177 Comments

Commenting has been turned off for this post
Carina's avatar

> You understand that what Harvard and its feckless peers would like is to admit fewer students whose Korean parents clear $40,000 a year from their convenience stores, right?

THANK YOU for spelling this out. The entire post was cathartic. (And thanks for an extra weekend post! They are always an unexpected treat.)

I don’t know if my Asian kid will be interested in schools like Harvard one day. I certainly don’t plan to encourage it (state school worked out fine for me). But I’m sick of these elite institutions doing everything they can to reduce the number of Asian students while dressing it up as social justice. The hypocrisy is nauseating.

Expand full comment
RC's avatar

Fuck yes. This channels my absolute rage over this issue better than any ironically detached “it’s wrong to ditch the SATs but my kid is still going to get into Harvard” Matt Yglesias post ever could.

The thing that makes me angriest is how much shittier this makes kids’ lives. They already had to do bizarre shit like start their own non profit institutions for their college resumes and now the last vestige of a chance for just a regular old smart poor or working class kid to stand out as genuinely remarkable in intellect and potential is gone. It’s all slavish devotion to not just grades, but wildly expensive extracurriculars, “volunteer” work, special projects that their parents can fund, and of course the essay contest which is the easiest thing in the world to game. And these things make teenagers lives MISERABLE and narrow. To be honest, I don’t give a shit what Harvard does but it enrages me that the UC system did this.

Expand full comment

No posts