Kool said:
aggie93 said:
Bonfire1996 said:
And there is a 0% chance he actually survived the rigors of a normal Harvard degree program. Dude was still a national political activist.
Harvard has a 97.8% Graduation rate. One of the things in the podcast they mention is how once you are in these schools it is virtually impossible to not graduate, you basically have to die or just quit. Otherwise you will get your degree. Apparently Cornell is thinking of dropping grades entirely and simply giving all students a 4.0.
This is absolutely true. Once you are in, you are in. It may be rigorous in general, but the grades will be inflated in order to not fail out those at the bottom. You might not get A's, but you also won't get D's or F's.
I went to one of the top two medical schools in the state of Texas. Several people failed out of the first year of medical school. None of those were Caucasian males. The school made those who failed repeat courses if it was only a class or two over the summer or they had them repeat the entire year if they failed too many classes. One of the students who failed INTO my class was a kid I went to high school with who was a year ahead of me. He went to Harvard undergraduate but failed his first year of medical school. He was also not a Caucasian male.
There is no way an employer or a graduate school will be able to tell how a student at one of these elite schools will be prepared for employment or further education that you are offering them. The "test optional" admissions process and pass/fail system (Part 1 of the Medical Boards is now Pass/Fail, and there is a push to make Part 2 Pass/Fail because residency programs use it to gauge academic abilities of students they plan to train to take care of people's health) are all designed to further "equity" in the academic environment.
Don't take my word for it though:
Medical Schools Bail on Academic Merit and Intellectual Rigor
"The dean of Stanford Medical School, Lloyd Minor, made a similar claim, announcing that instead of participating in the U.S. News rankings, the school would start issuing its own data "emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion."
A Jan. 24 statement from the dean of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, J. Larry Jameson, complained that the U.S. News rankings "measure the wrong things" and "encourage the acceptance of students based upon the highest grades and test scores." He then went on to say that "the Perelman School of Medicine aims to serve the needs of a changing world, including diverse communities and stakeholders.""
This stuff is really going to bite them in the ass. Essentially what many of these schools have done is take on the "a B is a C and a C is Failing" mentality. Now they are taking that up to the next level. The problem they are going to find is everything is based around living off a reputation built over decades and sometimes longer for academic excellence and selectivity. Once that veneer is broken (and it is already happening in many areas of business) it's going to be almost impossible to get back.
To be clear as well this is a strange situation for me. I don't really want my son to go to Stanford or comparable even if he gets in. I think he will be stronger and better prepared going to A&M or another large public school with intense competition and no coddling (he wants to do Biomedical Engineering so that means he will need to likely get no less than a 3.7 or so his Freshman year if he goes to A&M for instance). That degree has value because it is hard and competitive.
My issue is just as a Dad I also want to be supportive of his dreams. I don't want anyone to tell him he can't do something just because of his race or sex. When you go to those schools to visit it is hard not to be impressed, they just exude an aura of exclusivity and excellence even though that aura is more of a veneer the more I look at it. It just fills me with anger seeing him work so hard and knowing he is playing a game rigged against him. It also makes me completely unsympathetic to anyone talking about white/male supremacy or privilege when the reality is the opposite is true, especially for the next generation.
"The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Ronald Reagan