Kids crushed by college rejections get swept up by White grievance trolls
With college admissions season in full swing, many online right-wingers are pointing to race and gender as the reasons some institutions are rejecting qualified young men, despite the Supreme Court ruling affirmative action unconstitutional in 2023.
Students online have gone viral in the last week for posts highlighting their impressive resumes and disappointing admissions outcomes in a historically competitive year for college applicants.
While most commenters have chimed in with genuine life advice or critiqued the students’ essays, others have returned to a favorite right-wing boogeyman: affirmative action and DEI on college campuses.
In an X post on Tuesday, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk screenshotted a father’s story about his valedictorian son being rejected from all but one school.
“Why are we giving hundreds of billions of dollars to universities so stupid they won't offer this kid an admission because of his skin color (and let's be honest, that's why he was rejected everywhere)?” Kirk wrote. “Defund the college scam.”
The father’s original post on the r/collegeadmissions Reddit channel never mentions the student’s race, so it’s unclear where Kirk came up with that explanation.
The student’s father claimed he had a near-perfect SAT score and aced 18 AP exams, while getting a paid internship at a tech firm.
"I think that he and the people around him attach an undue amount of weight to superficial prestige,” the dad wrote, later noting that his son would now have to succeed in life despite going to UMass-Amherst.
The replies on X quickly filled up with assumptions that the student got denied from several elite colleges due to being a white or Asian male.
A similar screenshot from Reddit, which—again—did not mention race or gender, went viral last week.
That student claimed to also have a nearly perfect SAT score while doing a bevy of extracurriculars. "What did I do wrong in high school?” they asked, adding that they got rejected from several University of California schools and MIT.
“Why do I get the impression that it's something they did wrong at birth,” an X post asked.
“Do you mean, he is likely a white straight male?” another person responded.
The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions as unconstitutional in 2023, and many universities have voluntarily scrapped DEI-related programs in response to the election of President Donald Trump.
One commenter on Kirk’s post suggested some sort of reverse affirmative action to rectify the supposed injustice against white students.
“The answer to anti White college admission offices isn't to defund colleges,” they wrote. “the answer is to FORCE them to admit young White men and to drop their anti White curriculum.”
Students of all backgrounds face a grueling admissions environment this year, though, as a record number of students graduated high school as universities vie to be more selective. Last month, CBS News reported that college applications increased 6% from 2024.
Amid all the disappointment, one student went viral for posting his entire admissions essay on X, alongside a list of elite Ivy League institutions that denied him. (He claimed to be accepted at the University of Texas, Georgia Tech, and the University of Miami.)
The resume listed is impressive—he claimed to have a 4.0 GPA, a 34 ACT score, and a business doing $30 million in annual revenue—but most commenters pointed out that his essay about his self-made success as a tech entrepreneur missed the mark and suggested he may eventually drop out.
Not all commenters, though.
“He didn't get in because he's white and he is a ‘tech bro’ which is a type of person that offends the libtards in college admissions,” one reply on X read. “If he was black he would've gotten in no questions asked.”
The student himself didn’t mention his ethnicity at all.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
The post Kids crushed by college rejections get swept up by White grievance trolls appeared first on The Daily Dot.