Admissions and a Country Boy

By Ian McGrath | Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Let me describe a place I know very well, and see if you can guess where it is. For the past fifteen years, the unemployment rate has hovered in the teens, sometimes climbing as high as twenty percent. The average wage is well below the national norm. There is a very high percentage of minimum-wage laborers. The schools there are housed in ancient, depressing buildings. Attendance is poor, and the dropout rate is high. Teacher salary is so low that the top graduates from teaching programs seek employment elsewhere. School funding is so pitiful that the science classes can't do anything we would consider a 'lab.' Average SAT scores are the lowest for that region of the country. A minority of students apply to college. Even fewer end up going. Most of the few that do go end up studying at local community colleges. A few shining stars make it to the more reputable state-subsidized schools. As a result, a very high number of graduates stay put, never leaving the area. Eventually they bring up their children in the exact same environment. Yet Dartmouth and schools like it don't lift a finger to encourage those few excellent students to apply.

Now let me guess what just happened. Throughout the whole description, you were thinking, 'It's got to be some urban center, maybe New York or Chicago.' But then I put in that last sentence.

Everyone knows that Dartmouth and its brethren send admission representatives swarming through our major cities every year. They talk to students. They brief guidance counselors on all the financial-aid available for the disadvantaged. The general idea is this: They don't want high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to feel intimidated by the seemingly high cost or daunting odds of acceptance. The story is not at all the same in Page County, Virginia.

The school system in my hometown has sent a grand total of one (1) student to an Ivy League school in the past quarter century — me. It's not that there aren't qualified students. The problem is that while representatives actively push Dartmouth and other schools to inner-city (read: minority) students, no one seems to give two cents about the kids out in the country. The most common comments that I have heard from Page County students are about financial matters. 'My family could never afford it.' No one has told them admissions are need-blind and financial aid is readily available. 'I can't afford the application fee.' No one tells them that it is waivable. There are also self-confidence problems. Many students don't think their A's are worth as much as A's from the big, urban magnet schools. Many are also scared of going into such a strange environment, so far form home. Dartmouth addresses these fears for inner-city students, just not for the country boys. So while minority kids from New York are enjoying their all-expenses-paid trip up to Hanover, the Page County student is touring Lord Fairfax Community College.

Why? Why is there such a concerted effort to recruit the inner-city minority student and virtually nothing for the mostly white rural kid? Most of the explanations center on the fact that the College is lending a hand to 'historically disadvantaged' groups.

To put it in coutry terms, that's a load of hogwash. How about the 'currently disadvantaged?' There are more poor whites than poor minorities in this country. There are more rural poor than urban poor. Admittedly, there is a larger poverty rate among minorities. A higher percentage of city-dwellers are poor. Yet what moral system is it that holds, 'Help out groups with higher rates of disadvantage; don't worry about helping the disadvantaged as a whole?' It looks like a pretty screwed-up system of morality to me.

I think that the real agenda should be clear. The College has a goal of creating a 'diverse' student body (in which, I might add, city dwellers are heavily over-represented). Why can't they just admit that they do it? The reason: when stripped of all secondary explanations, admission policy lets a person's ethnicity play a crutial role in who attends Dartmouth. That, whether well-intentioned or not, is nothing better than racial discrimination — no matter what the color.

Admissions and a Country Boy

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