Hard as it may be to imagine an elitist country club in Jersey, Princeton existed. But it’s trying desperately to shed its old legacy Ivy image to appear more like the second-tier Ivies where the poor and downtrodden had a chance of admission.
Eisgruber and his colleagues have made real and rapid progress. Princeton was until recently among the country’s least economically diverse colleges, overlooking hundreds of qualified low-income high-school students each year.
No more. Only 6.5 percent of the class of 2007 received Pell grants, which typically go to students in the bottom half of income distribution. The share among the class of 2017, which graduates next week, is 14.9 percent. The share in both this year’s and next year’s freshman class is 21 percent.
The changes aren’t just about one statistic, either. Princeton is also enrolling more middle-class students and low-income foreigners, who are ineligible for Pell grants.
The mothers at Rosemary Hall are aghast, now that there is no longer a guarantee that one’s roomie will be suitable for a dinner invitation. But it’s not just that they don’t know which fork to use.
Members of the new Princeton proletariat refer to themselves as “FLI” — for “first-generation, low-income” — and they do not sugarcoat their experiences. They often arrive with spotty academic preparation.
Well, that’s not good. More importantly, that’s inconsistent with the core concept of diverse but qualified. Much as the argument in favor of diverse experiences contributes to the knowledge and experience of a community, diversity was never supposed to come at the expense of qualifications.
Does this mean the students are smart enough, despite lacking the education necessary to succeed at Princeton? If so, how does one know this to be the case? Standardized tests are castigated as racist, although no one has come up with a viable alternative for standardized tests because, well, that’s the point of standardization so that one can compare across demographics. Neither grades nor recommendations provide a sound basis for comparison.
Does Princeton seek to achieve economic diversity in order to shed its elitist country club image, by watering down the value of its education and, ultimately, its degree? After all, if one wants to go to college in New Jersey, there’s always Rutgers, which is a totally fine university provided one doesn’t own a blue blazer.
The ability to withstand and thrive in an atmosphere of serious academic rigor requires one to be capable of doing so, and part of that is to arrive as well-equipped academically as everyone else. Perhaps Princeton is offering remedial math to the impoverished? If the only way to create an economically diverse student population is to admit the ill-prepared, something has to give.
Either Princeton isn’t serving its students as well as it should, or the promise of being a Princeton Man* upon graduation is no longer kept, meaning that there isn’t much point to going to Princeton if the education isn’t any better than Monmouth College.
*Princeton Man is how grads referred to themselves and their brethren in the old sexist elitist days.
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Within five years, students at Princeton will go all Evergreen State on the administration. You read it here first.
That shipped has sailed.
That probably explains the move towards “low-income foreigners”. Poor U.S. students tend to be bad across multiple academic subjects. Many foreign students are bad at English but otherwise are well prepared academically, at least by U.S. standards.
Sure glad you didn’t generalize in your characterization of all foreign students because that erase their lives experiences and would be wrong.
You are forgetting to apply Conversational Sub-Rule 3(B)(2)(c)(ii), which reads, in part:
“(ii)…notwithstanding the prior section, such generalizations and comparisons are acceptable and may be entered so long as (a) they are made in favor of a minority group; (b) are made in opposition to the interests of a Privileged Party as previously defined; or (c) if they contain any negative statements for a group other than a Privileged Party, can, taken as a whole, most obviously be interpreted against the interests of a Privileged Party.”
Since this implies that US students suck at math, this falls under section (c).
Johnny-come-latelys compared to Clovis Man and Kennewick Man.
But they dressed more appropriately.
What an enchanting world you imagine, where the Ivy League admissions process is not a black box by design, but is, in fact, a meritocracy, where only the most academically qualified students are accepted.
One does wonder, where is the outrage for legacies, athletes, children of politicians, and extremely wealthy donors?
Ah, the adorable naivete of the kid who couldn’t get into an Ivy. That’s why there’s Harvard, where anybody could float by on a gentlemen’s C.
As usual, ignore the substance and attack the author, whenever a comment doesn’t support your narrative. Serves me right, standing up for the poor underclass trying to appropriate the academic experience of you and your other wealthy friends.
PS- I didn’t try to get into any college. In fact, I didn’t even finish High School. Go ahead and make all your jokes about how much that explains.
As usual, you believe the substance of your comment so monumentally significant that it demands my response. I post your comment for all the world to see, so your brilliance is available to anyone who cares. I don’t have to, but I do, because I care deeply about you.
Instead of appreciation for my kindness toward you, you whine that I ignore the substance. If I felt your comment warranted a substantive response, I might give it one. If I don’t, then it’s just out there for all to admire. Isn’t that enough for you?
You are an unappreciative lout, even if you are adorable.
Standardized tests are castigated as racist, although no one has come up with a viable alternative for standardized tests because, well, that’s the point of standardization so that one can compare across demographics.
The unstated purpose of standardized tests is to come up with a system to narrow down a ton of applicants to a small number of admitted students. If the tests bore any relation to how people did at college, they might predict how students would do after getting their thick envelope. Then again, I came by this knowledge from studies performed at Rutgers, so take it with a grain of salt.
Just another way of saying the same thing, Rutgersboy.
If you understood that what you take for outrage is something more like puzzlement, it might make more sense to you. People who sell out their integrity for money – money from contributing alumni, money from college sports, money disbursed from public coffers by kindly politicians – are neither new nor mysterious. Someone who sells out their integrity in the name of doing the right thing, well, that’s a little bit more of a head-scratcher.
I hadn’t thought about it that way, thanks for the additional context. That said, I stand by my original comment, now attenuated: My perception of the OP remains: SHG’s head-scratcher reads as a criticism of a system which does not exist, predicated on the fantasy that Ivy League admissions are meritocratic.
I realize this argument also follows a characteristic vector of criticism for Libertarianism, so it’s unsurprising that SHG thinks they are without substance.
As luck would have it, I was the first kid from Oklahoma to attend Groton. (Although I subsequently shunned the Ivy’s in favor of Harvey Mudd – also a Groton first.)
I was smart enough but woefully unprepared academically. But remedial classes – including remedial French ! – mostly took care of that.
But there’s still a gap – stuff kids who have been in the system know that you don’t. Here’s an example. One day a very angry English literature teacher announced that he had just given F’s to over half the class on assignment on “Leda and the Swan”. It seems they had all plagiarized the Cliff Notes on the poem – specifically some text about how “violence breeds violence”.
I looked down at my own C – I had had no clue what the poem was about – and was appalled – not by the plagiarism but that nobody had ever told me there were these things called Cliff Notes.
How did you end up at Groton?
When I was 12 my parents decided that my educational needs were not being met by Oklahoma public schools. A boarding school was the only option since the nearest private schools in Oklahoma (yes, they exist) were >100 miles away. And if you have to live there, it really doesn’t matter where “there” is, so why try for something better than what Oklahoma had to offer?
My father picked up some sort of guide to boarding high schools somewhere – a thick spiral bound tome – and after much toil we came up with a list. I ended up applying to six schools: Andover, Choate, Exeter, Groton, Hotchkiss, and Lawrenceville. Our hope was I’d get into one of them. If I was lucky.
In hindsight it’s obvious we had no idea what we were doing: I would either be desirable to these sorts of schools or I wouldn’t, so there was really no point in apply to so many schools of the same type. (Of course my school guidance counselor was telling me all the while that there was no point in applying to any of them.)
Anyway, except for Groton, all of the schools acknowledged my application but nothing more. But it turned out there was a professor at Groton originally from Tulsa. He took an interest, and asked if we would meet him at the airport in Tulsa. Which we did, and we got along well. (I ended up taking American Studies from him a few years later – one of the best courses I’ve ever taken.)
So we set our hopes on Groton. And then we were shocked when I was accepted by all six schools. It seems applications from kids from rural Oklahoma were … unusual.
We then proceeded to make the selection process harder than it needed to be – we actually visited all of the schools. That winnowed it down to Choate and Groton. But Groton was the one that had showed an interest, and that became the deciding factor.
It’s difficult to convey how big a deal this was for us. My parents were really worried about my ability to adjust, to the point where they dragged me to some psychologist for testing before even starting the process.
If nothing else, I ended up with some interesting classmates:
(Ed. Note: Links deleted per rules.)
Except Linda Livingstone (Linda Parrack at the time) was actually an elementary school classmate in Perkins, Oklahoma, and had nothing to do with Groton.
And when asked if I went to school with anybody famous, I usually tell people no, but I did attend the same high school as Fred Gwynne.
That explains it. FYI, links are not allowed in comments.