I'm curious: does anyone know the context of the grades in the application? I saw actual grades listed in three places (pages 3, 17 and 26). He seems to have received scores ranging from 50-85. Are these out of 100? If so, it appears he wasn't a great student. He was ranked 65th out of 110 students (page 17).
I'm not questioning his intelligence, he was clearly brilliant. However, I find it interesting that he was an underachiever in high school (something I'm sure the HN community can empathize with).
The letter from his father (page 13) says:
"Jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault. However, he is quite ambitious to try and do the work in three years. I know how the authorities feel about this and I have my own opinion, but it is a gesture that pleases me very much because it seems to be the beginning of an awakening ambition"
I feel like this statement would've been equally accurate on my own college applications.
I can't speak for Harvard in particular, but back in the '30s, grade inflation hadn't yet taken hold, so it was quite normal for there to be many students with Cs, rather than 90% As like today.
That doesn't explain his middle-of-the-pack class ranking. Even at a prestigious boarding school that's not exactly "Harvard material". (Well, I guess it is...)
I would be interested to hear other's thoughts on JFK's answer to why he would like to attend Harvard.
I suck at writing essays but it seems his reason for wanting to attend Harvard is incredibly trite and superfluous, especially coming from a man who would eventually be considered a great orator.
For example, he states that Harvard " is a university with something definite to offer." Yet gives no definitive examples. Why is "To be a 'harvard man' is an enviable distinction" in President Kennedy's mind? Essentially every sentence lacks justification and specificity.
Sigh. These sorts of materials at least provide fuel to refocus on work and studies. Being born outside a powerful family may lack certain advantageous but they can be overcome. Right?
His answers are shallow because they can be. The application was just a formality for the sake of show. He was guaranteed admission based on family connections.
I assume his reason is trite and superfluous because it's a stupid question. When you're a high school senior, all you know about colleges probably boils down to
- General reputation
- About famous people (or family members) that went there
- A brief visit to a few of them that you pick out of a hat
- How much it costs
What kind of non-superflous evidence do you expect him to be able to bring to bear?
Of course it is. Families like that don't think in terms of a single generation. Joe Kennedy knew that putting his kids in Ivy League schools meant that his grandkids had a very high probability of being in Ivy League schools, simply because of the connections you make with other wealthy people at these universities.
Joe didn't care whether his kid was in Princeton or Harvard, as long as it was one of them. Once you've made more money than you can count, the next step is to focus on your legacy.
> Joe didn't care whether his kid was in Princeton or Harvard, > as long as it was one of them.
And oddly enough, JFK went to both Princeton and Harvard. He attended Princeton for six weeks before getting ill and withdrawing and then going to Harvard the next year.
He would barely qualify for a state directional school with those grades at that time. Had he not been the son of Joe Kennedy, his school counselors almost certainly would have tried to steer him towards manual labor.
What do you base that on? Do you have the historical college admission records from the other 109 kids in his class? All 110 kids in his class at Choate are likely to be Ivy League material. I base this off of their current stats posted at http://www.choate.edu/admission/25greatreasons.aspx
The most popular colleges from 2008-2012: Georgetown University, 48; New York University, 40; Yale University, 38; Boston University, 32; Columbia University, The George Washington University, 31; Boston College, 30; Wesleyan University, 29; Cornell University, 24; Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, 21; Brown University, Trinity College, 20.
I am not sure of how the grading system worked at his particular school at that particular time, but it would appear that JFK received numerous C's and D's during high school (see: scores in the 60s and 70s on page four).
Ah, I see now. Page 6 appears to be the results of an exam conducted by Harvard, and I had figured Page 4 was probably related (in which case who knows what a "good" score is).
Now, the other question, how much did academics matter in 1935?
While JFK's grades may have been unexpectedly poor in any case, readers should bear in mind that C and D had different meanings than today's due to grade inflation.
Just wondering: Is there any decent Pdf host besides scribd? Every time I visit the site I regret it once again. The list of additional domains to whitelist in no-script just to view the content is endless. Just a simple Pdf link would be much more pleasant.
There is DocumentCloud, which Jeremy Ashkenas led (and was the project from which he spun off Underscore.js and Backbone.js, among other things). It's the best implementation of PDF on the web that I've seen though it is invite only to news orgs (it was jointly sponsored by the New York Times and ProPublica)
I used to hate Scribd when it was flash, but now that its HTML5 it is sometimes preferable to the broken PDF installations on borrowed computers (like, popping up Acrobat offering to update, selL me AV, etc). At home I generally prefer direct PDF, though.
The recommendation letter takes pains to talk about JFKs health and vigor, but this is now known to be a front. He had health problems from an early age, and took lots of medications. Reference: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/july-dec02/jfk_11-18.h...
The letter from his father to Harvard does mention that he has had some health problems (blood disease) but that he has fully recovered.
Interesting that he was willing to contradict the letter of recommendation that you mentioned. However, it looks like the letter from his father was sent after he had been admitted, so maybe it didn't matter anymore.
JFK had health problems in his youth and during his presidency, right up until he was killed. He felt it necessary to convey the impression of "vigor" (a key word for JFK) despite/because-of these problems. It's only recently that the inner circle has felt comfortable talking about it.
If you would favor seeing all transcripts, then why did you choose to single out Obama?
I hope you'll understand why I struggle to believe that this singling-out is purely coincidental in the context of an election season where rhetoric about Obama being 'the least transparent in history' is abundant, on the same weekend as a new movie which claims to dig up sinister anti-American mysteries from Obama's past. It is just terribly convenient to bring up such issues as a topic change.
In any case I find it very irritating that almost any HN article tangentially touching on the government is co-opted for some kind of biased political propaganda, however subtle.
Do we really need every thread that mentions the keyword 'President' to contain this kind of partisan rubbish? I don't see you calling for Reagan's, Bush's or Romney's applications.
His comment doesn't really seem partisan in any way to me. It's just a statement that it would be interesting to see the current president's college applications too, as it would be interesting to see any president's college applications.
Now you're being disingenuous. It is quite simple:
People have many interests. Interest is not a binary term - One can be interested in varying degrees.
Perhaps he is interested in all presidents' admission records, but more interested in the current president because it is more relevant to his life than others. Just because there is relevance, does NOT imply partisanship.
By analogy I find operating system internals interesting. I am interested in how many of them do things. However I find discussions about Windows more interesting than those about multics. Not because I am a fan of windows (I am not) nor because I hate windows (I don't, it is a decent OS these days, I just prefer others), but because it is relevant to my life as a person living in the era where it is actually being used.
Note, this won't stop me from reading an interesting new article about the multics way, just that when offered a source with new (to me) insights on windows or multics, I would choose windows.
I'm not being disingenuous. The topic was of intellectual, historical interest - about JFK. Who did not release the documents. They are just documents about JFK.
Somehow it is changed to a demand for documents from the current President in the middle of an election season.
If you are interested in all admission records, there is no reason to single out Obama... say you think all Presidents should have their admission records released.
This is more like 'look at this interesting snippet of code from CP/M' resulting in yelling about binary blobs in some modern OS. Totally irrelevant and political.
No, the topic was presidential college admissions. This one, because it was JFK, was historical. It also was political, because we were talking about a politician, a fact that does not change whether it was a current or past politician.
And your analogy is wrong too: It is like saying here is code from CP/M, and someone saying "how do modern OSes handle that feature?". That question is not advocacy for new OSes, it is a question of comparison between eras.
You are trying to ascribe motive and sinister desires to a neutral statement.
The reason people don't seem to be calling for those applications is because of family ties and connections, there was certainly never speculation that any of those men attended college on a Foreign Exchange scholarship.
I am not a fan of all the political hogwash about Obama not being American etc. I have plenty of gripes with just about every president on their politics alone and he is certainly no different, so for me if I am going to complain it will not be about where he is from or speculation about his birthplace but about his Senate voting record or the fact that his healthcare bill has little to do with Healthcare for the majority of the 2,600+ pages.
But honestly there is no reason to get upset that people are asking. The entire time Bush was in office people were speculating he was a C student and wanting his transcripts, they talked about how he only got in because of being a Legacy etc.
The only real difference was that apparently it was ok to pick on Bush, just do not do it to Obama since that somehow is not fair?
When you take the highest office in the land you open yourself up to scrutiny if you or your supporters cannot handle that then simply do not run.
President Obama was one of the MOST critical people of Geroge W Bush as a sitting president, he of all people should understand people reserve the right to be critical of him as well.
The subject was JFK. I wasn't changing the subject to Bush's grades. That would have been a stupid, political thing to do and I would have complained. So I'm not sure why you are lecturing about a double standard with GWB? Nobody is picking on GWB here. And whatever your suppositions, I'm not affiliated with Obama in any way so I don't either understand why you are saying that Obama ought to understand such and such. Obama isn't here. I am irritated by topic changes which are very political and biased.
Point? Is that rationale supposed to serve as justification for nepotism?
We should be creating institutions that have systems which will not respond to nepotism. Harvard is the precise opposite of this, with nepotism being one of its most sacred causes.
Its easy to be critical of JFK's admission to Harvard as a result of priviledge. I think it natural and correct.
Lots of people go to Harvard, ordinary (my niece) and priviledged. Those with money and power, use it to get good things for their progeny.
Else why gain money and power? Its not just scorekeeping. If I can't work hard to get better things for my children, then its all a game.
In a free market things are for sale, and good things cost more. Harvard is a private institution. They use legacy, money, ability about equally as admission standards. And it has served them well.
As a middle-class high school senior, I would like to point at that Harvard's net price per year for me would be ~$13,000, or roughly half the in-state price of my local state school, the University of Wisconsin (~$24,000). The notion that Harvard favors the rich is BS as far as I can tell. I think it's a bit more likely the rich more consistently pressure and enable their children to prepare.
> >They use legacy, money, ability about equally as admission standards.
> No they don't. Harvard, like just about every university these days, has need-blind admissions.
"Need blind" doesn't imply "legacy blind" or "blind to the political connections of the applicant's family". Harvard may not distinguish between someone who can pay and someone who can't, but I would be surprised if they didn't distinguish between someone who can pay for tuition and someone who can pay for a new wing of the library.
I always assumed that they kept a small, fixed percentage of their seats open for legacy admissions. I thought this was actually something accounted for in their written policies. Perhaps not anymore.
The interesting thing is that, whatever political interests they want to indulge, they need not be swayed by a potential student's family's ability to fund a new building any more than they need be swayed by a poor but gifted student's inability to pay full tuition. Their endowment is the largest of any university in the world, at $26 billion, and there is no shortage of people willing to give them more.
Absolutely. I'm addressing the statement that money is used as an admissions standard. If the name rings a bell to the admissions counselor, I'm sure that helps, but the people who make decisions in a need-blind admissions process don't get to see your bank account balance.
If you want to look at education as a privilege earned by having wealthy parents, maybe.
If $60k feels like a burden to you, imagine what it would be to the child of a single parent making $35k. If everyone were charged the same price, only the very rich could afford it.
There are other abilities that are not measured by tests, such as the ability to get on with people, humility, courage, willingness to learn from mistakes, insight, etc.
According to Robert McNamara, JFK's ability to empathise with the Russians' position was very important in resolving the cuban missile crisis.
As was his courage in facing down the military who wanted to attack cuba.
Presumably he had also learnt from his mistake in authorising the Bay of Pigs invasion, a project he inherited on coming to office.
George W. Bush wasn't a one dimensional idiot either. He had a lot of charisma and people skills and is probably one of the highest Presidents of all time on the 'would like to have a beer with him' barometer, even now.
I always thought of JFK as more like Obama (or rather, I thought of Obama as like JFK). As in, a genius. It is pretty clear from this application that a genius he was not.
> George W. Bush wasn't a one dimensional idiot either. He had a lot of charisma and people skills and is probably one of the highest Presidents of all time on the 'would like to have a beer with him' barometer, even now.
I would have thought the beer thing was a colloquialism for approval rating. If that's so, you're incorrect: at 22% his final approval rating was the worst in history, since they began recording such things in the thirties.
> If that's so, you're incorrect: at 22% his final approval rating was the worst in history, since they began recording such things in the thirties.
The day after election day, you're probably going to be telling us that 45-55% of the voters were idiots. Today, we can find large fractions which believe all sorts of idiocy (such as "think happy thoughts to help you get pregnant").
Combine that with a press that campaigned against W for his 2 terms while he stopped campaigning after his first and it's surprising that he was at 22%.
Today's happy fact, national "income" dropped more during "the recovery" than during the recession.
Wanting to have a beer with him is certainly not a colloquialism for approval rating. It is about him seeming like a cool guy on a personal level and like one you'd like to have a one-on-one conversation and hang out with.
That characteristic may or may not have anything to do with how good you think they are doing being POTUS. I thought he was a terrible President but still would love to have a beer with him and shoot the breeze.
> I thought he was a terrible President but still would love to have a beer with him and shoot the breeze.
I might be selling the sophistication of the electorate short but I think this attitude is probably a little unusual. I suspect for most people likability, approval, and electability are all rather synonymous. Difficult to prove since the polls don't include the beer question, just the questions related to actual approval.
You have a mistaken idea of genius as someone who is good at everything. They just have to be exceptionally gifted in one or more things to get noticed in history books.
Not sure the causality here, and I can't verify the citation on wikipedia, but from 1918-1928 2/3 of Choate graduates went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Presumably by 1935 things were much the same. The number I would be much more interested in seeing in the context of this is what percentage of Harvard applicants were accepted.
I'm not questioning his intelligence, he was clearly brilliant. However, I find it interesting that he was an underachiever in high school (something I'm sure the HN community can empathize with).
The letter from his father (page 13) says:
"Jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault. However, he is quite ambitious to try and do the work in three years. I know how the authorities feel about this and I have my own opinion, but it is a gesture that pleases me very much because it seems to be the beginning of an awakening ambition"
I feel like this statement would've been equally accurate on my own college applications.