Sounds good. Has a nice ring to it. If you take a group shot of an entering class, say at an elite LAC (Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore) or private (the Ivies, Duke), from above standing on a ladder, the group might just look like a crayola box.
Well, a group of Asian-Americans are saying "Fuck you, Harvard."
I wrote a little about (ethnic) diversity here when it came to college admissions.
Private universities can select their students as they wish, being a non-public institution, and there are varieties of ways to build a narrative of non-quotas being set (I do have a feeling that there is a quota), so I don't see Harvard being sued based on this accusation. Plus, it's Harvard. It has way too much clout and pull to lose if the case is approved to be analyzed and judged. It's been known, at least to me, that the Ivies and its like don't admit the very best students. Many of the admission committees want a "balanced class." That means science wiz of every color, poets and novelists, kid actors, star violinist etc. Athletes are the easy ones to blame for gaining admittance purely on athletic ability, and that's not contested since it's an accepted belief (and true). It's where the published poet and kid actor can a more well-rounded applicant, even with test scores in the accepted medium range, be rejected.
In the case of actors
Let's face it, I highly doubt Shia Labeof was accepted into Yale for mostly because of his demanding high school classes, high test score and essay. Same goes for all the actors who were accepted into elite universities or colleges that had an acting career well before they turned 17.
The man was in a couple of well-known films before he turned 18 and was on a hit tv-series where he won a Day-Time Emmy. Of course, it's easy to say that acting is his specialty, but how many kids enter acting and have made a career out of it? There's less kids wanting an acting career than what is popularly believed. Those that are aware of how auditions and casting is done, for children, know that unless you develop oddly during puberty you're still going to get parts. The better the agent the better the chances. Rarely do cast directors cast an unknown -- they want a person with a reel and a history. An actors career depends on others opinion (mainly critics) and their handlers, which consist of a couple of agents, a manager and publicist. Film & tv acting is such a niche "extra-curricular" activity that it's rather unfair to give such a group a "leg-up" in college admissions. I mean, look at the admittance of the following -
Natalie Portman - Harvard
AnnaSophia Robb - Stanford
India Ennenga - Brown University
Emma Watson - Brown University (had a semester at Oxford)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt - Columbia University
James Franco - NYU (masters), Yale (Phd in Film Studies)
I bet if Daniel Radcliffe applied to all of the Ivies, Stanford, NYU and USC he'd be accepted in at least two Ivies and all of the rest. Why? Because he's Harry Potter. Heck, when it comes to athletes, one athlete even confessed that his coaches were even making phone calls to admissions in order to smooth out the process of applying and getting in. This was at Cornell. If Cornell, an institution not known for its sports, gets the hustle from the coaches there's no doubt that an actors agent commits the same phone calls on their clients behalf. Oh, you were in that one HBO tv-series as a main character alongside that one famous actor? Decent essay, middle of the road test score ... Accepted! Where? Princeton University!
I heard it once said that it's much harder to get into an Ivy than it is to get out (flunk out). I believe this is true.
No comments :
Post a Comment