this entire crusade against diversity in hiring and admissions is based on the supposition that all white men are necessarily more qualified than any nonwhite person or woman who might be considered for the job. like, this lawsuit more or less states that outright.
for these people the mere presence of any nonwhite person, and especially any black person, in a desired and prestigious position is on its face evidence of anti-white discrimination and unfair preferences.
it’s why you have people still blaming affirmative action for why their kids couldn’t get into harvard et al. it’s not legacies or the fact that these places are hyper-selective. it’s that there is *a* black person who took *your* spot.
People really underestimate how hyperselective they are as well. They see 3% acceptance rate and don't realize how good the pool is. That your kid is valedictorian and has a 1450 SAT might not even put them in the top half of applicants to a place like Harvard (without a legacy connection).
right, these schools are so selective that if the single best student at every high school in the US applied to say, Harvard, the vast majority would be rejected.
Harvard gets applications from over 5000 schools per year. SCHOOLS.
There are roughly 1500 freshman slots.
That's at least 3500 valedictorians getting rejected right there. And Harvard doesn't want a freshman class full of valedictorians.
In the 80s at Princeton we were rejecting valedictorian all the time--it was much less selective then. It was CERTAIN schools that were given preference. (Many legacies also rejected)
This was an extremely popular explanation with the kids at my church in high school. I always replied, “it’s funny, all my rejection notices just said I didn’t get in, they didn’t include a picture of the kid who took my spot.”
this is like Charlie Kirk convinced that affirmative action is evil because a "Minority" took his position at West Point, which takes like nine people from every district.
When I was applying to schools everyone knew the unspoken rule was each ivy would admit max one person from the district, which for us was 9 schools across 5 cities
Based on some very cursory searching, there are less than 2 spots in Harvard each year for every 100 high schools in the country. There are about 115k high schools.
The "qualified" excuse hasn't changed any since I first entered the work force in the early 1960s. "We aren't going to lower our standards": this from a manager at West Publishing in 1990, where the coding standards had clearly not been evaluated in a decade or more.
