Nigerian Teen gets accepted into all IVY League Schools

[KittenMittens]

You make several claims based on no provided evidence. To claim "An Asian or White applicant with those credential wouldn't have gotten into all of them, maybe one or two or three, but not all 8" is absurd. This type of statement is based on ideology and not logic. In order to prove such a statement, one would have to have access to far more data than is available to the general public. Your statements appear to claim that all 8 Ivy League universities favored this applicant over similarly qualified applicants based on his race. This claim is impossible to prove and is therefore conjecture.

How many of the students with SAT scores that exceeded 2270 + have 4.0 gpa + have equally impressive writing skills + have equally impressive extracurricular activities + applied to all 8 Ivy League Universities were accepted to all 8? When phrased completely, your question is a good one. Unfortunately, it would take a significant quantity of research to answer.

It's reasonable to assume that with a 99 percentile + SAT, that GPA is going to be very high, it's limited data, but it gives a good impression on how many people are qualified. At 99th percentile, writing skills are already very high considering they're at the 99th percentile on the writing section. With GPA being unweighted now that many schools give higher GPAs for taking harder work, it's harder to compare GPAs from schools that are weighted versus unweighted. SAT scores aren't perfect, but knowing that about 14,000 students beat him on the SAT, let's make an extreme assumption that only 1,000 of the 14,000 students had 4.0s and similar stats (it's probably more, but let's just say it's 1,000 for the sake of argument), it's likely that not even 1 percent of them got into all 8 ivy league schools. Again, the statistical odds of getting into all 8 ivy league schools is essentially 0 unless one's credentials are truly that remarkable. While the Nigerian's credentials are certainly good, and make him competitive for getting into an ivy league school, he gets a boost because of the color of his skin. Many if not most of the successful candidates in schools like Harvard are equally if not more qualified, it's just that they don't get into all 8 ivies.

It's also common knowledge that colleges discriminate against Asians (and even white men) in general and there's enough information out there to gain the impression that there is strong and explicit discrimination against Asians. It's like the OJ Simpson Trial or Bill Cosby where you can't exactly prove that the former killed his wife since the clear evidence is lacking, nor can you for the latter since its been decades and no ability to do genetic screenings, but there's enough people to have vividly and in-depthly described their accounts with Cosby to get the general idea that he would drug and rape girls. Or the Armenian genocide where about 1.5 million people were killed, but Turkey disputes that it was a genocide partly based on a lack (rather censorship) of data.

To claim "An Asian or White applicant with those credential wouldn't have gotten into all of them, maybe one or two or three, but not all 8" is absurd.

It's the very opposite of absurd. In the case of affirmative action and Asians, there's enough info out there to know that this is indeed the case there's enough data out there to support it see: The Myth of American Meritocracy How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?. It's so bad that the Supreme Court in California ruled that California state schools like UC Berkeley could not discriminate on the basis of race and afterwards Asian admissions went up to the point that UC campuses are basically half Asian. You don't have much data on this from ivy league schools because they deliberately hide this information. There are ample studies and stories, and anecdotes that show this to be the case:

[URL="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/19/fears-of-an-asian-quota-in-the-ivy-league/statistics-indicate-an-ivy-league-asian-quota"]Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota
[/URL]Mindy Kaling's brother: I faked being black - CNN.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinio....html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led....html?_r=1

Also, I did provide an example of an Asian who self reported their credentials similar to the Nigerian ( https://www.reddit.com/r/UpliftingNews/c...ue/cq2hs1y ), and though it is a singular data point, it shows that he was rejected by all but the least difficult to get into ivy Cornell. This is all too common a story as I described above. I mentioned a friend of my son who got into 2 ivy league schools that was half hispanic/half Afghani despite having worse credentials overall (lower rank, GPA, SAT scores, less involved extracurriculars, etc.) and came from a richer background than us. My son also reported how a colleague of his, from a rich family from Haiti, with a 2.6 GPA, and a 23 MCAT score (he apparently studied the day before the MCAT whereas most people will spend 3 months to a year dedicating a substantial amount of time), and got into 5 medical schools. My son with phi beta kappa, 36 MCAT, and 3.8+ GPA from the same school? Only 1. And perhaps most recently, Mindy Kaling's brother who got rejected from medical school with a 3.1 and 31 MCAT in 1998, but shaved his head, trimmed his eyebrows, and changed him name to JoJo and got into several medical schools with many exclaiming how incredible he was when he reported himself black (but not when Indian).

Overall, I don't think it's an issue about disputing whether or not he was a qualified candidate, he most certainly is. But that in two years, two black kids getting into all 8 ivy league schools screams affirmative action since the statistical odds are essentially 0. And even if some random white or Asian did, how come you never hear about it in the news? I think it's great that he got in, and he's a testament that being black (and rich) can mean you can do just as well as white/Asian counterparts - it dispels the notion that being blacks can't do well on the basis of merit - this Nigerian certainly did. But it's important to recognize that skeptics will think that getting into all 8 ivies is indeed incorrectly applied affirmative action. Stories like these just make me roll my eyes since it's highly unlikely that an Asian/white counterpart would get into all 8, not to mention two black kids in a row in two years getting into all 8 ivy leagues (and the one from the year before scoring lower & not even being in the top 10 of the class).

A rich Nigerian, or a rich white woman are not the type of people who deserve or need affirmative action especially since the issue is primarily concerned with poor African-Americans and their ancestors who were treated poorly in the context of civil discrimination and slavery (but more the former since slavery was over 150 years ago). Like I've said before, affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic background not color of skin i.e. whether a person is a poor blacks, poor woman, poor Asian, or poor white, etc. Only then can we say that all have an equal footing.