Originally Posted by Tigerle
Didn't the extracurricular thing originally develop early in the last century because the ivies wanted to keep the "Jewish swots" from being admitted in large numbers? I think I once read something to that effect. They overwhelmingly brought the better academic credentials with them but at least country clubs could be relied on to keep them out of tennis and riding lessons. Officially, admission officials talked about leadership, though. These days, the disadvantaged ethnic group would probably Asian kids.

Some of the people I know that were part of that "jewish swoth" at Harvard, went to the catskills or the Sands club in Long Beach, LI where they had tennis for their jewish members.

I don't think the Asian kids, particularly the Chinese, are so disadvantaged. They are scoring higher. As an ethnic group they are scoring higher. Now is that because they have 3X the population and you are getting a better sampling? Who knows but when you consider that between the Chinese and India, you are dealing with 6X the US population. They now have the resources and the ability to pay for top US schools. So you have a pool of really smart kids with money applying. You can make a bunch of comments that they are not creative etc etc. But China had to totaly rebuild after the destruction that Mao inflicted. 35 years ago they had no universities left. No intelligencia. They had to send out students to get educated. And hope they came back. The people who are rebuilding China have to be pretty smart. We get idiots who earn 700X the average worker wage to run a country into the ground, if it looks good on paper. While a CEO in Japan makes 67X the average worker. It is all about the culture of entitlement.