Tiger Moms and Equity

I was to a party recently and found myself in a group with three moms of children on the cusp of college. They were full of AP and Running Start and Berkeley and other swank colleges.

Did you know? Back in the day there weren't any counselors to advise high-schoolers on Running Start ("Running Start is a program that allows 11th and 12th grade students to take college courses at Washington[ State]'s 34 community and technical colleges.") But now there are.

I asked the mom next to me what was driving all this super-achievement, and she said that it is a combination of kids and parents and school. Then she said something about "Equity."

Because she is a Nice Person. As usual, I didn't have a retort ready: not even "Puleeeze!" And anyway I wouldn't have wanted to prick her progressive bubble. That's not what parties are for.

But I immediately had a divine vision, directly from God. There is no way that the current fashion for "equity" among our educati is going to make a blind bit of difference.

Why? Because to play the game of Get Into a Good College you need one thing. You need a Tiger Mom. Everything else is liberal b*llsh*t.

OK, I know. You anti-racists are out there condemning me to Twitter Death for racism, because we know that Tiger Moms are all East Asian moms. OK, let's use a cat that's native to the good old US and A. Bobcat? Not fierce enough. Mountain Lion? Too long -- as in "mountain lion mom." Maybe "Panther Mom" will do the job.

But back to our story. There is no way that any gubmint program of "Equity" to assist BIPOC or other "oppressed peoples" children to get into college is ever going to beat the white liberal Panther Moms or the East Asian Tiger Moms.

Why? Well you tell me. Because the Tiger Moms are educated and they talk to each other and they care, they really care about getting their kids into selective colleges. Because the BIPOC moms are not that much into education and selective colleges. Because the BIPOC culture is not into higher education so much as aspiring rapperology. Because any program of Equity will devolve into a pure loot-and-plunder operation, because that it what all government programs are about.

And I'll betcha that any Equity program would end up screwing over ordinary white middle-class kids. You know, the kind of people that got screwed by Affirmative Action and then Diversity and then DEI, and now CRT.

And maybe there's another factor. I remember when I was a teenager in my pre-college years. I remember distinctly thinking that not going to college was unthinkable. What would I do if I didn't get into college? I couldn't imagine an adult life except as a college graduate.

Yes, think about this. If you are the child of educated parents, then working hard in high school and going to a good college is the road to a nice safe orderly life. You always get to be in a world where talent and intelligence and credentials are sensibly rewarded, and you gently advance through some corporate or government bureaucracy that seems to be eternal.

But the world outside that nice safe check-the-boxes life? As in start a business? As in join a tech start-up? That, clearly, is a horse of a different color.

Here's my Fearless Prediction. Whatever "Equity" becomes as the rubber hits the road and it gets instantiated into a thousand gubmint programs, I have one fearless prediction.

It will Make Things Worse.