January 13, 2013

Who are the "smart, low-income kids" who aren't going to good colleges?

From NPR:
Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids 
After Harvard offered what was, in essence, a free college education to students whose families earned under $40,000 a year, Hoxby says, "the number of students whose families had income below that threshold changed by only about 15 students, and the class at Harvard is about 1,650 freshmen." 
Hoxby says some college administers had confided to her that they had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the pool of low-income students with top academic credentials was just limited, and there wasn't much they could do to change that. 
But in an analysis published with Christopher Avery in December, Hoxby has shown that this conclusion isn't true. There is in fact a vast pool of highly talented, low-income students; they just aren't ending up in top schools. 
Hoxby says in an interview that she asked herself why talented students might escape the attention of college administrators, when the administrators were looking so hard for these students. 
"The students whom they see are the students who apply," she says, of admissions officers. "And if a student doesn't apply to any selective college or university, it's impossible for admissions staff to see that they are out there." 
Hoxby found that the majority of academically gifted low-income students come from a handful of places in the country: About 70 percent of them come from 15 large metropolitan areas. These areas often have highly regarded public high schools, such as Stuyvesant in New York City or Thomas Jefferson in the Washington, D.C., area. 
Low-income high-achieving students at these schools have close to 100 percent odds of attending an Ivy League school or other highly selective college, Hoxby says. 
The reasons are straightforward: These schools boast top teachers and immense resources. They have terrific guidance counselors. Highly selective colleges send scouts to these schools to recruit top talent. And perhaps most important, students in these schools are part of a peer group where many others are also headed to highly selective colleges. 
Hoxby and Avery found that top students who do not live in these major metropolitan areas were significantly less likely to end up at a highly selective school. These students were far less likely to find themselves in a pipeline that ended at an Ivy League school. 
"Imagine a student who is the only student who is a likely candidate for a place like Harvard or Stanford or University of Chicago — and he's not just the only student in his or her high school, but he's the only student that that high school has graduated like that in, say, three or four years," Hoxby says. 
Without mentors and academically talented peers, Hoxby says, many of these students fail to apply to schools that can offer them a premium education free of charge. And because the students are widely dispersed across the 42,000 high schools in the country, college recruiters have a hard time finding them.

Here's the abstract of Hoxby's latest paper. Here's an earlier one. A few points:
- We can argue over what the long term effects of going to, say, Stanford over Cal State Fresno are, but if you spend, say, 5% of your life in college, wouldn't you rather spend that 5% at Stanford than at Cal State Fresno, especially if Stanford is picking up the tab?

- I believe Hoxby is defining her pool of smart kids as 1300 or higher out of 1600 on the SAT (post-1995 scoring), which is very good but to get into Stanford or Harvard, a 1300 needs some sort of hook ("I started a petition drive to have my high school's LGBTQA alliance changes its name to LGBTQIA to stop discriminating against the Intersexed" or something like that which will catch the eye of an admissions officer -- "This boy/girl reminds me of when I was a boy/girl! Admitted!")

- Hoxby doesn't talk about race much, so I'm guessing that most of this reserve of ignored smart kids are white. My guess would be that there are a fair number of smart white kids out there whose family situations aren't finely tuned for generating the perfect college application. Dad's gone, mom's been feeling blue, that kind of thing. Or everybody in this hick town with anything on the ball just goes to Southeastern State.

- The other source of low income smart kids are probably ones who aren't really from a lower class, they just don't report a lot of income on their tax returns. Maybe they are from extended families with family businesses where the exact identity of who earns what can be manipulated as needed when applying to college.

A commenter adds:
The study basically shows that the colleges do their "lower-income" recruiting at high schools in big metro areas, for reasons of efficiency (hence the "lower-income" students the schools come in contact with are mostly minority). 
The "lower-income" students they miss are from smaller towns in rural states (it's not efficient for college recruiters to travel to each of these), hence presumably the "missed" students are mostly white. 
Referring to Unz's recent analysis, we might wonder how much the colleges really want to up the number of red-state whites, even if it would get them more economic diversity.

This is a little bit like how Goldman Sachs recruits only at a tiny number of Northeastern colleges because, you know, if it also recruited at Purdue and Texas A&M it would go broke from the rent-a-car fees alone. Same with Yale. Yale only has $15 billion or whatever in the bank, so it can hardly afford to send recruiters out to nowheresvilles. Motel bills add up!

126 comments:

dearieme said...

"Dad's gone, mom's been feeling blue, that kind of thing." I once admitted a youngster to an ancient British university based partly on a headmaster's report which invited me to discount her exam results because she had been busy running the home, her mother having contracted a terminal cancer and her father having buggered off. Of course I wasn't an Admissions Professional, just one of the academics who would teach her when she joined us.

"The other source of low income smart kids are probably ones who aren't really from a lower class, they just don't report a lot of income on their tax returns." The Conservative government of the Thatcher/Major years had a system of subsidising bright children from poor homes to attend top private schools. Blair's Labour government of scrapped the system because it attracted the wrong sort of poor - the children of parsons, for example. Ain't class war delightful?

Anonymous said...

The study basically shows that the colleges do their "lower-income" recruiting at high schools in big metro areas, for reasons of efficiency (hence the "lower-income" students the schools come in contact with are mostly minority).

The "lower-income" students they miss are from smaller towns in rural states (it's not efficient for college recruiters to travel to each of these), hence presumably the "missed" students are mostly white.

Referring to Unz's recent analysis, we might wonder how much the colleges really want to up the number of red-state whites, even if it would get them more economic diversity.

Anonymous said...

The people who are really good at identifying and recruiting really sharp kids with shitty home lives and indifferent grades are...the Navy. Their nuclear propulsion program is largely staffed by 1400 plus SAT/2.1 GPA types.

Steve Sailer said...

"... the Navy"

Yup, that's who I hired in 1986 to fix these new-fangled PCs -- a guy with no college degree who had spend 6 years as nuclear reactor technician in subs. He was an unbelievably good problem solver. Within 12 months, the CEO would call him in to fix his PC, then ask him his views on corporate strategy. It caused me all sorts of office politics problems with people in-between me and the CEO because my repairman was suddenly a major player in the corporation.

Whiskey said...

Let me add that Harvard and Yale's and the other high-ranked schools actions are entirely rational once you get over the fantasy ideology of Murray's smart fraction nonsense.

If Harvard's aim is to maximize its future alumni network influence, donations, and social power with each and every admittance and PARTICULARLY with financial aid; then it should look to pick not the SMARTEST but the most POTENTIALLY SOCIALLY POWERFUL.

Thus, a Barack Obama, son of the #2 man in Luo politics, or the son of Bo Xilai, perhaps at the time a potential Politburo member at least, or Michelle Robinson, part of the Chicago Black elite, or other connected persons (for financial aid) who have power in their background but not currently, a lot of money.

Harvard and Yale and Stanford are not any different from the ENArchs of France, or the Red Princelings at Tsinghua or Beijing University, or other aristocratic power network organizations. The purpose of Harvard is not learning or education, but connecting current and potential future elites of the next generation for a profitable middleman's cut.

Once you understand that, their behavior and motivations are ridiculously simple and predictable.

Anonymous said...

Intelligence is discriminatory.
We must end Intellectual Supremacism.
Most people are dumb, so places like Harvard must admit people for being dumb. That is the only way we can have equality.

Anonymous said...

"the Navy. Their nuclear propulsion program is largely staffed by 1400 plus SAT/2.1 GPA types."


Not just white, but white male. Those are guy numbers. If it weren't for test grades and finals, they would have flunked out.

Girls are more likely to have a 1000 SAT/3.5 GPA. Despite doing all the homework, they don't actually get it.

Anonymous said...

LGBTQIA

What about
'split-personality sexuals'?

I have a friend who goes from male to female to gay to lesbian to transexual to asexual all the time. One minute, he/she/it agrees with that 'gay marriage' is wrong but next minute calls me a 'homophobe'.

And what about fantasexuals like 'gay girl in dumbasscus'?

Anonymous said...


This is a little bit like how Goldman Sachs recruits only at a tiny number of Northeastern colleges because, you know, if it also recruited at Purdue and Texas A&M it would go broke from the rent-a-car fees alone. Same with Yale. Yale only has $15 billion or whatever in the bank, so it can hardly afford to send recruiters out to nowheresvilles. Motel bills add up!


Obviously they wouldn't have to actually go there. They could just contact the districts with their offer and ask that they pass it along to the counselors. Rural school counselors and principals aren't stupid. If the superintendent tells them to keep an eye out for a these kids, they are going to recognize these colleges and try to get their kids in.

Anonymous said...

How about people addicted to masturbation?

Autosexuals.

How about people addicted to food sex?

Gourmosexuals.

How about people addicted to spanking sex?

Spankosexuals.

How about people addicted to group sex?

Communosexuals.

How about people addicted to swapping spouses?

Swaposexuals.

stari_momak said...

Remember that Espenshade's study showed that low income white kids are one seventh less likely to be admitted to an elite university than are similarly situationed Asian kids (and it goes downhill from there).

But I think his study was of kids who had actually applied.

That said, most of these kids would be socialized into the Establishment Elite consensus at their undergrad university. If there were some way to break the power of the elite, what, 3-4, that would be preferable to sending more 'red state' bright kids into the belly of the best. Think of it if, say, the Labor secretary had, first, done some actual labor and had attended, say, UC Davis and then Pepperdine.

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting to learn the percentage of low-income smart kids who are legitimate products of their ostensible ancestries, versus the percentage who are simply cuckoo's eggs.

For example, Bill Clinton is fairly bright, and his Mom must have been pretty smart if she became a Nurse Anesthetist circa the 1960s, but it would make a lot more sense if his father hadn't been that Blythe loser who was posted with the US Army in Italy about 9 months before his birth, and if his father had instead been one of the local MDs about town.

EDIT: Although it is absolutely fascinating to watch personality traits [like smarts, or creativity, or musical gifts] as they seem to disappear for a generation or two, but then suddenly re-emerge, in a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, within [someone's] living memory of the last person in the family to have had those traits.

TH said...

Race is discussed in the paper. The racial breakdown of low-income high achievers (SAT 1300+ or ACT 29+) looks like this:

White 69.4%
Asian 15.2%
Hispanic 7.6%
Black 5.7%
Native American 0.7%
Other 1.4%

The races of high achievers from all income levels:

White 75.8%
Asian 15.0%
Hispanic 4.7%
Black 1.5%
Native American 0.4%
Other 2.6%

I think they chose relatively "low" cut-off points for SAT/ACT scores because otherwise everybody would be white or Asian.

Their data are from the high school graduating class of 2008, so for comparison purposes, here's the racial breakdown of everybody enrolled in grade 12 in 2011:

White 58.3%
Hispanic 20.4%
Black 17.3%
Asian 3.9%
(others excluded)

(source)

Anonymous said...

If Harvard's aim is to maximize its future alumni network influence, donations, and social power with each and every admittance and PARTICULARLY with financial aid; then it should look to pick not the SMARTEST but the most POTENTIALLY SOCIALLY POWERFUL.

Isn't that what Harvard is doing right now?

Anonymous said...

"The people who are really good at identifying and recruiting really sharp kids with shitty home lives and indifferent grades are...the Navy"

I have also heard this since sometime in the 60s and experienced it as well. The Navy seems good at identifying technically talented young men who seem in need of a little more adventure then high school admits, so going by grades alone you might not see the real picture.

How do they do this? My suspicion has been that Navy recruiters have been earnestly and diligently going to every little rural high school, in addition to all the rest, for about a hundred years and recruiting for talent in person. I recall in my very small, very poor very out-of-the-way rural high school the military recruiters were the only representatives of any "outside institution" who actually showed up and actively recruited students when we were seniors. Of all the services, the Navy emphasized technical training the most. All of them also had the message "how'd you like a way out of here?"

Any active Navy recruiters out there who can fill us in?

Anonymous said...

1400 plus SAT/2.1 GPA types...
Those are guy numbers. If it weren't for test grades and finals, they would have flunked out. Girls are more likely to have a 1000 SAT/3.5 GPA. Despite doing all the homework, they don't actually get it.

Girls with a 3.5 GPA probably used their world-class "social skills" to "get it". I'd like to see them try to use such skills to to stop radiation leaking from a nuclear reactor, preferably when no one else is around.

Or maybe not ... women and feminized men such as educrats are nearly always nucleophobes.

Anonymous said...

Steve, most of the low income high IQ students are rural whites, and there is no effective method of reaching out to them.

Of course, to be fair, most of the infrastructure in the african american community is like Jack and Jill and oriented towards higher income african americans. the following is from the NY times

Jack and Jill's image as an elitist group endures; it can be traced to the group's early decades, when some blacks saw it as open only to those who had ''good hair'' and were able to pass ''the paper-bag test'' -- that is, having skin no darker than a brown paper bag.

''I think Jack and Jill reinforced skin-color differences,'' said Christopher Scott Cherot, 30, a former Jack and Jill member, whose first movie, ''Hav Plenty,'' which he wrote, directed and starred in, was released last month. ''I think you had to pass the 'brown paper bag' test, and I was always conscious there of the 'bad hair, good hair' myth, too.''

Leaders of the organization say there are no appearance tests, implicit or otherwise, for membership

Anonymous said...

"Steve, most of the low income high IQ students are rural whites, and there is no effective method of reaching out to them."

Why don't rich conservatives reach out to such folks?
But then, high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America.

anony-mouse said...

There may be a bit of an 'it takes two to tango' problem here.

There is an assumption that every very smart teen in rural America really wants to go to an elite Northeast or CA University.

If such a kid were very smart you would think that they might contact, say, the Yale admissions office themselves. It doesn't seem that hard, especially for a brilliant kid.

Of course if what they really wanted to do is to fly planes, or invent the world's best rabbit trap, why would they?

Luke Lea said...

Remember the original definition of affirmative action? You find them, don't wait for them to find you.

Anonymous said...

there are two other cohort groups present in the high-IQ, low $$ cohort. While neither is too prevelent, they are prevelent @ the 15 to 1600 ratio discussed in the article
i) Recent failures. My own father started a business right as we were in early highschool. He had wanted to for a long time, but *that* was when he did it. I asked him "why then?" and he said, "I was going to either make so much money I could pay your tuition or be broke enough you'd go for free". I think IQ and income broadly positively co-vary, but in any one year an earner has high degrees of volitility. Another example would be a big-time salesman who's primary accounts all went bust.
ii) The military. You have to be quite high up before you make more than 40k. Obviously, there's tons of defered expense so the actual income numbers are under-valuing "as-experienced" prosperity. You could be a senior NCO (E7)and "make" less than 40k. The military pretty aggressively self-selects for IQ and conscientiousness in it's NCO corp. An Intel, Signals etc SFC is almost certainly a IQ115 and up guy. This is another perk afforded the mil family that isn't even on the radar of "normals".
Having said that, the tech start-up failure very likely meets the "social grooming* wants/needs of the elite school whereas the sarge's son does not

Anonymous said...

"But then, high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America."

You know this, precisely, how? Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, "rural white Americans"? Do you think the Amish, again just for instance, are of low intelligence?

(I think you should also look up why the US military in WWII were so interested in farmboys who could operate anything and fix anything...)

Another possibility is that you are simply mistaken because you've been watching too much TV.

Anonymous said...

How do they do this? My suspicion has been that Navy recruiters have been earnestly and diligently going to every little rural high school, in addition to all the rest, for about a hundred years and recruiting for talent in person. I recall in my very small, very poor very out-of-the-way rural high school the military recruiters were the only representatives of any "outside institution" who actually showed up and actively recruited students when we were seniors. Of all the services, the Navy emphasized technical training the most.

With the added benefit that their small town recruits would be much more likely to feel a sense of patriotism and love of country, and would choose to die a horrible, agonizing death, rather than reveal the locations of all the ballistic subs in the fleet.

Unlike their recruits whose fathers were university professors...

Carol said...

Just another Navy anecdote: our company recruited an ex sub vet from Loral, who started as a lowly ops guy but quickly rose to president. No college degree, just a few CC courses.

What struck me was his determination to master of our software and platform, and his unflappability. Very, very cool in the classic sense.

Anonyia said...


"Not just white, but white male. Those are guy numbers. If it weren't for test grades and finals, they would have flunked out.

Girls are more likely to have a 1000 SAT/3.5 GPA. Despite doing all the homework, they don't actually get it."

I really doubt there are a lot of brilliant slackers receiving 2.1 GPAs in high school. Being a former slacker, engaged to a former slacker, both of us managed to hold GPAs in the B to A minus range despite minimal amounts of effort. Anyone who receives a 2.1 GPA in high school today is not very bright, considering how dumbed down and flexible the curriculum has become. 2.1 usually infers you aren't doing so hot on the tests which make up the shortfall either. Only serious personal issues or absenteeism should result in those sort of numbers.

Anonymous said...

Hoxby found that the majority of academically gifted low-income students come from a handful of places in the country: About 70 percent of them come from 15 large metropolitan areas



The problem is that "low income" in America does not actually mean low income, it's a euphemism for "black". The blacks in question may or may not be from low income families.

if the colleges in question were willing to look at genuinely low income but gifted students regardless of race, they'd have no problem finding them. The trouble is, they'd be white.

Anonymous said...

The study basically shows that the colleges do their "lower-income" recruiting at high schools in big metro areas, for reasons of efficiency


Some people are so naive. Efficiency, my ass.

Anonymous said...

Steve, my understanding is that in order to make real money it is not enough to be smart, but one needs to muster sustained concentrated consistent effort towards a task. A famous inventor said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% effort, or something to that effect

My sense is that many low income white boys have the smarts but lack the ability to sustain concentrated effort towards a task but that the low income northeast asians have the discipline to sustain effort.

let me give an example, half sigma is obviously very smart but has said that his low income white family never translated smarts in to sustained effort and thus never made anything of themselves. half sigma himself has also pointed out that he has this problem as well and doesn't make any real money

Shouting Thomas said...

Do college administrators have anything of any substance to do?

How is this stuff pertinent to their jobs?

They get paid for carrying on this way?

Anonymous said...

We might wonder? No we mightn't. They don't.

Anonymous said...

The purpose of Harvard is not learning or education, but connecting current and potential future elites of the next generation for a profitable middleman's cut.

Once you understand that, their behavior and motivations are ridiculously simple and predictable.


Whiskey, I'm one of the (many) commenters who has called you out in the past for your ridiculous foreign policy views, but I have to say that you completely nailed it here.

Anonymous said...

high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America.


Don't be ridiculous.

A dislike for liberal "intellectuals" and a disdain for snotty "smarter than thou" urbanites (ahem, such as you) as a lack of appreciation for intelligence.

Anonymous said...

A good many of the smart low-income kids are the ones who jumped off a bridge or otherwise died by their own hand before they reached 18.

jody said...

i related earlier that as sports consultant in high schools, i routinely encountered high school seniors with admissions offers to the ivy league, MIT, or stanford, who instead chose the state university, because it was closer, or it had better engineering in the field they wanted, or it cost less, or it had less asians.

at first i didn't understand this line of thought and for a few years, i always encouraged them to reconsider and please, accept that offer to princeton or whatever it was, unless it was based solely on the engineering decision, which was the only one that made sense to me.

after a few years i started to see the logic of their reasoning and why they'd prefer to just go to purdue or penn state or UNC.

but the flagship university in probably 20 states or so, is a good school too. it doesn't suck. so these kids probably aren't what the author is talking about, i would venture.

you aren't going to a bad college if you go to minnesota, virginia, ohio state, texas, colorado, michigan, or vanderbilt. your life is not going to be over because you didn't make it to stanford or one of the ivys. even if you end up in some place like michigan state, pittsburgh, case western, rice, indiana, utah, texas A&M, georgia tech, florida, or emory, you're still going to be fine.

when you want to start to worry is when your university has the world "state" at the end of it's title, and you're not a student at penn state, ohio state, or michigan state. ok, if you're smart and you ended up at michigan state, you can start to worry. michigan state is still ok for the average college material student though.

Anonymous said...

Hoxby is actually quite conservative and has some good older work on things like charter schools, unions, the effects of students' peers, etc.

Anonymous said...

Come on. We all know that Harvard et al don't want poor rural white Gentiles. Why spend money on aid to whites that could be spent on blacks and mestizos?

Anonymous said...

Here is the thing: lots of whites in Hickville despise, Despise, DESPISE Harvard and Yale. The idea that everyone's idea of a success if to work for Goldman-Sachs or NYTimes is an idea that only exists in rotten brains of Ivy-educated SWPLs. Smart Hickville-based whites are smart enough to realize that education is NOT better at Ivys. The "my son attends Harvard" whisper makes little impression in Hickville.

Anonymous said...

"My sense is that many low income white boys have the smarts but lack the ability to sustain concentrated effort towards a task but that the low income northeast asians have the discipline to sustain effort."

Northern europeans probably don't make good slaves. Who's deciding this task is important? There's also an old Western saying to keep in mind: Money isn't everything.

AnonIvy said...

In the original post, Steve wrote,

"I believe Hoxby is defining her pool of smart kids as 1300 or higher out of 1600 on the SAT (post-1995 scoring), which is very good but to get into Stanford or Harvard, a 1300 needs some sort of hook..."

I'm a late-seventies graduate of an Ivy. The local club organizes an hour-long interview with an alumnus for each senior who has applied. Each year, I do a few. I've become less enchanted with the mission of the university, but the conversations are usually quite interesting.

The accomplishments of the top half (or so) of the candidates are impressive. Compared to my cohort, staggeringly so. The university doesn't share applications with interviewers, but I would estimate the SAT scores of the top-half as 1500 or higher.

From my notes, here are the AP courses that a recent top-half applicant took in his junior year at his local public high school: Statistics (5), Physics B (5), US History (5), and Spanish (3). In his senior year, he took US Government, Comparative Government and Politics, Economics, Calculus BC, and English Literature. I believe he pulled 4s and 5s. In addition to typical extracurriculars, he undertook a leadership role at a local church's anti-poverty program.

5% or so of applicants of this guy's caliber get an offer from my Ivy, in my experience (he wasn't one).

Hoxby and the NPR reporter seem to believe that entree to an Ivy is pretty much automatic for non-low-income kids who can tout an SAT higher than 1300 as a proxy for an excellent academic record. From what I have seen, this is far from accurate. It's not just a question of a "some sort of hook" add-on either -- most of the top-half candidates have one or more of them.

The one "hook" that I've seen in my cohort: a sports recruit (Title IX). The other big ones are claimed to be: spectacular accomplishment, NAM status, big-money family, celebrity family. Sounds about right to me.

If "smart, low-income kids" are accepted to my Ivy at the same rate as "smart, moderate/high-income kids", that rate is much closer to 0% than to 100%. And few such students come from big-money families. Obviously.

- AnonIvy rather than my regular pseud

Uncle Peregrine said...

"Do you think the Amish, again just for instance, are of low intelligence?"


No, the Amish aren't stupid, but they are not interested in secular higher education.

http://www.welcome-to-lancaster-county.com/amish-education.html

"The Amish remain firm in their objection to high school and college education. While few Amish youth even show an interest in attending high school, those who do show an interest to attend college risk excommunication. In short, by restricting exposure to unorthodox idea and limiting social contact with outside students, an Amish education preserves the traditions and values of the society and discourages the young adult from leaving the Amish community."

Kurt Greske BSME SJS 1967 said...

- We can argue over what the long term effects of going to, say, Stanford over Cal State Fresno are, but if you spend, say, 5% of your life in college, wouldn't you rather spend that 5% at Stanford than at Cal State Fresno, especially if Stanford is picking up the tab?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't know about Fresno State, but I was such a student in 1964 and Stanford would have picked up the tab simply because my Dad was a staff member there (the cooling water control systems engineer for Stanford's two mile long linear accelerator "SLAC" that was being built at the time) and the children of Stanford staff members could attend Stanford tuition free.

But Stanford graduated engineers with a Bachelor of ARTS degree instead of a Bachelor of Science degree so I told the Stanford admission counselor what I thought of the place and gladly went to San Jose State instead!

In my entire engineering career I NEVER REGRETTED THAT DECISION!

MUCH later, I found out that I could have 'put the bite' on Stanford to pick up the tab for my FIFTY DOLLAR A SEMESTER TUITION at San Jose State because of that deal where my Dad was a staff member of Stanford. I DO WISH I'D HAVE KNOWN THAT AT THE TIME!!!! :-)

Anonymous said...

Anyone who receives a 2.1 GPA in high school today is not very bright

Chicks, cars, motorcycles, computer games, dope, booze, sports, and the wrong but very fun sorts of friends. There are many outlets to restless teenage energy that don't involve classwork.

Jefferson said...

I doubt very much that the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago for example, have a lot of teenagers with a triple digit I.Q.

Anonymous said...


Northern europeans probably don't make good slaves. Who's deciding this task is important? There's also an old Western saying to keep in mind: Money isn't everything.


Hmmm, tell that to the Arabic and other raiders who took Northern Europeans as slaves and sold them to places around the Mediterranean.

Ron Unz said...

Each year there are over 16,000 publicly-identified NMS semifinalists, and I think their performance corresponds roughly to scoring above 1400 on the SAT metric discussed above. Some non-trivial fraction of them must come from low income families.

How difficult would it be for the Ivies to "recruit" all those students, if only via mailed information packages, and thereby encourage them to apply?

OSS said...

Yup, that's who I hired in 1986 to fix these new-fangled PCs -- a guy with no college degree who had spend 6 years as nuclear reactor technician in subs. He was an unbelievably good problem solver. Within 12 months, the CEO would call him in to fix his PC, then ask him his views on corporate strategy. It caused me all sorts of office politics problems with people in-between me and the CEO because my repairman was suddenly a major player in the corporation.

I believe that submariners have to learn each and every subsystem to be considered qualified, except for launching nukes and running the reactors(?).

Jack said...

My high school was about 50% Asian and Jewish and 50% non-Jewish white. Some of those non-Jewish whites were in AP classes and gifted programs, but they were much less likely to attend Ivies as Asians and Jews in the same situation.

I think a lot of it is asian and jewish families prize education more on average. These gifted white kids all went to college, but they were happy to play sports at a decent D3 school, or to have fun at State U. They didn't care that much about Ivies and such.

Anonymous said...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/16/jodie-foster-on-mel-gibson_n_836734.html

JHB said...

As I've written here before, the private schools don't want to recruit the brightest candidates. They want a mix of the most influential candidates with adequate grades and test scores and, because that leaves too few NAMs, they take the brightest minority candidates. Smart, non-influential white candidates are overlooked intentionally.

Our family has income and wealth in the 95th percentile range for the nation, making us very comfortable in our rural county. Our daughter graduated from a decent secular private school, one that normally sends about a fifth of its graduates to UVA and William and Mary, the two best land grant schools east of California. Our daughter graduated valedictorian, with a single-sitting SAT of 790/790/800 and other tests to match. Her academics were more rigorous as those of her classmates. She was the only Presidential Scholar finalist in Virginia southwest of a line dividing Richmond and Charlottesville: in that respect, she surpassed all the children of the professors at UVA and Virginia Tech, as well as many tens of thousands of other seniors.

We know from contacts that her interview for Harvard went well, but she wasn't selected. Dartmouth didn't even bother to interview her before rejecting her. Bowdoin, where she was a legacy, waitlisted her. So did Scripps. She was accepted at both Virginia and William and Mary, and she chose to accept an offer for the Echols Scholar program at UVA, a program that lands post-graduate acceptance about as well as a lower-tier Ivy.

That begs the question of why she was outright rejected by Ivies and waitlisted by lesser schools. (Bowdoin is roughly a peer of UVA, although the Echols program was better than Bowdoin general admission. Scripps is less respected than either UVA or William and Mary.) Our perception is that the Ivies didn't want any white or Asian students as low as 95th percentile in income unless they offered very significant hooks, and that the lesser private schools would happily have accepted our daughter, but only without financial aid (thus the waitlisting).

Our daughter is thriving at UVA. Still, she was one of the top thousand students in her national graduating class cohort, and no private school accepted her. That strongly suggests that schools aren't overlooking bright rural students by accident. They simply want richer urban and suburban candidates who will fit into campus norms better while possessing adequate, if not top, academic skill.

***

As an aside, Harvard no longer leads the world in National Merit Scholars admitted. It's now the University of Chicago, a good school but not an Ivy. It's challenging to prove that Ivies are no longer giving the best and brightest a fair chance, but the absence of National Merit Scholars suggests it, just as our daughter's experience suggests it.

Anonymous said...

New England WASPs were never fond of rednecks. They sold out to, were outsmarted by Jews and are no longer in a leading position. Why is there an expectation of Jews to look out for rednecks?

Ex Submarine Officer said...

the Navy. Their nuclear propulsion program is largely staffed by 1400 plus SAT/2.1 GPA types.

Correct that to "their enlisted nuclear propulsion program....." and I'll agree, although it is an overstatement.

But generally, the enlisted nukes tended to be the kind of guys that went to college for a year or two, parties a little bit too much, that sort of thing.

There was a very broad division between the nuclear qualified enlisted guys and the non-nuclear enlisted guys on the sub.

Most of the officers (who were all nuclear qualified, engineering degrees, etc), more or less recognized that the enlisted nucs were more or less their cognitive equals - "there but for the grace of God, go I'.

The enlisted nucs were clearly of this mindset as well, which made the whole enlisted/officer thing in the nuclear realm an ongoing psychodrama.

But anyhow, I think a lot of these guys find the Navy as much as the Navy finding them. After all, it isn't exactly a big secret that the USN has a lot of submarines going all over the world and so forth.

The average competence levels in the nuclear navy were probably the highest of any organization with which I've been involved. Unlike a lot of organizations, not only is/was the nuclear navy hard to get into, it is also hard to stay in, there is a lot of ongoing attrition, unlike most universities, companies, no matter how exalted, where once in, it it usually takes an extreme case to flunk out or get fired.

Steve Sailer said...

"The enlisted nucs were clearly of this mindset as well, which made the whole enlisted/officer thing in the nuclear realm an ongoing psychodrama."

Yup, that's what it was like managing an ex-enlisted nuc with a 160 IQ: office politics psychodrama. All the 130 IQ MBA senior managers were paranoid about why the PC repairman I had hired was now going out to lunch with the 160 IQ Chairman of the Board.

Heri said...

Elite schools struggle to recruit low-income children, it's all very well for the progress of children who are less fortunate.

Anonymous said...

Steve you are right. People born with very high iq can often leapfrog office politics

AnonIvy said...

JHB --

Thanks for the account of your daughter's experience (1/13/13, 11:37 PM - valedictorian rejected by Ivies). It squares with my experience as an Ivy alumni interviewer (1/13/13, 8:18 PM): a very high rejection rate for unusually talented and accomplished white and Asian candidates from the environs of this Mid-Atlantic city. (The very few NAMs at this level who I've seen have garnered acceptances. All from wealthy families IIRC, BTW.)

I don't have the perspective to comment on how the accepted candidates compare to the overall pool. Anyway, a statistical approach (e.g. that of Ron Unz) would be more informative than an anecdotal one.

The IQ 160 Crowd said...

Yup, that's what it was like managing an ex-enlisted nuc with a 160 IQ: office politics psychodrama. All the 130 IQ MBA senior managers were paranoid about why the PC repairman I had hired was now going out to lunch with the 160 IQ Chairman of the Board.

There is nothing on God's Green Earth which is more exhilarating than having a conversation with another human being who isn't a complete idiot.

John Mansfield said...

I was a lower income high school senior who tested at the 99th percentile back in 1984, so I can remember why I never bothered applying to Harvard. First was the concern as to just how expensive “free” tuition might possibly be. Harvard doesn’t give out academic scholarships outright, just decides who to admit and then reduces the sticker price however much it wants to in an obscure fashion that sounds more like charity than something earned, and the school’s plan is that the student and his parents are still going to empty their bank accounts and run up some amount of debt. Add to that the costs of traveling a few thousand miles roundtrip whenever who want to visit home, and the expensive housing. Compare that with the straight-out full tuition scholarship offered by my state’s best school and the chance to immediately be a free adult living on a few hundred dollars a month.

Second and less noble, but still how teen-aged me felt, was that I liked being top of my class and wanted to stay in the top decile or at least quartile. At one of those elite places, I would have been median, maybe well below median. Someone who taught math at Caltech later told me a lot of their freshmen find that a hard adjustment.


It never occurred to me at the time that Goldman Sachs didn't hire anyone without a Harvard degree. Goldman who?

Cail Corishev said...

"I really doubt there are a lot of brilliant slackers receiving 2.1 GPAs in high school."

No kidding. Some people seem to be defining terms like 'brilliant' and 'smart' awfully broadly. If you have a 150 IQ, that's about 1 in 1000, so you're not just the smartest kid in your class -- if it's a small school, you might be the smartest kid in the school, or even the smartest kid who's ever attended there. It doesn't just mean you can slack off on studying; it means you don't have to study at all: by the time the teacher has explained something enough that the other kids understand it well enough to do the work and study on it more later, you've got it down and are ready to move on. You don't need to study, period, and you can finish most of your work in the classroom while the other students are still trying to grasp the topic. (As someone pointed out Half Sigma has said, that leads to problems when you're an adult with no self-discipline skills whatsoever.)

If you're in the general population and you slack off, you don't get C's; you stop getting A-pluses. As long as you show up most of the time, turn in enough homework near enough to the deadline to keep you out of the principal's office, and ace all the tests, you'll still be an A student, with the occasional B at worst.

So yes, if I were an admittance officer and saw a high SAT/ACT score coupled with C grades, I'd suspect some kind of discipline problem or a terrible home life, not a brilliant kid who hasn't been challenged enough. Still worth investigating, but with reservations.

Anonymous said...

The lack of attention that admissions offices give to low-income but high scoring rural whites is an outrage. While genetics are certainly involved, I believe there is an undeniable anti-intellectual culture in rural areas, even if it is not explicit. That is, when your peers value sports stardom and other crude markers of status at an early age, it is unlikely that a talented kid will try his hand at science competitions, computer programming, or creative pursuits. On top of it, for these kids I think standardized tests have to be taken with a grain of salt. My Dad got a 1230 on the SAT back in the 70s; he had to drive an hour on country roads to an unknown location, carpooling with someone he didn't know to save gas. Practice tests and tutoring were unheard of, let alone taking the official test multiple times and cancelling scores. For good measure, throw in mediocre test conditions in terms of A/C, outside noise, lack of water, whatever.

Compare this with the experience of a kid of the same natural ability whose siblings, friends, and classmates all go to 4-year colleges, who hire private SAT tutors, drill specific vocab words and sections and test taking strategies, take the test multiple times in a convenient, quiet room -- I wouldn't be suprised if the difference is 250 points or more.

But my Dad got into the USAFA and things worked out okay. My sister and I got to go to do the private school + Ivy League thing.

Anonymous said...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/14/buzz-bissinger-i-was-deluded-to-believe-lance-armstrong-when-he-denied-doping.html?source=socialflow&account=thedailybeast&medium=facebook

Anonymous said...


Thanks for the account of your daughter's experience (1/13/13, 11:37 PM - valedictorian rejected by Ivies). It squares with my experience as an Ivy alumni interviewer (1/13/13, 8:18 PM): a very high rejection rate for unusually talented and accomplished white and Asian candidates from the environs of this Mid-Atlantic city. (The very few NAMs at this level who I've seen have garnered acceptances. All from wealthy families IIRC, BTW.)


I am glad your daughter at least applied because it creates a record of their activities. For example, George W. Bush was admitted for obvious reasons. Now, if people self censor and don't apply, then the Ivies can hide behind their record and say they accepted x% of highly qualified non rich, non legacy students. However, if the best keep applying in ever greater numbers, and the Ivies keep taking the rich legacy students over the more academically qualified, then they can't hide what they are doing so easily. They then declare themselves to be the sort of cartel by their own actions.

Anonymous said...

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/08/09/read-this-book-rebecca-harrington-on-her-harvard-set-novel-penelope/

Anonymous said...

Usually, the better students do better anyway no matter what college they attend. The Calif-State System needs some better students. I've known several people successful from the Calif-State System and some unsucessful from the UC system. The elite schools are not taught by the professors but by grad students in the lower division class work.

Anonymous said...

A lot of low income students can get I believe as much as 2 years of credit in High School by AP classes.

Anonymous said...

Well to me most of college you can learn on your own and these days you have more resources even on the internet. College is if you want to become a Lawyer or an Accountant or a teacher.

Anonymous said...

No, the smart lower income kids are not the ones that killed thmeselves its usually your kid that has ADHD and a lot of ADHD students are poor students since they don't focus on learning things in schools, particulary grade school puts them behind. The kid that picks the information up slower is the one that feels bad for being a dummy. I know since I was suppose to be ADHD in grade school and had strange IQ results between verbal and non-verbal scores. In the 1960's that could land you in the MR classes. I was found to have normal intelligence but the damage was done and I was behind my peers in written and math skills because of misplacing me.

Anonymous said...

I didn't breath when I was born and had to have oxygen and according to some studies lack of oxygen at birth causes some of the difficulty in reading like recognizing D and B and so forth. It effects your spatial relations and being able to recognized different spoken sounds.

JSM said...

"The study basically shows that the colleges do their "lower-income" recruiting at high schools in big metro areas, for reasons of efficiency


Some people are so naive. Efficiency, my ass."

It's very efficient, if you don't want to find somebody (like, say, rural Whites) to look where they're not.

Anonymous said...

I am one of those low income, high-achievers, 1410 on SAT in 1989. I had ZERO clue how to even approach the complex applications for elite schools. The rich kids' fathers' secretaries (with lower educational achievement) were filling the "Activities" section with fantastic stuff (internship at fortune 500 company, "educational" excursions to Madagascar.) I was struggling to figure out how to use a typewriter to put "Worked at JCPenney" in the blank.

I met those Harvard types again in a state medical school (test scores again were my ticket in)---we ended up with the same MD degree, but my debt load was much lower. Thank you state school!

The decreasing emphasis on testing will only further disadvantage the bright, poor, white kids.

Truth said...

"I doubt very much that the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago for example, have a lot of teenagers with a triple digit I.Q."

I'm with you Jeff, but to be fair, all of the rubble from the implosion two years ago probably makes it hard for a kid to find his books.

Cannelly said...

Why is there an expectation of Jews to look out for rednecks?

Hmm, because Jews pose as the morally superior levelers of the playing field for all members of society?

The "all" should include rednecks. It wasn't rednecks who supposedly put Ivy League quotas on Jews all those years ago, was it?

Truth said...

" Stanford would have picked up the tab simply because my Dad was a staff member there (the cooling water control systems engineer for Stanford's two mile long linear accelerator "SLAC" that was being built at the time) and the children of Stanford staff members could attend Stanford tuition free."


I KNOW who you are, Sport!

Truth said...

Just kidding.

candid_observer said...

I do wonder how much of, say, Harvard's current demographics in students derives from simple laziness or bureaucratic stasis in how they select their students.

My strong impression of how Harvard operates is that it has a well established high school feeder system in which over time the same number of students are selected on average. The natural tendency of such a scheme is to overlook students outside those feeder high schools, although likely a certain quota of such students are generally allowed, on what probably amounts to a fairly random selection basis. That quota probably has not deviated much over the years.

One of the obvious problems of such a scheme is that it doesn't track important changes in student demographics and performance over time.

It is likely that many Asian students who excel do so at high schools which are unfavored, and, even if they do so at some of the favored high schools, are nonetheless limited by quotas imposed on those high schools by the feeder approach. In general, the feeder high schools simply don't track the best students anymore.

I wonder too if this may not partially explain why Jews are admitted at such high rates relative to their actual performance. They might well be more likely than in decades past to go to very exclusive, very expensive private schools that are part of the feeder network, but now be part of the rich, rather lazy, crowd.

Steiner said...

Lower-income, high achieving whites from hinterland America are a manifestation of the reversion to the mean for America's core Germanic population. Those highly-skilled technicians on America's boomers are going to have blue eyes as long as America has a sub fleet worthy of the name.

The Voice of Experience said...

On the other hand, what's vastly more likely, for the high-IQ new hire, at the bottom of the totem pole, is that if he doesn't grossly enstupidify his demeanor & his behavior & his conversational skills, and make abso-damned-lutely certain that his towering IQ stays the hell under wraps, then all his middling-IQ co-workers will quickly gang up on him and conspire to destroy his career at the firm.

IQ-160 computer-repair-dude should thank his lucky stars that he stumbled upon an enterprise which had at least one other employee [and maybe two, if you include Steve] with whom he could relate.

Cail Corishev said...

"Here is the thing: lots of whites in Hickville despise, Despise, DESPISE Harvard and Yale."

Bingo. We don't like them any more than they like us. We know they think they're better than us; Barak Obama's comment about clinging to God and guns only confirmed what we already knew.

The problem isn't that the snooty Ivy colleges don't recruit hicks. The problem is that their alumni have taken over the power structure of our country and locked everyone else out, so we get to vote between the Harvard grad and the Yale grad, both of whom have been raised to think their destiny is to lead and care for the rest of us.

Anonymous said...

Here is the thing: lots of whites in Hickville despise, Despise, DESPISE Harvard and Yale.

Eh. For the most part I think HPYS isn't really on their mental landscape. Upper class parents obsess about it, but outside of that bubble I don't think it's that big of a deal, believe it or not. "Goldman who?", indeed.

International Jew said...

Steve, you're overthinking this. NPR expressing surprise that it's hard to find high-IQ "low-income" (read, NAM) kids is just a way of signaling that NPR would never ever entertain the possibility that there are racial differences in IQ distribution.

Cail Corishev said...

"Each year there are over 16,000 publicly-identified NMS semifinalists, and I think their performance corresponds roughly to scoring above 1400 on the SAT metric discussed above. Some non-trivial fraction of them must come from low income families.

How difficult would it be for the Ivies to "recruit" all those students, if only via mailed information packages, and thereby encourage them to apply?"


I'd guess they do. They did in 1986, anyway. I don't remember my PSAT score, but it was high enough to be a semifinalist, and I got info packets from seemingly every school in the country, including the Ivies and all the military academies.

And that was when the info packets were all you had, unless you paid some company for lists of phone numbers and scholarships. Nowadays, if a high school student or his parent is curious about his chances at Harvard, all he has to do is hit their web site and shoot off an email, and soon he'll know everything he needs to know. The idea that the smart kids and top schools just can't find each other is preposterous.

That's why I think it's a mutual thing: Harvard isn't interested in rural whites, and rural whites aren't interested in Harvard.

Anonymous said...

I think a lot of it is asian and jewish families prize education more on average.


They are willing/able to pay for it. I know a Jewish kid who, if he were regular white, would have ended up at Rutgers. He (and his family) wanted him to go to a "prestige" school so they agreed to pay the full whack to send him to George Washington University - about $60k/yr. Colleges are actually rather flexible about academic standards if you're willing to pay them rather then expect a scholarship.

Anon#10 said...

I feel that the term
"non-Hispanic white" should be augmented to the
"non-Hispanic non-Jewish white".
That will allow to elucidate
and exclude the Jewish component inside all the
"white" statistics,
without going into lengthy debate
if Jews do or do not constitute
a race, separate from other whites.

Anonymous said...

"But then, high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America."

"You know this, precisely, how?"

Cuz I'm very familiar with Kentucky and Tennessee, especially the small towns. Lots of nice people, but, you cannot have a discussion about anything with those people unless it's about guns, hunting, Bible, country music, and fried cooking.
Some of them have an interest in history, but mostly Civil War History and that's about it.

And for many of them, evolution is a dirty dirty dirty word.

The greatest culture shock for my friend was when she drove from NY to see me in Tennessee when I was living there. She said the radio suddenly had nothing but bible thumpers and country stations, and there were so few stations as she crossed into my county. No shit.

It's almost a redneck version of the scene in HIGH SCHOOL HIGH--where every radio station in Lovitz's car plays nothing but rap.

At 3:11

Jefferson said...

[QUOTE]I'm with you Jeff, but to be fair, all of the rubble from the implosion two years ago probably makes it hard for a kid to find his books.[/QUOTE]

You are assuming that most Black yoofs from the projects like to read books, which is definitely not the case.

Anonymous said...

"No kidding. Some people seem to be defining terms like 'brilliant' and 'smart' awfully broadly. If you have a 150 IQ, that's about 1 in 1000, so you're not just the smartest kid in your class -- if it's a small school, you might be the smartest kid in the school, or even the smartest kid who's ever attended there."

High IQ fuckups, especially white male high IQ fuckups, are incredibly common. I know four different guys like that from my youth, and yes, one of them had a 1460 SAT (pre-1995) and a 1.7 GPA...he was the smartest kid in our school, but completely unmotivated and self-sabotaging.

The Navy found him, decided they liked his brainpower and could supply him with the discipline and motivation he clearly lacked. He just finished his 20 as an E7 and is pulling down six figures as a private engineering contractor now.

Anonymous said...

No, the smart lower income kids are not the ones that killed thmeselves its usually your kid that has ADHD

Or autistic spectrum disorders, Asperger's, high-IQ depression, asynchronous development, and the like.

and a lot of ADHD students are poor students since they don't focus on learning things in schools, particulary grade school puts them behind. The kid that picks the information up slower is the one that feels bad for being a dummy.

It's not that simple. The kid that picks up information slower is often coddled for the express purpose of not being made to feel like a dummy. That wasn't the case in the 1960s, but it's very true now.

Nobody coddles the (white) kid who has "trouble getting along with his peers and teachers", which more often than not is an excuse for their mean-minded bigotry rather than any character flaws of the student. Or maybe the boy is "disruptive" which is a code word to criminalize intellectual curiosity.

It would also be a good idea to read some of the news stories about school suicides. It is almost always a smart "maladjusted" kid rather than an ultra-popular robotic dummy. If dummies kill themselves, it is invariably years after public school, when they realize the real world - the working world - is not a place that will coddle them and clean up after their mistakes. Having the social skills of a Barbie/Ken doll will fix up messed-up lives about as well as it can stop neutrons from a nuclear reactor - i.e. not at all.

JHB said...

That's why I think it's a mutual thing: Harvard isn't interested in rural whites, and rural whites aren't interested in Harvard.

I'm guessing that you didn't read my earlier post about my top-1,000 daughter rejected not only by Harvard but also by a lesser Ivy and a near-Ivy, while happily welcomed at a top land grant university into its best program for top scholars.

Ex Submarine Officer said...

If you're in the general population and you slack off, you don't get C's; you stop getting A-pluses. As long as you show up most of the time, turn in enough homework near enough to the deadline to keep you out of the principal's office, and ace all the tests, you'll still be an A student, with the occasional B at worst.

You make that sound simple. In 10th grade, 1st quarter geometry, I slept through the class, skipped the daily homework, aced all the tests. Teacher flunked me.

We had a discussion about, hey, you teach, I learn, you test, I pass test, school has done its purpose. So it is bad enough I have cops lined up to force me into this prison on a daily basis, why the heck does it have to extend into my home life via unnecessary (as evidenced by my test scores) busy work.

Teacher disagreed, said it was unfair to the other kids. I disagreed, said it was unfair to me to have to do this work because they needed a daily homework gimme to bring up their average.

I did the same thing the second quarter (aced all the tests, blew off homework), teacher did the same thing, we had the same unsatisfactory discussion and that was my last day of secondary school.

Doing a couple hours, it adds up, of bs busy work daily at home in addition to being imprisoned daily for 7-8 hours is hardly a trivial requirement.

ic said...

Anonymous said: "The people who are really good at identifying and recruiting really sharp kids with shitty home lives and indifferent grades are...the Navy. Their nuclear propulsion program is largely staffed by 1400 plus SAT/2.1 GPA types."

This is most definitely pushing it, though I will say that Navy nukes are well above average (think 1200-ish SATs, not 1400-ish). Even the USNA's median SAT score is well below 1400.

I run a control room in a power plant, and most of our new hires for skilled operator/tech positions seem to be former merchant marine officers and former Navy nukes. (I'm also a former enlisted guy, so know that this isn't a "hurr-durr enlisted guys are stupid" rant.)

Ann K said...

Texas A&M students are highly sought after. More than 2,900 companies come to College Station to recruit each year.

ben tillman said...

After Harvard offered what was, in essence, a free college education to students whose families earned under $40,000 a year, Hoxby says, "the number of students whose families had income below that threshold changed by only about 15 students, and the class at Harvard is about 1,650 freshmen."

Harvard didn't offer a free education to students whose families earned under $40,000 a year; it provided a free education to a few students in that income range who met certain entirely subjective criteria.

ben tillman said...

even if you end up in some place like michigan state, pittsburgh, case western, rice, indiana, utah, texas A&M, georgia tech, florida, or emory, you're still going to be fine.

Those schools aren't really comparable to one another. Rice is about four levels above IU.

Anonymous said...

Teacher disagreed, said it was unfair to the other kids.

They always give that excuse.

Anonymous said...

Actually, ADHD kids do kill themselves more most of the reserach shows this. The smart kid usually does well in life. The poor student I can tell you doesn't have it made. Most poor students are not good at sports since they have bad hand and eye coordination. Retard is the worst thing to be called in school. The gifted kids have it made. The teachers prefer them they do not coddle slow learners they are treated poorly by both teachers and students.

Anonymous said...

Only two top sports people had dyslexia, Greg L the diver and Bruce Jenner. Most dyslexics or ADHD students have poor hand and eye coordination.

Anonymous said...

"Anyone who receives a 2.1 GPA in high school today is not very bright, considering how dumbed down and flexible the curriculum has become. 2.1 usually infers you aren't doing so hot on the tests which make up the shortfall either. Only serious personal issues or absenteeism should result in those sort of numbers."

If your dad and all his friends spent some timne in the military and then worked skilled trades and they all seemed to really enjoy their life then why bother at school apart from learning to read and basic arithmetic?

There's no need - military then NCO or cop or skilled trade is (or was) more fun.

Truth said...

" Anonymous Jefferson said...

[QUOTE]I'm with you Jeff, but to be fair, all of the rubble from the implosion two years ago probably makes it hard for a kid to find his books.[/QUOTE]

You are assuming that most Black yoofs from the projects like to read books, which is definitely not the case."

Introducing, your white "high-IQ, low-income" male.

Where Jefferson grew up, there wasn't much satire so his 190 IQ didn't help here.

Five Daarstens said...

I read this autobiographical book about a guy who was a goofball in HS, enlisted in the Navy Submarine program. Later, he breezed thru college and medical school. The book had a deep impact on me at the time.

http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Sub-Secret-Mission-Pacific/dp/1557501785/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=2LNHIEM3CHC9P&coliid=I1WB9E2CMUHELE

Anonymous said...




Girls With ADHD Are More Likely to Commit Suicide, Study Says

Adolescent girls who are diagnosed with ADHD demonstrate early signs of impulsivity, which makes them three to four times more likely to attempt suicide and two to three times more likely to report injuring themselves.


By Nikki Tucker | Aug 14, 2012 03:53 PM EDT
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Though attention deficit behavior hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is known to affect a child's performance in school, new research suggest ADHD increases the risk in adolescent girls to commit suicide.











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(Photo : REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)


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Adolescent girls who are diagnosed with ADHD demonstrate early signs of impulsivity, which makes them three to four times more likely to attempt suicide and two to three times more likely to report injuring themselves.

The first stage of the study conducted in the San Francisco area by lead author, Stephen Hinshaw, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored 228 girls between the ages of six and 12 years of age.

The girls were recruited from schools, mental health centers, pediatric practices and community advertisements. Each participant underwent extensive diagnostic assessments, which revealed that 140 girls indeed suffered from ADHD. The other 88 girls were used as the control group. Forty-seven girls were diagnosed with ADHD-inattentive, a subtype of ADHD, where the individual is less inclined to act out, but still are confronted with challenges when it comes to paying attention, whereas the other 93 had ADHD-combined, a combination of hyperactive, impulsive and inattentive symptom (the most common subtype of ADHD referred for treatment).

Of the original cohort, 95 percent of participants completed the study including the follow up. Researchers followed up with each individual at the five and 10 year mark. When the girls were in their teenage and young adult years (17-24), researchers questioned their families about an array of life challenges including substance abuse, suicide attempts, self-injury and depressive symptoms. The young ladies were also tested for academic achievement and neuropsychological functioning.

Results demonstrated 22 percent of those who suffered from ADHD-combined had attempted suicide at least once, whereas eight percent of the girls who suffered from ADHD-inattentive and only six percent of the control group attempted suicide. Additionally, 51 percent of the girls who suffered from ADHD-combined reported to inflict self-injury, such as scratching, cutting, burning or hitting oneself, in contrast to the 19 percent control group and 29 percent in the ADHD-inattentive group. Researchers did find there was no difference in substance abuse.

"ADHD in girls and women carries a particularly high risk of internalizing, even self-harmful behavior patterns," said Hinshaw. "We know that girls with ADHD-combined are more likely to be impulsive and have less control over their actions, which could help explain these distressing findings."

This study was published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.




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David said...

>high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America

You know this, precisely, how? Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, "rural white Americans"?<

Were Washington and Jefferson typical of rural white Americans, then or now? Believe me, I live in rural East Tennessee among rural white Americans. Although they may have their good points, these people as I have known them for the past forty years are no Washingtons or Jeffersons (who is, really?). The life of the mind, so-called, isn't something that's sincerely appreciated for its own sake anywhere in the nation except "behind closed curtains" in "a few walled towns," in the words of cheeky Mencken.

Another thing to consider is that "rural white Americans" isn't like a Platonic Form that stays the same at all times, untouched by circumstances. A number of demographic, political, social, and economic changes have occurred since 1776; for example, a destructive war of northern aggression. Even since World War Two, changes have occurred. For example, the competent farm boy of 1941 is different from his obese, GameBoy-playing, hip-hop-lovin' "rural white American" counterpart of today. If we put both in a foxhole together long enough, then maybe some common ground would be found and some similarity would shine through, but I'd hesitate to do that, and those aren't the circumstances now anyway.

ben tillman said...

Teacher disagreed, said it was unfair to the other kids.

That teacher is stupid. Either: (a) the point of the homework is to help students learn, in which case requiring the "other kids" to do the homework is more fair than exempting them would be, or (b) the point of the homework is to torment students and waste their time, in which case no one should be required to do it.

Anonymous said...

It's interesting to note that Hoxby, who is a terrific economist, is not just conservative (as has been noted elsewhere) but also African-American.

Anonymous said...

"Hmmm, tell that to the Arabic and other raiders who took Northern Europeans as slaves and sold them to places around the Mediterranean."

Are there any recognizable remnant northern European slave populations around the Med, the way there are such recognizable populations in the western hemisphere? If it was profitable enough you'd think it would be routine, but it doesn't seem to have been. You can find instances of Arabs raiding places as far as Iceland, but they seem few enough in number to be isolated incidents. Experiments or just normal piracy. I'd imagine it was much more common to have Viking or other Europeans actually slave raiding, then selling slaves in the Med.

One wonders how many of those slaves you mention were women, as opposed to male labour. That trade is apparently still being plied. Were there any sustained populations of northern European slaves in the Med that included large numbers of males, as opposed to isolated individuals or those in military "slave" castes such as the Ottoman Janissaries or Egyptian Mamluks (though probably both were mostly Slav)? Those military Slav/European castes seemed to have ended up on top of society, so maybe they really weren't such good slaves.

Anonymous said...

"Remember that Espenshade's study showed that low income white kids are one seventh less likely to be admitted to an elite university than are similarly situationed Asian kids "

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/9309336-post9.html

as for adhd:

"Prevalence rates of attention problems appeared to change along gender lines during adolescence. At ≤12 years of age, boys had higher ratings of attention problems than girls, whereas young women from 15–30 years of age had higher ratings of attention problems than young men. This reversal also coincided with the switch from mother-report to self-report. “So again it is also quite difficult to disentangle whether this reflects a real change,” says Dr. Kan. “It may be a rater effect, but it may also signify underdetection of attention problems in women, for example.”

http://www.psychweekly.com/aspx/article/articledetail.aspx?articleid=1520

or because girls go from steady to unpeacable like the cat?

"You make that sound simple. In 10th grade, 1st quarter geometry, I slept through the class, skipped the daily homework, aced all the tests. Teacher flunked me."

what year?

"A famous inventor said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% effort, or something to that effect "

check up with tesla for that.

"let me give an example, half sigma is obviously very smart "

then why is he half sigma?
Let me point out a real smarts guy, the one who wrote "outsiders", about how high IQ kids can lose out in school for the average, especially the self-discipline to apply themselves.

Here's his obituary at megasociety,

http://megasociety.org/noesis/149/towers.html

Anonymous said...

"Are there any recognizable remnant northern European slave populations around the Med,"

there were two types of castration, one in which only the penis was removed.
some arab states have a gender ratio of 2 to 1 due to the male labour that works there.

Ex Submarine Officer said...

That teacher is stupid. Either: (a) the point of the homework is to help students learn, in which case requiring the "other kids" to do the homework is more fair than exempting them would be, or (b) the point of the homework is to torment students and waste their time, in which case no one should be required to do it.

I selected door (b) in 10th grade, walked out of the place, never looked back, never regretted it.

I could write a book on my experiences since them. Quitting high school maybe screwed the pooch on this white boy going Ivy and becoming a domesticated elite puke, but I've made plenty of dough, have post-grad engineering degree, Tau Beta Pi, and scads of adventures/stories interspersed with lots of sex w/women I didn't love.

I've also had lotsa Ivy leaguers working for me as well at various times in big time east coast locales.

One way to exploit having high IQ (and good health, reasonable good looks & social skills) is to live life the way you want to live it as a free man rather than being a slave, cossetted, but a slave nonetheless, doing the establishment grind/ass kissing for 50 years then hopping in your grave saying, "gee, that was fun".

jody said...

"Those schools aren't really comparable to one another. Rice is about four levels above IU."

i've been using this list as my reference now:

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2012.html

which puts most of them higher than rice. not to say the differences are all that big or anything. once you are out of the top 10, a few spots on the chart means two universities are pretty comparable using the methodology which these guys tried to employ. but some of those universities were 20 spots higher than rice.

note that using their criteria, dartmouth isn't even one of the top 50 universities in the US. i used to think it was brown that was the least important ivy and generated the least amount of academic output, but i guess it's dartmouth. due to size, presumably.

remember on their list, prestige is irrelevant. only results matter here. the university's academic output, in ways which can be measured. they measure it by field, so putting them all together sort of gives them a combined value, which is somewhat clunky, but it's better than the US news list, which is just a bunch of guys in an office, goofin' with a formula, and arbitrarily changing it every 3 years to shake up the rankings so they can sell more magazines.

US news & world report's version of this list is like ESPN's version of QB rating. their so called QBR, which is total garbage. real GIGO stuff.

ic said...

jody said: "note that using their criteria, dartmouth isn't even one of the top 50 universities in the US. i used to think it was brown that was the least important ivy and generated the least amount of academic output, but i guess it's dartmouth. due to size, presumably."

That should tell you that this list is entirely worthless when it comes to undergrad reputation (which is what we're really talking about here). UC-Davis over Dartmouth, McGill, and Brown (not to mention top-tier LACs like Williams and Amherst)? Come on now.

Anonymous said...

high intelligence and the life of the mind are not much appreciated in rural white America

You know this, precisely, how? Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, "rural white Americans"?



I have to chuckle here.

A friend is a "rural white American" on a hobby farm in Texas. Semi retired from corporate life. Grew up in the bronx in the '50's. He is what people here call Scots-Irish. wink.

Anonymous said...

"According to Muslim tradition, no man could lay his eyes on another man's harem, thus someone less than a man was required for the role of watchful guardianship over the harem women. Eunuchs tended to be male prisoners of war or slaves, castrated before puberty and condemned to a life of servitude.

White eunuchs were first provided from the conquered Christian areas of Caucasia, Georgia, and Armenia. They were also culled from Hungarian, Slovenian, and German prisoners of war. These white eunuchs were captured during the conflicts that arouse between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan countries. Black eunuchs were captured from Egypt, Abyssinia and the Sudan. Black slaves were captured from the upper Nile and transported to markets on the Mediterranean Sea - Mecca, Medina, Beirut, Izmir and Istanbul. All eunuchs were castrated en route to the markets by Egyptian Christians or Jews, as Islam prohibited the practice of castration but not the usage of castrated slaves.

There were several different varieties of eunuchs: "

http://www.allaboutturkey.com/harem.htm

Anonymous said...

interspersed with lots of sex w/women I didn't love

Did you leave a Submarine Junior Officer Corps in your wake?

Anonymous said...

You make that sound simple. In 10th grade, 1st quarter geometry, I slept through the class, skipped the daily homework, aced all the tests. Teacher flunked me.

More or less the same thing happened to me during the first semester of my junior year, and I promptly quit math for the rest of high school.

Fast forward about six years after that, and the director of graduate studies in my department was the guy who would solve Fermat's Conjecture.

Anonymous said...

Well tell me when the posters here break the taboos of specifically helping whites.

ben tillman said...

Jody, your rankings aren't relevant to the discussion. We're talking about undergraduate education, not the size of the school and its research accomplishments.

Rice students score 400 points higher than IU students on the SAT.

Anonymous said...

It's interesting to note that Hoxby, who is a terrific economist, is not just conservative (as has been noted elsewhere) but also African-American.

Also of note is the fact that she is very light-skinned and that her ancestry is more than likely Caribbean blacks.
Stereotypes are incredibly powerful, don't you think?

Anonymous said...

All eunuchs were castrated en route to the markets by Egyptian Christians or Jews, as Islam prohibited the practice of castration but not the usage of castrated slaves.


Uh, Christianity and Judaism also prohibit castration, so this is pretty stupid. Sounds like history revised by Muslims.

Anonymous said...

"What becomes of the progeny of such intercourse? I have no hesitation in saying that it is got rid of by infanticide, and that there is hardly a family in Stanboul where infanticide is not practiced in such cases as a mere matter of course, and without the least remorse or dread." - Castration for the males, harem membership for the females, atleast until they could pass.

And the muslims might have stayed in the game a little longer if they didn't castrate their best and brightest(naturally the slaves they took from us).

Difference Maker said...

Whiskey said...
The purpose of Harvard is not learning or education, but connecting current and potential future elites of the next generation for a profitable middleman's cut.

Once you understand that, their behavior and motivations are ridiculously simple and predictable.


Mm yes, if your family and your academic career don't evince the right kind of connections and behind the scenes knowledge, then you're just a loser, bye bye!

Difference Maker said...

anony-mouse said...
If such a kid were very smart you would think that they might contact, say, the Yale admissions office themselves. It doesn't seem that hard, especially for a brilliant kid.

Of course if what they really wanted to do is to fly planes, or invent the world's best rabbit trap, why would they?


No doubt. However, the northeastern colleges are the path to wall street banker money and getting to tell the country what to do.

I have no great need of these things, but I certainly don't want these malevolent clowns we have running the show.

Their reputation and their manipulation and construction of society as such stand in as litmus tests to screen their applicants. They want you to play along with their effeminate and perverse cultural programs to show that you are in, compliant, won't rock the boat.

Anonymous said...

Uh, Christianity and Judaism also prohibit castration, so this is pretty stupid. Sounds like history revised by Muslims.

Perhaps someone more learned than myself can correct me; but IIRC neither testament of the Bible say anything at all about castration, whether voluntary or not. Ditto with supplementary texts such as the Apocrypha, Talmud, and the Book of Mormon.

Anonymous said...

On a related topic, doesn't the Quran (sp?) also forbid honour killings?

Difference Maker said...

Hmmm, tell that to the Arabic and other raiders who took Northern Europeans as slaves and sold them to places around the Mediterranean.

What, Slavs?

I'd hate to rehash the stereotypes of Slavs vs Germanics/Vikings :)

Anonymous said...

@Ron Unz

"Each year there are over 16,000 publicly-identified NMS semifinalists, and I think their performance corresponds roughly to scoring above 1400 on the SAT metric discussed above. Some non-trivial fraction of them must come from low income families.

How difficult would it be for the Ivies to "recruit" all those students, if only via mailed information packages, and thereby encourage them to apply?"

I was a low income (well below poverty line) high school student, in the early 2000's, and I did in fact receive mailings from most of the Ivies ('cept for Princeton...jerks) as well as a lot of other schools after becoming a National Merit semifinalist. Either that or it was after making 1500 on the SAT a year later, but I think it was after the PSAT. I didn't end up going (or applying) to a 'good school', but it seems like they do make some effort to recruit people like me.

It's conceivable that my situation is fairly common -maybe there are a lot of high scoring poorish folk from the boondocks that just don't really want to go to a scary big far off school.

Don't regret not going to a big name college in the slightest, either. I was a little afraid when I was applying to grad schools that a no-name undergrad would hurt me, but it didn't seem to.

JHB said...

"I was a low income (well below poverty line) high school student, in the early 2000's, and I did in fact receive mailings from most of the Ivies ('cept for Princeton...jerks) as well as a lot of other schools after becoming a National Merit semifinalist. Either that or it was after making 1500 on the SAT a year later, but I think it was after the PSAT. I didn't end up going (or applying) to a 'good school', but it seems like they do make some effort to recruit people like me."

My daughter got things mailed to her, too. Then they rejected her when she applied with "only" a 2380 combined SAT.

Investing a few tens of thousands of dollars in providing shiny junk mail to bright rural scholars is a good way of concealing who really gets into the Ivies and near-Ivies.

Anonymous said...

"Perhaps someone more learned than myself can correct me; but IIRC neither testament of the Bible say anything at all about castration, whether voluntary or not. Ditto with supplementary texts such as the Apocrypha, Talmud, and the Book of Mormon."

Bill Buckley, years ago, made a similar point on Firing Line when a guest mentioned that there are no prohibitions against abortion in the Bible, he responded that there weren't any against cannabalism either.

Anonymous said...

"...neither testament of the Bible say anything at all about castration..."

I don't know if this counts and don't want to look it up. ;)

There was an important founding theologian of Christianity named Origen. (Yes, one wonders...) Apparently he really helped put Christian theology on the map. It was long believed that "Origen, following Matthew 19:12 literally, castrated himself." Some modern scholars suggest this is calumny. But it must have seemed credible even if so...