful and capable officer in the civil service, but he is charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier - like the Christian Quaker. Now if you offset these discreditable features by the creditable ones summarized in a preceding paragraph beginning with the words, "These facts are all on the credit side," and strike a balance, what must the verdict be? This, I think: that, the merits and demerits being fairly weighed and measured on both sides, the Christian can claim no superiority over the Jew in the matter of good citizenship. Yet in all countries, from the dawn of history, the Jew has been persistently and implacably hated, and with frequency persecuted.

Mark Twain

Anonymous said...

As individuals I have known many Jews i have liked and thought highly of. But as a group able to achieve substantial power-which they have,through control of the media, as Dr. Pierce correctly pointed out-Jews and Whites are not compatible in a society as constituted as is ours at present. Their influence is pervasive and toxic.

Whites need a society where they and they alone wield political and economic power. That's probably unfair to many non-Whites as individuals. I don't have a good answer for that.

Ironically it was a Jewish screenwriter who wrote, for a quintessentially Jewish actor (and terrible folk singer), the line I think best fits the situation, despite its abhorrence to libertarians: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few-or the one".