From the New York Times:
20 Full Rides to Top Colleges: A Texas Student’s Perfect Sweep
By MATT STEVENSAPRIL 1, 2018
Last week Ms. Rutledge-Brown’s son, Micheal Brown, opened the last of his big envelopes, and put an exclamation point at the end of an impressive streak: Mr. Brown, 17, got into all 20 highly selective colleges he applied to, all of which offered him a full ride through a combination of merit- and financial-based scholarships and grants.
“He actually earned it,” said Ms. Rutledge-Brown, a drug counselor.
Usually, the black kids who hit the affirmative action college admissions jackpot are African immigrants or are part white (which as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier used to say kind of defeats the reparations reason for affirmative action, until the rise of Barack Obama made them dummy up for political reasons)
Micheal Brown, however, is very black-looking and might well be a genuine African-American (although there remains a chance he’s West Indian.)
Still, in an era when colleges seem to want everything from their applicants, going a perfect 20 for 20 stands out.
Applying to 20 colleges would cost somewhat over $1000 in application fees, but low income applicants can get the fees waived.
Mr. Brown got into elite private schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Stanford and Georgetown — his top picks. He was also admitted to small but highly selective liberal arts schools like Pomona College and large public universities like the University of Michigan.
Mr. Brown, a senior at Lamar High School in Houston, said that in addition to the money pledged by the schools, he was awarded about $260,000 through scholarships he sought outside of the college application process.
It’s almost as if Racist White Supremacist America actually wishes smart, hard-working blacks well …
What did it take? Mr. Brown had a 4.68 grade point average when he applied to college, an SAT score of 1540 out of 1600 and an ACT score of 34 out of 36.
These are very good marks. At Stanford, the latest freshman class had a 1390 SAT score (latest scoring system) at its 25th percentile and a 1540 at the 75th percentile, so Brown’s 1540 puts him at the 75th percentile among freshmen.
He was on the school debate team, had done internships and was part of school activities like Key Club.
Still, he was initially unsure whether it would be enough to get him into Stanford, a school his mother said he had dreamed of attending for years.
On the other hand, lots of kids with 1540 SAT scores get turned down by Stanford and Harvard even though they would be above average in their classes. It used to be a common mistake for strong applicants to not apply to enough colleges because they assumed that they would get in just because they were above average.
This kid’s mom’s thinking that Stanford and Harvard ought to be his top two seems reasonable. If you are pretty much guaranteed a well-paid job for life (assuming you don’t mess up badly), the top two places to live are Northern California and New York. Stanford is the best feeder for the former and Harvard for the latter.
