That's right.
It's college acceptance season, the time when students find out whether they got
in or got rejected from the various colleges they applied to, which means
we are about to get a lot of dumb, uninformed shit floating around
on social media, as well as idiotic lawsuits.
So
let's ring in this new season.
Welcome, everybody, to this public service
announcement for the upcoming college acceptance season.
College acceptance season, what is that?
That is that time when students are getting responses.
It should be coming in the next few weeks for the first non early decisions,
as well as over the course of the next couple of months.
We should be hearing from students about the results of those applications.
And this is a time that you get a lot of dumbass analyses that happen
right after students find out that they were or were not accepted into a particular
college last year, we had Stanley Zong from the Bay Area in California suing
a bunch of universities because they thought, you know, must have been some sort
of discrimination happening, must have been based on race for sure,
because there's no other way that I wouldn't have gotten into at least one
of these very competitive universities this year.
We started early with lawsuits against University of California.
We started early with lawsuits against
the University of California, which is a very, very competitive university.
And we have a lot of people who are
very, very concerned about the impact of this over potential race discrimination
going into their admission decisions.
And, you know, every year there's going
to be a bunch of stuff posted on social media, both from students and parents,
who are going to go to school and oftentimes this is propagated by these
goddamn for-profit companies or individuals who are helping students
get into these schools by helping them with their essays and other things.
Those college consultants.
And they will start taking credit for all
the wonderful things they did to help students get into the college of their dreams.
All of this is a bunch of fucking garbage.
And this is part of the reason that I think before we even begin getting these
acceptance letters or rejection letters, I don't even like to use that word.
But, you know, non acceptance letters
is we need to just actually have a conversation about just slowing down
and thinking through the process of college application and how these
decisions are made, think through them reasonably so that we don't buy
into a lot of dumb explanations of what happened.
OK.
And here's what I want to really stress.
It's that, look,
unless you are in the meetings for all of these decisions that were made on every
applicant of a given college, you don't know shit.
You don't know shit.
Does that mean that there might be something shady going on?
It could be, but the reality is most of the time that's not what's happening.
You just don't know.
You don't know what everyone else submitted.
You don't know what kind of personal statements other students submitted.
You don't know what the admission officers were looking for.
You don't know which admission officer
was looking and reading your particular essay, why it hit or didn't.
You don't know which of the multitude of factors that impact final decision
could have contributed to your being accepted or not.
OK.
In other words, most of the people talking just don't know shit.
OK, let me go back to the Stanley's own example.
All right.
When this started going around last year, I was I was actually I didn't even know
that this happened, you know, a friend of mine texting me a link
to this article from last year to send the link, you know, the past month,
in the past month, sent it over to me.
I looked at it and I was like, oh, yeah,
you know, it doesn't surprise me because it happens all the time.
Right.
And then I read the details of this lawsuit and then I found out there was
something that was glaringly missing, which is that the.
The person suing, I don't know if it's Stanley's father, right,
somebody, whoever was suing, who decided it was a good idea to sue,
has no information on exactly what the application process looked like.
They don't know what the other applicants
did and what they presented on their application.
They don't know shit.
OK, they also don't seem to understand
the basics of how a lot of these admission officers make their decision.
This is just uninformed
kibblegobble. I don't know what to call it.
Garbage, right?
Gibberish to me.
OK, you cannot look at somebody's GPA and SAT score and think, oh, yeah,
clearly they should have a really good shot of getting into one of these
universities now. That's not how it works.
If you've been following my podcast,
you know that college admissions look at a lot of different things.
And the GPA and the SAT scores are honestly should make you think this is
just more like the baseline.
And no matter what the accomplishments you have accumulated in your high school
career, that doesn't guarantee shit if it's not valued in the same way that other
people's accomplishments are valued by the admissions officers.
And you don't know what the admissions officers are looking for.
You don't. You could listen to what the admission officers say.
But the reality is that there are so many damn applicants that go into any of these
universities, so many people that are having to review a shit ton of these
applications, OK, you don't know what made one student stand out and another not.
A lot of times it's almost like a coin flip.
OK, you don't know.
So here's the other thing I noticed.
OK, this student did not reveal the entirety of the application.
Hmm.
Don't know exactly what's going on.
I don't know exactly what could or could not have contributed to their being
accepted or not. OK, all this to say, if you are already buying into this bullshit
that it must have been because of race, you are the dumbass because clearly
there's not enough information to figure out what actually happened.
OK, now I know afterwards I looked around.
I saw that there was a lot of people who did wonderful analyses, people who actually
are, you know, you know, really analyzing and have experience with helping students
with their college applications.
And they pointed out to a lot of things that could have been the case.
But again, these are all things that could have been the case.
We don't know unless we see the actual application.
The point is this, right?
Every time around this time of the season, students do this to each other.
They start comparing like even within their school, they start comparing to one
another like, oh, my goodness, but this student and this they don't have as good
of grades as me and they haven't taken as many like AP classes as me.
Oh, and then they don't have as good of an SAT score.
How did they get into this school?
And I didn't because you don't know what was on the rest of their application.
You don't know.
You also don't know how it is that the
admission committee was looking and reading at these applications, what they
were looking for, they weren't you weren't privy to that information.
Because if you're not privy to the information,
shut the hell up because you don't know. OK.
Oh, then you have this lawsuit against the UC saying that it must have been based off
of race. And again, here we have another case where people are making a lot
of assumptions about things that they just don't have information on.
Now, if this lawsuit was about, hey, we want transparency.
Can you give us a better insight into the admission process?
I mean, that's a separate kind of lawsuit.
But assuming there was some something
going on, something about discriminating based on race, right?
Going on to help out certain groups of students, but not others to discriminate
against X, Y and Z groups, right? OK, this is based off of absolutely nothing.
You're just looking at data like, oh,
there's a certain group of this demographic that got in.
And so, you know, it's not the same as the previous years.
And so therefore something shady must have gone on.
Like, that's not how this works.
You don't know. You don't know how it is
that the admissions committee is looking at the applications, how they're
analyzing each applicant holistically. You don't know how much of this is just
statistical, like normal fluctuations in statistics.
And you also don't know how much of it is that they are actually actively choosing
to understand holistic evaluation in a different way.
They do this every year.
Colleges do this every year where they will review the way in which they
know, accepted students, they will review the process.
They will have conversations about what is a better way to do it in order to get
the kind of student body that they really are looking for.
OK, and then they will adjust the things that they pay most attention to or they
might adjust the way they weight different considerations, different factors in the
application process. This happens every year.
You don't know when you don't know.
This is the point you don't know.
OK, this is just all of this is just
uninformed dribble, just drool coming out of people's mouth.
They just don't know they're upset, they're angry, they're frustrated.
And there are people that are capitalizing on it and then using it as a means to get
everybody riled up. I don't know for what, right?
For political purposes, for their own to align their own pockets.
I don't know what the deal is.
OK, I don't know why.
I don't want to assume the reason for it.
I mean, people could be well-intentioned.
But the point is, none of these people are informed on what actually happened.
None of them. They're basing their judgment calls on a lack of information.
OK, so I want to go through some key points here that for all the students and I'm
also wanting to talk to the parents here, OK, the parents, especially sometimes the
parents are the worst. OK, students and parents, I want to talk to both of you.
OK, if it doesn't apply to you, great.
But if this does apply to you, I want you to take a moment to really think things
through. All right. I'm not trying to, you know, punish you or anything.
I'm not trying to yell at you.
I'm trying to just give you some facts of the matter that maybe you should keep in
mind before you start reacting and getting all worked up and then calling a lawyer.
OK, all right.
First key point, and I've already mentioned this, but I can't stress this enough.
Unless you're in all the goddamn meetings
during all of these application decisions, you do not know what happened.
Let me stress this. You do not know.
OK, and in fact, most of the people you
hear from, unless they were actually in those rooms, which I doubt you know any
of them, OK, they don't know either.
Don't trust any of these organizations,
these companies that claim that they have some deep insight into the application.
They don't.
They are guessing just as much as you.
Their guesses might be a little bit more informed with experience and with a longer
data set, but they're still guessing.
They don't know.
I've seen on YouTube people breaking down, right?
These consultants, college consultant places, they're breaking down like, oh,
we're seeing X and Y, Z trends, right?
In the early decisions, right?
I was like, oh, OK, all right.
What do you know about why students got accepted?
You don't know shit.
You see the results and then you're making guesses about what may or may not
have contributed to it based off of the limited information you have.
You don't know shit.
Don't believe any of these people.
They're all guessing.
Some might be making more educated guesses than others, but all of them are guessing.
OK, nobody has a magic formula.
Nobody knows exactly what happened.
OK, got it.
So take it with a grain of salt.
People who are making educated guesses,
you could listen to why they think they know that this is why students are getting
in or not, OK, you could listen to their analysis of why they think so.
OK, but always understand these are nothing more than educated guesses.
These are not deep insights into anything.
They're just guessing.
So take it with a grain of salt.
OK, all right.
Second key point,
context matters, context matters.
What I mean by that is you need to see the application as a whole before you
figure out why a student got in or not.
If you ever see anybody make any claims based off of strictly a few metrics
on their application, like their extracurricular activities and their,
you know, SAT and GPA scores, right.
OK, if that's all they're giving you, then you're not seeing the total picture.
You're not seeing what the admission committee saw.
You're not seeing the letters of recommendation, which the students
themselves probably don't have access to.
Right. A lot of times these are supposed to be kept confidential.
You're probably not seeing any of the interview tapes.
If there is an interview tape available.
Right. I mean, some places that do these
interviews, maybe they have some record of it.
I don't know.
Other places, they might just be like, you know, the interview happened
or conversations happen, maybe not even interview context.
Right. But you don't know what was talked about, how the student came off.
You don't know any of that.
You know, if you don't have a personal statement, you don't know
the totality of their application, which means you don't have the have good
grounds to draw any sort of conclusion about why an application was a good or
bad application, given that you haven't even seen the full application.
And it matters a lot because, again, I can't stress this enough.
Colleges care about more than just resume, one line, you know,
accomplishments that you could list off.
Right. They're concerned about more than
just the GPA, SAT score, your AP test and, you know, what else is it like?
A list of extracurricular activities and positions and awards that you received.
They want more.
There's a reason that they're asking for all this additional information
in the application because they use all that extra information and making their
decision. So unless you have the context, you're not going to get any good, useful
information on why a student got in or not.
You're just not.
OK.
And so, again, this goes back to look, if I don't see the full application,
I am not going to give a response as to why a student may or may not have gotten in.
It's a dumb exercise.
It's a worthless, time consuming, pointless exercise because it is
going to be grounded in very, very incomplete information that is going to
lead you to draw some terrible conclusions.
OK, this is just critical thinking one on one.
All right.
Just withhold your judgment until you get more information.
That's what I would say, withhold judgment.
OK.
All right.
Third,
because this is coming up more and more in the past, like, you know, I mean, it
existed for a while, but I mean, the lawsuits really you're seeing something
here, right, OK, which is people seem to be assuming that somehow race is what's
contributing to some students getting in or not.
OK, I want to I want to be clear about this.
Stop assuming that race or ethnicity had
anything to do with a student getting in or not.
OK, stop assuming it.
I'm not saying that that might not have been a factor.
What I'm saying is you all need to stop
assuming it and suing universities over this issue.
OK, looking at overall percentages of different ethnicities and who got in and
how many of them got in. OK, look, and then drawing the conclusion
that they got in because of the race, I'm going to be straight up with you.
OK, no sugarcoating.
That sounds racist as fuck.
That sounds absolutely racist as fuck.
You are assuming that the black Latino, the indigenous students who applied
basically the groups that are historically, you know, have been oppressed
in the United States, has been, you know, marginalized in the United States,
that they got in because they got some sort of boost because of their race.
That's what you're assuming and claiming.
This is go strictly to that UCF, the UC one.
But I mean, honestly, the Stanley's long lawsuit made me think about this as well.
OK, look, you're assuming that race has something to do with that.
It tells me that you seem to have certain biases that are leading you
that are leading you to jump to this factor as the factor that is determining
the fact that some students are getting in and not.
OK,
that sounds racist as fuck.
Maybe not like an intentional awareness,
like you might not be aware that you have these biases, but you're showing your
biases is what you're doing. OK, check yourself.
Ask yourself why you're jumping to these conclusions that race seems to be
the reason instead of something else in the application or damn it,
maybe like just statistics, right, just odds.
OK, instead of the application itself, which, by the way, again,
you're not privy to, you don't have actual information about what was
written on these applications, so you don't know what contributed to
student getting in or not.
And yet you're assuming that it must be based off a race.
That makes you sound like a racist.
All right, so slow down here.
OK, I'm not assuming you're a terrible person,
but I am saying that you are definitely showing some biases.
Calm down, slow down, back up, think critically.
All right, show the colleges you could think critically.
All right, my goodness.
Fourth,
please, whether you're a student or a parent or somebody else, please, please,
please study some goddamn statistics.
I get that it might be difficult, but it is important for you to study statistics
so that you could think critically about situations like this.
Look, suppose you apply to ten competitive
colleges, each with an acceptance rate of like 10 to 15 percent chance of getting
in. OK, a lot of the students that get into one competitive college will probably get
into several of those competitive colleges, which means your chances of getting into
each of these each of these colleges, unless you're one of the people that are
probably going to be getting into most of them, are going to be fairly low.
And there's going to be some correlation here.
If you get rejected from one competitive
college, you might very well get rejected from all ten.
OK, in other words,
you should expect it as a real possibility that you would get rejected from all ten
colleges. Look, let me give you an example.
All right.
This is again, this is I'm going to let you just study the math of this all.
Right. But if you actually understand how
this works, you will understand that getting rejected from all these
competitive colleges, especially the ones in the top 20 on the on these ranking
list, you're probably going to get rejected, you know, from a lot of them,
if not all of them, that's a pretty common experience.
OK, look, I applied when I was applying to graduate PhD programs in philosophy.
I applied to 40 different colleges, 40 different programs.
OK, I actually saved up money to pay
for all the applications, because it was insanely expensive, you know, applying to
so many places. But the reason I did so was I knew it would be a one and done
chance. I wasn't going to spend more money on these applications.
I wasn't going to try again another year.
OK, it was a one time thing.
I'm going to do it. If I don't get in, I don't get in.
And the reason I thought it was very likely I was making alternative life
plans and figuring out what to do if I don't get into any of them.
I made those alternative plans because I knew that all 40 of these programs had
an acceptance rate of somewhere in the two to five percent, maybe a couple had
like 10 percent, but a lot of them were hovering in the two to five percent range.
OK.
And I understood the math.
The math told me that there's a high likelihood that I get into zero of these
programs, especially when I know that the acceptance rate is very, very low
already to begin with and that the basic cut off to even be considered
for most of these programs are going to be a really, really, really high GPA.
Right. We're talking like the top 10th percentile, if not higher.
And on top of that, you should be getting
the top 10 percentile in on your GRE, which is like the SATs for graduate school,
right, on your GRE scores, which, by the way, is not an easy test.
OK.
And so that's just a cut off.
That's just to be considered in most of these programs.
And so doing all the having all these
accomplishments just didn't mean shit, it just means that you would be considered.
Right.
But even then, you're because there are just so few spots, you're just not going
to get in in most cases, right.
So I felt lucky as hell when I got into two.
I was like, oh, shit, I got into some.
Plural, too.
That was unbelievable.
I was expecting zero.
I thought if I got lucky, maybe I'd get into one.
Be like, haha, done.
OK, the reality, the reality is that there's just not a spot for everyone.
OK, there's just not a spot for everyone.
It's a limited resource at any given college.
Deal with it.
Understand the math of it.
Understand that your chances are low to begin with.
Set your expectations correctly.
Don't look at your own application and think too highly of yourself, because I
guarantee you, whatever your application shows, there's another student with an
application that just stands out even more.
You just don't know.
OK, if you're bitching about all of this, oh, I didn't get into one of these
competitive colleges, this just reveals to me that you still have a lot of growing
up to do both intellectually, study some statistics and emotionally.
OK, this is the reality.
You need to find a way to accept reality for what it is.
All right.
And I'm giving you just the basic math of it that you probably did not have a
guaranteed spot in any of these schools to begin with.
In fact, I don't think anybody really does.
OK.
All right, finally, last point.
I cannot reiterate this enough.
I've mentioned this before in other
episodes, but I can't stress it enough.
You are not owed a spot in any college,
except being community college because they'll accept everybody, right?
You are not owed a spot in any college at all.
Colleges want a lot of different things
from students and a particular balance of different students with different
interests, different backgrounds from different states, different life
circumstances, they want a variety. OK, people keep ignoring this point.
And it annoys me.
It annoys me to no end.
OK, parents are often the worst of it.
They just won't hear me when I tell them, right?
You need to let go of this idea that somehow you are owed a spot in a college
because of all the things you accomplished.
OK, the things you work so hard for, you are deserving of the good things that
come from all of your hard work.
I am not going to deny you that.
What I'm saying is that all that hard work doesn't mean that you are guaranteed
or you are owed any spot in any particular college.
What it means is that you should be given an opportunity by society.
That opportunity could look a lot of different ways depending on where it is
that these opportunities open up, but it just might not be at the colleges
you apply to, it might be somewhere else.
OK, but if you continue to work hard, you continue to apply yourself,
you continue to improve, you should see the fruits of your labor.
I truly believe that.
OK, it just doesn't mean that the fruit has to be the particular college that you
apply to. All right.
You don't know.
There is a lot of luck involved in the missions.
And I think people need to really get this through their head.
It's not about you being a bad candidate or worse candidate.
It's not about you being higher or lower in some ranking.
It's not about any of that.
It's about a lot of different factors that are outside of your control and
sometimes even outside of the control of the college.
They don't have spots for an insane number of XYZ type of student
because they're not looking for every student to look a certain way.
They're looking for students of different kinds, different backgrounds,
different interests. Maybe the essay just didn't hit with a particular reader
for whatever reason. Who knows?
OK, you were a solid candidate.
Maybe another student was a solid candidate when you have to pick between
these solid candidates and you can't pick them all.
Guess what? Sometimes it'll come down to a coin flip.
I've been in the decision rooms for deciding who to give scholarships
to who to open up a certain spot for, who to hire for XYZ.
Like a lot of these resumes start looking exactly the same.
There's very little difference.
If there is some difference, they're minute.
They're more like a preference.
It has nothing to do with you as a candidate.
All right.
It's OK to be disappointed.
And that includes you too, parents.
It's OK to be disappointed.
So be disappointed and deal with it like an emotionally healthy person.
And if you can't deal with it, get therapy, not a lawyer.
Got it?
Please.
In this upcoming acceptance season, I hope that with each year,
we as a collective community get better at this, which is let's not start jumping
to some goddamn conclusions.
Let's not have a bunch of lawsuits over shit that honestly is grounded in probably
various biases because you're clearly making some assumptions.
Like you just don't have the data to make the assumptions.
You're not warranted to making these assumptions.
You're just not.
OK, until you give me like actual reveal, like documents and, you know,
conversations happening behind closed doors in the admissions committees,
I am not going to buy any of your,
quote unquote, analysis or explanations of what actually happened because you don't know.
OK, all right.
This all to say there will be some upcoming videos I'm going to post on YouTube.
See the link to the YouTube channel in the description.
I'll be reviewing during this season when people start posting stuff up on social
media and bad information starts going around, sometimes good information.
I will be reviewing these posts.
I'm not here to trash on people's posts.
I'm just going to give my perspective.
Oftentimes I might, you know, cosign some of the things that are being posted
and really emphasize some of the things that they're saying to add to that kind
of culture of responding to college admissions in a healthy way.
Others I am going to call out,
especially if they're giving uninformed or biased or, you know,
doing a lot of guesswork, I want to make sure that that becomes clear
to the general public and I want to be one of the many voices that hopefully
will continue to kind of spread that sort of message.
OK,
and finally, if you are a student and you got accepted, rejected,
waitlisted, whatever the status is of your application and you want to understand why.
Right.
I would be more than happy to at least give you some insights from my experience
of the kinds of things that may or may not have.
Again, I have no guarantee.
I don't know what hit or not.
Sometimes it might just be luck.
I might look at your application and be like, you know, you just gotten lucky.
This is a really solid application.
You apply to a lot of places and any other year you could have been accepted.
Who knows what happened this year.
Right. You gave yourself a good chance.
Right.
I don't know what to tell you.
But sometimes what I find from applications is that there are aspects of the written
statements, the public, you know, the personal statements, or sometimes it
might be in the letter of recommendation that you don't have access to.
But there might be something in your extracurriculars that knowing a particular
university, why it might not have been seen as a good fit or some other reason why
you might not have been accepted.
Or even if you want to know why you got accepted, I could give you an idea of what
might have been part of the consideration and what combination it might have.
Again, I'm going to be guessing based off of experience.
I'm going to give you an informed guess.
Right.
But at least with some of the clear red
flags, I think those I can probably say with a little bit more certainty what
might have contributed to your getting in or not.
So if you are interested in me doing that sort of review, I think it's helpful.
I will try to give you some insight,
some feedback, some alternative ways you could have approached the application.
And this is a helpful exercise for students to do because if you especially if you're
planning on going to graduate school,
professional school, but even in the workforce, right,
you might not even be thinking about this, but sometimes, you know,
companies might ask for a cover letter or maybe they don't require it.
It's optional, but it might help to include a cover letter.
And cover letters often should read like those personal statements do.
So if you want to get some more insight into what, you know, people might be
detecting in your application, how they might be interpreting some of the things
that you have accomplished, I could actually help brainstorm
with you to try to figure out what might be going on.
And so hopefully that'll be super helpful.
But I will do this for you free of cost for anybody who's interested.
You could go ahead and send that over to me.
Just find my YouTube page against again, the link is in the is again in the
in the description, but on my YouTube channel, on the community post,
you could post that you want this sort of assistance.
You don't have to make it public.
I will find you separately and then have you email the information to me.
And I could give you that feedback directly.
I'd be more than happy to.
You don't have to worry that I'm some sort of scam artist.
I'm not hiding behind anything.
You could find me.
I'm a faculty at Pasadena City College and my information is all available free
online. It's really scary how much information about me is available online.
So, you know, I will do my best to try to help you to get that insight.
Please let me know.
My goal has always been to get connected
with students, to get connected with parents so that we could have real
conversations, honest conversations to get to the bottom of what really might be
happening instead of a lot of the talking points that get thrown around.
So I'm more than happy again.
I won't know until I see your actual application, the full of it.
And so please be ready to go ahead and send that over to me at some point.
And I'd be more than happy to help you get that sort of insight.
So I hope to see you there on the YouTube community posts until next time.