If I remember anything about Yale, I remember that there weren’t that many students there like me.
There were plenty of Asians, a good handful of Canadians, and lots and lots of guys—always guys—who passed glibness off as intelligence. As a loud-mouthed jerk, I fit right in (even by Yale standards I was arrogant).
But students from working class families, students whose dads used their hands to make a living, were barely welcome at Yale. If not in business, Yale fathers always seemed to be in education or healthcare or law or government. Never trade union members.
Not to say that my dad's work at a Chinese restaurant embarrassed me. I was enough of a Maoist then to believe in the noble virtues of manual labor—at least for other people. Indeed, I was rather proud that my dad earned an honest living cooking meals, while some other parents no doubt earned a dishonest one cooking the books. I even carried on the family tradition by washing dishes at Yale.
Chances are if I’d been the white, all-American son of a restaurant worker from Toledo, I never would have gotten into Yale. But my struggling immigrant background, my Canadian high school experience, and my unpronounceable name must have added just enough spice to getme in. Either that, or some absent-minded admissions clerk tossed my folder into the wrong pile. (It does happen.)
My impression that Yale and other ranking schools discriminate against working class applicants was backed by a study discussed in a recent New York Times commentary.
The study is similar to research done by Jerome Karabel and published as The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which showed how biases have always affected admissions policies at these schools. These biases have shifted over time, but the over-riding bias has always been to favor ‘people like us.’ In her book A is for Admission: The Insider’s Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, Michele Hernandez, a former Dartmouth admissions officer, admits that she and her colleagues favoured students who campaign for gay rights over those who campaign for gun rights. Karabel explains that America’s elite institutions can get away with such overt discrimination because their admissions process is subjective and secretive.
This is why Chinese are proud of their national examination system. The system may be cruel, brutal, and oppressive, but it’s also fair, transparent, and meritocratic.
But walk through Peking University and try to find a peasant child who studied his way into the Chinese establishment. You’d have better luck trying to interest Harvard in becoming a boxcar racing sponsor.
Ostensibly there’s great diversity among Chinese university students, but it’s a superficial diversity. If a Peking University student calls himself ‘provincial’ it means his father runs a province, and if he’s from a peasant background it means his grandfather was on the Long March with Mao.
Ditto for Harvard and Yale. They have enough black students who went to Exeter and who live on the Upper East Side to make their praise and defense of their affirmative action policies seem lame at best and repugnant at worst.
And even though the admissions process is supposedly qualitative it’s being made more quantitative by the overwhelming popularity of the US News & World Report university rankings. A student’s SAT and AP scores matter more than ever before, and that’s why Chinese refer to that system of tests as America’s national examination.
As the Chinese system shows, a so-called ‘fair, transparent, and meritocratic’ series of tests invariably favors those with a prodigious memory and an empty imagination—in other words, the children of technocrats and professionals who will become technocrats and professionals themselves. In his profile of Princeton students, David Brooks argues that the Ivy League churns out plenty of industrious and ambitious students with little imagination and moral character (this also matches my impression of my Yale classmates). The same could be said of Peking University students.
Peking University is called China’s Harvard not because anyone believes the two schools are academically comparable (or at least I hope not), but because they are both gate-keepers into the ruling elite. A long time ago, Harvard and Peking felt that sort of position empowered them to change their societies. But nowadays it seems like they’re more interested in maintaining their position, and thus they must 'rig' their admissions to cater to their respective ruling elites.
David Brooks may say that today’s very best American students have brains but no soul. The same can be said of the best universities in the US and China as well.
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Even Walser
Mr. Xueqin,
I find your article incredibly relevant and disheartening. It is well understood to anyone who has tried to break into the finance industry that it is a formal club with membership held exclusively for Ivy League graduates. These very same “elites” drove the country and economy off a cliff with their group think mentality taught to them by a teaching staff, that while having the appearance of diversity, hold uniquely homogeneous views. It is true that the Ivy League system has become a pathway to the new American aristocracy. In the interest of full disclosure, I would have loved the opportunity to have gone to an Ivy League school, for the doors they open however, it has been my experience that those who are admitted enter the workforce with little to offer and huge sense of entitlement. I have yet to meet the Ivy grad who has been worth the ego, entitlement issues and costs. If we, as a society, are going to bestow upon these private universities the keys to the kingdom, we need to ensure that their admissions processes are truly open to all, absent of cultural and economic bias and free of partisan professionals. As a practical and rational man, I know that we do not operate in a perfect world. Thus it is highly unlikely we could devise a perfect system however given the power graduates of these institutions hold we must begin the work of making the system more equitable and more reflective of the society as a whole.
Jay
Your posts are poorly reasoned, short on hard facts, and tedious. Constantly talking about the fact that you went to Yale impresses no one. It only makes you seem snobbish and immature.
James
I disagree with you. I have lived in China for nine years, and I find his writing about the education system both interesting and accurate.
If he didn’t mention Yale in this article how would the readers know that his opinion was based on experience?
Weiye
This article is very interesting and relevant, consistent with my personal experience in Peking University for undergraduate study and Ivy League for graduate study. I just read a China report in NPR that Xueqin is heading the international division of Peking University High School, pushing the reform by infusing “empathy” and “responsibility” that he feels is lacking among Chinese students, a very encouraging and wise move towards the SOUL education.
Michael
The lack of imagination part must hurt some of their liberal arts majors. Somebody with lots of cash could probably fix that by endowing grants for students in those majors based on actual interest and ability. ‘Encouraging’ the regular students to spend time volunteering in the poorer parts of their communities might help with the soulless part, too.
Chris
Mr Jiang,
Your point is confused, misinformed and self-contradictory. If the Gaokao is so brutally fair, how is it that the Communists who the ones who seem to dominate Peking University? The point missed is that all university admissions systems are biased in some way. China suffers from the same problem that British and French universities suffer: the rich can afford better education for their children, resulting in higher test scores for children of the rich, leading to higher university acceptance rates for the rich over the poor.
The Ivy League schools have begun to correct for this wealth-related disparity through emphasis on essays, interviews and extracurricular activities. Quite simply, they took a method to discriminate (interviews in order to reject Jewish students) and used it to discriminate (in favor of students from poorer backgrounds who have had to struggle). The correction, while favoring lower class Blacks and Hispanics, ends up hurting middle class Asian-Americans (especially those whose cultural heritage emphasizes studiousness over non-academic achievements). It’s a trade-off, which American universities have clearly made. Any university with an Admissions is rigging the system one way or another, either indirectly through promises of needs-blind admission or directly through affirmative action quotas.
And in the trade-offs the Ivies make, their existing biases make a lot of sense. Between a Gay Rights activist and a Gun Rights activist, who took the more difficult stand? Who went against the grain to fight the hard fight? The Gay Rights activist, simply because gay rights is far less accepted in the United States than gun rights. If these universities are going to seek out the “moral” students who will make an impression, they are going to go for the non-conservative students simply because outright liberal issues (gay rights, universal healthcare, and the like) are much less favored. That being said, these universities are clearly also going to favor the most outspoken for their area: the Massachusetts conservative and the Utah socialist.
As for David Brooks and Pat Buchanan, these guys are quack in terms of methodology. Brooks uses a single time point to make a comparison regard several time points, disregards increased philanthropy, utterly fails to note Princeton’s Eating Clubs and drinking culture, and his argument runs entirely counter to the principles of acceptance and tolerance. Buchanan’s charge that the Ivies were discriminating against conservative Christians was entirely based on the assessment that test scores are the complete measure of everything, and that a person’s background and situation does not affect his or her test scores. No wonder these guys are unhappy about college admissions: they represent a backwards form of morality that neither America nor history is willing to accept.
James
The gay rights/gun rights thing is HIGHLY subjective to the city you live in. Fighting for gun rights in San Francisco will get you mocked and hated, gay rights will get you polite smiles.
John
Yes, it is a mistery indeed. Fair testing resulting in unfair outcomes. The U.S. has the same problems. Here our affirmative actions is used to “correct” this problem.
Onething which many people failed to recognize is that positions of wealth and power are correlated with IQ, and that IQ is very heritable in societies where citizens are reasonably well off. Due to this fact, a disproportion of the people getting into any position through a fair exam will be offsprings of the rich and powerful. The other points about them not learning to think and lacking “soul” is truly tragic. Hopefully, more people like you will begin to change that situation.