Harvard Admits It Can’t Teach Everyone The university dumps students for sharing foul memes. Who’ll re-educate them now? By Naomi Schaefer Riley
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-admits-it-cant-teach-everyone-1496960896
At least 10 college-bound students found out this week that they won’t be going to Harvard after all. The college rescinded its admissions offers after reviewing explicit and racist messages the students had traded on a private Facebook page.
The school’s student newspaper, the Crimson, obtained screenshots of the chat and reported that it included “memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children.” One message “called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child ‘piñata time.’ ”
It makes you wonder what these kids wrote in their application essays. Harvard’s questions range from explaining “how you hope to use your college education” to saying “what you would want your future college roommate to know about you.” Jokes about the Holocaust or pedophilia probably didn’t spring to mind.
But that’s the farcical application process. Admissions officers, after reading all the 500-word essays, the heartfelt recommendations from teachers, the interviews with loyal alumni, know exactly what students want them to know. SAT scores are more objective, but testing plays a smaller role in admissions than it used to.
In a 2015 Kaplan survey, 40% of admissions officers at top colleges said that they check applicants’ social-media accounts. Let’s stipulate, too, that other elite schools would probably have had the same reaction—rescinding admission—upon discovering a similar Facebook group. CONTINUE AT SITE
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