<p>How about being an Asian at a high school that’s more than 80% Latino and that person doesn’t have the “typical Asian experience”?</p>
<p>Being Asian in a school that is mostly Latino or black does little to enhance one’s elite college prospects. That’s because Latinos and blacks have completely different standards of admission than the Asians studying along side them. I see this in the low-performing public schools (100% minority) in the SF Bay Area where Asians perform significantly better than their black & Hispanic classmates in school, but don’t get into the top schools as often as their non-Asian peers.</p>
<p>The best situation for an Asian student is to be in a high-performing school with a super-majority of white students (ideally, 80% or more). In this case, the top white students set a benchmark of performance for the Asian students when applying to the top colleges. Asians who outperform their white peers by clear margins can get into top schools when their white peers get into said schools. It’s akin to having the white students dragging their Asian classmates over the finish line. Clearly, it would look bad for Princeton to accept Kaitlyn and reject Mei-Mei if the latter outperforms her white peer in all areas.</p>
<p>Harvard practices Affirmative action and social balancing games in all its professional schools and undergraduate admission. But it is less so in graduate school level (at least in most of science disciplines). When it comes to faculty hiring and granting tenure, the prime factors are funding and top rate publications. The political and social agenda seems not playing any role. So, when something is vital to the University, Harvard is not a believer of the social engineering it plays for the American Society.</p>
<p>For those students who complain about unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity, there is a channel in civil right division in the Justice department to file a complaint, as Jian Li did 2 years ago. Harvard cannot survive one day without federal funding. Striping off tax payers’ money from Harvard is probably the most lethal way to destroy this institution (or make it to change its policy).</p>
<p>Of course, the ultimate channel is electing officials into our executive offices and legislatures who believe in race-blind admissions, who in turn, elevate like-thinking persons as Judges onto our court system (such as the Supreme Court) or write laws saying as much. Generally speaking, this did not happen in the 2008 elections.</p>
<p>Woah woah woah wait a minute there for those who say that being asian doesn’t affect it. the truth is, it does. Let me ask you this, you have 20,000 applicants, all of which does not put their ethnicity on it. Ok now you find out that 10,000 of these applications are students who are good at math, play tennis, like science, aren’t really good at English and plan on majoring in science or math. Would you say that this is diversity? I mean seriously, this is pretty much what Asians are. If you admit a ton of Asians. Almost all of those Asians are going to go into science and math. Then what is going to happen to your humanities department? What about the English department? I mean seriously, it doesn’t matter if they look at your ethnicity or not, having qualities similiar to one of the many asians that apply isn’t going to help you a lot. You have to convince the admissions office that you are different. I mean look at it this way, if you have a school population of all Asians and people who act similar to them (good at math and science, not great at English, all play non-contact sports) then what is going to happen to your school? Your not going to have many good humanities teachers any more because no one is going to go into humanities, you are not going to have much diversity. So honestly, if you are going to be another one of those Asians (and the stereotype is amazingly accurate because most Asians love math and science, most Asians aren’t so good at English, and most Asians don’t play contact sports and many play tennis and a lot of them aren’t all state or even all American) then Harvard has the right to reject you. Because you don’t stand out. I mean they don’t want a campus full of math loving, science loving students, non-contact sports students. They want diversity.</p>
<p>cdz512 appears to be channeling Marliee Jones.</p>
<p>“It’s possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament. My guess is that he just wasn’t involved or interesting enough to surface to the top. [I could] understand why a university would take a celebrity child, legacy, or development admit over yet another textureless math grind.” - Marilee Jones, ex-MIT Director of Admissions</p>
<p>She later resigned from her MIT post after officials found that she had lied about graduating from college.</p>
<p>Academic Ghettoization in Math and Sciences</p>
<p>Source: [American</a> Thinker: Asian Americans and Affirmative Action](<a href=“http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/08/asian_americans_and_affirmativ.html]American”>http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/08/asian_americans_and_affirmativ.html)</p>
<p>“Many AsianAmerican parents believe that their children are merely jockeying among themselves for the limited number of spaces allocated to them by college admissions officers. Other factors, most notably the declining number of white students choosing to study technical fields such as math, science and engineering, may also be working in tandem against them. According to AsianAmerican parents, the most noticeable effect of this shift has been the decrease the number of slots available to their children in nontechnical fields.”</p>
<p>“Their reasoning goes like this: to compensate for lower numbers of white students choosing to study math, science and engineering, colleges must accept more technicallyinclined Asian students to take their place. But if the overall number of AsianAmerican students is capped at a certain level, then a relatively high percentage of Asians majoring in technical subjects needs to be offset by a correspondingly low percentage allowed to major in nontechnical subjects. Paradoxically, ceilings on AsianAmerican enrollment may then actually perpetuate the ‘Asian nerd’ stereotype by prompting colleges to admit more Asian students majoring in technical subjects.”</p>
<p>“The net effect of demographics and racial quotas has been the academic ‘ghettoization’ of many select colleges and universities. An observer needs only to walk into an electrical engineering classroom at Michigan or UCLA to see this effect in real life.”</p>
<p>So the question really is: Why can’t white students (the non-Jews, at least) complete academically in math and the sciences? By choosing not to compete, they’re hurting the chances of Asian students who want to study non-technical subjects.</p>
<p>And just like the Asians, Jewish students aren’t very interested in contact sports as well. By cdz512’s logic, shouldn’t they be subject to the same quotas as Asians? Food for thought.</p>
<p>what’s so special about Jews?</p>
<p>jamescchen:</p>
<p>Wait sorry but I don’t get where you were going with this. Sorry</p>
<p>“Jewish students aren’t very interested in contact sports as well”</p>
<p>Actually have to say that is wrong. The Jewish kids I know in my school play Lacross, football and soccer (and Jewish kids make up a good 20-25% of my school, around 30% is Muslims, and around 30% Christians, and the last few are non-religious). And my school faces a Jewish school that has a lot of people on their soccer team.</p>
<p>So, as an Asian, I would have a better chance if I participate in politics, love English and history and economics, but don’t like math or science, right?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say a better chance, not whether you “like” math or science, but whether you do well at them or not. FYI being good at economics and history doesn’t give you any edge as to being an Asian applicant - I know plenty of Asians who do really well at those subjects. As for English, it really depends on the student’s family background, where she comes from and the resources offered at her school.</p>
<p>At my school, almost all Asians speak English as well as the natives (probably because they were in an international school for most of their lives, and most of them came to Hong Kong after living in the States for some years). But yes, if you talk to them in English you wouldn’t find ANY difference whatsoever with talking to a native.</p>
<p>So no, you wouldn’t have a better chance, but that doesn’t put you at a disadvantage either.</p>
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<p>Jones’ performance art was a masterpiece. We should all salute her for a (literally) fantastic accomplishment in the field of entertainment, marred only by its not taking place at the much more deserving school down the road. </p>
<p>Still, Jones’ ill-advised remark may be closer to reality than her resume. The Wall St Journal article painted a remarkably… textureless… portrait of that Korean applicant sent at great expense to Groton only to be rejected at his main admissions targets.</p>
<p>I thought that the affirmative action has been abolished?</p>
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<p>:eyeroll: Oh hey, want to come back to reality now?</p>
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<p>Sort of. However,</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Majority-whites may already be a minority at some elite schools. The white enrollment consists in large measure of Jews, immigrants, and international students. </p></li>
<li><p>There isn’t much white discomfort associated with US-born or assimilated Asians who speak unaccented English. There is no discomfort at all toward Asian women (wherever born and whatever quality of English they speak), as the out-marriage statistics indicate.</p></li>
<li><p>There has been a demographic wave of the children of the 1989 generation of Chinese graduate students and 1990’s HK expatriates. When this declines the Chinese enrollment may go down with it, as later-generation Asians are much less accomplished. </p></li>
<li><p>There aren’t enough high-achieving Asians around to reduce white enrollment below 50 percent anywhere but California, under race-blind admission. (They aren’t minority or high-achieving in Hawaii.) At the Ivy League schools Asians would make gains but would displace affirmative action minorities, not whites. The added Asians would be spread around a number of schools, but I don’t think there would be such a flood as to reach 40 percent at any school; getting past (or well into) the 30’s at some of the Ivies is questionable.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>You folks are in serious denial. There is clear discrimination, and an effective quota in the Ivies, to the detriment of US and foreign asian applicants. When de facto quotas are not employed the percentage of asian students increases to over 30% which the Ivies view as intolerable. There is nothing new here. In the past, the Ivies engaged in the same type of discrimination with respect to jews and before that, catholics.</p>
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<p>Not exactly. Asians face a combination of factors, which some Asians (most specifically, Chinese) tend to grotesquely magnify into a massive conspiracy to halve the Asian acceptance figures. The factors at play include: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Some adverse treatment; outright anti-Asian discrimination, or signs of likely discrimination that are hard to explain otherwise. This appears to be declining and the horror stories from the 1980-1990’s are out of date. Several top schools have made internal reforms in their selection procedures, and many people involved in the admissions process (admissions officers, alumni interviewers, professors, board of directors) are themselves Asian.</p></li>
<li><p>Some affirmative action in favor of lower-performing Asian populations (SE Asians, Filipinos, poor and first-generation applicants). </p></li>
<li><p>Some discounting of Asian credentials that is overtly race-based or at least highly race-correlated, but objectively justified if one is trying to select the academically most promising students. Korean kids in Flushing who attend SAT mills for a year or more, are expected to have scores that overstate their abilities. This may not be true of each individual Korean, but then again, it may not be true of any given white prep school applicant whose SAT scores are discounted for the same reason (compared to poor students from awful high schools). </p></li>
<li><p>Some absolutely equal treatment of Asian credentials, but under standards that have disparate impact on Asians, such as the high admissions value for contact sports. Conceivably Asians who excel in stereotypically non-Asian pursuits, such as basketball or political activism on behalf of (other) minorities, could receive better-than-equal treatment of the same credential, as in their case it shows “leadership” or “spark” or other such holistic admission buzzwords. </p></li>
<li><p>Some destruction of Asians’ natural admissions advantages through overpopulation of niches. Just as only a limited number of football players can be recruited, only a limited number of piano and violin players can get endorsement from the music department, and only a limited number of future math professors can be admitted. The few best individual Asian pianists and mathematicians in the pool will get the full benefit of those credentials, but as a group, the effect per Asian applicant of those strengths will be diluted. </p></li>
<li><p>Overpopulation of particular high schools. Universities try not to over-concentrate the admissions geographically or at particular high schools. Like other minorities, Asians often live in enclaves and they are often drawn to those enclaves by the academics, so the best students are competing with each other, but due to residential and not racial similarity. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Notice that #5 is quite different from “comparing Asians against each other”. If pianists are compared to pianists, and most of the pianists are Asian girls, then Asian girls will disproportionately fail to have their piano credentials given extra weight, and that remains true if the annual piano scholarship is invariably awarded to an Asian.</p>
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<p>There’s the grotesque magnification. It is simply assumed that Asians are able to top 30 percent at Harvard, or that they can displace the white share below 50 percent at any given school. That won’t happen outside California. Caltech is the extreme here: close to 40 percent Asian, at an unforgiving tech school, in California, with purely academic admissions, and with its current Asian numbers inflated from being the only school of that type (a refuge from whatever disadvantages exist elsewhere for Asian males). </p>
<p>The Espenshade and Chung model (the one that found Asians taking the equivalent of a 50-point discount on their SAT) predicted an increase in Asian acceptances, in year 1997, from 17 percent to 23-25 percent. It was a one-third increase under race-blind admission and a 40 percent increase under race- and athletics-blind admission. The increases would be smaller today, as Asians’ SAT advantage is less (SAT being less sharp an instrument than in the study’s data from the 80-90’s), and the Asian applicant profile becomes increasingly like the white upper-class profile over time.</p>
<p>The Ivies are not Berkeley or UCLA. They are national schools, they have a higher entrance threshold, their non-racial admissions criteria don’t play to Asian strengths, and there are other rival pools of non-Asian candidates that would rise in enrollment if racial admissions were scrapped. Jewish enrollment would go up under any system more favorable to Asians. White middle class nerds would increase their share if athletic and “holistic” preferences were dropped.</p>
<p>the Ivies are dirty American commercial institutions, don’t forget. racism, underhanded ways, and stupidity are just part of the game</p>
<p>Keep the denials of racial bias going, folks. I especially like the comments about all Asians being alike and deserving of higher admissions standards. I need more clients for my college consulting practice!</p>
<p>I bet sisrune is a Korean. Who wants to discriminate such a beautiful race-Asian?</p>