<p>asians are not disadvantaged - at least not in the sense presented in here of some conspiracy.</p>
<p>as someone with a) knowledge of admissions and b) a fairly good understanding of the asian/asian-american community, i believe this to be entirely true. instead of skirting around the issue, i’ll be blunt.</p>
<p>a lot of students try to blame admissions, but i liken the “problem of being asian” as similar to the “problem of applying pre/med or econ” though i do not suggest that the two are interchangeable. applying with an interest that is overrepresented in the pool as it is applying from ethnicity that is overrepresented in the pool means that the burden to be admitted changes and becomes higher, yet it doesn’t mean that any fewer students are admitted each year, in fact it is the contrary. by my contention - students who declare being interested in premed have a significant disadvantage in the application process not because they are not intelligent, but the size of the pool is so large that at a certain point you’ve seen every student that has volunteered for 2 weeks at a hospital saying they are interested in medicine; so you start seeking out only the students that have volunteered for a month, and the bar goes higher from there. the burden becomes higher on the student to distinguish him/herself. in fact i’d go further to say it is not so much being “Asian” aka checking the box (as a lot of asian/asian-americans have begun not to check any box as it is their choice), but often it is unconsciously pursuing the same thing, and not distinguishing oneself from others that have a similar background. from my perspective, a lot of white upper-middle class applicants suffer from the same problem of appearing too similar. </p>
<p>it becomes easy to be desensitized to accomplishment as an admissions officer, or at least that is what i have been told: being captain of the tennis team or being part of nhs loses its lustre; whereas it means a lot to you as a student, it lacks intrigue to a top tier admissions officer that has seen it before. what is truly impressive is someone that stands out based on their context.</p>
<p>what is affirmative action?</p>
<p>a lot of students consider it to be a double standard set to create an unethical playing field. this is not AA, especially not at top tier colleges today. i’d go as far as to say the original impulse for AA, to correct long standing disadvantages to some communities is no longer even the metric by which AA is measured.</p>
<p>what AA has left though is an impetus for admissions offices to care about context and to contextualize experience a lot better. what does it mean to be mexican-american and grow up in a family that doesn’t speak english? how might that effect your learning? what does successful look like coming from different contexts? at this point the metric by which all students are measured is to the yardstick that seems to be based on what they provide the admissions officer - it is who they are, what they say they want to be, and how hard have they worked relative to the resources available to make their goal happen. </p>
<p>what this also means is i’ve heard of conversations where admissions officers work with asian-american scholars to figure out what does it mean to stand-out within that context, what are indicators of students that do the best in college that come from a first generation american background v. someone whose family has been here since the 1880s. thus AA has in fact led to a more holistic admission practices that folks talk about, it has led to the denaturalization of standardized testing as the holy grail of success and led to other more nuanced understandings of excellence. new questions begin to be asked that didn’t used to be asked when AA first came into existence, and now about populations and groups that were not originally the intent of AA.</p>
<p>what does it mean to be a nationally-recognized athlete? how much commitment and mental energy does that require? </p>
<p>what does it mean to be the only asian in your small town? what kind of pressures does it place on you as a student? what kind of stresses does it place on you?</p>
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<p>this doesn’t mean more students are being admitted, but there should be solace in that no one is being immediately denied just for being asian, that doesn’t happen at top tier schools. </p>
<p>and from a personal perspective, i think that as populations shift, there will always be a need to support diversity in admissions, to support contextual-based admissions reading, and to support empowerment of communities and individuals that may be at that moment less powerful (at least in some foucauldian notion of knowledge-power dynamics). it should be comforting to know that if the tables were turned that people would be enlightened enough to thing critically about admissions in a way that is both for the individual, for the class, and in the grander scheme for society at large.</p>
I have three Asian friends that applied to Columbia - one was the stereotypical Asian - not really outspoken, 2400, went to the Columbia summer program, school online newspaper - he was accepted. Another was a “supported athlete” for a rare sport and had a lower SAT score (2200ish? after like…4 tries) and far lower GPA. She was accepted. The last friend was the outspoken, opinionated one aspiring to be a historian/lawyer with a 2300+ SAT and good GPA and so much more credentials that showed her passion and genuine interest in what she was doing, not to mention she probably got GLOWING recommendations from her teachers. She got rejected.</p>