Oh wow. Hmmm, without going PPB, I'm going to guess her remarks brought race into the conversation. For the record, I do not believe that any of the students accepted to Duke's class of 2022 do not belong there. That's the problem, of course, there are more kids that can do the work than there are slots. It's been that way for a long time, but the pressure is increasing and the slots are not. Duke is, in fact, building a brand new state of the art 21st century dorm - they should increase the size of their student body. If my previous comments sounded anything like I thought other kids did not deserve to be there and my son did - I apologize, that was not the point I was intending to make. I did disparage graduates who go on to work in the financial services industry. I will admit that I value scholarly achievement more than making money. Many would view that as a failing on my part and I accept the criticism even though I do not plan to change my mind. I love that my kid wants to double major in Classics and linguistics. I will never ask him "what do you plan to do with that?" He's smart, he'll figure something out. I'll still love him if he goes to work on Wall Street someday but I'm hoping for college professor.
Enrollment at top colleges has been kept artificially low. I'm not saying these places should double in size, but I do believe that the current environment is not sustainable. I suggested an increase of 2-5%. If the Ivies plus Stanford and Duke did that, we would have around 3000 more kids per year going to those schools. That would ease pressure by a lot. It might even lead to a less widespread cheating problem at high schools like the one where my kids go. And yeah, I believe that all the Ivies plus Duke and Stanford could, relatively easily, increase their enrollment by 200-500 kids (over 4 years, so 50-125 per class). I'll repeat, I'm arguing for increasing access by, you know, increasing access. That mom who got fired is railing against a system that is stacked against an awful lot of people. If I'm right about the nature of her comments, she's blaming the wrong people, but still, we're not going to keep going the way we are now without some kind of a breaking point being reached.