This has, of course, been discussed a lot of times, but there are a few points that I think should be made each time it comes up:
- Make sure you distinguish between steps colleges take to benefit URMs (such as black and Hispanic students), and steps that colleges allegedly take to discriminate against Asian students in favor of whites. They are not the same. The former is clearly happening, and it affects both white and Asian students–and many people, including me, approve of it. The latter, discrimination against Asians in favor of whites, is much more difficult to prove.
- There has never been any smoking gun, from any college, as far as I am aware, showing that the admissions office deliberately discriminated against Asians in order to make sure that the college wouldn’t have too many Asians. There has been no leak, no whistle-blower, nothing–in the years that this has been a controversy.
- Despite Point 2, it is certainly possible that colleges are deliberately or unconsciously taking steps to avoid having too many Asians. It is also possible that there is unconscious bias against Asians.
- However, just looking at stats is not enough to prove that discrimination is occurring, especially when looking at colleges that use holistic admissions. Thus, while Asian students gaining admission to Princeton may have, on average, higher scores than white admitted students, that is not necessarily proof that they “need” those higher scores to gain admission–this may be mistaking correlation for causation. If, as selective colleges claim, they look at the whole package, then you would really have to compare the whole package to see if there is likely to be discrimination going on.
- It is important to distinguish cultural norms from stereotypes. Let’s face it: there really are very many Asian violin players. Looking at the roster of the orchestra at any selective college is enough to show you that. So, if you are relying on your violin playing prowess to help you gain admission to college, you are competing with other violin players, not bassoon players or tuba players or even viola players. And there are white and URM students who are also excellent violin players–you are competing with them, as well. Also, while I’m sympathetic to the Asian kid who got a high SAT in one test with no prep, if it’s really the case that intensive test prep is much more prevalent among Asian kids than among white kids, whose fault is it, exactly, if admissions committees tend to assume that Asian kids had prep? Do you think it would be effective to ask on the application how much prep the kid had?
- This point is particularly important with respect to STEM intentions. While there are certainly many Asian students who are not potential STEM majors, I think it is pretty clearly true that a much higher percentage of Asian students (especially those looking at highly selective schools) identify STEM majors (and also, I believe, a subset of STEM majors). This has a couple of effects–first, it means that those students are not competing at all for many of the seats at highly selective colleges–the colleges want classics majors, foreign language majors, English majors, history majors, etc. In addition (and this is just my unproved opinion), white students identifying STEM majors are likely to be, on average, the white students with the highest standardized test scores. So you can’t look at scores across all of the applicants and admittees to a school like Princeton and deduce that Asians “need” higher scores to get in. It may really mean that an applicant who is white OR Asian needs higher scores to get admitted for STEM.