Signaled Virtue

When I was 18 years old, a senior in high school, I applied to a smattering of colleges which I thought would for-sure accept me (“safety schools”) and one college I wasn't sure about (“target school”). I was accepted to the target school, much to my delight. I wasn't a phenomenal student – I was never able to break into the upper echelon of the academically gifted, and my extracurriculars were never quite as cool as some other folks – but I was happy with what I had done and confident that it reflected my best work. So to be admitted to my target school, which was an esteemed university ranked #10 in the undergraduate major I sought, felt like a resounding acknowledgment that all my hard work paid off.

Should have felt. My enthusiasm was tempered. I wasn't sure by what then, and I attributed it falsely to the relative peace I felt after having “made it”. But many years later when my thoughts returned to that school, and how eager I had been to leave permanently after a few short months, I realized that the reason I didn't feel like I had earned my place at the school because I hadn't, and it was expected of me that I wouldn't.

My school guidance counselor heard all my stories, took a look at my so-so high school resume, and made recommendations for me about what I could do to get into my target school. Chief among them, that I make ample use of my intellectual disability in the essay portion. From the way they spoke about it you'd think I wouldn't even need to submit my grades. My SAT was nice, sure, but the real kicker was how severely autistic I was growing up. The bullying I went through. The grueling therapy sessions with dozens of trained professionals. My triumphant entry into the world of normal people with normal brains (taking great pain to mention how I'm still not normal!). And how my journey in life would be just right if it could continue it at [INSERT UNIVERSITY HERE]'s doorstep. So the essay was repeated ad nauseum, two or three details changed to fit the particular university better.

Of course I was accepted to my target school. So what if I was outside their “typically” accepted SAT range for the program I applied to? Only later did I realize that meant they didn't care about my score (because, of course, if they had cared, they would have denied me). I had done such a good job of suckering those damn college essay readers into thinking they and their school would be my next savior to lift me out of disabled oppression that my substandard SAT score didn't matter (if anything my score would be further proof of my oppression!). They'd hate to use those terms in public but their subconscious minds are probably even cruder than me.

Essentially, my high school counselor had one job: make my mediocre (from the university's perspective) grades and SAT score irrelevant by having me cynically exploit my own disability for maximum personal gain. I was meant to weaponize my own identity in order to gain the most access to the greatest number of places. I was meant to collapse my identity into the singularity of my adverse experiences. I was meant to invalidate my own victories against disability and adversity, to purposefully de-emphasize the progress I made and hyper-exaggerate the challenges I still faced, in order to beg. I was meant to beg for admission, to degrade myself by essentially admitting that I didn't deserve admission and that I was unworthy. And from this, evoke the God Complex of the admissions officer and get in anyway. The fact that this was in diametric opposition to the idea that institutions of higher education were meant to reward academic achievement never consciously crossed my mind. But my self-exploitation and undeserved admission did have a substantial toll on my self-image, and I was never happy at that school.

By the time my first semester was halfway over, my conviction to attend this institution had entirely reversed itself. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. My classes felt like torture, my exams further confirmation of my unbelonging. So I applied to a local school, and provided only my grades from high school and college. I was admitted 3 days later. The euphoria I felt in that moment stood in stark contrast to the unease I felt being admitted to my “target” school. When I saw that all I needed to apply was my grades, the word that came to my mind was freedom. I was liberated from the expectation that I would portray myself as a broken man who needed so desperately to be saved. At this local school, I knew, I would be able to exist freely, on the warrant of my own efforts. I would not be defined by factors which I had no control over. I started attending the local school the next semester. It was the best time of my life thus far.

The name for the process I described – self-exploitation and self-degradation to portray yourself to college admissions as an abandoned puppy needing rescue – is called “holistic admissions”, of which race-based admissions (“affirmative action”) is a factor. The racial component was eliminated by the Supreme Court because it quite obviously violated the words inscribed in the court's own building: “Equal Protection Under Law”. The holistic components won't go away, though, because the whole enterprise of college admissions and selective schools is a scam.

Does anyone actually believe that Harvard is so strapped for cash that it can't simultaneously admit both qualified and unqualified students? That it can't develop an intensive-education program for those with little-to-no high school education to bring them to the same level as a legacy-admission underclassman? And why are we so convinced that the criteria for attending school should be academic achievement? Nobody required me to take a form of the SATs before going to high school; I did it anyway to get a scholarship. But I could have had entry without it. Isn't the point of going to school to learn? Why are we expected to know already when a school's job is to provide knowledge?

The fact that these elite institutions got away with saying they had made their admissions processes more “equitable” is astounding. Look at the incomes of their attendees/their parents. Financial aid is nothing at these institutions. All the money goes... somewhere else. Never-mind the arbitrary nature of these place's pricing plans. My local college charges $500 a credit hour for what ended up being a comparable quality of education to my target school, which charged $1,500 for the same. I found publicly the salaries of each of their presidents: one made $400,000 annually, and the other $150,000 (still too much!!). Guess who leads each school.

These institutions don't care if they cost a lot of money. The vast majority of their students are paying via loan, which means they're not paying... yet. But the fact that they're not paying right away means they don't behave like they're spending $20,000 a semester on an English degree; they behave like they're spending their monthly repayment on the degree. Friedman's 4 ways to spend money comes in handy to conceptualize this (see item #3). The schools have no incentive to reduce costs for their students because very few are paying out-of-pocket and the rest don't know how to watch their loaned-out wallets because they're 18 years old.

Yet cost is the number one barrier to entry for this slop. Student loans are deeply debilitating financially to Americans. They're part of the reason why Millenials don't really own houses compared to previous generations. Z will be worse. Wouldn't equitability start when barriers to entry for disadvantaged groups are removed?

All this is to say that the minority/disadvantaged student who gets into an elite school like my reject-alma-mater on holistic admission is the least disadvantaged on that spectrum. I did not take out a loan to go to my school, thank god. I would've needed to work two jobs to make it happen after a year, but I would've afforded it. Most people, let alone actually disadvantaged people, can't do that. Maybe even most wouldn't have qualified for the loan.

In my school system, every Associate's degree holder is guaranteed entry into a school. No application necessary. You come to learn, and assuming you actually put in the work you'll get a degree. The associates is free from a community college and then plenty of night school options exist to accommodate the jobs that'll pay for $500 per credit hour for a Bachelor's. Isn't that the ideal? That everyone, regardless of previous experience, can come learn if they want to? Isn't that emblematic of an institution dedicated to education and learning? Doesn't any degree of selectivity in college admissions defeat the purpose of college?

Yes, I'm quite angry about having been sold a lie as an impressionable 18 year old and made to play a game that always ends with me as the loser, but it didn't really matter because I got out in time. I never really drank the Kool-Aid. Some of these affirmative-action defenders did though, and it shows. Dr. Kendi wrote an article in The Atlantic where not only does he compare color-blindness to the “separate but equal” doctrine (he argues that to “not see color” is to not see racism, as if we're all going to just accept that the principle of not being a racist fuckhead when you interact with people is actually a form of ignoring racism altogether) but where he is also just straight up racist against Asian people (accusing them of playing the victim card). If you pay attention to the people he pays attention to (the folks who say things like “Asians are not People of Color” and “Asians are not an oppressed minority”) you ought not be surprised. He actually starts making good points, like how legacy admissions and the athletics loophole (a much better Atlantic article called it “affirmative action for white people”) were left intact and how the college admissions process isn't fair even when race isn't considered. Then he veers off the deep end when he says that because test prep is a multi million dollar industry, it clearly must work to increase test scores. Nevermind that the tests are designed to make them impossible to actually study for. Then he also dismisses the Asian American claims of discrimination which are directly substantiated by evidence... a more substantive response will come soon.

And then there's Justice Jackson's dissent. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” What a marvelous revelation. I had no idea. It's almost like despite the Equal Protection Clause guaranteeing equal protection, racial discrimination still exists. The solution was never to give up and legalize it for colleges. Justice Jackson would like us to believe that in this case, and this case alone, making racism illegal is worthless because racism will still exist. Alright.