After the Supreme Court declared an end to the use of race criteria in college admissions, many administrators pledged to find a way around the decision. Schools are using essay prompts to flag race while rejecting the use of standardized testing to boost diversity in admissions. In the meantime, these schools are rejecting students with stellar credentials. The latest is Zach Yadegari, whose rejection by top schools offers an insight into the skewed criteria still in use for admissions.
Some schools, like the University of California system, previously abandoned standardized testing to boost minority admissions and make challenges more difficult. A few schools have since reversed the decision to restore academic standards. However, schools appear to be using race criteria in more subtle ways, like prompting applicants to discuss how they overcame such discrimination or bias in their essays.
An example of the curious standards is evident in the rejection of Yadegari by 15 of the 18 colleges.
Yadegari had stellar grades, with a score of 34 out of 36 on the ACT and a 4.0 GPA. More importantly, He built an app, Cal AI, which drew over five million downloads and $2 million in monthly revenue, according to TechCrunch. He went on to sell the app for $30 million.
That would seem a tad more impressive than the usual summer internship with Greenpeace or a donation drive found in applications.
However, he was rejected by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale, WashU, Columbia UPenn, Princeton, Duke, USC, UVA, NYU, Vanderbilt, Brown, and Cornell.
Notably, Harvard has fought the hardest to preserve racial criteria for admissions. It recently had to start a remedial high school-level math course for its students.
As discussed on sites like College Fix, he is not unique. Take Stanley Zhong, a 19-year-old with a 4.42 GPA and nearly perfect SAT score. He was also rejected from 16 of the 18 colleges. He and his father are now suing the University of California system for discrimination against Asian-American applicants.
The Trump Administration could assist these students by forcing schools to make greater disclosures. Harvard and other universities have spent millions in litigation resisting such disclosures.
These administrators have shown that they will not yield on the use of race. In California, voters repeatedly voted against using race, and a task force supported using standardized testing in admissions. Yet, University of California President Janet Napolitano still eliminated the use of standardized tests, and, as shown by Zhong, top students are still inexplicably rejected.
If these cases reflect the current criteria, the public and donors must do more to return our universities and colleges to a greater emphasis on scholastic credentials. This culture will not change without a substantial change in the administrators and staff at these schools.
The spirit of America has changed since my youth where adversity was addressed by pulling up your boots and not wallowing how you’ve been wronged. God help the next generation in their effort to pull their head out of their hinny!
NO ONE has been denied education since printing became affordable, and in more resent times the Public Library [thanks to Carnegie] and even more resent the Internet, a Sheep Skin does not equal education.
Eric Hoffer: “Far more critical than what we know or what we don’t know is what we don’t want to know.”
We’d never be able to storm the beaches of Normandy today.
#. That was God’s work so I suppose you’re right.
#. Harvard can become an all black univ. Why not.
Turley has a subtle way of putting out misinformation–take the issue of remedial math courses offered at Harvard. According to Turley’s earlier piece on the topic, all Harvard did was “offer” the course–it did not REQUIRE the course and it did not say how many of its students may or may not have needed or could benefit from this help. Harvard did offer an explanation–for some of its students, and they are not alone, the pandemic that Trump let get out of control, requring schools to close to in-person learning, put them behind. And, not all majors involve math proficiency–the remedial course was most likely offered to those who DO have to have taken a certain number of high school level math courses–and for those kinds of prerequisites, we’re not talking about Algebra I, either–this would be advanced math, calculus, advanced physics, and the like–to get into programs that require this background. Turley knows that putting out the intellectually dishonest message that Harvard is deliberately letting in people who need remedial math is intended to pander to non college educated whites–the MAGA cult. Just look at the comments on this blog by the MAGAts–one of the hooks used by MAGA is to bring MAGATs into the cult is that they are smarter than college-educated people, especially educated women and minorities–so they shouldn’t listen to the CDC, FDA or mainstream media–listen to MAGA media instead. Don’t wear a mask–take Hydroxychloroquine instead. Don’t vaccinate your kid against measles–let him get herd immunity. Tell that to the parents who have lost their children to a disease we believed had been eradicated. Dumbaxx RFK, Jr. was recommending that kids who contract measles should take a steroid to reduce the inflammation of the skin lesions–until a doctor pointed out that cortisone early in a viral infection suppresses the immune system and makes you sicker. He also recommended taking Vitamin A and an antibiotic. People were overdosing their children on Vit. A and antibiotics are ineffective against a virus. RFK, Jr.’s response to the issue of steroids suppressing the immune system: “I didn’t know that”. And, this fool is running our national health system and going on air giving out medical advice?
And, there were obvious multiple reasons why that stuck up little snot didn’t get into Harvard and the other elite schools–his attitude is probably the biggest reason–he starts out claiming he’ll “never go to college” and brags about how much money he has made. Harvard was looking for an essay describing a journey of personal growth and all they got was an arrogant display of braggadocio about how much money this little turd already made. He isn’t Harvard material. Turley does, or should know, that eduation is more than just making a lot of money–but that’s not the message he’s paid to convey.
You seriously need help.
I used to scoff at the suggestion that Gigi and George were one and the same. For me there are three possibilities that could be true. ONe, Gigi and george are both equally ignorant and venomous, making them appear to be the same one. Two, they copycat each other and others they are impressed with, making them sound alike. Three, they ARE the same one. Here’s some simple math for them.
one plus one plus one equals ZERO in their caSe.
George: Low IQ, no common sense, Stupid
Gig: Crazy, reality escapes her, repetitive
Dennis: A concrete mind, competes with a brick
Wow, you are so damaged in all manner of ways and have my sympathy along with enmity.
I wonder how every Kennedy family member that applied, was accepted by Harvard? Their essays must have been phenomenal.
Are you referring to the Kennedy E$$AY$ of dirty rum runner money having been laundered through dirty insider trading?
SEC rules were written agaisnt the very “cheating” practices of Joe Kennedy et al.
Camelot indeed!
____________________
AI Overview
Yes, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was involved in practices that, by modern standards, would be considered insider trading and market manipulation.
Elaboration:
Early Stock Market Practices:
In the 1920s, Kennedy was active in the unregulated stock market, using techniques like “wash sales” to create the illusion of activity and “short selling” to profit from falling stock prices. These practices, while legal at the time, are now considered manipulative.
Insider Trading:
Kennedy also engaged in activities that could be construed as insider trading. For example, he was known for buying stock options and manipulating their price, which would be illegal under modern insider trading laws.
Yeah, Joe Kennedy was a crook, and did engage in insider trading, which is how he got wealthy. In fact, FDR appointed him the first Securities Commissioner–saying, and I am paraphrasing: “It takes a crook to know all the angles on how to catch crooks”. Joe Kennedy took it as a compliment. He never tried to pretend he was anything else.
“When Prohibition came into effect, rumors that Kennedy was a rum runner spread wildly. Allegations came from everywhere. The gangsters Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky both accused Kennedy of being a bootlegger. Another rumor put him as Sam Giancana’s partner in crime. And a piano tuner working for Al Capone claimed that he saw Kennedy sit down with whiskey baron to talk business.”
“None of these stories have ever been proven, but we do know some things for sure. In 1922, Kennedy kept the liquor flowing at his Harvard 20th reunion. And, when Prohibition ended, Kennedy already had a whole stock of liquor ready to sell across the country.
“Kennedy claims all this liquor was acquired legally, and it’s quite possible that the whole rumor was just a way to run his name through the mud. One way or another, though, Kennedy was a businessman. Whether he started selling liquor during Prohibition or after, he saw a business opportunity and capitalized on it.”
– Listverse, by Mark Oliver, fact checked by Jamie Frater
Joe Kennedy was ambassador to England. Supposedly he worked a deal to get royalties on all the Scotch imported into the US.
Sort of like the Ivanka getting into Wharton and Tiffany getting into Georgetown Law and then not even bothering to take the bar exam or even get a law-related job. Fellow students have written that Barron is struggling at NYU, but the Trumps will never allow that story to be published. Tiffany took up a spot that someone with lesser connections might have gotten who could have made a wonderful judge, senator, or other leader. And, for schools like Harvard, there have always been legacy admissions. There has been a push lately to eliminate that, plus admission advantages for elite high school football and basketball players And, BTW, no one who has written about JFK ever said he was any kind of brilliant student or scholar–his grades were, at best, mediocre. The same was true for his son, who flunked the NY bar multiple times. But, scholarship wasn’t JFK’s greatest strength.
Kennedy money is dirty money, and Gigenius is debilitated into incoherence by all-consuming covetousness, envy, and jealousy.
It’s eating it/she/her/they alive!
Jonathan: At the age of 18 Zach Yadegari is certainly a successful start-up tech pro. But if you read his college admissions essay you can see why he was rejected by Harvard, et al. His essay is definitely “weak”.
The college admissions process requires the applicant to respond to the statement “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others”. In response Zach starts his essay with this first sentence: “‘I will never go to college’, I texted my mom on January 14, 2019–and for years, I believed this with every fiber of my being”. Starting an essay with that statement would probably be a turn-off for any college admissions officer. It’s like applying for a job and you tell your prospective employer “I really don’t want this job”.
Yadegari spends a lot of time in essay discussing his business accomplishments at an early age but he never expresses any coherent reason how those successes “sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others”. Another probable reason why his applications were rejected.
In a recent YouTube video Yadegari responds to all the criticism of his essay. He says it doesn’t bother him but you can sense it does. He says he will probably attend the University of Miami where he has been accepted. Why there? He says Miami is “paradise”, the “girls” and “I’m really going to college just for the social life”. He even says “I may drop out”. Based on this why would any elite university want Yadegari as a student?
Yadegari comes across as an individualistic arrogant young man. In the video he says “I’m not a materialistic person” but then he shows off his $7,000 Cartier watch. He says “It makes me feel cool”. Then he proudly shows the back of his T-shirt with a photo of Elon Musk. This young man apparently sees himself as a clown of the young Elon Musk–self-centered and full of ambition. U of M is probably where Yadegari belongs. But not at Harvard or Yale!
A score of 34 on the ACT roughly correlates to a score of 1500 on the SAT. SAT scores correlate highly with IQ scores, so based on his test scores, Yadegari would have an IQ of about 148. This is three standard deviations above the mean, which would put him in the 99.9th percentile.
He’s way smarter than you could ever dream of being, Dennis.
#. SATs are really acquired knowledge. Good schools produce high SATs. Enriched environments produce high SATs. Innate intelligence helps.
Yadegari should go to Miami and the after his sophomore year leave. And then start the business of his dreams and become a multi billionaire like Bill Gates. Screw the Ivy League.
That is exactly his intent.
The admissions people recognized this.
That is why he was rejected.
It would have wasted a placement.
In YouTube videos he has explicitly stated that he would probably drop out.
On socials media he has explicitly stated that the only reason he wants to go to college is for the social life.
He would have deprived another student of a real college education.
And he’ll still be an arrogant axxhole— a rich one who is still not an educated person.
# . Watched some yadegari u tube. Ordinary kid. His contribution is showing how easy it is to make money in the USA with so much opportunity.
College administrators essentially concede K-12 public school education is substandard, and to accommodate those graduates, who primarily compose racial minorities, the colleges a priori lower standards or create admission criteria that are subjective, manipulative and goal-oriented to achieve racial diversity in the freshman class
OT
“Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen, has lived in Maryland for almost 15 years. While he initially entered the U.S. without being granted legal status, a federal judge in 2019 granted him protection from being deported, because of concerns for his safety if he were to return to El Salvador.”
– NPR
_________
Abrego Garcia is a criminal illegal alien invader who must have been deported 15 years ago. A “judge” rewarded Abrego Garcia for committing crimes. A “judge” stopped that deportation because the judge felt sorry for this abject international criminal. I’m an American citizen, and I have had my constitutional rights and freedoms violated for decades and decades by a rogue juristocracy. When will a judge protect me and implement my protection from foreign invasion and the takeover of my country? In fact, the judge is not protecting Abrego Garcia; the judge is “facilitating” the invasion and conquest of America by foreigners.
Mao Zedong would have been accepted!!
The article does not present any evidence that the rejection of this applicant by 15 (!) out of 18 selective colleges was related in any way to “race criteria.” I understand and agree with the argument that colleges should maintain colorblind admission standards. But all of the named colleges admit hundreds of white students every year; that almost all rejected him suggests that something in his application turned them off.
It’s common knowledge that rejection rates for white and asian male applicants are far higher than all other demographic groups. This means that current policies have a statistical adverse impact that shows discrimination by race and sex. It’s also common knowledge that all of these institutions have admitted that they were looking for ways to grant preference to minority races. That’s called an admission against interest, so it’s admissible evidence even though it’s hearsay. Your arguments fail.
Meanwhile, a news article last week reported that a black high school senior, Mantavious “LeBron” Presley, was admitted to 61 colleges and received $1.1 million in scholarships. It would be interesting to compare his academic record with those of Zach Yadegari and Stanley Zhong.
And a Hispanic student named Angel Ortiz has so far been admitted to 7 of the 8 Ivy League colleges to which he applied. He attends Arts High School in New Jersey and plans to study political science. His parents migrated from Mexico and own two pizzerias.
These schools get 20x the number of applicants than openings. A $30 M app is impressive but not from an academic perspective. And he only had nearly perfect test scores. We don’t know about the rest of their application. Their essay could have been bad, and of their only extracurricular activity was that app than ya they will get rejected. This post is trying to find discrimination where none exists.
It’s a little more impressive than running a bake sale.
Interesting Franke. You make no mention of the other Asian student who had a GDP of 4.25 and was also discriminated against. Thank you for your pointless point.
Maybe their essays should have bolstered the idea Guam will capsize and tip over, then they could have been accepted?
As usual Turley is stoking rage among you dimwit MAGA morons with stories that don’t tell the full picture.
Yadegari posted his essay online in his X account. It starts with this sentence:
“I will never go to college”, I texted my mom on January 14, 2019”
The essay then continues in a grandiose and narcissistic description of his achievements in building a business based on different apps. One critic described the essay as self-fellatio. He describes how venture capitalists, who had been funding his business, encouraged him to forget about college. This has become a common theme in the tech world. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel also run funding programs that encourage high school kids to forget about college. People like Musk, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg are all college dropouts who built tech empires.
He ends the essay with a few sentences about how his life is not really complete and he thinks that it might be a good idea to go to college after all. He takes the attitude that college is just an addendum to his life so far.
Someone on his X account asked him what is his real motivation for going to college.
This is his answer:
“My motivation for going to college is just to have a social life.”
Any college admissions officer reading this nonsense would immediately reject him for obvious reasons. His attitude that he doesn’t really need college, but he wants to try it anyway is a big red flag. He would obviously be a student who was highly likely to drop out, just like Musk, Gates and Zuckerberg. This would mean that a place in a top school would be wasted, and some other much more deserving student would have been denied an opportunity.
By the way, Turley’s claim that he sold his app for $30 million is false. He did not sell it. He claims that the app generates revenue of $30 million a year. There is no way to verify this.
The app has also been widely criticized by other tech experts. Some have labelled it a scam. The app supposedly calculates the caloric content of food by simply taking a picture of it. However, it is highly inaccurate for obvious reasons. The app has a feature called “fix results” that is used when it initially gives false information, which is almost every time. The user then has to manually input a lot of information about the food, or scan the label of the food to “correct” the data. Experts point out that this can be achieved without taking a picture in the first place, and without any kind of app at all.
It is a scam.
Once again Anonymous makes a statement without sighting her source. Maybe she’s correct in her assertions but due to her constant refusal to sight a source to confirm her ramblings we must continue to come to the conclusion that she’s just full of it. Naysayers come cheap.
I told you he posted his essay on X (Twitter)
I told you that he commented on X that he just wanted to go to college for the social life.
Look it up for yourself.
I wonder why it is you have such a strong need to twist this story into a brilliant student just wants to have fun joke? Brilliant people can enjoy a social life AND do exceptionally well at university.
#. Social life is important. He wants a wife. I guess he could advertise or start an ivy dating app…
A social life! Isn’ t that what the university of Miami is for. Independent Bob.
Anonymous – what do you think about other motivations in going to college: playing athletics (a leading motivation for boys); or finding a spouse (a leading motivation for girls)?
It’s very simple. The cure for racism in the past is racism today. Instead of teaching black students to perform at a higher level in High School they just give them a free pass and then try to teach them ninth grade math after they enter college. A new course in high school should be titled grit 101.
# The idea of remedial math won’t work. Just not physicists nor logical. Base education in illogic and you’ll have a winner.
That’s not realistic. It has been shown over and over and over again, at the elementary, high school and college levels, that on average, Asian students will do better academically than whites; whites will do better than Hispanics, and Hispanics (even the children of immigrants), will perform better than blacks. There is a direct correlation between genetic I.Q. and academic performance. The literature also shows that black children raised by educated whites will show some improvement in their early years, but lose that advantage by high school. The only exception in the literature is students in Finland, a very white country, who nonetheless score in the top three rankings of international math testing, along with Japan and China. But that’s not really an exception, because the Finns carry an Asian gene, passed along from when their ancestors migrated from Asia millennia ago and ended up living by Scandinavians, although genetically and linguistically they’re not Scandinavian. So bottom line, people don’t want to acknowledge it, but there are clearly racial differences in intelligence that cannot be overcome by “grit.” Which isn’t to say that blacks can’t go to the Ivy League and graduate with a degree in a “soft” major like Sociology or African-American studies, but realistically, they’re not going to graduate from MIT or Berkeley with a degree in physics or engineering. So the societal question is whether we benefit from excluding an excellent white or Asian student in favor of a mediocre black or Hispanic one?
Jonathon’s report jumped this writer to Winston Churchill’s writing that after Americans have tried everything else, they will finally do the right thing. Then came the thought of Nicholas Copernicus and Galleleo. Meritocracy does not orbit higher education. Higher education orbits around meritocracy.
# . Merit is nothing absent good will. There’s a meritocracy now and it’s hidden. People with that kind of merit really don’t care what schools you create and attend. Make them violent, crass with drugs and porn.
Quit trying to tell colleges how to operate
And take away government funding
Not to ones misbehaving
To all colleges
Government needs to get out of the business of subsidizing our values
OK, let’s give up on basic science, and help China take over the world. Pull the blanket up a little tighter.
Communism is at the bottom of hell you know…
Nobody is above the law, except far left universities, blue states, illegal alien gangs and Weekend at Bernie’s Presidents.
Yes, and remove donations from foreign entities more importantly. Quotas on student visas or shop in the 3rd world for students. Give them opportunity and they’ll fit into the 3rd world USA.
start new schools and those die out into museums.
Defund just the ones illegally discriminating on the basis of race. Since it’s against the law, and as we’ve been told nobody is above the law, even leftists who run universities. The federal government should cut all of their funding, including research grants and student loans. If these folks want to be outlaw pseudo Confederates ignoring federal law, let them do it without federal funding of any kind.
End their taxpayer exemption. I think that can be selectively accomplished.
So, there is no longer an form section to leave a custom id & email for a comment without actually having an account? That will certainly improve the tone of discussion here (sarcasm off) I have started to sign up for a WP account more than once previously, and several requirements that contradict what I have in place for security of privacy on-line have stopped me. Oh, well. I have questioned the actual value of this comment section to myself on many occasions. How many times has any regular here actually changed his or her mind about an issue because a cogent, contrary argument was presented? I’m thinking that 10 fingers are more than enough to count those occasions.
Anonymous, maybe you should point one of those ten fingers at yourself. When have you ever changed your mind in reaction to a comment. Please elucidate further on your change of mind so that we may more aptly judge the veracity of your comment. We await your enlightenment but we realize that holding our breath waiting for your response would undoubtedly be fatal.
Occasionally some regulars post smart stuff.
For once I agree with Jonathan Turley!
Use standardized tests.
# there are IQ tests. Give those. Ted kocynski sp would do really well in math.
It is way past time to stop ALL taxpayer funding of colleges and universities. That makes institutions such as this one and their idiot supporters (including anyone foolish enough to pay tuition to such a school) the only entities to bear the negative impact of such ludicrous policies, and of all of the ridiculous woke beliefs, including DEI. The free market nearly always has the correct answer.
Yes, ou repair an institution by destroying it. The baby goes out with the bathwater.
China is very industrious, ambitious and hates our guts. Who cares about the future?
With 30 Million, He proved that he doesn’t need the education. He has mastered the Power Law curve of VC’s and can pocket Big Bucks with the latest (A.I.) investment Instruments. So hey, He free to roam around the World, of which there a many better Universities to choose from and attend.
If he wants so bad to go to these Universities, he’d have a better chance at applying for position on their Endowment Board (Investments), once obtained, and slip in a few classes while there.
Some prefer our tech leaders to be well-rounded, with knowledge of history (how self-correcting systems work) and a dash of humility. I mean, since they want to redesign the world and society. What could go wrong?
Anonymous, in other words what you’re saying is that he should just buy his way in if he wants to get an education at an Ivy league college. Is that what your daddy did for you? Snobbery is alive and well.
You’re equating success and money, value and money.
Why do we fund universities at all?
If funding to “higher education” is cut off, there will be these benefits: 1) the cost of attendance at these schools will plummet; 2) useless administrators will be fired; 3) admission standards will be clearer and more rigorously applied; 4) the quality of high school education will increase (now high schools look to colleges to “fix” the deficiencies in their students); and 5) the universities will move away from peddling political propaganda to teaching socially useful subjects (people who pay for their own schooling will insist on a return for their dollars).
Consider: this country was founded by people who, for the most part, had no college education; they were profoundly wise. Then the economic growth of the country was led by people with grade school education; Now, the country is being ruined by leaders who are heavily credentialed by the education industry/racket, but without any real skills or common sense. This must mean something.