<p>From Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission, chapter 7, "The New Jews, Asian Americans Need Not Apply":</p>
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In 1990, federal investigators concluded that UCLA's graduate department in mathematics had discriminated against Asian applicants.
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......... most elite universities have maintained a triple standard in college admissions, setting the bar highest for Asians, next for whites, and lowest for blacks and Hispanics. According to a 2004 study by three Princeton researchers, an Asian American applicant needs to score 50 points higher on the SAT than other applicants just to have the same chance of admission to an elite university. (Being an alumni child, by contrast, confers a 160-point advantage.) Yale records show that entering Asian American freshmen averaged a 1493 SAT score in 1999-2000, 1496 in 2000-2001, and 1482 in 2001-2. For the same three years, the average for white freshmen was about 40 points lower. Black and Hispanic freshmen lagged another 100-125 points below whites. A Yale spokesman attributed the Asian-white gap to more whites being recruited athletes, and said Asians and whites are held to the same academic standards."
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Federal investigators also turned up stereotyping by Harvard admissions evaluators. Possibly reflecting a lack of cultural understanding, Harvard evaluators ranked Asian American candidates on average below whites in "personal qualities." In comments written in applicants' files, Harvard admissions staff repeatedly described Asian Americans as "being quiet/shy, science/math oriented, and hard workers," the report found. One reader summed up an Asian applicant this way: "He's quiet and, of course, wants to be a doctor."
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He [Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt] added that the stereotype of the quiet Asian student is "really a strange notion. My Asian American students are very lively. They take leadership positions. They're not at all shy or reticent."
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Now as then, a lack of preferences can be a convenient guise for racism. Much as college administrators justified anti-Jewish policies with ethnic stereotypes -- one Yale dean in 1918 termed the typical Jewish student a "greasy grind" -- so Asians are typecast in college admissions offices as quasi-robots programmed by their parents to ace math and science tests. Asked why Vanderbilt poured resources into recruiting Jews instead of Asians, a former administator told me, "Asians are very good students, but they don't provide the kind of intellectual environment that Jewish students provide.</p>
<p>Similarly, MIT dean of admissions Marilee Jones rationalized the institute's rejection of Henry Park by resorting to stereotypes. Although she wasn't able to look up his application because records for his year had been destroyed, "it's possible that Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament," she emailed me in 2003. "My guess is that he just wasn't involved or interesting enough to surface to the top." She added that she could understand why a university would take a celebrity child, legacy, or development admit over "yet another textureless math grind." College administrators who made such remarks about black or Jewish students might soon find themselves higher education outcasts."
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Lenny [college counselor at Hunter College High School] acknowledged that the failure of college admissions staffs and high school counselors to probe below these superficial similarities and get to know Asian Ameican students as individuals may reflect unconscious racism. As a "white melting-pot woman" she said, it may be harder for her to communicate with Asian students than it would be for an Asian counselor. At the time of my visit, none of Hunter's counselors were Asian American." </p>
<p>...Hunter's mission is to find and educate New York City's most intellectually gifted students. ...... This system produces a student body that is nearly 40 percent Asian American, including many first-generation students.
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<p>From chapter 10, "Ending the Preferences of Privilege":
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Provide equal access for Asian American students and for international students who need financial aid. If elite colleges were truly committed to socioeconomic diversity, they would regard the proliferation of outstanding Asian American applicants as an opportunity, not a problem. They would rush to propel into the higher ranks of American society a group of students who not only boast outstanding test scores and grades but also are immigrants or immigrants' children from low- or middle-income familites that sacrificed in hope of a better life for the next generation. Asian American students also bring a variety of cultures, languages, and religions to stir the campus melting pot. Colleges should counter anti-Asian bias through sensitivity training sessions and hiring more Asian American admissions deans, directors, and staff.</p>
<p>In 1990, the federal Office for Civil Rights found that Asian Amercian students needed highter test scores than whites to be admitted to Harvard. But it bought Harvard's argument that preferences for legacies and athletes, who were mostly white, accounted for the gap, rather than race discrimination. Scaling back those preferences would deprive elite universities of excuses for setting a higher bar for Asian Americans and compel them to confront the question of racism.
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