Rutgers team: We accept Imus' apology By DAVID PORTER, Associated Press Writer
48 minutes ago
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Rutgers women's basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer said Friday the team had accepted radio host Don Imus' apology. She said he deserves a chance to move on but hopes the furor his racist and sexist insult caused will be a catalyst for change.
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"We, the Rutgers University Scarlet Knight basketball team, accept — accept — Mr. Imus' apology, and we are in the process of forgiving," Stringer read from a team statement a day after the women met personally with Imus and his wife.
"We still find his statements to be unacceptable, and this is an experience that we will never forget," she said.
The team had just played for the NCAA national championship last week and lost when Imus, on his nationally syndicated radio show, called the players "nappy-headed hos." The statement outraged listeners and set off a national debate about taste and tolerance. It also led to his firing by CBS on Thursday.
"These comments are indicative of greater ills in our culture," Stringer said. "It is not just Mr. Imus, and we hope that this will be and serve as a catalyst for change. Let us continue to work hard together to make this world a better place."
Imus was in the middle of a two-day radio fundraiser for children's charities when he was dropped by CBS. On Friday, his wife took over the show and also talked about the meeting with the Rutgers players.
"They gave us the opportunity to listen to what they had to say and why they're hurting and how awful this is," author Deirdre Imus said.
"He feels awful," she said of her husband. "He asked them, 'I want to know the pain I caused, and I want to know how to fix this and change this.'"
Deirdre Imus also said that the Rutgers players have been receiving hate e-mail, and she demanded that it stop. She told listeners "if you must send e-mail, send it to my husband," not the team.
"I have to say that these women are unbelievably courageous and beautiful women," she said.
Stringer declined to discuss the hate mail Friday. Rutgers team spokeswoman Stacey Brann said the team had received "two or three e-mails" but had also received "over 600 wonderful e-mails."
The team's goal was never to get Imus fired, Stringer said. "It's sad for anyone to lose their job," she said.
The cantankerous Imus, once named one of the 25 Most Influential People in America by Time magazine and a member of the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame, was one of radio's original shock jocks.
His career took flight in the 1970s and with a cocaine- and vodka-fueled outrageous humor. After sobering up, he settled into a mix of highbrow talk about politics and culture, with locker room humor sprinkled in.
Critics have said his remark about the Rutgers women was just the latest in a line of objectionable statements by the ringmaster of a show that mixed high-minded talk about politics and culture with crude, locker-room humor.
Imus apologized on the air late last week and also tried to explain himself before the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio audience, appearing alternately contrite and combative. But many of his advertisers still bailed in disgust, particularly after the Rutgers women spoke publicly of their hurt.
On Wednesday, a week after the remark, MSNBC said it would no longer televise the show. CBS fired Imus Thursday from the radio show that he has hosted for nearly 30 years.
"He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people," CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a memo to his staff.
Sharpton praised Moonves' decision Friday and said it was time to change the culture of publicly degrading other people."I think we've got to really used this to really stop this across the board," he told CBS's "The Early Show."
Some Imus fans, however, considered the radio host's punishment too harsh.
Mike Francesa, whose WFAN sports show with partner Chris Russo is considered a possible successor to "Imus in the Morning," said he was embarrassed by the company. "I'm embarrassed by their decision. It shows, really, the worst lack of taste I've ever seen," he said.
Losing Imus will be a financial hit to CBS Radio, which also suffered when Howard Stern left for satellite radio. The program earns about $15 million in annual revenue for CBS, which owns Imus' home radio station WFAN-AM and manages Westwood One, the company that syndicates the show nationally WFAN.
The show's charity fundraiser had raised more than $1.3 million Thursday before Imus learned he had lost his job. The total had grown Friday to more than $2.3 million for Tomorrows Children's Fund, CJ Foundation for SIDS and the Imus Ranch, Deirdre Imus said. The annual event has raised more than $40 million since 1990.
Imus' troubles have also affected his wife, the founder of a medical center that studies links between cancers and environmental hazards whose book "Green This!" came out this week. Her promotional tour was called off "because of the enormous pressure that Deirdre and her family are under," said Simon & Schuster publicist Victoria Meyer.
The Deirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology in Hackensack, N.J., works to identify and control exposures to environmental hazards that may cause adult and childhood cancers. Imus Ranch in New Mexico invites children who have been ill to spend time on a working cattle ranch.
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Associated Press writers Rebecca Santana, Karen Matthews, Warren Levinson, Seth Sutel, Tara Burghart, Colleen Long and Hillel Italie contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
http://wfan.com/pages/332252.php
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070414/ap_on_en_ot/imus_protests
Showing posts with label College. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College. Show all posts
Friday, April 13, 2007
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Living for College
Commentary: Live for Yourself, Not for an Application
Here are some of my reactions to the New York Times article, "For Girls, It's be Yourself, and Be Perfect Too." (See below)
It is very true. Girls--of course boys also--today are pressured to achieve on multiple dimensions and then told to still celebrate their youth.
But I do think it is possible to achieve and still be genuine. Students just have to love what they do. I did all my extracurriculars--theater, ultimate frisbee, chinese harp, newspaper, speech team, Broadway Club, Arista, history club, tutoring, etc.--with smiles on my face because I truly enjoyed everything.
Of course the truth is not everyone enjoy everything and they are being pressured to take up everything for the sake of "being well rounded." I think that everyone will feel a lot better when they take a step back and stop worrying about what they think others want them to do and start focusing on just their own passions. Of course, then they'll think about the admissions officers and will start worrying again!
The biggest problem with this is that people start to lose themselves. They live for others and forget who they are. It's sad when freshmen in high school already start looking around for resume-padders. They should be looking to get involved; but too many do it for the wrong reason. It's great that kids can win national spelling bees knowing the word "ursprache," but did all the participants of The Bee memorize dictionaries because they were interested or because their parents told them that they should be interested? One of the scariest things I can imagine would be for people to wake up one day and realize that they have been living for someone else, that no part of their being really belonged to themselves. But it seems that this very thing happens all the time now.
Of course this is still only dwelling on message #1. Message # 2--Be yourself. Have fun. Don't work too hard--adds even more trouble.
Kaavya Viswanathan's scandal-marred "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" seemed to have been exploring this exact tension. Of course I never got to read the whole book since Little, Brown and Company pulled it from the shelves. But from what I managed to read--the free first chapter--high-achieving Opal got rejected by Harvard for not enjoying her youth and relaxing. (I think her real problem was that she wasn't doing everything she was doing for the sake of doing them, but rather for the sake of getting into Harvard.)
I think this kind of rejection does happen, sometimes unfairly, sometimes not enough (I'm probably going to get jumped for this ::laugh::). It definitely doesn't add to a campus community to have prototype nerds stay up in their dorms or the library all day. A lively college needs students who can do more than do well in classes. Life at college is shaped by those students who are willing to have lives outside of classrooms, libraries and labs.
But then some outstanding friends of mine were probably rejected because they were wrongly classified as uninteresting nerds. That coupled with the acceptance of classmates who did whatever possible to secure the top grades, who club-hopped to pad their resumes, and whose achievements also included underage drinking and drug dealing, really demonstrated to me the unfairness of the whole thing.
In the end, life is imperfect and some injustices simply can't be rectified. What we still have is a world full of enough wonderful things to occupy our time and our mind. When we are happy and in tune with the songs of the universe, we will be able to change the world for the better, a little bit at a time.
When Perfection is Not Enough
For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
In an honors philosophy/literature class, Esther Mobley, center, participates in a discussion of “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
By SARA RIMER
Published: April 1, 2007
NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.
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Excerpts: How Applying to College is Like 'The Aeneid,' and Other E-mails (April 1, 2007)
Text: Esther Mobley's College Essay (March 30, 2007)
Text: Colby Kennedy's College Essay (March 30, 2007)
Transcripts: 'The Appearance of Effortlessness' (April 1, 2007)
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
At Newton North High School in Newton, Mass., a Wonder Woman mural offers a role model to some girls. Newton North, one of the best public high schools in the country, gears its teaching toward gears its teaching toward a wide range of students.
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up.’
Kat Jiang
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly. This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.’
Esther Mobley
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‘I’m living up to my own expectations. It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.’
Colby Kennedy
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater. You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.’
Julie Mhlaba
“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.
“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”
Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?
“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”
They both burst out laughing.
Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns.) Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.
But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.
An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive tense in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.
To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.
It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.
The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.
If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.
“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”
If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.
But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.
“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”
“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”
Stress Trumps Relaxation
Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.
The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.
Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.
The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.
High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.
“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”
Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.
Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.
Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.
‘Superhuman’ Resistance
Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”
If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.
But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.
Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.
“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.
There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.
Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.
“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.
Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.
She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”
“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”
First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.
On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.
About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.
Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”
Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’
On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.
Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.
Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”
“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”
Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.
“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”
As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”
Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”
Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”
“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”
The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”
As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.
“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”
Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”
But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’
“You do want your child to do well.”
Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
On a Fierce Mission to Shine
To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.
Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?
Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.
The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.
In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”
Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”
A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”
More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”
“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”
The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.
Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”
Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.
“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”
She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.
Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.
She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.
“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”
Who Needs a Boyfriend?
This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”
Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.
“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”
Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”
But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”
Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.
They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”
Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.
“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.
Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”
Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.
She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.
“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.
She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.
During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.
So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?
“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.
“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”
Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.
Encouraged to Ease Up a Little
The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.
“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.
Cameron said he felt the same way.
One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”
Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.
Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.
But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?
One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.
“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”
By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.
Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.
Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.
“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.
Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.
Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.
Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”
But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”
About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.
“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”
And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives
Has this all been a temporary insanity?
Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.
She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.
In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.
Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”
He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”
“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.
“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”
Epilogue: Esther learned last week that she had gotten into Smith. She learned on Saturday that she had been rejected by Amherst and Middlebury. She is still hoping for Davidson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/us/01girls.html?ei=5070&en=8542ef1a2b8dc3e1&ex=1176436800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
Here are some of my reactions to the New York Times article, "For Girls, It's be Yourself, and Be Perfect Too." (See below)
It is very true. Girls--of course boys also--today are pressured to achieve on multiple dimensions and then told to still celebrate their youth.
But I do think it is possible to achieve and still be genuine. Students just have to love what they do. I did all my extracurriculars--theater, ultimate frisbee, chinese harp, newspaper, speech team, Broadway Club, Arista, history club, tutoring, etc.--with smiles on my face because I truly enjoyed everything.
Of course the truth is not everyone enjoy everything and they are being pressured to take up everything for the sake of "being well rounded." I think that everyone will feel a lot better when they take a step back and stop worrying about what they think others want them to do and start focusing on just their own passions. Of course, then they'll think about the admissions officers and will start worrying again!
The biggest problem with this is that people start to lose themselves. They live for others and forget who they are. It's sad when freshmen in high school already start looking around for resume-padders. They should be looking to get involved; but too many do it for the wrong reason. It's great that kids can win national spelling bees knowing the word "ursprache," but did all the participants of The Bee memorize dictionaries because they were interested or because their parents told them that they should be interested? One of the scariest things I can imagine would be for people to wake up one day and realize that they have been living for someone else, that no part of their being really belonged to themselves. But it seems that this very thing happens all the time now.
Of course this is still only dwelling on message #1. Message # 2--Be yourself. Have fun. Don't work too hard--adds even more trouble.
Kaavya Viswanathan's scandal-marred "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" seemed to have been exploring this exact tension. Of course I never got to read the whole book since Little, Brown and Company pulled it from the shelves. But from what I managed to read--the free first chapter--high-achieving Opal got rejected by Harvard for not enjoying her youth and relaxing. (I think her real problem was that she wasn't doing everything she was doing for the sake of doing them, but rather for the sake of getting into Harvard.)
I think this kind of rejection does happen, sometimes unfairly, sometimes not enough (I'm probably going to get jumped for this ::laugh::). It definitely doesn't add to a campus community to have prototype nerds stay up in their dorms or the library all day. A lively college needs students who can do more than do well in classes. Life at college is shaped by those students who are willing to have lives outside of classrooms, libraries and labs.
But then some outstanding friends of mine were probably rejected because they were wrongly classified as uninteresting nerds. That coupled with the acceptance of classmates who did whatever possible to secure the top grades, who club-hopped to pad their resumes, and whose achievements also included underage drinking and drug dealing, really demonstrated to me the unfairness of the whole thing.
In the end, life is imperfect and some injustices simply can't be rectified. What we still have is a world full of enough wonderful things to occupy our time and our mind. When we are happy and in tune with the songs of the universe, we will be able to change the world for the better, a little bit at a time.
When Perfection is Not Enough
For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
In an honors philosophy/literature class, Esther Mobley, center, participates in a discussion of “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
By SARA RIMER
Published: April 1, 2007
NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.
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Excerpts: How Applying to College is Like 'The Aeneid,' and Other E-mails (April 1, 2007)
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Text: Colby Kennedy's College Essay (March 30, 2007)
Transcripts: 'The Appearance of Effortlessness' (April 1, 2007)
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
At Newton North High School in Newton, Mass., a Wonder Woman mural offers a role model to some girls. Newton North, one of the best public high schools in the country, gears its teaching toward gears its teaching toward a wide range of students.
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up.’
Kat Jiang
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly. This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.’
Esther Mobley
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‘I’m living up to my own expectations. It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.’
Colby Kennedy
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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
‘You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater. You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.’
Julie Mhlaba
“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.
“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”
Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?
“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”
They both burst out laughing.
Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns.) Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.
But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.
An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive tense in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.
To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.
It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.
The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.
If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.
“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”
If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.
But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.
“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”
“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”
Stress Trumps Relaxation
Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.
The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.
Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.
The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.
High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.
“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”
Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.
Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.
Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.
‘Superhuman’ Resistance
Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”
If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.
But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.
Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.
“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.
There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.
Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.
“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.
Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.
She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”
“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”
First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.
On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.
About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.
Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”
Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’
On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.
Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.
Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”
“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”
Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.
“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”
As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”
Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”
Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”
“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”
The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”
As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.
“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”
Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”
But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’
“You do want your child to do well.”
Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”
On a Fierce Mission to Shine
To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.
Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?
Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.
The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.
In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”
Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”
A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”
More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”
“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”
The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.
Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”
Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.
“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”
She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.
Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.
She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.
“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”
Who Needs a Boyfriend?
This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”
Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.
“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”
Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”
But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”
Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.
They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”
Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.
“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.
Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”
Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.
She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.
“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.
She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.
During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.
So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?
“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.
“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”
Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.
Encouraged to Ease Up a Little
The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.
“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.
Cameron said he felt the same way.
One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”
Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.
Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.
But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?
One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.
“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”
By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.
Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.
Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.
“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.
Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.
Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.
Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”
But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”
About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.
“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”
And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives
Has this all been a temporary insanity?
Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.
She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.
In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.
Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”
He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”
“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.
“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”
Epilogue: Esther learned last week that she had gotten into Smith. She learned on Saturday that she had been rejected by Amherst and Middlebury. She is still hoping for Davidson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/us/01girls.html?ei=5070&en=8542ef1a2b8dc3e1&ex=1176436800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Improv Comedy Class for College Credit
College offers Comedy Studies at theater By MEGAN REICHGOTT, Associated Press Writer
15 minutes ago
CHICAGO - Thirteen students lie in a circle and stretch. They make monkey sounds to warm up their voices. Then they practice being funny.
ADVERTISEMENT
"A ship," the instructor says. "The Mayflower." The students spring into action, morphing into the shape of a ship, one holding out her arms like a maiden figurehead on the bow and two rowing in the galley.
It is hardly a normal college classroom.
A new program at Columbia College Chicago allows students to take classes at The Second City, the humor Mecca that has turned out some of America's best-known improvisational comedians. Students also attend shows, network with artists and present their work in a showcase — all for college credit.
For aspiring performer Jennifer Ducharme, studying at The Second City "is exactly what I was looking for."
"I really wanted to get into comedy, especially improv; it's really what I need right now," said Ducharme, 20, a theater arts major at Boston University who took a leave of absence to spend the semester in Chicago.
It's new territory for The Second City, where actors usually come to learn improvisation on the job. Among those who developed their funny bones there are the late Chris Farley and Gilda Radner — both of whom became fixtures on "Saturday Night Live" — and Steve Carell, star of "The Office."
Columbia and Second City officials have lofty goals for their collaboration, which they hope becomes the "Juilliard of comedy," said Anne Libera, executive artistic director of The Second City training center.
"We would have died to have been in a program that had all those things; it's the education that all of us wanted to have," said Libera, who was in a theater company that included Stephen Colbert, host of the satirical news program "The Colbert Report."
"There's nothing else like it in the country. It's going to be big — it's going to be very big," said Sheldon Patinkin, chair of Columbia College Chicago's theater department and one of the founding members of what was first the Playwrights Theatre Club, then The Compass Players and, finally, The Second City.
The idea for the program came about more than two years ago, when Andrew Alexander, Second City's executive producer and a member of Columbia College Chicago's board of trustees, had lunch with Patinkin and college president Warrick Carter.
During the lunch, Alexander mentioned that a college in Toronto had a program that included courses in improv, Patinkin said.
"I immediately said, `Oh, what a great idea, let's do that with Second City,'" Patinkin recalled. "It was a mutual thing, we all wanted to do it."
Students take a full load of six classes, including "Context for Comedy," "History and Analysis of Comedy" and "Creating Scenes Through Improvisation."
While the training is as intense as other college programs, so is the cost. Tuition is $8,164, for the semester, plus an additional $230 for student fees. Students from out of town also must find their own housing.
Like many study-abroad programs, administrators will consider applicants from other universities. Candidates must be undergraduate juniors with an interest in performance, comedy writing or improvisation.
"Ultimately, yes, you have to be funny. (But) in this program, I'm not looking for funny people yet, I'm looking for people who have the desire to do this work and to delve into this work," Libera said.
Most of the inaugural class' 17 students are theater majors or have drama backgrounds, said instructor Jet Eveleth, a veteran improv performer who also teaches at The Second City conservatory.
Students "already have a lot of acting experience, and that's a great foundation," Eveleth said. "Sometimes, I'll work with groups, even graduate students, that aren't as free as them because they might not have the theater background."
However, a history of performing isn't necessary, Libera said.
"It's important to me that these people not just be theater majors, because I know that comedy writers and comedy performers tend to come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and that's important," Libera said.
Russell Chase, 22, a history major who plans to work in advertising after graduating from Connecticut College, couldn't resist applying after hearing about the program.
"I don't want to do the struggling acting thing," he joked. "But I was like, `Wow! That's so much better than sitting at a desk working on spreadsheets.'"
Chase said he's already interviewed at advertising firms in Boston and New York and gets the same response when recruiters find out he's studying at The Second City.
"They tell me, 'That's so creative,'" Chase said.
___
On the Net:
Comedy Studies: A Semester at The Second City: http://www.comedystudies.com
Columbia College Chicago: http://www.colum.edu/
The Second City: http://www.secondcity.com/
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Oprah to name new book club pick on Wed. AP Campbell released from community service AP Miss Tennessee crowned new Miss USA AP Snoop Dogg denied visa for U.K. concerts AP Sharp-Tongued Gibson Takes Teacher to School E! Online Most Viewed: Entertainment
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Entertainment Video
Retro feel of 'Back to Black' CNN - Sat Mar 24, 2:36 PM ET Miss USA woes CNN - Sat Mar 24, 7:37 AM ET Grandnephew seeks to 'set record straight' about Houdini's death CBC.ca - Fri Mar 23, 7:28 PM ET Sandler Takes Dramatic Turn in 'Reign' AP - Fri Mar 23, 5:01 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070324/ap_en_ot/comedy101
15 minutes ago
CHICAGO - Thirteen students lie in a circle and stretch. They make monkey sounds to warm up their voices. Then they practice being funny.
ADVERTISEMENT
"A ship," the instructor says. "The Mayflower." The students spring into action, morphing into the shape of a ship, one holding out her arms like a maiden figurehead on the bow and two rowing in the galley.
It is hardly a normal college classroom.
A new program at Columbia College Chicago allows students to take classes at The Second City, the humor Mecca that has turned out some of America's best-known improvisational comedians. Students also attend shows, network with artists and present their work in a showcase — all for college credit.
For aspiring performer Jennifer Ducharme, studying at The Second City "is exactly what I was looking for."
"I really wanted to get into comedy, especially improv; it's really what I need right now," said Ducharme, 20, a theater arts major at Boston University who took a leave of absence to spend the semester in Chicago.
It's new territory for The Second City, where actors usually come to learn improvisation on the job. Among those who developed their funny bones there are the late Chris Farley and Gilda Radner — both of whom became fixtures on "Saturday Night Live" — and Steve Carell, star of "The Office."
Columbia and Second City officials have lofty goals for their collaboration, which they hope becomes the "Juilliard of comedy," said Anne Libera, executive artistic director of The Second City training center.
"We would have died to have been in a program that had all those things; it's the education that all of us wanted to have," said Libera, who was in a theater company that included Stephen Colbert, host of the satirical news program "The Colbert Report."
"There's nothing else like it in the country. It's going to be big — it's going to be very big," said Sheldon Patinkin, chair of Columbia College Chicago's theater department and one of the founding members of what was first the Playwrights Theatre Club, then The Compass Players and, finally, The Second City.
The idea for the program came about more than two years ago, when Andrew Alexander, Second City's executive producer and a member of Columbia College Chicago's board of trustees, had lunch with Patinkin and college president Warrick Carter.
During the lunch, Alexander mentioned that a college in Toronto had a program that included courses in improv, Patinkin said.
"I immediately said, `Oh, what a great idea, let's do that with Second City,'" Patinkin recalled. "It was a mutual thing, we all wanted to do it."
Students take a full load of six classes, including "Context for Comedy," "History and Analysis of Comedy" and "Creating Scenes Through Improvisation."
While the training is as intense as other college programs, so is the cost. Tuition is $8,164, for the semester, plus an additional $230 for student fees. Students from out of town also must find their own housing.
Like many study-abroad programs, administrators will consider applicants from other universities. Candidates must be undergraduate juniors with an interest in performance, comedy writing or improvisation.
"Ultimately, yes, you have to be funny. (But) in this program, I'm not looking for funny people yet, I'm looking for people who have the desire to do this work and to delve into this work," Libera said.
Most of the inaugural class' 17 students are theater majors or have drama backgrounds, said instructor Jet Eveleth, a veteran improv performer who also teaches at The Second City conservatory.
Students "already have a lot of acting experience, and that's a great foundation," Eveleth said. "Sometimes, I'll work with groups, even graduate students, that aren't as free as them because they might not have the theater background."
However, a history of performing isn't necessary, Libera said.
"It's important to me that these people not just be theater majors, because I know that comedy writers and comedy performers tend to come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and that's important," Libera said.
Russell Chase, 22, a history major who plans to work in advertising after graduating from Connecticut College, couldn't resist applying after hearing about the program.
"I don't want to do the struggling acting thing," he joked. "But I was like, `Wow! That's so much better than sitting at a desk working on spreadsheets.'"
Chase said he's already interviewed at advertising firms in Boston and New York and gets the same response when recruiters find out he's studying at The Second City.
"They tell me, 'That's so creative,'" Chase said.
___
On the Net:
Comedy Studies: A Semester at The Second City: http://www.comedystudies.com
Columbia College Chicago: http://www.colum.edu/
The Second City: http://www.secondcity.com/
Email Story IM Story Printable View (What happened to the "Discuss" option?) RECOMMEND THIS STORY
Recommend It:
Average (3 votes)
» Recommended Stories
Entertainment News
Oprah to name new book club pick on Wed. AP Campbell released from community service AP Miss Tennessee crowned new Miss USA AP Snoop Dogg denied visa for U.K. concerts AP Sharp-Tongued Gibson Takes Teacher to School E! Online Most Viewed: Entertainment
When Tough Love Meets Self-Preservation Dear Margo Snoop Dogg denied visa for U.K. concerts AP Location, Location, Location Dear Margo Miss Tennessee crowned new Miss USA AP Donny says Osmonds may reunite for TV special Reuters
Entertainment Video
Retro feel of 'Back to Black' CNN - Sat Mar 24, 2:36 PM ET Miss USA woes CNN - Sat Mar 24, 7:37 AM ET Grandnephew seeks to 'set record straight' about Houdini's death CBC.ca - Fri Mar 23, 7:28 PM ET Sandler Takes Dramatic Turn in 'Reign' AP - Fri Mar 23, 5:01 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070324/ap_en_ot/comedy101
Harvard Club Says "Don't Do It"
Harvard club promotes abstinence By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Thu Mar 22, 2:39 PM ET
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Sometime between the founding of a student-run porn magazine and the day the campus health center advertised "Free Lube," Harvard University seniors Sarah Kinsella and Justin Murray decided to fight back against what they see as too much mindless sex at the Ivy League school.
ADVERTISEMENT
They founded a student group called True Love Revolution to promote abstinence on campus. The group, created earlier this school year, has more than 90 members on its Facebook.com page and drew about half that many to an ice cream social.
Harvard treats sex — or "hooking up" — so casually that "sometimes I wonder if sex is even a remotely serious thing," said Kinsella, who is dating Murray.
Other schools around the country have small groups devoted to abstinence. On most campuses, they are religious organizations. Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have Anscombe Societies, secular organizations named after an English philosopher and Roman Catholic. True Love Revolution is secular as well.
Some feminists, in particular, have criticized True Love Revolution's message.
Harvard student Rebecca Singh said she was offended by a valentine the group sent to the dormitory mailboxes of all freshmen. It read: "Why wait? Because you're worth it."
"I think they thought that we might not be `ruined' yet," Singh said. "It's a symptom of that culture we have that values a woman on her purity. It's a relic."
Others on campus have mocked the group. Murray said his friends take pleasure in loudly, and graphically, discussing their sex lives just to taunt him.
"On campus there is such a strong attitude of pluralism and acceptance, but then it doesn't extend to this," Kinsella said.
In the student paper, The Harvard Crimson, columnist Jessica C. Coggins praised the group's low-key approach and scolded Harvard students for their "laughter at the virgin." She said students on the campus, which has 6,700 undergraduates, should "find a different confidence booster than making fun of celibate peers."
True Love Revolution members say the problem starts with the university. They say Harvard has implicitly led students to believe that having sex at college is a foregone conclusion by requiring incoming freshman to attend a seminar on date-rape that does not mention abstinence, by placing condoms in freshmen dorms, and by hosting racy lecturers. (Harvard students have also launched H-Bomb, a magazine featuring racy photos of undergraduates.)
"Sometimes that voice on campus is so overwhelming that students committed to abstinence almost feel compelled to abandon their convictions," Murray said. He acknowledged he "slipped up" and had sex earlier in college but said he has returned to abstinence with Kinsella.
Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard health services, disputed the notion that the university promotes sex.
He said students mistakenly think everyone on campus is having sex. The National College Health Assessment Survey, which included Harvard and hundreds of other campuses, found that about 29 percent of students reported not having sex in the past school year. For the 71 percent who are having sex, it is crucial to promote safety, Rosenthal said.
"Some students may have a feeling that acknowledgment is condoning," he said, "and it's not."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070322/ap_on_re_us/harvard_abstinence
Thu Mar 22, 2:39 PM ET
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Sometime between the founding of a student-run porn magazine and the day the campus health center advertised "Free Lube," Harvard University seniors Sarah Kinsella and Justin Murray decided to fight back against what they see as too much mindless sex at the Ivy League school.
ADVERTISEMENT
They founded a student group called True Love Revolution to promote abstinence on campus. The group, created earlier this school year, has more than 90 members on its Facebook.com page and drew about half that many to an ice cream social.
Harvard treats sex — or "hooking up" — so casually that "sometimes I wonder if sex is even a remotely serious thing," said Kinsella, who is dating Murray.
Other schools around the country have small groups devoted to abstinence. On most campuses, they are religious organizations. Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have Anscombe Societies, secular organizations named after an English philosopher and Roman Catholic. True Love Revolution is secular as well.
Some feminists, in particular, have criticized True Love Revolution's message.
Harvard student Rebecca Singh said she was offended by a valentine the group sent to the dormitory mailboxes of all freshmen. It read: "Why wait? Because you're worth it."
"I think they thought that we might not be `ruined' yet," Singh said. "It's a symptom of that culture we have that values a woman on her purity. It's a relic."
Others on campus have mocked the group. Murray said his friends take pleasure in loudly, and graphically, discussing their sex lives just to taunt him.
"On campus there is such a strong attitude of pluralism and acceptance, but then it doesn't extend to this," Kinsella said.
In the student paper, The Harvard Crimson, columnist Jessica C. Coggins praised the group's low-key approach and scolded Harvard students for their "laughter at the virgin." She said students on the campus, which has 6,700 undergraduates, should "find a different confidence booster than making fun of celibate peers."
True Love Revolution members say the problem starts with the university. They say Harvard has implicitly led students to believe that having sex at college is a foregone conclusion by requiring incoming freshman to attend a seminar on date-rape that does not mention abstinence, by placing condoms in freshmen dorms, and by hosting racy lecturers. (Harvard students have also launched H-Bomb, a magazine featuring racy photos of undergraduates.)
"Sometimes that voice on campus is so overwhelming that students committed to abstinence almost feel compelled to abandon their convictions," Murray said. He acknowledged he "slipped up" and had sex earlier in college but said he has returned to abstinence with Kinsella.
Dr. David Rosenthal, director of Harvard health services, disputed the notion that the university promotes sex.
He said students mistakenly think everyone on campus is having sex. The National College Health Assessment Survey, which included Harvard and hundreds of other campuses, found that about 29 percent of students reported not having sex in the past school year. For the 71 percent who are having sex, it is crucial to promote safety, Rosenthal said.
"Some students may have a feeling that acknowledgment is condoning," he said, "and it's not."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070322/ap_on_re_us/harvard_abstinence
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Degree-Salary Equivalency
Most lucrative degrees for college grads
Survey finds best job market in 4 years, with most college majors seeing salary growth and some students receiving multiple job offers.
By Rob Kelley, CNNMoney.com staff writer
October 27 2006: 12:42 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers continue to boost starting salaries for the Class of 2006, which is enjoying the strongest job market in four years, according to a recent survey.
The biggest beneficiaries are graduates who majored in information sciences and systems: they are taking home 7.5 percent more than they did last year, according to the Fall 2006 edition of Salary Survey, a quarterly report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
Quiz Take the quiz
Will you succeed in your new job? Whether you're changing positions mid-career or starting your first real job out of college, new hires face common pitfalls. Do you know how to avoid them?
1. Five minutes from now, you will step on to an elevator whose only other passenger is your company's CEO, whom you haven't met before. You are most likely to:
Be completely tongue-tied and say nothing.
Introduce yourself and give a 30-second summary of the work you're doing and why you're excited about it.
Chat about the weather.
Employers have made a strong effort to attract college seniors and new grads through on-campus recruiting, career fairs, information sessions, and intern and co-op recruiting, according to NACE.
Top 50: Companies with most entry-level jobs for grads
"These salary increases combined with the results of a recent poll of Salary Survey participants indicate that 2005-06 has been the best job market in the past four years," said NACE executive director Marilyn Mackes in a statement.
According to the survey, majors that have seen some of the biggest increases in average starting salaries are:
Information sciences and systems: Up 7.5 percent to $47,182
Economics/finance: Up 6.2 percent to $44,588
Civil engineering: Up 5.3 percent to $46,084
Chemical engineering: Up 4.9 percent to $56,269
Accounting: Up 4.6 percent to $44,928
Business administration/management: Up 4.2 percent to $41,155
History: Up 4.2 percent to $33,071
For others, modest increases, some declines
Other majors also experienced slightly higher entry-level offers, but the increases from last year's offers didn't outpace inflation.
Mechanical engineering: Up 3.3 percent to $51,732
Electrical engineering: Up 2.9 percent to $53,500
Psychology: Up 1 percent to $30,369
Computer science: Up 0.3 percent to $50,744
Political science and government: Up 0.3 percent to $33,094
And in a few cases, starting offers actually declined. This was true for a few of the liberal arts majors, which only saw a 0.2 percent increase overall as a category.
English: Down 0.2 percent to $31,385
Sociology: Down 0.9 percent to $31,096
100 Top MBA Employers
Student loans: A life sentence
Where the (best) 6-figure jobs are
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/27/pf/college/lucrative_degree/index.htm?postversion=2006102712
Most lucrative degrees for 2007 grads
Marketing, business administration and engineering students see the biggest increases in average starting offers.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
February 8 2007: 1:24 PM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- With less than four months to go before saying sayonara to the quad for good, the class of 2007 is finding it easier than recent classes to get their foot in the work world.
Employers have said they expect to hire 17.4 percent more college grads than they did last year, and in many instances they plan to pay them more, too, according to a survey released this week by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
The students faring the best are marketing and business administration majors.
The average starting offer for seniors majoring in marketing is up 14 percent from last year to $41,323.
Those majoring in business administration are seeing a 9.2 percent jump to $43,523 in average starting salaries.
Others who are seeing pay increases, albeit some far more modest than others, are seniors majoring in:
Mechanical engineering: Up 7.7 percent to $54,587
Chemical engineering: Up 7.4 percent to $60,054
Management information systems: Up 5.5 percent to $46,568
Civil engineering: Up 4.8 percent to $47,145
Electrical engineering: Up 3.2 percent to $54,599
Computer science: Up 2 percent to $51,070
Accounting: Up 1.7 percent to $46,508
There are no prior year comparisons for two majors because in prior NACE surveys they were grouped together as one. However, based on prior years' average starting offers in the category (in 2006 it was $45,191), NACE characterized these average starting salaries as "respectable."
Finance: $47,905
Economics: $51,631
There have been slight decreases in the average starting salary offers for just a few majors, but NACE notes that given that it's still early in the hiring season and the job market is strong for college grads, salary offers may improve in the next few months:
Logistics/Materials management: Down 1.8 percent to $43,294
Liberal arts (including psychology, political science history, English): Down 1.1 percent to $30,502
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | | REPRINT
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/08/pf/college/lucrative_degrees_winter07/index.htm
Survey finds best job market in 4 years, with most college majors seeing salary growth and some students receiving multiple job offers.
By Rob Kelley, CNNMoney.com staff writer
October 27 2006: 12:42 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Employers continue to boost starting salaries for the Class of 2006, which is enjoying the strongest job market in four years, according to a recent survey.
The biggest beneficiaries are graduates who majored in information sciences and systems: they are taking home 7.5 percent more than they did last year, according to the Fall 2006 edition of Salary Survey, a quarterly report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
Quiz Take the quiz
Will you succeed in your new job? Whether you're changing positions mid-career or starting your first real job out of college, new hires face common pitfalls. Do you know how to avoid them?
1. Five minutes from now, you will step on to an elevator whose only other passenger is your company's CEO, whom you haven't met before. You are most likely to:
Be completely tongue-tied and say nothing.
Introduce yourself and give a 30-second summary of the work you're doing and why you're excited about it.
Chat about the weather.
Employers have made a strong effort to attract college seniors and new grads through on-campus recruiting, career fairs, information sessions, and intern and co-op recruiting, according to NACE.
Top 50: Companies with most entry-level jobs for grads
"These salary increases combined with the results of a recent poll of Salary Survey participants indicate that 2005-06 has been the best job market in the past four years," said NACE executive director Marilyn Mackes in a statement.
According to the survey, majors that have seen some of the biggest increases in average starting salaries are:
Information sciences and systems: Up 7.5 percent to $47,182
Economics/finance: Up 6.2 percent to $44,588
Civil engineering: Up 5.3 percent to $46,084
Chemical engineering: Up 4.9 percent to $56,269
Accounting: Up 4.6 percent to $44,928
Business administration/management: Up 4.2 percent to $41,155
History: Up 4.2 percent to $33,071
For others, modest increases, some declines
Other majors also experienced slightly higher entry-level offers, but the increases from last year's offers didn't outpace inflation.
Mechanical engineering: Up 3.3 percent to $51,732
Electrical engineering: Up 2.9 percent to $53,500
Psychology: Up 1 percent to $30,369
Computer science: Up 0.3 percent to $50,744
Political science and government: Up 0.3 percent to $33,094
And in a few cases, starting offers actually declined. This was true for a few of the liberal arts majors, which only saw a 0.2 percent increase overall as a category.
English: Down 0.2 percent to $31,385
Sociology: Down 0.9 percent to $31,096
100 Top MBA Employers
Student loans: A life sentence
Where the (best) 6-figure jobs are
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/27/pf/college/lucrative_degree/index.htm?postversion=2006102712
Most lucrative degrees for 2007 grads
Marketing, business administration and engineering students see the biggest increases in average starting offers.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
February 8 2007: 1:24 PM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- With less than four months to go before saying sayonara to the quad for good, the class of 2007 is finding it easier than recent classes to get their foot in the work world.
Employers have said they expect to hire 17.4 percent more college grads than they did last year, and in many instances they plan to pay them more, too, according to a survey released this week by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
The students faring the best are marketing and business administration majors.
The average starting offer for seniors majoring in marketing is up 14 percent from last year to $41,323.
Those majoring in business administration are seeing a 9.2 percent jump to $43,523 in average starting salaries.
Others who are seeing pay increases, albeit some far more modest than others, are seniors majoring in:
Mechanical engineering: Up 7.7 percent to $54,587
Chemical engineering: Up 7.4 percent to $60,054
Management information systems: Up 5.5 percent to $46,568
Civil engineering: Up 4.8 percent to $47,145
Electrical engineering: Up 3.2 percent to $54,599
Computer science: Up 2 percent to $51,070
Accounting: Up 1.7 percent to $46,508
There are no prior year comparisons for two majors because in prior NACE surveys they were grouped together as one. However, based on prior years' average starting offers in the category (in 2006 it was $45,191), NACE characterized these average starting salaries as "respectable."
Finance: $47,905
Economics: $51,631
There have been slight decreases in the average starting salary offers for just a few majors, but NACE notes that given that it's still early in the hiring season and the job market is strong for college grads, salary offers may improve in the next few months:
Logistics/Materials management: Down 1.8 percent to $43,294
Liberal arts (including psychology, political science history, English): Down 1.1 percent to $30,502
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | | REPRINT
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/08/pf/college/lucrative_degrees_winter07/index.htm
College Presidents With Huge Paychecks
Highest paid college presidents
The Chronicle of Higher Education finds increase in the $500K group is strongest at public universities.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
November 20 2006: 9:47 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Running a university or college can make for 20-hour days and intense pressure to please a long list of factions from donors, board members and alumni to faculty, students and parents.
But the job is well paid.
(or part of name)
OR
----------- state ------------AlaskaAlabamaArkansasArizonaAmerican SamoaCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDistrict of ColumbiaDelawareFloridaFederated States of MicronesiaGeorgiaGuamHawaiiIowaIdahoIllinoisIndianaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMassachusettsMarylandMaineMarshall IslandsMichiganMinnesotaMissouriMississippiMontanaNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaNebraskaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNevadaNew YorkNorthern Mariana IslandsOhioOklahomaOntarioOregonPennsylvaniaPalau IslandPuerto RicoRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVirginiaVermontVirgin IslandsWashingtonWisconsinWest VirginiaWyoming
In its annual survey, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 112 chiefs pulled down at least $500,000 among 853 public and private schools. That's up from 73 last year.
The jump was most pronounced among public university presidents -- 42 of whom earned at least $500,000, nearly double the 23 counted last year. A large portion of public-university leaders' compensation comes from public coffers such as taxpayer money and federal grants, while the rest may come from fundraising, tuition and other private sources.
Last year, compensation at private colleges broke the $1 million barrier for the first time, with 5 presidents earning at least that amount - there was no change in the number this year.
At public universities, the biggest compensation package fell just shy of the million-dollar mark. The University of Delaware's David Roselle earned $979,571 in pay and benefits. His base salary -- $729,054 -- is also the highest among public university leaders.
No. 2 on the list -- Martin Jischke of Purdue University, who made $880,950 in pay and benefits -- had the distinction of earning the biggest bonus ($400,000) among his peers on the list.
10 most expensive colleges
Jischke's bonus alone tops the compensation of the majority of public university presidents, who earn between $300,000 and $399,000, according to the Chronicle.
Of course, some of the folks who made the list of top 10 highest paid leaders at public and private schools had unusually large payouts because they were collecting deferred compensation -- such as Audrey Doberstein, who recently retired from Wilmington College. The majority of her $2.7 million package was retirement pay that she earned during her 26-year tenure.
The growth in college executive compensation is compared by many to the trend in corporate executive compensation and to a move toward a business model in the running of universities, for better or worse.
Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, told the Chronicle that at public universities the move toward higher pay can erode public confidence, especially when highly paid presidents make a plea for more state money.
Below are lists of the top 10 highest paid leaders at public universities, private research universities and private baccalaureate colleges.
Top 10 highest paid leaders of public universities
Leader Institution Total compensation
2006-2007
David P. Roselle University of Delaware $979,571*
Martin C. Jischke Purdue University $880,950
Mark A. Emmert University of Washington $752,700
J. Bernard Machen University of Florida $751,725
Mary Sue Coleman University of Michigan system $742,148
Mark G. Yudof University of Texas system $741,894
Carl V. Patton Georgia State University $701,524
M. Roy Wilson University of Colorado at Denver $697,500
John C. Hitt University of Central Florida $684,000
John T. Casteen University of Virginia $677,980**
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*For 2004-05
**For 2005-06
Top 10 highest paid leaders of private research universities
Leader Institution Total compensation
2004-2005
Audrey K. Doberstein Wilmington College (Del.) $2,746,241*
E. Gordon Gee Vanderbilt University $1,171,211
Jefrrey S. Lehman Cornell University $1,004,034*
Shirley Ann Jackson Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. $983,365
Aram V. Chobanian Boston University $945,654*
Harold J. Raveche Stevens Institute of Technology $917,538
Constantine N. Papadakis Drexel University $886,279
Benjamin Ladner American University $881,696*
William R. Brody Johns Hopkins University $837,016
John E. Sexton New York University $798,989
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*Stepped down
Top 10 highest paid leaders of private baccalaureate schools
Leader Institution Total compensation
2006-2007
Roger H. Hull Union College $1,024,652*
Frances D. Ferguson Vassar College $593,548*
Daniel F. Sullivan St. Lawrence University $551,643
Diana Chapman Walsh Wellesley College $513,401
Russell K. Osgood Grinnell College $512,445
William E. Troutt Rhodes College $511,200
John A. Fry Franklin & Marshall College $485,368
Morton Owen Schapiro Williams College $478,837
Douglas J. Bennet Wesleyan University (Conn.) $478,744
Larry P. Arnn Hillsdale College $473,415
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*Stepped down
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/20/pf/college/college_president_pay/index.htm?postversion=2006112009
The Chronicle of Higher Education finds increase in the $500K group is strongest at public universities.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
November 20 2006: 9:47 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Running a university or college can make for 20-hour days and intense pressure to please a long list of factions from donors, board members and alumni to faculty, students and parents.
But the job is well paid.
(or part of name)
OR
----------- state ------------AlaskaAlabamaArkansasArizonaAmerican SamoaCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDistrict of ColumbiaDelawareFloridaFederated States of MicronesiaGeorgiaGuamHawaiiIowaIdahoIllinoisIndianaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMassachusettsMarylandMaineMarshall IslandsMichiganMinnesotaMissouriMississippiMontanaNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaNebraskaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNevadaNew YorkNorthern Mariana IslandsOhioOklahomaOntarioOregonPennsylvaniaPalau IslandPuerto RicoRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVirginiaVermontVirgin IslandsWashingtonWisconsinWest VirginiaWyoming
In its annual survey, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 112 chiefs pulled down at least $500,000 among 853 public and private schools. That's up from 73 last year.
The jump was most pronounced among public university presidents -- 42 of whom earned at least $500,000, nearly double the 23 counted last year. A large portion of public-university leaders' compensation comes from public coffers such as taxpayer money and federal grants, while the rest may come from fundraising, tuition and other private sources.
Last year, compensation at private colleges broke the $1 million barrier for the first time, with 5 presidents earning at least that amount - there was no change in the number this year.
At public universities, the biggest compensation package fell just shy of the million-dollar mark. The University of Delaware's David Roselle earned $979,571 in pay and benefits. His base salary -- $729,054 -- is also the highest among public university leaders.
No. 2 on the list -- Martin Jischke of Purdue University, who made $880,950 in pay and benefits -- had the distinction of earning the biggest bonus ($400,000) among his peers on the list.
10 most expensive colleges
Jischke's bonus alone tops the compensation of the majority of public university presidents, who earn between $300,000 and $399,000, according to the Chronicle.
Of course, some of the folks who made the list of top 10 highest paid leaders at public and private schools had unusually large payouts because they were collecting deferred compensation -- such as Audrey Doberstein, who recently retired from Wilmington College. The majority of her $2.7 million package was retirement pay that she earned during her 26-year tenure.
The growth in college executive compensation is compared by many to the trend in corporate executive compensation and to a move toward a business model in the running of universities, for better or worse.
Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, told the Chronicle that at public universities the move toward higher pay can erode public confidence, especially when highly paid presidents make a plea for more state money.
Below are lists of the top 10 highest paid leaders at public universities, private research universities and private baccalaureate colleges.
Top 10 highest paid leaders of public universities
Leader Institution Total compensation
2006-2007
David P. Roselle University of Delaware $979,571*
Martin C. Jischke Purdue University $880,950
Mark A. Emmert University of Washington $752,700
J. Bernard Machen University of Florida $751,725
Mary Sue Coleman University of Michigan system $742,148
Mark G. Yudof University of Texas system $741,894
Carl V. Patton Georgia State University $701,524
M. Roy Wilson University of Colorado at Denver $697,500
John C. Hitt University of Central Florida $684,000
John T. Casteen University of Virginia $677,980**
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*For 2004-05
**For 2005-06
Top 10 highest paid leaders of private research universities
Leader Institution Total compensation
2004-2005
Audrey K. Doberstein Wilmington College (Del.) $2,746,241*
E. Gordon Gee Vanderbilt University $1,171,211
Jefrrey S. Lehman Cornell University $1,004,034*
Shirley Ann Jackson Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst. $983,365
Aram V. Chobanian Boston University $945,654*
Harold J. Raveche Stevens Institute of Technology $917,538
Constantine N. Papadakis Drexel University $886,279
Benjamin Ladner American University $881,696*
William R. Brody Johns Hopkins University $837,016
John E. Sexton New York University $798,989
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*Stepped down
Top 10 highest paid leaders of private baccalaureate schools
Leader Institution Total compensation
2006-2007
Roger H. Hull Union College $1,024,652*
Frances D. Ferguson Vassar College $593,548*
Daniel F. Sullivan St. Lawrence University $551,643
Diana Chapman Walsh Wellesley College $513,401
Russell K. Osgood Grinnell College $512,445
William E. Troutt Rhodes College $511,200
John A. Fry Franklin & Marshall College $485,368
Morton Owen Schapiro Williams College $478,837
Douglas J. Bennet Wesleyan University (Conn.) $478,744
Larry P. Arnn Hillsdale College $473,415
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
*Stepped down
http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/20/pf/college/college_president_pay/index.htm?postversion=2006112009
Hook-Up Culture Gets Moral Shake-Up
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Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Rising Elitism at CUNY
Higher education and the poor
The City University of New York
Jan 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.…
Unfinished. Look up on Nexis
The City University of New York
Jan 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.…
Unfinished. Look up on Nexis
Sunday, March 4, 2007
What if Meritocratic = Asian?
Little Asia on the Hill
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: January 7, 2007
WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
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Too Many? Not Enough? Some say Asian-Americans are being denied spots at top colleges to keep their numbers in check (Asians make up 5 percent of the population). Click for percentages of Asian undergraduates at selected colleges.
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“Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language,” says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. “It’s nice. You really feel like you don’t stand out.”
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. “Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,” reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, “just below the angels.”
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle’s, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it’s like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it’s like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of “selective self-racial segregation,” which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. “The different ethnic groups don’t really interact that much,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of sticking with your community.” But, he quickly adds, “People of my generation don’t look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they’re pretty much like your average American teenagers.”
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year’s freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from “the old Blues” — older alumni named for the school color — “who complain because their kids can’t get in,” says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. “It’s the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense.”
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. “It’s a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences,” he says. “I was never interested in that.”
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
“This is just a very, very egregious system,” Mr. Li told me. “Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race.”
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, “seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism.”
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. “I’m not seeking anything personally,” he says. “I’m happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter.”
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important “to ensure a diverse student body,” says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, “Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite” — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the “total package,” in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. “There’s no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students,” she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. “We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections,” Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world’s finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
“We are a meritocracy,” he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and ’80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. “You really do feel like you stand out,” says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. “I’m almost always the only black person in my class,” says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
“Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it’s overwhelmingly Asian,” she says. “I don’t feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don’t really identify with the Asian community as a minority either.”
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. “The problem is that because we’re so few, we get absorbed among the masses,” he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses “comprehensive review” — considering an applicant’s less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
“I just don’t believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state’s premier public university,” says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of “Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.” He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. “You could argue that the campus is more diverse now,” because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university’s job to fix the problems that California’s public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — “that tired old warhorse of the model minority.”
“We shouldn’t be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools ‘Asian values,’ ” says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal.”
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. “But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”
BERKELEY is “Asian heaven,” as one student puts it. “When I went back East my Asian friends were like, ‘Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,’ ” says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
“About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library,” one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: “Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn’t joins a ‘theme house’ or is a member of a club related to race.”
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. “You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone,” says Ms. Nakata. “But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from.” But she also says that the “celebrate diversity aspect” of Berkeley doesn’t go deep. “We want to respect everyone’s differences, but we don’t mix socially.”
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “there was this notion that you’re Chinese, you must be really good in math.” But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, “who don’t think it will be very lucrative.”
The story of Jon Lee’s journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of “the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano.” His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. “I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it’s like at Cal,” he says. “We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he’s taught me a lot.”
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.
Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.html?ei=5070&en=2100b567250576d4&ex=1173243600&pagewanted=all
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
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By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: January 7, 2007
WHEN Jonathan Hu was going to high school in suburban Southern California, he rarely heard anyone speaking Chinese. But striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this iconic university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish and, of course, the perpetual jackhammers from the perpetual construction projects spurred by the perpetual fund drives.
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Too Many? Not Enough? Some say Asian-Americans are being denied spots at top colleges to keep their numbers in check (Asians make up 5 percent of the population). Click for percentages of Asian undergraduates at selected colleges.
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“Here, many people speak Chinese as their primary language,” says Mr. Hu, a sophomore. “It’s nice. You really feel like you don’t stand out.”
Today, he is iPod-free, a rare condition on campus, taking in the early winter sun at the dour concrete plaza of the Free Speech Movement Cafe, named for the protests led by Mario Savio in 1964, when the administration tried to muzzle political activity. “Free speech marks us off from the stones and stars,” reads a Savio quote on the cafe wall, “just below the angels.”
There are now mostly small protests, against the new chain stores invading Telegraph Avenue, just outside the campus entrance, and to save the old oak trees scheduled for removal so the football stadium can be renovated. The biggest buzz on Telegraph one week was the grand opening of a chain restaurant — the new Chipotle’s, which drew a crowd of students eager to get in. The scent of patchouli oil and reefer is long gone; the street is posted as a drug-free zone.
And at least on this morning, there is very little speech of any kind inside the Free Speech Cafe; almost without exception, students are face-planted in their laptops, silently downloading class notes, music, messages. It could be the library but for the line for lattes. On mornings like this, the public university beneath the towering campanile seems like a small, industrious city of über-students in flops.
I ask Mr. Hu what it’s like to be on a campus that is overwhelmingly Asian — what it’s like to be of the demographic moment. This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.
Mr. Hu shrugs, saying there is a fair amount of “selective self-racial segregation,” which is not unusual at a university this size: about 24,000 undergraduates. “The different ethnic groups don’t really interact that much,” he says. “There’s definitely a sense of sticking with your community.” But, he quickly adds, “People of my generation don’t look at race as that big of a deal. People here, the freshmen and sophomores, they’re pretty much like your average American teenagers.”
Spend a few days at Berkeley, on the classically manicured slope overlooking San Francisco Bay and the distant Pacific, and soon enough the sound of foreign languages becomes less distinct. This is a global campus in a global age. And more than any time in its history, it looks toward the setting sun for its identity.
The revolution at Berkeley is a quiet one, a slow turning of the forces of immigration and demographics. What is troubling to some is that the big public school on the hill certainly does not look like the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
The oft-cited goal of a public university is to be a microcosm — in this case, of the nation’s most populous, most demographically dynamic state — and to enrich the educational experience with a variety of cultures, economic backgrounds and viewpoints.
But 10 years after California passed Proposition 209, voting to eliminate racial preferences in the public sector, university administrators find such balance harder to attain. At the same time, affirmative action is being challenged on a number of new fronts, in court and at state ballot boxes. And elite colleges have recently come under attack for practicing it — specifically, for bypassing highly credentialed Asian applicants in favor of students of color with less stellar test scores and grades.
In California, the rise of the Asian campus, of the strict meritocracy, has come at the expense of historically underrepresented blacks and Hispanics. This year, in a class of 4809, there are only 100 black freshmen at the University of California at Los Angeles — the lowest number in 33 years. At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion. (In 1997, just before the full force of Proposition 209 went into effect, the proportion of black freshmen matched the state population, 7 percent.) The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
This is in part because getting into Berkeley — U.S. News & World Report’s top-ranked public university — has never been more daunting. There were 41,750 applicants for this year’s freshman class of 4,157. Nearly half had a weighted grade point average of 4.0 or better (weighted for advanced courses). There is even grumbling from “the old Blues” — older alumni named for the school color — “who complain because their kids can’t get in,” says Gregg Thomson, director of the Office of Student Research.
Mr. Hu applied to a lot of colleges, but Berkeley felt right for him from the start. “It’s the intellectual atmosphere — this place is intense.”
Mr. Hu says he was pressured by a professor to go into something like medicine or engineering. “It’s a stereotype, but a lot of Asians who come here just study engineering and the sciences,” he says. “I was never interested in that.”
But as the only son of professionals born in China, Mr. Hu fits the profile of Asians at Berkeley in at least one way: they are predominantly first-generation American. About 95 percent of Asian freshmen come from a family in which one or both parents were born outside the United States.
He dashes off to class, and I wander through the serene setting of Memorial Glade, in the center of campus, and then loop over to Sproul Plaza, the beating heart of the university, where dozens of tables are set up by clubs representing every conceivable ethnic group. Out of nowhere, an a cappella group, mostly Asian men, appears and starts singing a Beach Boys song. Yes, tradition still matters in California.
ACROSS the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.
And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.
Asians have become the “new Jews,” in the phrase of Daniel Golden, whose recent book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” is a polemic against university admissions policies. Mr. Golden, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is referring to evidence that, in the first half of the 20th century, Ivy League schools limited the number of Jewish students despite their outstanding academic records to maintain the primacy of upper-class Protestants. Today, he writes, “Asian-Americans are the odd group out, lacking racial preferences enjoyed by other minorities and the advantages of wealth and lineage mostly accrued by upper-class whites. Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science.”
As if to illustrate the point, a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.
To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.
“This is just a very, very egregious system,” Mr. Li told me. “Asians are held to different standards simply because of their race.”
To back his claim, he cites a 2005 study by Thomas J. Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, both of Princeton, which concludes that if elite universities were to disregard race, Asians would fill nearly four of five spots that now go to blacks or Hispanics. Affirmative action has a neutral effect on the number of whites admitted, Mr. Li is arguing, but it raises the bar for Asians. The way Princeton selects its entering class, Mr. Li wrote in his complaint, “seems to be a calculated move by a historically white institution to protect its racial identity while at the same time maintaining a facade of progressivism.”
Private institutions can commit to affirmative action, even with state bans, but federal money could be revoked if they are found to be discriminating. Mr. Li is seeking suspension of federal financial assistance to Princeton. “I’m not seeking anything personally,” he says. “I’m happy at Yale. But I grew up thinking that in America race should not matter.”
Admissions officials have long denied that they apply quotas. Nonetheless, race is important “to ensure a diverse student body,” says Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman. But, she adds, “Looking at the merits of race is not the same as the opposite” — discrimination.
Elite colleges like Princeton review the “total package,” in her words, looking at special talents, extracurricular interests and socioeconomics — factors like whether the applicant is the first in the family to go to college or was raised by a single mother. “There’s no set formula or standard for how we evaluate students,” she says. High grades and test scores would seem to be merely a baseline. “We turned away approximately half of applicants with maximum scores on the SAT, all three sections,” Ms. Cliatt says of the class Mr. Li would have joined.
In the last two months, the nation has seen a number of new challenges to racial engineering in schools. In November, the United States Supreme Court heard a case questioning the legality of using race in assigning students to public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. Voters are also sending a message, having thrown out racial preferences in Michigan in November, following a lead taken by California, Texas, Florida and Washington. Last month, Ward Connerly, the architect of Proposition 209, announced his next potential targets for a ballot initiative, including Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska.
When I ask the chancellor at Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, if there is a perfect demographic recipe on this campus that likes to think of itself as the world’s finest public university — Harvard on the Hill — he demurs.
“We are a meritocracy,” he says. And — by law, he adds — the campus is supposed to be that way. If Asians made up, say, 70 percent of the campus, he insists, there would still be no attempt to reduce their numbers.
Asian enrollment at his campus actually began to ramp up well before affirmative action was banned.
Historically, Asians have faced discrimination, with exclusion laws in the 1800s that kept them from voting, owning property or legally immigrating. Many were run out of West Coast towns by mobs. But by the 1970s and ’80s, with a change in immigration laws, a surge in Asian arrivals began to change the complexion of California, and it was soon reflected in an overrepresentation at its top universities.
In the late 1980s, administrators appeared to be limiting Asian-American admissions, prompting a federal investigation. The result was an apology by the chancellor at the time, and a vow that there would be no cap on Asian enrollment.
University administrators and teachers use anguished words to describe what has happened since.
“I’ve heard from Latinos and blacks that Asians should not be considered a minority at all,” says Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at Berkeley. “What happened after they got rid of affirmative action has been a disaster — for blacks and Latinos. And for Asians it’s been a disaster because some people think the campus has become all-Asian.”
The diminishing number of African-Americans on campus is a consistent topic of discussion among black students. Some say they feel isolated, without a sense of community. “You really do feel like you stand out,” says Armilla Staley, a second-year law student. In her freshman year, she was one of only nine African-Americans in a class of 265. “I’m almost always the only black person in my class,” says Ms. Staley, who favors a return to some form of affirmative action.
“Quite frankly, when you walk around campus, it’s overwhelmingly Asian,” she says. “I don’t feel any tension between Asians and blacks, but I don’t really identify with the Asian community as a minority either.”
Walter Robinson, the director of undergraduate admissions, who is African-American, has the same impression. “The problem is that because we’re so few, we get absorbed among the masses,” he says.
Chancellor Birgeneau says he finds the low proportion of blacks and Hispanics appalling, and two years into his tenure, he has not found a remedy. To broaden the pool, the U.C. system promises to admit the top 4 percent at each high school in the state and uses “comprehensive review” — considering an applicant’s less quantifiable attributes. But the net results for a campus like Berkeley are disappointing. His university, Dr. Birgeneau says, loses talented black applicants to private universities like Stanford, where African-American enrollment was 10 percent last year — nearly three times that at Berkeley.
“I just don’t believe that in a state with three million African-Americans there is not a single engineering student for the state’s premier public university,” says the chancellor, who has called for reinstating racial preferences.
One leading critic of bringing affirmative action back to Berkeley is David A. Hollinger, chairman of its history department and author of “Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.” He supported racial preferences before Proposition 209, but is no longer so sure. “You could argue that the campus is more diverse now,” because Asians comprise so many different cultures, says Dr. Hollinger. A little more than half of Asian freshmen at Berkeley are Chinese, the largest group, followed by Koreans, East-Indian/Pakistani, Filipino and Japanese.
He believes that Latinos are underrepresented because many come from poor agrarian families with little access to the good schools that could prepare them for the rigors of Berkeley. He points out that, on the other hand, many of the Korean students on campus are sons and daughters of parents with college degrees. In any event, he says, it is not the university’s job to fix the problems that California’s public schools produce.
Dr. Birgeneau agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”
IF Berkeley is now a pure meritocracy, what does that say about the future of great American universities in the post-affirmative action age? Are we headed toward a day when all elite colleges will look something like Berkeley: relatively wealthy whites (about 60 percent of white freshmen’s families make $100,000 or more) and a large Asian plurality and everyone else underrepresented? Is that the inevitable result of color-blind admissions?
Eric Liu, author of “The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker” and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton, is troubled by the assertion that the high Asian makeup of elite campuses reflects a post-racial age where merit prevails.
“I really challenge this idea of a pure meritocracy,” says Mr. Liu, who runs mentoring programs that grew out of his book “Guiding Lights: How to Mentor and Find Life’s Purpose.” Until all students — from rural outposts to impoverished urban settings — are given equal access to the Advanced Placement classes that have proved to be a ticket to the best colleges, then the idea of pure meritocracy is bunk, he says. “They’re measuring in a fair way the results of an unfair system.”
He also says Asian-Americans are tired of having to live up to — or defend — “that tired old warhorse of the model minority.”
“We shouldn’t be calling these studying habits that help so many kids get into good schools ‘Asian values,’ ” says Mr. Liu, himself a product of Yale College and Harvard Law School. “These are values that used to be called Jewish values or Anglo-Saxon work-ethic values. The bottom line message from the family is the same: work hard, defer gratification, share sacrifice and focus on the big goal.”
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says. “Talking and thinking are not the same thing. Being a student to some Asians means that it’s not your place to question, and that flapping your gums all day is not the best thing.”
One study at the institute looked at Asian-American students in lab courses, and found they did better solving problems alone and without conversations with other students. “This can make for some big problems,” she says, like misunderstandings between classmates. “But people are afraid to talk about these differences. And one of the fantastic opportunities of going to a Stanford or Berkeley is to learn something about other cultures, so we should be talking about it.”
As for the rise in Asian enrollment, the reason “isn’t a mystery,” Dr. Markus says. “This needs to come out and we shouldn’t hide it,” she says. “In Asian families, the No. 1 job of a child is to be a student. Being educated — that’s the most honorable thing you can do.”
BERKELEY is “Asian heaven,” as one student puts it. “When I went back East my Asian friends were like, ‘Wow, you go to Berkeley — that must be great,’ ” says Tera Nakata, who just graduated and now works in the residence halls.
You need only go to colleges in, say, the Midwest to appreciate the Asian feel of this campus. But Berkeley is freighted with the baggage of stereotypes — that it is boring socially, full of science nerds, a hard place to make friends.
“About half the students at this school spend their entire career in the library,” one person wrote in a posting on vault.com, a popular job and college search Web site.
Another wrote: “Everyone who is white joins the Greek system and everyone who isn’t joins a ‘theme house’ or is a member of a club related to race.”
There is some truth to the image, students acknowledge, but it does not do justice to the bigger experience at Berkeley. “You have the ability to stay with people who are like you and not get out of your comfort zone,” says Ms. Nakata. “But I learned a lot by mixing it up. I lived in a dorm with a lot of different races, and we would have these deep conversations all the time about race and our feelings of where we belong and where we came from.” But she also says that the “celebrate diversity aspect” of Berkeley doesn’t go deep. “We want to respect everyone’s differences, but we don’t mix socially.”
Near the end of my stay at Berkeley I met a senior, Jonathan Lee, the son of a Taiwanese father and a mother from Hong Kong. He grew up well east of Los Angeles, in the New America sprawl of fast-growing Riverside County, where his father owned a restaurant. He went to a high school where he was a minority.
“When I was in high school,” he says, “there was this notion that you’re Chinese, you must be really good in math.” But now Mr. Lee is likely to become a schoolteacher, much to the chagrin of his parents, “who don’t think it will be very lucrative.”
The story of Jon Lee’s journey at Berkeley is compelling. As president of the Asian-American Association, he has tried to dispel stereotypes of “the Dragon Lady seductress or the idea that everybody plays the piano.” His closest friends are in the club. It may seem that he has become more insular, that he has found his tribe. But Mr. Lee says he has been trying to lead other Asian students out of the university bubble. Once a week, they go into a mostly black and Hispanic middle school in the Bay Area to mentor students.
For the last five semesters, Mr. Lee has worked with one student. “I take him out for dim sum, or to Chinatown, or just talk about college and what it’s like at Cal,” he says. “We talk about race and we talk about everything. And he’s taught me a lot.”
The mentoring program came about not because of prodding by well-meaning advisers, teachers or student groups. It came about because Mr. Lee looked around at the new America and found that it looked very different from Berkeley. And much as he loves Berkeley, he knew that if he wanted to learn enough to teach, he needed to get off campus.
Timothy Egan reports for The Times from the West Coast. He won a 2006 National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07asian.html?ei=5070&en=2100b567250576d4&ex=1173243600&pagewanted=all
Handle College Without Depression
Student Resources
Help with the Demands of College Life
Get help for the top mental health issues facing university and college students:
1. Hope for the rising incidence of stress and depression
2. Tips for parents
3. Mental health problems increasing among college students
1. Hope for the rising incidence of stress and depression
Help for college students: Know the signs and how to get help for the top mental health issues facing university and college students
By Liza N. Eversole, MTN Wellness & Mental Health Consultant, August 15, 2006
According to a study three years ago by Kansas State University, the number of students seeing school counselors for depression doubled over a 13-year period and the number of students with suicidal thoughts tripled over that same span.
This is alarming, but there is hope. Help is here for the increasing numbers of students with anxiety, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Campuses around the country are aware of the problem and many are creating ways to help manage these issues and even prevent students from developing mental health problems.
Read the following information to help manage these issues and learn how to get help when students can't manage the pressures of college life alone.
Some stress and anxiety is normal. Stress often increases as the number of responsibilities, choices, and decisions increase. Pressure to achieve good grades and fit into college life with ease contribute to the normal first year and back-to-school anxiety. Students who where successful in high school often find the competition too much. They are under even more pressure from high expectations to be the best and get higher paying jobs.
But, if stress continues to increase over time, the mental and physical results can be serious. Stress that persists day after day is a mental health problem. Experts agree that the physiological changes that result from stress contribute to nearly every major illness.
Be aware of the signs. The most commonly reported negative outcomes of stress include:
- Constant fatigue and/or insomnia: Are you just as tired when you wake up, as you were when you went to bed?
- Depression or anxiety: Are you feeling overwhelmed and anxious? Do you have angry outbursts?
- Physical Illness: Do you have a susceptibility to illness? Do you frequently have illnesses, high blood pressure, GI problems, headaches or back pain?
- Are you forgetful or disorganized?
- Are you noticing yourself using alcohol, drugs, or food more (or not eating)?
Please see your physician if you experience persistent physical symptoms!
The good news is that stress can be managed if students take the opportunity to assess the effects of stress on their overall wellbeing and to take the steps needed to improve their health and quality of life.
Keep yourself healthy: Take care of yourself physically and mentally. Your energy levels will be much higher if you are getting enough sleep, eating well, drinking enough water, and taking the time to do things you enjoy.
- Exercise regularly, but not excessively
- Get enough sleep (7-8 hours is average)
- Eat a balanced diet
- Slow down
- Stretch and breathe
- Learn relaxation techniques
- Remove yourself from stressors
- Get help from a counselor or therapist when the mental and emotional stress becomes too much to handle.
Signs and Symptoms of Depression
If you are experiencing any of the following, please seek help from an experienced counselor or therapist either at your Student Counseling Center, through your physician, or log onto MyTherapyNet.com.
Symptoms that Students and Parents Should Not Ignore:
- Abusing drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs or over-the-counter medications.
- Turning to food for comfort or not eating and/or excessively exercising (eating disorders)
- Problems with family or friends
- Feeling overwhelmed or anxious about school or personal issues
- Depression, which can have any of these symptoms/signs:
Feeling sad or empty, decreased energy, loss of interest in former activities, feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, excessive crying, difficulty in concentrating or making decisions, weight gain or loss, over or under sleeping and thoughts of suicide.
According to The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) if five or more of these symptoms persist for more than two weeks, it is recommended that the person seek professional help. Go to the NIMH website for more information: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/
2. Tips for parents
Parents should know what is available on campuses to help their children. Many universities and colleges have counseling and intervention programs, some free and some covered by student health plans.
Symptoms that Students and Parents Should Not Ignore:
- Abusing drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications
- Turning to food for comfort or not eating and/or excessively exercising (eating disorders)
- Unusual weight gain or loss
- Problems with family or friends
- Feeling overwhelmed or anxious about school or personal issues
- Difficulty in concentrating or making decisions
- Over or under sleeping
- Feeling sad or empty
- Excessive crying
- Decreased energy
- Loss of interest in former activities
- Feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness and thoughts of suicide.
According to a new study by the American Psychiatric Association, nearly one-third of adults who have a mental illness say they don't seek treatment because they fear what thers might think.
Students who are not comfortable talking find it easier to express themselves in writing. They often feel less inhibited and safer at the computer's keyboard, accept suggestions and move to solutions quicker than if they feel confronted by their therapist in person.
According to the article, Erasing stigma key to mental treatment, by former First Lady, Rosalyn Carter, "While mental illnesses can be as debilitating and life-threatening as many physical illnesses, research shows that fewer than half of the 54 million Americans who have a mental illness seek treatment. It is time to stop throwing up barriers to mental health care needed by so many Americans. No one suffering from a mental disorder should feel alone or ashamed."
By Liza N. Eversole, MTN Wellness & Mental Health Consultant, August 15, 2006
3. Mental health problems increasing among college students
Dr. Richard Kadison, chief of the mental health services at Harvard University Health Services believes colleges and universities should do anything they can to help the increasing numbers of students who arrive with pre-existing mental health problems or develop them while on campus.
ARTICLE SUMMARY: Mental Health Problems Increasing Among College Students
July 5, 2006, By KATHLEEN MEGAN, Courant Staff Writer
Every year at around this time, Dr. Kadisonef gets phone calls from concerned parents. Their children have been receiving treatment and medication for a mental disorder of some type, and they want to make sure that services are in place for their child in the fall at school.
"I am delighted to get the calls," said Kadison, author of "College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It." He believes colleges and universities should do anything they can to help the increasing numbers of students who arrive with pre-existing mental health problems or develop them while on campus.
Late adolescence and early adulthood have always been a time when mental illness is likely to flare up. "This is an age when there are developmental and hormonal changes going on with people," said Kadison. "It's a very common age of onset."
In the past, students with depression, severe anxiety or other mental illnesses often didn't make it to college or dropped out if those problems became too severe. Today, with better medications and treatment available, those students are staying on campus.
In a recent survey, about 90 percent of college counseling-center directors believe there has been an increase in the number of clients with severe psychological problems.
A study at Kansas State University looking at student mental health complaints on their campus from 1988 to 2001 found that the number of students who had serious depression had doubled, while the number contemplating suicide had tripled. Kadison said one in 10 students will seriously consider suicide, while 45 percent of students report having reached a point where they were so depressed they couldn't function.
FROM:http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hcyoungadults.artjul05,0,587993.story?page=3&coll=hc-headlines-life
Students and parents can receive confidential help NOW! Experienced therapists at MyTherapyNet.com are available 24/7! Therapists are only a mouse click away.
Managing stress is the foundation for a wellness: A well-balanced and healthy life. So, in addition to receiving quality therapy at MyTherapyNet, please visit
www.MindBodySeries.com for information, tools and products to help you manage stress.
ATTENTION UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES: Don't let your students suffer in silence! Take care of your students and help them adjust to being away from home. E-mail leversole@mytherapynet.com to help your university or college set up an Online Therapy support program to ensure a healthy school environment.
http://www.mytherapynet.com/Public/ShowText.asp?EUID=&articleid=225&articletype=38
Help with the Demands of College Life
Get help for the top mental health issues facing university and college students:
1. Hope for the rising incidence of stress and depression
2. Tips for parents
3. Mental health problems increasing among college students
1. Hope for the rising incidence of stress and depression
Help for college students: Know the signs and how to get help for the top mental health issues facing university and college students
By Liza N. Eversole, MTN Wellness & Mental Health Consultant, August 15, 2006
According to a study three years ago by Kansas State University, the number of students seeing school counselors for depression doubled over a 13-year period and the number of students with suicidal thoughts tripled over that same span.
This is alarming, but there is hope. Help is here for the increasing numbers of students with anxiety, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Campuses around the country are aware of the problem and many are creating ways to help manage these issues and even prevent students from developing mental health problems.
Read the following information to help manage these issues and learn how to get help when students can't manage the pressures of college life alone.
Some stress and anxiety is normal. Stress often increases as the number of responsibilities, choices, and decisions increase. Pressure to achieve good grades and fit into college life with ease contribute to the normal first year and back-to-school anxiety. Students who where successful in high school often find the competition too much. They are under even more pressure from high expectations to be the best and get higher paying jobs.
But, if stress continues to increase over time, the mental and physical results can be serious. Stress that persists day after day is a mental health problem. Experts agree that the physiological changes that result from stress contribute to nearly every major illness.
Be aware of the signs. The most commonly reported negative outcomes of stress include:
- Constant fatigue and/or insomnia: Are you just as tired when you wake up, as you were when you went to bed?
- Depression or anxiety: Are you feeling overwhelmed and anxious? Do you have angry outbursts?
- Physical Illness: Do you have a susceptibility to illness? Do you frequently have illnesses, high blood pressure, GI problems, headaches or back pain?
- Are you forgetful or disorganized?
- Are you noticing yourself using alcohol, drugs, or food more (or not eating)?
Please see your physician if you experience persistent physical symptoms!
The good news is that stress can be managed if students take the opportunity to assess the effects of stress on their overall wellbeing and to take the steps needed to improve their health and quality of life.
Keep yourself healthy: Take care of yourself physically and mentally. Your energy levels will be much higher if you are getting enough sleep, eating well, drinking enough water, and taking the time to do things you enjoy.
- Exercise regularly, but not excessively
- Get enough sleep (7-8 hours is average)
- Eat a balanced diet
- Slow down
- Stretch and breathe
- Learn relaxation techniques
- Remove yourself from stressors
- Get help from a counselor or therapist when the mental and emotional stress becomes too much to handle.
Signs and Symptoms of Depression
If you are experiencing any of the following, please seek help from an experienced counselor or therapist either at your Student Counseling Center, through your physician, or log onto MyTherapyNet.com.
Symptoms that Students and Parents Should Not Ignore:
- Abusing drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs or over-the-counter medications.
- Turning to food for comfort or not eating and/or excessively exercising (eating disorders)
- Problems with family or friends
- Feeling overwhelmed or anxious about school or personal issues
- Depression, which can have any of these symptoms/signs:
Feeling sad or empty, decreased energy, loss of interest in former activities, feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness, excessive crying, difficulty in concentrating or making decisions, weight gain or loss, over or under sleeping and thoughts of suicide.
According to The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) if five or more of these symptoms persist for more than two weeks, it is recommended that the person seek professional help. Go to the NIMH website for more information: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/
2. Tips for parents
Parents should know what is available on campuses to help their children. Many universities and colleges have counseling and intervention programs, some free and some covered by student health plans.
Symptoms that Students and Parents Should Not Ignore:
- Abusing drugs, alcohol, prescription drugs and over-the-counter medications
- Turning to food for comfort or not eating and/or excessively exercising (eating disorders)
- Unusual weight gain or loss
- Problems with family or friends
- Feeling overwhelmed or anxious about school or personal issues
- Difficulty in concentrating or making decisions
- Over or under sleeping
- Feeling sad or empty
- Excessive crying
- Decreased energy
- Loss of interest in former activities
- Feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness and thoughts of suicide.
According to a new study by the American Psychiatric Association, nearly one-third of adults who have a mental illness say they don't seek treatment because they fear what thers might think.
Students who are not comfortable talking find it easier to express themselves in writing. They often feel less inhibited and safer at the computer's keyboard, accept suggestions and move to solutions quicker than if they feel confronted by their therapist in person.
According to the article, Erasing stigma key to mental treatment, by former First Lady, Rosalyn Carter, "While mental illnesses can be as debilitating and life-threatening as many physical illnesses, research shows that fewer than half of the 54 million Americans who have a mental illness seek treatment. It is time to stop throwing up barriers to mental health care needed by so many Americans. No one suffering from a mental disorder should feel alone or ashamed."
By Liza N. Eversole, MTN Wellness & Mental Health Consultant, August 15, 2006
3. Mental health problems increasing among college students
Dr. Richard Kadison, chief of the mental health services at Harvard University Health Services believes colleges and universities should do anything they can to help the increasing numbers of students who arrive with pre-existing mental health problems or develop them while on campus.
ARTICLE SUMMARY: Mental Health Problems Increasing Among College Students
July 5, 2006, By KATHLEEN MEGAN, Courant Staff Writer
Every year at around this time, Dr. Kadisonef gets phone calls from concerned parents. Their children have been receiving treatment and medication for a mental disorder of some type, and they want to make sure that services are in place for their child in the fall at school.
"I am delighted to get the calls," said Kadison, author of "College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It." He believes colleges and universities should do anything they can to help the increasing numbers of students who arrive with pre-existing mental health problems or develop them while on campus.
Late adolescence and early adulthood have always been a time when mental illness is likely to flare up. "This is an age when there are developmental and hormonal changes going on with people," said Kadison. "It's a very common age of onset."
In the past, students with depression, severe anxiety or other mental illnesses often didn't make it to college or dropped out if those problems became too severe. Today, with better medications and treatment available, those students are staying on campus.
In a recent survey, about 90 percent of college counseling-center directors believe there has been an increase in the number of clients with severe psychological problems.
A study at Kansas State University looking at student mental health complaints on their campus from 1988 to 2001 found that the number of students who had serious depression had doubled, while the number contemplating suicide had tripled. Kadison said one in 10 students will seriously consider suicide, while 45 percent of students report having reached a point where they were so depressed they couldn't function.
FROM:http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hcyoungadults.artjul05,0,587993.story?page=3&coll=hc-headlines-life
Students and parents can receive confidential help NOW! Experienced therapists at MyTherapyNet.com are available 24/7! Therapists are only a mouse click away.
Managing stress is the foundation for a wellness: A well-balanced and healthy life. So, in addition to receiving quality therapy at MyTherapyNet, please visit
www.MindBodySeries.com for information, tools and products to help you manage stress.
ATTENTION UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES: Don't let your students suffer in silence! Take care of your students and help them adjust to being away from home. E-mail leversole@mytherapynet.com to help your university or college set up an Online Therapy support program to ensure a healthy school environment.
http://www.mytherapynet.com/Public/ShowText.asp?EUID=&articleid=225&articletype=38
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