<p>Xiggi: Atleast california1600 writes his own. Unlike that 1600 score article.</p>
<p>Remember my e-mail to you?</p>
<p>What are you intimating here with "at least California1600 writes his own. Unlike that 1600 score article", Simba? </p>
<p>FWIW, I do not recall any email on such a subject. Sorry!</p>
<p>Simba, the demographics don't lie. Why don't you talk to some people who have worked on either side of the Admissions aisle? You thing the Asian piano/violin or tennis/golf thing isn't a horribly skewed but true representation? And note: I never said or even suggested that was absolute. But Asian trombone-playing rugby players applying to Auburn are going to be far far far rarer than violin/piano-playing tennis players applying to Harvard. And some of you just don't want to admit it because then some of the admissions numbers start to make some sense.</p>
<p>Yay. I win. </p>
<p>The reason I can talk about UC admissions data is BECAUSE ITS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!</p>
<p>Ivy Leagues will NEVER EVER OPEN UP their admissions data to the public. So on UC admissions data, all I said is true. It holds. Asian Americans, regardless of major, are accepted within each major and within each school on a higher average SAT score than whites. And BTW, I was born here. My stats were 1600/800 Math IIC/ 730 Chemistry/ 700 Writing (also I scored above 1600 according to today's SAT scale, please don't lump me in with other average 1600 scores. Thats my pet peeve) so as you can see I didn't take SAT II Korean/Chinese. Also, remember that studying for SAT Verbal is difficult and so is Grammar (oh yea, you guys figured that out, thats why u added it) for an Asian American who grew up in a household speaking their native language. Whites have every single advantage in the world, and now are adding another one in the form of grammar being 1/3 of the new SAT. Now, if you are mad because your daughter or son lost their place at a good university to a URM, think of how much MORE ****ed Asian Americans are. We had to go UPHILL ALL THE WAY TO FACE EVEN MORE ADMISSIONS DISCRIMINATION THAN WHITES DO. Sheesh, talk about complaining about nothing. </p>
<p>Thank you very mucho. </p>
<p>Adios amigos! Remember kids, study hard! stay in school!</p>
<p>Haven't had time to read through all the posts, but I'm going to troll slightly here and say that Affirmative Action is similar to Communism. It tries to take clearly unequal people and make them equal. The USA rejected Communism so vehemently, so why not Affirmative Action? Because race is a touchy issue. </p>
<p>Look, if I was hiring people for a job (similar to how colleges are recruiting people for admission), I would want the BEST people. I certainly would not choose someone less qualified statistically over someone else just because their race is different. Therefore, the best should go to the best.</p>
<p>That's how life works. It doesn't matter how or why you're unqualified, but the bottom line is that you are.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Haven't had time to read through all the posts, but I'm going to troll slightly here and say that Affirmative Action is similar to Communism. It tries to take clearly unequal people and make them equal. The USA rejected Communism so vehemently, so why not Affirmative Action? Because race is a touchy issue.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Stupidest post ever. Communism would also encourage teamwork, and unselfish play. Which is why the Detroit Pistons beat the LA Lakers. Amateur hour tonight.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Look, if I was hiring people for a job (similar to how colleges are recruiting people for admission), I would want the BEST people. I certainly would not choose someone less qualified statistically over someone else just because their race is different. Therefore, the best should go to the best.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree with this, and so do most people. But in reality, things are not equal. The white male employee will be favored for promotions, hiring, bonuses, salary, work selection, office desk, etc.... etc... on and on forever. There will be biases. So affirmative action was set to help an applicant who will receive biases their entire lives a better first step. That was one of the intentions. If the US was truly colorblind and promoted based strictly on talent, and not on race politics, then we wouldn't have as much racial strife as we do now.</p>
<p>How did an Asian Americans post turn into Affirmative Action?</p>
<p>No matter how you look at it, Asians still get screwed in admissions. Many have tried justifying affirmative action by stating that these URMs were historically discriminated against. However, when you really look at the facts, it is so illogical. So, AA is meant to benefit historically disadvantaged races, right? Then why does it seem to benefit only blacks and hispanics? Are you saying that Asians were never discriminated against? Look at the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which specifically denied citizenship to Chinese Americans for no apparent reason at all except racism. Take a look at the Japanese internement camps. Were any Germans interred, interrogated, or robbed of their rights? No. Yes, I admit that AA does benefit some of those that have been historically discriminated against such as Blacks. However, if you really look at it, these admission practices tend to benefit wealthy blacks and Hispanics that weren't historically discriminated against anyway.</p>
<p>The myth with Asians is that many think that the Asians who do come to America were already rich in their former country to begin with. While this may be true for some Asians, this is simply not true. Just look at the number of Chinese immigrants who came here in the late 1900s. They came as railroad workers who had their labors exploited by the American government. And while current census data may claim that Asian Americans have the highest median income, this is simply not true. The statistics include wealthy Japanese business people who live here on extended stay. Further, what the statistics fail to note is that the average Asian family has more workers working so naturally their median income has to be higher. Of course an Asian family with three working people is going to make more than a black family with only one or two. </p>
<p>And of course. There are the poor Asians. I myself am a personal example. As a Vietnamese refugee, my family came here in 1992 with virtually nothing - literally. We lived off the charities of other, with 6 people living in a one bedroom apartment. I went to some of California's worst schools, faced with the constant threat of not graduating from an accredited high school. Yet, like countless other impoverished South East Asians, we've managed to rise above the adversity. Yet, when applying to college I'm still grouped as Asian and thus, must work harder to get admitted.</p>
<p>It further aggravates me that the area that asians do tend to do well in is being looked down upon. Not only are we discriminated in higher education, we're also discriminated on tv. Just look at William Hung. Would it be so funny if he were black or white? Of course not. What roles have Asians played on T.V. except for some asexual and inept karate fighting social outcast. Blacks and Hispanics are represented politically, but Asians are not. Even when we have managed to find our channel of advancement - education - we are still held back by discriminatory practices. </p>
<p>And, btw. I chose to not dwell over my family's harships at all when I applied for college. Sure, I could have related how both my parents had to work their asses off at less than minimum wage. And sure I could have related all the sappy sentimental crap that comes with that, but I chose not to. If I were black or hispanic, there is no doubt in my mind that I would get accepted anywhere. Sadly, since I'm Asian, I wait with trepidation as the admission or rejection letters come in.</p>
<p>"We're sorry, but you have been denied admission. We simply can't accomodate anymore Asians. Good luck."</p>
<p>totally agree with you, krazykamikaze...I hate it when people say "Asians do not face discrimination because they have tight cultural background in USA already and they have money.." errr...do they even know anything about Asian immigrants? it is true that some Asians are rich and they have families in US..but majority, like my family, came with nothing...I mean, if we had money and if we were rich in our native country, then why would we have left it? we immigrated precisely because we had nothing...and we thought that at least US would give us chance to make money and get a good education..but no~ colleges kick us out because we're Asians -_- AA doesn't make any sense. It's a stupid and racist practice. It's practically saying "the underrepresented (blacks and hispanics) don't have ability to opportune themselves"</p>
<p>
[quote]
So, AA is meant to benefit historically disadvantaged races, right?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>One of the common mistaken premises. This is addressed down thread.</p>
<p>..........ahah i dont think asians are being screwed over at all. maybe they will pick the black dude instead of the white or asian dude if they had the same grades and none of them seem to significantly stand out..but if ur the best, the admissiosn wont be so stupid as to letting go of a good prospective student just to get their % of black people from say..6% to 6.3% ahaha. anyways u guys that are complainin about it are just complainin becuse u dont have the stats and stuff to truly stand out regardless of ur race. just like hopkins is infested with whites and asians, and they might accept SOME more black people than they usually would, but htat doesnt mean that they completely neglect white+asians regardless of what kind of student thye are. also, as ive said in several other forums, its not whether or not u'll get in, its whether or not u can STAY in.</p>
<p>washingtonpost.com
Should Colleges Have Quotas for Asian Americans? </p>
<p>By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 12, 2004; 3:47 PM </p>
<p>One of the best parts of writing an online column is the conversations that grow out of answering questions from readers. What are at first quick exchanges sometimes turn into long dialogues, from which I learn much from people that I will probably never meet in person.</p>
<p>One of the most interesting and persistent of my online interlocutors is Ed Chin, a physician who lives in northern New Jersey. Chin and I are about the same age, but have different backgrounds. He is the child of non-English-speaking Chinese immigrant parents and grew up in a low-income neighborhood of New York City. I was raised in a relatively prosperous suburb of San Francisco by parents who spoke only English, as have most of our ancestors going back several generations to Ireland and Scotland. Chin attended a very competitive New York City magnet school, while I went to an average suburban high school. We both went to Ivy League colleges, but he enrolled in medical school while I escaped to the newspaper business. </p>
<p>Our Internet conversations have all been on one topic, how affirmation action in college admissions has hurt students of Asian descent. Chin has studied this subject with an energy and passion that is rare even among the many energetic and passionate people who write me. He has been asking me for years to address this topic. When my occasional swipes at it have not satisfied him, he has asked for more. He has suggested more than once that The Post and I are too politically correct and afraid of the heat that this issue generates. </p>
<p>Hoping to get him off my back, I told Chin I would broach the topic again only if he let me write about him and his views. I did not know of anyone else who argued the case as well as he did, I said, so he had to help me. He values his privacy, and resisted my offer for more than a year, but has now given me permission to publish the Chin doctrine. Here it is, as taken from his e-mails with his preferences on capitalization and punctuation preserved:</p>
<p>One of Chin's favorite examples of the Asian success at overcoming poverty is Princeton physicist Daniel C. Tsui, who won a Nobel Prize in 1998. He was born to a peasant family in a remote village in Henan province in central China, attended school in Hong Kong and then got a college scholarship to Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., leading to his research at the University of Chicago, Bell Laboratories and Princeton. </p>
<p>There was no affirmative action admission for Tsui, Chin said. "He credits his accomplishments to his Chinese parents' value placed on education, despite the fact that they were illiterate Chinese peasants themselves. These values are stressed by the philosopher, Confucius, in his Analects. That's the main ingredient for his success and his endless striving for academic excellence and his love of knowledge."</p>
<p>Chin quotes with approval a book, "Beyond the Classroom," by Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown and Sanford M. Dornbusch, which says "of all the demographic factors we studied in relation to school performance, ethnicity was the most important. . . . In terms of school achievement, it is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents, or to have a mother who is able to stay at home full time."</p>
<p>And yet the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action preserved the system at most selective private schools in which Asian American students with very high tests scores are passed over in favor of African American and Hispanic students with lower scores because the schools want significant numbers of all ethnicities on campus. Supporters of such policies say a diverse student body helps everyone learn to live in the real world, and there are plenty of other fine colleges that take students, Asian American or otherwise, whom they reject. </p>
<p>Whenever I raised this point, Chin would accuse me, rightly, of shrugging off the American commitment to fair play for individuals. He cited comments made by Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Massachusetts state school board member. "I think these racial preferences are very pernicious," she said in an interview on a PBS Web site after voters banned the use of affirmative action based on race in University of California admissions. "I don't think they do black students much good. I think they're poisonous in terms of race relations. And I do not think they are fair to the Asian student, for instance, who has worked very, very hard and is kept out of a Berkeley because a student with a slightly different skin color has gotten in as a consequence of racial identity."</p>
<p>Chin said "Chinese and ALL Asian Americans are PENALIZED for their values on academic excellence by being required to have a HIGHER level of achievement, academic and non-academic, than any other demographic group, especially Whites, in order to be admitted to Harvard, the Ivies and the other Elites in this zero-sum game called admissions based on racial preferences."</p>
<p>This may not be intended as a quota system, but Chin says it sure looks like one. He notes that in the 1980s some colleges, particularly Stanford and Brown, looked hard at their admissions decisions and discovered they were turning down many Asian American applicants while accepting white applicants with virtually the same characteristics. The Brown report admitted to "cultural bias and stereotypes," like the oft-heard canard that Asian American students have 1600 SAT scores and play the violin, but don't do sports. </p>
<p>Chin said if he had the power to change the admission policies of schools that discriminate in this way, he would let them continue to give preference to athletes, musicians, alumni children and any other groups the college wished to favor. And he would admit lower-scoring students whose parents, like his, did not have much money. But he would abolish all preferences based on race and ethnicity. </p>
<p>He noted the recent estimate by Harvard humanities professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. that two thirds of blacks at Harvard were not descendants of American slaves, but the middle class children of relatively recent immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. "Why should they deserve admission with lowered standards (relatively speaking) based solely on the color of their skin over a high achieving Asian American living in a Chinatown ghetto or a Black ghetto (many Asians live in Black and Latino ghettos) or a poor white from the slums of NYC?" Chin said.</p>
<p>The solution to the problem of lower average achievement among African Americans and Hispanics is not "the Band-Aid approach of race-based affirmative action," Chin said. "It is solved by improving the K-12 schools for the lower economic classes which are disproportionately Black and Latino."</p>
<p>Chin always ends his e-mails to me with the words "comments please" or "any comments?" So I am obliged to respond. </p>
<p>I had the good fortune to live and work in China for four years, and have spent half of my life studying Chinese culture. I think it is one of the greatest accomplishments of the human race, with its emphasis on learning, family, creativity and hard work. It is a thrill for me to see what people raised in that culture have achieved in this country, free of the fear and oppression that China is still struggling to rid itself of. </p>
<p>I am convinced that one reason why Chin's well-reasoned complaints have not led to massive demonstrations and legislative reform is that the students of Asian descent who are rejected by the Ivies get educations just as good in other colleges. College admissions cannot be fair for anyone when, as happens at some schools, there are ten applicants for every place in the freshman class. The test score differences that Chin emphasizes are only one measure of quality, and although they predict college grades fairly well, they don't have that much to do with success in life. </p>
<p>But there is one part of his argument, a reference to a sad era in American history, that is hard to ignore. Many selective colleges before World War II had quotas on Jews. They turned down many brilliant applicants in favor of non-Jewish prep school students with lesser records. They didn't call this striving for diversity, but it was a perverse form of affirmative action, and it left a bitter taste for decades. </p>
<p>Chin calculates that with those quotas gone, about a third of Harvard undergraduates are Jews, who make up about 3 percent of the U.S. population. About 17 percent of Harvard undergraduates are Asians, who make up about 4 percent of the population. Since the percentage of Asian Americans at schools of comparable quality that do not practice affirmative action are much higher -- 40 percent at Berkeley, 50 percent at selective New York high schools such as Stuyvesant -- Chin says the Asian American percentage at Harvard and other Ivies would go up significantly if the rules were changed. </p>
<p>I am not so sure. All of us, including admissions committee members, are human. We have plenty of other ill-considered biases that have not been rooted out and could affect these numbers. </p>
<p>But however that works out, Chin feels it is only right and fair and better serves the cause of vibrant and interesting campuses if admissions officers stopped giving preferences based on race, and instead tried to admit more young people whose parents are not affluent and did not go to college, people less like me and more like Daniel C. Tsui. </p>
<p>© 2004 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive</p>
<p>Man, I like this guy. How long are you going to be in town. He really tells you like it is. I am a white boy, but I don't think whites/asians are getting the short end of the stick either. Like he said, it might help a little if you are a minority, but not really enough to have 13 pages of people complaining. People need to get over it. If you got deferred/rejected through ED or if you do through RD, don't play the race card.</p>
<p>The only things I believe they should AA for are economic factors. The tests are biased against poor people because they often didn't have the same educational opportunities growing up. I think everything beyond that "in the name of diversity" is specious and should be struck down.</p>
<p>They do AA for that though, or at least the Ivies do. If you can't afford private test prep so some people get, they look at that and take that into consideration. I don't think they do much more than that in the way of race and such. If it was between a rich AfroAmerican kid and a poor white kid, both with a 1450, I think the poor white kid has the advantage.</p>
<p>It's hard to say, because the application doesn't really show how poor you are, but it definitely shows your race (if you put it on there).</p>
<p>well alot of schools are trying to eliminate the fact that rich kids have an advantage over poor kids now. two examples are that harvard will pay full tuition for any student that is accepted and has a family income less tahn 30,000 (or somewhere around 30) and hopkins made this new "Baltmore scholars" thing so any student graduating from a balto public school and ahs lived in the city will have full tuition also. also, maybe to a certain extent, the rich kids do have an advantage, they may go to a better school, get better test preps etc...but when it comes to IVies and other top schools, just those "help" isnt going to cut it. i mean no matter how much help you get an dno matter how rich ur family is, if ur stupid, u wont be able to get a 1500 on the sat even if u memorize the dictionary. so as far as "financial aid" goes, i think its not too bad. for example, i live in balto city, but moved to the county, and at first i couldnt qualify for the balto scholars thing, but hopkins still gave me a grant of 35,000 for 2005-2006; my family isnt able to pay any of the tuition (we dont even make as much as teh tuition) so.....its not as bad as you guys make it sound.</p>
<p>If you're stupid, you won't be able to memorize the dictionary either.</p>
<p>well .....u can try really hard. my point is that even if u memorize teh dictionary, uw ont be able to get teh analogy. but u get my point.</p>