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<p>In my experience, many of the upper level math classes at MIT have a higher than average proportion of Asians, compared to their overall population at MIT.</p>
<p>Okay, I read all the above posts. You guys are all correct. (I’ll add that a good third of the people at my school are Jewish)</p>
<p>The reason I brought this up in the first place is because discriminating against Jews really <em>is</em> repugnant, because your culture <em>is</em> valuable. And everybody, me, you, and the admissions officers, agrees with that. </p>
<p>But amazingly, similar statements to the ones I made are said about Asians all the time (“oh, they’re all the same!”…“boring robots”), from random posters here to actual admissions officers. Somehow, that’s fine. There isn’t a brigade of people jumping in outrage when <em>that</em> happens. So all I did was transfer that common way of thinking to another over-represented minority.</p>
<p>What I proposed was wrong, isn’t it? It’s goddamn idiotic! So please kill the double standard.</p>
<p>When has an admissions officer EVER said Asians are all the same? Source please.</p>
<p>Conquerer, regardless of what you JUST said while under the loom of our massively negative response to your inadvertent racism, you STILL said that Jews are not diverse and I’d like you to address that. What did you mean? What were you trying to say? I have a feeling that you are just really awful at getting points across, because, still, after your most recent post, I am left confused and unresolved.</p>
<p>You people are all completely missing the point of conqueror’s arguments. At no point did he condone Anti-Semitism, he just brought it up as a parallel example. We can all agree that Anti-Semitism is disgusting and I’m proud to say we leave in a country with a system that has all but eliminated it. </p>
<p>Rather than read and understand the arguments, you’ve simply jumped to conclusions about the nature of the posts and proceeded to make Ad-Hominem ([Your</a> logical fallacy is ad hominem](<a href=“http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem]Your”>Your logical fallacy is ad hominem) for those of you who don’t know) attacks. I could easily stoop to that same level, but that’s not the point. </p>
<p>The argument is this; you make valid points that a German Jew, an Israeli Jew, and an American Jew that may be orthodox or whatever (I’m not personally familiar with the other denominations, but you get the point) all bring unique cultural aspects to the table. As such, they are not treated as a lump quantity. However, the same standard does not exist between different Asian cultures. The difference between a student with Chinese ethnicity and a student with Japanese ethnicity is just as great IF NOT GREATER THAN that between a German and Italian Jew (which share at least SOME similarities due to their shared religion, whatever denomination they belong too). Yet Asians are treated as a lump sum with no differentiation. If you all view doing such a thing to Jews as disgusting (which it is), why the double standard for Asians?</p>
<p>Here’s where it goes wrong:
You cannot say that one culture is more valuable than another without being extremely offensive. Conquerer7 could have made his/her point just fine by saying, “Effort is put into not treating Jews like a lump and putting a quota on them; why not Asians? American Asians have a lot of diversity and can contribute heavily to the MIT community.” He did not have to say, “from a pure cultural standpoint Jews don’t bring as much.”</p>
<p>Reread conquerer7’s statement. At no point is there any hint of “just kidding!” or “I’m just using this as an example.” It is genuine and it is antisemitism.
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<p>Iluvatar343, I’m not sure you know what ad hominem means, but the way you use it is ironic. [Ad</a> hominem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem]Ad”>Ad hominem - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>MollieB is right. </p>
<p>It’s worth noting that it wasn’t this lopsided in the 90’s, which was before the advent of Art of Problem Solving and other study programs. I’d say the population of USAMO qualifiers probably 25%-30% Asian at that time. If the demographics of the USAMO qualifiers is representative of the competitive MIT applicant pool, that would mean that the Asian pool has gotten 2-3 times more competitive in the past 15 years, which is unlikely.</p>
<p>Cocquerer7, I believe that Iluvatar did a much better job at explaining what you were trying to get across. Had you left out some troubling comments, like the one about Jews having a huge, huge, financial advantage you wouldn’t have gotten such irate responses. Comments like that touch a very sensitive nerve to the many Jews whose families came to America with nothing.
However, I do understand why you are feeling frustrated by perceived discrimination against Asians.</p>
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Are they? Because I think the purpose of this question on the application is to describe your own unique cultural background and identity.</p>
<p>The admissions officers at MIT do not lump all applicants of Asian ancestry together as one.</p>
<p>I get the feeling sometimes that everybody perceives of the admissions process as somehow involving big stacks of applications separated by ethnicity, with people compared only with other members of their ethnic groups, and harsh quotas placed on overrepresented groups. This couldn’t be farther from the truth – each application is read and discussed individually, and there’s no quota system in place either for group minimums or maximums.</p>
<p>Just to add to the confusion, my son’s s/o is Korean, but adopted at birth by a Midwestern family.</p>
<p>MIT can pretty much guess ethnicity from the person’s name. So obviously the question about culture is not necessarily about ethnicity.</p>
<p>I apologize to everybody. I’m pretty bad at this, as you guys have seen. And I certainly didn’t mean Jews were soulless or anything… I meant that you all have something in common, in the same sense that Mormons or Christian Chinese or WASPs do. But there’s certainly no restriction placed on the number of Jews in MIT, in order to make a balanced class.</p>
<p>molliebatmit, I don’t believe that anybody is explicitly rejecting Asians, but I can’t reconcile that with the numbers. I’m not going to bring up that stupid SAT study (who cares about test scores anyway?). But you can repeat what I did for the USAPhO, USNCO, USABO, and USACO (that one’s even more imbalanced!), and then repeat it again for ISEF and Siemens, then go to an elite math summer program like ROSS or PROMYS or Mathcamp (where everybody <em>really</em> has to have true passion, to spend their summers doing that) and just look around. Notably, though the SAT study was done a while ago, you can get these numbers current to the year. The proportion of Asians in them has increased over the past decade; Asian share in MIT has not. Again, there are only a few possible conclusions:</p>
<p>1) Asians are worse in general at essay writing or ‘having a soul’ or whatever; if this is true, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
2) There’s something about us that’s deemed as adding a bit less diversity than the next guy. If so, exactly what is it?</p>
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<p>So you’re saying that there isn’t actually more intelligence in the Asian pool, just more training, and that’s why numbers have been rising? That it’s just sort of artificial, in some way?</p>
<p>Well, I reject that claim on the first premise: doing well on these things isn’t about intelligence! Maybe you need a little bit to get interested in it in the first place, but it’s not outrageously much. From what I’ve seen, there are tens of thousands of people out there with the potential to make the USAMO that just haven’t gotten around to trying, out of math phobia or disinterest. </p>
<p>Lots of us have a little extra push from parents to start training in the first place. (and it’s not a big push, because our parents stop understanding what we’re doing by the time we make the AIME) But that push, that training, leads to success, leads to expertise, leads to a deep interest and love for the subject. And that, I would like to believe, makes us a good match for MIT.</p>
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The statement of mine that started this discussion was that Chris has stated on this forum that Asian applicants are (or at least were, for the year he posted the numbers) admitted at higher rates (not just in higher numbers) than other minorities. </p>
<p>So, to me, the argument seems to be “well, sure, Asians are admitted at higher rates than other minorities, but not at rates as high as they should be.” It’s not clear to me what the numbers “should” be, either from a purely meritocratic standpoint or from a purely political standpoint.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree that large percentages of USAxO/top science competition/etc students should be admitted to MIT, and if those students are disproportionately Asian, so be it. But I don’t think that’s the major driver of the perceived inequality here – those students do not make up a huge percentage of the applicant pool or the admit pool.</p>
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Is it your position that MIT ought always to choose a USAMO applicant over an applicant with an equal amount of mathematical potential who hasn’t gotten around to trying USAMO-type problems?</p>
<p>Conquerer,</p>
<p>Um, there are lots of us parents who stop understanding what our kids do after algebra. (Well, ok, maybe I’m the only MIT parent like this)</p>
<p>^My mom is definitely with you. Actually, she had to cheat off my dad to pass high school geometry, so I can say with some certainty that she didn’t understand what I did past algebra. ;)</p>
<p>Clarifying what I meant with ‘if not more than’:
Jews share one common language and one very rich culture, dating back thousands of years, one set of holidays, etc.
Asians collectively speak over 20 languages and have over 20 distinct, very rich cultures, dating back thousands of years, over 20 sets of holidays, etc.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean Judaism was “bad”, in any sense.</p>
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<p>Meritocratically, about 40-50%? That’s race-blind UC Berkeley. Politically… what does that even mean? I thought MIT was above that crap!</p>
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<p>I get the feeling these people do make up a lot of MIT, perhaps most of the top 50%. There are ~1000 MITers every year, and 250 of each Olympiad, over 1000 ISEF people, maybe around 50 people each at each of the 10-15 elite summer science/math camps…</p>
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<p>That’s not quite what I meant, but by analogy… let’s say we’re talking about a liberal arts school, with a very strong English program. Wouldn’t you prefer somebody who’s been reading voraciously over the past four years, over somebody who says they really want to learn more about English in their essays, but only has been taking it as a foreign language course? (which is what a lot of math courses are like…) </p>
<p>In addition (and this applies more to Olympiads than research), it really is open… You can register for $10 yourself. You can get the textbooks you need for $20 used and the problems are free online. There aren’t insurmountable goals in the way of getting a deep understanding…</p>
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<p>Same! The hardest question my parents ever gave me was “what do you get if you add an odd number to an odd number?” Right now, my parents are trying to teach my little sister fractions, and I’m resisting the urge to run over and replace them since they’ve more or less forgotten themselves (or they only know the terms in Chinese!).</p>
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<p>Go type “Jewish ethnic divisions” into Wikipedia. Or “Jewish languages”. Or heck, type in “Judaism” and click the part about identity, or the part about the various religious movements. Judaism is far more diverse than you give it credit for, and it appears that you are either too dull or stubborn to do some very basic research to back up your statements.</p>
<p>My dad’s parents are from the Ukraine. They spoke Yiddish and came to the US right before the Russian revolution. My dad’s ethnically Jewish but culturally, he’s agnostic and never celebrates anything Jewish. He also didn’t speak much Yiddish. (Parents didn’t want that)</p>
<p>Yes, as “Asians” are all unique, so, too, are “Jews”.</p>
<p>Honestly, conquerer, since it seems that many of my son’s friends at MIT are Korean, Chinese, and Indian (at least by his Facebook page), they must have been able to convey their own unique indentities to MIT just fine. And the ones I knew well from math circle and the ones I’m getting to know just seem like nice kids who like to help each other. Maybe that’s part of their story, too.</p>
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MIT may well be, but I most certainly am not. And, as always, I am myself, and not a representative of MIT. Affirmative action is a political question, and I don’t think any of us is above politics.</p>
<p>UC Berkeley is perhaps not the best comparative population to MIT, given that its admissions process is very different from MIT’s (as is necessary for any university that receives 60,000 applications per year). Further, there are relatively more Asian residents of California (~13%) than of the US as a whole (~5%), so it’s likely that the UCB applicant pool contains relatively more Asian applicants than the MIT pool does.</p>
<p>(Interestingly, given that Asian-Americans tend to be very highly concentrated in coastal urban areas, part of the perceived bias against Asians may actually reflect interest in geographic, rather than ethnic, diversity. There’s no doubt that it’s tough for Californians and New Yorkers to get into top colleges, regardless of ethnicity. But few people argue against giving a chance to farm kids from North Dakota.)</p>
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No, the barrier is knowing about these activities in the first place. It’s getting easier in the age of the internet, but believe me when I say that going to a public school in the midwest is a totally different experience from going to school in, say, New York.</p>
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I would pick the student with the most promise in English. Past experience is one factor to consider, but it’s not the only factor. </p>
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But they don’t all apply to or choose MIT. According to numbers posted by Chris, only about 25% of the admitted class (and only ~5% of the applicant pool) is classified as being “academic stars”, which includes olympiads, top science competitions, etc. Most applicants, and most students at MIT, did not participate in these activities.</p>
Hey guys,
I’m sorry for reliving such old topic, but I have the same question that @angelsndemons asked.
I’m an international student that applied for RD Fall 2015. For this “Cultural Background” question, I wrote a 35-words’ answer just listing my ethnic heritages and my ethnic identity. Since this question was at the Part 1 of the application (and all other essays were at the Part 2), I thought that this question wasn’t intended to be an essay – just a way for international students explain their ethnicities (international students cannot check the “ethnicity” boxes right before this question). Now, realizing that almost everyone writes well-written essays on this question, I’m afraid that my direct answer hurts my chances. I do realize that MIT is incredibly competitive, especially for international applicants, but I don’t want to think that this very reason might have been a dealbreaker to my application. Could anyone give some insight on how much does this question matter?