Half Asian child: how to apply to college.

Parents Forum
261

While it might ridiculous to group people as you describe, the grouping might be solely for … statistical purposes or surveys “requested” by the government or publishers.

All in all, we might spend another decade (as it has been on CC for longer than that) and still make no progress in reaching a consensus. Again, some are determined to throw around terms such as quotas, limits, discrimination, and a few others that make Blum a happy camper, and others will simply reject the thesis as unfounded (for the many reasons debated ad nauseam here and multiple threads before.)

The above will never change until schools are forced to lift the veil (perhaps in answer to a better lawsuit than the horrendously researched Blum latest salvo) and people will be :“forced” to admit how misguided they were. In the meantime, the issue of the “blatant” discrimination will remain an unproven thesis that is really NOT worthy of all the keystrokes it has generated.

And so it goes … until the next thread that starts with a reasonable question and devolves into the same hackneyed debate that is predictable to the extreme.

262

@Sue22 wrote

This kid will still be embraced as First Gen.

Contrast that with the reception of The Asian kid ranked #11 has only been in this country for 5 years…

263

However, the patterns of immigration suggest that immigrants from places like India and China are more likely to be highly educated (70% and 42% college grad respectively) and advantaged in terms of promoting kids’ academic achievement, while the opposite is true for immigrants from places like Mexico (30% HS grad, 4% college grad).

It may be reasonable to say that Indian and Mexican immigrants from similar SES and parental education backgrounds should be treated similarly with respect to background factors – but a college admissions process that gives extra consideration to low SES and first generation to college applicants is likely to give that extra consideration much more often to Mexican immigrants than Indian immigrants.

264

To report the bias of many CC posters:

Multi-talented, high academic achiever URMs are genuine.

Multi-talented, high academic achiever asians are inauthentic, “manufactured”.

265

I don’t agree with post 263. It is not my opinion that “many” CC posters, if any, believe that. For example, I am very annoyed that the one college my Asian students seem unable to get into is Harvey Mudd. These are students who are accomplished in all the areas HM supposedly values. They have proven themselves already in various areas of engineering. They write terrific essays, tailored to those HM opportunities, which match the students’ academic accomplishments and goals.

A few years ago I was at a professional conference with other counselors like me, with reps from various colleges and U’s. I’ll never forget the rep from HM, who read aloud a teacher’s letter of rec about one female student, an undocumented immigrant, whose grades and scores were subpar for the typical HM applicant, yet she got in. The teacher justified her rec based on the student’s “passion,” despite checkered performance. The rep justified the admission based on “the college’s mission.”

Now, I am definitely pro-AA as long as the applicant is well-qualified. Passion is not, by itself, enough. Not for a URM, not for an ORM, not for a majority segment. I.m.o. this was a “political” admission. Someone had an agenda that was not academic. I have argued with my colleagues about more examples than this, by the way.

266

“Passion is not, by itself, enough”

This reminds me of a really sad article I read about a URM student at Cal. He was the top of his high school class and dreamed of going to Cal, but turned out to be woefully unprepared. Despite a lot of support from his friends and teachers, he barely managed to avoid flunking out his freshman year. The article was sad to me because although he made it through his first year, there was obviously no way he was going to graduate.

In order to support diversity in color-blind admissions, the UC’s automatically take a certain number of the top students from every public high school. But as epiphany noted, passion is not enough by itself. Even more unfortunate, I believe the african american student population at Cal has fallen by 50% in the past decade. Lower academic standards for “holistic” admissions to support diversity is a good thing, but only up to the point where it ends up being a disservice to the student that’s going to struggle academically.

267

Yes, you’re arguing, @anomander , that passion cannot, in practical terms, support the enterprise. That may also be true, but my argument was on principle: that a competitive school admission should not be a reward for passion in itself, when other students have both accomplishment and sufficient passion to thrive & contribute. And by the way, speaking of UC, she would have been admitted to a mid-level UC at minimum, received considerably more financial aid than at HM, and been matched academically with her ability and prior performance. UC assigns significant points for challenge, which includes the challenges of undocumented immigrants. The HM rep was speaking as if this would be her “only opportunity” for a 4-yr college. No, it wouldn’t have. She wasn’t so academically compromised that she would have failed at UC (she was bright, curious, and motivated – that was clear) and that she could “only” have succeeded at HM.

268

@JHS, I am also wondering why it is during the college admissions time that this flawed thinking is remedied. What is the government and other entities doing to change these unproductive attitudes which should be addressed well before going off to college?

269

@bogibogi: I wonder why you are fixated on something that is actually a pretty minor phenomenon. Of the relative handful of colleges that do not accept most or all of the qualified students who apply, some (not all) of the very few that might not otherwise have a critical mass of African-American or Hispanic students devote some effort to making certain those groups of students are represented in their student bodies and represented in enough numbers so that the students feel comfortable and future applicants are not discouraged. That level is far, far below the level of Asian representation in those colleges’ classes.

Those colleges, and others, if they engage in holistic review of applications, probably also take account of the fact that an African American student from a poor neighborhood who achieves high grades and top-5% standardized test scores has done something that shows enormous strength of character and individual distinction, while a Chinese-American or Jewish-American student with the same grades and top-1% test scores is neither extraordinary in the context of his or her community nor particularly unique, since he or she will probably know personally any number of demographic peers with similar grades and scores. Of course, they may have overcome obstacles, too, but it’s not likely that they will have overcome obstacles to the extent that the African-American student has. (And, if they did overcome major obstacles, they will probably get a lot of credit for it in admissions consideration.)

That isn’t trying to “remedy” flawed thinking; it’s recognizing the special merit of someone who thinks clearly in a community where most don’t. To be fair, though, there is probably some remedying going on – college administrations hoping that the attitudes will change over time if there is a growing nucleus of minority adults who demonstrate the advantages of high educational attainment.

Whatever goes on in college admissions for a small number of students at a handful of colleges is a drop in the bucket compared to the efforts of governments, educational institutions, businesses, and nonprofits to improve respect for educational achievement in minority communities and generally to improve the participation levels of minorities in mainstream institutions.

270

@JHS, I wouldn’t say fixated; just curious. And while it may be a minor phenomenon, it is the topic of the day so I am just asking some questions. After all, you are a highly educated, enlightened scholar whereas I am just a barley graduated housewife.

If what you say is true about cultural attitudes in Black and Hispanic communities, I find that to be disheartening. Given that HYPSM type institutions have money to burn, I have also wondered why they don’t get involved in lower education. With their unlimited resources, I would think that they could make huge strides in the communities where education is not valued.

271

@JHS #214 post - it is a nice story and we all want to believe we are doing what’s right for the society to giving some underprivileged kid a chance. What that Hispanic achieved, based on his circumstance, is probably a lot more impressive than many other ORM in their privileged environment. But this is not what we always see in the college admission, we have some very privileged URMs who are getting a bump because of their race. At my kids’ high school, there are URMs whose parents are doctors, lawyers, legacies at top tier schools, and they got admitted to schools where my kids (and other kids) were rejected at. Before everyone gets all up in arms about how would I know… My kids’ school was small enough that they knew what parents did for a living, where they lived (how fancy the house is), test scores, and GPA. If those privileged URMs had subpar stats relative to other white kids or ORMs, and they were admitted when others were denied then it is not hard to figure out why. I also confirmed with our GC.

What I am seeing is schools admit URMs to just tick off the box to say they have X% of URMs.

272

“Given that HYPSM type institutions have money to burn, I have also wondered why they don’t get involved in lower education. With their unlimited resources, I would think that they could make huge strides in the communities where education is not valued.”

It’s not their mission. As valuable as such a mission is, they see their mission as providing the resources and springboard for a group of highly talented young adults. That encompasses outreach to find the “diamonds in the rough,” but it doesn’t mean that their mission is smoothing the rough in the first place. Frankly, they can’t really achieve that objective anyway - that’s far broader than they can ever do.

273

I understand that it is not their mission, but why is that? Surely they understand the importance of early education and how crucial it is to later development.

Read more: http://nationswell.com/ask-experts-can-fix-early-childhood-education/#ixzz3hTsEiUgP

It is hard for me to believe that with their resources and brain power and influence, they couldn’t make some significant gains in that area.

274

“I understand that it is not their mission, but why is that? Surely they understand the importance of early education and how crucial it is to later development.”

It’s the mission of us as a society, and by extension our government. However it seems that our society’s current mission is much more about athletes than scholars.

275

“It is hard for me to believe that with their resources and brain power and influence, they couldn’t make some significant gains in that area”

I think you vastly overstate the “influence” these institutions have on the average American, who couldn’t care less about Harvard, Yale, and whatever-other-schools there are that are fancy-schmancy. They loom far, far larger in the consciousness of CC-ers than they do in society at large. And that goes double and triple for the populations that are at most risk and appear to least value education.

276

“It’s the mission of us as a society, and by extension our government. However it seems that our society’s current mission is much more about athletes than scholars.”

Right. Look at the places in Texas, for example, where they build multimillion dollar high school football stadiums. Those communities have already indicated their priorities. What the heck are them fancy boys from Massachusetts and New York going to tell them or do for them that is going to make them change?

277

“I recently saw a story of the troubles Koreans faced during the LA riots. Police did nothing while rioters and looters destroyed and pillaged 3 square miles of LA. These defenseless storeowners had no support and only violence and hatred came upon them. I wonder how many people truly sympathized.”

Seriously? I think mostly everyone is disgusted with looters and rioters who destroy the livelihood of innocent shopkeepers whose only “crime” was being in the way. I think your fear of anti-Asian sentiment runs awfully deep if you truly think that most Americans weren’t sympathetic to the Korean shopkeepers in that situation.

278

That only applies to the UC system taking the top 9% of each high school; in practice, that means that a qualifying student will get admitted to Merced if s/he is otherwise shut out of UC admissions.

279

Hundreds of programs — public and private – have been generated in this country since the 1970’s, in support of early childhood education. While the results are somewhat mixed, overall there has been gain during the lower years and the transition to primary grades. Essentially, what those programs did is do for children in poverty what other parents do for their children as a matter of course. However, what has been found is that the crucial difference came after those early years. And that is for two interrelated reasons: (1) Home influences are more determinate in educational outcomes than most people realize; much of that is simply the time the child spends in home vs. out of home; (2) Parents who themselves are not terribly literate or educated (or know the language) cannot advance their own children beyond their own level.

There have been many cases of students leapfrogging over their limited home and local circumstances. Some of them have ended up at Ivies or other elite or challenging college environments. However, that tends not to be the typical outcome. The correlation between the home environment (education parents providing abundant supplemental education in-home, starting with high-level vocabulary used among the adults in home) and educational outcomes is enormous.

Outsiders cannot do it all.

280

@oldfort: I knew someone was going to say what you did. It’s true that plenty of the URMs admitted to elite colleges come from privileged backgrounds. I personally know lots of cases like that, from among the children of our college and law school friends or people we know in our community. In lots of cases, though, these kids were as fully qualified as any other applicants – stratospheric test scores and GPAs, demonstrated leadership, etc., or in the alternative they were recruited as athletes. But even where that wasn’t the case, or even if it wasn’t the case, the experience of those families was very different from the experience of a family like mine. I’m not going to go into a case-by-case analysis, but I wouldn’t ever have wanted to switch places with them to get my kids into Harvard or Stanford. I am sure that there are plenty of Asian families with similar stories, though, and maybe their kids get “credit” for that and maybe not.

But I want to address specifically what you say above, because I anticipated it in what I wrote. I do agree that it’s a goal of these colleges to have “enough” URMs. “Enough” means enough to form a sustainable community. (Example: When I was a freshman at Yale, you could count all of the African-American women at Yale on your fingers and toes. Which contributed a lot to my African-American roommate’s burgeoning depression – he knew all of them, and none of them was going to like him “that way.” That’s not a sustainable community, and my friend ultimately dropped out.) Moreover, that community, if it’s going to interact successfully with all of the other communities in the college, can’t be entirely different from everyone else.

So, yes, there are going to be some relatively privileged, affluent URMs admitted who are pretty indistinguishable from the hordes of other relatively privileged, affluent white and Asian students in the class. Their presence helps stabilize the minority student community both by ensuring it’s large enough and by ensuring that its center of gravity in terms of values and culture is not too far removed from that of the rest of the student body. They provide a bridge for their underprivileged friends between the culture they came from and the culture of the college. That’s valuable.

If you live in a privileged, affluent community, you are mainly only going to see the privileged, affluent kids who are accepted. But that doesn’t mean those are the only kids being accepted.

@bogibogi: Major universities are not sitting on their hands about these issues. Penn runs a public elementary school, and is probably going to take on two or three more in low-income, mainly African-American neighborhoods. Yale does not have an Education School, and I’m not certain what goes on there. Harvard’s and Columbia’s Ed Schools are massively involved with efforts to improve educational outcomes and educational culture for minority communities.

But you should understand that my generation of African-Americans and Hispanics (i.e., baby boomers) was really the first to grow up in a world where more than a tiny percentage of them had educational opportunities beyond basic reading and arithmetic. The Hispanic world is a lot more complicated, but for African-Americans over most of the prior 300+ years there was very little by way of a model of what an African-American higher education would look like, and no general sense that one could improve one’s life through education.