I have read many articles on this Asian-American bias that these elite colleges seem to be against. The Harvard one was a very controversial one and apparently, most Ivy Leagues expect Asian students to score beyond their white, hispanic and black applicants.
Depends on the college. For example, they are an underrepresented minority at LACs, including the very top ones. Schools like Berkeley and Michigan don’t take ethnicity/race into account in admissions. This question has been hashed over for years out here – use the search function.
This thread may be quickly shifted to the Race in College Admissions sticky thread but let me toss this out to you (as an Asian American): correlation is not causation.
Please read the following excerpt from an essay entitled “Admissions Messages vs. Admissions Realities” by the former admissions dean for Reed College, Paul Marthers:
"Perhaps the most controversial and high-profile aspect of institutional self-interest concerns the students we admit. Who gets admitted and why? The simple answer to that question is the applicants we want the most. But colleges and universities seem to say, or imply, that only “the best” or “the most qualified” get chosen. Does every (or any) college simply admit the most qualified applicants? Who defines most qualified? During my stints as an administrator at Bennington College (Vt.), Vassar College (N.Y.), Duke University (N.C.), Boston College, Oberlin (Ohio), and Reed, I have seen in nearly every case, a version of admission by category, with the categories determined by institutional needs and priorities.
Most applicants compete not with the whole applicant pool but within specific categories, where the applicant-to-available-space ratio may be more, or less, favorable than in the pool at large. Categories can exist for athletics, ethnic diversity, international citizenship, institutional legacy and loyalty, musical and artistic needs, component schools or special academic programs, and in some cases, even gender. Students in the selected categories, which vary from institution to institution, have a “hook” because they help meet institutional needs.
Books such as Elizabeth Duffy and Idana Goldberg’s Crafting a Class; former Stanford admission dean Jean Fetter’s Questions and Admissions; and former University of California, Santa Cruz, Vassar, and Bowdoin College (Maine) dean Richard Moll’s Playing the Private College Admissions Game peer into the hidden reality of category admission.
If we want to provide useful back-fence counsel to prospective students, we must be frank about category admissions. The public is shrewd enough to extrapolate from books like Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers the reality that most applicants are “hookless” and thus in fierce competition for a limited number of spaces, once the institutional priorities are filled. Our candid explanations of the reality of selective admission can help prospective students understand that behind every rejection letter, whether stated or not, is the undeniable fact that the candidates selected best matched the institution’s needs. Admissions decisions are not random or arbitrary, but neither are they infallible or exact science. Sometimes we grossly underestimate the talent we see before us; I think of the student I wait-listed at Oberlin who went to Reed and earned a 3.6 GPA and a student I counseled who, after being spurned by Stanford, went to Washington University in St. Louis and became a Rhodes Scholar.
I suspect that prospective students and their parents wonder sometimes whether admission deans are educators or sales managers.
At the risk of redundancy, I need to say again that there are no random or arbitrary decisions in selective college admissions. Every decision is discussed, sometimes again and again, and again. Still, annually I encounter at least a dozen students who tell me some version of the following scenario: “I am going to apply to the University of Ultra-Selectivity and Prestige, even though I know I have no chance to get admitted. I know it sounds crazy, but maybe when the committee gets to my application, the dean will be asleep, or they will flip a coin, or they will stamp my file accept instead of wait list or reject.” Sorry to break your illusions, prospective students, but just as there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, there is no random quirk of fate that will overrule the reality of transcripts, test scores, essays, recommendations, and institutional priorities.
Do all colleges and universities practice category admissions vigorously? No. Most colleges and universities are not ultra-selective. Many quality colleges admit students up to the first day of classes. Even when practiced, the category admissions approach has different impacts, from institution to institution. Major state universities, for example, reserve slots for recruited athletes but in the aggregate those slots are a small percentage of the incoming class. Assaults on affirmative action have all but closed an explicit ethnic diversity category for state colleges. A few small colleges lack varsity teams and face no pressure to favor alumni children. Small colleges rarely admit students to individual departments or schools. Yet there is no avoiding the daunting fact that the most selective colleges and universities pose an admissions challenge-where applicants outnumber available spaces by multiples of 10 or even 20 to 1, category admissions cuts an unforgiving swath.
What does all this mean for confused prospective students who simply want to get a good education? It means you need to keep your options open, because there is no way to guarantee that you have what your first-, second- or third-choice college wants. That is not as bad as it may sound, because if all you want is a good education (and you want that more than you want a brand-name degree), you can get a good education just about anywhere. It also means rejection is less about you and more about the college or university doing the rejecting.
Remember that well-used break-up line, “It’s not you, it’s me”? This time it’s true. ’
The entire text can be found here
http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/admissions-messages-vs-admissions-realities