KEEP ‘STUY’TUS QUO
Star alum supports elite-HS admit test
Here’s one famed Stuyvesant HS graduate who wants to keep its coldly competitive admissions process intact.
Silicon Valley savant Naval Ravikant — whose entrepreneurial Midas touch has elevated him to nearguru status in tech circles — commended his alma mater this week for admitting kids based on a single test score.
“This is what I love about Stuyvesant,” Ravikant told Dilbert cartoonist and unlikely Kanye West compadre Scott Adams in an interview. “It wasn’t about academics. Because my academics weren’t necessarily that great. I wasn’t a good student. But it was about a test. It was like an SAT that you took in the eighth grade.”
Ravikant — the founder of AngelList and an early investor in supernova startups like Uber and Twitter — said the stripped-down process allowed anonymous immigrant kids like himself to vault toward professional success.
“I was a total unknown in New York City from a nothing family,” he said. “Single-family household. Immigrants. Trying- to-survive type of situation. I passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School. And that was it. That saved my life. Once I had the Stuyvesant brand, then I got into an Ivy League college, then I was in tech.”
Ravikant, who was born in India, moved with his family to New York City when he was 9 years old.
After graduating from Stuyvesant, he went to Dartmouth College before repeatedly striking tech gold out West.
“Stuyvesant is like one of those intelligence lottery situations where you can break into an instant validation network,” he said. “You go from being blue collar to white collar in one move.”
Critics have called for an overhaul of the admissions process for the city’s eight elite public high schools. Entrance is currently determined on a single test result.
Under that system, there’s a dearth of black and Latino kids who gain entry to schools like Stuyvesant — and some say additional attributes should be taken into account in order to diversify enrollment.
Critics also argue that poorer students have diminished access to testing prep materials that might bolster their shot for admission to the elite eight.
Last year, 74 percent of Stuyvesant kids were Asian, 18 percent white, 5 percent Latino and 1 percent black.
“Stuyvesant was the hardest to get into school in all of New York,” Ravikant said. “And it was public and it had brilliant teachers and great students. And they would take anybody as long as they passed that exam.”
Ravikant also took a jab at rival Bronx Science noting top scorers went to Stuy. “If you were number two you had to go to Bronx Science — which they will never live down,” he teased.