In the next month, Kwasi Enin must make a tough decision: Which of the eight Ivy League universities should he attend this fall?
A first-generation American from Shirley, N.Y., the 17-year-old violist and aspiring physician applied to all eight, from Brown to Yale.
The responses began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, he found he'd been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight on Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin.
The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation's most elite.
"My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight," says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she's never seen anything like this. "It's a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary."
For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA's top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%.
But Enin has "a lot of things in his favor," says college admissions expert Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a New York-based consulting firm.
For one thing, he's a young man. "Colleges are looking for great boys," Cohen says. Application pools these days skew heavily toward girls: The U.S. Department of Education estimates that females comprised 57% of college students in degree-granting institutions last year. Colleges — especially elite ones — are struggling to keep male/female ratios even, so admitting academically gifted young men like Enin gives them an advantage.
He ranks No. 11 in a class of 647 at William Floyd, a large public school on Long Island's south shore. That puts him in the top 2% of his class. His SAT score, at 2,250 out of 2,400 points, puts him in the 99th percentile for African-American students.
A first-generation American from Shirley, N.Y., the 17-year-old violist and aspiring physician applied to all eight, from Brown to Yale.
The responses began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, he found he'd been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight on Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin.
The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation's most elite.
"My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight," says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she's never seen anything like this. "It's a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary."
For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA's top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%.
But Enin has "a lot of things in his favor," says college admissions expert Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a New York-based consulting firm.
For one thing, he's a young man. "Colleges are looking for great boys," Cohen says. Application pools these days skew heavily toward girls: The U.S. Department of Education estimates that females comprised 57% of college students in degree-granting institutions last year. Colleges — especially elite ones — are struggling to keep male/female ratios even, so admitting academically gifted young men like Enin gives them an advantage.
He ranks No. 11 in a class of 647 at William Floyd, a large public school on Long Island's south shore. That puts him in the top 2% of his class. His SAT score, at 2,250 out of 2,400 points, puts him in the 99th percentile for African-American students.
Look, this young man seems like a fine kid, and he's certainly deserving of going to a fine college. But, let's face it... he might not get into any of these Ivy League colleges if he were white or Asian. And everyone who has spent five minutes on the College Confidential website reading posts from kids aspiring to go to elite colleges knows this. A 2250 SAT is very good, and would put him at the 98th or 99th percentile for all students (not sure why they note "African-Americans"... his score is terrific for anyone) but it's right at the median for Princeton et al. In other words, only the very very very elite kids are getting into those schools. So, were he white or Asian, he would be looking at an unbelievably uphill climb against a lot of kids who have the same scores or better... essentially a crapshoot. Maybe he wins and gets into one of the Ivies, maybe even two. But all eight? Come on. Who's kidding whom?
Which is what makes giving him obvious affirmative action admission so appalling and racist. Read more closely... he is African-American the same way a white Afrikaner from South Africa who emigrates here is African-American. Meaning: his family recently immigrated from that continent. But he is not "African-American" in the way that most of us think, and in the only way that makes giving affirmative action consideration make any kind of moral sense... he is not a descendant of slaves or grandparents who suffered under Jim Crow. There is no basis for America to be "correcting" past discrimination by giving him a leg up, not when he is getting that leg up by discriminating against Asian children, also recent immigrants, who are essentially kept out of the Ivies (and Berkeley and UCLA and USC etc.) by unwritten quotas. Or, for that matter, by discriminating against white kids who themselves bear no blame for any past discrimination.
(By the way, it's also appalling that no one at USA Today apparently had the balls to ask the obvious question... do you think the fact that you essentially flopped "21" eight straight times has something to do with affirmative action? Does it comport with a free and vibrant press for a national newspaper to self-censor quite so obviously?)
I have a friend who is an extraordinarily decent person whose son is a terrific kid who had higher SATs and higher class ranking at a competitive Jesuit high school. He didn't get a sniff of the Ivy League. The Regular Son has a higher SAT and we aren't even bothering. (Frankly, I don't think the marginal value of the education is worth the price, but that's a different story.) So tell me how exactly is any of that fair?
Nice looking kid. I wish him well. I'm certain he'd do great things wherever he goes. But this stuff has to stop. It will ruin us as a country.
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