The Problem With Elite-College Admissions.

Really, all college admissions.

The brilliant poet, distinguished novelist, or political cartoonist of the future who just did not care about that physics course in his or her sophomore year (and received a grade that showed it) is told that he or she doesn’t have a prayer of getting into one of the selective schools. So is the kid who starts out entertaining tourists on the street but who will eventually do extraordinary work as a performance artist. There is an appreciation for diverse talents, but only if they go hand-in-hand with great College Board scores and uniformly high GPAs.

The truth is due to my past I couldn’t get into any university except maybe Phoenix (and who would want to get into that one), but in all areas except some math classes, I’d blow even 99.9% of top students out of the water every time.

That’s not being arrogant or rebarbative; that’s just a fact. But why would I want to do this? I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me this. That is utterly worthless to me.

College is optimized to churning out unquestioning corporate drones at the undergrad level or spawning more academics at the grad level — those things aren’t intrinsically wrong, by the way, but are just how matters currently stand.

It is a system that like most is finely-tuned to perpetuate itself and little else. Pretending that it’s anything more than that does not square with reality.