Advice to Would-be Lowell Students
This June marked my 20-year anniversary of graduating from Lowell High School. Not many people know this, but I almost didn’t get in. My middle school guidance counselor accidentally submitted another student’s grades instead of mine, causing my perfect score of 69 (someone had a sense of humor in designing this points system!) to fall below the minimum score of 63 required for Chinese-Americans to gain admission to Lowell my year. After a period of panic, my parents and I were able to get the records cleared up and I got in. But there was one thing that continued to bother me — under the policy in place at the time, I would have been admitted with the lower grades if only I wasn’t born Chinese.
Lowell High School is one of the best public schools in the country. It was ranked #68 out of close to 18,000 high schools nationwide by U.S. News and World Report, and the only school from San Francisco to be named a California Distinguished School in 2019. Even though some of the details have changed over the years, admission remains merit-based, so city kids like me spent our middle school years striving for perfect grades and test scores to earn our spot.
This year however, that all changes due to the pandemic. The San Francisco School Board recently decided that they can’t make merit-based decisions without grades and standardized test scores from last spring. Instead, Lowell admissions for the class of 2025 will be decided by a lottery. Although the board claims that the lottery-based admission process will only be in place for one year, they have foreshadowed greater ambitions to overhaul the system.
Lowell’s admissions policies have long been controversial because of the diversity and equity issues that it raises. In the 1980’s, the San Francisco NAACP sued the San Francisco Unified School District to desegregate the school, resulting in a consent decree settlement to implement a race-based admissions policy. This is why I had to achieve a higher score to gain admission than non-Chinese Americans. In the 1990’s, a group of Chinese American families filed a class action suit in Ho vs. San Francisco Unified School District to disallow race as an explicit admissions classifier and replacing it with a Diversity Index. Despite these efforts, more than 50% of the study body has been Asian in the last three years according to the School Accountability Highlights report, compared to 34% of the San Francisco population in 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Lowell’s not alone — cases are actively being brought on other institutions like Harvard and Yale. The overrepresentation of Asians and underrepresentation of African-American, Hispanic, and Latino students has been a beguiling problem to fix.
Controversy aside, I mostly feel bad for this year’s 8th graders. They bought into the admissions game. They worked hard following the rules of the game, but the rules changed on them mid-game. Those that were at the top of their class and don’t get in next year because of the lottery will be left feeling supremely let down. I know how they’ll feel, because it happened — temporarily — to me.
To those kids, I have some advice. Let yourself feel frustrated, but don’t let those feelings linger. Instead, channel your frustration into a growth mindset and reflect upon what you have learned from the experience. There are three lessons that we can take away from this sudden and unexpected change.
You can’t control everything
The truth is, there will always be systems and decisions that you can’t control. At work, I’ve worked towards building a business case for promotion, then a reorganization happened that left me in a new org working with a new manager and needing to start from square one to re-establish my credibility and results. In my personal life, I’ve chased elite status with an airline, but then watched the benefits of the status level shrink just as I attained status. And for businesses too, Google can make an update to its search algorithm and cause organic traffic to your site to drop in unexpected ways. These kinds of situations happen all the time, so it’s good to learn this lesson early. Identify what you can control and what you can’t.
Give yourself power
One key question is what will happen to Lowell’s standing if it moves away from a merit-based system? Is what makes the school special the students, faculty, or resources? I believe that Lowell’s prowess can be at least partially explained by the phenomenon observed in Jane Elliot’s famous brown eyed and blue eyed experiment. Because of the merit selection process, Lowell students believe that they are more talented and hence expect more of themselves than students at other high school students, which causes them to do better. Without the merit selection process, I predict this psychological effect will be gone and Lowell’s record will converge with other San Francisco public high schools over time.
I urge students to challenge the belief that you need to be selected by Lowell to tell you that you’re talented, so that you hold yourself to a high standard. You don’t need Lowell or the powers-that-be to give that power to you. You can give yourself that power and use it to excel. You can fulfill your own prophecies.
Figure out what intrinsically motivates you
If you focus on external validation (e.g. gaining admission to Lowell), you can be left empty-handed when the system changes. Instead, you should focus on discovering your intrinsic motivation. Are you at school to get good grades to get into a good school, or are you at school because there’s a certain subject that you’re really passionate about learning about? This reframing will ensure you are spending your time building value in what’s important to you. Twenty years out, the subjects that you were really passionate about will be the learnings that you retain.
Lowell’s reputation as a top school means that there’s a lot more demand than supply for the limited number of spots at the school, so it creates a system where there are winners and losers. Someone will always be upset when you make changes because they personally lose out, even if it’s better for the greater good. Instead of blaming the system, I encourage you to reframe your thinking. Reflect on what you’re really after — what intrinsically motivates you, what’s important to you, and take that power back for yourself. As much as this situation sucks for the Class of 2025, it’s not such a bad thing to learn these lessons early. Your future can be as bright as you dream it to be.
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