From CNBC:
House passes bill to lift $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions
The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill on Thursday that would do away with the $10,000 limit on the itemized deduction for state and local taxes for two years.
Legislators narrowly voted in favor and did so largely along party lines: 218 to 206.
The measure, dubbed the “Restoring Tax Fairness for States and Localities Act” or HR 5377, proposes increasing the so-called SALT cap to $20,000 for married taxpayers who are filing jointly in 2019.
It also calls for the elimination of the SALT cap in 2020 and 2021.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y, along with Reps. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., and Mike Thompson, D-Calif., marked the latest effort by blue states to fight back against certain provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
…
Though the bill is unlikely to get much further in the remaining weeks of the year, there’s always the possibility it may return in 2020.
“There is no chance that this bill is getting through the Senate, but I think Democrats will continue to talk about the impact of the SALT deduction,” Kaeding said.
Legislators in support of the bill plan to continue pushing.
“This is going to continue to be an issue that comes up every year until we pass and sign it into law,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. “It’s a hit to so many parts of the country, a tax hike for my district and for a lot of us in the Northeast and on the coasts.”
First
Bystander,
Ray has been saying this for years. I guess he will be right eventually.
Why is he trying to help investors now? What’s his motive behind the talk? He runs a hedge fund. Why is he trying to get people to become fearful and sell? The guy is a genius, and his points are based in logic, but they are not always correct.
Right here on this blog, you watched me make calls that went right against experts like this. They would have laughed at my calls back in 2012/13 or even in 2015. They are not always correct.
Plus, if you are playing the stock market long, which is the correct way, wtf does it matter what the stock market does in the short term or even this decade? You are betting on the economy growing in the long term and being higher than today when you start to collect later in your life. If the stock market does crash, you start buying a ton of cheap shares. It’s a gift to a long term investor.
So are these guys like Dalio pushing for a crash so they can buy up cheap shares? I don’t know. I don’t know what their current intentions are, but I’m trying to figure it out instead of treating their advice as that of a god.
If I would have listened to a lot of these guys during the past decade, I’m probably would have not made as much money in the market as I did. I never took my foot off the gas and decreased my risk in this run up since 2012. Should have a huge impact on my long term pie due to the power of compounding. Every extra percentage now at a younger age pays huge dividends in the long term.
Until I see very strong inflation, this party is only getting started. This is not in the late stages like everyone thinks. They have been saying this for how long already. Every year since when? Always get the, “this run is long in the tooth” sage advice. This time is different, open your eyes. A recession is not due on “time,” it’s based on an economy that has overproduced due to euphoria. Where is the overproduction? The endless hype? Don’t see any of it. See lots of scared money which only helps to extend this run longer.
I’m not a fan of his, but on this note, he is giving good advice. Yes, ray will be right one day, but just ignore them. Like I said previously, I lost out on a hr investment in 2008 because I fell into the fear trap listening to these type. The world didn’t end…thanks for nothing.
“Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio is much smarter than I am. He’s convinced that central banks are running out of ammo and there will be little to no hope to avoid an ideological struggle that, to me, says sell all stocks. You can gain zero confidence that it’s worth owning stocks if you read what he said just now at an investment forum in Saudi Arabia. Whatever you have now, that’s all you are going to have.
Billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach is smarter than me. On March 12 he said we are in a bear market and the stock market could go negative in 2019.
These two are among a parade of billionaires who are, per se, smarter than I am because I am not a billionaire. Maybe I would have been a billionaire, but I stopped way too soon to do media and my 24% after all fees for 14 years did not net me billionaire status even as I trounced the S&P 500, which was up 8% over that period of time.
What matters, though, is not whether I am a billionaire or not, but that I actually try to help you make money, or at least teach you the way I made money — and I find my methods quaint now, and not able to withstand the billionaires’ negativity.
For instance when I read what Ray Dalio says about income inequality and central banks out of gas I say to myself that Ray is not telling me to go buy Merck (MRK) or Costco (COST) . He’s not giving me the high-five sign to buy Amazon (AMZN) on weakness or scoop up the ailing stock of McDonald’s (MCD) .
He’s not trying to steer me toward any mutual fund, let alone his hedge fund. He just joins a long line of people who are smarter than I am who are trying to keep you out of stocks because of big-picture issues, the same issues that would have kept you out of stocks in 1979 when I started investing.
He may not mean to scare you. He may actually have some pang somewhere about not helping the working person make more money. The fact is though, that you don’t want to own stocks if either billionaire, who, again, are smarter than I am, is right — and they have to be right, per se, or they wouldn’t be billionaires.
All my life I have found people smarter than I am. While I graduated Harvard with a magna, there were lots of people who were smarter than I was. I had the highest grade on my generals in my major but so what, there were brilliant people like Bill Gates in my class, so I am dumber than he is because he’s a big billionaire.
But here’s what I knew back then and here is what I know now. One, I didn’t have any money when I went to school. I cobbled together a bunch of scholarships including some money from RJ Reynolds for some free speech essay. Second, I was determined to help others make money. When I was crushing it in my dorm room leaving a stock tip every week on my answering machine — “Hi, I am not here right now but I think you should buy the stock of Monolithic Memories ahead of the quarter” — I was committed to help people make money.
Did I ever worry about central banks inflating bubbles? I said to myself, I am more stupid than people who worry about these things, but I am going to find stocks during these periods. In the great downturn, I found Salesforce (CRM) . Coming out of the downturn, I found FANG. Earlier this year, I found WATCH.
My stupidity and lack of billionaire status does not preclude me from trying to make extra money for you. I even formed a club so I could look like an idiot, publicly. I am castigated regularly on Twitter for not seeing the bubble and not recognizing that it will all end badly.
Frankly, I don’t care. You see, the difference is that I could come out every single night on Mad Money and say “there’s always a bull market somewhere, but to hell with it because we’re all gonna die anyway.” I could have billionaire status without being a billionaire.
But here’s what I do say, don’t take me with a grain of salt. At least I am working for you. Take them with a grain of salt. If they are wrong, big deal, they can just say they will be right. Me? I can be wrong, of course, but my goal is not to keep you in the chains I found myself in at Harvard, or when I lived in my car a few years after. I wasn’t the smartest guy at college or law school, but I worked harder than everyone else I knew. I am duplicating the formula even as I am more stupid than the billionaires.
At least I have accountability. What do they have, and do they care? I’d say they’ve made their money. They’re done. One day I will be, too. But not yet, and at least I’m still out here trying. I don’t know what more there is to do.”
the economic ladder? A new study by Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva and Edoardo Teso of Harvard University compares perceptions of social mobility in five countries—America, Britain, France, Italy and Sweden—against actual levels. It finds that Americans tend to be optimistic, while Europeans tend to be too pessimistic. An American born to a household in the bottom 20% of earnings, for instance, only has a 7.8% chance of reaching the top 20% when they grow up. Americans surveyed thought the probability was 11.7%.
Politically left-leaning respondents are naturally more doubtful about the scale of social mobility, and are more likely to support redistributive government policies, than conservative ones. But Mr Alesina and his colleagues also find that people of different political stripes also respond differently to new information. When given pessimistic information about social mobility, left-wing respondents became even more likely to support economic redistribution. In contrast, right-wing respondents’ support for redistribution did not change. Perhaps, the authors suggest, right-leaning respondents see government as “the cause of the problem, not the solution”.
I have met the man several times. I have a personal connection to him (20 years) who understands Ray’s mind and motives. I can tell you that Ray has made his money and he only cares about truth as per his principles. He is not actively involved in Bridgewater investment decisions anyomore. I am not saying he is perfect but rest assure if there was a paradigm shift then it is here. Warning is there. You want to believe we have decade..good luck.
If anything the billionariesinvestors seemed to vastly undersestimate the depths to which central banks would manipulate the market and politcal capitulation. Talk about Deep state manipulation.
This will have a bigger impact on future than anyone thinks, as long as they keep ex-Boeing management away.
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/12/heavy-metal-free-battery/
Even Shiller is starting to see the light, Bystander. Ray is a brilliant mind, and he is right about the shift, but he was wrong about the effect.
“Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Shiller believes the record market rally could last months — if not more.
He suggests there’s an emotional high gripping the market right now that shows little signs of fading.
“I put Trump as the primary cause of the recent strength in the market,” the Yale University professor told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Friday. “He’s a motivational speaker. We’ve never had a motivational speaker president before. He knows how to create animal spirits.””
https://apple.news/AjRtwF_ZdQVOy_HapNcpByw
Believe in America again…you have to thank trump for this. To say otherwise is crazy. He certainly didn’t hurt the economy, he poured rocket fuel on it.
I mean give me the counter arguments. Show me how he hurt the economy..
It’s the millennial demographic bloc. Trump is only rocket fuel. This is the most educated, skilled, workforce in the world…and it’s enormous in terms of generational avgs. Follow their spending patterns, key factor in reading the future economy. If education investment is effective, it’s one of your best bang for your bucks. We had to go through the pain (borrowing to invest in education aka college debt bubble), but we will see an enormous return on that investment in terms of future economic efficiency raising our per capita spending to record levels. Raising all asset classes to new floors and higher ceilings. We are here people, it’s happening before our eyes. Homer Simpson couldn’t lose investing in this American economy..
“For now, he appears to be in the 2020 bull market camp. Shiller, who is not serving as a presidential campaign advisor, thinks there’s a very good chance President Trump will get re-elected and a recession may be years away.
“We might see a continuation of the Trump boom for a while despite the impeachment,” Shiller said. “I could easily see that happening.””
What a time to be alive! Appreciate every second.
I feel bad for the trump haters…they are struck with fear. They think the economy is going to crash out of pure hate of trump success. Feel for them…going to miss out on a lot of money. Scared money, don’t make money.
That’s going to be the ultimate irony and maybe, not even joking, the end of the Democratic Party. They are responsible for the impeachment of the greatest presidential economy of our lifetime. They are going right down the road of the Federalists position in the war of 1812. People might start to turn on them hard if this economy continues. Like extinction.
Another crazy call by the pumpkin that might be dead on…the death of the Democratic Party as we know. It’s more than due based on our political history.
“From a previous post, we know that the average expenditure by U.S. consumers is huge.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the latest data for 2018 shows the average U.S. household spends $61,224 a year and earns $78,635 a year. Spending $5,102 a month on average is good living.
See the data for yourself in the chart below. Notice how the average income before taxes jumps a healthy 6.9% from 2017 to 2018, while the average annual expenditure only increases by 1.9% during the same time period.
Americans are getting richer AND saving more! The 2019 numbers will probably look even better when they come out in 2020.”
https://www.financialsamurai.com/average-vs-recommended-expenditure-on-housing-food-transportation/
Wow, between robo spammers and mental patient spammer.
Grim, shut site down please.
This bill should be called the “DNC grifter subsidy” bill. Let’s call it what it is.
Hillbilly,
Which bill are you referring to?
When your amazing call comes to fruition, don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same.
Then again, you are not capable of such a call, you lack the obsessive skills needed to reach such a call. Obsession is needed and not everyone has that type of skill.
But continue to hate if it makes you feel so much better.
Guy makes amazing calls and your response is to shut down the site because you are a jealous soul consumed with hate.
PumpkinNeedaElectricShockTherapy says:
December 23, 2019 at 7:45 am
Wow, between robo spammers and mental patient spammer.
Grim, shut site down please.
I don’t agree with shut down the site. But fcuk Over the weekend was a train wreck. Zero readable posts but tons of material.
PumpkinNeedaElectricShockTherapy says:
December 23, 2019 at 7:45 am
Wow, between robo spammers and mental patient spammer.
Grim, shut site down please.
Don’t shut it down there are still some good posts and interesting conversations. Just keep scrolling.
Shut it down. Forever grateful to Grim and great posters here but it has become home to mental patient drivel.
I don’t want to see this blog shut down. No! You have one troll trying to wreck it, so blacklist his/hers IP address.
Just ignore my posts. I have a right to post here. It’s a public blog in which my calls can be looked back upon in the future. Don’t even care for your respect anymore, just want my calls documented for future reference.
It’s my only form of proof that I made these calls that far out.
It should not be shut down because of one person. This still is a place where one can find reasonable rational discussions in spite of the rah rah mindedness cheerleading madness that’s posted.
Headline Eddie.
The reason the democrat party lost its Mind over the trump tax plan was because it removed the deduction they were using to fund their patronage machine. People are looking a lot more closely at the local tax bill now that it is no longer subsidized by low tax areas. And they are voting with their feet.
1989 a guy would stand on a corner mumbling to himself
2019 a guy can now sit in a chair posting comments to himself
Technology has improved his life so much
This is the one “tax break for the rich” that Democrats favor? I would expect Republican senators in high tax states would favor this too. Maybe not many of them are left.
When the next democrat president raises tax rates, will they also restore the deduction?
Fyi – Woodbridge houses bought and destroyed due to climate change:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nj-slow-motion-evacuation-climate-061552051.html
What the party of the poor wants to give a benefit to high-income individuals? The value of the SALT deduction only increased with income. On average 6.3 percent of rich taxpayers have a higher a federal tax liability with the SALT Cap and in NJ a high tax state it’s about 10.2 percent of taxpayers that pay more, everyone else got a tax break.
What ever happened to paying your fare share. We could just add it to the deficit heehehe there won’t be any consequences right?
Any republican that doesn’t vote for this is definitely not in favor of reducing taxes.
There should be no reason they would fight this. They don’t care about debt/deficits (if they say they do, they are liars)
Aforementioned reason mike. Salt deduction is a subsidy to the dnc political machine. Why give Them a never ending slush fund?
We’ve had plenty of trolls throughout the years. There’s no online forum that trolls don’t pollute.
Back to getting my fix again on twitter? That was a rough couple of weeks when this blog went inactive. Heck I may have to go to rehab it that happens again.
Robots are sometimes more comprehendible.
Fyi – Woodbridge houses bought and destroyed due to climate change:
Another $3.7m for Wayne flood buyouts..
https://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/feds-set-aside-3-7m-buyout-26-wayne-homes-flood-zones
Grim, any idea how feds determine market value for Wayne homes they buy? My assessment is these flood zone homes are worth less than zero, and the homeowners should pay the feds to take them.
I once bought a motorcycle from someone that lived in the Wayne Flood zone, first floor was a garage and second floor was the home, the waterline from I guess Hurricane Floyd looked to be all the way to the second floor.
FEMA funds buyouts but it’s a complex process where the state is involved and the town usually takes ownership, pre-flood values is what it says on their site.
Funny thing is those homes flooded many many times 1984, Hurricane Floyd, Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, etc etc. Pre-flood does not mean 1983 prices.
“the homeowner is offered a pre-disaster fair-market value for the property as determined by a certified appraiser.” per FEMA website.
Last round of buyouts of 26 homes averaged 140k per home, previous round averaged 270k per home, so who really knows what they are getting.
College applications are spiraling into sh!t…… as if they are not there already…
Fcuk! Fcuk Fcuk! sickening….. the last few paragraphs make my head explode…
U.S. EDUCATION
The Most Agonizing Question on a College Application: What’s Your Race?
Students worry about revealing race, ethnicity, sexual orientation in applications
By Douglas Belkin
Dec. 23, 2019 6:26 am ET
As elite colleges and universities seek to be more diverse, there is one section on the Common Application that has become increasingly loaded: the boxes where prospective students are asked about their identity.
Students know they face tougher-than-ever odds of earning admission and feel pressure to answer in a way that gives them an edge, college counselors and families say. Colleges, in turn, are frustrated because they have no way to confirm the information students give.
Questions college counselors are encountering from students and their parents include: Does partial heritage count? If a father is Cuban but you don’t speak Spanish, should you check Hispanic? Is it advantageous to declare yourself gay or bisexual even if you’re not?
At Friends Academy, a private Quaker school on Long Island, N.Y., where tuition is $37,000 a year, a student whose family was Jewish and came from Europe checked Latino on his application, said Ed Dugger, the school’s director of college counseling, describing the incident from three years ago. When Mr. Dugger asked him why, the boy said his family had just taken a DNA test and it showed that he was 2% Sephardic—meaning he also had ancestors from Portugal or Spain.
“He felt that was going to give him a leg up,” said Mr. Dugger. “I asked him if he felt connected to the Latino community.” The student changed his answer to white.
Universities prioritize diversity out of the belief that students learn from being in an environment of students with different perspectives, said Mike Reilly, executive director of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, whose membership includes admissions officers from more than 2,000 schools.
The Common Application is accepted by about 900 colleges and universities. More than one million students used it annually to send about five million applications. The demographic section is optional but the response rate is 90%, said a spokesman for the Common Application. Students aren’t asked which race or ethnicity they belong to, but rather “how you identify yourself.”
Inside college admission offices, the question is prompting debates and raising questions over whether students are legitimate members of certain groups or trying to game the system. Some admissions officers say schools look for extracurricular activities that could reflect an applicant’s racial identity, such as participation in a Latino or African-American student group. The absence of any further mention of their background could be a red flag.
The goal is to determine whether a student will represent a minority community in a way that enriches the school, said Jon Reider, who was a senior associate director of admission at Stanford University for 15 years and then director of college counseling at a private high school. This places colleges in the awkward position of determining whether a student is “authentically black” or “authentically Latino,” he said.
The impact of an applicant’s race is marginal and one of many factors a school considers, admissions officers say. But when students are trying to get into elite colleges with acceptance rates in the single digits, any advantage, however small, takes on outsize consideration to some applicants and their families.
The Supreme Court approved the limited consideration of race in admissions in 1978 on the grounds that fostering diversity represents a “compelling interest.” Affluent white students have long benefited from a different set of advantages including legacy preference, athletic recruiting and the ability to donate money.
The focus on identity has grown in recent years as elite schools try to reflect changing U.S. demographics. At Harvard University, for instance, the number of freshmen who identified as white declined to 601 in 2018 from 739 in 2010, according to federal data. Over the same period the number of Latino students rose to 176 from 144 while black students grew to 167 from 99. The entering-class size was flat.
In 2014, a nonprofit sued Harvard alleging the school discriminated against Asian-American applicants. A federal judge in October determined that the school’s admission policy wasn’t perfect but neither did it intentionally discriminate. The case has been appealed.
The purported advantages of lying about race figured into the sprawling admissions-cheating scheme this year. William “Rick” Singer, the college counselor and mastermind who pleaded guilty in March, encouraged some clients to identify as black or Latino. He warned teens that failing to misrepresent their race could put them at a “competitive disadvantage,” according to a person familiar with his business.
Marjorie Klapper, who pleaded guilty in connection to the case, had a son who was listed on at least one college application as African-American and Mexican, though he was neither. Ms. Klapper was sentenced to three weeks in prison. Neither she nor her attorneys responded to a request for comment.
A lawyer for Mr. Singer declined to comment.
At Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, a selective public school where 99% of students enroll in four-year colleges after graduation, conversations about race and admissions can be tense.
Richard Alvarez, a senior of Mexican heritage, is waiting to hear from the University of Chicago. He said his school has spent years educating students about race, but now that the college crunch has arrived that sensitivity training “has gone out the window.”
“Everyone is at each other’s throat,” he said. “White students have this thing that brown and black students unfairly get into schools over them.”
Luke Martin, who just got accepted to the University of Chicago, said he checked off white, black and Caribbean on the Common Application because one of his grandparents is black and from Jamaica.
“I think it helps you stand out,” he said.
Some schools now consider sexual orientation and gender identity in admissions. In 2016, the Common Application added an optional box to fill out under male or female “to share more about your gender identity.” In 2018, 2.5% of students responded.
At least 28 schools and university systems ask applicants about sexual orientation, said Geeny Beemyn, coordinator of Campus Pride’s Trans Policy Clearinghouse, an advocate and resource for transgender policies at colleges and universities.
Duke University’s application includes an optional essay, telling students that “Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. If you would like to share with us more about how you identify as LGBTQIA+ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersexed, Asexual+] and have not done so elsewhere in the application, we invite you to do so here.”
The question was added five years ago because Duke admissions officers were seeing an uptick in students writing about their sexuality on the main essay in the Common Application, said Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions. “We don’t tally up attributes, it’s really a matter of who is this person as an individual,” Mr. Guttentag said. Since the addition of the question, he said, the LGBTQIA+ population has grown larger, more vocal and more confident.
Duke is one of the most selective schools in the country. Nearly 36,000 students applied last year, fewer than 3,200 were accepted.
Karen Schiavo, a private college counselor in California, said her students generally find the questions about gender and sexual orientation puzzling.
“They want to give the right answer,” she said. “I had someone ask me once, ‘If it would be to my benefit if I self-described as LGBTQ?’ I said, ‘Well, are you? Do you identify as LGBTQ?’ The answer was no.”
chicagofinance says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 24, 2019 at 12:15 pm
College applications are spiraling into sh!t…… as if they are not there already…
Fcuk! Fcuk Fcuk! sickening….. the last few paragraphs make my head explode…
U.S. EDUCATION
The Most Agonizing Question on a College Application: What’s Your Race?
Students worry about revealing race, ethnicity, sexual orientation in applications
By Douglas Belkin
Dec. 23, 2019 6:26 am ET
As elite colleges and universities seek to be more diverse, there is one section on the Common Application that has become increasingly loaded: the boxes where prospective students are asked about their identity.
Students know they face tougher-than-ever odds of earning admission and feel pressure to answer in a way that gives them an edge, college counselors and families say. Colleges, in turn, are frustrated because they have no way to confirm the information students give.
Questions college counselors are encountering from students and their parents include: Does partial heritage count? If a father is Cuban but you don’t speak Spanish, should you check Hispanic? Is it advantageous to declare yourself gay or bisexual even if you’re not?
At Friends Academy, a private Quaker school on Long Island, N.Y., where tuition is $37,000 a year, a student whose family was Jewish and came from Europe checked Latino on his application, said Ed Dugger, the school’s director of college counseling, describing the incident from three years ago. When Mr. Dugger asked him why, the boy said his family had just taken a DNA test and it showed that he was 2% Sephardic—meaning he also had ancestors from Portugal or Spain.
“He felt that was going to give him a leg up,” said Mr. Dugger. “I asked him if he felt connected to the Latino community.” The student changed his answer to white.
Universities prioritize diversity out of the belief that students learn from being in an environment of students with different perspectives, said Mike Reilly, executive director of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, whose membership includes admissions officers from more than 2,000 schools.
The Common Application is accepted by about 900 colleges and universities. More than one million students used it annually to send about five million applications. The demographic section is optional but the response rate is 90%, said a spokesman for the Common Application. Students aren’t asked which race or ethnicity they belong to, but rather “how you identify yourself.”
Inside college admission offices, the question is prompting debates and raising questions over whether students are legitimate members of certain groups or trying to game the system. Some admissions officers say schools look for extracurricular activities that could reflect an applicant’s racial identity, such as participation in a Latino or African-American student group. The absence of any further mention of their background could be a red flag.
The goal is to determine whether a student will represent a minority community in a way that enriches the school, said Jon Reider, who was a senior associate director of admission at Stanford University for 15 years and then director of college counseling at a private high school. This places colleges in the awkward position of determining whether a student is “authentically black” or “authentically Latino,” he said.
The impact of an applicant’s race is marginal and one of many factors a school considers, admissions officers say. But when students are trying to get into elite colleges with acceptance rates in the single digits, any advantage, however small, takes on outsize consideration to some applicants and their families.
The Supreme Court approved the limited consideration of race in admissions in 1978 on the grounds that fostering diversity represents a “compelling interest.” Affluent white students have long benefited from a different set of advantages including legacy preference, athletic recruiting and the ability to donate money.
The focus on identity has grown in recent years as elite schools try to reflect changing U.S. demographics. At Harvard University, for instance, the number of freshmen who identified as white declined to 601 in 2018 from 739 in 2010, according to federal data. Over the same period the number of Latino students rose to 176 from 144 while black students grew to 167 from 99. The entering-class size was flat.
In 2014, a nonprofit sued Harvard alleging the school discriminated against Asian-American applicants. A federal judge in October determined that the school’s admission policy wasn’t perfect but neither did it intentionally discriminate. The case has been appealed.
The purported advantages of lying about race figured into the sprawling admissions-cheating scheme this year. William “Rick” Singer, the college counselor and mastermind who pleaded guilty in March, encouraged some clients to identify as black or Latino. He warned teens that failing to misrepresent their race could put them at a “competitive disadvantage,” according to a person familiar with his business.
Marjorie Klapper, who pleaded guilty in connection to the case, had a son who was listed on at least one college application as African-American and Mexican, though he was neither. Ms. Klapper was sentenced to three weeks in prison. Neither she nor her attorneys responded to a request for comment.
A lawyer for Mr. Singer declined to comment.
At Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, a selective public school where 99% of students enroll in four-year colleges after graduation, conversations about race and admissions can be tense.
Richard Alvarez, a senior of Mexican heritage, is waiting to hear from the University of Chicago. He said his school has spent years educating students about race, but now that the college crunch has arrived that sensitivity training “has gone out the window.”
“Everyone is at each other’s throat,” he said. “White students have this thing that brown and black students unfairly get into schools over them.”
Luke Martin, who just got accepted to the University of Chicago, said he checked off white, black and Caribbean on the Common Application because one of his grandparents is black and from Jamaica.
“I think it helps you stand out,” he said.
Some schools now consider sexual orientation and gender identity in admissions. In 2016, the Common Application added an optional box to fill out under male or female “to share more about your gender identity.” In 2018, 2.5% of students responded.
At least 28 schools and university systems ask applicants about sexual orientation, said Geeny Beemyn, coordinator of Campus Pride’s Trans Policy Clearinghouse, an advocate and resource for transgender policies at colleges and universities.
Duke University’s application includes an optional essay, telling students that “Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. If you would like to share with us more about how you identify as LGBTQIA+ [Lesb!an, Gay, B!is5xual, Transg5nder, Queer, Inters5xed, As5xual+] and have not done so elsewhere in the application, we invite you to do so here.”
The question was added five years ago because Duke admissions officers were seeing an uptick in students writing about their s5xuality on the main essay in the Common Application, said Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions. “We don’t tally up attributes, it’s really a matter of who is this person as an individual,” Mr. Guttentag said. Since the addition of the question, he said, the LGBTQIA+ population has grown larger, more vocal and more confident.
Duke is one of the most selective schools in the country. Nearly 36,000 students applied last year, fewer than 3,200 were accepted.
Karen Schiavo, a private college counselor in California, said her students generally find the questions about gender and s5xual orientation puzzling.
“They want to give the right answer,” she said. “I had someone ask me once, ‘If it would be to my benefit if I self-described as LGBTQ?’ I said, ‘Well, are you? Do you identify as LGBTQ?’ The answer was no.”
The whole college system will turn to sh*t. My town has two D1 regional colleges, Fairfield U and Sacred Heart. Both ok but I don’t see them providing any long term benefit for 60K year. We have a community theatre vacant for a decade with squirrel infestation. No private business would touch it. Lo and behold, Sacred Heart says they will pay exorbitant lease price so a business purchased and will complete massive renovations. They bought a Jewish Senior Center for 17m to build new quad (probably 20 million) as well as bought GE HQ for 32m in last two years. Sorry, this is insanity. This has to pop soon. Malinvestment that Fed is causing with cheap money, channel stuffing is bonkers.
Bystander very few schools worth 60k a year. Once you have your first job no one cares where you went to school. Ivy League a different story. Why people in NJ send their kid to URI vs Rutgers and pay out of state tuition I will never understand. Whatever! My guys are out of school and all doing well in their careers.
Happy Christmas:
https://youtu.be/BZ_HhwnIOV8