A typical white girl from New Jersey is not always, or even usually, a rich white kid from the Northeast. But, of course, you knew that, already, when you conflated the infinite diversity of white economic situations into one stereotype of "white privilege" and then concluded that the liberal election platform is perfectly correct in its propaganda, that discrimination against the children of millions of white waiters, truck drivers and store clerks will have no adverse social consequences. Too bad you're not right, but the violence perpetrated by racial preferences and its NECESSARY corollary, racial discrimination is well documented. So well documented that one would think that even profoundly racist "Media-Americans," such as you, would buy a clue.

... there are upper middle class students who actually are intelligent and hard working, creative, and without a lot of opportunities to prove themselves (just because parents have money doesn't mean they spend it on the kids). Their parents aren't making donations, but went to college and aren't on welfare. Some of these kids only went to private schools beacuse they begged and fenagled and stole to get there, out of sheer drive.

I think rejecting a student who's obviously qualified and gifted just because their parents have money, or they found a way to go to private school, is just as bad as rejecting someone for any other racial or socioeconomic factor.

Discrimination is discrimiation, no matter which way it goes. Yes, the public education system needs to be fixed. But that shouldn't keep smart kids out of colleges.

And, btw, I HATE that they refer to kids as "candidates". It shouldn't be the same process as applying for a job, or someone to fill a role and earn money for the school. It's an 18 year old kid trying to do their best in life and be as educated as possible.

Any time someone who is white, rich, male or Christian complains about discrimination, that person is clearly too clueless to get whatever job/position/admission that was being applied for.

The author complains about smutty, porno-sounding headlines at the Daily Beast, but later writes,

"Here’s the money shot on that white girl from New Jersey: [...]"

Eww!

There are millions and millions of well qualified students ready to go to college each year. Most fit a similar mold of well prepped and driven enough with all the future focus one can reasonably expect of an eighteen year old and a willingness to fake much more focus.

There are only just so many spots at any given school. Schools that are greatly prized can pick the students they want. Its a big enough job that they have to apply rules and general criteria. Those rules will often be of the institutions choosing. Many can be anticipated and gamed by the driven and well off. Some can't. Boo hoo.

If people would just be glad their kid has a chance to waste eighty percent of four years and a couple hundred grand on "college" then they would spare themselves a lot of angst.

There are happy balanced and sensible achievers at most colleges and neurotic losers and other mediocrities too. Just send the kid to a reasonably acceptable school with reasonable expectations and support and hope for the best.

Crying about being born white is pitiful behavior.

...poster who claims to be a former admissions officer from "a big state school in Florida" and writes that there was an "unofficial quota" on kids from New York and New Jersey because there were just too damn many of them. They probably "never realized it was because of their street address," she laments.

Well, duh! State universities exist primarily to provide an affordable education to residents of the said state. Of course, there will be a number of overseas students and out-of-state students paying full fees to boost revenue, but there is no obligation to take an unlimited number.

Sounds to me like New York and New Jersey need more state universities or else they need to do something about their weather.

This made me (nearly) laugh out loud:

Lack of privilege is just about the only thing not for sale to overachiever parents and their offspring

It's amusing, but does this really belong in broadsheet?

This article reminds me what Obama commented about Affirmative action last year. Affirmative action won't be about race in the near future. Instead, it will move on to class. And clearly, it's already happening.

This is the sort of drivel that is being fed to middle and lower-middle class white kids everywhere and contributing to a lot of racism and xenophobia.

The truth is that if you apply to your own State's schools with moderately decent grades, your shots of getting in are excellent. However, less than moderate students and students applying to schools that are not within that system are being encouraged to believe that their inability to get in is not do to an unimpressive transcript, but because of some mysterious black or hispanic kid OR (horrors of horrors!) an illegal alien.

Scoff all you want, but a lot of the U.S.'s culture and class wars are sown by this kind of material. We'd be better off to stop feeding the idea that "liberals" just don't care about "Americans" and actually go out there and get the data to refute a lot of these commonly held assumptions.

Neither of my parents finished college and we were solidly middle class, not upper middle class. I didn't have an SAT tutor, or a private college counselor. I went to a public high school in NYC that US News and World Report won't even include in its annual list of top high schools because its admissions standards are so high, you have to test to get in. So as a white girl from NYC going to an elite high school, were my chances of getting into the colleges my peers at other schools got into better or worse? Worse, hands down. (Not that I didn't get into a great school, I went to a college in the midwest that was looking to increase the number of students from the Northeast, so in a way it worked in my favor. But I have friends from other public schools who got into Ivies who wouldn't have had a chance coming out of my school) First, our grading standards were so hard that papers my friends got A's on in their high schools would have been Cs in mine. So you're comparing apples to oranges when you look at grades. A "mediocre" student from a private prep school may be a far stronger candidate than an A student from lesser school where there is little competition to blow the curve and where standards may not be as high. Second, no college is going to accept 20 kids from the same school or overrepresent a geographical area. Being clustered with all highly competitive students, from an academically highly competitive city, meant the odds of being accepted were lower than those of a student from a school, city or state where fewer kids were applying to top colleges. But you want to know who bore the worst brunt of this: the Asian students. At the time, our school was 40% Asian (It is now closer to 60%). I remember how horrible it was as I saw my friends getting rejected from schools they were more than qualified to attend because there were just too many Asian kids from our school applying. When California state universities eliminated affirmative action policies, Asians were the racial group that got the biggest boost in acceptance numbers, a fact no one really discussed at the time.

I don't know what the solution is, admission slots at elite universities are a highly limited resource, and there will never be a perfect system of distributing them. But don't assume that there are no deserving, upper class white kids who are not going to get into colleges that five or ten years would have been sure things, and I'm not sure it is fair to criticize them for being upset about it. Not all of them spend their time lolling around on Daddy's yacht. A lot of them work their asses off both on academics and extracurriculars to make sure they are strong candidates. I'm watching my 16 year old cousin, a white girl from New Jersey who is far from mediocre, struggling to figure out what else she can do to make herself more attractive to colleges. Someone from a disadvantaged background should not be kept out of a school because they don't come from the right background anymore than an upper class student should be kept out of a school because they have the "right" background. And most of these admissions officers are lying through their teeth. Schools don't accept dozens of disadvantaged students because most schools don't have need blind admissions policies. Which means if you can't pay enough tuition, tough luck, you're not getting in. So when schools are looking for "diversity" they're often finding it in students, not from the inner city, but from the suburbs and private schools whose families can foot part, if not all, of the bill.