First, at a number of elite schools, white students are no longer a majority, although they remain the largest single group. Hardly anyone is upset about that. If you break “white” down into its component parts, the element of “white” that has traditionally conferred prestige – WASPs from mainstream Protestant denominations – was surpassed long ago by both Asians and Jews. I’m sure there are people who are upset about that, but they know better than to say anything out loud.
Much more importantly: The issue here is culture, not race. One of the things that’s interesting about this thread is that many of the Asian participants believe that they or their children are being judged or excluded because of their color, and defenders of the status quo like me keep saying no one would do that, it’s all about too many STEM-oriented applicants, etc. As a matter of fact, I do believe that there was – and maybe there still is, although I think colleges are trying hard to counteract it – effectively some discrimination against Asian applicants, but it’s not racial, it’s cultural.
To be blunt: I don’t think anyone really cares if Chinese and South Asian students outnumber whites, but no one in the Elite University administration and no one in the Elite U alumni community thinks that Elite U would be a better place if its student culture resembled that of IIT or Tsinghua University (or maybe, for that matter, Cal Tech). And, frankly, I don’t think many Asian applicants – Asian-American or Asian-Asian – want to attend IIT or Tsinghua, either.
I think there’s been a tendency to reject applicants whose applications give a sense that they are effectively applying to an Asian university, i.e., trying to conform to what they think the university wants, as opposed to trying to figure out what their unique superpower is. Both because the institutions want students who are not conformists, and because admissions staff may believe that kind of attitude about applications signals an approach to being a student that they think would degrade the institution. (All work, no play. Regurgitating lectures. Non-experimental. Hyper-competitive and grade-grubbing.) That applies to Asian and white applicants alike, but I strongly suspect that it’s going to affect a lot more Asian applicants than whites, because one of the things I’ve learned on CC is that it’s hard for some Asian parents (and some of their children) not to see the application process as one of figuring out the selection criteria and conforming to them. And an application that reads like that is an application that’s overwhelmingly likely to be rejected.
So no one intends to discriminate against Asians, but they want to weed out, or at least limit, cultural stances that are often associated with major Asian ethnicities (you know who you are!), and that are probably far more prevalent among Asian applicants than among other groups. And, yes, that kind of thinking can slop over into racism, especially if decisionmakers are looking harder at applications with Asian names or pictures to see if they present those attitudes. And especially if decisionmakers are hypersensitive to those attitudes because they are seeing a huge increase in applications that give off that vibe. But – much as happened with Jews a century ago – they are not so much trying to exclude Asians and looking for the right sort of Asians – the sort whose approach to college resembles the pre-existing Elite U norm, and therefore threatens the status quo least.
In other words – with full irony – I expect the problem of discrimination against Asians to disappear as more Asians do a better job of figuring out the real admission criteria and conforming to them . . . which includes doing a great job of pretending you’re not doing anything of the sort. And stop whining about how their SATs and GPAs are better than everyone else’s, because that gets heard – both on this thread and in the halls of academe – as “We want exam-based admission just like IIT or Tsinghua.”