President Donald Trump signed a new executive order today, stipulating control over America’s higher education institutions.

The order, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, targets the federal government’s process for deciding what colleges and universities can access billions of dollars in federal student loans and Pell Grants — a significant source of indirect revenue for many of those institutions.

What it does:

The order asks the secretary of education to “hold higher education accreditors accountable including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination for poor performance or violations to the federal Civil Rights Act”.

It also “directs the attorney general and the secretary of education to investigate and terminate unlawful discrimination by American higher education institutions, including law schools and medical schools,” the official said.

I wonder if the current interpretation of "federal Civil Rights Act" and "unlawful discrimination" is the exact opposite of what they originally meant.

The high school I attended was "Brooklyn Technical High School", a prototype of today's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) schools. The school, while a municipally run public school, requires a significantly difficult entrance exam and awards entry strictly by performance on the test. The school is rather large (about 6,000 students, ten stories and 12 large elevators - but no parking as nearly all student arrive by Subway).

There is a story popular in the educational field that large class sizes full of poor minority students are a recipe for poor school performance. Well, in the case of this school, the Advanced Placement participation rate at Brooklyn Technical High School is 98%. The total minority enrollment is 77% (58.5% Asian), and 59% of students are economically disadvantaged, the average class size is 32 students, yet Brooklyn Technical High School is 1 of 533 high schools (which include 331,100 students) in the New York City Public School system. The vast majority of the student body is made up of immigrants or first generation Americans.

US News and World Repart SCORECARD
Took at Least One AP® Exam - 98%
Passed at Least One AP® Exam - 94%
Mathematics Proficiency - 99%
Reading Proficiency - 97%
Science Proficiency - 92%
Graduation Rate - 98% (NYS data) with nearly all accepted to at least one Ivy League university - obvoiously most receive significant financial aid.

At least six graduates of Brooklyn Technical High School have received Nobel Prizes.
Gary Becker in economics in 1992 for “having extended the domain of economic theory to aspects of human behavior
Robert Solow in economics in 1987 for a mathematical model illustrating theories of economic growth
Arthur Ashkin in physics in 2018 as the father of optical tweezers
Martin Perl in physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton
Baruch (Barry) Blumberg in medicine in 1976 for work on the hepatitis B virus
Stanley Cohen in medicine in 1986 for work in the fields of growth factors and genetic engineering
George Waldin Medicine in 1967 for his work on the chemistry of color vision and color blindness.

The inventor of the first digital camera, Steven Sasson, graduated in 1968
Some other notables: bths.edu: Hall of Fame Members - Alumni Hall of Fame

And frankly, I attribute the competitive environment of the school (where every kid was the smartest in the class), along with the unique curriculum of the time to the level of success I was able to achieve during my life by instilling within me the feeling that I could accomplish any project I decided to take on.

Since I was attending, there have been a constant string of lawsuits to open the entry of the school to more closely reflect the demographics of New York City, rather than being merit-driven. Originally, it was claimed that the test was crafted to favor Jewish applicants. Nowadays, it is claimed that the test is crafted to favor Asian students. It's the same test. That said, a major "concession" to demographics was made in 1969 when females were permitted to compete as well and they currently make up 43% of the school's students.

Thesde are the students who, today are sought after to fulfill the "diversity" requirements that major universities have, until recently, been forced to adopt. I fear, as of today, they will be the ones left behind despite the claims that we are entering a new age of meritocracies.

Jeff

usnews.com - Brooklyn technical high school
data.nysed.gov: BROOKLYN TECHNICAL HS