News: Montclair, New Jersey: As a New York high school student checked her phone for the results of her university admissions applications, she was overcome by disbelief.
One by one, each relayed the same news: Harvard. Yes. Dartmouth. Yes. Princeton. Yes. The University of Pennsylvania. Yes. Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Brown: yes, yes, yes, yes.
It was March 31, the emotion-filled day when Ivy League universities posted their decisions online. And Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, a senior at Elmont Memorial High School, Long Island, became the second student there to pull off an exceedingly rare feat: She swept all eight.
She screamed. Then she cried.
“It’s so surreal,” Ms Uwamanzu-Nna, 17, said on Wednesday. “It’s still hard to actually believe that this has happened to me.”
The accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the increasingly fierce competition that has driven down acceptance rates at selective universities for years. Harvard’s, for example, was 5.2 per cent this year, down from 9.3 per cent in 2006. News reports suggest that just a few students pull off a sweep each year.
What’s more, Ms Uwamanzu-Nna (pronounced oo-wah-man-ZOO-nah) is just the latest student from her school to do it. In 2015, Harold Ekeh drew national headlines when he was accepted to 13 universities, including all eight Ivies.
School officials said Mr Ekeh, now a freshmen at Yale, had been a huge inspiration to other students. He is also close friends with Ms Uwamanzu-Nna.
* Assuming the Intel thing isn’t rigged/affirmative-action, she sounds legit. No doubt her applications got some bonus for being black, but she doesn’t seem like a poster child for the worst affirmative action stupidity.
* But judging from the names and her picture both Miss Uwamanzu-Nna and her predecessor, Mr. Ekeh, are probably also Ibo. Migration patterns might go a long way towards explaining why they both wound up in the same town. This is a news worthy bit of the picture that I’m sure NYT reporters and editors will instinctively avoid as a career-ending move.
* One of the ironies of affirmative action is that while affirmative action was intended as a sort of crude reparations for the ill treatment that descendants of American black slaves endured, many of the current beneficiaries of affirmative action for blacks have, like Obama himself, ZERO American black slave ancestry because their parents are recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, or else they are mulattoes who were raised by their white mothers and have little if any contact with their black fathers or talented tenth octoroons who pass the paper bag test or children of black professionals who are not really in need of reparations. Once you eliminate those categories and blacks who are recruited because of their athletic talent, the number of actual brothas at elite schools is vanishingly small. For those with STEM majors, you would need a microscope to find them. Even though standards for blacks are relaxed somewhat, most American ghetto blacks are so far behind academically that they could not survive in a challenging academic environment even sheltered inside an AA studies dept let alone as a physics or math major.
* The detail I always look for in these stories is: what is the student’s SAT score?
Her other achievements are easy enough to find in the various reportage on her: her being valedictorian, her GPA, her Intel Science Search performance. But no mention anywhere that I can see of her SAT scores.
Last year another student of Nigerian background from the same school, Harold Ekeh, got into all 8 ivies, and his combined SAT scores were mentioned: 2270. This is almost the precise median score for Harvard (2260). Yet he did not, apparently, get a National Merit Scholarship, which is almost certainly due to a too low PSAT score (obviously, everything else in his background would make the National Merit Scholarship people salivate over handing him an award). So no doubt his PSAT was the regression to his mean, and his SAT a deviation against it.
The predictable never seems to stop being predictable.
* Yeah, but she is nothing compared to that female soccer player who’s scored the most goals in the history of the sport. I hear about her every four years the women’s World Cup rolls around. Most goals ever scored in the sport, which means more than any man soccer player either! I bet when you take the number of goals Pele scored, homeruns Babe Ruth hit, and baskets Michael Jordan sunk and add them together, the goals she’s scored are still an order of magnitude greater than that! She must be the most amazing figure in sports history! Not to mention inspiring, brave, smart, funny, passionate, kind, and cute. I hope she gets a big endorsement deal, like with GoDaddy or something, four years from now when we’re reminded she’s scored the most goals ever!
* Some of the ancestors of some of the Nigerian immigrants might actually have sold some of the ancestors of today’s African American to white slave traders. While most whites probably never had slave-owning ancestors, and many whites had ancestors who actually fought against slavery.
So the irony of the ironies is that the descendants of (African) slave traders might get preferential treatment over the descendants of Union soldiers who gave or at least risked their lives to end slavery.
* Ivies coordinate with each other not to fight for the same student, and only make exceptions for the most exceptional applicants. In other words, normally nobody gets admitted to all eight Ivies, even if one applies to all of them, because once one of them accepted you, the others will turn you down so that you will not be in a position to turn them down.
It’s obvious why blacks are the only ones for whom they all make exceptions. I’d be surprised if a similar student wasn’t found next year (and each year from now on) either.
