Elite colleges admit young elitists,writes Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum in the New York Post. Then they lecture the rest of us about “privilege.”
Ziad Ahmed, a senior at Princeton Day School in Princeton, NJ, who got into Stanford after he answered the application question, “What matters to you, and why?” by writing “Black Lives Matter” 100 times. He provided no explanation, saying “The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing.”
Ziad Ahmed’s Facebook page shows him with President Obama and with Hillary Clinton.
The son of a hedge-fund manager and an engineer, Ahmed has given a TEDx talk, “interned for Martin O’Malley, volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and has been invited to the Obama White House,” writes Riley. He also was admitted to Yale and Princeton.
She contrasts Ahmed with Martin Altenburg, a top student, violinist and athlete who was accepted at all eight Ivy League schools, plus Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT and University of Chicago.
Martin Altenburg, who didn’t think he could afford a college outside North Dakota, is choosing between Harvard, Princeton, MIT and Stanford.
“Originally my parents didn’t want me to apply to these schools because they thought we’d have to pay full price which, at a lot of these schools, is more than our yearly income,” he told his local paper.
Altenburg’s goal is “to see the world, be able to get a job that allows me to understand how the world works, and make a really big difference.”
At 38 elite colleges, more students come from the top 1 percent of the income scale than the bottom 60 percent, according to an Equality of Opportunity Project study.
High-income achievers may turn to activism because they feel guilty about their privilege, writes Riley. Since they think they know it all, they “shut down outside speakers and demand that professors censor their lectures,” demand safe spaces and trigger warnings.
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