But a growing movement of nonprofit talent hunters and advisers is seeking to raise the ambitions of disadvantaged students and connect them with premier colleges, attacking a widespread problem researchers call “undermatching.” Some are helping eye-catching numbers of students land at colleges with low admission rates, including Georgetown University in Washington.
.. Most disadvantaged students with strong academic credentials “just don’t get why it is that they should be interested in applying to a selective college,” said Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford University economist. They take one look at the sticker price of private colleges, often exceeding $60,000 a year, and write them off. They don’t realize financial aid can put schools with small class sizes and high graduation rates within their reach. Instead, Hoxby said, these students focus on community colleges or others they see as accessible, inexpensive and convenient.
.. in a 2012 study that at least 25,000 low-income students a year, and probably 35,000, rank in the top 10 percent on SAT or ACT admission test scores and have at least an A-minus average. Most of them, Hoxby and Avery found, do not apply to any selective college — rendering them effectively invisible to admissions officers.
.. The Hoxby-Avery study rang alarms. It suggested selective colleges were overlooking legions of deserving students.
Understanding Student Mobbists
My gut reaction is that these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail.
.. I came of age in the 1980s. In that time, there was an assumption that though the roots of human society were deep in tribalism, over the past 3,000 years we have developed a system of liberal democracy that gloriously transcended it, that put reason, compassion and compromise atop violence and brute force.
.. sophisticated people in those days wanted to be seen, to use Scott Alexander’s term, as mistake theorists. Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent.
.. Mistake theorists also believe that most social problems are hard and that obvious perfect solutions are scarce. Debate is essential. You bring different perspectives and expertise to the table. You reduce passion and increase learning. Basically, we’re all physicians standing over a patient with a very complex condition and we’re trying to collectively figure out what to do.
.. The idea for decades was that racial justice would come when we reduced individual bigotry — the goal was colorblind individualism. As Nils Gilman argues in The American Interest, that ideal reached its apogee with the election of Barack Obama.
.. But Obama’s election also revealed the limits of that ideal. Now the crucial barriers to racial justice are seen not just as individual, but as structural economic structures, the incarceration crisis, the breakdown of family structure.
.. The second thing that happened was that reason, apparently, ceased to matter. Today’s young people were raised within an educational ideology that taught them that individual reason and emotion were less important than perspectivism — what perspective you bring as a white man, a black woman, a transgender Mexican, or whatever.
These students were raised with the idea that individual reason is downstream from group identity. Then along came the 2016 election to validate that point of view! If reason and deliberation are central to democracy, how on earth did Donald Trump get elected?
.. If you were born after 1990, it’s not totally shocking that you would see public life as an inevitable war of tribe versus tribe. It’s not surprising that you would become, in Scott Alexander’s terminology, a conflict theorist, not a mistake theorist.
In the conflict theorist worldview, most public problems are caused not by errors or complexity, but by malice and oppression. The powerful few keep everyone else down. The solutions to injustice and suffering are simple and obvious: Defeat the powerful. Passion is more important than reason because the oppressed masses have to mobilize to storm the barricades. Debate is counterproductive because it dilutes passion and sows confusion. Discordant ideas are not there to inform; they are there to provide cover for oppression.
.. So I’d just ask them to take two courses. The first would be in revolutions — the French, Russian, Chinese and all the other ones that unleashed the passion of the mob in an effort to overthrow oppression — and the way they ALL wound up waist deep in blood.
The second would be in constitutionalism. We dump on lawyers, but the law is beautiful, living proof that we can rise above tribalism and force — proof that the edifice of civilizations is a great gift, which our ancestors gave their lives for.
.. Our new generation was never taught how to communicate outside it’s own tribe. And failure to learn how to do that will not bode well for their future or ours... I have spent my entire adult life on college campuses, and I would say that most students do not subscribe to mobbism or tribalism. Alas, I would say apathy is far more common than protest, and that most students are unlikely to know that Christina Hoff Sommers is even speaking on campus, to have an opinion about her ideas, or to attend. I see few protests, flyers, or petitions on campus these days. Instead, I see harried students who work part-time, struggle to pay tuition, and are anxious about landing a decent job when they graduate.
Thank You for Asking
Young people are radically changing how we think about violence, consent
and gender. Antioch College is where much of the conversation started... When Alyssa Navarrette, a third-year student who is studying anthropology and art, came home for her first visit after starting college, she was taken by surprise when her mother hugged her.
.. “If you don’t want to be touched and your mom wants to hug you, you should be allowed to say no,” Ms. Navarrette said. “It’s about having autonomy over your own body.”
.. People introduce themselves with their preferred pronouns (“I’m Katie and I use ‘they/them/their’”).
.. In a lot of ways, Antioch College exists in a bubble. With a current enrollment of 135 students
.. it guaranteed free tuition to its first four enrolling classes.
.. He attended several sessions at orientation devoted to the policy, including one led by Planned Parenthood educators, another about the history of sexual relations.
.. “silence conveys a lack of affirmative consent.”
.. the school and the women who created the policy were portrayed as endemic of a politically correct culture run amok that was trying to desexualize sex.
.. it became the subject of a lot of media attention, including a blistering skit on “Saturday Night Live” in 1993 starring Shannen Doherty (“major in Victimization Studies”)
.. programming has included screenings of ethical pornography
.. The college’s administration sees this all as a big selling point for the school.
.. “There’s an idea that it has to be very unromantic and very contractual and that’s not true at all,”
.. “You can learn to ask in ways that are sexy and romantic and say, ‘Is this O.K.? You want to continue to do this? Can I touch you there?’ These are all thing that can enhance the experience instead of killing the buzz.”
.. “The challenge was, ‘How do you get consent in a situation where everyone is so nervous?’”
.. She thought the policy was too based in political correctness. “I was an eye roller,” she said.
.. “I have very little patience with the notion that something like this isn’t needed,”
.. “I’m also looking for it to help people get justice or get acknowledgments at least for microaggression,”
Conservatives battle the left, without a clear foe
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference began 472 days after the 2016 presidential election. Its first day ended with jeers for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
.. During Barack Obama’s presidency, speakers — Trump included — warned that Democrats would “fundamentally transform” America and saddle children with unpayable debt.
.. portrayed a conservative movement that was winning the present and the future, in the position, finally, to smash the left.
.. the CPAC conservatives lacked a clear, new adversary.
.. Donald F. McGahn used his remarks to spell out how Trump’s judicial appointments — a ready applause line — were part of a long-term strategy to dismantle the bureaucratic state.
.. the young crowd was promised resources for campus organizing — and lawsuits, when necessary — to unravel decades of left-wing dominance at universities.
.. “The future of western civilization will be won on college campuses,”
.. The conference’s exhibit hall contained little about potential Democratic presidential candidates; the only one that stood out was a stand-up of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), made grotesque and outfitted with a Native American headdress.
.. Onstage, the Democratic Party was alternately mocked as pathetic or described as an increasingly radical menace
.. Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser who now works with the main presidential super PAC, said that Trump would face any impeachment push from Democrats by “outflanking them every day on Twitter multiple times.”