Poor Suzy Weiss. She didn't get into the college she wanted. She's taking it pretty well though. She wrote this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. She'd like us all to know how she's been wronged.I'd like to go after her like she was an entitled, bitchy, pinata:
Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.
Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.
Oh, there's more...
I saw this letter yesterday on Gawker. Oh dear, it's got so many insane bits, I didn't know what part of it I'd feature as "flava."
ReplyDeleteIt's this paragraph that floors me the most: "To those claiming that I am bitter—you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhhh—"The Real Housewives" is on."
That also got my dander up. Where was she going with that? The idea that, rather than honestly take stock of her strengths and weaknesses, she wants to just spoon more dreck into her diseased brain in blissful ignorance? The idea that all of the advice and consolation people are offering her vanishes in the face of her obsession with the banalities of pop culture? What?
DeleteThis is so terrible that it wouldn't work as satire, not with that "just be yourself" bit.
Surely that last paragraph is the one that makes clear that it is satire?
DeleteThe comments were hilarious! What kind of people read WSJ online?
ReplyDeleteI don't know how I missed this story. We had a student here a year ago who wrote a similar sort of whine in our campus paper, how her high school teachers didn't prepare her for college, how her college teachers didn't teach at "her level," etc. I knew the girl, and knew she was well-intentioned, but like Suzy, just clueless. As if!
ReplyDeleteI will join the line of people waiting to kick Suzy in the ass. My favorite comment from that article is the one from this parent: "As a bourgeois s.o.b. of no particular "ethnicity," (and a g-d male, to boot) the colleges gave me three functions when I visited my children on campus: to pay, to apologize and to appreciate."
ReplyDeleteAnd dear god, RGM, change the font!!!
I'm not going to cosign on the gendered insult, but Dear Suzy, you are a classist, entitled, racist little so and so.
ReplyDeleteThe whole idea of college admissions emphasizing participation in after-school non-academic activities is absurd, whether sports, do-good "social engagement" or science clubs. And not just because it is skewed in favor of kids who have access these things, and parents with the time and patience to do the driving; primarily for turning silly distractions into requirements, when their time would be better spent mastering the basics of the old core--math, writing, science, social studies.
ReplyDeleteForget enforced, artificial "well-roundedness" and just base the whole thing on academics: how well did Suzy do in her core academic subjects and how rigorous were the courses she took? How did she rank in a battery of academic-subject entrance exams designed by the university she is applying to (or a pool of those)?
(Hey, retro is in, and don't you see how "multicultural" this idea is?)
And, Suzy, why do you care so much about "big name" or "highly ranked" schools anyway? You do know that for most students at the undergraduate level that doesn't matter, don't you? (That is, at least in terms of education; parents of UGs at those schools are really paying for social connections and bragging rights. So go ahead and get deeply into debt if Suzy needs those things to make up for a talent deficit.)
Just try to be somewhere where most students are slightly smarter than you (and where the profs have doctorates), and that could mean the state school. Work hard and get the grades (or do something to distinguish yourself from the masses) so someone will pay for your grad school. And stop whining, it's a bad habit that will get you low grades.
What Peter K said. State schools can be an education bargain, if an education is what you're after and not just an expensive, four-year networking opportunity.
DeleteThat said.. Loki's famous line should have been applied to this one.
Peter, that's all true. The problem is that we would not get the desired racial/ethnic balance if we only required strong academics.
Delete"Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap."
ReplyDeleteOf course! Those things require EFFORT.
I hope that my university was one that rejected her.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of those instances when I can say with absolute confidence that being born and bred in a series of Catholic institutions--including educational ones--offers me a huge advantage. I never think that just being myself is good enough.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I didn't get that lesson until grad school, when the priests and nuns gleefully informed me, "Oh, we can do anything we want to you." At that moment I understood the angst of my friends who went through the Catholic school system.
DeleteI have to confess I don't get the obsession with going to a "good school." Of course no one wants to go to a crappy one with a terrible reputation, but a good education can be had at most institutions of higher learning. I don't even think there's one best school for which everyone should strive. A good fit in terms of one's aptitude, interests, and geographic preference will make the best school different for different types of students.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've read, the Ivy League advantage comes into play only in certain fields. I teach at a CC that has several tenured professors with Ivy League degrees. They didn't take the jobs because they "settled" but because they actually like to teach and didn't even go for the R-1 pool. They have the same job and make the same money as my colleagues who went to Big State U up the road or the two regional state unis within an hour's drive of here.
Most people don't become academics, though; what does an Ivy League degree do for everyone else?
DeleteYou make connections with people who will have power after graduation. You learn how people in that segment of society behave, which makes it easier for you to fit in with that group after college.
DeleteTrue, Ben, but even then, that's a small segment of the population. The whole "1% power broker" area is less than the number of graduates from the Ivy League over the years. I think there's great value to be had in an Ivy League education because of the experience, but I don't think most people's lives will be ruined because they didn't get in.
DeleteI think the "connections" thing is probably most useful in a fairly limited number of fields (beginning, and perhaps ending, with business).
DeleteIt probably also helps if one is good at networking, and ambitious in a conventional sense (said the underpaid, and in some ways underemployed Ivy grad who is neither).
Honestly, I go back and forth on the value of the whole experience, in my day and (especially) now. In my day (in the trough in between the baby boom and the bb echo), my alma mater was admitting a fair proportion of eccentrics, as well as the more boring very smart folk (and a few less-smart folk who usually turned out to be legacies). The combination of the resources available and the opportunity to interact with a really interesting mix of people (including undergrads, the grad students who did much of the interactive teaching, and professors, who were often more distant) made for a pretty heady, and pretty valuable, experience. I fear that the opportunity to be even more selective may actually be detracting from the value of the experience, by eliminating some of the "wild card" admits.
Why did the WSJ even publish this op-ed?
ReplyDeleteWho the FUCK is the editor who made that asinine decision?
*headshake*
Bari Weiss was an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Deletehttp://topics.wsj.com/person/W/bari-weiss/5476
Apparently her sister works (or worked?) for the WSJ and pulled some strings.
DeleteAssuming she actually wrote it herself. . . .
ReplyDeleteI wish my students had this much wit and could write this well.
Me too! Though actually my students have been a good group this term. (Caveat: haven't read their term papers yet.) Several of them can.
DeleteI finally got around to reading this article.
ReplyDeleteFolks, this is satire. It's pretty good satire. It's actually excellent satire for a young person who naturally lacks the life experiences, time spent practicing writing and wisdom that older writers have.
It lampoons parenting, the college admissions process, faux charity designed only to enhance your reputation and her own adolescence. She knows about current events and she writes well.
It's not just pretty good satire, it's pretty obvious satire. Even if your humor detector didn't catch it, the outrageous requests (being adopted by Amy Chua, going to Africa) should give it away. The self-deprecating humor is a sign that the writer is attempting comedy. To avoid that conclusion, you would need to interpret her as a racist little bitch who is so stupid that she doesn't realize that she comes across as lazy and entitled. That seems like a stretch.
No, umm, I don't think it is.
Deletehttp://tinyurl.com/bmba6wr
Warning: intense irritation behind the link.
What's in that interview that doesn't make her sound level headed and gracious about not getting into her favorite schools?
DeleteColleges didn't think she was as good as she thought she was. With those rejections in hand, she wrote an amusing essay about how she fell short of her goal. That's a pretty mature reaction, no?
That was what I thought. I was amused and entertained, and I am glad to hear that she is drowning her sorrows in the culturally appropriate release of Real Housewives. It was done with a light hand, which is hard to pull off, but I think she did.
DeleteI hoped it was satire, because otherwise, it would just be a racist, elitist rant. But readers aren't viewing it as such, and seem (based on the comments) to be coming out of the woodwork to embrace their own inner racist selves.
DeleteI thought it was hilarious. Of course, it is satirical - a send up of helicopter/flakes. Moreover, this is writing at a far higher level than I usually see from college seniors, much less HS.
DeleteSure, her totally racist comments weren't racist at all! Because satire!
ReplyDeleteGive me a break.
Please, review Monty Python. There is a rather large number of skits including "racist comments." Nobody has ever called the MP racist (nor will, unless she's fond of being laughed at).
Delete"Never be rude to an arab"...
DeleteWhile (as the reactions to this article demonstrate) satire is a dangerous game, one of its key techniques is to take attitudes with which the satirist disagrees to their logical extreme, as a way of demonstrating just how/why they are wrong (see Swift, Jonathan, "A Modest Proposal"). So, yes, one satirizes racism by making absurdly racist statements. As I said, it's a dangerous game.
DeleteThis might be the most read linked article ever at CM.
ReplyDeleteIt's a bit sad, but this OpEd is really on the money. The only sure fire way to get into an Ivy school is to be a minority or technical female (ie a female applying for a male major like engineering) and to be able to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide. Otherwise it's more or less a dice roll.
ReplyDeleteTrue story (back in the day): girl gets into MIT from my high school with a 3.2 GPA and a pretty average resume - guess what the color of her skin was? (No she was definitely not from a less-than-middle-class family) She ended up taking 6 years to get her BS. Nice work MIT ad-com!
And the horrible thing is that by letting her get in with a 3.2 they ensured that she'd always be at the bottom of her class, helping her to internalize a racist worldview. At the same time, by co-opting her into the Ivy world they tried to neutralize her as a potential challenger of that worldview. (Crass error, since class traitors are the best revolutionaries)
DeleteIn my experience at two Ivies (which was admittedly a while ago, but they were also less selective then), I never encountered a student or professor belonging to a minority group who struck me as being clearly less able than hir classmates or colleagues. I did encounter a few athletes, and a few more legacies, who fit that description. And I did see another pattern to which you allude: many minority students came from relatively privileged backgrounds. Honestly, Ivies have such a pool to choose from that they don't need to let in anyone who can't cope with the work (and they seem to be pretty good at identifying those who may scramble a bit to catch up, but are fully capable of doing so -- witness, to name one example who's been in the news thanks to her recently-published memoir, Sonia Sotomayor).
DeleteThe only place I've seen the pattern of minority students predictably being the weakest in the class was at a medium-selective state liberal arts college. They were trying very hard (perhaps a bit too hard) to increase diversity, and the phenomenon which French Professeur describes (and which was being both talked up and condemned at the time by Dinesh D'Souza) did seem to be present.
I have no experience with MIT, though. However, I have to wonder whether being female in an overwhelmingly-male environment might have played a role in the troubles of the student you describe. On the other hand, she made it through; kudos to her.
My experience mirrors yours, CC, in that I've noticed that often, it comes down to income level rather than to minority status. I would also note that the Ivies don't have incentive to increase their diversity simply for diversity's sake.
DeleteAs far as people who know people who got into an Ivy, looking at the numbers claimed by Ivies for diversity shows how many people really are getting in in favor of those who don't get in. IF the pattern were really that pervasive, there would ONLY be minorities at the Ivy schools.
I've read a bit about minority students admitted to law schools of a higher tier than their grades would suggest is reasonable. They have a higher percentage of dropping out and thus have debt and no degree. The schools are doing those students a favor, except improving their own diversity statistics.
DeleteOn the other hand, six years for an engineering degree isn't unheard of.
Oy veh. The minorities thing again. It's really painful to read this crap. Sure, there are some minority students who can't cut it where they are admitted. But let's talk about the stunning mediocrities, overwhelmingly white, who are let into the Ivies every year as legacies. They don't get kicked out or drop out because Daddy has connections and will just keep on paying.
ReplyDeleteI thought this child was both funny and entitled, how's that? What she forgot to do was have a Daddy who could donate a building, but she doesn't say that.