Here’s an interesting article from John Hopkins School of Education:
http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/multicultural-education/A%20closer%20look%20at%20asian%20americans%20and%20education/
"…not all Asian Americans are the same. For every Chinese American or South Asian who has a college degree, the same number of Southeast Asians are still struggling to adapt to their lives in the U.S.
For example, Vietnamese Americans only have a college degree attainment rate of 16%, only about one-quarter the rate for other Asian American ethnic groups. Further, Laotians, Cambodians, and Khmer only have rates around 5%. The cultural stereotype that “all Asians are smart” puts a tremendous amount of pressure on many Asian Americans. Many, particularly Southeast Asians, are not able to conform to this unrealistic expectation and in fact, have the highest high school dropout rates in the country. Again, not all Asian Americans are the same."
This got me thinking. Do colleges consider specific Asian ethnicities? It seems unfair if they’d take a Vietnamese or Cambodian war refugee struggling to survive off a low family income and group him/her with a rich, privileged Indian or Chinese applicant whose parents are able to fork over thousands for test prep, enrichment programs, and out-of-school opportunities.
Do colleges honestly believe it’s as simple as “Black, Asian, White, etc.”? Obviously, it’s not.
Here’s another article:
http://newamericamedia.org/2011/07/the-hard-part-is-getting-in.php
“Those of Southeast Asian heritage, for example, have college education attainment rates that match closely with the black and Latino communities. Fewer than 20 percent of Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese and Hmong Americans hold bachelor’s degrees, compared with more than 40 percent of Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese and Indian Americans, according to the 2000 census.”
Hi @differencemaker I think it depends not just on the school’s policy but on where they are reporting stats. It also depends on the application and how it’s written.
So for example, some stats aren’t that granular. They may have a box to check called “Asian” and include everyone from Korea to India in that box, with Indonesia in between. But in Admissions, they may realize that wow! They’ve never had a Uigher candidate before! Let’s get this person!
Technically the Uigher may be called “Asian” but the savvy Adcom knows about the politics of that region and the struggle and that they are not ethnically or culturally Chinese, but reside inside of China. This does happen for other ethnic groups of Asia as well.
It depends on the Adcom that happens to read the application and whether they are attuned to different ethnic and cultural groups in Asia; it depends on the context of how they are forced to group people because of bureaucracy and reporting, and it depends on how well the candidate spells out who they are and what they can contribute to a given campus.